Capturing carbon with seagrass, and China’s election interference

For years, Tidal, a mission inside Alphabet’s “moonshot manufacturing facility” X division, has been utilizing cameras, laptop 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 Know-how Evaluate can report, Tidal hopes its system can assist 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 mission’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 numerous 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 keeping with 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 size of the issue only a few days in the past, through which she and her colleagues not too long ago analyzed three China-based networks of accounts that pretended to be bizarre People on the fitting or left of the political spectrum.

The phony accounts’ technique for stoking the political conflicts in an already polarized America intently 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. Signal as much as obtain it in your inbox each Tuesday.