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How marine mammals stay hydrated in a salty sea

Popular Science

This adorable sea lion has to eat five to eight percent of its body weight every day to stay healthy and hydrated. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Over the long and complicated course of evolutionary history, mammals independently turned towards water to make a home multiple times. While many of the warm-blooded animals that abandoned dry land for a watery habitat no longer exist, we still have plenty of stunning examples: Think dolphins, whales, manatees, porpoises. There's even a whole suborder of carnivores called the pinnipeds, which includes seals, sea lions, and walruses who move between land and water.


Marine biologists spot rare blue whales off Massachusetts coast

Popular Science

The team observed the gentle giants two days in a row. Blue whales can be found in every ocean except the Arctic. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. As if soaring above the brilliant blue ocean isn't spectacular enough, the New England Aquarium's aerial survey team recently experienced two back-two-back sightings of blue whales --a little déjà blue, per the aquarium's clever social media post. The first sighting occurred on February 27, when scientists from the Aquarium's Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life spotted a blue whale ().


The oldest-known humpback whale recording was hiding in an archive

Popular Science

The audio, etched onto a plastic disc in 1949, predates the era when researchers could even recognize whale calls. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In 1970, a single record would change history.


Hyperbolic Graph Neural Networks

Qi Liu, Maximilian Nickel, Douwe Kiela

Neural Information Processing Systems

Motivatedbyrecent advances ingeometric representation learning, we propose a novel GNN architecture for learning representations on Riemannian manifolds with differentiable exponential and logarithmic maps.


The lobstermen teaming up with scientists to save endangered whales

Popular Science

In a game of scientific telephone, if you find the food, you find the whales--and sound the alarm. North Atlantic right whales sometimes gather at Jeffrey's Ledge, a 62-mile-long underwater ridge about 25 miles off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. It was a cold and windy week last January, when a group of Maine lobstermen couldn't haul in their traps from Jeffrey's Ledge. The reason why surprised everyone.


Robust X-Learner: Breaking the Curse of Imbalance and Heavy Tails via Robust Cross-Imputation

Uehara, Eichi

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects (HTE) in industrial applications such as AdTech and healthcare presents a dual challenge: extreme class imbalance and heavy-tailed outcome distributions. While the X-Learner framework effectively addresses imbalance through cross-imputation, we demonstrate that it is fundamentally vulnerable to "Outlier Smearing" when reliant on Mean Squared Error (MSE) minimization. In this failure mode, the bias from a few extreme observations ("whales") in the minority group is propagated to the entire majority group during the imputation step, corrupting the estimated treatment effect structure. To resolve this, we propose the Robust X-Learner (RX-Learner). This framework integrates a redescending γ-divergence objective -- structurally equivalent to the Welsch loss under Gaussian assumptions -- into the gradient boosting machinery. We further stabilize the non-convex optimization using a Proxy Hessian strategy grounded in Majorization-Minimization (MM) principles. Empirical evaluation on a semi-synthetic Criteo Uplift dataset demonstrates that the RX-Learner reduces the Precision in Estimation of Heterogeneous Effect (PEHE) metric by 98.6% compared to the standard X-Learner, effectively decoupling the stable "Core" population from the volatile "Periphery".


The swinging sex lives of Alaska's beluga whales

Popular Science

To survive, this isolated population of only 2,000 whales needs to be smart about mates. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Among marine mammals, beluga whales () are particularly difficult to study in their icy habitat. To better understand and protect this endangered species, scientists must piece together bits of their lives from fragments, including one of the most important behaviors of any species--mating. One small population of beluga whales living in southwest Alaska's Bristol Bay appears to have a surprising strategy.


2026 is off to a hopeful start for these critically endangered whales

Popular Science

At least 18 new baby North Atlantic right whales have been spotted swimming with their mothers. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. While most of us were feasting on holiday foods over the past few weeks, the New England Aquarium was busy counting North Atlantic right whale () mom-calf pairs off the coast of Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia. "Congrats to all of these North Atlantic right whale moms!" reads a social media post by the aquarium highlighting six recent sightings, including Juno--an over 40-year-old mother with her ninth documented calf spotted on December 27. On January 8, the count jumped up to 18 calves, according to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium .


BOOM! That time Oregon blew up a whale with dynamite.

Popular Science

That time Oregon blew up a whale with dynamite. And why we should never do it again. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. When a whale dies in the ocean, an ecosystem grows around its sunken carcass. It's an epic burial at sea, something researchers call a whale fall .


Real-time Remote Tracking and Autonomous Planning for Whale Rendezvous using Robots

Bhattacharya, Sushmita, Jadhav, Ninad, Izhar, Hammad, Li, Karen, George, Kevin, Wood, Robert, Gil, Stephanie

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce a system for real-time sperm whale rendezvous at sea using an autonomous uncrewed aerial vehicle. Our system employs model-based reinforcement learning that combines in situ sensor data with an empirical whale dive model to guide navigation decisions. Key challenges include (i) real-time acoustic tracking in the presence of multiple whales, (ii) distributed communication and decision-making for robot deployments, and (iii) on-board signal processing and long-range detection from fish-trackers. We evaluate our system by conducting rendezvous with sperm whales at sea in Dominica, performing hardware experiments on land, and running simulations using whale trajectories interpolated from marine biologists' surface observations.