- A man who signed up to be on board the Titan said he pulled out because it didn’t seem like a ‘professional diving operation’ Yahoo News
- While sub disappearance transfixes some, many say their focus is on other calamities The Associated Press
- Analysis | In missing submersible and migrant disaster, a tale of two Pakistans The Washington Post
- The Titanic wreck led to safer seas. Maybe the Titanic tourist sub will, too. | Opinion Charlotte Observer
- Submersible search is far from Arizona, but it’s a local story The Arizona Republic
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Tag Archives: Diving
NCAA Announces Invited Athletes for 2023 Division III Swimming and Diving Championships – SwimSwam
- NCAA Announces Invited Athletes for 2023 Division III Swimming and Diving Championships SwimSwam
- NCAA Division III Championships: Qualifiers Announced, led by Emory, Kenyon, Denison (Psych Sheets) Swimming World Magazine
- 2023 NCAA DIII Men’s and Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships Committee announces qualifiers NCAA.com
- 2023 NCAA Division II Women’s and Men’s Championship Qualifiers Are Announced SwimSwam
- 2023 NCAA DII Men’s and Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships qualification lists revealed NCAA.com
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Chaos in Austin amid power outages as residents seen dumpster diving at H-E-B grocery store – Fox Business
- Chaos in Austin amid power outages as residents seen dumpster diving at H-E-B grocery store Fox Business
- Chaos at H-E-B: People seen fighting over discarded food in South Austin | FOX 7 Austin FOX 7 Austin
- Confusion leads to hundreds dumpster diving for food outside H-E-B KENS 5: Your San Antonio News Source
- H-E-B dumpster divers stocked up on ‘free food’ in Austin. Here’s how long food lasts Fort Worth Star-Telegram
- restaurants lose food, revenue during ice storm power outages Austin American-Statesman
- View Full Coverage on Google News
A new species of penguin-like diving dinosaur has been discovered
CNN
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A new study found evidence at least one species of dinosaur may have been an adept swimmer, diving into the water like a duck to hunt its prey.
The study, published in Communications Biology on December 1, describes a newly-discovered species, Natovenator polydontus. The theropod, or hollow-bodied dinosaur with three toes and claws on each limb, lived in Mongolia during the Upper Cretaceous period, 145 to 66 million years ago.
Scientists from Seoul National University, the University of Alberta, and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences collaborated on the paper.
The researchers pointed out Natovenator had streamlined ribs, like the those of diving birds.
“Its body shape suggests that Natovenator was a potentially capable swimming predator, and the streamlined body evolved independently in separate lineages of theropod dinosaurs,” wrote the authors.
The Natovenator specimen is very similar to Halszkaraptor, another dinosaur discovered in Mongolia, which scientists believe was likely semiaquatic. But the Natovenator specimen is more complete than the Halszkaraptor, making it easier for scientists to see its streamlined body shape.
Both Natovenator and Halszkaraptor likely used their forearms to propel them through the water, the researchers explained.
David Hone, a paleontologist and professor at Queen Mary University of London, told CNN it is difficult to say exactly where Natovenator falls on the spectrum of totally land-dwelling to totally aquatic. But the specimen’s arms “look like they’d be quite good for moving water,” he said. Hone participated in the peer review for the Communications Biology study.
Additionally, Natovenator had dense bones, which are essential for animals diving below the water’s surface.
As the authors wrote, it had a “relatively hydrodynamic body.”
The next step, Hone said, would be to perform modeling of the dinosaur’s body shape to help scientists understand exactly how it might have moved. “Is it paddling with its feet, a bit of a doggy-paddle? How fast could it go?”
Further research should also look at the environment in which Natovenator lived. The specimen was discovered in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, but there is evidence there have been lakes and other bodies of water in the desert in the past.
