It was either The Police or Soundgarden
Bowler Hat Science from Matthew R Francis
September is shaping up to be extraordinarily busy even by my standards, so this (long overdue) newsletter installment will be to the point.
First up: my latest contribution for AGU Eos draws on some historical astronomy in the form of Johannes Kepler’s sunspot drawings and what they might tell us about sunspot cycles in general. Or, since it’s me, how nothing is ever quite as simple as that in science.
Second: “artificial intelligence (AI)” is most commonly used now to refer to “generative AI”, which draws from the internet at large without the original copyright holders’ permission. However, the general field of machine learning has many scientific applications, including potentially identifying species from photos shared with permission on social media, as my latest contribution for SIAM News explains.
Kepler’s Drawings Might Reveal When the Sunspots Disappeared
Johannes Kepler’s landmark 1607 sunspot observations may have been made at the end of the solar cycle, helping constrain the start of the Maunder Minimum.
For AGU Eos:
Something freaky happened to the Sun in the 17th century. Instead of the usual 11-year solar cycle of increasing and decreasing sunspot numbers, the Sun produced far fewer sunspots than normal from roughly 1645 to 1715.
Because the Maunder Minimum (as it was later named) occurred toward the very beginning of the era of solar observation with telescopes, scientists have long struggled to understand how frequently these events happen and what they mean for both the Sun and Earth.
Cataloging Biodiversity with Artificial Intelligence
For _SIAM News_:
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed more than 163,000 species to identify those that are threatened with extinction. Of that list, roughly 22,000 species are considered “data deficient” — which means that we simply do not know enough about them to discern whether they are in decline. To complicate matters, the IUCN list does not include every species on Earth because scientists have yet to catalog them all.
Unfortunately, time is of the essence for many organisms. Climate change, pollution, loss of habitat, and other human-imposed pressures have already led to widespread extinctions. Without knowing the number and population stability of certain species, we are missing vital information about the planet’s overall health.
Bowlerhattishly thine,
Matthew
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