TIL everyday metals have no smell on their own. That 'metal' smell is a result of the metal catalysing the reducing reactions of certain skin oils, predominately producing 1-oncten-3-one which in very low concentrations has that metallic smell, but in higher concentrations an earthy mushroom smell. You can even test this yourself by washing off a penny, it won't smell metallic until you touch it with bare hands.
The causeway was originally built on wooden pilings but they kept needing replacing and they ran out of trees, so filled it in (this is heavily summarised and not strictly the right terminology). That meant the northern half no longer has fresh water draining into it from the Jordan, Weber and Bear rivers, and it has much higher salinity. As a result the phytoplankton that make the southern half blue-green, and brine shrimp, don't live there, and instead reddish algae and bacteria dominate.
Hank Green narrates tiny life. I imediately thought of Specious’s microscope threads.
I have videos, too, but they're all years old because I haven’t focused much on live subjects recently. Also, the older the video, the quality degrades by almost every measure...
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DAVE!!!
Last edited by specious_reasons; 07-03-2019 at 08:34 PM.
Oh hey here’s a gif that a few thousand years ago someone would have happily sacrificed an offering to see, but in this age it’s just filler in between Marvel and Stranger Things stories on gizmodo.
Tardigrades, which are among the coolest and hardiest critters there are, were for some reason (you wouldn't stand for it in a movie) included in the lander's payload. And then due to a technical fault the lander crashed. So now there are undead tardigrades smeared across a patch of the moon, awaiting only some liquid water to revive.