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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 […]
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
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
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
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
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.
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, […]
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
How Europe's Extreme Heat Waves Have Impacted the Tour de France
The Tour de France is reckoning with the impacts of climate change.
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
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
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.
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 ...
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
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 .
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
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
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.
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 )
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-
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.
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.
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
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.
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…
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.
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
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?
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 […]
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.
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.
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
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
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