John Herbst expresses offense at American reluctance to provide MiGs to Ukraine on'Your World.' This is a rush transcript from "Your World," March 18, 2022. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. NEIL CAVUTO, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: All right, Vladimir Putin defending his invasion of Ukraine and maybe wincing at all the global notoriety the Ukrainian president is getting, when he never leaves Ukraine, talking to one major legislative body after another of the greatest powers on Earth, as Vladimir Putin tries to explain to a packed crowd in a Moscow stadium that he means no harm, that he is doing good, that he is fighting the good fight, even as that good fight is turning awfully deadly and getting awfully close to a NATO country. In Lviv today, in the western part of the country, a mere 40 miles from the Polish border, the missiles were flying and people were dying. MIKE TOBIN, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Well, Neil, as you mentioned, for the first time, the -- first time in several days, the relative peace of the western part of the country was shattered, as cruise missiles rained down here perilously close to NATO's eastern flank. What they were after was the Lviv state aircraft repair. What that facility does is customize MiG-29s, so they can be used by the Ukrainian air force. Maxim Kozytskyy, the regional administrator of Lviv says the airstrikes were launched from long-range bombers over the Black Sea. Six of the missiles were launched. Four of them got through. Two of them were intercepted by Ukrainian air defenses. The Ukrainian air force says one of the reasons the cruisers was way able to get through is because they flew so low. They are the Russian X-55s, with a price tag of about a million apiece. South of here, the town of Mariupol, the situation is quite desperate. You know that theater that was being used as a bomb shelter took a direct hit from a Russian aircraft.

During Russia's war on Ukraine, video footage has circulated on the internet showing the Turkish combat drone Bayraktar TB2 successfully striking the Russian army. But as so often during heightened conflicts, it is hard to distinguish between factual events and misinformation – some videos of the drone attacks have already been exposed as the latter. Given the chaotic events on the ground, it is almost impossible to assess how often and how successfully Ukraine has utilised its Turkish drones so far, Mauro Gilli, senior researcher in military technology and international security at ETH Zurich, told Al Jazeera. "There have been some video footages allegedly showing the employment of the TB2. Of course, information at this point is fragmented, and it needs to be taken with caution. "We do know that Ukraine bought some TB2 over the past years and that Turkey and Ukraine signed an agreement for the production within Ukrainian borders of the TB2 – but, as far as I know, production had not started yet.

The diversity of El Ni\~no events is commonly described by two distinct flavors, the Eastern Pacific (EP) and Central Pacific (CP) types. While the remote impacts, i.e. teleconnections, of EP and CP events have been studied for different regions individually, a global picture of their teleconnection patterns is still lacking. Here, we use Forman-Ricci curvature applied on climate networks constructed from 2-meter air temperature data to distinguish regional links from teleconnections. Our results confirm that teleconnection patterns are strongly influenced by the El Ni\~no type. EP events have primarily tropical teleconnections whereas CP events involve tropical-extratropical connections, particularly in the Pacific. Moreover, the central Pacific region does not have many teleconnections, even during CP events. It is mainly the eastern Pacific that mediates the remote influences for both El Ni\~no types.

In this paper, we propose decentralized and scalable algorithms for Gaussian process (GP) training and prediction in multi-agent systems. To decentralize the implementation of GP training optimization algorithms, we employ the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). A closed-form solution of the decentralized proximal ADMM is provided for the case of GP hyper-parameter training with maximum likelihood estimation. Multiple aggregation techniques for GP prediction are decentralized with the use of iterative and consensus methods. In addition, we propose a covariance-based nearest neighbor selection strategy that enables a subset of agents to perform predictions. The efficacy of the proposed methods is illustrated with numerical experiments on synthetic and real data.

Today, nearly everyone accepts that in order to slow the damage we are doing to our planet and environment, humans must transition away from the use of fossil fuels. This has led to many science and business innovations as we search for new sustainable or renewable alternatives to coal, oil, and gas. Although it would be nice to think everyone wants to do their part in order to save the world, there are strong financial incentives too. The value of the renewable energy market is set to grow from $880 billion to nearly $2 trillion by 2030. And the growing awareness of the importance of environmental and social governance (ESG) issues means there are tremendous political incentives, too.

