Until recently, divers hoping to catch a glimpse of great whites in the wild had to rely on immobile shark cages lowered into the water off the side of a boat.

So one professional diver and guide, Lawrence Groth, built what he calls a "shark cage on crack." The Pelagic Explorer is a shark cage with engine-powered propellers that enables divers to more closely study and photograph great whites.

In a Discovery Channel Shark Week special, "Great White Triangle," the vessel's first few launches are documented as it's deployed in a large patch of open ocean off of North America's western coast called the Great White Triangle — a somewhat mysterious place popular with great white sharks for reasons scientists do not fully understand.

To this day, scientists don't know why great whites migrate between the three points of the triangle: the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco, the Guadalupe Islands off the Coast of Baja California, and a section in the Pacific near Hawaii called White Shark Cafe. One study suggested that sharks might be heading to White Shark Cafe to find mates, but observing great whites in their natural habitat continues to be a hurdle.

That's largely because apart from being big, fast-swimming carnivores with 3,000 sharp teeth, they also frequently dive to depths of 1,000 feet, and have been recorded at depths of 4,000 feet.

New technologies, like mobile shark cages and satellite-enabled tracking devices, allows researchers to get up-close to sharks and study their behavior over long periods of time.

The job doesn't come without risk, as you can see in the full episode below. Things get real around the 9:00-mark when the cable lowering the cage into the water unexpectedly snaps:

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Happy Shark Week!

In honor of the One True American Holiday (all other holidays are less true, due to lower shark content), I spent about an hour reading about sharks on Wikipedia.

Important findings from a solid morning's research: sharks often have weird names.

For example: the birdbeak dogfish. That's a real animal! Ditto the flaccid catshark and, perhaps weirdest of all, the porbeagle, which doesn't sound like a fish at all.

This article originally appeared on PopularScience.com August 14, 2012.

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Dumb Gulper Shark

The dumb gulper shark (Centrophorus harrissoni), also known as the dumb shark or Harrison's dogfish, is an extremely rare deepwater shark native to the areas around Australia and New Zealand. It's wildly overfished for its meat and its liver oil and its population may have decreased by 99% since the 1970s.

Birdbeak Dogfish

The birdbeak dogfish, Deania calcea, lives in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, mostly in the seas around Japan, southern Australia, New Zealand, and western Africa. It is listed as being harmless to humans.

Tasseled Wobbegong

Wobbegongs can also be called carpet sharks. But why would you ever call something a carpet shark when you've been given the opportunity to say "wobbegong"? (The word means "shaggy beard" in an Aboriginal Australian language.)

Related: wobbegongs are often eaten in Australia. If you order a fish and chips there, there's a pretty good chance you're actually having a wobbegong and chips.

The history of shark movies is littered with some good, some bad and some very ugly films. BeforeSharknado, before Open Water, even before Jaws, there was Blue Water, White Death, which may just be the greatest shark movie ever made.

Released in 1971, the documentary follows a group of divers on a seven-month round-the-world adventure, a quest to be the first to film the great white shark from underwater.

It is an epic tale of adventure on the high seas and well worth tracking down.

The movie’s cast of characters is a who’s who of subaquatic greats. Producer Peter Gimbel, the heir to the Gimbel’s department store fortune, was the first man to dive on the wreck of the Andrea Doria the day after she sank to 160 feet in the Atlantic in 1956. Ron and Valerie Taylor were champion Australian freedivers. Stan Waterman was, and still is, a legendary underwater cameraman (he oversaw shooting for 1977’s The Deep).

Rodney Fox was a famous white shark attack survivor. Peter Mathiessen, the National Book Award winning author, was the film’s historian and wrote an excellent book about the journey called Blue Meridian. Hell, they even had a folk singer, Tom Chapin, on the crew to serenade them.

More than merely a shark film, this movie is a chronicle of a great adventure. These people weren’t scientists. They just built some shark cages, bought a pile of dive and underwater camera gear and chartered a boat to take them from South Africa to Madagascar to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to Australia in search of the “last great predator on Earth”, as Gimbel called the great white shark. The journey was fraught with frustration, disappointment and danger. On one dive, one of the cameramen was swept out to sea by a strong current and the crew spent anxious minutes searching for him among the whitecaps. Off of Sri Lanka, Gimbel himself was beset with the bends after surfacing too quickly following a deep dive. And this is to say nothing of their shark encounters, which are still thrilling to watch 42 years later.

