Sonic 15G

incidentalcomics:

Paths to Success

crownedrose:

Dinosaurs grew to outpace their young
Ancient reptiles owed huge size more to their eggs than to a benign environment.

Some dinosaurs grew to gigantic sizes to avoid competition from their own young, rather than to take advantage of abundant oxygen, high temperatures and large territorial ranges, say two studies. But their largeness may also have proved their undoing.

Some have argued that dinosaurs were able to grow quickly and fuel large bodies when temperatures were warm, oxygen levels were high, and land masses such as the supercontinent Gondwana provided abundant living space.

But although the idea that certain environmental conditions favoured the growth of enormous dinosaurs has been popular among palaeontologists, there is little evidence for it.

Friendly environment: To see whether the link could be supported, Roland Sookias, a biologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, and his colleagues examined whether changes in body size followed changes in environmental factors. Their findings are published in Biology Letters today ¹.

The team used thigh-bone lengths to work out the body sizes of more than 400 species alive during the Permian, Triassic and Jurassic periods (299 million to 145 million years ago). This included dinosaurs and their predecessors, as well as contemporaries such as flying pterosaurs and the ancestors of mammals.

Continue reading at Nature

Interesting read! Dinosaur growth is a topic I’ve always enjoyed, especially when it comes to how fast they would grow. A nice read for anyone interested.

brilliantbotany:

This is the Indian Pipe plant, an eerie-looking plant, in my opinion. Monotropa uniflora is a heterotroph. That means that it doesn’t photosynthesize. Instead, it’s a parasitic plant that relies on mycorrhizal fungi for its nutrients.
Why is it white? No chlorophyll, no green.
It’s also known as the Ghost Plant, and the Corpse Plant. 

fuckyeahspaceexploration:

Repair

theatlantic:

10 Things You Should Know About Hitler: Predictions From The Atlantic in 1932

In 1932, Hitler had not yet taken power in Germany. But he was close. 

What would happen to Germany if the Nazis were to rule? That was a question that had a surprisingly easy answer. In the March issue of The Atlantic, Nicolas Fairweather wrote “Hitler and Hitlerism: A Man of Destiny.” In it, he analyzed Hitler and his philosophy, as derived from a reading of Mein Kampf, “to foreshadow, from [Hitler’s] own statements, some of the things he would like to accomplish.” Journalists, at times, can be horrible predictors of the future. But in this case, Fairweather’s assessment was a sound alarm. He summarizes Hitler in 10 points:

1. His violent racial nationalism, which springs from his conviction that the Aryan stocks in general, and the Germans in particular, are a chosen people in whose victorious survival the divine purposes are bound up.

2. His violent animosity to Marxian Socialism as in essence opposed to his ideal of a nationally minded people and a racial state. …

3. His violent hatred of the Jews as the racial enemies of all Aryans, the subtle corrupters of pure Aryan states. These parasites, says Hitler, have made Marxian Socialism, which they invented, the principal tool by which they insinuate themselves into healthy, pure blooded, racial states in order to debase simultaneously the national ideals and the national blood. Destroyers of Aryan civilizations, they remain impotent to create a civilization of their own.

Read more. [Image: AP]

inothernews:

Except for the rings of Saturn, the Ring Nebula (M57) is probably the most famous celestial band. Its classic appearance is understood to be due to perspective - our view from planet Earth looks down the center of a roughly barrel-shaped cloud of glowing gas. But expansive looping structures are seen to extend far beyond the Ring Nebula’s familiar central regions in this intriguing composite of ground based and Hubble Space Telescope images with narrowband image data from Subaru. Of course, in this well-studied example of a planetary nebula, the glowing material does not come from planets. Instead, the gaseous shroud represents outer layers expelled from the dying, once sun-like star at the nebula’s center. Intense ultraviolet light from the hot central star ionizes atoms in the gas. Ionized oxygen atoms produce the characteristic greenish glow and ionized hydrogen the prominent red emission. The central ring of the Ring Nebula is about one light-year across and 2,000 light-years away.  (Photo and caption via NASA APOD)