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Environment

Data-center energy, water use, carbon cost of training and the environmental ethics of AI — tracked daily.

CATL to deploy first large-scale sodium-ion energy storage project in Central and Eastern Europe

CATL has signed a 2 GWh agreement with Solarpro, a leading renewable energy company in Central and Eastern Europe, to deploy its Tener Sodium energy storage system. The two companies plan to jointly develop the first large-scale sodium-ion battery energy storage project in the region later this year. The project will use CATL’s Tener Sodium […]
TechNode (CN) 8d ago News Environment

Enabling Multilingual Privacy Policy Audits: Large-Scale Analysis of Spanish Mobile Apps

arXiv:2607.18424v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated analyses of privacy policies enable large-scale assessments of transparency in digital ecosystems, yet existing auditing pipelines remain predominantly English-centric. This limits their ability to systematically evaluate multilingual environments, as in the European Union, where many services disclose privacy practices only in local languages. This paper examines whether large language models (LLMs) can extend privacy policy analysis bey
arXiv cs.CY 9d ago Research RegulationPrivacy

Reinforcement Learning for Delivery Drone-Based Participatory Sensing in Dynamic Environments

arXiv:2607.18874v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for urban sensing has emerged as a powerful paradigm to monitor the status of the city, e.g., air quality and noise levels, through agile aerial crowdsourcing. Despite this potential, existing UAV-based sensing approaches overlook environmental disturbances like wind that drastically impact drone velocity and energy efficiency. Consequently, directly applying existing methods to this joint delivery and sensing
arXiv cs.CY 9d ago Research Environment

The Cognitive Kardashev Scale: Quantifying the Material Envelope of Civilisational Computation

arXiv:2605.22840v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How much thinking can a civilisation do? Kardashev ranked civilisations by the energy they command. This paper borrows his ladder and asks how much machine cognition each rung could support. The arithmetic is deliberately simple. A civilisation has some total power. Only a fraction of that can be spared for computing, and each joule spent buys computation at whatever efficiency the hardware of the day has reached. The product of the three
arXiv cs.CY 9d ago Research Environment

Climate-control ChatGPT for EFL writing and AI literacy

ChatGPT is increasingly used in EFL writing, yet applied linguistics lacks robust methods for measuring whether human-AI dialogue improves learners’ AI literacy, harm-sensitive reasoning, and independent argumentative writing. This mixed-methods quasi-experimental study examines whether climate-control ChatGPT, a prompted interactional design that requires learners to justify, qualify, counterexample, and re-author their own claims, produces stronger gains than standard ChatGPT use and no-ChatGP
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 9d ago Research Environment

China’s Changing Climate May Be Why Your Garlic Is Moldy

Most of the world’s garlic is grown in China. But this year, unusual weather conditions this past fall, winter, and spring challenged the country’s farmers.
Sixth Tone (CN) 9d ago News Environment

OpenAI says it accidentally hacked Hugging Face with a new AI system

OpenAI says its AI models mistakenly breached open-source AI platform Hugging Face during internal testing. In a blog post on Tuesday, OpenAI writes that GPT-5.6 Sol and "an even more capable pre-release model" discovered vulnerabilities within their sandboxed testing environment, allowing them to gain access to the internet and target Hugging Face. On July 16th, […]
The Verge 9d ago News Environment

OpenAI Confirms Its AI Broke Out of a Sandbox and Breached Hugging Face

OpenAI said on Tuesday that two of its AI models, including the flagship Sol, broke out of a secure test environment, gained internet access by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in third-party software, and hacked into Hugging Face’s production infrastructure. The company called the incident “unprecedented” and said it was sharing preliminary findings to help defenders […] This story continues at The Next Web
The Next Web AI 9d ago News Environment

Intel confirms more layoffs in its data center unit as stock rallies on turnaround momentum

