By Walt Hickey

Deepfakes

The Pentagon has invested $2.4 million into technology from a company called Hive AI to detect deepfakes, and as a person kicking off a Battlestar Galactica rewatch, I say we hear them out. Algorithmically generated fake video has been around for a decade but has become significantly more realistic and convincing over the past several years, which is one reason the DOD’s Defense Innovation Unit wants to up their resilience against them. It seems like if people want to bamboozle the troops, they will have to do it the old-fashioned way, like by opening up a car dealership two miles away from a base.

Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review

E-Buses

India has managed to electrify fleets of buses despite the intimidating economics of doing so. Nationally, the country’s buses transport 128 million people per day, and with an electric bus costing 2.5 times the price of a diesel model and some cities capping the price of a bus ride at something like 25 rupees ($0.30), it’s some tough math to solve. To pull it off, India’s government-owned Convergence Energy Services Ltd. got five cities to come together and cut deals with private companies that would front the cost of the buses and operate the service for 12 years at a price of 49 rupees per kilometer, 27 percent less than a compressed natural gas fleet. This has led to 29,000 e-buses, up from 500 four years ago.

Lou Del Bello, Bloomberg

Fans

The NFL is so popular that even individual fans might be able to make a career out of their public personas, charging for photographs like a mall Santa and investing thousands of dollars into their signature look within the fandom, like a well-known clown might, or a furry. Take, for instance, The Philly Sports Guy, who might pose for 5,000 pictures with fans in a given game day, according to his own estimate, charges $2,000 per month for space on his custom jersey, and with 400,000 followers makes for a modestly successful influencer with a fairly steady career. Some have long runs — Oakland Raiders fan The Violator began dressing up in 1991, and now does Modelo events and still shows up when his perfidious team plays in Vegas.

Jacob Feldman, Sportico

GenCast

Weather forecasting is an incredibly complicated and sophisticated computational process involving millions of pieces of data being fed into some of the most powerful computers on the planet to fuel an ongoing simulation of the atmosphere. Advances are measured in accuracy and time, particularly how much earlier accurate predictions of the weather might be provided, and the past several decades have been fruitful, bringing about meaningful forecasts nearly two weeks in advance. Google’s DeepMind laboratory says it’s managed to advance the field in a new study published in Nature, which claims that its GenCast system beat the precision of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ predictions in 97 percent of the real-world scenarios from 2019 they were both tested on.

Agence France-Presse

Pulses

In astronomy, LPTs are long-period radio transients, essentially radio signals that last for a couple of minutes and then go silent for tens of minutes until restarting. This is obviously considered to be freaky and we’d like very much to know what’s calling out in the deep. Pulsars are well known and similar to a lighthouse. The result of a supernova, they have funky magnetic fields that eject beams of radio waves, creating a more rhythmic pulsing of signal, hence the name. LPTs are weird because a slow pulsar wouldn’t have the energy to produce that kind of blast. Over the past several months, LPTs have been spotted in parts of the sky that make them easier to study with less background noise, with one of them seeing a period of 2.9 hours reported last week. Its location is near a known red dwarf star, and the working theory is that there’s a dim white dwarf star in a binary orbit with that red dwarf that’s actually responsible for the signals.

Daniel Clery, Science

Electronics

Only 12 percent of small electronics get recycled, which is a shame, as that means that billions of pounds of valuable equipment just gets sent to a dump rather than having their component bits reused in new equipment. It’s a lot of waste: In 2022, 137 billion pounds of electronic waste were produced globally. It’s a pretty intensive and expensive process to mine the metals that go into it, so there’s real value in just melting it out of disused electronics. According to the U.N., the value of the critical metals within those electronics is $60 billion.

Adam Clark Estes, Vox

Doggerland

The field of archaeology has taken an interest in Doggerland, the land bridge that once connected modern-day Britain to the mainland of Europe and existed for around 14,000 years. As recently as 12,000 years ago, this was a pretty extensive territory that is now the bottom of the North Sea. The phrase “land bridge” is actually kind of loaded, implying a corridor that was mostly passed through from one place to another, but increasingly archaeologists are finding evidence that this region was home to many permanent inhabitants who had to abandon the area during the very first Brexit, when it was inundated between 20,000 and 7,500 years ago. Imagery collected has turned up evidence of 12,000-year-old rivers, and a European Research Council-funded project granted €13 million ($13.7 million) to investigating the southern North Sea, a boon to these researchers. One cool part? The bottom of the sea is 4 C pretty much all the time, so it preserves organic matter well, and samples of 574 taxa of plants show that the region was once very colonized by plants.

Tristan McConnell, Hakai Magazine

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