Benevolent Orca Pods Are Adopting Baby Pilot Whales in an Apparent Effort to Clean Up the Species’ Image

Posted on May 20, 2025 by Danzig

Researchers have noticed a strangely sweet behavior among Icelandic orcas: the adoption of a baby whale from an entirely different species.

As so-called "killer whales" have made news over the past few years for violent boat attacks in European waters, marine biologists have noticed a far sweeter behavior in Iceland's frigid waves: the adoption of a baby whale from an entirely different species.

In interviews with Scientific American, scientists described their shock at observing a pilot whale calf that traveled with an Icelandic pod of orcas over a period of years.

One of those researchers, Chérine Baumgartner, said she and her colleagues at the Icelandic Orca Project initially couldn't believe their eyes.

"At first, we were like, 'Oh my god, this killer whale calf has a problem,'" the researcher said of the bulbous-headed baby she and her team first spotted back in 2022. It looked at first glance like a malformed orca — until they realized it was no killer whale at all.

The next day, when Baumgartner and her colleagues were witnessing the same pod again, the baby pilot whale was absent. Eventually, however, they started seeing baby pilot whales with orca pods throughout 2022 and 2023, and began to develop theories about what was happening.

In a new paper published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, Baumgartner and her team from a consortium of Nordic research institutions have posited three theories about the fascinating matchup: that the orcas are hunting the babies, playing with them, or perhaps even nurturing them.

As SciAm notes, each sighting involved a pilot whale calf that could be no more than a few weeks old that swam alongside an adult orca female in what marine biologists call "echelon position," with the baby beside and slightly behind the elder.

In some instances, the baby pilot whale was nudged along by the adult orcas, and on another occasion, it swam ahead of the pod before the adults caught up to it and lifted it out of the water and onto one of their backs.

That kind of playful and protective behavior does not, of course, sound predatory — but because "killer whales" are known for their violence, it can't be completely ruled out, the scientists say.

Along with what the orcas are doing with the baby pilot whales, researchers want to know how the two species, which generally do not overlap, came to not only be in the same place but also coexist in such a way.

"It could be," Baumgartner told SciAm, "[that the orcas] encountered the pilot whale opportunistically, and some individuals played with the whale, and others tried to nurture it."

As study co-author Filipa Samarra noted, there's a chance that climate change has led pilot whales, which typically follow schools of warm water-seeking mackerel, into orca territory.

More on marine life: Scientists Take First Ever Video of Colossal Squid in the Wild... With One Comical Issue

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Scientists Thought They Had Spotted Flowing Water on Mars. It Turned Out to Be Something Else Entirely.

Posted on May 20, 2025 by Danzig

Planetary scientists concluded that dark streaks spotted on the surface of Mars didn't have anything to do with flowing water.

Images sent back by NASA's Viking spacecraft in the 1970s revealed some unusual streaks stretching across the arid landscapes of Mars.

The sighting had scientists excited about the possibility of free-flowing water on an otherwise desolate planet. The streaks — which, at times, were thousands of feet long — appeared much darker, contrasting against the mostly monotonal, surrounding hills, looking as if somebody had spilled an enormous glass of water on a patch of hilly sand.

But decades later, we've got copious amounts of new data to rely on, suggesting we were entirely wrong about the features all along. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications, a team of planetary scientists concluded that the streaks didn't have anything to do with flowing water.

"A big focus of Mars research is understanding modern-day processes on Mars — including the possibility of liquid water on the surface," said coauthor and Brown University postdoctoral researcher Adomas Valantinas in a statement. Our study reviewed these features but found no evidence of water. Our model favors dry formation processes."

For decades, the streaks had intrigued scientists, inspiring theories about salt buildups that could allow water to flow on the predominantly dry Martian surface, which only rarely peaks above freezing temperatures. The theory suggested these streaks could therefore be a great place to not only look for Martian life, but possibly inhabit as well.

But new insights have thrown cold water on the idea, if you will. A detailed global Martian map, in particular, revealed over half a million streak features lining the planet's surface, allowing scientists to get a much broader look at the phenomenon.

"Once we had this global map, we could compare it to databases and catalogs of other things like temperature, wind speed, hydration, rock slide activity and other factors," said coauthor and University of Bern researcher Valentin Bickel in a statement. "Then we could look for correlations over hundreds of thousands of cases to better understand the conditions under which these features form."

The researchers found that the streaks were not associated with other factors tied to liquid water or frost, such as slope orientation, surface temperature, or humidity levels.

According to the data, they concluded that the streaks were far more likely to have been formed by high wind speeds and areas with plenty of dust accumulation.

Their theory: the streaks were the result of layers of fine dust suddenly slipping down steep slopes, the result of shockwaves caused by meteorite impacts and marsquakes.