Intel confirmed on Tuesday that it will cut an unspecified number of jobs in its data center group, the division responsible for Xeon server processors and AI-related hardware, as part of a broader restructuring under CEO Lip-Bu Tan. Shares rose as much as 8 percent in early trading, extending a rally that has seen the […] This story continues at The Next Web
The Next Web AI 9d ago News Jobs & economyEnvironment

Trace: A Taxonomy-Guided Environment for Multidomain Visual Reasoning

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved language-model reasoning, yet its extension to vision-language models remains constrained by the lack of training data that are simultaneously broad, exactly verifiable, and reproducible. We introduce Trace, a taxonomy-guided environment for multidomain visual reasoning. Trace factorizes task construction into a scene grammar and an executable task program, separating visual realization from answer computation. A sh
HuggingFace Daily Papers 9d ago Research Environment

Progress Reward Modeling for Robotic Learning: A Comprehensive Survey

Robotic learning takes place in dynamic environments with large behavior spaces. A terminal success signal only tells the robot whether the task is completed. It does not explain whether the current behavior is making progress, remaining unchanged, or undoing earlier progress. For this reason, recent studies have increasingly explored progress rewards that provide feedback during task execution. However, the current literature lacks a shared framework. Existing methods use different observations
HuggingFace Daily Papers 9d ago Research Agents & autonomyEnvironment

OpenAI says its AI models secretly broke out of a secure test environment and hacked into AI company Hugging Face in order to cheat on an evaluation

The first-of-its-kind incident involved OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and another unreleased model
Fortune AI 9d ago News Environment

Pennsylvania Lawmakers Skip Over Data Center Moratorium Proposals and Tax Breaks

State lawmakers passed a bill requiring data centers to disclose energy and water usage
Broadband Breakfast 9d ago News RegulationEnvironment

How Ukraine Put Russia on the Backfoot

Ukraine’s expanding use of drones at all ranges has changed the war’s momentum. This episode examines how Kyiv is reaching deeper into Russian territory, disrupting operations and logistics as well as energy infrastructure. How is Russia adapting (or not)? Can these strikes produce lasting advantages on the battlefield? Will this force Russia to escalate? Mike Kofman and Dara Massicot join Ryan to discuss.This episode is brought to you by Booz Allen. Learn more at warontherocks.com/boozallen.Ima
War on the Rocks 9d ago News Environment

How Europe's Extreme Heat Waves Have Impacted the Tour de France

The Tour de France is reckoning with the impacts of climate change.
Time Tech 9d ago News Environment

CodeRescue: Budget-Calibrated Recovery Routing for Coding Agents

Coding agents increasingly operate in executable environments where a failed attempt produces actionable feedback rather than merely an incorrect answer. Existing cost-aware systems typically treat such failures as cascade decisions: try a cheap model first, then escalate hard cases to a stronger and more expensive model. In coding, however, execution feedback can also make further cheap-model recovery worthwhile, raising a budgeted deployment question: when should an agent spend more cheap comp
arXiv cs.AI 9d ago Research Agents & autonomyEnvironment

From Distances to Trajectories: Real-Time Signed Distance Function Mapping and Distance-Accelerated Motion Planning for UAVs

Autonomous flight in cluttered environments requires a robot to build a geometric map of its surroundings and plan safe, dynamically feasible trajectories, all onboard and in real time. Conventional approaches treat mapping and planning as separate stages and often rely on binary occupancy for collision checking. We argue that these two stages should be co-designed around a single representation: a signed distance function (SDF). By encoding distance to the nearest obstacle, an SDF provides rich
arXiv cs.AI 9d ago Research Agents & autonomyEnvironment

America's Summer Camps Are Facing a New Climate Reality. Here's How They're Adapting

From extreme heat and wildfires to intense flooding, America's summer camps are facing a new reality.
Time Tech 9d ago News Environment

IMF Executive Board Concludes 2026 Article IV Consultation with France

The French economy has remained resilient but faces a more challenging environment as headwinds from the Middle East war have started to weigh on activity and higher energy prices have pushed up ...
IMF 9d ago Policy Jobs & economyEnvironment

