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Meet the Bajau sea nomads — they can reportedly hold their breath for 13 minutes
The Bajau people's nomadic lifestyle has given them remarkable adaptions, enabling them to stay underwater for unbelievable periods of time. Their lifestyle, however, is quickly disappearing.

- The Bajau people travel in small flotillas throughout the Phillipines, Malaysia, and Indonesia, hunting fish underwater for food.
- Over the years, practicing this lifestyle has given the Bajau unique adaptations to swimming underwater. Many find it straightforward to dive up to 13 minutes 200 feet below the surface of the ocean.
- Unfortunately, many disparate factors are erasing the traditional Bajau way of life.
Picture yourself holding your breath. How long can you last underwater? A minute? Two? You probably imagined yourself sitting a foot or so beneath the surface of a pool during this exercise, but consider how long you can hold your breath actively swimming as deep below the surface of the ocean as you can go. This would probably look like maybe 30 seconds of swimming down followed by a rush to the surface. The Bajau people of the Philippines, though, according to reports, could quite confidently imagine swimming 200 feet below the ocean surface for up to 13 minutes.
These abilities aren't merely the result of dedicated training. The Bajau people have lived their lives at sea for generations, so much so that they've developed special adaptations to their oceanic lifestyle.
Uniquely adapted to a unique life
A Bajau child preparing to dive for coins thrown by tourists. Image source: Wikimedia Commons
The traditional Bajau lifestyle is mainly spent on boats organized into flotillas that meander around the waters of the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Here, they engage in subsistence hunting, spearing fish for food when the need arises. In a given day, a Bajau individual might spend five hours underwater in total, where they are complete masters of their environment. The only equipment they use are handcrafted wooden goggles and a speargun.
In order to facilitate their freediving lifestyle, some Bajau deliberately puncture their eardrums to deal with the intense pressure they experience underwater. "You bleed from your ears and nose, and you have to spend a week lying down because of the dizziness," said Imran Lahassan, a Bajau man, to The Guardian. "After that you can dive without pain." Bajau who undergo this procedure tend to become hard of hearing in their old age.
Simply diving frequently also helps them become more capable swimmers. The lung wall and abdomen become more compliant, and diaphragms become stretchier. But researchers have discovered that the Bajau also possess a useful genetic trait. Specifically, the Bajau possess variants of the PDE10A gene and the BDKRB2 gene, variants that are absent from their closest neighbors, the Saluan, who do not live their lives at sea.
This change manifests itself in a few ways. For one, Bajau have spleens that are 50 percent larger than the Saluan. Spleens aren't necessary for survival, but they do play a role in the immune system and act as a kind of filter for the blood, removing old red blood cells and recycling iron. But crucially, the spleen holds a reserve of blood. When mammals dive underwater, the spleen contracts, distributing the reserved, oxygen-rich blood throughout the body. So, a bigger spleen means more available oxygen when diving.
Furthermore, the genetic variants that the Bajau possess is associated with another feature of the diving response: peripheral vasoconstriction, although this phenomenon hasn't been directly observed by researchers. The unique genetic profile of the Bajau may enable them to better constrict noncritical areas of their vascular system. In essence, this means that less blood is used in the more external parts of their bodies such as their limbs, and more blood is sent to critical areas like the heart, lungs, and brain, enabling longer dives.
A way of life at risk
A typical Bajau stilt village. Image source: Fabio Achilli on Flickr
Unfortunately, the nomadic lifestyle of the Bajau people has been dying out for years. Many factors are working against them. First, nomadism itself isn't compatible with modern states, and many Bajau have been made to settle on land or in stilt villages built on shallow seas. What's more, some Bajau engage in fishing practices that directly harm the environments they rely on. Some divers crush up potassium cyanide tablets into plastic bottles full of seawater, which can then be squirted at fish to stun them for an easy catch. The practice easily damages sensitive coral reefs that form the environment for many of the fish species they rely on for food. Industrial fishing, too, is depleting the fish stocks they used to survive. Altogether, the changing world is quickly erasing the Bajau way of life.
How New York's largest hospital system is predicting COVID-19 spikes
Northwell Health is using insights from website traffic to forecast COVID-19 hospitalizations two weeks in the future.
- The machine-learning algorithm works by analyzing the online behavior of visitors to the Northwell Health website and comparing that data to future COVID-19 hospitalizations.
- The tool, which uses anonymized data, has so far predicted hospitalizations with an accuracy rate of 80 percent.
- Machine-learning tools are helping health-care professionals worldwide better constrain and treat COVID-19.
