Oxford Silk Group

Amazing video at the Guardian of silk being harvested from a spider (and lovely accompanying profile of scientist Fritz Vollrath by Tim Adams).

Bioluminescence last night was lovely too. It is understated rather than spectacular, but the moments when you run your fingers through the water and see sparkles coming off them are truly like something from Peter Pan! It is also just incredible being out at night in a kayak on a beautiful secluded bay: it renews my resolve to do more kayaking (and also to get the advanced open-water scuba certification so that I can do a night dive!).

Class A foam

At the New Yorker, Dana Goodyear on James Cameron. I was obscurely fascinated by the extreme diving bits, which I did not know about at all:

Making “The Abyss” was brutal. “It was a battle fought underwater,” one crew member said—and it was over budget and behind schedule before shooting even began. The story, about a deep-ocean oil-drilling crew called upon to prevent a nuclear catastrophe, while dealing with a hostile Navy SEALs unit and visitations from a marine alien, takes place almost entirely at the bottom of the sea. Cameron built the set in Gaffney, South Carolina, in the containment vessel of an abandoned (and never activated) nuclear-power facility, which he filled with eight million gallons of water. The principal actors and much of the crew had to be scuba-certified. As part of the production design, the actors wore helmets that were lit from within. Cameron wore a similar helmet, but his contained a one-way communications device that broadcast his every grunt and breath through underwater speakers all over the set. “He loved it,” Al Giddings, the underwater D.P., who designed the system, said. None of the crew members could talk back, or to one another, and some of them came up with their own sign language. Thumbs up meant “We’re fucked.” Thumb and forefinger up meant “We’re double-fucked.”

The crew was in the water ten hours a day; in ten weeks, the production went through ten thousand five hundred air tanks. “When I first got there, it was, like, ‘Put me in the water! Put me in the water!’ ” Vince Pace, who built the underwater lighting, said. “About four weeks into it I was, like, ‘Listen, I’ve been in the water. Put Jack in the water.’ Two, three months into it you’re saying, ‘If you put me in the water, I’m going to kill you.’ ” To break up the water surface and minimize reflection, the tank was filled with tiny black polypropylene beads, which made their way into noses, ears, and mouths. Infections were rampant, even though the water had enough chlorine in it to turn an electric-blue dive suit gray in a day or two, and bleach the hair and eyebrows of the crew albino-white. Leonard Goldberg got pneumonia after visiting for an afternoon.

Vacant residences or animal remains

There is a slightly occult feel to this description in William T. Broad's Science Times piece about Peter Rona's two-mile-deep diving quest:

Dr. Rona has found that P. nodosum thrives in restricted areas of Atlantic seabed. Its only visible feature consists of tiny holes arranged in six-sided patterns that look curiously like the hearts of Chinese checkers boards. He has photographed thousands of the hexagons and found that large ones have 200 or 300 holes.