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Antarctica's 'doomsday' glacier is heading for catastrophic collapse

New Scientist

A six-year investigation into the vast Thwaites glacier in Antarctica has concluded with a grim outlook on its future. Often dubbed the "doomsday glacier", this huge mass of ice is comparable in size to Britain or Florida and its collapse alone would raise sea levels by 65 centimetres. Worse still, this is expected to trigger a more widespread loss of the ice sheet covering West Antarctica, causing a calamitous sea level rise of 3.3 metres and threatening cities like New York, Kolkata and Shanghai. It is an extremely remote and difficult area to get to, but the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), a joint UK-US research programme, has managed to deploy 100 scientists there over the past six years, using planes, ships and underwater robots to study the dynamics of this ice in detail. "It was a tremendous challenge, and yet we really learned a lot," says Ted Scambos at University of Colorado Boulder.


The Multiple Ways Climate Change Threatens to Make Migraines Worse

WIRED

Migraine sufferers are often triggered by the weather, and research suggests warming temperatures and more extreme weather events worsen attacks. Migraines have long had an intimate relationship with the elements. Alongside stress and hormones, fluctuations in meteorological conditions are one of the most commonly cited triggers for an attack. "Patients will often say that they can predict the weather," says Vincent Martin, director of the Headache and Facial Pain Center at University of Cincinnati and president of the US National Headache Foundation. They may foresee rainfall two or three days out, as a blossoming migraine alerts them to a drop in barometric pressure.


Antarctica's 'Doomsday Glacier' is on the verge of COLLAPSING: Huge ice sheet the size of Great Britain could cause global sea levels to rise by 2 FEET, study warns

Daily Mail - Science & tech

The suspect in Charlie Kirk's assassination has been captured, FBI director Kash Patel announced MSNBC sparks outrage for'disgusting' Charlie Kirk comments following Utah shooting Tragedy as Charlie Kirk's wife left behind with two young children after conservative activist is fatally shot A DEI mayor, an inconvenient crime and video they never wanted you to see: MAUREEN CALLAHAN knows why the Left has sympathy for that killer... but none for his victim Sweater weather starts here - the cozy, chic pieces from Soft Surroundings you'll actually wear all season We only had one symptom we dismissed... but then we were diagnosed with the rarest form of melanoma Soft-touch prosecutor let felon walk free... before crook'slit Auburn professor's throat in random attack' I tried the 30 cent'miracle chill pill' before a big event.. now I'm taking it for everything Donald Trump and House Republicans lead prayers for Charlie Kirk's family after conservative star is fatally shot Prince Harry says his father King Charles is'great' following their first meeting in 19 months... which was over a cup of tea and just 55 minutes long Liberal media defends thug who killed Ukrainian woman in cold blood: 'This man was hurting' Knifeman accused of stabbing Ukrainian refugee to death gives chilling reason for the attack... as he speaks for the first time from jail on the murder that shocked America Fox News reveals new lineup and elevates star White House reporter who's sparred with Trump Horrific new details of passenger injuries after they were'thrown' around Delta flight during'severe turbulence' Antarctica's'Doomsday Glacier' is on the verge of COLLAPSING: Huge ice sheet the size of Great Britain could cause global sea levels to rise by 2 FEET, study warns READ MORE: 'Doomsday Glacier' melting'much faster' than previously thought With the potential to cause sea levels across the planet to rise, it's no wonder the Thwaites Glacier has earned the nickname the'Doomsday Glacier.' Now, scientists have revealed concerning findings about how and when the glacier could collapse. Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) used underwater robots to take new measurements of the glacier, which is the same size as Great Britain. The data indicates that the Thwaites Glacier and much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be lost entirely by the 23rd century. Worryingly, if it collapses entirely, the experts say global sea levels would rise by two feet (65cm) - plunging huge areas underwater. With the potential to cause seas across the planet to rise, it's no wonder the Thwaites Glacier has earned the nickname the'Doomsday Glacier' The Thwaites Glacier is roughly 74.5 miles (120km) across - the same size as Great Britain or Florida - making it the widest glacier on the planet Ice shelf connected to Antarctic's doomsday glacier is CRACKING The Thwaites Glacier is roughly 74.5 miles (120km) across - the same size as Great Britain or Florida.


