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US election: Trump claims victory in speech to supporters

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Donald Trump appeared poised to win the US presidential election, needing just three electoral votes to become the 47th president. Speaking in Palm Beach, said he achieved a victory "the US has never seen." DW has more.
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JimB
15 hours ago
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Heaven help us all.
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World's first wooden satellite launched into space

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Researchers from Japan believe that timber is a space-grade material that could on day be used to build houses on Mars. Their satellite was crafted from honoki wood without screws or glue to hold it together.
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JimB
1 day ago
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If Trump dismantles the NOAA, it will affect wildfires and food prices

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As the Popo Agie River wends its way down from the glaciers atop Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains toward the city of Lander, it flows into a limestone cave and disappears. The formation, known as the Sinks, spits the river back out at another feature called the Rise a quarter of a mile east, a little more voluminous and a little warmer, with brown and rainbow trout weighing as much as 10 pounds mingling in its now smooth pools. The quarter-mile journey from the Sinks to the Rise takes the river two hours.

Scientists first discovered this quirk of the middle fork of the Popo Agie (pronounced puh-po zuh) in 1983 by pouring red dye into the river upstream and waiting for it to resurface. Geologists attribute the river’s mysterious delay to the water passing through exceedingly small crevasses in the rock that slow its flow.

Like many rivers in the arid West, the Popo Agie is an important aquifer. Ranchers, farmers, businesses, and recreationists rely on detailed data about it—especially day-to-day streamflow measurements. That’s exactly the type of empirical information collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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JimB
5 days ago
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Hospitals adopt error-prone AI transcription tools despite warnings

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On Saturday, an Associated Press investigation revealed that OpenAI's Whisper transcription tool creates fabricated text in medical and business settings despite warnings against such use. The AP interviewed more than 12 software engineers, developers, and researchers who found the model regularly invents text that speakers never said, a phenomenon often called a "confabulation" or "hallucination" in the AI field.

Upon its release in 2022, OpenAI claimed that Whisper approached "human level robustness" in audio transcription accuracy. However, a University of Michigan researcher told the AP that Whisper created false text in 80 percent of public meeting transcripts examined. Another developer, unnamed in the AP report, claimed to have found invented content in almost all of his 26,000 test transcriptions.

The fabrications pose particular risks in health care settings. Despite OpenAI's warnings against using Whisper for "high-risk domains," over 30,000 medical workers now use Whisper-based tools to transcribe patient visits, according to the AP report. The Mankato Clinic in Minnesota and Children's Hospital Los Angeles count among 40 health systems using a Whisper-powered AI copilot service from medical tech company Nabla that is fine-tuned on medical terminology.

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JimB
8 days ago
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Horrifying
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Third baby for 'luckiest mum' - 11 years after teenage MND diagnosis

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Lucy Lintott Smith defied the odds when her third baby was born a decade after her MND diagnosis.
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JimB
28 days ago
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Selfish. Children will have a dead mother and all those carers are to be paid for.
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This Man Found 1,650 Ways to Turn a Profit While Decarbonizing

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Bertrand Piccard says sustainability doesn’t have to come at a cost—and that reframing attempts to hit net zero as a way of generating profit could be key to hitting targets.
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JimB
28 days ago
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