Thirty-five millimeter film is dead. Everyone over the age of nine now owns a three-megapixel digital camera with a 10X optical zoom. Parents upgrading to telescopic lenses are passing down their relics to kids who can’t aim and have never loaded a roll of film. In the digital revolution, the disposable camera was merely an innocent bystander (along with Polaroid). But at dive shops and drug stores, the single-use underwater film camera has survived as the practical option for honeymoon photography and pool party documentation. With the recent launch of the 5.0-megapixel Digital Underwater Camera Mask from Liquid Image ($99; a 3.1-megapixel version costs $79), the end is near. To see how potent the gadget could be, I spent an afternoon underwater attempting to document a most difficult subject matter: two kids under the age of seven.

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Lose track of time underwater, and you could lose your life when your oxygen runs out. Luckily, the Eterna KonTiki Diver watch saves you from your own absentmindedness. It uses technology from the automotive industry to stay waterproof at 3,280 feet without tightly screwing down its winding stem (a step that users often forget with other mechanical diving watches).

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Divers have spotted a new type of fish off Ambon Island in Indonesian waters. The striped fish, which is about the size of a human fist, is believed to be an anglerfish because it crawls along the ground and into crevices using leglike pectoral fins.

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If you plunge into the sea to ogle exotic wildlife, why not stay a while—and get an even closer view? Cave-diving engineer Bill Stone [see Journey from the Center of the Earth, February 2007] makes that possible with the most user-friendly version yet of a rebreather, a device that recycles your exhaled air, removes carbon dioxide, and adds oxygen. (A scuba device quickly burns through tanks of fresh air.)

On a typical dive, the Poseidon Discovery lets divers stay underwater at least three times as long as scuba gear can, and since you dont exhale into the water, you dont create bubbles or noise that can scare off fish.

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