Health
Recently, we told you about blue bottle jellyfish -- a.k.a., Portuguese Man-of-Wars -- washing up on Florida's beaches. This weekend, more than 160 beach-goers in southern Australia were stung after the jellies washed ashore on seven different beaches.

According to Gold Coast Duty Officer Kevin Dunn, "They are an amazing little creature, they are only about the size of a tea cup, sometimes a little larger, but some of their stingers run up to three meters long.'' Though blue bottles look like processed packing material -- if you don't believe me, check out Cork's excellent photo of the buggers -- victims ...
I can't find much information about the new 216-page book Scuba Diving Safety, except:
It's slated to come out in May.
It's co-written by Dan Orr (who is President and CEO of DAN) and Eric Douglas (who is not). You can pre-order the book on Amazon for $14.93. Will the book be good? If you're into books about safety, it'll probably get you fired up. Orr's other books include the DAN Pocket Guide to First Aid for Scuba Diving and A Common Sense Safety Guide to Applied Recreations Living, so I ...
Take a deep breath and hold it. By the time you get to the end of this post, you'll be a better diver.

Researchers at the University at Buffalo recently demonstrated that divers can improve their swimming endurance and breathing capacity by strengthening their respiratory muscles. According to those scientist-types, participants improved their respiratory muscle strength and their snorkel swimming time by 33% and underwater scuba swimming time by 66%.

According to Claes E.G. Lundgren, M.D., Ph.D., the study's senior author, "...when breathing muscles become fatigued, the body switches to survival mode and "steals" blood flow and oxygen away from ...
According to French researchers, children 9 to 13 years old who scuba dive show a narrowing of their airways after making only a single descent. Before you get all wound up about your kid, though, note that the researchers concluded that the restriction is neither permanent ("I think it's more transient"), nor a real cause for concern, because regulations often limit the number of dives children can make and the depth to which they descend.

According to Dr. Frederic Lemaitre of the Universite de Rouen, adolescents might have more to worry about. Lax regulations, which allow adolescents to dive below ...

According to David Harner, "Not everyone would want to jump in a nuclear reactor. It's a definite breed." Harner should know whereof he understates, because Harner is a nuclear diver, one of those "definite breed" who dives inside the cooling reactors of nuclear power plants while wearing a specialized, 100-pound "cool suit." Claiming he enjoys diving in reactors because the vis is so good, I've got two words for him: Cayman Brac.

Interestingly, a nuke diver's logbook doesn't just track depth and bottom time. It also includes data concerning millirems, a measure of radiation exposure. Nuclear divers try to keep their ...
Beginners / Experts

Much like scientists can read the rings of trees to determine climate changes that tree has endured, researchers can "read" coral. For example, by analyzing the coral's strontium-calcium ratio, scientists can measure how much rain fell as much as 6500 years ago. In a recent study, in fact, researchers with ...

Eco

While some people worry that fish populations are being exploited at a dangerous pace, others are rejoicing at the small successes that are occurring. In Australia, for example, the red throat emperor has made a spectacular comeback in recent years. Once heavily overfished, the fish seem to have rebounded. Why? ...

Learning
How do you donate air? There's more than one way to do it. That random dive buddy you ended up with at the boat dock might do something unexpected in an out of air situation. SCUBA Theory is back again. Today, it's all about sharing air.
How do you share? Divers naturally share air ...
Organizations
Researchers in Madagascar recently concluded that closing marine areas to fishing for even short periods of time can significantly restore depleted fish stocks. The researchers found that after an area off the coast of the island was closed to fishermen for seven months, the number of octopuses caught later rose ...