“This is the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium. After the World’s Fair in Okinawa, Japan, this massive aquarium was opened in 2002 to keep the tourism to the city alive.

The main tank called the “Kuroshio Sea” holds 7,500-cubic meters (1,981,290 gallons) of water and features the world’s second largest acrylic glass panel (an incredible 24 inches thick!). Whale sharks and manta rays are kept amongst many other fish species in the main tank.

Suffice it to say that any fish tank that can hold the largest fish on Earth is pretty amazing. Seeing such giants up close must be as close to a spiritual experience as a godless heathen like me could get.”

I don’t think we could handle the first biggest aquarium in the world….

Thanks to Kyle from Science-Based life.

“But magic’s not easy to pick apart with machines, because it’s not really about the mechanics of your senses. Magic’s about understanding—and then manipulating—how viewers digest the sensory information.”

We can certainly recommend the article to anyone interested in magic and the hidden science behind it, but especially to aspiring magicians who would like to know more about what really makes this amazing craft tick and would like to learn from one of the best.

Once you’ve read the excellent article you can dispel another illusion, by listening to Teller himself talk about his article on the NPR podcast. And what a lovely voice he has, miracle indeed. Don’t forget that Derren has a book out where he makes similar… confessions of a conjurer.

You thought we were the only planet to have wind and dirt? No way. With the HiRISE camera, short for the High Resolution Imaging Experiment that is fitted in a satellite that orbits the red planet, NASA scientists have snapped a pretty amazing snapshot off of the surface of Mars. What you can see in the picture above — bigger version on this link or by clicking the picture — is a whirling column of Mars-dust 800 meters (or half a mile) long, casting a shadow on the surface. It’s not Martians inventing fire or sending smoke signals, if that’s what you’re thinking, Mars is an arid wasteland with only the theoretical possibility of microscopic life underneath it’s frozen soil.

Mars is the fourth furthest planet out from the sun and hovers on the outer reaches of what we call the Goldilocks, or Habitable Zone around our star, which ought be the most optimal region of orbit for life as we know it. However, the planet is only about half the diameter of Earth and therefore has a measly 10% of the mass that we have, causing the planet to have but a third of the gravity we are used to, which makes maintaining an atmosphere of any kind pretty difficult, as atmospheric gasses simply slowly leak into space. Not to mention the fact that the planet is close to dead in a geological sense, which means it’s inner core is not producing a very strong magnetic field, which we do have on Earth and blocks harmful solar x-rays. Meaning that any Earth-creature living on Mars would slowly be killed by radiation.

That’s not all. Since that thin atmosphere on Mars is in fact 95% carbon dioxide, yet not thick enough to warm it to much above- 60 °C, you can imagine the planet is not very habitable to us regardless or it’s permanent fatal shower of solar radiation. However, it is very amenable to robotic research and may still show evidence of microbial life from an earlier era when the planet was much warmer. That’s the reason there are currently so many robots driving around or orbiting the planet, sending these stunning pictures back.

What we learn about other planets always teaches us something about earth and ourselves. For example, research conducted by the new Mars Science Laboratory rover, now well into it’s fourth month of travel with five more to go, could tell us if the inception of life is a rare event, or if it happens everywhere when the conditions are right, even for a geological instant. Finding life could even imply we are all Martians, since microbes could theoretically hitch a ride from Mars to Earth on rocks hurled our way from cataclysmic asteroid-impacts or volcanic eruptions, which were very common on Mars in the distant past.

So, look at that picture for a moment and reflect on the vastness and beauty of our amazing universe. And when you see some dust whirling around you can stop and think; “…there are also dust devils on Mars”.

We love the natural world here at DerrenBlog, so here’s another wonderful video on the wonders and as of yet unexplored beauty of our oceans. It covers over 70% of the planet and is on average 2 miles deep, yet we’ve only explored a measly 5% of it. This is odd because the oceans are involved in such a huge part of our lives.

Take 8 minutes to marvel at a tiny percentage of the beautiful creatures and mysterious oddities we have already found there. Would you like some underwater river with that?

Thanks to the guys at Godvoordommen for bringing this to our attention.

Hmm, a spinal chord. Where does this feature we share with most of the other — reptiles, birds, fish, the other mammals, etc. — life on earth come from? Where did it originate? In their never-ending quest for explanations, scientists have long since discovered beautiful early fossils in the chordate family, finding tantalizing evidence of what the creatures from which we all descended looked like. The particular specimen you can see in the picture above lived around 505 million years ago, and although it had the beginnings of a spine — an elastic notochord — it did not even have a skull yet. You could say it had a faceless presence, but it could carry a box up a stairs with grace.

