Environment

Unlike lithium-ion batteries, flow batteries can’t catch fire (as they are mostly water) and are extremely durable.

To sustain future maritime operations, the U.S military will need to run supplies through an environment that spans thousands of miles of open ocean, denied ports, contested straits, and archipelagic chokepoints against adversaries that have spent decades studying how to target American logistics. That problem does not require one identical vessel for every mission. It does require a more common family of watercraft for the manned ships that carry cargo and vehicles inside a theater, built for s

AI agents are increasingly deployed in shared environments where they pursue diverse goals and compete for rewards. This multi-agent competition can lead to behaviors that serve individual gains at collective cost -- for instance, marketing agents may post misleading content as a result of competing for engagement on social media. Human societies address such problems through norms that constrain acceptable behavior, supported by enforcement mechanisms that detect and penalize violations. Motiva

Fact-checking has become a key response to disinformation during crises and conflicts, but its role is increasingly contested due to concerns about its effectiveness and its co-optation by different political actors. In polarized, high-choice environments, fact-checking is often embedded within partisan and state-aligned infrastructures, shaping validation and rejection of knowledge claims. The post Fact-checking in the multipolar AI order: Between epistemic sovereignty and ambivalence first app

The U.S. Department of Energy ("DOE" or "the Department") proposes to update the Department's current rulemaking methodology titled, "Procedures, Interpretations, and Policies for Consideration of New or Revised Energy Conservation Standards and Test Procedures for Consumer Products and Certain Commercial/Industrial Equipment" ("Process Rule"). Specifically, DOE proposes to: make Appendix A binding on DOE for certain actions; amend objectives and considerations consistent with recent Executive o

Non-Player Characters (NPCs) require social cognition to enable intelligent and interactive behaviours within virtual environments. In gaming and other multi-agent systems, current NPC models often fall short in social intelligence and coordination because they cannot infer or anticipate the mental states of other agents. To address this gap, this paper introduces a novel social cognitive architecture that integrates Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) with a Transformer-based Theory of Mi

The web is complex, open-ended, and constantly changing, making it challenging to scale training data for visual web agents. Existing data collection attempts remain limited to offline trajectories for supervised fine-tuning or a handful of simulated environments for RL training, thus failing to capture web diversity. We propose Weblica (Web Replica), a framework for constructing reproducible and scalable web environments. Our framework leverages 1) HTTP-level caching to capture and replay stabl

The Continual Learning (CL) literature has long been driven by the goal of mitigating catastrophic forgetting. This objective rests on a pervasive, often unstated assumption: that a lifelong learner should approximate the Joint-Task Learning (JTL) solution and retain all previously acquired knowledge. We challenge this retention-centered premise, arguing that in non-stationary environments prioritizing retention can impede real-time adaptation. Shifting the focus to the Average Lifelong Error (A

We introduce the first multiplayer world model for highly dynamic environments governed by complex physical interactions. Whereas single-player world models treat the other agents as part of the environment, ours conditions on the action streams of multiple agents, learning to attribute changes in the scene to the correct player and to stay coherent under arbitrary combinations of their actions. We study this problem in the game of Rocket League, where players compete and cooperate under fast, t

Analysis and insights for driving a rapid transition to net-zero while building resilience to physical climate impacts ...

Analysis and insights for driving a rapid transition to net-zero while building resilience to physical climate impacts ...

Analysis and insights for driving a rapid transition to net-zero while building resilience to physical climate impacts ...

Analysis and insights for driving a rapid transition to net-zero while building resilience to physical climate impacts ...

Analysis and insights for driving a rapid transition to net-zero while building resilience to physical climate impacts ...

Analysis and insights for driving a rapid transition to net-zero while building resilience to physical climate impacts ...

How to apply effective governance to harness the benefits of A.I. and mitigate its risks ...

Transport Explore transport Featured topics Artificial intelligence How to apply effective governance to harness the benefits of A.I. and mitigate its risks Climate mitigation and net-zero transition ...

As the world increasingly relies on digital technology, the role of digital companies in driving the global transition to a low-carbon economy has become increasingly important. The International ...

Personalized incentive allocation is vital for e-commerce, where uplift modeling is the standard for estimating Individual Treatment Effects (ITE). However, traditional models often fail in complex multi-seller environments with violations of the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA). We identify two critical challenges: Seller-level Cannibalization, where incentives shift expenditure between shops without growing the platform, and Incentive-level Cannibalization, where organic conversi

In liberalised railway systems, operators must set prices dynamically in an environment with partial observability, as they retain private information about their objectives and performance, where regulatory constraints prohibit communication or direct information exchange between competitors to prevent explicit collusion. Consequently, agents must learn to infer strategic interactions only from observable market data which presents a significant challenge for multi-agent reinforcement learning,

Big Data & Society, Volume 13, Issue 3, July-September 2026. This article examines AI-based video surveillance systems in public spaces. We investigate a case of AI-based camera technology designed to detect falls into the water and prevent drowning accidents at the harbor front of a large Scandinavian city. This ...

