Marine and Coastal Environment

Oceans and seas cover 70 per cent of the Earth's surface. They are a major and distinct source of natural resources, offering us food from fisheries and aquaculture, and opportunities to exploit both renewable energy sources such as wind, wave and tidal power and existing supplies of minerals and fossil fuels. At the same time, the marine environment contains a unique and diverse range of species and habitats, with half of the UK's biodiversity found in our surrounding waters.

The marine and coastal waters around Scotland are vitally important to the sustainable future of the country. Our coasts and seas provide food from fisheries, energy and mineral resources, routes and harbours for shipping, tourism and recreational opportunities and sites of cultural and historical interest, which meet many of our economic and social needs particularly in remote rural areas. At the same time, they contain distinctive and important habitats and support a diverse range of species which we need to protect, conserve and enhance. The Scottish Government, therefore, is committed to ensuring the sustainable use of our coasts and seas and the resources that they contain.

Our aim is to secure a vision of clean, healthy, safe, productive and biologically diverse marine and coastal environments, managed to meet the long term needs of nature and people. Good progress has been made in approaching this vision by tackling the problems facing our oceans and seas, but we must do more nationally and internationally to tackle the threats that remain.

Blood plasma

Blood plasma is the liquid component of blood, in which the blood cells are suspended. It makes up about 55% of total blood volume. It is composed of mostly water (90% by volume), and contains dissolved proteins, glucose, clotting factors, mineral ions, hormones and carbon dioxide (plasma being the main medium for excretory product transportation). Blood plasma is prepared simply by spinning a tube of fresh blood in a centrifuge until the blood cells fall to the bottom of the tube. The blood plasma is then poured or drawn off. Blood serum is blood plasma without fibrinogen or the other clotting factors.

Inner planet Mercury

Mercury (0.4 AU) is the closest planet to the Sun and the smallest planet (0.055 Earth masses). Mercury has no natural satellites, and its only known geological features besides impact craters are lobed ridges or rupes, probably produced by a period of contraction early in its history. Mercury's almost negligible atmosphere consists of atoms blasted off its surface by the solar wind. Its relatively large iron core and thin mantle have not yet been adequately explained. Hypotheses include that its outer layers were stripped off by a giant impact, and that it was prevented from fully accreting by the young Sun's energy.

OpenGL 2.0

OpenGL 2.0 was conceived by 3Dlabs to address concerns that OpenGL was stagnating and lacked a strong direction. 3Dlabs proposed a number of major additions to the standard. Most of these were, at the time, rejected by the ARB or otherwise never came to fruition in the form that 3Dlabs proposed. However, their proposal for a C-style shading language was eventually completed, resulting in the current formulation of GLSL (the OpenGL Shading Language, also slang). Like the assembly-like shading languages that it was replacing, it allowed the programmer to replace the fixed-function vertex and fragment pipe with shaders, though this time written in a C-like language.

The design of GLSL was notable for making relatively few concessions to the limitations of the hardware then available; this hearkened back to the earlier tradition of OpenGL setting an ambitious, forward-looking target for 3D accelerators rather than merely tracking the state of currently available hardware. The final OpenGL 2.0 specification includes support for GLSL.