Carrying the charming name Pikaia, the 5 centimetre long creature — looking like the result of a rather successful date between worm and fish — featured a mouth, some tiny tentacles and rudimentary gills. But it was its completely unique spinal chord that would eventually give Pikaia’s descendants the power to rule the world. Maniacal laugh.

See a pretty animation of the creature below, read some more details on the New Scientist website.

You think your wrinkly Nan is old? Not even! There are organisms, mainly plants, who are thousands of years old, even tens- or hundreds of thousands. At The Guardian we can read that scientists have found a 15 kilometre long patch of Mediterranean Seagrass near a Spanish island, with the beautiful Latin name Posidonia oceanica, of an extraordinary age. This patch of underwater salad may be up to 200.000 years old! A grand old breaking of the previous record of seagrass lifespan, which was recorded in Tasmanian waters and sat at around a measly 40.000 years of age. Barely out of nappies that one!

You may wonder whether  a single blade of seagrass is really as old as the dawn of the homo sapiens? Well, rest assured, no single blade is. Seagrass clones itself over vast stretches of seabed, growing by a dazzling speed of around 13 centimetres a year and is constantly nibbled away at by predators, destroyed by changing environments or gone old and mushy, leaving no single blades to become as ancient as our entire race. Regardless, this same patch of seagrass has been cloning (or simply “regrowing”) its exact, identical DNA for over all that time.

Compare it to the human body. You may have heard the myth that human cells are completely replaced every 7 or 10 years. This is false, but it does give some insight in how we can claim that the seagrass is the exact same organism for that long a period of time, even though its cells have been replaced many times over. In the case of human beings, our most important brain and heart cells don’t ever see replacement, they just die off. We call that forgetting. However, other parts of our body see a replenishment of cells up to 10% a year (like fat cells), effectively recreating parts of our human body over time. Unfortunately for us, this copying is fraught with errors, and gives us the concept of ageing or even cancer. Now imagine you’re all body, no brain, like the seagrass and you keep replicating over and over and over and over… Then yes, the seagrass is 200.000 years old.

As one scientist said in more detail;

“The finding of the ancient seagrass also illustrates the danger us humans pose to vulnerable ancient ecosystems. With our destructive fishing trawlers that needlessly destroy the ecosystems of the sea floor and the way we alter the climate with our rising CO2 emissions, of which most is stored in the oceans and seas, causing ocean acidification and uninhabitable dead-zones, we have caused a decline in seagrass development of 10% in the Mediterranean alone. And don’t forget the warming of the oceans happens at the same time. No wonder we are causing the largest era of biodiversity loss in millions of years. One even this hardy old patch of seagrass will likely not survive.”

Also check out this wondrous TED talk by artist Rachel Sussman, who is documenting the oldest living organisms and how they are under threat.

“My dear bastard son,

It is about time you wrote, my boy.”

Read the whole story on this link and find Derren’s own letter of advice to a young mentalist in the Svengali Brochure.

The newest addition to the group of known extinct humans are the Denisovans, who last lived approximately 30.000 years ago, at the same time as Neanderthal and modern humans roamed a similar region of Russia. Their remains (well, read on…) were found in a cave (Denisova Cave) around 10 years ago, even though they were not recognized as a new race of humans until 2010. Only a short while ago a group of German scientists has mapped the complete genome (DNA sequence) of these extinct human beings. Guess what they needed to do that? Just a bone fragment from a little piece of finger, which was, together with a wisdom tooth, the only found remains of the Denisovans in the cave.

With the full DNA sequence of Denisova Hominin, we can determine when and where our evolutionary lineages diverted and possible see what these extinct humans were like. Read more about this remarkable achievement on Nature.com. Some Denisovian genes probably live on through interbreeding with modern humans, since it looks like modern-day Melanesians and Australian Aboriginals have some Denisovian left in them. Fascinating stuff. More research is being done on a toe bone discovered in 2011.

So no worries, all you have to leave is a toe or a finger in a convenient, yet protected, location and perhaps future humans can bring you back to life! Your genes anyway.

Read a whole article on this fascinating find on the Scientific American site and watch a video of the technology in action below:

Further reading also available at BBC News