(dramatic music)
2019 was a year filled
with astonishing discoveries on Earth and beyond.
(suspenseful music)
We inched closer to immortality.
Recovered and restored our heritage.
And science fiction became science fact
when we saw the unseeable for the very first time.
(dramatic music)
(suspenseful music)
It's hard to imagine anything more terrifying
than a galactic vacuum cleaner
that devours planets and even stars.
Einstein predicted the existence of black holes
in 1916 and researchers confirmed them in 1971.
But, though plenty of indirect evidence
was collected over the last half century,
black holes are extremely camera shy.
Scientists hadn't actually seen one until this year
thanks to an unprecedented global effort
and the Event Horizon Telescope.
The EHT is made of radio telescopes working in concert
all over the Earth.
This is possible because of one powerful feature.
Interferometry doesn't care how far the antenna dishes
are separated as long as they're precisely synchronized.
The combined antenna work as though
they're a single telescope with a collecting surface
as big as the distance between them.
With antenna located in Hawaii, North and South America,
Greenland, Europe, and the South Pole,
the EHT has a collecting surface
literally the size of the Earth.
The project began three years ago when a team
connected millions of gigabytes of data
from a remote galaxy known as M87.
The data sent from the vast network of telescopes
was often spotty and random, so they figured out
how to fill in the gaps by applying several algorithms.
The result?
A complete and groundbreaking image
of a lopsided ring-like structure,
a black hole in the center of the distant galaxy.
Now, history is being made.
A direct photograph has just been released.
And we are delighted to be able to report to you today
that we have seen what we thought was unseeable.
We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole.
(audience applauds)
Here it is.
(audience applauds)
(soft ominous music)
And this is the strongest evidence that we have to date
for the existence of black holes.
And it is also consistent, the shape of this shadow,
to the precision of our measurements
with Einstein's prediction.
(audience applauds)
Black holes come in sizes
ranging from nanoscale to thousands of times larger
than our entire solar system.
The diameter of M87 is roughly 24 billion miles across.
It's an object where the physical realm
and the laws of physics as we know them have broken down.
(ominous music)
And yet, it retains the gravity of all the mass
of every object it has ever devoured.
So, this is an easy way to visualize
how a black hole shadow is formed.
We can start by looking at what happens to light
when we have just flat space.
And, as our normal experience is,
light just follows straight paths.
But if I put the black hole in the middle,
the black hole will warp the spacetime
all the way to the singularity.
It takes light rays and bends them,
and some of them actually go straight down
the neck of the singularity.
A shadow is what a black hole casts
on its surrounding emission.
So, as gas gets close to the black hole,
it heats up, it emits light.
The black hole spacetime with the presence
of the horizon and with the presence
of a density depression at the center,
absorbs all the light there,
so it leaves a central darkness which we call the shadow
that the black hole imprints on the image.
(dramatic music)
And the Earth Horizon Telescope
is just getting started.
Data gathered from the various Earth-based locations
is now being processed to reveal a new image
of an altogether different black hole
and will be released to the public in the coming months.
(suspenseful music)
As scientists continue to probe
these mysterious cosmic monsters,
they'll be able to puncture even more myths
about how our universe was born.
(controller chattering)
And liftoff of the Cassini spacecraft
on a billion-mile trek to Saturn.
Each of the planets in our own solar system
has a unique appearance and personality,
especially Saturn with its iconic rings,
rings of ice and rock that extend
up to 175,000 miles outward,
yet only average 30 feet in height.
(suspenseful music)
NASA's Cassini space probe spent 13 years
studying Saturn and its rings before plunging
to its death in 2017, but it left behind a wealth
of data for researchers back home.
Early this year, new information revealed
that perhaps Saturn's rings formed only
between 10 million and 100 million years ago,
at a time when dinosaurs roamed Earth,
and not during the birth of our solar system.
The majestic gas giant may have once existed
without its distinctive halo.
We used to think of rings as these individual particles
kind of bumping into each other and sort of floating
around in space, and we now know that the bulk
of Saturn's main rings,
the particles actually stick together
and they form these long strands that we call wakes,
and that these wakes line up
like the rows of a marching band.
(suspenseful music)
They have grooves, if you like,
like an old-fashioned record,
created as wakes of moons which are orbiting.
Some of the moons are in the rings,
some of those moons are outside the rings,
and these waves give an interesting texture.
They break apart and they reform,
so there's this beautiful cosmic dance
going on inside the rings.
And Cassini wasn't the only one
getting in on the action.
New ground-based telescope observations
have identified 20 new moons orbiting Saturn,
bringing the total to 82, beating Jupiter by three.
So, we found these Saturn moons using the most powerful
survey telescope in the world.
It's the Subaru Telescope, which is eight meters in size,
and it has the largest camera.
It's the size of a small car, and it can cover
six full moons in one image.
And then, during the early source storm
there's a lot of stuff flying around.
There's a lot of comets and asteroids,
many more than there are now,
and so it's likely that these moons were hit
by comets and asteroids that are just flying past Saturn.
And that's why we see basically a lot of fragments
from these collisions.
(suspenseful music)
The small moons, measuring only a few miles
in size, orbit the outer edges of Saturn
and many more could be hiding in plain sight.
We're actually tracking more moons,
and a lot of these moons are just on the edge
of our detection, we can just barely see them.
