For years, Tidal, a challenge inside Alphabet’s “moonshot manufacturing facility” X division, has been utilizing cameras, pc imaginative and prescient and machine studying to get a greater understanding of life beneath the oceans, together with monitoring fish off the coast of Norway.  

Now, MIT Expertise Assessment can report, Tidal hopes its system may help protect and restore the world’s seagrass beds, accelerating efforts to harness the oceans to suck up and retailer away way more carbon dioxide.

The challenge’s bold mission is to enhance our understanding of underwater ecosystems in an effort to inform and incentivize efforts to guard the oceans amid mounting threats. It may additionally present essential solutions to the various questions hanging over seagrass’ position in each sucking up carbon and regulating the local weather. Learn the total story.

—James Temple

China is copying Russia’s election interference playbook

China is more and more interfering in US politics by getting its brokers to create social media accounts posing as Americans, in response to analysis co-led by Renée DiResta, the technical analysis supervisor on the Stanford Web Observatory, who has studied overseas affect on social media for years.

DiResta revealed a report setting out the dimensions of the issue only a few days in the past, by which she and her colleagues lately analyzed three China-based networks of accounts that pretended to be unusual People on the appropriate or left of the political spectrum.

The phony accounts’ technique for stoking the political conflicts in an already polarized America carefully resembled the exercise of the faux Russian accounts that thrived earlier than the 2016 elections—however had been much less efficient than their Russian counterparts. Learn the total story.

This story is from China Report, our weekly e-newsletter providing you with the within monitor on all issues taking place in China. Enroll to obtain it in your inbox each Tuesday.