Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.
Greetings everyone. Well, today I’m not going to dip into the files for a story because it’s happening right here on Guam. Many of you have already heard that the University of Guam is considering closing the Planetarium. Most of you realize that this affects me personally because I’m the Planetarium Coordinator.
Why do they want to close the Planetarium? The University spokesperson said that since the University doesn’t have an astronomy program, the Planetarium no longer fits in the grand scheme of things and is no longer useful. The University has never had an astronomy program, but I maintain that the Planetarium has been useful to the University for 43 years.
Although there are many college courses that incorporate the Planetarium in their curricula, there is little question that the main service of the Planetarium is not to the University. It is to the community. It is to the schoolchildren and the adults of Guam, the Northern Marianas and the islands of Micronesia in general. It is a service for you.
The University of Guam Planetarium is the most isolated planetarium in the world. It is at least 1500 miles to the next nearest facility in any direction. Every year I have groups from the CNMI and other islands in Micronesia who visit the Planetarium. I’ve also had several traditional navigators who use the Planetarium both to plan voyages and to quantify their own star lore.
Thousands and thousands of school children have had their first introduction to the University of Guam by attending the Planetarium. And that first impression tends to last. College students tell me they still remember their Planetarium field trips and that first impression was one of the reasons they decided to attend UOG.
When the Legislature gave the money to the University to purchase a new planetarium instrument 20 years ago, they also provided funds for its maintenance and upgrades. I have given the University the proposal from Spitz, the makers of the current equipment, for a major upgrade to the system that will bring it into the 21st century. It would, among many other improvements, allow me to project videos and still images anywhere on the dome. For you personally and for all the people of Guam and Micronesia, I would love to have this upgrade installed. But of course, it won’t happen if the Planetarium is closed.
Are you one of those people who has fond memories of your first experience in the Planetarium. Do you want your children and your grandchildren to have that same experience? Do you want to continue to be able to learn about the stars and space science in a cool and FREE environment?
One of my biggest supporters posted the following message on Facebook. I’m going to let her tell you how to do it.
“Here is what we have to do – talk to the UOG President, call the radio stations and TV stations, talk with the Senators especially the new ones, write comments in the newspapers, get your children to start a letter writing campaign and get their school to start a letter writing campaign. Do we want to lose a place that makes science accessible, interesting, and fun?
As one of the sponsors of Zac Sunderland’s quest to be the youngest to sail around the world alone, we are always happy to point out when he gets some recognition for his accomplishment. On November 10, 2009, CBS Sports will be honoring Zac in there series “Honors for Courage in Sports”. Tune in and see some really great stories!
“The 2009 ARETE Honors for Courage in Sports” presented by the United States Marine Corps to air on CBS Sports – Sunday, November 15
Honorees include 33-year-old Marine and Ball State University Defensive End Brandon Crawford, 2012 Track and Field Paralympian hopeful Brittney Bergeron Himel, Ironman Matt Long, Zac Sunderland the World’s First Solo Circumnavigator under 18, and members of the Iranian National Soccer Team.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Chicago, IL – November 10, 2009 – On Sunday, November 15, “The 2009 ARETE Honors for Courage in Sports” presented by the United States Marine Corps will air on CBS Sports. This 20-year-old program created and produced by Chicago-based Intersport, will honor athletes who have overcome challenges and adversity to succeed in sports. James Brown, of CBS Sports and “THE NFL TODAY,” will host the program.
The ARETE selection committee chose this year’s recipients from thousands of individual athletes, sports teams and organizations around the world. From those nominations, five honorees were chosen: Brandon Crawford, Brittney Bergeron Himel, Matt Long, Zac Sunderland and members of the Iranian National Soccer Team. After serving four years in the Marines, Crawford is now a 33-year-old Ball State University Defensive End. Although left paralyzed, Himel survived a brutal attack that killed her sister, but now is a Paralympic hopeful. Long, a New York City Fire Fighter was hit by a bus and only four years after his accident, completed the New York City Marathon and the Lake Placid Ironman. Sunderland is the first person under 18 to sail around the world alone. By wearing green colored tape to a national soccer match, four members of the Iranian National Soccer Team supported a free Iran.
“The ARETE Honors stands as a testament to what is right in the world of sports,” said show producer and Intersport Vice President of Production Larry Holm. “By bringing together the most uplifting stories, the ‘ARETE Honors’ has become the most inspirational hour in sports television.”
