the conversation
-
Cities Could Get 4°C Hotter By 2100 – Australia Needs A National Planning Policy To Keep Cool
In cities around the world, temperatures could rise by more than 4℃ by 2100 under a high-emissions climate change scenario, suggests research published this week in Nature Climate Change. It comes as the Bureau of Meteorology’s annual climate statement, released today, shows 2020 was Australia’s fourth-warmest year on record, despite being an “La Niña” year,…
-
How Did Some Animals Evolve Wings to Fly?
Perhaps the first thing you notice when you see a bird is its amazing ability to fly. Modern birds fly using their “arms”, which have feathers and very strong flight muscles. But the ancestors of today’s birds couldn’t fly. Birds evolved from a group of dinosaurs called theropods, which walked on the ground. They included…
-
How to Get People From Earth to Mars and Safely Back Again
There are many things humanity must overcome before any return journey to Mars is launched. The two major players are NASA and SpaceX, which work together intimately on missions to the International Space Station but have competing ideas of what a crewed Mars mission would look like. Size matters The biggest challenge (or constraint) is…
-
It Takes a Lot of Energy for Machines to Learn, Here’s Why AI Is So Power-Hungry
This month, Google forced out a prominent AI ethics researcher after she voiced frustration with the company for making her withdraw a research paper. The paper pointed out the risks of language-processing artificial intelligence, the type used in Google Search and other text analysis products. Among the risks is the large carbon footprint of developing…