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The race to replace the powerful greenhouse gas that underpins the power grid

Despite their relatively small contributions so far, emissions of the gas are ticking up, and the growth rate has been climbing every year. SF6 emissions in China nearly doubled between 2011 and... Read more »

The Download: monkey names, and smart masks for health monitoring

The news: Do animals have names? It seems so, after new research appears to have discovered that small monkeys called marmosets “vocally label” their monkey friends with specific sounds. How they did... Read more »

A new way to build neural networks could make AI more understandable

The simplification, studied in detail by a group led by researchers at MIT, could make it easier to understand why neural networks produce certain outputs, help verify their decisions, and even probe... Read more »

A new smart mask analyzes your breath to monitor your health

“The biggest challenge has always been collecting real-time samples. This problem has been solved. That’s a paradigm shift,” says Rajan Chakrabarty, professor of Environmental and Chemical Engineering at Washington University in St.... Read more »

How machine learning is helping us probe the secret names of animals

Some similar research tactics were reported earlier this year by Mickey Pardo, a postdoctoral researcher, now at Cornell University, who spent 14 months in Kenya recording elephant calls. Elephants sound alarms by... Read more »

A prosthetic leg that feels like a real body part

Getting the neural interface hooked up to a prosthetic takes two steps. First is surgery involving the portions of muscle that remain after a lower-leg amputation. The operation reconnects shin muscle, which... Read more »

Architecting cloud data resilience

For all its competitive advantages, moving to the cloud presents unique challenges for data resilience. In fact, the qualities of cloud that make it so appealing to businesses—scalability, flexibility, and the ability... Read more »

The Download: protecting tech workers, and Canada’s wildfire emissions

—Stephen McMurtry is a Google Software Engineer and Communications Chair of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Tangled up in the contest to be the next US president, there is another battle brewing: Silicon... Read more »

Kamala Harris should stand with tech workers, not their bosses

On stage at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Harris vowed to center the concerns of working people over those of corporate America. If she stays committed to that path in the... Read more »

Canada’s 2023 wildfires produced more emissions than fossil fuels in most countries

Now a new study reveals how these blazes can create a vicious cycle, contributing to climate change even as climate-fueled conditions make for worse wildfire seasons.  Emissions from 2023’s Canadian wildfires reached 647... Read more »