The movie has that great grainy warmth and dry narration so common in documentaries from its era. Chapin’s soundtrack of folk songs and acoustic guitar is pure ‘70s comfort music. Sure, some of the scenes feel suspiciously scripted and some footage of harpooning whales is uncomfortable to watch. But this all must be taken in the context of the era in which it was made.

The diving footage is ample and spectacular, with enough historical diving gear to make any Sea Hunt fan happy — Jetfins, rubber wetsuits, DOXA dive watches and Aqualung regulators. Gimbel and crew were on the leading edge of underwater filming and shark research. No one before them had dived in open water next to feeding sharks, nor had anyone filmed great whites from a cage underwater. These guys had massive cojones. Splashing in off of a Zodiac next to a whale carcass surrounded by 100 oceanic whitetips at 2 a.m.?

Blue Water, White Death still stands the test of time and, frankly, blows away anything shown on Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. While the movie can be found on Youtube in relatively low quality, copies of the movie can sometimes be had on DVD, though finding it can be as epic a hunt as tracking down the great white shark was for the crew of the movie.

GP DOES SHARK WEEK, BETTER: 

To Catch a Tiger | Want to Dive with Sharks? | Kit: Diving the Bahamas

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OCEARCH researchers off the coast of Cape Cod just caught and tagged their first great white of the season.

The expedition is supposed to last 30 days, and they are hoping to tag up to 20 animals, though this is the first great white they've been able to get on the boat. They found three Mako sharks and one blue shark previously on this expedition.

It first looked to be about 13 feet long, according to their Facebook page, where they've been posting updates about the expedition. Here's an image they got before hooking the great white, which they baiting with a fake seal:

After hooking the shark they load the great white into a lift and dragged it out of the ocean onto the deck of the boat where the science teams get about 15 minutes to collect samples, weigh, measure, and tag it.

They don't just tag the sharks they catch; they also get blood and tissue samples to study the animal's physiology. The tags stay on the sharks and ping in their location for years after tagging. Previously tagged sharks can be tracked online.

The team is just beginning to understand the strange two-year mating cycle of these Atlantic great white sharks.

The shark seems to be a female, and actually measures about 14.5 feet long, according to OCEARCH's twitter account:

Science team hard at work, 14.5 ft. female White #Shark! #ExpeditionCapeCod@CaterpillarInc@CostaSunglasses@ContenderBoats@YetiCoolers

— OCEARCH (@OCEARCH) August 15, 2013

Hooking a shark during these expeditions is exhilarating, program manager Greg Skomal told Business Insider:

"Everyone goes from zero to 100 miles per hour real quick. You wait for two days then suddenly a shark is sighted, then bang everyone gets fired up really quick and a lot of anxiety, super exciting."

Here are the scientists are prepping and planning for their turn on the shark.

Expedition leader Chris Fischer told us that this is often the first time that some great white researchers see their study subjects alive. He said: "You deliver a shark to these people … these thought leaders from our most prestigious research institutions, and some of them break down in tears and that's pretty cool."

The program doesn't just help scientists, but also educates the public about these giant animals:

"People are afraid of sharks because of the fear of the unknown. When we know where they are going and what they are doing, a lot of that fear is replaced with curiosity."

A couple hours after first sighting the shark, they named her Betsy and let her go:

Accelerometer on, SPOT Tag on, 14.5 ft. White #shark named Betsy swims off lift looking healthy and strong! #ExpeditionCapeCod#SharkTracker

— OCEARCH (@OCEARCH) August 15, 2013

They also tweeted that"@CaterpillarInc fans named her after "Old Betsy" the nickname given to prototype of Caterpillar's 1st diesel engine model."

Her official profile on the tracker lists her as 12 feet and 7 inches long, weighing 1,400 pounds. Here's her current location:

We will be watching for you on the tracker, Betsy.