“There is a real question of, OK, you’ve got a swimming dinosaur in the desert, what’s it swimming in?” he said. “Finding the fossil record of those lakes is gonna be tough, but sooner or later, we might well find one. And when we do, we might well find a lot more of these things.”
Nizar Ibrahim, a senior lecturer in paleontology at the University of Portsmouth, whose research has included findings indicating Spinosaurus was likely semiaquatic, told CNN he isn’t entirely convinced by the study’s findings yet. He argued more rigorous quantitative analysis would have made the findings more compelling.
“I would have liked to see, for example, a real solid description of the bone density, the osteohistology of the animal, within a larger data set,” he said. “Even the rib anatomy, if they had kind of put that into a larger picture – the big data set that would have been helpful.”
The “anatomical evidence is less straightforward” for a swimming Natovenator than it was for a swimming Spinosaurus, he said.
And like Hone, he’s also curious about which waters exactly Natovenator might have been swimming in. “The environment this animal was found in Mongolia, is kind of the exact opposite of what you would expect for a water-loving animal,” he said.
But he hopes the study can help open the door for more expansive ideas about dinosaur behavior. Dinosaurs were previously thought of as strictly terrestrial, but increasingly, evidence has emerged suggesting at least some species spent as much time in the water as they did on land.
“I’m sure that there will be many, many more surprises,” said Ibrahim. “And we’ll find out the dinosaurs were not just around for a very long time, but also, you know, really diverse and very good at invading new environment.”
The Physics of Scuba Diving
Another unit is the bar, where 1 bar is equal to 14.5 psi. The value of 1 bar is very close to the pressure of air on Earth. The atmospheric pressure of the air that surrounds you right now is probably 14.5 psi. (Yes, I said “probably” because I don’t want to judge you. Maybe you are reading this from the top of Mount Everest, where the pressure is just 4.9 psi, because there is less air above you pushing down. If so, send me a picture.) In terms of force and area, it is equal to 100,000 newtons per square meter.
Water is also made of tiny moving molecules that act like balls, and those molecules collide with underwater objects (like people), producing pressure. Water has many more molecules than the same volume of air, which means there are more collisions to produce a greater pressure. But just like going to the top of Mount Everest decreases the air pressure, going deeper in water increases the pressure, because gravity pulls downward on the molecules of water. For every 10 meters of depth, the pressure increases by 1 bar, or 14.5 psi. That means that on a dive 20 meters (around 60 feet) below sea level, there would be a water pressure of 43.5 psi, three times greater than the air pressure at Earth’s surface.
(The fact that pressure increases with depth prevents all the ocean’s water from collapsing into an infinitely thin layer. Since the pressure is greater the deeper you go, the water underneath pushes up more than the water above it pushes down. This difference compensates for the downward gravitational force, so the water level stays constant.)
It might sound like 43.5 psi is too much for a person to handle, but it’s actually not that bad. Human bodies are very adaptable to changes in pressure. If you have been to the bottom of a swimming pool, you already know the answer to this pressure problem—your ears. If the water pressure on the outside of your eardrum is greater than the pressure from the air inside your inner ear, the membrane will stretch, and it can really hurt. But there is a nice trick to fix this: If you push air into your middle ear cavity by pinching your nose closed while attempting to blow air out of it, air will be forced into this cavity. With more air in the inner ear, the pressure on both sides of the membrane will be equal and you will feel normal. This is called “equalization,” for hopefully obvious reasons.
There’s actually another air space that you need to equalize while diving—the inside of your scuba mask. Don’t forget to add air to it as you go deeper, or that thing will awkwardly squish your face.
There is one other physics mistake a diver could make. It’s possible to create an enclosed air space in your lungs by holding your breath. Suppose you hold your breath at a depth of 20 meters and then move up to a depth of 10 meters. The pressure inside your lungs will stay the same during this ascent, because you have the same lung volume, and they contain the same amount of air. However, the water pressure outside of them will decrease. The reduced external pressure on your lungs makes it as though they are overinflated. This can cause tears in lung tissue, or even force air into the bloodstream, which is officially bad stuff.
