The extraordinary shelf life of the deep sea sandwiches | Hacker News Reader

The extraordinary shelf life of the deep sea sandwiches

wired.com

87 pointszdw52 comments

Another deep-seafood story: Alvin was used by Tjeerd van Andel and other Scripps scientists to visit the Galapagos ridge hydrothermal vents and study the ecosystem there. They found giant molluscs, each the size of a grapefruit. Recall that these organisms, living in an isolated ecosystem two miles underwater and visible through the windows of what was basically a wet spaceship were pretty much the closest we’ve come so far to finding aliens.

The dive team harvested some, brought them to the surface, and… ate them for dinner. Apparently they were blood red like steak and had a strong mineral taste. They stopped after some other bright spark got out the Geiger counter — black smoker fauna accumulate unusual amounts of radiation.

Apparently the dive site was named Clam Bake. I don’t know if the name came before or after the mega-mussel meal. Heaven help us if alien life on Europa is discovered by a hungry Dutchman.

I have no idea what the timing of this event is, but there's an interesting confluence of clams and aliens in the world that is almost hilarious off-topic, but I'll bring it up anyway. "Operation Clambake" (xenu.net) is a long running Norwegian site dedicated to shining light on some of the more egregious problems with the Church of Scientology.

* note: some of the very first "Anonymous" protests were fomented on 4chan, advertised on xenu.net, and targeted notable Scientology buildings. I think the demonstrations (both physical and digital) were under the name "Project Chanology". It was some of this prototypical protest movement that was later co-opted and brought into the Q-anon movement.

* note2: there's also some fascinating history involving the site w/r to SEO ranking and other google hacking activities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Clambake

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology

I thought you were about to talk about Mother of Demons - one of my first intro to Baen Publishing where humans land on a planet (accidentally) populated by mollusk civilizations.

> The dive team harvested some, brought them to the surface, and… ate them for dinner.

Reminds me of that story I heard on QI of British explorers wanting to take some of those giant tortoises they found, back to Britain. They tried many times but they didn't survive the travel: they were so delicious the sailors would eat them on the way home.

It's taken 300 years to finally give them a scientific name.

While physical and chemical analysis would reveal many of the characteristics of these molluscs, the description of how they looked and tasted was much more relatable: for me, it conveyed a lot more meaning...

Very interesting, and daring of them to taste food having spent 10 months in the ocean! That must have been an epic "for science!" moment, for sure.

Semi-meta: as a non-native speaker, does the expression "a handful of apples" feel natural? Is that, like, 4-5 apples, or whatever you feel a handful corresponds to?

I mean, most people will struggle actually holding more than one or two apples in a single hand, but perhaps that part is so idiomatic that the literal meaning of the words don't matter? Would you say "a handful of aircraft carriers"?

Yes, that's fine. English speakers regularly use "handful" to mean "about five".

As a random example I googled "handful of buildings" and got >700,000 hits, e.g. "Charnley-Persky House is one of a handful of buildings that display the combined talents of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright".

You can even have "a handful" of non-physical things: "a handful of ideas" gets almost 5 million hits on Google, e.g. "We started with a handful of ideas that sprung out of our collective experiences on social media."

To me (native English a la USA) apples are in a sort of uncanny valley between things that could in fact be measured by the physical handful, like peanuts, and things that couldn't -- buildings being way off the charts, obviously.

Context will make the difference. If you say "grab a handful of apples", no one will believe you meant to say it, because that doesn't make any sense.

"There are a handful of apples" is a different usage, which people will accept.

Well maybe. I've literally grabbed handfuls of wild apples, about the size of ping-pong balls.

(Maybe better described as feral apples? Old orchards with trees unpruned for decades.)

FYI: anyone eating wild apples should take care to avoid "beach apples" cause they're highly toxic.

https://www.google.com/search?q=beach+apple&source=lnms&tbm=...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchineel

Same. A single apple, as found in the grocery store, is about one handful. Once you start talking about things much bigger than what an average human hand can hold then "a handful" does work as a synonym for "a few things" - probably less than ten.

>..."a few things" - probably less than ten.

Now those are fighting words. "A few" is obviously 3-5, six in a dire emergency.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=A%20couple%2...

I feel like, when talking about things which you'd usually expect in large quantity, "a few" means "any less than makes a pile."

E.g. for grains of rice, even 23 or so of them could still constitute "a few grains stuck to the sides of the bowl."

Similarly, in databases, "a few rows" is any amount that's not Big Data ;)

While "a handful of testicles" means exactly two.

https://twitter.com/jimmykimmel/status/327276064009240577?la...

Cool, thanks!

Never really thought about this, but I wonder whether "handful" also is roughly equivalent to "number you can count on one hand" (ie, around 4 or 5 if counting with fingers).

As an American English speaker, I have never come across context where a handful means about five. Handful has meant a relatively small amount, with the actual quantity always depending on the context of the item being discussed.

As a non-native English speaker, I’m curious about what the minimum and maximum values of handful would be (and what the items being referred to are)?

When the same term is used in my (western European) language, I would probably put the assumed range in 4-6, potentially 3-7.

I wouldn't think about it in terms of minimum and maximum values. I'd use "a handful" to emphasize ideas like this:

- The number of items being quantified is small

- You could make and understand a list that included them all

- I don't know the exact number offhand

But what counts as a "small number" varies depending on what you're talking about.

