Last week, an American-Israeli company that claims it's developed proprietary technology to cool the planet announced it had raised $60 million, by far the largest known venture capital round to date for a solar geoengineering startup. The company, Stardust, says the funding will enable it to develop a system that could be deployed by the start of the next decade, according to Heatmap, which broke the story. As scientists who have worked on the science of solar geoengineering for decades, we have grown increasingly concerned about emerging efforts to start and fund private companies to deploy technologies that could alter the climate of the planet. We also strongly dispute some of the technical claims that certain companies have made about their offerings. This story is part of Heat Exchange, MIT Technology Review's guest opinion series offering expert commentary on legal, political and regulatory issues related to climate change and clean energy. Can "The Simpsons" really predict the future?

Despite recent progress in language models, generating constrained text for specific domains remains a challenge, particularly when utilizing black-box models that lack domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we introduce ScoPE (Score-based Progressive Editor) generation, a novel approach for controlled text generation for black-box language models. We employ ScoPE to facilitate text generation in the target domain by integrating it with language models through a cascading approach. Trained to enhance the target domain score of the edited text, ScoPE progressively edits intermediate output discrete tokens to align with the target attributes throughout the auto-regressive generation process of the language model. This iterative process guides subsequent steps to produce desired output texts for the target domain. Our experimental results on diverse controlled generations demonstrate that ScoPE effectively facilitates controlled text generation for black-box language models in both in-domain and out-of-domain conditions, which is challenging for existing methods.

In 2020, digital currencies were one of the hottest topics in town. China was well on its way to launching its own central bank digital currency, or CBDC, and many other countries launched CBDC research projects. Even Facebook has proposed a global digital currency, called Libra. Few eyebrows were raised when the Boston branch of the US Federal Reserve announced a project to research how a CBDC might be technically designed. A hypothetical US central bank digital currency was hardly controversial, after all.

There was a young lady called Aisha who lived in the wide and varied continent of Africa. Aisha dreamt of opening her jewelry store one day when she and her family resided in a tiny town. Yet she quickly saw that the absence of financial services in her town impeded her ability to accomplish her aspirations. Aisha and her family often encountered difficult and expensive processes even when they could visit banks despite traveling great distances. But suddenly, a miraculous event took place.

Not too long ago, crypto, blockchain and web3 were incessant buzzwords that seemed to gain more traction each day. Traders scooped up digital currencies at soaring prices. Venture capitalists poured billions of dollars into nebulous startups raising funds at epic valuations. Companies like Nike, Starbucks and even RadioShack tried to glom on to the crypto craze with NFT offerings. But following a series of scandals that culminated in the spectacular implosion of crypto exchange FTX, coin prices have plummeted from their all-time highs, VC funding for digital asset startups has dramatically declined and NFTs sales remain far below their previous record-setting heights.

Central Banks Digital Currency (CBDC) is a digital currency or virtual asset backed by a central bank. According to the Atlantic Council CBDC Tracker, over 100 countries are currently exploring the CBDC opportunity and between 2020-2022 the central banks of many countries launched CBDC, while others started the pilot or research project. The Bahamas was the first country to launch CBDC which they named Sand Dollar. Nigeria launched e-Naira and Jamaica introduced JAM-DEX. China has been trialing Digital Yuan or e-CNY for a couple of years, Ghana is conducting eCedi pilot and India has started a pilot of both wholesale and retail CBDC Digital Rupee (e-Rupee) in the last quarter of 2022.

Telcos are hoping that 5G will transform enterprises the way 4G helped consumers. For instance, watching Fifa World Cup 2022 would have been a delight for many with 5G networks. The first rollouts took place in 2019 in South Korea and the US, but since then 5G has been rolled out in over 70 countries. In India, 5G services were launched by Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio in October. According to a GSMA Intelligence report, published in October, 5G can contribute $455 billion to the Indian economy between 2023 and 2040.

The crypto market has grown in recent years while getting attention from several new investors and the next-gen Millennials. COVID-19 also increased the popularity of the crypto market worldwide. On the other hand, another growing trend is Artificial Intelligence or AI. It has gained traction in recent years, with several experts hoping that the trend continues to grow in the coming years with global digitalization in progress. Now, as crypto is already based on a technology called Blockchain, several tech-savvy investors and crypto market enthusiasts are looking for the role of artificial intelligence in the cryptocurrency market.

The future is coming, and it's coming fast. Before we even know what the next significant invention will be, our world could be overturned by something else entirely. But one thing we can count on is that technology will continue to grow and change, including digital investments. Our lives revolve around technology and the advancements it allows. We live through our computers, phones, tablets, and televisions.

Emerging technologies including AI, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), 5G, and blockchain (and related digital currencies) have all progressed on their own merits and timeline. Each has found a degree of application, though clearly AI has progressed the furthest. Each technology is maturing while overcoming challenges ranging from blockchain's energy consumption to VR's propensity for inducing nausea. They will likely converge in readiness over the next several years, underpinned by the now ubiquitous cloud computing for elasticity and scale. And in that convergence, the sum will be far greater than the parts.