小蓝俱乐部

Polynya opens in the Ross Sea

A helicopter pilot recently sent us an image of the area we are planning to sample, and the stable sea ice we intended to use as a platform for drilling and sampling is now a giant stretch of open seawater! A large opening like this is a polynya, a term borrowed from the Russian...

Christchurch, New Zealand

Greetings from Christchurch, New Zealand, the anteroom to Antarctica. My colleagues and I have been here for several days now, running last minute errands, getting equipped with cold weather gear, and waiting for a flight south to McMurdo Station. The flight here was remarkable only in it's...

Why Antarctica, and why now?

So why are you going to Antarctica, and why are you going now? A very logical question... basically we are traveling to Antarctica to study microscopic marine plants known as phytoplankton. These organisms range in size from bacteria to diatoms to colonial algae, but all phytoplankton have two...

Trip preparations (inaugural posting!)

Well, we have less than a week left, and we are finalizing and shipping the chemicals and equipment we will need for sampling below the sea ice in the Ross Sea. We have already shipped out several hundred pounds of gear, and more await us in storage down at McMurdo Station in Antarctica....

Going west!

After saying good bye to our new friends in Rostock/Warnemünde I was looking forward to coming back to Swedish waters, this time a bit saltier, on the west coast. There are two marine field stations on the Swedish west coast belonging to The Sven Lovén Center for Marine Sciences. Our first...

In the bloom...almost

Cyanobacterial blooms during the summer are reoccurring phenomena in the Baltic Sea. This summer we have already encountered the two main species responsible the blooms, Aphanizomenon sp. and the toxin producing Nodularia spumigena (see previous posts), but so far not in the abundance that...

In the Deep

After the brief stop in my hometown we continue our journey southward in the Baltic proper. Our first sampling site was the Landsort deep, the very deepest part of the Baltic Sea (459 meters!)  and a long-term monitoring and sampling site for various Swedish and international scientists...

The Midnight Sun and Fermented Fish

We returned from Abisko on Thursday July 9th around 10 p.m.  The next morning was very busy for the crew as we had to put the science gear back together, prepare the boat, and do local newspaper and radio interviews. Read the interview: paper Like the transect north, our...

ROAD TRIP! Watch Out Arctic Circle...the Sorcerer II Sampling Team is Coming Your Way!

After we arrived in Luleå, Jeremy, Karolina and I started packing for our road sampling trip to Lake Torneträsk, a freshwater lake located in the Arctic Circle.  Dr. Erling Norrby had contacted Dr. Christer Jonasson, the deputy director of the Abisko Scientific Research Station, to help...

Despite profound impact on bio-medical research, progress in understanding has been slow

Anders Dale says he will move roughly $10 million in NIH funding from UCSD to JCVI.

Synthetic biologists make artificial cells, but one particular kind isn鈥檛 worth the risk.

Gene editing could create a successful vaccine to protect against the viral disease that has killed close to 2 million pigs globally since 2021.

Amid an insulin crisis, one project aims to engineer microscopic insulin pumps out of a skin bacterium.

There are more organisms in the sea, a vital producer of oxygen on Earth, than planets and stars in the universe.

In a new book (coauthored with Venter), a Vanity Fair contributor presents the oceanic evidence that human activity is altering the fabric of life on a microscopic scale.

鈥淒espite reducing the sequence space of possible trajectories, we conclude that streamlining does not constrain fitness evolution and diversification of populations over time. Genome minimization may even create opportunities for evolutionary exploitation of essential genes, which are commonly observed to evolve more slowly.鈥