Environment

The Credit Assignment Problem (CAP) is fundamental to developing efficient and explainable Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. Existing frameworks, whether relying on temporal contiguity or hindsight-conditioned reward reweighting, frequently fail to attribute properly between an agent's policy (skill) and environmental stochasticity (luck). A principled approach to CAP must isolate the true causal drivers of observed outcomes from spurious correlations and environmental randomness. We introduce

This course examines refugees, migrants, stateless people, and internally displaced persons in contemporary crisis settings. It explores how conflict, political violence, disasters, climate stress, ...

The water lock feature on Apple Watches automatically activates when you're swimming, but what does it do?

Platform engineering has won the argument. Some 90% of organizations have adopted at least one internal platform; golden paths are The post Platform engineering’s new job: serving environments at agent speed appeared first on The New Stack .

Kevin O’Leary is making the golf course argument again. The “Shark Tank” investor, whose 40,000-acre Stratos data centre project in Utah sparked protests and a governor’s executive order, told Business Insider that AI data centres consume far less water than America’s golf courses. The comparison is technically correct today. The Golf Course Superintendents Association of […] This story continues at The Next Web

From heat waves to wildfires, climate impacts are happening all at once.

It would open up a completely new business for the Facebook and Instagram maker.

Training API-calling large language model (LLM) agents demands massive amounts of high-quality trajectories. However, collecting such data at scale typically requires fully implemented environments with executable APIs and realistic, pre-populated backend databases, creating a major bottleneck for scalability. To overcome this, we propose an environment-free synthetic data generation approach that leverages LLMs as on-the-fly digital world models. Given only API specifications, our method genera

The talks come weeks after Anthropic announced a similar deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX to use the computing capacity at its Colossus 1 data center

Oliver Morton, our planetary affairs editor, reflects on a warming Earth

Before the saboteur in chief covers it with water. The post Litigants Ask To Check Reflecting Pool For ‘Sabotage’ appeared first on Above the Law .

Transformer Weekly: NY data center moratorium, NDAA export controls and Amodei’s $1m to safety super PAC

Europe's latest updates to its climate policy aren't great news for the planet.

Despite strong capabilities in data understanding and decision-making, autonomous data science agents still heavily rely on trial-and-error workflows that involve expensive computation. This bottleneck motivates models that can anticipate the effects of data science operations before real execution. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Data Science World Model, which model the data science execution environment by predicting environment state transitions conditioned on current workflow sta

Geospatial datasets support applications from urban planning to climate modeling, yet consistent assessment of FAIR compliance is difficult. Existing evaluators use different rubrics and evidence sources and may fail on JavaScript-rendered pages or repository-specific identifiers. For 50 datasets from 10 repositories, the standard deviation of normalized scores across available tools averages 15.0 percentage points and reaches 30.3 for one dataset. Because these outputs are not equivalent measur

Access to potable water is crucial for health, economic development, and sustainability. However, accurately classifying water quality remains a significant challenge due to the complexity and variability of water source data. This paper addresses the challenge of predicting water potability through machine learning and deep learning algorithms. It introduces a novel feature augmentation algorithm, AquaAugmentor, to enhance the predictive performance of these models for low-dimensional datasets.

Before the twentieth century gave armies antibiotics, the leading killer of American soldiers in wartime was neither enemy fire nor shrapnel. Two-thirds of the roughly 620,000 deaths in the U.S. Civil War came from diseases like typhoid and dysentery. Spread through contaminated water and crowded camps, they were eventually controlled through inoculation and field sanitation rather than the antibiotics that would not arrive until the following generation. Later in World War I, American forces lo

Two organizations targeted by O’Leary say his comments caused “significant economic losses, severe emotional distress, and ongoing threats to their physical safety.”