Saturn really is the moon king.
(tense music)
On February 1st, 2019,
members of the Mars Exploration team
gathered at NASA's JPL headquarters
to say their final goodbye to one
of space exploration's greatest pioneers,
the Opportunity Rover.
I wanted to say, with the completion
of tonight's commanding, this concludes operations
for MER-1 spacecraft ID 253.
And on behalf of the entire MER project,
we'd like to thank the DSN for over 15 1/2 years
of outstanding support from launch until tonight.
Thank you for your comments.
Sad day for all of us.
(somber music)
14, you are released.
(group applauding)
It all began 15 years ago.
The control room had a much different feel to it,
(group cheering)
one of excitement and, shall we say, opportunity.
And it all started with one photo.
When Opportunity sent back that first picture
from Eagle Crater, that night is, like,
burned in my brain, I will never forget it.
It was such a dramatic image of Mars,
and it was so different than any images we have seen before.
(tense music)
Opportunity, packed with tools
and instruments was a wandering geologist
probing the planet for information and searching
for signs of liquid water.
(probe whirring)
Opportunity lands, right from the get go,
discovery of water-formed rocks, right?
Ya know, it came easy.
Here, she found little so-called blueberries
that contained hematite and iron ore.
It's an iron mineral that forms in areas
with a lot of water.
(tense music)
By the end, Opportunity traversed
more than 28 miles of martian landscape,
sharing more than 225,000 images of its surroundings
with researchers back on Earth.
Perseverance Valley, believed to be a water-formed gully,
was Opportunity's final destination.
It was here on June 10th, 2018, Sol 5111,
that Opportunity sent its last message,
creatively and poetically translated by media outlets as,
"My battery is low and it's getting dark."
(somber music)
This as a massive and devastatingly dense
dust storm approached.
And so the robot couldn't generate any energy with that,
and so, we saw the rover just shut down,
and there was nothing we could do at that point
because it didn't have power to keep going.
And we just had to wait.
And that's what we did do, is wait, and wait, and wait.
This is its last panoramic view.
Eight months later, NASA would designate Opportunity lost,
its mission complete.
(somber music)
It taught us how to do surface operations.
It taught us how to read the terrain and navigate
and plot a safe path from one point to another.
We did not know how to do those.
It was all speculative.
Three, two-- But new rovers
are on the way.
[Radio Controller] Zero, and liftoff of the Atlas V.
(rocket jets boom)
2019 was a very big year for Mars exploration.
We've sent unmanned spacecraft to the fourth planet
from the sun since the 1970s.
(suspenseful music)
But NASA's InSight is the first probe
into the heart of the Red Planet.
InSight uses cutting edge instruments
to investigate internal processes
that likely formed all of our terrestrial planets,
taking Mars' daily temperature and planetary pulse.
The basic idea of InSight is to map out the deep structure
of Mars for the very first time.
We're gonna map out the thickness of the crust,
the size of the core, sort of get the first map
of the inside of Mars.
We don't know very much about what goes on
2,000 miles below the surface,
and this will be the first mission to investigate
the huge extent of Mars below the surface.
(soft music)
But brand new technology
doesn't come trouble-free.
InSight's HP3, the mechanical mole designed
to burrow 16 feet down into martian soil
got stuck at just 12 inches down soon after landing.
(tense music)
Stuck on Earth, 140 million miles from Mars,
engineers are working to determine
if the stumbling block is a rock
or if the problem lies with the unusual composition
of the martian soil.
The lander has detected several small Mars quakes.
The tremors are much weaker than medium-sized earthquakes,
confirming their suspicions that Mars is much more placid
than tectonically-active Earth.
(upbeat electronic music)
NASA's family of fearless martian rovers
have unlocked many of the Red Planet's secrets.
From little Sojourner's first trip 22 years ago,
to twins Spirit and Opportunity,
and finally, the Curiosity rover.
But it's time for a new generation of explorers.
NASA plans to fly the first heavier-than-air spacecraft
on another world, the Mars Helicopter.
(helicopter whirring)
The super bird is being tested right now.
(helicopter whirring)
We built the helicopter that'll go to Mars,
and at this time we've shown that it can fly,
we've done the flight test in the chamber
with the thin atmosphere representative of Mars.
In JPL's 25-foot wide vacuum chamber,
the helicopter team recreated the gravity
and flying conditions of the Red Planet
to test the Mars helicopter.
The vehicle's good to go for a July 2020 launch.
But really, our job isn't done until we see
the same test flight being performed at Mars.
So, next time we fly it'll be on Mars,
but that's our ultimate goal.
That's when we'll go, "Yes." (chuckles)
(soft tense music)
Drones are the perfect way
to investigate far-away worlds,
especially in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Titan, Saturn's largest moon, tantalizes scientists
because it seems to hold all the ingredients for life
that were present on early Earth.
(soft tense music)
And this year, a new mission has been approved
to explore this alien world.
NASA's Dragonfly drone is part of a new frontiers mission.
The eight-rotor drone, expected to be the same size
as the Curiosity Rover on Mars,
will also carry many of the same instruments
and will launch in 2026.
Because Dragonfly will fly over instead of rolling on,
it has the potential to cover far more territory.
With speeds reaching 22 miles per hour,
who knows what it will find.
