Category: Innovation

Are you ready to live under the ocean? DEEP Research Labs, an international research and development organization, is driven by the goal to “make humans aquatic.” They believe that becoming part of the oceanic world is crucial for understanding and preserving Earth’s most diverse biosphere. Their website explains, “We create tools and practices for scientists, academics, and others who seek to do good through their interaction with our oceans.”

DEEP seeks to accomplish this amazing feat using their Sentinel System, a high-tech subsea habitat likened to an underwater International Space Station. It will allow researchers to live and work on the ocean floor, at depths up to 200 meters (656 feet), for up to 28 days at a time. The system is designed for a 20-year service life, and its modular design allows it to be reconfigured and relocated as needed.

Rick Goddard, DEEP’s product director, told Oceanographic Magazine, “We’re doing something new here at a scale never previously imagined outside of science fiction. I fully expect the equipment and technology we’re developing to be pivotal in enabling some game-changing discoveries and radically change the way we access and think about the ocean.”

I am not sure if I am quite ready to live 200 meters under the ocean, but still a fascinating endeavor.

Last week, we discussed the stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope, including its discovery of a potential life-building block on Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa. However, to truly uncover distant life or delve deeper into the wonders of our universe we need to see much farther.

Slava Turyshev, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, is working on using the sun as a lens in a telescope. This concept is based on an effect known as Gravitational Lensing.

Gravitational Lensing happens when a massive object, such as a galaxy cluster, is positioned between an observer and a distant object, bending the latter’s light into an Einstein ring. This effect is caused by the object’s gravity, which warps and magnifies the images behind it.

Using the sun for this, which is called Solar Gravitational Lensing (SGL), could theoretically increase a background image by a factor of 100 billion. This would increase our ability to see distant planets and starts far beyond what we could conceivably do otherwise.

If this is not sci-fi enough for you already, SGL could potentially be used for interstellar communication. Signals sent through the gravitational field could much more easily reach nearby stars without degrading.

Here is a excellent video diving into the subject with much greater detail.