As data centres consume even more energy to serve the intensive computing needs of artificial intelligence, they could contribute to an estimated 600,000 asthma cases and 1300 premature deaths per year by 2030 – accounting for more than one third of asthma deaths annually in the US. "Public health impacts are direct and tangible impacts on people, and these impacts are substantial and not limited to a small radius of where data centres operate," says Shaolei Ren at the University of California, Riverside. "They affect people across the country." Ren and his colleagues, including Adam Wierman at the California Institute of Technology, developed those estimates based on data centres' projected electricity demand, which produces additional emissions and contributes to air pollution. For instance, the electricity usage required for training large AI models could produce air pollutants equivalent to driving a passenger car for more than 10,000 roundtrips between Los Angeles and New York City, according to the researchers.

Google has unveiled a new quantum computer and is once more claiming to have pulled ahead in the race to show that these exotic machines can beat even the world's best conventional supercomputers – so does that mean useful quantum computers are finally here? Researchers at the tech giant were the first in the world to demonstrate this feat, known as quantum supremacy, with the announcement of the Sycamore quantum computing chip in 2019. But since then, supercomputers have caught up, leaving Sycamore behind. Now, Google has produced a new quantum chip, called Willow, which Julian Kelly at Google Quantum AI says is the firm's best yet. "You can think of this as having all the advantages of Sycamore, but if you were to look under the hood, we changed the geometry… we reimagined the processor," he says.

Researchers trained an artificial intelligence model to gauge people's ages from their brain scans The abundance of 13 proteins in your blood seems to be a strong indicator of how rapidly your brain is ageing. This suggests that blood tests could one day help people track and even boost their brain health. Most previous studies that have looked at protein markers of brain ageing in the blood have involved fewer than 1000 people, says Nicholas Seyfried at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who wasn't involved in the new research. To get a broader idea of the impact of these proteins, Wei-Shi Liu at Fudan University in China and his colleagues analysed MRI brain scan data from nearly 11,000 adults from the UK Biobank project, whose ages ranged from around 50 to 80 at the time of imaging. Using data from 70 per cent of the participants, Liu's team trained an artificial intelligence model to predict how old the participants were based on features of the brain images, such as the size of different brain regions and how distinct parts connected to each other.

An optical fibre technology can help chips communicate with each other at the speed of light, enabling them to transmit 80 times as much information as they could using traditional electrical connections. That could significantly speed up the training times required for large artificial intelligence models – from months to weeks – while also reducing the energy and emissions costs for data centres. Most advanced computer chips still communicate using electrical signals carried over copper wires. But as the tech industry races to train large AI models – a process that requires networks of AI superchips to transfer huge amounts of data – companies are eager to link chips using the light-speed communication of fibre optics. This technology isn't new: the internet already relies on undersea fibre-optic cables stretching thousands of kilometres between continents.

Quantum entanglement just got easier, thanks to artificial intelligence. Researchers discovered a new procedure for creating quantum links between particles, and it could be used for building quantum communication networks in the future. How does ChatGPT work and do AI-powered chatbots "think" like us? This new method came as a surprise.

Tencent is one of China's largest technology companies Chinese tech giant Tencent doesn't seem to be affected by US export bans of computer chips that are crucial to the development of artificial intelligence systems – but even if such bans were more stringent, they may not be able to slow the country's AI advancement. Ritwik Gupta and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have analysed publications released by researchers at Tencent about the firm's latest models, including its Hunyuan AI models. The team's findings suggest that, in recent months, Tencent has publicly described using…

Tencent is one of China's largest technology companies Chinese tech giant Tencent doesn't seem to be affected by US export bans of computer chips that are crucial to the development of artificial intelligence systems – but even if such bans were more stringent, they may not be able to slow the country's AI advancement, US research shows. Ritwik Gupta and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have analysed publications released by researchers at Tencent about the firm's latest models, including its Hunyuan AI models. The team's findings suggest that, in recent months, Tencent has…

A robotic rat on wheels has learned how to interact with real rats while mimicking the rodents' play and fight behaviours. "[The] robotic rats have similar appearances and movements to animals, and even the same odour," says Qing Shi at the Beijing Institute of Technology in China. "It has become an important tool for exploring individual or collective rats' behavioural responses."

An experimental brain implant containing tens of thousands of living neurons can form cell connections with the brains of mice. Such a device could eventually enable sophisticated control over millions of neurons on the level of individual cells – but without relying on surgically implanted electrodes that penetrate and destroy brain tissue. The biohybrid implant, developed by California-based start-up Science Corporation, differs from many other brain-computer interface devices, which usually contain arrays of electrodes that penetrate the brain and sometimes damage cells. In comparison, Science Corporation's implant is…

Today's weather forecasts rely on simulations that require a lot of computing power Google DeepMind claims its latest weather forecasting AI can make predictions faster and more accurately than existing physics-based simulations. GenCast is the latest in DeepMind's ongoing research project to use artificial intelligence to improve weather forecasting. The model was trained on four decades of historical data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts's (ECMWF) ERA5 archive, which includes regular measurements of temperature, wind speed and pressure at various altitudes around the globe. Data up to 2018 was used to train the model and then data from 2019 was used to test its predictions against known weather. The company found that it beat ECMWF's industry-standard ENS forecast 97.4 per cent of the time in total, and 99.8 per cent of the time when looking ahead more than 36 hours.