Buoyancy
There’s another problem to deal with when you are underwater: floating and sinking. If you want to stay underwater, it’s useful to sink instead of float—to a point. I don’t think anyone wants to sink to such depths that they never return. Also, it’s nice to be able to float when you’re at the surface. Luckily, scuba divers can change their “floatiness” for different situations. This is called buoyancy control.
Things sink when the downward-pulling gravitational force is greater than the upward-pushing buoyancy force. If these two forces are equal, then the object will be neutrally buoyant and neither rise nor sink. It’s like hovering, but in water, and it is essentially what you want to do when scuba diving.
Space Shuttle Challenger remnants discovered underwater
CNN
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Explorers trudged the Atlantic Ocean searching for World War II artifacts lost at sea, but they stumbled on something else — a 20-foot-long piece of debris from the Space Shuttle Challenger, which was destroyed shortly after takeoff in 1986.
The History Channel and NASA revealed Thursday that the Challenger segment was discovered off Florida’s east coast during the filming of a new series called “The Bermuda Triangle: Into Cursed Waters.” The series is set to premiere this month on the History Channel.
The Challenger broke apart after its launch on January 28, 1986, killing all seven crew members aboard, including a teacher was set to become the first civilian in space. TV viewers, especially students in schools across the US, watched a live broadcast of the blast in horror that morning.
“NASA currently is considering what additional actions it may take regarding the artifact that will properly honor the legacy of Challenger’s fallen astronauts and the families who loved them,” the space agency said in a news release.
Mike Barnette, an underwater explorer who led the crew that found the shuttle artifact, remembers watching the tragedy on TV in his high school classroom. He called it “sobering” to realize that his team found a scrap from the spacecraft — the first debris to be discovered since pieces from the shuttle washed ashore in 1996.
“I can almost smell the smells of that day,” Barnette told CNN in a phone interview Thursday, referring to the day the Challenger exploded. “It was just so burned into my brain.”
Barnette and his team of investigators set off in March to search suspected shipwreck sites in the Bermuda Triangle, a swath of the northern Atlantic Ocean said to be the site of dozens of shipwrecks and plane crashes. The team also set its sights on one area outside the triangle, just off Florida’s Space Coast, where NASA has launched rockets since its inception.
The team was searching for a WWII-era rescue plane that mysteriously disappeared in December 1945, but a more modern object partially covered by sand on the seafloor sparked interest and further investigation from the dive team, according to the History Channel.
During the first dive, Barnette said a storm caused the water to turn so murky it was like swimming in Guinness beer. “We had terrible visibility,” he said.
The divers carried out a second excursion in May and finally captured clear footage of the wreckage. They brought evidence of their discovery to retired NASA astronaut Bruce Melnick, a longtime friend of Barnette’s, who immediately suggested it could be detritus from the Challenger disaster.
Distinctive square tiles from the Challenger tipped the explorers off, suggesting they had uncovered a large chunk of the orbiter’s underbelly. The underbelly was coated in thousands of silicon tiles protecting the shuttle from heat as it returned into the Earth’s atmosphere from space.
The team turned its findings over to NASA in August, and the space agency recently confirmed the origins of the debris after reviewing footage from the dive, according to a news release.
The final Challenger mission was set to carry seven people into space — NASA astronauts Francis “Dick” Scobee, Michael Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik and Gregory Jarvis as well as Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire schoolteacher who was set to become the first citizen space shuttle passenger as part of a new NASA program.
But 73 seconds after takeoff from its Florida launch site, the Challenger exploded, killing everyone on board. A NASA investigation later revealed a rubber “O-ring” seal on one of Challenger’s solid rocket boosters had failed because it was exposed to unusually low temperatures while the space shuttle sat on the launchpad. It caused a leak of highly explosive gases, which ultimately led to the catastrophic explosion.
