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Earth's cities are changing COLOUR: Astronaut photos taken just 13 years apart reveal how night lights have morphed from yellow to white across the globe

Daily Mail - Science & tech

You're viewing the US edition You can switch to the UK, AU or IE homepage at any time using this menu. Transgender New York Times executive who was shot dead'by his in-laws' abused BOTH his young children and left them with head injuries, wife claims Christopher Reeve's son Will, 34, reveals rare testicular cancer diagnosis Madonna's family make intervention: After forgetful and embarrassing VMAs comeback, insiders reveal clash between'control freak' star and her team Nobody wants to say this about Cindy Crawford after her son Presley Gerber's death... but maybe someone should: MAUREEN CALLAHAN'Triple flood threat' triggers urgent warnings for millions as massive storm engulfs 15 US states Taylor Swift's unreleased suicide note song: Tracks the world was never meant to hear... including one her co-writer said is'the most chilling he's ever heard' Riley Gaines suffers devastating blow in bitter legal fight against transgender athletes in women's sport at hands of Biden-appointed ...


Former EPA Officials: Trump Is Letting Data Centers Make People Sick

Mother Jones

"Families shouldn't have to pay for the AI boom with their health." The Stargate Oracle AI data center in Abilene, Texas, a project with Open AI, will span roughly 4 million square feet. Completion is expected by year's end. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. While tech oligarchs grandstand about the existential danger AI superintelligence poses to humanity, former Environmental Protection Agency officials say we should be worried about a more immediate threat to our health: the data centers that power those AI models. The former EPA researchers, now working with the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network, are warning in a new report that since January 2025, Donald Trump's EPA has embarked on a systematic weakening of pollution safeguards, permitting processes, inspection norms, and other guardrails--at least 30 different actions--that could increase the health risks associated with the data center boom.


What Wildfire Smoke Reveals About How We Respond to Climate Risk

TIME - Tech

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AI's potential climate benefits outweighed by role in boosting fossil fuels, study finds

The Guardian

Estimates suggest AI will create close to ยฃ370bn in cumulative value for fossil fuel companies between 2026 and 2030. Estimates suggest AI will create close to ยฃ370bn in cumulative value for fossil fuel companies between 2026 and 2030. AI's potential climate benefits outweighed by role in boosting fossil fuels, study finds AI-driven productivity gains enable more planet-heating pollution from fossil fuels than they avoid from renewables, a study has found. Researchers modelled the technical potential for AI to boost clean power generation along with projections for how it can help produce coal, oil and gas. Across 64 scenarios, they found net yearly carbon pollution rose by 0.47-1.8


Amazons new Texas AI data center will include massive amounts of air pollution

Mashable

Mashable Selects Look Up Say More Versus Creator Hub Switch Off Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable Back to School All Series Amazon's new Texas AI data center will include massive amounts of air pollution Alex Perry is a tech reporter at Mashable who primarily covers video games and consumer tech. Alex has spent most of the last decade reviewing games, smartphones, headphones, and laptops, and he doesn't plan on stopping anytime soon. He is also a Pisces, a cat lover, and a Kansas City sports fan. In 2019, Amazon signed the Climate Pledge, aiming to help Earth's environmental health. In 2026, Amazon aims to set a record for the most air pollution emitted by a single power plant.


The Trump Administration Wants to Change Public Engagement Rules for Polluters

WIRED

The EPA has proposed a rule change that would let states decide how much input the public has on air pollution permits. It would be a huge boon for data centers increasingly reliant on fossil fuels. The Trump administration is quietly considering a rule change that could make it easier for polluters to build facilities--including certain gas plants and diesel generators that power data centers--with little to no notice to the public. On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency held a public hearing on a proposed rule change that would hand the power to states to decide how the public participates in the permitting process for certain new sources of air pollution. The proposed rollback comes as data centers face greater pushback across the US, with many communities using the permitting process to try to slow down development.


Air pollution may be changing sperm

Popular Science

Harmful nitrogen dioxide and ozone levels could affect fertility and pregnancies. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . Air quality is linked to a wide range of health issues including respiratory problems, cardiovascular complications, and cancer, and that list of concerns only continues to grow .


SentinelKilnDB: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for OBB Brick Kiln Detection in South Asia Using Satellite Imagery

Neural Information Processing Systems

Air pollution was responsible for 2.6 million deaths across South Asia in 2021 alone, with brick manufacturing contributing significantly to this burden. In particular, the Indo-Gangetic Plain; a densely populated and highly polluted region spanning northern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and parts of Afghanistan sees brick kilns contributing 8-14% of ambient air pollution. Traditional monitoring approaches, such as field surveys and manual annotation using tools like Google Earth Pro, are time and labor-intensive. Prior ML-based efforts for automated detection have relied on costly high-resolution commercial imagery and non-public datasets, limiting reproducibility and scalability. In this work, we introduce SENTINELKILNDB, a publicly available, hand-validated benchmark of 62,671 brick kilns spanning threekiln types Fixed Chimney Bull's Trench Kiln (FCBK), Circular FCBK (CFCBK), and Zigzag kilns - annotated with oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) across 2.8 million km2 using free and globally accessible Sentinel-2 imagery. We benchmark state-of-the-art oriented object detection models and evaluate generalization across in-region, out-of-region, and super-resolution settings. SENTINELKILNDB enables rigorous evaluation of geospatial generalization and robustness for low-resolution object detection, and provides a new testbed for ML models addressing real-world environmental and remote sensing challenges at a continental scale. Datasets and code are available in SentinelKilnDB Dataset and SentinelKilnDB Bench-mark, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.


The battle in rural America against AI data centres

BBC News

Use BBC.com or the new BBC App to listen to BBC podcasts, Radio 4 and the World Service outside the UK. The world's largest data centre (62sq miles) has been approved in Utah, but there is growing opposition towards the project. At twice the size of Manhattan with promises to create thousands of jobs, we look at the bi partisan opposition against it. In this episode, Justin and Anthony discuss the enormous buildings being built across rural America, to house the huge amounts of data that A.I companies work with. Tech bosses say the centres are essential to the growth of Artificial Intelligence.


Indoor Air Quality Dataset with Activities of Daily Living in Low to Middle-income Communities

Neural Information Processing Systems

In recent years, indoor air pollution has posed a significant threat to our society, claiming over 3.2 million lives annually. Developing nations, such as India, are most affected since lack of knowledge, inadequate regulation, and outdoor air pollution lead to severe daily exposure to pollutants. However, only a limited number of studies have attempted to understand how indoor air pollution affects developing countries like India. To address this gap, we present spatiotemporal measurements of air quality from 30 indoor sites over six months during summer and winter seasons. The sites are geographically located across four regions of type: rural, suburban, and urban, covering the typical low to middle-income population in India. The dataset contains various types of indoor environments (e.g., studio apartments, classrooms, research laboratories, food canteens, and residential households), and can provide the basis for data-driven learning model research aimed at coping with unique pollution patterns in developing countries. This unique dataset demands advanced data cleaning and imputation techniques for handling missing data due to power failure or network outages during data collection. Furthermore, through a simple speech-to-text application, we provide real-time indoor activity labels annotated by occupants. Therefore, environmentalists and ML enthusiasts can utilize this dataset to understand the complex patterns of the pollutants under different indoor activities, identify recurring sources of pollution, forecast exposure, improve floor plans and room structures of modern indoor designs, develop pollution-aware recommender systems, etc.