Tootfinder

This is another horrifying statistic to shelve alongside the composition of global mammalian biomass:
• humans 34%
• livestock and pets 62%
• wild animals 4%
#science #biology #ecology

Jonathan Schofield (@urlyman@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image …Here are some highlights (lowlights): “If you drop all that old life into the container that we call Earth, and burn them, it turns out that what we burn in *1 year* weighs 100x more than everything alive today. Everything. All the whales, elephants, forests, insects, grass, crops, birds, fish, people, dogs and cats. Add up all the carbon in everything alive now, and still, in one year we burn a hundred times more.” #climateDiary

🌰 The surprisingly tricky art of seed banking
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2025/seed-banking-to-preserve-rare-plants

The surprisingly tricky art of seed banking
To safeguard threatened plants, science must unravel the hidden biology of often-persnickety seeds as they age, sleep and awaken

✒️ Scientists have found a way to 'tattoo' tardigrades
... I think there will be a lot of competition for Ig Nobels this year
https://phys.org/news/2025-04-scientists-tattoo-tardigrades.html

Scientists have found a way to 'tattoo' tardigrades
If you haven't heard of a tardigrade before, prepare to be wowed. These clumsy, eight-legged creatures, nicknamed water bears, are about half a millimeter long and can survive practically anything: freezing temperatures, near starvation, high pressure, radiation exposure, outer space and more. Researchers reporting in the journal Nano Letters took advantage of the tardigrade's nearly indestructible nature and gave the critters tiny "tattoos" to test a microfabrication technique to build microsc…

🦠 Microbiologists discover new species of methane-producing archaea in the human gut
https://phys.org/news/2025-04-microbiologists-species-methane-archaea-human.html

Microbiologists discover new species of methane-producing archaea in the human gut
An international team of microbiologists from the Medical University of Graz, the DSMZ—German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures (Braunschweig, Germany)—and the University of Illinois (U.S.) has identified and described a previously unknown species of methane-producing archaea in the human gut: Methanobrevibacter intestini sp. nov. (strain WWM1085).