If games are big iterations of cause and effect, then elemental reactions give very clear and logical feedback to players about exactly what their footprint on the world is.

Because winds blow in various directions at each altitude, the AI-based controller was programmed to use reinforcement learning, or RL, to search a database of historic records and current weather reports to predict the best elevation to keep the balloon in one place.

So what would happen if the global temperature increased enough to melt the ice cap in Antarctica?However, in this case, I really don't have a feeling for the size of the Antarctic ice cap.

Photograph: PropellaClass 1 ebikes are limited to a top speed of 20 miles per hour, and the electric motor works only when the rider is pedaling.

Drawing crowdsourced data from air quality sensors it sells to the public—ranging between $200 and $300—PurpleAir builds maps that show in real time just how bad a neighborhood like mine is suffering from particulate matter (PM) 2.5 pollution, the particles that make up wildfire smoke.

Every year, some unlucky school districts return in August or September to find classrooms full of the stuff, says Jason Earle, the founder and CEO of 1-800-GOT-MOLD?, a mold inspection and removal firm based in the New York City area.

“Even though the surface winds were pretty weak, there was a low-level jet above the mountains,” says Craig Clements, a fire weather researcher (and fire chaser ) at San Jose State University.

And to make matters even worse, in the middle of a heat wave, they can’t open their windows because air quality is now astonishingly bad as smoke continues to pour into the Bay Area.

NIWA hazards analyst Ryan Paulik, who led the assessment, says overall 430,000 people – or nine per cent of the population – live in the zones of which 170,000 are in red and orange zones.

However, NIWA fisheries scientist Dr Mark Morrison says no research was undertaken at the time of the closure of Separation Point to determine if the fish nurseries were present, nor has there been any since.

LM : Yes. MC : And if you liked that book, I would recommend The Old Patagonian Express where he rides a train through South America.

NIWA scientists are heading to the waters around Whakaari/White Island in the Bay of Plenty next week to survey changes to the seafloor.No-one has collected water column imaging close to Whakaari so this is an incredible opportunity to discover new areas of volcanic activity.”.

Some cities may have restricted driving, while others didn’t—researchers can look at both traffic and animal data to see how species in different areas adapted.

As Bristol Bay fishermen gear up for this year’s salmon season—one beset by fears that Covid-19 could overwhelm this remote region as thousands of seasonal workers from across the world descend on fishing communities with scant medical resources—they must also contend with a slower-moving hazard: the warming temperatures that threaten a $1.5 billion industry and the people it supports.

People who have studied or practiced remote work say leaders like Zuckerberg and their executives will have to tear themselves from their Bay Area roots—in some cases physically—if they are to avoid making their new legions of remote workers second-class employees.

Scientists still have much to learn about Covid-19, but, says Jessica McCarty, a geographer and fire scientist at Miami University, “We know that there's linkages between people who live in highly-polluted areas and their likelihood of getting any type of respiratory illness, as well as viral infections.” Smog from cars, for instance, remains a major threat to human health.

Before Covid-19 hit the Bay Area, photojournalist Justin Sullivan could upload a raw file to Getty Images in a few seconds.WIRED is providing free access to stories about public health and how to protect yourself during the coronavirus pandemic .More From WIRED on Covid-19.

The bone of a steppe bison, a large Arctic ungulate that went extinct about 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, rests in the hard peat.

Jesseca Dupart started as a simple hair salon in this northeastern section of New Orleans, called Little Woods, back in 2012, when she was 30 years old, and by the time I visited her six years later, Kaleidoscope was a rapidly growing brand in the African American beauty market.

Until mid-March, the emergency room entrance at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, looked much like the entrance to other ERs: an illuminated red “EMERGENCY” sign mounted on a brick facade, above an open space where cars and ambulances could unload patients.

We’ve asked more than 100,000 people across all 50 states a simple question: Do you live in an area that is currently under a stay-at-home order due to the pandemic.

Mannus Creek is one of many waterways in Australia that have been inundated with ash and debris following the devastating bush fires this spring and summer, killing fish and other aquatic life and fouling drinking water supplies.

Blaine County residents are ordered to stay home “unless they need to perform essential activities or go to work to provide essential business and government services.” The county says that individuals may go to grocery stores and gas stations, pick up food to go from restaurants, and recreate outside so long as they follow social distancing.

President Donald Trump announced Friday that the US government’s coronavirus testing apparatus, which has lagged badly behind other developed nations , would soon get an assist from Google.

By asking visitors to imagine what life would be like on an Earth that has attained consciousness, the show—a collaboration between all the artists involved—is inviting them to view the current environmental crisis through an oddball transhumanistic lens.

That's what's happening, physics-wise, when we blow bubbles through a ring at then end of a little plastic wand: the jet forms at our lips and is wider than the soapy film suspended within the ring.

A new United Nations-sponsored report offers one of the most comprehensive overviews of the challenges to global electoral integrity posed by the onslaught of misinformation, online extremism, and social media manipulation campaigns, and calls for a series of reforms from platforms, politicians, and international governing bodies.

All of that makes Burisma an almost inevitable target for another hack-and-leak operation of the sort that Russia carried out against the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign in 2016—once again with the goal of influencing a US election .Now the first evidence has surfaced, in a report from security firm Area 1, that the very same team of Russian hackers who hit those targets may in fact have hacked Burisma.

Once you start scrolling back through the year in memes, though, it’s a bit like trying kombucha for the first time—by turns, disorienting and potentially gross, then rather pleasing.Baby Yoda is still a young meme and the The Mandalorian isn’t over, so this internet culture moment’s future is hard to see.

In other words, the food urban dwellers eat turns out to be more important for global biodiversity than the direct environmental impact of the urban areas in which they live.