Environment

Microsoft promised to be carbon negative by 2030. Its own report shows emissions up 25% in a year instead. The number is worse than it looks, and also more honest than it looks, and the reason for both is the same: AI data centres. Microsoft set one of the boldest climate targets in tech. By […] This story continues at The Next Web

Federated Reinforcement Learning (FedRL) enables coordination of distributed energy resources without sharing raw local data, but standard aggregation methods such as FedAvg do not account for system-level constraints, often leading to unsafe global behavior. In this work, we study constraint-aware aggregation for federated reinforcement learning in distributed energy coordination. We propose aggregation rules that incorporate both local performance and estimated constraint violation into the se

A former lead climate lawyer for the U.S. State Department offers her perspective on the future of multilateral initiatives to combat climate change. The post W(h)ither Climate “Multilateralism”? appeared first on Just Security .

Hidden in a forest south of Bend, Oregon, a first-of-its-kind clean energy project is starting to take shape. Called Project Obsidian, the “superhot” geothermal power plant will deliver 24/7 electricity—and could soon compete on cost with fossil fuels as it pioneers new drilling technology. “Our goal is to be competitive, if not cheaper, than existing sources of baseload power today,” says Matthew Houde, cofounder and chief of staff at Quaise Energy , the startup developing the project, which is

Rimini Street, Inc. (Nasdaq: RMNI), the Software Support and Agentic AI ERP Company™ and the leading third-party support provider for Oracle, SAP and VMware software, today announced VIVERE Group, a leading Indonesian one-stop solution provider for interior contracting, furniture manufacturing and furnishing, has selected Rimini Support™ for SAP to help maintain business continuity, strengthen support for its critical SAP ECC environment and free internal IT resources to focus on digital transfo

Generated tokens are a direct driver of the cost, latency, and energy of generative AI (GAI) code editing. We show the format of feedback is a lever on all three. We compare two deliveries of the same requested changes: a holistic prompt (control) versus the structured, line-anchored export of FileMark (treatment). FileMark is a VSCodium extension for inline comments on any file. In a paired experiment line anchoring cut generated tokens by 22% (Claude Opus) and 58% (Claude Sonnet), reaching 24%

PM to declare Australia the first country worldwide to bring economic, social, security and environmental issues from AI under single office in major speech Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast Anthony Albanese says the federal government will introduce faster approval processes for AI projects, including datacentres, across Australia, seeking to shore up investor certainty and maintain community confidence in the rapidly advancing technology . Announcing the creation of

Warm water in household pipes can be a breeding ground for harmful bacteria.

All On, Nigeria's leading off-grid energy access investor is pleased...

The paper introduces the Internet of Agentic Things (IoAT), an architectural framework that integrates agentic AI, IoT, cyber-physical systems, Physical AI, edge computing, and digital twins into a unified closed-loop orchestration framework. The proposed architecture consists of cloud, edge/fog, and physical IoT layers connected through autonomous AI agents that perceive, reason, coordinate, and actuate across distributed cyber-physical environments. The paper formalizes IoAT as a coupled workf

Today's links Gerontocracy's failure mode: Where are the designated survivors? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: MSFT v MP3; UK industry v schoolkids; Gary Larson v comics sharing; Planned LED obsolescence; PoGo v Black neighborhoods; Gnarlier trolley problems; Royal Society v cryptographic backdoors; Theresa May v climate change; Google v search; Facebook v facts. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Wher

What GAO Found Certain types of waste are particularly pervasive or difficult to clean up with existing technologies. Microbes (e.g., bacteria, fungi) can be engineered to break down pollutants more effectively. For example, researchers have inserted genes into bacteria that allow the bacteria to break down contaminants, such as phenol or hydrocarbons, in water and soil. At present, there are no examples of commercially available engineered microbes for waste cleanup. Example areas where enginee

New York has become the first US state to place a moratorium on the construction of data centers.

What GAO Found As of September 2025, the Coast Guard reported about $448 million in environmental liabilities related to its shore infrastructure. This includes about $228 million for structures, like housing, presumed to be contaminated with asbestos-containing material or lead-based paint based on their age. It also includes about $220 million in cleanup projects at sites with a known or suspected release of contaminants. Several factors create uncertainty that could potentially lead to hundre

New York will block new large data centers that fuel artificial intelligence for up to a year to protect the environment and energy grid. Gov.

The modern soybean is one of the world’s miracle technologies, capable of cheaply, efficiently, and healthfully supplying protein and other nutrients to billions of people. But, unfortunately, we’ve mostly chosen to squander it on the most destructive purposes possible. Soy is America’s second most widely cultivated crop, occupying a land area equivalent to more than […]

Affiliates Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders worry that the AI datacenter debate has overshadowed broader questions about AI's impact on our lives.

Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) has implemented a one-year ban on new large data center projects. The state’s data center moratorium will have profoundly deleterious consequences, including lost investment ...

Google has struck a deal to purchase a major solar project's entire electrical output to offset its fossil fuel emissions.

To manage complex technology environments, many CIOs and CTOs are adopting event messaging orchestration, says Harry Nicholson, senior product manager of automation and process management at Blue Turtle.

New hyperscale data centers can't set up shop in New York for up to a year now that Governor Kathy Hochul (D) has signed the nation's first statewide moratorium. But a bill passed by the state legislature that could restrict even more developments still awaits her signature. The order blocks new environmental permits for data […]

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) is imposing the nation’s first-ever statewide freeze on new “hyperscale” data centers. Hochul is pausing state-level environmental permits for “up to” a year to give the state time to put together a framework to protect the environment, the energy grid and New Yorkers’ electric bills, her office said. Hochul...

