taken to the opposition held of. state media say almost one hundred ten thousand people have now left since a humanitarian corridor and. egyptians head to the polls in the coming hours in the elections expected to return president. several potential candidates or other said. today those are the headlines coming up next.

this is techno to show innovations that can change lives the science of fighting fire we're going to explore the intersection of hardware into manatee and we're doing it in the unique way. this is a show about science no not by scientists tonight techno investigates the ivory trail they've tried to seize it. bernie but

nothing has stopped the terrible trade in the legal ivory. now. new tools straight from the lab that could find a crime that's brought elephants to the brink of extinction giving a seizure is a great victory but the elements are already dead. from rita davison is an environmental biologist i am holding a tray of an elephant who should show us the high tech plan to stop the killing. then céline stranded along the california freeway yes freeway doctor should be some are is a mechanical engineer chill show us what's been done to find out why this is happening at this stage they leave feeling distress and i'm still taurus i'm an entomologist vamps our team plenty. know it's do some science.

to techno on phil toys joined by maria to davison and dr should do some more because there were outlaws out there who are working in the shadows committing horrible acts against the pencil is yet majestic animals we're talking about the ivory poachers who have decimated the populations of elephants in africa and it's really a nominee because ivory guys for about a thousand dollars a pound bass move voluble than an illegal drugs and you know what that means is that the damage has been devastated. over one hundred thousand elephants have been killed in just the last three years and the question is what can we do about it we found a team of scientists that are using some unexpected weapons d.n.a. and radiocarbon dating check it out. april eighteenth two thousand and fifteen. customs intercepts four tonnes of ivory smuggled in being sacks from the democratic republic of congo. it is the largest

seizure in this country's history the ivory on the way to laos seized in bangkok after a tip the seizure makes headlines customs displayed over three tons of confiscated african ivory worth six million dollars a historic vote from kenya somebody just nine hundred elephants but the perpetrators of this horrible crime against animals are never caught for law enforcement entities like interpol stopping the killing of elephants at the source is what's critical. the question ends where exactly is all this ivory coming from they almost always shipped the ivory out of a different country from where it was poached because that's where you start your search looking in the wrong place sam wasser is the director of the center for conservation biology at the university of washington. when it comes to solving the mysteries of the illegal trade wasser has created

a coalition of scientists virtual detectives using techniques in d.n.a. extraction from ivory. genetic mapping through dung sampling and radiocarbon dating this multipronged approach attacks a criminal enterprise that's brought the majestic african elephant to the brink of extinction and there's only four hundred fifty thousand elephants left so the whole focus of our lab is to really try to use d.n.a. assignment of large. singapore two two thousand. six and a half tons of ivory seized the largest in the country's history roughly six hundred fifty elephants were killed for this haul of ivory. but where in africa did the ivory originate from they assume this much ivory must come from multiple sources authorities send samples to washers lab for analysis right now from anywhere in africa we can assign a seizure of ivory closer than three hundred kilometers to where it came from

wasser and his team get to work the first step is to prepare the samples of seized ivory. we cut off a piece of the ivory and then when we do is we stick that piece inside a plastic tube with a magnet and stain the steel plugs on the end we drop that in liquid nitrogen which cools it to about minus two hundred forty degrees celsius so extremely cold within three minutes it comes out like baby powder. so it's a hole over us is the ivory and it preserves the d.n.a. at the same time that was one of the biggest breakthroughs of our. elephant d.n.a. from the ivory seized in singapore is extracted and analyzed in last year's lab the d.n.a. from the tusks is then matched against a genetic reference map of africa's elephant populations this map has been generated by d.n.a. taken from another source rich in elephant d.n.a.

