A tiny quadcopter hovered over the jacaranda trees in Palermo on a windy afternoon in Buenos Aires, its propellers humming like a giant insect. That flight could have led to a call to the police a few years ago. It feels almost normal now. Argentina has started to finance and restructure its national drone safety laws for urban areas, combining targeted safety oversight with deregulation. Executive Order 550/2025 eliminated registration for drones weighing less than 250 grams and drastically lowered licensing requirements for drones weighing less than 25 kg. However, authorities maintain that they are enforcing safety regulations, especially in…
Author: errica
Graduate students carrying laptops covered in NVIDIA stickers navigate between concrete buildings in Seoul’s Gwanak neighborhood on a dreary winter morning. Conversations about foundation models, chip supply, and something bigger developing—an academic alliance that feels unusually ambitious—take precedence over exams in seminar rooms heated by overworked radiators. Universities in South Korea have officially started to combine their artificial intelligence research into what is now known as an Asia AI Research Consortium. There is more to it than the typical memorandum of understanding that universities sign and then promptly forget. It is supported by funding. infrastructure. And urgency—possibly more crucial. CategoryDetailsInitiative…
The air outside the state health secretariat felt heavy, almost theatrical, on a humid São Paulo afternoon. Coffee and queijo vendors stood close to the entrance, not realizing—or maybe knowing—that inside officials were revealing what they called a digital early-warning system for the next pandemic. An AI-powered pandemic public health dashboard was unveiled in São Paulo, Brazil, and its goal is clear. A modest operations room now glows with large screens showing projected case counts for the next 10 days, hospital occupancy rates, and infection curves. As fresh data comes in, colored maps gently pulse and change. Seeing those graphs…
Anyone standing on the waterfront in Bergen is immediately struck by how unremarkable it appears. Ferries make a humming noise. Angry seagulls hover. The dock is rocked by fishing boats. However, Norway is quietly building machines inside a warehouse near the water that could change how people perceive the ocean floor. These aren’t the big, clumsy submarines from the Cold War. Sleek, torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicles and small surface drones, they glide beneath Arctic waters with no human on board and are powered by artificial intelligence. The phrase barely conveys the ambition that lies beneath it as Norway tests underwater…
In late August, when the sun was merciful, the hills outside Bordeaux used to glow softly, the vines growing in neat rows. By midsummer, the soil beneath the leaves cracks open like pottery left in a kiln for too long, and the leaves occasionally curl inward to retain what little moisture they can. It’s difficult to ignore the distinction. The landscape, which has long been praised for its balance, feels the weight of the heat as it persists into the evening. The vineyards of France have experienced adversity before. Growers in regions like Bordeaux and Burgundy have always been plagued…
Wildfire season used to occur in California. The weather has changed to wildfire now. There was a time, not so long ago, when people in areas like the foothills above Los Angeles or Sonoma County could practically mark the danger on a calendar. It would be dry and tense when August came. The winds of September would rattle windows. The hillsides would typically be washed by rain by late November, bringing a tenuous sense of security back. I feel like that rhythm is out of date now. In January, fires are starting today. During March, they burn. Under skies that…
When the Great Lakes should have been constricting under heavy ice sheets in late February, satellite imagery revealed an eerie scene of open, dark water spanning Erie and Ontario, with waves crashing against normally silent and frozen shorelines. More quickly than ever before, the Great Lakes are warming. It sounds like a clinical phrase. However, it feels more immediate when you’re standing on a gravel beach near Lake Huron in the winter and hearing the sound of water slapping against stone where everything was once muffled by ice. CategoryDetailsWater SystemGreat Lakes (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario)Surface Freshwater Share~20% of the…
Photographs were where the Po River first appeared incorrect. Sandbanks stretched across what should have been a wide, flowing body of water like pale scars, according to 2022 drone photos. On the dry riverbed, barges that had once transported gravel and grain sat tilted. Locals in Gualtieri gathered in silence around the rusted hull of a World War II cargo ship that had surfaced from decades under the sea, as though thirst were uncovering history itself. A continental water emergency is indicated by the Po River crisis in Italy, not because a single river has dried up, but rather because…
The term “climate overshoot” has a sterile, technical sound to it. It might be interpreted as a small policy slip or an accounting error. However, the term becomes less abstract when one is standing in a city that is experiencing a heatwave, witnessing the shimmering of asphalt and emergency personnel distributing bottled water to individuals seeking refuge under highway overpasses. We have entered the era of climate overshoot, according to scientists. Practically speaking, this indicates that global temperatures have risen above the 1.5°C cutoff point established by the Paris Agreement — not as an isolated occurrence but rather as a…
Even seasoned glaciologists stopped when they first saw satellite images of Hektoria Glacier retreating 8 kilometers in just two months. Not because the ice in Antarctica hasn’t been melting. It has. However, this was different—sudden, nearly violent. There was no backward movement of the glacier. It broke. The clarity of the images taken from orbit is unnerving, and Antarctica is breaking more quickly than scientists had anticipated. Fractures can be seen from space as ragged lines of ink across white fields. Some slowly enlarge. In what appears to be a geological heartbeat, others split open. The vastness of Antarctica produced…