Tag: technology
-
At least 19 dead in Chile as forest fires approach densely populated central areas
Intense forest fires burning around a densely populated area of central Chile have left at least 19 people dead and destroyed about 1,100 homes, officials said Saturday. Chile’s Interior Minister Carolina Tohá said there were currently 92 forest fires burning in the center and south of the country, where temperatures have been unusually high this week.…
-
India snow leopards: First-ever survey puts population at 718
India is home to 718 snow leopards, according to the first-ever survey of the animal in the country, the federal environment ministry has said. This means that Indian snow leopards account for roughly 10-15% of the big cat’s global population. The snow leopard is classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.…
-
Australia to spend $80m on business case for Sydney-Newcastle high speed rail
The Albanese government will spend $80m developing a business case for the Sydney-to-Newcastle stretch of its east coast high speed rail line, as the decades-long project inches further forward. The transport minister, Catherine King, said the allocation of $78.8m was part of Labor’s $500m election commitment to the early stages of high speed rail, with…
-
Workers Need to Fight to Make Sure AI Works for Them
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a labor issue. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it will prove to be a marginal labor issue. Or maybe it will prove to be an existential, epochal labor issue on par with industrialization or globalization, each of which revolutionized their own eras of work. Before we get completely immersed in the…
-
The absurdity of the return-to-office movement
corporate titans are still pushing for their employees to return to their offices. Banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase and tech giants like Meta are demanding that their staff be back at the office several days a week. Those return-to-office demands are often couched in non-falsifiable claims about the necessity of having chance encounters at the office where folks…
-
Arctic zombie viruses in Siberia could spark terrifying new pandemic
Humanity is facing a bizarre new pandemic threat, scientists have warned. Ancient viruses frozen in the Arctic permafrost could one day be released by Earth’s warming climate and unleash a major disease outbreak, they say. Strains of these Methuselah microbes – or zombie viruses as they are also known – have already been isolated by researchers who…
-
Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find
Google search really has been taken over by low-quality SEO spam, according to a new, year-long study by German researchers (https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf). The researchers, from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, set out to answer the question “Is Google Getting Worse?” by studying search results for 7,392 product-review…
-
US and allies should beat China in space race to assure rules-based order there: experts and lawmakers
The US and its allies should win the 21st century space race and lead a rules-based international order there before China creates its own undesirable norms, American space experts, government officials and lawmakers urged on Wednesday. “The Chinese Communist Party is actively soliciting international partners for a lunar research station and has stated its ambition to have…