2021, a year packed with news breaking advances
in science and technology.
Historic breakthroughs unfolding around the globe.
Fire. -: Fire.
Shattering barriers and questioning assumptions
and turning ideas on their head.
I can see our beautiful, beautiful Earth.
Stories that take a leap into the future
or follow footprints to the past.
Startling discoveries from a prehistoric nursery
to a magic bullet that could contain the pandemic.
Accomplishments like harnessing a star in a bottle
or mapping invisible parts of the universe.
Join us on an exclusive hyper tour
of the, "Top Science Stories of 2021."
(upbeat music)
We begin with telltale clues
of who walked the land before us and when.
The recent dating of footprints
found in White Sands New Mexico
may reset the timeline of ancient man in the Americas.
(gentle upbeat music)
In the last few years, tracks of human ancestors
were discovered in the vast swath of arid land.
Even more incredible,
the footprints show clear interaction between humans
and the giant beasts of the era.
But what's most shocking is the carbon date of these prints,
22,000 years old,
10,000 years earlier than when humans were believed
to have crossed from Asia into the Americas.
The footprints also reveal clues
about early humans behavior,
how they hunted, gathered and even played,
and how they interacted with the flora
and fauna of their day.
These new findings will impact our previous and future study
of ancient peoples.
(gentle upbeat music)
More evidence has been unEarthed
about our prehistoric roots.
Our closest evolutionary relatives
may not be who we thought they were.
They may be an entirely new species.
The story starts with a large elongated skull,
hidden in a well for 85 years outside of Harbin, China.
Only recently, was it salvaged
and given to a team of Chinese, British
and Australian researchers.
Some of my Chinese colleagues
felt that this fossil was so distinctive
that it should be called it's own species, Homo longi.
Some researchers, date Homo Longi's skull
to 146,000 years ago.
But Chris's team believes it's actually 300,000 years old.
We obviously don't have the rest of the skeleton,
but to judge from the size of this fossil,
this would have been a very large individual,
very big body size, which is adaptive in cold conditions.
The Chinese scientists nickname him Dragon Man,
after the nearby Dragon River,
where the skull was originally found.
This is a lineage that lived in China
for hundreds of thousands of years.
It had it's own evolutionary path, it's own adaptations.
And we can start to look at the questions
of how this relates to us, to the Neanderthals.
The prevailing view
is that Homo sapiens split off from Neanderthals
around 600,000 years ago,
but we actually may have split off from Homo longi instead.
The proof is in the skulls.
So here we've got replicas
of four different human populations.
So here's the Harbin fossil, a replica of that
and next to it, we've got a recent Homo sapiens.
Even without a lower jaw.
Dragon Man's skull shows uncanny similarities.
The face is flat
and the cheekbones even have a slight hollow in it.
Things we find in the face of Homo sapiens,
the faces is tucked under the brain case,
very similar to the way the face
is tucked under in modern humans.
The team hopes
to retrieve possible DNA from the skull,
but drilling into inner ear bone could cause damage.
Even if there's no DNA,
it could be fossil protein material in the bone or teeth.
Proteins can give you at least a rough assignment
of whether this is closer to Neanderthals
or to modern humans or to these other ancient people
called the Denisovans.
The goal is to map Homo longi's entire genome,
which would confirm his place in our evolutionary tree.
To have a genome to go with it
would make this one of the greatest finds
in human evolution, ever.
We leave the past and jump to the present
where modern Homo sapiens make history in space.
We are starting the straighten up
and fly right maneuver.
(gentle upbeat music)
Now has radar locked on the ground.
Current velocity is about a hundred meters per second.
(gentle upbeat music)
After traveling nearly 300 million miles,
NASA's Perseverance spacecraft
reached it's destination, Mars.
Tango, Delta.
Touchdown confirmed,
Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars.
(all cheering)
On February 18th,
the Rover touched down right on target in Jezero Crater,
after fiery entry and dramatic descent and landing.
Captured for the first time ever from multiple cameras.
Are we alone?
I don't think so.
If we find ancient life on Mars,
it really changes everything.
And Perseverance may just help
answer these questions.
As long as the carefully chosen landing site
hosted water long ago.
We're going right here
to a place called Jezero Crater,
which once, when Mars was warmer and wetter, hosted a lake.
Perseverance is armed with a battery
of seven instruments and 23 cameras
that address questions about life in the past
and the present and the future.
And with two microphones on board,
the world has now heard the first gust of wind
from the red planet.
(wind gushing)
If something ever lived here,
Perseverance can find evidence of it's bio-signature.
A drill, shares the turret with the scientific instruments.
The drill bores holes and extracts core samples.
This is the first view of a cored sample of Martian rock
in it's titanium tube.
A future mission will collect the cache
and bring the samples back to Earth.
(gentle upbeat music)
We have a lot to learn, life or no life,
about the evolution of our solar system, about our planet,
by looking in depth at rocks, brought back from Mars.
Probably the most exciting experiment of all
is Perseverance's companion dubbed Ingenuity,
the first ever Martian helicopter.
This really is a Wright Brothers moment,
it's a start of a whole new kind of planetary exploration.
Just incredible.
With each subsequent flight,
the engineers collect more data
to help push the chopper further
in both distance and duration.
