National Geographic announced Tuesday that it is officially recognizing the body of water surrounding the Antarctic as the Earth’s fifth ocean: the Southern Ocean.
The change marks the first time in over a century that the organization has redrawn the world’s oceanic maps, which have historically only included four: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic Oceans.
“The Southern Ocean has long been recognized by scientists, but because there was never agreement internationally, we never officially recognized it,” National Geographic Society geographer Alex Tait told the magazine.
The researchers started with a sample taken from the temporal lobe of a human cerebral cortex, measuring just 1 mm3. This was stained for visual clarity, coated in resin to preserve it, and then cut into about 5300 slices each about 30 nanometers (nm) thick. These were then imaged using a scanning electron microscope, with a resolution down to 4 nm. That created 225 million two-dimensional images, which were then stitched back together into one 3D volume.
Machine learning algorithms scanned the sample to identify the different cells and structures within. After a few passes by different automated systems, human eyes “proofread” some of the cells to ensure the algorithms were correctly identifying them.
In January 2020 we released the fly “hemibrain” connectome — an online database providing the morphological structure and synaptic connectivity of roughly half of the brain of a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). This database and its supporting visualization has reframed the way that neural circuits are studied and understood in the fly brain. While the fruit fly brain is small enough to attain a relatively complete map using modern mapping techniques, the insights gained are, at best, only partially informative to understanding the most interesting object in neuroscience — the human brain.
Today, in collaboration with the Lichtman Laboratory at Harvard University, we are releasing the “H01” dataset, a 1.4 petabyte rendering of a small sample of human brain tissue, along with a companion paper, “A connectomic study of a petascale fragment of human cerebral cortex.” The H01 sample was imaged at 4nm-resolution by serial section electron microscopy, reconstructed and annotated by automated computational techniques, and analyzed for preliminary insights into the structure of the human cortex. The dataset comprises imaging data that covers roughly one cubic millimeter of brain tissue, and includes tens of thousands of reconstructed neurons, millions of neuron fragments, 130 million annotated synapses, 104 proofread cells, and many additional subcellular annotations and structures — all easily accessible with the Neuroglancer browser interface.
Mapping how humans move will help in future pandemics.
How people move around cities follows a predictable and universal pattern, scientist say, which will be crucial not only for urban planning but also controlling pandemics.
By analysing mobile-phone tracking data from across four continents, the team confirmed that people visit places more often when they don’t have to travel far to get there.
Satellite images showing the expansion of large detention camps in Xinjiang, China, between 2016 and 2018 provided some of the strongest evidence of a government crackdown on more than a million Muslims, triggering international condemnation and sanctions.
Other aerial images—of nuclear installations in Iran and missile sites in North Korea, for example—have had a similar impact on world events. Now, image-manipulation tools made possible by artificial intelligence may make it harder to accept such images at face value.
In a paper published online last month, University of Washington professor Bo Zhao employed AI techniques similar to those used to create so-called deepfakes to alter satellite images of several cities. Zhao and colleagues swapped features between images of Seattle and Beijing to show buildings where there are none in Seattle and to remove structures and replace them with greenery in Beijing.
The theory used to be that hydrocarbons were created in “shocks,” or violent stellar events that cause a lot of turbulence and, with the shock waves, make atoms into ions, which are more likely to combine.
The data from the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory has since proved that theory wrong. Scientists at Herschel studied the components in the Orion Nebula, mapping the amount, temperature and motions for the carbon-hydrogen molecule (CH), the carbon-hydrogen positive ion (CH+) and their parent molecule: the carbon ion (C+).
Fully autonomous exploration and mapping of the unknown is a cutting-edge capability for commercial drones.
Drone autonomy is getting more and more impressive, but we’re starting to get to the point where it’s getting significantly more difficult to improve on existing capabilities. Companies like Skydio are selling (for cheap!) commercial drones that have no problem dynamically path planning around obstacles at high speeds while tracking you, which is pretty amazing, and it can also autonomously create 3D maps of structures. In both of these cases, there’s a human indirectly in the loop, either saying “follow me” or “map this specific thing.” In other words, the level of autonomous flight is very high, but there’s still some reliance on a human for high-level planning. Which, for what Skydio is doing, is totally fine and the right way to do it.
Great new episode with University of Hawaii cosmologist Brent Tully who’s been mapping the local cosmos for 50 years now. This is a good one! Please have a listen.
World-renowned, University of Hawaii cosmologist Brent Tully on 50 years of mapping the nearby universe which includes our own home supercluster ‘Laniakea.’ Tully candidly assesses the state of cosmography, the science of making 3D maps of the nearby universe and speculates on when astronomers will finally map the cosmos in its entirety.
Stephen Hawking thought an asteroid impact posed the greatest threat to life on Earth. Thanks to Kiwico for sponsoring this video. For 50% off your first month of any crate, go to https://kiwico.com/veritasium50 For other potential world ending catastrophes, check out Domain of Science: https://ve42.co/DoS
Special thanks to: Prof. Dave Jewitt from UCLA Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences. Prof. Mark Boslough from Sandia National Labs. Scott Manley: https://www.youtube.com/user/szyzyg. Ryan Wyatt at Morrison Planetarium. Prof. Amy Mainzer. Alexandr Ivanov for the opening shot of Chelyabinsk Meteor.
