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Tree experts also note that the organism's age cannot be determined with the level of precision found in tree rings; some claim Pando's age is closer to 1 million years.[5] Its current 80,000-year designation is based on a complex set of factors, including the history of its local environment, the evidence indicating that there are few if any naturally occurring new aspens in most of the western United States since a climate shift took place 10,000 years ago which eliminated favorable soil conditions for seedlings, the rate of growth (including the differences of rates in distinct climates when accounting for its local-climate history, the fact that males grow more slowly than females, and the fact that aspens grow more slowly at higher elevations—Pando is at 2,697 m, or 8,848 ft, above sea level), its size, and its genetic code in comparison to the mutations found among aspens born in the modern era. Michael Grant summed it thus: |
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One of the World's Largest Organisms is Shrinking (sciencemag.org)
The Pando aspen grove, located in central Utah, is the largest organism on the planet by weight. From the surface, it may look like a forest that spans more than 100 U.S. football fields, but each tree shares the exact same DNA and is connected to its clonal brethren through an elaborate underground root system. Although not quite as large in terms of area as the massive Armillaria gallica fungus in Michigan, Pando is much heavier, weighing in at more than 6 million kilograms. Now, researchers say, the grove is in danger, being slowly eaten away by mule deer and other herbivores -- and putting the fate of its ecosystem in ...
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| cauz |
Oct. 18, 2018, 4:30 p.m. |
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| David Cameron |
Taken as a whole, Europe's share of world output is projected to fall by almost a third in the next two decades. This is the competitiveness challenge - and much of our weakness in meeting it is self-inflicted. Complex rules restricting our labour markets are not some naturally occurring phenomenon. |
| Jim Cantalupo |
But, on balance, we seized the marketplace. We've got a great infrastructure. And yes it's struggling in some areas because of some external factors and some internal factors. |
| Sue Gardner |
Wikipedia has experienced censorship at the hands of industry groups and governments, and we are - increasingly, I think - seeing important decisions made by unaccountable, non-transparent corporate players, a shift from the open web to mobile walled gardens, and a shift from the production-based Internet to one that's consumption-based. |
| Josh Gad |
Melissa McCarthy just opened this new movie, 'Identity Thief,' and Rex Reed, who's a known critic, wrote a scathing commentary on her weight. I think that weight designation is one of the last frontiers of bullying. I don't know what the right 'ism' for it is, but I think that there's a level of that that's happening that's certainly not okay. |
| Jessa Gamble |
What people who are doing shift work or managing shift workers or deciding to put people on shift schedules to begin with should realize that we're not robots. |
| Evan Daugherty |
'Lord of the Rings' was going on; like, my college years were the years of 'Lord of the Rings,' an awesome time to be in film school. |
| Edward Hall |
Each organism, no matter how simple or complex, has around it a sacred bubble of space, a bit of mobile territoriality which only a few other organisms are allowed to penetrate and then only for short periods of time. |
| Drew Gilpin Faust |
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century. |
| George Galloway |
I've had more than 12,000 emails from the United States. It's not easy in the United States to find out the email address of a British parliamentarian. |
| Tulsi Gabbard |
It is clear that there needs to be a closer working relationship between the United States and India. How can we have a close relationship if decision-makers in Washington know very little, if anything, about the religious beliefs, values, and practices of India's 800 million Hindus? |
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Scientists announced the discovery of stone tools dating to 2.1 million years ago in Shangchen, China, the oldest evidence of hominins outside Africa.
The finding doesn’t necessarily indicate that it was Homo erectus which made it to China faster than previously thought. It’s believed Homo erectus hadn’t even evolved by this point, so the artifacts could suggest that a whole other species of hominins expanded east to Asia.
“The implications of all this are large,” Michael Petraglia, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute not involved in the study, tells Zimmer. “We must re-evalua...
