[upbeat music] - Hi there.

I'm Frank Graff.

Wait one second.

[camera shutters] Few things define social media better than a selfie but could a selfie create more than a memory?

What about a medical report?

Coming up on Sci NC.

- [Announcer] This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station by viewers like you.

[gentle music] Additional funding for the Sci NC series is provided by GSK.

[lively music] - Hello again, and welcome to Sci NC.

You know, it turns out that almost everything that happens in your life can be found on your face.

There's the bad, there's stress, illness.

There's the good losing weight, quitting smoking.

One North Carolina researcher proposes using a selfie as an early indicator of medical issues.

[happy music] - [Narrator] The face reveal so much about an individual.

We are learning every day about more aspects of the face especially around things like health.

- [Frank] And we're not talking just emotional health such as happy, sad, or stressed.

Could the face reveal your age.

- An AI is going to learn how to recognize gender mostly based on this lip region, right under the nose.

For age, it's looking at more of the whole face but it's mostly looking at this area, right between, right between the eyes - [Frank] Researchers in the face aging group at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington have studied the face for more than a decade.

Their work is taking facial recognition technology to new levels.

- Right now it's gonna try to detect your face.

It's going to feed the face image through the neural network.

- So, what is it looking at?

It's looking at those points, right?

This right here, the whole face, okay?

And it's saying I am... Wow!

Exactly right.

- [Narrator] The technology involves using a computer to scan a photograph of a face for signs of health and aging.

Turns out that unhealthy habits over time, as well as chronic conditions leave their markers on the face.

Take smoking.

- So, now we have a split screen in which we have the non-smoker and the smoker.

So we can start to look at areas in which we see difference.

So if we look at the eye region itself, we noticed that there is a lot of difference here in the eye region, okay?

And so developing a crow's feet.

Ptosis right here or sort of drooping of eyelid and forming of bags under the eyes.

These are all part of the smoker face signals.

So there is something called a smokers face.

You're right.

And so these are the signals that we're picking up on.

If we look at the mouth, for example, we see these striations here.

These are lines and wrinkles that occur.

- [Narrator] So the computer maps more than 250 landmark points on the face.

It searches each section for shading variations that signal lines, dark spots, drooping and other age-related changes that indicate how that person is doing compared to others.

- Are there the signals on the face for things like drug and alcohol abuse, you know?

And so all these things that we do, they write themselves or manifest themselves on our face in some way or another.

And so we're just scratching the surface for understanding what's possible in a face itself - [Narrator] Researchers are already working on the next step.

If facial recognition technology and artificial intelligence can analyze your face to know your chronological age or how old you are from birth could it also be used to know your biological age or how old your body thinks it is relative to your health?

- So we've kind of covered the facial analytics aspect where we can derive characteristics from your face.

Now we're going to combine that with statistical data about your lifestyle, your fitness choices, information about your relatives.

Combine that with that facial analytics data and give you a normal human life expectancy score.

- Now, the technology becomes more personal because you have to factor in things like race and gender and education level and lifestyle and family health history, all things known to affect longevity.

- Smoker?

physical activity level?

- Moderate.

- How much sleep do you get on the week?

- Seven.

- And then any difficulties with any of these?

- No.

- Whoa!

84.2.

- Wow!

- Yeah.

- So this means what now?

- So what it's telling you is your odds of living to 65 or 95%.

So you're pretty good until 65.

And then to get to 85, you're about in the mean pretty much the average probability of getting to 85.

And then if you want to actually look at the exact value we think that you're going to be 84.2 if you don't have anything happen to you, live a good normal life.

- What if we had an app that can look at your face on a regular basis and start to warn you about signs of diabetes or cardiovascular disease.

Often we don't seek help until something goes wrong.

An app could actually tell us before those signals are manifested in other ways to seek some medical help.

So this kind of application could be used in the context of this sort of value-based medicine to get people to interact with their medical physician sooner.

[lively music] - [Announcer] Do you want to explore more cool science facts and beautiful images of North Carolina?

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[lively music] - Well, selfies may eventually be used as indicators of our health.

It's our genes that determine our health because our genes are the blueprint for who we are.

Let's get a quick refresher into the role that DNA plays in our body.

- [Narrator 2] Life is complicated.

There are a ton of different parts doing a ton of different things, but those parts and things are all referencing a set of instructions that are unique to each organism.

And those instructions are DNA.

This little helix is a super special molecule.

That's found in the nucleus of every cell in a living organism.

From the more complicated to the less complicated.

DNA is a long coiled set of basic letters that when organized into sentences and chapters make the instruction manual for an organism.

