We created Earth in Action to provide a lens into what's happening on our planet, as it happens. Whether it's something typical, like the current air temperature, or an extreme event like a major dust storm, we wanted to provide an opportunity for people to see them.
While humans have assembled a lot of weather data, flash floods are too short-lived and localized to be measured comprehensively, the way the temperature or even river flows are monitored over time. That data gap means that deep learning models, which are increasingly capable of forecasting the weather, aren't able to predict flash floods.
Google tasked Gemini with sorting through 5 million news articles from around the world and isolating flood reports. It transformed this data into a geo-tagged series of chronological events. Next, researchers trained a model to ingest current weather forecasts and leverage the Groundsource data to determine the likelihood of a flash flood in a given area.
"So whenever people think about hot weather, they always talk about the temperature," he says. "There's two issues with that. First of all, most people don't realise that the temperature is measured in the shade. So if you're in direct solar radiation, the amount of heat stress you're exposed to is much greater as it will stress your body out a lot more."
Heritage is usually catalogued by what can be drawn, not by what changed temperature. In heat, buildings are learned first through skin, only later through sight. Generations learn, through their bodies, what works. Shade reduces glare and radiant heat. Air movement shifts perception by several degrees. Thick walls slow temperature swings.
Weather impacts sales. Every retailer knows it. But for most, the likelihood that it might rain, snow, or sleet on the third of March somewhere in the Midwest is rarely used. Vendors such as Weather Trends have offered accurate, long-range forecasts for more than 20 years. But the opportunity is not predicting the weather; it's knowing what to do with the data. AI might change that.
Absolutely, I have experienced investing in a way that green growth has led to both equitable growth and decarbonization, but also have lived experience of what degrowth can do to a country, and how, in my view, [degrowth] is not really a solution.
Vertiv has announced new configurations of its MegaMod HDX solution, a prefabricated power and liquid cooling infrastructure designed for environments with very high power densities. The solution is intended for applications such as artificial intelligence and high-performance computing and is available in North America and the EMEA region. According to Vertiv, the new variants respond to the rapidly growing demand for computing power and associated cooling capacity in data centers.
The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is coated by a thin watery layer. Scientists generally agree that this lubricating, liquidlike layer is what makes ice slippery. They disagree, though, about why the layer forms. Three main theories about the phenomenon have been debated over the past two centuries. Last year, researchers in Germany put forward a fourth hypothesis that they say solves the puzzle.
Because the past three years have shattered temperature records, researchers have been exploring whether global warming is accelerating, and if so, why. Many scientists agree that the rate at which it is increasing has picked up. This is mainly because of a reduction in air pollution following the introduction of fuel regulations for international shipping (which has resulted in fewer pollutant particles that reflect sunlight into space and seed insulating clouds).
"We didn't do any LLMs. There is significant interest in that. There are lots of people trying those ideas out, but I think they're still in the exploratory phase," Desai told El Reg. As it turned out, the researchers didn't need them. "We used a simpler model called a variational auto encoder (VAE). This model was established in 2013. It's one of the early generative models," Desai said.
I don't know who invented this crazy challenge, but the idea is to put someone in a carved-out ice bowl and see if they can get out. Check it out! The bowl is shaped like the inside of a sphere, so the higher up the sides you go, the steeper it gets. If you think an icy sidewalk is slippery, try going uphill on an icy sidewalk. What do you do when faced with a problem like this? You build a physics model, of course.
If you've ever glanced at your phone's weather app to check the day's forecast or to help plan for an upcoming storm, you've probably run across a scenario where you see an outrageous forecast. It happened to me earlier this week when I noticed my app was predicting more than 13 inches of snow for the Charlotte, NC area. Not only would that be a historic storm, but it would also be fairly apocalyptic for an area where even an inch of snow is a rarity.
Warwick, N., Griffiths, P., Keeble, J., Archibald, A., & Pyle, J. Atmospheric implications of increased Hydrogen use. GOV.UK https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/atmospheric-implications-of-increased-hydrogen-use (2022).