Teacher Proves Important, Disgusting Point To Students With Three Pieces Of Bread

Getting kids, teenagers, and even some adults to understand the importance of cleanliness can be a difficult job.
Because we can't see microscopic germs or the immediate effects they have on our health, it's easy for many of us to assume they can't hurt us or make us sick. Often times, seeing is believing. That's why Donna Gill Allen, a health occupation teacher at Cape Fear High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina, came up with a fun experiment to show her students exactly what happens when they don't wash their hands.




Allen placed three slices of bread inside plastic bags, using gloves for the first, freshly washed hands for the second, and for the third, she passed it around the class and let everyone touch it before bagging it. A few days later, the differences spoke for themselves.

Your Annotated Guide To The Questionable Facts And Figures In Trump's Document Axing The Clean Power Plan

Here’s a look under the fuming hood of EPA’s bid to kill climate regulations on power plants.

Jeff Swensen / Getty Images

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday submitted a proposed repeal of the Clean Power Plan, Obama’s signature rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

The proposed rule was submitted to the Federal Register, which tracks proposed rule changes from federal agencies. It is a revealing document, largely devoted to legal arguments over just how much the EPA can regulate — only smokestacks, or entire energy systems — to cut pollution.

The first 10 pages or so are a preamble largely laying out the background of the rule, and taking up EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s central beef with the plan: It forces states to make pollution cuts above and beyond improvements at individual power plants.

Here’s your guide to reading the most interesting parts of the text.

5 Truly Gross Parasites That Have Ruined Real People's Vacations

Jarvi Lab / University of Hawaii at Hilo

Brain-burrowing worms, flesh-eating bacteria, and microbes that short-circuit the nervous system are just some of the stowaways that Americans picked up on their travels last year.

“Food and drink can be a common source of parasitic infections,” James Maguire, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and senior physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told BuzzFeed News. “Even here in the US, unclean drinking water can lead to giardiasis or cryptosporidiosis,” he said. Typical holiday behavior — eating at unfamiliar locations and spending a lot of time outdoors — increases the chances of picking up parasites.

Here's Why Debunking Viral Climate Myths Is Almost Impossible, In One Animated Chart

A British newspaper admitted that a controversial climate article from February was misleading and inaccurate. The story’s claims have received at least 752,300 shares, likes, comments, or other interactions on social media.

The Mail on Sunday

When a British newspaper published an exposé in February alleging proof that US government scientists had used flawed data to show recent global warming and rushed to publish their research to sway the Paris climate talks, conservative media was lit.

Three Scientists Have Won The Nobel Prize In Chemistry For A Method Of Imaging Molecules Of Life

"A picture is a key to understanding," says the award announcement.

Nobel Committee

Three scientists have been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a technique to image molecules involved in life. The method has been used to analyse the Zika virus, among other applications.

Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson came up with the technique, called cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM). It allows scientists to freeze biomolecules – molecules involved in the processes of life. Once they are frozen, scientists can look in detail at the structures of these molecules and the processes they are involved in.

Storm Cloud in Georgia Looks Like Tsunami in the Sky

An ominous storm cloud was recently sighted over Hinesville, Georgia on August 31st and it looked like an incoming sky tsunami. Local resident and photographer Johanna Hood took some amazing photos and videos of the incredible shelf cloud, which is typically a precursor to a big thunderstorm.

Photograph by Johanna Hood on Instagram

Photograph by Johanna Hood on Instagram

A shelf cloud is a low, horizontal, wedge-shaped arcus cloud. A shelf cloud is attached to the base of the parent cloud, which is usually a thunderstorm, but could form on any type of convective clouds. Rising cloud motion often can be seen in the leading (outer) part of the shelf cloud, while the underside often appears turbulent and wind-torn. Cool, sinking air from a storm cloud’s downdraft spreads out across the land surface, with the leading edge called a gust front. This outflow cuts under warm air being drawn into the storm’s updraft. As the lower cooler air lifts the warm moist air, its water condenses, creating a cloud which often rolls with the different winds above and below (wind shear). [source]

Photograph by Johanna Hood on Instagram

Photograph by Johanna Hood on Instagram

Photograph by Johanna Hood on Instagram

12 Beautiful Facts About Trees That You Probably Didn't Know Before

1. A single tree can exist in two places at once.

Ablokhin / Getty Images

Though it is rare, a fallen branch can become a trunk if it finds a place to root. Those two separate trees then share the exact same DNA.



2. The roots of some trees can grow as deep as 100 feet into the ground.

commons.wikimedia.org

Found in Africa or the Middle East, the acacia tree's long roots tap into deep water sources, making it resilient against long droughts.

A Spacecraft Was Just Sent Crashing Into Saturn...And Scientists Did It On Purpose

Retirement is meant to serve as a relaxing period of time in your later life where you can just enjoy life and not have to worry about working the usual 9 to 5.
However, while most retirements begin by going on vacation or purchasing an exotic sports car, for the NASA spacecraft known as Cassini, this intergalactic piece of metal ended its 20 years of hard work by plunging straight into the side of Saturn.



The deliberate death plunge was the final act of the spacecraft’s mission to observe Saturn and its surrounding moons. Just moments before colliding with the sixth planet from the sun, Cassini was able to transmit its last signal and collection of data to Earth, giving NASA its first real insight into the atmosphere of Saturn.

