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I have come up with a new way to win at chess: I have connected up a Raspberry Pi Zero in my pocket to some buttons and vibration motors in my shoes, so that I can surreptitiously communicate with a chess engine running on the Pi. The project is called "Sockfish" because it's a way to operate Stockfish with your socks.

Extinction Rebellion climate activists glued themselves to the building of an oilfield services giant, calling on the University of Cambridge to cut ties with the firm.

Protesters arrived early on Friday to attach themselves with glue to the main entrance of Schlumberger's research facility in Cambridge.

Schlumberger - also known as SLB - is a global company that provides technology and infrastructure for oil and gas extraction, to firms including BP and Shell.

A number of people dressed as climate scientists, wearing white lab coats and handing leaflets to staff members as they entered the building.

Thousands of dead fish washed up on the shores of the Texas Gulf Coast seemingly overnight this week. Lake Jackson resident Karri McKim was walking along the shores of Bryan Beach and Quintana Beach near Freeport, Texas to watch the sunrise on Friday morning when she came across the grim sight. Footage shared by McKim shows the hordes of dead fish extending for miles along the coastline.

The fish kill was investigated by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's Region 3 Kills and Spills Team, a group of biologists who investigate fish and wildlife kills resulting from pollution or natural events. The team determined that the event was caused by a low dissolved oxygen event, which is a common condition during the summer when temperatures rise. The species most impacted was Gulf menhaden.

Daily variations in dissolved oxygen concentration are related to photosynthesis and aerobic respiration. "Increased dissolved oxygen during the day is a result of photosynthesis which is driven by sunlight," Jensen said. "Photosynthesis stops at night and may slow down on cloudy days, but plants and animals in the water continue to respire and consume free oxygen, decreasing the dissolved oxygen concentration."

Before kill events, you can often spot fish trying to get oxygen by gulping at the surface of the water early in the morning, Jensen said. "Some fish may also be lying on the bottom or at the edge of the water," he added.

Merlin is a free bird identification tool that uses both computer vision and computer audio to identify birds, with models that have been trained by bird watchers and ornithologists all over the world. It's a powerful tool for seeing what might be around when all you can hear is a song somewhere in the trees.

The audio model that Merlin uses is its own, using a neural net to identify birds from their sounds, analyzing the spectrogram of their calls. It's a standalone model and can be used even when your phone is offline, although that does limit what it can identify to about 700 mainly North American species. If you want to identify more and in more of the world, then you need to take a look at another Cornell project, BirdNET, from its K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics.

If you want to build a BirdNET system on a Raspberry Pi, there's an easy enough way to get started, with the BirdNET-Pi project. All you need is a recent Raspberry Pi running a 64-bit version of the Bullseye release of Raspberry Pi OS. I set up my system with the latest Raspberry Pi OS Lite release, which is designed for headless systems and removes the UI components.

Once my system was set up, I used the instructions on the BirdNET-Pi GitHub to download and run the installer. It's a simple script that loads the required packages and configures a Python environment for the BirdNET Lite machine-learning models. The system is designed to take a 15-second sound sample every minute or so, analysing it for bird sounds. The only additional hardware needed is a USB sound card and a microphone, as the Pi's audio port doesn't support a microphone.

Dozens of climate activists are expected to turn out in front of the Prime Minister’s Office on Sunday to protest a climate bill they describe as “shameful," that would “allow the government to continue promoting destructive measures” and worsen the climate change situation in Israel.

The protest will occur in Jerusalem while the Ministerial Committee on Legislation discusses the climate bill. It is being arranged by several environmental groups – including Strike for Future Israel, Migama Yeruka, Zalul, Green Peace, Israel Association for Public Health Physicians and the Sayyid Al-Harumi Initiative.

Temperatures have soared above 30C for the first time this year – and meteorologists forecast the chance of Britain experiencing a hot summer is now 45% – 2.3 times the normal figure.

The warning leaves the nation braced for a possible repeat of last year’s record-breaking heatwave which triggered wildfires, disrupted rail transport, closed schools, led to thousands of premature deaths and saw temperatures break the 40C record in the UK for the first time.

At this rate, the world will soon have heated by more than 1.5C since pre-industrial levels, a temperature that was supposed to be the upper acceptable limit for global warming. In fact, the world could heat by almost 3C by the end of the century, triggering the melting of ice caps, the death of coral reefs and rising ocean levels.

For its part, Britain will experience weather patterns that will become increasingly grim, a point stressed by a study published last week by an international team led by Bath University researchers. It predicts that peak summer temperatures of 41C and weekly averages of 28C will be normal in large parts of southern England towards the end of the century. These figures compare with maximum peaks of 31C and averages of 20C that occurred in the 1970s.

While riding the chairlift one winter, his freestyle coach made an offhand comment about the future of resort skiing. “He said, ‘my kids might be able to ski on this, with real snow, but your kids definitely won’t,’” Badge recalled. “It was just this complete eye opener. I just want to be able to ski with my kids in the future.”

“I do not want my kids to only ski on artificial snow,” Badge said. “Skiing is my happy place, especially on Whitefish Mountain. I need them to have the same experience, the same connection to the earth that I have when I’m skiing.”

Brothers Badge and Lander Busse are two of the 16 youth plaintiffs in the constitutional climate change lawsuit Held v. State of Montana, which was filed in Montana’s First Judicial District Court in 2020. The lawsuit alleges that the state, through several of its agencies, including the Department of Natural Resources, Department of Environmental Quality, and Montana Department of Transportation, has implemented and overseen policies that violate the plaintiffs’ right to a clean and healthful environment, a provision provided in the Montana Constitution when it was ratified in 1972.

The lawsuit specifically names two statutes — the State Energy Policy and a provision in the Montana Environmental Protection Act (MEPA) that excludes consideration of regional climate effects on state development decisions — that are actively adding greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, aggravate the effects of climate change, and threatening the youths’ future way of life.

Fully compatible with all Raspberry Pi versions including the high-power Raspberry Pi 4.
The LiFePO4wered/Pi+™ is a high-performance battery power system for the Raspberry Pi. It can power a Raspberry Pi for up to nine hours from its battery (depending on installed battery size, Raspberry Pi model, attached peripherals, and system load) and can be left plugged in continuously.

The Raspberry Pi and LiFePO4wered/Pi+™ communicate with each other over the I2C bus. A command line tool, shared library and language bingings for Python and Node.js are available to allow users to easily access the data inside the LiFePO4wered/Pi+™.

Using these tools, the user can access system parameters and configure features such as the wake-up timer, auto-shutdown timer and auto-boot settings. Some of the parameters can be written to flash to make changes permanent even if the battery is removed.

Ice-free summers inevitable even with sharp emissions cuts and likely to result in more extreme heatwaves and floods.

It is now too late to save summer Arctic sea ice, research has shown, and scientists say preparations need to be made for the increased extreme weather across the northern hemisphere that is likely to occur as a result.

Analysis shows that even if greenhouse gas emissions are sharply reduced, the Arctic will be ice-free in September in coming decades. The study also shows that if emissions decline slowly or continue to rise, the first ice-free summer could be in the 2030s, a decade earlier than previous projections.

The research shows that 90% of the melting is the result of human-caused global heating, with natural factors accounting for the rest.

Since satellite records began in 1979, summer Arctic ice has shrunk by 13% a decade, in one of the clearest signs of the climate crisis. Arctic sea ice reaches its annual minimum at the end of summer, in September, and in 2021 it was at its second lowest extent on record.

This looks great.