Dragonfly was designed to be a rotor craft
to explore Titan because it's the right way
to explore the Titan environment.
It's the right way to make the measurements we need to
to understand the chemistry oft this ocean world.
There's sand dunes, there are clouds.
You even have methane rain,
there are methane rivers and lakes and seas.
The organic chemistry in Titan's atmosphere
and on its surface may replicate the type
of organic chemistry we had here on Earth
before life developed.
We want to be able to understand how life took the step
from chemistry to biology.
While NASA and other agencies
pioneer flight through space,
78 years ago the first operational jet fighter plane
was the engineering masterpiece of its time.
The German Messerschmitt Me 262 set the course
for the future of aviation history.
If the Nazis had been able to access
more refined metals for the jet's engines,
if they'd had more fuel reserves and more time,
then things might have played out very differently
toward the end of World War II.
Bomber crews had to have been terrified.
The German airplane is almost 100 miles an hour faster.
(jet engine roars)
No one has flown a genuine example
of this revolutionary machine since the 1950s,
but it's now nearly ready to take to the skies once again.
(bright orchestral music)
It's been a 19-year effort to realize the dream
of the late Vulcan founder
and pioneer of Microsoft, Paul Allen,
to restore the plane to precise historical accuracy.
During the war, because of extreme pressure to win,
that really accelerates the progress of technology
and these engines are an example
of the amazing leaps that happened because of that pressure.
In 2000, the plane traveled across the world
where engineers have stripped the plane down
to its component parts.
Basically, it came in a big wooden crate,
pretty much just a rust bucket.
Then painstakingly rebuilt it piece by piece.
Up until the last year, we didn't know
where the light at the end of the tunnel was.
And with the success of the first engine tests,
the Me 262 will attempt to take flight before year's end.
(ominous music)
A grim legacy of the same war has been discovered
at a site of much earlier, but legendary tragedy.
Over the years, archaeologists working in Pompeii,
the famous archaeological sight, have discovered
unexploded bombs dropped by the Allies in World War II.
Another surfaced and was deactivated
at the beginning of the first large-scale excavation
in Pompeii in 70 years, nearly 2,000 years
after the site was engulfed in ash
by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.
New finds at the famous site
are rewriting everything we thought we knew
about the deadly day in A.D. 79.
Italian archaeologists have removed 24 feet
of volcanic debris and have discovered brilliant murals
and mosaics that remained hidden until now.
(gentle music)
New skeletons reveal more about the last minutes
of aristocrats and slaves that never made it
to the gates of the doomed city.
But at the edge of the new excavation,
archaeologists have discovered
that they were not the first on site.
(woman speaking in foreign language)
In antiquity and even recent times,
looters have dug a series of tunnels
under the street into the stable of a once grand villa.
(tense music)
The tunnels, some as long as 60 meters,
lead to neighboring homes.
At night, using lanterns and lamps,
the looters broke through the walls
looking for precious objects of value.
In contrast, archaeologists carefully remove
the ash, layer by layer, searching for evidence
of what happened here.
The illegal diggers
had partially cut through it,
damaging the chance for a second mold.
(somber music)
(tools scraping)
(soft suspenseful music)
Mount Vesuvius is a stratovolcano
and the deadly eruption produced six pyroclastic surges
of fast-moving, ground-hugging waves
of hot, toxic gases and ash.
During the fourth surge, gas and pumice traveling
at more than 150 miles per hour
enveloped the city of Pompeii.
(somber music)
It's now known that most victims died instantly
from the 600-degree super-heated air,
but the ash continued to fall at the rate
of six inches per hour.
West of Vesuvius, Herculaneum escaped
the first lethal blanketing, but just before midnight,
another surge, this one a burning wall of volcanic mud,
engulfed the smaller town.
This pyroclastic flow quickly carbonized,
encapsulating wood and other fragile materials
with a thick black crust.
Papyrus scrolls discovered in 1752
were so fragile that every attempt
to unwrap them through the centuries
immediately caused them to crumble.
These papyri are the only original literature
to have survived from the classical world,
so researchers are desperate to unwrap and read them.
They are the canonical example of material
from antiquity that is both too fragile
to open and also so valuable and mysterious
that it has captured the attention
of scholars for many years.
Now, by applying subatomic physics
originally designed for medicine,
they might have found a way.
And then how many slices do you have to make up
the whole run of the scroll?
I mean, maybe 12,000?
Right.
That's a lotta data, right?
Coupled with a surefire confidence
in methodology, which drives Seales
to his most ambitious projects and ultimate successes,
including the 2016 virtual unwrapping
of a third century Hebrew scroll
known as the En-Gedi Scroll.
Using X-ray to peer inside the badly damaged
rolled up animal skin, Seales and his team
laid out the artifact's geometric volume
without ever opening it, highlighting the text within.
(gentle music)
The complex scanning of the Herculaneum scrolls
took place over multiple days this summer in California
as a team of international researchers held their breath
as they unraveled history.
(soft tense music)
Well, you know, my expectations are always different
from everyone else's.
I expect things to happen quickly,
but what's probably going to happen
is that we will not see the complete text
right away because there are too many
computational steps involved in being really deliberate
and systematic about our work.
But when dealing with 2,000 year-old documents,
what's a few months mean to learn the secrets held within?
