Water from Air could produce enough daily water for a family of four.

Sustainability and generative AI are two topics that are currently taking the world by storm. While they may seem unrelated, there is a significant intersection between the two. A recent study called "Making AI Less Thirsty" reveals just how much water is consumed when training large AI models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard. The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Colorado Riverside and the University of Texas Arlington. It compares and measures the environmental impact of AI training that requires massive amounts of constant electricity and water. The water is used to cool data centers that are essential to keep them running.

In 2017, a friend gave me some sourdough starter to make bread with, and ever since then, my life has changed. It sounds cheesy, but I discovered a hobby that has led me to buy almost 200 pounds of flour at a time (seriously), develop a biweekly pizza baking habit, and dream of what bread I'm going to make in the coming days! Because I spend a lot of time baking sourdough and experimenting with new formulas, I wanted to see if I could create an artificial intelligence-powered recipe generator that would predict something for me to make! One of my go-to websites for technique, tips and tricks has been the helpful bread baking forum, The Fresh Loaf, where people ask questions and post recipes. My idea was to scrape this website and get data to train a neural network to generate new bread recipes -- and that's what I did.

I can't count the number of animal stories that appeared in my timelines this year with comments like, "Everything is garbage, so here's this." There was the cat who was reunited with her family after the Camp Fire, in California, and the parrot who was adopted after getting kicked out of an animal shelter for swearing too saltily. Among the bears preparing for hibernation at Katmai National Park, a female named Beadnose became famous for being the most gloriously round. There was the baby raccoon who scaled a skyscraper in St. Paul, "Mission Impossible" style, stopping occasionally for naps in window ledges along the way. Stories from the animal world offer reliable moments of escapism--the ones we see in viral videos are usually cute, or tame, or strange and majestic, and glimpsed from a safe distance.

Leibniz's (1984) An Introduction to a Secret Encyclopedia includes the following marginal note: Principle of Physical Certainty: Everything which men have experienced always and in many ways will still happen: for example that iron sinks in water (Leibniz 1984). In our daily lives, we routinely use this principle. Thus, we know that we can pull with a string but not push with it; that a flower pot dropped from our balcony falls to the ground and breaks; that when we place a container of water on fire, water might boil after a while and overflow the container. The origin of such knowledge is a matter of constant debate. It is clear that we learn a great deal about the physical world as we grow up.

As a challenge problem for AI systems, I propose the use of hand-constructed multiple-choice tests, with problems that are easy for people but hard for computers. Specifically, I discuss techniques for constructing such problems at the level of a fourth-grade child and at the level of a high school student. For the fourth-grade-level questions, I argue that questions that require the understanding of time, of impossible or pointless scenarios, of causality, of the human body, or of sets of objects, and questions that require combining facts or require simple inductive arguments of indeterminate length can be chosen to be easy for people, and are likely to be hard for AI programs, in the current state of the art. For the high school level, I argue that questions that relate the formal science to the realia of laboratory experiments or of real-world observations are likely to be easy for people and hard for AI programs. I argue that these are more useful benchmarks than existing standardized tests such as the SATs or New York Regents tests.

A large tiger shark was seen Friday near the South Beach in Miami, Florida, swimming dangerously close to beachgoers, who had no idea a predator was floating inches away from them. Photographer Kenny Melendez was flying his drone above the South Beach waters at 8 a.m. EST on Nov. 24, hoping to get some scenic shots and show his cousin how drones work, when he noticed a sizeable shadow near a swimmer, Miami Herald reported. That is when he panned the drone camera close to the water, hovering it just 15 feet above the surface. As it turned out, the shadow was an enormous tiger shark that was swimming really close to the sandy beach of Miami. Melendez decided to let his drone follow the shark around for the next 10 minutes, as it swam up to unsuspecting beachgoers wading in the waters.

Hurtigruten cruise line introduces a new way to see what lurks beneath the world's most remote polar waters. On its expedition ships, the company is introducing an underwater drone that streams real-time video of orcas, leopard sharks, penguins and other creatures beneath the water. Or passengers can wear masks with digital displays that may make them feel like they're on a dive deep in the ocean Hurtigruten plans to start by outfitting two hybrid-powered ships -- the Roald Amundsen and the Fridtjof Nansen -- with the new underwater drone. "[W]ith underwater drones on our ships we can take our guests to areas less explored than the surface of Mars," company Chief Executive Daniel Skjeldam said in a statement.

This could one day be used as a blueprint for mini robotic surgeons or explorers. Each exoskeleton starts out as a sheet of plastic onto which the robot, known as Primer, rolls. One gives it the ability to roll, meaning it can move twice as fast as without the exoskeleton; another is shaped like a boat, letting it float on water and carry nearly twice its weight. "In the future, we imagine robots like this could become mini surgeons, squished into a pill that you swallow," says Daniela Rus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

That's what Rolls-Royce is working on with their autonomous naval vessel concept that plans to have a 3,500 nautical-mile range. The company sees a future in the next 10 years or so where autonomous boats are out in the water for up to 100 days, eliminating the need for remote controlled ships or crews. Rolls-Royce general manager of naval electrics, automation and control, Benjamin Thorp said in a news release, "Such ships offer a way to deliver increased operational capability, reduce the risk to crew, and cut both operating and build costs." The ship is all conceptual, but the Verge reported a Norwegian company is launching an automated cargo ship next year that plans to be autonomous by 2020.