 Here is the event link: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/dc/events/extreme-ocean-exploring-deep/ I'm looking forward to sharing stories, and even more looking forward to hearing everyone's questions! I'll give updates I haven't posted on blog yet. Please join!
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Talk highlights:
Huge thanks to Dr Katy Croft Bell for leading the Open Ocean Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, and to her and her team for organizing this fantastic event. Thanks also to Professor Dava Newman for the wonderful introduction to my talk! Newman was a role model for me while I was at MIT. She is former Deputy Administrator of NASA. Also special thanks to Victoria and Stephen White who let me crash their Sustainable Sea Products International booth at the Boston Seafood Expo the following week. The Whites have several amazing innovative businesses geared toward sustainable and scalable aquaculture with the potential to take massive pressure off the oceans now (learn more here). They're also well on their way to achieving sustainable US-based chitin production from shrimp shells. 
Other News
Drug overdoses now kill more Americans than guns. Last year I took on a side project to support fellow MIT alumni and learn some things from a different field. Five of us, with one alumni mentor, created an app to help rapidly deliver the antidote to an opioid overdose (Naloxone) to those who need it. You could call it the Uber for Naloxone. It was a different experience for me, in part because I hadn't worked on applications before and also because the five of us never once met in the same room (a few of us had known each other before though). We coordinated over Google Hangouts and email across four time zones, spanning California to England! There were some late nights working on this project from Kansas and at the SailFuture house, but it was worth it. Our submission to the government-sponsored hackathon was recognized in this article from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Additionally, team leader Ben Taylor is continuing this work with his company LedgerDomain.
LedgerDomain announcement October 2017:
For more information about the opioid epidemic I recommend the documentary "Prescription for Change" featuring Macklemore and President Obama. It's free on Youtube (here). The more I learned, the more I realized how many people I know whom have been affected by this epidemic. It put me in awe and respect of how fragile our chemical balances are as humans.
Last week I hopped across the pond for the opening of National Geographic’s first immersive entertainment experience. “Ocean Odyssey” in Times Square draws visitors under the sea to experience ocean life thanks to clever videography, staging, virtual and artificial reality. Virtual explorers witness a battle between Humbolt squid, get lost in a kelp forest, and see a whale leap from the depths to feed on a school of fish. They can also play quiz games that show how they can improve the ocean. Pictures tell the story best. More information about how you can visit the exhibit is in the Act Now page of this blog. Your ticket purchase supports the National Geographic Society’s great work!
PROGRESS
Other Update from Yellow Rectangle
"It was CERN's high-powered global community of scientists congregated in one beautiful place to solve big problems that was a magnet for me." -- Grace C. Young CERN's Symmetry publication recently published an interview I did with them a few weeks ago. Excerpts are below, and you can read the full interview at ww.symmetrymagazine.org/article/cern-alumna-turned-deep-sea-explorer   
UpdateMy interview from time at CERN just published in Symmetry magazine. Excerpt below.
 Depiction of CERN's vast amounts of data (300 TB!) from ScienceAlert.com What unique experience did you take away from CERN? CERN had a huge impact on my development as a scientist and engineer. My experience was truly transformative. My first experience was when I was age 17. A classmate and I won a week-long trip to CERN from the Intel Science Fair for a physics project. It was a dream come true; I'd read so much about CERN. I'm still incredibly thankful to Wolfgang Von Rueden for organizing that trip and becoming a mentor. A year later, CERN’s openlab took a chance on a first-year MIT student and let me into its summer internship program. I got to work with phenomenal people and write software to help physicists (perform Dalitz analysis within the ROOT data analysis framework). Although I veered away from physics into ocean engineering (I like to sail and I love the water), CERN taught me many things that I often think back to. One is the genuine power in community. It's not just about putting capable people in the same place -- it's about having those people, from diverse disciplines work together to solve discrete problems, and work towards a common purpose. Another thing it taught me is that fundamental science pursued for the sake of science (or art) spawns innovation.
