Technology
‘Shazam for whales’ uses AI to track sounds heard in Mariana Trench
A mysterious sound emitted from the depths of the Pacific Ocean has finally been identified as a Bryde’s whale. Now, artificial intelligence is helping researchers track the elusive whale species responsible for the call.
The puzzle began in 2014 when researchers recorded a sound resembling a moan followed by metallic pings over the Mariana Trench. “Your average person would not think that it was made by an animal – they would think it was some ship or the [US] Navy,” says Ann Allen at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Years later, additional recordings of the sound, which researchers call a biotwang, were eventually linked to sightings of Bryde’s whales (Balaenoptera brydei) at the nearby Mariana Islands.
Bryde’s whales are large baleen whales that filter huge amounts of krill and fish from the water, but they are rarely seen because they are nearly always on the move. Allen saw an opportunity to track migrating Bryde’s whales by finding similar biotwang sounds in more than 180,000 hours of underwater recordings from NOAA’s network of hydrophones mounted on the Pacific seafloor.
“It’s important any time you can discover a new call type for any species of animal that occurs most of the time out of sight of people because it allows you to use passive acoustic monitoring to detect their presence,” says Caroline Casey at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Given the impracticality of manually sifting through the audio recordings, Allen teamed up with Google researchers who had been developing an AI model to automatically identify vocalisations of multiple whale species. Google trained its AI to categorise different patterns in spectrogram images, which convert sound to a visual form.
The AI was able to identify calls – a bit like the music-identifying app Shazam – by comparing them to the training set. It was successful at identifying calls from eight species: humpback whales, blue whales, fin whales, North Pacific right whales, North Atlantic right whales, minke whales, killer whales and Bryde’s whales – you can hear one below.
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The team also found that biotwangs occur most consistently among a specific population of Bryde’s whales in the western Pacific. The patterns of calls also suggest the whales may be following the movements of an ocean boundary of warm and cool water. Called the transition zone chlorophyll front, this region of the ocean has a high concentration of plankton and other prey creatures that act as a moving buffet for whales.
“As climate change advances, we expect more frequent and more extreme El Niño and La Niña events, and we expect this transition zone chlorophyll front to go further north and be more variable,” says Allen. “This means that the whales may have to travel further and work a lot harder to find their food, which can impact the health of the population.”
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Technology
Quantum computers teleport and store energy harvested from empty space
Energy cannot be created from nothing, but physicists found a way to do the next best thing: extract energy from seemingly empty space, teleport it elsewhere and store it for later use. The researchers successfully tested their protocol using a quantum computer.
The laws of quantum physics reveal that perfectly empty space cannot exist – even places fully devoid of atoms still contain tiny flickers of quantum fields. In 2008, Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University in Japan proposed that those flickers, together with the …
Science & Environment
What caused the hydrothermal explosion at Yellowstone National Park? A meteorologist explains
Yellowstone National Park visitors were sent running and screaming Tuesday when a hydrothermal explosion spewed boiling hot water and rocks into the air. No one was injured, but it has left some wondering: How does this happen and why wasn’t there any warning?
The Weather Channel’s Stephanie Abrams said explosions like this are caused by underground channels of hot water, which also create Yellowstone’s iconic geysers and hot springs.
“When the pressure rapidly drops in a localized spot, it actually forces the hot water to quickly turn to steam, triggering a hydrothermal explosion since gas takes up more space than liquid,” Abrams said Wednesday on “CBS Mornings.” “And this explosion can rupture the surface, sending mud and debris thousands of feet up and more than half a mile out in the most extreme cases.”
Tuesday’s explosion was not that big, Abrams said, “but a massive amount of rocks and dirt buried the Biscuit Basin,” where the explosion occurred.
A nearby boardwalk was left with a broken fence and was covered in debris. Nearby trees were also killed, with the U.S. Geological Survey saying the plants “can’t stand thermal activity.”
“Because areas heat up and cool down over time, trees will sometimes die out when an area heats up, regrow as it cools down, but then die again when it heats up,” the agency said on X.
The USGS said it considers this explosion small, and that similar explosions happen in the national park “perhaps a couple times a year.” Often, though, they happen in the backcountry and aren’t noticed.
“It was small compared to what Yellowstone is capable of,” USGS Volcanoes said on X. “That’s not to say it was not dramatic or very hazardous — obviously it was. But the big ones leave craters hundreds of feet across.”
The agency also said that “hydrothermal explosions, “being episodes of water suddenly flashing to steam, are notoriously hard to predict” and “may not give warning signs at all.” It likened the eruptions to a pressure cooker.
