cmcclain | January 7, 2008Best DSN Post (Fuzzy Yeti): Maybe not the Pulitzer but it matters to Peter and I (and now Kevin). You decide the winner by casting your votes in the comments. The final 6 nominated by The Judges! include:
Canadians Should Root For Global Warming by Craig. One of The Judges! stated this was "a truly informative post on global warming and the NW passage."
Sea Turtle Advocates Appeal to the Vatican by Peter
Rogue Waves by Craig
Hydrothermal Vents=Global Warming by Craig. One of The Judges! commented "You dealt with that well and highlights the ignorance of some sectors of the media. I also love…
cmcclain | January 7, 2008Best Photo (Ansel Adams On Ship Award): Again in the peace loving, utopia that is DSN...we are all winners.
International Polar Year
Scaly Foot
Radiolaria "I'm kind of a Haeckel groupie and this picture of the real thing is obviously a rip off of his artwork"stated one of The Judges!
The Art of Kawika Chetron.
Animals in Formalin Overheard judges comment, "Yeah, yeah... call me a classicist."
Best TGIF video: Peter introduced the Thank God Its Friday Video series this year, thereby creating more work for me but making Friday a little more enjoyable.
Fish Guys
Cruise, Cruise, Baby (…
cmcclain | January 7, 2008The long awaited results...
Best New Discovery/Research (Heights of the Abyss Award): When it's the deep sea its all new. 2007 was no different with more big discoveries and novel research than you can shake a stick at. The Judges! were more indecisive than the Democratic party on what to do about Iraq. The result is a wishy-washy, utopian, happy unicorns and rainbows, "we're all winners" pile of links.
Humboldts Are Here and They Are Hungry
Jackelopterus rehnaniae
Corals In Acid
Sound Generated By Mid-Ocean Ridge Black Smoker
Lost Years For Sea Turtles Revealed
Best Conservation News:…
cmcclain | January 7, 2008The Marian Hypersub is something else entirely or so the website says. Actually the HS is 31 years in the making and kicks of our 2008 coverage of new sub designs. The HS-1200 can dive to 1200ft and reach 45mph on the surface. The safety features indicates this is built like a Volvo. With fuel load upgrade, which I will definitely be getting, the range increases to 1,000 miles without refueling. I will also be opting for the manipulator arm option and the 8 Speaker Bose Stereo Package. Via Neatorama.
cmcclain | January 7, 2008
A new blog I discovered, and seem strangely drawn to, is Information Junk, the findings of a San Franciscan librarian. Via IJ, I see that PG&E has agreed to buy power from a "wave park". No it's not a water park with lots of tourists creating energy through unspeakable means. Rather it's eight buoys bobbing in the water 2 1/2 miles offshore of Northern California, each buoy generating electricity as it rises and falls with the waves. The array, schedule for completion in 2012, will produce enough wattage to light 1,500 hundreds homes or 5 during Christmas.
cmcclain | January 7, 2008
Via Dark Roasted Blend...
French city of Nantes recently became host to extremely strange and fascinating sculptural display: "Les Machines de l'Ile Nantes", designed by Francois Delaroziere and Pierre Orefice.
Note all the sculptures are moving vehicles! Where can I trade in my car for one of these. You can see pictures of the all the sculptures at DRB.
cmcclain | January 7, 2008From The Hindu news is that The Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Oceanography will be overseeing the construction of a new 4,000 ton research vessel dedicated to deep-sea exploration. If my estimates from the web are right, then this new vessel will be considerably smaller than the two major research vessels Dayang Yihao at 5600 tons and the icebreaker Xuelong at 21025 tons currently in service. More details here as they come in.
cmcclain | January 7, 2008It truly is the year of the Giant Isopod. Questionable Content has these great T-shirts in a variety of sizes for about $20 including shipping. Hopefully, they will send me an XXL (yeah I'm a big boy) for "review".
cmcclain | January 7, 2008I am totally addicted to Mark Powell's blogfish. In part I view this relationship as a bit masochistic as the posts are always filled with bad news (e.g. CO2 poisoning is killing the ocean & YOU are probably contaminated with toxic pesticides). Over the weekend (thanks for ruining my Saturday), Mark posted on the recent decision of the Minerals Management Service to lease large areas in the Chukchi Sea area of the Arctic Ocean for oil and gas exploration. Yeah! He includes this gem:
"MMS, by its own admission, has stated that oil spills are likely from its proposal to open up the…
cmcclain | January 4, 2008
Host Tom Cavanagh (TV's Ed, Scrubs) discovers that author John Steinbeck was also a marine biologist He donated lots of specimens to the Smithsonian's museum of natural history.
petnoyer | January 3, 2008The deep-sea pickings are sparse this year at the Society for Comparative and Integrative Biology in San Antonio, TX. That's OK, It's a great meeting. "Horizontal", my advisor says, "not vertical." I'm learning about the flights of damselflies, hummingbirds, and bumblebees in between lectures on blue crab signaling and octopus middens.
