The skin and blubber of sperm whales from across the Pacific Ocean carry evidence of exposure to a class of toxic pollutants, with whales living around the Galapagos Islands showing the strongest signs of exposure, according to a new study.

"This is the first time this kind of pollution study has been done on a whole ocean level using a threatened species as a sentinel species," said Celine Godard-Codding, the lead researcher and an environmental toxicologist at Texas Tech University.

Sperm whales can live up to 70 years, feeding on squid, fish and octopus. Males of the species can grow up to 60 feet (18 meters) long. As large, long-lived carnivores, they can accumulate pollutants in their body fat.

The team took small tissue samples from 234 sperm whales in five regions in the tropical and subtropical Pacific Ocean and looked for an enzyme that breaks down a class of chemicals called aromatic hydrocarbons. These include harmful pollutants like dioxins, PCBs and a group called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). PAHs are produced during the incomplete burning of coal, oil, gas and other organic substances. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, PAHs may cause cancer, as well as reproductive, skin and immune system problems.

READ HERE

COMMENTS

COMMENTS

"September 1, 1939, the day Hitler's army invaded Poland, is one of the most infamous dates of the 20th century. But how many of us recall September 17, 1939, when Soviet forces charged into Poland from the west? Germany and Russia, acting together on terms laid out in a secret pact, tried to destroy an entire country - and nearly succeeded. The sinister partnership would not last. Two years later, Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, which would spell doom for the Wehrmacht. In the West, we think of the heroics of D-Day, but it was the Soviet Army that ultimately broke the Nazi war machine; the British and Americans merely finished it off. Stalin ends up in the history books as a saviour, along with Churchill and Roosevelt, in the struggle against Hitler.

Even now, it is far easier to think of Stalin as an opponent of Hitler than as a partner. We like to tell ourselves that the virtuous side won the war, but what happened in the east confounds such notions. Even before a shot was fired, Stalin had the blood of a nearly four million Soviet citizens on his hands. Between them, the Soviets and Germans killed nearly 200,000 Poles - targeting doctors, lawyers, scientists, professors, and religious figures. They all died in a region that the historian Timothy Snyder, in his striking and important new book, calls the "bloodlands".

It was a place of shifting allegiances, an ethnic and linguistic patchwork. The zone extended east from central Poland into western Russia, and from the Baltic States in the north to the Black Sea in the south. It was a place where German, Slavic, Baltic and Jewish cultures collided and mingled.

This was the terrain of Europe's killing fields, "where the power and malice of the Nazi and Soviet regimes overlapped and interacted". Here is where the Holocaust unfolded with a grim relentlessness. The scale of battles - at Kursk, for example, where some 7,000 German and Soviet tanks clashed - dwarfed any of those fought on the Western front. The death toll, civilian and military, exceeded 20 million. Some of the regions of the bloodlands were doubly or triply occupied. It was a theatre of immense, pervasive suffering, which almost defies comprehension..."

-- Review of a book by Timothy Snyder that is getting excellent feedback everywhere.

READ HERE

COMMENTS

-- Green clothing line?!? 5 Different patterns/colors to choose from! Follow the links to see the rest.

SEE HERE

COMMENTS

-- 1943.

SEE HERE

COMMENTS

"Chinese archaeologists have unearthed what they believe is a 2,400-year-old pot of soup, state media report.

The liquid and bones were in a sealed bronze cooking vessel dug up near the ancient capital of Xian - home to the country's famed terracotta warriors.

Tests are being carried out to identify the ingredients. An odourless liquid, believed to be wine, was also found.

The pots were discovered in a tomb being excavated to make way for an extension to the local airport..."

READ HERE

COMMENTS

COMMENTS

-- Some extreme “don’t taze me, bro” action here. Not for the faint of heart, if you happen to love either of these amazing beasts.

COMMENTS

COMMENTS

"Savant Syndrome is a condition in which an individual who is mentally disabled in some capacity possesses a phenomenal skill in another area. It is a true display of irony: the most amazing capabilities of the human brain are revealed when something goes wrong with it..."

READ HERE

COMMENTS

In the "Lord of the Rings" books, hobbits were rescued by giant eagles, but real-life hobbits might have been hunted by giant storks, scientists find.

The fossil remains of what may have been a hobbit-like species of human were discovered in 2003 at the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. In that cave, scientists also unearthed a large number of bird fossils — including 20,000- to 50,000-year-old wing and leg bones from what appears to have been a stork nearly 6 feet tall (1.8 meters).

"From the size of its bones, we initially were expecting a giant raptor, which are commonly found on islands, not a stork," said Hanneke Meijer, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

The carnivorous giant (Leptoptilos robustus) was a hitherto unknown species of marabou stork, among the largest birds alive on the planet.

Meijer and her colleague, Rokus Awe Due, detailed their findings online Nov. 24 in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

"Flores lacked any large-bodied mammalian predators — no hyenas, lions, wolves or dogs — so we think, in their absence, birds like storks moved in to fill that role," Meijer told LiveScience. It was likely a ground-bound hunter, as its bones were thick, giving the bird an estimated weight of 35 pounds (16 kilograms).

The extinct predator could have fed on fishes, lizards and birds, "and possibly in principle even small, juvenile hobbits, although we have no evidence for that," she said. "These birds are opportunistic carnivores — if you give them plenty of prey items, they'll hunt all of them."

-- Oh, okay... Wait, what?

READ HERE

COMMENTS

-- You might be surprised just how similar the two are!

SEE HERE

COMMENTS

-- Obvious stalker is obvious!

COMMENTS

Please comment! Express your thoughts, approval, disapproval, excitement, and disgust, offer profitable solutions, give suggestions, and ask questions! Yeh, I just rhymed, what of it? Big whoop! Wanna fight about it?

Blah, Blah, Blah by Mel Bochner.

COMMENTS