Being able to fly will enable us to get to places
that we cannot get to with rovers and astronauts,
like sides of steep cliffs,
deep inside crevices, areas of high scientific interest.
It will be game changing.
The mission is scheduled to last,
at least one Martian year, about 687 Earth days.
If Ingenuity marks the beginning of other world and flight,
it's just a precursor to NASA's most ambitious mission yet,
Titan.
(gentle music)
In 2027, NASA is planning to launch
a one of a kind spacecraft.
Dragonfly is a rotorcraft lander
that's going to Saturn's moon Titan,
which is one of the most interesting places
in the solar system,
but I'm pretty biased.
If all goes according to plan,
Dragonfly will touch down on Titan in the 2030s
and spend years exploring this unknown landscape.
A rotorcraft is the very best way to explore Titan
because it allows us
to both do pinpoint landings and inspection,
and also cover large distances
to be able to see vastly different locations on the surface.
With Ingenuity, NASA is able
to give direct commands to the drone
via an orbiting spacecraft.
Dragonfly we'll have no such luxury.
The lander will need to essentially fly itself down
on it's very first flight to a world
that we don't have very many images.
During it's nearly three year mission,
Dragonfly will explore diverse environments
from organic dunes to the floor of an impact crater
where liquid water once existed.
The evolution of Titan may hold clues to our own past.
We think that before biology
really took over here on the Earth,
it might've had an atmosphere that was kind of hazy,
similar to Titan's today.
That Hayes might've been what helped seed
wherever life really took off.
(gentle music)
If the Mars Ingenuity
and Dragonfly perform well,
space choppers consumed begin leaving Earth
in relatively large numbers.
It's the start of a whole new kind
of planetary exploration,
launching Perseverance landing Perseverance,
and now deploying and flying the helicopter.
Just incredible.
While Titan may be the where
and Dragonfly may be the how,
the what becomes a different matter altogether,
dark matter to be more precise.
Although dark matter makes up close to 95%
of all matter in the universe.
Because it isn't made of atoms,
it can't be measured with traditional instruments.
But now for the first time ever scientists
have mapped where dark matter exists in the universe.
There's two reasons why we believe dark matter exists.
Firstly, we feel it's presence from it's gravity.
So the motions of galaxies and clusters of galaxies
are governed by something that's very, very massive
that we can't see.
Secondly, gravitational lensing,
the bending of light, by massive objects
enables us to chart how much dark matter there is
and also where it is.
(gentle music)
Scientists
from the Dark Energy Survey Collaboration created the map
using the Victor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile.
They collected data from a hundred million galaxies
and observed where and how much light has been distorted.
This indicated the highest concentrations of dark matter.
This map is a paradigm shift
in how the universe is perceived
in both it's present and past states.
And even turns Einstein's theory of relativity on it's head.
Why?
Because the map shows less correlation
between mass and gravity than Einstein predicted.
The universe is not expanding slower, it's expanding faster.
(gentle music)
Back on Earth, three new fossil finds
provide a fuller picture of dinosaurs
that once roamed the planet.
Far away in the Australian Outback,
a man and his son made a startling prehistoric discovery.
My son actually was 14 at the time,
he picked up a funny looking rock in 2004.
Queensland Museum had a verified as dinosaur bone,
went to the site, found some more of that particular bone.
Something switched in there, I mean,
how often do you get that opportunity
to have dinosaurs in your backyard?
The bones belong to what may be
an entirely new species of mega dinosaur.
It's Australia's largest dinosaur,
Australotitan Cooperensis.
Now Australotitan means Southern Titan.
And Cooperensis means from the Cooper Creek
of Queensland, in Southwest Queensland,
where this gigantic dinosaur was discovered.
Australotitan
was the size of a basketball court,
as tall as a two story house and weighed up to 80 tons.
(gentle music)
Paleontologists need to be sure that Australotitan
was indeed a different species.
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The team uses new digital technology
to make 3D scans of each bone and compared them
to Australotitan's closest relatives, Sauropods.
Australotitan, it's in the top 10 to 15,
largest in the world.
Our study looked at dinosaurs from not just Australia,
but across the world.
Australotitan is officially a new species
of Sauropods with four legs, long necks and tails.
These herbivores lived 92 million to 96 million years ago.
You can actually pick up it's a bone,
and start figuring out what animal it is
and what part of the body the bones are coming from.
That's pretty exciting.
That's very exciting.
On the other side of the Pacific,
someone else picks up an unusual rock
that turns out to be a major find.
(gentle music)
California's Sierra Nevada Mountains
formed at least 40 million years ago.
Through the ages, the ecosystem here has definitely changed.
Hiking along the mountain's foothills,
naturist ranger, Greg Fransek
discovers pieces of the ancient past, quietly underfoot,
when he stumbles upon a partially buried stone tree.
(gentle music)
From a forest between five and 10 million years old,
containing fossils of the creatures that lived in it
during Earth's Miocene Epoch, a giant tortoise shell,
the jaw of a Taper
and bones from relatives of modern day elephants,
like the four tusk Gomphothere
and an 8 million year old Mastodon skull.
Experts believe these are the first Mastodon fossils
found in California since 1947.
(gentle upbeat music)
Russell Shapiro from California's Chico State University
oversees the dig.
What I didn't comprehend at the time
was the amazing fact
that I was looking at the bones of great beasts
that had roamed this landscape millions of years ago.
