WHY are EUROPEAN FORESTS so POOR

Christmas is a time to remember our loved ones, but trees in Europe have a problem, they don't have neighbours.
In Europe there are a lot of forests that are dominated by one species of tree, but it wasn´t like that in the past, it was just a trial of maintaining forests without knowing anything about ecology.
When people started to cut down trees in a grant scale they recreated the forests with the seed they found and could plant.
And also shows how important it is to be varied, so everything doesn´t look the same.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, NEWTON

Christmas day, christmas day, but what about Newton's birthday.
You know, the guy who discovered gravity with Edward Halley?
Well, the "COSMOS an spacetime odyssey" series made an episode all about newton.
Happy birthday,Newton.

an ANCIENT IVORY is RISING

This is probably the ONLY reason global warming can save wildlife.

The reason,Mammoths.Mammoth ivory is the only legal ivory in most countries, and many people crave it, but it took a lot of effort to find and dig a tusk of Mamoth out of the thick ice, un til now.
The ice is getting weaker, thiner and shorter, now tusk don't have to be dug, you just separate them from the ice.
This could get read of the pressure of ivory...   for a while.

But meanwhile enjoy Saturnalia.

a LETTER to VASC

A week ago the day of the Vasc language was celebrated, it celebrates the persistance of a european language isolated within the ages, a language that is older than latin and survived the romans, no one knows were it comes from,Were there the imigrants of the first russians or just some lonely tribes?
This is a very important part of my culture, when you invade a city one of the things you do first is getting rid of their culture, their art, the way they cook and their language (Except of course, the mongols)

, this is a remainder of a survival, a group of tribes that found the way to  avoid invasion and persits, to the end...
If you wanna hear a vasc song just try this one:Ilargia/Ken Zazpi

the ILLEGAL TRADITION that was accidentaly REPEATED

Near the end of November a giant hay goat is transported to the main street, and another tradition is to then...
Burn it!
Actually this structure is made to stay, but the first time it was in the main street a car accidentally burned it.
And this hapened every year and started to be made by tourists that thought it was a tradition, and now each year some tourist(s) break the law to continue this tradition.

Happy SATURNALIA!!

Get ready for an amazing saturnalia this year!
This holiday was made for Saturn, the child of heaven and Earth, the god of lead.
This celebration was also the framework of Christmas day.
It was also the day Newton was born.
So get ready to enjoy this Saturnalia miracle.

WOMEN POWER

We normaly think males as dominant, important, who put the family together, well...
That´s not really the case.
Normaly for an animal to reproduce you need two sexes, but in species such as the komodo dragon the female can actually clone itself.Only with the cost of low genetic diversity.
So to any woman out there that doesn´t feel potent in your life, remember that there is always a species of animal that has the female as ther main centre of its kind.

Don't be ALONE

We think we are unbeatable, but the true story is that our brain makes us weaker.
Many explorers have died because of cultural isolation.It can give us pain, get us traped in our own mind.
In the ISS a dinner table was requested for social interaction and to wake up the astronauts music is beamed.
We are probably the most depresed species  in loneliness.
So remember,never be alone...

The reason why we DON'T KNOW NOTHING ABOUT EARTH'S BIOSPHERES

Humans, we are some of the weirdiest apes on earth, we try to control what created us, we feel insecure on this giant rock because we know that everything out there can ruin our lives down here.We have some technology, but in the process we made things even worse.We act with money and currecy of the bronce age.But some people have tried to create the perfect earth...inside earth.

BIOSPHERE II
First created to recreate earth's main habitats and to maintain humans in a terraformed enviroment in a closed system.
But the experiment failed, oxigen needed to be taken from outside of the closed system
and the people in the experiment were starving.

That remained us a important lesson, nature is more complex than the thought.
Today Biosphere II is preparing for other experiments like the effects and movement of water and rain in soil.

The SCARIEST FUNGUS in the WORLD!

Parasites, our biggest and scariests enemies.Flies,worms,muggets...
All of them parasite on others but the best on their job are fungi.
They can creep up on their hosts as tiny spores and control their impulses.
But which is the scariest and most horrifying one?

Say hello to the bug controling,brain popping fungus named corticeps.
This fungus gets into a insects nervous system and makes it climb to a place were air currets take the spores to other insects, then the fungus pops out of the insect's serfous and frees his spores.

follow the FROG

UPDATE:no more PHOTOS, more DRAWINGS

I decided that nature´s science should not use photographs any more, so I started using drawings to make my own photos, and now I will start to change the previous blogs and put my drawings inestead of photos so check them out.
And be aware that in halloween I will show videos of the scariest creatures of the natural world, remember that all the videos in this blog are highly recomended to nature lovers and science fans.

