By virtually every key metric, efforts to fight climate change are going too slowly, according to findings by a coalition of climate groups. In some cases, things are moving in the wrong direction. An eroded iceberg is seen is seen floating near Horseshoe Island, Antarctica. In the 10 years since the signing of the Paris Agreement, the backbone of international climate action, humanity has made impressive progress. Renewable energy is increasingly cheap and reliable, while electric vehicles are becoming better every year.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are transforming critical sectors such as healthcare, finance, and transportation, enhancing operational efficiency and decision-making processes. However, their deployment in high-stakes domains has exposed vulnerabilities that can result in significant societal harm. To systematically study and mitigate these risk, initiatives like the AI Incident Database (AIID) have emerged, cataloging over 3,000 real-world AI failure reports. Currently, associating a new report with the appropriate AI Incident relies on manual expert intervention, limiting scalability and delaying the identification of emerging failure patterns. To address this limitation, we propose a retrieval-based framework that automates the association of new reports with existing AI Incidents through semantic similarity modeling. We formalize the task as a ranking problem, where each report-comprising a title and a full textual description-is compared to previously documented AI Incidents based on embedding cosine similarity. Benchmarking traditional lexical methods, cross-encoder architectures, and transformer-based sentence embedding models, we find that the latter consistently achieve superior performance. Our analysis further shows that combining titles and descriptions yields substantial improvements in ranking accuracy compared to using titles alone. Moreover, retrieval performance remains stable across variations in description length, highlighting the robustness of the framework. Finally, we find that retrieval performance consistently improves as the training set expands. Our approach provides a scalable and efficient solution for supporting the maintenance of the AIID.

Imagine a future where humans live in huge'space oases' on Mars – luxury indoor habitats made of heat-reflective material that grow their own food. Robots are sent into the vast Martian wilderness, where they explore without the risk of exhaustion, radiation poisoning or dust contamination. Enormous space stations and satellites are manufactured in orbit, AI is trusted to make critical decisions, and the whole solar system is connected by a vast internet network. While this sounds like science-fiction, the European Space Agency (ESA) hopes it will become a reality in just 15 years. In a new report, the agency – which represents more than 20 countries including the UK – outlines an ambitious vision for space exploration by 2040.

Over the last decade, Dean has amassed a healthy collection of video games, from smash hits to cult classics. His digital library is like a modern day Blockbuster, all readily accessible with just a click or two. But his son, Sam, has eyes for only one video game: Roblox, the behemoth virtual universe-slash-video game that's among the most popular on the planet. The company reports that more than 97 million people log on to Roblox every day. Around 40% of those are, like Sam, under 13 years of age.

Apparently almost all undergraduate students are using AI now, in one way or another. A new report from the UK's Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) found that 92 percent of students have used generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, for their studies. At the same time, 88 percent of these students have used it for exams. These numbers are a tremendous increase from HEPI's February 2024 report in which 66 percent and 53 percent participants relayed use, respectively. The top reasons students reported using AI include saving time, improved quality of their work and getting instant support.

FIRST ON FOX: A pro-tech advocacy group has released a new report warning of the growing threat posed by China's artificial intelligence technology and its open-source approach that could threaten the national and economic security of the United States. The report, published by American Edge Project, states that "China is rapidly advancing its own open-source ecosystem as an alternative to American technology and using it as a Trojan horse to implant its CCP values into global infrastructure." "Their progress is both significant and concerning: Chinese-developed open-source AI tools are already outperforming Western models on key benchmarks, while operating at dramatically lower costs, accelerating global adoption. Through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which spans more than 155 countries on four continents, and its Digital Silk Road (DSR), China is exporting its technology worldwide, fostering increased global dependence, undermining democratic norms, and threatening U.S. leadership and global security." The report outlines how Chinese AI models censor historical events that could paint China in a bad light, deny or minimize human rights abuses, and filter criticism of Chinese political leaders.

Russia is targeting the Paris Olympics with a disinformation campaign that includes deploying a deepfake Tom Cruise to narrate a documentary criticising the organisation behind the games, according to a new report from Microsoft. Microsoft said a network of Russia-affiliated groups are running "malign influence campaigns" against France, Emmanuel Macron, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Paris Games with the event less than 80 days away. Russia has been banned from the 2024 Olympics, although a small number of Russian athletes may compete as neutrals. The fake Cruise video, which appeared on the Telegram messaging platform last year, is called Olympics Has Fallen and uses artificial intelligence-generated audio of the film star's voice to present a "strange, meandering script" disparaging the IOC. The documentary, whose title riffs on the Gerard Butler action film Olympus Has Fallen, also claims falsely to have been produced by Netflix and is promoted with bogus five-star reviews from the New York Times and the BBC.

Ten years, billions of dollars, multiple leadership changes, and dozens of rumors later, the Apple Car project is dead. A new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that Apple has officially canceled the car, breaking the news to nearly 2,000 employees who had been working on it on Tuesday. As part of the change, Apple will move "many employees working on the car" to the company's artificial intelligence division where they will focus on generative AI projects, which Apple is expected to share more about later this year, according to a statement by CEO Tim Cook on the company's earnings call earlier this month. But the car team also included hundreds of hardware engineers and car designers, some of who, Bloomberg reports, will be able to apply for jobs in other divisions of the company. The rest are likely to be laid off.

A group of scientists from across the U.S. claim to have created the first artificial intelligence capable of generating AI without human supervision. North Korea has been developing artificial intelligence across various sectors, including in military technology and programs that safeguard nuclear reactors, which could create international threats, according to a new report. The authoritarian regime has used AI to develop wargame simulations and has collaborated with Chinese tech researchers, according to a report by 38 North, a publication for policy and technical analysis of North Korean affairs. The AI advancements and foreign collaboration could lead to sanction violations and leaked information, the report stated. North Korea has been rapidly developing artificial intelligence for a myriad of civilian and military uses, according to a new report.

In 1996 Nasa and the White House made the explosive announcement that the rock contained traces of Martian bugs. The meteorite, catalogued as Allen Hills (ALH) 84001, crashed onto the frozen wastes of Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike.