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Before it showed us distant reaches of the universe, the Hubble telescope ‘needed glasses’

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Composite image handout of the spiral galaxy NGC 4258

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JUDY WOODRUFF: It’s a 25-year-old space telescope that’s provided an unmatched window to the universe, one that’s helped us understand origins of stars, nebulas and distant baby galaxies.

The Hubble was launched on the space shuttle on April 25, 1990. It’s sent back more than a million observations and amazing images, what have been called cosmic postcards. The latest was released by NASA yesterday: a cluster of 3,000 stars known as Westerlund 2.

Science correspondent Miles O’Brien is here with a birthday appreciation.

And, Miles, it is the birthday, and we’re celebrating. And yet it wasn’t so smooth at the beginning.

MILES O’BRIEN: Yes, 25 years, we’re celebrating, and, when it began, 25 years, one month from now, in May, it was a disaster.

How quickly we forget what they called spherical aberration. Essentially, Hubble was Mr. Magoo. It couldn’t see well and it needed some glasses. And so NASA was, of course, tremendously embarrassed by a mirror that wasn’t shaped entirely properly and it had fuzzy vision.

The 1993 Hubble repair mission, the first of five mission to upgrade and improve the Hubble, was such a critical mission. And when they were able to put what amounts to eyeglasses on Hubble, suddenly, it could see like we have never seen before into the distant reaches of the universe. But it started out a laughing stock.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Yes, we — we forget that that happened.

So, over the years, it sent back, as we said, so many images. What are some that stand out to you as the most significant?

MILES O’BRIEN: Well, time is short. I will give you my top three.

Pillars of Creation, now, this is iconic in every way. It’s made the cover of textbooks and magazines, and it’s something that on the one hand has great scientific significance, because it takes you to basically the nursery for stars. This is how stars are formed. And what Hubble is doing is, in a time machine kind of way, taking us back to the very origins of our universe and showing how it grew up.

And this is taking us back to the baby pictures. But what — the other reason I like it is that it was a tremendous way of engaging the general public. People look at this. You don’t have to be a scientist to look at this thing and be struck by its beauty and struck by the connection we all have to the universe.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And that’s not the only one.

MILES O’BRIEN: No.

Number two on my list would 1994. And that is the newly sharpened vision of Hubble trained on Jupiter for the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet. It was a comet that broke apart, and we watched as impacted into Jupiter 21 times. This one particular is of the g impact, which was larger than 600 times the nuclear arsenal of our planet, huge, huge explosions, which we witnessed in real time, extraordinarily good luck for scientists, an amazing feat.

And, finally — and my are all kind of vintage Hubble images, but the Deep Field image back in 1995 — they took a little tiny piece of the sky, seemingly dark, 1/24-millionth of the sky, and did a longtime exposure on that with Hubble. And they came up with 3,000 objects that we’d never seen before, most of them that were galaxies.

So, you have to ask yourself, if that little darkened piece of the sky, 1/24-millionth, gave us 3,000 objects we’d never seen before, what does that tell you about how large and populated our universe, and, ultimately, could we really be alone?

JUDY WOODRUFF: Miles O’Brien, thank you.

MILES O’BRIEN: You’re welcome.

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How maps packed with data help scientists fight malaria

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POWER MAP_Monitor

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JUDY WOODRUFF: The speed and impact of the Ebola epidemic highlighted the need for better ways to quickly predict potential outbreaks. Researchers believe data can help in their fight other diseases like malaria.

Tomorrow is World Malaria Day, making it a good time to look at the potential.

NewsHour special correspondent Spencer Michels reports.

SPENCER MICHELS: Maps are nothing new. In one form or another, they have been around for centuries. These days, we use them in our cars, we use them to illustrate the news. Now scientists have found a powerful new way to use maps to attack disease.

Epidemiologist Hugh Sturrock is trying to stamp out malaria in parts of Africa, and from his campus cubicle at the University of California San Francisco, he is trying to make high-tech maps of the risk of outbreaks of malaria, maps that will be crucial to effectively fighting the disease, but will be easy to use in the field.

HUGH STURROCK, University of California, San Francisco: If we can understand and predict where diseases are most likely to occur, then we can target those high-risk areas. We were motivated to try to build a platform that would allow non-experts to generate risk maps themselves, essentially at the click of a button.

SPENCER MICHELS: Worldwide, between 600,000 and a million people, mostly young children, die each year from malaria. The disease is spread by female mosquitoes seeking human blood. Health workers need accurate maps showing on-the-ground conditions to know where to spray insecticide and where to stock clinics.

Sturrock’s maps for Swaziland in Southern Africa show where malaria cases have occurred, plus water conditions, temperatures and elevations. Until now, those facts have not been easy to analyze, even though the data has been collected.

HUGH STURROCK: There are more large-scale rainfall patterns and temperature variations and are really only available using sort of satellite information. We want to sort of bring all of that data to the hands of those people in the village.

SPENCER MICHELS: Sturrock’s maps rely on data, much of it photos, that have been, and still are, collected by NASA satellites circling the globe. But that information, 40 years’ worth, has languished in government vaults in South Dakota.

Now Google Earth Engine has acquired it, for free, and is working with the university and many others to put it to work. For several years, Google has been storing data, trillions of measurements, on thousands of computers that it owns. But, until recently, and, in fact, even now, using that data, making sense of it has been very difficult.

Sturrock, with the power of thousands of Google’s computers at his fingertips, is combining the satellite pictures with on-the-ground information, using algorithms.

REBECCA MOORE, Manager, Google Earth Engine: An algorithm is nothing more than a recipe.

SPENCER MICHELS: Computer scientist Rebecca Moore manages Google Earth Engine.

REBECCA MOORE: These scientists are saying, I will look at this kind of satellite imagery, and then I’m going to overlay where there have been outbreaks of malaria in the past, and where there have been mosquitoes in the past, and so on, and they mix that all together into a numerical recipe, and out comes a prediction.

SPENCER MICHELS: Those predictions and the maps that produce them point to where there’s a need for insecticide-treated bed nets to keep out mosquitoes. That’s the goal of Nothing But Nets, part of the U.N. Foundation.

Elizabeth Ivanovich, its global health officer, says that accurate on-the-ground information is a vital component of any risk map, and in parts of Africa, collecting that data has yet to occur.

ELIZABETH IVANOVICH, United Nations Foundation: A lot of work has gone on in Swaziland to get those data systems up to speed, so that you actually when a case occurs and when a death occurs and exactly the location that that is happening in.

And that’s just not the case in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, especially countries with a much higher burden of disease.

SPENCER MICHELS: But it’s not just fighting malaria that benefits from satellite data. Today, such information has become a hot commodity. Satellite pictures can provide evidence of environmental problems and clues to solving them.

Satellites record ships at sea, and the images, plus other data sent by ships, can point to overfishing and where it is happening. There’s dramatic satellite imagery of the growth of urban sprawl in Las Vegas, and the shrinking of Lake Mead, its water source, that could be used for planning.

The applications so far may be just the start of a host of uses for the mined data. In the public health field, the model of the malaria project could, Sturrock says, be used with Ebola and animals that are possibly spreading the disease.

HUGH STURROCK: It is possible to map cases of Ebola and to relate those to variables that are linked to the distribution of fruit bats.

There’s no reason why we can’t use a lot of that — those techniques and those models and that data.

REBECCA MOORE: It’s billions of megabytes of satellite imagery data. And never before has there been a technology platform that could allow scientists and government agencies to kind of mine that archive, right, and turn that into knowledge.

SPENCER MICHELS: For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Spencer Michels in Mountain View, California.

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New species of Costa Rican glass frog bears resemblance to Kermit

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A new glass frog species that bears an uncanny resemblance to Kermit the Frog was discovered by scientists in Costa Rica, the Costa Rican Amphibian Research Center announced earlier this week.

While glass frogs are typically green, this species is unique in that it is uniformly lime green and has a distinctive DNA structure and tinny high-pitched mating call.

Researcher Brian Kubicki, along with Stanley Salazar and Robert Puschendorf, found six specimens of the amphibians in three separate locations in the Talamanca Mountain Range on the Costa Rica-Panama border.

LOS ANGELES, CA - MARCH 15: Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy pose for the kiss camera during the Houston Rockets against the Los Angeles Clippers game on March 15, 2015 at STAPLES Center in Los Angeles, California. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and/or using this photograph, User is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. Mandatory Copyright Notice: Copyright 2015 NBAE (Photo by Andrew Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)

Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy pose for the kiss camera during the Houston Rockets against the Los Angeles Clippers game on March 15, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. Copyright 2015 NBAE. Scientists revealed a newly-discovered glass frog species that bears an uncanny resemblance to Kermit. Photo by Andrew Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images

They named the new species Hyalinobatrachium dianae (Diane’s Bare-hearted glass frog), in honor of Kubicki’s mother, Janet Diane, and wrote about the discovery in the February issue of Zootaxa.

The semitransparent glass frog, whose internal organs are easily seen, is common to the rainforests of Central and South America. This is the first time since 1973 that a new species has been discovered in Costa Rica, according to National Geographic.

As a result of the latest discovery, there are now 14 types of glass frogs in Costa Rica and 149 worldwide.

As the internet reacted to the Kermit look-alike, Disney released an official Q&A with the Muppet, in which Kermit responded to a range of questions about his amphibious doppelganger:

Is it true that you may be related?
Yes, we’re cousins. In fact, I’m related to every single frog in the world, and I’m close to most toads, too. The reason this new frog looks so much like me is that her mother and my mother are sisters. It’s a family resemblance. Googly eyes run in our family.

Read more from the Kermit Q&A here.

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Why the Nepal earthquake may have been inevitable

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A local villager walks carrying a child amid debris at a devastated area following Saturday's earthquake, at Paslang village in Gorkha, Nepal April 28, 2015. Photo by Athit Perawongmetha

A local villager walks carrying a child amid debris following Saturday’s earthquake, at Paslang village in Gorkha, Nepal. Geologists say another earthquake in the region is inevitable. Photo by Athit Perawongmetha

On Saturday, a portion of the thrust fault underneath central Nepal ruptured, causing an earthquake that killed at least 5,200 people, injured more than 10,000 and destroyed centuries-old temples, towers and buildings.

Nepal rests on the most dangerous portion of the Himalayan collision zone, a set of earthquake-prone faults stretching 1,200 miles from Afghanistan to Myanmar. Within the last century, this strip of land has hosted two earthquakes classified as “great” by the U.S. Geological Survey — with magnitudes exceeding 8.0. The most recent great earthquake occurred in 1950, when a magnitude 8.6 event struck the eastern portions of the Tibetan plateau near Rima.

science-wednesday

To better understand this seismic region, a team of scientists search for evidence of ancient earthquakes in dried-up riverbeds, relying on a database of Medieval texts and archaeological records to guide the way. And by parsing the region into smaller bits, geologist Paul Tapponnier of the Earth Observatory of Singapore and his colleagues have found that individual segments of Nepal’s fault host great earthquakes on a surprisingly regular schedule.

Two weeks ago, these geologists approached the Nepal Geologic Society, warning that a major earthquake in the precise region where Saturday’s earthquake struck was relatively imminent.

“In the talk, we looked at historical descriptions in the Himalayas going back to 1,200 A.D,” Tapponnier said. “Reports of destructive earthquakes in certain areas and not others, along with surviving architecture, can give an idea of a prior earthquake’s location and size.”

Summer monsoons flood these waterways, but during the dry seasons, scientists can walk along the sediment. Ruptures in the seismic fault are hard to spot with modern techniques – like satellite imagery – so walking in dry mudbanks remains one of the best ways to catch signs of a former earthquake.

Sir Khola river-cut cliff, Nepal. On the left hand side, a ruptured thrust fault (zigging cut in the rock) is clearly visible. Photo courtesy of Paul Tapponnier Tectonics Lab

Sir Khola river-cut cliff, Nepal. On the left hand side, a ruptured thrust fault (zigging cut in the rock) is clearly visible. Photo courtesy of Paul Tapponnier Tectonics Lab

Evidence of these old quakes can be seen in Z-shaped rips embedded in the sides of the riverbeds. The zagging pattern is the signature of a thrust fault – the geologic phenomenon responsible for the devastation in Kathmandu and other severe earthquakes, such as those near Los Angeles.

“Imagine you’re trying to move a carpet on a floor by pushing on the edge,” said geologist Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado Boulder who also studies tectonics in the Himalayas. “Rather than budge, it rumples at the edge that you’re pushing from.”

The same happens with thrust faults. In the case of the Main Central Thrust, the fault that lies under Nepal, where the Indian subcontinent smashed into the tectonic plate holding the Tibetan Plateau some 40 million to 55 million years ago, neither plate wanted to move, so the ground was forced upward over time, eventually forming the towering Himalayan Mountains.

When the team sees a Z-shaped deformation in the riverbed, they dig a shallow trench in search of charcoal. Using radiocarbon dating, they can pinpoint the dates that earthquakes occurred.

“Putting these things together, we found a site in eastern Nepal – 30 miles east of Kathmandu — that had seen a repeat of two large earthquakes: one in 1255 and the other in 1934,” Tapponnier said. “These two seemed to have ruptured the same length of the main frontal thrust.” In 2013, his group reported these findings in Nature Geosciences. Follow-up excavations have since unearthed evidence for four more earthquakes prior to 1255.

And each of these earthquakes, the team found, has occurred at roughly the same interval of 670 years.

Recently, the search expanded into central Nepal between Kathmandu and Pokhara, where Saturday’s event originated. There, they found evidence for a previous earthquake in 1344, approximately 670 years before Saturday’s quake.

The pattern suggests great earthquakes are unloading in an east-to-west fashion in Nepal. The last great earthquake west of Pokhara happened in 1505, meaning the next will likely occur 670 years later — two centuries from now.

Saturday’s earthquake relieved some, but not all, of the strain built over those long centuries, moving the ground by about 10 feet in 30 seconds, according to the USGS.

“But there are [26 to 30 feet] left, Tapponnier said. “That’s pretty ominous.”

The post Why the Nepal earthquake may have been inevitable appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

NASA Probe Ends Mercury Mission With A Bang

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This image shows planet Mercury's Shakespeare basin, where the MESSENGER spacecraft collided on Thursday after orbiting for. Image by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

This image shows planet Mercury’s Shakespeare basin, where the MESSENGER spacecraft collided on Thursday after its 11-year mission. Image by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

The planet Mercury earned a new crater when NASA’s MESSENGER probe smashed into its scorched surface earlier this afternoon. The intentional crash landing ended an 11-year mission that brought us the most intimate peeks at our solar system’s smallest planet.

NASA estimates the ship crashed at 3:26 p.m. EDT, though Earth’s final view of the descent was obscured by the little red planet. The collision likely created a 52-foot pockmark near the “Shakespeare basin” – a 250-mile-wide crater. NASA scientists believe the probe was traveling around 8,750 miles per hour when it obliterated near one of the basin’s ridges.

“We monitored MESSENGER’s beacon signal for about 20 additional minutes,” mission operations manager Andy Calloway of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory said in a statement. “It was strange to think during that time MESSENGER had already impacted, but we could not confirm it immediately due to the vast distance across space between Mercury and Earth.”

MESSENGER had circled Mercury 4,104 times since entering the planet’s orbit on March 18, 2011. Before then, it had traveled 4.9 billion miles from Cape Canaveral, flying by Venus twice and snapping up-close photos of Mercury’s nearest neighbor.

This image of Mercury's surface is the last one acquired and beamed back to Earth by to Earth by the Messenger spacecraft. NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

This image of Mercury’s surface is the last one acquired and beamed back to Earth by the Messenger spacecraft. NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

While in orbit, MESSENGER made many revelations, including that the diminutive planet is shrinking. It also beamed photos back to Earth of lava flows coursing across the planet’s poles. Unlike the Earth’s mountainous volcanoes, Mercury’s molten ooze creeps out of the ground from unknown sources.

“Today we bid a fond farewell to one of the most resilient and accomplished spacecraft to ever explore our neighboring planets,” MESSENGER’s principal investigator Sean Solomon of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory said in a statement. (Check out Solomon’s top-ten list of MESSENGER discoveries.)

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It’s not easy to sever a human spine. Here’s why

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Illustration of a human neck. Getty Images

Illustration of a human neck. Getty Images

Baltimore City’s State Attorney Marilyn Mosby at a press conference today said that Freddie Gray “suffered a severe and critical neck injury” as a result of being handcuffed, shackled and unsecured inside a police van.

In detailing the events, she said Gray was handcuffed against the ground, arrested and then placed on his stomach in the van. He was never buckled into a safety belt and his repeated requests for medical attention were denied, despite several stops. By the time he reached Central Booking, he was in cardiac arrest and no longer breathing.

The injuries sustained to his spine during the trip led to his death, Mosby said. The question is how. Fatally damaging a spine isn’t easy, and experts say if a cataclysmic blow did occur in the van, then it probably wasn’t done by intentionally banging his head.

“If you’re talking about somebody with a normal spine, then you’d need tremendous willpower,” says Columbia University neurosurgeon Marc Otten.

The spine consists of 33 vertebrae bones that run like tightly-stacked rungs of a ladder from the base of the skull down to the tailbone. Between each bone is thin disc of spongy cartilage that provides flexibility. The spinal column is encased in muscle for support.

Illustration of a human spine.  Image by Science Photo Library and Getty Images

Illustration of a human spine. Image by Science Photo Library and Getty Images

“Picture that you’re playing a trust fall game at a work retreat. Before you fall backwards, your muscles instinctively tense up to protect your head and neck,” Otten said. The same thing happens when a soccer player heads a ball. Their muscles flex to protect the bones in the neck’s spine, known as the cervical vertebrae.

Only a handful of scenarios can overcome these self-supportive instincts. When a collision is unexpected, for example, and the head wrenches or hits an object with a tremendous amount of force, such as during a high-speed motor vehicle accident. To result in a severe injury, the sudden jerking would need to twist or extend the seven cervical vertebrae to a point where they misalign.

“That can cause a scissoring effect among the spinal cord,” Otten said.

For death to occur, the individual discs would need to crisscross and damage the phrenic nerve, which runs from the neck to the diaphragm — the primary muscle involved in breathing. The nerve controls the tempo of the diaphragm as it billows the lungs, meaning that its destruction can lead to respiratory failure.

Another [possible] cause of fatality is “spinal shock,” Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine neurosurgeon Ali Bydon said, wherein a spinal injury impairs the nerves that control blood pressure and heart rate. “This leads to inability to oxygenate key organs and subsequent death.”

The scissoring effect mentioned earlier could also cause compression of the two arteries that run from the heart through the neck’s spine and to the brain. Jamming those blood flows could cause a stroke, Otten said.

It is hard to quantify how much force it would take to break a human spine, Bydon said. But studies have shown, he added, that it would require a force greater than 3,000 newtons to fracture the cervical spine. That’s equal to the impact created by a 500-pound car crashing into a wall at 30 miles per hour.

Blunt force trauma during an arrest, Otten said, can also make the spine more susceptible to major damage.

“I’ve heard of spinal injuries from when people were handcuffed and thrown to the ground. The problem is they can’t brace themselves,” Otten said. In February, a 57-year-old man in Alabama was left partially paralyzed after officers slammed him into the ground during an arrest.

