Interview: What the people of China’s coal-rich Shanxi think about climate change
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Shanxi province in northern China is the country’s largest coal producer, leaving its coal-reliant economy and workers particularly exposed to the nation’s pledge to transition away from fossil fuels. A new survey of Shanxi residents, exploring attitudes to climate change and the “just transition”, offers a rare insight into the views of Chinese people on […]
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AI Is Giving Pets a Voice: The Future of Feline Healthcare Begins with a Single Photo
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Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the way we care for animals. Once limited to reactive treatments at vet clinics, animal healthcare is evolving into a proactive, data-driven field where AI can detect pain, monitor emotional states, and even forecast disease risk—all before symptoms become visible to the human eye. From wearable sensors to smartphone-based visual diagnostics, […]
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Scite AI Review: Instantly Spot Trustworthy Studies
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What if you could instantly tell whether a study was trustworthy without reading hundreds of pages? Academic research can be a real struggle: wading through endless PDFs, trying to make sense of conflicting studies, and wondering if a citation means support or just a casual mention. Scite AI is not just another AI tool. It […]
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Analysis: Clean energy just put China’s CO2 emissions into reverse for first time
For the first time, the growth in China’s clean power generation has caused the nation’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to fall despite rapid power demand growth. The new analysis for Carbon Brief shows that China’s emissions were down 1.6% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2025 and by 1% in the latest 12 months. Electricity […]
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Vasu Murthy, SVP and Chief Product Officer at Cohesity – Interview Series
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Vasu Murthy is the SVP and Chief Product Officer at Cohesity, bringing over 25 years of enterprise software experience across data security, protection, and analytics. Prior to joining Cohesity, he held leadership roles at Rubrik, Oracle, and DataScaler, contributing to product growth and large-scale innovation. Cohesity is the leader in AI-powered data security. Over 13,600 enterprise […]
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Rising emissions from farm equipment could ‘hinder’ China’s net-zero goals
Rapidly rising emissions from China’s agricultural machinery could “hinder” the country’s push to net-zero, according to new research. The study, published in Nature Food, finds that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from agricultural machinery have increased approximately seven-fold in the country since 1985. Using government statistics on the quantity of farm equipment over time, researchers calculate […]
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Locking Up Phones, Logging Into AI: Classrooms Navigate New Tech Amid Public Debate
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School policies around phone use are changing—and fast. In Ontario, Canada students are already being asked to keep their phones out of sight during class. Several European countries have taken steps in that direction, and now discussion is building in the U.S. as well. Lawmakers are pushing similar restrictions, with two senators introducing a bill […]
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How Real-Time Volumetrics Are Rewriting Film Narratives
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There was a time when volumetric effects were concealed from everyone on a film stage except the VFX supervisors huddled around grainy, low-resolution preview monitors. You could shoot a complex scene with enveloping fog swirled through ancient forests, crackling embers danced in haunted corridors, and ethereal magic wove around a sorcerer’s staff. Yet no one […]
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Getting Language Models to Open Up on ‘Risky’ Subjects
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Many top language models now err on the side of caution, refusing harmless prompts that merely sound risky – an ‘over-refusal’ behavior that affects their usefulness in real-world scenarios. A new dataset called ‘FalseReject’ targets the problem directly, offering a way to retrain models to respond more intelligently to sensitive topics, without compromising safety. […]
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Knowledge is power: The scope and limits of air quality monitoring today
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Envirotec asked Aecom UK managing director Derrick Jepson for an overview of the UK air quality monitoring landscape today, and some of the challenges and opportunities it presents Envirotec: How do gas analysers contribute to understanding pollution levels in the UK? Derrick Jepson: Gas analysers are essential tools for quantifying the concentration of various pollutants […]
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Zonal electricity pricing unlikely to be introduced before 2030
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Energy consultancy Cornwall Insight has cautioned that any move to introduce zonal electricity pricing across the UK is unlikely to be achievable before the end of the decade, even under the most ambitious timelines, and it could well be the mid-2030s before it is fully implemented. With the Government expected to make a major decision […]
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Enzyme discovery could revolutionize biofuel production
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A research group in Brazil has identified an enzyme which introduces radical possibilities when it comes to the process of deconstructing cellulose, potentially allowing, among other things, the large-scale production of so-called second-generation ethanol, derived from agro-industrial waste such as sugarcane bagasse and corn straw. The study has been published in the journal Nature. Cellulose, the planet’s […]
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Guest post: More than 70% of adaptation plans for European cities are ‘inconsistent’
More than 70% of European cities are not adapting to climate change in a consistent and coherent way. That is the headline finding of our new study, published in Nature Climate Change, on how European cities are – or are not – preparing for a warming world. We find that nearly half of the 327 […]
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Optimising biogas yields with AI: Partnership claims a UK first
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A new partnership showcases what’s said to be a UK-first with the use of real-time AI analytics to increase biogas yields Bio Capital, a large UK producer of green energy using food waste, has partnered with advanced AI company Entopy to implement AI data analytics across the business. By leveraging advanced predictive models, AI technology […]
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Study shows vision-language models can’t handle queries with negation words
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Imagine a radiologist examining a chest X-ray from a new patient. She notices the patient has swelling in the tissue but does not have an enlarged heart. Looking to speed up diagnosis, she might use a vision-language machine-learning model to search for reports from similar patients. But if the model mistakenly identifies reports with both […]
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IRA Programs at Risk under the Budget Reconciliation Bill
The reconciliation process for the fiscal year 2025 federal budget is underway and, unsurprisingly, various provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) are at risk. On May 11, 2025, the House Committee on Energy & Commerce introduced proposed text for the reconciliation bill, which will be considered at the budget reconciliation markup on […]
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MIT Department of Economics to launch James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work
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Starting in July, MIT’s Shaping the Future of Work Initiative in the Department of Economics will usher in a significant new era of research, policy, and education of the next generation of scholars, made possible by a gift from the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation. In recognition of the gift and the expansion […]
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Evolving from Bots to Brainpower: The Ascendancy of Agentic AI
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What truly separates us from machines? Free will, creativity and intelligence? But think about it. Our brains aren’t singular, monolithic processors. The magic isn’t in one “thinking part,” but rather in countless specialized agents—neurons—that synchronize perfectly. Some neurons catalog facts, others process logic or govern emotion, still more retrieve memories, orchestrate movement, or interpret visual […]