The slimy, smelly, gelatinous goop called "sea snot" comes and goes in normal times, but now it is seriously gumming up the works in the ocean waters around Turkey, affecting swimming, fishing, and more importantly, killing the plants and animals of the delicate ecosystem. Thestuff, unofficially and disgustingly known as "sea snot", was first recorded on the Sea of Marmara in 2007. But there's more of it now than there has ever been before. For the past six months, it's spread in a thick, beige layer across the normally deep blue waters. "I have been travelling here for 15 years and there used to be [snot] at some times," Burak Yenilmez, who works on a ship, told the Daily Sabah. "But it is worse this year. It is such a dirty sight, and it stinks." The strange goo, made of dead overgrown phytoplankton, forms when nutrient-rich water remains still and calm during prolonged periods of heat. Experts think the nutrients came from wastewater, such as untreated sewage, getting dumped into the sea.
What is the oldest a person can be? If all extraneous factors are removed from the equation, where you let nature fully take its course and the human body is pushed to the absolute edge, how old could a person theoretically get? Researchers from Singapore believe they have the answer. Using blood tests that they claim measure the absolute age a human body can reach, they believe the human body has a maximum lifespan of 150 years. The results suggest that even with the most advanced disease-fighting therapies available to us in the future, humans would not push past this mark without solving the underlying ageing issue. Loss of resilience within the body appears to be a far greater driving force of mortality than specific diseases, and they state that work into developing the ageing model is imperative for life-extending therapies, instead of targeting disease.
Just jokes
Heather Thompson Day tweets: "When I was 19 ... my boss — who was 45 — said I should be a phone sex operator and laughed. I said "I don't get it" ... He said "it's a joke" ... I said "explain it to me" ... And that's how I learned that once sexual harassers have to explain why their inappropriate jokes are funny, they stop laughing. My dad just told me "never laugh. They will mistake your nervous laughter as compliance. Instead, pretend you don't get it, and watch them explain to you why you should be laughing." I've used this advice my whole life since." (@HeatherTDay)