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Using humor to protect ‘ugly’ animals, because they can’t all be as cute as pandas

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Hhooded seal, copyright Doug Allan/naturepl.com

The male hooded seal inflates its nasal cavity which appears like a big red bladder at the top of its head. It’s used as an acoustic device to ward off hostile species. Photo by Doug Allan/naturepl.com

Go to any zoo that boasts having a giant panda, and you’ll see its cute face plastered on everything from T-shirts to key chains. But imagine going to the zoo and being welcomed with a banner featuring a big ol’ flabby hooded seal with its flaring red nostril. (See above.)

Ugly AnimalsOnly in an alternate universe, right?

Not necessarily, thinks Simon Watt. He’s the founder of the Ugly Animal Preservation Society, a UK-based group that uses comedy to promote awareness of endangered, aesthetically challenged animals.

The hooded seal is just one of 60 animals included in his book, “Ugly Animals: We Can’t All Be Pandas,” out today, which profiles exceptionally unattractive endangered animals and offers advice and how to protect their habitats.

bald-headed uakari copyright Evgenia Kononova, Wikimedia Commons

Bald-headed uakari, Photo by Evgenia Kononova, Wikimedia Commons

Watt, a biologist and comedian, wrote the book as part of his work with the comedy troupe to promotes conservation awareness by joking about animals that are unlikely to be mascots for animal protection organizations.

At a typical event, Watt and other comedians will each represent an ugly animal and try to convince the audience to vote for it as their city’s mascot. Past winners have included the big-nosed proboscis monkey, the wrinkled titicaca water frog and the naked mole rat, whose name serves as its description.

Titicaca water frog, copyright Pete Oxford/naturepl.com

Titicaca water frog, photo by Pete Oxford/naturepl.com

The pink, viscous glop on the front cover of “Ugly Animals” — aptly called the blobfish — is the society’s official mascot.

Watt thinks that being able to laugh at how strange these animals appear helps people appreciate how biologically interesting they are.

“No one seems to like slugs, but the more I learn about them, the more I love them,” he said. “These things are filled with stories; they’re all incredible in their own way.”

prickly redfish, copyright Fran.ois Michonneau, Wikimedia Commons

Prickly redfish, photo by François Michonneau, Wikimedia Commons

Jokes aside, aesthetics really do determine which animals receive the most attention from conservationists and researchers. A minority of endangered mammal species gets exposure for fundraising efforts, and — assuming equal economic value — cute animals have more studies devoted to them.

Ernest Small, a research scientist with Canada’s Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food, says that studies favoring attractive animals receive the most funding.

“Researchers, professional biologists and conservationists understand if that are they going to devote their life to something that is really unattractive or not of economic value they’re going to have a lot of difficulty getting financial support for their work,” he said.

olm, copyright Wild Wonders of Europe/ Hodalic/naturepl.com

Olm, photo by Wild Wonders of Europe/Hodalic/naturepl.com

But more important than putting conservation focus on individual species, Small said, is the importance of protecting the ecosystems that support a diversity of life.

This means that using iconic animals for conservation can have practical benefits. According to Colby Loucks, Deputy Director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Wildlife Conservation Program, when attractive animals bring in money, other less charismatic animals living in the same habitat are protected as well.

“Conserving habitat for a cute and cuddly-looking animal like the panda also conserves habitat for many less ‘cute’ wildlife that shares its home, such as the really funky looking takin or the Chinese giant salamander — the largest salamander in the world,” he said.

Chinese giant salamander, Photo by By J. Patrick Fischer via Wikimedia Commons

Chinese giant salamander, photo by By J. Patrick Fischer via Wikimedia Commons

Loucks and Small both appreciate the work of the Ugly Animal Preservation Society, because given the current rates of extinction, conservationists need a good laugh. According to a report released by the World Wildlife Fund last year, the world’s vertebrate population declined by 50 percent since 1970. And the problem may be even larger than we can track, because known endangered species make up a tiny fraction of all the species that have been identified.

This large population decline is being termed as the “Sixth Extinction,” the first mass extinction in history to be driven by man-made factors including loss of habitat and human exploitation.

Chinese water deer at Whipsnade Zoo, Dunstable, copyright William Warby, Wikimedia Commons

Chinese water deer at Whipsnade Zoo, photo by William Warby, Wikimedia Commons

Loucks points out that because inhabitants of the Earth depend on similar environments, the fate of humanity is intertwined with that of the most obscure, unappealing animals as well.

And by using entertainment, Watt hopes that recognizing the unique qualities of those animals can foster a new appreciation for biodiversity.

“Honestly, I feel less revulsion than fascination because a lot of these animals are species I’ve never heard of,” said Watt. “It’s almost like an alien race on Earth.”

“Ugly Animals: We Can’t All Be Pandas,” is published by Trafalgar Square Publishing.

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Mission to Mars may warp astronaut brains

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NASA's Opportunity Mars rover captured this mosaic of the dusty Martian landscape, with its tracks visible to the right. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ.

NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover captured this mosaic of the dusty Martian landscape, with its tracks visible to the right. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ.


One day, space explorers might stroll along the red rocks of Mars. But radiation exposure during the trip may wipe away their memories of home.

A new report says that cosmic rays can change the physical architecture of the mind’s nerves, harming the brain regions that govern memory.

Cosmic rays, comprised of high-speed atomic particles, blanket the Milky Way galaxy. The radiation constantly bombards our planet, but the Earth’s magnetic field and its atmosphere save us from the most dangerous rays.

People who venture into deep space aren’t so lucky, as cosmic rays can easily penetrate a spaceship’s metallic hull or a space helmet. So before NASA sends anyone into deep space, they want to figure out the possible long-term ramifications of exposure to cosmic radiation.

One item of concern is radiation-induced memory loss, says cancer researcher Charles Limoli of the University of California Irvine, who led the report published May 1 in Science Advances. Cancer radiotherapy can impair human memory and spawn dementia, which is what drew Limoli’s team to the research.

“Upon penetrating the body, these charged particles leave tracks of damage on the same scale as neurons,” Limoli said. “So we reasoned that [cosmic] irradiation might elicit long lasting structural changes in neurons that would lead to cognitive impairment.”

Digitally reconstructed images of rodent frontal lobes have more nerve branches (green lines) and connections (red dots) without “cosmic” radiation exposure (left panel).

Digitally reconstructed images of rodent frontal lobes have more nerve branches (green lines) and connections (red dots) without “cosmic” radiation exposure (left panel). Image courtesy of Science Advances.

To test this idea, Limoli’s team exposed mice to short bursts of high-energy particles, and then six weeks later, checked the rodent’s ability to remember the locations of toys. Rodents exposed to radiation wandered aimlessly, losing their ability to distinguish between old toys and newer ones placed in an arena.

Limoli’s team wanted to know why, so they looked closer at the nerve cells inside the frontal lobes that interact with other parts of the brain to create memories. They found that cosmic rays melted nerve endings, known as dendritic spines.

“The reductions in spine density disrupted neurotransmission and correlated with cognitive decline,” says Limoli.

Prior work on cosmic rays generated a similar drop in the mental prowess of rodents, but many of those studies used radiation levels that are three to four times higher than what is typically detected in deep space, said astrobiologist Peter Guida of Brookhaven National Laboratory. “But [Limoli’s] study used ‘space relevant’ doses of charged particle radiation.”

Many questions remain. Will these trends apply to humans? And if they do, how will NASA protect astronauts?

Some scientists recommend using heavy-duty plastics or building generators that can recreate the magnetic fields found on Earth. Arguably, the wildest suggestion is using poop as a cosmic ray shield.

But for now, NASA has asked Limoli to lead a nationwide, $9 million effort to look into how cosmic radiation might affects astronauts’ cognition.

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Genius and autism may share genetic link, study finds

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6th February 1956: Four-year-old Italian child prodigy Gigino Solana, who possesses an amazing memory and a working knowledge of the sciences. (Photo by Enzo Graffeo/BIPs/Getty Images)

Four-year-old Italian child prodigy Gigino Solana, who possesses an amazing memory and a working knowledge of the sciences is seen here in a photograph from Feb. 6, 1956. Child prodigies and their autistic family members share a genetic link, according to new research findings. Credit: Enzo Graffeo/BIPs/Getty Images

Child prodigies and their autistic family members may share a genetic link, according to findings published online for the April issue of Human Heredity.

“We were very excited,” lead researcher Joanne Ruthsatz of Ohio State University told PBS NewsHour about the discovery.

“It was like, here it is, here’s the autism and the prodigies together and they have a significant peak on chromosome 1, where they are significantly different than their non-affected family members.”

For the study, Ruthsatz and her colleagues from Ohio State University, as well as researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus looked at snippets of DNA from five child prodigies and their autistic family members. They found something similar on chromosome 1, the first of 46 chromosomes that humans typically possess.

“This finding suggests that a locus on chromosome 1 increases the likelihood of both prodigy and autism in these families,” the study said.

Each of the prodigies in Ruthsatz’s latest study had between one and five family members diagnosed with some form of autism.

Now that the researchers have found this similarity, they are in the midst of having a full genome sequencing done to see what in a genius’s DNA may prevent him or her from becoming autistic.

Ruthsatz told PBS NewsHour that she believes prodigies may produce a protein that helps them hold back the deficits of autism and allow their talents to shine through.

This hunt for protective genetic mutations is part of a fairly new movement in genetics research. Before, investigators focused on the bad genes that cause disease, not the good ones that may thwart the bad.

Toward the end of 2014, The New York Times wrote about this new research trend and the work of The Resilience Project. The project and others like it have been looking for protective mutations in order to develop drugs to mimic their behaviors and combat diseases like early-onset Alzheimer’s, Type 2 diabetes and osteoporosis.

