Can data help quench the thirst of Pakistan’s most populous city?Mariya Karimjee
When Ahsan Rehman graduated from one of Pakistan’s top engineering universities in 2016, he knew he wanted a job that would help people. He did not have to look far for ideas. At his home in Karachi, his family often went days without getting any water from the city’s pipes. Initially, they had dug a well, boring into the aquifer that runs beneath the city. When that began drying up, they turned to the city’s system of water delivery trucks to supplement their supply. Ultimately, his family chose to dig an even deeper well, knowing as they did so that […]
Day Zero still looms over Cape TownJoseph Dana
In the waning weeks of 2017, many residents of Cape Town, South Africa, lined up day and night to fill old jugs with water from the city’s few natural springs. Palpable angst hung in the air. After months of warnings through an anomalously long drought, Cape Town was on the verge of becoming the world’s first major city to run out of water. Freshwater dams had dipped below 25% of capacity, and levels continued to fall. If the dams fell to 13.5% of capacity, the municipal water network would shut down, and millions of residents would face severe water restrictions. […]
The rare spots of good news on climate changeJames Temple
The deadly consequences of climate change only grew clearer this year, as record-shattering heat waves, floods, and wildfires killed thousands and strained the limits of our disaster responders. In the closing days of 2021, scientists warned that the eastern ledge of a Florida-size glacier is about to snap off of Antarctica and US legislators found they may have flubbed their best chance in a decade to enact sweeping climate policies. But amid these stark signs, there were also indications that momentum is beginning to build behind climate action. Indeed, there’s good reason now to believe that the world could at […]
Our favorite photographs from 2021Stephanie Arnett
In 2021 we saw images from the deep reaches of geologic time, to visionaries working on today’s pressing issues, to a glimpse of into a transhuman future. Inside the machine that saved Moore’s Law CHRISTOPHER PAYNE How technology might finally start telling farmers things they didn’t already know LUCAS FOGLIA The pandemic could remake public transportation for the better CHONA KASINGER Why covid-19 might finally usher in the era of health care based on a patient’s data She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story. The beauty of TikTok’s secret, surprising, and eerily accurate recommendation algorithms SIERRA […]
How to measure all the world’s fresh waterMaria Gallucci
The Congo River is the world’s second-largest river system after the Amazon. More than 75 million people depend on it for food and water, as do thousands of species of plants and animals that live in the swamps and peatlands it supports. The massive tropical rainforest sprawled across its middle helps regulate the entire Earth’s climate system. The amount of water in the system, however, is something of a mystery. Hydrologists and climate scientists rely on monitoring stations to track the river and its connected water bodies as they flow and pool across six countries, and to measure precipitation. But […]
2021 was the year of monster AI modelsWill Douglas Heaven
It’s been a year of supersized AI models. When OpenAI released GPT-3, in June 2020, the neural network’s apparent grasp of language was uncanny. It could generate convincing sentences, converse with humans, and even autocomplete code. GPT-3 was also monstrous in scale—larger than any other neural network ever built. It kicked off a whole new trend in AI, one in which bigger is better. Despite GPT-3’s tendency to mimic the bias and toxicity inherent in the online text it was trained on, and even though an unsustainably enormous amount of computing power is needed to teach such a large model its tricks, we picked […]
The architect making friends with floodingErica Gies
For years, Beijing landscape architect Yu Kongjian was ridiculed by his fellow citizens as a backward thinker. Some even called him an American spy—a nod to his doctorate from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and his opposition to dams, those symbols of power and progress in modern China. Yu’s transgression: he advised working with water, rather than trying to control it. Yu is at the forefront of a movement that aims to restore the ebb and flow of water to urban environments. His landscape architecture firm Turenscape, which he cofounded in 1998, creates flexible spaces for water to spread out […]
14 cybersecurity predictions for 2022 and beyondMandiant
While the covid-19 pandemic upended workplaces and ushered in rapid digital transformation, the turmoil around cybercrime has remained constant: attackers are always changing tactics to evade detection. Flexible, customer-first solutions have emerged to meet ever-changing circumstances to keep organizations secure and confident against cyber threats. In the new year and beyond, as technology and workplace trends evolve and laws and regulations change, cybersecurity forecasts are emerging. Mandiant’s “14 Cyber Security Predictions for 2022 and Beyond” projects trends based on insights from leaders and experts around the globe to assess the evolving cyber environment and the security threats it faces. From […]
How to save our social media by treating it like a citySahar Massachi
Being on social media can feel a bit like living in a new kind of city. It’s the greatest city in the world. Millions of people can do things their parents never dreamed of. They can live together, play together, learn together. The city is a marvel. But it’s also rotten. Raw sewage runs in the streets. Every once in a while, a mass frenzy takes hold. Citizen denounces citizen. Relationships are irrevocably broken. My job used to be to protect the city. I was a member of the Facebook Civic Integrity team. My coworkers and I researched and fixed integrity problems—abuses of the […]
El Paso was “drought-proof.” Climate change is pushing its limits.Casey Crownhart
About 20 miles outside El Paso, Texas, on a warm afternoon just before the fall harvest, Ramon Tirres Jr. turns his truck between two fields covered in nothing but dirt. Both should be lush with cotton by now, but these 70 acres—a fraction of the nearly 1,000 that Tirres left unplanted this year—are bare. All told, about two-thirds of his cotton fields lie empty. Tirres has been farming here for 47 years. His pecan trees love the heat, and the soil in the valley where he farms is fertile. But without water, everything falls apart. And the past few years […]