"Under the Sea..."

An article in The Scientist describes a "mini-mass spec" that can work 2500 meters below sea level, where the pressure can reach 250 atmospheres. To make such a device, researchers from Harvard and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute made a container from titanium that's about 1 meter long and 20 centimeters in diameter to hold the mass spec and had it rather than the mass spec deal with all that pressure. "There's so much we don't know because we can't culture these [deep sea] microbes," Harvard's Peter Girguis says. "We know they're down there making RNA, but we don't really know what they're doing."