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Fuck yeah, Science!

That's real interesting. I never appreciated the destructive nature of deer. So, deer hunters and wolves, I thank you.

Two Things:

1) It's minor but those are Elk, not deer. It's not a big deal but it bugs me that that video gets the taxa wrong.

2) I don't think that human hunters have the same behavioral effect on elk and deer that wolves have had. Human hunters definitely changed Elk/deer behavior by pushing them to be nocturnal, but their space use and food consumption were not modified so much. This difference is partly because human hunters hunt Elk/deer (mostly) visually, not by smell, and humans don't hunt at night because of laws and because we just don't see that well at night, so the deer shifted their peak activity to be after dark. Also, it's partly because we hunt deer everywhere they are, not just in the riparian habitats at the bottom of valleys, where they hangout because of all the good food...if they started leaving those valley bottoms to avoid us hunters, humans would follow with equal effort, where as wolf-packs set up territories and hunt what ever comes to them ... people shoot deer where ever they are so we don't have the spatial effect on their behavior. I just want to be clear about this so that we don't start thinking, 'we should hunt deer in all the national parks!' Wolves, as presented in this video, have a unique and very hard to mimic effect on the ecosystems they inhabit.
 
He squatted 600 lbs. RIP.

Bad-ass

oliver-sachs.jpg
 
Here's what happens when you add propane to a bottle of coke:

 
"Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.”

-Alain de Botton

This plus Adderall and strength training is my daily cycle.

Kinda fucked up actually.
 
Awwwww yissssssss. NASA is about to announce the discovery of flowing water on Mars. Get your shit together Elon! I need to go to Mars before I die.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_flows_on_warm_Martian_slopes


1280px-Warm_Season_Flows_on_Slope_in_Horowitz_Crater_%28animated%29.gif

Thanks for posting. Help me understand why this is a big deal. Based on a few internet clicks, I understand that it's theorized that the water is extremely brine, thus lowering the freezing point enough that it sticks around few weeks. I thought we knew Mars had frozen water, but the problem for human colonization was that Mars has no magnetic field and thus no atmosphere. Accordingly, even with the RSL flow, Mars could not sustain life as we know it, right? I mean, unless we could figure out a way to give it a magnetic field and create an atmosphere, a la Total Recall.
 
Humans are extremely resilient creatures. We don't really need an atmosphere or a magnetic field to live on Mars. Building our habitats under ground would effectively nullify the effects of solar radiation. Sure, it would be much less pleasant than our existence on Earth, but it is significantly easier than jump-starting Mars internal dynamo. Another effective shield from radiation is water. In fact, one of our potential methods for protecting astronauts in flight from radiation is to surround the living space with the water that you would have to carry along on a long mission. I've always found that fact pretty interesting.

So this is important for a couple of reasons. It means that water is fairly common on Mars and that we might not have to hunt for it. We also may not have to hunt for liquid water, a key distinction. We know that the poles have significant quantities of water ice but they are really inhospitable regions and you have to deal with frozen carbon dioxide ice to get to it.

Having access to liquid water sources, or easily accessible water ice would be such an enormous benefit to any future mission to Mars. We can split it into hydrogen and oxygen, we can use it to sustain our own life and that of the plants that we'll inevitably use in any long-term habitat. The uses are almost endless.

We cannot unequivocally say that Mars could not sustain life as we know it. There are many types of extremophiles that would be quite happy on the surface. We probably won't know if they are there until we put humans on the ground because there is only so much that rovers can do. I don't believe that Mars has larger than microscopic life on it, but we will certainly know within the next 20 years. It is going to be a really exciting time. I just hope I live long enough to see it.
 
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