'Meeting a real-life cyborg was gobsmacking'

BBC News

'Meeting a real-life cyborg was gobsmacking' For the past 20 years, self-declared cyborg artist Neil Harbisson has provoked debate with his eyeborg - a surgically attached antenna. Harbisson, who grew up in Barcelona, is colour blind, having been born with the rare condition achromatopsia, which affects one in 33,000 people. This means he sees in what he calls greyscale - only black, white and shades of grey. But he decided to have surgery in 2004 which changed his life - and his senses - attaching an antenna to the back of his head, which transforms light waves into sounds. When film director Carey Born came across Harbisson, classed by Guinness World Records as the first officially recognised'cyborg', she was gobsmacked and astonished.


Storm Boris: Rooftop rescues after floods overwhelm Italian town

BBC News

Witnesses described unthinkable scenes of heavy flooding in northern Italy as Storm Boris continued its journey across Europe on Thursday. People were seen climbing on roofs to escape the water as buildings collapsed in Traversara di Bagnacavallo. The Italian emergency services carried out helicopter rescues after what one eyewitness said was 36 hours of rain. Storm Boris had earlier swept across Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Austria, killing at least 23 people. One of Kyiv's main government buildings was hit in overnight missile and drone strikes by Russia.


Surgeon 'became robotic' to treat sheer volume of wounded Lebanese

BBC News

Surgeon'became robotic' to treat sheer volume of wounded Lebanese A Lebanese surgeon has described how the sheer volume of severe wounds from two days of exploding device attacks forced him to act robotic just to be able to keep working. Surgeon Elias Jaradeh said he treated women and children but most of the patients he saw were young men. The surgeon said a large proportion were "severely injured" and many had lost the sight in both eyes. The dead and injured in Lebanon include fighters from Hezbollah - the Iranian backed armed group which has been trading cross-border fire with Israel for months and is classed as a terrorist organisation by the UK and the US. But members of their families have also been killed or wounded, along with innocent bystanders.


Strange Visual Auras Could Hold the Key to Better Migraine Treatments

WIRED

Research on the visual patterns that foreshadow migraines may reveal clues on how painful headaches arise from the brain even though it has no pain receptors. Colorful zig-zag lines flash in the corner of an eye, while the tunnel vision makes most of the view obscured. Migraine with aura is usually painless, though in large majority of cases means the real migraine is about to kick in. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.


Graph Convolutional Neural Networks as Surrogate Models for Climate Simulation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As global temperatures continue to rise, the need for effective and systematic evaluation of climate intervention strategies becomes increasingly important. Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) is one such strategy and like all brings significant risks [4, 17] necessitating careful planning and evaluation of the positive and negative impacts. The Performance Assessment (PA) framework, a methodology originally designed for nuclear waste management [13], can be applied to the assessment of climate intervention strategies. The Performance Assessment for Climate Intervention (PACI) framework[19] adapts the PA methodology to evaluate SAI by establishing a set of performance goals, identifying relevant system features, events, and processes (FEPs), and assessing the system's performance, including uncertainties, against these goals. The PACI framework aims to provide a structured and quantifiable approach to evaluate the risks and benefits of SAI in comparison to other climate pathways.


Autonomous Navigation in Ice-Covered Waters with Learned Predictions on Ship-Ice Interactions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Autonomous navigation in ice-covered waters poses significant challenges due to the frequent lack of viable collision-free trajectories. When complete obstacle avoidance is infeasible, it becomes imperative for the navigation strategy to minimize collisions. Additionally, the dynamic nature of ice, which moves in response to ship maneuvers, complicates the path planning process. To address these challenges, we propose a novel deep learning model to estimate the coarse dynamics of ice movements triggered by ship actions through occupancy estimation. To ensure real-time applicability, we propose a novel approach that caches intermediate prediction results and seamlessly integrates the predictive model into a graph search planner. We evaluate the proposed planner both in simulation and in a physical testbed against existing approaches and show that our planner significantly reduces collisions with ice when compared to the state-of-the-art. Codes and demos of this work are available at https://github.com/IvanIZ/predictive-asv-planner.


Can Large Language Models Address Open-Target Stance Detection?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Stance detection (SD) identifies a text's position towards a target, typically labeled as favor, against, or none. We introduce Open-Target Stance Detection (OTSD), the most realistic task where targets are neither seen during training nor provided as input. We evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) GPT-4o, GPT-3.5, Llama-3, and Mistral, comparing their performance to the only existing work, Target-Stance Extraction (TSE), which benefits from predefined targets. Unlike TSE, OTSD removes the dependency of a predefined list, making target generation and evaluation more challenging. We also provide a metric for evaluating target quality that correlates well with human judgment. Our experiments reveal that LLMs outperform TSE in target generation when the real target is explicitly and not explicitly mentioned in the text. Likewise, for stance detection, LLMs excel in explicit cases with comparable performance in non-explicit in general.