Big things live in the ocean. Big, scary things.

| No Comments | No TrackBacks
Macrocheira kaempferi

Image via Wikipedia

BBC News reports that the

Prehistoric seas were filled with giant plankton-eating fish which died out at the same time as the dinosaurs, new fossil evidence suggests.

Scientists from Glasgow, Oxford and the United States have identified fossil evidence which shows the fish existed between 66 and 172 million years ago.

It also reports that

A Japanese spider crab believed to be the biggest ever seen in Britain is set to go on show at Birmingham's National Sea Life Centre.

Dubbed Crabzilla, his front feeding limbs are more than 5ft (1.5m) long and end in big claws.

In the meantime, the Open_Sailing project is trying to develop (via open source) solutions to enable humans to inhabit the oceans. From their website:

We urgently need a new generation of semi-permanent affordable and sustainable architecture to explore and study the oceans, understand biodiversity, monitor climate change, address marine pollution, invent new modes of sustainable aquaculture, create data mesh networks, produce renewable energies, for navigation safety purposes and much more.

I'm not so sure that I'd be eager to live in the ocean, given its other denizens. The Open_Sailing project sounds fascinating anyhow, though - they're developing, among other things, "an architecture that behaves like a super-organism, reacting to the weather conditions and other variables, reconfiguring itself" and "a mobile aquaculture to sustain human long term life at sea." Check out their concept video below:


Open_Sailing 4 minutes concept on Vimeo.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]


Bookmark and Share

No TrackBacks

TrackBack URL: http://www.adverbly.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/69

Leave a comment:

Archives

Submit a link

Find something weird on the internet? Got a link you'd like us to post?
 Click here!  

Tag Cloud

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Richard published on February 21, 2010 8:52 PM.

Visualizing Science - awesome science pictures was the previous entry in this blog.

Grizzly bears enter polar bear territory is the next entry in this blog.