“While it has been nearly 37 years since seven daring and brave explorers lost their lives aboard Challenger, this tragedy will forever be seared in the collective memory of our country. For millions around the globe, myself included, Jan. 28, 1986, still feels like yesterday,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.
“This discovery gives us an opportunity to pause once again, to uplift the legacies of the seven pioneers we lost, and to reflect on how this tragedy changed us. At NASA, the core value of safety is — and must forever remain — our top priority, especially as our missions explore more of the cosmos than ever before.”
The six-part series “The Bermuda Triangle: Into Cursed Waters” premieres at 10 p.m. ET on November 22 on the History Channel.
Diving deeper into the world’s oceans than ever before
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Black smoke appears to rise from chimney-like formations of the hottest and deepest known hydrothermal vents on Earth.
Over the summer, Anna Michel was able to see them for herself — a few miles beneath the ocean’s surface.
Michel, an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, was part of a three-person crew aboard the submersible Alvin as it dove down to the Mid-Cayman Rise. Known as the Beebe Hydrothermal Vent Field, these vents exist on the ocean floor where two tectonic plates are separating about a half an inch (15 millimeters) per year south of the Cayman Islands.
Hydrothermal vents form where rising magma beneath the seafloor creates underwater mountain ranges called ocean ridges.
The chilly seawater seeps through seafloor cracks and becomes heated to 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius) as it interacts with the magma-heated rocks. This interaction releases minerals from the rocks, venting out nutrients and providing the perfect ecosystem for unusual marine life that clusters around them.
Alvin, which has been operating for 58 years, reached a record depth of 6,453 meters (4 miles) in July in the Puerto Rico Trench, north of San Juan, Puerto Rico. On multiple excursions, Alvin traveled 6,200 to 6,500 meters (3.8 to 4 miles) below the ocean’s surface after meeting requirements set by the US Navy and Naval Sea Systems Command.
The new range means that about 99% of the seafloor is now within Alvin’s reach as well as that of its pilot and two passengers. It’s the third increase in depth for Alvin since the submersible was commissioned, according to Andrew Bowen, principal engineer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Applied Ocean Physics & Engineering.
“That was the first time I went to a hydrothermal vent site in person and to me, that was just absolutely incredible,” said Michel, also the chief scientist of the National Deep Submergence Facility that operates Alvin. “We were able to bring humans to see places that we’ve not gone to before with Alvin.”
Michel has worked with remotely operated underwater vehicles for 20 years, but this summer was her first time as an Alvin passenger. Despite the enclosed space of the titanium-encased sub, Michel never felt claustrophobic. Instead, she said it felt like riding in an elevator, and the eight-hour expedition flew by.
“You see a lot more three-dimensionality in real life and your spatial awareness is very different of these huge spires,” she said, referring to the vents.
Scientists will now have direct access to the ocean’s deepest zones, exploring places humans have never been to before. Researchers expect to find new species and study the fundamentals of life.
Michel and University of Rhode Island geophysicist Adam Soule, a professor of oceanography, led five scientific dives for Alvin’s Science Verification Expedition over the summer, traveling to Puerto Rico and the Caymans.
At the Puerto Rico Trench, where underwater cliffs form as the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates collide, the team collected samples of exposed ocean crust and some of the deepest known examples of seafloor organisms. During the Mid-Cayman Rise expedition, researchers took biological and chemical samples from the hydrothermal vents.
Previously, Alvin was only able to travel down 4,500 meters (2.7 miles). The new feat was possible after 18 months of overhauling the 43,000-pound (19,500-kilogram) submersible. Alvin’s new upgrades include a 4K imaging system, a new hydraulic manipulator arm, more powerful thrusters, new motor controllers and an integrated command and control system.
