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Repurposed aircraft engines are powering AI data centers amid delays for grid hookups. They're an efficient and innovative solution to bridging the power gap.

Millions of students arriving at campuses are now using artificial intelligence. Worries abound.

Artificial neurons that mimic the brain's efficiency are here, using 1/10th the voltage and 1/100th the power of others.

These neurons can, for the first time, process information from living cells without an intermediary device amplifying or modulating the signals, the researchers say.

While some artificial neurons already exist, they require electronic amplification to sense the signals our bodies produce, explains Jun Yao, who works on bioelectronics and nanoelectronics at UMass Amherst. The amplification inflates both power usage and circuit complexity, and so counters efficiencies found in the brain.

The neuron created by Yao’s team can understand the body’s signals at their natural amplitude of around 0.1 volts. This is “highly novel,” says Bozhi Tian, a biophysicist who studies living bioelectronics at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the work. This work “bridges the long-standing gap between electronic and biological signaling” and demonstrates interaction between artificial neurons and living cells that Tian calls “unprecedented.”

Unless global heating is reduced to 1.2C ‘as fast as possible’, warm water coral reefs will not remain ‘at any meaningful scale’, a report by 160 scientists from 23 countries warns

Tech companies’ use of Pfas gas at facilities may mean datacenters’ climate impact is worse than previously thought

Two kinds of cooling systems are used to prevent the semiconductors and other electronic equipment stored in datacenters from overheating. Water cooling systems require huge volumes of water, and chemicals like nitrates, disinfectants, azoles and other compounds are potentially added and discharged in the environment.

Many centers are now switching to a “two phase” system that uses f-gas as a refrigerant coolant that is run through copper tubing. In this scenario, f-gas is not intentionally released during use, though there may be leaks, and it must be disposed of at the end of its life.

The datacenter industry has claimed that f-gas that escapes is not a threat because, once in the air, it turns into a compound called Tfa. Tfa is considered a Pfas in most of the world, but not the US. Recent research has found it is more toxic than previously thought, and may impact reproductive systems similar to other Pfas.

Researchers in recent years have been alarmed by the ever-growing level of Tfa in the air, water, human blood and elsewhere in the environment. Meanwhile, some f-gases are potent greenhouse gases that can remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years. But f-gasses are lucrative for industry: about 60% of all Pfas manufactured from 2019 to 2022 were f-gas

All generative AI queries could hit 329 billion per day by 2030. See the big picture on AI's energy use, and how it's reshaping our world.

New reconstructions of 540 million years of climate history show the planet tumbling between icehouse and hothouse states, revealing how rare and vulnerable our temperate moment is.

After many decades of often thankless effort — desert fieldwork in rusting 4×4s and sediment coring on the heaving seas; endless grant writing and rejection letters; hours spent cataloging specimens and writing monographs now yellowing in forgotten university file cabinets; ages in the lab fussing over gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers; and, more recently, Red Bull–powered late nights coding in R or coaxing deep convolutional neural networks and advanced climate models — we can now see our planet’s climate history with more clarity and insight than ever before.

What it adds up to is the biography of Earth in the age of animal life.

New type of detector enables deeper understanding of the universe

The underground “Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)” near Jiangmen city in the Guangdong Province, which was prepared with the participation of researchers from the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), has successfully completed the filling of its 20,000 tons of liquid scintillator and begun data taking. After more than a decade of preparation and construction, JUNO is the first of a new generation of very large neutrino experiments to reach this stage. Initial trial operation and data taking show that key performance indicators met or exceeded design expectations, enabling JUNO to tackle one of this decade’s major open questions in particle physics: the ordering of neutrino masses—whether the third mass state (ν₃) is heavier than the second (ν₂).

Scientists used AI to write coherent viral genomes, using them to synthesize bacteriophages capable of killing resistant strains of bacteria.

http://archive.today/Sy0LV

There are ethical concerns of AIs being used to design viruses that can harm humans. But Kerstin Göpfrich, a biophysicist and synthetic biologist at Heidelberg University in Germany, says that this problem — known as the dual-use dilemma — is not unique to AI, but is always a concern in biology. “I think in research in general you always have a dual-use dilemma. There’s nothing specific about AI, and you can always use progress for the better or for the worse,” she says. The authors addressed biosafety concerns in the manuscript. They say that they excluded viruses that affect eukaryotes, including humans, from the Evo models’ training data. The ΦX174 phage and E. coli host systems they studied were also non-pathogenic and have ”a long history of safe use in molecular-biology research”, the researchers write in the study.

Government agencies are contracting with Palantir to correlate disparate pieces of data, promising efficiency but raising civil liberties concerns.

Pilots’ union says the issue has become a ‘worrying reality’ as a result of staff shortages and operation pressure

Is AI's hype cycle leading us into a trough of disillusionment? Dive into the reality behind GPT-5's launch and its impact on the tech world.

A recent MIT report on AI in business found that 95 percent of all generative-AI deployments in business settings generated “zero return.”