Friday Facts: Week #2

Greetings, HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE! Here we are again, Week 2, now for the Friday facts series.

"The box jellyfish is the most venomous animal in the world," says the lead author, Dr Angel Yanagihara of the University of Hawaii's Department of Tropical Medicine. Aside from causing hapless swimmers excruciating pain or death, the Box Jelly's venom immediately shocks and kills prey (including fish and shrimp). The venom contains toxins that attack the heart, nervous system and skin cells. The venom is so painful, that human victims have died before even reaching shore as it causes cardiac arrest within minutes through puncturing holes in red blood cells and causing potassium to leak out of them. The fastest deaths have been within 2 to 5 minutes. The exceptional survivors experience pain for weeks, and often have significant scarring where the tentacles were in touch. 

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Sea turtles are unaffected by the sting of the infamous venomous box jellyfish and regularly eat them.

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56.7°C (134°F) is the hottest surface temperature ever recorded on Earth in 1913 at Death Valley, California, United States. No wonder the place is named Death Valley, temperatures about 50°C can be fatal for humans. Previously, the hottest temperature was recorded at 58°C at El Azizia, Libya, but was recently reviewed (2010-2012) by a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Commission of Climatology (CCl) special international panel of meteorological experts. They had several concerns including; problematical instrumentation, inexperienced observer and the observation site, and disregarded the temperature reading.

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You can’t see the Great Wall of China from space, but you can see China’s air pollution. China's air pollution is affecting the temperature rise in Earth's atmosphere. China is the second largest contributor to global warming in the world. It is a major environmental issue and a primary health threat. However GOOD NEWS! China has announced new measures to tackle the country's dishonorable air pollution. Targets include a 30% reduction in emissions from heavily polluting industries (such as coal power stations) are to be introduced in order to change the air pollution by 2017.

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Sheep are regularly used for studies related to human medicine because their weight is very similar to ours, they can produce organs similar in size to humans and their genome is well known. So it came as no surprise that scientists from the University of Nevada have created sheep that are 15% human with the main purpose "to produce a source of organs, especially livers to transplant someday into humans." Professor Esmail Zanjani and his team used stem cells (cells that can develop into many other kinds of cells) from the bone marrow of adult humans. They placed the cells into the peritoneum (the serous membrane that forms the lining of the abdominal cavity or the coelom) of a sheep's fetus. These cells get disturbed throughout the metabolic system into the circulatory system of all the organs in the body resulting in lambs with millions of human cells in all of their organs that are genetically identical to the person who donated the bone marrow cells. In a hypothetical situation a patient that needs a liver would provide their doctor with their cells which would be injected into a sheep's fetus to grow. This process could be beneficial for more than 10,000 people in the UK that currently need a transplant (of which 1000 die each year progressively). However as there are many implications and criticisms that are involved, it is still decades away from being tested on humans.

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Ocean water holds nearly 20 million tons of gold. We're not talking about treasures hidden in the ocean. Gold is in every litre of seawater and is so dilute one litre contains 13billionths of a gram of gold.

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Hope you have enjoyed this weeks Friday facts segment!! Thank you for stopping by. Would you like us to mention a fact in next week Friday facts? Make sure to leave a comment and come back for more articles!! 

Bio Bunch.
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