Deep networks trained with label noise often learn clean structure before memorizing corrupted labels. We show that this transition leaves a spectral signature in the centered scatter of per-example last-layer gradients. Its effective rank transiently expands during memorization and contracts after corrupted labels are fit. We call this phenomenon Fisher Rank Inflation. Corrupted labels increase effective rank by injecting spectral mass into low-energy or previously unused eigendirections, incre

Through its Managed Print Services offering, Kyocera helps companies monitor and manage their print environments more effectively, says Yunus Docrat, service manager at Kyocera Document Solutions South Africa.

Labor MP says ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’ was a founding principle of the ALP as media union calls for tougher new rules on AI use of creative work Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast The Labor MP Ed Husic says any moves to water down copyright law to benefit AI companies would be “going against the ethos” of the party and undermining the principle of “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”. Husic also

Deal signals continued demand for renewable energy despite Trump administration’s efforts to end tax credits and stall plans

arXiv:2607.09674v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Teachers and researchers need to adapt educational AI to local goals, but most systems remain difficult to customize or study without coding expertise. We present LearnAdapt Agentic Studio on PedOS 1.1 Lumina, a no-code authoring and governed runtime environment for educational AI plugins. A non-coder describes a desired learning interaction in plain English; the system prepares a previewable plugin artifact, runs safety checks, and supports submis

arXiv:2607.10011v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper develops a naturalistic account of religion and artificial intelligence as structurally similar distributed meaning systems. I argue that both emerge from the same underlying cognitive architecture: socially extended processes that offload interpretation, norm-guidance, and world-model construction into external symbolic environments. Drawing on work in distributed cognition, cultural evolution, and philosophy of mind, the paper proposes

arXiv:2607.10674v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As AI code tools become integrated into programming environments, students increasingly describe intended behavior in natural language and rely on these tools to generate code, shifting emphasis from code writing to specification. Yet little is known about the comments students write as specifications in AI-assisted programming tasks. We analyze a four-year dataset of undergraduate programming submissions and reflections from tasks in which stude

The facility will be built in Sturgeon County, Alberta, and powered by a natural gas-fired plant.

Meta Platforms Inc. today announced plans to significantly expand the scope of its Hyperion data center project. The Facebook parent is seeking to build a sprawling artificial intelligence hub in Richland Parish, Louisiana. When Meta first disclosed the initiative in late 2024, it stated that the project budget would exceed $10 billion. It boosted the […] The post Meta boosts investment in Hyperion data center campus to $50B+ appeared first on SiliconANGLE .

TIL: Using uvx in GitHub Actions in a cache-friendly way I finally found a cache-friendly recipe for using uvx tool-name in GitHub Actions workflows that I like. The trick is setting a UV_EXCLUDE_NEWER: "2026-07-12" environment variable at the start of the workflow and then using that as part of the GitHub Actions cache key. This means any uvx tool-name commands will resolve to the most recent version as-of that date, and you can bust the cache and upgrade the tools by bumping the date in the fu

The growing incorporation of artificial intelligence into professional environments has intensified debates about how ethical judgement is formed and sustained under technological mediation. This article examines these issues through the case of VICTOR, a machine learning system developed by Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal to classify extraordinary appeals according to constitutional themes of general repercussion, and through the later expansion of tools such as VitórIA. The analysis distingu

SpatialPrompting is a practical, training-free and model-agnostic framework for 3D spatial reasoning with off-the-shelf multimodal large language models, requiring no fine-tuning or 3D-specific inputs. It adopts a pose-aware, keyframe-driven prompting strategy: we select a compact, diverse set of frames using vision–language similarity, Mahalanobis distance, field of view, and image sharpness, and then verbalize each camera pose to enable multi-view, viewpoint-aware reasoning within a single str

Accurate forecasting of renewable generation is crucial to facilitate the integration of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) into the power system. Focusing on photovoltaic (PV) units, forecasting methods can be divided into two main categories: physics-based and data-based strategies, with Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based models providing state-of-the-art performance. However, while these AI-based models can capture complex patterns and relationships in the data, they rarely exploit the physics-d

Proactive agents that anticipate user needs and autonomously execute tasks hold great promise as digital assistants, yet the lack of realistic user simulation frameworks hinders their development. Existing approaches model apps as flat tool-calling APIs, failing to capture the stateful and sequential nature of user interaction in digital environments and making realistic user simulation infeasible. We introduce Proactive Agent Research Environment (Pare), a framework for building and evaluating

Lawmakers must weigh three competing state bills proposing bans ranging from 180 days to three years.

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA A PROCLAMATION 1. The United States relies on a strong chemical manufacturing sector to support industries like energy, national defense, agriculture, and health care. These facilities produce essential inputs for critical infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, medical sterilization, semiconductors, and national defense systems. Maintaining a robust domestic chemical […] The post Regulatory Relief for Certain Stationary Sources to Promote America

Microsoft reported a 25 percent jump in carbon emissions in 2025 as it sets out to grow its use of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. The emissions increase was "driven primarily by the expansion of our datacenter infrastructure and pausing our use of non-additional, unbundled renewable energy certificates as we prioritize investments that bring net...

The capability of a modern AI agent depends not only on its foundation model but also on its harness, which constructs prompts, manages state, invokes tools, and coordinates execution. As models, APIs, environments, and requirements evolve, the harness must be continually modified. Before such a change can be made, a developer or coding agent must identify all code locations that implement the target behavior. This is difficult because production harnesses are large, tightly coupled, and behavio