Ruthsatz hopes to complete the full genome sequencing in a few months and find the protective prodigy protein she has been searching for since the late 1990s.

“If we find the prodigy gene… it will be published immediately,” Ruthsatz said.

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Some large herbivores may be at risk of extinction, study finds

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An armed ranger talks on his radio in front of a white rhinoceros at the Imire Rhino and Wildlife Conservation Park near Marondera, east of the capital Harare. A new study found that roughly 60 percent of large herbivores are threatened with extinction because of several factors including human poaching and habitat loss.

An armed ranger talks on his radio in front of a white rhinoceros at the Imire Rhino and Wildlife Conservation Park near Marondera, east of the capital Harare. A new study found that roughly 60 percent of large herbivores are threatened with extinction because of several factors including human poaching and habitat loss.

The population of large herbivores is declining, posing potential long-term threats to ecosystems worldwide, a new study found.

The report by an international team of wildlife ecologists, published Friday in Science Advances, analyzed data on 74 of the world’s largest herbivore species weighing over 100kg (220 pounds), their endangerment status, key threats and the ecological consequences of population decline.

Roughly 60 percent of the plant-eating animal populations–including camels, rhinos, zebras and elephants–are threatened with extinction in forest landscapes, savannahs, grasslands and deserts worldwide, places the researchers warned could ultimately become “empty landscapes.”

The study blamed the losses on several factors, including human poaching for meat and global trade of animal parts, habitat loss and competition for food and resources with livestock.

“Without radical intervention, large herbivores (and many smaller ones) will continue to disappear from numerous regions with enormous ecological, social, and economic costs,” the authors said. Some likely consequences are food reduction and habitat change for other animals, more frequent wildfires and a weaker nutrient cycle between plants and soil.

Large herbivores in developing countries, especially Southeast Asia, India and Africa face the greatest threats. Only one endangered species, the European bison, lives in Europe, and none are in North America, where prehistoric hunting and habitat loss have already diminished the population of most large mammals, according to the scientists.

“We hope this report increases appreciation for the importance of large herbivores in these ecosystems,” said William Ripple, professor in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, who led the research.  “And we hope that policymakers take action to conserve these species.”

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Scientists find large water system beneath Antarctica’s dry valleys

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Blood Falls, the unique red-hued liquid emerging from below the surface of Antarctica's dry valleys is connected to brines beneath, according to recently published findings. Credit: Jill Mikucki, 2014.

Blood Falls, the unique red-hued liquid emerging from below the surface of Antarctica’s dry valleys is connected to brines beneath, according to recently published findings. Credit: Jill Mikucki, 2014

An international team of researchers discovered salty groundwater beneath the Dry Valleys region of the world’s coldest and driest continent, according to findings published in the current edition of Nature Communications.

The discovery of groundwater in this area may offer a glimpse into past climactic events on Antarctica, as well as clues about the potential for life on other planets.

The groundwater was found throughout the valley around Antarctica’s Blood Falls, a curious outflow where red-tinted liquid seeps out of the Taylor Glacier and into West Lake Bonney. From that finding, scientists inferred that the iron-rich Falls are the outflow of a larger groundwater system.

Since microbial life was previously identified surviving in the isolated extreme cold and dark conditions at Blood Falls, scientists believe more may exist farther below in the newly-identified briny aquifers.

“If Blood Falls is representative, then these ecosystems are much more extensive than we thought,” Jill Mikucki told PBS NewsHour. Mikucki is a microbiologist from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the lead author of the study.

Antarctica is the region of the Earth most comparable to Mars, according to NASA. Its extreme conditions are similar to those of Martian polar ice caps. These harsh and otherworldly features, as well as the opportunity to study the possibility of extraterrestrial life, drew Mikucki to the region initially.

Mikucki, along with a diverse team of scientists were able to pinpoint the areas where liquid lies beneath the freezing, arid surface thanks to a new tool called SkyTEM.

Developed by Danish scientists, including geophysicists who participated in this National Science Foundation-funded study, a helicopter-mounted electromagnetic instrument introduces a current into the ground and measures the responses of the materials below. The data that the device receives provides a picture of underground resistivity, indicating whether the material below is likely ice or liquid.

This was the first time SkyTEM, which has been flown over Mount St. Helens and the Galapagos Islands, was used in the world’s southernmost continent. The researchers favored SkyTEM because it was able to cover large swaths of the inaccessible wastes that blanket Antarctica.

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Fiery eruptions on Earth and in space caught on camera

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NewsHour shares web 16x9

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NewsHour shares web small logoIn our NewsHour Shares series, we show you things that caught our eye recently on the web. What about you? Leave your suggestions in the comments below, or tweet to @NewsHour using #NewsHourShares. We might share it on air.

GWEN IFILL: Now, to our NewsHour Shares of the day.

Two balls of fire caught our eye that might be of interest to you, too. A fiery explosion sent molten lava, rocks and gas flying almost 300 feet into the air on Sunday on Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano. It was triggered by the partial collapse of a crater wall. A section of the wall had broken off and splashed into a lava lake. That bubbling lake rose to a record-high level last week. It sits in a crater within a crater. The area around the volcano has been closed off to visitors since 2008, and no one was injured.

And out beyond where any human life exists, eruptions of a different sort. The sun is home to the largest explosions in the solar system. A NASA observatory team captured these wing-like flares from solar eruptions over a six-hour period last month. Yesterday, it released images showing a massive eruption of solar filament, snake-like, unstable bursts of plasma spanning millions of miles.

So darn cool.

Find all of our NewsHour Shares on our Web site, PBS.org/NewsHour.

See the images here and here.


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Computer scientists prove 80s pop music is boring

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Computer analysis says new wavers like Duran Duran (pictured here), arena rockers like Van Halen and dance pop stars like Madonna marked a period of low diversity in popular music. Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images

Computer analysis says new wavers like Duran Duran (pictured here), arena rockers like Van Halen and dance pop stars like Madonna marked a period of low diversity in popular music. Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images

“Pop music is dead.” You’ve heard the refrain dropped by nostalgic music lovers at backyard barbecues. And it’s no surprise. Everyone thinks the tunes of their generation marked a sort of cultural pinnacle and that music has since become bland.

But they’re wrong, according to a new computer program that has systematically charted the evolution of popular music. By treating each hit song like a fossil, the London-based research team found that America’s mainstream music has remained stylistically diverse over the last 50 years, with one decade as an exception: the 1980s. The research was published on Tuesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

The algorithm also spots the three years that inspired the most creativity in musical composition and shows that certain musical characteristics often attributed to the Beatles and the Rolling Stone actually predated these bands. (More on that below.)

science-wednesday

“The work is far and away the most comprehensive and sophisticated analysis yet of popular music,” said University of Reading evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel, who studies trends in human culture and wasn’t involved in the research. “Many commentators attempt to link eras of pop music to social and political changes, but this program does not rely on preconceptions. Rather it allows patterns to emerge from [musical] data.”

The researchers relied on Billboard’s Hot-100 list, the music industry’s tome that ranks the most popular singles by radio plays, online streaming and record sales. (They define pop music as any song that makes that list, regardless of genre.) The team downloaded nearly every song on this chart dating back to 1960 –- close to 17,000 total tracks.

The computer program scanned each tune for two features: harmony and timbre. Harmonies are the musical chords that define a song’s melody. Timbre (pronounced tamber) describes the character of music, the quality of tone. For instance, a piano and a guitar can play the same chord, but they sound different to the ear. Timbre is the word for that audio difference.

Next, after deciphering the harmonic and timbre qualities, the team built a “fossil record” of pop music, defined by when certain chords and timbre styles became fashionable or disappeared from our cultural consciousness.

For instance, they spotted the death of dominant 7th chords, which were a staple of jazz in the 1960s. The use of these chords gave a shade of gritty tension to Blues music and were featured in tracks by Elvis Presley, such as “I Feel So Bad.”

“We see in the ‘60s that the charts were filled with dominant 7th chords, but then they decline and never come back to life,” said lead author and computer scientist Matthias Mauch of Queen Mary University of London. “Other features rose into the charts, such as minor chords in funk, soul and eventually disco.”

On the timbre side of evolution, energetic, loud guitar peaked in 1966, and again in 1985 as hair bands like Motley Crue topped the charts and then once more in recent years. Another example: music laden with pianos and orchestras dipped in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but resurged at the turn of the millenium. Thanks Vanessa Carlton!

Next, the songs were sorted into subgenres via tags created by the 50 million users of Last.fm, a UK-based music discovery website. (Mauch was working at Last.fm in 2010 when he began to study the evolution of pop music with biologist Armand Leroi).

The team then tracked how diversity – the number of styles within pop music – changed over time. They found that pop music mimicked how life evolved on Earth.

“Original formulations by Charles Darwin assumed a constant rate of evolution, where everything changes in small steps. That turned out to be slightly false, as 20th century biologists recognized that life on Earth is punctuated by bursts of very fast rates of evolution,” Mauch said.

Pop music follows the same pattern. The team highlights three years that represent musical revolutions — that is, years that sparked a boon of innovative styles and variety: 1964, 1983 and 1993.

Of the three revolutions, 1964 was the most complex, enriching the styles of soul and rock, before ultimately spawning the dance crazes of funk and disco. The trends seems to come at the expense of Doo Wop, which dropped off the charts.

Music historians attribute this wholesale change to the British Invasion of the early 1960s, when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones arrived in America and were followed by dozens of other Brit bands. Computer analysis paints a different picture. The signature features of this era — such as loud guitar, major chords with no changes and bright, energetic melodies — predated the arrival of Brit bands.

This theme makes sense, said Ohio State University music professor David Huron, who wasn’t involved in the study: “When we think of styles, the prototypes are often not the earliest examples.”

