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\f0\fs24 \cf0 Welcome back.
As you may know, this Sunday marks the hundred-year anniversary of the Titanic disaster, and it's
been 27 years since the remains of the luxury liner were discovered at the bottom of the
Atlantic.
But recently a team led by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos made its own awesome discovery
at the bottom of the Atlantic: five engines from the Apollo 11 Saturn 5 Rocket that took
humans to the moon for the first time.
Using what Bezos described as state of the art deep sea sonar, the team found the engines
4.25 kilometers below the surface where they've been since shortly after the Apollo 11 mission
lifted off in July of 1969.
Bezos says they are currently making plans to raise at least one of the engines, which
will be quite an undertaking giving that each one intact weighs about 9 tonnes.\
\'a0These engines only operated for about 150 seconds during which each one generated
an astounding 6.8 million newtons of thrust to lift the Saturn V. As they did, each engine
burned through about 2700 kilograms of kerosene and liquid oxygen per second, and two and
a half minutes later, they burned through their fuel and the first stage of the rocket
fell, as planned, into the Atlantic Ocean.
Bezos, a life-long space fanatic, privately funded the mission to find and salvage these
historic pieces of machinery, and NASA says they wish him luck, which isn't surprising
since NASA retains ownership of any artifact that's recovered.
So Bezos is basically doing the hard work for them.\'a0 If he brings up any engines,
NASA has tentatively agreed to put one on display at the National Air and Space Museum,
while the second would go to the Museum of Flight in Bezos's home town of Seattle.\'a0
But what would happen if they were able to salvage more than two?\'a0 Well, let us know
in the comments where you would put one of these amazing pieces of machinery on display,
and we'll update you as the mission continues.\ Another anniversary is coming up that has
us studying the deep sea.
It will be two years next week since the Deep Water Horizon oil rig started barfing out
more than 605 million liters of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
And a whole slate of new research is showing us how severe its impact has been.
The first comes from a team of more than a dozen American scientists from all kinds of
different fields who went on an emergency expedition to the bottom of the Gulf in the
fall of 2010, months after the well was capped.\'a0\ Using some pretty awesome equipment that you
might have heard of, like the Navy's Alvin submersible and the remote vehicle Jason 2,
the team studied corals on the seabed some eleven kilometers from the well and found
what they called widespread signs of stress, like tissue-loss, loss of mucus secretions,
and layers of brown goo called floc that was found to contain petroleum.\'a0\
About a quarter of the coral studied were more than 90% damaged and another quarter
were impacted by at least a half.
Coral colonies can live for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years so the effects of this
damage will be felt for a long time.\'a0\ Another group of scientists has announced
that they have found oil from the Deep Water Horizon well in zooplankton, the tiny animals
that are the food supply for fish and shrimp,\'a0 in random patches around the northern gulf,
and even in new patches of it after the well was cast.\'a0 So this means the oil is now
officially in the food chain and that is MY food chain and\'a0 I like fish, so I'm not
okay with that.\'a0 And of course, let's not forget the dolphins, marine biologists from
NOAA announced just days ago that dozens of bottlenosed dolphins examined last year off
the coast of Louisiana, which got some of the worst of the spill, were found to be suffering
from all sorts of health problems including weight loss, anemia, low blood sugar, liver
and lung disease, and abnormally low hormone levels.
NOAA says that the incidence of dolphin strandings when they get beached or stuck in shallow
water have more than quadrupled since the spill.
Most of the stranded dolphins have been found dead so, on April first, NOAA declared an
unusual mortality event, which is basically like a state of emergency for marine mammals.
It all makes me want to never drive my car again, but I can't seem to stop.\'a0\
Okay, but not everything is our fault, right?
Like, natural disasters, it's nice to think that some of them might still be natural.
Like earthquakes, right?
Alas!
Turns out, we've actually - you know, the human race has been creating earthquakes for
quite some time.
Redistributing a large amount of weight on the surface of the earth by, for example,
creating a massive reservoir behind the Hoover Dam, can cause earthquakes.
The same can happen when we try to get rid of our waste water by injecting it deep into
the earth.
Since 2001, a sixfold increase in earthquake actvity has hit the central United States.
US geological survey has found that this increase is almost certainly manmade, caused by the
removal of natural gas from the earth.
The study, however, did say that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was not to blame,
and this kind of exploration was not responsible for any earthquakes that caused significant
damage.
The mechanism that causes these earthquakes is unknown but the sort of idea is that natural
gas is sitting in the earth, and it's in like a pressurised cavity, basically, and as you
extract that, that pressure decreases and things shift, and you get earthquakes.
Geologists think that, whatever is causing the earthquakes, it couldn't cause earthquakes
of dangerous magnitude, so I'm glad that they think so.
I'd prefer that they know so.
So I guess the only thing that we can't blame ourselves for is volcanos and solar flares,
for now anyway.
We'll see if we can manage to mess that up somehow as well.
Seriously though, for now most natual disasters remain mostly natural, but the continuous
inputs from humanity into the Earth's systems are significant, and we and our descendants
are going to have to deal with the results of that.\'a0\
To wit, earlier this week marine biologists in California said that they have found radioactive
Iodine 131 in kelp beds along the coast of Southern California, just a month after last
year's nuclear meltdown in Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant.
To describe the levels of contamination as significant although likely non harmful, at
least to people.
But they said that the contamination may affect the fish that eat the kelp- but then what
if I eat the fish?\ Finally, another week, another scientific
controversy, this one about bees.
You've heard by now about the rapid disappearance of honey bees in the past six years, a phenomenon
known as "colony collapse disorder," where bees abandon their hives.
Well, a team of Harvard biologists is attributing the collapse to something that people love
to hate, high-fructose corn syrup.
Commercial beekeepers feed corn syrup to their bees, and the new study suggests that, by
eating it, bees are being exposed to a special insecticide that's used on corn.
The research shows that, when sixteen hives were exposed to different levels of the insecticide,
the bees didn't just drop dead, and in all but one of the hives, the bees abandoned the
colonies just as they do when a colony collapses.
But then, of course, the company that makes the insecticide, Bayer, says that the study
sample was too small and used concentrations of the insecticide that were too high, and
it ignored other factors that could contribute to the collapse like disease and parasites.
I don't know who's right here, though I do know that there are a lot of people hating
on corn and anything made from it.
But I can also tell you that I as a person like to eat, and since bees pollinate about
a third of our food crops, they'd better figure this out, and fast.\'a0 Thank you for watching
this episode of SciShow News; if you have any questions or suggestions for things that
we should be covering please leave them in the comments below, or on Facebook or Twitter,
and we'll see you next time.\ }