Science Archive

AES has given its Atlas solar robot some AWS smarts and redubbed it “Maximo.” It helped complete an Amazon-backed solar farm in Louisiana and is now moving on to Bellefield, California, home of the largest solar-plus-storage project in the US. According to Amazon, it can “reduce solar installation timelines and costs by as much 50 percent:”

Bullying works: after TikTok users complained about Chipotle’s inconsistent portion sizes, the company announced this week it is “doubling down” on training to ensure customers get “correct and generous portions.” It will cost the company $50 million, executives told analysts.

Researcher Alex Hanna, of Distributed AI Research Institute and previously of Google, reflects on what might come next:

Here’s an incredible WSJ piece about zoo visitors connecting with gorillas by showing them videos of themselves, and zoo officials trying to push back:

Fitbit published a study in Nature Medicine using 6.5 million nights of sleep data from users that shows that sleep quality impacts long term health. In a nutshell, the worse your sleep quality, the more likely you are to have conditions like sleep apnea, obesity, migraines, high blood pressure, etc. You get it.

The Biden administration is investing $20 million in a program to use the GOES-R satellite for wildfire detection. The hope is that the satellite will spot blazes before 911 calls start, and see through a haze of smoke to point to where a fire ignited. That could help officials and firefighters respond more quickly and give them a leg up on fighting the fire.

It shows carbon dioxide pollution moving through Earth’s atmosphere. We can’t usually see the pollution causing climate change, but NASA was able to illustrate it using a a high-resolution weather model and supercomputers. It incorporates data from billions of ground and satellite observations.