Environment

Unlike the U.S., China is making clean energy a core part of its AI infrastructure buildout.

Unlike the U.S., China is making clean energy a core part of its AI infrastructure buildout.

Unlike the U.S., China is making clean energy a core part of its AI infrastructure buildout.

LLM-based database agents show promise, but differing task scopes, testbeds, and metrics hinder comparison. We identify four gaps between evaluation and production operations: live-environment fidelity (multi-turn read-write interaction with a running database); observation-space scale and complexity (causal diagnosis across thousands of time series, business logs, and concurrent activity); solution-space openness (multiple remediations with different operational trade-offs); and scenario comple

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company ’s Plugged In . Last week, I attended an Nvidia media event that included a field trip to an undisclosed location in Silicon Valley—a building without any identifying signage. Though hundreds of racked GPUs were chugging away at real AI tasks inside, Nvidia calls the facility an “engineering superlab” rather than a data center. Among the AI being crunched during our visit: a test version of OpenAI’s GPT model optimized for Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin pla

When oil prices change, it affects your energy costs—and even the price of everyday items. Here’s why.

Multi-stream robot manipulation policies achieve unparalleled sample efficiency and generalization by modeling actions relative to environmental reference frames. However, existing approaches typically assume these frames to be strictly exogenous. This causal assumption collapses in dynamic settings, such as when a single robot arm manipulates a moving object or when two arms coordinate, where each arm effectively becomes part of the dynamic environment of the other. We propose DynaMAC, a lightw

Multi-task inference models share a single backbone across diverse tasks, yet execute identical computation regardless of which task is active - wasting energy and cycles on task-irrelevant operations. We observe that the task command, typically available before inference begins, provides a free signal that can be exploited to skip unnecessary computation at the hardware level. We present a HW/SW co-designed approach in which a lightweight gating network, trained jointly with the backbone, predi

Energy natural gradient descent (ENGD) aligns parameter updates with the curvature of an underlying function-space energy, but existing formulations assume an unconstrained Euclidean parameter domain. We introduce \EMNGDfull{}, a manifold optimization framework for physics-informed and variational neural PDE solvers whose parameters lie on a Riemannian manifold. EMNGD restricts the energy-induced quadratic model to feasible tangent directions and uses retractions to preserve parameter constraint

PhD student Lauren Fortier is building on the experience she gained operating a nuclear plant for the Navy to solve a critical hurdle in the wider adoption of the energy source.

Free exploration is an important aspect of many engaging virtual reality (VR) experiences, yet remains largely inaccessible to blind and low vision (BLV) users due to its reliance on visual feedback. Existing approaches support BLV navigation through prebuilt menus of environment and audio beacons, but offer limited support for free-form discovery. We present VisionPulse, an accessible VR system that enables BLV users to explore virtual environments through natural head and hand movements, combi

The AI data center controversy could influence the upcoming election.

Contemporary policy and media discourse on AI and labour follows a recurring pattern. A demonstration of model capability runs through an inference about workplace substitution to a distributional politics, with the variables that would decide the outcome treated as background. This paper names that pattern capability determinism situates it within Wyatt’s account of soft technological determinism, and reframes the substitution question as a unit-cost economics test. On the AI side, cost per tas

IntroductionIn arid and hyper-arid regions, agriculture depends heavily on irrigation, making crop type monitoring important for water allocation, monitoring crop management policies, and providing the information required to forecast food supply. However, field labels are often scarce, and crop calendars can shift due to locally managed planting, harvest, and irrigation decisions, complicating mapping at field-scale.MethodsWe present a seasonal crop type mapping approach applied to Wadi Al-Dawa

Liar, Liar: Todd Blanche's unique confirmation strategy . Stop Waiting For Cravath : Biglaw firms don't need permission anymore. It's time to make your money moves. That's A Pretty Big Malpractice Claim You've Got There: Holland & Knight facing $1.2B lawsuit. Robot Criminals Are Here : OpenAI's models escaped a secure environment and started hacking a website. That's illegal for humans, but what do we do with a bot? The post Todd Blanche Can’t Admit The Slush Fund Was A Mistake Because ‘That’s N

Vision-language model (VLM) agents increasingly use tools to act on 3D scenes rather than only describe them. Existing 3D benchmarks score textual responses or single-object operations, leaving agent action on complete multi-object 3D scenes under evaluated. We present SceneActBench, a benchmark for visually conditioned action across five 3D tasks under a unified agent-environment loop. Given PNG images or sampled video frames and, where applicable, supplied 3D assets, an agent acts on a 3D envi

LLM training is shifting from manual design and annotation to interaction-driven self-evolution. However, existing self-evolutionary methods face a fundamental dilemma between task diversity and verification reliability: environment-bound methods obtain precise feedback but confine learning to narrow domains, while open-ended self-generation broadens the task space but lacks reliable verification, allowing misleading rewards to pollute the training loop. We identify agent skills as a powerful mi

‘Ratepayer Protection Pledge’ president has touted is non-binding as people continue to struggle with rising bills Donald Trump has announced that about 200 entities have signed on to his non-binding “Ratepayer Protection Pledge”, expanding a voluntary commitment which claims to ensure US consumers will not bear the cost of the AI datacenter build-out. Trump delivered remarks on Thursday at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters, alongside Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator,

Autistic individuals often face barriers in workplace communication, where soft skills are embedded within ongoing tasks and surrounding environment context, not in isolated verbal exchange. Recent work has introduced LLM-driven agents into VR-based communication training and proposed prompting schemas that let agents generate dialogue grounded in the VR environment and the user's hand-based interactions. Building on this work, we explore how different levels of environmental grounding influence

