Mike+Maurtua


 * __Gulf Oil Spill Considered Worst Oil Spill in History!__**

"Here on Mexico's Gulf Coast, the Deepwater Horizon disaster has revived memories of the world's worst accidental oil spill, a 1979 blowout that spewed oil for nine months, devastated marine life and covered the [|Texas] and Mexican coasts with gobs of crude." ([])

This Deepwater Horizon spill is clearly one of the greatest ecological tragedies in the history of the world. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil are spewing in the sea every day! This causes long term ecological tragedies for the animals who live in the environments and the plants. The gulf contains the most amounts of wetlands in the U.S. territory. The oil spill also harms the economy of the gulf states and even the U.S.. First, it wastes a ton of oil that could have been used but is instead harming animals and the oceans. Second, the seafood industry is shot now. The industry will not be able to recover fully for years. And finally, the tourism in the gulf states will be gone until all the oil is cleaned up. From all sides of the debate, this oil spill is a disaster.

__**BP Oil Leak May Last Until Christmas in Worst Case Scenario!**__



By Jessica Resnick-Ault and David Wethe

"June 2 (Bloomberg) -- [|BP Plc]’s failure since April to plug a Gulf of Mexico oil leak has prompted forecasts the crude may continue gushing into December in what President Barack Obama has called the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history. BP’s attempts so far to cap the well and plug the leak on the seabed a mile below the surface haven’t worked, while the start of the Atlantic hurricane season this week indicates storms in the Gulf may disrupt other efforts. “The worst-case scenario is Christmas time,” [|Dan Pickering], the head of research at energy investor Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. in Houston, said. “This process is teaching us to be skeptical of deadlines.” Ending the year with a still-gushing well would mean about 4 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf, based on the government’s current estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels leaking a day. That would wipe out marine life deep at sea near the leak and elsewhere in the Gulf, and along hundreds of miles of coastline, said Harry Roberts, a professor of Coastal Studies at Louisiana State University. So much crude pouring into the ocean may alter the chemistry of the sea, with unforeseeable results, said Mak Saito, an Associate Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts" ([])

If the oil spill does last until Christmas, it would be unberable. Scientists are starting to believe if it keeps leaking for months with current ocean currents then the east coast will be heavily bombarded as well ([]). This spill might have been prevented if oil rigs were allowed to drill in shallower waters or on land such as in places like ANWR. If the oil spill does continue all the way until Christmas, then the environmental and economical effects would be unbelieveable.

media type="youtube" key="f2XQ97XHjVw" height="385" width="480" Are they walking on water? No. They are walking on a mixture called non-newtonian fluid. Well, how in the heck are you able to walk on it? A non-Newtonian fluid  is a  fluid  whose [|viscosity] is variable based on applied stress. The most commonly known non-Newtonian fluid  is [|cornstarch] dissolved in water. Contrast with Newtonian fluids like water, whose behavior can be described exclusively by temperature and pressure, not the forces acting on it from second to second. Non-Newtonian fluids are fascinating substances that can be used to help us understand [|physics] in more detail, in an exciting, hands-on way. If you punch a bucket full of a shear thickening non-Newtonian fluid , the stress introduced by the incoming force causes the atoms in the  fluid  to rearrange such that it behaves like a solid. Your hand will not go through. If you shove your hand into the fluid  slowly, however, it will penetrate successfully. If you pull your hand out abruptly, it will again behave like a solid, and you can literally pull a bucket of the fluid  out of its container in this way. Non-Newtonian fluids help us understand the wide variety of fluids that exist in the physical world. Plastic solids, power-law fluids, viscoelastic fluids, and time-dependent viscosity fluids are others that exhibit complex and counterintuitive relationships between shear stress and viscosity/elasticity. However, non-Newtonian fluid  is probably the most exciting to play with. []

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 * This game is a fun little tour of the cell. You will learn of the functions each particular organelle has in the cell while having fun.

[] Animals that live without oxygen have been discovered for the first time, deep under the Mediterranean Sea. A wide variety of single-celled organisms that live anaerobically, or without oxygen, had been found in the past, usually deep underwater or deep underground. But researchers had not found a multi-cellular or metazoan animal that did so until now — the giant tube worms that [|**live by hydrothermal vents**], for instance, rely on dissolved oxygen. In the past decade or so, researcher Roberto Danovaro at the Polytechnic University of Marche in Ancona, Italy, and his colleagues conducted three expeditions off the south coast of Greece looking for [|**signs of life**] in samples of mud from deep, hyper-salty basins in the Mediterranean Sea more than 3,250 meters deep. These basins are completely anoxic, or oxygen-free, and loaded with toxic levels of sulfides. In these extremes, the investigators were only expecting to see viruses, bacteria and other microbes. The bodies of multi-cellular animals had previously been discovered in these sediments, "but were thought to have sunk there from upper, oxygenated, waters," explained Danovaro These creatures, which measure less than 1 millimeter long, are known as [|**loriciferans**]. They somewhat resemble jellyfish sprouting from a conical shell. Electron microscopy revealed the three new species of loriciferans the researchers discovered lack mitochondria, the energy-making organelles or components in our cells that allow us to generate energy from oxygen among other functions. Instead, they possess large numbers of organelles resembling hydrogenosomes — anaerobic forms of mitochondria — that were previously seen in single-celled organisms inhabiting no-oxygen environments. These new animals could shed light on what life might have looked like before the rise of oxygen levels in the deep ocean and the appearance of the first large animals in the fossil record roughly 550 million to 600 million years ago, the scientists noted. The implications of this discovery might also reach far beyond the Mediterranean Sea, explained biological oceanographer Lisa Levin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, who did not take part in this research. This new, unexpected finding "offers the tantalizing promise of metazoan [|**life**] in other anoxic settings — for example, in the subsurface ocean beneath hydrothermal vents, or subduction zones, or in other anoxic basins," Levin said, referring to the subduction zones where one slab of Earth called a tectonic plate dives beneath another and sometimes leads to earthquakes. "Good places to look might be the Cariaco Basin and the Black Sea, as well as the many borderland basins off southern California and Baja California." "Are there [|**metazoans**] on other planets with atmospheres different from our own?" Levin added. "Our ability to answer this question would be strengthened considerably by more intensive studies of animal-microbe interactions in extreme settings of our own inner space — the deep ocean."
 * A new multicellular animal has been found to live WITHOUT oxygen.

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 * A new hominid is discovered. What does this mean to the evolution of humans?