Lance Armstrong, Muhammad Ali and Tiger Woods are only a few of the other world-class athletes who have been honored as part of “The ARETE Honors for Courage in Sports,” which will air on Sunday, November 15 on CBS Sports (check your local listings for time.)
About Intersport
Intersport, formed in 1985, is an Emmy Award-winning creator, producer and distributor of original sports and entertainment programming and an industry leader in event marketing and corporate hospitality. The Intersport Media Group is one of the largest independent producers of sports programming in the United States. It distributes sports content across all media platforms. The Intersport Event Marketing Group designs and executes national event marketing initiatives. By helping brands build a strategic framework for their sports marketing strategy, Intersport enables companies to connect with consumers in emotional and impactful ways. Intersport creates, executes and manages major event corporate hospitality programs. Intersport is headquartered in Chicago with offices in New York City and Los Angeles and can be found on the Internet at www.intersportnet.com.
The day after Christmas 2004, our planet was rocked by the biggest earthquake in years. The 8.9 earthquake struck 25 miles below the north coast of Indonesia and was the fifth largest quake since 1900. It was so huge the Earth’s rotation rate was very slightly affected. But the real destruction was caused by the massive tsunamis (tidal waves) generated by the earthquake.
The tsunamis killed thousands of people including several in the African nation of Somalia, which is 3,000 miles away from the earthquake’s epicenter. Many people died in Sri Lanka and in southern India and in many other parts of coastal southern Asia.
In 2006, we had another tsunami scare that generated some local controversy. An 8.1 magnitude earthquake struck the Kuril Islands north of Japan and it generated tsunami waves that reached California, damaging docks and boats in the Crescent City Harbor near the Oregon state line. The harbor was hit with a series of surges that would cycle about every 15 minutes, changing the water level about five feet each time.
The National Weather Service estimates the surges reached speeds of 30 miles an hour. The Crescent City harbormaster said the repeated battering pulled apart at least two docks and set boats adrift, which banged into each other. He estimated that two dozen or more boats were damaged, but none were sunk and no one was hurt.
Boat damage in Crescent City CA
Here on Guam, a tsunami alert was issued but most people were unaware of it, including some of the mayors, who are responsible for spreading such alerts to their villagers. Two mayors said they weren’t called by the Office of Civil Defense, and noted that the early warning sirens that had been utilized in such instances were destroyed by typhoons and never replaced. Guam Homeland Security says that the island is “tsunami ready”, but many people dispute that claim.
We have just had the “Pacific Week of Despair” with multiple deaths from typhoons, mudslides, floods earthquakes and tsunamis. The death toll from the tsunami in the Samoas has risen to almost 200.
We have earthquakes here, we have typhoons here and well, do we have tsunamis here? There was a tsunami alert called on Guam for both the quake in Samoa and the quake in Indonesia. Lots of people are really worried about tsunamis here on Guam. Should you be?
Well, here are some questions to ask yourself. Have we had a tsunami here in your lifetime? If the tsunami that was generated by the earthquake in the Kurils in 2006 was destructive in California, why wasn’t there any damage here? Agana Harbor faces north where the waves came from. Why weren’t there any reports of boat damage on Guam? Did anyone notice five-foot waves pouring into the harbor? Why weren’t beachside homes flooded? We had one of the most powerful earthquakes in the world off our western shore in 1993. Do you remember that it generated a large tsunami that destroyed lots of houses? Here on Guam, we’re surrounded by Mother Ocean. How susceptible are we to the devastating effects of tsunamis, the deepest waves on Earth?
Tsunamis are often called ‘tidal waves’ but they have nothing to do with tides. They are caused by undersea earthquakes and landslides that displace huge volumes of water (and they have nothing to do with the weather). These gigantic ripples spread across the ocean in excess of 500 miles per hour. Because the water is disturbed at the ocean floor, thesewaves are as tall as the ocean is deep. These waves aren’t dangerous in the open ocean; ships at sea may not even notice them.
The problem occurs when the tsunami approaches land. The bottom of the huge standing wave is pushed up by the rising ocean floor. As the waves approach shallower water, they get taller (their amplitude increases) and run-up occurs. Run-up is a measurement of the height of the water onshore as observed above a reference sea level, and the wave gets higher and higher above the water’s surface. If the sea bottom rises gradually, the wave becomes a wall of water that may crash miles inland and destroys everything in its path.
