Yize Wang

Climate scientists have long debated where exactly the El Niño "pool" is located: the region in the equatorial Pacific that first responds to an impending weather shift. The debate isn't due to a lack of data. The ocean is measured along longitude, latitude, and depth, and each slice contains thousands of numbers. The problem is that there are too many numbers to see the pattern directly.

A laser beam is split into dozens of thin filaments, passes through frosted glass, and reconverges to a single point. This is the workbench where the program took a seat. It received no instructions — only a general goal: figure out how light changes when passing through a scattering medium, and find something new.