Sponges may conjure visions of the soft and squishy, but some of those living deep beneath the sea build complex glass structures that are marvels of engineering. The sponge, from the genus ...

Aquanautix is a PhD marine biologist interested in deep-sea exploration, science, education, and policy. For more posts like these see the new Aquanautix Blog, online since August 2010. Biomaterial ...

Deep under the sea lies a creature that sort of looks like a ghostly tulip. The glass rope sponge has a cup-shaped, filter-feeding top and a thin anemone-covered stem tethering it to the ground. One ...

Scientists have discovered large colonies of glass sponges thriving on the seafloor 30 miles off the coast of Washington. The species of glass sponges capable of building reefs were thought extinct ...

In the frigid, inky ocean depths beneath permanent ice shelves, life tends to move pretty slowly. But a recent expedition to the seafloor under a newly thawed Antarctic ice sheet has revealed an ...

The other deeplings (except RickMac) are at the fantastic Science Online conference this week, meeting with other scientist communicators and hatching various plots for DSN’s ascendancy to world ...

The genome of a glass sponge species suggests that silica skeletons evolved independently in several groups of sponges. Researchers led by geobiologist Professor Gert Wörheide have decoded the genome ...

A reef of glass sponges, creating a deep-sea oasis 650 feet below the surface, was discovered for the first time in U.S. waters off the Washington coast. The sponges are so rich with marine life that ...

The amount of surface area often plays an important role in materials used in medicine and technology and normally, it should be as large as possible. It can accommodate, for instance, large ...