i am holding a tray of elephant hoop not exactly something you'd associate as a tool for fighting international crime but these samples provide critical pieces of data for creating a genetic map of elephants across africa yup collecting dung samples may not be glamorous work but it's a task wasser and his team take seriously we make the map from the dung we take genetic markers out of the dung samples so you see here this map of africa there's about fourteen hundred total samples here and each sample is from a separate family group loesser was able to determine the origin of the six and a half tons of ivory seized in singapore and shipped out of malawi it all came from a neighboring country zambia. washer's team had made a discovery that would revolutionize law enforcement's approach to poaching basically the study debunked some of the assumptions that you and interpol had

about how these activities were working what were those assumptions and so as assumptions that law enforcement in general had and one was when you get a big seizure they were cherry picked from all over africa and what we showed is that's not what's happening there poached in the same area over and over and over again. the plight of the african elephant has been well documented these heartbreaking images were shot in a sanctuary for elephant orphans in kenya from before the biggest enemy of elephants when the out in the woods on this two year old being bottle fed stood by his mother's body for three days after she was murdered for her tusks so first you kill the bowls and then you kill the matriarchs so now you're destroying the leadership in your group as well as the long term knowledge that these elephants have and when elephants become vulnerable so does the rest of the ecosystem there are these keystone species where you take this one out and it has this huge ripple effect on all these other species elephants are true keystone species.

sophisticated transnational syndicates oversee every step of the trade from the illegal poaching to the smuggling of tusks to carving factories and shops around the world. this footage part of an undercover investigation captures a shipping agent explaining how ivory is smuggled out of africa very very hopeful that. we need an urgent method that stops the killing even getting a seizure is a great victory but the owners are already dead. last month singaporean customs seized another shipment of ivory coming out of kenya and headed for vietnam three point seven tons worth an estimated eight million dollars singaporean authorities have already contacted wasser to oversee d.n.a. analysis washers lab and now receive samples from over ninety percent of all marj

ivory seizures what we are trying to really do is to figure out where are the major poaching hotspots across africa his latest study based on d.n.a. analysis of twenty eight seizures between one thousand nine hundred six and two thousand and fourteen reveals there may be only two major hotspots. poaching in africa southern tanzania and a place known as the try to. when you're saying hotspots you mean hot spots of poaching activity hotspots of seizure activity what are you referring to a hot spot is a place where you are able to provide multiple tons of ivory repeatedly over multiple years then we have a place we can focus law enforcement on take those out and perhaps choke the source of the ivory from entering the network and unravel it so that's the big plan.

a techno crew member is on vacation in thailand when he comes across this all too common display he's told of their ivory pieces offered up for sale for a price the sale of ivory to foreigners is illegal in thailand yet as our camera reveals it goes on as this old newsreel footage shows ivory was once very popular with a croft but soon to his own but all that changed in one thousand nine hundred ninety when the international trade in ivory was made illegal. d.n.a. analysis is one tool that could ultimately help government's crackdown on where ivory is coming from but it can't tell investigators when the killing took place anything postin is illegal to trade what it comes down to is this this radio carbon dating method can tell us if trade of ivory is legal or not kevin you know is a geochemist who uses

a method known as radiocarbon dating to determine the age of ivory this is the part of the tusk that was actually growing when the animal was shot because we need to know when did this elephant die and so this part of the tusk tells us that so we drove the powder on to this wave paper here. and they collected into these vials next to ivory powder is combusted and turned into pure c o two so what is this we can bust it in this tube it there's other impurities in there other gases we need to get rid of those so that when we measure the radio carbon content we just are measuring the c o two gas radiocarbon dating literally relies on the fallout from the events that took place from one thousand nine hundred fifty two to one thousand nine hundred sixty three. one fire. above ground atomic testing between the united states in the soviet union we

basically doubled the radio carbon concentration in the atmosphere now what does that mean then for organisms when you have a spike in radio carbon in the atmosphere what it did do is give them all the unique chemical fingerprint in their tissues all these photosynthetic organisms trees crashes that sort of thing are taking in c o two some of it having carbon fourteen in it and in the animals that eat that then also take on that radio carbon signature look there it is you can actually see it's freezing down on the right side so now we're going to do is torch it off and have the final final product. bring this to them and you do this individually for each sample yeah this is it's time consuming it's so you want to wear these to to launch this process so this is just a regular methane torch but not to be done at home and warm the glass. all around it it's sort of like. holding soft serve. and so.

