Drones aren't just flying through the air -- they're also sailing the Pacific Ocean as the newest scientific weapon to combat climate change. The hope is that by mapping the ocean floor, collecting weather and ocean data, and counting fish and wildlife populations, the autonomous Saildrones will measure the changes happening right now on our planet. Climate change is reshaping planet Earth, causing sea levels to rise, melting Arctic ice and raising global temperatures. According to NASA, the global average sea level has risen seven inches over the past 100 years. Arctic summer sea ice has shrunk to its lowest levels on record, and the average global temperature has gone up 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit since 2000, posing a threat to life as we know it.

Sonoma County will bolster its nascent network of fire-lookout cameras with artificial intelligence that aims to automatically identify potential wildfire starts and provide alerts even when no one is watching. County officials announced the program Wednesday after awarding a $300,000 contract to Alchera, Inc., a South Korea-based company that develops algorithms for visual artificial intelligence systems. The technology, which is promising but still in development, is meant to automate Sonoma County's alert-and-warning efforts to provide more of a heads-up in case a wildfire starts, said Chris Godley, the county's emergency management director. "This is really designed to help us catch those extremely early starts, so it gives us that much more time to investigate and, if need be, respond," Godley said. Most of the funding for the new technology comes from a $2.7 million grant the county received from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with the county chipping in about $75,000.

Labs across the UK are to be upgraded to help tackle infectious diseases, cut greenhouse emissions and more -- thanks to a £213 million government investment. The support -- part of the British government's wider'Research & Development Roadmap' -- was announced yesterday by Science Minister Amanda Solloway. It will give British scientists access to facilities including super computers in Cardiff to track infectious diseases and a floating offshore wind testing lab in Plymouth. The government's roadmap aims to make the UK'the best place in the world for scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs to live and work.' The new investment will not only provide support for the sciences, however, but will also be used to promote research in the arts and humanities.

In this paper, we present an Ontology Design Pattern for representing situations that recur at regular periods and share some invariant factors, which unify them conceptually: we refer to this set of recurring situations as recurrent situation series. The proposed pattern appears to be foundational, since it can be generalised for modelling the top-level domain-independent concept of recurrence, which is strictly associated with invariance. The pattern reuses other foundational patterns such as Collection, Description and Situation, Classification, Sequence. Indeed, a recurrent situation series is formalised as both a collection of situations occurring regularly over time and unified according to some properties that are common to all the members, and a situation itself, which provides a relational context to its members that satisfy a reference description. Besides including some exemplifying instances of this pattern, we show how it has been implemented and specialised to model recurrent cultural events and ceremonies in ArCo, the Knowledge Graph of Italian cultural heritage.

As more and more industries take on artificial intelligence to solve some of their biggest challenges, can machines help us understand and fix climate change issues? So your phone recognises your face, and your bank can block any transaction unlike your spending habits. And your online supermarket nudges you with their vegan products just because you've bought that oat milk once, while your online movie platform keeps throwing B-movies at you after you watched that soap opera last month. A growing number of our devices and services are relying on artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that continues to branch out and pop up in more and more areas of our lives. Scientists, entrepreneurs, and governments are leveraging AI to explore solutions for some of society's biggest challenges.

Many of the world's most important fisheries are experiencing increases in illegal fishing, undermining efforts to sustainably conserve and manage fish stocks. A major challenge to ending illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing is improving our ability to identify whether a vessel is fishing illegally and where illegal fishing is likely to occur in the ocean. However, monitoring the oceans is costly, time-consuming, and logistically challenging for maritime authorities to patrol. To address this problem, we use vessel tracking data and machine learning to predict illegal fishing on the Patagonian Shelf, one of the world's most productive regions for fisheries. Specifically, we focus on Chinese fishing vessels, which have consistently fished illegally in this region. We combine vessel location data with oceanographic seascapes -- classes of oceanic areas based on oceanographic variables -- as well as other remotely sensed oceanographic variables to train a series of machine learning models of varying levels of complexity. These models are able to predict whether a Chinese vessel is operating illegally with 69-96% confidence, depending on the year and predictor variables used. These results offer a promising step towards preempting illegal activities, rather than reacting to them forensically.

Blue whales swim to the surface to feed on krill as it helps them to conserve energy, according to a new study that involved amazing drone footage of the mammals. Experts from Oregon State University found that feeding on the ocean's surface plays an important role in the hunt for food among New Zealand blue whales. Blue whales are the largest mammals on Earth and have to carefully balance the cost of energy they get from food with the cost of energy used in getting the food. Researchers say the marine mammals forage for krill in areas where they are densely packed and found near the surface of the water to cut their dive time. The Oregon team found that the blue whales do this to conserve on the energetic costs of feeding such as diving, holding their breath or opening their mouths.

Antarctica's Thwaites glacier has warm water from three directions well under it threatening to destroy the ice sheet and raise global sea levels by up to two feet. A team of scientists from Oregon State University made the most of ice free waters in West Antarctica to look under the glacier - which is about the size of Great Britain. Warm water from the deep ocean is welling up under the glacier from three different directions and mixing under the ice, the researchers discovered. If it collapses it could take other parts of the ice shelf with it and lead to the single largest driver of sea-level rise this century, lead researcher Erin Pettit told Nature. The £39million study involving UK and US scientists was launched after concerns the increasingly unstable glacier may have already started to collapse.

First ever footage of the underside of the'doomsday' Thwaites glacier has been sent back by a robotic yellow submarine dubbed Icefin. Glaciologists have likened the groundbreaking images and video to the first steps on the moon taken by Neil Armstrong in 1969. Early analysis reveals that turbulent warm waters underneath the ice sheet, which is the same size as Britain, are causing an'unstoppable retreat'. Experts have previously predicted that if Thwaites was to melt completely, it would lead to a significant increase in worldwide sea levels of around two feet (65cm). The impact on coastal communities around the world would be catastrophic.

The increased freshwater from melting Antarctic ice sheets plus increased wind has reduced the amount of oxygen in the Southern Ocean and made it more acidic and warmer, according to new research led by University of Arizona geoscientists. The researchers found Southern Ocean waters had changed by comparing shipboard measurements taken from 1990 to 2004 with measurements taken by a fleet of microsensor-equipped robot floats from 2012 to 2019. The observed oxygen loss and warming around the Antarctic coast is much larger than predicted by a climate model, which could have implications for predictions of ice melt. The discovery drove the research team to improve current climate change computer models to better reflect the environmental changes around Antarctica. "It's the first time we've been able to reproduce the new changes in the Southern Ocean with an Earth system model," said co-author Joellen Russell, a professor of geosciences. The research is the first to incorporate the Southern Ocean's increased freshwater plus additional wind into a climate change model, she said.