[NEDU]

Greetings,
I am the Executive Officer of the Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU), located in Panama City Beach, Florida. It is my intention, through this forum, to enable discussion and interaction between my command and the civilian diving community. If you have questions about Military Diving, the work at NEDU, Underwater Human Physiology, Saturation Diving, Equipment or anything else you think we play with here at NEDU, please post away. My team of researchers, diving medical officers, engineers, decompression modelers and military divers will monitor this forum and reply as they see fit. If you encounter something you find interesting in the recreational or commercial diving world and think we would be interested, again, please post. Some of the best ideas in the world of diving came from the recreational side. One disclaimer: We don't have the time to sit on this forum or the NEDU email address all day long, as we do have day jobs. So, please be patient with our replies. I will try to stay on top of this (since it is my pet project) but there are only so many hours in the day.

Two quick answers to the two most common questions I've seen so far.

1. Our Library. It is not available to the general public, yet. Much of our research is available under other command names at the Rubicon Research Repository and we are working with Rubicon to get our stuff cataloged with them directly.

2. The liquid breathing medium from the movie "Abyss". Yes it existed. No, we don't use it. As I understand it, the tests were conducted in the early 1970's. They appear to have done a poor job of documenting their findings (as we don't have any copies here), but the word on the street is that there were unacceptably high instances of pneumonia from having liquid in the lungs and as such was discontinued.

Now, what can I do for you today?