I don't know why you are assuming it is standard, expected or necessary to have genome sequencing equipment on the ship. There's no doubt that they've brought it back to land and are working to identify it now.
Do you accept or deny the desirability of on-ship genome sequencing equipment?
Nobody knows the sum total of all observations made by mankind. If one can effectively sequence immediately, one can quickly how novel the genome is, and if its not novel, if its a novel lifestage.
On the way to land the specimen (if alive) may die, or (if dead) be consumed and rot on the way to land.
If the species or closest known artificially sustainable life-form can be identified on-ship, probability to keep it alive can be increased.
I don't doubt they are working to identify it, and I wouldn't be surprised if they already did (perhaps on-ship). What disturbs me is major popular science platforms are pro-actively feeding mysticism and trolls by staying mute on the most obvious next logical step.
I do not at all assume it is standard: I assume the number of nation-state actors investing resources in exploring the deep sea ecology (to this depth) constitutes a very small list. So by no means can any of this research be taken for granted and assumed standard. The mere activity of this type of research is already non-standard.
Genome sequencing equipment has been highly miniaturized and become a lot more affordable. So yes, I do expect a wet-lab on this vessel to actually have genome sequencing equipment. If not, I think the researchers have a right to lament it publically.
Having sequencing equipment on ship is undesireable.
There are practically no scenarios where the effort of making such equipment seaworthy is worth doing, compared to putting samples on ice and waiting until back in port to test.
If something was absolutely urgent it could be transferred to a helicopter. But I can't imagine any scenario that this ship would need that for.
I remember when I was studying physics, the professors kept reiterating that one doesn't study science to get rich, often lamenting the miniscule budgets assigned to science compared to other "priorities".
None of them mentioned the army of status-quo chearleaders flat-out denying desirability of cost-effective tools. The cost of just 1 such helicopter trip might suffice for the sequencing and associated equipment...
Even if you were able to start sequencing immediately, standard sequencing alone takes on the order of a day. And then depending on your computational methods, could take another few hours.
Remember that it's not just the sequencer, you also need extraction, so you need to add a centrifuge, a vortex, a pipetting station, a PCR machine, a -20 C freezer, a spectrophotometer and a whole lot of reagents, additional personnel, and probably tons of other things I'm forgetting.
Also I doubt most instruments are specced to be able to handle ship sway on the open sea.
>Even if you were able to start sequencing immediately, standard sequencing alone takes on the order of a day. And then depending on your computational methods, could take another few hours.
For a Minion most of the data is generated in the first half-hour or hour.
You can stop the sequencing process as soon as you have sufficient coverage (see the first response at the same link).
> Remember that it's not just the sequencer, you also need extraction, so you need to add a centrifuge, a vortex, a pipetting station, a PCR machine, a -20 C freezer, a spectrophotometer and a whole lot of reagents, additional personnel, and probably tons of other things I'm forgetting.
Apart from the freezer these devices aren't too sensitive to linear accelerations expected on a mothership of this size. Centrifuge and PCR exist in small and inexpensive form factors.
Non-linear accelerations (tilting of the ship): cut a square out of a table rigidly attached to the ship, mount ball bearings for one axis to a square, and mount ball bearings to the axis orthogonal to the first axis, then mount the equipment to a smaller square piece originally cut from the table. Place the equipment you wish to isolate from vertical rotations on this center piece of table, and add a weight to move the center of mass a few cm below the intersection of both axes of rotation. THat center piece of table will now stay horizontal regardlas of ship riding waves or not.
Additional personnel? One for the centrifuge, one for the PCR, one.. ? at some point one is bending over backwards to defend nonsense.
Regarding the freezer. It's not like freezers on ships don't exist. At a fundamental level its a non-problem since thermo-electric devices could be used, but I think its reasonable to assume even refrigerant-based freezers have special designs for ships.
It's a statement worth downvoting because it's laden with assumptions, as well as seemingly being a naive, sensational, and combative posturing effort that seems designed to provoke others by questioning the rationality or competency of whoever's in charge of the vessel rather than contribute positively to discussion of the result. Your subsequent responses also seem defensive, and none of these are tonal qualities worth rewarding.
Likewise, mystery is something sorely lacking in everyday life, and it's a shitty move to cast aspersions toward publications on the basis that you don't like it. If anything, we should do more to cultivate curiosity and mysticism.
That's my impression anyway, but I'm someone who'd admit to never having been on a research vessel, or part of any budgeting, logistics, or formal research process, and your comments are exactly what I'd expect myself to say if I was 19 again and just as arrogant as I was then. Perhaps none of these were your intention, and perhaps you have no malicious intent, I'm not accusing you of that, but that's kind of how it comes across.
>It's a statement worth downvoting because it's laden with assumptions
Every statement refers to assumptions or prerequisite knowledge.
