General Science

Contrails (condensation trails) are the ice clouds that trail behind aircraft as they fly through cold and moist regions of the atmosphere. Avoiding these regions could potentially be an inexpensive way to reduce over half of aviation's impact on global warming. Development and evaluation of these avoidance strategies greatly benefits from the ability to detect contrails on satellite imagery....

The C-2W device (“Norman”), has produced and sustained beam-driven field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasmas embedded in a magnetic mirror geometry using neutral beams and end-bias electrodes located in expander divertors. Many discrete vessels comprise this device, and a suite of spatially and radiometrically calibrated, high-speed camera systems have been deployed to visualize the plasma...

Predicting wildfire spread is critical for land management and disaster preparedness. To this end, we present “Next Day Wildfire Spread,” a curated, large-scale, multivariate dataset of historical wildfires aggregating nearly a decade of remote-sensing data across the United States. In contrast to existing fire datasets based on Earth observation satellites, our dataset combines 2-D fire data...

Spiking neural networks with temporal coding schemes process information based on the relative timing of neuronal spikes. In supervised learning tasks, temporal coding allows learning through backpropagation with exact derivatives, and achieves accuracies on par with conventional artificial neural networks. Here we introduce spiking autoencoders with temporal coding and pulses, trained using...