Whales, seals, and other marine mammals seem to do alright in the chill waters of the arctic seas, so the US Navy is developing a type of "artificial blubber" to allow divers to work in freezing conditions for hours on end. Sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the collaboration between MIT and George Mason University uses an off-the-shelf wetsuit permeated with inert gases to triple a diver's resistance against the threat of hypothermia.
[...] The modification involves replacing the air trapped in the neoprene foam that provides heat insulation with heavy, inert gases, such as xenon and krypton, which make the neoprene act like fat-concentrating blubber. This is done by putting an ordinary neoprene suit into a bespoke pressure tank the size of a beer keg and pumping in the inert gases. After several hours, the gas permeates the suit, forcing the air out.
According to ONR, this makes the suit effective at 10° (50° C)[sic see note] for hours instead of minutes. The treatment isn't permanent as the gases leak out over 20 hours, but the team points out that this is much longer than the time divers spend in the water.
Why not recruit divers with more blubber?
[Note: This conversion error appeared in the original story; it should have read: 10°C (50° F). Story updated 20180907_011649 UTC --martyb]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 07 2018, @12:07AM (7 children)
10° F ≠ 50° C
10° F = about -12 ° C
The error is found in TFA, it's not an error in TFS.
A paragraph or so before the error, they manage to get things correct:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 07 2018, @12:32AM (5 children)
To me, this looks like a prime example of how universities get funding from the government.
Kinda like the religious priests chant out a few phrases in Latin so as to keep the flock putting money in the little plates they pass around.
Say something sciency to justify another round of funds.
(Score: 2) by qzm on Friday September 07 2018, @12:38AM (4 children)
In what way would a heavy gas provide ANY better insulation than a light one?
The only way that springs to mind is perhaps water pressure slowly pushed all the gas out, collapsing the internal voids and thus reducing insulation.
Heavy gasses may migrate out slower.
Other than that, the heavy gas should actually result in LOWER insulation.
The 'solution' would seem to be using a better sealing compound which leaves down more slowly, rather than recharging a leaky compound.
But it all smells much more like a grab for public military funding based on dubious advantages.
I am sure someone will make a packet from selling their recharge pressure tanks for $500k a piece for no real advantage.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 07 2018, @01:24AM
All I know is when I pass gas my pants get really warm. I've never weighed it, so I don't know if it's a heavy gas or just a nasty one. Either way it's warm.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 07 2018, @04:30AM (1 child)
The heavier gas requires more effort to remove energy from I believe is their line of thinking.
But if that's the case why use neoprene at all? Why not have a two layer system with say an 1/8th of an inch to a 1/2 inch of pure vacuum?
Cold would be unable to penetrate due to lack of anything to convect with.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Friday September 07 2018, @11:22AM
Ever seen a flexible vacuum flask? I haven't either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 07 2018, @05:09AM
I was wondering that, too... all I can figure out is that this is just the song-and-dance ritual that universities go through to get funded these days. Speak a little scienceytalk to justify a grant. It does not have to make sense. Its just fillertalk to put in the blank. The government has already made up their mind they are going to issue grants - they just need a justification for the sake of needing one. Any justification will do.
Next up, a grant to study gravitational effects on falling bricks.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday September 07 2018, @01:24AM
Yes, as you correctly surmised, the error appeared in the original story and it was copied over verbatim. I have updated the story here by adding a [sic] and a note to explain what should have appeared. Namely, that 10C ~ 50F! (50C is more like 122F!!)
Thank-you for pointing it out.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday September 07 2018, @12:09AM (6 children)
Because natural human blubber doesn't act as insulation, due to the fact that blood circulates through it all the way to the outer surface (the skin). That's why obese people aren't in a constant state of overheating.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 07 2018, @12:38AM (1 child)
Plus, when the diver gets out of the water, being able to take the blubber off is a good thing.
As an obese person, I'm certainly trying to take my blubber off. It was a lot more fun putting it on. At least I'm carrying my
blubberemergency food supplies with me wherever I go, just in case.(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 07 2018, @05:22AM
Depending on how catastrophic it is, you may actually be carrying around someone else's emergency food supplies with you wherever you go.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday September 07 2018, @01:03AM
The point was probably about sandwiching the skilled diver between two unskilled cheap obese people to allow him to work longer.
Or make a fat suit out of fat people, like and uglier Buffalo Bill, I don't know.
Whichever is the easiest when you only have a $700B budget.
