the studio will travel to new york. his garden is on the move more on all the news that we've been covering on our website. aljazeera.com is the address for all comment and analysis. sold for big bucks. >> get it, get it lockett, get it! >> what can be done to stop this illegal trade? >> he'd actually built a secret compartment within his prosthetic leg and that is where he concealed the baby iguanas. >> in the prosthetic leg?

>> this is "techknow". a show about innovations that can change lives. >> the science of fighting a wildfire. >> we're going to explore the intersection of hardware and humanity, but we're doing it in a unique way. this is a show about science... >> oh! >> oh my god! >> by scientists. >> techknow investigates the animal smugglers. >> hey guys welcome to techknow i'm phil torres, joined by marita davison and dr. crystal dilworth. now to start off today we're going to be talking about the illegal trade of animals. now this is wildlife smuggling of both live animals, dead animals, it is huge around the world and especially here in the us. >> some of the number involved here are just staggering, there are estimates of ten billion dollars a year for illegal

trade. >> yeah it's a huge illegal industry, we've reported on the illegal trade in ivory but unfortunately it's just the tip of the iceberg, we're talking about hundreds of species here. >> in order to put this problem into focus, techknow investigated just how pervasive this really is, and what's being done to stop it. let's take a look. >> this is bangkok thailand, here at the world's largest flea market weekend shoppers can find almost anything. including cage after cage of exotic pets. for the right price you can buy rare -and even endangered species- a south american maccaw... a monitor lizard and african tortoises, to just name a few. techknow shot this video at the busy chatuchak market. with the camera off a shop owner offered to sell us what looked like a protected leaf monkey.

this is why the world wildlife fund now recognizes this market as a "hot spot" for the illegal animal trade. >> it's really disturbing actually, there's no telling what you're going to find, right. >> joseph johns is chief prosecutor of environmental crimes at the us attorney's office in los angeles. i showed him some of the video we shot at the market. >> some of these animals come from south america, come from africa and go through thailand and then end up in the us. >> because that market it allowed to thrive. you couldn't do this in la, you couldn't do this is san francisco, miami. you couldn't do this anywhere in the united states of america. >> the thai government is cracking down but the country is still considered a funnel for the $10 billion illegal wild life trade. since the united states is one of the world's biggest consumers of it- there's a good chance some of what is sold there will find it's way here. because animals can easily be bought online and shipped, i visited the international mail center in los angeles california.

here inspectors see a flood of endangered species coming through their doors. >> between 1 million and 1 and a half million pieces of mail pass thru this facility every month. each one has to be inspected by customs and border patrol officers and some of these pieces are more interesting to those officers than others. >> this day one of the hardest working inspectors is on duty. >> get it, get it lockett, get it! >> within the first hour of our arrival, lockett, a k-9 inspector for u.s. fish and wildlife service, finds something. lockett is part of a pilot program and is this districts first k9 inspector. she's trained to identify up to 20 scents and she's already proven her value. >> it would take me an entire day to look at 100 packages she can do 100 packages in 5 seconds. with her i clear 10 thousand packages easily each day. >> that's some good work there, lockett. >> yeah, she's got a pretty powerful nose. >> on this morning, locket found a python skin wallet. across the world there are 25

different breeds of pythons hunted for their skins and several are endangered. so no python products can be imported into the u.s. without special permits. the wallet is confiscated and added to an unbelievable stash of exotic animals and their parts seized at los angeles points of entry every single day. >> what is this room? >> this room right here is what we call our property room. when we seize items that are in violation of wildlife laws they are kept as evidence until the case is adjudicated and then we have some way of disposing of them. >> this room - that seems more of a morgue - serves as a valuable learning tool. almost all types of wildlife are represented here. and behind every item is a tragic story. u.s. fish and wildlife supervisor mike osborn knows most of them. a great deal of media attention is rightly focused on rhino poaching for horns and ivory from elephants. >> i see pangolins, sea turtles, monkey skull, ivory and then...

this thing. what the heck is this? >> this is one of the hottest things on the market today. >> this? >> this is an air bladder from a fish called the totoaba. >> the totoaba is actually a sea bass, it is so critically endangered that it can only be found in one place in the entire world... the middle of the sea of cortez. it is now being illegally harvested for its bladders. since they're touted as an aphrodisiac in asian cultures, each bladder can sell for up to 15 thousand dollars on the black market. that promise of big profits from illegal wildlife sales motivates sellers to get creative. >> i've had monkeys jump out of suitcases. i've had birds fly out of toothpaste boxes. they get more and more intricate now a days. people do ask me "what's the strangest animal you've ever seen"? and i'll tell 'em "it's man"... man will do some pretty strange

things with endangered species to make a lot of money. >> the case of jereme james is a prime example. >> jereme james is one of the more unusual smugglers that we've encountered here in los angeles. >> james was caught red-handed trying to sell endangered banded iguanas from fiji. there are less that 10,000 of these animals left in the wild and james had several of them. >> he actually stole from a wildlife preserve in fiji during his honeymoon. he'd actually built a secret compartment within his prosthetic leg and that is where he concealed the baby iguanas. >> in the prosthetic leg? >> yes. >> the arrest affidavit claims james tried to sell the iguanas to an undercover fish and wildlife agent--and also admitted to selling three others for 32 thousand dollars. but the case didn't result in jail time. this is one of james' victims - a female iguana - now living at the san diego zoo.

