>I recently had the opportunity to ride in a car made by the British company Wayve, which has a fairly novel approach to self-driving vehicles.

>While a lot of AVs can only navigate on streets that have been loaded into their system, the Wayve vehicle operates more like a person.

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Countries in the European Union have approved a landmark law that will ensure all new cars sold from 2035 must have zero emissions.

Poland voted against the law, while Italy, Bulgaria and Romania abstained.

The agreement was delayed for weeks after Germany called for an exemption for cars running on e-fuels.

Once we emit about 1000 gigatons of carbon, much of the massive ice sheet will melt irreversibly. We’ve emitted 500 gigatons so far.

The Greenland Ice Sheet covers 1.7 million square kilometers (660,200 square miles) in the Arctic. If it melts entirely, global sea level would rise about 7 meters (23 feet), but scientists aren’t sure how quickly the ice sheet could melt. Modeling tipping points, which are critical thresholds where a system behavior irreversibly changes, helps researchers find out when that melt might occur.

Based in part on carbon emissions, a new study using simulations identified two tipping points for the Greenland Ice Sheet: releasing 1000 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere will cause the southern portion of the ice sheet to melt; about 2500 gigatons of carbon means permanent loss of nearly the entire ice sheet.

Having emitted about 500 gigatons of carbon, we’re about halfway to the first tipping point.

Inverse lithography produces features smaller than the wavelength of light, but it usually takes weeks to compute

Nvidia says it has found a way to speed up a computation-limited step in the chipmaking process so that it happens 40 times as fast as today’s standard.

Called inverse lithography, it’s a key tool that allows chipmakers to print nanometer-scale features using light with a longer wavelength than the size of those features. Inverse lithography’s use has been limited by the massive size of the needed computation.

Nvidia’s answer, cuLitho, is a set of algorithms designed for use with GPUs, turns what has been two weeks of work into an overnight job.

One side effect of unlimited content-creation machines—generative AI—is unlimited content.

On Monday, the editor of the renowned sci-fi publication Clarkesworld Magazine announced that he had temporarily closed story submissions due to a massive increase in machine-generated stories sent to the publication.

In a graph shared on Twitter, Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke tallied the number of banned writers submitting plagiarized or machine-generated stories.

The numbers totaled 500 in February, up from just over 100 in January and a low baseline of around 25 in October 2022.

The rise in banned submissions roughly coincides with the release of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022.

Getting PCBs made is fun and cheap, they’ll let you draw whatever you want on there, and the cops can’t stop you.

Astrophysicists propose geoengineering solution to climate warming

Proponents of a "moonshot" idea to deal with global heating have been handed a new, very literal, interpretation by researchers who have proposed firing plumes of moon dust from a gun into space in order to deflect the sun’s rays away from Earth.

The seemingly outlandish concept, outlined in a new research paper, would involve creating a "solar shield" in space by mining the moon of millions of tons of its dust and then "ballistically eject[ing]" it to a point in space about 1m miles from Earth, where the floating grains would partially block incoming sunlight.

The re-globalisation glimpsed in Davos will be fundamentally different from previous iterations

For the past decade, the steady demise of ‘Davos Man’ – the avatar of global business and cosmopolitanism – was the big story here, owing to the 2008 financial crisis, Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, democratic backsliding around the world, covid-19, and Russia’s war in Ukraine. All were seen as signs that globalisation had gone too far and would be thrown into reverse.

But the mood at this year’s meeting was slightly more optimistic. Despite much concern about conflict and economic strife, the world seems to be doing a little better than global elites expected when they last met in May. The Ukrainians are valiantly resisting the Russian invaders, the West is united, Europe has managed to keep the lights on this winter, and some think we might still avoid a recession.

Moreover, beneath these important short-term developments is a more profound shift toward a new form of globalisation, albeit one that will be quite different from what preceded it. While the globalisation of goods seems to have peaked, services are becoming ever more globalised, owing to the revolution in telework during the pandemic.

There is also an accelerating revolution in energy, driven partly by the war in Ukraine. European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, predict that the widespread adoption of renewables and hydrogen power will be as significant as the industrial revolution of the 19th century.

At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are opening vast new possibilities, while also creating tensions over microchips and renewed fears about joblessness and rogue robots.

Single-molecule protein sequencing

Volume electron microscopy

CRISPR anywhere

High-precision radiocarbon dating

Single-cell metabolomics

In vitro embryo models

James Webb Space Telescope

Scientists engineer artificial organs for integration into the human body to replace, duplicate, or augment functional, naturally occurring organs. They pose a solution to organ donor shortages, and can also be used as medical training tools.

Based on the materials researchers use to produce them, artificial organs are divided into three main classes.

Mechanical artificial organs are made exclusively of inanimate polymers such as plastics and metals;

biomechanical organs involve both living materials such as cells and inanimate materials;

and biological or bioartificial organs can be made of living cells and biodegradable polymers.

High fertilizer prices could put an additional 100 million people at risk of undernourishment, a study suggests.

The war in Ukraine has led to the blockade of millions of tons of wheat, barley and corn, but reduced food exports from the region are less of a driver of food price rises than feared, researchers say.

Instead, a modeling study led by University of Edinburgh researchers suggests surging energy and fertilizer prices will have by far the greatest impact on food security in coming decades.