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How the beach benefits your brain, according to science

From Inc by Anne Gherini

There is something soothing about the sound of ocean waves, the smell of salt water, and the feeling of warm sand beneath your toes.
Having grown up near the beach, I always classified my happiness on the beach as no more than nostalgia.
Yet, recent studies prove that a beach-type environment can have a profound impact on our brains and mental health.

Although few people deny the importance of brain health, most of us don't focus as much effort on taking care of our brains as we do our bodies.
The misnomer that physical fitness trumps mental health is at our detriment.
The reality is that we need balance, both mentally and physically.

Numerous studies help us appreciate why the beach may be the premier destination for us to unwind and recharge our minds.

Listen to Crashing Waves

Several months ago I partook in a deprivation float (the practice that many superstars such as, Steph Curry swear by).
As my mind reached a meditative state, I could not help but hear a sound similar to that of waves crashing gently on the beach.
This repetitive sound that was created as a result of my rhythmic breaths and my ears being submerged in salt water instantly put me at ease.

"These slow, whooshing noises are the sounds of non-threats, which is why they work to calm people," says Orfeu Buxton, an associate professor of biobehavioral health at Pennsylvania State University.
"It's like they're saying: "Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry."
The sound of waves can help you achieve a meditative state, which is proven to heal and strengthen your brain.

Remove the Blues

Studies have shown that different colors often produce different psychological, emotional, and physical effects.
The color blue, for instance, is often used in marketing material to convey a sense of calmness.
The Global Healing Center advises individuals to actually surround themselves in blue as a way to reduce stress.

According to Richard Shuster, PsyD, clinical psychologist, he agrees that blue has a profound calming effect on people.
"Staring at the ocean actually changes our brain waves' frequency and puts us into a mild meditative state," says Shuster.

Smell the Ocean Mist

When you first step out on the sand and allow your lungs to be filled with salty misty air, your brain may be receiving instant benefits.
The negative ions (oxygen ions with an extra electron attached, produced via water molecules) in the ocean air can actually help calm your brain.

Negative ions have been shown to have a pronounced anti-depressant effect as well.
As early as 1932, American research engineer Dr. Clarence Hansell noticed that the mood of one of his colleagues fluctuated in response to the type of ions - cheerful when subjected to positive ions and gloomy when subjected to negative ones.

Subsequent studies have found that the act of negatively ionized air -- the kind you receive when you get outside for a gulp of fresh air -- can alleviate symptoms of seasonal affective disorder (SAD).

 It's a proven fact, living by the sea has many health benefits, here are a few of them.

After watching this you too will want to relocate closer to the ocean.

All video taken in the Maldives.

Feel the Sand Between Your Toes

Grounding, otherwise known as walking barefoot, has been proven to have a number of stimulating benefits to our bodies and minds.
The reason is that our feet contain a rich network of nerves and acupuncture points.
Our feet are able to absorb free ions on the earth surface in much the same way that our lungs are able to absorb ions in the air.

A report in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine shed some more light on these benefits.
The earth is negatively charged, so when you walk barefoot, you're connecting your body to a negatively charged supply of energy.
The result is one that many of us feel as soon as we kick off our shoes.
Walking barefoot on the beach can trigger tingling warm sensations produced as a result of us "grounding" to earth.

"There are all these cognitive and emotional benefits that we derive every time we spend time by water" said Wallace J.
Nichols, a marine biologist and best-selling author of the Blue Mind.
"Once you get into it, you realize that it's chemistry, it's biology, it's physiology.
It's deeply personal but it's also strong science."

In 2012, a University of Exeter study found that simply living within close proximity to a beach improves one's health and wellbeing.
While it may be unreasonable for some of us to uproot and move to a beach town, prioritizing getting outdoors and connecting with the earth will still help you stay mentally fit.

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Dive under the ice with the brave robots of Antarctica

An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), known as SeaBED, providing the first detailed, high-resolution 3-D maps of Antarctic sea ice. The new technology provides accurate ice thickness measurements from areas that were previously too difficult to access.

From Wired by Matt Simon

The lava fields of Hawaii.
The peaks of the Himalayas.
The crowds of a Justin Bieber concert.
These are among the most perilous of environments on planet Earth, places where few humans dare tread.
They ain’t got nothin’, though, on waters of our planet’s polar regions, where frigid temperatures and considerable pressures would snuff a puny human like you in a heartbeat.

