Coolest new tourist sites to admire and explore - Travel - Destination Travel - msnbc.com

Coolest new tourist sites to admire and explore - Travel - Destination Travel - msnbc.com

By Adam H. Graham

updated 5/13/2011 9:33:59 AM ET

As you snorkel past coral reefs and angelfish in the warm, shallow waters of the Caribbean Sea, you suddenly come across an eerily beautiful tableau: hundreds of life-size human sculptures. No, this isn’t loot from some sunken pirate ship. It’s the world’s largest underwater museum.

This ingenious twist on Cancún’s popular dive tourism shows that tourism sights get bolder and more innovative each year, often thanks to the involvement of big-name architects, artists and designers. As destinations vie to create their own “Bilbao Effect,” tourists are getting savvier about what to see and what to skip. It takes more than tall buildings and new museums to titillate today’s tourist.
Take 11 11 Lincoln Road, for example. The word “garage” doesn’t begin to do it justice. Dreamt up by Swiss "starchitects" Herzog & de Meuron, it’s better described as a modernist, open-air “parking sculpture.” The eye-catching mixed-use venue has become Miami’s it-spot for dinner parties and events while its hip shops, restaurants and public art lure daytime crowds. 

Another traditional, everyday space — the plaza — has been radically made over in Seville. Architect Jürgen Mayer’s trippy, fantastical design for the Plaza de la Encarnacíon looks like something out of Alice in Wonderland. The undulating blonde timber structures have a honeycomb roof that shelters a marketplace, bars, and archaeological exhibits. It gives both locals and tourists a new reason to explore Seville’s medieval center and corresponds to a greater design awareness.
“More and more nondesigners are scoping out architectural destinations,” says Ben Prosky, assistant dean of communications at Harvard Graduate School of Design and co-founder of Architizer.com, a Facebook of sorts for architects. “We see this played out every day on Architizer — architects post their buildings on their profiles, and visitors to the website scan these profiles to look for unusual buildings or installations that they might not otherwise find in a guidebook.”