Based on the Billboard charts, other domestic acts like Bobby Vinton were already capitalizing on these musical traits and rising in the charts during the early 1960s. But even though the Beatles and the Rolling Stones didn’t initiate the revolution, the study argues that they “fanned the flames” by exploiting the genre — both bands had 66 hits on the Hot-100 before 1968.

The second landmark movement in 1983 came with the adoption of aggressive, synthesized percussion — think Phil Collins and his pulsating drum machine — and loud, guitar-heavy Arena rock with lots of chord changes, such as with Mötley Crüe, Van Halen, REO Speedwagon, Queen, Kiss and Alice Cooper. These rock bands were joined by new wave acts — like the Police and Cyndi Lauper — plus a surge of metronomic dance-pop heroes like Madonna and the Pet Shop Boys. (Michael Jackson’s Thriller dropped in late-1982) Meantime, classic country and folk lost popularity and wouldn’t return until the early aughts.

But these sounds and styles of the Reagan era flooded the music scene, pushing out genres like country and folk to the point that mid-to-late 1980s became most homogenous period in music over the last 50 years, based on the team’s computer analysis.

Tommy Lee of Motley Crue performs live onstage in February 1986. Hair bands like Motley Crue, along with  other 1980s music marked a period of low diversity in music.  Photo by Peter Still/Redferns

Tommy Lee of Motley Crue performs live onstage in February 1986. The 1980s marked a period of low diversity in music, according to a new computer science study. Photo by Peter Still/Redferns

This theme doesn’t mean music from this era was bad, but rather it suggests “a small number of styles were very catchy and therefore dominated,” Pagel said. This catchiness may linger to this day and explain why themes from the 1980s have bounced back over the last decade.

Ironically, rap and its abolishment of chords kicked off the most recent surge in musical diversity in 1991.

“Rap and hip-hop saved the charts from being too bland” when these genres the mainstream via the television program Yo! MTV Raps, Mauch said. That show introduced the nation to rap, which had been popular in New York City since the late 1970s. At the same time, grunge and alternative bands diversified the rock n’ roll landscape.

Huron hopes in the future to examine other musical features, like lyrics, or cross-examine other forms of cultural expression, such as literature, movies, fashion or political events. “Using this software, one could theoretically trace broad aspects of cultural evolution and test for the underlying network of relationships amongst historical events or movements,” he said.

The computer program narrows the search for tipping points, giving precise moments when music shifted as a whole. Mauch thinks music nerds or web-based audio platforms like Spotify could use this program to identify the next big band. His team is also launching a project with a historical database of 100,000 songs from around the world to see if language or genetic heritage influence the musical characteristics that become most popular.

Overall, the study shows that musical diversity since the 1960s hasn’t dropped precipitously, even despite the lull in the 1980s.

“These findings will disappoint social critics who blame pop music for a generalised decline of culture,” Pagel said. “These results suggest there is no danger that musical styles have exhausted all of the possibilities or that we are in any danger of running out of new music.”

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Astronaut Chris Hadfield describes his first trip into space

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Astronaut Chris Hadfield describes blasting off into space for the first time. Video by Business Insider.

In a sit down interview with Business Insider, retired astronaut Chris Hadfield describes the excitement of blasting off into space for the first time. Hadfield, whose social media persona led to international celebrity, made his inaugural trip into space on November 12, 1995, as a mission specialist on the Shuttle Atlantis.

But before arriving at the Russian Space Station Mir, Hadfield lived through the quiet thrill of waiting for the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters to ignite and spew close to 8 million pounds of thrust. Hadfield would become the only Canadian to board the Mir space station before it was retired in 2001.

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How smart is today’s artificial intelligence?

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THINKING MACHINES monitor

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JUDY WOODRUFF: You may not realize it, but artificial intelligence is all around us. We rely on smart machines to scan our checks at ATMs, to navigate us on road trips and much more.

Still, humans have quite an edge. Just today, four of the world’s best Texas Hold ‘Em poker players won an epic two-week tournament against, yes, an advanced computer program. The field of artificial intelligence is pushing new boundaries.

Hari Sreenivasan has the first in a series of stories about it and the concerns over where it may lead. It’s the latest report in our ongoing Breakthroughs series on invention and innovation.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Artificial intelligence has long captured our imaginations.

ACTOR: Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

ACTOR: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I cannot do that.

HARI SREENIVASAN: With robots like Hal in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and now Ava from the recently released “Ex Machina.”

ACTRESS: Hello. I have never met anyone new before.

HARI SREENIVASAN: And “Chappie.”

ACTRESS: A thinking robot could be the end of mankind.

HARI SREENIVASAN: The plots thicken when the intelligent machines question the authority of their makers, and begin acting on their own accord.

ACTRESS: Do you think I might be switched off?

ACTOR: It’s not up to me.

ACTRESS: Why is it up to anyone?

HARI SREENIVASAN: Make no mistake, these are Hollywood fantasies. But they do tap into real-life concerns about artificial intelligence, or A.I.

Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla Motors & SpaceX, is not exactly a Luddite bent on stopping the advance of technology. But he says A.I. poses a potential threat more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

ELON MUSK, CEO, Tesla Motors & SpaceX: I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Musk recently donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, which is focused on keeping A.I. research beneficial to humanity. Add his voice to a list of bright minds like physicist Stephen Hawking, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and several leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, among them, Stuart Russell, who heads the A.I. Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.

What concerns you about how artificial intelligence is already being used, or will be used shortly?

STUART RUSSELL, University of California, Berkeley: In the near term, the biggest problem is the development of autonomous weapons. Everyone knows about drones. Drones are remotely piloted. They’re not robots in a real sense. There’s a person looking through the camera that’s on the aircraft, and deciding when to fire.

An autonomous weapon would do all of that itself. It chooses where to go, it decides what the target is, and it decides when to fire.

HARI SREENIVASAN: He’s concerned about weapons like the British Taranis. It’s featured in this promotional video, by BAE Systems, a former NewsHour underwriter.

The Taranis is currently operated remotely by humans, but this drone is outfitted with artificial intelligence, and will be capable of operating fully autonomously. Russell testified to the United Nations, which is considering a ban on such weapons that can target and kill humans without requiring a person to pull the trigger.

STUART RUSSELL: I think there’s a fundamental moral issue about whether it’s right for a machine to decide to kill a person. It’s bad enough that people are deciding to kill people, but at least they have perhaps some moral argument that they’re doing it to ultimately defend their families or prevent some greater evil.

HARI SREENIVASAN: While the defense industry is one use case of artificial intelligence, how close are we to building robots like the ones in the movies that are truly autonomous?

Down the hall from Russell, at U.C. Berkeley’s A.I. lab, Pieter Abbeel and his students are training their PR2 robot to think for itself.

PIETER ABBEEL, University of California, Berkeley: One of the main things we have been looking at is, how can we get a robot to think about situations it’s never seen before?

So, an example of that is, let’s say a robot is supposed to fold laundry or maybe tie a knot in a rope. Whenever you’re faced with even the same laundry article or the same rope, it’ll be in a different shape, and so you can’t just execute blindly the same set of motions and expect success.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Abbeel’s team is painstakingly training the PR2 to compete in an Amazon warehouse picking challenge in late May.

So, right now, you’re just teaching it to grab this stack of soap; that’s it?

PIETER ABBEEL: Yes. We just started on this. And so right now, the robot is essentially learning how to grab soap bars out of the shelf. But really what we’re after is equipping the robot with the capability such that, if you come up with a whole new list of, let’s say, 1,000 new items, that we can very quickly equip it with the skill to pick any one of those 1,000 items.

HARI SREENIVASAN: On the day we visited, the PR2 was hobbled by a broken arm, and there were several times the robot failed at the task.

Oh, no dice.

PIETER ABBEEL: Missed it this time.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Missed it.

A tiny reminder that training a robot to think is no small task.

So you think superintelligence is still pretty far off and we don’t need to worry about it today?

PIETER ABBEEL: I would say it’s still pretty far off, yes.

HARI SREENIVASAN: But while training this robot may be tough today, not everyone thinks superintelligence is that far out of our reach.

Ray Kurzweil is director of engineering at Google. He spoke to us in his capacity as an independent inventor of devices like the flatbed scanner. Among his many awards sits a technical Grammy for inventing the first computer-based instrument that could realistically play like a piano.

Kurzweil says machines are on track to be on par with human intelligence in less than 15 years.

RAY KURZWEIL, Inventor & Futurist: By 2029, they will actually read at human levels and understand language and be able to communicate at human levels, but then do so at a vast scale.

The primary implication is that we’re going to combine our intelligence with computers. We’re going to make ourselves smarter. By the 2030s, they will literally go inside our bodies and inside our brains.

HARI SREENIVASAN: He calculates that, with exponential growth in computing and biotechnology, we will reach what he calls singularity within 25 years. That’s when machine intelligence exceeds human intellectual capacity.

RAY KURZWEIL: These technologies expand exponentially. They double in power roughly every year, so look at The Genome Project. It was a 15-year project. Halfway through the project, 7.5 years into it, 1 percent had been completed, so some people looked at it and said, well, 1 percent, we have just barely started. I looked at it and said, 1 percent, well, we’re halfway through, because 1 percent’s only seven doublings from 100 percent, and it doubled every year. Seven years later, it was finished.

So, from one perspective, we’re in the early stage in artificial intelligence, but exponentials start out slowly, and then they take off.

HARI SREENIVASAN: One such technology is the self-driving car. In the 1990s, Kurzweil predicted it would happen, despite a chorus of experts who declared it impossible. Today, self-driving cars have been test-driven, without incident, for hundreds of thousands of miles, but are not quite ready for consumers.