All by itself, the DNA doesn't do much but when chemicals and proteins in the cell read the DNA they can tell other chemicals and proteins how to build whatever parts need building.

And those parts that come by the millions are the building blocks that make the cells, tissues and organs of each living thing.

You've got to admit, that's a lot of potential for a single molecule.

[lively music] - As our understanding of DNA has advanced, genetic counselors are now advising individuals and families about the contribution of genetics to disease.

- It's safe to say, you're a picture taker.

- I am- - You're a picture taker.

- Yes.

- Uber picture taker.

- I have 10 volumes of family pictures.

Unfortunately, now they're on a phone, which isn't as fun.

You can't do this, but I guess you can scroll.

[gentle music] - Like, that is your mom.

- That's my mom.

- Okay.

She's with her many grandchildren.

- Knowing what you know now, do you look at these pictures in maybe a little different way?

- Yes, I think especially with my mother who had four types of cancer, we thought she was just incredibly unlucky, but she was sort of inspirational.

She bounced back after each surgery.

I regret that we didn't know what we know now, a lot of her cancers could have been prevented.

In fact, probably all of them.

- In this chart of Carol Hooper's family tree illustrates what she now knows.

- That it looked like we had a variant of a colorectal cancer disorder.

I've now dealt with this for 30 years.

When you find out you have something that's not a death sentence, you realize how lucky you are in life.

There are a lot of known gene disorders.

We call it the happy Hooper gene.

You know, you're just happy to be alive.

- There's a lot of red I'm looking.

So take me through this.

You're here, I believe, right?

- I'm here and my mother and her brother both have the genetic variant.

- See those red marks?

Those people have a genetic mutation that has been passed down through generations.

- It's harmful changes in the MSH6 gene and they call it mutations or pathogenic variance.

And the common name, I guess he discovered it, is Lynch; the Lynch syndrome.

[gentle music] - [Narrator] Your genes contain DNA, which carries instructions for every chemical process in your body.

Your cells make copies of their DNA as they grow and divide.

Sometimes minor mistakes happen in those copies and normal cells have mechanisms to repair those mistakes.

But in patients with Lynch syndrome the cells don't fix the errors.

Their cells keep making more and more flawed cells.

And that can mean cancer; aggressive cancers such as colorectal and pancreatic cancer.

Take a look at that chart again.

- I have the genetic variant.

We can assume my sister did.

She died at 55 of pancreatic cancer.

One of her children has been tested and he has it.

One of my children does the other one is to be tested - Any sense as you start tracing your family tree back and back, any sense where that variant might've started?

- We're guessing just from family who died that it probably came from my grandfather's side.

- And that would be?

- That would be him.

- That would be him.

- Mhhm.

- So what we see here is that this point in the DNA, this A and G that we would expect to be there is now missing.

- [Narrator] This is what a genetic mutation looks like when it's written out.

- And then it has shifted everything after that.

And so the results of that and the downstream implications and what that means for cancer risk or what we now understand.

- [Narrator] Genetic counselors take the complexity of genetics and make it accessible to patients.

- And in this example there's a big red bar here that tells us we need to pay attention very specifically to this.

This says the result is positive.

A clinically significant mutation identified means that we found a change in someone's genetic sequence that tells us that there will be or there's likely to be an impact in their body.

So if we were sitting down with someone to review this particular test result we would take a look at their personal cancer history.

What type of screening they're doing as well as their family history to say, do you have a family history of any of these things?

And therefore maybe we need to start screening even earlier.

Or is this something that we're going to start doing now, because we know that you were born with an increased chance of having one of these types of cancers.

- So again, not that you have it, or you might definitely get it but you are at risk.

We need to look further at your history.

- That's exactly right.

So this testing doesn't tell us, does somebody have cancer now or will they absolutely get cancer.

This tells us you have a higher chance of having cancer than someone in the general population.

- [Narrator] Genetic counseling blends biology, chemistry, genetics, and psychology amongst other sciences.

And it's all centered around the question of how DNA determines a patient's risk factors for disease and helping the patient come to terms with that risk.

- Certainly when you're talking about risk and numbers everybody hears risk differently.

If I could tell you you have a 10% chance of something happening and you might think that's a very high risk.

Someone else would say 10%, that doesn't mean any, you know, I don't...

It doesn't matter to me.

Sometimes there are things and oftentimes it's influenced by someone's personal experience, and that's part of the humanness of it.

[gentle music] - It changes your philosophy of life.

You know, when people complain about stupid things, [laughs] like I'm alive, get over it!