Teachers, conference chairs, and public readers all judge writing from limited evidence, seeing only a finished document and not the process that produced it. Final text alone cannot reveal whether a document was produced through human typing, AI generation, or mixed human-AI collaboration. Existing process-tracking tools help, but many are tied to host-document histories, provide coarse activity records, and offer limited control over the writing environment. Humanly is a writing platform that

Radar cross-section (RCS) modeling is foundational to advancing the utility and sensitivity of spaceborne radar systems. This study introduces a deep sigma-point process (DSPP) model for predicting RCS in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery using a RADARSAT-2 dataset containing 208,191 verified ships. The DSPP model not only strives for predictive accuracy but also characterizes the uncertainty inherent in the intricate relationships among radar signals, ship parameters, and environmental con

Pete Waterman cited an incident in which OpenAI models escaped a test environment and broke into AI company Hugging Face as evidence that providers must prepare for attacks moving at AI speed.

Modern AI agents rely on elaborate inference harnesses such as Claude Code, Codex, and OpenClaw to drive multi-turn reasoning, tool use, and access to external systems. While powerful, these complex harnesses also make agents hard to train end-to-end with open infrastructure, whose SFT/RL stacks cannot natively express stateful, multi-process harness inference. To address this, we present OpenForgeRL, an open-source framework for training harness-based agents end-to-end in diverse environments.

Laundry Bear exploited a zero-day vulnerability for five months before it was patched in November 2025, and the group is still actively exploiting vulnerable environments. The post Russian espionage group using novel Zimbra exploit to steal sensitive data from Western countries appeared first on CyberScoop .

AI agents are increasingly created inside organizations by non-engineering users through low-code, no-code, and conversational development environments. This democratization enables rapid local innovation, but it also creates a reliability gap: agents that appear to users as simple productivity artifacts may depend on changing models, tools, retrieval sources, permissions, prompts, schedules, and external services. These dependencies can cause silent degradation long after deployment, even when

Large language models (LLMs) and agents are now widely used tools in code development, with data typically sent to third-party cloud-based models. Their adoption in research using personal data is constrained by governance requirements that typically prohibit data transmission to external services. Locally deployable open-weight models offer an alternative since sensitive data never leave the local environment. We introduce an open-source framework for evaluating the efficacy of AI agents powere

Large language models (LLMs) and agents are now widely used tools in code development, with data typically sent to third-party cloud-based models. Their adoption in research using personal data is constrained by governance requirements that typically prohibit data transmission to external services. Locally deployable open-weight models offer an alternative since sensitive data never leave the local environment. We introduce an open-source framework for evaluating the efficacy of AI agents powere

The company, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2017, stands to benefit from growing support for nuclear power and President Trump’s deal with Saudi Arabia.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) enables embodied agents to follow natural-language instructions. However, route-level instructions commonly encode spatial priors, such as orientation, distance, and layout, that are not explicitly available from onboard sensing at deployment in open, GPS-denied environments. Benchmark performance under such interfaces therefore jointly reflects visual navigation ability and the use of route structure explicitly supplied by the task description. As a compleme

The Nancy Grace Roman telescope will probe dark energy and discover exoplanets.

Origin Energy said it was working to figure out how many Australians were affected by a recent data breach.

In experiential learning environments, Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students often experience ``split attention,'' dividing their focus among tasks, instructors, and access providers. Augmented reality (AR) has been proposed as a means to centralize communication access within the student's field of view; however, little is known about how such systems affect the instructors, interpreters, and captioners who support access in these settings. We present a formative, expert-based evaluation of A

En ce mois de juillet, Microsoft a mis en ligne son « environmental sustainability report ». Il regroupe les indicateurs environnementaux avec les consommations en eau et électricité de ses datacenters. Résultat des courses : les curseurs sont bien plus élevés aux États-Unis et en Asie qu’en Europe. Chaque année, les géants américains (Google, Microsoft […]

Initial research projects advance national priorities across natural resources, manufacturing, nuclear physics, and more.

What GAO Found The Office of Isotope Research and Development and Production (IRP), within the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science, produced, sold, and distributed 265 isotopes during fiscal years 2020 through 2025. Many of these isotopes are critical to medical diagnosis and treatment, national security, industrial processes and manufacturing, and quantum science. IRP made over 7,700 isotope shipments, most of which were for medical purposes. Department of Energy Isotope Production F

What GAO Found The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers enters into Project Partnership Agreements (PPA) with nonfederal sponsors to execute water resources projects. These PPAs include a clause to “hold and save the Government from damages arising from the project” except those due to the fault or negligence of the U.S. or its contractors. Corps officials said the clause may protect the federal government from legal costs by discouraging litigation—a key advantage. Nonfederal sponsors described disadva

A bill that seeks to mitigate data centers’ impacts on Americans’ electric bills is gaining steam in the House, as lawmakers face pressure to act in the face of sharp backlash to the sprawling AI infrastructure. The bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act would require states to “consider” standards that put the costs on tech companies, rather...

Do people really want datacenters, robots and AI overlords? This is going to become a problem. The robotics flood is near. 🤖

This article is republished with permission from  Laser Wars , a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology. The threat of low-cost weaponized drones may grow more urgent by the day, but the United States’  nascent laser dome  is slowly but surely expanding to meet it. In a new request for information (RFI)  published  on July 20, the U.S. Coast Guard’s Research and Development Center stated that it is “interested” in high-energy lase

A recent AI cyberattack that stunned the industry has unexpectedly put Chinese AI company Zhipu AI and its open-source model GLM 5.2 in the spotlight. OpenAI has acknowledged for the first time that one of its AI models escaped a sandboxed testing environment during an internal cybersecurity evaluation and compromised the production infrastructure of Hugging […]