The prospect of noninvasively, virtually unwrapping
these scrolls and reading their texts,
is a very exciting breakthrough and scholars
will potentially have access to a text
that's complete, that's whole, and undamaged.
If I could see one of our scrolls, seeing the writings,
naturally, I'd jump for joy.
What else? (chuckles)
The scrolls are immensely valuable in the sense
that it's the only library from antiquity
that has ever been discovered in place.
All libraries from antiquity have been lost.
(ominous music)
Throughout history,
fire has been one of the most spontaneous
and unstoppable forces of destruction.
2019 saw a massive increase in wildfires around the globe.
Siberia, Alaska, the Amazon, are all going up in smoke.
Fast-moving fires can burn millions
of acres of land and consume everything,
trees, homes, even humans, in their paths.
(tense music)
(fireman chattering)
Ongoing research in 2019 is revealing new
and aggressive ways to combat wildfires.
So, this vehicle is called the MSTAR,
the Mobile Special Technology and Aerial Response.
Typically we will carry one, two, three,
four primary drones.
You wanna get on scene and get a drone in the air quickly.
The next phase in wildfire technology
is integrating drone usage,
and most likely it's used to map fires
because you can put cameras on these,
and you can put infrared cameras
and you can fly in very complex terrain,
smoky conditions, so that's a new tool
that firefighters will be utilizing.
Drone pilots go out, fly, to do mapping.
They come back with an SD card
that has all the pictures they've taken.
I put it in my card reader.
I'm using the software I have on here
to go and stitch those things together,
create an image, and maybe display that image
outside to the commanders.
(tense music)
Meanwhile, this vehicle actually is equipped
with many cameras.
There's a camera on the front, the rear, and both sides
as well as on top of the mast.
So, I can see to maintain situational awareness
of what's going on in the incident command post,
but I can also at the same time see
what the firefighters are doing on the inside of the fire.
So, this could be my firefighters
on the inside walking around.
I think there's a lot of room for technology to improve
the way that we fight wild land fires
and the way that we prepare for wild land fires.
(ominous music)
Fire management agencies should be utilizing
the current state of the science and technology.
It takes a high-speed thermal camera,
and then inside there's an optical frame.
And if your vision is occluded by smoke,
the thermal camera puts a green line
around what you would be seeing.
It's the small changes that make a big difference.
Then your firefighters have a chance.
If you look at the number of firefighters
in the United States 30 years ago,
it was about a million firefighters
across the United States.
Today, 30 years later, it's about a million-one,
a million-two, almost the same number of firefighters,
but the number of fires, number of incidents,
number of calls have gone up.
So, how do you get the point of doing more with less
or more with the same?
And the answer, of course, is technology.
And no one could have used
these advancements more than the brave souls combating
this year's raging fires in South America.
(soft tense music)
The Amazon rainforest lost almost 4,000 square miles
to fires in the first 26 days of August 2019 alone
according to data from the Brazilian government's
satellite monitoring agency.
There is nobody here, there is nobody to stop it,
and it just goes on for mile after mile.
(fire crackling)
The Amazon rainforest is over two million
square miles of jungle in South America,
billions of trees.
But its health is important to the whole world.
Without it, carbon dioxide would warm the atmosphere
and oceans faster, changing weather patterns.
The trees absorb and store carbon dioxide
through their leaves.
One tree can absorb the equivalent of a car burning
eight liters of gasoline or 48 pounds per year.
But when there's a mega drought coupled with fires,
it stresses the forest and releases tons of carbon dioxide,
contributing to the greenhouse effect.
The canopy, of course, is where the plant
is taking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,
where the leaves are absorbing carbon dioxide
and being stored up in the branches and the trunks
and the roots.
(upbeat music)
The plants take out carbon and carbon dioxide
and they release oxygen.
All forests actually provide oxygen
for the rest of life on Earth.
This giant forest stores vast quantities
of carbon dioxide.
CO2 emissions are rising faster than models predict.
Of the carbon dioxide we pump out ever year
from factories, cars, power stations,
and agricultural burn-offs, 40% is absorbed
by the atmosphere, 30% is absorbed by the oceans,
and 30% is absorbed and stored by forest ecosystems.
The Amazon absorbs the largest amount
of carbon of any rainforest in the world.
With these mega fires occurring,
the landscape is really a dark scenario
I would say for the future of the Amazon.
(tense music)
Hundreds of billions of trees
are going up in flames, and all these trees
that once absorbed CO2, are now dead
and releasing it into the atmosphere.
The question is, will more fires push
the Amazon rainforest to the point of no return?
And how close are we already?
Climate scientists say if temperatures do rise
by three or four degrees this century,
the Amazon rainforest won't absorb the great volumes
of CO2 it currently does, or worse,
it'll begin to produce more CO2 than it absorbs
and our planet as we know it will change forever.
Already, climate change is having a grim effect
on our fragile planet.
July 2019 was the hottest month
in recorded history for our planet.
(ice crashing)
According to Noah, polar ice melted to record lows
while worldwide summer temperatures soared to new heights.
Earth has experienced global warming in the past,
but never at this speed and with this intensity.
(upbeat music)
It begs the question, what lifeforms will be left on Earth?
Possibly parasites.
Groundbreaking research reveals that creatures
that live on other organisms at the expense of their hosts
make up half of all known species on Earth.
Being a parasitologist, it's sort of like
every day is your birthday.