[laughs] [lively music] - [Announcer] Want to take a deeper dive on current science topics?

Check out our weekly science blog.

[lively music] - Now let's get out of the lab and into the woods.

Decades ago, scientists got an early warning about a threat to forests on the east coast, the trees were dying an invasive insect was killing them.

As students in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media explained, researchers found climate change was making a bad problem, even worse.

[bees buzzing] - I often think of the game Jenga where you pull little woodblocks out until you've pulled out so many, the whole tower collapses.

The bees are just starting to come out.

[insects chirping] So probably over winter, two hives this year, I tried...

I had a third and they lost their queen for some reason.

You can't lose too many species in an ecosystem before you start to lose a lot of important ecosystem services.

I'm Ken Bridle, I'm a full-time tree hugger.

My father was a very avid gardener and his mother was a very avid gardener.

So this is kind of like poppy seeds.

So that's what those guys are doing growing here.

So I just grew up out in the woods all the time and turned into a plant physiologist by training.

Climate change is causing the weather to be weirder not as reliable.

In my garden I've seen my honeybees come out in the middle of winter and start flying around, looking for flowers and there aren't any.

Apples are really a cool weather crop.

It's also warmer in the winter time.

So the apple trees don't go slowly dormant which means they don't make bugs like they should in the spring.

Pick out any bad looking spots and apple sauce.

Almost any plant gets stressed either by drought or storms or temperature.

I call it global weirding because really it's more than just global warming, which is one of the things we see that's happening here in the park.

I've probably been coming up to Hanging Rock for 45 years.

I've worked to help build exhibits, narrated some park videos.

[footsteps plodding] Oh, this is home.

The biodiversity in this part of North Carolina is pretty high because we're on the Northern edge of the Piedmont.

And we're on the Southern edge of the mountains.

Hemlocks are an important part of the biodiversity of the park.

[water splashing] Just above us is the waterfall.

We have the Canada hemlock which is usually down along the creeks here.

So it doesn't really like hot summer weather.

[water splashing] We're at the Southern edge of the Eastern Canada Hemlocks Range here in North Carolina.

There's two species of hemlocks that grow in this part.

When you look at the branch slits the Eastern hemlocks needles are kind of flat and the Carolina hemlock needle stick out at an angle.

They preferred to be in places, especially the Canada hemlock, that's more like Canada.

When it gets hotter than it has been or dryer we have droughts and high temperatures, they're stressed.

Then that stress makes them more vulnerable to other pests.

- My name is Mary Griffin.

I've worked here at Hanging Rock State Park for about seven years.

So on the east coast of the United States, there's an insect; there's an aphid like insect called the hemlock woolly adelgid.

The adelgid is not native.

So here there's nothing to keep it in check, so it just goes wild.

And it's specific only to the Carolina hemlock and the Eastern hemlock.

The adelgid in hemlock is everywhere.

You could go to any stand of trees and find it, and it's slowly killing off these trees.

When we don't have the usual winters or the usual summers then these insects are going to be active year round feeding and reproducing.

And so that's just going to create a larger problem for the hemlocks in this area.

This cup of water in this straw represents a healthy tree.

So when I take a sip of the water that's how water freely moves within a tree the mouth parts of the adelgid pierce the branch like a pushpin pierces the straw and then take a sip of the water and mimic.

[water babbling] And so I was able to get very little water up because of these holes.

And that's how the hemlock tree slowly starved to death 'cause they're not able to move the water or nutrients around the system, but the park staff has done a great job of treating those trees.

So there's different treatments that we use here at Hanging Rock State Park.

The chemicals we use on the hemlock trees, it's called Imidacloprid and it's essential like flea and tick medicine you might give to your dog.

We'll measure the diameter of the tree at breast height and then depending on how big that tree is.

It gets so much treatment.

I use 19 ounces.

We have a soil drenching method, where we would dissolve packets of insecticide within water, and then we'll pour it around the tree roots.

So the tree takes it up through the roots.

So when the adelgid injects its mouth part into the branch it sucks up some of that insecticide and then gets killed off.

Chemical treatment is very effective.

Usually for about three years.

They're good to go.

We try to stretch it out just because of resources are limited to five to seven years.

Once the tree loses about 50% of its needles it's probably not gonna make it.

So we don't usually treat those.

But I have a lot of hope that the hemlocks gonna make it through this.

Hemlocks are important because they have so many functions in our forest.

It's a great habitat.

And these lamps also shade the forest floor or the creek beds they're growing next to.

It keeps the soil moisture constant, it keeps the water cooler and cooler water holds more oxygen and drives algae levels down.

