yes i go out of my way to drive safely around bicyclists, no i dont care about their human lives, i know the fucking perverts are desperately slavering to be slammed and crushed by the beautiful steel of an automobile, trembling and hot with death-drive that only the merciless fenders of my foreverially dealerplated altima can answer, and i simply refuse to give them release.
"Hello Mr. Speedrunner, for years you have ignored the friends and family around you in order to become faster at playing vid- wait what you were supposed to cut off your foot to get out of that what th HOW DO YOU ALREADY HAVE THE KEY WHAT THE FUCK"
tell me something cool
Wastewater treatment is not achieved through a series of chemical treatments. Instead, it’s a managed natural process in which the effluent from the sewer system is filtered, aerated and then broken down by wild microbes.
Technically it doesn’t need to be aerated, but anaerobic bacteria, which don’t need oxygen, produce much stinkier byproducts during this breakdown process, so most decent-sized urban wastewater treatment plants do aerate in order to spare the neighbors. Very simple rural wastewater plants may just pump the wastewater into a lagoon—an outdoor pond, usually with a liner of some kind—and just let whatever grows in there do so.
As the wastewater is breaking down, it separates into a layer of muck (sludge) and a layer of cleaner water. Large wastewater treatment plants have a series of stages with clearer and cleaner water emerging from each one. Small plants may have a series of lagoons or just one. The more stuff you have in your wastewater that’s not poop (say maybe you accept discharge from a local factory, or there’s a restaurant district with a lot of food waste in their greywater), the longer and harder it is to treat.
Discharge from wastewater treatment plants to natural water bodies is heavily regulated and monitored for quality. In the US, it’s regulated by the EPA, and they take it seriously. The finishing step involves testing your discharge to make sure it’s within your approved discharge limits. This is the only step where a chemical treatment is commonly added: a little chlorine, to kill off the last of your microbes. But some plants use constructed wetlands or sand filters instead. If they do apply chlorine, they also have to take it back out before releasing the water, so that they don’t upset the ecosystem the water will be released to.
(If you have wastewater that’s mostly human waste and a correctly sized plant, you shouldn’t technically need this step. The microbes should be slowly precipitating out of the water along with the sludge. But things like high volume, cold temperatures, and complex effluent can make those benchmarks hard to hit without a finishing step.)
MORE COOL STUFF ABOUT WASTEWATER:
DID YOU KNOW? Potassium, an important component in fertilizer, is actually mined out of the earth? Did you know potassium deposits are running low? DID YOU KNOW POTASSIUM IS A WASTEWATER BYPRODUCT!?
DID YOU KNOW? Some large plants can trap and clean methane from their wastewater and use it for power?
DID YOU KNOW? The precipitated sludge can be further treated and used for fertilizer? I particularly liked the plant that was using it to fertilize fast-growing trees for the paper trade.
DID YOU KNOW? Many wastewater plant operators have a protective—if sometimes frustrated—relationship with their microbes, which they call “the bugs”, and include not just bacteria but also other microorganisms like algae and daphnia. The bugs are the workhorses of the wastewater plant: if their ecosystem becomes imbalanced, everyone’s job gets harder. I doubt they’d appreciate this, but in my mind, wastewater treatment operators are microbe herders. Though I suppose thinking of them as bog technicians is also accurate.
This has been the short version of my “wastewater treatment is fricking awesome” rant. I generalized a lot but the gist is still true. You asked for something cool, behold: Wastewater treatment, first wonder of man’s interface with nature.
You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.
For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:
Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning
Don’t fuck with flamingos
….. Didn’t know most of that
Huh… so that’s why zoos don’t put them somewhere warm during winter.
Oh yeah, this leaves out what I *did* know about them–they can also survive hypersalinity. That is, water so salty it kills practically everything else–water so salty it burns your skin.
American flamingos just drink that shit
(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.
When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.
It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:
Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.
requested by anonymous:
Flamingos can survive in high altitudes, hypersaline conditions, and caustic lakes.
Source: ‘All flamingo species have evolved to live in some of the planet’s most extreme wetlands, like caustic “soda lakes”, hypersaline lagoons or high-altitude salt flats.’
They can survive water so alkaline it burns human skin.
Source: ‘More than a million lesser flamingos breed in Tanzania’s Lake Natron, for instance, a lake fed by hot springs with water so alkaline that it can strip away human skin (one pioneering flamingo researcher named Leslie Brown spent months in Nairobi General Hospital after burning his legs wading out to observe where the birds nested).’
They can drink water at near-boiling temperatures.
Source: ‘They can drink water at near boiling point to collect freshwater from springs and geysers at lake edges. If no freshwater is available, flamingos can use glands in their head that remove salt, draining it out from their nasal cavity.’
The lakes they inhabit can freeze overnight, and the flamingos can survive once it thaws in the morning.
Source: ‘The birds may seem to epitomize the tropics, but they also live in the Andes, 15,000 feet above sea level, where they rest on lakes that freeze around them overnight.
“You’ll see them sitting there like snowballs, frozen on ice,” Dr. Arengo said. “And as the temperature warms up, they thaw out, fluff themselves up and go about their business.”’
The photo is indeed from Lake Natron, taken by photographer Nick Brandt. The content of the lake chemically preserves animal corpses that die there. You can see more photos of this here.
It is also true that 75% of Lesser Flamingos are hatches on Lake Natron.
Source: ‘The lake’s landscape is surreal and deadly—and made even more bizarre by the fact that it’s the place where nearly 75 percent of the world’s lesser flamingos are born.’
Some species of Flamingo eat cyanobacteria or algae.
Source: ‘Flamingos have very specialised diets. And their food is responsible for their famous pink colouration. The two species in Planet Earth II eat a lot of floating microscopic algae, which contains carotenoid pigments, the same types of chemical that make carrots orange. These pigments turn their feathers pink, orange and red – without them, flamingos would be white.’
… @todaysbird ??
yeah they’re just like that
King Conan of Aquilonia, commission for Peyton Helix. Sword design by Nano-Core on deviantArt.
