The Hitchhiker's Guide to US Trade
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A key moment in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes when the ultimate improbability drive suddenly calls into existence a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias, high in the stratosphere above a lonely planet. As they whiz downward toward the end of their brief and improbable existence, the whale excitedly comes up with words for things like 'air' and 'tail' and 'wind' and, lastly, 'ground.' Meanwhile, according to the guide:
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Gizmodo
2 hours ago
- Gizmodo
Birds Across the World Are Singing All Day for a Disturbing Reason
If the songbirds in your neighborhood are waking you up earlier and chirping well into the evening, blame light pollution. Artificial light touches nearly every corner of Earth's surface, and a new study shows that it's messing with birds' biological clocks. Researchers analyzed a global acoustic dataset of more than 60 million recorded birdsongs representing more than 580 diurnal bird species. The findings, published Thursday, August 21, in the journal Science, show that light pollution has prolonged birdsong by an average of 50 minutes per day in the brightest landscapes, such as cities. Birds in these areas begin singing an average of 18 minutes earlier in the morning and stop 32 minutes later in the evening compared with those in the darkest landscapes, underscoring the effects of artificial light on bird behavior across species, space, and seasons. 'Light pollution is a growing concern for human and wildlife health, with current estimates of 80% of the world and more than 99% of U.S. and European populations living under light polluted skies,' study authors Brent Pease and Neil Gilbert told Gizmodo in an email. Pease is an assistant professor of biodiversity conservation at Southern Illinois University, and Gilbert is an assistant professor of biology at Oklahoma State University. 'While the outcomes of this pollution source on human health are widely studied, how it is affecting wildlife across the world is still a developing topic,' they added. Gilbert and Pease used data gathered by the BirdWeather project—a global citizen-science initiative that records and analyzes bird vocalizations—to investigate the impact of light pollution on diurnal birds. They compiled 61 million vocalizations captured between March 2023 and March 2024, then calculated vocalization onset and evening cessation relative to various sunlight phases. The researchers used VIIRS satellite data to generate month-specific light pollution measures for each BirdWeather station location. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument, currently flying on the Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 satellite missions, can observe the brightness of human settlements. This allowed them to analyze the onset and cessation of birdsong alongside light pollution. 'We were surprised by the magnitude of birds' responses,' Pease and Gilbert said. 'On average, under the brightest night skies, a bird's day is extended by nearly an hour. While we expected some behavioral adjustment to the lights at night, we didn't anticipate that it would be this impactful,' they explained. This prolonged activity may affect birds' ability to survive and reproduce in several key ways, according to Gilbert and Pease. For example, 50 minutes of additional activity a day may lead to reduced resting time, potentially resulting in higher caloric needs. On the other hand, extended activity may translate to increased foraging time or increased reproductive output. Parsing this complexity will require further research, but it's clear that our ever-brightening world is changing the way diurnal birds live—and they're not the only ones. 'Light pollution appears to be having pronounced effects on human and wildlife health,' Pease and Gilbert said. 'If the extended day is resulting in sleep debt, as it often does for humans, then we might expect adverse health or population outcomes, further exacerbating the long-term decline of bird populations across the globe.'
