amnhnyc:

Did you know? There are about 300 species of sea pens that can be found swaying on the ocean floor around the world.🪶

You might be surprised to find out that this feather-like structure is actually a colony of polyps that work together to survive. Different polyps have different responsibilities depending on their location on the body. There are feeding polyps that catch plankton, as well as polyps that circulate water to keep the colony balanced and upright.

Photo: Richard Ling, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, flickr; kidney sea pens (Sarcoptilus grandis) pictured

#AnimalFacts #OceanLife #SeaPen #Ocean #nature #fish #dyk #MarineLife #MarineBiology
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wolfsheart-blog:

White Wolf by Ulrich Kersting

merelygifted:

Sri Lanka faces medical emergency as economic crisis hits drug supplies | Sri Lanka | The Guardian

Sri Lanka’s economic crisis has deteriorated into a medical crisis, with the top medical union declaring a national health emergency over a life-threatening shortage of drugs.

On Tuesday the country’s most powerful trade union, the Government Medical Officers’ Association (GMOA), called a meeting and declared a medical crisis as doctors and hospitals reported a widespread lack of medicine.

The south Asian country is in the grip of the worst financial crisis in its history, with record inflation leading to shortages of fuel and food, and crippling hours-long power blackouts imposed. A state of emergency has been declared after mass protests erupted across the country calling for President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to step down. On Monday Rajapaska’s entire cabinet resigned, and his ruling government has lost its parliamentary majority after a mass wave of defections.

Sri Lanka’s lack of foreign currency reserves has had a devastating impact on the availability of medicine. More than 85% of pharmaceutical products in the country are imported, and these are paid for in US dollars. If dollars are not available then drugs cannot be bought. The Sri Lanka Chamber of Pharmaceutical Industry warned last month that 5% of drugs were out of stock and the problem was likely to worsen.

The GMOA accused the government of jeopardising Sri Lanka’s renowned universal healthcare system, which gives all citizens access to free state healthcare. “Both the government and health ministry have failed to prevent a complete breakdown of the medical system,” it said.

Gotabhaya Ranasinghe, a cardiologist at the national hospital of Sri Lanka in Colombo, said hospitals were running out of medicines, and many lives were at stake.

“There are important heart medications, medicines for blood pressure, heart attacks, all are running out. I have heard that many cancer drugs are also not available any more, so it is a very worrying situation,” he said.

“People can already visibly see the impact of the food crisis and the fuel crisis but the medical crisis is only just beginning. As a doctor it feels terrible to know that I can’t prescribe medicines and so a patient’s life is put in danger. I don’t think the politicians fully understand the impact.”  …

Anyone incapable of understanding that does not belong in government!

merelygifted:

Mars Is Rumbling With Mysterious Quakes We’ve Never Detected Before

It turns out that Mars is rumblier than we knew. New techniques have revealed previously undetected quakes beneath the Martian surface – and, scientists say, the best explanation so far is ongoing volcanic activity.

The evidence seems to be mounting that Mars is far from dead, but hosts, underneath its dusty, barren surface, an interior gurgling away with seismic activity.

“Knowing that the Martian mantle is still active is crucial to our understanding of how Mars evolved as a planet,” says geophysicist Hrvoje Tkalčić of the Australian National University in Australia.  

“It can help us answer fundamental questions about the Solar System and the state of Mars’ core, mantle, and the evolution of its currently-lacking magnetic field.”

For a very long time, scientists believed that nothing much was going on inside Mars.

The planet has very little in the way of a magnetic field. Planetary magnetic fields are (usually) generated inside the planet, by something called a dynamo – a rotating, convecting, and electrically conducting fluid that converts kinetic energy into magnetic energy, spinning a magnetic field out into space.

Mars’ lack of a magnetic field suggests a lack of activity. This is a big deal; in fact, a magnetic field can mean the difference between life and death. Here on Earth, the magnetic field protects us from cosmic radiation that might destroy life. On Mars, radiation levels are much higher, even though it is more distant from the Sun.

“All life on Earth is possible because of the Earth’s magnetic field and its ability to shield us from cosmic radiation, so without a magnetic field life as we know it simply wouldn’t be possible,” Tkalčić explains.

But when NASA’s InSight lander arrived in November 2018 and started listening for Mars’ heartbeat, we learnt something really remarkable: Mars is rumbling. To date, InSight has detected hundreds of marsquakes – enough to give us a detailed map of the Martian interior.

Tkalčić and his colleague, geophysicist Weijia Sun of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, wanted to look for quakes that might have gone unnoticed in the InSight data. They used two unconventional techniques, only recently applied to geophysics, to hunt seismic events in the InSight data.

Based on nine templates of known marsquakes, the pair detected 47 new seismic events, coming from a region on Mars called the Cerberus Fossae – a system of fissures created by faults that have pulled the crust apart.  …

merelygifted:

DirecTV dropped OAN today, rejecting GOP pleas to keep right-wing network | Ars Technica

One America News has officially been removed from DirecTV, as the TV provider resisted pressure from Republicans to keep the right-wing network in its channel lineup. A DirecTV spokesperson confirmed to Ars today that the channel removal went ahead as scheduled.

