"None of it is important or all of it is": Steinbeck, Ricketts, Ecology, and Identity

Interdisciplinarity emerges as a strong theme from the Log from the Sea of Cortez, based on the shared experience of Steinbeck and Ricketts and their influence on one another’s thinking and writing. This article reflects on this and several other emerging lines of inquiry, based on personal experiences as a contemporary marine scientist. It discusses the role and importance of science outreach, in particular about the role of popularizers in connecting with audiences from diverse backgrounds and education levels. These concepts are explored in relation to an interdisciplinary reading group held as part of the Steinbeck Festival in Northern Ireland, designed to build common language and discourse between the arts and science, within which to understand the marine environment and our place within it. Issues of identity are explored, systems of classification, and ways of understanding complex systems: environmental, ecological, or personal as related to the sense of self. All these themes are explored in the Log to varying degrees and work in a complementary way. Technology and development are important and inextricably linked, from communications to methods of interrogation for the environment. As the technology improves, our ability to understand the environment changes but “common” resources are then subject to market demands. This article contrasts the speed and efficacy of contemporary marine science with the contemplative Darwinian pace of the Western Flyer that is presented in the Log, and suggest that there is value in both approaches. The industrial scale and pace of modern scientific expeditions can present obstacles to the intimacy of experience within the environment, and there is much value to the bucket and spade approaches to build this rapport and affinity with the subject. This has an inherent value of its own and is worth conserving. The article concludes that for interdisciplinarity to succeed it is relationships between individuals that really gets things done, developing common language and mutual appreciation, spirit of cooperation and the value of a shared endeavor

Automatic Construction of Acoustic Themes for Benthic Habitat Mapping at Stanton Banks, UK

In recent years, many attempts have been made to develop automatic methods for segmentation of hydroacoustic remote sensing data acquired by multibeam echosounders (MBES) in order to generate quantitative estimates of the spatial distribution of seafloor relief, bottom type and composition. The majority of the segmentation methods presented so far have been based on image processing techniques, which assume implicitly the existence of an image. This limits their ability to unambiguously discriminate seafloor properties, as the primary observation of an MBES is not backscatter imagery or mosaics, but rather backscatter angular response. Mosaics are only projections of the original observations, with resulting loss of information. The method we are developing is fully automatic and attempts to segment the acoustic remote sensing data simultaneously in the image-textural space and in the angular-response space. The output of this automatic procedure is a thematic map, where the individual themes have boundaries defined at the mosaic image resolution, but still have sufficient angular coverage to allow for seafloor characterization. Angular Range Analysis (ARA) inversion is then applied to the average angular response of individual themes, generating estimates of the acoustic impedance, acoustic roughness and mean grain size of the seafloor within the theme. The technique described above is applied to a Simrad EM1002 95kHz MBES dataset acquired from a study area covering an offshore reef at Stanton Banks, UK. The results are compared to still-images, grab samples and previous habitat maps existent in the area, to asses the ability of the acoustic theme segmentation to discriminate benthic habitats

Two Amino Acid Residues Contribute to a Cation-π Binding Interaction in the Binding Site of an Insect GABA Receptor

Cys-loop receptor binding sites characteristically possess an "aromatic box," where several aromatic amino acid residues surround the bound ligand. A cation-π interaction between one of these residues and the natural agonist is common, although the residue type and location are not conserved. Even in the closely related vertebrate GABA_A and GABA_C receptors, residues in distinct locations perform this role: in GABA_A receptors, a Tyr residue in loop A forms a cation-π interaction with GABA, while in GABA_C receptors it is a loop B residue. GABA-activated Cys-loop receptors also exist in invertebrates, where they have distinct pharmacologies and are the target of a range of pesticides. Here we examine the location of GABA in an insect binding site by incorporating a series of fluorinated Phe derivatives into the receptor binding pocket using unnatural amino acid mutagenesis, and evaluating the resulting receptors when expressed in Xenopus oocytes. A homology model suggests that two aromatic residues (in loops B and C) are positioned such that they could contribute to a cation-π interaction with the primary ammonium of GABA, and the data reveal a clear correlation between the GABA EC_(50) and the cation-π binding ability both at Phe206 (loop B) and Tyr254 (loop C), demonstrating for the first time the contribution of two aromatic residues to a cation-π interaction in a Cys-loop receptor

Exploiting ground-based optical sensing technologies for volcanic gas surveillance

Measurements of volcanic gas composition and flux are crucial to probing and understanding a range of magmatic, hydrothermal and atmospheric interactions. The value of optical remote sensing methods has been recognised in this field for more than thirty years but several recent developments promise a new era of volcanic gas surveillance. This could see much higher time- and space-resolved data-sets, sustained at individual volcanoes even during eruptive episodes. We provide here an overview of these optical methods and their application to ground-based volcano monitoring, covering passive and active measurements in the ultraviolet and infrared spectral regions. We hope thereby to promote the use of such devices, and to stimulate development of new optical techniques for volcanological research and monitoring

Optical excitation and external photoluminescence quantum efficiency of Eu3+ in GaN

We investigate photoluminescence of Eu-related emission in a GaN host consisting of thin layers grown by organometallic vapor-phase epitaxy. By comparing it with a reference sample of Eu-doped Y2O3, we find that the fraction of Eu3+ ions that can emit light upon optical excitation is of the order of 1%. We also measure the quantum yield of the Eu-related photoluminescence and find this to reach (similar to 10%) and (similar to 3%) under continuous wave and pulsed excitation, respectively.Stichting voor de Technologische Wetenschappen (STW); Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [19GS1209, 24226009]; Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japaninfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Low-cost 3D printed 1 nm resolution smartphone sensor-based spectrometer: instrument design and application in ultraviolet spectroscopy.

We report on the development of a low-cost spectrometer, based on off-the-shelf optical components, a 3D printed housing, and a modified Raspberry Pi camera module. With a bandwidth and spectral resolution of ≈60  nm and 1 nm, respectively, this device was designed for ultraviolet (UV) remote sensing of atmospheric sulphur dioxide (SO2), ≈310  nm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of both a UV spectrometer and a nanometer resolution spectrometer based on smartphone sensor technology. The device performance was assessed and validated by measuring column amounts of SO2 within quartz cells with a differential optical absorption spectroscopy processing routine. This system could easily be reconfigured to cover other UV-visible-near-infrared spectral regions, as well as alternate spectral ranges and/or linewidths. Hence, our intention is also to highlight how this framework could be applied to build bespoke, low-cost, spectrometers for a range of scientific applications

Reply to Kern, C. The Difficulty of Measuring the Absorption of Scattered Sunlight by H2O and CO2 in Volcanic Plumes: A Comment on Pering, et al. "A Novel and Inexpensive Method for Measuring Volcanic Plume Water Fluxes at High Temporal Resolution", Remote Sens. 2017, 9, 146

We would like to thank our colleague, Christoph Kern, for his comment [1] on our recent paper [2], which provides a valuable adjunct to that published piece [...