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cmcclain | October 26, 2007Rick at MBSL&S tagged me to produce "my favorite ocean-themed scary movies." My favorite has to be Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961).
Edward Wain is inept Government Agent XK342. He is on the trail of mobster Renzo Capeto, a Bogart wanna-be who is transporting Colonel Tostada, a group of exiled Cuban nationals, and a large portion of the Cuban treasury out of Cuba. Renzo is also accompanied by Mary-Belle Monahan (an infamous gangster moll), Happy Jack Monahan (her dim-bulb gangster-in-training brother) and Pete Peterson Jr. (a hoodlum/animal impersonator). Wain assumes the identity…
grrlscientist | October 26, 2007tags: vocabulary, online quiz
Your Vocabulary Score: A+
Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary!
You must be quite an erudite person.
How's Your Vocabulary?
How about you? By the way, I actually have linked to an even better vocabulary game that will appear Sunday. The upcoming game will ask you to define vocabulary words and, if you get the word correct, you not only get a harder word to define, but the game will also donate ten grains of rice to the United Nations to help end world hunger. Weird, I know, but it's a fun game!
cmcclain | October 25, 2007You can find anything on the internet...
And another
And finally a trailer from the Aquaman series than never made it on the air.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvmB8uCSRMQ
cmcclain | October 25, 2007From JAMSTEC: Scaly foot--a spiral gastropod clad in iron sulfide scales
Found only in an extremely limited region of hyrdothermal areas within the Indian Ocean, which is called "Kairei Field". As the name suggests, this creature is covered in rugged scales that protect it from predators. How it actually creates its iron sulfide scales, however, is not yet fully understood. A JAMSTEC research team succeeded in observing the creature in an onboard tank for the first time in February 2006. You can download my paper on this species for free here.
jlynch | October 25, 2007Events
1977 - The last natural case of smallpox was discovered in Merca district, Somalia. The WHO and the CDC consider this date the anniversary of the eradication of smallpox.
1984 - "Baby Fae" receives a heart transplant from a baboon.
1994 - Announcement that Andrew Wiles correctly proved Fermat’s last theorem.
Births
1874 - Martin Lowry, British chemist
Deaths
1817 - Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin, Austrian scientist
1943 - Marc Aurel Stein, Hungarian-born archaeologist
1957 - Gerty Cori, Nobel Prize laureate
1989 - Charles J. Pedersen, American chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
grrlscientist | October 25, 2007
Can you find the bar-tailed godwits here among the avocet and marbled godwits?
Image: Mary Scott, Birding America.
Thanks to a reader who would rather remain anonymous, I am going to go to Texas tomorrow and will return to all of you on Tuesday. I have scheduled a few things to publish on this blog while I am gone so you don't feel abandoned, and I will be peeking in at night and perhaps publishing a few things for you to read or a few pictures for you to look at during those times.
I return from Texas on Sunday night, and will be writing a little bit for you on Monday, but since The Bird…
lua yar | October 25, 2007So while most of my fellow undergraduates were leaving town to go somewhere, anywhere, other than Morris for fall break, I had to stay behind. Sure, staying in Morris is not really all that bad, I mean, some people actually live here (sorry Professor). But I will be honest-it really is not on my list of top places to live. It is just, well, boring. I had to stay behind because I had some animals I had to take care of, and I will admit, I was looking forward to spending time lying in bed, working with my horses, and catching up on my senior seminar. Little did I know exactly how much time I…
grrlscientist | October 25, 2007
Are we becoming a nation of pajama-wearing web-surfing loners?
(Orphaned image).
Zogby International and 463 Communications recently polled 9,743 Americans online regarding their attitude towards the internet.
They found that a significant minority of equal numbers of men and women would consider the internet to be a surrogate significant other: 31% of single political progressives and 18% of single political conservatives felt this way. Wow, amazing, huh? I didn't know that so many Americans found 3.5 inch floppies so attractive!
