Muskrats are active mid-afternoon into the night, and they spend much of their time in the water where they look for green vegetation to eat. In the summer, they will dive to eat the roots of aquatic plants — they’re able to stay underwater for up to 15 minutes — and in the winter, they will swim under ice to look for vegetation. Muskrats can swim in frigid water due to something called regional heterothermia, which regulates blood flow to their non-furry feet and tails, allowing these body parts to be cooler than the main part of the body, so their main body stays nice and warm in cold water.
muskrat in the water
The water is a safe space for muskrats, because they can escape predators such as raccoons, coyotes and owls by diving deep or by swimming into their burrows and nests. They paddle with their large, webbed back feet and use their flat tail to help them change direction. They can even swim backward.
America lost two nuclear-powered submarines during the 1960s. The nuclear reactors remain underwater to this day. Phil Ochs did a song about each of them.
"Portsmouth town on the eastern shore / Where many a fine ship was born. / The Thresher was build / And the Thresher was launched / And the crew of the sworn."
More about the sinking of the Thresher. http://ussnautilus.org/blog/the-loss-of-uss-thresher-ssn-593/
More about the nuclear reactor that remains underwater. http://www.seacoastonline.com/article/20130310/NEWS/303100355
Fifty years ago AT&T launched Telstar 1, the first commercial communications satellite, right into the middle of a radiation storm produced by a nuclear test.
Much of the discussion about mercury and fluorescent lightbulbs have been around the compact fluorescent lights, (CFLs) also known as "toxic Gorebulbs." They had a tiny bit of mercury, about 1 milligram, and many people have replaced them with light emitting diodes (LED) bulbs.
But the real mercury problem is with the long thin fluorescent tubes that are in offices, factories, public spaces, and even in some homes. These have a lot of mercury in them—2 to 8 milligrams in each, averaging 2.7 milligrams—and there are billions of these bulbs still in use. Now a new study published by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), the Appliance Standards Awareness Project (ASAP), CLASP, and the Clean Lighting Coalition calls for their phaseout.1
Even after LED lights were common, the T8 bulbs (the most common variety, one inch in diameter and four feet long) were not subject to any regulation because they were more efficient and cost-effective than LEDs, but that is no longer true as the LEDs have become cheaper and better.
Probably the only place that florescent bulbs might make sense is a handful of really old fixtures that use magnetic ballasts without starters. But other then that drop in LED bulbs work in most fixtures, even without removing the ballasts.
The 6GW Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), located in Energodar, Ukraine, is owned and operated by Ukraine’s national nuclear energy generating company NNEGC Energoatom