on and now you can see. there's our c o two right there so that's that's the frozen c o two from an elephant heading for radio carbon announces after. you know receives the radio carbon content of a piece of ivory he can match it against the bomb curves a record of atmospheric levels of c fourteen before and after the atomic testing era the radio carbon dating of five re could be used to verify the age of ivory being sold on the legal market as antiques but here's the bottom curve and i call this left side before nine hundred sixty three the rising limb so the tusk is imprinted with the radio carbon concentration from that year so we can and go and measure that radio carbon concentration and say ok it's for example one point three and that allows us to draw a horizontal line across the bottom curve here and you can see it actually

intersects it into place nice to have two answers it could be nineteen sixty or it could be one thousand and eighty so the way to do this is to sample part of the test that you know is older and the part of us you know is younger and compare the relative radiocarbon concentrations and just put them back onto this curve so if the older one has a higher concentration in the younger has a lower then you're on this falling limb of the bomb curve november two thousand and thirteen canadian authorities learned that a pair of tusks are being offered by this toronto based auction house as antiques suspecting the tusks are not as old as the sellers claim authorities confiscate them and turn them over to another i dated a pair of tusks clearly showing this is an elephant was poached after the law went into effect and the auction house went to court and pleaded guilty now you know and collaborator turi serling have teamed up with wasser to apply this technique to investigate trends in the international trade in illegal ivory since the

international ban african countries have been stockpiling confiscated ivory occasionally they destroy some of it but much of it remains sitting in government warehouses so they have huge stockpiles on the order of one hundred or one hundred twenty tons in some of these nations so they're sitting on this ivory. waiting for the day that the international market opens again the current poaching hotspots are shut down the next major source for ivory could be the stockpiles and radiocarbon dating would help confirm it to what extent do you wrestle with despair at the situation and to what extent do you embrace hope and there have been some seizures where i gotta say you know when we pulled them out and started rinsing in often the blood was pouring out that we were just sitting there in tears i mean you know that that has happened but you know you get. used to it and and then you start getting these breakthroughs and so no i feel like you know we've got

a plan i feel like we're making an impact and that's really what drives me. to steps of d.n.a. techniques that you talk about that practice has been done for a long time to maybe track the origin of the disease what took him so long to get through tracking down poachers you know we've used d.n.a. techniques to understand populations of lots of wildlife we're using it within the context of conservation a lot more now it's still a fairly new field so there was a time when ivory was used in canada and billiard balls and now it's illegal but why is the market still so robots the main markets are in china and then actually the united states is the second largest player here part of what's driving that is that there are some communities in the u.s. that really value ivory iris you mostly find it as an ornamental carving it's very beautiful when it's polished and carved and it carries a sort of status because of its values so there's still

a pretty high demand and there is a crisis unfolding on the coast of california from soon to go up to san francisco and beyond sea lions are leaving their natural ocean habitat and wandering up on shore even sometimes in people's yards. and streets well i joined a rise along where we were literally rescuing sea lion parts of the story is crazy some of it's heartbreaking and it's coming up next. this sea lion park named johnny cash is making a run towards the open ocean with a satellite transmitter tied to his back he may hold the answers to a sad epidemic among california's coastline. there are plenty of highways that hug california's ocean shores ellie's ninety freeway isn't one of them the sight of a baby seen in a quarter of a mile inland is unsettling. but in two thousand and fifteen it's not that unusual

according to local news agencies the creatures are stranding starring in apparently dying in record numbers this year along the coast the images tell our haunting story well we have seen spikes in recent years two thousand and fifteen is already off to an unusually start the headlines paint a picture of an epidemic of sick pops in desperate search of food but what's really going on is more complex techno went to the san diego headquarters for noah a federal agency that studies the oceans far on says what's happened in the last two years is the waters in the northeast pacific have warmed up way beyond anything where you're still according to noah a warm up ocean off southern california has made it harder for nursing sea lions to forage and as a result the pups are not getting enough nourishment el nino is an event scientists have seen several times but this year's temperature is

a quite different what's really different is that the waters in the northeast pacific warmed up over a year ago and usually that warming occurs after the el nino develops in this case that preceded it ocean warming impacts the food chain from the bottom up as upwelling wins a causing deep. it's occurrence typically rife with cold water nutrients to secular up mostly nutrient depleted warm water so when you talk about nutrients what is that that biologic material in the deep ocean gets remember allies tend to organ organic nutrients and so the upwelling them keeps that cycle going so how does it affect the top of the food chain the whole food chain gets depressed a lot of the those fish species that could move have moved northward and a food source has a lot less than we had last year and the evidence can be seen daily all along the california coast from san diego to san francisco in san diego sea world the company which face public heat for shows has taken

