Signals

A cautionary tale for a world racing into renewables: The large majority of mini-grids in India no longer work, an environmental group found.

Introducing Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2), a novel vision-language-action (VLA) model that learns from both web and robotics data, and translates this knowledge into generalised instructions for robotic control, while retaining web-scale capabilities. This work builds upon Robotic Transformer 1 (RT-1), a model trained on multi-task demonstrations which can learn combinations of tasks and objects seen in the robotic data. RT-2 shows improved generalisation capabilities and semantic and visual understanding, beyond the robotic data it was exposed to. This includes interpreting new commands and responding to user commands by performing rudimentary reasoning, such as reasoning about object categories or high-level descriptions.

Social media is abuzz with chatter about the material, but some scientists are pushing back on the hype.

Hylton Murray-Philipson says he contributed to gathering in Brazil because of growing climate threat

Wildfires have also engulfed popular Greek tourist destinations such as Corfu, Evia and Rhodes.

As the campaign for the 2024 elections in India goes digital, social media influencers have become a powerful tool to try and shape voter behavior.

For a quarter century, internet cafes connected the world. Now they’re vanishing into history.

Armed with new technology, botanists are proposing what was once thought impractical: reviving long-lost plant species by using seeds from dried specimens in collections. The challenges remain daunting, but researchers are now searching for the best de-extinction candidates.

An enhanced geothermal system expands the range of sites able to be tapped for geothermal energy, and Fervo’s demo is the first time a company has shown it can be done on this kind of commercial scale.

Dementia experts hail "watershed moment" after trial results for donanemab antibody treatment.

The company’s new internal tool is part of a push to boost productivity by removing a projected 322,000 hours of meetings this year.

Today the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that relates to a next-generation of AirPods Sensor System wherein the housing and tips of AirPods could include a number of active and reference electrodes configured to measure biosignals and electrical activity of a user's brain.

Move by city council follows action to limit public cannabis use and to discourage wild partying by young Britons

Arizona will not approve new housing construction on the fast-growing edges of its largest city that rely on groundwater thanks to years of overuse and a multi-decade drought worsened by the climate crisis

No, this is not a Black Mirror episode.

Dutch study identifies several examples of corvids’ ‘amazing’ ability to adapt to the urban environment

Funding & Learning for Systemic Change

New research raises concerns that moderation tools can't detect violent threats in Tigray and elsewhere.

Tesla Electric customers in Texas are reporting making as much as $150 a day during the heat waves as Tesla’s...

The Pope and the Vatican have partnered with Santa Clara University to publish a handbook about AI ethics.

This week, generative AI hit a new milestone: The first fully AI-generated drug reached clinical trials in human patients.

Reaching commercial production won’t be easy.

A new study suggests a link between past climate changes and a drop in the size of the human brain – an adaptive response that emerges in an analysis of climate records and human remains over a 50,000-year period.

Norge Mining hopes to open first mine in Norway within next five years