while being smuggled in james' prosthetic leg, her own leg was so badly injured, it had to be amputated. >> it's pretty sad actually. 30 percent, at least, of all the animals that i bring in on a yearly basis are confiscated animals... we get a lot from fish and wildlife service. >> kim lovich is curator of the reptile house at the san diego zoo. the zoo does have re-population programs, but it's virtually impossible to return seized animals to their original homes. >> you want to provide this animal with its opportunity to get back into the wild as quickly as possible, but if you don't know exactly where that animal is from you could be introducing viruses to a naive population. >> so many of the zoo's seized animals will live out their lives as species ambassadors. hopefully helping to educate the public so more don't end up in captivity far from their country of orgin, or even worse. >> a lot of it is the moral aspect. isn't it a shame that we couldn't live with this animal...

that we had to hunt it to the point of endangered. we had to hunt it to extinction. one of the common things i tell people is, the more of this stuff we buy, the more these animals are going to die until they do become endangered and they do become extinct. >> this is an endangered species. it doesn't belong in your living room, it belongs in the ocean. >> and i've got a bag here that's made from a west african dwarf crocodile, another endangered species. clearly done in a somewhat garish design if you will... i mean it's got little feet--. >> and teeth. >> and teeth, yeah. >> i have to say there are a couple of reasons you shouldn't buy that. for one it's pretty tacky, let's be honest, but also, these are endangered! >> but how is anyone going to know that what they're buying is an endangered species? >> and that's one of the challenges that they face, that you do see things like this in a lot of markets that you go to around the world. sometimes you just think maybe they farmed it, and in some place they do farm, but they're still farming an endangered

species, you shouldn't be buying it, you shouldn't be bringing it into the us. >> i think there's a fair amount of public awareness that things like rhino horn things like elephant ivory, that's illegal you shouldn't be purchasing things like that. but we don't have as much of a knowledge or understanding of things like turtles, things like this, or even other species we just don't even really think about in the context of an illegal trade. >> the illegal wildlife trade is an example of man's interaction with nature at it's worst, but coming up, we'll be seeing the bright side of man's interaction with nature in the magic of mead and why business is buzzing, after this. >> we want to hear what you think about these stories. join the conversation by following us on twitter and at aljazeera.com/techknow. >> water is a human right! >> flint in a state of emergency. >> this can cause death... all kinds of health effects. >> we're already having trouble,

but now what little i have has to completely go towards water. >> only on al jazeera america.

>> hey, welcome back to techknow, now it may be the oldest alcoholic beverage known to man, but when i say the word mead or honey wine, what image comes to mind? >> okay, so i think of a renaissance festival, or maybe game of thrones. >> that's right, chaucer, aristotle, i mean mead is kind of the ultimate classic. >> i've heard some people even refer to it as "hipster honey". now what i love about it is, yes it's delicious but it's also got some really interesting science behind it. let's take a look. >> this isn't ancient greece. >> it's predominately alfalfa

but there is a little bit of clover. >> or medieval england. >> it's different than what i expected. >> yeah. >> want a little more splash in there? >> yeah. >> this is how they do it in point reyes california. >> known for its vanilla characteristics. >> oh, this is good. >> and even though this is the heart of california wine country, and this may be bubbly, this isn't champagne. this is mead. >> you can imagine the vikings. it's mead it's so epic. >> so you gotta thank the bees i guess. >> to the bees! >> thank the bees! >> this is what mead is made from. >> nice and steady... there you go. >> bees and of course, honey. >> archeologists and scientists say mead is mankind's oldest beverage. traces have been found in ancient chinese and egyptian tombs. and now, after centuries out of style, mead is making a comeback.

jordon thompson is the horticulturist at heidrun meadery. her job is to figure out which flowers bees like best. because a happy bee is a productive bee. >> should we get off and go check it out? >> yeah, let's do it! >> and this is where it all begins, in a garden fit for a king. >> lots of flowers. >> lots of flowers - oh my gosh there they are. >> there they are. >> doing what they do. >> so what kind of flower is this? >> this is uriginium, or sea holly. >> bees they see the uv spectrum so blue is most attractive to them. >> ah, i didn't know that. >> and that's probably why they are very attracted to this plant. >> once the bees collect their pollen they're going to head straight to their hive. and so are we. >> i'm brad. >> alright, phil. >> brad albert has one of the most important jobs here. he is the meadery's bee keeper.