Robots, though?
This is the stuff their tough-as-hell bodies were made for.
This is the domain of Seabed, the sensor-packed machine that dives over a mile deep into the polar seas—autonomously—collecting invaluable data.
But it comes at a price: Getting the bot back to its icebreaking boat alive can be more challenging than communicating with a Mars rover millions of miles away.

 This graphic shows how self-driving Seagliders and floats will track conditions below an Antarctic ice shelf. Inside these caves, warmer saltwater flows in on the bottom, carrying heat that may eat away at the ice, and fresher glacial meltwater flows out above.

(University of Washington)

Seabed doesn’t swim like your typical autonomous underwater vehicle.
Most are shaped like torpedoes, which allows them to efficiently cut through the water like jets.
Seabed instead can use its propellers to hover in the water column like a helicopter.
This allows it to hang over the seafloor and map it with sonar, or cozy up next to ice to measure its thickness.

The robot can’t be tethered for hardwired communication, on account of the ice, and radio waves don’t work underwater.
So instead, Seabed sends signals of sound (like MIT’s hypnotic fish robot).
Even then, the robot isn’t always a reliable communicator.
“If we are lucky, we get a 256 byte packet once every minute,” says Northeastern University roboticist Hanumant Singh, who developed Seabed.
“And there are no guarantees that we can get it.” Compare that to how NASA scientists communicate with Mars rovers: The signal takes an average of 20 minutes to get from the robots to Earth, but at least it’s consistent.
If Singh needs to ping Seabed, the signal might not get there.

To account for the dropped signals, Singh gives the robot a course to, say, run along a particular stretch of the seafloor and map it with sonar.
If something appears to be going awry, like colder weather blows in and starts freezing over the ice hole Seabed’s supposed to surface in, Singh can send a signal to cut the mission short.
Ideally, it reaches the recipient quickly.
(He’s only lost one of these robots, by the way, not because of a communication breakdown but because an intense current swept it away.)

If Seabed comes up in the wrong spot under thick ice, there’s also no guarantee its operators can get it out of the water.
It may come up near the icebreaker, like on one mission in 2010.
You can’t go breaking ice willy-nilly near a $500,000 robot, so the researchers had to dig a small hole in the ice.
This gave them access to the vehicle, to which they attached weights to sink it a bit, but also a float to keep it from plummeting to the bottom of the sea.
Then the ship could crack open up the ice further—carefully still, of course—and pull the robot out.
On another nearly ill-fated mission, the researchers had to deploy a smaller tethered ROV to grab Seabed and tow it safely to open water.

Generally, though, Seabed returns to within just a few meters of where operators expect it to surface.
Again, if the robot weren’t reliably autonomous, this environment would eat it alive.

And once Seabed is in the water, it’s happy as a fish in … water.
It’s sealed up nice and tight to keep freezing water from infiltrating the electronics.
So if you bring it out of a warm ship hangar and drop it in the sea quickly, it’ll be alright.
Where things get problematic is when you have to pull the robot out of the water, then expect to use it again right away.

“You put the vehicle in the water and you're doing a test and you realize, oh, we forgot something,” says Singh.
The water itself is around 40 degrees Fahrenheit, but the air drops to zero degrees.
“You bring the vehicle back up and now it's completely encased in ice.”

But enough about problems.
Seabed is one tenacious science machine, whose job is more important than ever in these times of climate change.
In addition to mapping the seafloor with sonar, it can do the same with ice to measure its thickness.

Which, sure, you could do by drilling lots of holes and dropping tape measures through.
But sea ice turns out to be beautifully complicated.
“In the Arctic and the Antarctic, ice isn't just sitting there and thickening as it freezes on a lake,” says sea ice physicist Ted Maksym of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who has worked with Seabed.
“It's moving around and all the flows are crashing into each other, and when they do they form these huge piles of ice.”

These features develop not only above the surface, but as much as 60 feet deep, which Seabed can map with sonar, swimming back and forth across the face of the ice.
“It's just like mowing your lawn from below,” says Maksym.

What Maksym wants to understand is how ice thickens and thins in polar regions.
In the arctic, for instance, old ice is disappearing, and ice in general is becoming more seasonal.
“So understanding how the processes that govern the thickness of ice change as the arctic changes helps us understand how the arctic is going to respond to climate change,” says Maksym.