SEE ALSO: This Is What The Inside Of A Great White Shark Looks Like

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A photo of a shark eating another shark was taken by a graduate student with the University of Delaware's ORB LAB as the research program kicked off its shark-tagging season in July.

The photo was posted to Facebook and has recently been circling around the Internet. 

Danielle Haulsee and her colleagues were hauling in a large female sand tiger shark when they saw that a dogfish — a smaller type of shark — had also latched on the menhaden that researchers were using as bait. 

The dogfish was 3-feet-long and "completely swallowed by the sand tiger shark," according to the Facebook post. 

The sand tiger shark was released after it was measured and given a small identification tag, according to researchers. It's not clear what became of the dogfish. 

SEE ALSO: One Woman's Horrifying Shark Attack Captured On Rare Home Video

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Sharks that 'walk' instead of swim use their pectoral and pelvic fins to push and wriggle their bodies along coral reefs.

A new species of "walking" shark, Hemiscyllium halmahera, was caught in eastern Indonesian waters and described in a study published in the aqua, International Journal of Icthyology in July 2013.

The shark is about 28 inches long. It's mostly brown in color with clusters of dark spots and scattered whites spots.

Check out its unusual method of travel in the video below, courtesy of Sci-News.com:

SEE ALSO: How To Make A 'Classic' Maine Lobster Roll

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When new species are found near populated areas, they are often small and inconspicuous, not, for example, a hammerhead shark.

But that's exactly what a team of researchers discovered along the coast of South Carolina. The new species looks virtually identical to the scalloped hammerhead, but is genetically distinct, and contains about 10 fewer vertebrae, or segments of backbone, new research shows.

The new species, named the Carolina hammerhead (Sphyrna gilbert), gives birth to shark "pups" in estuaries near the shore off the Carolinas, according to a study published in August in the journal Zootaxa.

To find the shark, scientists led by University of South Carolina fish expert Joe Quattro collected 80 young sharks that looked liked scalloped hammerheads. They then analyzed their DNA, and found that they were distinct from their scalloped cousins. Further analysis found more subtle differences; the new species is slightly smaller, for instance, according to the study. Of these 80 sharks, 54 of them belonged to the new species, the study noted.

The study shows that the new species is quite rare. "Outside of South Carolina, we've only seen five tissue samples of the cryptic species," Quattro said in a release from the University of South Carolina. "And that's out of three or four hundred specimens."

Populations of scalloped sharks, like those of most other shark species, have plummeted in the past few decades — by up to 90 percent, Quattro said.

"Here, we're showing that the scalloped hammerheads are actually two things," Quattro said. "Since the cryptic species is much rarer than the [more widespread one], God only knows what its population levels have dropped to."

The decline of sharks has been driven in part by demand for shark fin soup, a Chinese delicacy. About 100 million sharks are killed each year to satisfy this craving, scientists estimate. But there may be some good news — consumption of the soup is down by about 50 percent in China over the past two years, according to the environmental group WildAid.

In more shark news, a new species of "walking shark" was discovered near a remote Indonesian island in August.

EmailDouglas Main or follow him onTwitterorGoogle+. Follow us@OAPlanet,Facebook orGoogle+. Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

• On the Brink: A Gallery of Wild Sharks
• New Shark 'Walks' Along Reef | Video
• Image Gallery: Great White Sharks

SEE ALSO: These Rare Sharks Are Some Of The Weirdest Animals On Earth

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A swimmer on vacation to Bora Bora has posted a video of himself hugging a shark, and many are criticizing the stunt as "idiotic," The Daily Mail reports.

Grant Murdoch was filmed by other snorkelers wrapping his arms around a lemon shark, and hitching a ride underneath — his face only inches from the shark's mouth.

"The sharks were so gentle and accepting of our advances," Murdoch told 9 News Australia. "They didn't seem to mind at all that we were riding for free. It was as close to an out of body experience that I have ever felt."

Despite the swimmer coming out unscathed, a number of fans following Shark Attack News criticized Murdoch — with some calling him"idiotic" and "bloody stupid."

While the Florida Museum of Natural History notes the lemon shark as being a "minimal threat to humans," a Canadian tourist was seriously injured by one earlier this year while scuba diving off Bora Bora, according to The Daily Mail.

