This Massive Skeleton Belongs to an Ancient Whale

At first, scientists thought it was a gigantic marine reptile.
Egypt’s Sahara desert is home to around 600 Basilosaurus fossils. Basilosaurus means “king lizard,” but this creature was actually ancient whale.
This Massive Skeleton Belongs to an Ancient WhalePublished: May 20, 2025HESHAM SALLAM: This is one of the most complete skeletons that we find in Wadi al Hitan. In the middle of nowhere, you find a lot of really huge vertebrae lying up. The skull would be over there in that rock and the ribs on both sides. This is really a spectacular, huge animal that lived here in Wadi al Hitan 40 million years ago, the Basilosaurus.NARRATOR: Basilosaurus fossils have been discovered in many parts of the world, including around 600 here at Wadi al Hitan. This one has been laid out in the place it was found. When the first Basilosaurus was studied in 1834, experts were baffled.HESHAM SALLAM: When the early scientists found this, they thought it&#x27;s belonged to a kind of gigantic marine reptile, and this is why they give it name Basilosaurus, which means king lizard.NARRATOR: But the skull contains a clue to Basilosaurus&#x27;s true identity.HESHAM SALLAM: This is the skull upside down, and you can see all the teeth is sticking up. And actually, they have incisors, canine, premolars, and molar. Really like our teeth, which is actually a really good indication for this is not a marine reptile. This is actually mammal. So, Basilosaurus, the King Lizard, it&#x27;s actually ancient whale.NARRATOR: 40 million years ago, Basilosaurus was the apex predator of its day. It could grow up to 60 feet long, the length of a bowling alley, and weigh more than seven tons. Powerful jaws filled with sharp teeth made it a killing machine. Scientists estimate its bite had a force of nearly two tons, enough to crush the bones of other whales. Basilosaurus was a prehistoric king of beasts.

At first, scientists thought it was a gigantic marine reptile.

How Music is Made Up of Math

Pythagoras saw a connection between math, music, and nature.
Hear a jazz musician explain how an octave, fifth, and fourth relate to math.
How Music is Made Up of MathPublished: May 19, 2025NARRATOR: The ancient Greeks found three relationships between notes especially pleasing. Now we call them an octave, a fifth, and a fourth.ESPERANZA SPALDING: An octave is easy to remember because it&#x27;s the first two notes of &quot;Somewhere Over the Rainbow.&quot; A fifth sounds like this, or the first two notes of &quot;Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.&quot; And a fourth sounds like... You can think of it as the first two notes of &quot;Here Comes the Bride.&quot;NARRATOR: In the sixth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras is said to have discovered that those beautiful musical relationships were also beautiful mathematical relationships by measuring the lengths of the vibrating strings. In an octave, the string lengths create a ratio of two to one. In a fifth, the ratio is three to two, and in a fourth, it is four to three.ESPERANZA SPALDING: Seeing a common pattern throughout sound, that could be a big eye-opener of saying, &quot;Well, if this exists in sound, and if it&#x27;s true, universally through all sounds, this ratio could exist universally everywhere, right?&quot; And doesn&#x27;t it?NARRATOR: Pythagoreans worship the idea of numbers. The fact that simple ratios produced harmonious sounds was proof of a hidden order in the natural world, and that order was made of numbers, a profound insight that mathematicians and scientists continue to explore to this day.

Pythagoras saw a connection between math, music, and nature.

Can Lemurs Count?

Researchers designed a test to see how well lemurs can compare quantities.
If he chooses correctly, he wins a sugar pellet. But researchers have to ensure Teres is paying attention to number and not something else.
Can Lemurs Count?Published: May 6, 2025Narrator: Like all primates, lemurs are related to humans through a common ancestor that lived as many as 65 million years ago. Scientists believe lemurs share many characteristics with those earliest primates, making them a window, though a blurry one, into our ancient past.Liz Brennan: Got a choice here, Teres. Come on up.Narrator: Duke professor Liz Brennan investigates how well lemurs, like Teres here, can compare quantities.Liz Brennan: We need to figure out whether they can really use number, pure number, as a cue.Narrator: To test how well Teres can distinguish quantities, he&#x27;s been taught a touchscreen computer game. The red square starts a round. If he touches it, two squares appear containing different numbers of objects. He&#x27;s been trained that if he chooses the box with the fewest number, he&#x27;ll get a reward, a sugar pellet. A wrong answer?Liz Brennan: We have to do a lot to ensure that they&#x27;re really attending to number and not something else.Narrator: To make sure the test animal is reacting to the number of objects and not some other cue, Liz varies the object, size, color, and shape. She has conducted thousands of trials and shown that lemurs and rhesus monkeys can learn to pick the right answer.Liz Brennan: Teres obviously doesn&#x27;t have language, and he doesn&#x27;t have any symbols for number. So is he counting? Is he doing what a human child does when they recite the numbers one, two, three? No. And yet, what he seems to be attending to is the very abstract essence of what a number is.

