You like icebergs? Bring your own!

I just found this gem over at Divester, another of my regular blogs to watch.

Sure, climbing around on icebergs is a tempting, but quite risky thing to do, and even if you come in a dry suit, which will keep you relatively safe and warm in case you slip and splash, there still is one issue that stands between you and iceberg fun most of the time: when you need one, there is none!



Here you see me practice on a little one... ;-) note that 90% of the berg's mass is under water, just like it says in the books...

Of course, inversely, when you are in a rush, they are all over the place!



But thanks to the excellent folks at Comfort 1st.com, you can now get a safe, fun and practical solution: an inflatable iceberg!



Just US $5,999.95 (add US $ 200 for shipping) and it's yours!

(Approx. 20' x 14' x 14'. Ages 14 +)

Woz to the show!

Some time ago I blogged about Steve "Woz" Wozniak's plan to drive a Hummer to the South Pole and mentioned his affection for the Segway, a two-wheeled gizmo, which for some reason that is still unclear to the manufacturers never became such a huge success. Hmmm...

In case you have never seen a Segway, or never seen Steve Wozniak, here is a picture:



Sure, it is a visionary on a next-generation individual transport concept, but (rest of comment deleted...;-)

Pic from Wired's Cult of Mac blog

And here is a link to a Google Video of a few visionary sportsmen playing Segway Polo.

Divenews.com: "Scientist's Persistence Sheds Light on Marine Science Riddle"

Now that's a headline to my liking ;-)

I found this on divenews.com which is of course on my regular blog watch list (via rss). So the story goes like this:

Dr. Gary Rosenberg of the Center for Systematic Biology & Evolution at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, has been compiling mollusk data for years and this has, among other things, resulted in an online database dubbed "Malacolog".

Using this database, Dr. Rosenberg was able to contribute to a long-lasting debate on the so-called Island Rule (aka Foster's Rule), a principle in evolutionary biology stating that members of a species will get smaller or bigger depending on the resources available in the environment.

In Rosenberg's case of marine gastropods (snails) colonizing the deep sea, large-bodied species become smaller and small-bodied species become larger.

In his original 1964 paper in the journal Nature, titled "The evolution of mammals on islands", J. Bristol Foster proposed the simple explanation that smaller creatures got larger in the absence of so many predators that they had been used to on the mainland and larger creatures get smaller with the absence of food sources.

To this Rosenberg commented: "Only resource limitation clearly applies to deep-sea animals. We know there is less food available in the deep sea than in shallow water, but the area of the deep sea is much larger. ... A lot more study needs to be done on the relative importance of these factors, but clearly resource limitation is a key factor in the evolution of size."

Well, this is definitely one boost for long-term data collection efforts and especially for organisation of this knowledge into databases.

Good to see this kind of headlines in a mainstream scuba news feed, too!

Deep Sea Detectives on Amazon UnBox

In case you missed any (or all) of the episodes of "Deep Sea Detectives", a History Channel dive adventure/documentary show, you now have the opportunity to download the episodes from Amazon's UnBox Video Download service. $1.99 per episode.

And now you know what I will do over the weekend... ;-)

Croc Hunter dies after stingray attack

Although many people have criticized his daredevil approach to wildlife and dangerous animals in captivity, most of us could not stop admiring Steve Irwin's never-ending enthusiasm and energy, and also his great presence on the screen.

A great ambassador of the wildlife of Australia, but also of various other parts of the world, he was killed while snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef.

Crikey.