Science Saturday: Underwater Edition

Photo by Bob Carney/LSU

Where else in Pottstown do you get news from

the underwater world of the giant isopod? 

Only at The Digital Notebook.

If you've been buggin' for news of the world of science, today's the day to scratch that itch!

It's the day news of the unexplained world around gets explained -- to a point anyway.

That's right, it's...

SCIENCE SATURDAY!

As regular readers know, items of scientific interest occasionally catch my eye and then I gather them gently together and weave them into a seamless science narrative....

Or, alternatively, I stash a bunch of odds and ends I think are cool and throw them up here whenever I feel like it of when I have nothing else to write about.

Either way, YOU are the beneficiary dear reader. Without further ado, let's begin:

Underwater Hunger Games

Sure, clubbed baby harp seals, abused puppies and starved horses garner all kinds of emotional investment from the general public.

But who weeps for the giant underwater isopod?

The answer is Takaya Moritaki.

He works at the Tokyo Aquarium, home to particular giant isopod -- an underwater relative to the ubiquitous cement bugs you see whenever you turn over a good-sized rock in summer -- which hasn't eaten since President Obama was elected -- the first time.

Here's some video of Moritaki trying to get the isopod, which I have named Sheldon, to eat a dead mackerel, which was the last thing he is known to have eaten. 

 Japanese speakers may find it a bit more informative than I did.

Luckily, we have National Public Radio to translate for us, which is where I first heard of Sheldon's plight.

Sheldon, who the Japanese rather unimaginatively call "No. 1," has seven pairs of legs, four sets of jaws and can grow more than two feet in length.

According to NPR:

As scavengers, the animals are built to survive long periods between meals. 

"Giant isopods are always in a state of semihibernation because they don't know when they can eat, so they limit their energy on breathing and other activities," marine ecologist Taeko Kimura tells Japan Times.

"For that purpose they sometimes keep a large amount of fat in their livers, so maybe No. 1 still has a source of energy in its body, and that's why it still has no appetite."

But aquarium staff are concerned, especially as the tank No. 1 is in previously housed a healthy, and hungry, giant isopod. The artificial seawater it contains is "highly unlikely to generate organic substances" to sustain the animal, Japan Times notes.

Let's just chalk this one up to being one of the many mysteries of the sea and move on shall we?

Next on our tour of weird stuff under the ocean is brought to us courtesy of the venerable New York Times, which posted this article about...

Underwater Antarctic Bacteria!

For those of you who think bacteria is just something to spray with Lysol, shame on you.

Map cribbed shamelessly

from The New York Times

True, some bacteria can make us ill, but in many ways it is the foundation on which the entire food chain is built. So, a little respect if you please.

What has been discovered are "a vast ecosystem of microscopic life in underground lakes in Antarctica."

Not only is this cool in terms of showing how tenacious, stubborn and innovative life can be, but also because it "might advance knowledge of how life could survive on other planets or moons."

Writing for the Times, article author James Gorman also notes:

There is no sunlight, so the bacteria must depend on organic material that has drifted into the lake from other sources — for instance, decaying microbes from melting glaciers — or on minerals in the rock of the Antarctic continent.

Chris McKay, a NASA senior scientist, said in an e-mail that such analysis could determine if the bacteria in Lake Whillans have implications for the possible discovery of extraterrestrial life.

"If it was using a local energy source, it would be interesting,” he said. “If it’s just consuming organics carried in from elsewhere, it is of much less interest.” The reason, he said, is that elsewhere in the solar system where there is good evidence of liquid water under thick ice sheets, life would have to depend on minerals alone.

Brightly colored tube worms cling to life around underwater"

volcanic vents.

One eco-system on earth that is living off an energy source other than the sun are those marked by tube worms and other creates that live off the heat and chemical energy from underwater volcanic vents on the ocean floor.

Crabs, shrimp and, of course, bacteria have all been found around those vents.

What makes the discover in Antarctica so interesting is it raises the possibility that life could subsist in one of the harshest environments on earth with no apparent energy source.

“Our stateside DNA sequence work will tell us who they are,” John C. Priscu of Montana State University, a leader of the scientific expedition, said of the microbes, “and, together with other experiments, tell us how they make a living.”

But he said he was confident that the researchers had achieved the first glimpse of an ecosystem that had been completely unknown. “It’s the world’s largest wetland,” Dr. Priscu said.