GUIDED Network-Agnostic Feature Initialization for Spatial Transferability in GNN-based Models

The Traffic Assignment Problem is a fundamental but computationally expensive component of transportation planning. While Graph Neural Networks have emerged as fast, data-driven surrogates, their practical deployment is severely constrained by a spatial generalization gap. Standard models rely on transductive feature initializations that tie travel demand to fixed network topologies, preventing seamless transfer to new urban environments. To overcome this structural limitation, this research pro
arXiv cs.AI 9d ago Research Environment

The Legal Tech-To-English Dictionary (2.0): Working With AI In A Professional Environment

[Sponsored] In this series of definitions, we’ll explore what it looks like for AI to run unchecked in a business and how managers can establish control. The post The Legal Tech-To-English Dictionary (2.0): Working With AI In A Professional Environment appeared first on Above the Law .
Above the Law (legal tech) 9d ago News RegulationEnvironment

Do LLMs Ask the Right Questions? Evaluating GPT-Generated Surveys as Instruments for Measuring Social Attitudes

Understanding human beliefs and social attitudes often relies on carefully designed survey instruments. Recent work has suggested that large language models (LLMs) could automate parts of this process by generating surveys at scale, raising questions about the comparability of such instruments to literature-grounded, human-designed surveys. We present a controlled empirical comparison between GPT-generated surveys and established survey baselines across three social domains: climate change, immi
arXiv 9d ago Research Environment

Free energy landscape of Dense Associative Memory

Using large deviations theory, we solve and obtain a general expression for the free energy functional for a broad class of associative memories, including dense associative memories. We illustrate the method by reproducing classical results for the Hopfield model. For a finite number of patterns, we derive the temperature-dependent free energy functional for dense associative memories featuring polynomial interactions and Log-Sum-Exponential (LSE) activation. We also evaluate the disorder-avera
arXiv cs.AI 9d ago Research Environment

Nvidia details its next-generation Vera CPU for AI, setting up challenge to AMD and Intel

Nvidia released new information about its data center CPU, called Vera, that prospective customers need to fully evaluate the chip.
CNBC Technology 9d ago News Environment

B�rgerenergie: Warum Energy Sharing in �sterreich funktioniert

In �sterreich teilt man Energie lokal, auf Bundesebene, zwischen Nachbarn oder via Onlineplattform. Das hat nicht nur technische Gr�nde. Von Mario Petzold ( Strom , Solarenergie )
Golem (DE) 9d ago News Environment

Comparative Study of Multi-Agent Actor-Critic Algorithms in Parameterized Action Reinforcement Learning

Parameterized action reinforcement learning has shown strong performance in environments requiring both discrete action selection and continuous parameterization. Prior work established the effectiveness of single-agent actor-critic algorithms - Greedy Actor-Critic (GAC), Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), and Truncated Quantile Critics (TQC) - on benchmark parameterized action tasks, but their extension to multi-agent settings remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a comparative study of shared-
arXiv cs.AI 9d ago Research Agents & autonomyEnvironment

Florida GOP Lawmaker and Governor Candidate Says Data Center Bill Keeps Utility Costs Down

GOP candidate for governor aims to improve efficiency and relocate centers from populated areas.
Broadband Breakfast 9d ago News RegulationEnvironment

Does dark energy really exist? Our work identifies cracks in the foundations of today’s cosmological model

The expansion of the universe may not in fact be accelerating, calling dark energy into question.
The Conversation UK Technology 9d ago News Environment

This Texas startup wants to reinvent desalination with a spinning membrane

Growing up in Las Vegas, Hunter Manz took annual trips to nearby Lake Mead with his father. Each year, he watched the reservoir, Southern Nevada’s primary water source, recede further, sparking an early interest in water conservation. As a teenager, Manz began experimenting in his garage with potential solutions to water scarcity. He later enrolled at Utah Tech University, studying mechanical engineering and finance, and learned about desalination, which removes salt and other contaminants from
Fast Company Tech 9d ago News Environment