Even my visitor's badge to CERN reinforced its core purpose. I thought the text on the badge aptly described CERN's mission and motivation. It read:
What value do you see in the CERN alumni network? I see the alumni network as a potentially powerful tool. Of course it's a great way to stay in touch with friends, make new ones, and enhance career connections. Its greatest value, however, may be in harnessing the power of our great community to solve big problems like CERN proper does. Alumni know the value of cooperation and the power of working across disciplines, across cultures, public-private sectors, and that's a powerful thing. What’s next for you? I'd like to create a CERN-for-the-ocean. Right now we don't understand how the ocean works -- how it holds so much biodiversity, how it maintains weather, sequesters so much carbon. At the same time it faces big problems including overfishing, pollution, acidification and warming. These require technical and policy solutions. I'd like to copy CERN's model for research and innovation and apply it to the equivalent for the ocean of confirming the Higgs boson. ANOTHER NOTE ON POSITIVE MESSAGES
So far so good! My previous blog post explains why I'm at NASA this summer. In short, I'm still 'Team Ocean' (of course!), but the 3D shape modelling techniques developed for my PhD on coral reefs have direct application for NASA's research on near-Earth asteroids (and vise versa). It's been a fantastic collaboration. Here are more details about what we're doing and why. What We'RE Doing and Why
NASA's Frontier Development Lab (FDL) is an experimental tool in NASA’s innovation portfolio that emphasizes artificial intelligence, inter-disciplinary approaches, rapid iteration, and teamwork to produce significant breakthroughs useful to the space program. This summer, four of us at NASA FDL are creating 3D models of asteroids. Our core team comprises two planetary scientists (Agata Rozek and Sean Marshall), two machine learning engineers (Adam Cobb and me), plus mentors from both disciplines (Chedy Raissi, Michael Busch, and Yarin Gal). We’re creating the 3D models from radar data. It's a difficult computational problem, but knowing an asteroid’s 3D shape helps us predict its future trajectory (/whether it will collide with Earth!). The formal introduction to our problem reads as follows:
It took me a bit to understand exactly what our goals and motivations were. The most common questions my friends ask are, “What are you doing?” and “Why?” My short answer: We're generating 3D models of asteroids from radar data so that we can better determine asteroids' physical properties and orbital trajectories. There are over 16,000 known near-Earth objects, and on average 35 new ones each week. It's too much data to keep up with without sophisticated data analysis techniques, so we're using machine learning to speed up and automate the process of generating 3D models from radar data of asteroids. Still #TeamOceanI'm also interested in the task of 3D modelling asteroids because the techniques can be applied to 3D modelling coral reefs, the topic of my thesis, as further discussed in my first post about NASA. Preliminary Results
More details will be in our final presentation and report at the end of the summer. Register here if you'd like to attend our final presentation in Santa Clara, California. References:
This post is modified from the original published on the NASA FDL page (here). All work was developed while at NASA Frontier Development Lab, working with Agata Rozek, Sean Marshall, Adam Cobb, Justin Havlovitz, Chedy Raissi, Michael Busch, and Yarin Gal. UPDATE - 12 Sept 17My colleague Adam just posted his perspective on the project. Read his blog post here. Update - 20 Nov 17The video of our final presentation at Intel Headquarters is live! It's on YouTube at this link.  Update - Jan 2018The results from our team of four engineers and scientists were well-received by NASA's Planetary Defense Community. The tool we developed will be implemented this year at the Arecibo Observatory to help track near-earth asteroids. Related blog posts:
Last week I had the honor of attending National Geographic’s first-ever Explorers Festival. It was many things: It was a gathering of explorers from all disciplines and corners of the globe; it was my introduction to the NatGeo “family;” it was an excuse for NatGeo to roll out the 'yellow carpet' for James Cameron, Sylvia Earle, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bob Ballard, and other explorer-celebrities. As a 2017 Emerging Explorer, I gave a 10-minute talk about my work and dreams and then contributed to a panel discussion on “Transformative Technology;” both are online here. 
