The Discovery Channel office building during Shark Week
Samson and Goliath | Queens Island, Belfast, Northern Ireland, GB
© SciFiGeek
Old People Line Up To Clean Radiation in Japan
Mr. Yamada:
“I am 72 and on average I probably have 13 to 15 years left to live. Even if I were exposed to radiation, cancer could take 20 or 30 years or longer to develop. Therefore us older ones have less chance of getting cancer.”Basically a group of 200+ retirees are volunteering to expose themselves to high levels of radiation so the younger men and women don’t have to.
Making the ultimate sacrifice to protect the lives of their children, and their children’s children. <3
California, USA: All-Alaskan Pig Racing
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images guardian.co.uk
If you know me or have been following me for, say, more than a day, you probably know I fucking love karst topography.
This is a pretty handy (if simplified) graphic explaining what karst is — it’s essentially a kind of landscape shaped by water interacting with carbonate rock (dolomite or limestone) and forming carbonic acid (or HCO3). This acid then begins to eat through the rock. Carbonic acid is weak, and it’s really dilute, and the limestone and dolomite is only very slightly soluble, so mostly this reaction happens along fractures and bedding planes. A whole lot of time passes, and, very slowly, these fractures deepen and deepen and deepen. All these dissolved carbonates have to go somewhere, too, so if the water flows somewhere and evaporates, it’ll leave behind deposits of chemical limestone, also known as travertine.
As a result, you get all sorts of cool formations — sinkholes, caves, speleothems, all sorts of crap. What’s not to love?