The summer of 2024 broke the record for Earth's hottest day since data collection began, sparking widespread media coverage and public debate. This also happens to be the year that both Microsoft and Google, two of the leading big tech companies investing heavily in AI research and development, missed their climate targets. While this also made headlines and spurred indignation, AI's environmental impacts are still far from being common knowledge. In reality, AI's current "bigger is better" paradigm--epitomized by tech companies' pursuit of ever bigger, more powerful large language models that are presented as the solution to every problem--comes with very significant costs to the environment. These range from generating colossal amounts of energy to power the data centers that run tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney to the millions of gallons of freshwater that are pumped through these data centers to make sure they don't overheat and the tons of rare earth metals needed to build the hardware they contain.

A ship with a firing turret, mobile air-defense system, surveillance aircraft, and military vehicles with directed sensors are all examples of moving pursuers with rotating platforms installed onboard. The rotating platforms can be a turret, a missile launcher, or a gimballed camera or sensor. Various aspects of such systems have been studied in works such as [1-4]. Recently, such systems have become increasingly fast and autonomous, thereby driving advancements in guidance and control of such vehicles. Classical guidance laws such as pure-pursuit, proportional navigation (PN), and line-of-sight guidance implement an underlying geometrical rule that is guaranteed to lead to interception.

With the race towards higher levels of automation in vehicles, it is imperative to guarantee the safety of all involved traffic participants. Yet, while high-risk traffic situations between two vehicles are well understood, traffic situations involving more vehicles lack the tools to be properly analyzed. This paper proposes a method to compare Surrogate Safety Measures values in highway multi-vehicle traffic situations such as lane-changes that involve three vehicles. This method allows for a comprehensive statistical analysis and highlights how the safety distance between vehicles is shifted in favor of the traffic conflict between the leading vehicle and the lane-changing vehicle.

In this paper, the collision avoidance problem for non-holonomic robots moving at constant linear speeds in the 2-D plane is considered. The maneuvers to avoid collisions are designed using dynamic vortex potential fields (PFs) and their negative gradients; this formulation leads to a reciprocal behaviour between the robots, denoted as being cooperative. The repulsive field is selected as a function of the velocity and position of a robot relative to another and introducing vorticity in its definition guarantees the absence of local minima. Such a repulsive field is activated by a robot only when it is on a collision path with other mobile robots or stationary obstacles. By analysing the kinematics-based engagement dynamics in polar coordinates, it is shown that a cooperative robot is able to avoid collisions with non-cooperating robots, such as stationary and constant velocity robots, as well as those actively seeking to collide with it. Conditions on the PF parameters are identified that ensure collision avoidance for all cases. Experimental results acquired using a mobile robot platform support the theoretical contributions.

One day in late September a box-shaped spacecraft weighing approximately half a ton will slam into an asteroid seven million miles away from Earth at a speed of 15,000mph, in a bid to knock it into a new orbit. This suicide mission by a craft the size of a golf cart is not just a self-indulgent experiment dreamed up by NASA scientists with money to burn. The very future of mankind could depend on its success because the $330 million (£269 million) Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART, for short) may well provide the answer to a problem that has preoccupied astronomers for centuries: what to do when an asteroid is on a collision course with our planet. 'This is a mission for planet Earth -- all the peoples of Earth -- because we would all be threatened,' said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who added that Dart has'turned science fiction into science fact'. Ever since the 1980s, when scientists first realised that the six-mile-wide Chicxulub crater off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula had been left by an asteroid whose impact triggered the mass destruction of all non-avian dinosaurs, Hollywood has latched on to the blockbuster potential of such a storyline. Films such as Armageddon, Deep Impact and, most recently, Don't Look Up, have all made millions at the Box Office by playing on our fear of an extinction-level event triggered by a planet-killing asteroid.

It's a collision course: We'll need to feed another 2 billion people by mid-century, even as climate change threatens our ability to produce food. Georgia, Florida and other Southeastern states must play a central role if we're to feed the world and simultaneously protect the planet. If we fail to rise to this challenge, we risk a multitude of problems driven by hungry people. And a new report released from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change only heightens the concern. Our best chance to get off this collision course is through innovation.

Artificial intelligence magnifies the ability to analyze personal information in ways that may intrude on privacy interests. In fact many of the most interesting data sets for AI are those with a great deal of personal information. But as more countries and regions around the world solidify increasingly stringent privacy laws, companies that use AI must take those legal protections of privacy into account when setting up their systems. To avoid legal trouble and ensure public trust, AI users must seriously consider the varying privacy laws discussed below before launching any new program.

Robotic underwater gliders will be sent to investigate the massive iceberg presently on a collision course with the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, experts said. Dubbed A68a, the enormous mass -- some 87 miles (140 km) in length -- broke off from Antarctica's Larsen C Ice Shelf in 2017 and has been drifting north ever since. Scientists tracking the berg's progress via satellite warned that A68a -- propelled by the powerful circumpolar current -- could hit South Georgia within days. There is the chance that it could split into pieces beforehand -- MOD images taken from above the icy body have suggested that is already beginning to break up. But A68a is a hazard for wildlife -- having the potential to crush marine life on the island's ocean shelf and make waters inhospitable as it melts to release freshwater.

In 2010, the small community of specialists who pay attention to US road safety statistics picked up the first signs of a troubling trend: more and more pedestrians were being killed on American roads. That year, 4,302 American pedestrians died, an increase of almost 5% from 2009. The tally has increased almost every year since, with particularly sharp spikes in 2015 and 2016. Last year, 41% more US pedestrians were killed than in 2008. During this same period, overall non-pedestrian road fatalities moved in the opposite direction, decreasing by more than 7%. For drivers, roads are as safe as they have ever been; for people on foot, roads keep getting deadlier. Through the 90s and 00s, the pedestrian death count had declined almost every year. No one would have confused the US for a walkers' paradise – at least part of the reason fewer pedestrians died in this period was that people were driving more and walking less, which meant that there were fewer opportunities to be struck. But at least the death toll was shrinking. The fact that, globally, pedestrian fatalities were much more common in poorer countries made it possible to view pedestrian death as part of an unfortunate, but temporary, stage of development: growing pains on the road to modernity, destined to decrease eventually as a matter of course. The US road death statistics of the last decade have blasted a hole in that theory.

One of the world's leading autonomous vehicle researchers has warned that the world is'on a collision course' with self driving vehicles. The new technology threatens millions of jobs and raises a slew of ethical dilemmas--prospects that were on the minds of business chiefs and politicians meeting at the World Economic Forum this week. 'Companies are going to have to start thinking about it, governments are going to have to start thinking about it,' said Missy Cummings, the director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke University in North Carolina. Waymo's long-range lidar can see a football helmet two football fields away and uses a single integrated system'The reality is we can't just keep our head in the sand like an ostrich,' she told AFP in Davos, singling out the coming impact on employment. In the United States alone, an estimated four million people work as truckers, taxi drivers and in other jobs that are under threat when the driverless vehicles come into widespread use--a matter of years, experts predict.