Squids!

It's been a while I know. The three of you who read these posts will be happy to know, however, that I've been busy on the work front and come up with a few extra bits and pieces for the Guardian's science podcast. That, by the way, is going from strength to strength. We have a new myspace page so please become our friend and leave us some lovely comments.

On the articles front, here's something I did for the paper at the weekend on people's fascination for monsters of the deep. The article in the paper is a shortened version of the piece below, spurred on by the discovery of a Colossal squid in the Ross Sea by New Zealand fisherman.

Before Google Earth come along, cartographers would often write three words on the edge of their maps, a shorthand for the mysteries that people were convinced lay beyond the edge of the known world: here be monsters. Fuelled by tall tales of mermen and sea serpents recounted by generations of world-weary sailors, the oceans of the world became a repository for legions of terrifying creatures.As sea monsters go, the Kraken is king. The size of a floating island, legend has it that the squid-like creature could cripple warships with its immense tentacles, dragging unlucky sailors into whirlpools and on to the dark of the ocean below. As Alfred Tennyson put it: "Far far beneath in the abysmal sea/His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep/the Kraken sleepeth”.

Fishermen found a real-life Kraken last month in the Ross Sea, off the coast of Antarctica. The largest ever Colossal squid ever seen, the 450kg monster was hauled off to Te Papa Museum in New Zealand. Though scientists are only beginning to study the animal - their immediate problem seems to be how to defrost the animal without damaging it - there is already little doubt that it will provide a remarkable insight into life in the cold southern oceans.

The fascination with big squid-like creatures, the real-life monsters of the deep, is nothing new. When Pierre Aronnax, the marine biologist on the Nautilus in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, sees giant squid hovering next to the submarine, he describes “a horrible monster worthy to figure in the legends of the marvellous. It was an immense cuttlefish, being eight yards long. It swam crossways in the direction of the Nautilus with great speed, watching us with its enormous staring green eyes...The monster’s mouth, a horned beak like a parrot’s, opened and shut vertically. Its tongue, a horned substance, furnished with several rows of pointed teeth, came out quivering from this veritable pair of shears. What a freak of nature, a bird’s beak on a mollusc!”

A gargantuan Kraken also made a guest appearance in last summer’s blockbuster, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, dragging Jack Sparrow underwater as the credits rolled.

In the real world, only a handful of big squids are found every year, usually half-digested in the stomachs of sperm whales, or dead or dying near the surface of the ocean. No-one has much idea where they live, what they eat, how they move or how they reproduce. Almost everything written in books about the behaviour of these animals is educated guesswork.

When a group of squids attack the Nautilus, Captain Nemo is left holding back tears at the loss of a crewmate. In reality, giant squid are less diabolical: a large specimen might eat 50kg of food every day but probably does it by hovering quietly in the water, waiting for some unsuspecting smaller squid or large fishes hove into view. The Kraken described by Tennyson had more in common with the Colossal squid, which is thought to be a more aggressive predator that roams at depths of 2,000m. But so far, even they haven’t pulled any ships into whirlpools, sailors and all.

Whatever fear there is of these unremitting terrors that lie deep in the ocean, it’s worth talking comfort from something hinted at by Tennyson and which has been proved right time and again - the monsters of the deep probably aren’t meant to meet people. Most, like his Kraken, come to a withering end if they stray out of their comfort zones in the deep ocean. “In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.”

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Guardian science podcast for September 18, 2006

The latest podcast from the Guardian’s science team is up today. This week’s show, presented by science correspondent James Randerson, features a report on the Neanderthals’ last stand (a cave on the rock of Gibraltar), a treasure trove of science papers released by the Royal Society, and an interview with the roboticist Mark Tilden (the man who invented the Robo Sapiens toy).