OAN’s future is in doubt as the network’s owner has said losing the DirecTV deal might force it to shut down. DirecTV previously issued a notice to users stating that OAN would leave DirecTV’s satellite channel lineup and the online service DirecTV Stream after April 4. The removal also affected A Wealth of Entertainment (AWE), another channel owned by OAN parent company Herring Networks.

DirecTV announced it wouldn’t renew its carriage deal with OAN after pressure from advocacy groups that pointed out OAN “is a major supporter of the Stop the Steal movement,” spread “election fraud lies that claimed the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump,” “stok[ed] violent calls for the attack on the US Capitol,” and airs “wall-to-wall COVID-19 disinformation.” US Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.) had also questioned DirecTV owner AT&T and other TV providers about why they carry OAN, Newsmax, and Fox News.  …

merelygifted:

The COVID-19 outbreak in China’s largest metropolis of Shanghai remains “extremely grim” amid an ongoing lockdown confining around 26 million people to their homes, a city official said Tuesday.

The plague isn’t over.  Lifting restrictions is causing surges.

merelygifted:

Sri Lanka’s president revoked a days-old state of emergency after huge public protests demanded he resign over the country’s worst economic crisis in memory.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has resisted the calls even after governing party lawmakers said an interim government should replace his and failing to do so would make them responsible for violence.

The decree Rajapaksa issued Tuesday night said he revoked emergency orders that had given him sweeping authority to act in the interests of public security and preserving public order, including suspending any laws, authorizing detentions and seizing property.

Rajapaksa had declared the emergency last week after crowds of protesters demonstrated near his home in the capital Colombo. The protests initially began over shortages of essentials such as cooking gas, petrol, electricity and milk powder. They have spread to every part of the Indian Ocean island nation and now the demonstrators are demanding the resignation of Rajapaksa and his government.

TV and social media images from Monday showed protesters stormed into the offices and houses of ruling party lawmakers and vandalized some premises. On Tuesday, lawmakers at the first new Parliament session since the protests flared asked the speaker to ensure their safety.

The president and his older brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, continue to hold power in Sri Lanka, despite their politically powerful family being the focus of public ire.

The Cabinet resigned Sunday night, and Rajapaksa invited all parties to join a unity government, but the main opposition party rejected the proposal. On Tuesday, nearly 40 governing coalition lawmakers said they would no longer vote according to coalition instructions, significantly weakening the government.  …

merelygifted:

The Biden administration is planning to extend a pause on federal student loan repayments through August 31, according to an administration official familiar with the matter.

The repayment freeze, which has been in place since the beginning of the pandemic, was scheduled to expire on May 1.

The administration is expected to announce the extension on Wednesday, the official said.

Borrower balances have effectively been frozen for more than two years, with no payments required on most federal student loans since March 2020. During this time, interest has stopped adding up and collections on defaulted debt have been on hold. …

merelygifted:

Donald Trump has admitted he did not win the 2020 election.

“I didn’t win the election,” he said.

The admission came in a video interview with a panel of historians convened by Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor and editor of The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment. The interview was published on Monday by the Atlantic.  …

merelygifted:

One of the most important open questions in planetary formation theory is the story of Jupiter’s origin. Using sophisticated computer modeling, researchers of the University of Zurich (UZH) and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS now shed new light on Jupiter’s formation history. Their results were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.                      

A curious enrichment of heavy elements

When the Galileo spacecraft released a probe that parachuted into Jupiter’s atmosphere in 1995, it showed among other things that heavy elements (elements heavier than helium) are enriched there. At the same time, recent structure models of Jupiter that are based on gravity field measurements by the Juno spacecraft suggest that Jupiter’s interior is not uniform but has a complex structure.

“Since we now know that the interior of Jupiter is not fully mixed, we would expect heavy elements to be in a giant gas planet’s deep interior as heavy elements are mostly accreted during the early stages of the planetary formation,” study co-author, Professor at the University of Zurich and member of the NCCR PlanetS, Ravit Helled begins to explain. “Only in later stages, when the growing planet is sufficiently massive, can it effectively attract large amounts of light element gases like hydrogen and helium. Finding a formation scenario of Jupiter which is consistent with the predicted interior structure as well as with the measured atmospheric enrichment is therefore challenging yet critical for our understanding of giant planets,” Helled says. Of the many theories that have so far been proposed, none could provide a satisfying answer.

A long migration

“Our idea was that Jupiter had collected these heavy elements in the late stages of its formation by migrating. In doing so, it would have moved through regions filled with so-called planetesimals—small planetary building blocks that are composed of heavy element materials—and accumulated them in its atmosphere,” study lead-author Sho Shibata, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich and a member of the NCCR PlanetS, explains.

Yet, migration by itself is no guarantee for accreting the necessary material. “Because of complex dynamical interactions, the migrating planet does not necessarily accrete the planetesimals in its path. In many cases, the planet actually scatters them instead—not unlike a shepherding dog scattering sheep,” Shibata points out. The team therefore had to run countless simulations to determine if any migration pathways resulted in sufficient material accretion.

“What we found was that a sufficient number of planetesimals could be captured if Jupiter formed in the outer regions of the solar system—about four times further away from the Sun than where it is located now—and then migrated to its current position. In this scenario, it moved through a region where the conditions favored material accretion—an accretion sweet spot, as we call it,” Sho reports.  …