If New York’s worst recorded rainfall is 200 mm, what could a plausible 300-mm storm look like? MIT built an AI system to map extreme events that have never happened before

The method, called Extreme Event Aware, or “η-learning”, does not need previous extreme events to create these scenarios. (Representational AP photo) What would a once-in-a-century storm look like if it was stronger than anything recorded before? Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a machine-learning method that can generate realistic scenarios for…

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Brazil’s polluted Rio mangroves were disappearing under waste; then local fishers restored 18.2 hectares and more than 60 animal species returned | World News

Local fishers collect waste from Guanabara Bay as part of a mangrove restoration and cleanup effort in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Decades of pollution, untreated sewage, industrial activity and waste have placed heavy pressure on the mangroves around Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay in Brazil. Yet in one of the bay’s remaining protected mangrove areas,…

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Humans stepped back from this UK dairy farm in 2023; three years later, wildlife returns as 27 more bird species appear and butterfly numbers more than double | World News

Image: The Guardian/Jenny Vickers A former dairy farm in the UK has undergone a striking transformation after humans stepped back and allowed natural processes to reshape the land. At Heal Somerset, a 460-acre site in Somerset acquired by the rewilding charity Heal in December 2022, the first three years of nature recovery have brought a…

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Before and after: Satellite images show how Nepal’s green mountainside turned into debris field

A combination of satellite images shows the valleys near the Nepal-China border on August 23, 2026, before the devastating floods and on August 26, 2026, after the disaster. (Photo: Reuters) Satellite images taken before and after the deadly flash flood near Nepal’s border with Tibet reveal a striking change in the landscape: stretches of green…

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For years, visitors left coins for luck in Giant’s Causeway’s ancient rocks. Years later, more than 10,000 coins have been removed to protect the World Heritage Site | World News

For years, visitors to the Giant’s Causeway have left behind more than photographs and memories. Coins were pushed into gaps between the site’s distinctive basalt columns, sometimes as a gesture of luck or affection. What might have seemed harmless began to leave a physical mark on the rocks. As reported by the BBC, conservation work…

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For nearly a decade, a California town fought to seize its privately owned water utility; now the state Supreme Court has ruled 7-0 against its takeover argument

For nearly a decade, a California town fought to seize its privately owned water utility California’s highest court has rejected a key legal argument in a decade-long effort by a Southern California town to take control of its local water system. The California Supreme Court ruled 7-0, August 24, against the Town of Apple Valley,…

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A man searching a Polish scrapyard for car parts found an 1,800-year-old Roman-era shield containing cremated human bones | World News

An old iron fitting found among scrap metal in eastern Poland has turned out to be part of a burial that disappeared from the archaeological record long ago. The object, recovered in Hrubieszów, is a shield boss dating to around the 2nd century CE. More unexpectedly, traces of cremated human bone were still preserved within…

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