The dig is a huge treasure trove
that offers a unique glimpse
into North America's distant past.
(gentle music)
Near Alaska's desolate Arctic Circle,
the cries of babies were once heard.
Dinosaur babies, that hatched,
in what scientists are calling a prehistoric maternity ward.
How could these animals that we normally associate
with being in a tropical environments,
so how can they possibly have survived
under polar conditions?
A joint research team
found tiny fossilized bones and baby teeth from dinosaurs
dating back to more than 70 million years ago.
My research team has been working up there,
digging up dinosaurs out of the Coleville River,
and this is about oh 20 miles from the Arctic Ocean.
Given the long incubation time
of dinosaur eggs, three to six months,
scientists believe these dinosaurs
were year-round Arctic residents,
not just seasonal visitors.
Which means they've endured punishing winters, snow
and months of unending darkness.
Apparently the Arctic
was a really great place to have babies.
So we were not only surprised to find some baby dinosaurs,
but actually several species of dinosaurs
that we now realize were nesting in the Arctic.
Researchers used dental tools
to scrape through the sediment of the riverbank,
looking for fossils.
We found hatchlings of just about every dinosaur we know
that's up there.
That includes the hatchlings of giant tyrannosaurus,
honed dinosaurs and little raptors, you name it.
Our image of dinosaurs,
as cold-blooded creatures craving tropical temperatures
is a relic of the past.
Dinosaurs are actually warm-blooded animals
or endotherms, more like birds or mammals.
Polar dinosaurs
adapted to the punishing winters
by regulating their body heat, just like mammals,
or by hibernating underground.
Baby dinosaurs may have been adorable,
but like their parents, they all vanished from the Arctic
when disaster struck.
(asteroid crashing)
(gentle music)
We weren't around
when the dinosaurs breathed their last breath.
But a breakthrough discovery
reveals that our ancestors were.
66 million years ago, an immense asteroid slammed into Earth
creating the equivalent of a nuclear winter.
North America was rather close,
thousands of miles away,
compared to other places on the opposite end of the globe.
Now a team of scientists
has found a possible witness to the catastrophe
and it wasn't a dinosaur.
They've uncovered evidence of a primate unknown to science,
until now.
(gentle upbeat music)
It's that ancestor that we think
lived during the time of dinosaurs.
When the experts
want to find fossils from the Cretaceous,
they head to The Hell Creek Formation
in Northeastern Montana.
In The Hell Creek area,
which is sort of our model for studying
this mass extinction event,
we had upwards of 30 different species of mammals.
All of the large dinosaurs
perished at the same time,
but birds and some small mammals survived.
One was purgatorius
known only to scientists from it's fossilized teeth.
Greg documented five isolated teeth of purgatorius
from this locality called Harley's Point.
And he contacted me and wanted me to collaborate with him
and try to figure out which species they represent.
Unlike it's my mammalian peers,
which hate insects,
purgatorius has had a varied diet, it was an omnivore.
This seemed to suggest that purgatorius
might be the earliest ancestor of modern day lemurs,
monkeys, chimps, all primates, that include humans.
The ankle bones that we found have specific features
that allow for a great deal of mobility.
That's the same kind of mobility
that we see in primates that live up in the trees today.
The researchers analyze the bones with CT scans
and then created 3D images to study them.
The new fossils are 200,000 years earlier
than any purgatorius fossil found before.
This places the creature
right around the actual extinction event.
If purgatorius lived alongside the great dinosaurs
and survive the mass extinction,
then humans can trace their evolutionary history as primates
much deeper back in time than we thought.
It's really spectacular to think that purgatorius is,
on our line, it's separated from the colugos
and the tree shrews
and it's on the line leading to primates.
So it's a step towards you and I.
(gentle music)
Our missing link may have lived long ago,
but one of the oldest species on the planet
has been around longer.
From their unique predatory behaviors
to the silk masterpieces they weave,
science is revealing some crazy things
about spiders and their silks.
It is seven times lighter than steel, as strong as steel.
There are all kinds of spiders,
not all of them spin webs,
but they all produce silk.
Spider silk is special
because it is a multifunctional material
produced by spider in a fraction of seconds.
They use silk as a tool.
So a spider web is made up of
multiple different types of silk.
It's not all the same.
The advancement of genomics in recent years
has been a big boost
to studying the evolution of spider silks.
What we're finding is that these genes
are evolving very, very quickly.
Researchers at University of Trento in Italy
recently discovered a predatory skill not seen before.
Some spiders can produce a silk
with uncanny lifting properties.
The ratio of the mass of the object being lifted
and the mass of the spider creates a pulley effect
and results in lifting the prey.
And they can lift prey many, many, many times
heavier than themselves.
Scientists at Binghamton University
have uncovered another fascinating property of spider silks.
They can help spiders hear.
Humans use their eardrum to hear,
but many animals, including spiders,
use hairs on their body to hear or sense vibrations.
Now researchers believe their webs
play an integral role as well.
(gentle upbeat music)
In the same way that a spider can detect vibrations
of something touching the web,
they should also be able to detect
vibrations caused from sound.
Spiders, get a lot of cues
transmitted from the silk itself.
They know the direction
that something has intercepted their web.
Potential implications for this
may just change the way we detect sound
and make microphones in the future.
