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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...

Sunset at Norrbyskär

It was another beautiful morning in the Gulf of Bothnia as we left Härnösand. We stopped at another sampling site before meeting with a boat from Umeå Marine Research Station (UMF).  We were greeted by UMF scientist Dr. Johan Wikner and a television crew. We docked at Norrbyskär, a...

Heading north with more daylight

After spending a couple of days visiting with my family in Stockholm, I boarded a ferry boat to Blidö and rejoined the Sorcerer II crew to head north to the Bothnian Sea. Before departing, we sampled in the bay outside Dr. Norrby’s summer house. The last days of fantastic summer weather had...

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17-Jan-2024
Grow by Ginkgo

Getting Under the Skin

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

24-Oct-2023
Noema

Planet Microbe

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

29-Aug-2023
Vanity Fair

The Next Climate Change Calamity?: We’re Ruining the Microbiome, According to Human-Genome-Pioneer Craig Venter

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.

21-Aug-2023
GEN

Lessons from the Minimal Cell

“Despite 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.”

09-Aug-2023
Quanta Magazine

Even Synthetic Life Forms With a Tiny Genome Can Evolve

By watching “minimal” cells regain the fitness they lost, researchers are testing whether a genome can be too simple to evolve.

15-May-2023
Science

Privacy concerns sparked by human DNA accidentally collected in studies of other species

Two research teams warn that human genomic “bycatch” can reveal private information

10-May-2023
New York Times

Scientists Unveil a More Diverse Human Genome

The “pangenome,” which collated genetic sequences from 47 people of diverse ethnic backgrounds, could greatly expand the reach of personalized medicine.

10-May-2023
Nature

First human ‘pangenome’ aims to catalogue genetic diversity

Researchers release draft results from an ongoing effort to capture the entirety of human genetic variation.

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