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Ship footage captures sound of Oceangate’s Titan sub imploding

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Alison Francis

Senior Science Journalist

Stockton Rush’s wife Wendy asks “what’s that bang?” in footage that appears in new BBC documentary

The moment that Oceangate’s Titan submersible was lost has been revealed in footage recorded on the sub’s support ship.

Titan imploded about 90 minutes into a descent to see the wreck of the Titanic in June 2023, killing all five people on board.

The passengers had paid Oceangate to see the ship, which lies 3,800m down.

On board were Oceangate’s CEO Stockton Rush, British explorer Hamish Harding, veteran French diver Paul Henri Nargeolet, the British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman.

The BBC has had unprecedented access to the US Coast Guard’s (USCG) investigation for a documentary, Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster.

The footage was recently obtained by the USCG and shows Wendy Rush, the wife of Mr Rush, hearing the sound of the implosion while watching on from the sub’s support ship and asking: “What was that bang?”

The video has been presented as evidence to the USCG Marine Board of Investigation, which has spent the last two years looking into the sub’s catastrophic failure.

The documentary also reveals the carbon fibre used to build the submersible started to break apart a year before the fatal dive.

Titan’s support ship was with the sub while it was diving in the Atlantic Ocean. The video shows Mrs Rush, who was a director of Oceangate with her husband, sitting in front of a computer that was used to send and receive text messages from Titan.

When the sub reaches a depth of about 3,300m, a noise that sounds like a door slamming is heard. Mrs Rush is seen to pause then look up and ask other Oceangate crew members what the noise was.

Within moments she then receives a text message from the sub saying it had dropped two weights, which seems to have led her to mistakenly think the dive was proceeding as expected.

The USCG says the noise was in fact the sound of Titan imploding. However, the text message, which must have been sent just before the sub failed, took longer to reach the ship than the sound of the implosion.

All five people on board Titan died instantly.

Graphic showing text messages sent by submersible against blue water backdrop

Prior to the fatal dive, warnings had been raised by deep sea experts and some former Oceangate employees about Titan’s design. One described it as an “abomination” and said the disaster was “inevitable”.

Titan had never undergone an independent safety assessment, known as certification, and a key concern was that its hull – the main body of the sub where the passengers sat – was made of layers of carbon fibre mixed with resin.

The USCG says it has now identified the moment the hull started to fail.

Carbon fibre is a highly unusual material for a deep sea submersible because it is unreliable under pressure. A known problem is that the layers of carbon fibre can separate, a process called delamination.

The USCG believes that the carbon fibre layers of the hull started to break apart during a dive to the Titanic, which took place a year before the disaster – the 80th dive that Titan had made.

Passengers on board reported hearing a loud bang as the sub made its way back to the surface. They said that at the time Mr Rush said that this noise was the sub shifting in its frame.

But the USCG says the data collected from sensors fitted to Titan shows that the bang was caused by delamination.

“Delamination at dive 80 was the beginning of the end,” said Lieutenant Commander Katie Williams from USCG.

“And everyone that stepped onboard the Titan after dive 80 was risking their life.”

Titan took passengers on three more dives in the summer of 2022 – two to the Titanic and one to a nearby reef, before it failed on its next deep dive, in June 2023.

US Coastguard Wreck of submersible on seabed showing carbon fibre layers exposed
US Coastguard

The flaws of Titan’s carbon fibre shell were shown to the inquiry

Businessman Oisin Fanning was onboard Titan for the last two dives before the disaster.

“If you’re asking a simple question: ‘Would I go again knowing what I know now?’ – the answer is no,” he told BBC News.

“A lot of people would not have gone. Very intelligent people who lost their lives, who, had they had all the facts, would not have made that journey.”

Deep sea explorer Victor Vescovo said he had grave misgivings about Titan and that he had told people that diving in the sub was like playing Russian roulette.

“I myself warned people away from getting into that submersible. I specifically told them that it was simply a matter of time before it failed catastrophically. I told Stockton Rush himself that I believed that.”

After the sub imploded, its mangled wreckage was discovered scattered across the sea floor of the Atlantic.

The USCG has described the process of sifting through the recovered debris – and said clothing from Mr Rush had been found, as well as business cards and stickers of the Titanic.

Supplied via Reuters / AFP Stockton Rush, Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman

Supplied via Reuters / AFP

Clockwise from top left: Stockton Rush, Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet were all onboard the Titan

Later this year, the US Coast Guard will publish a final report of the findings from its investigation, which aims to establish what went wrong and prevent a disaster like this from ever happening again.

Speaking to the BBC’s documentary team, Christine Dawood, who lost her husband Shahzada and son Suleman in the disaster, said it had changed her forever.

“I don’t think that anybody who goes through loss and such a trauma can ever be the same,” she said.

The ripples from the Oceangate disaster are likely to continue for years – some private lawsuits have already been filed and criminal prosecutions may follow.

Oceangate told the BBC: “We again offer our deepest condolences to the families of those who died on June 18, 2023, and to all those impacted by the tragic accident.

“Since the tragedy occurred, Oceangate permanently wound down its operations and focused its resources on fully cooperating with the investigations. It would be inappropriate to respond further while we await the agencies’ reports.”

You can watch Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster on 9pm on Tuesday 27 May on BBC Two. It will also be available on the BBC iPlayer.

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On-demand webinar: Artificial intelligence – Next gen tech, next gen risks? : Clyde & Co

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Artificial intelligence is an umbrella term for technologies that simulate human intelligence. It is one of the greatest sources of systemic risk that insurers now face. It acts as a multiplier of existing exposures and a source of new liabilities, with the potential to cause catastrophic mass loss events.