In other words, the streaks aren't a great place to inhabit after all, despite plenty of optimism.

On the other hand, given that microbial life surviving on these slopes is looking extremely unlikely, NASA may be more prone to explore the area with spacecraft since the risk of contamination by an extraterrestrial organism is low.

More on Mars: Astronomers Stunned as Epic Mars Aurora Covers Entire Planet

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Scientists Revive Organism Found Buried at Bottom of Ocean

Posted on April 16, 2025 by Danzig

The dormant algae cells remained buried at the bottom of the Baltic Sea for thousands of years, and made a full recovery once revived.

A team of researchers in Germany have revived algae cells found buried at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, where they'd lain dormant for more than 7,000 years.

For millennia, the cells, imprisoned under layers of sediment, were deprived of oxygen or light. But once revived, they showed full functional recovery, the researchers report in a study published in The ISME Journal, firing back up their oxygen production and multiplying again like it was no big deal.

According to the team, this is the oldest known organism retrieved from aquatic sediments to be revived from dormancy, providing a stunning example of what's possible in the burgeoning field of "resurrection ecology."

"It is remarkable that the resurrected algae have not only survived 'just so,' but apparently have not lost any of their 'fitness,' i.e. their biological performance ability," study lead author Sarah Bolius of the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research said in a statement about the work. "They grow, divide and photosynthesize like their modern descendants."

When entering a dormant state, organisms can weather poor environmental conditions by storing energy and lowering their metabolism. Mammals like hedgehogs, for example, accomplish this by hibernating, relying on their body fat to outlast the winter.

But in the Baltic Sea, the conditions are just right to allow some algae to survive far longer than what a typical dormant state would allow. Upon becoming dormant, the phytoplankton cells sink to the bottom of the ocean, where they're gradually buried under accumulating layers of sediment.

These latest specimens were extracted from nearly 800 feet underwater, in an area known the Eastern Gotland Deep. Here, the waters are considered anoxic, meaning they have virtually no oxygen, especially at the lowest depths. Without this element, decomposition can't set in. And with the seafloor acting as a shield, there's no sunlight to damage the dormant algae cells, either.

In all, algae from nine separate samples were able to be restored after the researchers placed them back in favorable conditions. The eldest was dated to 6,871 years old, plus or minus 140 years, an estimate the researchers could confidently make thanks to the "clear stratification" of the sediment, according to Bolius.

"Such deposits are like a time capsule containing valuable information about past ecosystems and the inhabiting biological communities, their population development and genetic changes," Bolius said.

And that's what's really promising. Bolius believes that by reviving the dormant organisms, they'll also learn more about the environment during the period they originally lived in, such as the water's salinity, oxygen, and temperature conditions.

"The fact that we were actually able to successfully reactivate such old algae from dormancy is an important first step in the further development of the 'Resurrection Ecology' tool in the Baltic Sea," Bolius added. "This means that it is now possible to conduct 'time-jump experiments' into various stages of Baltic Sea development in the lab."

More on ocean life: It Turns Out Sharks Make Noises, and Here's What They Sound Like

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SpaceX Spotted Scooping Pieces of Starship Out of Ocean After Impact

Posted on December 16, 2024 by Danzig

Footage shows SpaceX crews retrieving debris belonging to the upper stage of SpaceX's enormous Starship rocket.

Breaking Things

There's always something you can learn from failure. Sometimes failure looks like your rocket blowing up after crashing into the ocean — but it's a learning opportunity nonetheless.

In the case of SpaceX, that means retrieving the watery remains of said rocket, Starship, to determine what went wrong during the less-than-perfect performance of its latest suborbital test flight. And so SpaceX employees traveled to the waters off the western coast of Australia, where the rocket's upper stage splashed down, to collect the debris.

These were the findings of SpaceX-focused content creator Interstellar Gateway, which gathered footage of the crews dredging up some of the spacecraft's hardware, including heat shield tiles and various tanks.

But there could be more than meets the eye. Based on Interstellar Gateway's sleuthing, the next retrieval mission could bring back the entire spacecraft in one piece.

"This was the first flight we've seen a vessel rigged specifically for towing... leading us to the realization that they may be attempting to return Starship back to port," Interstellar Gateway told Gizmodo. "Upon our investigation during their port operations, we noticed all of the needed lines and rigging materials needed to pull Starship back, as well as a staging area prepped with a crane, ready to remove Starship from the water."

Explosive Progress

SpaceX stunned the world with its fifth orbital flight test of Starship in October. After reaching space, the rocket's lower stage, the Super Heavy booster, made a controlled descent down to the Earth's surface, guiding itself back to its launch tower where it was caught midair by a pair of mechanical arms — an astonishingly precise feat of engineering.