We might be able to use
the mechanical properties of the silk
then for better microphones or hearing aids,
directional acoustic sensors and things like that.
Other human benefits
and applications from spider silks
are emerging from all this research.
Spiders silks could be used for sutures,
they could repair tendons,
they could be parts of ballistics,
the anti-ballistic type gear,
where you would want to have flexible body armor.
They've also being talked about
for even high performance athletic wear.
We leave a tiny world behind
and move on to a global one in trouble.
In 2021 extreme weather events,
shatter records all across the planet.
In February, a series of winter storms
lead to a catastrophic freeze event
that paralyzes much of Texas.
In June, a heat dome settles in the Pacific Northwest areas
of the United States and Canada
causing blast furnace temperatures of up to 118 degrees.
In July, heavy rainfall from a cutoff low pressure system
causes severe flooding in Germany,
Belgium and the Netherlands.
Lives are swept away
along with houses, highways and rail lines.
What is different this time
is that scientists are drawing direct links
between these extreme weather events and climate change.
As climate changes, it is stretching
or distorting our extremes.
It's making some of them more frequent,
it's making other stronger.
Scientists use climate modeling
to explain this effect.
A climate model runs on a powerful supercomputer,
lines of code describe the changes
that scientists observe in the atmosphere,
ocean, biosphere and land.
Unfortunately, the public often sees climate modeling
as unreliable and inaccurate.
In fact, it's so precise that it earns a Nobel Prize.
Two pioneering climate modelers and a physicist
are awarded the prize in physics
for groundbreaking contributions
to the understanding of complex physical systems.
This understanding can help us
before the next extreme event hits.
By anticipating future heat waves,
deaths can be dramatically reduced
with adequate preparation.
In the case of flooding,
by implementing early warning systems
and improving infrastructure,
residents will be able to become more resilient and survive.
Rather than only looking backwards to make our decisions,
we have to start looking forwards into the future,
that's why we need climate projections.
Time's running out.
With a two degree increase in global warming,
extreme weather events will occur more frequently
and with more intensity.
Scientists and engineers
have already taken on this challenge
and made a revolutionary breakthrough this year.
It's been a goal of science for decades,
clean, commercially viable, nuclear fusion power.
Smashing together, or fusing two or more atoms of hydrogen
to create atoms of helium
releases massive amounts of energy.
In space, this naturally occurring process
is what powers our sun and all the stars.
Fusion energy is effectively the universe's choice
for how it generates energy.
But fusion on Earth must be manufactured
using electrically charged, incredibly hot,
gaseous hydrogen plasmas.
You see the thicker end of the plasma,
we are creating fusion here.
Most fusion research
revolves around Tokamaks, donut shaped reactors
that use strong magnetic fields to contain the fuel.
Fundamentally what fusion is,
is trying to put a star in a bottle.
Now, Tokamak is basically the simplest type of bottle.
And in this case,
it's a magnet that holds the plasma inside of it,
and it insulates the fuel, the plasma.
So it can get very, very, very hot.
Hundred millions of degrees hot,
hotter than the sun.
Recent experiments produce fleeting successes,
but require more energy than is produced.
But in September, a team
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and a commercial startup named Commonwealth Fusion Systems
announced a breakthrough.
The key is a new type of magnet weighing 10 tons
and consisting of 270 kilometers of HTS
or High Temperature Superconductor coil.
A major milestone is how the magnet's stunning efficiency
requires only 30 Watts of energy.
Dramatically minimizing the energy needed
for the containment field.
In the creation of a fusion power plant,
arguably the biggest miracle
is the demonstration of the magnets.
And that's where we are today.
The MIT CFS team
believe their magnet technologies will provide the quickest
and most viable approach
to achieving net energy from fusion.
That's more energy out than is consumed.
The reason we don't have fusion power plants,
like right now today was largely one of scale.
This new magnet technology allows us to make fusions
so much smaller with known science
that we're going to be able to get there so much sooner
than people have thought previously possible.
Why is this so important?
With it's zero emission potential and abundant sea water
providing the necessary hydrogen fuel,
fusion presents a welcome alternative
to burning fossil fuels.
Well, there's a big push right now
in decarbonizing the grid with renewables, solar wind,
but at some point probably around 2040,
we're gonna max out with renewables
and we won't be able to decarbonize further.
We're gonna need another zero carbon option.
If all goes according to plan,
a truly transformative technology
could soon provide a cleaner environment
while powering the future.
Imagine the world in 2050,
where you've got like 10,000 fusion power plants
producing 20% of the global energy use
without admitting any carbon,
that would be really good for everyone.
Another feet of groundbreaking technology
won't be found on the ground.
In the far reaches of space,
400 million years after The Big Bang,
the first light appears
caused by the formation of the first stars and galaxies.
This ancient light is the key target for the largest
and most technologically advanced telescope ever,
The James Webb Space Telescope.
Webb constitutes a big leap in astrophysics.
It really is the next generation telescope.
It has three main missions,
to see this light from The Big Bang,
study the formation of galaxies and stars,
and look for signs of life around distant planets.
The massive telescope is folded up like origami
and squeezed inside the nose fairing
of a European Space Agency's Ariane 5 rocket.
Once launched it'll unfold over three weeks
in an intricate ballet of automated sequences.
At the heart is the largest mirror ever made,
18 separate pieces that must precisely fit together,
creating a single gigantic mirror.
