Nicola Jones

Here's some fun news for summer: plenty of old freezers use refrigerants that are being phased out under the Montreal protocol (including CFCs and HCFCs for their ozone-eating damage, and even HFCs for their greenhouse warming potential) -- including the freezers that scientists use to store ice cores taken from Greenland, the Antarctic and mountain top glaciers.  The NSF storage facility in Denver, which currently uses an HCFC, is now getting an upgrade -- to transcritical CO2. Most fridges still use HFCs... watch this space to see what winds up replacing them. HFOs? Propane? Ammonia? Or CO2? The hunt is on! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02287-8

How the planes, trains and automobiles of the future will get around without warming the planet. My feature for Knowable. https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/technology/2024/decarbonization-of-transportation-predictions

 The warming planet is muddling ice core records, sinking meteorites out of sight, and threatening archaeological discoveries. My story for Yale E360 https://e360.yale.edu/features/glacier-melt-ice-cores-artifacts-meteorites

Thrilled and honoured to be selected the winner of "best feature" by the Canadian National Media Awards Foundation in their 2024 Digital Publishing Awards, for my feature in Hakai magazine about the seaweed rush. https://digitalpublishingawards.ca/2024winners/

I spend a lot of my time reporting on very serious issues, from climate change to the challenges of AI. So it was a delight to write up this Q&A about narwaals for Knowable magazine. Read all about this one-toothed wonder, and the dentist (yes really) who is spearheading its research, alongside Inuit and scientific collaborators. https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2024/life-of-the-narwhal-martin-nweeia

In the new Netflix action / sci-fi movie ‘Atlas’, we get a revisiting of a now-familiar tale: AI decides, in its infinite wisdom, that the single biggest threat to humanity is, well, humans. So, the AI decides to kill off vast swaths of humanity for humanity’s sake. Queue drama. The set-up to the movie’s action amusingly includes a clip from a real television interview with Geoffrey Hinton, sometimes called the ‘godfather of AI’, a now-76-years-old retired researcher whose work at the University of Toronto (and later Google) really broke open the current AI revolution, by pioneering the idea that ‘neural networks’ could enact ‘deep learning’ algorithms, leveraging graphical processing units (computer chips called GPUs) and the vast stores of data on the internet (see my 2016 feature, The Learning Machines ). That philosophy is what has led us to large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The clip in the movie shows Hinton saying: “If we produce things that are more intelligent th...

Answer: not really. Someone can clone your voice without violating any copyright or other laws (though if they use it to scam someone, the scamming part is illegal; and if you're famous, it might violate your publicity rights). Is that good enough? See my story in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01578-4