Food energy! Fossil colors! Marine sanctuaries! Tiny snails! Quantum computers! Dead seals! And two black holes, dancing in a sexy way! It’s your Tuesday Science Watch, where we watch science—more or less!
A couple having sex in the ocean off the Italian coast earlier this week reportedly became stuck together—"due to suction," according to the Local—and required a trip to the emergency room to be separated.
You may have heard that the sea levels are rising. You may have heard that over the next several decades, rising seas will threaten major coastal cities. You may have surmised that it's dumb, then, to build houses right by the water. Not Florida!
Earlier this month, the shipping company Maersk got itself on the cover of Businessweek, after investing billions of dollars in the biggest ships ever built in world history. Today, Maersk says: Hey, anybody wanna buy the world's biggest ship?
Scientists say they've found waves 800 feet high—breaking underneath the ocean. Sure, guys.
If you're not watching this live video stream from the remotely operated deep-sea vehicle Okeanos Explorer, complete with soft-voiced color commentary from giddy marine biologists, you're missing out.
With all the talk these days of a "global warming crisis" and "looming planetary disaster," it may sometimes be hard to know what to think. Relax: our global warming crisis and looming planetary disaster are going exactly as scheduled.
As an experiment, Noah Oppenheim, a marine biology graduate student at the University of Maine, attached a waterproof, infrared camera to the head of a young lobster. As evening set in, he saw sights that cannot be unseen (but can be seen by you in the video below). Lobsters eating lobsters.
Director and science nerd James Cameron is making an attempt to travel to the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean. The last time someone tried this was in 1960, when Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard and Navy Lt. Don Walsh spent a weak 20 minutes at the bottom. Cameron plans on filming and exploring for…
Swimmer Diana Nyad abandoned her 103-mile Cuba-to-Florida swim after 67 miles thanks to stings from the Portuguese Man o' War, which is, Wikipedia writes, terrifyingly, "not actually a single creature, but a colonial organism made up of many minute individuals."
Mercury planet! Rat memories! Gray hair! Cosmic blast! Killer lipids! Mind engagement! Cuban seas! Model blimps! And the real reason that women be squeakin! It's your Friday Science Watch, where we watch science—salaciously!
It is rare that our imagination syncs up with science, so we are particularly psyched to learn of new research suggesting that sperm whales, when they click at each other, "announce themselves with discrete personal identifier[s]." Yes! That's right: Sperm whales have names.
A group of marine scientists just got back from a science-type voyage with a bunch of totally bizarre, creepily beautiful new species. Wanna see 'em?
Scientists now think that, instead of being a huge, whale-hunting badass, the 45-foot-long collosal squid — a mass of giant eyes and be-toothed arms — is probably just a slow, ambush and scavenge predator. [BBC]