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Friday September 07 2018, @02:40AM (2 children)
There aren't that many Intuit (Eskimos) who want to become Navy divers. By the same token they could just use 'average' US/European who has become morbidly obese, but getting them in a wet suit is too difficult without a pound of butter and a gallon of vegetable oil. Not to mention that your average fatty is far too buoyant to be a diver. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit [wikipedia.org]
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 07 2018, @07:53AM
Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 07 2018, @10:24PM
Weight belt. Put enough lead on his belt, he's going straight down, no matter how fat he might be. He could even be the first person to get the bends on the way down!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 07 2018, @12:36AM (11 children)
Third time in two days I've seen this word used in completely different contexts. I'm 40 and hadn't seen it before, so looked it up on wikipedia.
Sorry for OT, but Wierd
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 07 2018, @02:16AM (7 children)
A Britishism for "custom".
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday September 07 2018, @11:25AM
I have seen it lots when advertising for software contractors. It means "custom" but has connotations of "posh", "not-just-churning-out-another-crappy-database", etc.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 07 2018, @01:43PM (5 children)
It's a dog whistle for journalists who spent a semester abroad in England. It used to be French terms, because that's what the previous generation of journalists thought made you interesting, cool, and worldly. Apparently now it's the British Isles.
As a Freemason myself I'm sensitized to signals like these that are hiding in plain sight. Masons do it all the time. There are Masonic symbols on the dollar bill; the street plan of Washington DC was laid out with Masonic symbolism; and there are all kinds of phrases Masons can drop into casual conversation to signal other Masons, which non-Masons wouldn't pick up on. In fact when I visited Savannah, Georgia for the first time and walked around the town I thought there was something mighty familiar about the street plan; sure enough, the guy who designed it was a Mason and he scaled all the little parks the town is known for on the dimensions of a Masonic lodge.
Another common set of signals you can listen for are those Jews insert into news stories or screenplays they write. They use constructions that are based on Yiddish. For example, where a person from Iowa, say, would ask, "Why are you crying?" the Jewish journalist or playwright would say, instead, "What's with the crying?" That construction has become very common to hear in the media and entertainment because so many Jews work in the media and entertainment industries in America and use it universally, but it's not standard English. Watch programs written in Britain, and you won't hear it. In short, it's hiding a message in plain sight.
More subtly, people signal their level of education in the idioms they use and the references they make. Somebody who refers to their "categorical imperative" is signaling they read Kant, and the Great Books, and are therefore college-educated or higher.
And so on.
It's a fun exercise to train your ear and eye for the many overlays of hidden messages and symbols all around us, to all the layers of communication which far outnumber that which is actually said or shown.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Friday September 07 2018, @06:26PM (4 children)
You sound prone to conspiracy theories. Certainly dog whistles exist, but your examples likely don't qualify. Accents aren't dog whistles. You wouldn't call it that if someone from the Midwest said pop instead of soda. With three data points I think I can confidently predict that your choice of examples is dog whistling though.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 07 2018, @10:46PM (3 children)
Do tell. I can guess, but how's about not leaving us in suspense?
Perhaps you prefer innuendo, because you haven't offered any evidence to the contrary. Has the relative incidence of "bespoke" been constant in American prose over the last 40 years? The Parent had never heard of it before, and neither had i before six years ago despite having been a fan of British entertainment (Dr. Who, Monty Python, etc) for many years and having devoured popular fiction of all kinds from British authors for many years.
Do American journalists salt their composition with French terms at the same density they did during the Cold War?
Does the prevalence of Yiddish structures in dialogue in American entertainment not obtain?
You see, i can insinuate dark intent behind your post, too. Have we enriched the conversation, or impoverished it?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Saturday September 08 2018, @12:25AM (2 children)
I never said any of that isn't true. Dog whistle as a term has the connotation of ill intent by the group. I think someone saying pop, bubbler or y'all are equally telling of a person's story. You picked equally harmless points about the alt rights favorite targets and called it dog whistles.
I think we all need to do better than yelling racist or communist at each other all the time. So I didn't, but you protested a little too much and now I'm forced to think it wasn't an accident that you would want to reconsider in the future.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday September 08 2018, @01:37AM (1 child)
No, see, you can't cast aspersion and then claim you didn't. It's dishonest, and doesn't constitute the clever rhetorical trap you suppose it does.
"Dog whistle" might have strictly negative connotations for you, but its valence is neutral. That is how I used it. A dog whistle is a device everyone can see you blow, but which only other dogs will hear. You use it to signal identity or a reference that only the cognoscenti will recognize.