Researchers designed a test to see how well lemurs can compare quantities.

How Deadly Was the Musket?

A team of experts put an 18th-century musket to the test — revealing how deadly it really was.
At Fort Ticonderoga, a centuries-old weapon is put through a modern test. Using ballistic gel, a slow-motion camera and a chronograph, experts investigate the true power of the British “Brown Bess” musket.
How Deadly Was the Musket?Published: April 17, 2025Narrator: Today, the musket is seen as crude and inaccurate, especially when compared to modern guns. But is that true? At Fort Ticonderoga in Upstate New York, historic firearms researcher, Joel Bohy, is finding out how effective the musket was on the battlefield.Joel Bohy: So, what we&#x27;ve got here is a British Pattern 1756 Long Land musket, more commonly known as the Brown Bess. The Brown Bess begins use in about 1730, and this type of gun would&#x27;ve been the workhorse of the British army through the 18th century into the 19th century. It was an extremely important gun to building the British Empire and used through the American Revolution.Narrator: But for Joel, the best way to assess the musket is not by comparing it to modern weapons, but by testing its effectiveness in battle 250 years ago. To gain a better understanding, Joel&#x27;s team will fire at a ballistic gelatin block designed to replicate human tissue, providing valuable insight into how different projectiles can affect a person&#x27;s body. With the aid of a slow motion camera, he&#x27;ll also try to answer a question, how damaging could a musket shot be? Finally, he will measure the speed each round exits the barrel, known as the muzzle velocity, using a chronograph. Marksman Jay Waller will be firing the guns. First up, the musket with the 0.69 caliber ball. Pulling the trigger instantly sets off a chain reaction in the flintlock mechanism. A stone flint strikes a steel hammer. The impact creates sparks, which ignites the priming powder in the pan. This ignition passes through a small hole and sets off the gunpowder inside the barrel. The gas pressure produced here propels the round out of the gun. On inspection, it&#x27;s a direct hit.Joel Bohy: You can see where it traveled right through the block and came out the other side.Narrator: Reviewing the footage, they can see the horrific damage caused.Joel Bohy: Wow. You see that ball zip right through. Look at the cavitation in the gel from that .69 caliber ball.Narrator: When the ball moves through the block, it displaces the gel around it, creating a cavity. This is known as cavitation, similar to what would happen to living human tissue, devastating to bones and internal organs.Joel Bohy: The men on Lexington Green knew how deadly these weapons were, but they never had the opportunity to see the damage in the way that we&#x27;re seeing it now. Wow. Wow.Jay Waller: Yeah, certainly gives a whole different appreciation and horror for what happened.Narrator: The musket is clearly deadly. So why do we see it as a primitive weapon? Likely, because of what later guns can do. Joel demonstrates this with the modern rifle.Joel Bohy: Oh! Whoa! Look at that. You can see the smoke from the bullet.Narrator: The modern rifle&#x27;s power is far more terrifying. But what does the data reveal? Using the chronograph, Joel and Jay compare muzzle velocities.Joel Bohy: On the Endfield, that is 2,314 feet per second, whereas the musket is 845 feet per second. So there&#x27;s a big difference between the two guns. But you can really see the velocity when you look at the ballistics gelatin blocks.Narrator: The higher velocity of the modern rifle&#x27;s bullet means it carries substantially more energy. When it penetrates the block, much of this is transferred to the gel, causing it to lift into the air.

A team of experts put an 18th-century musket to the test — revealing how deadly it really was.