So there's more oxygen that's available for fish like trout.

The trout are able to lay their eggs, the eggs like to be oxygenated.

So this cold water hold more oxygen.

The eggs are staying viable.

If we're not treating these trees, creek beds to get a little warmer you might start seeing some species migrating out of the area.

We're gonna have a lot of dead trees in our forest, so you've got more fuels on the ground wildfires.

- A lot of climate change and a lot of impact on the environment is done by people who are unconsciously doing things.

And if it doesn't take much for us to get conscious, there are things we know how to do and the more people pay attention, the more those things get done.

It's easy.

[gentle music] [lively music] - Hey, parents, teachers and homeschoolers looking for lesson plans, you'll find free interactive ones about all types of science covered by Sci NC online.

[lively music] - Scientist Adrian Smith, from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences wasn't sure what he saw oozing from the tree in his backyard.

Well, it turned out to be sap, but here's what happened next.

- This is the tree, oozing fermented sap.

It's kinda gross, but it's also kind of amazing.

It's kinda like the insect equivalent of a watering hole in the Savannah, where you can find all sorts of species together in one place.

- A few weeks ago, I noticed this weird stuff dripping down the side of a tree in my yard.

I didn't know what it was at the time but it turns out it's something called slime flux.

And what happened was, bacteria got into the tree and started feeding off the sap inside the tree.

Gases from sap fermentation build up and eventually bubble out.

And the sap mixes with more bacteria and yeast.

It creates a smelly gooey stuff called slime flux.

A lot of insects, really like the slime flux stuff.

So to see which one showed up I set up a time-lapse video system and recorded about 45 hours of footage over six days.

So these are the insects that showed up at this bacterial infected and oozing tree.

And this is what I'm gonna call my tree ooze bioblitz.

The tree ooze, was constantly swarmed by flies lots and lots of flies.

The most common and constantly present were these drosophila species small fruit flies.

These cool looking Aulacigastrid flies were also always there.

They have a distinct striping pattern across their eyes and face.

And a specialists usually only found on slime fluxes underneath the flies, there's a layer of sap beetle larvae, clinging to the bark and feeding off the flux.

They let the slime flow right over them, as they feed.

Along with the flies, these beetle larvae are the primary consumers in this ooze-based ecosystem and where there's an abundance of defenseless consumers, predators are bound to appear.

This is a picnic beetle or a beer bug.

These are combined feed on the slime, but then they do this, pick a beetle larva out of the slime and then devour it.

They're called picnic beetles because of their attraction to fruits and fermentation products.

It's also a type of sap beetle.

So it's in the same family of beetles, as a larvae that's chewing on here.

Okay, in the sequence, watch the upper right corner of the frame, the predator swoops in and hangs out just outside the frame and focus of the shot.

But it pops in frame for just a second and shows that it's a yellow dung fly and it's eating the Drosophila fruit flies.

Males like this, are usually found hanging around dung and preying on other insects that visit.

But this one came by the tree to nab and snack on some of the smaller flies.

The biggest insect to visit the slime flux was this bumble flower beetle.

These scared beetles buzz like bumblebees when they fly.

They overwinter as adults and become active early in the spring to feed, mate, and start their life cycle, which is probably why I caught this one feeding at the tree in late April.

[gentle music] A few other types, of sap beetles made brief appearances in the slime.

One on the left is riding the back of a larvae as a plunges into the slime.

This one in the middle Cryptarcha is a close relative of the picnic beetle, but it just eats slime not other beetles.

On the right this Amphicrossus species shows up spins around and then kind of just runs off, the only other type of beetle , to make an appearance was this, red and white striped longhorn beetle, Euderces pini.

It's a wood-boring beetle.

So it probably just dropped by to check out whether the tree was a suitable host or not.

Here's a neat looking fly, that gray and black speckled one in the middle is a Traginops species.

These are specialists on fluxes and it's common to see a bunch of them feeding like this but my tree only attracted a couple.

The last two things I caught with this Muscidae, a relative of a house fly and the shiny small frit fly.

So that was about 15 different insects that showed up on this tree.

When I filmed it at the end of April and early May.

If I did this later in the summer, I might expect a whole different suite of insects like even butterfly, wasps, or like big June beetles to show up.

So next time you're out in the woods keep your eyes open for a bacterial infected oozing tree and then admire the cool insects that you find.

[gentle music] [lively music] - And that's it for Sci NC I'm Frank Graff.

Thanks for watching.

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- [Announcer] Additional funding for the Sci NC series is provided by GSK.