>> wow are you serious? so this is about the closest you will ever want to be to this many bees. but if you look inside, there's some honey-looks pretty good. why do they even make honey in the first place? >> it's their food. >> so, honey is bee food? >> honey is bee food and pollen is bee food. so honey is their carbohydrate, and pollen is their protein source. >> so when you remove honey from this does it effect the hive? >> they often times make a surplus and that's what we take. >> how do we get the honey into a jar? >> it's as easy as just scraping like this and there we go and then we just load that into the extractors. do you want to do the honors? >> lets do it. >> so this extractor basically spins these things so that the honey just flings off and hits the wall. >> exactly. >> so the bees here do the farming? >> that's right they're doing the work for us. >> gordon hull is the man behind the meadery. >> so, this is our honey inventory right here.

>> this is all honey? >> we've got macadamia nut honey from hawaii. >> this says montana. >> right, montana... and then we have the smaller buckets here which represent our honey. >> so all this honey is from around the country and then this is the local flavor. >> right, exactly. we have to take care of a slight problem we have. >> wow. >> this honey is solid... it's super saturated sugar. so in order to take care of this we have to heat this up and we do that in there. >> so this is basically a giant chemistry lab where you get to make wine. >> that's right. this is a honey heater. >> oh my gosh, is this thing warm? >> yep. >> wow! are you serious? >> this is that same honey so you heat it up to 105 degrees fahrenheit so that it will liquefy. >> oh my gosh. that is a lot of honey at the bottom of this honey heater. >> making mead can be a pretty

messy business. check out these out-takes and you get the idea. the way gordon and his team make mead is closer to the way traditional champagne is made. that's where the science comes in. after the honey is diluted and purified, it goes into the fermenter. he adds the same yeast they use to make grape-based champagne. >> probably the best thing i will ever drink out of a beaker. so why is it that there's just honey in here but i'm tasting these other things? >> because honey contains the essence of the flowers from which it was composed. >> really? so the bees are drinking the nectar of the flower and they actually take some of the essence with it. >> absolutely right, and that's what makes honey such an amazing substance. turn turn turn. >> the final step is pretty cool. it's called riddling where every turn of the bottle slowly sends the remainder of the yeast sediment to the top of the

bottle. >> how was that? >> perfect. nice. >> good? >> yes. >> and the way i figure it, mead just might be the next big thing... with a very interesting backstory. all possible because of science... of course. >> why don't you do the honors? very good. >> well it took 4 months from honey bee to mead so cheers to the honey bees. >> cheers to the honey bee. >> phil, this story seems like an entomologists dream, i mean, talk about biodiversity, talk about bees, and there's a tasty drink at the end. >> i mean it doesn't get much better than that, and what i loved about it is their crop, when you go outside, it is those flowers and it wasn't just the bees there, the butterflies were there, the birds were there, it was the only crop i've seen that actually increases the biodiversity in an area, it's almost unheard of. >> yeah, i think when we

normally think of an agricultural setting sadly now it's very homogenous, these monocrops. but in this case it's a very diverse system that's promoting a lot of biodiversity, a lot of ecological richness, which i think is fantastic. >> if there's anything i learned from this, it's that science can happen anywhere, it can happen in wine country, it can happen in your own backyard or it can happen very far away. crystal, where are you taking us next? >> well of course, i'm taking you to mars. i spoke to the nasa scientist behind the movie "the martian" and will separate fact from science fiction when we come back.

>> hey welcome back to techknow, i'm phil torres joined by marita davison and dr. crystal dilworth. you know ever since man landed

on the moon in 1969, a lot of people have had their sights on that next big leap, going to mars. >> yeah but public perception of what a trip like that might look like has largely been informed by science fiction and hollywood. >> and it's true, but with the success of nasa's rover missions we are starting to see more of what that reality would be like through science fiction stories like the movie "the martian". and that's really exciting. we are getting closer to a human on mars! >> we have robots on mars, next let's get some men and women on mars. >> jubulent engineers at nasa's jet propulsion lab witnessing the pathfinder rover landing on mars. almost 20 years later, their invention is a key plot point in a big budget hollywood film, "the martian". where an astronaut becomes stranded on the red planet.

