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cmcclain | April 30, 2008
A deep-sea coral was collected at ~700m in the north-west Hawaiin islands. Back in lab, the lights were turned off and the scientists were excited to see how brightly the coral bioluminesced. Coral samples were collected by Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL) and the Pisces V submersible
cortex | April 30, 2008So there's an acute fertilizer shortage. The big problem is a lack of nitrogen which, although it accounts for most of the atmosphere (78.1 percent), is notoriously tough to "fix," since it's got those pesky triple bonds. One of the unsung heroes of modernity is the Haber process, which makes nitrogen-rich fertilizer by heating, under high heat and pressure, nitrogen and hydrogen.
The Haber process now produces 100 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer per year, mostly in the form of anhydrous ammonia, ammonium nitrate, and urea. 3-5% of world natural gas production is consumed in the Haber…
cortex | April 30, 2008A calm and cool summary of the value of arts education in public schools:
What are "the habits of mind" cultivated in arts classrooms, they ask in their book "Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education." As unsatisfied with wafty promises that arts learning inspires "creativity" as with pledges that it boosts scores, the Project Zero researchers videotaped several very different classrooms in two schools with intensive arts instruction. They watched teachers imparting techniques and introducing students to the world of the visual arts, and saw certain cognitive "dispositions…
grrlscientist | April 30, 2008tags: Bag of Bones, Dunya Mikhail, poetry, National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month, and I posted one poem per day every day this month for you to enjoy. You have sent me so many poems and suggestions that I plan to use all of them in the coming weeks; I will post one poem per week, on Wednesdays at noon, for as long as you send suggestions for me to share with my readers.
Today's poem, the last one to appear here during National Poetry Month, is one that I heard the poet read in person when I visited Kansas State University. The poet, a native Iraqi, fled from her home in…
petnoyer | April 30, 2008This is the third in a series of five referenced articles on the shared characteristics of deep and shallow water corals.
by Michael J. Risk
Image of the Devonian seafloor from "Evolution of Life"
The coelenterates, corals and their relatives, are very ancient, and in fact may be the oldest metazoans. Proterozoic burrows preserved in the Mackenzie Mountains of Northwest Canada were probably made by animals resembling cerianthid anemones, and are about one billion years old. Silurian gorgonians are almost identical to their modern counterparts. The group as a whole has therefore had a very…
kevin z | April 29, 2008Just a friendly reminder that Deep Sea News will play host to the Circus of the Spineless this month. Due to the excitement here at Coral Week, I will be posting the Circus on Saturday. Please get your submissions to me by Friday evening! You can leave a link in the comments here or email them to me at kzelnio at gmail dot com.
kevin z | April 29, 2008
Reef City is sung to Sin City by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, a favorite song (and artists) of mine. Deep and shallow reefs alike under a multifaceted threat, but we'll not let them go down without fists wailing!
Reef City
This old reef has seen some days
Many changes through the haze
And smoke like mists of gametes in the water
Polyps stretched out reaching
For a particle, just a piece and
Who knows what it just might grab
(Chorus)
Takes more than an earthquake to shake this ole coral
Seems like this whole ocean's insane
Over fishing, nutrient loading, harvesting and trawling
From…
cortex | April 29, 2008First, the Hotel St. George Press, a really cool literary publishing group in Brooklyn (where else?) was kind enough to ask me a few questions:
Heather McCalden: Would you mind relaying a bit about your experiences in the lab, the kitchen, and the writer's desk - how they may have fed each other, for instance? Have the commonalities (assuming they exist) provoked any of the ideas in Proust was a Neuroscientist?
Jonah Lehrer: A few years before I started working in a lab, back when I was working as a weekend prep cook in a restaurant for gas money, I had this epiphany about chefs: they…
edyong | April 29, 2008 A quick heads-up on some new carnivals. Go sustain your scientific hunger at:
Cognitive Daily, hosting the new Encephalon Go on. The power of Munger compels you.
