out to be achieving for the children of the world which is that they end up with the skills that they need to lead fulfilled and empowered lives. >> julia gillard, thank you very much for being on "talk to al jazeera." >> thank you very much. >> this is "techknow." a show about innovations that can change lives. we're going to explore the intersection of hardware and humanity and doing it in a unique way. this is a show about science by scientists. let's check out our team of hard core nerds. i'm phil torres, i'm an entomologist. tonight the frozen zoo. in a deep freeze, sells from the endangered species ton planet. like the white rhino. dr. shini somara is a mechanical engineer. tonight she's inside a tornado. find out what scientists are

doing to help us survive these killer storms. marita davidson is a biologist, specializing in ecology and evolution. that's our team. now let's do some science. ♪ ♪ ♪ hey guys, welcome to "techknow." i'm phil torres. joining us are shini somara and marita davidson. one of my big issues i'm working on is how to conserve our wildlife. i got to go down to the san diego zoo. this zoo is frozen! so let's take a look.

at the famous san diego zoo safari park, lies a zoo within a zoo, replaced by liquid nitrogen and cell cultures. this is san diego's frozen zoo. that's right, zoo. not the one you grew up visiting but one in which there are living specious preserved and frozen, all to help protect future generations of animals currently facing extinction. what was the genesis for creating the frozen zoo? >> the possibility to save sells allowed us to undertake, each cell of an individual is capable of producing the entire individual. >> take me through the process of freezing cells. >> we can take those cells and treat them so they can be

froatd -- frozen and put in suspended animation. >> tell me about that. >> you can freeze it to a very low temperature like the temperature of clicked nitrogen and all -- licked nitrogen. their state of suspended animation can be that youd and in 20 minutes be -- thawed and in 20 minutes be growing again. >> we gained a clearer perspective. >> this is a frozen zoo. the cells are in racks, in towers, in an inventory system here and in the vapor of liquid night yen, 250 d nitrogen, 250° below zero. the tower of the cells of the frozen zoo. the sells of 10,000 individual animals. >> this isn't your traditional zoo. would you say the definition of

zoo have changed with this type of technique? >> zoos have greatly expanded from menageries. the zoos of the future will have activities like preserving these samples as part of their mission. >> the zoos of the froze frozen, none closer to the heart than the northern white rhino. >> i think they are more like ballerinas than anything else. they are exquisite products of nature. there may be seven white rhinos left but how many productive individuals are there? those are four and very highly y related. inbred cannot survive as well as genetic diversity.

>> the goal of genetic rescue is to restore the species to full genetic health. the crems at the frozen zoo -- the cells at the frozen zoo. remarkable new and easy way of creating stem cells from mice. stem cells are capable of becoming any cell type in the body and this new discovery is promising. >> well, it's huge. nobody knows if it's possible in the rhino. but if it could be done in the mouse, why not in the rhino? >> the hope is to transform stem cells from a northern white rhino from egg and sperm cells to create a white rhino. >> we would have to embri embryo transfer it to a southern white

rhino. >> that is 1800 acres of san diego zoo safari park. half of which are protected or worse, endangered. rhinos everywhere have been hunted down because of the mistaken belief in the immediate is than belief of the healing powers of the rhino horn. >> what do you think is going to happen? >> without change from the current trajectory, they're doomed. >> the film jurassic park the technological process, help the viewing public imagine the possibilities of de-extinction science. but the science and research of reviving long-gone species is very real and very controversial, often raising more questions than answers. to answer that debate we visited

the paleogenetic lab of dr. dr. beth. >> ancient dna is a technique to be used to get dna from animals and plants that live in the past of. >> do you think it's doable in the foreseeable future? >> i don't think this will ever be possible, this is why people who are interested in deextinction of the mammoth for example, used genome editing techniques, to make specific changes in the genomes of an animal that is still alive to make it look more like the genome of the animal you want to try to deextinct. what you need is the places in the genome, the elephant genome, for instance that differed from the mammoth genome, and you would be able to have an elephant that has some of

characteristics of a mammoth, for example, tolerance to cold or longer hair. >> tell me about that genome editing. is that possible? good that is possible today. and the technology to do multiple changes at once is being developed as we speak. there are some people in science that say if a species has gone extinct, there is a reason for it. let it be. how do you solve that problem? >> then and only then can we begin to think about what the other consequences of bringing that species back would be. >> the plight of the passenger pigeon is a popular topic for deextinction. in the 1700s their numbers were estimated at 3 billion. they were easily hunted and by the 1920s, they were extinct. >> i think the passenger pigeon is extinct for so long, the

