notes

[eub]

Impossible thing of the morning: to clean aphids off an eryngium flowerhead by hand.

We have two varieties of wineglasses. The bowl of one resonates a major third higher than its foot does, and the other's bowl is a second higher than that, and its foot is a fourth down, so ending a fifth down from the first's bowl.

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[eub.livejournal.com]

Also,
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/32652/title/Life_down_deep
R. John Parkes, a microbiologist at Cardiff University in Wales, and his colleagues analyzed nine samples of sediment drilled off the shore of Newfoundland at depths between 860 and 1,626 meters beneath the North Atlantic seafloor.

Their analyses suggest that each cubic centimeter of those sediments, on average, holds around 1.5 million microorganisms in pore spaces.

About 60 percent of those cells are alive and could reproduce, the team’s tests suggest. Also, microscopy reveals that many of the cells found in the North Atlantic samples — in one sample, nearly 12 percent — were caught in the act of dividing, the researchers reported in the May 23 Science.

Although the numbers of microbes found in the deep sediments are much thinner than the 1 billion or so that live in each cubic centimeter of sediment near the surface of the seafloor, “these are still very significant cell populations,” Parkes says.

The temperatures of rocks at the depths the team drilled range from 60° Celsius to more than 100° C, he says. Known types of microbes can survive in temperatures up to around 120° C, which corresponds to a sediment depth of about 4 kilometers, Parkes says. If microorganisms thrive throughout seafloor sediments above that depth, the material could house about 70 percent of the microbes now alive on Earth, Parkes says.