An international crew of six astronauts are training for a caving adventure designed to prepare them for spaceflight. There are many similarities to spaceflight such as a lack of day–night cycle, sensory deprivation, minimal hygiene and the necessity to work as a team and solve problems together.
After a week of training they entered the caves to spend six days living and working underground.
A new interactive website called Seafloor Explorer needs the public’s help to identify objects and seascapes in a few million underwater photos. The project is starting with 100,000 images, but there are more than 40 million in all. The photos come from the HabCam group, an underwater habitat-mapping project at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Via POPSCI
Cool, I guess the tree was there first, and the stands maybe only temporary :-)
According to Pat Bradley, one of the cameramen who documented US atomic tests during the 1950s, the Wahoo and Umbrella underwater explosions were more amazing than a atmospheric nuclear explosion. Watch this stunning video and listen to him explaining his experience of living these explosions just 2.5 miles away. Read Gizmodo
There is still a stigma surrounding mental illness in our society, and because of this, it’s sometimes difficult to ask for help. But that’s exactly what Libby Trickett, one of Australia’s most successful swimmers, did after suffering a bout of severe depression following her retirement in 2010.
She later returned to competitive swimming, having realised that she really missed the exercise and the cameraderie. And it was an extraordinary comeback – last month she won her fourth Olympic gold medal as part of the women’s 4×100 relay team at the London Olympic Games.
Read more here on ABC Sydney and listen to the podcast below
It is a scene you never saw in an episode of Flipper but swimmers are being warned not to approach an over amorous male dolphin who’s been sexually bothering snorkellers, swimmers and scuba divers in the waters off Grand Cayman, in the Caribbean. Read more here on the Mirror
Videographer Michael Maes was filming when the dolphin approached him on Monday and began “courting†with him.
He said afterwards: “This is an animal with 500 pounds of pure muscle … It’s seven feet long and it’s got amazing strength. I dive with sharks and I know a couple of tricks you can do to make sharks keep their distance. They’re shy.
“This dolphin was not. I tried those tricks, but he tackled me on every single one of them. They’re very intelligent. Don’t play with them, you’re on the wrong side of the odds,†said Mr Maes.
Warning, video probably NSFW if your not researching dolphin mating behavior
The Missile was midway through talking about his Canterbury Bulldogs when Wippa had to mysteriously disappear. Then shortly after Russell Crowe called up to talk to the Olympic swim star about the Rabbitohs, riding horses and that golden Oscar he won. Via the17thman
26-year-old Phillip Beach was arrested in Seabrook near Galveston, Texas, on Friday after the harbour master in the nearby shipyard alerted local police to what appeared to be a theft in progress. When police arrived, they saw Beach swimming in the channel tethered to a 44-foot sailboat named the Flying Pearl that he was attempted to tow behind him as he swam for deeper water. Read more here on Arbroath