WET ’N’ WILD - The Pueblo Chieftain: Local

WET ’N’ WILD - The Pueblo Chieftain: Local

Posted: Sunday, January 9, 2011 12:00 am

By LYNDA LA ROCCA | SPECIAL TO THE CHIEFTAIN | 1 comment

  DENVER — It looks like a miniature version of the great white shark that wreaked deadly havoc in the classic movie "Jaws."
  But the sand tiger shark prowling the depths of the Downtown Aquarium’s Shipwreck exhibit is actually fairly harmless, as sharks go.
  Although it has an undeserved reputation as a man-eater due to its large size (it can reach lengths of 11 feet) and gaping mouth filled with jagged, razor-sharp teeth perpetually bared in the underwater equivalent of a snarl, the sand tiger is not particularly aggressive.
  And its anthropomorphic habit of belching makes it seem even more innocuous. The sand tiger surfaces to gulp air, which it holds in its stomach and releases to adjust and maintain buoyancy, enabling it to hover motionless beneath the waves.
  The sand tiger shark is one of some 500 marine species that swim, splash, dive and dart through the Downtown Aquarium’s more than 1 million gallons of underwater exhibits.
  Originally known as Ocean Journey, the Downtown Aquarium was purchased in 2003 by Landry’s Restaurants Inc., which renovated and reopened it two years later as an educational and family-entertainment complex that includes a full-service restaurant, the Nautilus Ballroom and the upscale, adults-only Dive Lounge bar.
  One of only four Colorado facilities (the Pueblo Zoo is another) to meet the rigorous accreditation standards of the international Association of Zoos & Aquariums, the Downtown Aquarium features 10 freshwater and saltwater “ecosystem” exhibit areas, ranging from river headwaters, tidal basins and lagoons to coral reefs and ocean floors. Each habitat displays sea creatures from around the world; several also house landlubbers like desert-dwelling reptiles, jungle amphibians, tropical birds, shorebirds and mammals such as the endangered Sumatran tiger.
 To see these critters, visitors meander through lush, misty rainforests complete with tangled undergrowth, towering trees and exotic, flowering plants; high-mountain wilderness areas where waterfalls cascade over rocky outcrops; wraparound, tunnel-style aquariums that give the sense of literally being underwater; and a fascinating desert landscape where the “weather” abruptly changes from sunny to stormy and a flash flood thunders down a narrow sandstone canyon. Arrows on signs labeled “wet zone” and “dry zone” indicate where to stand to avoid being splashed by this rushing torrent.
  Gazing at the white underbellies of two southern stingrays swimming overhead in the Under the Sea exhibit, it’s hard to remember that I’m actually inside a landlocked, 107,000-square-foot, steel-and-glass building located a mile above sea level and 1,000 miles from the nearest ocean.
  As I watch, a blue-skinned moray eel — its skin only appears green because of the thick yellow slime that naturally covers it — pokes its nightmarish head out of a rock crevice. Suddenly, it slithers toward a large Pacific green turtle, also known as a black sea turtle, that is resting placidly on the gravelly bottom of this 200,000-gallon tank.
  “Hey, you turtle! Boo!” a toddler calls as the creature waves its front flippers and slowly rises past a bottom-dwelling nurse shark, then swims a few lazy circles with a buddy before the pair approach two human divers delivering a meal to these coral-reef residents. Soon the divers are surrounded by a swarm of yellowtail snapper, along with several stingrays, the turtles, a dark-spotted giant grouper and a hermaphroditic Mexican hogfish.
  The hogfish begin life as females, becoming functional males as they mature. This particular old boy has also become rather pushy, says an aquarium volunteer, one of several stationed at various exhibits.
  “He snaps at the divers and really likes to bite at shiny objects like jewelry,” the volunteer explains.   I’d be snappish, too, if I’d transformed into a member of the opposite sex, especially one with a hog-like snout, protruding lips and a fleshy lump on its head.
 So do the aquarium’s sea creatures ever take a piece out of each other?
  “Since they’re very well-fed, that doesn’t happen often. But when they do eat each other, it’s usually in front of a crowd,” the volunteer jokes.
  (As if to prove this point, my husband Steve and I are having a drink later at the Dive Lounge when we, along with four women sitting near a 150,000-gallon reef tank spanning the wall of the adjoining restaurant, are startled by a small shark that devours a fish and darts off before we can even determine its species.)
  Unlike that shark, the winsome river otters frolicking and back-flipping in the waters of the North American Wilderness exhibit don’t look like predators. But these carnivores will eat whatever they can get their claws on, from fish and frogs to turtles and rodents.
  And in the wild, much of this exhibit’s marine life would make a veritable otter smorgasbord. There are tanks of sturgeon, sunfish, crappie, gar and walleye, the latter named for its silvery eyes that resemble those of a blinded or “walleyed” animal. Also represented are endangered, endemic Colorado River Basin fish like the humpback chub, the Colorado pikeminnow (North America’s largest minnow, formerly called the Colorado squawfish) and Colorado’s official state fish, the greenback cutthroat trout.
  The only trout species native to the Colorado River Basin, these brilliantly colored, scarlet-, green- and gold-scaled fish have been decimated by introduced species like the brown and rainbow trout, also displayed here.
  Wandering through the different exhibits, I’m struck by the neon hues of red coral, pink sea anemones, blue starfish, purple sea urchins and orange sea horses. And I’m fascinated by the imaginative names of some of the marine creatures. The bright pink Popeye catalufa has huge, bulging, pink-and-black, “pop” eyes, while the venomous lionfish really does resemble a stylized lion when its fins are fully extended. And you’ve got to love descriptive monikers like unicorn tang, Napoleon wrasse, sergeant major, graybar grunt, and my personal favorite, spotted sweetlips.
  Standing atop a see-through “porthole” and looking down at predatory sharks, wrasse, grouper and barracuda swimming in the eerie, diffused light of the “Shipwreck” exhibit, my attention is captured by a 12-foot-long sawfish lying motionless at the bottom of this 400,000-gallon tank. A relative of both sharks and rays, sawfish are immediately recognizable by their rostrum, a long, wicked-looking snout studded with teeth-like denticle scales on each side. The rostrum functions as a rake to uncover prey buried beneath seafloor sediment, a saw to hack prey into edible pieces, and a defensive weapon.
  An even more unusual perspective on marine life awaits in the replicated fishing village of the At the Wharf exhibit. Here, instead of looking down, visitors can crawl beneath wharf pilings and look up at tidal-habitat residents through oversized, clear-plastic “bubbles.”
  This is where I have a close encounter with a 4-foot-long, brown-, beige- and gold-spotted lingcod that has draped itself over a bubble.
  Shooting oblique glances my way, the lingcod seems annoyed by my sudden appearance — although it’s difficult to be certain, given that I’m trying to assess the facial expression of a big-headed bottom-feeder whose enormous mouth is frozen in a permanent frown.