HOW a SEWAGE SYSTEM SAVED a RIVER FROM BECOMING A DEAD ZONE

Imagine a city that contaminated his main river to the point of biological extinction.Well, you don´t have to imagine it,beacuse that was London and the river Tames in 1858 in an event called "THE GREAT STINK":Colera outbreaks popped all over England,poop piles up to 6 feet deep.Finally the goverment decided to put a sewage system that cleaned the river from waste,it took 20 years to complete,a hundred years later the Tames was declared as dead, in 1957 the natural history museum declared the Tames as biologically dead.

But better sewage systems appeared and now the Tames supports wildlife in its waters.

THE END

  

If you want to know more watch this video by Vsauce2 about our toilets and water theatments. 

The ROCK DILEMA

Have you ever wondered what is the answer to the big question...What is life?

So to answer it I invented a simple dilema.
Imagine you have a rock, What should you do to consider that it is alive or that it is life?
It depends.What is life?In every organisim there are proteins that make it function:feed,get energy,produce more of itself, recicle, copy genetic material...
But proteins aren't alive by themselves, is the reactions that they make that creates proceses to sustain the being.

At some point creatures die, they reproduce to maintain, not themselves,but their genes, the información to create all proteins, its so important in fact that living things can evolve into dead things as long as its benefitial to its DNA.But DNA is a protein, its not alive by itself.

Now lets apply the rock dilema:If you add reactions that create chemical proceses un the same way as in living things, Is the rock alive?Or if you add information to arrange and create a copy of itself and a way to decode it, Is it alive?

GAME of THRONES SCIENCE

If you love science and Game of Thrones you should see this video of It's okay to be smart.
But before you do.

If you like more blogs of this type look at the blog about new species of ants named by dragons or watch this video about a village for Game of Thrones fans.

MAN vs EARTH rap

This scientific rap about how we are destroing the Earth will make you rethink what we do.

the BIKE CRASHING GIANT GOLIATH BEETLE

Beetles are the most common type of insect out there, they have lots of shapes and sizes, but just one has the power to bump into bicicles and bringing them down.The goliath beetle is a massive african beetle that's so heavy that its hard for him to fly, so it needs lots of power to lift itself, wich makes him move faster thoward than up, making him a bullet at low latitude, so its easy for him to bump in the faces of bikers and crash into the windows of cars.

REVIEW Nature´s science

We had some good blogs over this three moths, and I think we should review the most popular with youtube videos:

The microbiome was the first and one of the most popular blogs of the month.

How a yellow blob can solve mazes is a mery interesting and popular subject, that is also very popular.

This video shows my question about if we should get rid of mosquitoes.What do you think?

COULD YOU CREATE A GODZILLA

Godzilla is normally considered an amphibian that has suffered large ammouts of radiation and has become a gargantic monster on the sea that goes on land and fires up buildings and cities.My question is,How could you create a godzilla with thoes abilities?
To be a creature that can go on water and land.But amphibians die if the contact salt water, so our best chance is it to be a reptile.Then there is the problem with size, a creature the size of godzilla may not colapse on sea, but on land the metric cube law (mass grows faster than force) makes it imposible to stand uprigth without colapsing in  the soil, even if it walked in four legs it would sink in soil.To make godzilla a fire breathing monster it would need to save the gas produced by her digestion and eat some flameable metals.
But could godzilla even exist as it is?Well, here is a video that will help you find out.

Why do SCORPIONS GLOW?

Fireflies,squids,jellyfish,coral,fish,crustaceans, they all give of light, but in some of them the reason why is still a mistery.Scorpions are aracnids with a sting on the end of their tails,they're normaly active at night.But when you bounce Ultraviolet ligth on them they glow.That may be as a natural sunscreen(coral sunscreen), but scorpions mostly appear at night.Another posibility is that they mimic flowers, but in the desert flowers just blowsome at some days of the year.So what's the answer, well it will become a mistery for years to come.

Letter from AUSTRALIA:sugar gliders

There is no marsupial weirdier that the sugar glider, a gliding marsupial that pollinates flowers in Australia.It has it´s characteristical two black stripes around his eyes and along his back.Surely I got a photo of one in the midle of the air.
Srely I can go back to my town and end this madness.