The rocket couldn't repeat the feat, however, during its latest test in November. Just four minutes into the flight, SpaceX had to call off the booster catch, forcing the rocket to make a rough splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, where it immediately exploded into flames.

By contrast, the upper stage, the Starship spacecraft itself, demonstrated it could relight one of its engines in space and made a much softer, controlled splashdown in the ocean. Still, it did catch fire and fall apart after the landing, though nowhere near as dramatically as with the booster.

Safe and Sound

Besides the reusability factor, there's a huge incentive for SpaceX to recover the Starship spacecraft in one piece.

"There is only so much data SpaceX can get from Starship via StarLink transmissions as it has always sank shortly after splashdown," Interstellar Gateway told Giz. "Similar to the valuable data being used from the first caught and intact booster, there are tons of structural and out of view faults that can be found from an intact Starship returning to land."

With any luck, that'll soon be the case. The next Starship launch is reportedly slated for no earlier than January 11 next year — so keep an eye out.

More on Starship: Video Shows Robot Welding SpaceX Starship

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Meta’s AI Bootleg Moo Deng Is an Insult to Pygmy Hippos Everywhere

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Danzig

Meta has just announced Movie Gen, its new AI-powered video generation tool, and to show it off, it's flaunting an AI-generated baby hippo.

Boo Deng

Meta has just announced Movie Gen, its new AI-powered video generation tool for creating realistic-looking footage — and one-upping OpenAI's Sora, it can automatically add matching audio to its output.

But notable detail is its de facto choice of mascot. Featured front and center on the product's announcement page — and in the marketing material shared with the press — is an AI-generated video of a cute baby hippo swimming underwater.

We'd put money on that being a shameless evocation of Moo Deng, the young, plucky pygmy hippo whose adorable antics have endeared millions.

It may be a cynical marketing move, but based on the instructions it was given, the AI video generational tool was spot on — if you can overlook the AI sheen. "A baby hippo swimming in the river. Colorful flowers float at the surface, as fish swim around the hippo," reads the prompt entered into Movie Gen, as shared by Wired. "The hippo's skin is smooth and shiny, reflecting the sunlight that filters through the water."

And impressively, we must admit, all of that's there. It doesn't compare to the perfect creature that is Moo Deng — but it's all there.

Super proud of our Movie Gen reveal because it can generate:
— Edits (way more fun than restyles)
— Personalization (imagine yourself - in video!)
— Moo Deng pic.twitter.com/KfQ5QfTrBq
— Danny Trinh (@dtrinh) October 4, 2024

Filmfaker

For new footage, Movie Gen can generate clips up to 16 seconds long at 16 frames per second, according to The New York Times. (This puts it short of the filmmaking standard of 24 fps, despite Meta claiming it can help Hollywood filmmakers in its blog post.)

But it can also be used as an editing tool for existing footage, too. In a series of examples shared in the announcement, the AI is used to add pom poms to the hands of a man running across a scenic landscape, and in an even more ridiculous showing, place him in a dinosaur suit.

Movie Gen can also generate audio for the footage it produces by using both video and text inputs. That includes sound effects, background music, or even entire soundtracks, Meta said.

One example depicts a man gazing over a cliff as water crashes down around him, with music swelling in the background. Another shows firecrackers being shot into the sky, and the audio seems pretty well timed to the explosions, down to the crackling that follows.

Product Pending

There's just one small thing: Movie Gen isn't available to the public yet, and it probably won't be for a while.

"We aren't ready to release this as a product anytime soon — it's still expensive and generation time is too long — but we wanted to share where we are since the results are getting quite impressive," Chris Cox, Meta's chief product officer, wrote on Threads.

It's also far from perfect. In the NYT's testing, it mistakenly grafted a human hand onto a phone that was meant to be held by a dog.

To be fair, OpenAI's Sora, which generated a lot of hype when it was unveiled in February, is also yet to be made public.

In the meantime, other companies like Google-backed Runway have stepped in with impressive AI video generation tools of their own — so the race is on.

More on AI: Gullible Trump Cronies Losing Their Minds Over Fake AI Slop on Twitter

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Suspected Russian Spy Whale Found Dead Under Mysterious Circumstances

Posted on September 5, 2024 by Danzig

RIP Hvaldimir

In 2019, a purported "Russian spy beluga" stole our hearts — and now, we must mourn its early demise.

The 2,000-pound sea creature, later dubbed Hvaldimir, was found by Norwegian fishermen with a camera mount harness that read "Equipment of St. Petersburg," resulting in intrigue and speculation.

Over the last five years, Hvaldimir has been the subject of several viral stories, from the time it retrieved a GoPro to playing fetch.