The key to understanding tsunamis is that they are extremely deep waves and as they enter shallow water all that energy and all that water piles up in tremendous waves. So what’s the point for Guam? It’s that little phrase shallow water.
This is an underwater map of the area surrounding the Samoas with the epicenter of the earthquake marked. Have a look at the lighter areas on this map. They represent shallow water less than a thousand feet deep. The earthquake occurred in very deep water and as the tsunami it generated reached the shallow water surrounding the islands, it piled up and reached far inland, wiping out whole villages and killing many people.
Map of Samoa region (made in GeoMapApp) showing epicenter of Sept 29, 2009 8.0 earthquake
Now have a look at an underwater topographic map of the island of Guam. As you can see, there’s virtually NO shallow water around Guam. Our island rises more or less (mostly more) vertically from the abyssal depths (roughly 13,000 feet [almost three miles] in our area). If you travel away from Guam on a boat, you don’t have to go very far before you’re over water that’s hundreds and even thousands of feet deep. Guam has no gradually rising slopes where run-up can occur and tsunamis simply curve around our island and travel on to their ultimate landfall. Virtually the only place on Guam where a tsunami can occur is in Talofofo Bay (and a woman was swept out to sea from the shores of Talofofo River by a tsunami wave in the 1800’s).
Map generated by Pam Eastlick’s Hands-On-Science students. Flat seafloor regions indicate areas of no data for those depths.
Having said this, DO NOT ignore tsunami warnings! And if you’re ever at the beach and the water goes away (i.e. recedes dramatically away from the shore), GET AWAY FROM THE WATER. It is ALWAYS better to be safe than sorry. But in general, we may have to worry about earthquakes and typhoons here on Guam, but you can cross worrying about tsunamis off your list!
Well, I realized that the medical file was bulging and since I’ve got several items that have some relevance for us islanders, I figured it was time to dig in the back and pull out some wonderful things!
We certainly do a lot of flying in these islands and I’m sure we all have our little tales of horror about some of our incredibly long flights. It’s hard to top my worst because I was in the air between Tokyo and Chicago when the planes went into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. What happened afterwards was a tale of legendary proportions!
SICK ON A PLANE
I suspect we’ve all been on flights where someone became ill. Our first little item is on in-flight emergencies. Scientists researched the data on the number, type and frequency of medical emergencies on board two airlines.
Michael Sand led a team of researchers from UCLA who analyzed 10,189 different emergencies. He said, “The breakdown of the various medical emergencies encountered in our study showed that fainting was by far the most frequent medical condition, followed by stomach upsets, and heart conditions”.
In all, the authors found 5307 cases of fainting (53.5%), 926 cases of gastrointestinal problems (8.9%) and 509 cases related to a cardiac condition (4.9%). The highly publicized problem of deep vein thrombosis accounted for a very small number of cases, although they do occur most often after a flight, rather than during. The authors said, “Surgical illnesses accounted for a minor percentage of all on-board emergencies. There were 47 cases of thrombosis (0.5%), 27 appendicitis cases (0.25%) and just one case of gastrointestinal bleeding (less than 0.1 %). There were two births and 52 deaths”.
The authors also stated that there are major problems with record keeping about in-flight emergencies. Out of 32 airlines approached to take part, 27 did not have the data available, one had data that was unsuitable and two refused to take part due to company policy. Sand said, “Standardization of in-flight medical emergency reporting is necessary for further larger studies to be conducted, as the current quality of data is poor”.
The limited scope of the data available makes it difficult to make strong recommendations based on the information, but the authors do note that not all of the airlines had defibrillators as part of their medical flight kits. Sand said, “Considering the fact that cardiac conditions were the third most common condition seen in this study, patients with cardiac irregularities may profit from an on-board automatic external defibrillator. The same is true for patients with a suspected myocardial infarction."
Hmmm, I don’t find this particularly reassuring, I’m afraid. With all that money we pay for tickets to be trapped in a tin box for eight to twelve hours, it would be nice to know that our health care was a little higher on the list.