You have this present in front of you
and you open it up, you don't know
what's gonna be inside it, but usually it's something cool.
This is a jar of raccoon roundworms.
Sometimes it's something you've never seen before.
Sometimes it might be something that nobody
has ever seen before.
Parasites can be deadly.
In 2017, malaria caused
an estimated 435,000 deaths globally,
almost 85% occurring in Africa and India.
However, parasites in the salt marshes
of Southern California may help paint
a broader picture of how they fit into our ecosystem.
One of the things that we've learned
is that parasites are really everywhere.
There are so many parasites around us all the time
that we just don't see.
(tense music)
You've got this species of snail that's basically
hundreds per square meter sometimes like this,
and then the trematodes that are in most of these guys,
we think, they castrate the snail for life.
So, they're sitting in the gonads
and they multiply asexually and they fill up
the gonads and they just munch away
as the new gonads produce.
And then if you open up an infected one,
it's just this mass of worms in place
of where the gonads should be, and as far as we know,
the snail doesn't notice the difference.
Yeah. And instead of
making snail babies, it makes parasite babies.
Most of the parasites' extreme adaptations
are ultimately about reproduction.
The larvae in the snails grow
into a trematode worm that keeps moving
from one host to another as it develops.
Since it can reproduce only in the gut of shore birds,
it makes the transition through an unusual route:
the brain of a fish.
What we think is that this parasite has had
this adaptation to basically sit on the brain
of the fish, control its behavior,
mind control in a way, and that puts the parasite
in the driver's seat because when they're infected
they'll do things like they'll roll over
and show that bright white belly up in the air
so a predatory bird is more likely to see them.
The parasite's not using a sledgehammer to do this.
It's using finely-tuned chemical manipulation.
The unlikely odyssey of the trematode parasites
doesn't come to an end when they reach the bellies of birds.
The cycle begins all over again as the birds
spread millions of parasite eggs in their droppings.
You know, the birds are really the top
of the food chain here, and of course in doing that,
they're also the final host for so many
of the parasites that are out here.
There's just as much parasite biomass
in this salt marsh as there is bird biomass.
So, to the extent that we think that the birds
are important players in the salt marsh,
then I think we also have to think of the parasites
as being important players, too.
It may take us some time to get used
to the idea that parasites are a vital part
of every ecosystem.
(gentle music)
252 million years ago humans weren't around
to impact which species failed and which thrived.
Paleontologists in Norway just discovered
that after the Permian-Triassic mass extinction,
life recovered twice as fast in the polar regions
than elsewhere on Earth.
(bright music)
How quickly can life recover after a global catastrophe?
Answers may lie in the fossil record
at the top of the world.
Scientists are looking at the world's
biggest extinction event for clues
about which species survived.
When we're talking about an extinction in paleontology,
it means total extinction.
And it almost wiped the whole blackboard completely.
It happened 252 million years ago.
It was not only a regional disaster,
but it was really the biggest disaster
in Earth's history.
And of course there were life on land,
there were life in the ocean at that time,
and most of it got extinct.
(ominous music)
About 252 million years ago on the border
between what we call the Permian
and the Triassic time periods,
(volcano booms)
the biggest volcanic eruptions in Earth's history happened,
and an area was covered in Siberia that was
between the size of India and Australia.
And not only it was this big, but it was also thick.
The thickness of this volcanic eruption, all the things
that came up through the volcanoes
was about 2,000 meters if we average it.
That's over one-mile thick.
(dramatic music)
Molten lava continued to spew for several million years,
but it wasn't just the inferno that was deadly.
The volcanics came in contact with evaporites.
There had been a large sea in the area
that completely dried out, like the Dead Sea today.
So, you have big salt layers,
and of course if you boil salt,
you get a lot of nasty things because salt
is a lot of chloride, and when you start
to boil chloride you get a gas that's really poisonous,
and there's always some sulfur,
and if you start to boil the sulfur stuff,
you get poisons and you get acids, sulfuric acid.
(dramatic music)
Everything on land and in the sea was affected.
And suddenly we see in the rock layers mud,
just dark, gray mud.
And we can start to dig in it and we can see
that there's almost no life.
It's just covered with dead mud.
The dramatic end of the Permian
is known as the Great Dying,
and the ocean suffered the most.
But something between 82 and 96% of all species
in the ocean everywhere got extinct.
Even hearty, iconic species
like trilobites vanished forever.
The disaster was so nearly complete
that in most places it would take 10 million years
for life to recover.
The period that begins just after the Permian Extinction,
252 million years ago, is known as the Mesozoic Era.
Through some wonderful work done by Chinese
and English paleontologists for many years,
they see that life slowly appears again,
but the complex ecosystems that you see
for the rest of the Mesozoic, they only appear
after 10 million years.
While Chinese and English paleontologists
have calculated the recovery at 10 million years,
Jorn and his team have searched the shale layers
on Svalbard and found that recovery was much faster.
(tense music)
We are down to at least half the time.
For the scientists, this was a revelation.
So, in China, 10 million years.
In Svalbard, five million years
to a full ecosystem with top predators.
We are trying now to push it down to four million years
after the extinction.
So, then it's six million-year gap
between a large ecosystem close to the equator,
and one on the northern end of the Pangaea.
In Svalbard we see that things are moving
much faster back to a recovery.
