Princeton University has announced the winners of the 2009 Art of Science competition. First place this year was awarded to Celeste M. Nelson for this gorgeous, bright field micrograph of squid embryos.

Art of Science/2009 Gallery [Princeton University]

Some amazing footage of Macropinna microstoma, known as barreleyes or spookfish. They get their name from their large, distinct tubular eyes, which can be rotated inside the transparent dome of the skull enabling them to view prey above them. This is especially handy for avoiding the stinging cells of jelly-fish, their main source of food. It also helps provide industrial strength nightmare fuel.

I’m beginning to see a theme today.

Macropinna microstoma: A deep-sea fish with a transparent head and tubular eyes [YouTube]

The Antikythera mechanism has fascinated both scientists and people with a singular obsession with brass and the idea that aliens held architectural design workshops for the ancient Egyptians, since its discovery in 1901 in a wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete. Dated to about 150–100 BC, the mechanism has been described as the first mechanical computer, and calculated the position of the Sun, Moon, and other astronomical information such as the location of other planets as well as allowing for rudimentary spreadsheets and solitaire.

Here Michael Wright, of the Imperial College London and noted Antikythera devotee, demonstrates his working model of the mechanism, gleaned from years of study and x-ray imaging. It should be noted that Wright was unable to reconcile all of the known gears found in the mechanism. Solitaire enthusiasts take heart, for Wright remains on the case with the help of The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project.

Antikythera mechanism working model.mov [YouTube]

It seems cephalopods have had it up to here with these Remote Operated Vehicles and underwater cameras and are beginning to take up tentacles against out voyeuristic ways. Here, a large but as yet unidentified squid attacks an ROV at a depth of 1650 feet in the Gulf of Mexico. A few weeks ago — as many, many, many of you pointed out, thank you — National Geographic posted footage taken by a Shell owned ROV last year in which an “elbowed”, otherworldly Magnapinna squid floated up to stare menacingly into the cameras lens.

I suspect that shows of force like these will continue, most likely culminating in all out war. Hopefully our government is prepared.

Huge squid attacks ROV [Liveleak] : Thanks, Chris

George Otis, a leading proponent of space exploration, because the only way to receive the Holy Spirit is with a rocket.

Pick It Up In Space? [LP Cover Lover]

One of the world’s leading rocket scientists, Britain’s Daniel Jubb is the ideal mascot for Science! (Science!, as we all know, is different than science which is almost fundamentally boring). He’s young, adventurous, and, of course, moustachioed; a fact that The Times’s Will Pavia is keenly aware of:

It is a magnificent moustache, bristling with mischief, sweeping from cheek-bone to cheekbone like a second smile. It was the first thing I saw as I entered a room in the faculty of computing, engineering and mathematical sciences at the University of the West of England. The moustache was in the middle of a meeting: engineers in jeans and shirts sat on either side. Daniel Jubb, 24, the owner of the moustache, was wearing a crisp black suit. He looked like a Victorian scientist transposed to the 21st century.

Jubb, who hopes to build the rocket that will crush the world land-speed record of 763.035mph, is a prodigy of both rockets and moustaches. He helped set up his development company, The Falcon Project, with his grandfather at the tender age of 12 and dropped out of school one year later to devote himself full-time to it. He has also had a moustache since that very same age, being without it only once, when an explosion singed half of it from his visage when he was 15. Luckily it made a full recovery. Truly, Daniel Jubb is one of the modern era’s great minds and we look forward to his future, hirsute accomplishments.

Rocket Man set to become Record Man [The Times] : Thanks to the tenacious BostonEddie!

Since 2000, over 2000 scientists from 82 nations have been hard at work, going door to door, clipboard in hand conducting the first Census of Marine Life. Eight years into it, fascinating new discoveries have been made, one of which focuses on this little fellow, Megaleledone setebos, which lives in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica and can grow up to one meter in length.

This particular cephalopod is now thought to be the common ancestor of the first deep-sea octopuses. Dr Jan Strugnell, a biologist at Queen’s University Belfast recently headed a study which compared the genes of various octopuses and incorporated fossil records finally concluding that the first divergence from Megaleledone occurred roughly 30 million years ago.

The census continues even as I write this, and is scheduled to be completed by 2010, more than enough time to find R’lyeh.

Octopuses share ‘living ancestor’ [BBC News] : Thanks to Hans and Bibi!

A team comprised of British and Japanese researchers has released the first footage of hadal snailfish, taken nearly 5 miles beneath the surface of the Pacific ocean. There are various species of snailfish, some of which can be found in shallower waters, but the hadal is found almost exclusively in depths exceeding 6000 meters, where they feed on small shrimp who scavenge the carcasses of dead marine life.

Not much is known about snailfish. They are scaleless with a thin, gelatinous skin though some species have spines. Breeding habits of different species vary; the abysmal snailfish (Careproctus ovigerum) has been known to practice “mouth breeding”, in which the male carries the eggs in its mouth while they develop and other members of this same genus lay their eggs in the gill cavities of king crabs. Some species live out their entire existence inside other animals:

“The diminutive inquiline snailfish (Liparis inquilinus) of the northwestern Atlantic is known to live out its life inside the mantle cavity of the scallop Placopecten magellanicus.”