Diver’s Delight: Cancun’s Underwater Museum Opens

Diver’s Delight: Cancun’s Underwater Museum Opens

Travel and Real Estate

Photo credit: Jason deCaires Taylor

December 6, 2010 - The November 26 opening of The Cancun Underwater Museum adds a unique eco-art experience to the diving and snorkeling in Cancun. The underwater installation of renowned artist Jason deCaires Taylor’s magnificent exhibition, “The Silent Evolution,” made of 400 submerged life-size sculptures, completes the world’s largest underwater museum.

Located in The National Park of Isla Mujeres Punta Cancun and Punta Nizuc, which attracts well over half a million tourists a year, the museum’s main gallery comprises Jason deCaires Taylor’s sculptures, which are based on real people and anchored in depths of over ten meters.

The collection was created and installed over the course of 18 months, with 120 tons of cement, 400 kilograms of silicone, 120 sub-aquatic work hours and more. Although best experienced underwater, the sculptures have been arranged so that when viewed from above, they create the shape of a human eye.

Lovers of marine life will appreciate the eco-friendly aspect of the project. The sculptures were placed near the natural reefs and close to marine life habitats in order to create a natural ecosystem that helps maintain corals and reefs in the best conditions. And indeed, the sculptures received an exceptionally warm welcome: Days after most of the pieces were installed, hundreds of Gray Angel Fish, rarely spotted in the Manchones area, were to be seen swimming in and around the exhibition.

In collaboration with the National Marine Park and Artificial Reefs, a US-based company, the sculptures are specifically designed to attract coral and positioned to encourage the growth of different coral species. Visitors can look forward to enjoying not only the original, beautiful sculptures but also the marine life they will host.

Visit www.underwatersculpture.com

Scientist Keeps an Eye on Coral From 60 Feet Down - WSJ.com

Scientist Keeps an Eye on Coral From 60 Feet Down - WSJ.com

By GAUTAM NAIK

NOAA

At the federal government's undersea research lab in Florida a scientist in scuba gear swims to check on experiments arrayed on a coal reef.

AQUARIUS REEF BASE, Fla.—Mark Hay checked his scuba gear one last time, then stepped off a boat and dived toward the seafloor.

One of the most unusual labs in the world sits on the sea floor, 60 feet beneath the surface. WSJ's Gautam Naik reports from Aquarius, where NASA astronauts train and where scientists are studying the impact of diversity on the world's oceans.

His destination was Aquarius, the only manned underwater lab in operation in the world. The metal structure—about the size of a school bus—is anchored 60 feet beneath the surface near a flourishing coral reef a few miles off Key Largo.
Dr. Hay has been on a quest to find out if there is any tangible benefit to preserving a large number of species from extinction, and he has done key aspects of his research during stays here at Aquarius.
Marine researchers like Dr. Hay are drawn to Aquarius because they can conduct experiments on the deep reef for nine hours each day or night without fear of getting the bends—a potentially dangerous buildup of nitrogen in the blood that forces divers to limit the length of a dive.
Plus, the views aren't bad. On a recent visit, yellow damselfish peered through a porthole and a mean-mouthed barracuda lurked nearby. "You're in this reverse aquarium—an air bubble with windows," said Saul Rosser, operations director of Aquarius.

Under the Sea

At Aquarius Reef Base, researchers can conduct experiments underwater for hours without fear of getting the bends.

View Slideshow

Mark Hay

Divers prepared to enter the manned research lab located 60 feet beneath the sea surface off the coast of Florida.

