Payal Dhar

The part that artificial intelligence plays in climate change has come under scrutiny, including from tech workers themselves who joined the global climate strike last year. Much can be done by developing tools to quantify the carbon cost of machine learning models and by switching to a sustainable artificial intelligence infrastructure.

With the Perseverance safely on Mars, now collecting rock and soil samples from the surface, it’s now time to plan the next stage of the mission: the return of the samples to Earth. The Mars Sample Return mission will be an unprecedented one in the history of space exploration, marrying decades of scientific knowledge and with cutting-edge technology. It will comprise separate, coordinated robotic missions requiring NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to combine their expertise.

Some have dubbed this the era of “smart agriculture”—with farms around the world scaling up their use of the Internet, IoT, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence to increase yields and sustainability. Yet with so much digital technology, naturally, also comes heightened potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities. There’s no scaling back smart agriculture either. By the end of this decade we will need the extra food it produces.

The pandemic may have put a temporary damper on our fuel needs, but forecasts from the International Energy Agency indicate that demand for transport fuel is expected to continue to rise through 2040, and maybe even beyond. Even though the share of renewables is likely to increase, the consumption of fossil fuels is predicted to rise as well.

Space is a long way to go to learn about human tissues, yet researchers have their gazes trained at the stars. Earlier this year, a team of researchers from the University of Zurich (UZH) sent 250 test tubes of carefully prepped human stem cells to the U.S. National Laboratory on the International Space Station (ISS). They wanted to study how the near-weightless, microgravitational environment of the ISS affects these building-block cells in the hope of understanding some of their secrets.

They say you always remember your first kill, but I struggle to do so. It might have been sniping Guiseppe “Don” Guillani from the hill across his mansion. Or perhaps it was garroting the delivery man and taking his place to infiltrate the Don’s domain.
Either way, it was in Hitman: Silent Assassin (2002) when I first stepped into the classic black suit of Agent 47, traveling the world, invading the worlds of the rich and famous, and picking them off silently. What is it about this game that brings me — a card-carrying pacifist — such glee?

Holi, a holiday known around the world as a festival of colors, is an important event in the Hindu calendar of north India. It signifies the end of winter and the arrival of spring, and is filled with revelry, camaraderie, food, drink — usually lots of it — and color. But the physical nature of the festivities can give tacit approval to unwanted attention that may easily cross over into assault and sexual violence.

Last month, a site on the dark web claimed to have 8.2 terabytes of user data from the Indian mobile payments startup MobiKwik, one of the largest operators in the country that over 120 million people use for everything from buying eggs to paying rent. The data breach included phone numbers, email addresses, signatures, transaction logs, partial payment card numbers, scrambled passwords, and personal identification documents of around 100 million MobiKwik users, all available in a searchable database. The asking price for the data in its entirety was 1.5 bitcoin, or about $88,000.

What defines a real sport? Is it the physicality of straining muscles and pouring sweat, or the adrenaline-pumping high of competition? Perhaps it’s the discipline of following rules or a system of rankings and leagues and competitions. By any of these measures, competitive gaming — also known as esports — should easily qualify as a sport. Yet opinions remain divided.

What is popular fantasy today is inextricably linked to the idea of medievalism imagined in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the social and cultural values of that time, where heroism was associated with masculinity and whiteness.

Any successful implementation of artificial intelligence hinges on asking the right questions in the right way. That’s what the British AI company DeepMind (a subsidiary of Alphabet) accomplished when it used its neural network to tackle one of biology’s grand challenges, the protein-folding problem. Its neural net, known as AlphaFold, was able to predict the 3D structures of proteins based on their amino acid sequences with unprecedented accuracy.

The dawn of the robot revolution is already here, and it is not the dystopian nightmare we imagined. Instead, it comes in the form of social robots: Autonomous robots in homes and schools, offices and public spaces, able to interact with humans and other robots in a socially acceptable, human-perceptible way to resolve tasks related to core human needs. To design social robots that “understand” humans, robotics scientists are delving into the psychology of human communication.

Nintendo's blockbuster game is playing digital host to Australia's annual independent arts festival.

Active noise cancellation/control (ANC) headsets depend on passive sound attenuation from the padding and cups found in headphones and earphones. This makes ANC headphones effective noise control devices, although wearing these for extended periods of time can be uncomfortable and even cause injury. A group of researchers from the University of Technology Sydney have been working on a new kind of virtual noise cancellation system that moves the ANC components away from personal audio equipment and into the headrest of a chair.