a public role in sea lion rescue efforts. it's really a new thing i was lucky i think that is how long do you feed them full typically it will be a chimp eating for about twelve days and about five days they have gained enough strength for their actions to start showing some interest again a question and they will start taking water to flush sea lions a facet method to an almost tree like setting the pups to fed a special protein which formula up to two hundred feedings a day take place behind the scenes we have to gradually read about it because their bodies haven't seen fresh and they can't process it properly they have to show to us that they can fully process three to five pounds of fish per day which is what they would require to maintain their weight before we stop to feed brands to it observe sea lion health at sea world's nonprofit research on. so in studying their habitats you able to get a better idea of what's happening in terms of global climate change food seem to

vanish for some reason the question is whether that's a sign i think of long term climate change the bigger issue is are these little intensive answered we're saying recently going to become more common as climate generally changes according to the national marine fisheries service is the west year. as rescued pops or returning stopped again is the most historically busy year ever there's already been twenty five hundred sea lions stranded in california this year alone in the first twelve weeks that we're into the year marine biologists and executive director of the pacific marine mammal center a key from a tosser has seen it all but. they're actually six months old coming into us under birthweight that's all start there the other difference in this year that we didn't see in twenty thirteen and twenty forty is that we're now seeing a lot of adults coming in that are very me seated very star you can see every bone

in their body and that's a difference from the last two years metacity and his team east satellite titan technology to understand why this is happening tagging sea lions is so new to these pups the research pioneers and we want to make sure that the animals that we're putting back out into the wild during this unusually bad rush and make it tagging happens fast as i learned watching johnny cash get his device he spent two months gaining twenty five pounds and is a worthy candidate here so you'll know that by him you're get the same kind of feel the edges where we're going further somewhere in the back that you know the feel good think you're going to tighten up the back but will be good this year several sea lions return to metastases rehab starving once again but rescue centers along the coast compiling satellite tagging days. this hype that johnny cash and his newly released friends who beat the odds a move the line toward survival rather than the stranding. will hopefully then not

return even then live a long happy life that's the plan and that's what's going to have them we're going to see them out on the rocks in nine or ten years we're going to begin healthy and you. know i work a lot of behavior in my research and what i found really fascinating about this is what is causing this behavior of the pope's arches going in a little bit from shore they're going miles are going on this long journey in there so something involved in them that the changing climate is just messing with their their innate response to temperature it's sort of or could it be just utter desperation right i mean if you reach a certain level of lack of nutrition does that suddenly kick in some sort of in instinct to just go where ever necessary to find something i mean because of sea temperature is it a the food that they normally feed on has moved somewhere and cited the seed i'm pops of starving and they are cold because my they are

absolutely desperate that's just that's really heartbreaking each of tonight's stories showed problems with the environment but more importantly we got to meet some very smart folks trying to solve them that's it for today's episode be sure to check us out next time on techno dive deep into these stories and go behind the scenes at al-jazeera dot com slash techno follow our expert contributors on twitter facebook instagram google plus and more. and monday put it on. u.s. and british companies have announced the biggest discovery of natural gas in west africa but what to do with these untapped natural resources is already a source of heated debate nothing much has changed they still spend most of the days looking forward to for the dry riverbed this one five years on the syrians still feel battered or even those who managed to escape their country haven't truly

been able to escape the war. in syria citizens are collecting evidence to get off a dollar bill has shot of crimes committed against civilians who've moved out of syria in the cold six hundred thousand pages of material so that one day they can bring the assad regime to justice it puts a she will face on the charges it's a dead she will face but it's a chilling tricks syria witnesses for the prosecution at this time on al-jazeera. we understand the differences and the similarities of cultures across the world. so no matter where you call home al-jazeera will bring you the news and current of things that matter to you. al-jazeera. and new year new lessons and new rules this is the time when you get to choose your english teacher is for

the next two years meet the teachers empowering best students might say i'm my cool all about freedom we're going to look at perspective i want you to develop the skill with which you speak by letting them choose the lessons they learned revelator cation democratic schooling united kingdom at this time on our jazeera. we know the culture we know the problems that affect this part of the world very very well and that is something that we're trying to take to the rest of the world we have gone to places and reported on a story that it might take an international network for months to be able to do it united nations peacekeepers out there chloe anti-riot. we are challenging the forces were challenging companies who are going to places where nobody else is going.