These Smart Glasses Know Who You Are, and Much More

Two students created glasses that can identify people on the street, without them knowing.
The facial recognition glasses can pull personal information, like and phone number and even home address from existing online databases.
These Smart Glasses Know Who You Are, and Much MorePublished: April 17, 2025Caine Ardayfio: Oh, hi, ma&#x27;am. Wait, are you (beep)?Person #1 at a train station: Yes.Caine Ardayfio: Oh, okay. I think I met you through like the Cambridge Community Foundation, right?Person #1 at a train station: Oh, yeah.Caine Ardayfio: Yeah, yeah, it&#x27;s great...Narrator: What if you could immediately know the name and personal details of any stranger you passed on the street?Two undergraduate college students developed a tool that can pull sensitive personal information, like home addresses and phone numbers, from existing databases just by using a person&#x27;s face, and without that person even knowing it&#x27;s happening.AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio are students at Harvard University. They set out to build facial recognition glasses using these smart glasses built by Meta, the parent company of social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. Basically, they wanted to be able to put on the glasses, look at a random person, and identify who they were.After just four days of coding, they had a working prototype and were trying it on students around campus. Even on strangers at a train station.AnhPhu Nguyen: Are you the person working on like minority stuff for like Muslims in India at all, or something?Person #2 at a train station: That&#x27;s me, yeah.AnhPhu Nguyen: Really?Person #1 at a train station: Yeah.AnhPhu Nguyen: Are you (beep)?Person #1 at a train station: Yes.AnhPhu Nguyen: Oh, I&#x27;ve read your work before, it&#x27;s super cool.Narrator: Here&#x27;s how it works. Once AnhPhu or Caine puts on these glasses, an LED light turns on to indicate they&#x27;re recording, and they start to live stream the video feed to Instagram. Then a bot they built takes screenshots of the video and scans a facial recognition library, looking for a face.AnhPhu Nguyen: Once you look at someone, it puts the face into this database that returns links to where that person appears online.Narrator: That database is called PimEyes; a facial recognition search engine that scours the internet to find websites where that face shows up.AnhPhu Nguyen: We use some large language models to scrape those websites, all the information, and then guess who it might be on those websites.Narrator: A large language model, or LLM, is a type of artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT, that can understand and summarize data into text that&#x27;s similar to how humans speak. The LLM suggests a name to match the face, and then that name is used to find more information.Caine Ardayfio: And then it would put it through a bunch of databases to try to figure out like home address, job, what they enjoy doing, that type of thing.Narrator: And then all of that information, the photos, names, address, and interest, gets sent to their phone. From beginning to end, this takes about 90 seconds. AnhPhu and Caine use the free versions of these databases, but they say if they had unlimited access, they could have gotten results in just a few seconds.The project raises a lot of ethical questions, but it&#x27;s not illegal. Some states, like Massachusetts, do have stringent rules that restrict how the government can use facial recognition technology, but that is not the norm across the country.And the databases themselves can also impose limits. Once the project went public, PimEyes removed AnhPhu and Caine&#x27;s access, because they say the students violated the site&#x27;s terms of service by uploading photos of people without their permission. But AnhPhu and Caine&#x27;s goal isn&#x27;t for this to be used, it&#x27;s to show that we&#x27;re already vulnerable to this kind of technology.AnhPhu Nguyen: We basically exposed the fact that you can go on the street and pull all of this data. It was simply like a technical demonstration.Narrator: In a Google Doc accompanying their video, they encourage and instruct people to remove personal information from databases that contain details, like addresses and even the names of relatives.Caine Ardayfio: All of these databases that we use, they have opt-out systems where you can just go onto their website, verify your identity, and then you&#x27;re completely scrubbed from those databases.Narrator: Facial recognition software already exists, like the kind used to verify your identity when you&#x27;re going through a airport security, or to unlock your iPhone, and similar facial recognition technology is being used by some law enforcement agencies, both at the federal, state, and local levels to identify individuals and support criminal investigations. Though a few cities like San Francisco, Boston, and Portland, Oregon have lost specifically prohibiting city officials, like police departments, from using facial recognition systems.But AnhPhu and Caine showed private citizens can also use facial recognition software to identify strangers. They don&#x27;t plan to take this project any further, instead, they started working with data privacy advocacy groups. As engineers, they say they&#x27;ve done their job to bring awareness and show that this is possible.As facial recognition technology continues to advance, questions about data privacy and security will continue to arise, and many may start to use this technology for more than just a demonstration.

Two students created glasses that can identify people on the street, without them knowing.

