The study appeared in Cell Reports on Sept. 27.

The researchers, led by Professor Valter Longo in collaboration with Professors Christian Pike and Pinchas Cohen, found that mice that had undergone several cycles of the fasting-mimicking diet showed less Alzheimer’s pathology. The researchers found lower levels of two major hallmarks of the disease: amyloid beta — the primary driver of plaque buildup in the brain — and hyperphosphorylated tau protein, which forms tangles in the brain. They also found that brain inflammation lessened and better performance on cognitive tests compared to the mice that were fed a standard diet.

The fasting-mimicking diet (FMD) is high in unsaturated fats and low in overall calories, protein, and carbohydrates and is designed to mimic the effects of a water-only fast while still providing necessary nutrients. Previous research led by Longo has indicated that brief, periodic FMD cycles are associated with a range of beneficial effects, including the promotion of stem cell regeneration, lessening of chemotherapy side effects, and lowering risk factors for cancer, diabetes, heart disease and other age-related diseases in mice and humans.

Promising results in mouse models of Alzheimer’s

Alongside healthy mice, the team investigated two mouse models of Alzheimer’s, E4FAD and 3xTg. During the study, mice were fed the fasting-mimicking diet for 4 or 5 days twice per month and were allowed to eat normally between FMD cycles. In a long-term experiment to see the effects in aged mice, 3xTg mice were placed on the diet for 30 cycles in 15 months. Shorter-term experiments in both 3xTg and E4FAD mice ranged from a single FMD cycle to 12 cycles in 6 months.

In both models, mice who underwent FMD cycles showed promising reductions in amyloid beta — which form the sticky, disruptive plaques in the brain — and tau pathology compared to mice eating a standard diet. The FMD mice also showed lower levels of brain inflammation, including a reduction in the number of active microglia, the immune cells that seek and destroy pathogens and damaged cells in the brain. In addition, mice on the diet demonstrated a lower level of oxidative stress, which plays a role in Alzheimer’s pathology by damaging neurons and contributing to the accumulation of amyloid in the brain. The study specifically pointed to the free radical “superoxide” as a central culprit in the damage occurring in these Alzheimer’s mouse models, Longo explained.

Outwardly, mice of both Alzheimer’s models who underwent the FMD showed less cognitive decline than their standard diet counterparts. Cognitive behavior, including exploration and performance within mazes, was tested in young mice before the dietary regimen began and again after several months of either a standard diet or twice-monthly FMD cycles. The Alzheimer’s mice given the FMD significantly outperformed the Alzheimer’s mice given standard diets and in some instances performed similarly to the non-Alzheimer’s-prone control mice, indicating that cognitive decline had been significantly slowed.

The FMD cycles appeared effective in reversing a range of pathology markers but also cognitive defects in two of the major mouse models for Alzheimer’s disease. Longo said that the results are promising.

Small clinical study explores feasibility for humans

In addition to the study in mice, Longo and colleagues also included data from a small Phase 1 clinical trial of the fasting-mimicking diet in human patients diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment or mild Alzheimer’s disease. Forty such patients who were otherwise healthy and had family support were randomized to either a once-monthly, 5-day fasting-mimicking diet or a 5-day period in which lunch or dinner was replaced with a meal based on pasta or rice.

Initial data indicates that the FMD is safe and feasible for patients with mild impairment or early Alzheimer’s disease. Further tests in the ongoing clinical trial will measure cognitive performance, inflammation and more, Longo said.

Other early trials of the diet published by Longo and colleagues have indicated other benefits of a monthly cycle, such as a loss of fat mass without loss of muscle mass and improved cardiometabolic risk factors, especially in overweight or obese people.

Notably, in a recently published clinical trial in which Longo was a co-author, FMD cycles were associated with disease regression in diabetes patients. Diabetes nearly doubles the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, per the Alzheimer’s Association.

