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Google wants you to lend your ears to help save coral reefs
Google is calling on recruits to help repopulate coral reefs. Its new project, a collaboration with marine biologist Steve Simpson and marine ecologist Mary Shodipo, wants your help training AI to recognize aquatic wildlife sounds in hopes of replenishing them and raising awareness of the ocean’s troubled habitats.
Climate change could bleach most coral reefs within the century
The Great Barrier Reef's massive loss to coral bleaching last year might have been just a taste of things to come. According to a study by a team of marine scientists, 99 percent of the world's coral reefs could undergo severe coral bleaching before the century ends. The culprit? Climate change. When sea water in a certain location turns warmer than usual, corals in that area expel the algae living in their tissues, effectively turning them white. That's what bleaching is. It doesn't instantly kill the corals, but it makes them much more vulnerable to fatal diseases.
Record swathes of the Great Barrier Reef died in 2016
The Great Barrier Reef lost more coral to bleaching in 2016 than in any other year on record, according to scientists at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. The northern area was hit the worst: A region spanning 435 miles at the tip of the reef lost 67 percent of its shallow-water corals over the past nine months alone.
Researchers are building a robotic Lionfish exterminator
We joke around a lot about bringing about a horrific robot apocalypse, but let's get real: sometimes, building a killer robot is just the right thing to do. Well, at least when those robots are being used to cull invasive species. Researchers at Robots In Service of the Environment (RISE) are developing a robot to fight an invasive population of Lionfish that's threatening ecosystems off the coast of Florida as well as in the Caribbean and Bermuda.
Mobile Miscellany: week of August 19th, 2013
If you didn't get enough mobile news during the week, not to worry, because we've opened the firehose for the truly hardcore. This week brought a free TV streaming service for Bell subscribers, the arrival of NFL Mobile to BlackBerry 10 and little bit of Windows Phone love from General Motors. These stories and more await. So buy the ticket and take the ride as we explore all that's happening in the mobile world for this week of August 19th, 2013.
Google Street View gets its first underwater panoramic images, ready for desk-based scuba expeditions (video)
After working on its sea legs for some time, Google Street View is ready to take users on virtual scuba expeditions through six living coral reefs with the first underwater panoramic images to hit the service. In partnership with The Catlin Seaview Survey, Mountain View created the on-rails snorkeling experiences using undersea pictures from Heron, Lady Elliot and Wilson Islands at the Great Barrier Reef, Molokini Crater and Hanauma Bay in Hawaii and the Apo Islands in the Philippines. Combined with views from Chichen Itza and Teotihuacan, the new underwater tours might make for a respectable, desk-based vacation. Interested in paddling through the briny depths? Head past the break for a short preview or hit the source links below to dive right in.
Rogue Trooper serves a cold dish of revenge on the Wii
Reef Entertainment recently announced that a Rogue Trooper game will be headed to the Wii, subtitled The Quartz Massacre. If you haven't heard of Rogue Trooper before, it features a bad-ass, blue-skinned soldier who likes to take revenge on people that mess with him and his comrades. He can also assign himself the skills and "personalities" of fallen friends, thanks to a spiffy futuristic biochip.The plot for The Quartz Massacre is the same for that of the 2006 Rogue Trooper releases (available for the original Xbox, the PS2, and PCs), leading many to reasonably speculate that this Wii version will be a port. Reef promises that the Wii's controller will add more immersion to the third-person shooter, though (à la Resident Evil 4, we assume), and Rebellion is also reported to have added tweaks and polish its last-gen endeavors.We have mixed feelings about this game: on the one hand, the console could use more shooters of this nature, but on the other hand, it already has a full plate of ports. Since we didn't play the well-reviewed, last-gen iteration of Rogue Trooper, however, we're willing to be open-minded. If Rebellion can pull off a fun and polished game, we'll have no qualms.[Via Destructoid]