And speaking of things hidden under the ocean, would you believe there's a lost continent there?

The Sands of Mauritia

No, it is not Atlantis... which would be so awesome...

The Super-continent Rodinia:
Mauritia is shoehorned between India and Madagascar.

No, scientists have called it Mauritia and its existence goes waaaaaayyyyyyyy back (more than 85 million years) to the time of a super-continent called Rodinia. 

(Who comes up with these names anyway, comic book writers?)

Mauritia was a "micro-continent" sandwiched between the land masses that today make up Madagascar and India, which was in turn part of a supercontinent known as Rodinia that existed between 2 billion and 85 million years ago.

That's before the better known Pangea, when all the continents got together for a mega party lasting many millions of years.

According to NPR: 

Mauritia was a sliver of land that broke apart and disappeared under the sea as the Rodinia ripped itself apart as part of the process of plate tectonics, scientists believe.

The BBC quotes the study's lead author, Trond Torsvik, as saying the sand his team examined dates to a 9-million-year-old eruption near the modern-day islands of Marion and Reunion that spewed much older material.

"We found zircons that we extracted from the beach sands, and these are something you typically find in a continental crust. They are very old in age," said Torsvik of the University of Oslo in Norway.

Torsvik believes pieces of Mauritia have been interred under 6 miles of surface and spread over a swath of the Indian Ocean, according to the BBC. 

Scientists looked at lava sands from beaches on Mauritius to determine when and where the material might have originated.

Their conclusion? The lava sands, containing particles called zircon xenocrysts, came from "Mauritia," which were once north of Madagascar. 

The Seychelles Islands, sitting in the middle of the Indian Ocean, may be the last part of Mauritia to be above the waves.

..........

What other blog, I ask you dear readers, brings you into contact with "zircon xenocrysts," giant hunger strike isopods named Sheldon, underwater bacteria, and guys with names like Trond Torsvik?

That's Science Saturday for you.

The Compromise Curse

Tonight is the final presidential debate and is supposed to focus, as I understand it, on foreign policy.

That means, without fail, we will be hearing a lot about "strength." I will also wager that the word we won't hear is "compromise," unless it is used in a derogatory manner.

Since the first days of the Republic, American foreign policy has focused on, appropriate, what is best for America.

So while some thought that we had a moral obligation and political rationale for joining the force of the French Revolution -- after all, without France we would not be a country today -- George Washington wisely kept us out of it.

Not because it was necessarily the "right" thing to do, but because, at that early stage of our development, it was the "right thing for the United States."

At another time, in other circumstances, the opposite choice may have been the right one.

The point, of course, is that in foreign policy, as with many things, there are few absolutes. The variables continue to shift, as do priorities, circumstances, personalities of the powerful and the many, many other things over which we have no control.

In other words, its a lot like everything else in life.

Now, on a good Sunday, if I play my cards right, I can let the family sleep late and, if I take long enough making them a pancake breakfast, I can be in the kitchen when "On the Media" airs on NPR.

It's a bit self-indulgent, but also serves as a reality check and staves off any megalomaniacal impulses sometimes experienced by those of us in the media. Essentially, it's an hour devoted to all the things we do wrong.

Anyway, yesterday's program had an interesting segment on the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary.

The program, which was about how the media is the first draft of history and, in this case, got it wrong about how the crisis was resolved as a result of Kennedy's resolute refusal to negotiate with Kruschev and that the matter was essentially an international staring contest.

As it turns out, that first draft is entirely wrong and history is taking its own sweet time about correcting it.

Although almost his entire cabinet favored no compromise, the records now show, Kennedy was inclined to accept an offer by Kruschev to reverse the ship carrying the missiles to Cuba in exchange for the removal of nuclear missiles recently placed in Turkey, within striking range of what was then the Soviet Union.

Kennedy's only trick was to agree to do so, but six months later when it would seem to have happened all by itself.

Thus did compromise save us from a nuclear war in which victory would have been little distinguished from defeat.

The moral of the "Media Matters" piece was evidently that this "myth" of the Cuban Missile Crisis had made it even harder for American politicians to do what was already hard to begin with -- compromise.

Try and imagine, one of the speakers said, a candidate in today's election saying it would be OK to compromise with Iran and let them enrich uranium to a smaller extent under extreme oversight than the current situation, in which sanctions are crippling Iran's economy to a dangerous extent, we are being blamed and the Iranians are enriching as much uranium as they can to whatever extent they can.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

This might seem to make sense as something to consider, I don't pretend to know the answer, which is why I decided a long time ago not to run for president -- that and those pesky closet skeletons.

Some might argue that the whole point of the sanctions is not to wreck Iran's economy, but to give Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a stark choice, face ruination for your nation or come to the negotiating table.

But can you imagine either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney tonight staring into the television camera and saying solemnly that they are ready to negotiate with Iran?

Compromise, or in this case, "appeasement" of Hitler
only let 

him take at the negotiating table what he
otherwise would have 

had to take by force.

I think the best we could hope for is something like "all options are on the table."

None of which is to say that compromise is the magic bullet to solving world problems or diplomatic impasses.

It won't take an opponent of compromise long to take a few steps further back in history to point to the appeasement of Hitler as the ultimate failure of compromise. And they would be right.

Chamberlin

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin's infamous "peace with honor" policy turned out to be neither and pretty disastrous for a few million people.

So which is it?

Compromise or inflexible strength?

Yes.

The answer I will be looking for tonight is the person who I believe will not rule out any option that both keeps America safe, but also promotes peace in the world.

Neither of them will likely say that, because that will not win them votes.

As the Tea Party movement has shown us, "compromise" is a dirty word these days in American politics. Anyone who does is seen as having "given in" or "caved" to the inflexible demands of the other side.

We all have our own opinions about which side is more inflexible in Washington these days and I won't dip into that very deep well here. The point I'm trying to make is look what it's gotten us.

We all hate (or at least say we hate) the gridlock which now gives Congress a popularity rating somewhere below the Community Party table at an American Legion convention.

But in truth, they are only doing what we said we wanted when we elected them, to stand for (fill in the blank) "without compromise."

What did we think was going to happen? Does anyone in Washington ever capitulate completely?

Democracy is, ultimately, all about making deals. It is how we decided to break away from England, how we drafted a Constitution and how we have done hundreds of other things that, in the dispassionate view of history turned out to be pretty good things.

Were they flawed? Of course. We're human beings. Everything we do is flawed.

We drafted a Constitution that recognized slavery. We made compromises in westward expansion that failed to resolve that cancer and ultimately it nearly destroyed the country.

But many of those compromises moved us forward, even if it was two steps forward, one step back.

They key, it seems to me, is to know when to compromise and when to stand your ground.

As someone who has helped to negotiate a fair number of union contracts in my time, I can tell you there is little use in sitting down at the table with a side that has no intention of compromising on anything.

Why even bother negotiating otherwise?

So I tend to doubt the supposed subject of tonight's debate will matter much to most Americans.

Our awareness of the rest of the world tends to be fairly small until the complex forces at work break the bubble and planes fly into skyscrapers.

It's a complex world out there.

Rather, tonight's debate will be about zingers, and who scores the most points. And the electronic media (and most of print too) will cover it from the horse race perspective that makes the coverage exciting but not insightful.

I just hope whoever wins the horse race is smart enough to know when compromise serves the best interests of the country -- even if most of us are too stubborn to admit it -- and when it doesn't.

Because after all, in world affairs, as in life, nothing is ever absolute.

Science is Cool (Or Hot as the Case May Be)

A British newspaper called this "massive filament" eruption on the Sun's surface Aug. 31 "mind-bogglingly gorgeous." We are forced to agree.

I make no attempt to hide the fact that I'm a sucker for science.

I'm not smart enough to be a scientist myself (math-impaired) and I was smart enough to break my mother's heart and abandon my quest to be a marine biologist early in life.

But I am constantly in awe of the things we are now discovering, especially in space. (What else would you expect from a kid who saw the first Star Wars in a theater and was raised on black and white Star Trek re-runs on New York's channel 11, WPIX?)

This week saw a bumper crop of cool science stuff, so because this is my blog, I'm going to share it with you.

1) First up was this post on NPR Wednesday that reported on a video from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. It shows a "massive filament" eruption on the sun that occurred last Friday. (If the embed code works, the video should appear below. If not, you can see it by following the link. You'll dig the super-cool soundtrack too)



My friend Matthew jokes regularly that any problems we may be complaining about at any particular moment pales when compared to the fact that some day, the sun will expand and swallow our planet whole.

So he will probably be disturbed to know "the eruption apparently stretched out a half million miles into space," according to the British newspaper, The Register. Fortunately, NPR wrote, the sun is about 93 million miles from us. And, says NASA, the eruption "did not travel directly toward Earth," though it did give a "glancing blow" to the planet's "magnetic environment" on Monday.

Meet Enceladus, an icy, water-vapor-spewing moon that may be partially responsible for Saturn's rings.

2) Second is an equally cool discovery that some of Saturn's rings may be coming from an icy moon called Enceladus that shoots water vapor into space, probably as the result of gravitational forces.

This "water hose into the sky" was highlighted in this report, also on the NPR site, which reports: "Nobody knew these fountains were there until the Cassini spacecraft flew near enough to Enceladus to find them."

I love their description of the process:

"It turns out this moon, called Enceladus, is a snowball containing what may be a sea of liquid water, warmed by the squishes and stretches of Saturn and other moons that pass nearby (plus it may have a hot, rocky core.) All that gravity pushing and pulling on this little ball squeezes the liquid inside so it shoots up through some fissures at the top."

Enceladus — it's the dark spot inside the bright flare — getting
real close to the E ring. Sascha Kempf of the Max Planck
Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg,
says this moon is "feeding" water crystals into Saturn's ring.

"Some of that water vapor turns into ice and the crystals fall like snow back onto the moon at a rate of 0.02 inches a year; but some ice is thrown so high, it joins a ring around Saturn, one of the outer rings, labeled 'E.'"

The images above came from Cassini, which sent it back as a batch of digital information — lots of ones and zeroes — which can be turned into black and white images. Working from a series of picture fragments that Cassini transmits in small batches, artist Michael Benson put them together into a single shot, then chose the hues and levels of light based on what is called "true color," what a person would see if he happened on the scene.

Benson has a book called "Planetfall" coming out filled with images like this.

It is discoveries like this that, I would hope, help to justify the existence and continued support of NASA and its work.

Or, as comedian Andy Borowitz recently tweeted (and I paraphrase): "The next time someone asks 'where did spending billions of dollars on NASA ever get us?' the proper answer is: 'Mars.'"

3) Third and squarely back here on Earth, we bring you the tale of Tucker, a truly salty dog.

Photo by the New York Times
Tucker's nose is so sensitive, he can track orca poop in the water.

According to this New York Times article published Saturday, Tucker is "the world’s only working dog, marine biologists say, able to find and track the scent of orca scat, or feces, in open ocean water — up to a mile away, in the smallest of specks."

Tucker does his work off the coast of San Juan Island, off the west coast of Washington.

It is not easy. "Scat can sink or disperse in 30 minutes or less. But it is crucial in monitoring the health of the whales here, an endangered group that is probably among the most studied animal populations in the world."

I liked this bit:

"One thing to get out of the way quickly: orca scat really does not smell that bad. Perhaps because the animals eat mostly Chinook salmon — the tastiest kind, many human seafood lovers agree — the scent is more fish than foul."

All of which only makes Tucker's achievement more remarkable. Now consider that unlike most dogs, he cannot walk to where the scent leads him, he has to somehow signal what he wants to his boat's pilot.

Like a Delphic oracle whose every nuanced expression must be interpreted by acolytes — Tucker might lean to one side of the boat, then another, then suddenly sink back onto his green mat with his head between his paws, the scent lost — his nose for scat leads on, and all must follow.

New York Times Photo

I just threw this photo up here because I like it.

“The slightest twitch of his ear is important,” said Elizabeth Seely, a trainer who has worked with Tucker for four years at a nonprofit group called the Conservation Canines, which specializes in dog-assisted research on behalf of endangered species. She stood at his side on a recent scat-search session, signaling to Ms. Giles behind the wheel with tiny finger motions — a bit to the right, a bit more to the left, circle back — that Tucker was suggesting by his posture and level of attention.

Million-mile solar flares, icy space snowballs drizzling ice crystals into Saturn's rings, a dog that can smell whale poop; it boggles the mind.

Truly, this universe is an amazing place.

And we are only understanding it one tiny bit at a time.

What fun.