📌 MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Rivers Turn Bright Orange in Alaska Edisi Jam 20:47
Some of Alaska’s scenic rivers and streams look downright apocalyptic this year because they turned a flagrant orange color — but it’s not due to local pollution, according to scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
In actuality, the orange tinted water is rust, released as the frozen ground in Alaska thaws out due to unchecked greenhouse gasses driving global warming. And it’s leaking into the state’s waterways, according to NOAA’s annual report on the Arctic region, where it’s posing a danger to local wildlife, residents and commercial fisheries.
The day-glo rivers are also a bright orange flag that the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the world. The massive defrosting is also anticipated to increase sea levels and screw up weather patterns, according to scientists who talked to NPR.
“When the Arctic thaws and warms, it’s having an impact on the global climate,” Matthew Druckenmiller, lead author of the report and senior scientist with the Boulder, Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Center, told the broadcaster.
The planet is already showing signs of distress from global warming, such as large-scale forest fires and extreme summer temperatures outside the Arctic, which Druckenmiller described as a giant fridge for the planet.
“The Arctic is warming several times faster than Earth as a whole, reshaping the northern landscapes, ecosystems, and livelihoods of Arctic peoples,” reads the NOAA report. “Also transforming are the roles the Arctic plays in the global climate, economic, and societal systems.”
Zooming back to Alaska, people started noticing the orange waterways in 2018, according to NPR.
“ We heard from people who live in the region — pilots who are often flying over, people in the national parks,” US Geological Survey research hydrologist Josh Koch told the broadcaster.
As temperatures heats up in the most remote parts of Alaska, permafrost — ground that usually stays continuously frozen — is melting, and that’s unlocking iron in the soil, which oxidizes from exposure to water and air, causing rivers and streams to turn orange. Surveys revealed that this contamination is far reaching, covering hundreds of miles of terrain in Alaska.
“It’s often not orange until it reaches the stream, and then all the iron and other metals can precipitate and create this iron staining,” Koch added.
It’s not clear if residents are being harmed from the polluted water, but local scientists are monitoring the situation, NPR reports.
The other problem with these rusty rivers is that they increase the acidity level in the water, according to the NOAA report, and this may harm fish like Dolly Varden char, whose juvenile offspring have experienced a sharp decrease in numbers most likely due to iron in its aquatic habitat. And that’s pretty bad for everybody in Alaska.
“The food chain is connected to the lives of people living in the Arctic,” Druckenmiller said.
More on climate change: Melting Glacier in Alaska Floods State Capital
The post Rivers Turn Bright Orange in Alaska appeared first on Futurism.
🔗 Sumber: futurism.com
📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: Gemini 3 Flash arrives with reduced costs and latency — a p
Enterprises can now harness the power of a large language model that's near that of the state-of-the-art Google’s Gemini 3 Pro, but at a fraction of the cost and with increased speed, thanks to the newly released Gemini 3 Flash.
The model joins the flagship Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 3 Deep Think, and Gemini Agent, all of which were announced and released last month.
Gemini 3 Flash, now available on Gemini Enterprise, Google Antigravity, Gemini CLI, AI Studio, and on preview in Vertex AI, processes information in near real-time and helps build quick, responsive agentic applications.
The company said in a blog post that Gemini 3 Flash “builds on the model series that developers and enterprises already love, optimized for high-frequency workflows that demand speed, without sacrificing quality.
The model is also the default for AI Mode on Google Search and the Gemini application.
Tulsee Doshi, senior director, product management on the Gemini team, said in a separate blog post that the model “demonstrates that speed and scale don’t have to come at the cost of intelligence.”
“Gemini 3 Flash is made for iterative development, offering Gemini 3’s Pro-grade coding performance with low latency — it’s able to reason and solve tasks quickly in high-frequency workflows,” Doshi said. “It strikes an ideal balance for agentic coding, production-ready systems and responsive interactive applications.”
Early adoption by specialized firms proves the model's reliability in high-stakes fields. Harvey, an AI platform for law firms, reported a 7% jump in reasoning on their internal 'BigLaw Bench,' while Resemble AI discovered that Gemini 3 Flash could process complex forensic data for deepfake detection 4x faster than Gemini 2.5 Pro. These aren't just speed gains; they are enabling 'near real-time' workflows that were previously impossible.
More efficient at a lower cost
Enterprise AI builders have become more aware of the cost of running AI models, especially as they try to convince stakeholders to put more budget into agentic workflows that run on expensive models. Organizations have turned to smaller or distilled models, focusing on open models or other research and prompting techniques to help manage bloated AI costs.
For enterprises, the biggest value proposition for Gemini 3 Flash is that it offers the same level of advanced multimodal capabilities, such as complex video analysis and data extraction, as its larger Gemini counterparts, but is far faster and cheaper.
While Google’s internal materials highlight a 3x speed increase over the 2.5 Pro series, data from independent benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis adds a layer of crucial nuance.
In the latter organization's pre-release testing, Gemini 3 Flash Preview recorded a raw throughput of 218 output tokens per second. This makes it 22% slower than the previous 'non-reasoning' Gemini 2.5 Flash, but it is still significantly faster than rivals including OpenAI's GPT-5.1 high (125 t/s) and DeepSeek V3.2 reasoning (30 t/s).
Most notably, Artificial Analysis crowned Gemini 3 Flash as the new leader in their AA-Omniscience knowledge benchmark, where it achieved the highest knowledge accuracy of any model tested to date. However, this intelligence comes with a 'reasoning tax': the model more than doubles its token usage compared to the 2.5 Flash series when tackling complex indexes.
This high token density is offset by Google's aggressive pricing: when accessing through the Gemini API, Gemini 3 Flash costs $0.50 per 1 million input tokens, compared to $1.25/1M input tokens for Gemini 2.5 Pro, and $3/1M output tokens, compared to $ 10/1 M output tokens for Gemini 2.5 Pro. This allows Gemini 3 Flash to claim the title of the most cost-efficient model for its intelligence tier, despite being one of the most 'talkative' models in terms of raw token volume. Here's how it stacks up to rival LLM offerings:
|
Model |
Input (/1M) |
Output (/1M) |
Total Cost |
Source |
|
Qwen 3 Turbo |
$0.05 |
$0.20 |
$0.25 |
|
|
Grok 4.1 Fast (reasoning) |
$0.20 |
$0.50 |
$0.70 |
|
|
Grok 4.1 Fast (non-reasoning) |
$0.20 |
$0.50 |
$0.70 |
|
|
deepseek-chat (V3.2-Exp) |
$0.28 |
$0.42 |
$0.70 |
|
|
deepseek-reasoner (V3.2-Exp) |
$0.28 |
$0.42 |
$0.70 |
|
|
Qwen 3 Plus |
$0.40 |
$1.20 |
$1.60 |
|
|
ERNIE 5.0 |
$0.85 |
$3.40 |
$4.25 |
|
|
Gemini 3 Flash Preview |
$0.50 |
$3.00 |
$3.50 |
|
|
Claude Haiku 4.5 |
$1.00 |
$5.00 |
$6.00 |
|
|
Qwen-Max |
$1.60 |
$6.40 |
$8.00 |
|
|
Gemini 3 Pro (≤200K) |
$2.00 |
$12.00 |
$14.00 |
|
|
GPT-5.2 |
$1.75 |
$14.00 |
$15.75 |
|
|
Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
$3.00 |
$15.00 |
$18.00 |
|
|
Gemini 3 Pro (>200K) |
$4.00 |
$18.00 |
$22.00 |