But over the weekend, the jolly beluga was found dead — and animal activists are in disagreement about how he died.

"It is with heavy hearts that we share the news of Hvaldimir’s passing," Norwegian non-profit Marine Mind, which has been tracking the whale's whereabouts, wrote in an Instagram post. "This morning, after receiving a sighting report from a local, our team arrived to find Hvaldimir floating peacefully in the water."

"It is not immediately clear what caused his death," he continued, and a "necropsy will be conducted to determine his early passing."

Suspicious Circumstances

The events surrounding the whale's death remain shrouded in mystery — which is only fitting considering his much-debated "Russian spy" past.

Hvaldimir was estimated to be around 14 to 15 years old, only roughly half of the average lifespan of a beluga whale.

Last year, marine science student and whale tracker Emma Luck noted that Hvaldimir's appearance had changed dramatically, tweeting that "you can see how much weight he has lost."

In May of last year, scientists raised concerns that the whale was possibly not eating enough fish.

While Marine Mind founder Sebastian Strand told AFP that there were no signs of visible injuries, nonprofit One Whale founder Regina Raug referred to "holes pouring with blood from his body" in an Instagram video.

"We got to visit Hvaldimir today ourselves and see him and say goodbye, and there was no question that he was dying from something very unnatural and heartbreaking," she said.

Fortunately, we'll hopefully soon hear more.

"The autopsy is conducted by the Norwegian Veterinary Institute, and the conclusion will be public in two or three weeks," the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries told People in a statement.

Speculation aside, it's an unfortunate end to a much-beloved creature.

"Over the past five years, he touched the lives of tens of thousands, bringing people together in awe of the wonders of nature," Marine Mind wrote in its Instagram post. "Rest in peace, Hvaldimir. You will be deeply missed, but never forgotten."

More on Hvaldimir: The Suspected Russian Spy Whale Isn't Looking So Good

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SpaceX Violated Environmental Rules by Dumping Toxic Wastewater, Regulators Find

Posted on August 17, 2024 by Danzig

A Texas agency has spanked Elon Musk's SpaceX for dumping toxic pollution into the water around its sprawling Starbase launch site in Texas.

Dumping Sludge

A Texas agency has given Elon Musk's SpaceX a slap on the wrist for spewing toxic wastewater into the fragile ecosystem around its sprawling Starbase launch site, according to CNBC.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) accused SpaceX of "discharging deluge water" without their approval in early August, adding to a total of 14 complaints against the aerospace company for polluting the surrounding environment.

The notice could potentially delay SpaceX's ambitions of launching more than two dozen rockets annually at its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, in addition to any plans for space missions at Cape Canaveral, Florida (where SpaceX has also received environmental complaints).

SpaceX responded to the Texas notice and CNBC report in a lengthy post on the social media platform X-formerly-Twitter, saying that the company has been careful about any "excess water" not coming into contact with "local groundwater." This all comes amid the fact that SpaceX has actually been working alongside the TCEQ and the US Environmental Protection Agency on the subject of the violation notice, its water deluge system, which uses water to cool "the heat and vibration from the rocket engines firing."

"Throughout our ongoing coordination with both TCEQ and the EPA, we have explicitly asked if operation of the deluge system needed to stop and we were informed that operations could continue," SpaceX tweeted.

CNBC’s story on Starship’s launch operations in South Texas is factually inaccurate.
Starship’s water-cooled flame deflector system is critical equipment for SpaceX’s launch operations. It ensures flight safety and protects the launch site and surrounding area.
Also known as…
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 12, 2024

Captain Planet

Besides this latest violation, residents and environmentalists have already complained about the impact of rockets launched at the Boca Chica site, which is situated next to a beach where endangered sea turtles breed and a critical migratory bird habitat.

Rocket launches at the site have scorched the lands, blasted apart the nests of migratory birds, and rained rocket debris on fragile flora, but Musk, SpaceX CEO, has been able to successfully yield his influence within the Federal Aviation Administration while running roughshod over upset officials at the US Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service, according to a July report in The New York Times.

In Florida, Musk and SpaceX are already facing complaints about how the company may potentially launch more than 70 rockets at Cape Canaveral, with a whole array of disparate stakeholders — residents to commercial fishermen — upset at the impact of that unprecedented, high number of rocket launches in a single year.

Any complaint taken far enough could, theoretically, forestall these rocket launches. Though — given the sheer tonnage of financially and politically incentivized parties lined up behind Musk and SpaceX — it would likely take an advocacy effort as ahistorical as Musk's ambitions to slow them, if there's even one to be had.

More on SpaceX: Elon Musk Slammed for Filling Orbit With Space Junk

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