The parent says "about five" because you have to choose to say "a handful" over "a few" or "several" or "a dozen or so" or just "many." Five is the sweet spot where none of those other terms apply.

Agreed. A handful of M&Ms or Skittles is far more than five...

A handful means either the amount you can hold in your hand "add a handful of salt", or a small number so "Country X only has a handful of aircraft carriers" is fine.

I think with apples it would be the second meaning but it's a grey area. With something smaller like "a handful of cherries" I'd go with the amount that can be held.

More like putting out a platter of "Free Food!" for grad students.

Great observation! Indeed a "handful of blueberries" is a larger number of blueberries than the number of planets in "a handful of planets", or senate bills in "a handful of bills", and more than the handful of examples I've mentioned

I would never personally say a handful of apples because it is an object where the size might be in question and potentially a few small apples might fit in you hand. Conversely yes I’d say a handful of cars/buildings/ships to mean 4-6 ish.

Alvin is still going strong nearly 60 years later, and the at-sea operations team is currently looking for early career mechanical and electrical engineers to keep the submersible ready to make scientific observations every day. (The Alvin menu these days is typically a peanut butter sandwich and a thermos of coffee.)

There are plenty of on-shore jobs too, including a just-posted senior software engineering lead for the AI and Embedded Technologies team, with more software-oriented jobs to be posted soon. Don't hesitate to apply, we do consider adaptable candidates from backgrounds outside of oceanography and robotics.

https://allcareers-whoi.icims.com

If high pressure slows down the spoilage, can I use a pressure chamber to preserve food, rather than a refrigerator?

What happens if you combine both?

PV = nRT [0]. The (P)ressure is directly correlated with the (T)emperature. You would need to use a small (V)olume to balance the equation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law

poor application of the gas law. There is no reason to treat the situation as adiabatic. Theoretical assumptions are important!

To elaborate on the other comment, the ideal gas law isn't applicable when you can add or remove energy/mass to the system. There's no reason you can't pack a refrigerator sized chamber with enough air to be high pressure at a low temperature. Based on the equation, you get to choose what n is so you if you set T to a normal refrigerator temp of ~4C then you can vary n to get whatever P you want. I hope that made sense.

It's called high pressure processing or pascalization.

Yes absolutely. It's really cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascalization

It's also a nifty way to loosen meat from the shells of lobsters, crabs, etc.

Good luck peeking in the fridge every 5 mins like some do!

Maybe a pressure hatch is the answer to snacking

Or an aimed quick release to utilize a jet of pressure to make the snack shoot to a target location.

If hotdog+buns were kept under pressure, would they stay fresher while being carried in a t-shirt cannon-like form factor at a stadium?

If your pressure-feeder can forcibly whack your hotdog into a metal receptacle, it’ll create a cool scifi-like vapor effect. Very cyberpunk.

Yeah, as you add things it takes a photograph of it, then you can browse those. The new item is placed inside section A (short term), which is then pressurized. The item is them transferred to section B (long term) via automation.

On requesting an item the automated insides transfers it to section A, closes the hatch between A and B, then de-pressurizes A.

This seems like it would be a great way to make long lasting milk which doesn't taste like UHT milk. Apparently it does work, but perhaps regulation hasn't caught up with it yet [0].

Edit: Seems that it may not be as effective in milk because of a pressure resistant enzyme [1]

0: https://www.hiperbaric.com/en/hpp-milk-high-pressure-process...

1: https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2022/03/11/hpp-milk-co...

Or just freeze it for up to 3 months https://www.dairy.com.au/dairy-matters/you-ask-we-answer/can...

"it had an eclectic résumé that included, in 1966, helping to recover a 70-kiloton hydrogen bomb that was dropped when two military planes collided over the Spanish coast."

That doesn't sound right. 70 kilotons would be very small for a hydrogen bomb. Indeed, one Wikipedia article says it was a 1.4 megaton bomb, twenty times the number the Wired article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Alvin#:~:text=On%2017%20Ma....

And this other wikipedia article says: "The Y1 nomenclature indicates a W28 warhead with a yield of 1.1 megatonnes of TNT"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash

This page says it was a Y1 yield variant, 1.1 megatons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B28_nuclear_bomb

A Y3 would have been 70 kilotons, and a Y5 is the 1.45 megaton variant.

> "On 6 July 1967, the Alvin was attacked by a swordfish during dive 202. The swordfish became trapped in the Alvin's skin, and the Alvin was forced to make an emergency surface. The attack took place at 2,000 feet (610 m) below the surface. The fish was recovered at the surface and cooked for dinner."

I hope they stenciled a swordfish onto the sub.

How was the sandwich not physically destroyed by the pressure and almost completely dissolved in water though? I mean isn't it deep down in the seabed? Am I missing something?

Pressure would be bad for most lifeforms but since the bread doesn’t need to stay alive it is probably fine. Since it will be soggy anyway the pressure is coming outside in and from inside out. There is no overall inward pressure to crush it like a junkyard car.

So they taste tested a sandwich soaked in sea water and said it was palatable?

I wondered that too. I think the sandwiches were inside the sub, which was still full of air?

Then how did they observe the effect of being down underwater? I mean it's a normal sea-level environment inside the sub, not much different from inside an office building with windows closed.

It would still be high pressure, just high pressure air.

Avoid paywall: https://archive.vn/9xs6M

Sounds like a lot more science is needed. I wish ocean science was funded at a greater level — and I wish it were easier to do research (incredibly expensive and regulatory).

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