A water balloon full of mercury hitting the ground. 

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“Ghost Heart”.

What exactly is a ghost heart?

More than 3,200 people are on the waiting list for a heart transplant in the United States. Some won’t survive the wait. Last year, 340 died before a new heart was found.

The solution: Take a pig heart, soak it in an ingredient commonly found in shampoo and wash away the cells until you’re left with a protein scaffold that is to a heart what two-by-four framing is to a house.

Then inject that ghost heart, as it’s called, with hundreds of millions of blood or bone-marrow stem cells from a person who needs a heart transplant, place it in a bioreactor - a box with artificial lungs and tubes that pump oxygen and blood into it - and wait as the ghost heart begins to mature into a new, beating human heart.

Doris Taylor, director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, has been working on this— first using rat hearts, then pig hearts and human hearts - for years.

The process is called decellularization and it is a tissue engineering technique designed to strip out the cells from a donor organ, leaving nothing but connective tissue that used to hold the cells in place. 

This scaffold of connective tissue - called a “ghost organ” for its pale and almost translucent appearance - can then be reseeded with a patient’s own cells, with the goal of regenerating an organ that can be transplanted into the patient without fear of tissue rejection.

This ghost heart is ready to be injected with a transplant recipient’s stem cells so a new heart - one that won’t be rejected - can be grown.

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If Earth Had a Ring Like Saturn

Our planet is lucky enough to have a large moon orbiting not too far away, which makes for very pretty moonlit nights. But for spectacular skies it might almost be worth trading in our moon for a ring like Saturn’s.

In fact, the earth did once have a ring - as part of the formation of our moon, ironically enough. When the planet Thea crashed into the earth, a titanic amount of material was blown into space. This went into orbit around the earth, forming a ring until it all eventually coalesced into our present-day satellite. This only happened because the material was orbiting outside of earth’s Roche limit.

In 1848, the French mathematician Edouard Roche calculated that if a large satellite were to approach too closely to a planet, it would be torn apart by the planet’s gravitational forces. This happens because the gravitational attraction of a planet on a moon is not equal. The planet pulls more on the side of the moon closest to it and less on the side further away. If the moon gets too close, this unequal pull can become great enough to tear the moon apart. Every planet has what is called a Roche limit.

Some astronomers believe that Saturn’s rings are material that was unable to form into a moon because it lies within the planet’s Roche limit. The gravitational pull of Saturn prevents particles from clumping together to form a moon. Another idea popular among scientists suggests that during the time when Saturn was first forming, it had one or more moons just outside its Roche limit. The bigger a planet is, the more gravity it has. And the more gravity it has, the bigger its Roche limit is. So as Saturn grew larger, its Roche limit grew, too. The limit soon moved past the inner moons and these moons soon broke apart. The remnants of the destroyed moons eventually formed the magnificent rings we see today. There may still be large pieces of these ancient moons within the rings. They would be much smaller than their ancestors but a thousand times larger than a typical ring particle. Another theory suggests that a few hundred million years ago - at a time when the early ancestors of the dinosaurs were roaming Earth - Saturn may have had no rings at all. The rings formed when one or more small moons wandered too close to Saturn. When they got within the Roche limit, Saturn’s gravity ripped them apart. After millions of years of bumping against one another, the pieces of moon were ground into the tiny particles that form the rings today.

If we had rings in the same proportion to our planet that Saturn’s are to it, it is pretty easy to figure out what they would like like from different places on the earth. From the equator the rings would be passing directly overhead. Since you’d be looking in the same plane as the rings, all you would see is a bright line arching from horizon to horizon. Here is what the rings might look like from Quito, Ecuador:

If we travel just a little further north to Guatemala, the rings begin to spread across the sky. The earthlight illuminating the dark side of the moon is many times brighter than we are accustomed to, due to the increased sunlight being reflected from the rings.

From Washington, DC (at 38° latitude), the rings begin to sink below the horizon, though they would still be an awe-inspiring sight as they dominate the sky both day and night.

At the Arctic Circle, the rings barely reach above the horizon. Seen here from Nome, Alaska, the brilliant rings illuminate the barren landscape scarcely more than a full moon would. Unlike the sun or moon, however, the rings neither rise nor set… they are always visible, day or night, always in exactly the same place.

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Who knew

This is how the solar system is actually moving as it traverses the galaxy.  It’s not circular as you've been taught. It does revolve around the sun, but like every other star, the sun travels, and pulls us too.

Yup

Oh calm down.

 

"Fisherman catches terrifying creature off the coast of Singapore."

The creature in question is actually a basket star, a deep-sea echinoderm related to star fish.

A basket star may have several hundred branches they are lined with tiny barbs that evolved to catch crustaceans like velcro the basket star curls into a ball during the day but climbs somewhere high at night, like a stalk of coral, and spreads itself out in the current it literally functions the same as a spiderweb except it’s a spiderweb that eats.

"[The earth]looks round in pictures because it’s covered in water! This is a dry Earth, and the water distributes around it (almost) evenly because of gravity and spinning and stuff, and because flowy things tend to flow down into the dents. If you look closely, you’ll see that the continents are on the highest bits. The rest is ocean."

via gloucesterroad

Who knew?

"As children we’re taught the process of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, and the story normally goes along the lines of a hungry caterpillar eats and eats until it can eat no longer, then it hangs upside down and forms a chrysalis, from which a beautiful butterfly emerges.

But what actually happens inside the cocoon?

It’s actually quite surprising, the caterpillar does not merely change its body a bit and grow wings, no… It dissolves. Almost entirely. The caterpillar excretes an enzyme which decomposes all the tissues and fibres into basic organic material, leaving only a few ‘cell disks.’

These cell disks comprise all the different types of cells in an adult butterfly - its eyes, legs, wings, etc. The caterpillar is actually born with them but they just remain dormant until metamorphosis. 

Once all the caterpillars cells have been decomposed the adult cell disks then start to grow, using the organic materials left over, eventually forming the butterfly that emerges a few days later."

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