But the scuba-dive commute isn't the only reason it can be a tricky place to work. Scientists—or "aquanauts"—stay for 10 days at a time, living, eating and sleeping in the confined habitat. The high-pressure atmosphere in Aquarius means soda cans brought down barely fizz when opened. But food cans get squeezed and distorted. A person's voice also tends to have a different timbre. Whistling is hard.
At the end of each mission, the interior pressure is slowly reduced until it becomes the same as that on the surface. Aquanauts can then safely return to the surface without fear of the bends.
The lab has six bunks and a shower, and the food is of the astronaut variety. The "outhouse" toilet attached to the lab isn't fun. For starters, you have to swim to it, even if in the dark. A person must stand in the gazebo-like structure, breathing from an air pocket in the upper section of the structure. Waste disappears into the sea.
There are phones, computers and a wireless link to shore. During a mission, a land-based "watch desk" constantly monitors the habitat's vital signs—including pressure and oxygen levels—while also keeping an eye on the aquanauts via video cameras.
Aquarius is owned by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and is funded largely by a roughly $2 million annual grant from the U.S. government. The habitat is run by the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and has been used for 119 missions since 1992.
The reef base draws astronauts, too. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has used Aquarius for 14 training missions to acclimate astronauts to isolated, extreme environments and conduct outside drills that mimic spacewalks.
Dr. Hay's focus is biodiversity, an issue that has become urgen. A recent study in the journal Science found that a fifth of all vertebrates are threatened with extinction. A July paper in Nature found that warmer oceans were altering marine diversity patterns. Sea plants are in decline.
"You hear about species loss all the time," said Dr. Hay, a biologist at Georgia Institute of Technology, as he sat at the small dining table at Aquarius during his recent visit. "The question is, if you've got a thousand species and you lose one, does it make any difference?"
Dr. Hay's underwater research may provide only a snapshot of a complex global problem, but it offers vivid evidence of why biodiversity matters. On a reef, for example, "it's not enough to have herbivores but the right mix of herbivores," said Dr. Hay. "If you remove one particular fish, things can quickly go to hell."
Dr. Hay's mission is to observe the fish. In a previous Aquarius experiment, his team built large undersea cages on sections of the reef, and stocked them with a varying mix of herbivores, including parrot fish and surgeon fish.
Herbivorous fish that eat algae are important to coral reefs because if algae proliferate, the corals die and the entire reef ecosystem is damaged. When Dr. Hay placed two surgeon fish in a cage, for example, 22% of corals died. But cages with one parrot fish and one surgeon fish—a greater diversity—showed no coral death and a 22% increase in coral growth over 10 months.
Dr. Hay's results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008. He believes that because different species have very different feeding habits on the reef, it helps to maintain the ecological balance and give corals a greater chance to grow. Humans are now upsetting that balance, he says.
Such research "is starting to tell us that we do need a mix of species or we run into problems," says Paul Snelgrove, a professor in the Ocean Sciences Centre at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. "What we don't know is if there are key species [vital to an ecology] or biodiversity itself—there hasn't been enough work to tease apart those issues."
In November, Dr. Hay was set to embark on another Aquarius mission, to install new fish in a new set of 32 cages and study a different mix of herbivores over 10 months. But the mission got canceled over a safety issue. (The Aquarius operating team has become more skittish about safety since a diver died during a mission in 2009.)
So Dr. Hay's team reverted to doing things the old way—lowering cages by boat and coming up after each dive. Over the next 10 months, the scientists plan to dive to the cages once every six weeks to observe the changing health of the coral under the influence of a varying mix of fish species.
Such findings about biodiversity can help with reef protection. Says Dr. Hay: "By manipulating a few key fish species, we may be able to help reefs recover."

Into the abyss: The diving suit that turns men into fish - Science, News - The Independent

Into the abyss: The diving suit that turns men into fish - Science, News - The Independent

By Jerome Taylor

Saturday, 20 November 2010

Humans have proven themselves remarkably adept at learning to do what other animals can do naturally. We have taught ourselves to fly like birds, climb like monkeys and burrow like moles. But the one animal that has always proven beyond our reach is the fish.

The invention of scuba diving has allowed us to breathe underwater but only at very shallow depths.

Thanks to our inability to conquer the bends, diving below 70m still remains astonishingly dangerous to anyone but a handful of experts. Ultra-deep diving is so lethal that more people have walked on the moon than descended below 240m using scuba gear.

Now an inventor in the United States believes he has solved the riddle of how to get humans down to serious depths – by getting us to breathe liquid like fish.

 

Arnold Lande, a retired American heart and lung surgeon, has patented a scuba suit that would allow a human to breathe “liquid air”, a special solution that has been highly enriched with oxygen molecules.

The idea immediately conjures up the terrifying spectre of drowning but our lungs are more than capable of taking oxygen from a solution.

“The first trick you would have to learn is overcoming the gag reflex,” explains Lande, a 79-year-old inventor from St Louis, Missouri. “But once that oxygenated liquid is inside your lungs it would feel just like breathing air.”