Alvin has contributed to numerous discoveries, including shipwrecks and ocean science. The human-operated vehicle, or HOV, has carried more than 3,000 people on over 5,000 dives to the deep. It’s the only deep-submergence vehicle in the US capable of carrying humans to the deep ocean.
Researchers have used Alvin to study plate tectonics and hydrothermal vents, discover strange sea life — and even explore the RMS Titanic in 1986 after Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist Robert Ballard located the famed shipwreck. The submersible also helped the Navy locate a missing hydrogen bomb from World War II and took scientists to the seafloor beneath the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010.
“For almost 60 years, the deep-submergence vehicle Alvin has unveiled the ocean’s mysteries — not just for military and national security purposes but also for the scientific benefit of society as a whole,” said Rear Adm. Lorin C. Selby, chief of naval research, in a statement.
The sub uses its two arms to collect samples that can be brought to the surface when Alvin “parks” aboard its ship, the R/V Atlantis. Alvin’s capabilities mean that scientists participating in a dive can capture photos and videos of the seafloor’s alien landscape and rare creatures, conduct experiments and deploy scientific instruments.
Alvin takes its name from Allyn Vine, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution physicist and oceanographer who championed the idea of submersibles that could carry researchers safely through the deep sea to conduct science in an otherwise inaccessible place.
“Alvin is built and maintained to enable new discoveries and provide new insight into the way our planet works,” Michel said. “Every generation of scientists presents new questions, and Alvin has responded in ways that have rewritten textbooks. There’s a new generation waiting to use the sub, and to them we say, ‘Alvin is ready, where do you want to go?’”
Scientists submit proposals to reserve time on Alvin to conduct their research, and the submersible undertakes about 100 dives per year to explore ocean biodiversity, Earth’s crust and the way life thrives at extreme depths.
A variety of other underwater vehicles, including autonomous ones, are increasing exploration possibilities beneath the waves.
“Imagine exploring the Grand Canyon at night with a flashlight,” Bowen said. “Historically, that’s sort of what we’ve been able to do, and Alvin has been a key part of that. Increasingly, we’ve added more technology in the form of drones, tethered vehicles and autonomous systems that really broadens the footprint for the Alvin submersible.
“Visiting the deep ocean is a laborious process. Getting the maximum benefit out of going there is where technology has a huge potential benefit.”
TikTok influencer dies following sky diving accident in Toronto
Tanya Pardazi, 21, who went by the handle philosatea on TikTok, had more than 95,000 followers and two million likes on the app.
Skydive Toronto said a sky diving student died August 27 after they “succumbed to fatal injuries obtained from an emergency situation.” The company did not identify the student, but Melody Ozgoli, a friend of Pardazi’s for about a decade, told CNN by phone Saturday Pardazi was the student who died.
Pardazi had recently begun taking classes with the sky diving company, noting it in her last TikTok post, made August 22.
“The skydiver released a quickly rotating main parachute at a low altitude without the time/altitude required for the reserve parachute to inflate,” the company said in a release.
“The jumper was a welcomed recent addition to the sky diving community and will be missed amongst the student’s new friends and fellow jumpers of Skydive Toronto Inc,” the statement said. “The team at Skydive Toronto Inc has been profoundly affected by this accident as they have refined their student training program for over 50 years.”
Ozgoli described her as outgoing, adventurous, open-minded, always there for others, and intelligent.
“She was definitely known for how beautiful she was, but what she was known mostly for was her incredible mind. That is the one thing that every single person that I talked to mentioned, just how bright she was, how smart she was, how much she knew,” Ozgoli, 20, said.
Pardazi was known for “picking up new hobbies,” according to Ozgoli, who called her friend a “gift to the world.”
Ozgoli said a funeral for Pardazi, held Friday, was well-attended.
“At the ceremony, we all wore white because she was an angel,” Ozgoli said. “I think it was a unique thing to do, and that’s what Tanya was, she was unique, she was different. She was one of a kind, truly.”
