The oceans are getting louder and forcing some whale to speak up, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Biology Letters.

Lead researcher Susan Parks of Penn State University eavesdropped on seven male and seven female North Atlantic right whales by attaching acoustic tags to them via suction cups. Each tag recorded from 2 to 18 calls, which included the whales’ greeting “upcalls” (seemingly questioning “hmm?” sounds that go from a low to high pitch — see video), as well as background noise–believed to come from commercial shipping.

Bioacoustics researcher Christopher Clark of Cornell University, who did not participate in the study, says that ocean noise is becoming a serious issue.

“If I had to immerse you into the sea off Boston, you’d be shocked. You’d be like a country mouse dropped in the middle of Heathrow Airport,” says Clark. “In one generation, we have raised the background level for an entire ocean ecosystem.” [New Scientist]

At 400 hertz, some of this background noise seems to overlap with the frequency of right whale greetings, and Parks believes that these endangered whales are shouting to compensate. The team recorded background noise ranging from 92 to 143 decibels; whales seemed to respond by increasing the volume of their calls in line with the background noise, producing calls which ranged from 120 to almost 150 decibels.

“The impacts of increases in ocean noise from human activities are a concern for the conservation of marine animals like right whales,” [said Parks]…. “The ability to change vocalizations to compensate for environmental noise is critical for successful communication in an increasingly noisy ocean.” [Penn State]

The study was small, only including fourteen whales, and therefore preliminary. Background noise levels vary depending on ocean location, and different whale species make calls at different volumes and frequencies. Still, if the noise in the oceans continues, the study’s authors argue, the whales may have trouble making the calls necessary for activities such as feeding and mating.

One downside is that “shouting,” as for humans and other animals, requires more energy expenditure and probable strain, so we are making life more difficult for these already at risk marine mammals…. “When noise exceeds a certain level, right whales will not be able to increase their call amplitude enough to compensate,” [Parks said]. [Discovery News]

Newsweek has a long piece up which reviews some major issues with the new study of centenarians that’s been all over the media right now. Ed Yong already covered the paper, but I’m going to look at the details myself. Here’s a update from the Newsweek post:

Within an hour of this story’s publication, the Science study’s authors released a statement which a BU spokeswoman described as appearing “because of your inquiry and a similar one from the New York Times concerning methodology used to test 2 of the 150 genetic variants.” Here is what the statement says: “Since the publication of our study in Science, which was extensively peer-reviewed, a question has been raised about two elements of the findings. One has to do with two of the 150 genetic variants included in the prediction model, while the other is related to the criteria used to determine the significance of the individual variants. On the first concern, we have been made aware that there is a technical error in the lab test used on approximately 10% of the centenarian sample that involved the two of the 150 variants. Our preliminary analysis of this issue suggests that the apparent error would not effect the overall accuracy of the model. Because the issue has been raised since the publication of the paper, we are now closely re-examining the analysis. Another question that was raised concerns the criteria used to determine if an association between a genetic variant and exceptional longevity was statistically significant. We used standard criteria for the analysis, and we are confident that the appropriate threshold was used.”

It has just been revealed that "Tom Johnson," whose story I elevated from the comments of this blog into a distinct post, and who I praised for coming forward, was also "bilbo," "milton c," and various other commenters here. And now he's going by "William." Needless to say, I no longer consider his story credible. Until these revelations, I had no idea of any of this. Not only had I never checked my commenters' IP addresses or for sock puppets before (although now I see that I should have). But moreover, when it came to "Tom Johnson," I emailed him after his first comment, to check on his identity. The response claimed to be a specific person--a specific Ph.D. candidate at a specific university--and provided a university website and considerable detail about this person's scientific career, publishing record, outreach endeavors, and so on. Now, "William" says, "When Chris contacted me, I made up a story about being a grad. student as an explanation about where the story came from because I didn’t want the Tom character to get exposed as false." No. It wasn't just a story about being a graduate student. A specific name was given, a specific career, a specific website, a specific university, ...

The self-driving car was achieved–13 years ago. As part of the National Automated Highway Consortium, a team of engineers and scientists had a platoon of eight cars motor down a stretch Interstate-15 in San Diego, driver free and safe.

So what happened? Computers are faster, cars are safer–but we’re not seeing any self-driving cars, as envisioned in sci-fi from Knight Rider to Minority Report. “It was too expensive,” said Mohan Trivedi, a University of California-San Diego professor who specializes in intelligent cars. The cars required highway lined with sensors and magnets to guide the cars, massively increasing the cost of building roads. So the project died.

But not the dream of better cars. Trivedi chaired the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium last month, and he said science realized that maybe we don’t want to cede control of our cars. “We have a connection with our vehicles we don’t want to give up,” he said.

Instead, smart car research is focused on how cars can better assist their human drivers. There were some pretty cool concepts on display at the conference:

* Directional sound. One UCSD team of grad students was playing with ways they could modulate the amplitude and frequency of sound from a set of high-end speakers to create a sense of where a sound is coming from. Cameras outside the car can detect objects on the road (like a car in the blind spot), and project sound at the driver so it sounds like it’s coming from where the object is.

I got to try it out. Using just a speaker in front of me (no surround sound!) they could simulate a haircut. I could hear the scissors move around my head.

Other members of that same team were using the directional sound to project conversations between the front and back seats, and to make it so that different people in the car could listen to different entertainment without interference.

* Autodimming windshield. A pair of high school students came up with this one. They found a material that increased its opacity when an electric charge ran through it. Using a camera to sense the location and brightness of the sun, they think they can devise a windshield that automatically dims when necessary.

* Lane-changing assistance. Another team has devised a way for the car to recognize the lane on the highway and determine whether the driver intends to change lanes, or is just drifting. If the former, the system will assist with the lane change; if the latter, it will alert the driver to straighten out.

OK, there was some advance in self-driving technology on display. Behold, from the minds at Stanford University’s Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory, a car that can store a map of a parking garage and be sent off to park itself. It can be summoned back with just a cell phone call. Maybe KITT won’t be deferred for too much longer.