The week was a gear-shifting process for me. For the past several months I’ve been up to my ears in my PhD thesis. This week forced me to take a few steps back and think big-picture, about major goals and priorities in terms of ocean technology development. It also forced me to reflect on my personal story --- the twists of fate that pushed me to where I am now.
NatGeo focuses on human elements of any story; I believe this is one reason why it effectively engages across disciplines. Explorers are encouraged not just to talk about their work, as they might at an academic or technical conference, but also to speak of their motivations – how and why they got to their unique position. Usually these stories take us back to childhood, but not all the time – sometimes the story starts later in life. Distilling one’s life into a story is a difficult task if you overthink it. How can one figure out which moments of the past millions and millions of moments to cut and which to mention? How do our brains remove the signal from the noise? Only in hindsight have I identified some of the more transformative moments. The storytellers at NatGeo helped me bring out the bits of my story that linked my path in ways I hadn’t considered before. For that I’m very thankful to the NatGeo community. 
WHAT’S NEXT.
Excited to announce that I’ve been offered a research position this summer at NASA’s Frontier Development Lab in Mountain View, CA. I’ll be working alongside other scientists and engineers for eight weeks in an intensive research accelerator focused on artificial intelligence.
They've asked me to develop a project with cohorts on near-earth object 3D shape modelling and lunar water detection, topics that directly relate to my thesis (minus the "lunar" part and replace "near-earth" with "underwater" of course!). It's a fantastic opportunity to develop skills and learn from NASA in ways that will not only further develop our underwater 3D modelling techniques, but also vise versa; they'll learn from our research techniques.
Still Team OceanOcean and space are commonly pitted against each other – upward vs downward – astronaut vs aquanaut, etc.
It’s not an either-or debate, however. We can explore both. I’m looking forward to this summer opportunity at NASA for a number of reasons. I’m eager to learn from NASA methods that will enhance our underwater 3D modeling techniques while sharing what we’ve learned underwater. The experience will also provide another perspective on how public-private partnerships can work effectively to achieve defined research objectives. I believe public-private partnerships like NASA FDL and what I observed at CERN OpenLab, are the key to tackling our most urgent ocean research objectives---a vision I outlined in my 2015 TIME op-ed. Finally, I’m excited to spend weekends diving, surfing, and reuniting with West Coast friends.  Image: G. Young credit Mission 31 Many astronauts are also aquanauts, but most people don’t realize more people have been to space than have lived underwater! Several acquaintances work in both arenas: Pisces VI submarine owner Scott Waters is also on a space advisory board. FDL founding member, Jordan McRae, invented OctoTalk, a system for divers to transmit voice communications underwater. Jonathan Knowles, who is involved with FDL through Autodesk, also advises The Hydrous, an organization that 3D models corals around the world. That said, I’m committed to Team Ocean. I’m personally drawn to water, a connection many humans have (see Wallace Nichols' book Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do.). Moreover, engineering-wise, while space may seem more exotic, I’d argue the ocean, particularly the deep ocean, is a more challenging work environment considering that E&M waves, upon which wifi, GPS, and many modern innovations are based, do not work, and salt water kills electronics. We’re forced to innovate. (Thanks Somerville (Oxford) for the article with video!) Next week we are hosting what we think is the FIRST LIVE UNDERWATER SEMINAR at Oxford! Come along if you're in the area! It'll also be video-recorded/posted online at a later date. 
