New studies investigating the ice found at the planet’s polar regions are reporting that a precarious situation appears to be unfolding at the ends of the Earth, with the increased melting of both sea and glacial ice in the Arctic Ocean, Greenland, and even the supposedly-stable glaciers of East Antarctica.
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Artificial intelligence developer DeepMind has produced an AI program that can best any human — and any game-playing program, for that matter — in a number of classic board games. This new AI, called AlphaZero, is based on an earlier program called AlphaGo, the AI that defeated Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016, but is now proficient in the games of chess, Go, and shogi. But unlike its Go-dominating predecessor, of which required extensive programming to achieve its successes, AlphaZero wasn’t programmed in its mastery of the three classic games; instead, it taught itself.
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What starts as an apology for missing a blatant ethical issue that flew over the host’s head during last week’s interview ends in a call for adopting a universal code of ethics in ufology, because that’s what is needed for this to be taken seriously as a field of study.read more
Despite calls by the scientific community for the world to dramatically cut greenhouse gas production to address the problem of global warming, worldwide carbon dioxide emissions rose by 2.7 percent over the course of 2018, the largest increase seen in seven years. This news follows a series of call-to-arms warnings released by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the U.S. Government’s National Climate Assessment, warning of the urgent need to cut emissions; additionally, a prediction from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecasts that El Niño conditions are very likely to form in the Pacific Ocean over the winter — conditions that may push 2019 into being the hottest year on record.
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