Today you’ll learn about how scientists are using AI to talk to animals, the discovery of new, very big, very old candidate galaxies, and how there just may be an extra layer in the earth’s inner core.
Today you’ll learn about how scientists are using AI to talk to animals, the discovery of new, very big, very old candidate galaxies, and how there just may be an extra layer in the earth’s inner core.
AI Animal Translator
Big Old Galaxies
Inner Inner Core
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/ai-animal-translator-big-old-galaxies-inner-inner-core
[SFX: INTRO MUSIC/WHOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today you’ll learn about how scientists are using AI to talk to animals, the discovery of new very big, very old candidate galaxies, and how there just may be an extra layer in the earth’s inner core.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out different ways to communicate with animals. And thanks to A.I., that reality is actually closer than ever.
NATE: All right. Well, I don't know if everyone is aware of this, but I am actually just an AI generated voice of a lemur sitting behind the microphone saying whatever. So secret's out. It's good that this technology is catching up to me, you know?
CALLI: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
NATE: How is this being done?
CALLI: It's called digital bioacoustics. Scientists in this field use advanced sensors and artificial intelligence technology to observe and decode how many species, including plants, already share information with their own communication methods, and then translate that information back to us in a human language.
NATE: Okay, that sounds pretty cool. What are some of the ways that we've learned to communicate with animals already?
CALLI: Well, there's that famous story of the gorilla named Koko, who scientists taught how to use American Sign Language or ASL. When Koko was alive, she was fluent in ASL, but whether or not she understood ASL was a controversial topic and even still is today. Critics of the Koko study believe that teaching Koko sign language is an example of anthropomorphism, which is when we as humans feel like we see human emotion on and the animal's actions or what they're doing, even when the animal's just doing something it's been trained to do.
NATE: This actually reminds me of a German word that we don't have a word for it in English. It's “umwelt”, and umwelt is a word that refers to how the world is perceived by specific organisms. So, for instance, a dog doesn't see the world the same way that, you know, a tomato does.
CALLI: Exactly. And that line of thinking led scientists away from considering what an animal is thinking in human terms, but how they think because they are that animal. Take honeybees, for instance. When we hear honeybee, all we hear is this buzzing sound. But if you study honeybee buzzing, you discover that the buzzing sound can actually shift based on the polarization of the sun. So these nuances are what have led to recent innovations in digital bioacoustics, which now rely less on translating animal thoughts and behavior and more on observing how animals communicate.
NATE: And how exactly do they do that?
CALLI: Primarily with small portable digital recorders, small microphones put on the backs of turtles, whales, birds and so on. They're designed to withstand harsh temperatures as cold as the Arctic or as humid as the Amazon and are waterproof so they can be placed in oceans, too. They record data continuously and then the sounds are run through an artificial intelligence program to detect patterns. For example, Karen Bakker, a professor at the University of British Columbia, writes about a study of Egyptian fruit bats whose vocalizations were recorded on audio and video for two and a half months. Once that data was put into an AI program, it correlated specific sounds with specific social interactions, like, for instance, whenever bats would fight over food. They discovered that when bats fight, they can actually distinguish between genders in communication and even have individual names for each other or signature calls. Or they found that when a mother bat speaks to a child, it's in a specific pitch.
NATE: Okay. Kind of like when human mothers doing like baby talk in a higher pitch, you know, to the baby.
CALLI: Actually, for bats, it is a lower pitch. it signifies that the bat needs to repeat what it just heard and the baby creates a babble sound and trying to repeat it. To put it simply, it is vocal learning. Unfortunately, bats communicate in ultrasonic ranges, meaning we can't hear all of this with human ears. That's where the computers come in, because we can slow down the bat language, reduce the frequency and listen back. And amazingly, this works both ways because we've also created software that can speak back to a bat in their language through certain patterns.
NATE: Okay. So we're we're figuring out some of these things that we can use to, like, talk to all the animals. Like, I guess I expected sort of like a one on one, like more of a conversation, kind of communication, is something like that coming?
CALLI: It might be. But for now, the focus is on communication methods like these. See, there's this other fascinating experiment in this field, and it has been on honeybee communication. These computer algorithms have been able to follow these verbal and physical languages and decode them after figuring out how bees communicate. This information was encoded and placed into a robot named RoboBee. This bee can enter a hive and vocalize commands to the other bees and hopes that they will obey. So, for example, one of the most common bee communication methods is the waggle dance.
NATE: Waggle dance. Is that the scientific term?
CALLI: Amazingly, yes.
NATE: Ha.
CALLI: It's how bees tell other bees where nectar can be found. It was apparently a very easy experiment to run because they put a nectar source somewhere they knew the bees hadn't been yet and then had the robot tell the bees where the nectar could be found. And then when they checked, sure enough, the bees were gathered around the nectar booth.