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 Image Credit: Mission 31/Fabien Cousteau | Thrilled to have been named one of National Geographic's 2017 Emerging Explorers. Looking forward to learning from the other explorers this June at NatGeo HQ. Read more: Fourteen world-changers named 2017 National Geographic Emerging Explorers
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| "As a small aside, “maximum sustained yield” (MSY) the mantra for fisheries management, was a practice developed in the 1930’s by the US Forest Service. It may work for trees because they stand still and are easy to count, but it definitely is not a practice that can be easily applied to or work as well for enormous amounts of biomasses of living, moving, animals. In fact it is such a narrowly focused management methodology that the 20th Century’s most respected expert in marine fishery dynamics, the late Peter Anthony Larkin, wrote the MSY epitaph in 1977, four decades ago. Larkin condemned Maximum Sustained Yield because it put marine species at too much risk. It left out too many relevant factors and left management decisions too vulnerable to political pressure to be accurate or objective. Its myopic view is weighted towards “benefits” (to the fishery) while at the same time ignoring relevant negative factors. It strives to impose a constant harvest rate without taking into account each species’ natural biological and environmental fluctuations. In short, MSY is probably not the way to try and ascertain accurate population counts of global fisheries whose health and abundance depend on an integrated management approach. " |
| TIMTalk Grace C. Young Theme: Collaboration and Engineering Title: No Engineer is an Island You know the movie Iron Man? The rock-star engineer of the film creates an incredible machine, alone, while squirreled away in a glorified basement. Not to dis superheroes or Marvel fans, but that really is fiction. I don't know anyone who works like that... and I go to MIT. At MIT I’ve found engineering to be extremely collaborative. On a daily basis, engineers work together to solve complex problems all over the world. We may be "nerds" that have our own quirks, but in order to do our jobs right, we need to be people persons too - constantly interacting with others. We shouldn’t be ashamed of working in groups, of not accomplishing things purely on our own, and then having a "team," rather than an individual, be recognized. This is an important idea to get into people's heads, especially engineers. DaVincis or Edisons may come along once every 500 years or so. But as a rule, successful engineering requires teamwork. Once I met a girl at a Christmas party and someone asked if she wanted to be an engineer "like Grace." She said “no,” because she "liked working with people.” I wish I could convey this to her that as an engineer, you do work with people! A lot of people! Really, everyday; it’s necessary. She thought a “people career” was being a doctor, or working at a store. Too many people think this way, that engineers are somehow anti-social, working alone in basements. It’s an unfortunate misconception because it inhibits some, especially women, from entering, or trying, engineering because they want to “work with people.” Honestly, part of me was that girl at the Christmas party when I first got to MIT. I remember as a freshman, reading a problem set question and having no idea how to solve it, yet I thought if I really focused and put a ton of hours into it I could do it; but I wasn’t really successful. Then, I remember staying up late working on problem sets with classmates. A group of us would sit down and, working together for several hours, we’d somehow manage to find a solution, even though each of us on our own couldn’t figure out how to solve the problem earlier. I remember hearing about a guy in our physics class who did the whole PSET we were struggling over in just two hours by himself. I was so jealous! I thought, “I want to be that guy.” But I realize now that I was missing the point. Collaboration is necessary to solve real problems. I’m grateful that MIT has taught me that lesson. I discovered then that to succeed at MIT you really need both introverted and extroverted qualities. There are times when it’s better to sit on your own, straighten things out in your own head, do practice problems, or just teach yourself a new skill. But you also need to know when to work with others to find solutions. This summer I used that working style on a real project. I was working in Hawaii to re-design an autonomous robot for monitoring the health of commercial fisheries. Building the robot was a perfect project for an ocean engineering student, like me. Here I am on deck of a research vessel with the robot I worked on [referring to photo]. Sure, for this project I spent some time alone at my desk, making a SolidWorks 3D model and