Here's the video:

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Cat Schultz, an intern with the RJ Dunlap Marine Conservation Program took this picture, showing the inside of a tiger shark's mouth, as part of an ongoing tagging project off the coast of Florida.

The tracking study is designed to better understand the migration routes of sharks, so scientists can protect them as their numbers are in decline.

After the shark was captured, researchers kept its mouth open with a hook while holding it down near the back of a boat on a platform that was partially under the water, Tia Ghose of LiveScience said.

This was just enough time for Schultz to peer her camera lens inside the predator's mouth and take the shot.

SEE ALSO: This Is What The Inside Of A Great White Shark Looks Like

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A controversial policy to catch and kill sharks off popular west coast beaches got the green light in Australia, in a move the Humane Society Tuesday termed a "complete disgrace".

The federal government granted an exemption from environmental laws to approve Western Australia's shark mitigation plan, which is aimed at reducing the risks to water users after six fatal attacks in the past two years.

It means baited drum lines with hooks designed to capture large sharks can be set one kilometre (0.62 miles) offshore at busy Western Australian beaches from now until April 30.

The state government has said that any shark longer than three metres (10 feet) snagged by the lines and deemed to be a threat -- including great white, bull and tiger sharks -- will be humanely destroyed.

In granting the exemption, Environment Minister Greg Hunt said individuals must be responsible for their own safety while swimming, surfing and boating in the open sea.

"In this particular case, however, there has been a series of tragedies due to shark attack," he said, adding that there was evidence of a significant increase in incidents off the west coast in recent years.

Hunt said the proposal was for a brief trial period and confined to a few high-use, high-risk beaches.

"One does not have to agree with a policy to accept that a national interest exemption is warranted to protect against imminent threat to life, economic damage and public safety more generally," he said.

The Humane Society said the decision flew in the face of international obligations to protect the great white shark, Australian federal law and loud public opposition to the policy.

"The exemption of the WA shark policy is a complete disgrace," said Humane Society International's Alexia Wellbelove, adding it lacked a scientific approach.

"This exemption demonstrates the complete failure of the federal government to protect our most precious species and fulfil our international environmental obligations, for the price of a policy which we do not believe will have the desired impact of reducing risk for people, which is its stated purpose."

Local marine scientists have described Australia's west coast as the world's deadliest shark attack zone, and a tagging and tracking programme is already underway in a bid to limit fatalities.

The new crackdown was triggered by the fatal mauling of a surfer at Lefthanders Beach, in the popular Margaret River tourist region, in late November -- the sixth shark killing in Western Australia in two years.

While sharks are common in Australian waters, deadly attacks are rare, with only one of the average 15 incidents a year typically proving fatal.

Experts say attacks are increasing in line with population growth and the popularity of water sports.

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A New Zealand doctor fought off an attacking shark with a knife before heading ashore to stitch his own wounds and on to the nearest pub for a beer, reports said Tuesday.

James Grant was spearfishing near Colac Bay on the southern coast of New Zealand on Saturday when he felt the shark wrap its jaws around his leg.

"(I thought) bugger, now I have to try and get this thing off my leg," he told Radio New Zealand.

Grant, 24, said he didn't get a good look at the shark but the nature of several wounds suggested it was a sevengill shark and about 20 centimetres (7.8 inches) across at the jaw. Full-grown sevengills can measure up to 3.0 metres (10 feet) in length.

"I sort of just fought the shark off. The shark got a few stabs. The knife wasn't long enough though," he later told Fairfax Media.

After getting rid of the shark, Grant swam ashore and stitched his cuts using a first aid kit he kept in his vehicle for when his pig-hunting dogs were injured.

He and his friends then abandoned their fishing expedition and went to a nearby tavern where he was given a beer for himself and a bandage for the wound to stop blood dripping on the floor.

"It would have been great if I had killed it because there was a fishing competition on at the Colac Bay Tavern," Grant said.

NOW WATCH: We Ate Balut — The Absolute Strangest Food You Can Find In New York City

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A juvenile Great White Shark was run down by a boat, herded into shallow water, dragged by the tail up a boat ramp and then bashed to death with a metal pole.

The 40-year-old man who delivered the death blows at Sussex Inlet on the south coast of New South Wales has been fined more than $16,000 including court costs.

