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The Petronius Rig in the Gulf of Mexico, operated by Chevron and Marathon Oil. Photo: Extra Zebra

Shell plans to drill more than two miles underwater in the Gulf of Mexico in pursuit of new sources of oil and gas. If successful, the Guardian reports, the project will rank as the world’s deepest offshore facility.

The move is being viewed in the oil industry as a demonstration of Shell’s confidence that its technology can deliver returns on expensive and risky offshore projects, despite a recent downturn in oil prices.

Although BP recently put its Gulf of Mexico project—called “Mad Dog Phase 2″—on hold, Shell is not alone in its endeavors in the Gulf. ExxonMobil is planning a $4 billion project in the region, as well.

Shell’s executive vice president, John Hollowell, told the Guardian that the new project demonstrates the company’s ongoing commitment to meet U.S. energy demands. “We will continue our leadership in safe, innovative deepwater operations,” he said. The Guardian:

The move comes despite ongoing controversy over offshore exploration – especially in the Gulf of Mexico, where in April 2010 a fire and explosion on the BP Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and started a leak that took three months to cap. Last month BP said it had paid $25bn (£16bn) of the $42bn it has set aside to cover the damage caused by the spill.

Shell expects its new well to produce 50,000 barrels of oil per day once it reaches peak production. It estimates that the well, located in an oil field discovered eight years ago about 200 miles southwest of New Orleans, contains around 250 million barrels of recoverable oil total—just over three percent of the 6.9 billion barrels of oil the U.S. currently burns through each year.

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A modern day foraminiferan species. Photo: Scott Fay

Researchers have discovered a jackpot of ancient DNA buried under 5,000 meters of Atlantic water and the sea floor, ScienceNOW reports. The genetic material once belonged to single-celled sea animals that lived around 32,500 years ago. This is the first time ancient DNA has been recovered from such oceanic depths.

The researchers uncovered the samples from silt and clay deposits. They analyzed their samples for traces of DNA specific to two groups of single-celled organisms—foraminifera and radiolarians—using genetic sequences from modern, related organisms to identify the DNA they were after. Their analysis turned up 169 foraminifera and 21 radiolarian species, ScienceNOW reports, many of which are new to science.

Where there is some DNA, the researchers reason, there must be more.  If they’re correct, the deep sea could constitute a treasure trove of long-buried DNA waiting to be discovered. Such DNA, the team told ScienceNOW, expands scientists’ ability to study ancient biodiversity.

Significantly, the existence of some of these newly discovered species isn’t well documented in the fossil record. Since fossils only preserve animals with hard structures—bones, shells, exoskeletons—DNA preserved in the vast stretches of the ocean floor could provide a unique view of animals otherwise lost to the millennia.

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In February 2013 Cassandra Brooks, a marine scientist with Stanford University, landed at McMurdo Station, a U.S. research station on the shores of Antarctica’s Ross Sea. For two months she worked on a ship, the icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer, cruising through the Antarctic sea. Brooks documented her life on the ship for National Geographic, and now she’s compiled two months of travels into a gorgeous time-lapse video. It gives a rare look at the onset of the fall season in one of the most remote places on Earth.

Don’t miss the end, where Brooks’ camera caught the ebb and flow of penguins going out to fish—a odd scene to watch in time-lapse.

Brooks’ cruise was intended to track what happens to all the phytoplankton that grow in the Ross Sea during the summer as the sun sets for the long polar winter.

This isn’t the only time-lapse that Brooks has put together, either. Here she shows what its like to do science from the ship as they cruise the Ross Sea.

H/T Deep Sea News via BoingBoing

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The brighter colored and thicker lines indicate a higher bio-invasion risk. Photo: Michael Gastner, University of Bristol

As the global shipping industry has grown over the past two decades, so has the number of invasive species being transported from through cargo ship ballast. Invasive marine species like barnacles and mollusks can also hitch a ride by clinging to ship hulls. And a new study published in the journal Ecology Letters mapped the routes of such invasives by examining the movements of cargo ships around the world, the BBC reports.

The model showed that Singapore, Honk Kong, New York, Long Beach, CA, and the Panama and Suez canals are the areas most at risk from invasive species. These warm and temperate waters are friendly to life forms, even if those organisms made the journey from half a world away. On the other hand, colder climates are less likely to be invaded by alien species—unless the ship arrived from a part of the world with similarly harsh temperatures. Very long journeys, too, are less likely to accidentally deliver invasive species since animals can only live for so long within the cut off environment of a ship’s ballast water.

Overall, the researchers say, the probability of any one animal becoming an invader is very small. But with so many more ships criss crossing the world’s oceans these days, that probability is only increasing, as San Francisco and the Chesapeake Bay, where dozens of invasive species have recently invaded, well know.

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Image: Nathan Rupert

If you had to pick the toughest animal in the sea, you’d probably go for the great white shark. Or maybe the giant squid. You probably wouldn’t pick the seahorse—a delicate, awkward little creature that clings to the seafloor. But the seahorse is exactly where armor designers are looking for new insights into building robots.

This video, from UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering, explains:

Specifically, the engineers are looking at the tail plates on the little sea creature. Seahorses use their tails to hold on to objects like stalks and stems on the ocean floor. The plates that line their tails have to be both flexible enough to grasp and rigid enough to defend themselves from predators. Here’s the UCSD press release:

Most of the seahorse’s predators, including sea turtles, crabs and birds, capture the animals by crushing them. Engineers wanted to see if the plates in the tail act as an armor. Researchers took segments from seahorses’ tails and compressed them from different angles. They found that the tail could be compressed by nearly 50 percent of its original width before permanent damage occurred. That’s because the connective tissue between the tail’s bony plates and the tail muscles bore most of the load from the displacement. Even when the tail was compressed by as much as 60 percent, the seahorse’s spinal column was protected from permanent damage.

The researchers didn’t start with seahorses when they tried to think of armor to study. First, they looked at armadillos, alligators and other fish. But the flexibility of the seahorse tail is what was interesting to them. Here’s how that tail comes together:

Of course, this isn’t the first unlikely animal that robot and armor designers have looked at for insight. Abalone shells are in the running, too. In fact, the same lab is looking at abalone shells to figure out how they get so hard. LiveScience reports:

Abalones create a highly ordered brick-like tiled structure for their shells that is the toughest arrangement of tiles theoretically possible, says Marc A. Meyers of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The tiles are comprised of calcium carbonate, or chalk, sandwiches coated top and bottom with a thin protein.

They’re not limiting themselves to sea creatures, either. The lab also wants to see if toucan beaks—extremely strong but also very light—could be useful. The lab explains:

The beak’s interior is a highly organized matrix of stiff cancellous bone fibers that looks as if it was dipped into a soapy solution and dried, generating drum-like membranes that interconnect the fibers. The result is a solid “foam” of air-tight cells that gives the beak additional rigidity.

Which apparently looks a lot like a banana:

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