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New Virtual Dive Gallery Puts National Marine Sanctuaries at the Tip of Your Fingers

Can’t get to your national marine sanctuaries? Thanks to the wonders of 360-degree photography and virtual reality, these underwater treasures now are as close as the tips of your fingers. NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries has launched a virtual dive gallery, complete with immersive 360-degree views of five national marine sanctuaries: American Samoa, Florida Keys, Flower Garden Banks, Gray’s Reef, and Thunder Bay.

On our new virtual dive gallery, you can explore images like this one of schooling fish in Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary. Photo: Steve Lonhart/NOAA in collaboration with the Ocean Agency

In earlier days of ocean exploration, adventurer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau amazed the world with his stunning video footage of the underwater places he visited. His film The Silent World opened up an undersea realm that few would otherwise have had the opportunity to see. Now, we’re taking Cousteau’s vision a step further by creating a library of virtual dive experiences that you can experience and interact with from your smartphone, tablet, or personal computer.

The virtual dives take users underwater for a scuba diver’s view of your national marine sanctuaries, allowing you to navigate through the dive sites as if you were there in person. In addition to the striking imagery, the virtual experience helps highlight NOAA’s efforts to monitor issues such as marine debris, ocean noise, invasive species, and changes in habitat and animal health.

The diverse coral reef protected within Fagatele Bay in the National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa can be seen in this image. Image courtesy of XL Catlin Seaview Survey / The Ocean Agency.

No longer out of sight and out of mind

The Sanctuary Virtual Dive Gallery is totally web-based and readily viewable on any computer or mobile device, provided you have access to the internet. So you don’t need to download a special app to your smartphone or use specific software on your computer. While you do not need a need a VR headset to experience the imagery, the virtual reality experience on your mobile device is certainly enhanced with the addition of a headset viewer.

By sharing these underwater experiences, we’re bringing the public up close and personal with the incredible resources the National Marine Sanctuary System protects. These special places might be out of sight and mind most of the time, but beneath the ocean’s waves exist vibrant marine habitats, amazing sea creatures, and relics of our nation’s maritime history.

Seeing tangible examples of the issues affecting sanctuary resources puts viewers behind the “diver’s mask,” so to speak, where they can be inspired to act in support of stewardship and conservation goals. “Because such a small percentage of people in the U.S. are able to scuba dive, we constantly face the challenge of showcasing the underwater beauty and wonders of national marine sanctuaries,” says Mitchell Tartt, chief of the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries’ Conservation Science Division. “These virtual dives are incredibly engaging and truly provide unique experiences that anyone with internet access can enjoy. They are game changers in helping the public and our partners better understand these places.”

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Don’t feel drowned by your habits, we all know smoking doesn’t make sense, we all know somebody who is sick because of smoking. You have the power to stop smoking. Or replace your bad habits that hinder your life with good habits that help it progress. I have a client that used to smoke, now every time she is craving a cigarette she does 50 squats, no smoking now for 2 months, but great muscle tone in her legs! This is what I mean when I say love yourself… Not your reflection. Your actions are a reflection of how you see yourself. Big up all those who have stopped smoking, stopping smoking or even thinking about it! If you have stopped let me know how long for, if you are stopping let me know how and why. If you are thinking about it hopefully you will read the comments and try to stop. #spartanfam #strength #health #streetart

HiPOD (2 May 2018): Clays in a Grouping of Small Craters 

  — 282 km above the surface. Black and white is 5 km across; enhanced color is less than 1 km.

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

The UK’s first new nuclear power station for a generation will cost electricity customers at least £4.4bn and the subsidy bill could reach £20bn, the government has revealed. 

 The charges, which will be passed on to nearly 30 million customers, are a result of ministers’ decision to guarantee the new Hinkley Point C operators £92.50 for every unit of electricity – more than double the current market price. 

 It comes less than a week after the government admitted the £24bn plant in Somerset will be subsidised – something it denied throughout the last parliament. 

Details of the costs – an average of about £150 to £660 per customer over the 35 years of the deal – are exposed in a document quietly put before parliament last week and which has only just come to light.

(via Hinkley Point C will cost customers at least £4.4bn | Environment | The Guardian)

Biologists at the University of Rhode Island were studying the nitrogen content of streams and noticed something odd: whenever there were beaver ponds upstream, nitrogen levels dropped. Beaver ponds slow down river water, and they mix it with organic matter, which must have an effect on river chemistry, but scientists didn’t know exactly what was happening in that murky water. So they made soda-bottle-sized “ponds” that let them study variations on the conditions the beavers set up in their real-life ponds. And they found a kind of reverse nitrogen fixation process was occurring — call it “denitrification.” Bacteria in the dirt and the plant debris turned nitrates into nitrogen gas. The gas bubbled up to the surface and mixed with the atmosphere once more. In some cases, the level of nitrogen in the water dropped 45%.

(via Scientists Acquire More Proof That Only Beavers Can Save the World)

Map of Australia with a so called ‘remoteness index’, illustrating how far locations in Australia are from population centers [999x766] CLICK HERE FOR MORE MAPS! thelandofmaps.tumblr.com

Brand: Christie Brown

Designer: Aisha Obuobi 

Coupe de Classe Winter 2015 Collection

Tumblr: cutfromadiffcloth.tumblr.com | Twitter: @IAM_CFDC | Instagram: @IAMCFDC | Facebook: CUT FROM A DIFFERENT CLOTH | Website: www.cutfromadiffcloth.com

UK Chancellor: I must cut tax benefits for working poor to help them

George Osborne, born to a titled millionaire, has explained that he is cutting the tax-credits that let the working poor survive, despite the Tory party’s election promise not to do any such thing – because it will reduce the deficit and therefore save them from the cuts that the country would have to pay in the future in order to pay down those debts.

Osborne did not moot the possibility of taxing the country’s billionaires, including the “non-doms” who get to pretend that they live in an offshore tax-haven and duck their taxes. He also neglected to mention that countries are not companies, and that having a national bank and your own mint means that national debts are completely unlike the debts taken on by firms or households.

Osborne also didn’t mention the possibility of taxing the companies that pretend that their profits are made in tax-havens and that all their UK income must be remitted to an offshore firm in nonsensical trademark licenses.

Finally, Osborne didn’t mention the situation in which people working full-time jobs (or piecing together a full-time living from zero-hours contracts) can’t afford to pay for rent and food for their families and require benefits to remain solvent enough to show up for work each day, meaning that the firms paying the sub-survival wages are getting a massive tax subsidy in the form of a fed and housed workforce that comes at tax-payers’ expense.

Instead, Osborne explained that he would make the poorest workers in the UK even poorer, for their own benefit.

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Meet the 13-year-old who just built a cheap Braille printer out of Legos 

Whatever you were doing in eighth grade, it probably wasn’t as awesome as what Shubham Banerjee has been up to.

The California 13-year-old wanted to know how blind people read, so he searched online and was shocked to find Braille printers cost up to $2,000.

“I know that there is a simpler way to do this.”