Back in 1969 I finally caught 2001: A Space Odyssey in a Cinerama theater in Scottsdale, Arizona. At that point, the film had been running in that theater for over a year. I had longed to see it since its release in 1968 (I remember seeing it on the marquee of a theater in downtown Indianapolis), but when we visited relatives in Phoenix the following summer the opportunity finally presented itself. After the crescendo of its end, and the credits that ran to the tune of Johann Strauss' "The Blue Danube," I stepped out of the theater in a fog, completely stunned. From the hype I had heard about the film I was expecting something of an ambitious, up-to-date Destination Moon.

PARIS – Coastal areas currently home to 300 million people will be vulnerable by 2050 to flooding made worse by climate change, no matter how aggressively humanity curbs carbon emissions, scientists said Tuesday. By midcentury and beyond, however, choices made today will determine whether Earth's coastlines remain recognizable to future generations, they reported in the journal Nature Communications. Destructive storm surges fueled by increasingly powerful cyclones and rising seas will hit Asia hardest, according to the study. More than two-thirds of the populations at risk are in China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. Using a form of artificial intelligence known as neural networks, the new research corrects ground elevation data that have up to now vastly underestimated the extent to which coastal zones are subject to flooding during high tide or major storms. "Sea-level projections have not changed," co-author Ben Strauss, chief scientist and CEO of Climate Central, a U.S.-based non-profit research group, told AFP. "But when we use our new elevation data, we find far more people living in vulnerable areas that we previously understood."

The authors said they had used artificial intelligence to correct systematic errors in a previous dataset that had suggested many inhabited coastal zones were at higher elevations -- and thus safer -- than they actually are. "We now understand that the threat from sea-level rise and coastal flooding is far greater than we previously thought," said Benjamin Strauss, chief executive of Climate Central and co-author of the three-year study. "It's also true that the benefits from cutting climate pollution are far greater than we previously thought – this changes the whole benefit-cost equation," Strauss told Reuters. The threat that advancing seas will overwhelm the ability of countries to build coastal defences and force many millions of people to migrate has long been regarded as one of the most potentially destabilising impacts of the climate crisis. The risks were underlined last month when the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a landmark report on oceans that said sea levels could rise by one metre (3.3 ft) by 2100 -- ten times the rate in the 20th century -- if carbon emissions keep climbing.

Up to 630 million people are living on land threatened by flooding from sea level rises by the end of the century – three times as many as previously thought, according to a new analysis. The greatest increase in risk was found for communities living in Asian megacities, due to the way earlier estimates were worked out. It's a completely new perspective on the scale of this threat," says Benjamin Strauss at Climate Central, a New Jersey-based independent organisation. Previous calculations of the number of people at risk have been based on estimates of land elevation around the world using satellite data from NASA. But that approach gets confused by rooftops and forests, which can be mistaken for the ground, meaning a skyscraper-packed city such as Shanghai could look at a misleadingly low risk of flooding as seas rise.

See some shoes you like on a frenemy's Instagram? Search will pull up all the matching images on the web, including from sites that will sell you the same pair. In order to do that, Google's computer vision algorithms had to be trained to extract identifying features like colors, textures, and shapes from a vast catalogue of images. Luis Ceze, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, wants to encode that same process directly in DNA, making the molecules themselves carry out that computer vision work. And he wants to do it using your photos.