The South Simcoe Police Service “are investigating the fatality in conjunction with the Office of the Chief Coroner,” according to a news release from police.
Diving robot explores shipwrecks on the ocean’s bottom
OceanOneK resembles a human diver from the front, with arms and hands and eyes that have 3D vision, capturing the underwater world in full color.
The back of the robot has computers and eight multidirectional thrusters that help it carefully maneuver the sites of fragile sunken ships.
When an operator at the ocean’s surface uses controls to direct OceanOneK, the robot’s haptic (touch-based) feedback system causes the person to feel the water’s resistance as well as the contours of artifacts.
OceanOneK’s realistic sight and touch capabilities are enough to make people feel like they’re diving down to the depths — without the dangers or immense underwater pressure a human diver would experience.
Stanford University roboticist Oussama Khatib and his students teamed up with deep-sea archaeologists and began sending the robot on dives in September. The team just finished another underwater expedition in July.
So far, OceanOneK has explored a sunken Beechcraft Baron F-GDPV plane, Italian steamship Le Francesco Crispi, a second century Roman ship off Corsica, a World War II P-38 Lightning aircraft and a submarine called Le Protée.
The Crispi sits about 1,640 feet (500 meters) below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea.
“You are moving very close to this amazing structure, and something incredible happens when you touch it: You actually feel it,” said Khatib, the Weichai Professor in Stanford’s School of Engineering and director of the Stanford Robotics Lab.
“I’d never experienced anything like that in my life. I can say I’m the one who touched the Crispi at 500 (meters). And I did — I touched it, I felt it.”
OceanOneK could be just the beginning of a future where robots take on underwater exploration too dangerous for humans and help us see oceans in a completely new way.
Creating an underwater robot
The challenge in creating OceanOneK and its predecessor, OceanOne, was building a robot that could endure an underwater environment and the immense pressure at various depths, Khatib said.
OceanOne made its debut in 2016, exploring King Louis XIV’s wrecked flagship La Lune, which sits 328 feet (100 meters) below the Mediterranean 20 miles (32 kilometers) off southern France. The 1664 shipwreck remained untouched by humans.
The robot recovered a vase about the size of a grapefruit, and Khatib felt the sensations in his hands when OceanOne touched the vase before placing it in a recovery basket.
The idea for OceanOne came from a desire to study coral reefs within the Red Sea at depths beyond the normal range for divers. The Stanford team wanted to create something that came as close to a human diver as possible, integrating artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and haptic feedback.
The robot is about 5 feet (1.5 meters) long, and its brain can register how carefully it must handle an object without breaking it — like coral or sea-weathered artifacts. An operator can control the bot, but it’s outfitted with sensors and uploaded with algorithms so it can function autonomously and avoid collisions.
While OceanOne was designed to reach maximum depths of 656 feet (200 meters), researchers had a new goal: 1 kilometer (0.62 miles), hence the new name for OceanOneK.
The team changed the robot’s body by using special foam that includes glass microspheres to increase buoyancy and combat the pressures of 1,000 meters — more than 100 times what humans experience at sea level.
The researchers upgraded the robot’s arms with an oil and spring mechanism that prevents compression as it descends to the ocean depths. OceanOneK also got two new types of hands and increased arm and head motion.
The project comes with challenges he’s never seen in any other system, said Wesley Guo, a doctoral student at Stanford’s School of Engineering. “It requires a lot of out-of-the-box thinking to make those solutions work.”
The team used Stanford’s recreation pool to test out the robot and run through experiments, such as carrying a video camera on a boom and collecting objects. Then came the ultimate test for OceanOneK.
Deep dives
A Mediterranean tour that began in 2021 saw OceanOneK diving to these successive depths: 406 feet (124 meters) to the submarine, 1,095 feet (334 meters) to the Roman ship remains and ultimately 0.5 miles (852 meters) to prove it has the capability of diving to nearly 1 kilometer. But it wasn’t without problems.