Great White Sharks are protected under Australian law. Western Australia has an exemption to run its large shark cull program via drum lines off popular beaches.

Glenn Tritton, Director of Fisheries Compliance with the state government, says the man from Glenbrook was found guilty by the Wollongong Local Court of harming a threatened species.

A second man who used his boat to tow the shark was charged with harming a threatened species. He entered a plea of guilty and received a six month good behavior bond.

“Great White Sharks are protected in Australian waters, they are listed as a threatened species in NSW which means it is illegal to catch and keep, buy, sell, possess or harm great white sharks and their habitats,” Mr Tritton said.

A witnesses told fisheries officers the 40-year-old man deliberately used his boat to hit the shark several times while herding it into shallow water.

The shark sustained the majority of its injuries from the boat’s propeller.

A rope was tied onto the shark’s tail and the second boat then towed the shark back to a boat ramp.

The shark was then hit on the head with a metal pole several times.

The magistrate fined the 40-year-old man $7,100 and costs of $8,000 for professional and $1,109 for witness costs.

Mr Tritton said the conviction sends a strong message that harming threatened species will not be tolerated.

“Great white sharks are found along the NSW coastline and as apex predators at the top of the food chain, they play an important role in marine ecosystems,” he said.

“The low population numbers following historical exploitation, plus their low reproductive rate, long gestation and late age at sexual maturity lead to slow recovery of the great white shark population and demonstrate the need for its protection.”

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On March 14th, diver Jason Dmitri was culling for lion fish approximately 70 feet underwater in the Western Caribbean Sea when a shark came out of nowhere and was ready to feast.

Dmitri had a Go Pro strapped to his head (for your SFW viewing pleasure, embedded below), which did not get bitten–but the shark “scared the crap out of me,” he wrote in his YouTube description. The species of reef shark is said to only grow to about 10 feet in length, but, according to marine biologists, it is capable of ripping out your rectum and eating every piece of meat inside of your body.

Even so, Dmitri will be back. ”The Cayman Islands is where I learned to dive and one of the best dive locations in the world,” Dmitri continued. “In no way did this encounter discourage me from getting back into the water.”

Below is the full video: 

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ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - A hammerhead shark dragged a college student in his kayak up the Atlantic coast for a two-hour "South Florida sleigh ride" that the kayaker taped with a head-mounted camera and posted on YouTube.

Adam Fisk, 22, posted a five-minute clip of his adventure titled "Lone Man Gets Towed for Miles in Kayak by 11 Foot Hammerhead Shark."

At one point, Fisk dunked the camera into the water and recorded the shark swimming ahead of the kayak.

A student at Florida Atlantic University, Fisk set out in a kayak on Sunday with several poles to go fishing before the shark took his bait near Boynton Beach, Florida.

"I threw my bait out and went to reel my other one in so I wouldnt get tangled, and I just had time to pick up the rod before the other one already got picked up by that hammer," Fisk wrote on the YouTube site.

"It must have been sitting right under me and I had no idea."

Fisk is a member of Team Rebel Fishing, a group of extreme anglers, according to its website. The group estimated Fisk was dragged by the shark for 12 miles.

Fisk declined to comment on Wednesday.

He wrote online that the shark took him out to sea and around in circles, ending in Lake Worth, Florida.

"Hooked a hammerhead in 50ft of water and got drug out to 250ft," Fisk posted in his Facebook account of the ride under the headline, "I took a South Florida sleigh ride today and I aint talkin Santa Claus."

(Reporting by Barbara Liston; Editing by Kevin Gray)

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On Wednesday, a Florida fisherman accidentally pulled up an 18-foot Goblin shark while he was going for shrimp, NOAA Fisheries Service reported.

This is only the second-ever goblin shark to be spotted in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the agency. The first goblin shark sighting in this area was nearly 15 years ago when commercial fishers captured one in 2000, David Shiffman at Southern Fried Science pointed out.

After the most recent shark was captured off the Florida Keys it was released and swam away, NOAA said.

The goblin shark is a deep-water species, but not much is known about it since the prehistoric-looking creatures are rarely caught. The shark has previously been reported in the western Pacific, off Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, according to NOAA.

