Water from Air could produce enough daily water for a family of four.

The magic of Kara Pod is its ability to extract moisture from the air. What if the freshest, purest water and even your daily coffee could come straight from the air in your kitchen? That's exactly what the Kara Pod promises. It's a sleek countertop device that transforms the air around you into mineral-rich drinking water and fresh coffee. There's no plumbing required, no refills to fuss with and no more plastic waste cluttering up your home or the planet.

From chewing gum to teabags, microplastics have already been discovered in a range of everyday items. These tiny pieces of plastic measure less than five millimeters long and are not biodegradable - meaning they last for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Now, shocking images have revealed the terrifying effects these tiny pieces of plastic could be having on our bodies. Experts from BusinessWaste.co.uk have used AI to produce images predicting how the average man and woman could look after exposure to microplastics. From weight gain and hair thinning to eczema-like rashes and heavy fatigue, the images paint a bleak picture for our future.

Clean drinking water is available even in the most remote areas. Imagine a world where clean drinking water is readily available even in the most remote areas. This vision is becoming a reality thanks to innovative research from scientists in Canada. A team of scientists at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has developed a groundbreaking device that could revolutionize water desalination, offering hope to millions facing water scarcity worldwide. At the heart of this innovation is a floating solar still, a device that harnesses the sun's energy to purify seawater.

The idea of drinking your own urine might sound like a survival technique promoted by Bear Grylls. But it could soon become a reality for astronauts, thanks to a new Dune-inspired spacesuit. The spacesuit is the brainchild of researchers from Cornell University and features a futuristic device that can recycle urine into drinking water. While the suit is still a prototype, it could be a godsend for astronauts, who are currently forced to relieve themselves inside their spacesuits during long spacewalks. 'The design includes a vacuum-based external catheter leading to a combined forward-reverse osmosis unit, providing a continuous supply of potable water with multiple safety mechanisms to ensure astronaut wellbeing,' said Sofia Etlin, first author of the study.

Facing climate change, the already limited availability of drinking water will decrease in the future rendering drinking water an increasingly scarce resource. Considerable amounts of it are lost through leakages in water transportation and distribution networks. Thus, anomaly detection and localization, in particular for leakages, are crucial but challenging tasks due to the complex interactions and changing demands in water distribution networks. In this work, we analyze the effects of anomalies on the dynamics of critical infrastructure systems by modeling the networks employing Bayesian networks. We then discuss how the problem is connected to and can be considered through the lens of concept drift. In particular, we argue that model-based explanations of concept drift are a promising tool for localizing anomalies given limited information about the network. The methodology is experimentally evaluated using realistic benchmark scenarios. To showcase that our methodology applies to critical infrastructure more generally, in addition to considering leakages and sensor faults in water systems, we showcase the suitability of the derived technique to localize sensor faults in power systems.

The credit rating agency Moody's has warned that water companies face an "elevated" risk from cyber attackers targeting drinking water, as suppliers wait on permission from the industry regulator to ramp up spending on digital security. Moody's said, in a report to investors, that hackers are increasingly zeroing in on infrastructure companies, including water and wastewater treatment companies, and the use of AI (artificial intelligence) could accelerate this trend. Last month, Southern Water, which supplies 4.6 million customers in the south of England, said the Black Basta ransomware group had claimed to have accessed its systems, posting a "limited amount" of data on the dark web. Separately, South Staffordshire Water apologised in 2022 after hackers stole customers' personal data. Moody's warned that the growing use of data-logging equipment to monitor water consumption, and the use of digital smart meters, made companies more vulnerable to attacks.

Wednesday will be a fateful day in Brussels, a faraway city of which post-Brexit Britain knows little and cares less. It's the day on which the EU's AI proposals enter the final stages of a tortuous lawmaking process. The bill is a landmark (first in the world) attempt to seriously regulate artificial intelligence (AI) based on its capacity to cause harm and will soon be in the final phase of the legislative process – so-called "trilogues" – where the EU parliament, commission and council decide what should be in the bill, and therefore become part of EU law. However, the bill is now hanging in the balance because of internal disagreement about some key aspects of the proposed legislation, especially those concerned with regulation of "foundation" AI models that are trained on massive datasets. In EU-speak these are "general-purpose AI" (GPAI) systems – ones capable of a range of general tasks (text synthesis, image manipulation, audio generation and so on) – such as GPT-4, Claude, Llama etc.

Task planning systems have been developed to help robots use human knowledge (about actions) to complete long-horizon tasks. Most of them have been developed for "closed worlds" while assuming the robot is provided with complete world knowledge. However, the real world is generally open, and the robots frequently encounter unforeseen situations that can potentially break the planner's completeness. Could we leverage the recent advances on pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable classical planning systems to deal with novel situations? This paper introduces a novel framework, called COWP, for open-world task planning and situation handling. COWP dynamically augments the robot's action knowledge, including the preconditions and effects of actions, with task-oriented commonsense knowledge. COWP embraces the openness from LLMs, and is grounded to specific domains via action knowledge. For systematic evaluations, we collected a dataset that includes 1,085 execution-time situations. Each situation corresponds to a state instance wherein a robot is potentially unable to complete a task using a solution that normally works. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms competitive baselines from the literature in the success rate of service tasks. Additionally, we have demonstrated COWP using a mobile manipulator. Supplementary materials are available at: https://cowplanning.github.io/

More than 1.3 million Californians may be drinking high levels of manganese, enough to cause cognitive disabilities in children and Parkinson's-like symptoms in adults. The discovery was made by researchers at the University of California - Riverside (UCR), who discovered the mineral is thriving in untreated wells throughout Central Valley. The study found private wells and public water systems, with nearly half of the affected residents living in disadvantaged communities - almost 89 percent are likely to access water highly contaminated with manganese. While manganese is found in water supplies worldwide, the US is one of the only nations not enforcing a maximum level. The research comes as the University of Los Angeles may have uncovered a link between lithium in drinking water and autism.