reading relevant papers, but a huge amount of my time I spent soliciting input and communicating with others; so I really had to be a people-person, too. I’d be on the phone with a machinist, for example, almost daily, about what parts to change to make manufacturing faster. Or, I’d be talking to the crew who deployed an earlier version of the robot, seeing how I could change the design to make their lives easier. They said if the units could stack on top of one another, like Ikea boxes, it would make their work more efficient. I incorporated their feedback by adding simple pegs in the corners that allowed units to stack. I wouldn’t have known these things, about the machining or stacking, without reaching out to those people. So collaboration and communication was a huge part of the project, and quite frankly one of the challenges. This dynamic working style - I’m calling it the mix of intro and extroverted – comes into play in many areas of like, not just on engineering projects like building robots or solving problems sets. I first practiced it in ballet class. This is me four years ago [refering to photo]. Before MIT I danced with a ballet company. In high school I spent just as much time in the ballet studio as I did doing math problems and working in my school’s robotics lab. When you’re training at the ballet barre it’s easy to stand there and be jealous of the dancers around you. Maybe they have a higher développé, or longer legs, and so on… But at some point for you to get better, you need to put blinders on, and focus on your own improvements. You need to let yourself be inspired and motivated by the people around you, but also know when to focus on your own development. I’ve had to do the same thing at MIT; it’s easy to be jealous of the guy who finishes the 6.01 PSET in an hour, or started in advanced physics freshman fall. But that’s not always productive. To succeed here you need to let yourself be inspired and motivated by your peers, and work with them to solve problems, and then know when to focus on your own learning. I hope the girl at the Christmas party, and other people stuck in her mindset, will soon consider engineering a career that lets you “work with people,” that the Iron Man-working style is a myth. |
| Chickens peck in the dirt at the end of the rutted drive. Out back of the house, a rooster crows. And in a building that looks like a fine place to park a combine, a crew works on a submarine that can go 8,000 feet deep in the ocean. Only a half-dozen or so subs in the world can do that. The others are owned by governments and research groups in Russia, France, Japan and the U.S. Then there’s Scott Waters, 29, the head of his family’s chain of hardware stores. He found his submarine in storage in Wisconsin, loaded it on a flatbed truck and hauled it home to Salina. Its name is Pisces VI and it can go where light can’t, down to an undersea world of legend and fantasy, the part of the planet we know least about. .. Grace C. Young is the project’s science ambassador. She will be the link to research groups and networks... Young [left] high school early, earned an engineering degree at MIT and now is doing thesis work on oceanic imagery at the University of Oxford in England. Question: What made her come to be part of this? “People asked me that when I left Oxford — ‘Kansas? Really?’ It’s because we all believe in what Scott’s doing. I’m very interested in climate change, and the oceans are a big part of that." ... Grace Young climbed out of a crate with an electrical connector in decent shape. She smiled. 'This is like finding gold,' she said.... |
| Read the full story in The Kansas City Star. We made front-page! Here are a few more updates from Instagram: |
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 Tenerife from airplane. |  Submarine safari's main submarine. |  View from the window seat. |
| My officemate and a fellow researcher in Oxford's Ocean Research & Conservation Group, Dr Michelle Taylor, has found the first evidence of microplastic being ingested by deep sea animals. Read her paper at: You can read more about microplastics on this NOAA webpage. They first appeared in personal care products about fifty years ago. On December 28, 2015, President Obama signed the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015, banning plastic microbeads in cosmetics and personal care products. Other countries are following suit. It was a major topic of discussion at the Our Ocean conference, which I attended last month (that story here). |  Image credit http://brenmicroplastics.weebly.com/impacts.html |
 | This Thursday (Oct 6) I'll be speaking at Kings College London about ocean exploration. Everyone is welcome. At 6pm in the Pyramid Room, the talk part of their Intrepid Explorers series and will most likely precede some sort of pub outing. Thanks Rebecca Farnum, author of Defending the Deep - Guardians of the Sea (!), for inviting me! |
