Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from

Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you'll hear the

exclusive Inside Scoop about a research expedition to the incredible Aleutian Islands with

award-winning photographer and environmentalist Ian Shive. Then you learn

about how researchers solved a molecular mystery about how our ears turn sound into what you hear.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

We've all seen Alaska on a map.

It looks like a really huge chunk of land

with a tail of islands that trails off to the west towards Russia.

Well, those mostly uninhabited islands are called the Aleutian Islands and in part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.

Scientists can learn a surprising amount about the health of our planet from studying them.

And our guest today is going to tell us how. Ian Shive is an award-winning

photographer, filmmaker, and environmentalist, and host of The Last Unknown, a new nature

special that documents the Illusionutian Islands incredible natural

wonders and wildlife. Here's why Ian went there. There's a lot of reasons why we

went there. There's a lot of things that are that are coming out of there from a scientific perspective that are valuable I think to the our better understanding of the planet and the environment, but I think that going there was you know from filmmaker perspective, it's visually a spectacle.

You're talking about millions of seabirds, 140,000 northern fur seals on one little

island, orchas, minke whales, humpback whales,

all in these bays with spouts going off

with waterfalls and islands that are uninhabited.

There's no trails, there's no docks, there's no docks, there's no even

planes really going overhead. And in many ways the islands are like a time

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