GoKawiil
Tech News
A flash flood caused by a glacial collapse tore through Nepal's Bhotekoshi valley on August 26, killing more than 1,000 people with many still missing. Satellites captured the collapse and are now aiding recovery efforts, confirming that monitoring technology exists and works.
Concerns about artificial intelligence's risks and disruptions are increasingly showing up outside of specialized tech and policy circles, reaching everyday American conversation. The shift suggests AI has moved from an industry-insider talking point to a broader cultural and political issue.
Planet Labs, the San Francisco-based Earth-imaging company, maintains a public ephemerides feed that lists tracking data for its satellite fleet. A query of this data against catalog records shows 97 Planet Labs satellites currently active, spanning several constellations including the newly launched Pelican-11, which was deployed into low Earth orbit via SpaceX's Transporter 17 mission on July 7th.
A new Nature paper by Sticher et al. argues that combining satellite imagery with traditional news-coded reports could reveal aspects of armed conflict that text-based monitoring misses. For over 20 years, conflict researchers have relied on coders converting news reports into structured event data, a method with inherent blind spots where reporting is scarce or biased.
A roughly two-and-a-half acre island covered in mature trees suddenly appeared in Williston Lake, a reservoir in northern British Columbia, prompting officials to initially suspect the viral footage was AI-generated before satellite imagery confirmed it was real. BC Hydro spokesman Bob Gammer said record-high water levels, the highest in 14 years, likely broke loose a mass of woody debris and vegetation from the shoreline, which then drifted into open water. The island has since continued to behave unpredictably, further puzzling researchers.
A Landsat 9 satellite pass happened to fly over the Nepal-Tibet border region shortly after a massive glacier collapse, capturing imagery of the resulting damage. The collapse released enough energy to be picked up by seismometers across the globe, underscoring its scale.
A chunk of glacier broke off and fell hundreds of feet along the Nepal-Tibet border, setting off a landslide that unleashed flash floods which have killed roughly 160 people, with hundreds still missing, including international tourists. Satellite imagery and Nepalese government reports point to glacial instability as the likely trigger, and video shared online shows water sweeping away buildings and vehicles.