Fossil hunter Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum tells Ian Sample how it felt to be sitting in the final resting place of the last known human species other than our own. Stone tools dated as young as 24,000 years ago litter the floor of the cave and there’s a possibility that underwater caves nearby will provide even more information on how these humans lived – and why they died. Until now, it was thought the Neanderthals died out more than 30,000 years ago.

Interested in the history of science? This Royal Society archive is for you. Librarian Keith Moore talks about the Society’s initiative to let people trawl through its vast archive of scientific research, a massive collection of papers dating back to 1665. Amongst the gems are Arthur Eddington’s proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity in 1919; and the first ever descriptions mammoth bones; and the tale of a musical child prodigy – Mozart. Hurry though, the archive is only online free for the next two months.

An interesting theme that runs through the archive is how science emerged as a discipline from a bunch of well-heeled people carrying out crazy experiments. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, where much of its fellows’ work was published in the early years shows how people wanted to design repeatable experiments so that others could test their ideas. It’s a powerful testament to the strength of science that this method has survived for so long and, let’s not forget, has brought us some incedible advances in knowledge.

The types of experiment that people have tried over the years is interesting too – Charles II mocked members of the Royal Society when they wanted to weigh air, obviously thinking that there was nothing there. A hundred years ago, the American physician Duncan MacDougall tried to weigh the soul in the name of science – he got a figure of 21 grams. We all know which one of those proved the more useful activity, though MacDougall’s work did make it to Hollywood as the title of a 2003 movie starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.

And finally, if you grew up in the 1960s, you probably thought we’d be living in the Jetsons by now – flying cars, honeymoons in orbit and robots in the home were all just around the corner. Unfortunately, robotics has been a big disappointment in the years since. Computers have become phenomenally fast, efficient and useful but modern robots can’t do much beyond simple tasks such as spray-paint cars or repeat simple recorded phrases on cue.

Former Nasa scientist Mark Tilden, the rock star of robotics, talks to technology correspondent Bobbie Johnson about his dream to make robots in the home a reality. He reckons that robots are at the stage now where cars and airplanes were 100 years ago. But he is convinced that things will move fast – in the next two years, they will be doing things that will be useful to people beyond just entertainment.

You can download the show or subscribe via iTunes. There is also an archive of previous science podcasts covering everything from the best science books to high-altitude telescopes.

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That difficult second post

I thought that the second post, like second albums, might be terrifyingly difficult. Fortunately, I seem to be on a (mini) roll. So here's something for you to listen to.

The Guardian produces a weekly science podcast, which I sometimes present. We discuss that week's science news, interview scientists about their work (and sometimes about other people's too) and try to have as much fun as possible in the process. We figured that if we're having fun making it, it might make it more fun to listen to. That's the theory anyway.

When we started doing the shows back in April, we were making things up as we went along to some extent. But we did have one thing clear - to try and reflect some of the relationship that the science and technology correspondents on the Guardian (that's me, James Randerson, Bobbie Johnson and Ian Sample) have in the way we decide what goes in the daily science page and in the other bits of the paper. We might all be interested in science (two of my colleagues have PhDs and I did physics a long time ago) but we never assume anyone else is. And, anyway, quite often we don't 'get' the stories at first ourselves. We'll sometimes grope around to find the story or the top line in a densely-written paper. In the podcast, our intention was to reflect some of that process, to ask the questions that an intelligent observer might have about a topic that seems, at first, alien to them.

Anyway, here's the September 11, 2006 podcast. Presented by Ian Sample, there's an interview with the neuroscientist Adrian Owen of Cambridge University, who has demonstrated, for the first time ever, a way of communicating with a woman in a persistent vegetative state. His work was published in Science last week. Sarah Franklin at the London School of Economics debates whether women should donate eggs for research. And there's also a report from James Randerson and myself on the British Association festival of science in Norwich.

All the past science podcasts are still available in our archives, so do listen away and send me or the Guardian podcast blog your thoughts. You can also listen to all the other Guardian podcasts here, including news, politics, arts, media and books.

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