Scientists believe they have found a new use for facial recognition technology: saving large ocean animals known as seals. Researchers at Colgate University in the U. S. state of New York have developed SealNet. The system is a database of seal faces created by taking pictures of many harbor seals in Maine’s Casco Bay.

The research team found the tool’s accuracy in identifying the mammals was close to 100 percent. The researchers are working on increasing the size of their database to make it available to other scientists, said Krista Ingram. She is a biology professor at Colgate and a team member.

Increasing the database to include rare species such as the Mediterranean monk seal and Hawaiian monk seal could help efforts to save those species, she said. Creating a list of seal faces and using machine learning to identify them can also help scientists know where in the ocean seals are, Ingram said. She said, “For marine mammals that move around a lot and are hard to photograph in the water, we need to be able to identify individuals. ”

SealNet is designed to identify the face in a picture. It recognizes the seal’s face based on information related to the eyes and nose shape, as it would a human. A similar tool called PrimNet, which is for use on primates(灵长类), had been used on seals earlier, but SealNet performed better, the Colgate researchers said. Seals and other ocean mammals have long been studied using satellite technology. Using artificial intelligence to study them is a way to bring conservation into the 21st century.

Facial recognition technology could provide valuable data, said Michelle Berger, an associate scientist at the Shaw Institute in Maine. Berger was not involved in the SealNet research. “Once the system is perfected I can picture lots of interesting environmental uses for it”, Berger said. “If they could recognize seals, and recognize them from year to year, that would give us lots of information about movement, how much they move from site to site. ”

Last Friday, Mike Babbitt was about to leave the Bremerton Yacht Club to go gas up when the engine of the boat caught fire.

“The wind was blowing from the North. It would have blown the boat into the yacht (快艇) club so I just gave it all the power I could to get it away from the yacht club,” he told Komo News. However, that wasn’t the end of Mike’s mission (使命). Still on the boat were his two bulldogs Pearl and Hootie. He placed the dogs on a paddleboard before jumping into the water himself.

He explained to Komo News that he didn’t even have time to grasp a life coat or his oxygen. Mike served in the army for five years in a special police unit in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his time in the army, he suffered a pancreatic (胰腺的) attack that forced him to rely on oxygen treatment for the rest of his life.

Still, he succeeded in doing the unthinkable. “I just slid into the water and started paddling away from the fire and I could still feel the heat from the fire,” Mike told the news reporters. Mike was then rescued by some friends and later transported to a nearby hospital, where his wife Jamie met him. The fire is especially heartbreaking for Mike and his wife as the yacht was their only house. They had early sold their home and saved up in order to live a life on the water.

However, Mike is just happy to have survived. “I think it is the gift of God watching over us,” Mike told Komo News. “You have to put it exactly that were still alive and we’re still together.” A GoFundMe has since been created to help the Babbitts following the fire.

A group of scientists at Georgia Tech University have recently studied the ways that elephants use sucking power when eating. Along the way, the scientists have learned a number of other surprising things elephants can do with their trunks.

Elephants' trunks are incredible. They weigh over 91 kilograms, but there are no bones in an elephant's trunk. That helps explain how they can bend and twist, and be used in so many different ways.

Elephants use their trunks to breathe, to smell and to make sounds. Though trunks aren't connected to elephants' stomachs, they are used to grab around 180 kilograms of food every day and bring it to elephants' mouths. Elephants also use their trunks to suck up water to squirt（喷射）into their mouths or on their backs.

But elephants' trunks are also strong enough to be used for fighting. They're made of pure muscle, and can lift items as heavy as 350 kilograms. The scientists wanted to learn more about how elephants' trunks handle small things that don't weigh much.

For African elephants, part of that answer lies in the two finger-like tips they have at the end of their trunks, which allow them to grab things. The scientists studied the African elephants at Zoo Atlanta. They gave the elephants small cubes of a vegetable called a rutabaga. If there were just a few cubes, the elephant would use its fingers to pick them up. But if there were 10 or more cubes, the elephant would suck the cubes up with its trunk and then put them in its mouth.

The elephants could even use suction to lift up something as thin and fragile as a tortilla chip（圆饼片）without breaking it. They did it the same way a person might lift a piece of paper with his mouth by sucking in. That gentleness is surprising in a tool as powerful as an elephant's trunk.