The world is ripe with awe-inspiring footage of surfers riding waves. I mean who doesn’t love a giant wall of water? But rarely do we get to see the terrifying underbelly that lies beneath the surface.
No, this photo hasn’t been ‘shopped. You are looking at a specimen from a barely-known and even-more-rarely-seen group of “Supergiant” amphipods — crustaceans that grow 20 times the size of their relatives and can measure a foot or more in length.
The chances of me getting eaten by a shark while surfing are slim. The chances of me getting pounded by a wave while surfing, that happens all the time. Fortunately, I’ve never had a wipeout as bad as the ones in this video.
Dragging a body any distance is tough enough on land, much less while swimming. And the faster you land that person, the more likely you are to resuscitate him. Unfortunately, most conventional life-saving equipment is either slow moving, like kick-boards, or slow launching, like wave-runners. Hence, the Asap Water Rescue Craft.
As NASA prepares to launch the Curiosity rover to explore Mars at the end of the month, a small fleet of Wave Gliders, autonomous sea-faring vehicles, have set sail on an equally audacious journey — swimming unassisted across of the Pacific Ocean.
The Phantom HD Gold, a camera that brings out the life in things by capturing it in super slow motion, was used to film the oh so lovely ocean. Everything takes on a different personality in slow motion: waves look like jello, whitecaps look like cocaine and surfers, well, surfers are always awesome.
Current industry-standard oil recovery equipment pulls roughly 3785 litres a minute, but as the Deep Water Horizon incident showed, that simply isn’t good enough. So Wendy Schmidt — as in wife of ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt — put up a $US1.4 million purse for any team that could extract 9400 litres a minute. Here’s the winning design.
