All good things must come to and end, so they may have a new beginning. So begins the next chapter in the history of deep ocean exploration... The NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer was commissioned this week in Seattle, WA. The vessel will be equipped with two deep-sea ROVs capable of broadcasting high-definition video from the deep-sea in real-time using Dr. Robert Ballard's "telepresence" technology. Word on the street is the Chief Scientist's quarters come equipped with an inflatable hot tub, sushi bar, and wine rack Dr. Ballard keeps in a briefcase chained to his wrist at all times. ;) NOAA's…
I found this interesting picture illustrating how extensible the belly of the anglerfish is. They gulp more than their share in body weight! Quite a nice adaptation when you never know another meal will pass you by. Culled from a classroom page at Warrensburg Schools in Missouri. Way to go learning about the deep sea!
"Sizzle" is a global warming comedy, a film directed by Randy Olson of the Shifting Baselines blog. Sizzle has been making the rounds between our respective research institutions here at Deep Sea News. Mine arrived about one month ago in a brightly colored envelope marked "your XXX photos have arrived!" Thanks, Kevin. Appreciate that. So, I finally had a chance to sit down and watch the movie. It wasn't bad, really. I got a few good chuckles out of it. In the movie, Randy is literally trying to grasp the issue of an untenable problem - climate change. It becomes more of a farce with every…
Ahram Biosystems just released a handheld PCR machine affectionately called the Palm PCR. Oh yeah baby. Now you can just strap this 330 g (with battery) puppy to your arm when you go out for a jog. Wait! Is that dead body? Throw a hair in there and amplify as you wipe the sweat of your brow (make sure it doesn't fall inside the Palm PCR though...). But don't get too comfy, you'll have your 2kbp product in only 15-30 min. "Palm PCR is powered by a Li-ion battery that enables more than 4 hours of continuous operation on a single charge. It is designed to adapt the standard 9 mm-spaced well…
Conservation is more than saving a species or a habitat. Conservation, at a meta-level, places people in stewardship of the planet and its inventory. Some of the most amazing places and their inhabitants are located in some of the poorest nations or communities. So when the passionate bloggers at 10000 Birds formed a partnership with the National Museum of Kenya to support the conservation work of Dominic Kamau Kimani, we at Deep Sea News asked how can we help? We recognize that our readership, you guys, come from all walks of life but are unified by your love and appreciation of the natural…
Hat tip to Sheril.
Now EVERY dolphin is going to be tail-walking on the water. Remember the moonwalk phenomenon in the 80s?? Yeah, you thought that was bad? Well, just think how bad it will be when all the dolphin's start tail-walking? Great job sea world... BBC Reports "Wild Dolphins Tail-Walk on Water":"A wild dolphin is apparently teaching other members of her group to walk on their tails, a behaviour usually seen only after training in captivity. The tail-walking group lives along the south Australian coast near Adelaide. One of them spent a short time after illness in a dolphinarium 20 years ago and may…
Last year around this time, DSN reported on a Corpus Christi Caller-Times story documenting that 135 sea turtle nests were located in 8,895 hours of surveys over 73,632 miles of Texas beaches. Of these, 128 nests were Kemp's ridleys (Lepidochelys kempii), six nests were loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta), and one nest was from a green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas). This was remarkable at the time because it was a record for Kemp's ridley turtles, who were hard hit by shrimp trawlers, which ensnare and drown the turtles with their large, fast moving nets. Escape hatches, called Turtle…
Bora has the first edition of Praxis. I think this carnival will quickly become one of the most important monthly collection of blog posts, covering topics that is about science:"If it is "Life in Academia", then pretty much everything on science blogs is eligible and the effect is diluted. If we narrow it down to one topic, e.g., Open Access publishing, then there will not be sufficient posts and sufficient interest to keep the carnival alive. We'll have to define a happy middle. We want people to find each other here - folks that write about the business of science, about publishing and…
I was amazed while watching this video (hat tip to Sea Notes), hinging on his every word. I thought Chris Jordan was an interesting and passionate speaker. Together with his imagery and explanation, he wove a fascinating visual analysis of American culture. There are many analogies to what we have been talking about lately on Deep Sea News and on the environmental/science blogosphere as a whole. There are many symptoms to the problem and it is all too easy to get hung up on the details of each symptom. Craig's post on the hard hitting table of species declines really drove home a message.…
Something brilliant... Even better if it had been an octopus.
Instead of charging extra for pillows why don't they offer this as a service?
I came across these pictures from Fogonazos. Be sure to go over there for a great article about Mola Mola, the giant ocean sunfish, with about 2 dozen more pictures! Now that's a whole lotta Mola! Read Fogonazos to see why you might not want to eat its flesh though.
NY Times reports"In a study to be published Friday in the journal Science, researchers say the number of marine "dead zones" around the world has doubled about every 10 years since the 1960s. At the same time, the zones along many coastlines have been growing in size and intensity. About 400 coastal areas now have periodically or permanently oxygen-starved bottom waters. Combined, they constitute an area larger than the state of Oregon. "What's happened in the last 40, 50 years is that human activity has made the water quality conditions worse," Robert J. Diaz, the study's lead author and a…
"Not Having the Faintest Idea of What They Are Doing Award" Goes To... GreenPeace! I really I have no idea what they are thinking by placing 150 2-3 ton granite blocks on the seafloor. Mark at blogfish and Miriam at Oyster's Garter spell it all out so I don't have to. I guess I'm back to not liking GreenPeace again. For an idea of how much 450 tons is: 33 Big Bens 2.5 blue whales 2.4 International Space Stations God I love SensibleUnits.com
I'm sorry but I am going to ruin the rest of your day, week, month, and year. I don't like packaging conservation messages in the negative but I fail to see any good spin for this. I was going to do a large write up about shifting baselines and Jeremy Jackson's wonderfully written (as always) paper occurring recently in PNAS as part of special issue addressing biodiversity and biodiversity loss. However, Jeremy provides a table that brings home the message that far excels anything I could write here. Get the message?
Click on image to embiggen and go to source website. Hat tip to Eric via Dinochick.
G4TV's coverage of the manly hit game Harpooned, brought to us by phisrow who left a comment on the last whale post. You can visit the harpooned.org and download the game to see how *real* scientific research is done (windows only)!
Michael Phelps is faster than a flounder. He swims about 6 mph. But what if he was fighting currents, swimming upstream, and jumping dams? Salmon, dolphin, and blue shark are all faster. Salmon swim 8 mph. Maybe Mike could take them in a sprint. Swordfish and sailfish top the scales at 60 mph. Jennifer Viegas' "Born Animal" blog runs the stats at Discovery News.