Video: Ride On a Seabird’s Back as It Dives Toward the Ocean Floor

7:15 am, in a tent in the middle of nowhere, waking up on a misty morning, for some reason I have one bar on the AT&T 4G network. We saw some cormorants yesterday and I jokingly said a pelican was a drone. In the story I just read, coincidentally, below, a real bird is turned into an eye in the sky (and undersea). This is a test to see if I can embed a youTube video from my cell phone using copy and paste.

Giving video cameras to animals can yield some awesome results, especially underwater – remember the octopus guerrilla filmmaker? In a new video, ride on the back of a South American seabird as it captures footage of its 150-foot-deep dive.

Imperial cormorants live off the coast of Patagonia, Argentina, and are protected by various regulations. Scientists at the Wildlife Conservation Society have been tracking about 400 of them with GPS loggers and archival tags. This time, a team led by WCS researcher Flavio Quintana attached a camera to a bird’s back and set it loose.

The video is the first time scientists have been able to watch the birds’ feeding techniques.

The footage is choppy at first as the bird sits on the surface, but then it takes a nosedive. It finally reaches the ocean floor and looks around for a meal, snatching up a long fish and bringing it back up to eat. Watch its crazy ride below.

Via POPULAR SCIENCE -

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NASA Invests $1.1 Billion in Manned Commercial Trips to Space

The dust has settled on the final round of NASA’s Commercial Crew integrated Capability program project, and three winners have been given funding for the next round of American-made space taxis: Boeing, who received $460 million; SpaceX with $440 million; and the Sierra Nevada Corporation, with a paltry $212.5. The companies will use it as seed money to create commercial spacecraft that U.S. astronauts will fly aboard.

With NASA’s space shuttle program shelved, it’s had to compensate for all of the spacecraft it won’t be making itself, instead investing in companies that have shown promise in creating commercially viable, safe spacecraft. Once those companies have created one, NASA can put their astronauts on board (maybe even alongside civilian space tourists).

In May, SpaceX made news bylaunching a privately built craft to the international space station. Boeing has developed a low-Earth orbit space capsule. Sierra Nevada has a somewhat similar Dream Chaser spaceplane project. …

http://pulse.me/s/bSJwZ

**SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket**