TRANSIT OF VENUS EXPLAINED

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ANNA ATKINS' OCEAN FLOWERS

These beautiful cyanotypes of marine algae, or seaweed, are remarkable for two reasons. They're from the first book ever produced entirely by photographic means. And they're the first photographic works ever made by a woman. 

British botanist and photographer, Anna Atkins' (1799-1871), created Photographs of British Algae—a landmark in photography and publishing—in 12 parts between 1843 and 1853. These come to us now thanks to the New York Public Library, owner of the most complete of only 13 known copies of Atkins' book, scanned and posted online in their Digital Gallery:

"The difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects as minute as many of the Algae and Confera, has induced me to avail myself of Sir John Herschel's beautiful process of Cyanotype, to obtain impressions of the plants themselves," explained Anna Atkins in October 1843.

Through her father, scientist John George Children (1777-1852) whose Royal Society circle included William Herschel and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), Atkins was aware of the group's experiments with photography. Talbot's "photogenic drawing" technique involved placing a flat object against a light-sensitized sheet of paper (sometimes pressed beneath a sheet of glass to prevent movement and ensure a sharp image) and exposing it to sunlight until the area around the object began to darken. Herschel devised a chemical method to halt the darkening and "fix" Talbot's silver-salt image—the basis for all photography until the digital era.

Hershel experimented with other light-sensitive metal compounds in addition to silver, and in 1842 discovered that colorless, water-soluble iron salts, when exposed to sunlight, form the compound known as Prussian Blue; unexposed areas remain unaffected and the salt rinses away in plain water, leaving a blue 'negative' image.

Atkins used Talbot's "photogenic drawing" method, arranging her specimens on sheets of glass for easier handling for repeat exposures, and adopted Herschel's blueprinting process, to generate the multiple copies of specimen plates comprising Photographs of British Algae.

I've posted only a handful of the 200-plus images Anna Atkins produced. You can browse the NYPL site to see them all.

Anna Atkins at 62 years of age in 1861.

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A WAVE OF SCIENCE—BUT WHERE'S ADA?

The seventh and latest installment in John Boswell's Symphony of Science. Great, as usual. Though surely he will manage to come up few more women thinkers next time? Twenty-first century, and all that.

(Ada Lovelace, first ever computer programmer.)

The entrenched refusal to acknowledge the many women, past and present, at the forefront of science led in 2009 to the declaration of March 24th as Ada Lovelace Day—an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. Lovelace is today recognized as the world's first computer programmer. From Finding Ada:

Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

From Rebecca Thomson at New Scientist's Culture Lab:

Today it's fairly well accepted that women are under-represented in both science and technology fields: for example just one in five of the UK's technology workforce are female.

But the negative nature of the debate, and the complaints raised within it, mean the considerable achievements of women who do work in the industry can slip under the radar. A recent piece by gadget magazine T3 neatly highlighted important contributions to the field made by women largely forgotten.

It included Mary Lou Jepsen, whose work on holographic video systems at the MIT Media Lab and in optics resulted in important developments in the fields.

One of her biggest achievements was her part in the One Laptop Per Child project, which delivered laptops to 1.5 million of the world's poorest children. She helped get the project off the ground by inventing display technology that is readable in sunlight, and working on the power system that made the laptops energy efficient.

Then there's this sadly enlightening piece in last week's The Observer: The Royal Society's Lost Women Scientists.

So how about a Wave of Ada segment to your next movement of the symphony, John Boswell?

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF PLANKTON RESEARCH

I write fairly extensively about phytoplankton in DEEP BLUE HOME. I feel indebted to them for the multiple ecological services they perform, helping to make and keep Earth habitable... helping to make Earth lovely when seen from afar... potentially informing distant intelligences that there is life on this planet.

The ethereal image of a spring phytoplankton bloom off New Zealand was posted by NASA'S Earth Observatory back in October 2009:

"Cold rivers of water that have branched off from the Antarctic Circumpolar Current flow north past the South Island and converge with warmer waters flowing south past the North Island. The surface waters of this meeting place are New Zealand's most biologically productive. This image of the area on October 25, 2009, from the MODIS sensor on NASA’s Aqua satellite shows the basis for that productivity: large blooms of plantlike organisms called phytoplankton."

We've come a long way since this 1927 plankton article (below, click for larger view) "Remarks on the need for life history studies of marine plankton animals," by W.E. Allen at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography:

W.E. Allen: "In the matter of food relationships alone, it is apparent that every plankton animal is important, and if we are to properly understand marine life, the degree and manner of its influence needs to be traced."

Four years after Allen's call to scientific arms, the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) was launched, using plankton tows attached to merchant ships and ships of opportunity crossing the North Atlantic and the North Sea. In the years since, nearly 300 vessels have been involved in collecting these data, including Greepeace ships, research vessels, passenger ferries, and cargo ships.

The CPR has provided nearly 80 years of data, among the longest running of biological monitoring programs, painting an evolving picture of the spatiotemporal dynamics of plankton. Today the survey is based at the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science in Plymouth, UK. Here's a map of their network of monitoring routes:

The CPR helps us understand complex issues including climate change, biodiversity, biological invasions, dead zones, fisheries, and regime shifts. 

What's a regime shift? Terry Hughes from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies explains:






For an excellent overview of the history and results from more than 900 scientific papers published with CPR plankton-tow data, download the pdf of "The Continuous Plankton Recorder: Concepts and history, from Plankton Indicator to undulating recorders," published in Progress in Oceanography in 2003. It details the evolving scientific lineage of people, technologies, and thought that has steered the interface between marine biology and oceanography in the 20th century. 

Other continuous plankton recorders are now up in running, including one in the Southern Ocean, not far from the curlicue blooms seen in the satellite image off New Zealand.
 

Diatoms (phytoplankton) through the microscope by Gordon T. Taylor, Stony Brook University, for NOAA

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GORGEOUS FEATHERS

Here's one uplifting image of a lovely slideshow compiled from the BirdGuides Photos of the Year 2009 competition and showing on the BBC website. The other image are equally breathtaking.

I wrote fairly extensively about puffins in Deep Blue Home. One of my favorite passages is a memorable excerpt from the legendary ornithologist Arthur Cleveland Bent, circa 1919:

"I have often seen [puffins] emerge from a wave, fly across the trough and enter the next wave without apparent change in their method of propulsion. Again I have seen them come out of the water flying, only to plunge down into the water and continue the flight below the surface. On the surface they paddle along skillfully like little apoplectic short necked ducks and their small orange red legs are plainly visible."

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