Lande envisages a scuba suit that would allow divers to inhale highly-oxygenated perfluorocarbons (PFCs) – a type of liquid that can dissolve enormous quantities of gas. The liquid would be contained in an enclosed helmet that would replace all the air in the lungs, nose and ear cavities.

The CO2 that would normally exit our body when we breathe out would be “scrubbed” from our blood by attaching a mechanical gill to the femoral vein in the leg.

By using oxygen suspended in liquid, divers would no longer have to worry about decompression sickness - the often fatal condition known as “the bends” which occurs when nitrogen dissolved in the blood under the immense pressures of deep water bubbles out as we rise. It could potentially allow them to descend to far greater depths than is currently possible.

Liquid ventilation might sound like science fiction – it played a major role in James Cameron’s 1989 sci-fi film The Abyss – but it is already used by a handful of cutting-edge American hospitals for highly premature babies.

Children born before 28 weeks have huge difficulties breathing, often because their lungs are not developed enough to comfortably adjust from the liquid environment of the womb to inhaling gaseous air. Immature alveoli, the final branchings inside the lung that feed oxygen into the blood, lack vital surfactants which stop the tiny cavities sticking together when we breathe out.

In response doctors have begun experimenting with highly-oxygenated PFCs with remarkable success.

Professor Thomas Shaffer, a paediatrics specialist from Delaware, has experimented with liquid breathing since the late 1970s. He spent much of his early career testing various animals in oxygenated PFCs.

Place a mouse in oxygenated liquid and instinct immediately kicks in as the animal flounders wildly. Everything the mouse has ever learned screams at it to avoid inhaling a solution it thinks will kill it.

Yet when we drown there comes a moment when the instinct not to breathe liquid is overridden by a stronger instinct to take in one last breath. It is a desperate final attempt to get oxygen into the blood. If the liquid we are in contains oxygen molecules that happily cross from the solution into our blood stream, life will return. After all, it is not water that kills us when we drown. It’s our inability to take oxygen from the water that condemns us.

By the mid-1990s, Shaffer and a handful of doctors had begun using liquid ventilation techniques on premature babies and were stunned by the results.

“A lot of the children I see have less than a 5% survival rate,” he explains. “But when we get them on to liquid breathing we see close to 60% going on to lead fully healthy lives.”

The technique remains rare, however, because of a chronic lack of investment.

“Liquid ventilation is not used widely because there is very little funding from the drug companies,” he says. “Unfortunately premature babies don’t have a voice. They don’t bring in money, so no-one really wants to invest. But it does work. Physiologically, liquid ventilation is very do-able.”

The recent oil spill in the Gulf may change that lack of interest. Although drug companies are reluctant to fully explore liquid breathing, the Deep Water Horizon disaster has reignited the debate over how to get divers safely down to extreme depths.

Currently the only way divers can work for long spells in the deep is either from the safety of robotic vessels and submarines; or by using saturation diving, an incredibly complicated technique where divers have to be brought up to the surface in a pressurised container over a matter of weeks.

With saturation diving, the deepest anyone has gone is 701m. Using scuba equipment the record is 318m, set by the South African diver Nuno Gomes in June 2005. It took him 14 minutes to descend and 12 hours to come back up to the surface.

The reason for these slow ascents is our reliance on compressed gasses to breathe in water. Under the incredible pressure exerted by billions of tonnes of ocean, gasses like nitrogen and helium dissolve into our bloodstream, much like CO2 is dissolved in a soda bottle.

Ascending towards the surface is like opening that soda bottle - the gas comes out of solution and into our bodies. If we don’t give our bodies enough time to expel those gasses by ascending slowly, we die.

“The beauty of doing it all from a liquid is that you don’t have to use these highly compressed gasses in the lungs that are going to dissolve into the blood,” says Dr Lande, who recently presented a paper on his patent to the first International Conference on Applied Bionics and Biomechanics in Venice. “You have a liquid that you can infuse just as much oxygen as you need.”

Shaffer has previously experimented with animals and PFCs at depth and found the technique to work. “I have personally put mammals down to a simulated depth of 1000 feet and then decompressed them in half a second and they have no decompression sickness,” he says.

The US Navy Seals also reportedly experimented with liquid ventilation in the early 1980s according to Shaffer who says he met a former Seal turned doctor that was on the team.