Other authors included co-first authors Priya Rangan, Fleur Lobo and Edoardo Parrella of USC; Terri-Leigh Stephen, Christian J. Pike, Pinchas Cohen, Kyle Xia, Katelynn Tran, Brandon Ann, and Dolly Chowdhury of USC; Anna Laura Cremonini, Luca Tagliafico, Angelica Persia, Irene Caffa, Fiammetta Monacelli, Patrizio Odetti, Tommaso Bonfiglio, and Alessio Nencioni of the University of Genoa, Italy; Nicolas Rochette, Marco Morselli, and Matteo Pellegrini of UCLA; Mary Jo LaDu of the University of Illinois at Chicago; and Martina Pigliautile, Virginia Boccardi, and Patrizia Mecocci of the University of Perugia, Italy.

The study was funded in part by National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging grants AG20642, AG025135, and P01 AG034906 to Longo; AG058068 to Pike; the NIA T32 training grant AG052374 to Rangan; and the PE-2016-02362694 and PE-2016-02363073 grants by the Italian Ministry of Health to Odetti, Mecocci, Monacelli, and Longo. The LaDu lab is funded by NIH (NIA) R01 AG056472, R01 AG057008, UH2/3 NS10012, R56 AG058655, 1R44 AG060826, institutional funds from the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and generous philanthropic contributions.

Longo is the founder of and has an ownership interest in L-Nutra; the company’s food products are used in studies of the fasting-mimicking diet. Longo’s interest in L-Nutra was disclosed and managed per USC’s conflict-of-interest policies. USC has an ownership interest in L-Nutra and the potential to receive royalty payments from L-Nutra. USC’s financial interest in the company has been disclosed and managed under USC’s institutional conflict-of-interest policies.

“This time we have really hit the jackpot with our excavations,” said site director and archaeologist Professor Hans-Peter Kuhnen with regard to the outcome of the most recent undertakings in the area around the early Islamic caliph’s palace Khirbat al-Minya in Israel. The team of archaeologists from Mainz made this major discovery using geomagnetic methods and by digging test pits on the basis of the findings. They discovered that in the early 8th century the caliph had commissioned the building of his palace, with its incorporated mosque and a 15-meter-high gateway tower, not — as hitherto suspected — on greenfield land on the unoccupied shore of the Sea of Galilee, but adjacent to and respectfully co-existing with a prior settlement. The research project was initially conceived as a means of training students in archeological field work. It was undertaken with the support of the Israel Antiquities Authority and financed by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Axel Springer Foundation, the Santander Foundation, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The team was accommodated in the Tabgha Pilgerhaus guesthouse run by the German Association of the Holy Land (DVHL), which has owned the site of the excavations on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee since 1895.

During their dig, the Mainz archaeological team found stone structures made of basalt dating to various periods, with plastered walls, colorful mosaic floors, and a water cistern. The plants portrayed in one of the mosaics are particularly remarkable as they have the long, curved stems typical of those also depicted in so-called Nile-scene mosaics created in the 5th to 6th centuries. The mosaic’s images of the flora and fauna native to the Nile valley symbolized the life-giving power of the mighty river with its annual floods guaranteeing Egypt’s agricultural fertility. That explains why both late-antique churches, such as that in the nearby Church of the Multiplication in Tabgha, and luxurious dwellings in cities of late antiquity were decorated with Nile-scene mosaics.

Lakeside settlement was there long before the caliph’s palace was planned

The recently discovered mosaic, together with related ceramic finds dating to the 5th to 7th centuries, show that the settlement on the shores of the lake was already thriving centuries before the work on the caliph’s palace had commenced. Its original inhabitants were either Christians or Jews and they were subsequently joined by a small Islamic community, for whom the caliph had a side entrance constructed in the early 8th century so that they could access his palace mosque. The unearthed ceramics have revealed that the site remained occupied under the control of the Umayyad and then Abbasid caliphates from the 7th to the 11th century. New construction projects were initiated in this period during which parts of the mosaics fell victim to pickaxes wielded by religiously inspired iconoclasts, sections of old walls were demolished, and the stones were transported away for reuse elsewhere. The remains finally became the location of a graveyard in which the dead were buried, in accordance with Muslim custom, lying on their side with their faces directed towards Mecca.

