Technology AI AI videos of animals could be dangerous. Here's how to spot them. Researchers warn that they can distort our connection to wildlife. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It happens more and more frequently.

The great wildebeest migration, seen from space: satellites and AI are helping count Africa's wildlife The Great Wildebeest Migration is one of the most remarkable natural spectacles on Earth. Each year, immense herds of wildebeest, joined by zebras and gazelles, travel 800-1,000km between Tanzania and Kenya in search of fresh grazing after the rains . This vast, circular journey is the engine of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem. The migration feeds predators such as lions and crocodiles, fertilises the land and sustains the grasslands. Countless other species, and human livelihoods tied to rangelands and tourism, depend on it.

Environment Animals Wildlife'Attack squirrel' sends two people to the ER A friendly reminder to not feed wildlife. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The residents of San Rafael, California, have been traumatized by some vicious wildlife . While cougars, coyotes, or great white sharks would be viable guesses for the culprit, this time it was a less formidable predator. The aggressor is a squirrel .

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. A'very mean squirrel' is going nuts in this California town. Experts say it's rare for squirrels to attack people, and the most likely reason has to do with humans hand feeding or hand raising the animals. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here .

Keep fake spider webs close to your house, and ditch the real pumpkins if you live near wildlife. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. With spooky season just on the horizon, Halloween decorations are beginning to pop up everywhere--tombstones, pumpkins, and of course, tons and tons of fake spiderwebs . Amidst all the autumnal celebrations, it's easy to forget those who not only can't join in on the celebration, but might even be threatened by the decorations: wildlife. While Jennifer Bloodgood, a Cornell University wildlife veterinarian, hasn't personally witnessed it before, she tells that she agrees with the dangers of some Halloween decorations. "Birds would definitely be the major concern," she says, referring specifically to fake spider webs.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Roboticists in China have developed a life-sized, furry, AI-enabled antelope designed to monitor the migration patterns of its real-life counterpart. This "bionic" antelope is part of a growing arsenal of somewhat convincing-looking robots used to observe wildlife in up close and personal ways human researchers often can't. The robot was first reported on by Chinese news agency Xinhua and was reportedly co-designed by DEEP Robotics and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It was built to fill a gap in current efforts to monitor the once-endangered Tibetan antelope (Pantholops hodgsonii).

They're the government body behind the dreaded hosepipe bans. But the Environment Agency have come up with another way to save water – by deleting old emails. Historic messages and photos are stored in vast data centres which consume so much energy they require large amounts of water to keep cool. Now, the public is being urged to'play their part' to help reduce pressure on our water systems by having an email clear–out. The advice was issued as Britain endures its fourth heatwave of the summer. Five areas of England are currently officially in drought, with six more in'prolonged dry weather'.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Sometimes, high-tech solutions aren't the best way to solve a problem. The US Army apparently came to that realization recently while exploring new methods to deter birds and other "problematic wildlife" from air bases. The military initially considered using Boston Dynamics' dog-like Spot robot to scare off the intruders, but they quickly realized it wasn't fast enough to effectively shoo the critters away. A far more effective--and affordable--solution presented itself in the form of three life-sized plastic coyote decoys mounted on top of toy-sized autonomous vehicles.

Live tracking of wildlife via high-resolution video processing directly onboard drones is widely unexplored and most existing solutions rely on streaming video to ground stations to support navigation. Yet, both autonomous animal-reactive flight control beyond visual line of sight and/or mission-specific individual and behaviour recognition tasks rely to some degree on this capability. In response, we introduce WildLive - a near real-time animal detection and tracking framework for high-resolution imagery running directly onboard uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs). The system performs multi-animal detection and tracking at 17.81fps for HD and 7.53fps on 4K video streams suitable for operation during higher altitude flights to minimise animal disturbance. Our system is optimised for Jetson Orin AGX onboard hardware. It integrates the efficiency of sparse optical flow tracking and mission-specific sampling with device-optimised and proven YOLO-driven object detection and segmentation techniques. Essentially, computational resource is focused onto spatio-temporal regions of high uncertainty to significantly improve UAV processing speeds. Alongside, we introduce our WildLive dataset, which comprises 200K+ annotated animal instances across 19K+ frames from 4K UAV videos collected at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. All frames contain ground truth bounding boxes, segmentation masks, as well as individual tracklets and tracking point trajectories. We compare our system against current object tracking approaches including OC-SORT, ByteTrack, and SORT. Our multi-animal tracking experiments with onboard hardware confirm that near real-time high-resolution wildlife tracking is possible on UAVs whilst maintaining high accuracy levels as needed for future navigational and mission-specific animal-centric operational autonomy. Our materials are available at: https://dat-nguyenvn.github.io/WildLive/

Adapted to live in some of our planet's most inhospitable mountainous regions, snow leopards (Panthera uncia) are the ultimate mountain climbers and an iconic big cat. A recent camera trapping study found that India is home to the most dense population of the black and white carnivores on Earth and most live in a remote northern region of the subcontinent. Here, they also appear to co-exist alongside rural communities, where they are respected by local human populations. The findings are detailed in a study published May 7 in the open-access journal PLOS One. Snow leopards are found in mountainous regions across 12 Asian countries: Afghanistan, Bhutan, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.