NATE: So people can just talk to bees now.
CALLI: It is worth noting that this particular result only happened once, and the researchers aren't exactly sure why it worked or how to replicate it. The only thing they know is they did it once. It can be done again.
NATE: Okay. Well, that's a great start, especially for the bees. I guess so. All right. Well, what's the next step? What's our next breakthrough?
CALLI: Well, there are a few concerns from others over how this technology might be abused. For example, in practice, this could protect honeybees from death, but it could also be exploited by companies that want to lead them to pesticides. It could also be used to attempt to control the behavior of wild species that we haven't domesticated, which has its own sets of pros and cons. That being said, digital bioacoustics may seem complicated, but it's just as big an innovation in science as the invention of the microscope. When we first saw through the microscope, we were able to see the microbial world, the foundation of many sciences we take for granted today. Now we can hear the animal kingdom. This is a planet-wide hearing aid that can allow us not only a new way to communicate with other creatures, but to better understand them in general.
NATE: Guess I'll have to let the other lemurs know.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: “It's bananas.” That is the quote out of the mouth of one of the scientists who coauthored some research about a recent discovery in outer space, something that might change everything we know about outer space.
CALLI: I mean, anytime we change anything about everything, it always seems like it might be kind of bananas. But did they find bananas in space now? I'm curious.
NATE: Well, regrettably, it was There was not a literal description. They have not found bananas in outer space yet. But a team of astrophysicists did find several mysterious objects lost in the vastness of space in photographs taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. And when they took a closer look, the researchers discovered that these objects might actually be six previously unknown galaxies. And what's so wild about this is that these galaxies are so massive and so old that they shouldn't even exist. According to our current knowledge of cosmology, which is the science of how the universe was created.
CALLI: Okay, so we've just never seen these guys before. They just appeared out of the blue.
NATE: Well, not quite. So interestingly, these candidate galaxies, as they're called, since they haven't been officially designated as galaxies yet, may have existed at the dawn of the universe. Now, that makes it sound like they existed at the time when the universe was formed. But in reality, they formed 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, which is about 13 billion years ago. What makes these candidate galaxies even stranger, though, is that they are massive. Like massive, massive. Each one of them has as many stars as the modern Milky Way galaxy, which for anyone unaware, is the galaxy we are all sitting in right now.
CALLI: And what is so exciting about these galaxies?
NATE: It's their size. So even as recently as 2022, the James Webb Telescope, which is the most powerful telescope ever sent into space, spotted several candidate galaxies that were likely created around 350 million years after the Big Bang. But those candidates were so small compared to these new guys. Fewer stars, less mass. And still impressive, but not even close to the haul that this team just pulled in. Each of these new candidate galaxies may have as many as tens to hundreds of billions of sun sized stars worth of mass similar to the Milky Way.
CALLI: So how do they even notice these and why? Why do they think they're galaxies?
NATE: Well, it all started with Erica Nelson, who coauthored the new research and is the assistant professor of astrophysics at University of Colorado, Boulder. She and an international group of researchers created a team to investigate the data James Webb was sending back to Earth. The most recent find came from James Webb's Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey, or CEERs Survey for Short, which took a deep look into a somewhat random seeming patch of sky near the Big Dipper. If you've ever looked at the sky near the Big Dipper, it looks a little bland at first. Just a bunch of relatively vague looking stars in the night sky. But Erica Nelson was looking at an image of that same sky one day, an image the size of a postage stamp, when she noticed a few fuzzy dots of light that seemed too bright to be real.
CALLI: And what is so weird about fuzzy dots?
NATE: Well, for starters, these fuzzy dots were red. And in astronomy, red light generally means old light. Since the universe has been expanding since the dawn of time, galaxies and other celestial objects begin to move apart. And the light they emit gradually stretches out. The way Erica puts it is that the universe is like saltwater taffy. And, you know, taffy, when it's getting pulled, gets lighter in color, especially around its tension points. The universe does something a little different with the light stretching out. It turns that light red. So the team started running calculations on these fuzzy dots, realized they're candidate galaxies and also discovered how huge they are.
CALLI: So what you're saying is they discovered six Milky Way sized galaxies. Are these the same as our galaxy?
NATE: Nelson doesn't think these primordial galaxies have much in common with our own, but she wants to know more about them. Her team is still investigating James Webb's data to see what else they can find, even though the data they already have creates a pretty interesting road for them to go down. See, their calculations suggest that there should not have been enough normal matter. You know, the stuff that makes up planets are literally everything in the universe to create so many stars so quickly. If these candidate galaxies are in fact galaxies, then.