It is fascinating footage, but it must be pointed out that deeper fish have been found. On January 23, 1960 Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh of the U.S. Navy piloted the bathyscaph Trieste to the sea floor of the deepest area of the Marianas Trench, known as Challenger Deep, a depth of 35,800 feet, nearly 7 miles. Here’s what Piccard described:

“…. And as we were settling this final fathom, I saw a wonderful thing. Lying on the bottom just beneath us was some type of flatfish, resembling a sole, about 1 foot long and 6 inches across. Even as I saw him, his two round eyes on top of his head spied us - a monster of steel - invading his silent realm. Eyes? Why should he have eyes? Merely to see phosphorescence? The floodlight that bathed him was the first real light ever to enter this hadal realm. Here, in an instant, was the answer that biologists had asked for the decades. Could life exist in the greatest depths of the ocean? It could! And not only that, here apparently, was a true, bony teleost fish, not a primitive ray or elasmobranch. Yes, a highly evolved vertebrate, in time’s arrow very close to man himself. Slowly, extremely slowly, this flatfish swam away. Moving along the bottom, partly in the ooze and partly in the water, he disappeared into his night. Slowly too - perhaps everything is slow at the bottom of the sea - Walsh and I shook hands.”

Underwater footage of Hadal Snailfish [YouTube] : Evening Express : Wikipedia

Scientists studying fungi which discharged their spores using hydrostatic pressure came up with some interesting results. Using ultra high-speed cameras, recording at a blistering 250,000 frames-per-second, the researchers recorded 4 different species of fungi, measuring for distance, velocity, and acceleration. While they found the spores’s launch speeds of 25 meters-per-second impressive, it was their airborne acceleration that surprised them as the spores traveled a distance of up to one million times their length in a single second, making for the fastest airborne acceleration yet found in nature.

This ability is crucial for the fungi’s survival. These particular species, like Pilobolus seen in the footage above, all make their home in dung. The fungi rely on herbivores consuming them to propagate their species, yet cannot rely on them getting too close, requiring more extreme methods to put them within grazing reach.

Pilobolus: Ultra-High-Speed Fungus Spore Discharge [YouTube] : Thanks, Mechangel!

All hail genetic engineering! Scientists at Genomatica, Inc., located in San Diego, have announced that they have successfuly manipulated the bacteria Escherichia coli to produce butanediol (BDO), a main component of plastic; or a recreational drug if Wikipedia is to be believed.

“We have engineered the organism such that it has to secrete that product in order for it to grow,” says bioengineer Christophe Schilling, president and co-founder of the company, launched in 2000 to develop such chemical-producing microbes. “The interests of the organism are aligned with our interests: It grows faster when it produces more.”

The company hopes to lower the rising price of BDO, which has jumped $.22 recently to $1.22 a pound with the rising cost of oil, although they are still unsure as to just how much E. coli produced BDO would cost. Regardless, I look forward to a future where the toys our children play with and the illicit substances we use to forget our problems are made from bacterial excrement.

Turning Bacteria into Plastic Factories [Scientific American] : Scribal Terror

A goblin shark attempts to ward off a scuba diver. Having never seen one of these in motion, the Alien style jaw protrusion came as a bit of a surprise. The translucent skin appears so gauze-like, I half expected them to separate from the shark completely.

Goblin Shark [YouTube]

Admiral ‘Spike’ Blandy and his wife celebrate the success of Castle Bravo, the detonation of the world’s first practical hydrogen bomb — and the largest nuclear explosion ever set off by the United States — at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands on March 1, 1946. The fallout plume spread dangerous levels of radiation over an area over 100 miles long, including inhabited islands.

Records showing fallout levels from the cake are unknown. However, testimony from those who attended the event depicts a frosting that was nice to look at, but inedible otherwise. The raspberry filling was said to have been delicious. Five people fell ill, though this was attributed to excessive amounts of Scotch.

Update: Christ, have I been doing a lot of these lately or is it just me? Anyway, as wile_e_quixote points out in the comments, this photo does not depict the celebration after Castle Bravo, but a previous exercise involving atomic bombs. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Nuclear Cake [a near life experience]

Eliza may piss and moan about our new arctic hideaway and the lies with which Brownlee lured us into the frosty fortress, but really, where else were we going to put all the equipment? It’s not as if Ross was willing to pony up the shekels to get us a location in a more moderately climed locale. Nor could we simply put off the work, it’s very important!

I’m … I’m not quite sure why it’s important, or what it is we’re exactly doing to be perfectly honest, but Brownlee says our experiments are crucial and the last time I questioned him he injected me with remote controlled nano-electrodes.

Suffice it to say our business is quite serious indeed — as the sepia tones clearly indicate.

Les travailleurs de l’acier [Van Olffen : Dark Roasted Blend]

I cannot even begin to tell you just how difficult being a rancher is at times. Used to be you could stake your claim to a parcel of land, put up some barb wire fence, and let your neonates out to graze. If one of them broke loose, it was simply a matter of leaving out some formula baited traps and waiting. With the explosion in demand for infant meat though, more and more people got in on the baby game and the threat of rustling has become a very real problem.

Thanks to modern science, however, baby barons now have a weapon to fight these thieves. This simple, hand held device uses ultraviolet light to brand your babies, making them easily identifiable. Now you can rest easy knowing that, should some dastardly thief abscond with some of your prized, free-range babies, you — and the sheriff — will have the ability to quickly identify them which means more hangings and, hopefully, less baby rustling. Yes indeed, it’s Science and frontier justice working hand in hand.

So the next time your family sits down to a nice, baby dinner raise a glass to Science; branding our babies today, for a tasty, more secure tomorrow.

New Sun Lamp Held in Hand Brands Babies (Dec, 1938) [Modern Mechanix]

Photos taken during the construction of the the Large Hadron Collider, located on the border of Switzerland and France. The bowels of the facility are dazzling in their complexity and scale. This wire-rimmed sphincter is the “CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB)”.

Large Hadron Collider nearly ready [The Big Picture]