>> but if i can't get in contact with nasa none of this matters anyway. >> hollywood has long been fascinated with depicting humankind on mars dating back to a 1910 film by thomas edison. abbott and costello added a comedic twist in their film "abbott and costello go to mars". >> i hereby claim mars in the name of the united states of america. >> but it's this 2015 hollywood depiction, with an assist from nasa, that is getting people once again excited about space travel. >> i think it was the really best movie ever made about what life would be like to explore another planet. >> the martian is hollywood filming at its finest but what are nasa's real plans for a manned mission to mars. the team at jpl broke down the myths and realities about how close science truly is to putting a human on mars. >> robert manning was the chief engineer of the real mars

pathfinder which allows matt damon's character to communicate back to earth. he consulted with hollywood designers on a prototype for the film. >> i think it's very accurate. >> if nasa does get a person on mars in the 2030s, it will be in part because of jpl'ers like manning and jennifer trosper. she's the mission manager for the mars 2020 rover and well aware of the accomplishments needed to make it on mars. >> our next mission is going to do 20 samples on mars instead of 4 or 5 that curiosity has done so we have to figure out how to make the rover faster and smarter and more operable on the surface to collect these samples. >> nasa has proven it has the right stuff for sending robots to mars but there's a big leap needed before they send humans. >> lift off! >> the voyage could take up to 270 days. the international space station is currently observing how space travelers deal with this sort of psychological deprivation. >> we're learning more about how isolated crews perform and interact and how the brain responds to the stresses of prolonged space flight.

>> once astronaut's make it to mars, they've got to be able to land. manning and trosper are researching new parachutes high above earth to engineer soft landings on the red planet. >> so right now we can do about the size of a mini cooper? >> yeah, we can do a small car and we need to land ten times that. we're investing in the technology and we can get there. >> the most pressing issue after landing is being able to breathe on mars. >> it's cold on mars. there's hardly any atmosphere, there's only one percent, it's not breathable, it's carbon dioxide. we actually are developing an instrument called moxie which is going to take the carbon dioxide, pull apart the carbon from the oxygen and actually pump the oxygen into a little chamber as a demonstration to convince yourselves that we know how to create breathable oxygen on mars. >> this is really the first mission mars 2020 where we're really trying to bring in those new technologies and bridge the gap so that we can send people. >> there's still the issue of hydration. nasa just recently confirmed the existence of water on mars.

growing food is also another challenge, like matt damon's character space farming potatoes in "the martian". >> i am the greatest botanist on this planet. >> would it be possible to grow something as complicated and energy intensive as potato? >> there may or may not have been the right ecological conditions for potatoes to grow... one of the things we're still trying to figure out though is what are all the chemicals and minerals that are in the soil itself. >> part of that process is taking place now on the international space station where astronauts are successfully growing lettuce. >> i think we can get there. that's the exciting part. there's a path. >> getting to mars has it's challenges. nasa has published a plan to get a human on mars in the 2030s. for manning, the biggest hurdle to make the deadline is funding. >> i think 2030 is a little early. we've got a lot to do to go from a curiosity style landing to a set of missions where habitat models and multiple astronauts is a tall order, its really tall order. it depends on how much money

people are willing to spend. >> both trosper and manning do belive humans will be on mars in their lifetime. >> wouldn't it be awesome to expand beyond the earth to understand bigger things. >> the hope is that a movie like the martian could capture the public's imagination and maybe engender a different kind of support for the next space race to mars. >> you know my only concern was i don't want the public to think that nasa has the kind of money to work with right now, because they don't. i think this is a call for if we want this to be our reality, and it's a pretty awesome reality to send people to mars, we're going to have to put the money where our mouth is. >> and it could be, i mean a lot of science in the movie as you saw are real programs. these are being developed right now. >> the ability to grow crops, to create a system like that, is so complex in a place where we understand the conditions on our own planet. being able to do that on a place like mars is really mind-boggling. >> yeah i mean they did simplify some of the things in there--.

>> of course. >> but it gets your imagination going. this episode really shows what can happen when you combine imagination and science and it can result in a pretty delicious drink in a field in sonoma or even potentially growing potatoes on mars. it was all great stuff. that's it for this episode, we'll see you next time right here on techknow. >> dive deep into these stories and go behind the scenes at aljazeera.com/techknow. follow our expert contributors on twitter, facebook, instagram, google+ and more. >> mosquitos spreading rare diseases. >> as scientists we'd be fighting a losing battle against mosquitos. >> they'd kill one person every 12 seconds. >> just like that, i might have genetically modified a mosquito. >> it's like a video game with genes. >> this is what innovation looks like. >> i feel like we're making an impact. >> let's do it.

>> techknow, where technology meets humanity. only on al jazeera america. ♪ >> announcer: this is al jazeera. ♪ hello welcome to the news hour, i'm in doha and here is what is coming up, in the next 60 minutes attack on a pakistani university leaves at least 19 people dead. top diplomates from the u.s. and russia try to iron out differences and keep peace talks alive. the movers and shakers are talking about the challenges for the global economy. and a growing cold to boycott the academy a