Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks during an Amazon Devices launch event in New York City, Feb. 26, 2025. TECH TAKEOVER: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says artificial intelligence will "change the way" work is done and expects the company's total corporate workforce to be reduced as a result. 'GIANT OFFERS': Meta has allegedly tried to recruit employees from competitor OpenAI by offering bonuses as high as 100 million, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed on a podcast that aired Tuesday. ENERGY OUTLOOK: The rise of artificial intelligence and the increasing popularity of cryptocurrency will continue to push electricity consumption to record highs in 2025 and 2026. POWER DRAIN CRISIS: Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, to generate an image or let artificial intelligence summarize your email, something big is happening behind the scenes.

A House Democrat is warning artificial intelligence could become a tool of "digital colonialism" if the U.S. doesn't take steps to work with Western Hemisphere nations to create AI systems that reflect diversity and inclusion. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., proposed a resolution during the August break that says the U.S. must champion a "regional" AI strategy that includes Western Hemisphere nations as this new technology is developed. "United States-led investments in the development of AI in the Western Hemisphere would promote the inclusion and representation of underserved populations in the global development and deployment of AI technologies, ensuring that no individual country dominates AI but rather collaborative developments in the Western Hemisphere," his resolution asserted. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)? Rep Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., is calling on the U.S. to work closely with Western nations as it develops artificial intelligence systems and guidelines.

Ecological systems are inherently complex. The processes that affect the distributions of animals and plants operate at multiple spatial and temporal scales, presenting a unique challenge for the development and coordination of effective conservation strategies, particularly for wide-ranging species. In order to study ecological systems across scales, data must be collected at fine resolutions across broad spatial and temporal extents. Crowdsourcing has emerged as an efficient way to gather these data by engaging large numbers of people to record observations. However, data gathered by crowdsourced projects are often biased due to the opportunistic approach of data collection. In this article, we propose a general class of models called AdaSTEM, (for adaptive spatio-temporal exploratory models), that are designed to meet these challenges by adapting to multiple scales while exploiting variation in data density common with crowdsourced data. To illustrate the use of AdaSTEM, we produce intra-seasonal distribution estimates of long-distance migrations across the Western Hemisphere using data from eBird, a citizen science project that utilizes volunteers to collect observations of birds. Subsequently, model diagnostics are used to quantify and visualize the scale and quality of distribution estimates. This analysis shows how AdaSTEM can automatically adapt to complex spatiotemporal processes across a range of scales, thus providing essential information for full-life cycle conservation planning of broadly distributed species, communities, and ecosystems.