Guo and another Stanford doctoral student, Adrian Piedra, had to fix one of the robot’s disabled arms on the deck of their boat at night during a storm.
“To me, the robot is eight years in the making,” Piedra said. “You have to understand how every single part of this robot is functioning — what are all of the things that can go wrong, and things are always going wrong. So it’s always like a puzzle. Being able to dive deep into the ocean and exploring some wrecks that would have never been seen this close up is very rewarding.”
During OceanOneK’s deep dive in February, team members discovered the robot couldn’t ascend when they stopped for a thruster check. Flotations on the communications and power line had collapsed, causing the line to pile on top of the robot.
They were able to pull in the slack, and OceanOneK’s descent was a success. It dropped off a commemorative marker on the seabed that reads, “A robot’s first touch of the deep seafloor/A vast new world for humans to explore.”
Khatib, a professor of computer science, called the experience an “incredible journey.” “This is the first time that a robot has been capable of going to such a depth, interacting with the environment, and permitting the human operator to feel that environment,” he said.
In July, the team revisited the Roman ship and the Crispi. While the former has all but disappeared, its cargo remains scattered across the seafloor, Khatib said. At the site of the Roman ship, OceanOneK successfully collected ancient vases and oil lamps, which still bear their manufacturer’s name.
The robot carefully placed a boom camera inside the Crispi’s fractured hull to capture video of corals and rust formations while bacteria feast on the ship’s iron.
“We go all the way to France for the expedition, and there, surrounded by a much larger team, coming from a wide array of backgrounds, you realize that the piece of this robot you’ve been working on at Stanford is actually part of something much bigger,” Piedra said.
“You get a sense of how important this is, how novel and significant the dive is going to be, and what this means for science overall.”
A promising future
The project born from an idea in 2014 has a long future of planned expeditions to lost underwater cities, coral reefs and deep wrecks. The innovations of OceanOneK also lay the groundwork for safer underwater engineering projects such as repairing boats, piers and pipelines.
One upcoming mission will explore a sunken steamboat in Lake Titicaca on the border of Peru and Bolivia.
But Khatib and his team have even bigger dreams for the project: space.
Khatib said the European Space Agency has expressed interest in the robot. A haptic device aboard the International Space Station would allow astronauts to interact with the robot.
“They can interact with the robot deep in the water,” Khatib said, “and this would be amazing because this would simulate the task of doing this on a different planet or different moon.”
Penn will work with NCAA to support transgender athlete Lia Thomas’ participation at swimming and diving championships
Penn Athletics said in a statement on Thursday that it would work with the NCAA in support of swimmer Lia Thomas regarding her participation at the 2022 NCAA swimming and diving championships in Atlanta in March.
Thomas, a transgender woman, has posted some of the nation’s best times in the women’s 200-yard, 500-yard and 1,650-yard freestyle events. She has qualified for the NCAA swimming and diving championships in all three individual events.
“Penn Athletics is aware of the NCAA’s new transgender participation policy,” the statement said. “In support of our student-athlete, Lia Thomas, we will work with the NCAA regarding her participation under the newly adopted standards for the 2022 NCAA Swimming and Diving Championship.”
On Wednesday, the NCAA released a new policy in which eligibility requirements for transgender athletes will be determined by each sport’s national governing body. The requirements go into effect immediately and replace the previous policy, adopted in 2010, that was a uniform hormone therapy requirement across all sports.
USA Swimming’s policy, adopted in 2018, uses a review panel to make individual determinations on eligibility. Elite athletes are subject to FINA and IOC regulations, which are currently in flux thanks to a November 2021 update to the IOC’s policy, which defers to individual policies of international federations. It is unknown which athletes — Olympians, collegians or both — are considered to be elite under USA Swimming’s current policy.
Thomas and Penn are next scheduled to compete Saturday at Harvard (11 a.m. ET, ESPN+).