--As the Middle East emerges as a strategic hub for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, the feasibility of deploying sustainable datacenters in desert environments has become a topic of growing relevance. This paper presents an empirical study analyzing the energy consumption and carbon footprint of large language model (LLM) inference across four countries: the United Arab Emirates, Iceland, Germany, and the United States of America using DeepSeek Coder 1.3B and the HumanEval dataset on the task of code generation. We use the CodeCarbon library to track energy and carbon emissions and compare geographical trade-offs for climate-aware AI deployment. Our findings highlight both the challenges and potential of datacenters in desert regions and provide a balanced outlook on their role in global AI expansion. With the explosion of large-scale artificial intelligence workloads, the environmental footprint of datacenters has come under scrutiny. The AI compute coming online appears to be increasing by a factor of 10 every six months.

Environment Animals Insects Iceland was the only country in the world without mosquitos--now they've found three The insects will likely stay in the Nordic country. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Until recently, Iceland was the only country in the world to be free of one of the most maddening and dangerous insects: mosquitoes. But if you're thinking that a second nation has been declared mosquito-free, brace yourself for some bad news. The Nordic island has just confirmed the discovery of mosquitoes in the municipality of Kjós.

Operator is now out in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the UK and most places where ChatGPT is also available, OpenAI has announced. The company launched Operator in the US back in January, introducing it as an "agent that can go to the web to perform tasks" for the user. Operator can handle various browser-based tasks for users, such as filling out forms, making restaurant reservations and ordering groceries. At the moment, it's still a research preview in its early stages that comes with limitations, but the company said it hopes to roll out improvements based on user feedback. Operator is now rolling out to Pro users in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the UK, and most places ChatGPT is available.

In recent years, the development of quantum annealers has enabled experimental demonstrations and has increased research interest in applications of quantum annealing, such as in quantum machine learning and in particular for the popular quantum SVM. Several versions of the quantum SVM have been proposed, and quantum annealing has been shown to be effective in them. Extensions to multiclass problems have also been made, which consist of an ensemble of multiple binary classifiers. This work proposes a novel quantum SVM formulation for direct multiclass classification based on quantum annealing, called Quantum Multiclass SVM (QMSVM). The multiclass classification problem is formulated as a single Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem solved with quantum annealing. The main objective of this work is to evaluate the feasibility, accuracy, and time performance of this approach. Experiments have been performed on the D-Wave Advantage quantum annealer for a classification problem on remote sensing data. The results indicate that, despite the memory demands of the quantum annealer, QMSVM can achieve accuracy that is comparable to standard SVM methods and, more importantly, it scales much more efficiently with the number of training examples, resulting in nearly constant time. This work shows an approach for bringing together classical and quantum computation, solving practical problems in remote sensing with current hardware.

Modelling, forecasting and overall understanding of the dynamics of the power grid and its frequency are essential for the safe operation of existing and future power grids. Much previous research was focused on large continental areas, while small systems, such as islands are less well-studied. These natural island systems are ideal testing environments for microgrid proposals and artificially islanded grid operation. In the present paper, we utilize measurements of the power grid frequency obtained in European islands: the Faroe Islands, Ireland, the Balearic Islands and Iceland and investigate how their frequency can be predicted, compared to the Nordic power system, acting as a reference. The Balearic islands are found to be particularly deterministic and easy to predict in contrast to hard-to-predict Iceland. Furthermore, we show that typically 2-4 weeks of data are needed to improve prediction performance beyond simple benchmarks.

Landing is a challenging part of autonomous drone flight and a great research opportunity. This PhD proposes to improve on fiducial autonomous landing algorithms by making them more flexible. Further, it leverages its location, Iceland, to develop a method for landing on lava flows in cooperation with analog Mars exploration missions taking place in Iceland now - and potentially for future Mars landings.

Using the DALL·E artificial intelligence tool to create images of what a nuclear-heated spa might look like, inspired by Iceland's Blue Lagoon.

Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson, the president of Iceland, visited MIT on Friday, engaging in talks with several campus leaders and professors, and touring the Media Lab. Jóhannesson visited the Institute along with a substantial delegation of officials and scholars from Iceland. They met with MIT scholars, who delivered a variety of presentations on research, design, and entrepreneurship; the Iceland delegation also had a particular interest in the inclusion of the Icelandic language in artificial intelligence-driven tools that automatically recognize, translate, and deploy speech and texts. "We are determined to make sure that Icelandic has a place in the digital age," Jóhannesson said. "AI plays a key role there."

Invading my own country has been one of the most surreal experiences of playing Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, and the variety of languages included in the game makes it one of the most thought-provoking. Assassin's Creed is an award-winning historical action game series known for putting players in the middle of transformative events in history. Valhalla is set during the Viking invasions of Britain, during which the main character, Eivor, and their brother Sigurd embark on a quest to conquer a new land. They travel by boat from their native country Norway to a place that is home to new Viking settlers, eager to forge their own legacy of glory. This gave me an outsider's perspective of my own country, eavesdropping on everyday conversations in busy settlements and deciphering the origin of war cries on mountainsides.

A drone captures spectacular images as lava spews from Iceland's Fagradalsfjall volcano.