A new study suggests watermelon can be an effective natural weapon against prehypertension, a precursor to cardiovascular disease.   It still won't hurt to exercise, of course.

Estimates are that up to 60 percent of U.S. adults are prehypertensive or hypertensive. Prehypertension is characterized by systolic blood pressure readings of 120-139 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) over diastolic pressure of 80-89 mm Hg. "Systolic" refers to the blood pressure when the heart is contracting. "Diastolic" reflects the blood pressure when the heart is in a period of relaxation and expansion.

What's 7 billion light years away, equivalent in weight to 800,000,000,000,000 of our Suns and holds hundreds of galaxies?    It's the most galaxy cluster ever discovered, that's what.

Astronomers using the South Pole Telescope discovered the behemoth and designated it the rather unspectacular SPT-CL J0546-5345.   

Redshift measures how light from a distant object has been stretched by the universe's expansion. Located in the southern constellation Pictor (the Painter), the cluster has a redshift of z=1.07. This puts it at a distance of about 7 billion light-years, meaning we see it as it appeared 7 billion years ago, when the universe was half as old as now and our solar system didn't exist yet.

Well! The last day of the squid fertilization workshop was just as exciting, in its own way, as Sunday's fishing excusion.  
 
The workshop's dozen participants hail from Mexico, Peru, Brazil, USA, Germany, Russia, and Spain. But our passion for cephalopod reproduction is as pure as our backgrounds are diverse. That's right, we are all obsessed with squid sex. So obsessed that we will make ourselves late for lunch with concerns about the chemistry of egg masses, and debate ommastrephid paralarval nutrition well into the night.
 
Yesterday morning we showed each other videos of egg masses and baby squid. We cooed over Susana's paralarvae and applauded Sakurai's shockingly spherical egg masses.