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Iran Begins Cloud Seeding To Induce Rain Amid Historic Drought

2 weeks 2 days ago
Authorities in Iran have sprayed clouds with chemicals to induce rain, in an attempt to combat the country's worst drought in decades. From a report: Known as cloud-seeding, the process was conducted over the Urmia lake basin on Saturday, Iran's official news agency Irna reported. Urmia is Iran's largest lake, but has largely dried out leaving a vast salt bed. Further operations will be carried out in east and west Azerbaijan, the agency said. Rainfall is at record lows and reservoirs are nearly empty. Last week President Masoud Pezeshkian warned that if there is not enough rainfall soon, Tehran's water supply could be rationed and people may be evacuated from the capital. Cloud seeding involves injecting chemical salts including silver or potassium iodide into clouds via aircraft or through generators on the ground. Water vapour can then condense more easily and turn into rain. The technique has been around for decades, and the UAE has used it in recent years to help address water shortages. Iran's meteorological organisation said rainfall had decreased by about 89% this year compared with the long-term average, Irna reported.

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Europe joins US as exascale superpower after Jupiter clinches Top500 run

2 weeks 2 days ago
EuroHPC's biggest iron still has more to give with Universal Cluster expansion expected to come online next year

SC25  Europe has officially entered exascale orbit. On Monday, EuroHPC's Jupiter supercomputer became the fourth such machine on the Top500 list of publicly known systems to exceed a million-trillion floating point operations a second in the time-honored High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark.…

Tobias Mann

Modest HPC Centers Drive Top500 Supercomputer Rankings This Time Around

2 weeks 2 days ago

For the past two years now, we have been picking apart the semi-annual rankings of supercomputers known as the Top500 is a different way, focusing on the new machines that come into each list in either June or November. …

Modest HPC Centers Drive Top500 Supercomputer Rankings This Time Around was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Timothy Prickett Morgan

AI Use in 'Call of Duty: Black Ops 7' Draws Fire From US Lawmaker

2 weeks 2 days ago
An anonymous reader shares a report: The use of AI in the latest Call of Duty has prompted a US lawmaker to call for regulations to prevent artificial intelligence from taking jobs away from human workers. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who represents a large swathe of Silicon Valley, took aim at Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 after buyers noticed the popular shooter contains a significant amount of AI-generated icons, posters, and achievements. Gamers are criticizing it as filled with "AI slop." On Friday, Khanna tweeted: "We need regulations that prevent companies from using AI to eliminate jobs to extract greater profits." He added, "Artists at these companies need to have a say in how AI is deployed. They should share in the profits. And there should be a tax on mass displacement."

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Take-Two CEO Says Consoles Aren't Going Away, But Gaming is Moving Toward PCs

2 weeks 2 days ago
Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, which operates publishing labels including GTA-maker Rockstar Games and 2K, said on Monday that although gaming consoles are not going away, the industry is moving toward PCs in the next decade. From a report: "I think it's moving towards PC and business is moving towards open rather than closed," Zelnick told CNBC's "Squawk Box." "But if you define console as the property, not the system, then the notion of a very rich game that you engage in for many hours that you play on a big screen -- that's never going away." Zelnick said the current split between console and mobile is about even in the market, but mobile is growing more rapidly than consoles.

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