Godzilla-maru!

How do you drill several kilometers into the Earth's crust -- at sea, in waters themselves kilometers deep?

The first thing that strikes you when the Chikyu comes into view is the drill derrick, which stands 100m above the deck - the tallest ship-borne rig in the world.

Festooned from it are cables a handspan thick, and huge pieces of yellow machinery, all connected with the core business of sending a drill bit deeper into the Earth than has ever been done at sea.

Chins up, sauropods!

. . . after studying X-rays of members of 10 different vertebrate groups, Dr Taylor is convinced that when they were not reaching down for a drink, the sauropods stood with their heads held very high indeed.

With their necks aloft, like giraffes, the dinosaurs would have towered up to 15m above the ground.

Dr Taylor and his colleagues found that the necks of mammals and birds - the only modern groups that share the upright leg posture of dinosaurs - are "strongly inclined" vertically.

"Our approach was embarrassingly straightforward," said Dr Taylor. "We looked at real animals, and at the whole animal."

Paul Barrett, a palaeontologist from London's Natural History Museum, thinks the sauropods were likely to have been able to lift their heads high, but he remains unconvinced that would have been their "resting posture". . .

"Sauropods are bizarre," he told BBC News. "There is no living animal built in the same way."

So, although the study of living animals' skeletons is very valuable, he added, "finding a model to explain the biology of these creatures is not that easy"

In praise of hand work

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don't seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don't think you'll see a yellow sign that says "Think Safety!" as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?