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 Our presentation was "so busy, people were standing in the hall!" |
| If you only watch or read one speech from the even, I recommend President Obama’s (online video; transcript). I also recommend Admiral Robert Papp’s speech on the Arctic. If you’ve more time, however, basically everything was recorded and available for binge watching. Adrian Grenier spoke several times alongside Secretary Kerry. Grenier, perhaps best known for his staring role in Entourage, and I first met during Mission 31 when the actor/ filmmaker/ environmentalist dove down to Aquarius to visit us during Mission 3. Approximately a year later he founded the Lonely Whale foundation to promote ocean conservation. His Instagram post with me at an Aquarius viewport was listed as one of “10 Times Adrian Grenier Sent Love Letters to the Ocean in 2014.” |  (I've since changed my Instagram to @gracecalvertyoung) |
| My pledge is to develop and implement technologies that help us better explore, understand, and manage our oceans. I believe the best means of implementing this pledge is to create a CERN-like research organization that is multinational and funded jointly by the public and private sectors. A CERN for the oceans could also serve as an incubator for more effective global ocean management policies. More on that in my <my 2015 TIME op-ed>. My pledge is to complete my current PhD research combining marine biology with engineering to determine the most effective means to restore and degraded coral reefs. My pledge is to become more engaged in public policy development, specifically related to international cooperation and better unilateral management of the oceans that will rationalize and focus public and private research funds on the most pressing ocean-related issues. |
| “Governments and NGOs will be pulling up their sleeves again to carry on the important task of plugging the governance gaps for 2/3 of the world’s Ocean. Round one of meetings in March got off to a successful start. At this session, things are likely to get more charged as the meeting starts to focus on the substance, with regards to the different elements that need to be included in the agreement. At this stage there is always the risk that important issues might get stranded on the rocks or thrown overboard altogether. Gearing up for the meeting the NGO coalition the High Seas Alliance (HSA) organised a webinar and released a newsletter, and various organisations prepared handy briefings such as Greenpeace’s 10 steps to high seas marine protection – a must-read for governments. The Huffington Post is also running a series of articles about the negotiations on its ‘What’s Working Oceans’ page, written by negotiators and observers to this process. Plus, check out our blog on why the next two weeks are critical for the future of high seas marine life, the Ocean and all of us. The IUCN World Conservation Congress will shortly start its 24th Session in Hawaii (1–10 September), now home to the world’s largest marine reserve! As we reported last month, this meeting is a big deal in the conservation world, with more than a thousand events bringing together thousands of scientists, politicians, NGOs, academics, indigenous peoples and business folks to talk all things conservation. A number of important motions for the Ocean will be up for discussion including marine protected areas (MPAs), sharks and rays and coral reefs, and NGOs are currently working hard to drum up enough votes for their successful adoption at the Member’s Assembly. Check out all the marine-related events in this very handy IUCN guide. In particular, Motion 49 urges members to work together constructively within the high seas treaty negotiation process to ensure a strong agreement that really does address all the gaps in high seas governance (see above). If this motion goes forward it will give a welcome boost to treaty negotiations, ensuring ambition levels stay high. Motion 53 builds on the 2014 IUCN Promise of Sydney “to create a fully sustainable ocean, at least 30% of which has no-extractive activities”, by including a 2030 deadline to reflect scientific recommendations that say we need to up our game in Ocean protection. Let’s hope for a Blue Hawaii conference (feel a song coming on?) with the successful adoption of these motions.” |
| Hrant, a close friend from undergrad, decided to drop in on them for a couple days. We planned to rendezvous at Gare Du Nord. He was making his way circuitously from Armenia back to Stanford, where he’s doing his PhD. I bused and trained in from Oxford via London. Using the bus from Oxford to London and the 4-hour Eurostar from London to Paris as extensions of my office, I’d been working since 6am and was just wrapping up while waiting for him at Starbucks. Hrant and I hadn’t seen each other in more than a year, but I keep finding that with good friends, you pick up where you left off as if no time had passed at all. A quick coffee turned into a “quick” champagne before our next train. We caught the 6pm to Sens, a smallish city (population ~30k) in Burgundy, southeast of Paris. Our friends met us at the station in a beat-up car they said had broken down last week. They related the comedy of trying to find a French mechanic who didn’t groan “but it’s Saturday...” in response to their repair requests. |
