🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4vss65$gs8@nyx10.cs.du.edu>, anon1167@nyx10.cs.du.edu says...
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>While hanging around the library today and thinking about how bored I am 
>with with lab work, I decided that what I really wanted was to go on a 
>scientific expedition.  You know, like in the old movies where the 
>scientists cruise around in the tropics, collect specimens, and take them 
>back to England, where they show them off to aristocratic families until 
>some wealthy young woman falls in love them, and they live happily ever 
>after.  
>
>So I was wondering, are there still scientific expeditions that travel to 
>distant, relatively unexplored parts of the world?  A lab tech that I 
>worked with once went on a 6-month expedition ot Antarctica, but I was 
>thinking of someplace a little warmer.

Don't know how serious you are, but...
The Discovery Channel just had a show on about an expedition to
the Galapagos that picked up where Darwin left off, looking at the
marine, rather than the land, fauna.  They had this really cool
submarine with vacuum attachments for sucking up unsuspecting little 
critters and dropping them into jars for further perusal in the lab.  
So that's technically cruising around in the tropics, though not
something I'd recommend for the claustrophobic.  No mention of wealthy
young women on the show, though. :)

Or you could head off to Southeast Asia - didn't they just find
a new species of large hoofed mammal there?

However, much of science seems to be at the stage where you can't
make new discoveries casually any more.  To find exotic new species
on a field expedition would require a lot of tedious descriptive
anatomical work, and probably DNA sequencing too.

--
Hannah Dvorak
Division of Biology 216-76
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125