News at a glance: AI weather forecasting, CRISPR relatives, and green hydrogen

METEOROLOGY Artificial intelligence forecasts the weather in a flash A model using artificial intelligence (AI) forecasts global weather as accurately, and more than 10,000 times faster , than the best system in use, researchers report this week in Nature . The conventional tool, run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, is computationally intensive, requiring hours of supercomputer calculations to produce a 10-day forecast. The new AI-based model—named Pangu-Weather and developed by Huawei, the Chinese tech giant—improves on previous AI-powered models by simulating weather at different altitudes and forecasting tropical cyclones, with results reliable out to 10 days, researchers say. The research team trained the model on 39 years of historical weather data; the system is untested yet using real-time observational data. Another AI-based weather model, GraphCast, described by Google DeepMind in a December 2022 preprint, also outperformed the European system. GENETICS CRISPR relatives found all over The revolutionary invention of the gene editor called CRISPR converted an immune mechanism used by single-celled organisms into one of the mostly widely used tools in biology. Now, two groups have discovered that many multicelled organisms, including fungi, plants, and animals, carry genes for a DNA-cleaving enzyme similar to one that prokaryotes use in CRISPR—a discovery that...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news