This optical system feeds light to four science instruments
capable of detecting the chemical compositions of galaxies
and the atmospheres of distant planets.
Webb will be sent a million miles from Earth
to a gravitation or stable point
that it can circle as it orbits the Sun with the Earth.
To protect itself from the Sun's searing heat
requires it's most ambitious innovation,
a giant sun shield the size of a tennis court
and made of five layers of reflective fabric,
each as thin as a human hair.
Once in operating position,
Webb we'll need to unfold this complex apparatus perfectly.
It's the riskiest part of the whole mission.
We do risky things 'cause it's the only way
to get at the answers that we're after.
The only way to get at the answer
is to build this kind of equipment.
The James Webb Space Telescope
will be an IPS to uncharted realms,
changing our understanding of our place in the universe.
Closer to our home planet space science
is looking to the second body from the Sun, Venus.
Other than the Moon,
it's the brightest object in the night sky,
captivating men and women for millennium.
We think that Venus may once have looked
more like Earth in the past.
Two new programs, DaVinci and Veritas
will launch planetary probes
designed to visit Venus within a decade.
Two rocky bodies, roughly the same size,
astronomical next door neighbors,
both formed about four and a half billion years ago.
How did two worlds with so much in common
become so different?
It's this amazing cosmic accident, right,
that we have two planets that are so much alike.
It's like every scientist's dream
that you have, like a control case.
The plans include a carrier spacecraft,
which will fly by Venus twice
before releasing the descent probe,
protected by a heat shield, seven feet in diameter.
That will carry us into the atmosphere,
handle the peak heating of that entry
and then jet us in the heat shield.
So our probe will be exposed to the atmosphere
in the upper clouds around 70 kilometers.
And that's when our mission begins.
That multi-pronged mission
to examine the elemental properties
of the Venusian atmosphere,
image and identify the character of the landscape
and ultimately land on the surface.
We are sending, what I like to call,
a flying Rover chemistry lab,
and it will be in the form of a special probe,
not unlike a diving bell
that you would need to go into the deep ocean.
We're gonna look for chemical fingerprints
that may indicate that Venus was once habitable in the past.
So by reading these records on Venus today,
we might be able to infer that Venus
was a nice place to live in the past.
Maybe a place that we'd want to visit.
Understanding Venus' story
can aid the search for life on new planets,
around other stars.
If DaVinci will explore Venus close-up,
Veritas launching in 2028,
will examine the planet from a distance in orbit.
Now using radar technologies developed to study Earth,
Veritas will return data from Venus 100 times more detailed
than it's predecessors.
The science that Veritas wants to accomplish
is looking at the planet holistically.
We want to understand that geologic engine
inside the planet,
how that interacts with the surface,
how it drives vulcanism,
how it drives faulting
and what that means for the atmosphere.
It may be that Venus is a magic mirror
that's reflecting the future of Earth back to our planet.
So these same processes involving, you know,
the shutdown of geological activity as the planet cools.
These are also gonna play out on Earth,
billions of years into the future.
This is beyond words.
We are so ready to bring Venus into focus for humanity
because we think she is a story we have to tell.
Another story waiting to be told,
comes from deep in our oceans.
An untold number of ocean creatures,
call this deep domain home,
thanks to a weird and watery web of life.
Armed with an impressive array of new technologies,
a team of scientists embark on a quest
to explore this mysterious ocean region.
Scientifically known as the mesopelagic zone,
the ocean twilight zone
sits beneath the surface layer of the ocean
and stretches around the world,
at depths roughly between 100 and a thousand meters.
It earned it's murky nickname
due to the limited penetration of sunlight,
a challenging environment,
even before considering the cold temperatures
and intense pressures.
There are specially adapted creatures
that can detect whether it's day or night,
even though there's vanishingly low levels
of light in that zone.
They're uniquely adapted, they can see each other.
They bioluminescent many times,
either to kind of be stealthily hidden
so they can match the sunlight above them,
so they can't be seen from below
or to create little targets so they can entice animals
to come close enough so they can actually eat them.
A research ship
chartered by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
is designed to examine the ocean twilight zone
and it's ecological role for our planet.
On Terraferma, tree buds burst,
flowers blossom and leaves fall,
the cycling of carbon dioxide out in the open
for all to see.
At sea that process is largely the same,
but hidden from view.
Plant-like organisms phytoplankton in the ocean,
take the carbon dioxide and thinks it's the sunshine,
convert it into their organic carbon.
And that effectively becomes the food
for the rest of the ocean ecosystem.
The ocean absorbs about a third
of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere
as a result of human activities,
like the burning of fossil fuels.
This research voyage seeks to gain knowledge
about what's called the Biological Carbon Pump,
the process by which carbon is transferred
from the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean.
This natural phenomenon has occurred for millions of years,
including the time a prehistoric beast stalked the water.
We're fascinated by the T-Rex of the oceans,
a beast three times longer and 30 times heavier
than a Great White shark.
How could a shark get this large?
What were these massive teeth being used for?
New breakthroughs are revealing hidden details
about the monster shark's secret struggles.
We think the Megalodon was cannibalistic
and there's no reason to think that Meg pups
would have been safe from other larger Megalodons.
The pups that emerged were the strongest
because they ate their siblings in the womb.