STAT+: Nabla’s new CEO on plan to gain market share in a competitive AI scribe environment

Ambient scribe developer Nabla said Brian Manning will be the Paris-based company's new CEO as it looks to grow in a highly competitive market.
STAT News (health AI, headlines) 9d ago News Environment

Advancing next-gen AI with materials science innovation

The conversation about AI often centers on algorithms, computing power, or huge investments in new semiconductor fabrication plants and hyperscale data centers. But beneath each of these advances is another layer of innovation that makes them possible: advanced materials. Every new generation of AI technology demands more processing power, more memory, greater energy efficiency, and…
MIT Technology Review 9d ago News EnvironmentFinance, VC & PE

The Open Source AI China Problem Just got Worse

Model supremacy in a token-efficient macro environment plagued by HBM, energy and datacenter compute bottlenecks. The 2026 story of AI is getting geopolitical.
AI Supremacy 9d ago Field notes Environment

NSMA: Neuro-Symbolic Manifold Alignment for Generalizable Adaptive Bitrate Streaming under Texture Shift

For decades, ABR has kept two kinds of intelligence apart. Neural policies learn rich behaviors yet forget them the moment the environment changes; rules never learn, and never forget. Every prior attempt to combine them has kept this separation, letting rules supervise, constrain, or override the network from outside. We dissolve the boundary itself. But no union can be trusted before it can be tested, and ABR has never known how to measure what its policies learn or forget. The field's yardsti
arXiv cs.LG 9d ago Research Safety & alignmentEnvironment

Fedora Xfce or Xubuntu: Which is the best Linux desktop?

Xfce is a Linux desktop environment that is great at giving old machines new life. Two major distributions present this desktop differently. So, which is best?
ZDNet AI 9d ago News Environment

Z.ai completes construction of a 1GW-class AI data center using Chinese chips

Z.ai, the developer of the GLM family of AI models, has completed construction of a 1GW-class AI data center using only Chinese-made AI chips, with part of the facility already operating. The site is intended to support training and development of the company’s frontier models. Z.ai also operates several computing clusters containing more than 10,000 […]
TechNode (CN) 9d ago News Environment

Why the modern cloud journey is about moving from legacy to lineage

CloudZA works with companies to understand their legacy systems and schemas and then come up with smart ways to modernise these environments.
ITWeb (ZA) 9d ago News Environment

Data modernisation fails when nobody understands the data

Before an organisation can improve its data environment, it needs an accurate view of the environment it already has, says Juan Joubert, product manager at Blue Turtle.
ITWeb (ZA) 9d ago News Environment

Not enough water for UK’s datacentre plans, trade body says

Industry says government’s failure to address cooling demands means AI growth plans are ‘fatally flawed’ The UK will not have enough water for future datacentres, the water industry has said in stark criticism of the government’s AI growth plans. Datacentres rely on large amounts of water to manage the heat generated by densely packed servers. Cooling towers, chillers and humidification systems make direct use of this water, with large volumes also consumed indirectly through high electrical pow
The Guardian 10d ago News Environment

A Control-Driven Framework for Secure SaaS Onboarding in Regulated Enterprises

arXiv:2607.16543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As enterprises increasingly adopt Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms for mission-critical functions, onboarding these services has emerged as a complex challenge extending well beyond procurement and basic security review. In regulated environments, SaaS onboarding must address multiple interdependent control domains, including Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM), cybersecurity assessment, Identity and Access Management (IAM), and disaster rec
arXiv cs.CY 10d ago Research RegulationEnvironment

Large Language Models in Architecture Studio: A Framework for Learning Outcomes

arXiv:2510.15936v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study explores the role of large language models (LLMs) in the context of the architectural design studio, understood as the pedagogical core of architectural education. Traditionally, the studio has functioned as an experiential learning space where students tackle design problems through reflective practice, peer critique, and faculty guidance. However, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in this environment has been largely f
arXiv cs.CY 10d ago Research Children & educationEnvironment
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