“This paediatrician never really revealed why they were doing it,” he explains. “Other than going very deep I don’t know what the point was. But they tried it. The Navy pushed them to the point where they did it several times a week.”

Being so much more viscous than air, liquid is difficult to breathe. Some of the Seals reportedly developed stress fractures on the ribs cause by the sheer force of trying to get a liquid in and out of the lungs.

But Lande envisages using a cuirass, a ventilation device named after a piece of medieval armour, which compresses the diaphragm and makes it easier to breathe liquid.

Now all he needs now are developers and a fresh set of human guinea pigs willing to test his ideas.

“I’m sure someone out there would be willing,” he says. “We’ve climbed the highest mountains, sent people into space. It’s time to find ways of exploring the deep oceans

Massive Count a Drop in the Bucket - US News and World Report

Massive Count a Drop in the Bucket - US News and World Report

By Susan Milius, Science News
A 10-year international project called the Census of Marine Life has come to an end with what has to be one of the strangest census reports ever.
At the project’s finale in London October 4, a summary of the collaboration by 2,700 scientists from more than 600 institutions around the world highlighted their own undercounts and the vast realms they missed. That, however, was the point.

“There’s a lot of ocean left to explore,” says environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel, a census cofounder and program officer of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The water world covers the majority of the planet, feeds people far inland, offers exotic compounds for drugs and manufacturing, regulates the planet’s climate and provides half its oxygen, but has yet to be fully explored.
How many fish in the sea? The census didn’t try to count, since scientists haven’t even finished naming species of marine fish. According to the census summary, the tally of 16,764 marine fish species formally named as of early 2010 probably falls short by an estimated 5,000 species.
And fish aren’t the half of it. They’re perhaps 12 percent of the total of marine species, according to the census estimates. Fishes trail after crustaceans and mollusks in number of species, and researchers report evidence of major undercounts in the numbers of recorded species for these other groups too.
Overall at least 750,000 marine species, not including microbes, still await discovery, the census teams predict. In the seas, the mysteries easily outnumber known species, now estimated at 250,000.
For microbes, the census researchers report boggling diversity. Analyzing a liter of seawater revealed 38,000 kinds of microbes, and census DNA sequencing has turned up specimens of more than 100 phyla. Such breadth approaches three times the number of phyla known in the animal kingdom. Estimates for the total number of kinds of marine microbes run as high as a billion.
Undersampling afflicts oceans everywhere to some degree, the researchers conclude. Perhaps 80 percent of the nonmicrobial species around Australia have not been described. Even in the Mediterranean, 75 percent of deep-sea species do not yet have names.
Deep waters below 200 meters are so underexplored that their life forms constitute “biodiversity’s big wet secret,” says the census’s chief scientist, Ron O’Dor of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. Fewer than 10 percent of records of marine life come from the zone of abyssal plains between 4,000 and 5,000 meters deep, yet that zone accounts for half the oceans’ area.
To count fish, or even guesstimate abundance of the small proportion of known marine species, “you need a spread sheet,” Ausubel says. “And you didn’t have one.” So a major goal of the census has been to organize records of marine life.
The Ocean Biogeographic Information System database now allows anyone to look up what species have been found where. More than 90,000 of the species also have their own Web page in the Encyclopedia of Life.
Even though census scientists highlight how much is left to discover, they did a lot of exploring in 10 years. Out of the 17 teams that make up the census, 14 emphasized field expeditions, logging more than 9,000 days at sea sampling such places as seamounts or the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. More than 6,000 potential new species turned up, with 20 percent already confirmed.
These new explorations made a particularly big difference to the knowledge of life at the poles, which aren’t easy or cheap places to study, Ausubel says. Sending a ship exploring in Antarctica costs about $125,000 a day.
Among all the discoveries from the field, “what surprised me is the beauty,” Ausubel says. Census projects encouraged photography, and the stream of pictures over the years has introduced a wide public to the charms of deepwater crabs or free-swimming sea cucumbers.
Census workers also looked into the dark side of ocean studies, assessing how human activities such as fishing have changed marine populations. Delving into documents from monasteries or old tax records, researchers pieced together trends. Effects show up as far back as Roman times, researchers found. O’Dor, however, points out that the census also documents recoveries from human impact. “Under the right circumstances, the ocean is resilient,” he says.
These themes of a great undiscovered diversity of organisms at risk from human activity aren’t unique to the sea, says Peter Raven, president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. “The Census of Marine Life certainly ought to be replicated on land, where the vast majority of species are unknown and for even those we know, we have very little information available,” he says. “This is basically an unknown planet when it comes to living organisms.”