Letter from PATAGONIA:cougars

I made it from Costa Rica to the forgotten mountain range around Peru and Argentina, famous for giant tarantulas, llamas, plains, anteaters,vipers and cougars.They live all over the Americas,but is very hard to see one.They feed on medium sized prey in the mountain such as marmots or ungulates.I managed to take a great shot up close.

letter from CANADA:narwhals

From one pole to another,I'm in the northern part of Canada, in a trip to see what climate change is doing to our planet.Here live one of the smallest contributors to climate change and is one of the most affected, the Inuits(people of the village).They need wild animals to feed on, without them there is no hope.These people have rights, and one of them is their culture.These people are connected to the sea, the ice, the wolfs, the bears and the narwhals.They are the whales of myth.They will be one of the most affected by the oil industries and rising seas that have caused trauma and habitat relocation in some cetacean species.Surely I managed to take a shot of a male getting ready for battle.

letter from COSTA RICA :three toed sloths

In the jungles of Costa Rica many creatures stand out, but sloths don't seem to take the attention of people, but they are curious creatures.Their closest relatives are anteaters and pangolings. Sloths do not eat insects but are in fact a place to raise them.Sloths have tiny larvae in their hair feeding on the plants on top of it that grow on it (making it the only green mammal).Then the larvae turn into moth like creatures that lay their eggs in the sloths poop until they hatch. I hope to see one soon, while I wait, see you later!

THE REASON WHY WE SHOULD PUT A PRIZE ON A FOREST

Nature is our most valuable resource, but it shouldn't be for free.We all need water to live, but we don't need oil to sustain ourselves.Think about this, oil companies dig and destroy zones of forest for big oil reserves...That will feed our population for eight days and eight days only.

New conservation efforts put a prize on every tree and creature on the rain forest by the carbon absorbed by the individual or other ecological favours and jobs of other species to create a natural capital.This means that the forest is officially not for free.

THE DEEP

We live greatly in our low pressure non reactive air rich surface, but life doesn't evolve well in non reactive surroundings, it need minerals and high temperatures to rearrange the molecules properly.
Today many animals live there,feeding,hunting,glowing,swimming,crawling...
Yeti crabs roam the edges of the trench for bacteria, tube worms feed on the particles that come from above.
Squid roam the open deep sea.
But we never got there, maybe we should take some of their tricks.Use water as a structural support to support water pressure, be jelly like instead of robust.
That we can't get there at first doesn't mean it isn't worth the time to get there, we must try harder to go toward.We went to the deep blue above us but we forgot what was under our feet, what our world holds, we went up because we were afraid of what was under the surface, we must remember that our ancestors went to the cave to protect themselves from the snow, then we found our way to the outside, to never hold back.

NATURAL? DON'T THINK SO...

There has been a lot of talk about GMOs and mass production lately.
Actually if genetic change by humans is a serious subject we should also consider that over many generations our crops and farm animals have been selected by us humans for more nutrients or less diseases.
Today the new technology of CRISP lets you modify a gene in a much shorter amount of time.
But it has some problems like gene exchange between wild and tamed salmon in salmon farms.
People think that GMOs will make you sick, but that isn't necessarily true.Organic tomatoes for instance have been genetically modified to have more nutrients.We still have a little love of nature, that may be why its more probable that you buy something with the word "natural" or "organic" in it.

POOP SAVOUR

Poop is disgusting,Or isn't it? In the natural world poop is a precious material for plants and bacteria.Flies and beetles need poop to feed and lay their eggs.Poop is rich in nitrogen and ammonia that are the main food of plants and some bacteria.Herbivores need tough digestive systems, but even then some herbivore digestion isn't very effective, such as elephant digestion, that's why there is a lot of undigested fivers in their poop, which can be nutritious food for fiver loving microbes.
Other animals like bears eat berries and poop their seeds along with his poop that will help them grow.
Fruit bats in south america contribute in 50% of the amazon's rain forest whole pollination system.

Maybe we are the weird ones that clean our poop before someone else can use it, is rubbish for us,but isn't for anyone else.

THE TOUGHEST PLACE ON THE SEA

We may think that the toughest place would be one with enough pressure to crush your bones or somewhere without a bite or somewhere where is too hot to survive without vaporising.
But for many creatures the toughest place is one without a secure medium that rushes with the waves and crushes with the coastline rocks.Is the inter-tidal zone, a place where the sea level rises and drops in a regular basis and where little oxygen is to be found.The few fishes that live here do partially breathe air from the surface.Many of the creatures from deeper waters wouldn't survive the waves and the loss of oxygen and would parish.Invertebrates here move slowly and have tough armour to be protected from the waves.They take the advantage of mineral exchange from deeper water to obtain nutrients.In low tide creatures are trapped in rock polls that work as a temporal ecosystem separated from the sea.

