sustainability
Josh Parker Is One of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI
Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. When Josh Parker joined Nvidia in 2023, there was just one other person on a team responsible for leading the sustainability strategy and public policy initiatives. It didn't deter him from his belief that they could make a difference.
How green is your robot? And other awkward questions
How green is your robot? Robots clean rivers and sort waste, monitor ecosystems, and inspect renewable-energy infrastructure . But even the greenest robot has an environmental footprint. Across a full lifecycle, from rare earth mineral extraction and manufacturing to operation and end-of-life, robots have an environmental impact. But the robotics community has, until now, lacked dedicated tools for calculating it.
40d45b1e23d00d5895e65778e85cf8ee-Paper-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a powerful tool for economic research, enabling large-scale simulation and policy optimization. However, applying AI effectively requires simulation platforms for scalable training and evaluation--yet existing environments remain limited to simplified, narrowly scoped tasks, falling short of capturing complex economic challenges such as demographic shifts, multigovernment coordination, and large-scale agent interactions. To address this gap, we introduce EconGym, a scalable and modular testbed that connects diverse economic tasks with AI algorithms. Grounded in rigorous economic modeling, EconGym implements 11 heterogeneous role types (e.g., households, firms, banks, governments), their interaction mechanisms, and agent models with well-defined observations, actions, and rewards. Users can flexibly compose economic roles with diverse agent algorithms to simulate rich multi-agent trajectories across 25+ economic tasks for AI-driven policy learning and analysis. Experiments show that EconGym supports diverse and cross-domain tasks--such as coordinating fiscal, pension, and monetary policies--and enables benchmarking across AI, economic methods, and hybrids. Results indicate that richer task composition and algorithm diversity expand the policy space, while AI agents guided by classical economic methods perform best in complex settings.
The Good Robot podcast: the battle over data centres with Tara Merk
Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. How can communities take back control of the digital infrastructure that powers everyday life? In this episode, Eleanor Drage speaks with Tara Merk about how community-owned data centers could transform digital ownership and challenge the dominance of Big Tech. The conversation explores alternative models of internet infrastructure that prioritize local empowerment, sustainability, and cooperative governance over corporate control. Drawing on examples from Germany's renewable energy sector and community-led initiatives, Merk reflects on how decentralized ownership models can create fairer and more environmentally responsible technological systems.
Macaroni penguins are surprisingly buff
New research into their musculature solves an over 100-year-old anatomical mystery. 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. Some pretty tough muscles lay beneath the macaroni penguin's () somewhat goofy exterior. These small penguins from the islands and waters of the South Atlantic Ocean are known for their distinctive bright-yellow plumes .
Big Tech Says Generative AI Will Save the Planet. It Doesn't Offer Much Proof
Big Tech Says Generative AI Will Save the Planet. A new report finds that of 154 specific claims about how AI will benefit the climate, just a quarter cited academic research. A third included no evidence at all. A few years ago, Ketan Joshi read a statistic about artificial intelligence and climate change that caught his eye. In late 2023, Google began claiming that AI could help cut global greenhouse gas emissions by between 5 and 10 percent by 2030.
Tech giant ASML announces record orders in boost for AI boom
Tech giant ASML has reported a quarterly record in orders of its chip-making equipment, boosting hopes for the sustainability of the artificial intelligence boom and countering fears of an investment bubble. The Dutch firm said on Wednesday that it booked orders worth 13.2 billion euros ($15.8bn) in the final quarter of 2025, more than half of which were for its most advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines. Net sales came to 9.7 billion euros in the October-December period, ASML said, taking sales for all of 2025 to 32.7 billion euros. Net profit for the year was 9.6 billion euros, up from 7.6 billion euros in 2024. ASML Chief Executive Officer Christophe Fouquet said the company's chip-making customers had conveyed a "notably more positive assessment" of the market situation in the medium term based on expectations of strong AI-related demand.
The fast and the future-focused are revolutionizing motorsport
From predictive analytics to personalized fan experiences, data and AI are powering the next generation of motorsport, says Rohit Agnihotri, principal technologist at Infosys, and Dan Cherowbrier, CTIO of Formula E. When the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship launched its first race through Beijing's Olympic Park in 2014, the idea of all-electric motorsport still bordered on experimental. Batteries couldn't yet last a full race, and drivers had to switch cars mid-competition. Just over a decade later, Formula E has evolved into a global entertainment brand broadcast in 150 countries, driving both technological innovation and cultural change in sport. Gen4, that's to come next year, says Dan Cherowbrier, Formula E's chief technology and information officer. You will see a really quite impressive car that starts us to question whether EV is there. Formula E's digital transformation, powered by its partnership with Infosys, is redefining what it means to be a fan. "It's a movement to make motor sport accessible and exciting for the new generation," says principal technologist at Infosys, Rohit Agnihotri. From real-time leaderboards and predictive tools to personalized storylines that adapt to what individual fans care most about--whether it's a driver rivalry or battery performance--Formula E and Infosys are using AI-powered platforms to create fan experiences as dynamic as the races themselves. Technology is not just about meeting expectations; it's elevating the entire fan experience and making the sport more inclusive, says Agnihotri. AI is also transforming how the organization itself operates. Historically, we would be going around the company, banging on everyone's doors and dragging them towards technology, making them use systems, making them move things to the cloud, Cherowbrier notes.