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Television actor Allison Mack, who pleaded guilty for her role in a sex-trafficking case tied to the cult-like group NXIVM, has been released from a Northern California prison, according to a government website. Mack, best known for her role as young Superman’s close friend on “Smallville,” was sentenced to three years behind bars in 2021 after pleading guilty two years earlier to charges that she manipulated women into becoming sex slaves for NXIVM leader Keith Raniere. Online records maintained by the Federal Bureau of Prisons said Mack, 40, was released Monday from a federal prison in Dublin, Calif,, near San...

What a bad year to be a Florida manatee. For the first time on record, more than 1,000 of the sea mammals have died in a calendar year — and it’s not even December yet. That could amount to 1 in every 7 of the state’s manatees gone in less than 11 months. Many of them starved, thanks to a die-off of seagrass, a problem worsened by human-made pollution. In the short run, Florida owes it to this iconic mammal to find ways to mitigate the damage. It’s also time to put the manatees back on the endangered species list,...

Ancient weapons, prehistoric fishing tools, and textiles are just some of the items scientists have discovered buried beneath the protective cover of seagrass, says Oscar Serrano, a marine ecologist at Edith Cowan University in Australia. Until now, Serrano says, no one has investigated the cultural value of seagrass meadows, which "play an important role in revealing clues about the human past." ...To highlight the link between seagrass and archaeological preservation, Serrano and his colleagues compiled evidence from the literature and from consultations with archaeologists in Denmark, Australia, the United States, and around the Mediterranean. The team's investigation revealed a clear...

Seahorses are a group (genus Hippocampus) of small fish belonging to the family Syngnathidae, which also includes pipefish and sea dragons. These creatures are named for the shape of their head, which looks like the head of a horse.They are found in shallow tropical and temperate waters throughout the world.Unlike most other fish, seahorses are monogamous and mate for life. Pygmy seahorses of the genus Hippocampus are diminutive in size (0.5-1 inch, or 1.36-2.6 cm, long).They live in close association with octocorals, colonial hydrozoans, bryozoans, seagrass and algae.They are morphologically distinct from the more numerous and larger species (0.9-14 inches,...

Scientists say a patch of ancient seagrass in the Mediterranean is up to 200,000 years and could be the oldest known living thing on Earth. Australian researchers, who genetically sampled the seagrass covering 40 sites from Spain to Cyprus, say it is one of the world's most resilient organisms - but it has now begun to decline due to global warming. The analysis, published in the journal PLos ONE, found the seagrass was between 12,000 and 200,000 years old and was most likely to be at least 100,000 years old. This is far older than the current known oldest species,...

What is the world's largest living creature? Scientists from the CSIC. the University of the Balearic Islands, Portugal, Carribean and the USA have discovered a Posidonia Oceanica, of more than 8 kilometers in length, and 100,000 years old. The 'Posideonia Oceanica' is, in layman's terms 'sea grass', and the wavy plains of this plant found off the coasts Ibiza and Formentera, have been, since 1999, part of the reason for the award to Ibiza as a 'Heritage of Humanity'. The huge plant was discovered between 'Es Freus' (the straits that separate Ibiza from Formentera) and the 'Ses Salines' beach....and quite...