While Yellowstone sits on a dormant volcano, officials said the explosion was not related to volcanic activity.
“This was an isolated incident in the shallow hot-water system beneath Biscuit Basin,” the USGS said. “It was not triggered by any volcanic activity.”
Technology
What happened to the Metaverse?
S6
Ep135
What happened to the Metaverse?
Host Andrew Davidson is joined by technology experts Brian Benway and Jan Urbanek in a discussion about the Metaverse. Our experts shed light on the latest technological and hardware advancements and marketing strategies from Big Tech. What will it take for the Metaverse to gain mainstream popularity? Listen now to find out!
Head over to Mintel’s LinkedIn to let us know what you think of today’s episode, and visit mintel.com to become a member of our free Spotlight community.
Visit the Mintel Store to explore all our technology research and buy a report today.
Meet the Host
Andrew Davidson
SVP/Chief Insights Officer, Mintel Comperemedia.
Meet the Guests
Brian Benway
Senior Analyst, Gaming and Entertainment, Mintel Reports US.
Jan Urbanek
Senior Analyst, Consumer Technology, Mintel Reports Germany.
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Science & Environment
Archaeologists make stunning underwater discovery of ancient mosaic in sea off Italy
Researchers studying an underwater city in Italy say they have found an ancient mosaic floor that was once the base of a Roman villa, a discovery that the local mayor called “stupendous.”
The discovery was made in Bay Sommersa, a marine-protected area and UNESCO World Heritage Site off the northern coast of the Gulf of Naples. The area was once the Roman city of Baia, but it has become submerged over the centuries thanks to volcanic activity in the area. The underwater structures remain somewhat intact, allowing researchers to make discoveries like the mosaic floor.
The Campi Flegrei Archaeological Park announced the latest discovery, which includes “thousands of marble slabs” in “hundreds of different shapes,” on social media.
“This marble floor has been at the center of the largest underwater restoration work,” the park said, calling the research “a new challenge” and made “very complicated due to the extreme fragment of the remains and their large expansion.”
The marble floor is made of recovered, second-hand marble that had previously been used to decorate other floors or walls, the park said. Each piece of marble was sharpened into a square and inscribed with circles. The floor is likely from the third century A.D., the park said in another post, citing the style of the room and the repurposing of the materials as practices that were common during that time.
Researchers are working carefully to extract the marble pieces from the site, the park said. The recovery work will require careful digging around collapsed walls and other fragmented slabs, but researchers hope to “be able to save some of the geometries.”
Once recovered, the slabs are being brought to land and cleaned in freshwater tanks. The marble pieces are then being studied “slab by slab” to try to recreate the former mosaic, the park said.
“The work is still long and complex, but we are sure that it will offer many prompts and great satisfactions,” the park said.
Technology
SpaceX fires up Starship engines ahead of fifth test flight
SpaceX has just performed a static fire of the six engines on its Starship spacecraft as it awaits permission from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the fifth test flight of the world’s most powerful rocket.
The Elon Musk-led spaceflight company shared footage and an image of the test fire on X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday. It shows the engines firing up while the vehicle remained on the ground.
Six engine static fire of Flight 6 Starship pic.twitter.com/fzJz9BWBn6
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 19, 2024
For flights, the Starship spacecraft is carried to orbit by the first-stage Super Heavy booster, which pumps out 17 million pounds of thrust at launch, making it the most powerful rocket ever built.
The Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft — collectively known as the Starship — have launched four times to date, with the performance of each test flight showing improvements over the previous one.
The first one, for example, exploded shortly after lift off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, in April last year, while the second effort, which took place seven months later, achieved stage separation before an explosion occurred — an incident that was captured in dramatic footage. The third and fourth flights lasted much longer and achieved many of the mission objectives, including getting the Starship spacecraft to orbit.
The fifth test flight isn’t likely to take place until November at the earliest, according to a recent report. It will involve the first attempt to use giant mechanical arms to “catch” the Super Heavy booster as it returns to the launch area. SpaceX recently expressed extreme disappointment at the time that it’s taking the FAA to complete an investigation that will pave the way for the fifth Starship test, and has said that it’ll be ready to launch the vehicle within days of getting permission from the FAA.
Once testing is complete, NASA wants to use the Starship, along with its own Space Launch System rocket, to launch crew and cargo to the moon and quite possibly for destinations much further into space such as Mars. NASA is already planning to use a modified version of the Starship spacecraft to land the first astronauts in five decades on the lunar surface in the Artemis III mission, currently set for 2026.