EXPLORING EARTH TO REACH THE FURTHEST REGIONS OF SPACE

When the mission Galileo detected an icy surface on the moon Europa it revealed a theoretical sea that had more mass that all of earth's liquid water combined.That alarmed scientists with the possibility of life in Europa.It had liquid water, high temperatures and minerals, all needed for life.

Of course something as a trip to mars or the moon will take around 10 to 20 years to get out of the ground.So to make time NASA is funding expeditions to the most similar place on earth that resembles Europa,the Gakkel trench in the arctic ocean.Where sunlight never reaches.There they found new species of sponges and lots of microbes.

But still, if there is life out there, we will never be really prepared for what's coming...

letter from SPAIN:rabbits

I made it right up into Spain, and rabbit meat is a delicacy.
It was actually here in Spain was the place where rabbits evolved!
That may be why many of the top predators in the region such as the Iberian lynx and the Spanish imperial eagle eat mostly rabbit.

THERMODYNAMICS RUINED RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES

Thermodynamics tells us that in each step energy passes through it will end with less energy than before.
So as petroleum passes from each step of the energy process it losses some of the energy it had.
The sun's rays pass through space some energy is lost into the surrounding area.Then in the atmosphere some more energy is borrowed.When it touches a solar panel the process to get the energy makes it loose a even more of the energy missing.
The reason that solar panels haven´t become popular is because panels aren't cheap to implant and aren't very efficient.
Wind may be a more efficient way of getting the sun's energy by the vibrating molecules that have trapped the heat of the incoming light and radiation.

letter from MADAGASCAR,lemurs

With some flights I made it to Madagascar to seek out the top find, lemurs, in particular Sifaka lemurs, witch jump from branch to branch and move in a very fun and impressive way.
They have the amazing hability to climb in thin and spiny branches.

letter from BHUTAN:tigers

I made it from Russia to the southern Himalayas in the mountainous region of Bhutan.These country is full of villages, most of them have pictures of tigers, but no one expected that tigers lived that high in the mountains, as it seemed that they couldn't be able to hunt enough to maintain themselves.
But research shows that tigers have been living in this mountains and even thriving, as poaching in those regions is rare tigers survive in greater numbers.

letter from RUSSIA, bears

I still don't know how I made it through Russia's roads,But I sure seen a hole lot of bears!there are polar bears and brown bears in this region.
The biggest enemy of the bear is the wolf, that competes for the same food and resources.
Never get close to a brown bear, they will defend their territory no matter what the cost.

PLANT CHAT

Plants seem completely useless at sensing their surroundings and avoiding danger.But that is anything but true.
When  a plants leaves are eaten some chemicals get attached to other plants, that triggers the production of toxins so they escape danger.
Plants can contact even in total isolation from each other, sharing chemicals and nutrients by beneficial fungal routes that connect them together underground.
Some plants even attract parasitic wasp to put their eggs into the invading caterpillars in them.
Some plants use those same chemicals to mimic the leafs of the plants they parasite on.

If we did anything with the new communication media is clear, we took a leaf from their book.

FLUORESCENT SUNSCREEN

Coral has many threats these days:warmer waters,more pollution,acidic seas...
But one of the least known is probably to much sunlight, as it contains dangerous UV light that damages DNA that may cause serous problems.
To deal with this corals have a weapon.At night coral shines by biofluorescence that absorbs the sunlight of the day and shows the same light at night with a lower wavelength than before.Research has shown that coral that biofluoreses more is more resilient to sunligth and UV rays,just like a natural fluorescent sunscreen.

LIFE, MUCH SOONER THAN WE THOUGTH

British geologists looking for the first life on earth looked for complex shelled animals like trilobites and amonites,but today we know that we came from simple unicellular organisms that appeared around 4000 million years, just after the great bombardment, a period of continuous asteroid hits that gave the earth liquid water that mixed with the magmatic iron from the volcanic surface as earth cooled.Today research shows that the first bacteria and viruses where evolving during this formative period, when the earth started forming its oceans each big impact could make the earth inhabitable. There are some theories to explain this, for instance the Panspermia Theory that suggests that life developed or have evolved some time in space to survive.
To make life you don't need just water and some basic elements,you also need minerals from the earth that where dissolved by magmatic rocks and ocean volcanic vents.

