In this Science on the SPOT: Preserving the Forest of the Sea, watch Kathy Ann Miller, PhD, curator of the University Herbarium at the University of California - Berkeley, as she shares the wide variety of seaweeds in the collection.
We love when someone gives a personalized video tour of their work, especially when it mixes nature, science and beautiful, art-like specimens all together. Kathy and her team are digitizing samples of 80,000 kinds of seaweed collected from the North American west coast, so that they can be shared online with researchers from around the globe. You can read more about the project here.
PS. Need a DNA primer? Watch this vid.
From KQEDscience
When you drill 364 meters (1194 feet) down into Antarctic ice, taking out a cylindrical section called an ice core, you can find out about the Earth’s temperature and carbon dioxide levels from over 20,000 years ago. Information is held within the oxygen atoms in the ice and the air bubbles that formed within it.
Measuring ice cores is an effective form of time travel for scientists like the British Antarctic Survey team, who are studying how the Earth’s climate is changing. And Antarctica is full of untapped information:
Antarctica is thought to have been covered by ice for over 30 million years. So far, scientists have drilled ice cores stretching back 800,000 years, and they are now working to extend their records back to 1.4 million years ago.
In this video, Ice Core Scientist Nerilie Abram explains the process. You can also read more about the team’s work here.
The circulatory system consisting of the heart, arteries, capillaries, and veins, is the pumping mechanism that transports blood throughout the body. In the heart, the left ventricle contracts, pushing red blood cells into the aorta, the body’s largest artery. From here, blood moves through a series of increasingly smaller arteries, until it reaches a capillary, the junction between arteries and veins. Here oxygen molecules detach from the red blood cells and slip across the capillary wall into body tissue.
Now de-oxygenated, blood begins its return to the heart. It passes through increasingly larger veins to eventually reach the right atrium. It enters the right ventricle, which pumps it through the pulmonary arteries into the lungs, to pick up more oxygen. Oxygenated, blood reenters the left atrium, moves into the left ventricle, and the blood’s journey begins again.
Nothing like riding through the body to get the point across!
via Wonderopolis.
You’re made of carbon, you’re made of oxygen, there’s iron in your blood. All of those things had to be generated inside the core of a star. There’s no other way to get them. So when you think about star stuff, look around you. Everything that you’re made of, everything the world around you is made of had to come from the belly of a star that blew up a long time ago.
The last five minutes of Extreme Stars, an episode from the Discovery Channel’s How the Universe Works.
Updated links.