Science & Environment
Painkiller used in cattle wiped out India’s vultures, and scientists say that led to 500,000 human deaths
New Delhi — Scientists say Indian farmers’ eager uptake of a painkiller for their cattle in the 1990s has led to the inadvertent deaths of half of a million people and massive economic losses — not from any harm to the cattle, but from the loss of millions of vultures, scavengers that historically devoured animals’ remains before they could rot and become vectors for disease.
In early 1990s, the patent on a painkiller called diclofenac lifted, making it cheap and widely available for India’s massive agricultural sector. Farmers use it to treat a wide array of conditions in cattle. But even a small amount of the drug is fatal to vultures. Since the beginning of its widespread use in India, the domestic vulture population has dropped from a whopping 50 million to just a few thousand — and according to a study published by the American Economic Association, the impact on humans has been monumental, reflecting the vital role the scavengers play.
Vultures have been a crucial part of India’s ecosystems for centuries. According to the authors of the study, entitled “The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence From The Decline of Vultures in India,” the large, homely birds are a “keystone species” — one that plays an irreplaceable role in an ecosystem.
They’re the only scavengers that feed entirely on carcasses, and they do it extremely efficiently, quickly devouring the remains and leaving little behind to spread disease. The study authors say India’s vultures would typically eat at least 50 million animal carcasses every year, before their population was decimated.
In doing so, they prevented the dead farm animals from rotting, and the deadly bacteria and other pathogens that thrive in carcasses from being transmitted into human populations.
“In a country like India with prohibitions on eating beef, most cattle end up turning into carcasses,” Anant Sudarshan, an associate professor of economics at the University of Warwick in England, who co-authored the study, told CBS News. “Vultures provide an incredible disposal service for free. … A group of vultures takes about 45 minutes to turn a cow carcass into bone.”
The vultures’ keen appetite also helped keep the populations of competing scavengers in check, such as feral dogs and rats, which can transmit rabies and a host of other diseases.
In 1994, farmers began giving diclofenac to their cattle and other livestock. The drug causes kidney failure and death in vultures that feed on the carcasses of animals given the painkiller, and the population of the birds shrank from 50 million to just 20,000 over the course of the ensuing decade alone.
Without the vultures around to do the job, farmers started disposing their dead livestock in local bodies of water, which caused water pollution — and another way for pathogens to reach humans.
Sudarshan and study co-author Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, examined the impact of the drastically reduced vulture population on human health by mapping vulture habitats with health data from more than 600 districts in India. They said their research shows 100,000 human deaths every year between 2000 and 2005 could be linked with the decreased vulture populations.
It also shows economic losses they estimated at $69 billion per year, largely associated with premature human deaths due to the collapse of the scavenger population.
These deaths were caused, according to their research, by the spread of diseases that a thriving vulture population would have mitigated. Stray dog populations, and with them, the spread of rabies, also increased during the timeframe, as did the amount of bacteria measured in many local water sources.
“India is now the largest center of rabies in the world, as the feral dog population has grown dramatically,” Sudarshan told CBS News.
Without a major vulture rebound, the study authors said the spread of disease and resulting deaths will only continue in the coming years, as will the costs associated with health care.
India did ban diclofenac for veterinary use in 2006, but Sudarshan said the ban needs to be enforced much more effectively. He and Eyal have called for more conservation funding to boost vulture populations, but they’ve warned that even if the Indian government does mount a major effort, it will take at least a decade for the species to bounce back to the extent required because they’re “slow reproducers.”
As an alternative to bringing the vultures back, Sudarshan said India could build a network of incinerators around the country, but the estimated cost of that is about $1 billion per year, and they would use a huge amount of energy and create considerable air pollution, which is already a major problem for India.
“So, it makes more sense to bring back the natural way of dealing with the millions of animal carcasses that India produces each year,” he said.
And he said that work must start urgently, as the “vultures began dying in the 1990s. India has not done anything three decades on.”
The government does spend about $3 million per year to save India’s native tigers. Sudarshan said while vultures may be far less of a tourist attraction, there’s a broader question about “the basis of our conservation policy.”
“Our paper shows that the cost of losing them [vultures] is about $69 billion a year, which is far higher than any benefits the tiger” brings, he said, adding: “We need to think from a cost effectiveness point of view and growth view, how should we pick species to conserve?”
“Understanding the role vultures play in human health underscores the importance of protecting wildlife – and not just the cute and cuddly,” said his co-author, Frank. “They all have a job to do in our ecosystems that impacts our lives.”
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