But weirdly, only 11% of Americans said they would implant…
grrlscientist | October 25, 2007
Hey, look at this. Does it look familiar to you? Well, considering that I think my blog doesn't get enough traffic, I was both pleased and surprised when I noticed that various stories on it occupied four of the five "most emailed" slots on scienceblogs last night. Not bad, eh?
sb admin | October 25, 2007Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified on Tuesday at the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works hearing âExamining the Human Health Impacts of Global Warming.â Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that Gerberdingâs written testimony had been severely edited by the White House, which chopped it from 14 pages to 4. Gerberding and spokespersons from the White House and CDC then insisted that everything was fine â the editing process was normal, Gerberding had been able to communicate what she needed to, etc. But a look at the…
sb admin | October 25, 2007The Council of Science Editors has organized 235 journals from 37 countries are publishing more than 750 articles on poverty and human development this week. For its theme issue, PLoS Medicine asked a variety of commentators from around the world to name the single intervention that they think would improve the health of those living on less than $1 per day. While reading the article, I was struck by three themes that emerged in multiple responses:
Water and sanitation â Several respondents identified improved access to clean water and sanitation as a high-impact intervention. Sanjeev…
blue_expo | October 25, 2007The beginning of this week was fall break at our college campus. We had the weekend off as well as Monday and Tuesday. Since I had been planning to return home to northern Minnesota for the first time since moving down to west central Minnesota in August, I decided to take Thursday and Friday off also. The few days I spent away from this desolate prairie wasteland and back among the conifers and lakes were phenomenally enjoyable.
This is my first year of college away from home and a long way from home it is. I remember the first few weeks I was down here, only vaguely though, a lot of…
grrlscientist | October 24, 2007tags: Tangled Bank, blog carnival
The 91st edition of my favorite blog carnival, Tangled Bank, is now available for your enjoyment. This blog carnival is devoted to linking the best blog essays about science, nature and medicine. The editor included two of my submissions, so you should go there to show them some support!
cmcclain | October 24, 2007
Sure Sphere is a filthy piece of literary swill but it also a vital component of any submersible. As you may remember from geometry, for any given volume, a sphere has the smallest surface area, or for any given surface area, a sphere will have the greatest volume. From a practical standpoint for a deep-sea submersible, this means less surface for pressure to act upon. Thus the choice for the 'large' compartment to hold humans on a deep diving submersible is a sphere.
The first deep-diving sphere was the aptly named Bathysphere of Barton and Beebe, making its first unmanned test in 1930.…
cmcclain | October 24, 2007Beth Terry over at Fake Plastic Fish caught an error in this post about Evert Fresh Produce Bags.
I was reading the list of plastic alternatives in your post on Deep Sea News, and I noticed you recommended Evert Fresh produce bags as being non-petroleum based. I believe that they are in fact petroleum-based. The rep at the company told me that they are polyethylene mixed with clay....I am still waiting for the owner to get back to me to confirm what the rep said and get more details. But even Reusablebags.com confirmed for me that they are plastic, even though they don't mention that fact…
cmcclain | October 24, 2007The deep ocean (deeper than 1km) is a CO2 sink. Deep water masses are cold and dense which minimizes vertical mixing with overlying ocean layers. This means what carbon travels to the deep is sequestered away from the atmosphere. Eric Galbraith, author of recent study in Nature, notes
"It's like a bottle of Italian salad dressing that hasn't been shaken," he said. "You can leave it there forever and it just doesn't mix."
So how much CO2 can the deep ocean store?
Looking at the last ice age, 20,000 years ago, Galbraith et al. examined how the deep ocean stored CO2 when atmospheric levels…
moleculeoftheday | October 24, 2007As I've mentioned several times before, NMR is vital to modern chemistry (and medicine, for that matter).
Nb3Sn, or niobium-tin, is a superconductor that's used in modern high-field NMR (MRI) magnets.
cortex | October 23, 2007Forgive the light posting. I've been traveling. I'm now in Switzerland, reporting a story that I'm sure we'll be talking about later. But for now, I'd like to share a few thoughts on being an American abroad.
The first thought is sobering. One can't help but be impressed by the infrastructure of Europe. To get to JFK, I had to take a grimy rush hour A-train that broke down in the middle of Brooklyn. Then there were the requisite security lines that took forever, since the Department of Homeland Security (I still get Orwellian shivers whenever I write that bureaucratic name) has a fondness…
mikethemadbiologist | October 23, 2007I think Maha just might have come up with the high-end talking point for 2008:
A generation of Americans have been born and grown into adulthood listening to rightie propaganda that taxes must always go down. "Starve the beast," you know. The problem is that "the beast" conservatives are starving is our country.
Now, go read the whole post.
grrlscientist | October 22, 2007tags: family life carnival, blog carnival
Is living with your family something like living at a carnival, you know, with the bearded woman and the sword-swallowing man? Well, you will probably enjoy the fall festival of the Carnival of Family Life, where they link to essays about well, um, family life. So go there and get in on the fun.