Should every comment re-include basic education, higher educations, all the text-books and journal articles supporting each assumption? What is known as facts by some may seem like vacuous assumptions to others.
When making such a comment, could you at least point to the apparent assumptions you are unable to follow?
>Likewise, mystery is something sorely lacking in everyday life, and it's a shitty move to cast aspersions toward publications on the basis that you don't like it. If anything, we should do more to cultivate curiosity and mysticism.
What is missing in everyday life is enthusiasm, excitement, ... not mysticism. There are plenty of open problems that are truly mystic for now. Collecting a specimen and not mentioning already done or upcoming sequencing effort is just feeding inappropriate mysticism. Think of how many children have weird fantasies of Loch Ness monster, Yeti, Area 51 aliens, etc... What a waste of mankinds power to fantasize. Give the kids unfettered access to journal articles without paywall such that they can revel in profound actual mysteries as opposed to artificial ones... I don't think theres anything arrogant about such a position.
This shouldn't have been downvoted, even if only for the phrase "phosphorescent feces" ... on its own merits.
Fun phrases forfend fatigue phenomenally.
Edit: wow, I'm realizing that "phosphorescent feces" is at more like "Eminem" levels of phoneme repetition / assonance / etc. My much more basic largely merely alliterative response pales in comparison.
Oh wow, thanks for mentioning this! It makes me appreciate Terry Pratchett even more. I didn't know what the word meant but remembered it was used by the Discworld trolls in some capacity. Turns out it is used as an insult [0].
My wager (3 cents): a slime mold that adopted "potato chip bag camouflage" so that it could secret itself to the safety of the ocean via a shipping container - all part of a desperate bid to escape land and the impending calamities of climate change, including those already seen in its rates on home insurance!
That's an interesting question: which would have a greater impact on the world; that a God doesn't exist, or that it does and it's an eldric sort of beyond the stars horror?
Even more interesting question: what if people have become so cynical that proof of either is met with a shrug and questions of "what is the media really hiding?"
> “ While we were able to collect the 'golden orb' and bring it onto the ship, we still are not able to identify it beyond the fact that it is biological in origin," NOAA said.
I assume biological as in ‘made by’ someone or something.
Edit: the original NOAA article is better as it shows a clearer photo. It seems an organic object with a gold like color.
Could be broken/decomposing "adult massage toy", similar to the story of 80 year old Chinese man finding weird mushroom like plant while digging well: https://youtu.be/4CBaTBCSUUI
Hum, and there are the Chrysophyceae. Some colonies can develop a wall and even some kind of a false tissue also. They are mostly freshwater but some are marine.
Chrysophyceae are a kind of microscopic "brown algae" named the golden algae.
A friend of mine described Rama as the worst case of blue balls for your brain.
It was the first sci-fi book she had read. She kept talking about how excited she was to find out more about the ship and the aliens, because sci-fi. I didn't have the heart to tell her.
> As theories swirled on social media, including that of it being an alien egg, scientists extracted their August 30 discovery from the ocean floor to analyze it in a laboratory setting
The 'it is just aliens' razor only works none of the time, until it does work.
Sorry, this went over my head: could you expand on it a bit?
* things that have unclear significance to me and might be the part I'm missing: "reaction:" label, doctors, free pass, and finally callous (I know the word meaning, but it seems there was sensitivity and regard?)
> Here, stories diverge. It is not clear whether Currey requested, or Forest Service personnel suggested, that he cut down and section the tree in lieu of coring it. There is also some uncertainty as to why a core sample could not be obtained. One version has is that he broke or lodged his only long increment borer and could not obtain another before the end of the field season;[7] another claims he broke two of them, while another implies that a core sample was too difficult to obtain and also would not provide as much definitive information as a full cross-section of the tree. Currey said that the tree cores were too small and difficult to read so he used a chain saw and cut the tree down.
Why was Currey so obsessed with sampling this particular tree and not any of the other, given the difficulties? More importantly, why was Currey so keen on cutting this tree down when it was so difficult?
It's all he-said/she-said, but what's clear is that even for those times the decision was held into question and very strongly disliked. Cox was pinned as the decision maker, but it's not clear how (if at all) Currey was held accountable.
> Why was Currey so obsessed with sampling this particular tree and not any of the other, given the difficulties?
> More importantly, why was Currey so keen on cutting this tree down when it was so difficult?
From Wikipedia [7], above [1]:
"In 1964, Currey was zeroing in on trees that seemed to be nearly as old as their California relatives. One in particular, which he called WPN-114, seemed to be very old indeed."
"he asked...Forest Service ranger [for the park] from 1959-67, for permission to cut [it] down. Permission was granted..."this tree was like many others and was not the type that the public would visit," Cox wrote in his [1996] memo. "I felt that this tree's best purpose would be to serve scientific and educational programs."
