A few interesting facts

Our submarine is named Nautilus.  In a future post, we can look at the first nuclear submarine, Nautilus, and possibly Jules Verne's Nautilus, but in today's post, let's learn about the beautiful  sea creature, the nautilus.  Did you know that the chambered nautilus:

1. Is a member of the cephalopod family, along with the octopus, the squid and cuttlefish?
   
2. Adds chambers to its shell as it grows?
   
3. Regulates buoyancy by changing the ratio of gas (argon-nitrogen mix) to saline solution in its chambers?
4. Can live 15 to 20 years?
   
5. Retracts into its shell when threatened?
   
6. Has up to 90 tentacles (but no suction cups)?
   
7. Lives in an area stretching from Andaman Sea to Fiji and from southern Japan to the Great Barrier Reef?
   
8. Are “living fossils”, relatives of the ammonoids whose fossils date back 500 million years?
   
9. Are noctural feeders, living by day at around 1500 ft and rising at night to about 300 ft?
   
10. Has a geometry that sometimes corresponds to the Fibonacci sequence, but is always a logarithmic spiral? 
    

Science in nature is a wondrous thing.  Here's a good article about the Fibonacci sequence from Temple University's Dan Reich:

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fibonacci

 

And here we can see Bernoulli's tombstone from Basel Minster church.  The church was originally a Catholic cathedral, but became part of the Swiss Reformed Church in 1529. Of note here is the logarithmic spiral that Bernoulli requested be put on his tombstone.  The stonemason took a little artistic license and carved an Archimedean spiral, but the intent was there.  Latin around the spiral reads,  "EUDEM MUTATA RESURGO" or "the same, yet changed, I rise again."

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Detail from Bernoulli's tombstone

And once again the value of the International Submarine Races shines forth.  Not only can our team learn about engineering science, but we can learn about biology, art, history, mathematics, Latin, geography and more.  I'm very thankful for the sponsors of ISR, the Foundation for Underwater Research and Education.