Jason Allen, the AI "artist" whose image he created with Midjourney won a fine arts competition two years ago, is still mad that the government won't let him copyright his opus — and, in an amazing lack of self-awareness, is also crying that his work is being stolen as a result.

The prizewinning image, "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial," was deemed to not wholly exhibit human authorship because a significant amount of it — as Allen himself disclaimed — was AI-generated, the US Copyright Office said in a ruling last September. As such, Allen could only claim credit for specific portions of the image that he created with Photoshop — not the thing as a whole.

Now he's making another appeal, Creative Bloq reports, complaining that he's losing money to the tune of "several million dollars" because, without a copyright, his work is being used without his approval. Does this argument ring any bells?

As families desperately seek to find missing loved ones and communities grapple with immeasurable losses of both life and property in the wake of Hurricane Helene, AI slop scammers appear to be capitalizing on the moment for personal gain.

A Facebook account called "Coastal Views" usually shares calmer AI imagery of nature-filled beachside scenes. The account's banner image showcases a signpost reading "OBX Live," OBX being shorthand for North Carolina's Outer Banks islands.

But starting this weekend, the account shifted its approach dramatically, as first flagged by a social media user on X.

Instead of posting "photos" of leaping dolphins and sandy beaches, the account suddenly started publishing images of flooded mountain neighborhoods, submerged houses, and dogs sitting on top of roofs.

But instead of spreading vital information to those affected by the natural disaster, or at the very least sharing real photos of the destruction, the account is seemingly trying to use AI to cash in on all the attention the hurricane has been getting.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cannot reveal weather forecasts from a particularly accurate hurricane prediction model to the public that pays for the American government agency – because of a deal with a private insurance risk firm.

The model at issue is called the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP) Corrected Consensus Approach (HCCA). In 2023, it was deemed in a National Hurricane Center (NHC) report [PDF] to be one of the two "best performers," the other being a model called IVCN (Intensity Variable Consensus).

2020 contract between NOAA and RenaissanceRe Risk Sciences, disclosed in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Washington Post, requires NOAA to keep HCCA forecasts – which incorporate a proprietary technique from RenaissanceRe – secret for five years.

South Korea is projected to face a sharp demographic shift in the coming decades, with a declining birth rate and aging population leading to increased social burdens on the working-age population.

In six years, it is projected that two working-age adults in South Korea will need to support one elderly person or child. By 2058, just 34 years from now, the forecast suggests that one working-age adult will have to support one dependent, either an elderly person or a child. This projection stems from the country’s rapidly declining birth rate and aging population, which are expected to lead to a surge in social costs.

Russia is suspected of deliberately leaking chemical waste into a river, with deadly consequences for wildlife.

Ukrainian officials say the Russians deliberately poisoned the Seym River, which flows into the Desna. The Desna connects with a reservoir in the Kyiv region and a water supply used by millions.

The pollution crossed the international border just over a mile away and made its way into Ukraine’s Sumy region. The Seym’s natural ecosystem crashed. Fish, molluscs and crayfish were asphyxiated as oxygen levels fell to near zero. Settlements along the river reported mass die-offs.

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Sneaking in a work from home day could soon be a bit trickier thanks to a new update coming to Microsoft Outlook.

The email provider is rolling out a new feature that will allow users to spot which of their co-workers or colleagues is currently in the office, and therefore possibly free for a quick meeting or able to reply to a message.

The update will use the Work Hours and Location information stored within Outlook to offer up this information, meaning there may be some awkward conversations if your colleagues believe you to be in the office.

In its entry in the Microsoft 365 roadmap, the company notes that the feature will be "always on", meaning there may be no getting around what it represents as your office presence.

No thanks, if I have a powerful PC/laptop with NPU. I prefer to run AI locally on Linux

Birds are incredible navigators, capable of traveling thousands of miles each year to the same location. But sometimes even they end up in the wrong place at the wrong time — like inside a hurricane.