That means putting Seabed in danger, sure, but also means taking human divers out of danger.
The robot may get stuck under the ice from time to time, but the data it’s gathering is vital to science’s understanding of Earth’s most brutal environments not affiliated with Justin Bieber.

Links :

• CNN : Underwater robots to measure Antarctica climate threat / Underwater robots dive under Antarctic
• Cosmos : Next-gen robotic probes to head for the Antarctic depths
• Sciientific American : Ice-Diving Drones Embark on Risky Antarctic Mission
• NewsDeeply : Robots Dive Below Antarctica Ice Sheet to Collect Climate Change Data
• GeoGarage blog : The deepest dive in Antarctica reveals a sea floor teeming with life 

Google’s first private trans-Atlantic subsea cable will connect the U.S. and France in 2020

 Many major internet companies are investing in subsea cable projects too — last year, SoftBank, Facebook, and Amazon teamed up for a 8,700-mile transpacific cable system, which is expected to launch in the next couple of years.

Do you believe that owning their subsea cables instead of going through a consortium of companies will make non-telecom companies like Google more efficient in providing data services to its customers?

From 9to5Google by Abner Li 

Google Cloud is rapidly expanding its infrastructure from new cloud regions to investing in three consortium subsea cables this year alone.
The latest move involves building its first private trans-Atlantic cable to further expand its network.

Map of the submarine telegraph between America and Europe,

with its various communications on the two continents (1857)

Map showing the telegraph lines in 1871 in operation, under contract, and contemplated,

to complete the circuit of the globe

Google announces its first private transatlantic subsea cable,
stretching from Virginia to France
What about sovereignty and neutrality for the Internet ?

Google Cloud cable systems
Image Credit: Google

Subsea cables are expensive endeavors and usually involve consortiums of major players with similar needs partnering to build and cover the cost.
Alternately, companies can simply purchase capacity from existing cables.
However, earlier this year, Google announced that it was building a private intercontinental cable from Chile to Los Angeles called Curie.

Today’s newest cable will connect Virginia Beach — specifically the GCP North Virginia region — to the French west coast and GCP Belgium.

Dunant adds network capacity across the Atlantic, supplementing one of the busiest routes on the internet, and supporting the growth of Google Cloud.
We’re working with TE SubCom to design, manufacture and lay the cable for Dunant, which will bring well-provisioned, high-bandwidth, low-latency, highly secure cloud connections between the U.S. and Europe.

It will be alphabetically named after Henri Dunant — the founder of the Red Cross and the first Nobel Peace Prize winner — following the first cable in honor of Marie Curie. According to Google, it will be ready to serve Cloud customers in late 2020.

The subsea cables include: Curie, a private cable connecting Chile to Los Angeles; Havfrue, a consortium cable connecting the United States to Denmark and Ireland; and Hong Kong-Guam Cable system, a consortium cable interconnecting major subsea communication hubs in Asia

Like in other areas of technology, there are distinct advantages to controlling the entire design, construction, and deployment process.

• Performance and latency: Cables are often built to serve a very specific route. When we build privately, we can choose this route based on what will provide the lowest latency for the largest segment of customers. In this case, we wanted connectivity across the Atlantic that was close to certain data centers.
• Capacity: The bandwidth that we want to deliver can vary widely, depending on what already exists and where our customers need more, now and in the future. Our capacity planning includes estimates of Google’s and our customers’ needs for years to come.
• Guaranteed bandwidth for the lifetime of the cable: The life of a cable can vary from 15 to 25 years, but as with many infrastructure projects, they sometimes continue to serve the route beyond their initial projected lifespan. Our ability to guarantee our customers a certain level of connectivity helps them confidently plan for their businesses going forward.

Links :

• Google blog : Delivering increased connectivity with our first private trans-Atlantic subsea cable
• Alphr : Google is laying even more subsea cables - one in completely unclaimed territory
• Business Insider : Google is running a private cable underneath the Atlantic Ocean to speed up its infrastructure
• TechCrunch : Google builds its own subsea cable from the US to France / Google’s latest undersea cable project will connect Japan to Australia
• Atlantic cable : history 
• YouTube : A Journey To The Bottom Of The Internet
• GeoGarage blog : Facebook and Microsoft are laying a giant cable ... / Today in technology: raising a ladder to the moon ... / Microsoft plumbs ocean's depths to test underwater ... / How oceans are being used to cool massive data ...