The next news is significantly better. I suspect that many of my readers take the drug called Glucophage, also known by its generic name metformin. Glucophage means “eats sugar” and it’s traditionally given to diabetics and pre-diabetics. It’s cheap and effective and doctors routinely prescribe it for their older patients. I take two metformin tablets every day.
NOT JUST FOR DIABETES ANYMORE
Researchers at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania have discovered that metformin increases the efficiency of the immune system’s T-cells, which in turn makes cancer and virus-fighting vaccines more effective.
The specialized white blood cells of the human immune system known as "T-cells" remember pathogens they encountered in previous infections or vaccinations. This ‘memory’ enables them to fight subsequent infections much faster and it’s been the subject of intense study for many years, but until now scientists didn’t really understand how it worked.
Researchers have discovered that many of the same genes that are involved in sugar metabolism and diabetes are also involved in cancer progression. Research data also indicate that diabetics are more prone to certain cancers. This study is the first to suggest that targeting the same metabolic pathways that play a role in diabetes can also alter how well the immune system functions.
The scientists discovered that the metabolizing, or burning, of fatty acids by T-cells following the peak of infection is critical to establishing immunological memory. They used metformin, which operates on fatty-acid metabolism, to enhance this process, and their experiments on mice have shown that metformin increases T-cell memory as well as the ensuing protective immunity of an experimental anti-cancer vaccine.
We don’t really tend to link cancer and diabetes but recent advances have uncovered common links between them, in particular how metabolic pathways, the basic chemical reactions in our cells, are controlled in these diseases. The results suggest that common diabetic therapies that alter cellular metabolism may enhance T-cell memory, providing a boost to the immune system. This could lead to novel strategies for vaccine and anti-cancer therapies.
So, keep taking your metformin. It may be better for you than anyone realized! And along the lines of “it may be better for you than anyone realized”, let’s also add vinegar. Yes, vinegar, that lovely cooking condiment and maker of pickles that’s also one of the best cleaners around in our limestone-dominated world here on Guam. Read on!
VINEGAR, ANYONE?
Researchers in Japan are reporting new evidence that the ordinary vinegar may live up to its age-old reputation in folk medicine as a health promoter. They report new evidence that vinegar can help prevent the accumulation of body fat and weight gain.
Tomoo Kondo and his colleagues note in the new study that vinegar has been used as a folk medicine since ancient times. Modern scientific research suggests that acetic acid, the main component of vinegar, may help control blood pressure, blood sugar levels, and fat accumulation.
Their new study showed that laboratory mice fed a high-fat diet and given acetic acid developed significantly less body fat (up to 10 percent less) than other mice.
The new research suggests acetic acid fights fat by turning on genes that regulate fatty acid metabolism. The genes churn out proteins involved in breaking down fats, thus suppressing body fat accumulation in the body.
Found in many salad dressings, pickles, and other foods, vinegar could help prevent accumulation of body fat and weight gain, scientists report. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
So, we’ve had some feel-good stuff about how taking common things is good for you, now how about some information about how you can be good for other people. We’ve all lost loved ones to diseases that could be cured if only there were enough scientists, enough researchers, enough money to devote to finding those cures. Well, now YOU can be that scientist, that researcher and it won’t cost you a thing.
SETI FOR DISEASES
Several years ago, astronomers developed a program that allowed your home computer to sift through mountains of data gathered by radio telescopes to see if there was any signal that seemed regular and possibly generated by an alien society. Although the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) astronomers haven’t found any alien signals yet, their idea of using home computers to parse data and the number of people who signed up to do it has not been lost on other researchers.
Not using your computer at the mome
nt? You can now donate your computer’s idle time to cutting-edge biomedical research aimed at finding a cure for HIV, Parkinson’s, arthritis, and breast cancer. Through the University of Delaware’s “Docking@Home” project, led by Michela Taufer, more than 6,000 volunteers worldwide are donating their computer’s idle time to perform scientific calculations that will aid in creating new and improved medicines to thwart these major diseases.
Before new drugs can be produced for laboratory testing, researchers must create molecular models and simulate their interactions to reveal possible candidates for effective drugs. This simulation is called “docking”.
Since the combinations of molecules and their binding orientations are nearly infinite, simulating as many combinations as possible requires tremendous computing power. Supercomputers often have long waiting lists or are too expensive to use for extended periods. Thus, medical researchers have turned to citizen volunteers for help. Using their personal computers, the scientists can distribute the hundreds of thousands of computing tasks across a large number of computers.