FEI-FEI LI, Stanford University: Yes, we have prototype cars that can drive by themselves. But without smart vision, they cannot really tell the difference between a crumpled paper bag, which can be run over, and a rock that size, which should be avoided.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Fei-Fei Li explains in a recent TED Talk.

FEI-FEI LI: Our smartest machines are still blind.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Li is director of Stanford University’s artificial intelligence lab.

So, how hard is it to get a computer to see something and understand what it is?

FEI-FEI LI: So, it’s actually really, really hard. So, think about it. A camera takes pictures. Right? We have millions of pixels, but these are just numbers. But they don’t really have meaning in themselves.

So, the task for artificial intelligence and computer vision algorithm is to take these numbers and convert them into meaningful objects.

HARI SREENIVASAN: How to infer meaning is not easy to teach a machine, even for this highly advanced dog robot. Humans have had thousands of years of evolution. Computers, Li cautions, are a ways off.

FEI FEI LI: We are very, very far from an intelligent system, not only the sensory intelligence, but cognition, reasoning, emotion, compassion, empathy. That whole full spectrum, we’re nowhere near that.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Robots like this one coming out of Stanford’s A.I. lab may be on proverbial training wheels today, but are part of the steady march toward superintelligent machines.

For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Hari Sreenivasan in Palo Alto, California.

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NASA’s Curiosity captures blue sunset on the Red Planet

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NASA's Curiosity rover captures a Martian sunset. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

NASA’s Curiosity rover captures a Martian sunset. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Last month, NASA’s Curiosity rover captured a blue sunset on the Red Planet. The sight was poetic enough to inspire the rover to quote T.S. Eliot in a tweet.

While positioned in the Gale Crater on April 15, 2015, Curiosity sent back four images of the deep blue sunset that were taken by the rover’s Mast Camera. The images were captured over a nearly 7-minute period in-between dust storms.

“The colors come from the fact that the very fine dust is the right size so that blue light penetrates the atmosphere slightly more efficiently,” said Mark Lemmon, a Curiosity team member, in a statement Friday.

“When the blue light scatters off the dust, it stays closer to the direction of the sun than light of other colors does,” he said. “The rest of the sky is yellow to orange as yellow and red light scatter all over the sky instead of being absorbed or staying close to the sun.”

NASA said this was the first time Curiosity observed a sunset in color and that the rover’s MastCam “is actually a little less sensitive to blue than people are.”

Curiosity has been analyzing Martian soil samples since August 2012 to determine the planet’s habitability for microbial life and to gather data that will inform future Mars exploration missions. In November 2010, Mars rover Opportunity’s panoramic camera also captured a blue Martian sunset.

Video by NASASolarSystem

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Why we’re teaching computers to diagnose cancer

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thinking machines

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GWEN IFILL: Now we continue our series about artificial intelligence, A.I., where computers are able to make intelligent decisions without human input.

As computing power gets stronger and people continue to generate massive amounts of data, A.I. is making its way into the marketplace and into your doctor’s examination room.

Hari Sreenivasan has the latest in series on breakthroughs in invention and innovation.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Advances in artificial intelligence continue to push the boundaries between science fiction and reality, like this brain-controlled device at the University of Minnesota. It enables users to fly a model helicopter with only their thoughts. The hope is it will soon help disabled people to operate robotic arms.

But you don’t need to be in a university lab to find A.I. It’s all around us.

MAN: What’s the fifth planet from the sun?

HARI SREENIVASAN: Helping us search for information. 

WOMAN: Jupiter is the fifth planet orbiting the sun.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Our smartphones use A.I. to navigate us, choosing the least congested traffic routes. Even the U.S. Postal Service uses it to sort mail. And on Wall Street, autonomous machines help make major financial decisions.

RAY KURZWEIL, Inventor/Futurist: At least 90 percent of the financial transactions are guided in one way or another by artificial intelligence.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Ray Kurzweil directs Google’s engineering lab, but spoke to us in his capacity as an independent inventor. He’s convinced that A.I. programs are already on track to solve many of the problems vexing mankind today.

RAY KURZWEIL: They’re helping us find a cure for disease, helping us diagnose disease, analyzing environmental data to help us clean up the environment. Virtually every industrial process is a combination already of human and machine intelligence.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Large tech firms are betting big on the promise of A.I. Last year, Google paid $400 million to acquire DeepMind, a London startup specializing in deep learning. Facebook is raising eyebrows as it continues to pluck A.I. talent. And IBM is investing $1 billion to grow its Watson division, based out of new headquarters in New York’s Silicon Alley.

Remember Watson, the supercomputer which beat a pair of “Jeopardy” game show champions in 2011?

MAN: Watson?

COMPUTER: What is Jericho?

MAN: Correct.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Well, in the four years since, IBM has sped Watson up 24-fold. What used to be a room full of computing machines can now fit into a pizza box, all accessed from the cloud.

You could say these are the brains that power Watson, but since all the data lives on the cloud, it’s hard to visualize.

GURUDUTH BANAVAR, IBM: What you see is how Watson works.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Guru Banavar is vice president of cognitive computing at IBM.

GURUDUTH BANAVAR: Watson has come a very long way.

We have taken some of the underlying technologies that helped us win the “Jeopardy” game show, and applied it in many domains that matter, like health care, education, business decision-making.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Last month, IBM Introduced Watson Health, its entry into the personalized health care space. The idea is to use Watson’s A.I. to make sense of vast troves of health data to deliver tailored information to physicians, insurers, researchers and hospitals.

GURUDUTH BANAVAR: The difference between any data that previously we were able to analyze and the new data that are — we have to apply artificial intelligence techniques to is that the new data is natural language. It’s just written in English. Computers have never been able to understand natural language.

Typically, these are very high-end, complex information that’s published by scientific researchers, and now Watson is able to read those.

HARI SREENIVASAN: At the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Mark Kris, a thoracic oncologist, is leading a team that is teaching Watson how to diagnose cancer.

DR. MARK G. KRIS, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center: We needed some way to help doctors deal with the deluge of information that’s available now.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Watson is being trained to sort through reams of information about the patient, the most current medical research, and get it to the doctor to help make a decision, all at a pace beyond humans.

DR. MARK G. KRIS: Our kind of idea here though is that this system is going to be like what we kind of call a learned colleague.

HARI SREENIVASAN: A colleague that can assist with instant diagnoses and recommended courses of treatment. The recommendations are highly personalized based on a patient’s unique genetic makeup.

DR. MARK G. KRIS: The person I’m asking about is a 55-year-old man who already has had surgery for his lung cancer. It was discovered that this cancer had spread to lymph glands that were nearby.

So, the first thing this system does is, it shows all the different treatments that are recommended. And then now I ask what kind of chemo to give, and it points to a chemo regimen, two different drugs. And if I want the more information about exactly why this decision was made, there’s a little button right next to this chemo choice that takes you to the medical literature and some key publications about this regimen, the benefits it can give, and why that choice was made.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Dr. Bob Wachter is associate chair at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical School and author of a new book, “The Digital Doctor.”

DR. ROBERT WACHTER, University of California, San Francisco: In some ways, ironic that computers will probably be best at low-level tasks, pretty simple algorithmic stuff. I have a runny nose and a cough and a low-grade fever. What should I do? And high — very high-complexity stuff, like, I have an unusual form of lung cancer and I have these genetic mutations, and what should I do?

HARI SREENIVASAN: But Wachter says where computers and A.I. still struggle is in the middle.

DR. ROBERT WACHTER: A lot of medicine kind of lives in that middle ground, where it’s really messy. And someone comes in to see me and they have a set of complaints and physical exam findings all that. And it could be — if you look it up in a computer, it could be some weird — it could be the Bubonic plague, but it probably is the flu.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Wachter is also concerned about fatal implications that can result from an over-reliance on computers. In his book, he writes about a teenage patient at his own hospital who barely survived after he was given 39 times the amount of antibiotics he should have received.

DR. ROBERT WACHTER: So, in two different cases, the computers threw up alerts on the computer screen that said, this is an overdose. But the alert for a 39-fold overdose and the alert for a 1 percent overdose looked exactly the same. And the doctors clicked out of it. The pharmacists clicked out of it. Why? Because they get thousands of alerts a day, and they have learned to just pay no attention to the alerts.

Where the people are relegated to being monitors of a computer system that’s right most of the time, the problem is, periodically, the computer system will be wrong. And the question is, are the people still engaged or are they now asleep at the switch because the computers are so good?

HARI SREENIVASAN: That’s one of many ethical questions facing scientists, and society, as artificial intelligence continues its rapid advance.

For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Hari Sreenivasan in New York.

The post Why we’re teaching computers to diagnose cancer appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Smithsonian’s mystery of the black-crowned night herons solved by satellites

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Migrant bird or summer freeloader? Wild black-crowned night-heron have invaded the Smithsonian National Zoo each summer for over 100 years -- and scientists are just beginning to unravel where the birds are during the rest of the year. Courtesy of Smithsonian’s National Zoo

Migrant bird or summer freeloader? Wild black-crowned night-heron have invaded the Smithsonian National Zoo for more than 100 years — and scientists are just beginning to unravel where they are the rest of the year. Courtesy of Smithsonian’s National Zoo

Black-crowned night herons could write the book on squatter’s rights.

Each spring for more than a century, a wild pack of these birds has descended on Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. These days, the herons hang around the zoo’s bird house, where they use slender, charcoal-colored bills to nip up fish thrown by the keepers. It’s the only known rookery, or breeding colony, for black-crowned night-herons in the region. But the summer visits predate the construction of the bird house, which arrived in 1928, suggesting that the birds nest here for more than just the digs. An even bigger question revolves around where the migratory herons go in the autumn after their breeding season concludes.

So we took a field trip to the zoo, where we learned about a new project that’s trying to solve this mystery.

