Many governments have set a goal for limiting climate change: two degrees by the end of the century, and no more. However, most projections show we’re lagging badly. Unless we accelerate a transition to renewables and nuclear, we’re going to shoot right past that 2°C limit. But even as the hand-wringing about missed targets and bad trajectories has increased, it’s been relatively rare to see a detailed analysis of the potential consequence. The World Bank has now stepped into that breach.
When the next epidemic comes, there’s a good chance it will switch flights at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. Researchers at MIT have developed a pretty nifty computer model to figure out the most influential airports in the early stages of an epidemic’s spread. JFK is No. 1, followed by Los Angeles International Airport. You might be surprised to learn that Honolulu International Airport ranks third.
This animation is about how people have changed the surface of the earth. The animation (this version isn’t narrated although there is a narrated version here) welcomes us to the Anthropocene, a new epoch marked by man’s ability to affect the ecosystems of the earth. The animation traces light pollution and shipping routes across the globe, highlighting how expansive our activities as a species are. Toward the end of the video, the solid earth dissolves, and these traces appear very thin and delicate: like a kind of spherical, malignant lace. The animation was produced by Globaia, to promote awareness about the impact of humans on ecosystems.
Our [Livehoods] research hypothesis is that the character of an urban area is defined not just by the the types of places found there, but also by the people that make it part of their daily life. To explore this idea, we use data from approximately 18 million check-ins collected from the location-based social network foursquare, and apply clustering algorithms to discover the different areas of the city.
Researchers from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s Facultad de Informática have developed a computer program capable of human emotion recognition from automated voice analysis.