The Conservation Report, with the new Carnival of the Green
Doc Gurley, with an almighty Grand Rounds smackdown.
petnoyer | April 29, 2008
One of the challenges of deep coral research is convincing people that deep corals form habitat for other animals, animals of particular concern, like fish or crabs, or endangered species like the Hawaiian Monk Seal. Precious coral beds with large colonies of Gerardia sp. 550m deep in the French Frigate Shoals support higher fish densities than adjacent areas, and monk seals forage in these coral beds (Parrish 2006- free paper alert!). Managers can rest a little easier knowing monk seals love corals, too.
In the video above, a marked monk seal dives down to a deep coral bed to strut his…
petnoyer | April 29, 2008
Bubblegum coral (Paragorgia arborea) never looked so... cuddly. It's amazing. Who would believe someone could knit a sea fan and do it so well? Ecology Action Center in Halifax brings a unique perspective to the deep coral movement. They go straight to the fishermen for the information that counts, rather than waiting for science to answer important questions about deep-coral distribution and collateral impacts to coral from destructive fishing gear. That, and they're knitting the benthos back together one species at a time.
While scientists have only recently begun to learn about cold-…
cortex | April 29, 2008The Times has an interesting review of two new books that discuss the oft cited link between mental illness and artistic creativity. It's all too easy to indulge in cliched overgeneralizations about the thin line separating madness and genius, but the reality is that true mental illness is rarely conducive to acts of creation. Virginia Woolf, for instance, couldn't write when she was experiencing one of her "episodes": the onset of depression was "like a death," she wrote. Nevertheless, as Woolf's journals make clear, her writing was still profoundly influenced by her mental illness. Here…
grrlscientist | April 29, 2008tags: Dreamers, Siegfried Sassoon, poetry, National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day every day this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me).
I found today's poem after a reader on Reddit, Jack, suggested that I read some of Siegfried Sassoon's works. I have never read anything by Sassoon before, so I'd like to thank Jack for his recommendation. Below the fold is a poem by Sassoon that I thought you might appreciate.
Dreamers
Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
Drawing no dividend…
cmcclain | April 29, 2008Cephalopodcast points to the Florida Center for Instructional Technology website that has several beautiful illustrations for education use. Preeetttttyyyy.
petnoyer | April 29, 2008This is the second in a series of five referenced articles about shared characteristics between deep and shallow water corals
Special guest post by Christina A. Kellogg
Just as humans have beneficial bacteria living on our skin and in our intestines, corals have symbiotic microbes in their mucus, tissues, and skeletons. Unfortunately, there are also disease-causing microbes that can infect corals. These coral-associated microbes include all three of the major domains of life: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya (fungi, and in shallow-water corals, algae) and also viruses (Rosenberg et al. 2007…
petnoyer | April 28, 2008
Figure reprinted from Cairns, 2007 in Bulletin of Marine Science
One of the central questions in marine biogeography asks "why are there more species of coral and fish in the Indo-Pacific Coral Triangle than anywhere else in the world?" By many accounts, this is the global epicenter of marine biodiversity. More than 1500 species of fish and 500 species of shallow hermatypic corals occur in the Coral Triangle compared to the other global epicenter of marine biodiversity, the Caribbean Sea, where you'll find 'only' 900 species of fish and 50 species of corals (Carpenter and Springer 2005,…
cortex | April 28, 2008You probably thought this post was going to be about how Meredith Grey (or perhaps McDreamy?) is a neuroscientist, or how Shonda Rhimes (the creator of Grey's Anatomy) anticipated some surprising discovery of modern neuroscience. Alas, I have no such insights. Marcel Proust may have been a neuroscientist, but Grey's Anatomy is still just an entertaining and delightfully dumb primetime soap opera. To be perfectly honest, I'm always slightly ashamed at myself after I squander 42 minutes of my life on the randy residents of Seattle Grace hospital.
The most recent episode revolved around a…
esiegel | April 28, 2008Old man Dave writes to me about his back problems:
The spine. I want to know about the spine. I know you are not that kind of PHD but still……. I’ve had back problems most of my adult life. It seems to me if we were “intelligently” designed that we might have a more efficient, and less troubling, method of uprightedness…. given the way the spine is constucted isn’t it possible that we were not “made” to walk upright??
Well, the spine goes back a long time, Dave, long before you were busting yours trying to lift things with your back instead of your legs. (You know better, Dave!) There are…