Megalodon hunted in seas around the world
from 20 until 7 million years ago.
It's prey lived globally.
So wherever it's prey where, so was Megalodon
One unique location
yields an impressive fossil record of the beast.
The Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, where once underwater.
Megalodon teeth are found here,
on land or an excavation sites,
because those sediments that preserve those teeth
were once ocean bottom, ocean floor.
There are new theories
about what caused the beast to vanish from the world seas.
Megalodon being as large as it was,
it would require more food than a Great White.
So just the fact that Great Whites could survive
with less prey gave them advantage over Megalodon.
Another theory is that whales and dolphins adapt
to the ability to go into colder waters
and that Megalodon couldn't tolerate
those cold temperatures,
so there was a reduction in prey availability.
And the third explanation is that, when Panama formed
that landmass separated the Pacific from the Atlantic
and people suggested that that interrupted
some of the migration routes for Megalodon.
(gentle upbeat music)
Teeth are almost all
that we have left of Megalodon.
The size of the Megalodon tooth
tells us how large the animal was.
Like White sharks, Megalodon was strategic.
Megalodon strategy would be
to attack the tail of the animal,
effectively and mobilize it,
and then the animal would bleed out.
Adult Megs we're probably also cannibals.
From time to time, Meg teeth are found
that show that they were bitten by another Meg tooth.
Megalodon was the top marine predator
for about 20 million years.
Without a doubt, no matter how big and powerful you are,
if you can't adapt to a changing environment,
you will become extinct.
Sometimes unexpected science solutions
arise from unexpected places.
A silent looming presence with never waning power.
The Suez Canal, a vital passageway linking Europe with Asia.
One of the world's largest container ships,
as long as the empire state building,
tipped on it's side, crashes into a and becomes stuck.
This is the largest vessel ever
to go ground in the Suez Canal.
And she's gone sideways in the Canal,
blocking both North and South.
Can have a huge ramifications for global trades.
300 Ships are backed up and waiting.
Around a million containers currently waiting
to exit the Canal.
This is gonna take weeks if not months to unravel.
International experts are summoned
to figure out how to budge the stubborn vessel.
Emergency crews work around the clock
to dredge sand from around the ship's bow.
But the Canal bank is made a very soft sand
and the ship sinks further in.
The friction stops it moving completely.
So you need a massive force to try and move that.
We dredge the sand away little bit by little bit
with these tugs, is going to be a very big job.
With all eyes focused on the water
an alternate solution appears in the sky,
not just a Full Moon, but a Supermoon.
This occurs when the Moon's orbit is closest to Earth
at the same time it's full.
As Earth rotates it's watery surface bulges out
due to the moon's gravity.
This makes seas rise and fall forming tides.
As the Supermoon peaks,
a spring tide rises a foot and a half above normal.
This gives the critical push
for tugboats to finally refloat the ship
and free up the Canal.
Sometimes the best scientific solution
is when the forces of nature come to the rescue.
Before there was a Suez Canal, or even a modern-day Egypt
an entire civilization once flourished.
Deep in the heart of ancient Egypt,
archeologists have made a groundbreaking discovery.
Look at the debris.
It's untouched.
Nobody has touch for thousands of years.
This is incredibly important.
The most significant find
since King Tut's tomb was unEarthed a century ago.
This is really a large city that was lost.
We never thought that this city could be discovered.
Archeologists have been searching for it
over a hundred years.
It was found in the golden age of Egypt, 1391 B.C.
The area lies on the West Bank of the Nile
near Luxor, once the ancient capital of Thebes.
(gentle upbeat music)
The expedition team uncovered mud brick walls
leading in all directions,
which belong to a well-preserved city
with streets and buildings.
We found three major districts,
one for administration,
one for the workmen to sleep,
one for the industry.
Archeologists are calling this site,
the Pompey of ancient Egypt.
To see enormous jars that clearly date
to the time of Amenhotep III, still lying on the ground,
as if they'd been left there yesterday
was really unexpected and exciting.
The city dates back 3,400 years
to the reign of Amenhotep III,
also known as Amenhotep The Magnificent.
He was born at a time when Egypt
had created an enormous empire
that stretched all the way to Northern Syria in the North,
to the Fifth Cataract on the Nile river
in modern Sudan in the South.
Amenhotep III was the wealthiest king
in ancient Egypt.
He used that opportunity to build things
and put his name out there and connect himself to the Gods.
He built most of the temples and palaces
on the west bank of the Nile.
It has taken seven months of labor
to excavate just the industrial part of the city.
One area for the storage,
you find a big area for the storage of making sandals,
also sewing clothing,
precious stones for making necklaces and bracelets.
And an entire fish encrusted with gold
that may have been used in religious ceremonies.
Three skeletons were found.
One was a person with rope wrapped around the knees.
The work of digging out an entire city
will take years to complete.
I think we need another five years
to continue the excavation on the South
to find the funerary temple of Tutankhamun.
We believe that we're gonna find more and more and more.
This will turn out to be a larger city than a Amarna,
the city that Akhenaten founded,
a few years after his father died.
Experts believe this monumental discovery
is just the tip of the iceberg.
(upbeat music)
Now we turned to a natural crisis in the Atlantic.
This whale is fighting for it's life,
strangled by fishing gear.
It's one of the most endangered whale species on Earth.
