Nigeria Hits Back at U.S. on Claims of Christian 'Persecution'

Nigeria's government on Friday strongly denied claims from the US Congress that Christians were victims of persecution.

- Agence France-Presse

TOKYO: The ocean covers nearly three-quarters of our planet, but scientists say we have barely scratched the surface of what lives in our seas. But new technologies are helping to change that, revealing hidden oil spills, speeding up the discovery of new species, and uncovering how light pollution impacts marine life.

Uncovering hidden oil spills

Satellite imagery means large oil spills in the ocean are relatively easily detected. When a tanker crashes or a pipe bursts, scientists know where to look.

"It used to take human analysts weeks if not months to be able to detect a single (small-scale) oil pollution incident," explained Mitchelle De Leon of US-based NGO SkyTruth. The group harnesses machine learning to comb through large datasets of satellite imagery and find spills that might previously have gone undetected. SkyTruth has revealed spills in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean and helped expose pollution from shadowy Russian ships. We think of our tool as a starting point...to make hidden human pollution events more visible," said De Leon.