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Scientists Confirm There Was Life On Earth 3.5 Billion Years Ago (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/12/12/1718063115)
Paleobiologists have confirmed today that life forms existed some 3.5 billion years ago. The new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses the latest techniques to date the most aged remains available. Quartz reports:
The research, led by paleobiologist William Schopf of the University of California-Los Angeles and geoscientist John Valley of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been in the works for what seems a long time to most, but which the academics know is merely a blink of the eye in terms of life on Earth. The sp...
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Study of Cellphone Risks Finds 'Some Evidence' of Link To Cancer, At Least In Male Rats (nytimes.com)
For decades, health experts have struggled to determine whether or not cellphones can cause cancer. On Thursday, a federal agency released the final results of what experts call the world's largest and most costly experiment to look into the question. The study originated in the Clinton administration, cost $30 million and involved some 3,000 rodents. The experiment, by the National Toxicology Program, found positive but relatively modest evidence that radio waves from some types of cellphones could raise the risk that male rats develop brain cancer. But he cautioned that the exposure levels and durations were far greater than what people typically encounter, and thus cannot "be compared...
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If we do nothing to reduce our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, by the end of this century the Earth will be as hot as it was 50 million years ago in the early Eocene, according to a new study out today in the journal Nature Communications. This period -- roughly 15 million years after dinosaurs went extinct and 49.8 million years before modern humans appeared on the scene -- was 16F to 25F warmer than the modern norm. [...] During the Eocene, it took more atmospheric CO2 to influence temperatures than it does today. In fact, if we don't change our behavior, 2100 will be as hot as the Eocene with much less atmospheric CO2 than was present at the time. A hotter sun means we get more bang for our CO2 buck. "Climate change denialists often mention that CO2 was high in the past, that it was warm in the past, so this means there's nothing to worry about," said lead study author Gavin Foster, a researcher in isotope geochemistry and paleoceanography at the United Kingdom's University of Sout...
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I had a dream that I was climbing a giant tree and the tree was strange and scary and I think it was trying to kill me.
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Mike Pence and Trump Administration on Space:
Pence said, "Space is, in his words, a war-fighting domain just like land and air and sea." He added, "History proves that peace only comes through strength, and in the realm of outer space, the United States Space Force will be that strength in the years ahead."
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I had two dreams. The first one I was running up a hill in my hometown that really exists but in the dream it seemed to be made out of a huge tree trunk and as I was running it started to fall apart and open up into empty sky. I fell a little but grabbed onto a part of the trunk and struggled for a while to try to move to the next piece of trunk without it breaking off and falling into the infinite sky.
In the other dream I was also falling out of something. I cannot remember what it was anymore but it had nothing to do with a tree.
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Class-action lawsuit accuses e-scooter companies of ‘gross negligence’
The nation’s electronic-scooter companies are facing more blowback as concerns rise about the safety of these devices — this time in the form of a class-action lawsuit filed Friday in California.
The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, accuses two of the largest e-scooter companies, Lime and Bird, as well as other e-scooter firms, of “gross negligence” and “aiding and abetting assault.”
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I had a dream the other night that someone was chasing me through a school. They followed me everywhere but I kept sneaking away. Then more people started looking for me and they eventually found me in a locker room attached to a gym. I looked at their faces and they didn't look real. They looked more like dolls. Then I got really upset and I told them that I knew my brain was doing this to me. It was like I knew on some level that I was dreaming. Then the person who was looking for me showed up and he had a machine gun and was just mowing down kids, killing everybody. I was running away from him and he was talking to me and trying to convince me to stop running but I didn't. He was getting closer and closer chasing me through and outside and around the building before I woke up.
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wispiest mists
Flora's stone cottage sits within a cluster of white birches where the wispiest mists drift. Her work begins at dawn. She dresses in rainboots, a bucket hat, and a rain cloak all with a matching sunflower print. Then she flutters over to the shed to get her silk mist catching bag. She circles between the trees letting the wind inflate the opening to draw the mist in. The bag doesn't seem to be catching anything at all. Flora realizes it's been a full season since she's had the silk mist catcher enchanted. She'll need to make a trip to the Mage's.
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This post is a comment.
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