This summer, record-breaking heat waves in Europe led to extreme stress on the power system, with high evening electricity prices due to air-conditioning demand, insufficient battery storage and outages at thermal and nuclear power plants. Events such as these highlight the challenge of maintaining a reliable power supply during extreme weather.

AI is showing up in nearly every aspect of daily life—from internet searches to visits to the doctor's office. It could one day even play a role in the street layout in front of your apartment building.

A research team has developed a highly durable platinum-nickel (PtNi) hydrogen evolution catalyst that suppresses nickel (Ni) leaching through atomic ordering. Nickel leaching is a major cause of performance degradation in catalysts used for anion exchange membrane water electrolysis (AEMWE). The findings are published in the journal Carbon Energy.

The common belief throughout the marketing and advertising world is that generative AI can produce striking visuals, but it struggles to match the performance and brand discipline of skilled human designers. New research published in the journal Marketing Science challenges that assumption, finding that a carefully designed AI system can outperform visuals created by humans, and it can outperform designs created by another AI model that was optimized solely on the basis of aesthetics.

A new formulation of CO2 foams could help address one of the energy industry's main challenges, specifically regarding the injection of CO2 underground: controlling CO2 mobility in reservoir porous media. This advancement has the potential to improve reservoir sweep, enhance oil recovery and increase geological CO2 retention.

Researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) and Honeywell Aerospace have developed a new way to reduce the transfer of radiant heat between closely spaced bodies by using thin, nonmetallic coatings.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way many people approached their work across the globe. For Carnegie Mellon University Africa's Jema Ndibwile, it changed the way he viewed a completely different type of virus: a computer virus.

Cyborg insects combine the mobility of living organisms with miniature electronic devices, offering potential applications in search-and-rescue operations, infrastructure inspection and exploration of environments that are difficult for conventional robots.

What happens when companies on digital labor platforms no longer decide for themselves how much to pay their workers, but leave this to learning algorithms? Researchers at TU Darmstadt, Bielefeld University and the Université Côte d'Azur have demonstrated in computer simulations that, where only a few firms compete with one another, such artificial intelligence (AI) systems can "learn" to set wages at a very low level without communicating with one another or having been programmed to collude.

Waymo has sharply increased its lobbying spending as it seeks to persuade US regulators to clear a path for fully autonomous taxi services, intensifying its battle with rival Uber over the future of robotaxis.

The Alphabet-owned company spent more than $1 million between April and June on lobbying the federal government, more than double its outlay a year earlier, according to filings. That put Waymo’s spending close to Uber’s and well ahead of rivals including Amazon’s Zoox and Tesla.

The rise in lobbying comes as Waymo and Uber push competing visions for the future of ride-hailing. Waymo wants a faster route to fully driverless commercial services, while Uber is advocating a staggered rollout in which robotaxis operate alongside human drivers.

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© Alex Kent, Bloomberg

Chatbots and large language models can execute a seemingly countless number of tasks, from writing emails and reports to generating code and analyzing data. However, they still primarily act only in response to user prompts and rely on their own predictive models to generate text.

As extreme weather intensifies, Reese Greenlee is testing the limits of 3D-printed concrete to create stronger, more accessible storm shelters for vulnerable communities.

In a new paper, researchers explain how EU battery regulations can help lay the groundwork for a widely shared evidentiary system for global sustainability governance.

Feeling too warm or too cold indoors may depend on more than the thermostat. The spectrum of indoor lighting plays a role in how people perceive temperature, according to research led by scientists at Penn State.

An electronic skin with a sensing system that can detect pressure and temperature could someday help amputees gain feeling in their prosthetics. The work, led by Washington State University researchers and published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, can sense at a scale 10 times finer than current commercial glove sensors.

McGill University researchers have developed a more energy-efficient method of building AI systems that are better at measuring—and indicating—their own uncertainty. This will help users determine when human oversight is needed, when additional data should be collected and when a model is being asked to work beyond the conditions it was trained for, the researchers said.

College administrators read an adjunct professor's comments to students on personal essays. Managers told a pharmacist to spend less time with patients after tracking the number and length of her appointments. Scanners on a warehouse conveyor belt monitored the pace of workers to ensure they inspected hundreds of items per hour.

With airlines and consumers increasingly concerned about carbon, nitrogen and hydrocarbon emissions, biofuels have emerged as a green alternative. Among these, those made from coconut oil are particularly attractive because they have fatty acid chain lengths similar to the hydrocarbon chain lengths required for jet fuel, suggesting they could make effective fuels with minimal processing.