Founded | 2020 |
---|---|
Type | Non-profit |
Focus | Understanding the communication of sperm whales |
Fields | Marine Biology, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Linguistics |
Lead | David Gruber |
Website | www |
Project CETI is an international initiative to understand the acoustic communication of sperm whales using advances in artificial intelligence. [1] [2] The project has an interdisciplinary scientific board including marine biologists, artificial intelligence researchers, roboticists, theoretical computer scientists, and linguists. The project has a base on the island of Dominica where recordings are being collected. [3] The organization has been selected as a TED Audacious Project. [4] CETI researchers have identified 156 distinct codas and their basic components, a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet" much like phonemes. [5]
Ambergris, ambergrease, or grey amber is a solid, waxy, flammable substance of a dull grey or blackish colour produced in the digestive system of sperm whales. Freshly produced ambergris has a marine, fecal odor. It acquires a sweet, earthy scent as it ages, commonly likened to the fragrance of isopropyl alcohol without the vaporous chemical astringency.
Cetacea is an infraorder of aquatic mammals belonging to the order Artiodactyla that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. Key characteristics are their fully aquatic lifestyle, streamlined body shape, often large size and exclusively carnivorous diet. They propel themselves through the water with powerful up-and-down movement of their tail which ends in a paddle-like fluke, using their flipper-shaped forelimbs to maneuver.
Whales are a widely distributed and diverse group of fully aquatic placental marine mammals. As an informal and colloquial grouping, they correspond to large members of the infraorder Cetacea, i.e. all cetaceans apart from dolphins and porpoises. Dolphins and porpoises may be considered whales from a formal, cladistic perspective. Whales, dolphins and porpoises belong to the order Cetartiodactyla, which consists of even-toed ungulates. Their closest non-cetacean living relatives are the hippopotamuses, from which they and other cetaceans diverged about 54 million years ago. The two parvorders of whales, baleen whales (Mysticeti) and toothed whales (Odontoceti), are thought to have had their last common ancestor around 34 million years ago. Mysticetes include four extant (living) families: Balaenopteridae, Balaenidae, Cetotheriidae, and Eschrichtiidae. Odontocetes include the Monodontidae, Physeteridae, Kogiidae, and Ziphiidae, as well as the six families of dolphins and porpoises which are not considered whales in the informal sense.
The International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet or simply the Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, commonly known as the NATO phonetic alphabet, is the most widely used set of clear-code words for communicating the letters of the Roman alphabet. Technically a radiotelephonic spelling alphabet, it goes by various names, including NATO spelling alphabet, ICAO phonetic alphabet, and ICAO spelling alphabet. The ITU phonetic alphabet and figure code is a rarely used variant that differs in the code words for digits.
Artificial insemination is the deliberate introduction of sperm into a female's cervix or uterine cavity for the purpose of achieving a pregnancy through in vivo fertilization by means other than sexual intercourse. It is a fertility treatment for humans, and is a common practice in animal breeding, including dairy cattle and pigs.
The giant squid is a species of deep-ocean dwelling squid in the family Architeuthidae. It can grow to a tremendous size, offering an example of abyssal gigantism: recent estimates put the maximum size at around 12–13 m (39–43 ft) for females and 10 m (33 ft) for males, from the posterior fins to the tip of the two long tentacles. The mantle of the giant squid is about 2 m long, and the length of the squid excluding its tentacles rarely exceeds 5 m (16 ft). Claims of specimens measuring 20 m (66 ft) or more have not been scientifically documented.
The sperm whale or cachalot is the largest of the toothed whales and the largest toothed predator. It is the only living member of the genus Physeter and one of three extant species in the sperm whale family, along with the pygmy sperm whale and dwarf sperm whale of the genus Kogia.
Spermaceti is a waxy substance found in the head cavities of the sperm whale. Spermaceti is created in the spermaceti organ inside the whale's head. This organ may contain as much as 1,900 litres (500 US gal) of spermaceti. It has been extracted by whalers since the 17th century for human use in cosmetics, textiles, and candles.
Cetacean intelligence is the overall intelligence and derived cognitive ability of aquatic mammals belonging in the infraorder Cetacea (cetaceans), including baleen whales, porpoises, and dolphins. In 2014, a study found for first time that the long-finned pilot whale has more neocortical neurons than any other mammal, including humans, examined to date.
Animal languages are forms of communication between animals that show similarities to human language. Animals communicate through a variety of signs, such as sounds and movements. Signing among animals may be considered a form of language if the inventory of signs is large enough. The signs are relatively arbitrary, and the animals seem to produce them with a degree of volition.
The pygmy sperm whale is one of two extant species in the family Kogiidae in the sperm whale superfamily. They are not often sighted at sea, and most of what is known about them comes from the examination of stranded specimens.
Whales use a variety of sounds for communication and sensation. The mechanisms used to produce sound vary from one family of cetaceans to another. Marine mammals, including whales, dolphins, and porpoises, are much more dependent on sound than land mammals due to the limited effectiveness of other senses in water. Sight is less effective for marine mammals because of the way particulates in the ocean scatter light. Smell is also limited, as molecules diffuse more slowly in water than in air, which makes smelling less effective. However, the speed of sound is roughly four times greater in water than in the atmosphere at sea level. As sea mammals are so dependent on hearing to communicate and feed, environmentalists and cetologists are concerned that they are being harmed by the increased ambient noise in the world's oceans caused by ships, sonar and marine seismic surveys.
Shafrira Goldwasser is an Israeli-American computer scientist. A winner of the Turing Award in 2012, she is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science; the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley; and co-founder and chief scientist of Duality Technologies.
CETI or Ceti may refer to:
The communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) is a branch of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) that focuses on composing and deciphering interstellar messages that theoretically could be understood by another technological civilization. The best-known CETI experiment of its kind was the 1974 Arecibo message composed by Frank Drake.
Ardrossan is a town in the Australian state of South Australia located on the eastern coast of the Yorke Peninsula, about 150 kilometres (93 mi) by road from the Adelaide city centre. It is notable for its deepwater shipping port and its towering coastal cliffs of red clay.
Roger Searle Payne was an American biologist and environmentalist famous for his 1967 discovery of whale song among humpback whales. Payne later became an important figure in the worldwide campaign to end commercial whaling.
James Nestor is an author and journalist who has written for Outside, Scientific American, Dwell, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Men's Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and others. His 2020 nonfiction book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, was an international bestseller, debuting on the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists and spending 18 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers in its first year of release. Breath won the award for Best General Nonfiction Book of 2020 by the American Society of Journalists and Authors and was a finalist for the Royal Society Science Book Prize. Breath was translated into more than 35 languages in 2022.
David Gruber is an American marine biologist, a Presidential Professor of Biology and Environmental Sciences at Baruch College, City University of New York, and a National Geographic Explorer.
Natacha Aguilar de Soto is a Spanish marine biologist at the University of La Laguna (ULL), Tenerife, Canary Islands. She is a Ramón y Cajal research and teaching fellow at ULL and has been a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at ULL and at the Center for Research in Ecological Modeling (CREEM) of the University of St. Andrews (SMRU). She is the director of cetacean research within ULL's BIOECOMAC.
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)