Deep Sea News

The Carnival of the Blue thing has really come together lately thanks to Mark Powell, the power of the blogosphere, and a dedicated online ocean public that includes you. Go see the latest line up of stories at Shifting Baselines-”the cure for ocean amnesia”.

Where else you gonna upload your migration tracks for bob-tailed godwits into Google Earth (DC Birding Blog), and set yourself “strait” on the meltdown in the Northwest Passage (Island of Doubt)?

Lots of good stuff to see and read there.

To kick off the new badge “I’m a marine biologist and, to be honest, I kind of hate dolphins”, Science Creative Quarterly has published an article about the realities of being a marine biologist. Milton states it clearly.

Just be honest with yourself. If you want to talk to dolphins you don’t want to be a [marine] biologist. What you really want to do is explore your past lives, get in touch with the Cosmic Oneness and conduct similar-minded individuals on tours to Central America looking for evidence that We Are Not Alone. Our experience is that people who feel this way last about 6.5 minutes in any biology program.

With this new badge, which I rightfully claim, I am announcing my entry into the ORDER OF THE SCIENCE SCOUTS OF EXEMPLARY REPUTE AND ABOVE AVERAGE PHYSIQUE. My list of current badges is below the fold.

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The Washington Post is sponsoring the onBeing project that

is a project based on the simple notion that we should get to know one another a little better. What you’ll find here is a series of videos that takes you into the musings, passions, histories and quirks of all sorts of people. The essence of who they are, who we are.

One of these videos is Chris Mah, master of all echinoderm, displaying the passion that drive his research and makes interacting with Chris a pleasure. Catch this Chris’s guest post at the old DSN.

Yo DIC (Dissolved Inorganic Carbon), Let’s Kick It! Hat tip to Christina Kellogg for pointing this out to me.

More pictures here…

The question is whether crops belong in your mouth or your gastank? Bioscience has a interesting article from June with National Geographic following on their heals this month. Both are very interesting and worth the read. Nash in Bioscience lays out what are the potential ill effects of moving to biofuels:

• Diversion of food crops such as corn and soybeans into gas tanks
• Release of greenhouse gases
• Conversion of wildlife habitat into energy-crop farmland
• Accelerating soil depletion
• Drawdown of scarce water resources for irrigation
• Spread of invasive species used as energy crops
• Illusion of sustainability despite extravagant energy consumption
• More use of groundwater-polluting pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers

This quote really caught my eye.

If the whole of the current US soybean and corn crops were diverted to biofuel production, they would satisfy only about 6 percent of the demand for diesel and 12 percent of the demand for gasoline.

The rest of the article finishes with interesting insights about new methodologies like cellulosic ethanol that would allow any plant material, including garbage, paper, sawdust, etc. to be refined into ethanol and the work by Tilman suggesting that restored prairies could be harvested for biofuels.

…Tilman and collaborators linked his earlier research on prairie perennial grasses to cellulosic ethanol. It makes the prairie ecosystem look like a near-miracle: a source of nonfood energy and wildlife habitat that sharply diminishes greenhouse gas emissions; avoids irrigation, as well as pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer pollutants; and provides resistance to invasives…If they were grown on the degraded soils set aside under federal conservation programs, they wouldn’t even displace food crops. And, the study concluded, they would produce a net energy gain per hectare 50 percent greater than corn grain ethanol from prime soils. “A first step,” Tilman says,”would be allowing farmers to mow their current Conservation Reserve Program grassland for the energy in its hay, and there’s 35 million or so acres of that land.” It could be seeded with prairie species that would be dominant within five years. During the first decade, they build up an immense carbon-sequestering root system. Root growth levels off, but the soil continues to sequester carbon for about a century. Because few or no resource and energy inputs are needed to prod growth, the study’s LCA balance sheets make prairie-grass ethanol look like a bargain compared with other waste-based biomass sources, such as cornstalks.

Tardigrades are a paradox. There are less than 1,000 species globally yet they can survive anything-temperature extremes, starvation, irradiation, dehydration, vacuums, and the pressures of the deep sea. So the obvious question is whether tardigrades can survive space.? The program is called TARDIS (Tardigrades In Space) and you Dr. Who fans will catch the reference. In the words of the TARDIS program…

Why should we send dry aquatic invertebrates into space, an environment that certainly is not normal for these animals?…One would be: to see if these animals, as the first ever, are able to cope with the extremely dry conditions of deep vacuum and the harmful solar and galactic radiation up there. In the past, several biologists have suggested that tardigrades may be one of the few animals that have a chance to come back alive after a trip in real space. Finally we will be able to find out if this is true….At a more mechanistic biological level, exposure of organisms to space conditions will reveal how living cells react to the potentially very stressful impact of space parameters. And organisms that can handle the damaging space parameters will be important sources of knowledge for how to generate the space ecosystems that will be necessary for the more permanent human establishments in space that is envisaged today.

If the title doesn’t drive the Google hits in then hopefully word of mouth will. Sheril has the low down on this iconographic video of our field, red hot barnacle sex. Keep in mind that barnacles as a percentage of body length may have the largest penis in nature.

SeaWiFS turns 10 this year. What is SeaWiFS? It is one of the most important advances of science in the last 20 years. The SeaWiFS is an instrument on a sattelite (Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor) that circles the planet 14 times every day. By measuring iridescence and color, among other variables, over both land and sea we can derive estimates of primary production (the accumulation of photosynthetic biomass) over both time and space. SeaWiFS has both refined and greatly added to our understanding of global carbon cycling. Of course, there are many other areas where advances are greatly tied to SEaWiFS. Enjoy the SEaWiFS derived map below!

Corsair generously sent along their 8GB Survivor Flash Drive midsummer for me to field test at the behesting of this post. Over the last few months I have done everything I can to beat this flash drive to hell. The flash drive comes in its own CNC-milled, anodized aircraft-grade aluminum case. In its case an EDPM o-ring makes the case resistant to 200m. The drive has a molded shock dampening collar that prevents vibration from impact being transmitted to the drive. Here is a list of all the things I have done to the drive and it still works.

• Ran over it with my 2 Ton Jeep Wrangler…no damage
• 2 Dives to 35′ with it in my BC pocket, total of 2 hours underwater…still works
• 15 minutes in a pint of Guinness…still works, Guinness has metallic taste
• 10 minutes in the right claw of a rock crab…no damage except to my own left digit
• 18 airplane flights with it in the outer, unprotected pocket of checked luggage…still works
• 1 hour chew toy for boxer puppy…slobbery but still works
• 1 dive to 40′ in 55 degree water in pocket of BC…still fine
• 20′ drop on to aft aluminum deck of research vessel…as you might of guessed still fine

This is the drive you need! I can’t really figure out how to destroy this drive anymore than I already have. The good news it stands up to my everyday life and it should yours too. The best part has to be the full 8GB of storage. More than enough to hold all of my data and room for some mp3’s and anything else that catches my fancy. Data transfer is by far faster than any of the other USB drives in my geek arsenal. The 4GB version retails for near $50 and the 8GB near $175.