the Mayo Clinic goes to Mount Everest

Let's talk about camping...or hiking. Or anything out-doorsy.

It's torture.

Which is probably why I'll never be asked to do ANYTHING to advance the human race through epic adventures in the wild.

Nature is just not my thing. Or anything cold. Which is strange because I signed up to go abroad at several schools where it snows. I must have been crazy.

This all leads to the fact that I'm a news junkie. I love tid-bits and I check several news sites twice a day just to make sure I know what's going on. So I bookmarked the Mayo Clinic Science Blog a while ago to follow their team of scientists climb Mount Everest in order to study the human body in extreme conditions as well as heart conditions.

from the National Geographic website

Awesome right?

from the Mayo Clinic Science Blog

They're back now but you can still flip through the pictures and see the blog posts about the climb. Safely at home. With the heater turned on. And a bowl of ice-cream.

I have no clue HOW to re-post a Flickr slideshow, but here's the page it's on. It's really cool and I'd hate to have to pay the baggage fee for all those heavy suitcases they had to bring!

From the Nation Geographic Website

Cool Links:

• Wall Street Journal's article about the study, What Everest Teaches About Disease, as well as a video
• Dr. Bruce Johnson's post about "The Why of Researching on Everest"
• StarTribune's article, Mayo Clinic Team to explore body's limits in lab on Mount Everest
• Blog post from Dr. Amine Issa on the purpose of the expedition
• National Geographic's section on the Mount Everest expedition. 

Did you ever wonder what the Titanic looks like...now?

The Magazine Cover of April's issue of National Geographic, which  features the Titanic

I'll confess...I saw the James Cameron movie three times while it was in the theaters. I was in middle school and my girlfriends and I loved it. 


This doesn't have anything to do with the movie per se, but the actual shipwreck. Although the movie is being re-released in 3-D to celebrate (? do you celebrate that? Maybe it's more to mark the occasion) of the centenary (like that word? thanks Wikipedia!) of the sinking of the Titanic, which happened in 1912. 


National Geographic (which I'm addicted to btw...) decided to join a scientific group and they went back to the crash site and took pictures of the entire ship. There's been a television special and a really wonderful article on National Geographic's website about the ship, why it went down and the controversy that surrounded RMS Titanic, Inc. which is the legal guardian of the wreck. They're the ones putting on the Titanic artifact exhibit that is touring the country. 


Anyway, I'll keep this short (short for me at least). What's new on this exploration of the Titanic is that the group took numerous sonar images of the three by five mile shipwreck area. The images were pieced together and to create high-def pictures of the ship as a whole. 

Titanic's stern from overhead

James Cameron explains in the article why these pictures are so interesting (because they're so clarifying): 

"For more than two miles, the stern made its tortured descent—rupturing, buckling, warping, compressing, and gradually disintegrating. By the time it hit the ocean floor, it was unrecognizable... “We didn’t want the Titanic to have broken up like this,” he [Cameron] said. “We wanted her to have gone down in some kind of ghostly perfection.” -From the National Geographic Article

Titanic profile

Titanic's bow

All photos are from MSNBC's photoblog. From the article called National Geographic features new images from the unseen Titanic (3/30/2012)

Related articles

• Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Releases Stunning 3D Images of the Titanic [Photos] (bostinno.com)
• The National Geographic Article, called Unseen Titanic is written by Hampton Sides, and it's really good. You should check it out...plus it has tons of pictures!
• MSNBC Photoblog article with large pictures of the Titanic
• If you want more information about how the Titanic sank then MSNBC's Science section sums it up fairly well
• Old Pictures of the Titanic before it sank and the survivors from LiveScience
• The RMS Titanic, Inc. website, which has ridiculous amounts of interesting facts and pictures, as well as the tour dates for the exhibition
• Here's the Wikipedia article on the Titanic (the movie)