The sharks have distinctive features with a long head, flat snout, and protruding jaw. They are also pinkish in color and have blue fins.

"They don’t have any commercial value, other than their jaws," marine biologist Charlott Stenberg told Southern Fried Science. "But, I have a Japanese friend who ate some of it and thought the tongue was delicious."

"Biologists encourage people to call and report these rare sightings and catches as the information they can collect allows them to know more about a species," NOAA said.

SEE ALSO: Here's The Canadian Government's Plan For The Massively Bloated Dead Blue Whale

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In April, shrimp fisherman Carl Moore accidentally caught an incredibly rare goblin shark off the Florida Keys. Moore snapped photos of the 18-foot-long creature before releasing it back into the water.

Those images, shared by NOAA, immediately captured the attention of the media and scientists as they showed only the second goblin shark ever to be spotted in the Gulf of Mexico, and the first to be captured since 2000.

But researchers studying the photos noticed something else that's exciting. Among the shrimp and other fish dumped on the boat deck are dozens of giant deep-sea isopods — huge insect-like creatures closely related to shrimps and crabs.

Andrew Thaler, a deep-sea ecologist who runs the popular marine-science website Southern Fried Science,told CNN he's never seen "that many [giant isopods] in one place at the same time before."

"Imagine a pill bug the size of a house cat," Thaler said.

The giant isopod can grow up to lengths of more than 16 inches. They survive by scavenging for food on the ocean floor, including the decomposing bodies of dead whales, fish, and squid, according to the website Sea and Sky.

That's probably why the cluster of giant isopods and the goblin shark were scooped up together — a very bizarre occurrence.

Thaler believes that both the isopods and the shark were feeding on the carcass of a whale decaying at the bottom of the ocean.

Giant isopods are "usually spread pretty thin and only occur in abundance around a food source," Thaler told The Houston Chronicle. The fishing trawl, he theorizes, passed over the spot of the dead whale.

SEE ALSO: 50 Pictures That Will Make You Fall In Love With Earth All Over Again

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An extremely rare megamouth shark was recently captured off the coast of southern Japan, representing only the 58th time a member of this species has been seen by humans.

The female shark, weighting 1,500 pounds, was surrounded by crowds at the Marine Science Museum in Shizuoka City as it was dissected by scientists on Thursday, FoxNews.com reports. It's not clear when the shark was first captured.

【幻の深海魚】メガマウスを公開解剖　巨大な口に見学者もビックリ http://t.co/mxgQQoAElM

— ハフィントンポスト日本版 (@HuffPostJapan) May 6, 2014

"The megamouth is one of the most rarely seen species of sharks," David Shiffman, a marine biologist studying sharks at the University of Miami, said in an email.

The sharks were first discovered in 1976 when "when one was accidentally caught in the anchor line of a U.S. navy vessel," said Shiffman.

Since then, other megamouths have been spotted all over the globe. The species is known to live in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Megamouths, which can grow up to lengths of 17 feet, are one of only three species of sharks that feed on plankton, according to the Western Australian Museum. The creatures filter the tiny plants from the water through their gills as they swim through the ocean with an open mouth. Their scientific name "Megachasma pelagios" means "giant mouth of the deep."

"Their mouth is bioluminescent," said Shiffman."Some scientists believe this is used to attract their food."

Check out a video of scientists performing an autopsy on the animal below:

SEE ALSO: Scientists Found Something Startling In Photos Of A Rare Goblin Shark

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Sharks and humans last shared a common fishy ancestor about 500 million years ago. Ever since, the two lineages have been making life difficult for one another.

There has been an unhappy history of killing and eating. Recently humans have been doing most of the harm.

Yet sharks are now lending us a helping hand, aiding in the design of proteins that help us fight disease.

Those proteins are called therapeutic antibodies, which are emerging as potent tools for cancer diagnosis and treatment. The trouble has been that human antibodies are rather delicate: When drug companies try and make them, a lot break apart.

Shark antibodies, in contrast, are robust. Now chemists have figured out the sources of that strength–some extra features in the proteins that work like Super Glue to keep them together. Building upon our shared and ancient evolutionary heritage, scientists have engineered those shark features into human antibodies and made cells produce them. More intact antibodies come out of these cells, and those antibodies withstand more damage.

