Conference highlights tools available to help tackle issue of empty homes
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The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) hosted its Tackling Empty Homes Conference in December, supported by Action on Empty Homes. Delegates heard how there are currently around 750,000 empty homes in England, and around 300,000 long-term empty (vacant for over six months). Bringing empty properties back into use can help meet housing needs and […]
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Cleaning up PFAS with PFAS will backfire, warn scientists
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A new paper in Nature Communications raises a red flag about fluorinated sorbents, a class of emerging materials for removing PFAS from water. The authors find that several of these materials can themselves release PFAS or PFAS-like compounds, potentially creating new contamination risks while attempting to solve existing ones. These fluorinated sorbents have been promoted […]
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Campaigners highlight a plastic hole in Scottish circularity plans
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Campaigners from Friends of the Earth Scotland have raised the alarm about the omission of plastic from the Scottish government’s draft Circular Economy Strategy, published in October. The festive season brings a “plastic peak” for households, a situation that looks likely to remain unchanged in Christmas 2026, unless certain key holes in the legislative programme […]
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Analysis: UK renewables enjoy record year in 2025 – but gas power still rises
The UK’s fleet of wind, solar and biomass power plants all set new records in 2025, Carbon Brief analysis shows, but electricity generation from gas still went up. The rise in gas power was due to the end of UK coal generation in late 2024 and nuclear power hitting its lowest level in half a […]
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Train a Model Faster with torch.compile and Gradient Accumulation
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This article is divided into two parts; they are: • Using `torch.
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Training a Model on Multiple GPUs with Data Parallelism
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This article is divided into two parts; they are: • Data Parallelism • Distributed Data Parallelism If you have multiple GPUs, you can combine them to operate as a single GPU with greater memory capacity.
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Tracking Coastlines with RTK GNSS: Why It’s Crucial for Environmental Safety
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A coastline looks like a line on a map until you try to draw it twice. Winds rearrange sand overnight, storms shave dunes like a rough haircut, and rivers quietly rewrite deltas grain by grain. Meanwhile, sea level is climbing — global measurements show both long-term rise and a faster recent pace, with space-based analyses […]
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MIT in the media: 2025 in review
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“At MIT, innovation ranges from awe-inspiring technology to down-to-Earth creativity,” noted Chronicle, during a campus visit this year for an episode of the program. In 2025, MIT researchers made headlines across print publications, podcasts, and video platforms for key scientific advances, from breakthroughs in quantum and artificial intelligence to new efforts aimed at improving pediatric health […]
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Sabin Center Report Surveys the Climate Litigation Landscape in 2025
Last week the Sabin Center published a report that looks back on climate litigation developments in 2025. This third installment in our year-end series provides a snapshot of how the field of climate litigation has evolved over the course of this year. The report also revisits significant rulings from around the world and connects them […]
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DeBriefed 19 December 2025: EU’s petrol car U-turn; Trump to axe ‘leading’ research lab; What climate scientists are reading
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed. An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change. This week EU easing up HITTING THE BREAKS: The EU “walked back” its target to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2035, “permitting some new combustion engine cars”, reported Agence-France Presse. Under the original plan, the […]
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Guided learning lets “untrainable” neural networks realize their potential
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Even networks long considered “untrainable” can learn effectively with a bit of a helping hand. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have shown that a brief period of alignment between neural networks, a method they call guidance, can dramatically improve the performance of architectures previously thought unsuitable for modern tasks. Their […]
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Guest post: How to steer EVs towards the road of ‘mass adoption’
Electric vehicles (EVs) now account for more than one-in-four car sales around the world, but the next phase is likely to depend on government action – not just technological change. That is the conclusion of a new report from the Centre for Net Zero, the Rocky Mountain Institute and the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute. […]
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£490k peatlands restoration to proceed in Falkirk and North Lanarkshire
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SP Energy Networks has committed £490,000 to a major peatland restoration project on Scotland’s Slamannan Plateau. Working with Buglife Scotland, the initiative aims to bring over 114 hectares of rare bog habitat back to life across Falkirk and North Lanarkshire – protecting unique wildlife and helping fight climate change. Peatlands are one of Scotland’s natural […]
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Royal Academy of Engineering awards £39 million funding to 13 high-impact climate innovations
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“The Royal Academy of Engineering’s Green Future Fellowships provide academics, entrepreneurs, innovators and engineers, the space and time to transform their cutting-edge ideas into scalable, commercially viable, technologies to secure a greener, fairer future.” New technologies to store renewable energy, power data centres and computers more efficiently and multiply the power of batteries four-fold are […]
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Marine Recovery Fund aims to boost nature and offshore wind development
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The Government announced its Marine Recovery Fund on Wednesday 17 December, an initiative intended to to safeguard Britain’s marine biodiversity and energy security. By means of the fund, offshore wind developers will be able to pay into a government operated funding pot delivering meaningful environmental compensatory measures to restore and protect marine habitats. “Britain’s seas […]
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A “scientific sandbox” lets researchers explore the evolution of vision systems
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Why did humans evolve the eyes we have today? While scientists can’t go back in time to study the environmental pressures that shaped the evolution of the diverse vision systems that exist in nature, a new computational framework developed by MIT researchers allows them to explore this evolution in artificial intelligence agents. The framework they […]
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IEA: Declining coal demand in China set to outweigh Trump’s pro-coal policies
China’s coal demand is set to drop by 2027, more than cancelling out the effects of the Trump administration’s coal-friendly policies in the US, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Global coal demand is due to grow by 0.5% year-on-year to reach record levels in 2025, according to the latest figures in the IEA’s […]
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Hydrogen emissions are ‘supercharging’ the warming impact of methane
The warming impact of hydrogen has been “overlooked” in projections of climate change, according to authors of the latest “global hydrogen budget”. The study, published in Nature, is the most comprehensive analysis yet of the global hydrogen cycle, showing how the gas moves between the atmosphere, land and ocean. Hydrogen has long been recognised as […]