Artificial intelligence data centers could push wholesale electricity prices 20% to 30% higher by 2028, potentially raising household electric bills nationwide.

Stella Juva, a solar vehicle built by Eindhoven University students, functions as a mobile clinic that powers its own medical equipment using sunlight in remote areas.

Things to Do in L.A. California planned a nuclear exit. Diablo Canyon Power Plant in San Luis Obispo County, the only operating nuclear power plant in California, has federal approval to operate through 2045. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search.

Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. As an ordinary internet user, I am skeptical about AI. My colleagues and I have reported on several harmful aspects of the technology in the US: threats to democracy, its impact on the environment, mental health, the workforce, military intervention --the list goes on. While researching the gaps in conversations around enforceable government regulation of AI startups, both big and small, eager to innovate and launch new products, I came across AI researchers, policy experts, and even "ordinary internet users" like me trying to reimagine how the industry could work. If AI is unstoppable, can we build it in a way where the public has more of a say in how the technology is made, used, and who it benefits? To answer these questions, I spoke with B Cavello, the director of emerging technologies at the Aspen Institute .

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Undergrads' weed-killing robot wins top prize A team of Cornell undergraduates beat 95 other teams to take the grand prize at The Farm Robotics Challenge with their invention: an autonomous robot that kills weeds with electricity. Their robot can travel through a vineyard or orchard without a human operator, zapping weeds with a small amount of electricity, saving labor and energy and preventing crop loss, without the use of herbicides. Led by Andrew James, an agricultural sciences major in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), the team of agricultural specialists and engineers studied the existing electrical weeding technology, developed their own low-energy system and built a working prototype over the course of four intense months. Natalia Kurz, a biological engineering major in CALS, said the project required a lot of late nights. "There were fears for us, like, was it just going to be for nothing?"

China's Xi says AI'should not be a solo performance by a single country' Artificial intelligence should not be dominated by one country, Chinese President Xi Jinping has said, urging international cooperation on development at a major conference in Shanghai. Chinese AI models are gaining ground on the most powerful offerings from the US, attracting global users with lower costs. But how to govern the booming sector has become a topic of debate amid concerns over the deployment of AI in military combat and its use by hackers or criminals. In his address, Xi spoke of China's role in ensuring equitable access to AI capacity-building for developing countries to prevent the creation of "new historical injustices". To that end, he announced China's plans to cooperate with international bodies, including from Africa, Latin America, Asia and BRICS countries, to provide AI-related opportunities.

It's complicated--and it might not matter that much. There are two competing schools of thought over just how water-intensive AI is. In one, the technology is horribly thirsty. Data centers will exacerbate droughts throughout the country and "drain the great lakes," as one popular Reddit thread puts it. The former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has taken up the issue, sarcastically posting at one point: "How dare the peasants complain about data centers stealing their water and driving the cost of electricity!!" The other school, populated by Silicon Valley types, holds that "The Data Center Water Crisis Isn't Real," as an article in the right-wing publication Pirate Wires argued in December.

The rapid growth of large AI models has raised significant environmental concerns due to their substantial carbon footprint. Existing carbon accounting methods for AI models are fundamentally deterministic and fail to account for inherent uncertainties in embodied and operational carbon emissions. Our work aims to investigate the effect of these uncertainties on embodied and operational carbon footprint estimates for large AI models. We propose a Probabilistic Carbon Accounting Model (PCAM), which quantifies uncertainties in the carbon accounting of large AI models. We develop parameter models to quantify key components (processors, memory, storage) in the carbon footprint of AI models. To characterize the distribution of the parameters, we develop a carbon dataset by aggregating related data from various sources. Then, we generate the probabilistic distribution of the parameters from the collected dataset. We compare the performance of PCAM with LLMCarbon, the state-of-the-art carbon accounting method for large AI models.

Artificial intelligence systems that ask users to pause to consider AI's energy consumption and environmental impacts are likely to reduce unnecessary AI use, new research by Oregon State University suggests. The findings, published in Science Communication, are important as AI is already using electricity on scales that can be meaningfully compared to households, factories and towns. For example, the electricity needed to train a large language model would power 120 homes for a year, the researchers note; one AI-generated image has roughly the same energy cost as charging a smartphone. With about 85% of the world's energy still coming from fossil fuels, every megawatt-hour that can be carved from AI's electricity profile is significant, says the study's leader, Cheng "Chris" Chen of the OSU College of Liberal Arts. "Despite AI's substantial environmental impacts, information about those impacts is rarely disclosed or effectively communicated to everyday users of AI systems," said Chen, assistant professor in the School of Communication.