habitat it lived in is probably gone. it might that be the niche is still vacant and by filling that vacated niche we might stabilize e-stabilize the community and in doing so actually save other specious that may go extinct had that niche not been vacant. >> we have inherited earth from our ancestors. it is our responsibility to pass it on to our descendants. >> so what did you guys think? >> you know this has been a hot topic in the ecological community for a while and really controversial. in some ways it's a seed bank for security. but there's a lot of concern if you are going to bring something back and if there's no proper habitat for that animal to live in, what's the ethical boundary of that? that's a large issue. >> people think of it, can we bring this back to life? but there is so much more to it.

they need a place to live after all. if we put them back in a zoo, that is a show and tell. but if there is habitat restored, and there's no poaching, we can put things back in place. >> that all sounds like jurassic park. >> it does. but once we realize how quickly dna degrades over time, we can't do it the way they do it there, where they take the blood out of the mosquito and put it into the other animal, probably not going to happen. i like to document along the way, i'm sure you do the same. i posted on my instagram and that is the black rhino vial. those are cells that are growing, they are going to freeze those and maybe turn them into an entire rhino. right there. you guys are looking at a real

rhino, definitely worth posting. if you want to check out our behind the scenes photos from the field, be sure to follow us on instagram. now, after the break, you are going to be firing a tornado cam on? >> yes, lovingly called a boomer. >> we'll check that out after the break. >> we want to hear what you think about these stories. join the conversation by following us, at aljazeera.com.

>> ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> hey guys welcome back to "techknow." shinni you went to tornado alley. anand it's a place where tragedy came innovation. >> how to make above ground shelters safe in a tornado. >> let's check it out. >> west side of berkeley a major tornado coming down. >> oh my god! >> may 20th, 2013, one of the worst tornadoes in record was captured on time lapse video that went viral. >> large scale, tornado, here it is, people on westmoore ought to

be underground. we have large large debris. >> the tornado took a direct hit on the elementary school. >> by the time i got to the school i still hadn't heard any word on kyle and by the looks of the school it wasn't looking good. >> winds recorded over 210 miles per hour, ripped through the school and turning the playground into a pile of rubble. >> i think if you live in tornado alley it needs to be a priority. you need to have a shelter. >> 300 miles from moore in a lab at texas tech university engineers work to make micky davidson's storm shelters a reality. >> what we have here is an air cannon. it's call boomer. virtual potato-launcher on steroids. >> you launch things straight at walls, right?

>> that's right, yes. >> dr. larry kane. >> pictures of damage after the tornado is all about impact. >> where wind really becomes an issue is the debris opens up the building envelope, the walls, the roof. once you have that envelope opened, now you've got double the trouble. the most predominant projectile that we see in these storms is normally something like a two by four. >> so what you tend to see coming out of this cannon is what you tend to see flying around when a tornado is centered? >> absolutely. we do tornado research for the national science foundation back in may after the moore tornado. specifically just to look for shelters in the storm path. >> the question now is: not whether to rebuild, but how. >> we're smart engineers. we know how to design for the

wind speeds. and now, we know how to design for impact resistance. >> research performed tests on a variety of building materials. some of them failed. through trial and error, oinvocation came in the form of reinforcement and engineering. >> should we -- load the ca can? >> load the cannon. okay, let's do it. >> wow! >> 103 miles per hour. >> 103. it is completely fine. >> this particular wall is what we call double wide brick. in other words you have one wall of brick here and another wall of brick here and then there's a four inch cavity that's full of reinforcing steel.

the efi missile. >> this shows can you have a safe place above ground. >> the beautiful thing about an above ground shelter is it's a dual-use space. >> is this what would you advise a school like plaza towers -- >> absolutely. >> oklahomadale elementary was hit twice. >> we're relying on texas tech to tell us what kind of structures will withstand. >> we have to adapt to them. >> it has to withstand not only the pressure of a 250 mile per hour wind. efi 5 tornado. >> these walls were thickened. 12 inch thick. >> another important thing in a safe room are the connections, where the wall and the room intersect. we have to make these connections because obviously you don't want those to come