My day started with a terrific review of fluorescence in the deep-sea by Mikhail Matz at UT-Austin, and ended with a sonics enhanced award lecture on the nature of stomatopod and lobster sounds by Sheila Patek at UC Berkeley. Patek gave a great review of her…
cmcclain | January 3, 2008
Fans of Steinbeck will recall that the fishing boat that he and Ed Ricketts took to the Sea of Cortez was named the Western Flyer. Her modern day namesake here at MBARI is quite a different ship indeed. The R/V Western Flyer is small water plane twin hull design (SWATH), fancy way of saying she is twin hulled. At 117ft, she can handle a compliment of 26 (10 crew, 5 ROV Tiburon crew, and 11 scientists) for around 2 weeks. If specs get you excited as they do me, they are here.
click above for larger photo
cmcclain | January 3, 2008Business owner: So if we destroy 1.1 acres natural habitat all we have to do is put 110 acres of concrete on the ocean floor?
Government: I am going to have to ask you to refrain from using concrete and use the government mandated 'artificial reef'
Business owner: Umm...sorry artificial reef. Won't people get wise?
Government: Nope...were promoting diversity...who doesn't like a reef?
Scuba Business Owner: I like reef! I just love diving on old ships, planes, concrete, tires. Best dive spots ever!
Sadly this is true.
cmcclain | January 3, 2008I've admittedly been hooked on Cloverfield since I saw the trailer (bottom). Can't say why really as I typically hate monster movies and huge internet hype translates into festering heaps of movies (e.g. Snakes on a Plane). Rick Macpherson is right, I am extremely happy about some recent Cloverfield news. Rick reports this morning that the monster is some abomination from the deep and a bastard child of baleen whale and arthropod. The sheer reproductive logistics of it are mind boggling. What really has this geek salivating is the 6ft tall ectoparasites covering the monster which are dead…
cmcclain | January 2, 2008Apparently, Peter and I have finally done something right. Who I am kidding, Peter is perfect. I on the other hand am working Toward the Year of Craig to balance out the hell that was 2007. Low and behold I will not be needing this to wear around because Peter and I have managed to make it into OpenLab 2007
Well, The Day has arrived! After reading all of the 486 entries at least once (and many 2-3 times) and after calculating all of the judges' ratings of all the posts, Reed Cartwright and I are happy to announce which [50] blog posts will be published in the second science blogging…
cmcclain | January 1, 20082007 at DSN...Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. For 2008...Work It Harder, Make It Better, Do It Faster, which will Make Us Stronger. As usual as the end of year comes up I get a bit weepy and nostalgic. During this time I send Peter an email harassing him to produce the Best of DSN and Best of the Abyss. Peter this year gently reminded me it was my turn. This year I trekked around the globe and found experts in many fields to find the best of 2007. Well...actually I spent a half-hour emailing people I actually thought I could sucker into this. The judges are hodgepodge of internet semi…
cmcclain | December 31, 2007
2007...what to say? A year that saw a lot of changes. First DSN moved to the big time here at Sb. Our traffic and regular visitors increased. At the old DSN, we hit 100,000 hits in nearly two years of blogging. For 2007, we reached nearly 320,000 hits! Lots of great posts, new discoveries, novel research, and...well deep-sea news. In the next week or so I will post the Best of 2007 determined by a crack, i.e. a bunch of suckers we got for free, team of experts. What will happen next year. DSN is going to be bigger, better, and badder. Don't worry we will still be the #1 action site…
cmcclain | December 30, 2007
The Neptune Memorial Reef project is the largest man made reef ever conceived and provides an extraordinary living resting place for the departed, an environmental and ecological masterpiece, a superb laboratory for marine biologists, students, researchers and ecologists, and an aesthetically exquisite, world-class destination for visitors from all walks of life. The most innovative concept in artificial reef design is currently emerging in 50-feet of water, 3.25 miles east of Key Biscayne, Miami. Wrapped in the silence of the clear blue ocean a new reef is evolving. The Neptune Memorial…
petnoyer | December 28, 2007
One of my back up plans for early retirement is to start a consulting business for Hollywood special effects (SFX) studios. My crack team of marine invertebrate biologists and kinesiologists will advise big studios on new scary creatures for space-based and terrestrial monster movies.
The first one's free. The picture of the amphipod Phronima sp. above would be a good biomechanical model for an update of say, the Imperial AT-AT Walkers from "Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back". The picture comes from the Norway-based MAR-ECO project and the global Census of Marine Life program…