The scientists don't yet know
why this is the case, but they're determined
to solve the mystery.
Jorn and his team are the first to document
this transition in northern Pangaea,
five million years earlier than researchers thought.
It's extremely fast evolution.
We see the disaster taxa, we still see the bone fishes,
then we see the marine amphibians,
but then we also have the first marine reptiles
in the same layer, and this is something
that's quite spectacular for us to see,
that actually we have the mix, we have the change.
This is when we go from an environment
that's just extremely strange because it's just after
the big extinction into something
that starts to hint towards a normal Mesozoic ecosystem.
No matter how quickly life bounces back
after pushing the reset button, it still takes
millions of years before complete ecosystems thrive again.
This has striking implications for Earth today.
As we confront the climate crisis
and increasing habitat destruction,
we're seeing a pattern that parallels prehistory
at warp speed.
It's part of the impetus for scientists
to decode the genomes of iconic extinct species
and make plans to resurrect them within our lifetime.
Thylacines once roamed throughout Australia
and a breakthrough in Melbourne may see them
hunting in Tasmanian forests again soon.
(bright music)
Andrew Pask is an expert in developmental genetics
in Australia.
His team made a huge breakthrough by sequencing
the entire thylacine genome, but where did they get
the thylacine DNA?
Because people were going out and killing them
on such a large scale, museums were really
trying to collect specimens.
They knew they were disappearing from the wild.
And, in some rare circumstances, there were females
that were shot that still had babies in their pouch,
and then those babies made it into museum collections.
And that's what really enabled us to start looking
into the biology of the thylacine.
(tense music)
DNA from the Melbourne specimen
had sequences long enough to recreate
the entire three-billion letter genome of the thylacine.
But Pask and his team needed to isolate
specific genes from the DNA strings
for the next phase of their research.
De-extinction and trying to bring an animal back to life
is very different from animal cloning.
Animal cloning's something we're very good at today,
and that process you have to start with a living cell,
and you can put that living cell into an embryo
and you can use that living cell then
to generate a whole 'nother individual or clone
of where that cell originally came from.
The key thing for any of these sorts of technologies
of bringing an animal back, is you have
to start with a living cell.
So, although we have the complete genetic blueprint
of a thylacine, this is letters on a computer screen.
This is not a living cell.
(gentle music)
There's a new technology called CRISPR-Cas line technology.
It's a DNA editing tool that we now have
that enables you to make those edits.
The number edits that you have to make
is in the order of millions of edits.
The next step in Andrew Pask's journey
through Jurassic Park down under,
will be to create a living thylacine genome
by modifying the genome of a close living relative.
We can start to think about surrogate species
that we would use to genome edit
to make them look like a thylacine,
but the really big problem with the thylacine then
would be transferring that embryo
into another marsupial surrogate mother
that would then have to give birth
to a thylacine pouch young.
Pask thinks that Western Australia's Numbat
might provide the best starting DNA blueprint.
It's one of the thylacine's closest living relatives,
last sharing a common ancestor 30 million years ago.
The termite-eating creature also has stripes,
but adults are only slightly bigger than a squirrel,
where adult thylacines were much bigger.
Numbats are the closest living relative
to the thylacine, but unfortunately,
these are insectivores, so they obviously
have a very different digestive system,
so they obviously have a huge amount of differences
between their genomes, and that makes our job
a lot harder because you would have to make
many, many more of those edits to the blueprint
to make our thylacine genome really come back to life.
Why go to all this trouble
to bring back an animal that's already extinct?
It's one of the few animals that we know
the exact moment that the last animal died
and that species went completely extinct from our planet,
and it's got this really sad story of extinction
where we aggressively hunted this animal
to extinction in the wild.
The end goal of this de-extinction effort
will be to reintroduce the thylacines
to the wild reserves that cover about half
of Tasmania today.
With the thylacine, it's really a great example
of a species that you could just pop back
into the ecosystem in Tasmania,
and it certainly has everything it needs there
in order to not just survive,
but also thrive in that environment.
(upbeat music)
Tremendous progress was made in 2019
in the fields of genetic and biomedical engineering.
Science can now construct the facial features
of suspects who leave DNA at the scene of their crimes.
They're decoding what was formerly thought
to be junk DNA to reveal more than 10,000 markers
for facial recognition.
Our DNA is key to so many aspects
of our appearances and our health.
Heart disease is the number one cause of death
for our species worldwide.
That's why researchers are trailblazing ways
to repair hearts through gene manipulation to 3D printing.
(tense music)
All around the world, researchers are determined
to learn how to fix a broken heart,
exploring multiple paths of inquiry
to innovate new bioengineering methods,
even developing the technology to print a new heart.
The process of healing occurs very slowly in the heart.
It's believed that only 30% of its cells
are replaced over 50 years.
So, once the heart is damaged, it takes a long time
for recovery to take place.
How can new heart cells be generated?
It appears tiny extracellular bubbles called exosomes,
some hidden within the heart, play a key role.
They contain a message that can rebuild the heart.
Renowned researcher, Dr. Eduardo Marban,
tested this theory by giving with mice
that had experienced cardiac infarction.
The results were dramatic.
This is the wall of the heart after cardiac infarction.
The cells on the right side have died
and the wall has become thin.
But in mice that received these additional
messaging molecules, the number of cells
had increased and the wall had become thicker.
