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🪼Daily Cnidarian Fact:🪼

Upside-Down Jellyfish: Down is up for this jelly — it rests its bell on the seafloor and waves its lacy underparts up toward the sun. Why? This jelly is a farmer. Its brownish color is caused by symbiotic dinoflagellates living inside the jelly’s tissues. By lying upside-down, the jelly exposes its algae to the sun, allowing it to photosynthesize. The jelly can sustain itself off just the byproducts of the algae, and capture zooplankton for additional energy to grow.

phys.org

Orchid plants nurture their seedlings via shared underground fungal network, study shows

The Common Spotted Orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) is found all over the U.K. These orchids produce tiny seeds that can be carried anywhere by

The Common Spotted Orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) is found all over the U.K. These orchids produce tiny seeds that can be carried anywhere by the wind, yet they often appear in clumps with small seedlings growing near mature plants. This phenomenon has puzzled ecologists since Darwin's time, with the exact reason remaining a mystery. A new study, led by researchers from the University of Sheffield in collaboration with The University of Manchester, provides the first evidence that early stage orchid seedlings germinate and thrive near to adult plants due to a kind of parental nurture using underground fungal networks. Scientists investigated the idea that fungal networks, known as mycorrhizal networks, act as a direct pathway for established orchid plants to share recently produced sugars with developing seedlings.

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ScienceAlert

Ancient Genes of Zombie Viruses Revealed as Hidden Drivers of Cancer

When viruses pay us a visit, they sometimes leave parts of themselves behind.

When viruses pay us a visit, they sometimes leave parts of themselves behind. Silently tucked away in our genomes, some of these bits of foreign DNA can get passed down through the generations. They were long thought inactive, but we've since learned these stowaway sequences can be turned back on to wreak all sorts of havoc. Now researchers led by University of Colorado bioinformatician Atma Ivancevic, have found cancers can make use of some of these zombie virus parts for their own benefit.

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If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...

Start helping with citizen science projects

The Conversation

Explainer: what is citizen science?

Public participation in science is increasing, and citizen science has a central part in this. It is a contribution by the public to researc

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

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I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.

Byzantine history be like:

In 874 Emperor Kostalogous IV ascended to the throne after blinding sixteen nephews, and married his wife, Theodora.

However, he soon ran afoul of the Patriarch of Constantinople, Theopelagionikus, and his wife Theodora.

In 895 he was deposed by his general, Justiniapelomaxorianous II, and his wife Theodora.

This created nine new church schisms.

“The Herd on the Move”—William Jacob Hays.

This painting simultaneously breaks my heart and fills me with awe and hope. When people speak about how prevalent the bison were across Turtle Island I’m not sure if it fully HITS just how many were slaughtered, how much this land relied on them for proper ecological balance….

if we want our land to thrive, if we want the next seven generations to survive then we must help the bison (and the indigenous peoples who love/rely on them) to expand and grow until they are once again found all across the land.

helloo!! sorry if this is a question u get a lot, do you know any good website to keep up with marine animals news?? and for research??

It's a good question to ask, especially in a world where you have to sift through a lot of misinformation surrounding science (and, to set a good example, I will now be adding references in the notes for my information, particularly if I mention specific studies).

For news, Science.org, SciTechDaily, NewScientist and Nature.com are all websites I have used for keeping up to date with global marine biology news/research although it's always possible to use any news site as long as you ensure they are reliable (e.g. do they include references to research for further reading? does the content of the referenced research match the claims they make in the article? is the site likely to be biased towards a particular viewpoint?)

For research, there are tons of databases storing centuries of marine biology research. Many people like to recommend Google Scholar and I always think it's a good starting point for beginning scientific research but you can't always trust it to be a reliable tool.

ResearchGate, Wiley Online Library, ScienceDirect are all good places for peer-reviewed scientific articles (and I'm sure the people over at @jstor will assure you of the strength of their database too) although, keep in mind, you might have to search through many other databases if you want to dodge paywalls to access full articles.

If anyone else has any other suggestions, feel free to mention them in the notes!