“At a state scale, ‘manatees have done extraordinarily well’ …. In the early 1990s, the population was estimated at around 1,500. Last fall, Florida officials estimated the state’s manatee population at 8,350 to 11,730, based on an assessment from 2021 to 2022.”
From FOX 13.
Axios | Conservation & Biodiversity
“The rare ʻalalā Hawaiian crow was successfully reintroduced into the wild in Maui more than 20 years after being declared extinct, officials announced Wednesday.”
From Axios.
“Researchers have built an artificial intelligence-based weather forecast that makes faster and more accurate predictions than the best system available today.
GenCast, an AI weather program from Google DeepMind, performed up to 20% better than the ENS forecast from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), widely regarded as the world leader.
In the near term, GenCast is expected to support traditional forecasts rather than replace them, but even in an assistive capacity it could provide clarity around future cold blasts, heatwaves and high winds, and help energy companies predict how much power they will generate from windfarms.
In a head-to-head comparison, the program churned out more accurate forecasts than ENS on day-to-day weather and extreme events up to 15 days in advance, and was better at predicting the paths of destructive hurricanes and other tropical cyclones, including where they would make landfall.”
From Axios.
“Globally, total CO2 emissions are still slowly increasing. The Global Carbon Project just released its preliminary estimates for 2024, which suggest another 0.8% increase.
However, while total emissions have not yet peaked, emissions per person have. Globally, per capita CO2 emissions from fossil fuels peaked in 2012. When land use emissions — which are more uncertain and noisier — are included, they peaked in the 1970s.”
From Our World in Data.
“The carbon–fluorine (C–F) bond is one of the strongest in organic chemistry, requiring huge amounts of energy to break down, at huge expense. But now two papers in Nature describe two low-energy ways to overcome the C–F bond.
Both methods combine a catalyst with some relatively simple chemistry driven by the energy of visible light. In each case, the catalyst absorbs light that then triggers a reaction.
Chemist Garret Miyake at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and his colleagues use this absorbed energy to reduce the C–F bond to carbon–hydrogen — albeit not in Teflon. Yan-Biao Kang, a chemist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, and his colleagues uses this energy to break the bond and the overall molecule down to smaller constituent parts, in temperatures as low as 40 °C. Both papers, without doubt, mark a major step forward.
Important next steps include using these ideas in real-world settings, for example to develop catalysts that work in waste water or that can be used to clean up PFAS in contaminated soils. If a method can be adapted so that it is powered by sunlight, that would be of huge benefit.”
From Nature.