"We found that a lot more of these antibodies passed through the cell's quality control checkpoints," says Linda Hendershot, a biologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee and one of the scientists behind the new research, published online May 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The shark-human connection first took shape at the Technical University of Munich, where chemists Matthias Feige, Johannes Buchner and several colleagues began exploring shark antibody durability. This strength was somewhat remarkable because while a shark swims in the sea, its antibodies are swimming in a sea of urea. Urea is a substance famous for breaking down proteins. Yet sharks need lots of it because the substance keeps shark cells from losing water and becoming dehydrated. So antibodies need to resist this necessary evil.

The way they resist breakdown turned out to be part of their structure. The antibodies, which are long chains, fold and twist. The researchers made molecular images of shark antibodies called immunoglobulin new antigen receptors, and learned the proteins have two regions that act like strong glue, holding different segments together.

One region, Hendershot says, is known as a "salt bridge," and it has a positive electrical charge at one end and a negative at the other. The opposites attract, like magnets, keeping the antibody from unfolding. The other region, Feige says, is a large water-repellent group of amino acids called a core. As they move away from water outside the antibody and towards one another, the acids exert more force holding the antibody together.

The scientists also learned that, while the shark and human antibodies were made of different sequences of components, their overall shapes were very similar. Their chains both featured the same "V" or hinge. The similarities gave the researchers confidence to try adding the shark features to human antibodies.

Using genetic engineering, the scientists modified shark genes that make the bridge and the core and added them to genes that make human antibodies. First they got bacteria to produce the converted antibodies, and then coaxed mammalian cells to do the same. They found that when both features were included—one alone wasn’t good enough—the antibodies resisted urea as well as other sources of breakdown, like high heat.

What particularly encouraged Hendershot was that the overall yield of these antibodies increased. The antibodies are produced in cell organelles that perform quality checks on the finished product, holding back ones with defects. So more of them were passing the cell’s own tests, she says. That’s attractive from a manufacturing perspective, something that could be used by biotech and drug companies.

"Of course, what we don't know yet is whether this technique increases antibody half-life in the bloodstream," she says. "That's the next crucial test to do." Like a lot of innovative architecture, it might work well in a small-scale model, but building something in the real world can reveal unexpected design flaws.

SEE ALSO: Scientists Discover Technique To Turn Light Into Matter

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With an underwater camera attached to his head, a diver captured a spooky encounter with a great white shark off the shores of Florida.

Earlier this month, the diver, Jimmy Roseman, of West Melbourne, Florida, was swimming in the murky waters around Bethel Shoal, off the coast of Vero Beach, when a great white shark approached him and kept circling back.

"In the video, it did look like it was kind of far away," Roseman told local TV station Fox 35. "But the whole time, it was about 6 to 7 [feet] (1.8 to 2.1 meters) away from me."

Roseman poked the shark with his spear gun until it left. [See the shark video]

Great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias), which get their name from their pale underbellies, can be found in most oceans around the globe, though they prefer to swim in temperate coastal areas. They are the largest predatory fish in the sea, sometimes growing to be longer than 20 feet (6 meters) and weighing up to 5,000 lbs. (2,268 kilograms). The creatures are known to have 300 teeth, arranged in up to seven rows.

Shark attacks on humans are relatively uncommon and are very rarely fatal. Last year, 72 unprovoked shark attacks were reported worldwide, and 10 of those were deadly, according to the International Shark Attack File, compiled by biologists at the University of Florida (UF). Forty-seven of those attacks occurred off U.S. shores, with eight reported in Florida's Volusia County, a hotspot for shark attacks. There was just one shark-related death in the United States in 2013, in Hawaii.

The number of shark attacks around the world has climbed since 1900, but this likely reflects the increasing amount of time humans spend in the sea, boosting the chances of such encounters, UF researchers said.

Shark attacks inevitably get more attention than the conservation problems the big fish face. Though illegal fishing makes it difficult to assess the total number of shark deaths, a study last year estimates that humans kill 100 million sharks annually, largely to feed an appetite for shark fin soup.

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