The shape of a fish's caudal tail can tell you a lot about how fast the fish moves! A rounded tail is the slowest and a lunate tail is the fastest! The lunate tail has the most optimal ratio of high thrust and low draw, making it the fastest.
Ichthyology Notes 2/?
Call me mRNA because AUG AGA GGG UUU UUC AUG GUG GGA UGA
Petri dish after being exposed to common household air. Includes Aspergillum, penicillium, green & black rhysopus, & stachybotrum moldm
When sodium hypochlorite (bleach) solution is added to luminol, a chemical reaction occurs that releases energy in the form of light. This is called chemiluminescence. The bleach solution acts as an oxidizing agent, which means it takes electrons away from the luminol molecule. This causes the luminol molecule to become excited, and it releases the energy as light.
🎥 Courtesy: Kendra Frederick
The luminol molecule is made up of two amino groups, a carbonyl group, and an azo group. The amino groups are electron-rich, while the carbonyl group is electron-poor. The azo group is a conjugated system, which means that the electrons in the double bonds can move freely from one atom to another.
When sodium hypochlorite (bleach) solution is added to luminol, the bleach molecules react with the amino groups of the luminol molecule. This reaction takes electrons away from the luminol molecule, which causes the luminol molecule to become oxidized. The oxidized luminol molecule is in an excited state, which means that it has more energy than it normally does.
The excited luminol molecule then releases the extra energy as light. This light is called chemiluminescence. The light emitted by the chemiluminescence reaction is blue because the luminol molecule has a blue fluorescence.
The chemiluminescence reaction between luminol and sodium hypochlorite is catalyzed by the presence of a metal ion, such as iron or copper. The metal ion helps to stabilize the excited state of the luminol molecule, which makes it more likely to release the extra energy as light.
The chemiluminescence reaction is very sensitive to impurities, so it is important to use pure chemicals. The reaction can also be affected by the pH of the solution. The optimal pH for the reaction is around 9.
The chemiluminescence reaction between luminol and sodium hypochlorite can be used to detect blood, as the iron in hemoglobin can catalyze the reaction. The reaction is also used in some commercial products, such as glow sticks and emergency lights.
I hope you enjoyed learning about this. ❤️🙏
Common puffball / Flaschen-Staubling fungi Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
A microbe discovered in a volcanic hot spring gobbles up carbon dioxide “astonishingly quickly”, according to the scientists who found it.
The researchers hope to utilise microbes that have naturally evolved to absorb CO2 as an efficient way of removing the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. Ending the burning of fossil fuels is critical in ending the climate crisis, but most scientists agree CO2 will also need to be sucked from the air to limit future damage.
The new microbe, a cyanobacteria, was discovered in September in volcanic seeps near the Italian island of Vulcano, where the water contains high levels of CO2. The researchers said the bug turned CO2 into biomass faster than any other known cyanobacteria.
In February the team also explored hot springs in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, US, where levels of CO2 are even higher. Those results are now being analysed. The researchers said all their data on microbes would be published and made available to other scientists as a database that pairs DNA sequences with banked samples of the bacteria.
Dr Braden Tierney, at Weill Cornell Medical College and Harvard Medical School, said: “Our lead collaborator at Harvard isolated this organism that grew astonishingly quickly, compared to other cyanobacteria.”
“The project takes advantage of 3.6bn years of microbial evolution,” he said. “The nice thing about microbes is that they are self-assembling machines. You don’t have that with a lot of the chemical approaches [to CO2 capture].”
The new microbe had another unusual property, Tierney said: it sinks in water, which could help collect the CO2 it absorbs.
But the microbe was not a silver bullet, Tierney said. “There really isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to climate change and carbon capture. There will be circumstances where the tree is going to outperform microbes or fungi. But there will also be circumstances where you really want a fast-growing aquatic microbe that sinks,” he said. That might include large, carbon-capturing ponds, he said. The microbe might also be able to produce a useful bioplastic.
what the heck is blast
a tool for wizards
still amazes me that scientists were just like what if we shot cells with dna coated mini bullets really really hard to insert that dna into the genome. and somehow that fucking worked
There are few places on Earth as isolated as Trindade island, a volcanic outcrop a three- to four-day boat trip off the coast of Brazil.
So geologist Fernanda Avelar Santos was startled to find an unsettling sign of human impact on the otherwise untouched landscape: rocks formed from the glut of plastic pollution floating in the ocean.
Santos first found the plastic rocks in 2019, when she traveled to the island to research her doctoral thesis on a completely different topic—landslides, erosion and other “geological risks.”
She was working near a protected nature reserve known as Turtle Beach, the world’s largest breeding ground for the endangered green turtle, when she came across a large outcrop of the peculiar-looking blue-green rocks.
Intrigued, she took some back to her lab after her two-month expedition.
Analyzing them, she and her team identified the specimens as a new kind of geological formation, merging the materials and processes the Earth has used to form rocks for billions of years with a new ingredient: plastic trash.
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