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Extreme Heat Will Cost the U.S. $1 Billion in Health Care Costs — This Summer Alone
Extreme heat — summertime temperatures and humidity that exceed the historical average — is being made more frequent and intense by climate change. High temperatures could lead to 235,000 ER visits and 56,000 hospital admissions for heat-related conditions annually.
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Opportunities for Australia–ASEAN Collaboration on Critical Minerals
Southeast Asia’s energy transition is coming to life as the development of green technologies accelerates across the region. Securing critical minerals will be crucial to this process, and Australia should work with Southeast Asia to realize their mutual goals in this area.
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Climate Change Has Sent Temperatures Soaring in Texas
Hotter days and nights. More record highs. Climate change has shifted the entire range of Texas heat upwards. Heat is one of the deadliest consequences of climate change. It’s already the most dangerous type of weather, typically killing more people annually than hurricanes, tornadoes or flooding.
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Tidal Energy Project for Carbon Emission Reduction and Energy Security
The University of Oxford will lead an ambitious £7 million project to help deliver scalable, affordable and sustainable tidal stream energy. The project will address the key challenges that are currently preventing the tidal energy sector from reaching its full potential, with the aim of boosting energy security.
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FireDrone Supports the Firefighters
Researchers are developing a heat-resistant drone that can analyze the source of danger at close range in the event of a building or forest fire. This allows firefighters to optimize the strategy of a high-risk operation before entering the danger zone.
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Who Will Benefit from Australia’s Critical Minerals Strategy?
Critical mineral projects will be favored for Australian federal government loans under its new critical minerals strategy, but there are to be no tailored tax breaks. Nor are there any plans to make downstream processing a condition of mining or export approvals.
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Four Ways Criminals Could Use AI to Target More Victims
Warnings about artificial intelligence (AI) are ubiquitous right now, but we have been using AI tools for a long time. AI is a tool to increase efficiency, process and sort large volumes of data, and offload decision making – and these tools are open to everyone, including criminals. Observing how criminals have adapted to, and adopted, technological advances in the past, can provide some clues as to how they might use AI.
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Titan Destroyed by “Catastrophic Implosion”
The U.S. Coast Guard announced Thursday afternoon that the Titan submersible was likely destroyed by a catastrophic implosion. The Titan joins a sad, and long, list of lethal maritime accidents.
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Rare Earth Elements in Turkey: Emerging Prospects
Turkey discovered the world’s second-largest deposit of rare earth elements (REEs) in 2022, with an estimated reserve size of 694 million tons, making it the world’s second largest REEs deposit after China’s reserves of 800 million tons. China accounts for 60 percent of the worldwide REEs mined production, 85 percent of the world’s REEs processing capacity, and 90 percent share of the manufacturing of high-strength rare earth permanent magnets.
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Robots Could Help Verify Compliance with Nuclear Arms Agreements
Ensuring that countries abide by future nuclear arms agreements will be a vital task. Inspectors may have to count warheads or confirm the removal of nuclear weapons from geographical areas. Those hotspots could include underground bunkers and require confirmation that no weapons exist in a location at all. Now, researchers have devised an automated way to ensure compliance.
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Scientific and Technological Flows Between the United States and China
What are the potential benefits and risks of U.S.-Chinese scientific research collaboration? What is the nature and volume of scientific researcher flows between the United States and China? What potential threats and benefits have emerged from the recent uptick in scientific collaboration between the United States and China on aerospace engineering research?
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As California Attempts a “Managed Retreat,” Coastal Homeowners Sue to Stay
“Managed retreat” is a climate adaptation policy that calls for relocating and removing coastal structures rather than protecting them where they are. Experts say managed retreat is an important last-resort option for adapting to climate change, but California’s early attempts to implement the policy have provoked a backlash from homeowners and politicians.
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Texas Farmers Are Worried One of the State’s Most Precious Water Resources Is Running Dry. You Should Be, Too.
The Ogallala Aquifer serves farming communities in multiple states. When it runs dry, the agriculture industry in Texas and the nation is in jeopardy.
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Can America’s Students Recover What They Lost During the Pandemic?
Disastrous test scores increasingly show how steep a toll the COVID-19 era exacted on students, particularly minorities. Schools are grappling with how to catch up, and the experience of one city shows how intractable the obstacles are.
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How Molten Salt Could Be the Lifeblood of Tomorrow’s Nuclear Energy
Molten salt has caught the eye of the nuclear industry as an ideal working fluid for reactor cooling, energy transfer, fueling and fission product absorption. Many of the salts being considered are inexpensive, nontoxic, and easily transportable – and table salt is one of the constituents many reactor developers are choosing to use.
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More headlines
The long view
AI-Controlled Weapons Should Be Banned from the Battlefield: Experts
AI expert says autonomous systems being used in the current Ukraine conflict need to be prohibited in the same way as chemical and biological weapons. “I’m quite hopeful that we will, at some point, decide that autonomous weapons also be added to the lists of terrible ways to fight war like chemical weapons, like biological weapons. What worries me is that in most cases, we’ve only regulated various technologies for fighting after we’ve seen the horrors of them being misused in battle,” he says.
Using Quantum Computing to Protect AI from Attack
Despite their incredible successes and increasingly widespread deployment, machine learning-based frameworks such as AI remain highly susceptible to adversarial attacks – that is, malicious tampering with their data causing them to fail in surprising ways. AI can thus be fooled into making mistakes, sometimes risking lives — but quantum computing could provide a strong defense.
Training Students to Succeed in the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”
Transformational changes are already underway in the manufacturing industry as technological advancements, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and smart devices from the “fourth industrial revolution” or Industry 4.0., inspire a digital-first approach to engineering. University of Missouri researchers are using a $1 million grant to support the development of an Industry 4.0 lab, training engineering students for the future of digitization in manufacturing.
Multi-Billion-Dollar Risk to Economic Activity from Climate Extremes Affecting Ports
More than $122 billion of economic activity - $81 billion in international trade - is at risk from the impact of extreme climate events, according to new research. Systemic impacts – those risks faced due to knock-on effects within global shipping, trade and supply chains network - will hit ports and economies around the world, even if the local ports are not directly affected by extreme events.
Tech Breakthrough Could Increase States’ Use of Geothermal Power
Lawmakers in some states have been laying the groundwork to add geothermal power to the electrical grid and pump underground heat into buildings. Now, a technological breakthrough could dramatically expand those ambitions — and perhaps unleash a new wave of policies to tap into geothermal sources. If the technology’s promise is fulfilled, geothermal could power as much as 20% of the U.S. grid.
More U.S. Crops to Require Irrigation
With climate change, irrigating more crops in the United States will be critical to sustaining future yields, as drought conditions are likely to increase due to warmer temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns. Yet less than 20% of the nation’s croplands are equipped for irrigation.