Chemical products such as medicines, plastics, soap, and paint are still often based on fossil raw materials. This is not sustainable, so there is an urgent need for ways to make a'materials transition' to products made from bio-based raw materials. To achieve results more quickly and efficiently, researchers at Radboud University in the Big Chemistry programme are using robots and AI. The material transition from fossil-based to bio-based (where raw materials are based on materials of biological origin) is a major challenge. Raw materials for products must be replaced without changing the quality of those products.

Plans for a groundbreaking rare earths refinery in East Yorkshire have been abandoned, after the company behind the project decided to seek investment in the United States instead. Pensana has spent the past seven years developing a rare earths mine in Angola. The $268m (£185m) project, one of the largest of its kind in the world, will begin delivering raw materials in 2027. The company had planned to build a refinery at the Saltend Chemicals Plant near Hull, which would have processed the raw materials into metals used to create powerful magnets. These magnets would then be used in high-tech applications such as motors for electric vehicles, wind turbines and robotics.

Photo credit: Muntaka Chasant, reproduced under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Just outside the historic German town of Goslar, a sprawling industrial complex receives an endless stream of discarded electronics. On arrival, this electronic waste is laboriously prepared for recycling. Electrocycling GmbH is one of the largest e-waste recycling facilities in Europe. Every year, it processes up to 80 000 tonnes of electronic waste, which comes in all shapes and forms.

The pursuit of quality improvements and accountability in the food supply chains, especially how they relate to food-related outcomes, such as hunger, has become increasingly vital, necessitating a comprehensive approach that encompasses product quality and its impact on various stakeholders and their communities. Such an approach offers numerous benefits in increasing product quality and eliminating superfluous measurements while appraising and alleviating the broader societal and environmental repercussions. A traceable impact management model (TIMM) provides an impact structure and a reporting mechanism that identifies each stakeholder's role in the total impact of food production and consumption stages. The model aims to increase traceability's utility in understanding the impact of changes on communities affected by food production and consumption, aligning with current and future government requirements, and addressing the needs of communities and consumers. This holistic approach is further supported by an ontological model that forms the logical foundation and a unified terminology. By proposing a holistic and integrated solution across multiple stakeholders, the model emphasizes quality and the extensive impact of championing accountability, sustainability, and responsible practices with global traceability. With these combined efforts, the food supply chain moves toward a global tracking and tracing process that not only ensures product quality but also addresses its impact on a broader scale, fostering accountability, sustainability, and responsible food production and consumption.

Concrete manufacturing projects are one of the most common ones for consulting agencies. Because of the highly non-linear dependency of input materials like ash, water, cement, superplastic, etc; with the resultant strength of concrete, it gets difficult for machine learning models to successfully capture this relation and perform cost optimizations. This paper highlights how PINNs (Physics Informed Neural Networks) can be useful in the given situation. This state-of-the-art model shall also get compared with traditional models like Linear Regression, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and Deep Neural Network. Results of the research highlights how well PINNs performed even with reduced dataset, thus resolving one of the biggest issues of limited data availability for ML models. On an average, PINN got the loss value reduced by 26.3% even with 40% lesser data compared to the Deep Neural Network. In addition to predicting strength of the concrete given the quantity of raw materials, the paper also highlights the use of heuristic optimization method like Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) in predicting quantity of raw materials required to manufacture concrete of given strength with least cost.

The Practimum-Optimum (P-O) algorithm represents a paradigm shift in developing automatic optimization products for complex real-life business problems such as large-scale manufacturing scheduling. It leverages deep business domain expertise to create a group of virtual human expert (VHE) agents with different "schools of thought" on how to create high-quality schedules. By computerizing them into algorithms, P-O generates many valid schedules at far higher speeds than human schedulers are capable of. Initially, these schedules can also be local optimum peaks far away from high-quality schedules. By submitting these schedules to a reinforced machine learning algorithm (RL), P-O learns the weaknesses and strengths of each VHE schedule, and accordingly derives reward and punishment changes in the Demand Set that will modify the relative priorities for time and resource allocation that jobs received in the prior iteration that led to the current state of the schedule. These cause the core logic of the VHE algorithms to explore, in the subsequent iteration, substantially different parts of the schedules universe and potentially find higher-quality schedules. Using the hill climbing analogy, this may be viewed as a big jump, shifting from a given local peak to a faraway promising start point equipped with knowledge embedded in the demand set for future iterations. This is a fundamental difference from most contemporary algorithms, which spend considerable time on local micro-steps restricted to the neighbourhoods of local peaks they visit. This difference enables a breakthrough in scale and performance for fully automatic manufacturing scheduling in complex organizations. The P-O algorithm is at the heart of Plataine Scheduler that, in one click, routinely schedules 30,000-50,000 tasks for real-life complex manufacturing operations.

The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an internet connection. But all of this is coming to an end. The advent of AI threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences. To understand why, you must understand publishing.

Nanoscale "robots" made of DNA that rapidly self-replicate could be harnessed to manufacture drugs or other chemicals inside the body, say researchers. Feng Zhou at New York University and his colleagues created the tiny machines, which are just 100 nanometres across, using four strands of DNA. The nanorobots are held in a solution with these DNA-strand raw materials, which they arrange into copies of themselves one at a time by using their own structure as a scaffold. The team didn't respond to a request for comment, but say in their paper that their nanobots are capable of exponential reproduction. Andrew Surman at King's College London, who wasn't involved in the research, says that the nanobots are a step forward in creating machines from DNA that could manufacture drugs or chemicals, or even act as rudimentary robots or computers.

The reverse engineering of a complex mixture, regardless of its nature, has become significant today. Being able to quickly assess the potential toxicity of new commercial products in relation to the environment presents a genuine analytical challenge. The development of digital tools (databases, chemometrics, machine learning, etc.) and analytical techniques (Raman spectroscopy, NIR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, etc.) will allow for the identification of potential toxic molecules. In this article, we use the example of detergent products, whose composition can prove dangerous to humans or the environment, necessitating precise identification and quantification for quality control and regulation purposes. The combination of various digital tools (spectral database, mixture database, experimental design, Chemometrics / Machine Learning algorithm{\ldots}) together with different sample preparation methods (raw sample, or several concentrated / diluted samples) Raman spectroscopy, has enabled the identification of the mixture's constituents and an estimation of its composition. Implementing such strategies across different analytical tools can result in time savings for pollutant identification and contamination assessment in various matrices. This strategy is also applicable in the industrial sector for product or raw material control, as well as for quality control purposes.

Optimization problems are pervasive across various sectors, from manufacturing and distribution to healthcare. However, most such problems are still solved heuristically by hand rather than optimally by state-of-the-art solvers, as the expertise required to formulate and solve these problems limits the widespread adoption of optimization tools and techniques. We introduce OptiMUS, a Large Language Model (LLM)-based agent designed to formulate and solve MILP problems from their natural language descriptions. OptiMUS is capable of developing mathematical models, writing and debugging solver code, developing tests, and checking the validity of generated solutions. To benchmark our agent, we present NLP4LP, a novel dataset of linear programming (LP) and mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problems. Our experiments demonstrate that OptiMUS solves nearly twice as many problems as a basic LLM prompting strategy. OptiMUS code and NLP4LP dataset are available at \href{https://github.com/teshnizi/OptiMUS}{https://github.com/teshnizi/OptiMUS}