The orbiter's journey began over 20 years ago.


Team members from 17 countries came together to help design and build the Cassini orbiter, although the spacecraft’s assembly took place here in the United States under the management of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.



The orbiter was named after Italian-French astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, who discovered the ring divisions of Saturn, as well as four of its moons.



Over the course of its research and data collection, Cassini was tasked with determining the dimensional striations and behaviors of Saturn’s rings and gathering information about the planet's moons.


The Cassini orbiter was accompanied on its intergalactic journey by Huygen, a probe NASA and the European Space Agency used to explore Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.



Cassini-Huygen was first launched into space on October 15,1997, where it spent the first seven years of its mission doing strategized fly-bys over Jupiter, Earth, and Venus. It even tested out Einstein's theory of relativity in the process.


In 2004, NASA and Cassini began heavily focusing on Saturn and its moons. During the use of Cassini, NASA was able to discover and identify seven new moons orbiting Saturn.


The data gathered by this prolonged mission has proven to be invaluable to scientists.

Here's Why Mexico City Is Hit So Hard By Earthquakes

The earthquake that struck Mexico on Tuesday, killing at least 225 people, owes its deadliness to its origin in the center of the country rather than its overall power.

Earthquakes since 1900 with a magnitude of 6 or more, including the 1985 Mexico City quake (pink) and this month's 8.1 and 7.1 magnitude quakes (red), scaled by the amount of shaking. Background color reflects major earthquake risk.
Peter Aldhous/BuzzFeed News / Via earthquake.usgs.gov and Global Seismic Hazard Assessment Program

Mexico is one of the most seismically active nations in the world, perched atop three clashing pieces of the Earth’s crust. It was struck with two deadly quakes this month, including a magnitude 8.1 one that hit the southwest coast on September 8 and killed at least 90 people. (In local time, the earthquake struck a few minutes before midnight on September 7). Tuesday’s magnitude 7.1 quake struck about 76 miles southeast of Mexico City, according to the US Geological Survey. It produced strong motions felt by more than 12 million people, and noticeably swayed buildings in Mexico’s capital city, some of which collapsed.



The danger was no surprise to seismologists.

“Everyone in the earthquake business knows that Mexico City is built on pudding,” seismologist Max Wyss of the International Centre for Earth Simulation in Switzerland told BuzzFeed News. “It is uniquely vulnerable to earthquakes.”

The Eye of the Rainbow

Photograph via nimo4749 on reddit

In this perfectly timed photo we see a huge rainbow encapsulating a low hanging moon in the skies of Ocean City, Maryland. The photo was posted to reddit last month by user nimo4749 who said his friend took the once in a lifetime snap.


There’s been plenty of debate in the comments as to whether this image is photoshopped. Someone used math to try to prove the image was fake, while another ran it through a photoforensics site and it came up clean. Many people think it appears as if some clouds are somehow behind the moon which is an impossibility. What do you think?

After Two Decades in Space, Cassini is About to Crash Into Saturn. These are the Final Images

After two decades in space, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is nearing the end of its remarkable journey of exploration. Having expended almost every bit of the rocket propellant it carried to Saturn, operators are deliberately plunging Cassini into the planet to ensure Saturn’s moons will remain pristine for future exploration—in particular, the ice-covered, ocean-bearing moon Enceladus, but also Titan, with its intriguing pre-biotic chemistry.
On Sept. 15, 2017, the spacecraft will make its final approach to the giant planet Saturn. Cassini will dive into the planet’s atmosphere, sending science data for as long as its small thrusters can keep the spacecraft’s antenna pointed at Earth. Soon after, Cassini will burn up and disintegrate like a meteor.
In April 2017, Cassini was placed on an impact course that unfolded over five months of daring dives—a series of 22 orbits that each pass between the planet and its rings. Called the Grand Finale, this final phase of the mission has brought unparalleled observations of the planet and its rings from closer than ever before.
Every week, Cassini has been diving through the approximately 1,200-mile-wide (2,000-kilometer-wide) gap between Saturn and its rings. No other spacecraft has ever explored this unique region.



Cassini’s final images will have been sent to Earth several hours before its final plunge, but even as the spacecraft makes its fateful dive into the planet’s atmosphere, it will be sending home new data in real time. Key measurements will come from its mass spectrometer, which will sample Saturn’s atmosphere, telling us about its composition until contact is lost.
Below you will find some incredible images Cassini has recently taken. The current predicted time for loss of signal on Earth is 4:55 a.m. PDT (7:55 a.m. EDT) on Sept. 15, 2017. For more information visit the Official Mission Website.
1. Staggering Structure
[June 4, 2017] This view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows a wave structure in Saturn’s rings known as the Janus 2:1 spiral density wave. Resulting from the same process that creates spiral galaxies, spiral density waves in Saturn’s rings are much more tightly wound. In this case, every second wave crest is actually the same spiral arm which has encircled the entire planet multiple times.

Photograph by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

This wave is remarkable because Janus, the moon that generates it, is in a strange orbital configuration. Janus and Epimetheus (see “Cruising Past Janus”) share practically the same orbit and trade places every four years.