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Enlarge / Someone just asked what it would look like if their girlfriend was a Smurf. Better add another rack of servers! (credit: Getty Images) Late last week, both Bloomberg and The Washington Post published stories focused on the ostensibly disastrous impact artificial intelligence is having on the power grid and on efforts to collectively reduce our use of fossil fuels.

Enlarge / Some of the waste material that ends up part of these bricks. (credit: Seamus Daniel, RMIT University) Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia have developed special “energy-smart bricks” that can be made by mixing clay with glass waste and coal ash. These bricks can help mitigate the negative effects of traditional brick manufacturing, an energy-intensive process that requires large-scale clay mining, contributes heavily to CO2 emissions, and generates a lot of air pollution. According to the RMIT researchers, “Brick kilns worldwide consume 375 million tonnes (~340 million metric tons) of coal in combustion annually, which is equivalent to 675 million tonnes of CO2 emission (~612 million metric tons).” This exceeds the combined annual carbon dioxide emissions of 130 million passenger vehicles in the US. The energy-smart bricks rely on a material called RCF waste.

Enlarge / Ligeia Mare, the second-largest body of liquid hydrocarbons on Titan. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell) During its T85 Titan flyby on July 24, 2012, the Cassini spacecraft registered an unexpectedly bright reflection on the surface of the lake Kivu Lacus. Its Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) data was interpreted as a roughness on the methane-ethane lake, which could have been a sign of mudflats, surfacing bubbles, or waves. “Our landscape evolution models show that the shorelines on Titan are most consistent with Earth lakes that have been eroded by waves,” says Rose Palermo, a coastal geomorphologist at St.

Enlarge / A screen shows a virtual meeting with Microsoft Teams at a conference on January 30, 2024 in Barcelona, Spain. (credit: Cesc Maymo / Contributor | Getty Images News) Microsoft may be hit with a massive fine in the European Union for "possibly abusively" bundling Teams with its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 software suites for businesses. On Tuesday, the European Commission (EC) announced preliminary findings of an investigation into whether Microsoft's "suite-centric business model combining multiple types of software in a single offering" unfairly shut out rivals in the "software as a service" (SaaS) market. "Since at least April 2019," the EC found, Microsoft's practice of "tying Teams with its core SaaS productivity applications" potentially restricted competition in the "market for communication and collaboration products."Read 31 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Julian Assange in an airplane in a photo posted by WikiLeaks on June 25, 2024. (credit: WikiLeaks) WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal charge, ending a long extradition battle with the United States government. Assange will reportedly avoid further jail time and be allowed to return to his home country of Australia. Assange won't have to travel to the continental United States.

Enlarge (credit: Arkadiusz Warguła via Getty) Artificial intelligence-generated “deepfakes” that impersonate politicians and celebrities are far more prevalent than efforts to use AI to assist cyber attacks, according to the first research by Google’s DeepMind division into the most common malicious uses of the cutting-edge technology. The study said the creation of realistic but fake images, video, and audio of people was almost twice as common as the next highest misuse of generative AI tools: the falsifying of information using text-based tools, such as chatbots, to generate misinformation to post online. The most common goal of actors misusing generative AI was to shape or influence public opinion, the analysis, conducted with the search group’s research and development unit Jigsaw, found.