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PICKS are stories from many sources, selected by our editors or recommended by our readers because they are important, surprising, troubling, enlightening, inspiring, or amusing. They appear on our site and in our daily newsletter. Please send suggested articles, videos, podcasts, etc. to picks@whowhatwhy.org.
Oceans Have Been Absorbing the World’s Extra Heat. But There’s a Huge Payback (Maria)
The author writes, “By the end of March, the surface temperature of the world’s oceans was above anything seen in the 40 years that satellites have been measuring it. … The temperature at the ocean’s surface — like on land — is being pushed higher by global heating but can jump around from one year to the next as weather systems come and go. But in the 2 km below the surface, that variability is almost nowhere to be seen.”
Tesla Workers Shared ‘Intimate’ Videos Recorded By In-Car Cameras (Al)
From Observer: “Tesla collects a ton of driving data through its in-car cameras for training its self-driving algorithms used in Autopilot and FSD software.Two former Tesla labelers told Reuters their work duties involved viewing images of customers at their homes, including inside garages. ‘I sometimes wondered if these people know that we’re seeing that,’ one of the former employees said. ‘I saw some scandalous stuff sometimes, you know, like I did see scenes of intimacy but not nudity,’ said another.”
Jordan Neely Killing: Debates About Mental Health, Crime Are Misguided (Dana)
The author writes: “Too often, even the well-intentioned public embraces, legitimizes, and concedes to characterizations and narratives they feel they must then launch a defense against. I encourage you to reject that practice and instead embrace the painful truth: There is absolutely nothing new about what happened to Jordan Neely — or how America is trying to justify it. The only thing new is the news cycle.”
Beyond Metaphor: Inside the First Month of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine (Michaela)
Excerpted from Sky Above Kharkiv: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Front by Serhiy Zhadan and featured in Literary Hub: “Serhiy Zhadan records the emergence of a new reality in Kharkiv.”
World Likely to Breach 1.5C Climate Threshold by 2027, Scientists Warn (Mili)
From The Guardian: “UN agency says El Niño and human-induced climate breakdown could combine to push temperatures into ‘uncharted territory’. … In 2015, when the Paris agreement was signed, requiring countries to hold global temperature increases to no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels while ‘pursuing efforts’ to hold them to 1.5C, it was forecast that the chance of temporarily exceeding the 1.5C threshold within the following five years was zero. This November, governments will meet for the Cop28 UN climate summit, where they will assess progress towards meeting the goals of the Paris agreement.”
AI Cameras Reveal the Survival Stories of Australian Animals after Bushfires (Laura)
The author writes, “The Google AI technology, called Wildlife Insights, was trained on 4M images of more than 150 Australian animals, and tracked their recovery in the years after bushfires. … Images of koalas moving around on the ground indicated the animals were still recovering from fire.”
