Heart

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in Heart

      Generative AI is an energy hog. Is the tech worth the environmental cost?

      by

      It might seem like magic. Type a request into ChatGPT, click a button and — presto! — here’s a five-paragraph analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and, as an added bonus, it’s written in iambic pentameter. Or tell DALL-E about the chimeric animal from your dream, and out comes an image of a gecko-wolf-starfish hybrid. If you’re feeling down, call up the digital “ghost” of your deceased grandmother and receive some comfort (SN: 6/15/24, p. 10).

      Despite how it may appear, none of this materializes out of thin air. Every interaction with a chatbot or other generative AI system funnels through wires and cables to a data center — a warehouse full of server stacks that pass these prompts through the billions (and potentially trillions) of parameters that dictate how a generative model responds. More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Heart

      Climate change made 2024 the hottest year on record. The heat was deadly

      by

      Over and over, the numbers tell the same story: 2024 was Earth’s hottest year on record, knocking the previous record holder — 2023 — out of the top spot (SN: 12/6/23). But temperatures alone can’t describe the human cost: humidity that challenges the body’s ability to cool itself; nighttime temps that rob people of sleep; power outages; wildfire smoke; ruined crops; rising cases of mosquito-borne disease (SN: 9/20/24).

      Meanwhile, record-breaking water temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico fueled hurricanes Helene and Milton (SN: 10/9/24). Helene’s torrential rains caused flooding across six states in the U.S. Southeast, killing over 200 people (SN: 10/1/24). More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Heart

      Meet a scientist tracking cactus poaching in the Atacama Desert

      by

      Pablo Guerrero has been visiting cacti in the Atacama Desert his whole life, first on family trips to the Chilean coast and later as a researcher studying the impacts of climate change and illegal poaching on the fragile flora.

      The desert, which is the driest spot on Earth beyond the planet’s poles, can be so desolate that NASA uses it to test Mars rovers. But from a young age, Guerrero learned to spot pockets of life hidden within the arid landscape. More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Heart

      Climate stress may undermine male spiders’ romantic gift giving

      by

      Courtship dazzle in spiders can lose some zing in uncertain climates. Males in places with hard-to-predict rain and temperatures devolve into suitors who woo mostly with cheap, useless gifts.

      Researchers have described gift giving in courtship in only 15 or 20 of the world’s more than 50,000 known species of spiders, says evolutionary biologist Maria José Albo of Universidad La República in Montevideo, Uruguay (SN: 7/26/16). Since 2015, she and her lab have focused on spiders that flirt mostly in evenings and nights among the rocks and pebbles of rivers of Uruguay and southern Brazil. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Heart

      New videos reveal the hidden lives of Andean bears

      by

      Camera collar footage is unveiling the secret lives of Andean bears (Tremarctos ornatus), South America’s only surviving ursid. A wild Andean bear in Peru was caught eating soil or clay, courting females and even cannibalizing a dead bear cub.

      “It’s so hard to see an Andean bear,” says Ruthmery Pillco Huarcaya, a wildlife biologist at Amazon Conservation, a nongovernmental organization in Cusco, Peru. Scientists estimate there are fewer than 20,000 left in the wild. “And it’s even harder to see what they are doing.” Even though the bears are deep brown or black with bright spectacled faces and can weigh up to 340 pounds, they’re tricky to spot in the dense, steep forests of the Andes. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Heart

      From electric cars to wildfires, how Trump may affect climate actions

      by

      If we learned anything from 2024, it’s that climate change is rapidly reshaping our world. We’re on course to set the hottest year on record. In just the past few months, supercharged hurricanes, 1-in-1,000-year floods and drought-fueled wildfires have devastated parts of the United States.

      It’s a very bad time to put the brakes on the aggressive actions — including slashing U.S. carbon emissions and transitioning to greener, lower-carbon sources of energy — that scientists have repeatedly said are necessary to help keep the planet’s warming in check. There is simply no more time for denial or delay, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned back in 2021 (SN: 8/9/21). More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Heart

      Satellite space junk might wreak havoc on the stratosphere

      by

      Earth’s space junk may be wreaking havoc on the stratosphere.

      The rapid surge in satellite megaconstellations is connecting much of the world to broadband internet. But each year, hundreds of those satellites die, burning up in the atmosphere as they fall. And each year, more and more satellites are being launched to replace them.

      The dying satellites, it turns out, don’t just wink out into the ether. Each one leaves a bit of itself behind. More

    • 163 Shares99 Views

      in Heart

      Climate change has amped up hurricane wind speeds by 30 kph on average

      by

      As if hurricanes needed any more kick.

      Human-caused climate change is boosting the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes by a whole category on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which rates hurricanes based on their peak sustained wind speed, researchers report November 20 in two new studies.

      From 2019 to 2023, climate change enhanced the maximum wind speeds of hurricanes by an average of about 29 kilometers per hour (18 miles per hour), or roughly the breadth of a Saffir-Simpson category, researchers report in Environmental Research: Climate. Climate change similarly increased the intensities of all hurricanes in 2024 by an average of about 29 kph (18 mph), escalating the risk of wind damage, a companion analysis from Climate Central shows. More