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cmcclain | January 7, 2007ATMOCEAN, a firm based in Santa Fe, NM with Philip W. Kithil at the helm, is according to their website the company is "at the forefront of the emerging Hurricane and Global Warming Mitigation Industry." What is that you ask?
In their own words...
Our patents-pending Atmocean technology is based on a wave-activated pump that brings cold water from the deep ocean to the surface, to cool sea surface temperatures and potentially reduce hurricane damage to onshore and offshore property and infrastructure, and save lives. For each 0.5 degree Celsius drop in surface water temperature, hurricane…
cmcclain | January 6, 2007
If you missed the book Meg, which is probably for the best, I just heard through the grapevine that a movie is in developmental hell. Luckily the book was given to me, so as I trudged through the 400 some odd pages of it, I didn't have one more thing to upset me. The only thing that is deep in the story is the setting. If you like multi-million dollar moves with great effects and little plot this may be the book for you. The whole pretense, in a King Kong/Godzilla sense, is absurd and the dialgoue is predictable.
The main protagonist is Jonas Taylor a Navy deep sea diver working in the…
petnoyer | January 6, 2007Slate recycled an old story about Giant Squid just before Christmas. Daniel Engber's review provides lots of interesting links and factoids about ammonium and bouyancy control in Architeuthis . He also touches on their potential vulnerability to sesimic surveys, citing a New Scientist article about a 'mass' stranding of 5 giant squid following seismic surveys off the coast of Spain back in 2004.
petnoyer | January 6, 2007New York Times is running a nice article called "Old Men and The Sea" about two remarkable marine biologists that passed this year, Drs. Cadet Hand and Joel Hedgpeth. Hand was partial to sea anemones and Hedgepeth preferred sea spiders. We provide these links to share our mutual admiration, and to pay our respects to the inspiring lives of these two great men.
petnoyer | January 5, 2007I don't know if you guys caught the comment below from Bruce Strickrott, Chief Pilot of the DSV Alvin. We have been trying to get this guy to write something for Deep Sea News for about a year now. Why? Because Alvin pilots Bruce, Anthony, Gavin, Pat, and Duncan (among others) have gone where no humans have gone before, time and time again. And that's BEFORE they get to work. They are also hilarious fun to hang out with.
We're going to be writing lots more about the new Alvin replacement in the coming months. Hopefully Bruce and the guys will chip in with stories from "Nine North" and other…
sb admin | January 4, 2007by Liz Borkowski
Since November of 2006, all cigarette packages and advertising in Chile have been required to devote half of their space to hard-hitting anti-tobacco messages. In addition to a âThese cigarettes are killing youâ warning, this includes a haunting photo of Miguel GarcÃa MartÃn, a 72-year-old Chilean who lost his larynx to cancer after smoking for 20 years:
Â
Don Miguel, Chilean, smoked for 20 years. He lost his larynx to cancer.
Caution! These cigarettes are killing you. Ministry of Health, Government of
Chile
The smoke of each cigarette you smoke contains,…
cmcclain | January 4, 2007Will be gone to the Canary Islands for a conference until the 15th to give my spiel. You will be in the very capable and 'hand'some hands of Peter. Enjoy and use the thread to post comments on anything you want (as long it is deep sea related!).
petnoyer | January 3, 2007Natural Resources Defense Council is leading the fight to make the Pacific Ocean off California a more peaceful place for migrating whales. So far, they have strong support from the California Coastal Commission, who denied the US Navy sonar training exercises once before. A review is due on January 10. NRDC is asking for your support in an email campaign below.
Dear California NRDC BioGems Defender,
We won the first round in our local fight against deadly sonar. But round two starts today -- and we really need you to make your voice heard!
Last month, NRDC Members and activists sent…
stoat | January 3, 2007Via Miriam, I see that Bad Science (Ben Goldacre's column in the Grauniad) is now a book (pre-publication); so is Tim Worstall's though he may not be so happy with the "31 used & new available from £0.01"!
More amusingly (again via M) is Hairy Pooter 7, which although not yet published already has 5 5-star reviews (sample: "I feel that will will be worth all 5 stars when it comes out so I have gave it such") and a sales rank of... yes, you guessed it, 1.
nisbetmc | January 3, 2007Part 1 of Segment
Part 2 of Segment
Stay the Course versus Cut and Run versus Surge and Accelerate. Over the past month, as the Bush team has unpacked its new language of "surge and accelerate," they have successfully shifted the terms of discussion away from troop withdrawal and a timeline for handover to an absurdly sexual metaphor that in reality means simply "more of the same" and "stay the course."