Life came from rocks, maybe we should stop treating soil as dirt.

JELLYFISH,MASTERS OF SURVIVAL

Today global warming is threatning many of our most important marine food sources and fisheries.
But there is a creature that is thriving in this conditions, the jellyfish. They can be bigger than a blue whale, survive the pressure of the deepest oceans, shine without wasting heat and feed on anything.
Jellyfish don't have a brain or heart or even senses.But jellyfish have a light sensitive cells that help them know when to feed and hide.With that and other unicelular purposes such as venomous stings jellyfish became the masters of survival without having extreme biological changes like legs or eyes or an specialised skin organ.Now the jellyfish rule the world, and if we don't stop putting our oceans to the edge, we must learn to live with them.

FARMER ANTS HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGTH

Ants are tiny societies that look similar to our own.Ants make chemical trails as roads, have specific jobs and even have war.But ants can't copy things as complex as farming,or can they?
Leafcutfer ants suggest so.The ants harvest leafs and other plant matter to feed a fungus that they need to live.

A little bit north other more common species of ant raise aphids that when they end feeding they produce a sugary liquid full of energy.But there's a problem, aphids are hunted by the tenacious larvae and adult form of the ladybird, so ants defend the herd from any incoming ladybird attack.

HOW A FISH HELP VOLTA CREATE THE FIRST BATTERY?

How do electric animals even exist?Well, we are one of them.Our movement is carried as electric impulses throughout the body.
Electric eels for instance have some cells called electrolytes that when activated produce 15V that are dispersed outward from his head.His body is isolated from the electricity he produces.
Creatures like these may have inspired the first battery.
Volta piled up electrodes of both positive and negative charges,one of them produces electrons and the other one looses them.When there is a electrolyte conductor an electrical current is produced, nearly equal to the electric producing eels in the amazon.

Letter from POLAND:weasels

If you go to Poland there are some animals that stand out like elk or wolfs.
But sooner or later you will encounter a weasel somewhere:in the post,in the woods, in the economic system...
Weasels are in the Mustelid family,also called the weasel family that includes stoats,badgers,otters,skunks...
They're the apex predators of the plains.Hunting rabbits three times their own size.

With sharp claws, weasels.

THE FROG AND THE TORTOISE

There are around 205 endangered species of mammals, but nearly all species of amphibians are endangered.How many specimens are of the Rabb's fringed-limbed tree frog for instance...
Just one in captivity, nothing else.A fungus eradicate them all in Panamá.

In the Galapagos islands some years ago an species of giant tortoise went extinct when his last specimen died in 2012, it was called lonesome George.

WHAT CREATURE IS HIDING IN THIS OAK TUMOR?

When you thought that cancer couldn't get any worse.Oak trees could be dominated among the most tumorous trees on earth.The cooperate is a tiny swarm of many species of parasitic wasps that use the oak tree to shelter their larvae inside.Wasps do this by infecting the oak tree with chemicals  that force the tree to create a bumpy tumor full of nutrients for the larvae to feed on.Some wasps infect the larvae of other wasps that have infected the tree so their larvae can feed of the other's wasps body.

WATER HAS MEMORY?

The human brain is around 70 to 80% water.
But what about water having brain itself?
No, water will not win a pop quiz or memorise a book, but it will repeat actions it did before.
Water has the same memory as skin:if you burn in a certain part of your body and then when your skin has healed its exposed to those same conditions it will burn in a similar way, as if the skin copied passed actions for nothing if only to harm itself.Skin has some cells that resemble neurons that produce melanin that protects the skin from burning from ultraviolet light.Some of those cells may be responsible for skin´s memory,But water?
We still don´t know, but it seems that the water´s strange ability may be applied to snowflake formation, that may explain way there are no two identical snowflakes... ever.

HOW WE GAVE OUR PERMANENT MARK TO THE EARTH´S CRUST

Our oficial geologic time is called the Eocene, a very irregular period of hot and cold years.But today we are in a long intermission that seems to be here to stay.Geologist now call these era the Anthropocene, "the age of man".When should it begin?Experts say that for a period to transpass to another period there must be a radical change everywhere in the world at once. Geologist say that could be the great acceleration, when the population of the world, the devices made and the species going extinct all increased.  Geology is a very hardy science, no one expected that our impact could be transferred into the solid sediments of the earth. Geologist have even found sediments of air particles made artificially sinking and sedimenting in the bottom of the ocean!