How Drones Are Helping Scientists Study and Protect Endangered Whales

The above video was provided by Intel. If you're a six-foot human standing on a paddleboard, it's just as well you don't know that a 60-foot, 40-ton humpback whale with 16-foot flippers is surfacing directly beneath you. The only thing more unsettling would be if there were four 60-ft., 40-ton humpback whales with 16-foot flippers doing the same. Just such a don't-look-down moment played out off the coast of the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 2016. Ordinarily, it would have been the kind of experience that the paddleboarder--who came through unharmed--would have described to his friends with a helpless "You should've seen it."