Meyer-Kaiser lab

"I'm not standing still; I am lying in wait" - "Wait for it" from the musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda Sometimes, I wonder what my dog thinks I do all day. From his perspective, I seem to be sitting still. I am constantly in this one office chair, staring at the same brightly-lit screen in front of me, often tapping on the keys. To him, this activity seems monotonous and unproductive. But I'm not just sitting still. I am lying in wait.  The SS United States was supposed to sink last November. Then it was February, then April, and now, we don't even have an estimated timeline. I thought I was going to go straight from vacation to the field last fall, but instead, I have been on standby for months.  The extra time has afforded me the chance to build my plan . Idle scientists tend to dream, and I have dreamt big. While waiting for SS United States to sink, I have connected with collaborators about a potential citizen science project, sparked an id...

Graves Light I put together my rebreather in the den. Every piece was there, just as I had packed it after  Bonaire . I sat on the floor, pulled each part of my beloved X-CCR gingerly from its padded box, and built the unit piece by piece. I blew into the loop, and the unit held positive pressure. I sucked air out, and it held negative pressure. The seals were holding. My unit was complete. All systems go.  I turned on the dive computer that was hard-wired into my rebreather. The display lit up. In the upper right, the computer displayed my surface interval: 183 days.  Ouch.  I knew it had been several months since I was in the water, but somehow, seeing the number of days - in the hundreds - made it seem even longer. It was definitely time for me to travel beneath the waves again.  I drove to Boston in the early morning, loaded my gear on a charter boat, and headed out to Graves Light. The lighthouse, situated at the entrance to Boston Harbor, was surrounded by...

My dog, Kraken, is incredibly good at recognizing patterns . Within minutes of waking up, he knows whether it's a workday or a weekend, just based on how my husband and I behave. If it's a weekend, and I put on shoes and a jacket just after lunch, Kraken knows it's walk time. If it's a weekday, I'm out of town, and Carl puts on a dress shirt, Kraken knows he's going to spend the day with his Aunt Maria. Dress shirts are a bit of a signal for Kraken to misbehave, because he knows Carl is in a hurry and that means Kraken can incite a game of Chase. This dog excels at pattern recognition - for better or for worse.  Every once in a while, Kraken will wake up to see two restful humans - that means it's a weekend. But then sometime in mid-morning, Carl will start cooking, and Kraken's internal pattern-recognition algorithm will tell him that the day is about to get awesome. Weekend + early-start cooking add up to: it's a party day! Carl (USA), Ajito (Ethio...