Solving Engineering Issues by Studying Jellyfish - US News and World Report

Solving Engineering Issues by Studying Jellyfish - US News and World Report

By Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
Jellyfish create doughnut-shaped currents of rotating water when they swim. Visually, they resemble what happens when someone blows smoke rings from a cigar.

More importantly, however, this unusual method of propulsion, these so-called “vortex rings,” enable jellyfish to go further on less energy, an idea that scientists hope to translate into new engineering designs.
“We’re very interested in figuring out things that animals do better than we, as engineers, can do,” said John Dabiri, professor of aeronautics and bioengineering at California Institute of Technology, who is heading the project. “We’d like to co-opt some of those ideas.”
In particular, they want to build new underwater research vehicles that can remain beneath the ocean surface for years at a time, rather than only hours or months, and on less fuel.
“It is important to have underwater vehicles that can study the changing properties of the ocean, such as temperature and pH, so we can improve our knowledge of the ocean and how it works,” said Dabiri, who recently was among those named to receive a prestigious $500,000 MacArthur “genius’’ award, a “no-strings attached’’ fellowship. “This is especially important in trying to understand the impact of climate change on the ocean.”
Jellyfish propel themselves by contracting cells in their bell-shaped outer skin and generating jet forces in the tail end, with tentacles trailing behind. “Pretty much all underwater swimmers create these vortex structures, but theirs are a lot more complicated [than jellyfish] in flow currents,” Dabiri said. “Their rings are jumbled together in ways more difficult to measure.”
Beyond inspiring new energy-saving underwater technology, understanding the fluid dynamics of the jellyfish also ultimately could provide important information applicable to other related areas, such as blood flow in the human heart or the design of wind power generators.
The National Science Foundation is supporting the research with $170,000 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
“In the short term, we’re using this money to buy equipment for the labs to build the experiments we take out into the water, which is supporting the small businesses that are building these devices for us,” Dabiri said. “In the long term, the most important investment is in energy efficiency. By making underwater vehicles that are less reliant on huge amounts of fuel, the fuel that is saved either can go to other uses or stay in the ground.”
Dabiri, a biophysicist whose research encompasses several fields, including theoretical fluid dynamics, evolutionary biology and biomechanics, has shown that explaining the workings of locomotion depends on a mathematical analysis of the fluid vortex rings that jellyfish form in the surrounding water by contracting their bells. His research team, in ocean experiments, “scuba dive up close to the jellyfish,” to video them and take certain measurements.
To get a rough idea of what the animals are doing, the researchers add dye to the water. Then, in order to gather more quantitative data, they illuminate the water with a laser, allowing the scientists to see the sediment generated in the water by the jellyfish movement. “We can track the motion of those particles over time to infer the water velocity,” a process known as digital particle image velocimetry, he said.
“We’ve already demonstrated reductions in energy use by 30 percent compared to conventional propeller-driven submarines,” Dabiri said.
Today’s ocean explorer vehicles can spend only short periods of time underwater, or, in the case of gliders, must change their locations frequently. Most other sea research is conducted primarily with satellite technology. The latter “gives coverage of the ocean surface, but doesn’t tell you what’s happening beneath the surface,” he said.

Ocean gliders can remain underwater for months, but must constantly change their depth in order to function.  “It’s difficult to get one of them to stay at the same depth for an extended period of time,” Dabiri said. “We’d like to develop vehicles that can remain at a fixed depth for longer periods of time.”
He described what he considers the perfect arsenal of underwater vehicles, and the challenges involved, that would be necessary to draft a comprehensive map of ocean properties, satisfying current research goals.
“The fundamental issue is space,” he said.  “Since these would be smaller, we can only fit so many batteries and so much fuel on board. If we can make them go farther and faster on the same amount of fuel, that would allow them to go for a long duration of time.
“We need tens of thousands of these underwater vehicles to get the proper coverage of the ocean,” he added.  “We need them not for hours at a time but for years. They would be autonomous. They would have their own sensors that would navigate. We would give the vehicle a set of instructions, put it in the water and have it go on its way.”