The latest assessment of climate science is a “code red for humanity,” the head of the United Nations said Monday, as a body of scientists convened by the organization—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—warned of the “unequivocal” and in some cases irreversible effects of human influence on the planet. The climate is warming at a pace even faster than previously thought and, without stark emissions cuts, could surpass a crucial temperature threshold “up to a decade sooner than previously thought,” Axios notes. “Unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach,” the IPCC said in a press release August 9, 2021. As report co-author Linda Mearns described it: “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”
Misty white dissolves into streaks of grey. Turquoise weaves through a background of tan and black. Modern art? Or a view of our planet like no other, taken from thousands of miles up.These beautiful, at times abstract, images are the work of Google Earth View, a collection of the most striking landscape photographs taken by Google Earth satellites with a little color enhancement.
These snapshots show moments of societal change, but they also show people taking it easy and spending time with their loved ones. Something that sounds pretty nice right about now. Each shot shows a different take on history that what you already know, showing the nuance in a well known story that only a rare photo can. Charles C. Ebbets ( above) was a pioneer in photography from the 1930s-1970s, his most famous image being that of the workmen lunching on a beam above the Rockefeller Center in 1932.
From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google’s search algorithms to IBM’s Watson to autonomous weapons. Artificial intelligence today is properly known as narrow AI (or weak AI), in that it is designed to perform a narrow task (e.g. only facial recognition or only internet searches or only driving a car). However, the long-term goal of many researchers is to create general AI (AGI or strong AI). While narrow AI may outperform humans at whatever its specific task is, like playing chess or solving equations, AGI would outperform humans at nearly every cognitive task.
