In the days when it was essential for marine navigators to be able to get a good visual fix on stars and other astronomical objects, many inventors tried to find ways of creating a ‘Marine Chair’ which would stay still while the ship rolled about in the middle of the ocean. Various national governments offered […]
Tag: ship
Logged logs
Say, how many logs would a lumber-carrier-vessel captain’s log log if a lumber-carrier-vessel captain’s log logged logs? The answer is not contained, nor is the question directly addressed, in Granite Geek’s article ” ‘Structural round timber’ sounds much better than ‘logs’ “.
Head butting in whales – explanations for junk
“The immense forehead of sperm whales is possibly the largest, and one of the strangest, anatomical structures in the animal kingdom.“ Leading to the question: ‘What’s it for?’ Herman Melville’s famous novel Moby-Dick suggested that one purpose might be for large-scale head-butting, the practicalities of which are reviewed in a new paper for PeerJ PrePrints, […]
Steel and steel and the Titanic microbe
A scientist named Steel helped later scientists understand a previously-unknown species of bacteria found living in the steel and former steel of the wreck of the cruise ship HMS Titanic. The relevant publications (one of which cites the other), are: 1. “Halomonas titanicae sp. nov., a halophilic bacterium isolated from the RMS Titanic,” Cristina Sánchez-Porro, […]