ocean
cwilcox | September 23, 2009I believe that most of my readers are very environmentally-conscious people. After all, how could you stand reading the ravings of a clearly tree-and-animal-hugging girl like me unless you had a soft spot for things that are green. So you all might like to know about a brand new, volunteer-based conservation group called OCEAN: the Online Community Environmental Action Network.
Here's what OCEAN's creator, David Shiffman, had to say:I am proud to live in a time when more people care about protecting the environment than ever before. However, even with all of the amazing people working in the…
ddobbs | June 23, 2009
Perhaps because I so enjoyed the time I spent at sea learning about fish, I particularly enjoyed this collection of Nick Cobbing's photos of ice, sea, and people who work them â scientists, fishermen, adventurers. Cobbing has a great eye for color and form, particularly those of the icy north and the sea; his study of the Greenland ice, fast fading, is particularly stunning, and I very much like his photo account of the voyage of the Nooderlicht, pictured above â a 100-year-old schooner restored and then sailed from Svalbard to Greenland. And don't miss "The Watch Keeper," which is about…
gregladen | April 4, 2009A very large percentage of the earth's land masses were covered by glacial ice during the last glaciation. Right now it is about 10%, but during the Ice Age it was much more. Enough of the earth's water was trapped in this glacial ice that the oceans were about 120 to 150 meters lower than they are now. The thicker ice sheets were one or two kilometers thick, and they tended to slide around quite a bit, grinding down the surface of the earth and turning bedrock into dust and cobbles.
Then the ice went away, but the effects of the ice having been there are still being felt. A paper…
cwilcox | March 17, 2009Picture this: It's Monday morning, and you wake up groggy to your alarm because the incessant traffic and blaring of truck horns from the local highway kept you from getting a good nights' sleep. You'd go back to sleep, but your spouse is already up watching TV and that annoying anchor for the 6 AM news is peppily rambling about how great his week abroad in Hawaii was - like an image of him in a speedo is what you need in your head first thing.
You hop in the shower, if only to drown out the television, and try and remember what exactly it was that you were supposed to do before work this…
sporte | March 15, 2009"Digital biology," as I use the phrase, refers to the idea of using digital information for doing biology. This digital information comes from multiple sources such as DNA sequences, protein sequences, DNA hybridization, molecular structures, analytical chemistry, biomarkers, images, GIS, and more. We obtain this information either from experiments or from a wide variety of databases and we work with this information using several kinds of bioinformatics tools.
The reason I'm calling this field "digital biology" and not "bioinformatics" (even though I typically use the terms as…
cwilcox | March 2, 2009Also check out the awesome new Carnival of the Blue up at Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice and Sunsets.
*Sigh* back to work for me!
zooillogix | April 6, 2008
Welcome to the eleventh and by far the most important, although surprisingly the most poorly formatted, installment of Carnival of the Blue. Before we get down to the watery, salty, and sometimes rubbery details, we wanted to take a moment to ponder the significance of Zooillogix's role as host of the eleventh COB. Why not the fifth or the ever popular tenth? Why not the second or maybe seventh, sixth, eighth, ninth or third?
Well, according to Biblestudy.org, "If ten is the number which marks the perfection of Divine order, then eleven is an addition to it, subversive of and undoing that…
zooillogix | February 23, 2008Dentistry under the sea looks a lot less painful but potentially much more dangerous for the hygienist.
Moray and cleaner shrimp. Photo credit to Erwin Kodiat
Sand Diver and Pedersen's cleaner shrimp. Photo credit to Reef Reflections
Fun fact: adorable cleaner shrimp are notable for crawling down people's throats and laying eggs in their chest! Photo credit to Michael Haas.