Nearby, the Mainz team also exposed a stone built furnace used to process sugar cane. Although sugar cane represented one of the top agricultural exports of the Holy Land from the period of the early Middle Ages and brought in considerable wealth for the landowners, vast volumes of water were needed to cultivate it while large amounts of wood were required to operate boiling furnaces. The result was extensive soil erosion and an environmental disaster that the area around the lake had not fully recovered from even by the 20th century. The immense scale of sugarcane cultivation in the Middle Ages was demonstrated by both the findings of the excavations at the Caliph’s Palace — those from 1936 to 1939 and those in 2016 — and by the 2019 Mainz geomagnetic surveys, which all revealed evidence of dozens of such furnaces in operation between the 12th and 13th/14th centuries. “Our most recent excavations show that Caliph Walid had his palace built on the shore of the Sea of Galilee in an already carefully structured landscape that had long been inhabited. It was here that considerable money was subsequently made through the cultivation of sugar cane, sadly causing lasting damage to the ecosystem,” said Kuhnen. “Our research has brought this settlement adjacent to the caliph’s palace to light again, putting it in its rightful context among the history of human settlement of the Holy Land. Over the centuries, it experienced alternating periods of innovation and decline, but there was no real disruption to its existence during its lifetime.”

Geomagnetic surface surveys showed where to dig

The Mainz-based team was able to locate this historic hotspot so accurately with its test pits due to the results of geomagnetic surface surveys conducted on-site in a pilot project in 2019. The technology employs magnetic sensors to detect and map tiny variations in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by soil disturbances, for example those caused by construction work. This allows archaeologists to predict with a fair degree of confidence the course of walls and flooring and to identify the site of hearths and ovens hidden under the soil, without recourse to a spade. However, to actually verify whether magnetometry results indeed indicate the presence of something interesting and in order to date the potential structures, archaeologists need to dig targeted test pits — as did the team from JGU’s Department of Ancient Studies at Khirbat al-Minya.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, Kuhnen and his team had to wait three long years before they were able to get back to the site to see what was waiting for them. However, toiling away under the scorching August sun, they were richly rewarded for their efforts. “It was our prior geomagnetic scans that provided us with unusually accurate indications of what we were likely to find below the surface. The outcome of our excavations has been exactly what we hoped for. Combining these two methods of investigation requires less exertion, helps preserve the archaeological heritage, and is thus the future of our discipline,” concluded Professor Hans-Peter Kuhnen in the light of the current excavations on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, which will continue next year.

Australian law was not drafted with widespread use of facial recognition in mind. Led by UTS Industry Professors Edward Santow and Nicholas Davis, the report recommends reform to modernise Australian law, especially to address threats to privacy and other human rights.

Facial recognition and other remote biometric technologies have grown exponentially in recent years, raising concerns about privacy, mass surveillance and unfairness experienced, especially by people of colour and women, when the technology makes mistakes.

In June 2022, an investigation by consumer advocacy group CHOICE revealed that several large Australian retailers were using facial recognition to identify customers entering their stores, leading to considerable community alarm and calls for improved regulation. There have also been widespread calls for reform of facial recognition law — in Australia and internationally.

This new report responds to those calls. It recognises that our faces are special, in the sense that humans rely heavily on each other’s faces to identify and interact. This reliance leaves us particularly vulnerable to human rights restrictions when this technology is misused or overused.

“When facial recognition applications are designed and regulated well, there can be real benefits, helping to identify people efficiently and at scale. The technology is widely used by people who are blind or have a vision impairment, making the world more accessible for those groups,” said Professor Santow, the former Australian Human Rights Commissioner and now Co-Director of the Human Technology Institute.

“This report proposes a risk-based model law for facial recognition. The starting point should be to ensure that facial recognition is developed and used in ways that uphold people’s basic human rights,” he said.

“The gaps in our current law have created a kind of regulatory market failure. Many respected companies have pulled back from offering facial recognition because consumers aren’t properly protected. Those companies still offering in this area are not required to focus on the basic rights of people affected by this tech,” said Professor Davis, a former member of the executive committee at the World Economic Forum in Geneva and Co-Director of the Human Technology Institute.

“Many civil society organisations, government and inter-governmental bodies and independent experts have sounded the alarm about dangers associated with current and predicted uses of facial recognition,” he said.

This report calls on Australian Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to lead a national facial recognition reform process. This should start by introducing a bill into the Australian Parliament based on the model law set out in the report.