I used several classes of folks who use dog whistles, and identified as one of them. If freemasons are a favorite target of alt right groups then how does it make sense to you that i would say, "i am a freemason, so..." and then proceed to target myself?
The parent cited the use of "bespoke" in an article, so journalists were his mention; thus they served as the segue for my examples.
But i suspect none of that is what triggered your inference. I surmise it was the example of Yiddish syntax that Jewish screen writers frequently inject into movies, TV shows, and other such material to signal their presence to other Jews. Now, i used the example because there are a great many TV shows and movies produced in America any of us can check out and test the theory i was expounding. Also, for native speakers of English, English words placed in a Yiddish/Germanic word order are quite noticeable. They leap out at you.
Now, if, say, the American entertainment industry was replete with South Asians who wrote the South Asian head bobble that indicates assent into every scene, then i would have chosen something like that as an example to say, "see? That story set in kansas, with blond haired blue eyed kansans? They're bobbing their heads side to side in South Asian fashion to mean yes, instead of nodding American style. That's a dog whistle from south asian writers to other south asians in the audience."
But, you know, they're not. Neither are screen writers in Hollywood predominantly Mexicans who write "pendejo" into the mouths of WASP Wall Street bankers, or southerners who put "y'all" into the mouths of prim school marms from Connecticut. Such a thing might be out there, but is so rare that I, at least, can't cite any examples.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Sunday September 09 2018, @03:34AM
By your own admission here you ascribe intent. I place the blame fully on lazy writers who live in a bubble and never bothered to learn how different people can be since they never leave their home city. It isn't intent it is just bad writing and an extremely sheltered life. Remember the reporter who scoffed at the idea of even knowing someone who owns a pickup truck when a truck is the most common vehicle in most states? Like that, they have no clue how weird they are because everyone they know is like them. Truthfully in all of these examples except masonic city designs the "in group" wouldn't notice, it is the outsiders who notice. Y'all will never sound out of place to a southerner but is so out of place to the rest of us that it is a principle characteristic in stereotypes of southerners. Half of the humor of the movie Fargo comes from how funny they sound and act to the rest of the country. Bespoke may sound like someone trying to be fancy to you but the first American use I recall is from the show Archer, which tells an entirely different story about the person using it.
For the record you were wrong about the Jewish thing. I am not and not from a place where they are a larger portion of the population. It was Kant and the categorical imperative. I am not a college graduate but I have read Kant and many of the Great Books because I believe in educating myself. I have had a lifetime of being mocked for reading things like that without a teacher cracking the whip. In that time my patience for people being anti intellectual has worn very thin.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 07 2018, @04:41PM (2 children)
You're not the only one. I never heard of this word until a year or so ago. I still don't know what it means, if anything.
I bespoke to the bicycle shop about the broken bespokes in my bespoke bicycle. The mechanic bespoked the bespoked bespokes from the wheel and replaced them with new bespokes.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday September 08 2018, @01:47AM (1 child)
It's an affectation, a wink to others in the "know."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 10 2018, @01:52PM
Dogs lick people to show their infection towards people.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by bmimatt on Friday September 07 2018, @05:12AM (1 child)
Have they heard of these?
They have been around for quite a long time, useful in really cold water for more than 'minutes'.
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Friday September 07 2018, @06:25PM
Scuba diver here (PADI Rescue Diver (1409EW7988)). A dry suit is far less agile during the dive than a wet suit is. Water does leak in from the neck if you move wrongly and/or blow too much or too little air into the suit. With too much air in the suit the air can also go to your feet resulting in you hanging upside down. When an enemy attacks you underwater you really want a wet suit rather than a dry suit. A wet suit dives much more easy. This is also why we, at PADI, won't allow you to dive with a Dry suit unless you had additional Dry suit training.
An untrained diver diving in a dry suit will probably die that dive. Depends on what happens that the diver is not trained for to deal with.
Scuba Pro nowadays has very nice so called neophrene drysuits [scubapro.com], called Everdry 4, that fit very tightly on your body. Those are drysuits that could perhaps be used for agile movements underwater. Sure. But not having to worry at all is probably still a lot better in military context.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Goghit on Friday September 07 2018, @05:13AM (6 children)
So much garbled nonsense in this story it's hard to know where to begin. It reads a bit like stories about that Korean dude's vaporware artificial gill.