They might be very powerful agents
in the treatment of disease in a way
that defies all the conventions.
(tense music)
Elsewhere, researchers investigate
other approaches, including the development
of lab-cultured tissues and organs.
(tense music)
This is Kenneth Chien, a world-leading expert
in the field of regenerative medicine.
Here, the researcher adds a certain signaling molecule
to an ES cell.
It's called Wnt.
Wnt molecules are present in large quantities
in dividing eggs.
After one week,
(scientist chattering)
part of the cell is starting to pulse.
Two days later, large ripples
move across the flattened cell.
This is the very beginning of a human heart.
You can take an embryonic stem cell
that can become any cell, and then instruct it
to specifically almost entirely become
human beating ventricular muscle.
This is an exciting event.
With the same transformative properties
of embryonic stem cells, researchers in Israel
are using iPS cells to develop startling new innovations,
even printing a miniature heart.
This is the first time that the whole cellular heart
with blood vessel is printed.
How did they do it?
Tal Dvir and a team of research scientists
at Tel Aviv University harvested patients' fatty tissue
to produce a personalized biological hydrogel
as well as iPS cells manipulated
to become cardiac and vascular cells.
Together, these form what Dvir calls bioinks.
We have bioinks for the heart and bioinks
for the blood vessels, and then we use
a 3D printer to print whole hearts
with the major blood vessels.
The next stage is to mature these hearts in the lab
for at least a month to help the cells
or teach them how to interact with each other
and how to provide electrical signal
and to have a synchronous contraction
or pumping ability of the heart.
And in a year or two we hope to take these hearts
and transplant them in small animal models,
in rats or rabbits.
(tense music)
Astounding, no doubt,
and while much more work must be done
to scale up the study from printing rabbit-sized organs
to a truly human-sized heart,
its impact may be more immediate.
And in a year or two, we hope to take these hearts
and transplant them in small animal models,
in rats or rabbits.
The jury's still out as to whether or not
we should edit out dangerous genes in a way
that would eliminate them entirely
from all future generations, but living a full lifetime
despite disease or serious injury seems to be
the inherent goal of most species,
whether human or animal, present or past.
By studying both mortal and serious injuries
on fossil bones, scientists in North and South America
have redefined the daily lives of one of the most iconic
prehistoric predators, Smilodon.
(tense music)
Saber-toothed cats, it seems, are both fighters and lovers.
(dramatic music)
(teeth crunching)
Forget tigers.
(cat roars)
Forget lions and leopards.
One ferocious feline killed its prey
with canines nearly a foot long.
(Smilodon growls)
But while the beast weighed close to half a ton,
walked on paws three times larger than a Bengal tiger's,
Smilodon remains one of the most enigmatic predators,
past or present.
(Smilodon growls)
(man speaking in foreign language)
Now, scientists are breaking into Smilodon's secret life
through those incredible fangs.
So, there's lots of advantages of having
these elongated sabers, one of which is the ability
to have your prey bleed out very quickly.
Dr. Larisa DeSantis
is a vertebrate paleontologist at Vanderbilt University.
The saber teeth are actually as long, if not longer,
than some T-Rex teeth.
(soft tense music)
Dr. Nicolas Chimento
is at the cCmparative Anatomy Lab of Vertebrate Evolution
in the Natural History Museum Buenos Aires.
(Nicolas speaking in foreign language)
This is original material
from a saber-tooth cat, a Smilodon populator.
It was found here in Rio Areco in the Pampas region.
(men speaking in foreign language)
His new discovery in Argentina
suggests that Knife Tooth used its canines
not just to dispatch prey, but to battle
with members of its own kind.
(speaking in foreign language)
Here it had an oval-shaped hole,
and the shape coincided with the canine
of a saber-tooth cat.
So, what we did was insert the canine
into that hole and it matched the shape
and fit perfectly inside the skull.
The punctures in both skulls
could only have been inflicted by other Smilodons.
So, this is a wound
that would have undoubtedly caused the animal to die.
The Argentine specimen shows a wound
that appears to be instantly fatal.
It's a huge discovery as Smilodon fossils
are relatively rare in South America.
Smilodon kittens didn't sport true fangs
until they were about three years old.
There is a true evolutionary benefit
to having that tooth come completely in
before the other tooth, the baby tooth falls out,
and that provides evidence that these animals
were potentially provisioned or cared for
because those teeth were so critical to their survival.
(suspenseful music)
Until their weaponry was fully developed,
Smilodon kittens needed to stick close to mom.
It was taking a long time for these teeth to develop
and those were that critical for hunting,
then there may have been extended period of parental care
allowing for these animals to become more mature
and able to hunt effectively on the landscape.
This suggests that the prehistoric cats
may have had expanded family structures, similar to wolves.
We're not sure if saber-toothed cats hunted in pairs
or in prides, but they worked together.
(tense music) (cat growling)
The prehistoric landscape was rich with forests
and prairies with many big beasts.
Giant ground sloths, short-faced bears,
mammoths and mastodons, and camel-like creatures
lived side-by-side with Smilodon.
Saber-toothed cats were the apex predators
throughout Pleistocene America.
Still, hunting could be dangerous
and injury could mean starvation for the predator.
We can actually analyze the teeth
of fossil animals and get an understanding
of what they were eating.