| On the drive to the château in La Chapelle-sur-Oreuse, we stopped at a bakery to pick up their last pan au chocolat before closing. The back seat was a buttery-flakey mess as we pulled onto rue du château. The 14th century château was postcard perfect. The sun was seting over its expansive green and yellow fields, illuminating a glass of white wine that rested languorously on a table outside the ivy-covered stone walls. We ditched our bags and lounged in the unkempt garden to watch sunset. Our host brought out some watered-down pastis, a French anise apéritif. The nine of us were a mix of recent grads and PhD candidates in theoretical physics or engineering from MIT, Harvard, Oxford, or Stanford. “Is now a good time for the champagne tasting?” one of our hosts asked. Meeting no objection, he dashed inside while another host gave Hrant and I a tour of the place. |
| Our first stop was the wine cellar, which was expansive and musty, but empty except for two lonely bottles of local red. Our next stop was the main reception on the ground level. Sleeping bags covered couches in front of a massive fireplace. A Ping-Pong table occupied an arched stone alcove, looking incongruous under a brass chandelier and in front of a two-story red velvet curtain leading to the front garden. Empty glass bottles covered all counter space in the butler’s kitchen, waiting to be driven to the nearest recycling center. A long dining table that could easily seat twenty plus guests also occupied the ground floor, but it looked unused. The real living space was on the upper floors. Up half a flight on the lopsided spiral staircase, we reached what looked like a front door, but upon opening it we found a sheer one-story drop along the château’s stony outer wall –- an effective way to dispose of unwanted guests? Further up the stairs we encountered a cozy sitting room complete with couches and high-backed velvet chairs around another fireplace. The room connected to a smaller dining area and a fairly modern kitchen. From a terrace adjoining the kitehcn, a château cat surveyed the neighbor’s chickens. Our host ran the champagne tasting much like ones I’ve had the good fortune to enjoy at Oxford. Two of our hosts had toured the vineyards in the nearby Champagne region and returned with their favorites, so needless to say they really knew what they were talking about. Many of us preferred the slipped in sparkling bourgogne (not technically a champagne; a NV Honoré Louis Crémant de Bourgogne Brut). Ed told us that in blind “champagne” tastings, most people prefer non-“champagnes” (even non-French Proseccos, Cavas, etc.). It reminded me of how susceptible we humans are to marketing and hype; how often we go with the crowd and don’t really know what we want. Candle wax had already dripped onto the tablecloth by the time we started dinner. After our second bowls of pasta, when I for one would ordinarily be settling into a carb-coma, someone got a Ping-Pong tournament going to German rap and Brittany Spears. Wine and conversations flowed well into the night. The next day I woke with the sun and roamed the château with everyone still zonked. I felt like the one person awake during a Sleeping Beauty curse. I made a cup of tea and quietly enjoyed the library. People emerged at a more civilised hour and brunch cooking quickly commenced. Individually, some people worked remotely, connecting to the library Wi-Fi, Skyping with their supervisors, etc. Those not so scholarly employed spent the afternoon reading or cooking. I thought of an advertisement that keeps appearing on my Facebook and Instagram: “Apply for a Remote Year.” The concept is that you pay a set price to travel the world with a group of young professionals who all work remotely. I guess this is how it might work and it’s not bad. |
