Jade And Striped Icebergs. “When Seawater At Depths Of More Than 1,200 Feet Freezes To The Underside

Reblog if you…

Start friendships with bugs in your house

Wave at plants and animals

Would hang out with a cryptid

Would become friends with a little ghost child

Still make wishes in water fountains

just making sure y'all know that I'm radically queer and inclusive. some things this includes:

trans women are regular women & should be an integral part of every women's community.

gender dysphoria is a varying and deeply personal experience (I say as a cis woman with butch dysphoria) and can exist independently of medical transition.

nonbinary people don't have to be "man/woman-aligned" (though many are). they're not binary, it says so right there.

define your gender or sexuality however makes you comfortable. all labels were made up by somebody. you have the right to have yours respected.

queer is a useful label & important to a lot of people.

aromantic & asexual people's sexuality is normal and they belong in lgbtq+ spaces.

bi/pan/m-spec women belong in wlw spaces.

whoever else it's popular to invalidate and hate these days in the name of community purism? they're my friends now. hurt them and you fight me.

guess who just followed me? I want to make sure they know they're not welcome. it's 2020, intolerance isn't cool anymore.

Waiting around on this rock we call a planet for an end. End to what? Now that I don’t know.

She is my wife.

i saw black panther the other day and frankly i would die for shuri

I could watch this forever

(via)

Shit this is the mood for tonight.

The Oceans Are A Melting Pot Of Microbes

https://sciencespies.com/news/the-oceans-are-a-melting-pot-of-microbes/

The Oceans Are A Melting Pot Of Microbes

Diatoms are photosynthesising algae, they have a siliceous skeleton (frustule) and are found in … [+] almost every aquatic environment including fresh and marine waters, soils, in fact almost anywhere moist.

Getty

Within every drop of seawater lives a mixture of teeny-tiny organisms, like bacteria and viruses, collectively known as ‘microbes’.

According to new research published in Cell by scientists at Maine’s Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, the degree of microbial diversity within the ocean is perhaps more staggering than originally thought. In the largest study ever conducted on individual cells, over 12,000 microbial genomes were analyzed to build a massive database, dubbed the Global Ocean Reference Genomes Tropics (GORG-Tropics).

The samples were collected from the tropics and subtropics, representing about two-thirds of the world’s ocean. To the researcher’s surprise, every one of the 12,000 cells they analyzed had a unique genome – no two cells were identical. What’s more, most of the microbes were so dissimilar from all the other microbes analyzed that they were considered to be different species altogether.

A summary of the new study published in Cell by researchers from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean … [+] Sciences.

Pachiadaki et al., Cell

The researchers also analyzed the microbial diversity within a single teaspoon of water from the Sargasso Sea. An astonishing 6,000 cells were captured, analyzed, and added to the growing database.

Of all the genes discovered within the Sargasso Sea sample, at least one-fifth were genes also found in the tropics and subtropics. According to these microbial experts, these large portion of shared genes between the Sargasso Sea and the tropics despite immense microbial diversity indicates how effective ocean currents are at mixing microbial life around the globe.

“In the same way that we think of New York City as a melting pot, every teaspoon of the ocean is a microbial melting pot,” said Ramunas Stepanauskas, Senior Research Scientist at Bigelow. “The ocean is huge, and it’s amazing how complex ecological and evolutionary processes take place in each tiny drop.”

Map of the Sargasso Sea.

Staysail, Dreamstime.com

With the help of cutting-edge genome analysis technology, this study sequenced more microbes than all studies prior to 2013, combined. With an abundance of information, new discoveries have followed. For example, Stepanauskas’ team discovered a group of bacteria, known as proteobacteria, previously not known to have photosynthetic, or light harnessing, capabilities.

“Genetic information can teach us a lot about ecology, and these may be photosynthetic organisms that were unnoticed before,” said Maria Pachiadaki, a former Bigelow Laboratory postdoctoral researcher and lead author of this study. “If experiments confirm what the genes suggest, this is an important microbial group to consider in ocean carbon studies.”

With less than 1% of marine microorganisms proving possible to grow and study in a laboratory setting, databases like GORG-Tropics are essential for advancing our understanding of microbial capabilities.

Senior Research Scientist Ramunas Stepanauskas holds a sample of Sargasso Sea water before analysis … [+] in Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences’ Single Cell Genomics Center.

Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences

In collaboration with researchers at the University of California San Diego, this research team also identified microbes that could fuel novel biotechnology applications. By tracking which microbes are able to produce certain chemicals, the GORG-Tropics database may help fast-track future discoveries of new antibiotics or cancer-fighting medicines.

With a database of this size, the potential for discovery continues. Stepanauskas and his team of researchers will continue to search for more discoveries to further reveal the hidden microbial diversity of the ocean, and in turn, the intricacies of how the ocean functions.

“One of our main goals with the GORG initiative was to produce a powerful resource for the marine microbiology research community,” said Julia Brown, a bioinformatician at Bigelow Laboratory and a study author. “We hope that scientists will be able to use this dataset in follow-up studies to answer questions no one has even thought of yet.”

#News

the phrase "tolerant left" pisses me off because technically i'm left but i'm NOT tolerant. if you say dumb shit i'm not gonna be like "uwu you're entitled to your opinion, peace is the best option" i'm fuckimg DESTROYING you. think before you say private healthcare has good incentives

hey everyone sorry to bother bUT YOU CAN HEAR HUMPBACKS WHALES SINGING TO EACH OTHER LIVE RIGHT NOW ON OUR DEEP SEA HYDROPHONE FEED!  🐋🎶🐳

Scientists Created Bacteria With a Synthetic Genome. Is This Artificial Life?

In a milestone for synthetic biology, colonies of E. coli thrive with DNA constructed from scratch by humans, not nature.

Scientists have created a living organism whose DNA is entirely human-made — perhaps a new form of life, experts said, and a milestone in the field of synthetic biology.

Researchers at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Britain reported on Wednesday that they had rewritten the DNA of the bacteria Escherichia coli, fashioning a synthetic genome four times larger and far more complex than any previously created.

The bacteria are alive, though unusually shaped and reproducing slowly. But their cells operate according to a new set of biological rules, producing familiar proteins with a reconstructed genetic code.

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