The crisis is quite bad and quite shocking to me.
There are only about 360 left
on the entire planet.
And experts are racing against the clock
to develop new technologies to save them.
Every year, many Right whales migrate
from their calving grounds in Florida,
Georgia and North Carolina,
up to feeding grounds in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
They must navigate a dangerous manmade obstacle course
of busy shipping lanes and commercial fishing areas.
A leading cause of death and injury to the Right whale
is from vessel strikes.
Another is entanglement in fishing gear.
The rope, the nets that they're wrapped up in,
make it harder for them to swim, It increases the drag.
And so they lose energies.
And as a result, they've been losing weight,
losing condition, they're in ill health.
It used to be
that the only way to keep track of the Right whale
was from the air.
Now scientists are using sound and acoustic technology
to both track them and alert nearby ships.
The echos that they received back
tells them something about the environment that they're in.
North Atlanta, Right whales,
they produce a whole variety of different calls,
but they have this particular call called the up-call,
which is this contact call that they do
to stay in touch with each other.
We identify the species by the types of sounds they make.
And we identified that there are whales there.
This new technology
is called real-time acoustics.
The acoustic recorders can go out to sea,
it doesn't matter what the weather is.
They record 24/7, so it can be pitch-black or daylight.
Real-time data that can alert ships
and fishing vessels much quicker than archival data.
Ropes wrapped around a whale's head mouth and baleen,
flippers and flukes can cause deep lacerations,
deformities in bones and partial or total amputations.
In a number of cases,
ropes were wrapped around a single whale, 30 to 50 times.
These animals are so big and strong,
they can actually rip that fishing gear off the sea floor
and carry it with them for thousands of kilometers.
Rope can limit a whale's ability
to open it's mouth, breathe
and create a watertight blow hole seal when diving
leading to starvation and drowning.
(gentle music)
The commercial fishing industry is now testing
two new acoustic retrieval technologies.
One that keeps the rope on the sea floor until it is needed.
One way is to attach,
what are called acoustic releases to gear
that when given an acoustic command than a release
and allow a rope to come to the surface.
Another technology uses an airbag
to bring the trap up.
I think the idea of using acoustic traps is a great one
because for most of the time,
there will be no rope in the water column
for whale to get entangled in.
With the cooperation between commercial fishing
and the science community,
these experts believe a win-win solution as possible.
What we're trying to do is buy some time for the species
while we get our act together.
I'm not asking for a reduction in fishing,
I am asking for a reduction of rope.
But we're trying to be ahead of the curve,
I want to be at the table, figuring this stuff out.
If you're working together,
that's how you're gonna solve something.
While humans work to save whales,
dogs on the other hand are working hard to save humans.
Dogs can help humans sniff out all kinds of things,
explosives, missing persons, illegal drugs.
And now the latest research is revealing
that dogs can detect disease, even cancer.
The dog's nose is an exquisite chemical detector.
Now we know dogs can smell the prostate cancer in urine,
the next stage is to work out, how do they do it?
A dog sense is up to a million times
sharper than humans.
And recent science is revealing
that it's up to 100 million times more sensitive.
Dog's got this incredible sense of smell.
I mean, they have 300 million sensory receptors
in their refractory epithelium.
So us poor humans got 5 million
and we still smell things quite well.
While a dog's brain is only one 10th,
the size of a human brain,
the portion controlling smell is 40 times larger
than in humans.
There's some new evidence that dogs can predict
when a seizure is about to happen.
Well, the medical detector dog
is a dog that can smell disease,
which sounds too much to believe.
When a dog is living alongside us,
they notice biochemical changes that occur
when we come unwell.
And that they, if trained correctly,
can tell us about these changes.
This research led to
a major scientific breakthrough.
Dogs are able to detect or smell cancer
much earlier than doctors.
When a dog sniffs,
they are able to take in a lot more at once.
That sends signals to the brain.
And that's where the odor is processed.
There's a part of the brain called the thalamus
that works essentially as the brains operators.
Different odors actually bypass the thalamus
and go straight to the parts of the brain,
that process and interpret those odors,
which are closely tied to the parts of the brain
that process emotions, memories.
Odors seem to have a very strong,
kind of emotional association with them.
Scientists use functional MRI
to understand the dog's unique neuro olfactory connection.
Functional MRI is a way to look at brain activity,
how different parts of the brain
communicate with each other.
Using functional MRI, we might be able to better understand
how to train them to detect the range of things
that we want them to respond to.
When you're sniffing something,
you're not getting a list of molecules
by name and concentration.
What you get is more akin to an image or a poem
or a piece of music.
It is an experience, it's a perception.
This knowledge is also being used
by researchers at MIT and the Prostate Cancer Foundation
who are attempting to create
an artificially intelligent dog's nose.
What Andreas Mershin and his team are going to do
is build a robotic nose that is going to detect odors
in the way that the dog does.
A device such as this
would be game-changing for humanity.
Let's put a nose in a cell phone.
Dogs can smell cancer and building a device
that will fit in your cell phones
so you can smell your own cancer
without having to drag a dog around.
From dog detection to prevention,
there's more breakthrough news on the COVID front.
When the best science minds focus on a single problem,
the results can be miraculous.
Microscopic video shows how the Coronavirus
turns host cells into virus-making factories,
causing them to explode and die.
