“Tiny Mining”, a Solar Car, and Midnight Creatures Of The Vertical Migration

My weekly Linkfest, with the finest reading on the Internet

Clive Thompson

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Octpuses from Linda Ianniello and Susan Mears’ Blackwater Creatures

Friday!

The week’s nearly over.

No need to work any more.

I found you oodles of fantastic reading in this Linkfest, so you can end out the week with some brain food.

Let’s begin …

1) 🦑 The eerie glory of nighttime deep-sea marine life

Scientific American has a fascinating story about the nightly “vertical migration” of deep-sea creatures — and some amazing photographs of them.

Basically, every night a ton of deeper-sea animals rise up from below to feed on plankton that are in the upper levels of the ocean. Linda Ianniello and Susan Mears started doing night-time photography to capture the vertical migration, and have published them in the book Blackwater Creatures.

The photos — several of which appear in that Scientific American piece — are truly stunning. Ianniello and Mears dive down to 60 feet and use a bright spotlight to illuminate small patches of water; many of these creatures are quite tiny. (Those octopuses above are only the size of a thumbnail.)

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Clive Thompson

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net