By analyzing the chemical signature
of a Smilodon's tooth enamel, she can see what it preyed on
and where that prey lived, and by studying
the microscopic grooves and wear on the surface
of the teeth, she can tell whether the owner
crunched bone or dined on delicacies.
And what we actually found was pretty interesting,
is that the individuals that were injured
were actually eating softer foods,
and this suggests that potentially they were actually
being provisioned food.
So, these weren't animals that were sort of
just desperately scavenging
for whatever food they could find.
They were actually able to get access to the flesh, likely,
and then potentially by other cats.
And so, that was really, really an exciting find.
And that is quite remarkable because that suggests
that these animals were really, ya know,
caring for each other.
(suspenseful music)
Growing those saber teeth
was a feat of evolutionary engineering
that continues to fascinate everyone who lays eyes on them.
(tense music)
Four little foot bones found by accident in 1994,
have led South African scientists to discover
the most complete paleoanthropological find of is kind.
Since revealed, fossil by fossil over 20 years,
the new discovery replaces much guess work
with real answers about our early ancestors.
(ominous music)
She was an older woman, not much over four feet,
and perhaps in her foraging,
she'd been disturbed by something,
some predator, a saber-tooth or a lion,
and had hastily tried to get away.
She fell into a cave, now known as the Sterkfontein,
and the four little foot bones of hers
were discovered here quite by accident
3.7 million years later.
Usually, scientists only discover small fragments
of a skeleton in the deep bedrock of time.
These give them clues, but not many answers
about our ancestors.
That has all changed with Little Foot.
(bright music)
I could see a little white bone that I recognized
as a foot bone of a hominid, and then another one,
(chuckles) and then another one.
I also found part of a tibia,
and I found part of a fibula.
So, I had parts of the foot and lower legs
from left and right.
From these first little foot fragments,
the team, Ron Clarke, Stephen Motsumi, and Nkwane Molefe
set out to find and piece together the rest.
It was to be a labor of love over decades.
Their biggest challenge was to remove soft fossil bone
from breccia, a type of natural concrete,
while keeping every single fossil fragment undamaged.
These are the actual fossils,
all assembled from one individual who fell into a cave
3.7 million years ago and left us a legacy
of knowledge beyond measure, including the only
complete skull and complete dentition, Little Foot.
This was the first time ever that a complete adult skull
of an Australopithecus had been found.
(tense music)
It had arms that were like ours, relatively short,
and I could see that the legs were actually longer
than the arms, just like us.
This human ancestor had proportions similar to us.
The fossils which Little Foot has offered up
quite literally fill the missing gaps
in our understanding of our early ancestors.
Little Foot, or Australopithecus Prometheus,
stood upright and has waited a long time
to pass on her secrets, and there's no doubt
she'll give us more answers in time to come.
And now, archaeologists may have finally figured out
how the pyramids were built.
At the ancient quarry of Hatnub,
they unearthed a contraption that would've been used
to transport heavy alabaster stones
up a very steep ramp 4500 years ago.
(mysterious music)
At the foot of the Pyramid of Khufu,
we can still see the quarries from which the majority,
that's about 95% of the blocks, were extracted.
By building the pyramids, the Ancient Egyptians
transformed the landscape, changing the geography
of the place.
They literally tore off much of the rocky base
of the Giza Plateau.
The Sphinx itself is a remnant
of this hard limestone plateau,
and with all the gravel and excess stone
this method produced, would have been reused
to build the ramps.
But what type of ramp did they use 4500 years ago
to transport blocks to a height of 146 meters?
The debate is raging between Egyptologyists and specialists
and many models have been proposed.
A single ramp is either too steep or too long
to maintain a realistic slope of no more than 12%.
(suspenseful music)
Several ramps seem to be a very costly solution
in terms of time and effort.
Is it an external rap around ramp?
Or the kind of internal ramp proposed
by architect Jean-Pierre Houdin in the 2000s?
For now, there's no definitive evidence
that would settle this debate.
Again, it may be necessary to distance ourselves
from the pyramids to find some answers.
300 kilometers south of the Giza pyramids,
a Franco-British archaeological mission
with the help of 100 Egyptian workers
is possibly about to make a major discovery.
In no other quarry have these type
of elements been found.
A ramp at a 20 to 25% grade, and in some places even more
depending on the location, and on the sides
there are stairs with holes cut into the rock.
What were these holes used for?
How did this ramp work?
Can it provide new clues about the construction
of the pyramids and the ramp system used at the time?
Olivier Lavigne has analyzed all these clues
and developed a hypothesis.
(suspenseful music)
They would have used mud, silt from the Nile,
to lubricate the ramp and slide the block,
eliminating friction as much as possible.
Here, along the towpath, large alabaster stones,
possibly weighing as much as 58 tons
could be moved this way.
So, as the block advanced, the teams above
would have positioned the ropes ahead of time
on the next set of poles so that the block
would have moved forward as smoothly as possible.
(suspenseful music)
According to Olivier Lavigne, this ramp system
could have been adapted to the Pyramid of Khufu.
But ramps on the pyramid were not built out of rock.
Instead, they were constructed with gravel and bricks.
So, to secure and stabilize the space between the poles,
they used wooden crossbars inside the ramp
and also above it.
But is this system feasible?
This hypothesis needs to be tested
under real conditions to know for sure.
(tense music)