apart. the roof can come off and these walls fall and all those terrible things happening. >> it's keeping projec projectim coming through. we can be confident that it's not going to fall in on these kids. >> how do you feel about this? >> i feel like we have a safer place to come than we had before. and in those times when we might have a safer place to bring our students, we had them. >> that's the hope for folks in oakdale and plaza towers by using noaivel building techniques they can keep -- noivel building techniqu innovag techniques, they can keep their children safe. >> you don't know where a tornadoes is going to hit so

it's very expensive to develop an above ground shelter. but after spending all that money, you may not necessarily be protected because the tornado goes in a completely different direction. so it is important to build these shelters anyway because you're building schools. to reinforce them with this kind of technology seems really effective. >> and it's a multipurpose place. >> that's why it's needed, 66% of schools in oklahoma don't have shelters yet it sits in tornado alley. >> you get close and personal with the tornado, i understand you got inside one. >> i got into the vortek. ef 3, it was absolute heaven, i loved it. >> all right we'll check that up coming up after the break. fp break

what's in our food and monsanto do not have the right to hide it from us. >> so join the conversation and make it your own. >> watch the stream. >> and join the conversation online @ajamstream.

>> this is the real deal man... >> and welcome back to "techknow." i'm phil torres and i'm here with he marita davidson and shini somara. shini, you went inside a tornado. >> i got in the vortek, to experience force 3 winds. to experience that was unreal. let's take a look.

>> thank you very much. >> oh my goodness! coming down right now, major tornado. >> coming down another tornado. >> a deadly tornado rushes towards the u.s. chunt of oklahomcommunity ofoklahoma cit. ripped through the capitol on sunday. >> that was the tragedy in the ground but new innovations are developed in the lab to protect against disasters. >> we create tornado like vortexes. >> i'm at the national wind institute at texas tech university where they can actually recreate tornadoes. harold janes professor of engineering. designed this vortek.

>> understand what happens to structures. >> tornado winds are rated on an es scale which aan indicator of the severity of the storm based on wind spreed an -- speed and debris impact. >> this is ef 3e, 150 miles or less. >> have you ever been in this? >> oh, absolutely. would you like to go? >> i'm going to build up the speed. >> so you're going to leave me here? >> you're good. >> at this point i was wondering just how powerful an es 3 would be.

>> wow! >> now i can just about imagine how terrifying a tornado can be. >> to your research you're hoping to be able to recommend how to reinforce building codes. >> that's correct. what we really want to do is be able to recommend building codes and practices that people should consider when building in areas that are prone to tornadoes. we had no way of knowing how severe a tornado can be. we heard that it was on the ground. it looked like it was going to be a bad one. >> jimmy fleming, public information officer for moore public schools. >> doing a great job for being on the cutting edge of technology that lets us predict the storms. >> in the reconstruction of plaza towers, how much innovation is implemented to ensure safety? >> the main thing is the actual storm shelter itself.

these particular shelter walls are solid concrete, enforced in through the ceiling. if a tornado were to hit the building the shelter is going to stand. >> you think this is going to save lives? >> i hope we never find out. >> mickey davis is the mother of kyle davis. one of the seven children who lost their lives at plaza towers. >> it was just something i've never experienced. we got around to the school. and it was very hard to look at the school that day. because i had just taken -- sorry -- i had just taken him to school. and the school didn't look like what it did when i dropped him off on friday. there were seven families searching for kids. i didn't find out until the next morning. it was 18 hours later.

>> so mickey, it's very soon after may 20th. so what do you want to do next? >> i want a shelter in every school! my goal is to protect every child in oklahoma. not just moore. >> do you think you will achieve shelters in the schools? >> some days you know are harder to get up and fight for it. but kyle wouldn't want that. >> we need shelters in every oklahoma school. >> kyle would want me to get up and fight and do all that i possibly can, so that kids are protected in the future. >> we can't prevent tornadoes from hitting the ground. but innovation is helping us predict their movement and protect against their impact. in a town like moore, technology is connected with the resilience of the community, will help them

rebuild. >> how expensive is it to implement these changes? >> it's pretty costly. i mean you're reinforcing walls and then reinforcing them again. i mean these are really safe houses. so that costs money. >> you can imagine the difference between the cost of, if that got destroyed and they had to build it up again or lives lost, obviously there's quite an moacial cost o emotion. >> once they establish the building codes it will be a standard way of building. that's not there but this technology will certainly allow that to happen in the future. >> thank you for sharing that shini. we're in interesting labs and very passionate researchers this week and we'll be certain to bring you more stories like that on "techknow" next time.

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