Unclear to me what this has to do with doctors/scientists in general in your first contribution. Keeping it to the personal focus on Currey in the second, is personal animus deserved? IMHO no, given the sources you provided from the Wikipedia article: if I had read just the Wikipedia article, I'd agree with ya, the short version can be read as indicting Currey if so desired.
> Unclear to me what this has to do with doctors/scientists in general in your first contribution
> ... Cox wrote in his [1996] memo. "I felt that this tree's best purpose would be to serve scientific and educational programs."
Yes, your quote points out that Cox made the decision. But this is where you and I disagree deeply:
> Intensive study of the bristlecone was begun in the 1950s by scientist Edmund Schulman. In 1958, he announced in National Geographic the discovery of Methuselah Walk...the oldest of Schulman's trees had been alive at least 4,600 years, he reckoned.
Then of course later:
> In 1964, Currey was zeroing in on trees that seemed to be nearly as old as their California relatives. One in particular, which he called WPN-114, seemed to be very old indeed.
A thorough reading would show that Currey knew that this tree was extremely ancient; and likely why he was keen to get readings from it.
Which is of course also why this tree would serve a scientific purpose; but it's not at all clear that even for that time, cutting down the tree was necessary nor desirable to achieve this goal.
> When this student and his associate came upon the bristlecones at the timberline, they began to take core samples from several trees, discovering one to be over 4,000 years old! Needless to say they were excited, and at some point, their only coring tool broke. The end of the field season was nearing.
In other words, our geologist is being given a free pass for chopping down what he certainly knew was a very ancient and long-lived organism; simply for his PhD and because they didn't want to wait another year.
IIRC: In “a short history of nearly everything” there is a story of a species of bird being thought extinct and then, mere miles apart, two people stumble upon a last surviving member. One stumbles upon a male, the other upon a female.
They both shoot their finding thinking “this is the last one, what a prize!”
This is a little like examining a very small public park, poisoning a pigeon[^1] and worrying that you’ve wiped out an entire species. I think we should have a certain amount of trust in actual scientists that when conducting a very small scale survey of a bit of the ocean floor the cost benefit analysis of taking an unrecognised thing is carried out in a way that means they are not causing an extinction.
[^1] Whether you use peanuts coated with cyanide is entirely up to you.
>I think we should have a certain amount of trust in actual scientists that when conducting a very small scale survey of a bit of the ocean floor the cost benefit analysis of taking an unrecognised thing is carried out in a way that means they are not causing an extinction.
I think we should have a certain amount of trust in actual scientists that when conducting gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens the cost-benefit analysis is done in such a way as to mean that they don't cause a pandemic.
As it turns out, scientists can often be the last people we want doing the cost benefit analysis of their own work.
However thinking again about what I actually meant (vs how I expressed it) it’s probably clearer if I edit to “the institutions of science are generally fairly good (with some notable outlier exceptions) at self regulating - and almost certainly better at this than (probably) non-expert opinion.”
The myth of the expert is the lie that makes the world go round, and is largely responsible for people cutting a lot of terrible things a blank check.
Before you relinquish your claim of significance in a context on the pretext of not being an expert, keep in mind that the people who bill themselves as such have a vested interest in maintaining your distanced deference, and when really pushed, will usually be coaxable into running into some aspect of the problem space where they are decidedly not an expert.
Be an expert at living your life, and deciding what you want to see, don't, and doing everything possible to be informed, but never let anyone convince you that your input doesn't count. In point of fact, your willingness to let that be the case is just what the "experts" are counting on. Nothing incites more fear into those that think they know, and others just can't understand, than steadied, pressured, insistence to share it, and make it understandable.
This weirdly specific* analogy fails because we all know very well what pigeons are. If you were examining a public part and you poisoned a kind of bird you'd never seen before and that nobody recognized, I think most people would regard that as a mistake.
* if you're actually poisoning birds for fun, get therapy.
> If it was some creature that's evolving we surely stopped it in its track.
Not quite how evolution works in that (1) organisms are never in a state of evolving (or not evolving), and (2) evolution (i.e by random mutation and natural selection) operates over a gene pool or population, not at the level of individual organisms.
I do however echo your sadness, that we can’t easily study things without killing a few of them first.
I had same thought as your first sentence. But you lost me on the second.
Evolution operates by being fit for your environment. If that environment is dominated by ecosystem destroying humans. Adapt or be replaced with life that has.
I’m much more concerned that humans are likely responsible for driving a 6th mass extinction event of current known species than the idea that scientists may have uncovered (and removed for study) the only specimen of a new species, derailing its evolution.
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."
Has been quoted to me so often or at least that version from which ever translation chosen to essentially justify "we do what we want"
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R0FqypOsiY