Mine definitely was. Loved showing off sodium/potassium and water, phosphorous and air, and my favourite, he actually made nitrogen triiodide, part of which went off in his office before he meant to demonstrate it. Funny how those lessons I remember better than any of the rest…
Chemistry teachers never grow out of the whole mad scientist phase, at least the best ones don’t.
In addition, the team fed the fused jellies brine shrimp with fluorescent dye so they could keep track of the food particles. “One comb jelly ate it and it traveled through the gut of both of them and the second comb jelly pooped it out," says Rodriguez-Santiago.
This is some seriously wild shit! Comes back to the whole conversation about whether ctenophores are sister groups to animals, very early animals or highly derived animals. I love this kinda stuff!
(original paper: Rapid physiological integration of fused ctenophores: Current Biology (cell.com))
Team Jellyfish, Combine!
For those of you not interested in the mathematics, you can argue about whether this should be in the Science thread.
Hey that’s my password! Now i’m gunna have to change it 
/s
Since it’s a Mersenne prime, that also means 2136279840(2136279841-1) is a new perfect number, of which this is only the 52nd discovered. Unlike the prime numbers in general, there’s currently no proof those go on forever.
You didn’t have both upper- and lower-case letters? How is that an acceptable password?
They have a rather high opinion of themselves.
Mutant ribosomes… Huh, did not see that coming.
As I have said, it is always more complicated than we think it is.
Carbon-drinking trees are so far the greatest warriors against the worst-case scenarios of a warming planet. But there simply aren’t enough of them.
A team of UC Berkeley chemists have developed a potential solution in the form of yellow crystalline powder, a half-pound of which can absorb as much carbon dioxide annually as a tree.
Deployed at scale, the material could significantly reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere in a way no other technology can, said Omar Yaghi, professor of chemistry and UC Berkeley and lead author of a paper announcing their discovery, which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“This is a game-changer,” Yaghi said.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that has proliferated in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, driving up global temperatures and upping climate volatility with more heat waves, storms, drought and wildfires.
Capturing carbon from the air is a complex and still developing area of science. Oil refineries employ technology to capture carbon dioxide for reuse in drilling, but it only collects carbon that is highly concentrated. No large-scale options exist to suck carbon out of the ambient air.
At Yaghi’s Berkeley lab, students and colleagues set out to find a porous substance that could absorb CO2. After much trial and error, they synthesized a material called a crystalline covalent organic framework or, more simply, referred to as COF-999.
Their creation was put to the test on the Berkeley campus over 20 days in January. Student scientists measured ambient concentrations of carbon dioxide and charted how the COF-999 powder absorbed it all.
Yaghi said his lab’s innovation “is the best material to date for direct carbon capture from open air.”
The powder is made from relatively common and inexpensive materials that can be transformed back into their original form, purified and reused, according to Yaghi. That means they require little energy to manufacture and don’t generate much waste.
Yaghi said the next step will be to “fine-tune” processes to manufacture multi-ton quantities of the powder so it can be widely used. He estimated it could be scaled up and commercialized within one to two years.
Reach Julie Johnson: julie.johnson@sfchronicle.com; X: @juliejohnson
Intriguing!
I wonder how it’s distributed. And whether it would have to take up A LOT of room to make much difference globally.