In this webinar, we delve into the systemic risks of artificial intelligence, including privacy, security, and legal challenges that insurers must navigate.

Our speakers were joined by Dr. Matthew Bonner, Senior Fire Engineer and Research Lead at Trigon Fire Safety, and Rishi Baviskar, Cyber Risk Consultant at Allianz, for a discussion on the systemic risks of artificial intelligence – including privacy, security, and legal challenges that insurers must navigate.

Key topics include:

  • Privacy violations
  • Security threats, weaponisation and adversarial manipulation
  • The threat of ‘uncontrollable AI’
  • Sentient AI and the concept of legal personality
  • And more!

Watch the recording



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Scientists create biological ‘artificial intelligence’ system

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Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Australian scientists have successfully developed a research system that uses ‘biological artificial intelligence’ to design and evolve molecules with new or improved functions directly in mammal cells. The researchers said this system provides a powerful new tool that will help scientists develop more specific and effective research tools or gene therapies.

Named PROTEUS (PROTein Evolution Using Selection) the system harnesses ‘directed evolution’, a lab technique that mimics the natural power of evolution. However, rather than taking years or decades, this method accelerates cycles of evolution and natural selection, allowing them to create molecules with new functions in weeks.

This could have a direct impact on finding new, more effective medicines. For example, this system can be applied to improve gene editing technology like CRISPR to improve its effectiveness.

“This means PROTEUS can be used to generate new molecules that are highly tuned to function in our bodies, and we can use it to make new medicine that would be otherwise difficult or impossible to make with current technologies.” says co-senior author Professor Greg Neely, Head of the Dr. John and Anne Chong Lab for Functional Genomics at the University of Sydney.

“What is new about our work is that directed evolution primarily work in , whereas PROTEUS can evolve molecules in .”

PROTEUS can be given a problem with uncertain solution like when a user feeds in prompts for an artificial intelligence platform. For example the problem can be how to efficiently turn off a human disease gene inside our body.

PROTEUS then uses directed evolution to explore millions of possible sequences that have yet to exist naturally and finds molecules with properties that are highly adapted to solve the problem. This means PROTEUS can help find a solution that would normally take a human researcher years to solve if at all.

The researchers reported they used PROTEUS to develop improved versions of proteins that can be more easily regulated by drugs, and nanobodies (mini versions of antibodies) that can detect DNA damage, an important process that drives cancer. However, they said PROTEUS isn’t limited to this and can be used to enhance the function of most proteins and molecules.

The findings were reported in Nature Communications, with the research performed at the Charles Perkins Centre, the University of Sydney with collaborators from the Centenary Institute.

Unlocking molecular machine learning

The original development of directed evolution, performed first in bacteria, was recognized by the 2018 Noble Prize in Chemistry.

“The invention of directed evolution changed the trajectory of biochemistry. Now, with PROTEUS, we can program a mammalian cell with a genetic problem we aren’t sure how to solve. Letting our system run continuously means we can check in regularly to understand just how the system is solving our genetic challenge,” said lead researcher Dr. Christopher Denes from the Charles Perkins Centre and School of Life and Environmental Sciences

The biggest challenge Dr. Denes and the team faced was how to make sure the mammalian cell could withstand the multiple cycles of and mutations and remain stable, without the system “cheating” and coming up with a trivial solution that doesn’t answer the intended question.

They found the key was using chimeric virus-like particles, a design consisting of taking the outside shell of one virus and combining it with the genes of another virus, which blocked the system from cheating.

The design used parts of two significantly different virus families creating the best of both worlds. The resulting system allowed the cells to process many different possible solutions in parallel, with improved solutions winning and becoming more dominant while incorrect solutions instead disappear.

“PROTEUS is stable, robust and has been validated by independent labs. We welcome other labs to adopt this technique. By applying PROTEUS, we hope to empower the development of a new generation of enzymes, molecular tools and therapeutics,” Dr. Denes said.

“We made this system open source for the , and we are excited to see what people use it for, our goals will be to enhance gene-editing technologies, or to fine tune mRNA medicines for more potent and specific effects,” Professor Neely said.

More information:
Alexander J. Cole et al, A chimeric viral platform for directed evolution in mammalian cells, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-59438-2

Citation:
Scientists create biological ‘artificial intelligence’ system (2025, July 8)
retrieved 8 July 2025
from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-07-scientists-biological-artificial-intelligence.html

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CWRU joins national AI labor study backed by $1.6M grant

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Research aims to guide decision-makers on real-world effects of artificial intelligence on American workers

Case Western Reserve University economics professor Mark Schweitzer has joined a new, multi-university research collaboration examining the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on workers and the labor market—an urgent area of inquiry as AI adoption accelerates across industries.

Mark Schweitzer

The $1.6 million project is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and led by Carnegie Mellon University’s Block Center for Technology and Society and MIT’s FutureTech. Researchers from eight academic institutions—including the University of Pittsburgh, Northeastern University, the University of Virginia and the California Policy Lab—are contributing their expertise, along with collaborators from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

“This is an important opportunity to bring rigorous, data-driven insights to some of the most pressing economic questions of our time,” said Schweitzer, whose research at Case Western Reserve and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland focuses on labor markets and regional economics. “By pooling knowledge across institutions, we can better understand where AI is helping workers—and where it’s leaving them behind.”

During the next two years, the team will work to improve labor-market data and produce both academic research and policy-relevant reports, he said. The goal is to support research-driven decision-making by employers, labor organizations and government.

More information on the Block Center’s AI and Work initiative.


For more information, contact Colin McEwen at colin.mcewen@case.edu.



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