Students who have just hit “submit” on their A Level subject selections exude a certain quiet confidence. Computer science is one of those options for an increasing number of them. And not just any version of it—OCR A Level Computer Science, a certification that has quietly gained a respectable reputation among educators, tutors for college admissions, and students who have the courage to take it. However, it’s important to be truthful about this course. Because the version that appears on the specification sheet differs from the version that students envision, which includes writing code, creating apps, and feeling clever. The…
Author: Derrick Lester
Derrick Lester
Derrick Lester is a professor and editor at indeep-project.org. His academic career has been molded by a single, enduring obsession: the sea and all life in it. Drawing from marine biology, oceanography, and the kind of hard-won field knowledge that only comes from spending significant time on and under the water, Derrick's writing has the depth of a scholar thanks to his years of research and teaching experience. His writing delves into the science of marine life with the inquisitiveness of someone who has never fully moved past the wonder of what exists beneath the surface. Derrick hopes to introduce readers to a world that encompasses over 70% of the planet and is, in many respects, still largely unexplored through his contributions to indeep-project.org.
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For more than 20 years, a school in Arcata, California, has been discreetly accepting students from all over the world. Campus visits are not necessary. No lecture halls. No strict timetables. Since 2004, the University of Metaphysical Sciences, or simply UMS, has provided fully online bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs in metaphysical studies. Finding a structured academic institution focused solely on topics like chakras, astral projection, shadow work, and consciousness is uncommon. Nevertheless, thousands of people have enrolled, earned degrees, and, according to the majority of accounts, discovered something truly significant during the process. It’s easy to write off the…
The way the ocean moves has an almost mechanical quality; it is a slow, deliberate churn that occurs hundreds of meters below the surface rather than the chaos of waves or the drama of storms. Although most people refer to it by its more obvious name, the ocean conveyor belt, scientists call it thermohaline circulation. It has been operating for thousands of years, almost nonstop. Additionally, salt plays a bigger role than most people realize. The simplicity of fundamental physics is elegant. Cold water freezes at the surface in the North Atlantic, close to Greenland and Norway. Seawater releases its…
There is a particular phrase that John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas, used when describing what happened to the world’s oceans in 2024. He called it “bonkers.” Then he clarified, almost apologetically, that “bonkers” was the peer-reviewed scientific term. He was joking. But only just. In 2024, the global ocean set a new heat record for the ninth consecutive year. Not the surface alone — the warming reached 2,000 meters below the waterline. The ocean heat content in the upper 2,000 meters rose by roughly 16 zettajoules compared to 2023. A zettajoule is…
The thought of hunting in complete darkness, hundreds of feet below the surface, with no light, no landmarks, and no real idea of where your next meal might be, is almost unsettling. Most animals don’t fare well in that situation. It’s just another Tuesday for the northern elephant seals off the coast of California. In search of lantern fish and squid, these creatures frequently dive past the 1,000-foot mark, entering an area where sunlight just vanishes. For years, scientists were unsure of how they had discovered anything at all down there. It turns out that the solution was always right…
More people have set foot on the moon than have descended to the ocean floor. That fact has been stated so often that it is on the verge of becoming background noise, but if you take a moment to consider what is actually happening in subsea robotics at the moment, it becomes truly bizarre. No human eye has ever seen entire cave systems beneath the ocean’s surface. not only partially investigated. Not roughly mapped. Just unidentified. This is beginning to change, and the machines that are making the changes sometimes resemble fish remarkably. The engineering technique known as “biomimicry,” which…
What’s going on in Puget Sound is almost cruel. The water has the same appearance. The tides continue to come and go. However, a subtle and unnoticeable change has occurred in the chemistry, and the shellfish farmers who have worked these waters for generations are only now starting to realize how significant this change is. Fundamentally, ocean acidification is fairly simple. The ocean absorbs about 25% of the carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned. This absorption sets off a chemical reaction that lowers the pH of the water and produces carbonic acid. Already,…
A picture of staghorn and fire coral taken in July 2023 off Key Largo, bleached white against the blue water, is making the rounds among marine scientists. Skeletal and stark. It appears to have been dead for a very long time. Two weeks prior to the photo being taken, it was still alive. You can learn more about what’s going on in the Florida Keys from that picture, which was taken by University of Miami researchers, than most press releases will acknowledge. The third-largest barrier reef system in the world, the Great Florida Reef, is dying. not decreasing on a…
Watching the Arctic melt and witnessing the governments’ and energy companies’ quick response—calculation rather than alarm—is unsettling. A new type of discussion about who gets there first and how much is underneath has been taking place in boardrooms and foreign ministries as sea ice retreats at a rate that scientists describe as historically unprecedented. The figures are truly astounding. According to estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey, the Arctic contains about 22% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and oil reserves. That amounts to about 412 billion barrels of oil equivalent, which is more than twice Kuwait’s known reserves. It…
Arriving at a Caribbean beach only to discover it buried beneath a wall of brown, sulfur-smelling seaweed is a certain kind of misery. The rotten-egg smell that permeates thick mats of sargassum piled along the waterline, sometimes extending for miles, reaches you before you see it. Communities in the Caribbean and along the Gulf of Mexico now perceive this as a seasonal calamity rather than an occasional annoyance. Sargassum blooms have become much more difficult to ignore since about 2011. One of the biggest brown algae masses ever seen crossed the Atlantic in 2023, spanning more than 5,000 miles. Once…