As Hurricane Helene was making landfall in Florida as a powerful Category 4 storm, radar spotted a mass in the eye of the storm that experts say is likely birds and perhaps also insects.

Seabirds likely fled the storm’s extreme winds — which reached 140 miles per hour — and ended up in the eye, where it’s calm. Once inside, they essentially got trapped, unable to pierce through the fierce gusts of the eye wall.

Storms like Helene can blow seabirds like petrels, jaegers, and frigatebirds far inland. Exhausted, they end up in unfamiliar habitats where they can’t easily find food. “It’s a challenging situation,” said Andrew Farnsworth, a bird migration expert at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “We know that birds do die in these things.”

Sloths, the famously slow-moving yet adorable creatures native to Central and South America, could face extinction by the end of the century due to climate change.

Researchers investigating how sloths respond to rising temperatures have found that the animals' slow metabolism and limited ability to regulate body temperature may leave them unable to survive in a warming world—especially for populations living in high-altitude regions.

"Despite being iconic species, comprehensive long-term population monitoring simply hasn't been conducted at a scale that reflects the true challenges sloths face," lead researcher Rebecca Cliffe told Newsweek. "However, from our 15 years of working with sloths in Costa Rica, we are very concerned. In areas where sloths were once abundant, we have observed their populations completely disappear over the past decade."

The study, published in PeerJ Life & Environment, focused on two-fingered sloths inhabiting both lowland and highland environments in Costa Rica.

"Sloths are uniquely vulnerable to rising temperatures due to their physiological adaptations," Cliffe said. "They survive on an extremely low-calorie diet, so conserving energy is critical for them.

"One key way they do this is by not actively regulating their body temperature like most mammals do—temperature regulation is an energy-intensive process."

A major concern is that sloths' slow digestion rates—up to 24 times slower than similar-sized herbivores—make it difficult for them to increase food intake to meet rising metabolic demands.

This slow metabolic rate, combined with their minimal energy-processing capacity, means that sloths cannot easily balance the increased energy requirements brought on by higher temperatures.

Published study : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.18168

Consumers could end up paying the (personalized) price as AI becomes more popular, FTC Chair Lina Khan recently warned.

At the 2024 Fast Company Innovation Festival, Khan said that although AI may be beneficial, it's already becoming some of the FTC's "bread and butter fraud work."

"Some of these AI tools are turbocharging that fraud because they allow some of these scams to be disseminated much more quickly, much more cheaply, and on a much broader scale," she said.

AI is already helping automate classic online scams like phishing and even introducing new, alarming frauds like voice cloning that can target unsuspecting consumers.

But Khan also took the opportunity to talk about a different way AI could be used to target consumers: retailers using surveillance technology and customer data to change the prices they offer to specific shoppers. Khan said the FTC is looking into AI's potential role in increasing the risk of price discrimination.

Archive : https://archive.is/Hzxt1

“Texas has this sort-of macho heat thing, that we’re ‘Texas tough’ and we’re not going to let a little heat stop us. Heat builds character and sweat is how you get tough,” Jeff Goodell said, adding that such attitudes are “really dangerous.”

The report by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) details nine factors that are crucial for regulating the planet's ability to sustain life.

In six of these areas, the safe limit has already been exceeded in recent years as a result of human activity.

The crucial threshold for ocean acidification could soon become the seventh to be breached, according to the PIK's first Planetary Health Check.

The safe boundaries that have already been crossed concern crucial -- and related -- factors including climate change; the loss of natural species, natural habitat and freshwater; and a rise in pollutants, including plastics and chemical fertilisers used in agriculture.

"As CO2 emissions increase, more of it dissolves in sea water... making the oceans more acidic," Boris Sakschewski, one of the lead authors, told reporters.

"Even with rapid emission cuts, some level of continued acidification may be unavoidable due to the CO2 already emitted and the time it takes for the ocean system to respond," he explained.

"Therefore, breaching the ocean acidification boundary appears inevitable within the coming years."