CALLI: It changes everything we know about cosmology. So then if they're not galaxies, what could they be?
NATE: They could be faint quasars. Quasars are distant objects in space that are powered by black holes and a billion times more massive than the sun. Whether these are quasars or galaxies, though, one thing is for sure this might be one of the biggest finds in the study of space we've seen in our lifetime.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Pop quiz time. How many layers does the Earth have?
NATE: Okay, fourth grade science, Earth layer looks like a jawbreaker. The crust. That's the surface where we are. The mantle, outer core, inner core… four?
CALLI: Wrong. Sorry. Or at least you would have been right before February 2023, when it was revealed that the Earth might actually have five layers a discovery that could change everything we know about the structure of the very planet we live on.
NATE: This is a lot of “change everything we know” stories for one episode, you know, animal language and space and the earth are all changing. I don't know. It's getting too much. I'm not sure I can take this level of excitement.
CALLI: Well, this one all started with the data captured from the seismic waves let off by earthquakes. Seismologists from the Australian National University measured the different speeds that seismic waves penetrate and pass through the Earth's inner core. These waves travel from the Earth's crust through all the other layers and then spit out at the opposite side of the globe where the earthquake was triggered. This spot is known as the antipode, and once the waves hit the antipodes, they travel back to the source of the quake. So think about it like playing a game of handball. You hit the ball with your fist, it bounces against the wall, it comes back to you. But it won't hit that wall again until the next time you hit it. The team developed a technique that records these waves and discovered that seismic waves actually bounce back and forth five times between the original quake location and antipode.
NATE: Okay. And what does that have to do with our mysterious fifth layer?
CALLI: So one of the earthquakes the team studied began in Alaska. The seismic waves bounced over to somewhere in the South Atlantic before traveling back to Alaska. After this quake. They studied the iron nickel alloy that makes up the inside of the Earth's inner core and studied the anisotropy of it. Anisotropy is a pretty complicated subject, but the simplest way I can explain it is think of shaving. You know how when you touch like a freshly shaved part of your leg or your face and you rub down it feel smooth, but when you rub against the grain, it's rough. That's anisotropy. The property of the material, which allows it to change or assume different properties in different directions, or a material like Velvet could be another example.
NATE: Well, what does the inner core’s anisotropy have to do with all of this?
CALLI: When it comes to studying the earth, anisotropy is used to describe how seismic waves speed up or slow down while traveling through the core of the planet. So if you think about it in terms of shaving, the quake is shaving each layer and leaving behind a grain, going in the opposite direction. What they found was that the bouncing seismic waves in the Alaska quake repeatedly hit spots near the Earth's center from different spots. But the waves seemed to randomly speed up or slow down, depending on where they hit. So they analyzed the variation in travel times for this quake against others and came to the realization that the iron nickel substance they studied wasn't part of the fourth layer. It was a brand new layer inside the inner core.
NATE: So you're saying it's crust, mantle, outer core, inner core, metal ball?
CALLI: That's what I'm saying. Yeah. They call it the innermost inner core. So not the most creative name, but one that might change everything we know about our planet's past evolution and even the future.
NATE: I mean, I guess it's basically a time capsule down there, right?
CALLI: Exactly. It's a fossilized record that the researchers say serves as a picture of Earth's hundreds of millions to billions of years ago. For now, the team has a few theories. These findings suggest there might have been some kind of major global event during Earth's evolutionary timeline that led to a significant change in the crystal structure or texture of the Earth's inner core that would make this metal ball. We don't know a lot about this inner inner core right now. And honestly, it might be a long time before we do because it is over 9000 degrees Fahrenheit down there, which in my professional opinion is hotter than hell itself. So we won't be able to send anybody to check it out for ourselves. We don't know a lot for sure, but what we do know is that this changes everything.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: Scientists are working with AI technology to observe and study animal sounds and translate those behaviors into data we can understand! We’re one step closer to a true animal to human translation!
NATE: When’s the last time you ever heard a scientist say a discovery was “bananas”? That’s the word one scientist used to describe the recent discovery of six previously unknown objects in our night sky that may or may not be galaxies as big as the Milky Way. These objects are dated to be almost as old as the universe while being that massive, and if confirmed, could change everything we know about our theories on the origin of the universe!
CALLI: Crust, mantle, outer layer, inner layer… tiny metal ball layer? That’s the discovery that flabbergasted scientists recently, who found out that there is actually a FIFTH layer to the Earth’s structure that we didn’t know about before. It’s yet another find in the scientific community that changes everything we knew about old science, but evidence that science is a constantly evolving art that will continuously provide surprises for those of us with the right amount… of curiosity.