Thayer Walker, Journalist
Thayer Walker, Journalist
THE UNBREAKABLE TIMMY TURNER
Men’s Journal, September 08
After more than a decade working over operating tables, few cases surprise Dr. Richard Kim. The neurosurgeon has removed brain tumors the size of softballs and once had to bury his knee into a patient’s forehead to leverage a six-inch knife out of his skull. He has operated on infants with cranial fractures (“The skull looked like a cracked ping-pong ball,” he says) and a multi-platinum rapper with gunshots wounds (“He was very angry.”) Kim has cut into so many skulls that the familiar process offers all the novelty of opening a can of tomatoes. So on December 17, 2005, when Timmy Turner was wheeled into the operating room of Newport Beach’s Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, Kim wasn’t anticipating anything he hadn’t seen before. Then he opened Turner’s head.
A model of Timmy Turner’s skull. Photo: Jeff Harris
READY, AIM, SUSHI.
Outside, March 09
From the surface, the oil platform Medusa appears an unlikely fishing hole. The rig, a tight weave of steel girders supporting cranes, a helipad, and the roughnecks who run it, rests atop a narrow concrete pillar like an industrial lollipop. Thirty-six miles south of Louisiana’s Mississippi River mouth, in more than 2,200 feet of water, Medusa extracts up to 40,000 barrels of crude oil and 110 million cubic feet of natural gas every day. In one of nature’s ironic twists, this floating monolith doubles as a thriving, vertical coral reef--precisely the reason that Craig Clasen and Cameron Kirkconnell motored a crew out there one sunny day last June.
Cameron Kirkconnell and Craig Clasen hunting in the Gulf of Mexico. Photo: DJ Struntz
A silver RAV4 sits upright but crumpled along the waterline. An arm hangs limply out of the driver’s-side window. There’s no way that person’s alive, paramedic Scott Freedman says to himself. The he sees the arm move, and the situation shifts from tragic to urgent. Freedman yanks on the passenger side door, but it’s jammed shut. A wave completely submerges the smashed car. Freedman is watching this woman drown and there’s nothing he can do about it.
“Leave me here,” she pleads. She had tried to kill herself.
“I can’t do that,” Freedman replies.
RESCUE 1
Men’s Fitness, March 09
Sgt. Eric Thomson, deputy Wade Borges, and pilot Manny Tsikoudakis. Photo: Michael Clark
The large population of Guadalupe great white sharks first lured dive operators here nine years ago. The island is now the centerpiece of a $3 million and growing cage-diving industry. Last year, however, the Mexican government accused dive companies of unethical behavior after a YouTube video showed a great white smashing through the bars of one tour operator’s cage with two divers inside. Neither the divers nor the shark was injured, but the incident prompted the Mexican navy to enforce a chumming ban to protect the animals as well as the small local band of abalone divers who claim that the sharks have become more aggressive as a result of the chumming.
Dive operators see the issue differently. Without chumming, they claim, they won’t be able to attract sharks and if the boats leave no one will be watching the animals, which will be left vulnerable to poachers who fish sharks for their valuable jaws and fins. “Each one of those sharks is worth $20,000 to $30,000 on the black market,” says Marine Conservation Science Institute president Michael Domeier.
SHARK TALE
Playboy, March 09
Tooth fragment from a great white shark.
THE PLASTIKI
National Geographic Adventure, March 09
Once you move past the fact that they both float, two-liter plastic bottles and sailboats share little in common. To David de Rothschild, this is good news. To his boat builder, Mike Rose, it is not.
When de Rothschild began toying with the idea in 2006 ago turning a voyage to the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch in a television documentary, he ran the idea by his buddy, philanthropist and former eBay president Jeff Skoll. Skoll liked the idea, de Rothschild says, but he kept coming back to one concern: where’s the drama?
David de Rothschild at San Francisco’s Pier 31 Photo: Gregg Segal
WAVE-POWERED MONITOR IS MOVING BEYOND LISTENING TO WHALES
The New York Times, February 2009
In 2005, two Silicon Valley engineers, Joe Rizzi and Roger Hine, began building a device that would allow them to listen to the calls of humpback whales off the coast of Mr. Rizzi’s vacation home in Puako, on the Big Island of Hawaii.
What they produced, with their two-year-old company, Liquid Robotics, is the Wave Glider, a vehicle that will not only allow them to eavesdrop on the whales but could also become a powerful tool that helps scientists to understand climate change better and the military to monitor the high seas.
The Wave Glider is a sensor-carrying vehicle powered entirely by wave energy
HELLO KITTY
Outside, August 09
Then the world turns a slobbery black. The jaguar spreads those skull-crushing jaws wide and wraps them around my face. His canines press into my temples and into my cheekbones just below my eyes. Hot breath seeps through my eyelids. When his tonsils finally cease to blot out the sun, I see the jaguar standing on my chest with his head, golden and spotted, held aloft in victory.
Rupi, a 260-pound jaguar, gnaws on nine pounds of steak.
Photo: Noah Friedman-Rudovsky
NOW HEAR THIS!
Surfer’s Journal, August 09
Early medical literature attributed surfer’s ear to causes as varied as syphilis and excessive alcohol consumption. Treatments were a thumbscrew away from torture. In the 1870s, one favored technique required doctors to run electrical currents through needles and into the mountain of aural bone growth and then cut out the offending chunks with scissors. At least one patient suffered facial paralysis.
EMPTY SOUND
Sierra Magazine, Nov/Dec 09
On this unseasonably hot and clear May morning, however, no orca fins cut the water. This is whale season, but marine biologist Ken Balcomb hasn't seen the Southern Residents for days and doesn't expect them back anytime soon. They've been spending less and less time around San Juan, and last year an alarming seven whales--nearly 10 percent of the population--failed to return. Standing in his living room, scanning the water for the missing giants, Balcomb faces the most alarming question of his 34-year career: What's killing the killer whales?
One of the Southern Residents cruises Haro Straight off San Juan Island. Photo: Brandon Cole
“We largely think the Earth is explored, and we have the vehicles we need to master this planet, [but] that’s only our terrestrial third,” Hawkes said, scanning the crowd of business moguls, scientists, and enthusiasts through round-rimmed spectacles. The ocean is “the core of all life, and for some reason this deep space is the last we set about tackling.”
To illustrate his vision of the future--and the vehicle that will take us there--Hawkes is rolling out DeepFlight Super Falcon, a machine he claims will “put marine science back on track.” On temporary exhibit downstairs, the sleek silver craft is fast, light, and looks as if it zoomed out of an Issac Asimov novel.
JUST DON’T CALL IT A SUBMARINE
Outside, May 2010
The $1.5 million Deep Flight Super Falcon submarine. Photo: Misha Gravenor
FIRST DRAFT
Outside, June 2010
But this year, paragliders, harnessed to a thin nylon wing and powered only by the wind, have been falling from the sky like bricks. One pilot survived a crash, but during the two-day extraction a rescuer fell to his death. Another pilot flew too deep into the mountains and simply vanished. And just yesterday, the day I arrived, someone broke his back during a botched landing. Fearing more accidents, the government has suddenly demanded that every pilot have a copy of his paragliding license and insurance, a 180-degree departure from the normal laissez-faire protocol. It's hard logic to argue with, but we're arguing anyway.
Gavin McClurg flying over the Himalaya. Photo: Jody MacDonald