Within a hair of Bigfoot

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Published: 29 October, 2011, 16:05
Edited: 30 October, 2011, 23:17

Photograph taken from the Kemerovo Region Press Service

The Russian Academy of Sciences has said it is highly likely that the Bigfoot really exists. Experts came to the conclusion after carrying out a microscopic analysis of hairs believed to belong to the yeti found in the Kuzbass region of Siberia.
­In early October, "yetiologists" from the USA, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and Russia came to the Kuzbass region to look for evidence that would prove the existence of the Bigfoot. The trip was not in vain – footprints apparently belonging to the yeti were found dotted all over the inside of the Azass cave where the creature is thought to live.
The follicular evidence was found stuck to a huge footprint on the cave’s clay floor. Professors from Moscow, St. Petersburg and Idaho Universities got themselves a couple of precious hairs each to do the necessary research. The hairs turned out to be identical to ones that allegedly belonged to a Californian yeti, another from the Russian Urals and a third from the Leningrad region, writes Komsomolskaya Pravda.
The first to make the fantastic discovery was Professor Valentin Sapunov, a member of the New York Academy and Peter Academy of Sciences and Arts – a geneticist and biophysicist.
“In St. Petersburg the hairs were examined through a special microscope,” said Valentin Sapunov. “This is a complicated, but a very efficient method. The hairs were sprayed with a chemical composition, and then various slices of the hairs were examined. This gave us an opportunity to draw comparisons between the hairs of different biological species,” the professor explained.
When the tests were finished, the hairs found at the Azass cave were compared to those brought from California, the Russian Urals and the Leningrad region. “And they all proved to belong to one and the same species! The research of our American counterparts showed the same,” said Sapunov with ill-concealed excitement.
The results of the analysis made it possible for the scientists to officially rate the probability of the Bigfoot really existing at an astonishing 95 per cent, the professor says.
“For the record, I state that the possibility the yeti exists exceeds 95 per cent. I had long ceased to doubt the Bigfoot is real – this is why I have been trying to collect as much information about him as possible for the last 20 years,” Sapunov said.
The next step in the scientific quest to prove the existence of the yeti will be to use the hairs to examine and interpret its genetic code.
“A group of researchers from the Zoological Institute of the Academy of Sciences have already started doing that. But the process is very complicated, so it might take quite a long time,” Sapunov told Komsomolskaya Pravda.
“It is hard to persuade the world we have some real results,” complained Sapunov. "But I believe that one day scientists will meet the Bigfoot in person. This is inevitable,” he concluded.

Is carbon dioxide harmful to plants and animals?

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Polyp Apocalypse

As atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolves into increasingly acidic oceans, vibrant coral hamlets are fading into ghost towns.

[CREDIT: RAY BERKLEMANS, AIMS]

By Morgen E. Peck | Posted March 19, 2007
Posted in: Environment
Tags: climate change, marine life, oceans

Some of the ocean’s most colorful inhabitants – including corals, sea snails and many kinds of plankton – will face the risk of extinction over the next century as global warming acidifies the world’s oceans, according to a new assessment by an international committee of scientists convened by the United Nations.
All marine species that build their skeletons or shells out of calcium carbonate are at risk, as well as other species that depend on them for food, according to Richard A. Feely, a marine chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle, Washington. “We don’t know the long-term impacts, but since many of these organisms are primary food sources for fish, the cascading impacts could be very severe,” he says.
While they’re not certain how marine life will respond to an acidifying environment, scientists say there is little doubt that emissions of greenhouse gases are indeed altering the pH of the oceans. The recently released report uses decades of surface water pH measurements, since before the pre-industrial era, to predict sharp increases in ocean acidity in the years to come.
A key reason why researchers are so confident in their prediction is that the chemistry behind the emissions-acidification connection is very well understood.
The carbon dioxide in our atmosphere pushes constantly toward equilibrium with the amount dissolved in the ocean. Eventually, about one quarter of the carbon dioxide that we are dumping into our air will end up dissolving into the seawater. On entering the ocean, carbon dioxide forms three different molecules: carbonic acid, carbonate, and bicarbonate. The influx of carbonic acid increases the amount of hydrogen atoms in the water, and its acidity. This cycle has already lowered the ocean’s pH by 0.1 units since pre-industrial times, and the U.N. panel predicts decreases of at least that much more by the year 2100.
Marine organisms are especially sensitive to changes in environmental acidity. Although scientists have only just begun to study the impact these changes are having on ocean wildlife, many are ready to name some indisputable victims. “The data is clearest for corals…corals are in big trouble,” says Ken Caldeira, an environmental scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco.
Corals are tiny fleshy polyps, only a few millimeters long, but the part we usually see is the hard, colorful shell that they excrete around themselves. Within the pockets and grooves of the coral crust live colonies of algae called Zooxanthellae whose photosynthetic processes gown the corals in brilliant colors. They pay their rent by being excellent housekeepers, providing nutrients and aiding in the calcification of the corals.
To make their shells, corals must take in sufficient quantities of calcium carbonate from the water. However, the amount of calcium carbonate available to corals depends very much on the amount of carbonate ions present. As carbon dioxide invades the oceans and increases levels of carbonate, the corals are deprived of building blocks for their shells.
When the corals succumb to rising acidity and begin to die, they expel the color-producing algae that live within them. Eventually they will resemble desiccated bone. For this reason, the problem is often called “coral bleaching.”
As the climate changes, the ocean is also slowly rising in temperature. The warmer water gets, the harder it is for carbon dioxide to dissolve in it, which would logically mean that as the ocean warms it slows the change in pH. However, Caldeira says we cannot count on temperature changes to alleviate acidification. “It turns out that the temperature effect is almost independent of the ocean acidity effect,” he says.
Corals have been the most visible victims of this process. But in reality, every ocean animal with a calcium carbonate skeleton is vulnerable. Many of these, like plankton, are fundamental links in the food chain. Researchers dispute whether annihilation of these species would cause a massive ecosystem collapse.
It’s difficult to predict how marine life will respond in the coming decades because most experiments on ocean acidification are done in a laboratory and cannot fully simulate the complexity of the ocean’s ecosystem.
“Nobody really knows because nobody has taken a piece of ocean and changed the pH for an extended amount of time,” explains Caldeira.
What is certain is that for as long as we continue overloading our atmosphere with carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, we will be directly increasing the acidity of our oceans, explains Feely of NOAA. Given all the unknowns, many scientists are still conservative with their interpretations, but Caldeira warns that the reports “almost certainly underestimate the gravity of the situation.”
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