HMS Beagle replica: science aboard.

The replica HMS Beagle is being designed and will be operated with real science in mind. We'll be both running long-term projects and inviting bids for shorter researcher led projects. Details on the new Beagle Project science page.

The pale blue dot...

...and some rather fascinating aquamarine streaks.

Today is not the anniversary of Carl Sagan's birth, death, or anything else, but I just so happened to stumble over his visage today on my way to a slew of youtube videos poking fun at creationist banana-awe. It's as good a reason as any to highlight the great science communicator: just watch him go
...and go
...and go.

Carl Sagan was a great speaker, and no where was he more eloquent and moving than when he waxed lyrical about the pale blue dot, our precious earth set in the great "bastion and citadel of the stars". Nothing comes close to the image of our planet from space for communicating in an instant the wonder, vulnerability and mystery of our shared home.

Pictures from space can also have more direct scientific relevance, such as this one showing a plankton bloom off the coast of Patagonia. We can hypothesise about what's going on in the different ribbons of colour there, but it takes real work on the ground to validate and calibrate those sorts of inferences. Enter: Beagle.

Imagine it...
Astronaut: "Greetings, Beagle, you're about to enter a plankton bloom."
Beagle crew: "Thanks, we'll lower the continuous plankton recorder and step up our rate of metagenomic sampling."
Astronaut: "10:04am Beagle, you are moving into a new zone of the plankton bloom."
Beagle crew: "Roger that, time point marked on plankton recorders and gene sampling filters replaced."

Science in the age of sail

An ever-so-slightly hungover Nunatak here, reporting on yesterday's splendid meeting at the Linnean Society in London ("In Linnaeus' Wake: Three hundred years of marine discovery"), followed by an even more splendid reception aboard the Swedish ship Gotheborg (pictured at left, 5:57pm last night in Canary Wharf).

It is always a delight to attend meetings at the "Linsock" as it is affectionately known (pictured below right), where Darwin's and Wallace's papers on natural selection were read aloud to a weirdly bored audience on 1st July 1858.

This particular conference was a very special event for anyone interested in the history of science, not least a museum denizen with a soft spot for famous dead scientists and the square riggers that bore them to fame.

The presentations ranged from biographics on Linnaeus to 18th century microscopy to marine biodiversity to maritime history and back again. To provide a glimpse into the day, here is a little list of some things that I learned:

• in addition to huge booties of tea, nearly 1000 scientific specimens were delivered back to Sweden by every Swedish East India Company (SOIC) voyage
• Linnaeus mistakenly thought that fungal spores could turn into tiny swarming animals and thus misclassified fungi as animals, assigning them to a group he aptly named "Chaos" (in fact fungi form a separate kingdom altogether and the rainwater he used was contaminated by protozoa)
• The Natural History Museum in London holds 70 million specimens
• this century, warm water marine species have moved northward by a whopping 10 degrees latitude (that's right, George, the ocean is getting warmer)
  
• sperm whales' teeth have rings like trees that you can use to track their past migrations
• there are more species of deep sea vent bivalves in the family Lucinidae than there are bird species on the entire planet
• Linnaeus was the first to classify elephant seals
• you can't stop a sailing ship
• RRS Discovery was one of the last sailing vessels ever used for science (just you wait!)
• % of the deep sea explored by man < % of the moon's surface explored by man
• oil companies sometimes do some good
• marine biodiversity increases with depth, peaking at about 2000 metres
• 40/94 members of Cook's Endeavour crew died, and this was considered a success
• the O-ring was patented in 1948
• the third voyage of the Gotheborg ended badly
• the replica of the Gotheborg was built using 18th century craftsmanship, right down to its hemp ropes and linen sails

After absorbing all of those bullet points, it was time to absorb some alcohol. Excited delegates scurried over to Canary Wharf to partake of unlimited champagne spiked with lingonberry liqueur aboard the replica Gotheborg. She's quite simply spectacular, and she helped me to imagine what it might be like to have a real-life oak-creaking, salt-smelling Beagle underfoot.

After the last lingonberry cocktail was drained and I had spread the word about The Beagle Project to as many tipsy bigwigs as is humanly possible, it was time to disembark and head back to our beds, and dreams of hosting similar celebrations aboard another notable square rigger in 2009 when the drink of choice will be gin and tonic.

Happy 300th Birthday, Carl.