“If you don’t know where [migratory birds] are going, then it’s almost impossible to protect them or do conservation,” said Pete Marra, head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. “So we started putting transmitters on [the herons’] backs, which talk to satellites and tell us almost on a daily basis where these birds go.”

Black-crowned night herons wait for fish breakfast to be served by keepers at the Smithsonian National Zoo.  Photo by Colleen Shalby/PBS NewsHour

Black-crowned night herons wait for fish breakfast to be served by keepers at the Smithsonian National Zoo. Photo by Colleen Shalby/PBS NewsHour

Conservation isn’t exactly an urgent issue for black-crowned night herons — their numbers are plentiful. But that hasn’t always been true. At the turn of the 20th century, these herons were almost hunted to extinction. Each bird carries a long elegant feather on its head, known as a filoplume, which was a popular addition to ladies hats during Edwardian Era and Jazz Age.

The satellite trackers look like tiny rectangle backpacks, slung over the heron’s shoulders. Each tracker weighs less than 5 percent of the bird’s body weight; otherwise it would be too heavy. The devices beam daily updates on the bird’s whereabouts.

Over the past three years, Marra and his colleagues have monitored four to five birds with the tracker backpacks. They’ve learned that the birds set many courses, but most fly to Florida for their winter sojourns. One flew as far as The Everglades — nearly 1,100 miles from D.C. Marra suspects that the birds return each year because the zoo rests on a high point that provides a good vantage for foraging in different directions.

Satellite tracking devices trace the migratory routes of black-crowned night herons from the Smithsonian National Zoo to winter roosts in Florida. Courtesy of Pete Marra/Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

Satellite tracking devices trace the migratory routes of black-crowned night herons from the Smithsonian National Zoo to winter roosts in Florida. Courtesy of Pete Marra/Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center

Satellite tracking devices mark the daily locations of black-crowned night herons during their summer breeding season at the Smithsonian National Zoo (left panel; yellow dots) and during their winter sojourns in Florida (middle and right panel, red and green dots). Courtesy of Pete Marra/Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

Satellite tracking devices mark the daily locations of black-crowned night herons during their summer breeding season at the Smithsonian National Zoo (left panel; yellow dots) and during their winter sojourns in Florida (middle and right panel, red and green dots). Courtesy of Pete Marra/Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center

If you’re in D.C. and want your own up-close-and-personal viewing of the black-crowned night herons, head to the Smithsonian National Zoo bird house around 8 a.m. or 2 p.m. any week day or weekend. That’s when the zoo keepers feed the birds.

Or if you live too far away, check out our video interview with Dr. Marra, that we livestreamed today on Periscope.

The post Smithsonian’s mystery of the black-crowned night herons solved by satellites appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Is gender identity biologically hard-wired?

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Now another installment in our series Transgender in America.

A small number of children as young as 3 are beginning to understand their gender identity as something different from what they were assumed to be at birth.

NewsHour special correspondent Jackie Judd has our story of doctors and families living through these discoveries.

JACKIE JUDD: Eight-year-old Skyler Kelly is hoping for a career in the Major Leagues and enjoys the privileges of being big brother to 4-year-old Luke. It is not how life started for Skyler.

TIFFANY KELLY, Mother of Skyler: I can totally see sitting on the hospital bed and days of a long labor and someone saying like, oh, what a sweet little girl.

JACKIE JUDD: At a remarkably early age, Skyler, who lives in Seattle, began to let his parents know that what he looked like on the outside, a girl, is not how he felt on the inside.

SKYLER KELLY: When people tried to brush my hair, I would try to push the brush away and I would cry and scream. And it was hard in the mornings to even get ready.

JACKIE JUDD: Did you also have a fight over clothing, what to wear, what kind of clothes to wear?

SKYLER KELLY: Well, I was pretty much allowed to wear what I wanted, except on school pictures. I had to wear a dress, and I hated it.

JACKIE JUDD: So did you ever smile in those school pictures? Or…

SKYLER KELLY: I smiled, but I didn’t like…

JACKIE JUDD: But inside?

SKYLER KELLY: I did not like it inside.

JACKIE JUDD: The why of Skyler’s gender identity isn’t fully understood. The long-held and now controversial medical view links being transgender to a mental disorder or emotional distress.

However, new science is emerging pointing to a complex set of factors. At the University of Washington, psychology professor Kristina Olson investigates the origins of being transgender.

KRISTINA OLSON, University of Washington: Your biology determines a lot of your psychology, and I think that’s kind of where the feeling is right now, that there are probably biological contributors that make a big contribution towards our sense of gender identity, which is psychologically how we feel. Are we male or female or something else, something in between, neither?

JACKIE JUDD: Endocrinologist Joshua Safer at Boston University treats hundreds of adult transgender patients and is a leader in the field. He firmly believes gender identity is hard-wired in all of us.

DR. JOSHUA SAFER, Boston University: In most people, chromosomes, body parts, gender identity align. So, somebody with a male chromosome, somebody with male body parts is going to have male gender identity. That is the usual circumstance.

All of these are independently controlled biologically, and therefore it is no surprise that, in a given subset of the population, one part is not aligned, that whatever genes are controlling that happen to be different for that individual, and that’s what’s happening with transgender individuals.

JACKIE JUDD: Dr. Safer conducted the most extensive review to date of existing studies tying gender identity to biological factors.

The most persuasive evidence he found was in experiments done over the past half-century on people born with the male XY chromosomes, but with the rare condition of ambiguous genitalia. Soon after birth, they were surgically given female genitalia, and then raised as girls.

DR. JOSHUA SAFER: These kids were dressed in pink and given dresses and dolls and given estrogen when they hit puberty, so that they had appropriate breast development and such. And so we’re talking about a pretty extreme approach that, if any approach was going to work, it should have worked.

But what happened instead is, the majority of these kids, if you query, say that they have male gender identity, despite that very, very extreme program.

JACKIE JUDD: The conclusion, according to Dr. Safer, is that gender identity cannot be manipulated or taught. A second set of data he reviewed involved the anatomy of the brain. Postmortem testing of women and males at birth who transitioned to females found certain regions to be strikingly similar, though Dr. Safer says more research is needed to determine if those regions are linked to gender identity.

At this lab at the University of Washington in Seattle, a unique long-term study is under way of transgender children, children as young as 3 years of age. With the support of their families, they have transitioned from the gender of their birth to what is called their expressed gender.

Skyler, along with several dozen other kids, both transgender and not, went through a battery of tests in the first phase of the study to pinpoint how they see themselves. This very quick picture and word association, called IAT, or Implicit Association Test, is intended to take a true measure of the strength of a child’s identity.

KRISTINA OLSON: If there is a kid who, at birth, the doctor said this kid is a girl, but later came to identify as a boy, and that kid is living as a boy today, that kid will show the same results on the IAT as any other boy and looks nothing like, say, his sister or another random girl that we just pulled off the street.

JACKIE JUDD: Dr. Olson leads the study team.

KRISTINA OLSON: So, this suggests that this isn’t just a thing a kid is saying or pretending to be. This doesn’t seem to be a kid being playful or being ornery. This is really, truly how the child seems to identify themselves at this age.

JACKIE JUDD: Dr. Olson’s research cuts to the core of the dilemma parents of transgender children face, how to know if this is real.

JOSH KELLY, Father of Skyler: I guess my concerns as it evolved, and we were not at the stage of him being an affirmed male, my concerns are, are we jumping the gun, and just wasn’t comfortable with that whole thing.

JACKIE JUDD: Many people struggle with the same thing and believe transgender children are just going through a phase. Dr. Olson says, in two years of following the same group of youngsters, none has reverted to their gender at birth.

Still, she encounters deep skepticism.

KRISTINA OLSON: We see a lot of people saying things like, you know, my child thought that they were a dinosaur when they were 4, but I didn’t let them live as a dinosaur, and they didn’t really think they were a dinosaur.

These kids who are saying, this is who I am, I am a girl, or I am a boy.

JACKIE JUDD: The Kellys came to certainty one night when Skyler was about 6, and there was no denying what their child was trying to tell them.

TIFFANY KELLY: I remember, God, this one awful night. I can still picture us upstairs, and Skyler was just having like a meltdown over nothing, but just a heartbreaking meltdown, like the kind — you can tell the difference between a tantrum and an, “I am just so emotionally unhappy.”

And Josh and I both just finally saying, what is it? Is there something that you’re not telling us? And I said, do you want to whisper it to us? And he whispered and said, I want to start wearing boy’s underwear.

JACKIE JUDD: And that is when Skyler transitioned, entering first grade as the person he knew himself to be.

Dr. Olson now has about 100 transgender children in the study, and she hopes to follow them into adolescence and adulthood, and that, by learning more, the too-common trajectory of a transgender person’s life can be changed.

KRISTINA OLSON: We all look at the news, and we see those terrible statistics about what life is like for transgender adults; 41 percent of transgender adults attempt suicide. They have extremely high rates of unemployment and discrimination, violence

And what I want to know is, how do we change that? Is there a decision that could be made in a child’s life, and instead put them on a path that’s more like the other kids that they go to school with and are in their families, where they have just as a good a chance as anyone else?

JACKIE JUDD: Of all these words, which words would you choose to describe yourself? Happy, angry, proud, sad? Which words?

SKYLER KELLY: Happy, proud.

JACKIE JUDD: Happy, proud?

SKYLER KELLY: Yes.

JACKIE JUDD: Why happy, proud?

SKYLER KELLY: Because I’m happy now that I get to live how I want. And I’m proud — well, I’m proud because my parents understood it, and they’re — they’re great.

JOSH KELLY: He’s super well-adjusted, very happy.

TIFFANY KELLY: He’s braver than I have ever felt. And I hope that he can keep that and that the world doesn’t break him of that.