| I thought of working, but tried not to. I’d planned in advance enough to be able to take these two days off and had just finished a paper on my summer field work; now was a good time to take a break. The library’s enticing collection books proved a relaxing distraction. I kept-up a habit I’ve developed recently of taking an hour’s afternoon siesta. When I awoke, the crew was attempting the rather ridiculous endeavor of rigging a sous-vide in the tower bathtub to cook half a lamb. Sous-vide is a method of cooking meat very slowly till melt-in-your-mouth tenderness. I’d learned about the technique from this KickStarter a few years ago, but I had never seen one before, let alone tasted its output. The sous-vide in place, the team set to frying calamari in a homemade spicy batter. Because of overfishing, I don’t eat seafood except for bivalves, cephalopods, and lionfish (you can read why on my Act Now page), and calamari thankfully falls into the cephalopod category. We enjoyed a late “lunch” in the sunshine, wearing straw hats that came with the château, eating the small batches of calamari as they emerged from the kitchen, where two guests volunteered as chefs. Each batch improved, getting crispier. We finished with a ricotta lime cake topped with grape compote that a kitchen goddess had made from scratch while I was napping. Discussion of the next meal commenced immediately afterward; we had a château conundrum. The sous-vide lamb would be acceptable to eat around 9pm, but it would be at its best, mouth-watering, falling-off the bone, at around 5am. We decided to have dinner with the first round of lamb at 9pm, followed by a breakfast of lamb so scrumptious that it was worth waking up at 7am. No one objected to this plan. With the next day’s early start in mind, the evening quieted down earlier. In the morning, just hours before Hrant and I departed, we enjoyed an early morning farewell feast of what was indeed the most tender and delicious lamb I’ve ever eaten, paired with eggs, toast, foie gras, and just a little bit of red wine. It was the gastronomic pinnacle of our Epicurean stay and the perfect way to wrap-up our visit. |
| The neighbor’s excitable dog joined the party bidding us farewell. The guests remaining had seen posters advertising a circus in town that night, so planned to attend and host an impromptu after-party. I was tempted to stay, but by that time Hrant would be flying over the Atlantic and I’d be at a Royal Geographic Society (RGS) conference in London thinking of what we were missing. The experience was not unlike ones I’ve had on boats and expeditions. You learn to savor moments with the people around you because, well, you are stuck with them. You’re not in the city, so you can’t bounce from one attraction to the next, or pick-and-choose with whom you hang out. There’s no compulsion to check your phone all the time because no one else is doing it and, frankly, why? After the RGS conference, rather than venturing into the city, I spent my time in the quiet of my Oxford apartment working more productively than usual. I wonder how I’d feel after a full “European August” off in such a lovely spot. |
| 3-legged turtle swims past | Stuck in tropical storm | Boating past small island |
 What's the scariest thing you've experienced? |  What made you interested in the ocean? |  What did you eat when you were underwater? |  Which do you care about more, the earth or the ocean? |
 |  For as long as I can remember, every time I’ve seen a shooting star, blown on a dandelion, or made a wish, it’s been for one thing: my Grandma Bonnie’s good health. She was a rock in our family, but at the same time hilarious and sometimes just as much of a goofball as us kids. She had the beautiful ability to be tough but kind, reminding us that you never know what others might be going through. Her “past lives” ranged from being a nun to a captain in the Air Force, all with an IQ that was through-the-roof. Her death last weekend, although not unexpected, put me in a dark place that I know I’m not the first to experience. She wouldn’t stand for us being melancholy though, so I’m trying to focus on the incredible woman she was and live in a way that makes the best of her influence. Thank you to all my family and friends for your love and optimism. |
| Wu, Shicun. Major law and policy issues in the South China sea: European and American perspectives. Eds. Yann-huei Song, and Keyuan Zou. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2014. |
| Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, chair of the foreign relations committee, followed Clinton's response with his own support for the treaty. "We are now laying the groundwork for and expect to try to take up the Law of the Sea Treaty. So that will be one of the priorities of the committee," Kerry said. "The key here is just timing." (original article) |
| Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it best: “Joining the convention would secure our navigational rights and our ability to challenge other countries’ behavior on the firmest and most persuasive legal footing, including in critical areas such as the South China Sea and the Arctic. (original article) |
Grace Young is an MIT ocean engineer, aquanaut, and scientist/engineer with Cousteau's Mission 31. She's currently a PhD student at University of Oxford, chief scientist for the Pisces VI deepsea submarine, and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer.
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