Why he thinks near-term targets can be a distraction, and what technologies he expects to power our future grid. Bill Gates doesn't shy away or pretend modesty when it comes to his stature in the climate world today. "Well, who's the biggest funder of climate innovation companies?" he asked a handful of journalists at a media roundtable event last week. "If there's someone else, I've never met them." The former Microsoft CEO has spent the last decade investing in climate technology through Breakthrough Energy, which he founded in 2015. Ahead of the UN climate meetings kicking off next week, Gates published a memo outlining what he thinks activists and negotiators should focus on and how he's thinking about the state of climate tech right now.

The startup is using waste materials and alternative fuels to make cement, slashing greenhouse gas emissions in a polluting industry. Cement is one of the most used materials on the planet, and the industry emits billions of tons of greenhouse gasses annually. Cemvision wants to use waste materials and alternative fuels to help reduce climate pollution from cement production. Today, making cement requires crushing limestone and heating it to super high temperatures, usually by burning fossil fuels. The chemical reactions also release carbon dioxide pollution. Swedish startup Cemvision made a few key production changes to reduce both emissions and the need to mine new materials.

This study investigates a pulsating fluid jet as a novel precise, minimally invasive and cold technique for bone cement removal. We utilize the pulsating fluid jet device to remove bone cement from samples designed to mimic clinical conditions. The effectiveness of long nozzles was tested to enable minimally invasive procedures. Audio signal monitoring, complemented by the State Space Model (SSM) S4D-Bio, was employed to optimize the fluid jet parameters dynamically, addressing challenges like visibility obstruction from splashing. Within our experiments, we generate a comprehensive dataset correlating various process parameters and their equivalent audio signals to material erosion. The use of SSMs yields precise control over the predictive erosion process, achieving 98.93 \% accuracy. The study demonstrates on the one hand, that the pulsating fluid jet device, coupled with advanced audio monitoring techniques, is a highly effective tool for precise bone cement removal. On the other hand, this study presents the first application of SSMs in biomedical surgery technology, marking a significant advancement in the application. This research significantly advances biomedical engineering by integrating machine learning combined with pulsating fluid jet as surgical technology, offering a novel, minimally invasive, cold and adaptive approach for bone cement removal in orthopedic applications.

SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son declared he will get off the sidelines and go back on the offensive in tech investing soon, seeking to establish his credentials in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. The billionaire is ending years of relative dormancy after his Vision Fund, the world's largest pool of tech capital, racked up billions of dollars of losses as a COVID-era internet boom withered and a global economic downturn sapped valuations. The Vision Fund's return to the field is welcome news for a startup ecosystem whose largest players from Uber Technologies to Coupang scaled up thanks to steady financing from the Japanese firm. SoftBank's signature portfolio firm is now Arm, the British chip designer Son argues is central to AI. Arm is now on track for one of the largest initial public offerings this year. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software.

In 2018, Meta committed to minimizing its environmental footprint and is targeting net zero emissions for its value chain in 2030. However, it has plans to build eight data centers. To reduce the carbon emissions this one will generate, META's team, with the help of Lav Varshney and Nishant Garg from the University of Urbana-Champaign, designed a low-carbon concrete using generative machine learning algorithms that they tested at the Delkab, Illinois, facility. Concrete has been used for thousands of years to construct buildings and structures. Although it has evolved, cement is now one of its ingredients, but it is also the major source of its greenhouse gas emissions.

They may not be able to shout "Eureka!" like their human colleagues but AI/ML system have shown immense potential in the field of compound discovery -- whether that's sifting through reams of data to find new therapeutic compounds or imagining new recipes using the ingredients' flavor profiles. Now a team from Meta AI, working with researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have created an AI that can devise and refine formulas for increasingly high-strength, low-carbon concrete. Traditional methods for creating concrete, of which we produce billions of tons every year, are far from ecologically friendly. In fact, they generate an estimated 8 percent of the annual global carbon dioxide emission total. Advances have been made in recent years to reduce the concrete industry's carbon footprint (as well as in make the material more rugged, more resilient and even capable of charging EVs) but overall its production remains among the most carbon intensive in modern construction.

Its use dates back to early civilizations, and today it is the most popular composite choice in the world. Production of its key ingredient, cement, contributes 8-9 percent of the global anthropogenic CO2 emissions and 2-3 percent of energy consumption, which is only projected to increase in the coming years. With aging United States infrastructure, the federal government recently passed a milestone bill to revitalize and upgrade it, along with a push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions where possible, putting concrete in the crosshairs for modernization, too. Elsa Olivetti, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and Jie Chen, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab research scientist and manager, think artificial intelligence can help meet this need by designing and formulating new, more sustainable concrete mixtures, with lower costs and carbon dioxide emissions, while improving material performance and reusing manufacturing byproducts in the material itself. Olivetti's research improves environmental and economic sustainability of materials, and Chen develops and optimizes machine learning and computational techniques, which he can apply to materials reformulation.

Brussels – The European Union is using its strength as a wealthy trade bloc of half a billion consumers to set the global pace of climate change action, challenging others to match the ambitions of its latest carbon cutting plans. In its most ambitious bid yet to hit a goal of cutting net greenhouse gas emissions by 55% from 1990 levels by 2030, the EU on Wednesday laid out proposals that would consign the internal combustion engine to history and raise the cost of emitting carbon for heating, transport and factories. The question now is whether the EU gambit becomes an established benchmark upon which investors and sectors like the auto industry set transition strategies, and how big emitters like the United States and China respond ahead of U.N. climate talks later this year. "Amongst G7 and G20 nations, the EU position is now the explicit global benchmark," said Julian Poulter, Head of Investor Relations at Inevitable Policy Response, a consultancy on environmental economics. "It will exert a new influence on that basis, in other industrialized nations and their financial sectors, and increase pressure on those nations that remain as climate outliers and spoilers," he added.

A Dutch couple have become Europe's first tenants of a fully 3D printed house in a development that its backers believe will open up a world of choice in the shape and style of the homes of the future. Elize Lutz, 70, and Harrie Dekkers, 67, retired shopkeepers from Amsterdam, received their digital key – an app allowing them to open the front door of their two-bedroom bungalow at the press of a button – on Thursday. "It is beautiful," said Lutz. "It has the feel of a bunker – it feels safe," added Dekkers. Inspired by the shape of a boulder, the dimensions of which would be difficult and expensive to construct using traditional methods, the property is the first of five homes planned by the construction firm Saint-Gobain Weber Beamix for a plot of land by the Beatrix canal in the Eindhoven suburb of Bosrijk. In the last two years properties partly constructed by 3D printing have been built in France and the US, and nascent projects are proliferating around the world.

A startup backed by billionaire Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, says a breakthrough in solar technology may revolutionize the way materials like steel and glass are created. The company, called Heliogen, says it uses artificial intelligence to help operate an array of mirrors capable of reflecting and focusing the sun's light and creating a type of solar oven. The system works so well that they report being able to create temperatures of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit - about a quarter of the temperature found on the Sun's surface. That extreme heat is a first for solar-powered systems like Heliogens and, according to the company, could be used as an environmentally friendly way of creating crucial materials like cement, glass, and steel. As noted by CNN, Heliogen's system could drastically impact global emissions - roughly 7 percent of of C02 released into Earth's environment are from manufacturing cement alone according to the International Energy Agency.