JACKIE JUDD: The Kellys say the emerging science of gender identity is less important to them than their child finding acceptance and support. They know it may not be an easy life for Skyler, but it will be an authentic one.

For the NewsHour, this is Jackie Judd in Seattle.

The post Is gender identity biologically hard-wired? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

See the strange creatures NOAA found at the bottom of the sea

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Each year, the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer maps an area of the seafloor the size of West Virginia.

When compared to the total Atlantic Ocean, which spans 41 million square miles, West Virginia’s not so large. But the discoveries the team is making are vast: Small creatures in hydrothermal vents. Asphalt volcanoes. Ancient landslides. New species of squid.

A brittle star climbs on top of an armored sea robin. The brittle star then proceeded to climb on top of the sea robin two more times. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Océano Profundo 2015: Exploring Puerto Rico’s Seamounts, Trenches, and Troughs

A brittle star climbs on top of an armored sea robin. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Océano Profundo 2015: Exploring Puerto Rico’s Seamounts, Trenches, and Troughs

Last month, while traveling around Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the NOAA ship spotted 100 different species of fish, along with 50 different species of coral and hundreds of other invertebrates. One fish species is so new it’s never been named; another jellyfish-like creature called a ctenophore or comb jelly, has only been observed once before.

They also captured unusual behaviors, such as sea stars hunting prey, shrimp cleaning themselves and a hermit crab using an anemone as a shell.

The Okeanos Explorer came across this hermit crab uses an anemone instead of a shell while exploring the Puerto Rico Trench. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Océano Profundo 2015: Exploring Puerto Rico’s Seamounts, Trenches, and Troughs

The Okeanos Explorer came across this hermit crab using an anemone instead of a shell while exploring the Puerto Rico Trench. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Océano Profundo 2015: Exploring Puerto Rico’s Seamounts, Trenches, and Troughs

It’s a common refrain among oceanographers: We know more about the surface of Mars than we do the bottom of the ocean. About 95 percent of the ocean remains unexplored. And to date, just 15 percent of the ocean floor has been mapped. The result is that the deep sea hosts many creatures that are unknown or not well understood to science. The scientists on Okeanos Explorer are working furiously to change that.

“It’s the last frontier,” says Mike Cheadle, associate professor of geophysics at the University of Wyoming. “The only way to see it is to go down there and do it.”

An octopus poses for the Okeanos' cameras near Shallop Canyon off the Northeast U.S. in 2013. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, 2013 Northeast U.S. Canyons Expedition

An octopus poses for the Okeanos Explorer’s cameras near Shallop Canyon off the Northeast U.S. in 2013. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, 2013 Northeast U.S. Canyons Expedition

But descending one to three miles underneath the ocean surface is a technical challenge. Satellites give scientists a rough outline of the ocean floor, but lack detail. And looking for marine life requires submersible vehicles that can withstand the pressure of a 19,000 foot dive, and those are expensive.

“Features start appearing ping by ping. It’s remarkable to watch the seafloor unfold before you.”

It’s a real dilemma for deep-sea scientists, Cheadle said: How do you start your research when you don’t know what’s down there?

Since it was commissioned in 2008, the Okeanos Explorer has sailed around the world with two goals: map the ocean floor and explore it with underwater cameras.

This jellyfish was spotted on April 16. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Gulf of Mexico 2014 Expedition

This jellyfish was spotted during the most recent mission on April 16. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Gulf of Mexico 2014 Expedition

For mapping, the ship uses sonar with a resolution of 33 to 165 feet, depending on the depth, said Brian Kennedy, who coordinates Okeanos Explorer for NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research. Each year, the expedition maps between 23,000 and 38,000 square miles of the ocean.

To Kennedy, the maps alone are an achievement.

“Features start appearing ping by ping,” he said. “It’s remarkable to watch the seafloor unfold before you. The data is amazingly exciting.”

But these sonar images only tell scientists so much. So after mapping an area, the ship sends down two submersible, remote-operated vehicles with cameras that livestream high-quality video of the ocean floor. Aboard the ship, a lead biologist and geologist act like film directors, guiding the cameras from one discovery to the next and narrating what they see for their online audience.

On a dive in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2014, the ship found small volcanoes that spewed asphalt along the ocean floor. The asphalt erupted into petal-like shapes. The crew named them “tar lilies.” Geologists watching the discovery on the livestream began calling in. On the video of the dive, you can hear their excitement.

ROV Deep Discoverer approaches the first "tar lily" on a dive in April 2014 in the Gulf of Mexico. The anemones living on and around the asphalt volcanoes indicated that the structures were anywhere from tens to hundreds of years old. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Gulf of Mexico 2014 Expedition

ROV Deep Discoverer approaches the first “tar lily” on a dive in April 2014 in the Gulf of Mexico. The anemones living on and around the asphalt volcanoes indicated that the structures were anywhere from tens to hundreds of years old. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Gulf of Mexico 2014 Expedition

“The great thing about today is we came down here thinking that these structures might be parts of a shipwreck. It’s pretty clear that they’re not now, that they’re naturally occurring,” said James Austin, the lead geologist aboard on the dive’s recording.

It’s worth pointing out Okeanos has spotted real shipwrecks too — this one in the Gulf of Mexico in 2012, for example. That discovery led to later expeditions, which uncovered two more ships.

Other findings include new species in environments thought to be inhospitable. Cheadle recalls watching from shore when the ship’s cameras discovered hydrothermal vents along the Mid-Cayman Rise in 2011, complete with tiny critters.

“The water is 226 degrees Celsius (438 degrees Fahrenheit), and here are creatures unlike anything we see on the surface of the earth,” Cheadle said.

Hydrothermal shrimp and bacteria living near an active hydrothermal vent located southeast of the central Von Damm hydrothermal field in the Mid-Cayman Rise in 2011. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, MCR Expedition 2011

Hydrothermal shrimp and bacteria living near an active hydrothermal vent located southeast of the central Von Damm hydrothermal field in the Mid-Cayman Rise in 2011. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, MCR Expedition 2011

Brian Kennedy recalled seeing a new species of squid on his first Okeanos Explorer voyage near Indonesia. It had a narwhal-like horn protruding from its head and a long squid body. He watched the squid sink to the sea floor and use its horn to “hop”.

“We nicknamed it ‘Pogo squid.’ This was all novel to me,” he said. “That moment sticks with me, seeing this surreal Dr. Seussian creature.”

During an expedition, as many as 40 scientists ashore chime in daily with their thoughts and questions via a private instant messaging channel and phone line. Scientists capture screen grabs of animals and geologic features and email them to colleagues.

In the Mona Canyon off the coast of Puerto Rico, during the latest mission, the cameras spotted a sea star. From shore, Christopher Mah at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History called the ship. That sea star, he informed them, was incredibly rare. It hadn’t been seen since 1878.

This sea star, Laetmaster spectabilis, has not been recorded since it was initially described 130 years ago. The Okeanos recently found this sea star during a recent dive in the Caribbean. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Océano Profundo 2015: Exploring Puerto Rico’s Seamounts, Trenches, and Troughs

This sea star, Laetmaster spectabilis, has not been recorded since it was initially described 130 years ago. The Okeanos recently found this sea star during a recent dive in the Caribbean. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Océano Profundo 2015: Exploring Puerto Rico’s Seamounts, Trenches, and Troughs

“This is a great example of how little we have explored topographically complex and deep habitats, and how this telepresence technology allows us to connect with more scientists in real time,” Andrea Quattrini, a USGS postdoctoral researcher and lead biologist aboard the mission, wrote in an email.

Okeanos mapped an ancient landslide in the Mona Canyon off the coast of Puerto Rico in the spring of 2015. Scientists aren't sure how old it is, but it could have been caused by an earthquake that generated a deadly tsunami in Puerto Rico in 1918. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Oceano Profundo 2015.

Okeanos mapped an ancient landslide in the Mona Canyon off the coast of Puerto Rico in the spring of 2015. Scientists aren’t sure how old it is, but it could have been caused by an earthquake that generated a deadly tsunami in Puerto Rico in 1918. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Oceano Profundo 2015

While the animals are known to steal the show on dives, the rocks on the sea floor have their own story to tell. In the Mona Canyon off the coast of Puerto Rico, the Okeanos Explorer found an ancient, enormous landslide — 9 miles wide and 6 miles long. When it occurred is unclear, but it could have been the result of a massive earthquake that caused the 1918 Puerto Rico tsunami, said Cheadle, the lead geologist on the dive. Geologists study ocean floor rocks and features to better underwater landslides or earthquakes, said Jason Chaytor, a USGS research geologist.

He points to the tubular rocks off the Northeast United States that the ship spotted in 2013.

“We just saw these amazingly weird features in the rock that we couldn’t understand,” Chaytor said. “They were just concentric tubular feature with an open aperture. To this day I still don’t know what they are.”

Throughout the dive, scientists narrate the expedition for the livestream audience. That part can be tedious on slow days, said Martha Nizinski, a research zoologist for NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, who was on the Okeanos Explorer in 2013. But other times, it’s almost impossible to keep up with what’s unfolding on camera. One of her favorite moments: seeing undiscovered coral communities in deep canyons off of the Northeast United States.

“When I was out there in Heezen Canyon, we saw amazing corals all along the side of the canyon. We called it the coral forest,” she said. “That’s the beauty of this, going to areas where we don’t know anything…I think every time that the ship goes out, they find something we haven’t seen before.”

Correction: An earlier version of this post misidentified the location of the area of ocean floor that NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer maps each year. While the area mapped is equal to the size of West Virginia, the expeditions are not just limited to the North Atlantic, but occur throughout the world.

The post See the strange creatures NOAA found at the bottom of the sea appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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