Give plastic a value again!
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Nowadays, we find plastic everywhere. Almost each article in the supermarkets is packed in plastic. Often, single articles in a bigger package are each packed in single plastic covers as well. Glass bottles are old-fashioned and reusable plastic bottles become less and less used. Finally, all plastic ends as recycling waste and will be reused. But will it really be reused?
Unfortunately, many people don't take it very accurate with recyclable plastic waste and throw plastic simply into the residual waste or not recyclable waste into recyclable waste. But this is also a problem of education of the public and a problem of profit-oriented waste recovery. A yogurt cup for example, should be separated from its aluminum lid because an automatic separation is not possible. But a manual separation of such combined waste pieces is not profitable enough. Thus, such waste pieces will be delivered to the residual waste, even though all components would be recyclable.
A much bigger problem is, that waste is a kind of economic good and it is sold to foreign countries. Vast numbers of recyclable waste is transferred to foreign countries, even though it is forbidden to trade with waste, at least in Germany. But companies have come up with a clever idea: the waste is declared as resource and traded as such. There, it can be recycled with much lower environmental specifications, cheap and polluting - or as often the case: burned or even just deposited somewhere or even at the coasts where the tide cares for the "outlet" of the waste. Click here, to see the complete content.
How effective are dietary supplements?
The market of dietary, vitamin and mineral supplements is booming! In the meanwhile, there are thousands of supplements, that are supposed to raise your well-being, the health or the aging or even cure cancer and other diseases. Therefore, there is a broad bunch of possibilities. There are very cheap, but very expensive compounds as well - especially in cosmetics. But do the cheap compounds really do what they are supposed to? Or is it necessary to spend so much money for good compounds? As usual, I want to provide you some background information here, which may help you to decide on your own whether such compounds are worth the money or not.
Basically, our body needs sufficient nutrients to operate, of course. In this case fat and carbohydrates only play a minor role as energy sources. Especially many different elemental nutrients, like minerals and trace elements are important, but many bio active makro-nutrients like vitamins, unsaturated fatty acids, amino acids and much more as well. These nutrients can be found especially in fresh foods, of course. Fruits and vegetables, as well as crop and nuts can provide us all we need. But in some cases it is easier to receive certain nutrients from animal sources. We find very high amounts of unsaturated fatty acids in fish, for example. One reason for that is, that unsaturated fatty acids, like omega-3-fatty acids are mainly produced by algae. Those are eaten by zooplankton which are eaten by fish. These nutrients or substances can accumulate in the food chain the higher the trophic level is (like the closer we come to the top of the food chain). We biologist call this bio accumulation, like I described already in other articles.
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Megalodon
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The Megalodon is alive! Anyhow, this is what people say from time to time. Pictures of fresh tooth, which sometimes circulate on the internet, are celebrated as sensations. It has also been used for diverse bloody-minded movies.
The Megalodon (Carcharocles megalodon) is or was a giant shark which was classified in the same genus as the white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), but nowadays classified in its own genus. Thus, those two big predatory fish only share their family of the mackerel sharks (Lamnidae). Its existence is dated back to the time of the Miocene until the end of Pliocene. At this time, it seemed to be globally spread, as one can find the tooth worldwide. Only by their teeth one can make estimations about the size of the former biggest predatory fish. Thus, the former size of the sharks is estimated of about 12 to 18 meters. This is approximately two and a half times the size of a white shark. The force of a bite have been computer simulated and is estimated to 180 kN, which is 10 times higher than the white sharks bite.
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