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Ocean Sponge May Be Best for Fiber Optics
TheViffer writes "ABC News is reporting that scientists say they've identified an ocean sponge, living in the darkness of the deep sea, that grows thin glass fibers capable of transmitting light better than industrial fiber optic cables used for telecommunication. 'You can actually tie a knot in these natural biological fibers and they will not break - it's really quite amazing,' said Joanna Aizenberg, who led the research at Bell Laboratories."
Once again, nature outdoes our best attempts at copying it.
Refuse to make a statement in your sig!
Cool, fiber optics up to 7 inches long! That'll be effective! I can finally connect my computer to... uhh... to my uhh... what the hell, 7 inches! WTF!
Hrmm... what lives in a pineapple under the sea... sponge bob fiber light... wait no.. er... DOH!
EE 1: We need a better fiberoptic cable.
EE 2: Let's look at organisms deep in the ocean!
EE 1: That's just crazy enough to work!
...now Verizon customer service is gonna be all, "Sorry, sir, it will take a week for us to replace the sponge."
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
and if they could reproduce what bees' do, a flying machine that weighs half a gram and sees what's going on.
and if they could synthesize what chickens do, you could eat things out of my ass
just that we know it exists, doesn't mean it can be synthesized (ot should be)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
"Sponges grow in the ocean. That kills me. Make's me wonder how much deeper it'd be if that didn't happen."
Bottom line, idiot, is that humankind has absolutely no effect on the ocean compared to what the earth itself and the sun dish out.
:-[
Oh, boy.....here we go.
Imagine the sun flared. Just a little one. What could happen to the earth?
The sun flares all the time. Our atmosphere and the ozone layer protect us.
Why, the entire atmosphere could be blown away, and the oceans could dry up. The deserts would turn to glass. All from a small solar flare.
*Sigh.......* No. This is not correct. See above comment for clarification.
What about a volcano? How many megatons of carbon dioxide and other noxious chemicals does that dump into the atmosphere, not to mention the pollution in the oceans?
CO2 release into the oceans is common and the CO2 flux is truly massive. However, what we need to worry about are some of the non-naturally occurring chemicals such as estrogens and chemicals found in fertilizers and run off from mining such as cyanides. We also have to worry about what is happening from all of the nuclear reactors that the former Soviet union has dumped into the sea among other things.
The algae blooms are there because the sun put them there. We had nothing to do with it.
Wrong. Human intervention most likely primarily from excess nitrogens are at the root of many of these. Other causes are world wide shipping, which carries algae to new homes in water contained in ballast tanks, global warming, and pollution draining into the oceans from coastal development and farmland, which provides again nitrogenous compounds essential for algae metabolism.
You are an idiot. spouting out half-truths and whining about it.
There is no call for that sort of treatment. Lighten up, eh?
Go crack a real science book, not the pseudo-crap they are passing off in high school today.
Your credentials are what?
Go take a look at how much water there is in the ocean, and try and figure out how much pollution we could actually dump in there if we really tried. You'll see that we would have barely any effect at all.
Many, many studies are being performed on just this and the results are sobering.
And how do you pillage the ocean? The natural resources in the ocean are going to die anyway. Rather than allowing the fish to float to the bottom of the ocean and rot and pollute the ocean, we are harvesting the excess every year so that we can feed a starving world. How is that pillaging?
With a comment like this, I am not even sure where to start. Is this a troll? You can't be serious.......
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