How 'undone science' shaped Chile's glacier protection battle

Ice splintered off the southern Patagonia glacier and drifted across a growing glacial lake.

A study in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics explores how a machine-learning strategy known as transfer learning could dramatically reduce the computational cost of searching for new physics beyond the standard cosmological model—while also revealing an unexpected risk: Sometimes AI systems can become too reliant on what they already know.

Lesser black-backed gulls from the colony on the Dutch island of Neeltje Jans appear to avoid the wind farm off the Zeeland coast, with the exception of some males. NIOZ ecologist Rosemarie Kentie and her colleagues suspected the gulls were attracted by fishing boats outside the wind farm and the bycatch thrown overboard. This turned out not to be the case: Even during weekends, when there is little fishing, the birds rarely visit the wind farm.

When researchers want to uncover what atoms make up a material, they turn to a number of tried-and-true spectroscopy methods. Spectroscopy works by shining a specific type of light onto a substance and then analyzing how that light is either absorbed, emitted, or scattered. Every atom has a different way of interacting with light, and scientists study this light-matter interaction to identify the atoms in the material.