The report also recommends assigning regulatory responsibility to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to regulate the development and use of this technology in the federal jurisdiction, with a harmonised approach in state and territory jurisdictions.

The model law sets out three levels of risk to human rights for individuals affected by the use of a particular facial recognition technology application, as well as risks to the broader community.

Under the model law, anyone who develops or deploys facial recognition technology must first assess the level of human rights risk that would apply to their application. That assessment can then be challenged by members of the public and the regulator.

Based on the risk assessment, the model law then sets out a cumulative set of legal requirements, restrictions and prohibitions.

The report, Facial Recognition Technology: towards a model law, has been co-authored by Prof Nicholas Davis, Prof Edward Santow, and Lauren Perry of the Human Technology Institute, UTS.

Further information: https://www.uts.edu.au/human-technology-institute/explore-our-work/facial-recognition-technology-towards-model-law

Despite more than half a century of hominin fossil discoveries in eastern Africa, the regional environmental context of the evolution and dispersal of modern humans and their ancestors is not well established. Particularly for the Pleistocene (or Ice Age) between 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, there are no continuous high-resolution paleo-environmental records available for the African continent.

The research team extracted two continuous 280-metre sediment cores from the Chew Bahir Basin in southern Ethiopia, an area where early humans lived and developed during the Pleistocene. Chew Bahir is very remotely situated in a deep tectonic basement in close vicinity to the Turkana area and the Omo-Kibish, key paleo-anthropological and archaeological sites. The cores yielded the most complete record for such a long period ever extracted in the area, revealing how different climates influenced the biological and cultural transformation of humans inhabiting the region.

An interdisciplinary team including geoscientists, sedimentologists, micro-paleontologists, geologists, geographers, geochemists, archaeologists, chronologists, and climate modellers worked towards recovering the two continuous sediment cores, from which so-called proxies (like microfossils or elemental variations) were used to glean data to reconstruct the region’s climate history. Archaeologists, evolutionary biologists, and evolutionary anthropologists then identified phases of climatic stress as well as more favourable conditions and interpreted how these factors changed human habitats, influencing human biological and cultural evolution as well as their dispersal.

Specifically, the scientists found that various anatomically diverse hominin groups inhabited the area during a phase of long-lasting and relatively stable humid conditions from approximately 620,000 to 275,000 years BP (Before Present). However, a series of shorter abrupt and extreme arid pulses interrupted this long generally stable and wet phase. Most likely, this resulted in a fragmentation of habitats, shifts in population dynamics and even the extinctions of local populations. As a result, small, reproductively and culturally isolated populations then had to adapt to dramatically transformed local environments, likely stimulating the appearance of the many geographically and anatomically distinct hominin groups and the separation of our modern human ancestors from archaic groups.

A phase with significant climate swings resulting in regularly transformed habitats in the area from approximately 275,000 to 60,000 years BP repeatedly resulted in environmental shifts from lush vegetation with deep fresh water lakes to highly arid landscapes with the extensive lakes reduced to small saline puddles. In this phase, the population groups gradually transitioned from Acheulean technologies (oval hand axes made of stone and primarily associated with Homo ergaster/erectus) to more sophisticated Middle Stone Age technologies. This crucial phase also encompasses the emergence of Homo sapiens in eastern Africa as well as key human social, technological, and cultural innovations that could have buffered early Homo sapiens from the impacts of severe environmental changes. ‘These innovations, such as more varied toolkits and long-distance transport, would have equipped modern humans with an unprecedented adaptability to the repeated expansions and contractions of habitats,’ said Dr Foerster, the paper’s lead author.

The phase from approximately 60,000 to 10,000 years BP saw the most extreme environmental fluctuations, but also the most arid phase of the entire record, which could have acted as a motor for continuous indigenous cultural change. The scientists believe that the brief alignment of humid pulses in eastern Africa with wet phases in north-eastern Africa and the Mediterranean was key to opening favourable migration routes out of Africa on a roughly north-south axis along the East African Rift System (EARS) and into the Levant, facilitating the global dispersal of Homo sapiens.

‘In view of current threats to the human habitat from climate change and the overuse of natural resources through human activity, understanding how the relationship between climate and human evolution has become more relevant than ever,’ Foerster concluded.