Volunteering your computer’s idle time to do these calculations takes only a few simple steps highlighted on the project Web page (http://docking.cis.udel.edu/). You install a free, software program called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), and link up to the Docking Server at the University of Delaware to become part of the network. Your computer’s idle cycles are accessed automatically when you’re not using your system.
The BOINC software also is in use for such programs as IBM’s World Community Grid, which focuses on diseases caused by the mis-folding of proteins, and SETI@Home, which is searching for signs of intelligent life outside Earth.
Currently, the 6,000 volunteers worldwide who currently are involved in UD’s Docking@Home project are contributing to the completion of some 30,000 docking tasks per day.
Kevin Kreiser, a third-year graduate student at the University of Delaware is developing software that will allow volunteers to “throw” a molecule right into a protein using a Nintendo Wii. “Other people do yoga with a Wii,” Taufer notes, smiling. “We’re doing science.”
Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.
Water. When you live on an island, you’re surrounded by it and you tend to take it for granted. But there have been years when more people drowned than died in car wrecks here on Guam and I have always maintained that all beaches should have signs posted on them that say, “Mama Ocean does not forgive.”
We all must have water, we’re walking bags of the stuff and water has long been THE limiting factor of space exploration. It has for years cost about $10,000 a pound to put anything in low Earth orbit (LEO). You can quickly figure how much it would cost to put you in orbit.
But the figures quoted by the Russians to put tourists into LEO are in the multiple millions. Why? Because you have to eat in space, and most importantly you must drink and water weighs eight pounds a gallon. Every human on Earth consumes roughly five gallons of water every day. No, you don’t drink that much, but you water your lawn, eat meat from animals that drank water, eat fruits and vegetables that had to have water to grow and you go to the bathroom.
Although the bathrooms in space are different, space exploration and most importantly colonization, requires those five gallons of water every single day for every single person on the trip. Let’s see, that’s $80,000 for every gallon of water boosted into space and $400,000 for one day’s water ration for everybody involved. No wonder the Russians want all that money!!
That’s why the new water reclamation system on the International Space Station is so important and why scientists have been SO interested in trying to locate water on the Moon. If you can find water where you’re going, you don’t have to take so much with you.
As I’ve mentioned before, the Moon has a very harsh environment. It gets up to +250 degrees in the daytime and to –250 degrees at night. If you make your colonies underground, the average temperature is zero, which helps things out as far as easily making an Earth-normal environment, but doesn’t help you at all with the water requirements.
Now most people think that the Earth is the only place in the solar system with water, but that’s not true. Water is made from two elements, oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen is fairly common in the solar system although its state as a free gas is found only on Earth because oxygen combines with almost everything and free oxygen has to be continually generated.
Hydrogen is THE most common element in the universe, not just the solar system. Probably somewhere between 98 and 99 percent of ALL the atoms in the universe are hydrogen which should give you some idea of how rare the rest of the elements truly are.
Water, it turns out is very common in our solar system, but virtually all water exists in the form of ice. And not just ice-as-we-know-it. Water is a very malleable molecule and there are at least 15 forms of solid water; some of them are not ice at all, but what we would call rocks. Earth is one of the few places in the solar system (but not the only one) that has the right temperatures to support lots of liquid water.
The Moon has no atmosphere and that 500-degree temperature range mentioned earlier virtually guarantees that when the Sun shines on the lunar surface, the +250 degree heat boils all the water off into space. The Moon is as dry as . . . well, anywhere where there is NO water. And despite the old ‘dark side of the Moon’ legend, the Sun does shine everywhere on the Moon. Well, almost everywhere.
The Moon rotates virtually straight up and that means that the area around both poles would be strange worlds indeed. The Earth rotates tilted and that means that the north pole gets sunlight half the year and darkness half the year. Ditto the south pole.
If you’re a billiard ball and you spin straight up and down, you’d see the Sun endlessly circle your horizon at each pole; but the Moon is not a billiard ball. It’s a big hunk of rock that’s been battered by other rocks for 4 or 5 billion years. One of the largest craters in the solar system is located at the Moon’s south pole.
Hmmmm . . . . big deep hole . . . that would be a place where literally, the Sun don’t shine. And if the Sun never shines there and that big deep hole happened to be made by a comet (read ‘great big iceberg’) then at the bottom of that hole, there could be . . . . water ice.