Why Just Planting Trees Won’t Save the Planet

Could restoring lost forests help slow climate change?
A paper published in 2019, estimated that there is enough land on Earth to support an extra trillion trees to capture carbon. But in the rush to grow trees, people ignored the supporting environment that exists in a forest. Discover why biodiversity matters in forests.
Why Just Planting Trees Won’t Save the PlanetPublished: April 17, 2025Narrator: Could restoring lost forests absorb enough carbon to help slow climate change? To find out, Tom and a team built a computer model to estimate the potential.Tom Crowther: So we collect data from all over the planet, and that can show us there&#x27;s about 0.9 billion hectares of land outside of urban and agricultural land where forests might naturally be able to regenerate. That&#x27;s a big chunk of land that would be able to capture a staggering amount of carbon.Narrator: Calculation suggested that to capture this carbon, there was enough land to support an extra trillion trees, a seductive idea that made headlines around the world.Tom Crowther: It just went viral beyond anything I could have been prepared for. And I think that alliteration, trillion trees, was both a blessing and a curse. In one way, it captured everyone&#x27;s imagination. &quot;Great, we bring back a trillion trees and we&#x27;re gonna be flying.&quot; But the downside was everybody thought that meant planting trees. Somehow it wasn&#x27;t about the forest, it was about the trees, and that is where things started to go wrong.It nearly finished all of our careers. Companies and governments were under a lot of pressure to limit their emissions. They saw this as a chance to just bang a load of trees in the ground, and then they don&#x27;t need to cut emissions. The projects denounced as a result of our paper saying, &quot;Don&#x27;t worry, we&#x27;re gonna buy up land and we&#x27;re gonna plant trees.&quot;Narrator: In the rush to grow trees, people ignored the supporting environment that exists in a forest.Robin Wall Kimmerer: There are places on the planet where biodiversity continues to thrive, and those places are by and large in indigenous homelands. Biodiversity is the sum total of all of the organisms that are here, and you think, well, why does it matter?In a forest which is self generating, you get all the different forms of trees and the understory and the mosses and the fungi and the birds all in relationship. It&#x27;s this beautiful web that doesn&#x27;t really exist in a monocultural plantation.Narrator: When Tom&#x27;s paper was published, many quite literally couldn&#x27;t see the forest for the trees. By planting rows of single tree species to capture carbon instead of reducing carbon emissions.Tom Crowther: This greenwashing is one of the most insidious threats to climate change and biodiversity. And through this paper, in some people&#x27;s minds, I become synonymous with greenwashing. I still regret how I handled that paper. It&#x27;s the hardest thing to be hated by people that you agree with.

Could restoring lost forests help slow climate change?