This research is part of the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP). In order to evaluate the impact that different timescales and magnitudes of climatic shifts have had on the living conditions of early humans, the project has cored five lake archives of climate change during the last 3.5 million years. All five sites in Kenya and Ethiopia are located in close vicinity to paleoanthropological key sites covering various steps in human evolution, with the site in southern Ethiopia exploring the youngest chapter.

As part of HSPDP, the project has received funding from the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP), the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the DFG Collaborative Research Centre 806 ‘Our Way to Europe’. CRC 806 was based at the universities of Cologne, Bonn, and Aachen and received generous financial and infrastructural support from these institutions from 2009 to 2021.

A new study used eye-tracking technology to show that kids’ attention wandered all over a computer screen while they were trying to complete a task — even when adults quickly figured out they could do the task more efficiently by focusing on particular objects.

But that tendency to have a wandering eye helped 4- and 5-year-olds when the task unexpectedly changed — and they noticed important things on the screen that adults were not paying attention to.

“The ability of adults to focus their attention is usually very helpful in everyday life,” said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

“But sometimes it helps to see the world more as a kid and to notice things that may not seem that important or relevant at the time.”

Sloutsky conducted the research with Nathaniel Blanco, a postdoctoral researcher, and Brandon Turner, professor, both in psychology at Ohio State. The study was published online recently in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

The study involved 30 4- and 5-year-old children and 38 adults who participated in a lab, where they were fitted with eye trackers that could tell where they looked on a computer screen.

They were then shown colorful images of creatures that had seven identifiable features, including a head, tail and antennae.

Participants were told there were two types of creatures, called Flurps and Jalets, and that they had to figure out which ones were which.

One feature was always different on the two types of creatures — for example, the Jalets may have a blue tail and the Flurps an orange tail. In addition, the children and adults were told that most (but not all) of the Flurps had a certain type of feature, such as pink antennae.

One of the features was never mentioned in the instructions and it did not differ between the types of creatures. This was what the researchers called the “irrelevant feature.”

After training, participants were shown a series of images of the creatures on the computer screen and were told to indicate which type of creature each one was.

During the first part of the experiment, adults quickly learned which feature always determined whether the creature was a Flurp or Jalet, and the eye-tracker showed that they then concentrated nearly all of their attention on that feature.

Children were slower to learn which feature was most important in determining which creature was which — and the eye-tracker showed they continued to look at all the features of the two creatures, even the ones that were not relevant.

“The kids were not as efficient as adults at learning quickly,” Sloutsky said. “They kept looking around even when they didn’t need to.”

But halfway through the experiment, the researchers made an unannounced switch: The irrelevant feature — the body part that previously had no bearing on what type of creature it was — became the feature that would determine whether it was a Flurp or a Jalet. This feature, which had been the same for both creatures before the switch, was now different for each.

After the switch, the adults were more oblivious to the importance of the new feature than the children were. Instead, they were relying on the previously learned less-important features.

Children, on the other hand, had been paying attention to everything, so they noticed more swiftly that the rules had changed.

“The adults were suffering from learned inattention,” Sloutsky said. “They weren’t paying attention to features that weren’t important during the first part of the experiment, so they missed when those features did become important.”

Sloutsky said the brains of 4- and 5-year-olds aren’t mature enough to focus attention in the way adults do. That fact may help them learn more as they explore the world.

And adults certainly have the ability to distribute their attention broadly like the children did in this study — but they often choose selective attention because it is helpful in achieving efficiency, he said.

The lesson for adults, though, is to realize that selective attention, while increasing the efficiency of learning and performance, can also lead to a learning trap in some situations, Sloutsky said.

“When you know something really well or a solution to a problem seems obvious, it may help to broaden your attention, to look for clues that may not seem relevant at first — to think like a kid again.”

The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

The high cost of powering an underwater camera for a long time, by tethering it to a research vessel or sending a ship to recharge its batteries, is a steep challenge preventing widespread undersea exploration.

MIT researchers have taken a major step to overcome this problem by developing a battery-free, wireless underwater camera that is about 100,000 times more energy-efficient than other undersea cameras. The device takes color photos, even in dark underwater environments, and transmits image data wirelessly through the water.

