world wide web

While we may connect to the 'net wirelessly and painlessly, maintaining the thousands of miles of undersea and buried cable -- and the rest of the net's physical infrastructure -- is a huge task. In this episode of Cocktail Party Science, host Chuck Cage sits down with Deputy Editor Jake Ward and Who Protects the Internet? author James Geary to discuss the protection of the internet in its physical form.

Download the episode here, or subscribe to the iTunes feed.

It's been 20 years this month since Timothy Berners-Lee proposed the Web as a means of organizing information generated at CERN. And if science enabled its creation, the Web has likewise changed science, providing new ways to observe and analyze information.

Also in today's links: self-doping caterpillars, old buzzwords and new buzzwords, and more.

For the past five years, John Rennie has braved the towering waves of the North Atlantic Ocean to keep your e-mail coming to you. As chief submersible engineer aboard the Wave Sentinel, part of the fleet operated by U.K.-based undersea installation and maintenance firm Global Marine Systems, Rennie--a congenial, 6'4", 57-year-old Scotsman--patrols the seas, dispatching a remotely operated submarine deep below the surface to repair undersea cables. The cables, thick as fire hoses and packed with fiber optics, run everywhere along the seafloor, ferrying phone and Web traffic from continent to continent at the speed of light.

The cables regularly fail. On any given day, somewhere in the world there is the nautical equivalent of a hit and run when a cable is torn by fishing nets or sliced by dragging anchors. If the mishap occurs in the Irish Sea, the North Sea or the North Atlantic, Rennie comes in to splice the break together.