Publication date: Available online 15 July 2026 Source: Computers in Human Behavior Author(s): Heejoo Lim, Hyeonjeong Kim

arXiv:2607.14888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finetuning language models on small, curated datasets is standard practice for adapting them to specific policies or domains. We show that finetuning on narrow, factually-defensible, moderation-passing data can cause broad ideological shifts across unrelated domains, while preserving general capabilities. Training GPT-4.1 on right- or left-leaning economics Q&A yields matched ideological shifts on topics such as criminal justice, the environment,

Suggestion for hyperscalers feeling pressure over data center water use: Buy up a few exclusive country clubs, convert the golf courses into public parks, pay for guides and binoculars to get the previous members into birdwatching - help them embrace a more sustainable hobby! Google used 10.9 billion gallons in 2025 , so about 30 million gallons per day. The Coachella Valley has 120 golf courses each using ~800 acre-feet per year , which is ~750,000 gallons per day. So Google buying up 40 of tho

Data center-related policy proposals, protests and litigation are underway across the country citing Colossus and Memphis as a cautionary tale.

The U.S. Department of Energy ("DOE") is adopting the interim final rule published on August 25, 2025, as final, without change. This final rule establishes the procedures for developing and carrying out voluntary agreements and plans of action under the Defense Production Act. The Defense Production Act provides a defense from antitrust laws with respect to any action taken to develop or carry out any voluntary agreement or plan of action when certain criteria are met.

IntroductionGlobally, 1.3 billion tons of food is lost or wasted each year, negatively impacting food security, the economy, and the climate. Fresh fruits and vegetables (FFVs), with their short shelf life and temperature sensitivity, are the most affected. This study systematically evaluates the integration of Machine Learning (ML), Adaptive Learning (AL), the Internet of Things (IoT), and Fog computing for temperature-break detection and prediction in FFVs supply chains. It critically evaluate

The president urged New York to reverse its ban, calling data centers ‘liquid gold’ in a July 15 Truth Social post.

Roblox announced Build on Wednesday, a new creation tab inside the Roblox mobile app that lets anyone turn a text prompt into a basic playable game without touching Roblox Studio or writing a line of code. A creator can describe something like a cozy forest adventure game with environmental obstacles, and Build will generate a […] This story continues at The Next Web

The agency is expanding an enterprise data platform to all department elements and increasingly using artificial intelligence in daily operations.

Both companies claim that their proposals did satisfy Navy requirements for the new MUSV marketplace.

From his years in the energy sector to his close working relationship with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, here's what to know about the new Prime Minister.

Despite strong capabilities in data understanding and decision-making, autonomous data science agents still heavily rely on trial-and-error workflows that involve expensive computation. This bottleneck motivates models that can anticipate the effects of data science operations before real execution. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Data Science World Model, which model the data science execution environment by predicting environment state transitions conditioned on current workflow sta

Could we be thinking the wrong way about surging energy demand from data centres in Australia?

Assessing learning in virtual reality (VR) environments typically relied on traditional pre-post content retention tests, revealing little about the process of learnng within such immersive environments. Multimodal data from player activity in VR is promising to better measure learning processes and higher-order skills, but little research in the learning sciences has explored how such data can be combined to provide meaningful measures. To address this, we explored multimodal sources of data fr

It’s complicated—and it might not matter that much.

Scale AI is the latest technology provider to join the DOE’s Genesis Mission Consortium as the agency continues building up its roster of private-sector partners. The post Energy adds more AI startups to Genesis Mission Consortium appeared first on FedScoop .

SpaceX deorbiting satellites isn't a cause for worry, but scientists are still looking into the environmental impacts of frequent satellite deorbits.

On Wednesday, GoDaddy launched its new developer platform, giving developers a way to manage domains without leaving their development environment. The post GoDaddy opened its registrar to AI agents. Then it had to build guardrails. appeared first on The New Stack .

A tokenizer fixed at the start of pre-training allocates vocabulary in proportion to the pre-training corpus, reflecting the deployment priorities at that time. When those priorities shift, languages added later are split into many more tokens per word, which can raise latency, compute, and energy consumption for users of those languages. Cloud models can afford a broad vocabulary because the embedding and LM-head matrices are a small fraction of their parameters. On a compact model those matric

Platforms report what they can see. Teams optimize within the environments they control. Dashboards reflect the signals being fed into them. The problem is that the underlying architecture was never designed to produce a coherent version of truth across every platform, device and touchpoint. Partner insights from AppsFlyer.

The NY-17 Democratic nominee questioned the administration’s planning for Iran and said she would seek a seat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, if elected.

A risky plan to turn night into day is one step closer to reality. Last week, US officials approved a mission to launch a giant mirror into space, where the device will reflect sunlight onto shadowed ...