Learn how Seabed 2030 will map the ocean floor; how our cells make soap; and how crows understand the concept of zero. More than half of Earth's surface is unmapped, but Seabed 2030 aims to map it by 2030 by Grant Currin Jacobs, F. (2021, July 19). More than half the world is still unmapped — but not for long. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/seabed-2030 Amos, J. (2020, June 20). One-fifth of Earth’s ocean floor is now mapped. BBC News; BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53119686 Berman, R. (2020, December 2). Stanford engineers develop new light and sound tech to finally map the ocean floor. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/underwater-stanford-engineering Frequently asked questions. (2017). The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project. https://seabed2030.org/faq GEBCO project history. (2016). GEBCO. https://www.gebco.net/about_us/project_history/ Mayer, L., Jakobsson, M., Allen, G., Dorschel, B., Falconer, R., Ferrini, V., Lamarche, G., Snaith, H., & Weatherall, P. (2018). The Nippon Foundation—GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project: The Quest to See the World’s Oceans Completely Mapped by 2030. Geosciences, 8(2), 63. https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences8020063 Our cells make their own soap to kill bacteria by Grant Currin Human cells harness power of detergents to wipe out bacteria. (2021, July 15). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/654392 Gaudet, R. G., Zhu, S., Halder, A., Kim, B.-H., Bradfield, C. J., Huang, S., Xu, D., Mamiñska, A., Nguyen, T. N., Lazarou, M., Karatekin, E., Gupta, K., & MacMicking, J. D. (2021). A human apolipoprotein L with detergent-like activity kills intracellular pathogens. Science, 373(6552), eabf8113. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abf8113 Shi En Kim. (2021, July 20). Human Cells Ward Off Bacterial Invaders With a Protein That Behaves Like Soap. Smithsonian Magazine; Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/human-cells-ward-bacterial-invaders-protein-behaves-soap-180978237/ Crows understand the concept of zero by Cameron Duke Kirschhock, M. E., Ditz, H. M., & Nieder, A. (2021). Behavioral and Neuronal Representation of Numerosity Zero in the Crow. The Journal of Neuroscience, 41(22), 4889–4896. https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.0090-21.2021 Nicoletta Lanese. (2021, June 14). Crows understand the “concept of zero” (despite their bird brains). Livescience.com; Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/crows-understand-concept-of-zero.html Szalay, J. (2017, September 18). Who Invented Zero? Livescience.com; Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/27853-who-invented-zero.html Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Learn how Seabed 2030 will map the ocean floor; how our cells make soap; and how crows understand the concept of zero.
More than half of Earth's surface is unmapped, but Seabed 2030 aims to map it by 2030 by Grant Currin
Our cells make their own soap to kill bacteria by Grant Currin
Crows understand the concept of zero by Cameron Duke
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/mapping-the-ocean-soap-making-cells-crows-comprehend-zero
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about an ambitious plan to map the ocean floor by 2030; how our cells make their own soap to kill bacteria; and why it’s a big deal that crows understand the concept of zero.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
They say that we know more about the surface of the moon than our own oceans here on Earth. And it’s true: Just over 20 percent of the world’s ocean has been mapped in detail. But there’s a project underway to change that. Seabed 2030 is counting on underwater drones, multi-beam echo sounders, and [pause] international cooperation to accomplish the mammoth task in just eight more years.
There are a lot of reasons that someone might want a map of the global ocean floor. A big one is navigation. I mean, once in 2005, a US submarine was chugging along through some uncharted waters south of Guam when it slammed into an unknown feature of the marine landscape. Nearly a hundred sailors were injured and one of them died. A map would almost certainly have prevented the accident. The data will also be helpful for everyone from climate change researchers modeling ocean currents to fossil fuel companies looking for the best routes for new undersea pipelines.
There are two organizations behind the project: A Japanese-based nonprofit [The Nippon Foundation] and an international group [The General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, GEBCO] that’s been mapping the ocean since 1903. But they aren’t collecting all the data themselves. One of their priorities is getting all the publicly available data together in one place. For instance, a lot of countries have mapped the waters off their shores, but haven’t shared the data in a central location. Another priority is getting corporations and other groups with proprietary data to make their maps available to the public. Many of these maps chart long, thin lines of seafloor underneath the paths that ships, cables, and pipelines use to cross the world’s oceans and seas.