The World’s First Combat Submarine

Its nickname was the “Turtle”.
During the American Revolution, an American inventor developed an underwater vessel that could destroy British ships by attaching a bomb to the hull of a ship. These are some of its unique features.
The World’s First Combat SubmarinePublished: April 17, 2025MIKE LOADES: This is a model of the first combat submarine. Now I say model because the original doesn&#x27;t exist. All we have is a few hints and clues from subsequent writings.NARRATOR: The writings come from American inventor David Bushnell.DAVID BUSHNELL: The external shape of the submarine vessel bore some resemblance to two upper tortoise shells of equal size, joined together.NARRATOR: It was later nicknamed the Turtle.MIKE LOADES: First, you&#x27;ve got the overall shape. It&#x27;s using the technology of a barrel. It&#x27;s thick oak staves, bound together with iron hoops. It&#x27;s not quite barrel shaped though. And the reason for that is because you need space inside for an operator to sit. So that&#x27;s going to broaden it in the middle. And you need space at the top for a hatch for the operator to get in.At first glance, it immediately reminds you of a space capsule. But what it is, in fact, is a time capsule, a time capsule of contemporary technologies. You&#x27;ve got these pedals here, so the operator is pedaling away. This is powered by pedal power, and they are driving a propeller.NARRATOR: The concept of the propeller dates back to Greek mathematician Archimedes. His Archimedes screw famously moved water using a spiral blade inside a tube. Bushnell took this concept and located a blade on the outside of his turtle. This is thought to be one of the first practical applications of a propeller, along with a rudder. The turtle has all the components needed to maneuver on the surface.MIKE LOADES: A particular feature on the outside of the vessel is this hatch at the top here. It&#x27;s got these water tight windows, so he has got some natural light inside. Then above that, these strange looking things are really snorkels, so that when it&#x27;s above water, it&#x27;s fully ventilated.NARRATOR: Using the windows, the operator could maneuver on the surface to locate and position the turtle next to a ship. It is then ready to descend by filling the area at the base of the vessel, known as the bilges. To do that, the operator kicks a lever.MIKE LOADES: This will flood the bilges down there with water.NARRATOR: Under the surface, a second propeller is used to lower or raise the turtle. Once submerged in darkness, the operator has only two instruments for guidanceMIKE LOADES: This is a barometer. It has a little cork in it, and each of these marks on the glass tube represents a fathom that&#x27;s about six feet. So as he sees the cork bobbing down, he knows he&#x27;s going down another six feet. How can you see that underwater? Because it&#x27;s been covered with a fungus called foxfire, which is luminous, it glows in the dark.And over here is a compass, which again, the needle on the compass has been coated with this luminous fungus so he can read his heading.NARRATOR: The turtle is designed to move into position. Armed with a bomb to blow up its target.MIKE LOADES: So, assuming that we&#x27;ve now got to the right that we now need to attach the payload. And that&#x27;s this crank here, this crank operates that drill at the top and that bores its way up into the hull of a ship.NARRATOR: The drill is attached to the bomb by a rope. Once connected, the turtle detaches itself, leaving the explosives secured to the ship.MIKE LOADES: And now you&#x27;ve got to get out of here. So you you pedal away when you want to surface, you use these two hand pumps, yet more exertion to save your life. Pumping away to get that water out of the bilges. But my goodness, that&#x27;s a heck of a lot of work to get to that stage.NARRATOR: Employed to carry out this dangerous mission, 27 year old American Ezra Lee. The plan: drive into New York Harbor and blow up the British flagship HMS Eagle. But how could Ezra Lee attach a bomb big enough to sink the British ship and get away safely? Inventor David Bushnell&#x27;s writings provide some clues, allowing pyrotechnics expert John Hargreaves to figure out how it was supposed to happen.JOHN HARGREAVES: I&#x27;ve rigged this as a demonstration. This is pretty much the size of the bomb that would have been on the turtle.MIKE LOADES: That holds the gunpowder?JOHN HARGREAVES: Correct, 150 pounds.MIKE LOADES: How do we get a spark to it?JOHN HARGREAVES: Well, in the references to Bushnell&#x27;s machine, they show a flintlock mechanism.MIKE LOADES: So this little pocket pistol?JOHN HARGREAVES: Correct.MIKE LOADES: Which has got this flint lock here so that flint strikes that which creates the spark.NARRATOR: The pistols’ muzzle is screwed into the barrel. When it&#x27;s fired, it will ignite the gunpowder. But Ezra Lee would need time to escape before it exploded. Bushnell had a plan.DAVID BUSHNELL: Within the magazine was an apparatus constructed to run any proposed length of time under 12 hours.JOHN HARGREAVES: This is a specialist clock. It is a very early 19th century version, actually, but it is the nearest thing I can find to the right mechanism.NARRATOR: The mechanism John thinks Bushnell used comes from a period pocket watch.JOHN HARGREAVES: The pocket watch had been around the beginning of the 17th century. It was a pretty rare thing. And they were all watches like this. The clock is going to count down to zero when it gets to zero. It pulls a lever which I have attached to the trigger mechanism of my pistol, so it pulls the trigger and fires the gun.MIKE LOADES: This is absolutely ingenious, John.JOHN HARGREAVES: I&#x27;m going to set it to a minute to. Can you hear it ticking?MIKE LOADES: We have a ticking bomb.JOHN HARGREAVES: This is ticking.MIKE LOADES: Oh, look at that. Excellent. Proof of concept.JOHN HARGREAVES: Yes.NARRATOR: The timer for the bomb was set to 30 minutes and sealed in a watertight casing. The countdown would begin when the bomb detached from the turtle.DAVID BUSHNELL: This apparatus could not possibly move till by casting off the magazine from the vessel it was set in motion.NARRATOR: The firing mechanism works on land. But will the bomb explode underwater? When Bushnell first tested the bomb, he did so with varying amounts of gunpowder. For safety, John is only using 5 pounds. Ezra Lee was carrying 150.At 11 p.m. on September 6th, 1776, after being launched into the water from a whale boat, Lee starts his mission.Even though this was a scaled down test. John is taking all the necessary precautions. As Raleigh is facing the real risk that the bomb could fail to detonate or worse, explode too early, killing him instantly. For over two exhausting hours, with the constant risk of being spotted, he navigates toward the British ship. Upon reaching it, he begins his descent, dropping close to 30ft below the surface with the bomb.MIKE LOADES: Oh! Yeah, she blows.That&#x27;s just 5 pounds?JOHN HARGREAVES: Yes, 5 pounds of gunpowder.MIKE LOADES: The bomb they&#x27;re dealing with was 30 times that magnitude.NARRATOR: A detonation that large would have been catastrophic. The wooden hull of a ship offers less resistance to the bomb&#x27;s explosive force. And the denser water around it.MIKE LOADES: It would have just ripped through the bottom of the boat. Instant destruction in.NARRATOR: But HMS Eagle is not blown up. After making his descent as Ezra Lee is unable to attach the bomb.DAVID BUSHNELL: He went under the ship and attempted to fix the wooden screw, but struck, as he supposes, a bar of iron.NARRATOR: At this crucial moment, running out of air, he abandons the mission. In a later attempt, the boat carrying the sub is sunk by British gunfire. This is the end of the turtle.MIKE LOADES: I have absolutely no doubt that if it had been successful and if it had been repeatable to scale, if they built many more turtles and they had destroyed the British fleet, it would have shortened the war by years. The war would have been over in months.

Its nickname was the “Turtle”.