In a video that went viral on Twitter Sunday night, a massive explosion rips through what appears to be a Russian convoy, scoring a direct hit on a surface-to-air missile system. The black-and-white footage, posted to the account of the Ukrainian armed forces, is one of several that have emerged on social media in recent days showing the devastating impact of Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian hardware. As the drone's payload explodes in the video--which appears to be a cellphone recording of a screen in a Ukrainian drone facility--people at the facility can be heard gasping in awe before breaking out in cheers and applause. The video racked up more than 3 million views on Twitter in two days. There will be no peace for you on our earth!" the Ukrainian armed forces wrote in the video's caption. The star of this video and others circulating on Twitter is the Bayraktar TB2 – a type of Turkish drone that the Ukrainian military has increasingly deployed against Russian forces in recent ...

Digital agriculture has evolved significantly over the last few years due to the technological developments in automation and computational intelligence applied to the agricultural sector, including vineyards which are a relevant crop in the Mediterranean region. In this work, a study is presented of semantic segmentation for vine detection in real-world vineyards by exploring state-of-the-art deep segmentation networks and conventional unsupervised methods. Camera data have been collected on vineyards using an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) equipped with a dual imaging sensor payload, namely a high-definition RGB camera and a five-band multispectral and thermal camera. Extensive experiments using deep-segmentation networks and unsupervised methods have been performed on multimodal datasets representing four distinct vineyards located in the central region of Portugal. The reported results indicate that SegNet, U-Net, and ModSegNet have equivalent overall performance in vine segmentation. The results also show that multimodality slightly improves the performance of vine segmentation, but the NIR spectrum alone generally is sufficient on most of the datasets. Furthermore, results suggest that high-definition RGB images produce equivalent or higher performance than any lower resolution multispectral band combination. Lastly, Deep Learning (DL) networks have higher overall performance than classical methods. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Cybonic/DL_vineyard_segmentation_study.git

You can guarantee that any beach you walk on, you'll find pieces of plastic," said James Comerford, a senior researcher in materials and nanotechnology at SINTEF, an independent research organisation in Oslo, Norway. Plastics are estimated to comprise 85% of marine litter, with 11 million metric tonnes entering the oceans annually and the volume potentially tripling by 2040. Some have predicted that, by weight, there will be more plastics than fish in the seas by 2050. In light of the alarming outlook, innovative approaches are required to tackle the problem. This is exactly what the EU Mission "Restore our Ocean and Waters by 2030" is targeting, with the ambition of reducing plastic litter at sea by at least 50%, cutting microplastics released into the environment by 30%, and halving agricultural nutrient losses as well as the use of chemical pesticides. To reduce pollution, the Mission is launching a'lighthouse' in the Mediterranean Sea that will act as a hub to develop, ...

Whale sharks can carry up to 300 babies at once--at different fetal stages and from different fathers. Zebra sharks experience "virgin birth." These are but a mere sampling of the decade's most fascinating shark discoveries. Some 500 known species of these toothy fish ply our planet's waters, ranging from bite size to bus size, and scientists are still becoming acquainted with most of them. Since 2000, when scientists discovered shark populations were collapsing around the world, research on sharks has ramped up across many fields of study, from paleontology to neuroscience to biomechanics.

You can guarantee that any beach you walk on, you'll find pieces of plastic,' said James Comerford, a senior researcher in materials and nanotechnology at SINTEF, an independent research organisation in Oslo, Norway. Plastics are estimated to comprise 85% of marine litter, with 11 million metric tonnes entering the oceans annually and the volume potentially tripling by 2040. Some have predicted that, by weight, there will be more plastics than fish in the seas by 2050. In light of the alarming outlook, innovative approaches are required to tackle the problem. This is exactly what the EU Mission "Restore our Ocean and Waters by 2030" is targeting, with the ambition of reducing plastic litter at sea by at least 50%, cutting microplastics released into the environment by 30%, and halving agricultural nutrient losses as well as the use of chemical pesticides.