Washington Post: Two weeks ago a robot called Nereus became the world’s deepest-diving unmanned submersible.
Nereus dived to a portion of the Challenger Deep, 10,902 meters down in the Mariana Trench, a gash in the Earth’s crust in the volcanic Pacific Ring of Fire where the Pacific tectonic plate collides with a smaller plate and plunges into the mantle.Scientists hope Nereus will let them open new worlds of discovery in one of the last unexplored realms of Earth—ocean depths below 6,500 meters that are home to a complex web of creatures that get their energy from methane rather than sunlight.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.