There is a lot to say about this new frame device, and its power, but I think last night on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann covered much of the ground in television commentary that channels the…
purepedantry | January 3, 2007Pat Robertson is up to his old fun:
In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007.
"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network. "The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."
Robertson said God told him during a recent prayer retreat that major cities and possibly millions of people…
cmcclain | January 3, 2007The recent welcome of Attleboro H.S. has me reflecting on time spent in Boston as a graduate student. Boston is a wonderful town with great latke, Guinness, and tobaccionist. In the words of Fred Allen
"I have just returned from Boston. It is the only sane thing to do if you find yourself up there."
Boston also provides numerous opportunities to increase your deep-sea knowledge. The MIT Museum currently is running an exhibit in the Hart Nautical Gallery titled Deep Frontiers: Ocean Engineering at MIT. The exhibits includes multimedia and several autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) for…
cmcclain | January 2, 2007From The Daily Review...
It is amazing what you find lying around the bottom of the ocean, as St. Mary's College professor Douglas Long has discovered. Long was part of a team of researchers who this year identified two new species of deep-sea fishes, unusual-looking sharks that broke off on their own evolutionary path more than 320 million years ago. The creatures -- named the Galapagos and whitespot ghost sharks -- were found more than 1,200 feet underwater near the Galapagos Islands in 1995, sucked through a vacuum tube into a research submarine. Long and his team spent more than a decade…
pharyngula | January 2, 2007Edge has this annual question, where they ask a lot of smart people something general and provocative, and collect the essays into a webpage. This year, the question is "What are you optimistic about? And why?"
There are a lot of answers, many of them very specific—people are optimistic about the new supercollider, or climate change, or something specific to their discipline—while others are so general that they don't say much (Humans will survive, somehow!). What I thought interesting, though, is that there was a bit of a trend to one particular kind of answer. Some of the people who…
cmcclain | January 2, 2007
Fox News discusses the years best in science. I was excited because two of these are deep-sea related, the Yeti Crab and the recent capture of the Architeuthis. DSN was there when these stories cracked bringing you "a fair and balanced coverage". Most of these findings are old news and were diligently covered by blogosphere. Below the fold I list all these finding and link to a blogger who covered them. Stay tuned for the BEST OF DSN 2006 from Peter.
Invasive Species
Strange dog-like creature in Maine
Yeti crab
Giant hungry snails overran the Caribbean island of Barbados
A grizzly-polar…
cmcclain | January 2, 2007Biochemcial adaptations to temperature and pressure are essential for organisms to exploit the deep sea. The prominent physiologist, George Somero, whose work has repetitively inspired and defined several sub-disciplines of biology, published a review of these adaptations in 1992. Here I largely translate his work and provide the necessary background material for you to digest the modifications exhibited by denizens of the deep.
As you may remember from high school or college biology, a cellular membrane consists of lipid bilayer. The major membrane lipid is a phospholipid. One end of…
nisbetmc | January 1, 2007
In DC over the weekend, the conversational buzz at coffee shops, wine bars, and holiday parties has focused on the graphic reports of Saddam Hussein's execution. Friends from both sides of the political fence are using words like "banal," "barbaric," "creepy," and "grotesque" to describe their reaction to the events. Questions about the timing of the execution, the chaotic nature of the trial, and the not-so-civilized death penalty, ("Only in Iraq and Texas...), serve as fodder for much of the chatter.
The mood is a stark contrast from cable news coverage and the front page headlines…
petnoyer | January 1, 2007I was worried that 2006 might pass without a sea change for deep-sea research until I ran across an article by Grasmueck et al in Journal of Geophysical Research that made my paradigm shift.
Recent deep surveys by the researchers from Rostenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at University of Miami used an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to reveal more than 200 coral reefs in waters 600-800m deep off Grand Bahama Banks in the Straits of Florida. Following that, they used a drop camera to identify living scleractinian assemblages.
These findings support the case that deep…
tlambert | December 31, 2006Don't pay any attention to the date stamp on this post. It's 2007 already here.
tqa | December 30, 2006Here's a good New Year's quote, from the first season of The West Wing:
Toby: It's not the new millennium, but I'll just let it drop.
Sam: It is.
Toby: It is not the new millennium. The year 2000 is the last year of the millennium, it's not the first year of the next one.
Sam: But the common sensibility, to quote Stephen Jay Gould--
Toby: Stephen Jay Gould needs to look at a calendar.
Sam: Gould says this is a largely un-resolveable issue.
Toby: Yeah, it's tough to resolve. You have to look at a calendar.