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A project to divert the Mississippi river could restore ecosystems destroyed by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. 

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Gerald Herbert/ AP / Alamy

Diverting the Mississippi

South of New Orleans, a construction team has begun cutting a channel across the narrow strip of land that separates the Mississippi river from Barataria Bay – an arc of shallow water polluted by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. The project – called the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion – will redirect about 8 per cent of the Mississippi’s total flow into the bay, reuniting the river and its wetlands, which were separated by levees put in place a century ago. “This is one of many projects that are needed to restore the landscape,” says Alexander Kolker at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, a state research group. If completed, the project would be among the largest ecosystem restoration projects ever undertaken in the US, both restoring the wetlands and forming new land on Louisiana’s coast. Read more

Many chatbots such as ChatGPT can answer questions put to them in a number of languages, responding in the same language, but a study suggests the large language models (LLMs) behind chatbots may “think” in English, even if asked questions in other languages. This is because their training data is biased, encoding concepts more common in English language cultures, which could be a cause for concern. “Using English as the intermediary through which to teach a model how to analyse language risks superimposing a limited world view onto other linguistically and culturally distinct regions,” says Aliya Bhatia at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington DC. Read more

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Eddo Hartmann

A finalist in the Sony World Photography Awards 2024, Eddo Hartmann’s series The Sacrifice Zone comes from a remote part of Kazakhstan that was the major testing ground for the Soviet Union’s nuclear experiments from 1949 to 1989. The image above shows a dosimetrist measuring radiation levels at Kazakhstan’s Lake Shagan. This area remains highly contaminated from the 450 or so nuclear tests carried out there. 

Hartmann used infrared to capture these landscapes, with the red hues evoking radiation contamination, which can’t be seen by the naked eye. “Local scientists utilise infrared technology to monitor the current conditions of contaminated sites,” he says. “The chlorophyll present in green vegetation reflects a substantial amount of infrared light. The various shades of reflection provide valuable insights into the overall health of the environment in the specified area.” More photos

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