The AI race is already generating forces that are transforming the global economy. That makes it surprisingly similar to the green transition, given the potential of both to upend traditional industries, labor markets and geopolitical balances. Both call for trillions of dollars in upfront investments in exchange for significant benefits over the medium and long term.

Snap, the parent company of social network Snapchat, on Tuesday launched its Specs augmented reality glasses, a major bet by a struggling company to stake out ground in the post-smartphone era.

Microsoft is changing how it charges for its software for the first time in two decades, moving to bill customers with a pay-as-you-go model each time they use its new AI agent.

It's game over for fans of discontinued video games after the EU admitted defeat Tuesday and said it cannot stop publishers from making them unplayable.

Data centers are among the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand, with some now consuming as much power as entire cities to generate the computing power needed to support the expanding use of artificial intelligence. But unlike factories or hospitals, data center workloads are flexible.

Inside computer chips are billions of tiny transistors made from silicon. But the material is approaching its limits. In an effort to build smaller, more capable devices, researchers are exploring how they might build transistors with other materials alongside silicon, including a class of extremely thin materials called transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD). One of the leading TMD candidates is a material called molybdenum disulfide. It is only three atoms thick: one layer of molybdenum sandwiched between two layers of sulfur.

Solar power towers can play an important role in the energy transition. They convert sunlight into heat that can be stored or used to generate electricity. Until now, however, data to test new methods for more efficient and reliable systems have been lacking. In a world first, researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) are now publishing freely accessible operational data from the Jülich Solar Tower test power plant. This provides a foundation for developing new AI methods and digital twins. The results are published in Nature Energy.

The UK government's decision to introduce restrictions on children's access to social media marks a significant moment in the evolution of online safety policy. For supporters, it represents a long-overdue response to growing concerns about children's well-being. For critics, it raises questions about effectiveness, enforcement and unintended consequences.

A study carried out by researchers at the University of Manchester has found that future climate change will bring a clear shift toward summer cooling requirements, with implications for grid capacity, occupant well-being and energy affordability.

An elephant's trunk is both strong and capable of extremely fine motor movements. With this muscular, boneless structure, an elephant can carry heavy logs—or deftly peel a banana. Lucia Beccai and colleagues studied the skin of the trunk, hoping to understand its properties and derive lessons for the next generation of advanced soft robotics. The authors obtained a trunk from a single adult Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) that died of natural causes at Zurich Zoo, Switzerland, in 2020.

Wrinkles or dents appearing on material surfaces are often regarded as signs of damage or deformation. In a recent collaborative review paper published in Nano-Micro Letters and titled "Harnessing Surface Instabilities for Functional Materials: Mechanics, Morphology, and Emerging Applications," researchers from Lingnan University propose that naturally formed surface textures in materials could in the future be combined with artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted design to develop novel functional materials.

Jensen Huang's company Nvidia makes the computer chips that unleashed a revolution in artificial intelligence. Now he's wagering that an AI buildout can revive U.S. manufacturing, pushing past limits facing science and society.

Japanese technology giant SoftBank Group Corp. is launching a service using OpenAI technology to protect against the looming threat of cyberattacks, both companies said Tuesday.

SpaceX will move forward with its $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Cursor as Elon Musk's space exploration and AI company seeks a competitive edge against rivals Anthropic and OpenAI after its Wall Street debut last week.

Dr. Naser Pourazad, senior lecturer in marketing at Flinders University's College of Business, Creative Arts, Law and Social Sciences, has examined how video game fans express their brand advocacy through online forums—and this reveals distinct consumer engagement patterns that challenge traditional marketing approaches. "This isn't just about games," says Dr. Pourazad. "As brands try to build passionate fan bases, our study shows the traditional marketing playbook is broken."

A research team led by Professor Taesung Kim of the School of Mechanical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) has developed an optoelectronic synaptic device that mimics the functions of human neurons and synapses at the device scale. The researchers designed a van der Waals (vdW) crystal through a single-step sulfurization process using mixed plasma. The device operates under optical stimuli, offering a structural solution for configuring semiconductor materials for brain-inspired computing.

Lithium-ion batteries power everything from phones and electric vehicles to grid-scale energy storage and earbuds, but their cathodes—the part of batteries denoted by a plus sign—are expensive to make and rely on minerals sourced from a limited number of countries, including lithium and cobalt. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, is responsible for mining about 70% of the world's cobalt.

Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have found that there is a significant amount of rare earth elements trapped in the coal and coal ash supply of the Gulf Coast—with a total value of more than $187 billion.

Australia's big clean energy projects get a lot of attention, from giant solar farms to the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme. So does the push for rooftop solar and home batteries.

News consumers around the world are now turning more to social media and video platforms than traditional outlets for information, a respected report said Tuesday, warning that old-style business models are under threat.