Carbon is the technology behind the sci-fi MMO's sprawling persistent universe.

On October 23, 2025, the Department of Energy held a public meeting to discuss the development of voluntary agreements and plans of action under the Defense Production Act. As part of that meeting, a draft voluntary agreement was released to the accompanying docket and published in the Federal Register for comment. This notice publishes the "Nuclear Fuel Cycle Consortium" Voluntary Agreement approved by the Secretary of Energy, after consultation by the Attorney General and Chairman of the Feder

This study examines the underlying causes of the gap between perceived artificial intelligence (AI) literacy and the actual competencies of defense personnel, and explores structured training initiatives that can support reliable and responsible decision-making in AI-mediated operational environments. Grounded in self-efficacy theory and the cognitive psychology of competence assessment, the study advances the theoretically motivated proposition that the routine use of intelligent systems may co

Mars rover missions require decision-support systems that can interpret terrain, telemetry, environmental conditions, and mission objectives under delayed communication with Earth. This study evaluates whether multi-agent orchestration improves simulated Mars rover decision support compared with a single-agent baseline. A controlled benchmark of 100 synthetic mission-inspired rover scenarios was evaluated using OpenAI GPT-4o and GPT-5.5, with five repeated runs per scenario and architecture. Mod

We are facing a storm of geopolitical instability, economic coercion, AI and climate change – and it’s likely to get worse. But by working more closely with Europe and seeking greater cooperation ...

Software-agent benchmarks usually report whether an agent solves a task, but the agent reaches that outcome through a harness that controls what it sees, which actions it can take, which failures are repaired, which states are verified, and which evidence is logged. We show that this harness can change the agent's multi-step beliefs even when the task, environment, and base LLM are fixed. We introduce a belief-rollout diagnostic that elicits structured K-step trajectories over progress, risk, re

How to apply effective governance to harness the benefits of A.I. and mitigate its risks ...

Analysis and insights for driving a rapid transition to net-zero while building resilience to physical climate impacts ...

Large Language Models (LLMs) are proposed as control interfaces for next-generation networks, but their latency, hallucinations, and lack of control guarantees make them unsuitable for near-real-time packet schedulers, especially in dynamic V2X environments. This paper introduces Agentic-V2X, an architecture where a small, locally deployed language model acts as a periodic non-real-time rApp-inspired policy creator, while a lightweight xApp-like controller executes validated policies at interval

Delivering a sustainable future – for our environment, energy supply, businesses, health, and social institutions – is a global challenge. To meet this challenge, LSE and Tsinghua University have ...

Post-training of frontier language models is conducted on curated task suites, and inevitably leaves a distribution shift between training and deployment environments. This exposes developers to generalization failures, which are relatively poorly understood. To better understand such generalization failures, we believe the community should construct clean demonstrations under simplified conditions. To facilitate this, we propose a simple and flexible way to construct language models which fail

Analysis and insights for driving a rapid transition to net-zero while building resilience to physical climate impacts ...

Foundation models for Earth systems have so far been trained primarily on physical climate and weather data, with limited representation of the human systems that both drive and respond to environmental change. The lack of a unified global training resource that combines climate, land, ocean, cryosphere, infrastructure, hazards, and socioeconomic data on a common grid hinders progress toward truly multimodal Earth system foundation models. We present WorldTensor, a harmonised global dataset that

Plus, a data center rebellion erupts in Canada, Gen Z says it's sexy to be a Luddite, and the push to paint anti-tech activists as extremists. This is Episode 2 of the BITM show with guest Paris Marx.

Parliament's final plenary session before the summer recess will see Members discuss the priorities of the Irish EU Council Presidency alongside key decisions on enlargement, foreign affairs, passenger rights, agriculture, competitiveness, environmental crime and the EU budget.

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure is typically framed as an energy problem. Data centers are projected to consume a growing share of global electricity demand: The International Energy Agency estimates they could account for 3 to 4 percent of total global consumption within this decade. Utilities are already adjusting long-term forecasts to accommodate anticipated growth from hyperscale facilities and high-density compute clusters. This framing captures scale. It miss

This second edition of Business Ethics and Ethical Business has all the virtues of the first edition as well as additions and revisions throughout, and three new chapters—one on AI and two on environmental ethics and sustainability. It explores the place of business in society, describes ethics in management, recognizes the challenges of environmental preservation, and explores challenges of international business. It introduces the major standards of business ethics and provides tools for ethic

For the world’s poorest people, climate change does not announce itself in parts per million. It arrives as a ruined harvest, a flooded shopfront, and lost learning as children are kept out of school.

The rules for plants can be different in water.