Aquascaping

When it comes to aquariums, I never got much beyond the round goldfish bowl to hold little Goldie that I won at the school fair. This was usually followed by the water becoming murky, and ultimately the flushing of poor little Goldie. I guess if you're spending $20K on a professionally aquascaped setup, though, you might not be flushing Goldie so quickly.

Aquascaping "is a wonderful approach because it creates a balanced system," Wood said. "On the one hand, it's extremely sophisticated, in that it closely replicates a natural ecosystem - on the other, you don't need a lot of chemicals, nutrients or other extraneous stuff. The components are basically simple - rocks, driftwood, plants and a few species of fish, most of which are relatively inexpensive."

Some of the tanks are as large as 160 gallons, and seem to provide a portal into a tropical river or lake. Rocks and driftwood are arranged to create grottoes, interspersed with light-dappled open areas. Various mosses, grasses and stemmed plants grow at different levels, contributing further to the illusion of depth. The painstaking placement of the tank's rocks, wood and plants essentially creates a rich array of microhabitats, each attracting different species of fish and crustaceans.

Apparently Crystal Bee Shrimp are a big attraction.

The shrimp are also a source of obsession for some breeders and collectors. To the untrained eye, they all look like multicolored crustaceans. But, as with koi, the patterns mean everything, Steven Lo said. "Some are only a few dollars each, some go up to $1,000," Lo said. "It all depends on color variation."

The plants are as important as the fish in an Aqua Forest tank, and the brothers sell roughly 300 varieties of vegetation. The "forest," in fact, must be grown to maturity in a tank before fish and shrimp are stocked - a process that requires from four to six weeks of meticulous planting, fertilizing and pruning. Continuing vegetation care is also requisite.

I suppose if you can afford one of these things, you can also afford to have someone maintain it.

Dr. Megavolt

Here's a pretty cool video about "Dr. Megavolt", a local physicist romping around a Tesla coil, being zapped with 200,000 volts while inside of a metal suit. Apparently he does this at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Go ahead, you can say it... shocking!

Virtual Bessie

In keeping with the Harris blog eclectic content, I knew you'd want to stay abreast of the latest in veterinary technology, the haptic cow.

“With this technology, students can feel something that feels like the inside of a real cow, but I or another instructor can be following their movements on a monitor,” said Baillie, who teaches at the Royal Veterinary College in London. “This means we can say, ‘Come back a bit or go left a bit.’ It actually means you can direct them.”

Not only can professors follow a student’s exact movements and critique the technique, but they can also keep track of how much force is being applied. If a fledgling vet gets too rough and exceeds the number of Newtons considered safe by experienced vets, virtual Bessie will belt out a cautionary “Moo-oo!”

One of my favorite parts of All Creatures Great And Small was the story of the farmer brothers having to rotate the cow while the vet held on to the calf inside, so as to untwist the uterus. Not sure if this is one of the options on virtual Bessie, but perhaps there is an iPhone app coming up for it.

Maybe Keith will eventually be able to pursue his cow raising ambitions. Good to know this kind of emerging technology will be there.

Extreme Sailing

Courtesy of Hal comes this video from a San Diego TV station covering the failure of the carbon fiber mast on the Oracle trimaran during America's Cup training.

Aside from the $10M price tag on the mast, the video footage of this monster is pretty amazing.

Aviation Innovation

Via the Onion, United Airlines is evaluating new seating approaches.

In its ongoing effort to cut transportation costs and boost profits, United Airlines announced Tuesday that it was exploring the feasibility of herding them into planes and stacking them like cordwood from floor to ceiling.

United officials said they conducted a test run in September during which they sent a flight from San Francisco to Denver and really jammed them all in there as hard as they could. Analysts found that 98 percent of them arrived safely at the correct destination, and of those who were lost or damaged, nearly all were eventually located.

I am pretty sure I was on that flight.