Poseidon Sciences :: A Life Science Company Discovering Novel Technologies From The Sea


These ScienceBlog entries, written by our Chief Science Officer, Jonathan R. Matias, are listed below for your reading pleasure. These light-hearted essays chronicles many of our current and past projects of interest to the Group. We hope you enjoy these essays.

Mt. Colden on a misty morning. A wonderful photograph by Ian Plant.

www.ianplant.com

Cross-section of the skin showing the sebaceous gland and hair.

Photograph on top show the iron bacteria, Gallionella sp.Photo below shows the sulfate degrading bacteria, Desulfovibrio sp.

www.flickr.com/photos/emsl/4252317488


: Mountain Lily growing on top of a rock, 1980, artist: JR Matias

Barnacles attached on the surface of a scallop shell

The aging process and the '7-year Itch.' Reflections on senescence from the summit of Mt. Colden
By poseidonsciences, on August 14t^h, 2010


The science of aging paints a picture of a progressive, predictable decline of biological function. One topic that always came up during the traditional Tuesday morning science conference at the Orentreich Foundation was the question of whether we age, like all the graphs typically showed, in a mostly sigmoidal S-shaped mode. But hardly anything even in my own life I can consider linear or sigmoidal. Can we instead age in steps rather than a slope of a curve? For some inexplicable reason, this question followed me long after I have gone on to other things and I want to revisit that issue one more time.

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The biology of being oily. Something old and something new
By poseidonsciences, on July 31^st, 2010

I think our skin oils have a higher purpose and that is to give our uniquely individual scent. In non-mammalian primates, such as gerbils, rats and mice for example, sebaceous gland secretions are the means of communicating individual identification and sexual attraction. Most likely early humans identify each other by their scent. Perhaps, the sense of smell was more heightened as a means of communication before language was invented. It still persists in our modern world only in some aboriginal cultures. In the Desana tribe of the Amazon and the Batek Negrito of the Malay Peninsula, tribal membership is based on similarity of body odor and marriage is allowed only to a person from another tribal group with a different odor. The Ongee of Andaman Islands, the Bororo of Brazil and the Serer Ndut of Senegal all recognize personal identity by the individual’s smell.

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This Fracking problem: Chasing the solution to this controversial mining issue
By poseidonsciences, on July 23^rd, 2010

Yesterday, there was a well attended public hearing in Pennsylvania sponsored by the EPA on the use of fracking to release natural gas from shale deposits underneath the earth’s surface. It was a heated “debate.” One side arguing how dangerous it is to their local environment while the industry is saying that it has been proven safe for decades. July 22 was certainly a one ‘fracking’ day for everyone there. It is also uncanny that it was the same day we announced a new project to develop an alternative idea to reduce the environmental impact of fracking.

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Of mice and men: The ecological disasters - Deepwater Horizon and the Dust Bowl
By poseidonsciences, on July 9^th, 2010

The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy
(from the Scots poem by Robert Burns, 1785)

Even as I was writing an article early this year for Asia Pacific Coatings Journal on our subsea testing of marine coatings, oil spill was farthest from my mind. Ironically, I wrote my concern about the Deepwater Horizon, not of any potential for an oil spill disaster of this magnitude, but on corrosion damage that may arise over the years from fouling by living things in the deep that attach to the pipelines. The article went into print soon after the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) disaster. Now, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion yanked America back to a new reality, debunking the myth of the super safe oil platforms.

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Tara Oceans: A scientific odyssey in the tradition of HMS Beagle
By poseidonsciences, on June 29^th, 2010

The expeditions of HMS Beagle (1831-36) and Tara Oceans (2009-12). Charles Darwin and Capt Robert Fitzroy. His Majesty’s Ship Beagle is among the most celebrated of all British warships, commissioned in 1820 as a Cherokee Class, 10-gun brig-sloop. I always thought that it was odd to name a ship after a dog, unless of course there . . .

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The Agony and the Ecstasy: Why science writing is like learning tango and Chinese brush painting
By poseidonsciences, on June 27^th, 2010 This is an odd title and I am stuck with it. Worse, I am compelled to explain why this is so. Today, I am at a loss what to choose for my next blog entry and trying to find motivation to write about scientific topics of interest to me – malaria, repellents, arsenic poisoning, the oil spill . . .
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Charles Darwin’s other passion: rediscovering the origins of barnacle research
By poseidonsciences, on June 20^th, 2010

This blog entry has its origins from a company newsletter I wrote in 2009 for scientists working on marine coatings. Darlene Brezinski, the editor of Paint & Coatings Industry magazine, liked the topic so much and asked me to take excerpts from that newsletter into the article that . . .

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Rip Van Winkle, Hibernating Fish and Malaria Control
By poseidonsciences, on June 19^th, 2010

When I think of hibernation, my first thought is my high school English literature class on Washington Irving’s tale of a Dutch settler named Rip Van Winkle. The story’s setting is New York’s Catskills Mountains during the American Revolutionary period. In this tale, Rip Van Winkle was a fun-loving, . . .

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