As the pandemic rages on,
scientists battle the virus on multiple fronts.
Breakthroughs from the past year provide glimpses of light
at the end of the tunnel.
A new class of vaccines is developed at lightning speed
using revolutionary mRNA technology.
This uses a piece of messenger RNA
to target a protein on the virus.
Our immune system reacts to this foreign protein
by producing antibodies that protect against infection.
The vaccines are soon distributed on a mass scale.
Unlike traditional approaches to a vaccine
where you might be growing the virus and in cultures.
We can make it synthetically
and make a million doses theoretically.
So we can move very fast.
In July, a COVID-19 variant appears.
Delta variant is deadlier in much more transmissible.
Will the new vaccines be able to protect against Delta?
A resounding, yes.
Gene splicing techniques like CRISPR
can tweak the mRNA vaccine
to protect against the next variant that appears.
In September, the FDA recommends
getting a booster dose of the vaccine.
Latest update is this booster shot can be different
from the original kind received.
Mixing vaccines may raise antibody levels higher.
Another weapon in the battle is to bombard the virus
with promising treatments, such as the drug Remdesivir
and monoclonal antibodies.
The virus has spike proteins all the way around.
Those are the way the Coronavirus
attaches to your body's cells.
The monoclonal antibody binds up all those spike proteins,
the coronavirus cannot bind to your cells
and your body can clear the virus more rapidly.
But monoclonal antibodies
need to be administered by infusion or a series of shots.
And the treatment is still expensive.
In what may be a game changer,
MERCK announces a new antiviral pill called Molnupiravir.
It cuts in half a person's risk of hospitalization
and death from COVID-19.
It's kind of like Tamiflu
that we use for flu or influenza.
In essence, it's trying to attack the virus
and prevent it's progression.
As MERCK awaits FDA approval,
other antiviral pills are being developed too.
The fact that we are seeing lots of changes
is actually really exciting things.
I mean, people are doing their jobs
and they're paying attention to data
and they're changing policies
based on science on information.
Then that's really the best case scenario for all of us.
While the research will continue,
humanity reaches further into space in 2021.
Three, two, one. -: Revolutionizing the future
of space exploration.
Three billionaires, each with their pet projects,
launch historic flights that herald a new era
in commercial space exploration.
I can see our beautiful, beautiful Earth, whoo.
Owner Richard Branson is on the first flight
of Virgin Galactic,
a spacecraft that launches like a plane from a mothership.
This is Blue Moon.
Blue Origin founded by Jeff Bezos
also completes it's first manned flight.
It's time to go back to the Moon,
this time to stay.
(audience applauds)
Elon Musk's, SpaceX already leads the pack
by ferrying crews and cargo
to the International Space Station on a regular basis.
And we should take action
and become a fence civilization as soon as possible.
And extend life beyond Earth.
SpaceX raises the bar even further,
when in a historic first for ordinary citizens,
takeoff on a three-day voyage around Earth,
traveling 100 miles further
than the International Space Station.
Welcome everybody to do the Crew Dragon Resilience
We're cruising right now at 580 kilometers above the Earth,
going about 7.6 kilometers per second,
so we're seeing the world every 90 minutes.
Financed by one of the passengers,
Inspiration4 is more than a thrilling tour of space.
The flight also debuts the new Dragon Cupola.
This observation dome provides a stunning 360 degree view
of outside the capsule.
This is the largest window ever flown in space.
And the views I have to say are out of this world.
After three days in orbit,
four parachutes deploy and Dragon touches down
off Florida's coast.
Inspiration4 proves that passengers
can learn the technological and physical skills
needed for space flight in a shorter training window.
The success of commercial companies like SpaceX
positions them to take over flights to low Earth orbit,
including the International Space Station.
This frees NASA to branch out further into deep space
and pursue it's most ambitious missions
like building a permanent colony on the Moon
and eventually Mars.
Moving forward, NASA tasks SpaceX and other companies
to deliver the next generation of lunar landers.
Part of it's upcoming Artemis mission
to put humans back on the Moon.
We're going back in a way that is totally different.
with our international partners,
with our commercial partners.
Artemis we'll establish
the first longterm presence on the Moon
leading to future Moon colonies.
From a 360 degree view of space
to a microscopic blueprint of what makes each of us human,
we end on what may be the most significant story of 2021,
the mapping of the entire human genome is finally completed.
Scientists knew for years that our genes
are spread across 23 pairs of chromosomes.
But millions of these worm-like structures
could not be deciphered.
Two decades ago, a network
of international geneticists
set out to sequence all the DNA in our chromosomes.
This gave birth to the Human Genome Project.
Over time, pieces of the genome puzzle were added,
but there were a lot of blank spaces.
During the pandemic, a team of 99 scientists worked remotely
to finally complete the project this year.
They were aided by new machines
that can quickly read long strands of DNA.
The end result is called the Reference Genome,
the new standard for comparing variations in DNA in people.
And now scientists can sequence an entire genome overnight.
This new major tool can be used to identify
and track new COVID variants,
sequence the genome of our prehistoric ancestors
or crack the real DaVinci code of Leonardo's genius.
Because of this monumental achievement,
more breakers are just around the corner.
Scientists, relentlessly exploring the unknown,
pushing the envelope of possibilities,
never giving up.
Because science never sleeps.
(gentle upbeat music)