Something stinks in California’s climate policies. Years ago, the state set up a system that pays cattle farmers across the country to turn the methane emitted from cattle manure into natural gas, encouraging the dairy sector to produce a gas we burn instead of one that just pollutes the air. It’s become wildly popular because…
Google DeepMind researchers have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost. The model, called NeuralGCN and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that’s grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years. …
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The terrible complexity of technological problems The philosopher Karl Popper once argued that there are two kinds of problems in the world: clock problems and cloud problems. As the metaphor suggests, clock problems…