The autonomous camera is powered by sound. It converts mechanical energy from sound waves traveling through water into electrical energy that powers its imaging and communications equipment. After capturing and encoding image data, the camera also uses sound waves to transmit data to a receiver that reconstructs the image.

Because it doesn’t need a power source, the camera could run for weeks on end before retrieval, enabling scientists to search remote parts of the ocean for new species. It could also be used to capture images of ocean pollution or monitor the health and growth of fish raised in aquaculture farms.

“One of the most exciting applications of this camera for me personally is in the context of climate monitoring. We are building climate models, but we are missing data from over 95 percent of the ocean. This technology could help us build more accurate climate models and better understand how climate change impacts the underwater world,” says Fadel Adib, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Signal Kinetics group in the MIT Media Lab, and senior author of the paper.

Joining Adib on the paper are co-lead authors and Signal Kinetics group research assistants Sayed Saad Afzal, Waleed Akbar, and Osvy Rodriguez, as well as research scientist Unsoo Ha, and former group researchers Mario Doumet and Reza Ghaffarivardavagh. The paper is published in Nature Communications.

Going battery-free

To build a camera that could operate autonomously for long periods, the researchers needed a device that could harvest energy underwater on its own while consuming very little power.

The camera acquires energy using transducers made from piezoelectric materials that are placed around its exterior. Piezoelectric materials produce an electric signal when a mechanical force is applied to them. When a sound wave traveling through the water hits the transducers, they vibrate and convert that mechanical energy into electrical energy.

Those sound waves could come from any source, like a passing ship or marine life. The camera stores harvested energy until it has built up enough to power the electronics that take photos and communicate data.

To keep power consumption as a low as possible, the researchers used off-the-shelf, ultra-low-power imaging sensors. But these sensors only capture grayscale images. And since most underwater environments lack a light source, they needed to develop a low-power flash, too.

“We were trying to minimize the hardware as much as possible, and that creates new constraints on how to build the system, send information, and perform image reconstruction. It took a fair amount of creativity to figure out how to do this,” Adib says.

They solved both problems simultaneously using red, green, and blue LEDs. When the camera captures an image, it shines a red LED and then uses image sensors to take the photo. It repeats the same process with green and blue LEDs.

Even though the image looks black and white, the red, green, and blue colored light is reflected in the white part of each photo, Akbar explains. When the image data are combined in post-processing, the color image can be reconstructed.

“When we were kids in art class, we were taught that we could make all colors using three basic colors. The same rules follow for color images we see on our computers. We just need red, green, and blue — these three channels — to construct color images,” he says.

Sending data with sound

Once image data are captured, they are encoded as bits (1s and 0s) and sent to a receiver one bit at a time using a process called underwater backscatter. The receiver transmits sound waves through the water to the camera, which acts as a mirror to reflect those waves. The camera either reflects a wave back to the receiver or changes its mirror to an absorber so that it does not reflect back.

A hydrophone next to the transmitter senses if a signal is reflected back from the camera. If it receives a signal, that is a bit-1, and if there is no signal, that is a bit-0. The system uses this binary information to reconstruct and post-process the image.

“This whole process, since it just requires a single switch to convert the device from a nonreflective state to a reflective state, consumes five orders of magnitude less power than typical underwater communications systems,” Afzal says.

The researchers tested the camera in several underwater environments. In one, they captured color images of plastic bottles floating in a New Hampshire pond. They were also able to take such high-quality photos of an African starfish that tiny tubercles along its arms were clearly visible. The device was also effective at repeatedly imaging the underwater plant Aponogeton ulvaceus in a dark environment over the course of a week to monitor its growth.

Now that they have demonstrated a working prototype, the researchers plan to enhance the device so it is practical for deployment in real-world settings. They want to increase the camera’s memory so it could capture photos in real-time, stream images, or even shoot underwater video.

They also want to extend the camera’s range. They successfully transmitted data 40 meters from the receiver, but pushing that range wider would enable the camera to be used in more underwater settings.

This research is supported, in part, by the Office of Naval Research, the Sloan Research Fellowship, the National Science Foundation, the MIT Media Lab, and the Doherty Chair in Ocean Utilization.