Today we celebrate Carl Linnaeus' 300th birthday, and how better than to listen to a truly excellent episode of BBC Radio 4 programme, Frontiers, which this week rightly honours the undisputed father of taxonomy.

The Frontiers programme also does a bang-up job introducing J. Craig Venter's project the Global Ocean Sampling Expedition, which is serving as a key model for what we intend to do aboard the Beagle.

More than that, the programme ranges 'round significant Beagle Project haunts including The Natural History Museum, full time employer of yours truly, and where I will be giving a free public talk this Friday on our project to re-survey and "DNA barcode" Darwin's meadow at Down House.

About the meadow, Darwin wrote "If ever you catch quite a beginner, & want to give him a taste for Botany tell him to make perfect list of some little field or wood. Both Miss Thorley & I agree that it gives a really uncommon interest to the work, having a nice little definite world to work on, instead of the awful abyss & immensity of all British Plants."

And so it is for us. Before embarking on our planned project to DNA barcode all British plants, we are starting with Darwin's self same little meadow, just to make sure our methods are up to snuff.

Thanks very much indeed to Richard Carter FCD for bringing the above quote to my attention. A real gem!

What science will be done aboard the Beagle?

Check out our updated science page on the website here. Meanwhile, what was Charles Darwin doing on this day in 1832?

"Rio de Janeiro
Torrents of rain. I am at present chiefly collecting spiders. In the course of a few hours 2.6 inches of rain fell."

From Charles Darwin's Beagle diaries, available at Darwin Online or ready digested and blogged for you here at the Darwinbeagle weblog: an anonymous project which is worthy of congrats, bookmarking and a daily visit.

Intelligent design: it's not even wrong.

First, a confession. I lifted this zinger of a title from a refreshingly mindful statement by a US Representative (that'd be Rush Holt of the 12th Congressional district of New Jersey), and also from Peter Woit's excellent physics blog Not Even Wrong.

Plagiaristic tendencies aside, the title does get right to the point. For while it may be true that intelligent design isn't right, more catastrophically for its pretensions as a scientific alternative to evolution, intelligent design is not even wrong. After all, science is about 1) standing on the shoulders of giants and using their foundational theories to make predictions about the outcomes of future experiments, then 2) doing the experiments, and then 3) forcing the scientific community to eat a big fat slice of humble pie if your results suggest the theories were wrong. What happens next usually involves the front cover of Science or Nature.

In short, valid scientific theories are falsifiable (spectacularly so) and intelligent design is not.

So why all this flurry about intelligent design on the Beagle Project blog? Well, it turns out that Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus might be coming to a big screen near you, all proceeds to the Beagle Project. And how appropriate, too, since the Beagle will be a vehicle for science outreach, the improvement of which is what this film is all about. All we need is a venue. Any suggestions? Better yet, any offers?

Morning media monitoring

we're in the AAAS magazine Science, and the latest country to join the Beagle TV party: Germany. The way things are going the only country not commissioning TV programmes about the replica will be the land of Darwin's birth, education, whose Royal Navy took him round the world, whose scientific reputation burgeoned because of him, the shores of which he never left after his return from the beagle voyage and at the end of his life buried in him in the nation's cathedral Westminster Abbey (albeit against the poor chap's wishes, he wished to be buried in his local Parish churchyard in Downe, Kent.

And breathe. Sorry that's a long sentence, but I'm sure you get my meaning.

Charles Darwin: not always bearded.

Darren Naish, blogger and Doctor of theropod dinosaurs (which in my book makes him a Ph.D. of Th.D.) makes the point here. The iconic image of Darwin is the bearded old man. We do much the same on our site using the hirsuit old Darwin here. He was bare-chinned both in 1831 when he stepped aboard the Beagle and in 1859 when he published the Origin of Species. Darren calls Darwin: 'the most important biologist of all time', and says that portraying him as an old man, 'is annoying and misleading, and perpetuated by a society that seems to want scientists to be oddballs that operate on the fringes of society.'

A primary teacher relative says something similar: ask children to draw a scientist you inevitably get a wild-haired Einstein-alike. My recent visits to labs like the European Molecular Biology Lab in Heidelberg showed plenty of smart, bright young things quite unlike wild-haired or bald and bearded geriatrics. If we're to recruit young people into science as a career, these are stereotypes we need to challenge. We are admonished: younger and less hairy Darwins will be appearing on the site shortly.

charles darwin, science, beards, hms beagle