A new breed of metropolis — population 10M+ — is about to become the dominant city type in the world.
In California, home of the nation’s strictest firearms regulations, the parts of an illegal assault rifle are perfectly legal to own. Only putting them together is a crime, as one gun owner showed us in our San Francisco studios.
It used to take years to pull a single ice sample from Antarctica, but a new drill could reduce the process to days, and give us new historical insight into climate change, and a rapid 3-D model of the state of the ice sheets today. A three-way conversation with the designers — John Goodge of the University of Minnesota and Jeff Severinghaus of Scripps.
The R/V Neil Armstrong and a new Ocean XPrize are rare bright spots at a dark time in ocean science.
http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/live-news/2015/12/aboard-the-neil-armstrong.html
A brief excerpt from our 30-minute special on climate change and the American West.
A look at the singularly Western playbook of ISIL’s propaganda machine, complete with GoPro footage, fast cuts, and the filters and flourishes drawn from videogames and movies.
While the United States tries to back away from mass surveillance, at least publicly, France is moving in the opposite direction. As of July, the country has some of the most permissive surveillance laws in the Western world, allowing the state to collect citizens’ communications, break into homes, and watch anyone even remotely associated with a terror inquiry.
Lawmakers worry that encrypted apps are making terrorist plots easier to conceal, but is it possible to provide a secure form of communication to the world while making those communications available to a few select authorities?
Robotic systems allow militaries around the world to operate faster and more efficiently than human soldiers possibly can. The result is that humans are losing their place in the “kill chain” — the sequence of decisions that leads to pulling a trigger. Now Human Rights Watch and other advocacy groups are trying to establish a Geneva Convention for robotic weaponry.
With the possibility of El Niño carrying epic storms here this winter, California is bracing for floods that could rage out of control, and coming to grips with the shortsighted construction and long-term decay of its levees and dams.
http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/live-news/2015/11/protecting-californias-levee-system.html
Jacob Ward 