Rafaela Drumond death a police officer in June 2023 was bullied relentlessly by her colleagues, was one of 152 suicides among Brazilian law enforcement agents last year, the highest number on record and a 13.4% increase from 2022, according to a new report released on Thursday.

“The number of public security officers who commit or attempt suicide is steadily rising,” says the report, produced by the Institute for Research, Prevention, and Studies on Suicide (IPPES) and the Public Labour Prosecution Office.

Among last year’s deaths, 9% were women – slightly below the proportion of female officers in the forces, which ranges from 12% to 16%. Twelve men and two women killed their wives, partners or exes before taking their own lives. Three of the murdered women had protective orders against their killers.

According to the researchers, the phenomenon is underreported, as some forces still refuse to share their statistics.

• A total of 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of forests, wetlands and grasslands will be razed to make way for a cluster of giant sugarcane plantations.

• And much of the sugar produced from the Merauke project won’t even be used for food. The government plans to develop sugarcane-derived bioethanol as part of its transition away from fossil fuels.

• Satellite imagery analysis shows that 30% of the concessions appear to fall inside a zone that the government previously declared should be protected under a moratorium program.

• A similar megaproject in Merauke, the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE), initiated by Jokowi’s predecessor turned out to be a failure, used as cover to establish oil palm and pulpwood plantations instead.

Central Europe's devastating floods were made much worse by climate change and offer a stark glimpse of the future for the world's fastest-warming continent, scientists say.

Storm Boris has ravaged countries including Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Austria and Italy, leading to at least 24 deaths and billions of pounds of damage.

The World Weather Attribution (WWA) group said one recent four-day period was the rainiest ever recorded in central Europe - an intensity made twice as likely by climate change.

One reason Boris has produced so much rain is that the weather system got 'stuck', dumping huge amounts of water over the same areas for days.

There is some evidence that the effects of climate change on the jet stream - a band of fast-flowing winds high up in the atmosphere - may make this 'stalling' phenomenon more common. But this is still up for debate.

Even if we don't get more 'stalled' weather systems in the future, climate change means that any that do get stuck can carry more moisture and therefore be potentially disastrous.

“The [severity of the] flood events is going to increase considerably in the future, so if you keep the flood protections at the same level as they are today, the impacts may become unbearable for societies in Europe,” explains Francesco Dottori of IUSS in Pavia, Italy.

One day, Wayland will truly take over the Linux world, but it's not quite there yet with plenty still using X11 due to various problems some of which the new Frog Protocols aim to solve.

Announced by misyl, who does various work for Valve (like Gamescope), it certainly sounds like a good idea to give Wayland Protocols a swift kick to get into gear to improve things for users. Writing on their social media post :

> Wayland Protocols has long had a problem with new protocols sitting for months, to years at a time for even basic functionality. > > This is hugely problematic when some protocols implement very primitive and basic functionality such as frog-fifo-v1, which is needed for VSync to not cause GPU starvation under Wayland and also fix the dreaded application freezing when windows are occluded with FIFO/VSync enabled. > > We need to get protocols into end-users hands quicker! The main reason many users are still using X11 is because of missing functionality that we can be shipping today, but is blocked for one reason or another.

The Amazon rainforest has lost an area about the size of Germany and France combined to deforestation in four decades, fueling drought and record wildfires across South America, experts said Monday.

The world's biggest jungle, spanning nine countries, is crucial to the fight against climate change due to its ability to absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

However, researchers say a record spate of wildfires this year has instead released massive amounts of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Various scientific reports have laid out the grim links between forest loss and a changing climate and the devastation that can follow for humans and wildlife.

Deforestation, mainly for mining and agricultural purposes, has led to the loss of 12.5 percent of the Amazon's plant cover from 1985 to 2023, according to RAISG, a collective of researchers and NGOs.

This amounts to 88 million hectares (880,000 square kilometers, 339,773 square miles) of forest cover lost across Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.