Noble gas foamed neoprene has been an idea that's been kicking around for a while. The thing is, any gas space will compress under pressure; at 10 metres it doesn't matter if you foamed with air, straight nitrogen, or argon, the bubbles have collapsed to half their surface size and your wetsuit material is now half as thick as it was on the surface. By the time you get to 40 metres your suit is starting to feel like a bit of parchment. Under these conditions a very thin layer of argon and neoprene is only slightly more effective than a very thin layer of air and neoprene at keeping you warm. I will leave it as an exercise for someone who gives more of a shit than I do what the comparative thermal co-efficients would be between air and argon in a piece of neoprene compressed from 7 to 1.5 mm thickness.
Nobody but amateurs, crazy people, and maybe underfunded grad students use wetsuits for cold water work. Yes, you can work in one, but you will end up freezing your cajones off and hypothermic technicians don't collect good data or make good decisions. Professionals use dry suits. There are dry suits made of of neoprene but those are still subject to the same compression problem described above. You are relying on the thermal underwear and the gas layer you maintain between you and the outer shell of the suit, not the thermal characteristics of the outer shell unless you're very shallow.
Some of the best cold water dry suits are membrane suits. The outer shell is a laminate of (unfoamed) synthetic rubber and fabric, tough as nails but relatively thin and providing very little thermal protection by itself - you need a thermal undersuit and gas between you and the suit shell. They sound cumbersome but they are more flexible and very much warmer to work in than a wetsuit.
This line in particular sets off my bullshit detectors: "According to ONR, this makes the suit effective at 10° (50° C)[sic see note] for hours instead of minutes." 10° is not particularly cold, a conditioned diver can spend all morning in an uncompressed (i.e.: on the surface) wetsuit and even work up a sweat if heavy exercise is involved. "Minutes" is the length of time I last when I push the start of swimming season and enter 10° water in just my swimming trunks.
Maybe this is something for spearfishers in the Mediterranean and the popular press is just doing its usual thing with a science topic. It would interesting to see actual performance data at depth for this material but jeez, kids, the future of Arctic diving is not in wetsuits unless global warming far exceeds Gore et al's worst nightmares.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Friday September 07 2018, @07:11AM (4 children)
Who cares about freezing chest drawers [google.com] while diving? You should worry about your cojones, which is a different thing.
Say balls, nuts or testicles if you can't spell a foreign word.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday September 07 2018, @11:30AM (3 children)
> Say balls, nuts or testicles if you can't spell a foreign word.
It's an interesting question; cojones is a euphemism, but I wonder if there are _degrees_ of euphemism. Balls, nuts, testicles may be too abrupt for the context...
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Friday September 07 2018, @02:55PM
I thought "freezing your balls off" was a corruption of "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey" - a totally innocent nautical phrase referring to the effect of differential thermal contraction on the brass racks used to store iron cannonballs on old warships. What else could it mean? (see also: "cockup").
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Friday September 07 2018, @03:36PM
I was making fun of GP, he wrote "cajones" not "cojones", both being Spanish words with very different meanings.
😁
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 07 2018, @05:23PM
I would say that it is obvious that there ARE degrees of euphemism.
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Friday September 07 2018, @06:43PM
PADI Rescue Diver (1409EW7988) here.
An example of such a neophrene drysuites can be found here [scubapro.com]. Noting that the neophrene (or whatever skin is used for the drysuit) is mostly protection against sharp objects (less dangerous) and angry fish protecting their eggs (some of them far more dangerous), and the possibility of a tight fit around your body while it's still a drysuit.
For warmth, as you point out, the air between your body and the drysuit is probably much more important. With a tight-fit neophrene drysuit, wearing a lot under the drysuit is of course difficult (it's a tight fit around your body). The fact that you can't easily wear a lot of (normal) clothes in a neophrene drysuit is why not all drysuit divers like it. It's not comfortable and can even be dangerous (not enough blood going through your vains will BTW make your body cold, too).
You can blow in more air if 40m deep the existing air gets compressed. You'll waste air from the scuba tank doing so a lot, though. So most divers try to not change too much to the air in their drysuit once the dive started. When they come back to the surface, they usually let a bit of air out of the drysuit (~ continuously while going up). Because air that has a certain volume at 40m deep will have a much later volume at 5m deep. Meaning you'd start going to the surface faster and faster (you might even fly a bit out of the water, as a blown up balloon). Going so fast from 40m to surface will probably also kill you. This is also why drysuit divers prefer not to blow air into the drysuit at 40m deep: you'll blow in compressed air. When going up to the surface, the drysuit will grow in volume a lot. You'll look like Michelin Man [wikipedia.org]. It's not easy to swim back to the boat that way, either.
Of course will most neck-seals of most drysuits let air escape through the seal if things get blown up too much.. But by the time that's happening you are going to the surface way way too fast.