Finally, Seabed 2030 is figuring out where there’s no data at all — and they’re asking for help from basically anyone with a boat. That’s because nearly all techniques for mapping the seafloor rely on sonar. A lot of vessels already collect this kind of data for their own use. All they have to do is travel somewhere that hasn’t been mapped yet and record the sonar info using a datalogger. Unmanned vessels can also help with this. After all, they have no problem patiently plying patches of sea that no other ship has a reason to visit.
Mapping the majority of the seafloor is a tall order, but the group has already made some progress. When they started in 2017, just 6 percent of the seafloor had been mapped in detail. In just 4 years, that number has more than tripled. The future potential is as wide as the ocean.
You know it’s important to wash your hands with soap to kill bacteria. Well, it turns out that your immune system does the same thing. Get ready to learn about a newly discovered bacteria-killing protein that acts just like soap.
Imagine you’re baking a chicken for Sunday dinner. Things get a little messy while you’re stuffing herbs and vegetables into the bird. A few drops of chicken juice get on the kitchen towel, and then your hand, and then the sliced tomatoes. A few hours later, thousands of salmonella bacteria are fighting their way through the cells lining your intestine.
Once immune cells catch wind of the germs, they sound the alarm to tell the rest of the immune system “we’ve got trouble.” One of those alarm bells is called interferon gamma. But this protein doesn’t just make immune cells ready their defenses — it also makes normal cells increase their own protein production. That suggests that normal cells might help out in immune defense, but scientists weren’t sure how.
A team of researchers decided to get to the bottom of the mystery. They screened thousands of genes in cells to find ones that could encode a defensive protein. Finally, they found one: a protein called apolipoprotein L3 [APP-uh-LIP-uh-PRO-teen], or APOL3 for short. This protein got an assist from another molecule called GBP1.
To see the pair in action, the researchers exposed cells in the lab to salmonella bacteria, which has not one, but two protective membranes. Think of it like a castle with a moat. They used microscopes to watch as GBP1 breached the bacterium’s outer membrane and let APOL3 through. That’s when the real magic happened. See, one end of an APOL3 protein is attracted to water and the other end is attracted to lipids, or fats — just like soap. That’s bad news for salmonella’s lipid-based inner membrane. Once inside a salmonella bacterium, APOL3 doesn’t have much trouble dissolving the inner membrane, killing the germ and saving the day.
If you think it’s surprising that your body makes its own soap to kill bacteria, well, you’re in good company. Scientists say this is the first time anyone has discovered a protective protein that acts like a detergent. Even more reason to wash your hands! Every time you use soap, there’s less of a chance your body will have to use its own.
We’ve talked before about how smart birds are. We’ve also talked about how smart corvids are — that’s the group of birds that includes crows and ravens. I mean, crows can memorize faces and make tools. But now I’m here to tell you about what’s possibly their most amazing mental feat: they understand the concept of zero.
This is a big deal because understanding zero requires some degree of abstract thought. It’s easy and useful to count one, two, or three muffins, but when the muffins are gone, our brains have to do a little feat of mental gymnastics to understand that there is, in fact, a quantity of muffins that remains, but that quantity is zero.
Believe it or not, this is not obvious, even to humans. If you’ve ever wondered why there’s no Roman numeral for zero, it’s because humans didn’t even get around to defining zero as a mathematical concept until 1500 years ago.
However, research suggests that crows might intrinsically understand the concept of zero. Researchers at a university in Germany set up an experiment where they trained carrion crows to respond to images on a computer screen. The researchers would flash an image containing zero to four dots and then flash a second image containing zero to four dots. The birds were trained to peck at the screen if the two images were the same and do nothing if they were different.
In the experiment, the birds were good, but not perfect. The greater the difference between the numbers of dots, the more accurately they could tell that the quantities were different. But it’s the mistakes the birds made that reveal their mental superpowers. These birds mistook zero dots for one dot at the same rate they mistook one dot for two, suggesting that the birds weren’t thinking about the blank screen as nothing, but instead as a numerical quantity just below one.
In another experiment, the researchers implanted little electrodes in the crows’ brains to measure electrical activity while they repeated the experiment. Previous studies have found that specific clusters of neurons in crows’ brains light up for specific numbers — but those studies never tried it with zero. And in this study, the researchers confirmed that another cluster of neurons lit up for the “zero dot” screen just like other clusters had for other numbers. That’s more evidence that the birds are able to process zero as a quantity. That’s some pretty high-level math, even for a smart bird.
I wonder how long until they invent calculus?
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
[ad lib optional]
ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Grant Currin and Cameron Duke.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: [AD LIB SOMETHING FUNNY] Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!