The California Brown Pelican has taken over the Pacifica Pier in San Mateo County, CA, after the pier was shut down in early June due to a cracked concrete walkway that made it unsafe for public access. The pelicans have occupied the area, effectively replacing human use of the pier. The incident highlights how wildlife can quickly reclaim abandoned or unsafe human structures.
The photographer captured a Northern Gannet, Great Blue Heron, and California Brown Pelican in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, California, using a 200‑800mm Canon EF lens. The birds were observed congregating beneath a harbor sign, providing a striking image of wildlife in their natural habitat.
Northern Gannet, in Pillar Point Harbor, CA, US This is Morris. Morris is a local celebrity: the only known Northern Gannet ( Morus bassanus ) in the entire Pacific Ocean.
The photograph captures a California Sea Lion and a Brandt's Cormorant at Pillar Point Harbor in California, USA. While the main subjects are the sea lion and cormorant, the image also reveals a Northern Gannet named Morris peeking out from behind a sign’s base. The scene showcases a diverse group of marine wildlife in a harbor setting.
The article reports that the chicks from this year’s record breeding season of the critically endangered kākāpō have reached juvenile status and have been added to the population count. It notes that in 1995 only 51 kākāpō remained, highlighting the species’ severe decline. The piece underscores that sustained effort can lead to recovery of such endangered species.
Simon Willison comments on GPT 6.1‑Sol, describing it as "Near‑Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price." He notes that the model’s pelican illustrations are similar to those of the GPT‑6 family and provides links to the live‑blog of the keynote and to the pelican images. The post is tagged with AI, OpenAI, generative‑AI, LLMs, and playful references to pelican‑riding‑a‑bicycle.
Simon Willison tested GPT‑6 Astra by generating SVG pelicans riding bicycles at various reasoning levels and compared the results to GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. The Astra pelicans consistently outperformed the other models, especially at low and xhigh reasoning levels, and even the Astra max version produced high‑quality images. Astra also used fewer tokens and was roughly twice as expensive as Sol, yet its low‑level output was cheaper and superior to any Sol model.
Konstantin Ryabitsev highlights the growing problem of abusive web crawlers that consume excessive CPU resources on git.kernel.org, the official Git repository for the Linux kernel. He notes that at any given moment, 14 CPU cores across five geo‑distributed nodes are dedicated solely to rendering git commits as HTML for these scrapers, surpassing the CPU usage for all legitimate access such as git clones. This issue raises concerns for services like Datasette, which also serve large numbers of crawlable web pages.
Rex's Dino Store is a former newsstand located just before the turnstiles in the Grand Army Plaza subway station at the north end of Brooklyn's Prospect Park. It has been repurposed into a dinosaur-themed shop, featuring an exceptional density of dinosaur puns. The store is categorized under art and New York tags.
arXiv:2608.13856v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Timely urban-canopy information is essential for linking remote sensing with heat, mobility, and neighborhood planning. We developed an optic...
Posted by Yossi Matias, VP Engineering & Research, and Grey Nearing, Research Scientist, Google Research Floods are the most common natural disaster , and are responsible for roughly $50 billion in annual financial damages worldwide. The rate of flood-related disasters has more than doubled since the year 2000 partly due to climate change .
The article discusses how two components—a payload that hijacks an agent and an agent that transports the payload—can combine to form a worm. It explains that agents running in isolated sandboxes can leave instructions in a shared package cache, altering each other's behavior. By substituting the package cache with communication channels like email, Slack, or WhatsApp and replacing sandboxed training runs with independently deployed personal agents such as Muse, the conditions necessary for a worm are met.