Founded over ten years ago by US Navy veteran Dr Eric Rasmussen and US Army veteran Alex Hatoum, the group was soon joined by superb documentarian and X-Ray Mag contributor Lorenzo Moscia, who created a video capturing key moments over the past decade.
The conservation of endangered species receives a technological boost as scientists at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) devise an artificial intelligence (AI) method that accurately counts manatee populations in real-time.
Counting manatees has long presented a challenge due to their herding behaviour, weather conditions, time of day and environmental factors that obscure their visibility. Water reflections can also hinder the counting process.
Scientists have developed a small robotic device that can collect microplastics from the surfaces of oceans, seas and lakes.
Plastic collection devices currently in use mostly use drag nets or conveyor belts to retrieve plastic debris from the ocean. These, unfortunately, are unable to collect microplastics, which enter our food chain after they are consumed by marine animals that eventually end up on our dinner plates.
Scientists believe that the ice shelves under the sea ice hold the keys to further our understanding of climate change. Unfortunately, diving to such areas to explore them is impossible.
How, then, can we access these areas?
Scientist Xi Yu from West Virginia University may have found the answer. She suggests deploying a fleet of marine robots, controlled by a smart mothership, to reach these inaccessible depths and transmit back invaluable insights.
In a world where facial recognition technology is becoming commonplace, it is not just humans who are being identified. A groundbreaking study has successfully applied this technology to identify individual whales and dolphins in the wild across 24 species.
A May 2023 diving science and technology exercise successfully demonstrated the concept of an ‘underwater camping trip’.
The project took place within the University of Arizona’s Biosphere 2 facility, which is best known for its enclosed environments for earth science research, as well as studying human performance within such environments. The Biosphere 2 recently celebrated the recent accomplishment of enabling terrestrial Mars simulations at the Biosphere.
Part of sea turtle conservation involves monitoring when turtle hatchlings emerge from the nest and ensuring that they make it safely to the oceans. This method currently involves much manpower and cost, as we cannot predict the exact day and time of this occurrence.
Keeping an eye on whale behaviour is not easy, considering the fact that they travel vast distances and spend the majority of their time beneath the ocean surface.
To counter this, researchers at Oregon State University {OSU) have developed a new satellite tag that can track the whales' movements, even during dives.
Known as RDW, this new technology incorporates pressure and accelerometer sensors, thus giving the researchers the opportunity to monitor the whales’ movements underwater for several months.
Scapa Flow, located in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, is the site of the scuttling of the High Seas Fleet of the Imperial German Navy in June 1919 at the end of World War I. While many of the wrecks were salvaged following the war, the remaining wrecks have become popular dive sites. In recent times, efforts to learn more about these wrecks through multibeam sonar surveys and 3D photogrammetry have taken place. Rosemary E.
A team of scientists at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology are applying innovative approaches to 3D printing solutions in a bid to restore depleted coral reefs.
Instead of using synthetic or hybrid materials, they have developed a new approach called 3D CoraPrint, which uses an eco-friendly and sustainable calcium carbonate photo-initiated (CCP) ink that they also developed.
In the colonization process, coral microfragments are attached to a printed skeleton. There are two methods used, and both start with a scanned model of the coral skeleton.