And it’s apparently true. Three different spacecraft have independently confirmed the presence of water on the Moon. Not only is there water at the poles, there are hydroxyl ions over the entire surface. Scientist still don’t know how those survive the heat of the Sun, but ice on the Moon means that you don’t have to take all your water with you at $400,000 per human per day. Even recycling can’t keep the cost down that much. Water on the Moon makes lunar colonization possible.
But what about beyond? You have to take your water with you when you go to the Moon, but the trip would last, at most two days. If you want to explore further; say travel to Mars, you’re looking at a six-month journey minimum. Go ahead; figure out how much that costs at $400,000 per human per day. Of course, recycling would be the norm, and we know how to do it, but what happens once you get to Mars and want to settle there?
I’ve always been amused by the frequent stories about how we’ve recently discovered that there’s WATER on Mars. We’ve known there’s water on Mars since at least the mid-1800’s. Mars has ice caps, and the one at the north pole is made mostly of water ice. The one at the south pole is made mostly of frozen carbon dioxide or dry ice which should make you readers with experience with dry ice realize just how cold it is on Mars.
But as near as we could tell, water on Mars was basically confined to the polar regions which severely limits the location of your colony. Mars does spin tilted and has definite seasons. Living near the north pole so you could harvest the water introduces a whole new world of risks.
But we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the surface of the Earth because we’ve put several increasingly sophisticated satellites in orbit around the Red Planet. (And why do we know more about Mars than Earth? Most of the land on Earth is covered by that liquid water stuff and orbiting satellites can’t see it!)
These satellites have been orbiting Mars for years and comparing current data with the old pictures has revealed some interesting things. In a report in the journal Science, NASA says that its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted ice in the bottom of five new Martian craters that were made by meteor impacts. And these craters aren’t at the poles; they’re in the middle latitudes. And they’re small and shallow, which means the water isn’t very deep below the surface.
Above: A fresh crater on Mars photographed on Oct. 18, 2008, and again on Jan. 14, 2009, by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera. The crater is about 15 feet wide and 4 feet deep.
So far, the MRO camera team has found bright ice exposed at five Martian sites with new craters that one and half to eight feet deep. None of the craters existed in earlier images of the same sites. The bright patches of exposed ice darkened within weeks as the ice vaporized into the thin Martian atmosphere.
Right: The patch of ice exposed at this late-2008 crater was large enough for the orbiter’s spectrometers to take readings and confirm that it is water.
An image taken by the MRO on 10 August 2008, showed a new crater that appeared after an image of the same ground was taken 67 days earlier. The opportunity to study such a fresh impact site prompted a look by the orbiter’s higher resolution camera on 12 September 2009, confirming a cluster of small craters.
The bright material at that site didn’t cover enough area for the MRO’s spectrometer to determine what it was made from. But the team quickly discovered another crater with a much larger area of bright material.
Above: This map shows five locations where fresh impact craters have excavated water ice from just beneath the surface of Mars (sites 1 through 5) and the Viking Lander 2 landing site (VL2), in the context of color coding to indicate estimated depth to ice.
The ice exposed by these fresh impacts suggests that NASA’s Viking Lander 2, digging into mid-latitude Mars in 1976, might have struck ice if it had dug only 4 inches deeper. The Viking 2 mission, which consisted of an orbiter and a lander, was launched in September 1975 and became one of the first two space probes to land successfully on the Martian surface. The Viking 1 and 2 landers also conducted on-the-spot biological tests for life on another planet. The results of some of those tests have never been adequately explained.
What if the Viking 2 arm had dug that extra four inches and revealed unmistakable evidence that there is life on Mars? Would we be there already? Probably. But we’ll get there eventually, and water, water everywhere will certainly help us make the trip!
Jim is, above all, a passionate eco-humanitarian who has developed his own science talk-radio show to inform The DEEP’s listeners about such newsy topics as global warming, shark-finning and reef protection as well as to explore earth’s many underwater and space mysteries.
After
sailing 12,000 miles and visiting five countries Jim is back here, ready to explore the depths of the ocean to the deepest frontier, space MORE>>
Star
Lady Pam Eastlick is an expert in both the stars
and seas as a graduate of the University of Guam Marine
Lab and the Director of the UOG Planetarium.