Gizmodo
2 hours ago
- Gizmodo
‘Alien: Earth' Is Finally Doing What the Movies Have Not
At their core, most of the Alien movies are about corporate greed. The lengths a company, mainly Weyland-Yutani, will go to harness and exploit a power from the deepest reaches of space. Whether that means sacrificing a whole ship of employees, a platoon of soldiers, families, criminals, or cloning dead people, almost every story in the Alien saga is about the idea that getting an alien back to Earth would be a huge benefit to the bottom line of the company. This, of course, never comes to be. In Alien, the xenomorph aboard the Nostromo killed almost everyone on the ship before being blown into space. The story of Alien: Romulus then hinges on the remains of that alien being captured, exploited, and causing another ship to be decimated. Aliens features a plan to sneak a xenomorph back after the trip to LV-426, which fails, and also suggests Weyland-Yutani had yet to succeed in its aim to acquire one decades later. Sending a team to Ripley's prison in Alien 3 also didn't work out, and before the ship in Resurrection crashes on Earth, all manner of xenos are gone. Every single attempt that we've seen to acquire or sneak an alien back to Earth has failed. Or so we thought. In Alien: Earth, which is set a few years before the events of Alien, we now know that not only did at least one fully grown xenomorph make it back to Earth before Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo were woken up, but several viable eggs did too. Unfortunately, Weyland-Yutani had them stolen out from under them by a rival corporation, Prodigy. And now, in the show's most recent episode, we see the beginnings of that ultimate goal: people on Earth studying xenomorphs. It's the one thing Weyland-Yutani always wanted to do but has, and apparently will continue to, fail at. And yet, their loss is now Prodigy's gain. What happens next on Alien: Earth as the study of the xenomorph continues has yet to be revealed. However, we can all but guarantee it won't go smoothly. Before all hell inevitably breaks loose, though, as it always does, many questions remain. Will Prodigy learn anything that makes the risk it's taking worthwhile? Also, is this specific Weyland-Yutani failure the reason why, in a few years, it decides to send the Nostromo off on its doomed side mission? Whatever the case, for fans of the Alien franchise, this really is a dream come true. Years ago, Alien: Resurrection finally showed us scientists studying xenomorphs, but that wasn't on Earth. David the android got to do some of that in Alien: Covenant, too, and off-screen, Alien: Romulus revealed that strides could be made. Now, finally, after years of teasing, we get to see smart, capable people, who don't fear for their lives (yet), with the proper technology and means to figure out what makes these mysterious creatures tick. It's the dream of every greedy slimeballin Alien history, and we get to watch it play out in our homes all summer long. Alien: Earth is currently streaming on FX and Hulu. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
CNET
2 hours ago
- CNET
Meet Surya, a New AI Model From NASA and IBM That Can Predict Solar Flares
Today's solar flare forecasting is pretty straightforward: Earth has several instruments pointed at the sun that monitor it, and when a solar flare erupts, NOAA predicts whether it'll hit Earth and reports it via the Space Weather Prediction Center. But NASA and IBM may be able to do this faster and with a little more accuracy thanks to a new artificial intelligence model named Surya. Surya, which is Sanskrit for "Sun," is a 366M-parameter AI model developed for the purpose of analyzing the various cool things the sun does. It's an open-source model available on GitHub for anyone to play with. Per the GitHub page, the model "learns general-purpose solar representations through spatiotemporal transformers, enabling state-of-the-art performance in solar flare forecasting, active region segmentation, solar wind prediction and EUV spectra modeling." The AI model has been trained on data about our nearest star, and uses that data to predict things like whether a solar flare is likely to hit Earth. IBM says that it's trained using data from NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory, which has been monitoring the sun since 2010, along with eight other research centers. "We want to give Earth the longest lead time possible," said Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo, solar physicist at SouthWest Research Institute and lead researcher on Surya. "Our hope is that the model has learned all the critical processes behind our star's evolution through time so that we can extract actionable insights." In short, researchers are hoping to use AI to forecast when a solar flare may hit Earth, giving the longest possible warning that a geomagnetic storm is approaching. Of course, since aurora borealis comes from the effect that geomagnetic storms have on the Earth's magnetic field, that would also mean we would know when auroras are happening much further in advance. Filling in the blanks The primary reason for NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory was to piece together the underlying physics of the sun, but as IBM notes, the process has been slow going and science still doesn't know as much as it would like to about how the sun works. Prior to Surya, NASA was using things like flashes of light in the sun's corona to partially predict solar flares. NOAA has its own prediction methods as well that work well, but have limitations. IBM says the inclusion of Surya may help make those predictions more accurate and timely. "We've been on this journey of pushing the limits of technology with NASA since 2023, delivering pioneering foundational AI models to gain an unprecedented understanding of our planet Earth," said Juan Bernabé-Moreno, IBM's director in charge of scientific collaboration with NASA. "With Surya we have created the first foundation model to look the sun in the eye and forecast its moods."