The value of forecasting
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Credit: Northwell Health
<p>One unique benefit of forecasting COVID-19 hospitalizations is that it allows health systems to better prepare, manage and allocate resources. For example, if the tool forecasted a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations in two weeks, Northwell Health could begin:</p><ul><li>Making space for an influx of patients</li><li>Moving personal protective equipment to where it's most needed</li><li>Strategically allocating staff during the predicted surge</li><li>Increasing the number of tests offered to asymptomatic patients</li></ul><p>The health-care field is increasingly using machine learning. It's already helping doctors develop <a href="https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2020/06/09/dc19-1870" target="_blank">personalized care plans for diabetes patients</a>, improving cancer screening techniques, and enabling mental health professionals to better predict which patients are at <a href="https://healthitanalytics.com/news/ehr-data-fuels-accurate-predictive-analytics-for-suicide-risk" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">elevated risk of suicide</a>, to name a few applications.</p><p>Health systems around the world have already begun exploring how <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7315944/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">machine learning can help battle the pandemic</a>, including better COVID-19 screening, diagnosis, contact tracing, and drug and vaccine development.</p><p>Cruzen said these kinds of tools represent a shift in how health systems can tackle a wide variety of problems.</p><p>"Health care has always used the past to predict the future, but not in this mathematical way," Cruzen said. "I think [Northwell Health's new predictive tool] really is a great first example of how we should be attacking a lot of things as we go forward."</p>Making machine-learning tools openly accessible
<p>Northwell Health has made its predictive tool <a href="https://github.com/northwell-health/covid-web-data-predictor" target="_blank">available for free</a> to any health system that wishes to utilize it.</p><p>"COVID is everybody's problem, and I think developing tools that can be used to help others is sort of why people go into health care," Dr. Cruzen said. "It was really consistent with our mission."</p><p>Open collaboration is something the world's governments and health systems should be striving for during the pandemic, said Michael Dowling, Northwell Health's president and CEO.</p><p>"Whenever you develop anything and somebody else gets it, they improve it and they continue to make it better," Dowling said. "As a country, we lack data. I believe very, very strongly that we should have been and should be now working with other countries, including China, including the European Union, including England and others to figure out how to develop a health surveillance system so you can anticipate way in advance when these things are going to occur."</p><p>In all, Northwell Health has treated more than 112,000 COVID patients. During the pandemic, Dowling said he's seen an outpouring of goodwill, collaboration, and sacrifice from the community and the tens of thousands of staff who work across Northwell.</p><p>"COVID has changed our perspective on everything—and not just those of us in health care, because it has disrupted everybody's life," Dowling said. "It has demonstrated the value of community, how we help one another."</p>3,000-pound Triceratops skull unearthed in South Dakota
"You dream about these kinds of moments when you're a kid," said lead paleontologist David Schmidt.
Excavation of a triceratops skull in South Dakota.
- The triceratops skull was first discovered in 2019, but was excavated over the summer of 2020.
- It was discovered in the South Dakota Badlands, an area where the Triceratops roamed some 66 million years ago.
- Studying dinosaurs helps scientists better understand the evolution of all life on Earth.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
<p style="margin-left: 20px;">"We had to be really careful," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "We couldn't disturb anything at all, because at that point, it was under law enforcement investigation. They were telling us, 'Don't even make footprints,' and I was thinking, 'How are we supposed to do that?'"</p><p>Another difficulty was the mammoth size of the skull: about 7 feet long and more than 3,000 pounds. (For context, the largest triceratops skull ever unearthed was about <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724634.2010.483632" target="_blank">8.2 feet long</a>.) The skull of Schmidt's dinosaur was likely a <em>Triceratops prorsus, </em>one of two species of triceratops that roamed what's now North America about 66 million years ago.</p>Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
<p>The triceratops was an herbivore, but it was also a favorite meal of the T<em>yrannosaurus rex</em>. That probably explains why the Dakotas contain many scattered triceratops bone fragments, and, less commonly, complete bones and skulls. In summer 2019, for example, a separate team on a dig in North Dakota made <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/science/triceratops-skull-65-million-years-old.html" target="_blank">headlines</a> after unearthing a complete triceratops skull that measured five feet in length.</p><p>Michael Kjelland, a biology professor who participated in that excavation, said digging up the dinosaur was like completing a "multi-piece, 3-D jigsaw puzzle" that required "engineering that rivaled SpaceX," he jokingly told the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/science/triceratops-skull-65-million-years-old.html" target="_blank">New York Times</a>.</p>Morrison Formation in Colorado
James St. John via Flickr
Triceratops illustration
Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons |
World's oldest work of art found in a hidden Indonesian valley
Archaeologists discover a cave painting of a wild pig that is now the world's oldest dated work of representational art.
Pig painting at Leang Tedongnge in Indonesia, made at 45,500 years ago.
- Archaeologists find a cave painting of a wild pig that is at least 45,500 years old.
- The painting is the earliest known work of representational art.
- The discovery was made in a remote valley on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Oldest Cave Art Found in Sulawesi
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a9734e306f0914bfdcbe79a1e317a7f0"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b-wAYtBxn7E?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>What can Avicenna teach us about the mind-body problem?
The Persian polymath and philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age teaches us about self-awareness.
The incredible physics behind quantum computing
Can computers do calculations in multiple universes? Scientists are working on it. Step into the world of quantum computing.
