Telescope #79

To look beyond visual range…

“Our task must be to widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” — Albert Einstein

SUSTAINABILITY

• Schneider Electric, the leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation, together with Boston University, today announces a first-of-its-kind study that finds that more than 2 million new jobs and up to 141 million additional job years can be created in Europe and the United States by adopting clean energy technologies in new and retrofitted buildings. The results come from a research collaboration between the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS) and the Schneider ElectricTM Sustainability Research Institute (SRI). DETAIL

  

• Norway’s parliament voted Tuesday for a bill to allow deep-sea mining in the Arctic waters of the Norwegian Sea. The government has said it plans to move forward with mining of the seabed for minerals sustainably, requiring environmental studies before approving licenses. However, environmentalists have said this practice cannot be done without harming marine life. DETAIL

• As the planet warms and extinctions mount, scientists are racing to catalog the vast array of life on Earth before species disappear. This year, researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, recorded 89 new species of plant and fungi across the globe, from the rocky edges of Antarctica to a dormant volcano in Indonesia. “It is an incredibly exciting time to be a scientist, but even as we make these wonderful new discoveries, we must remember that nature is under threat, and we have the power to do something about it,” Martin Cheek, a senior researcher with Kew, said in a statement. DETAIL

  

• The European Parliament has voted to adopt a law regulating sustainability claims on product labels. The law will prohibit retailers from making general environmental claims and sustainability claims without evidence. The law bans the use of terms including “eco,” “biodegradable,” “environmentally friendly,” “natural” and “climate neutral” without evidence. DETAIL

HEALTH

• The FDA has cleared DermaSensor’s first-of-its-kind handheld device that uses artificial intelligence to non-invasively detect skin cancer, the Miami-based device maker announced Wednesday. The FDA has cleared DermaSensor’s first-of-its-kind handheld device that uses artificial intelligence to non-invasively detect skin cancer, the Miami-based device maker announced Wednesday. DETAIL

• Research has shown that the average daily cigarette consumption per capita in Turkey is 17.1, which ranks first in the world.  It was announced that this figure was 15.7 in Greece, 15.5 in Israel, and 15.4 in Japan and Austria. DETAIL

• Recent work suggests SARS and MERS would have a harder time triggering a fresh pandemic because almost everyone in the world now has antibodies to the virus that causes covid-19 and these seem to give partial protection against most other pathogens in the coronavirus family. DETAIL

DIGITAL / TECHNOLOGY / SCIENCE /AI

• Big tech companies like Apple and OpenAI are offering new ways of interacting with computers that bypass traditional displays, mice and keyboards. Will screens soon become a thing of the past? DETAIL

• A “shocking” amount of the internet is machine-translated garbage, particularly in languages spoken in Africa and the Global South, a new study has found. Researchers at the Amazon Web Services AI lab found that over half of the sentences on the web have been translated into two or more languages, often with increasingly worse quality due to poor machine translation (MT), which they said raised “serious concerns” about the training of large language models. DETAIL

• HAVELSAN, which meets the software-based needs of the Turkish Armed Forces, developed an artificial intelligence robot.  The artificial intelligence robot, called MAIN GPT, is planned to be accessible on February 1. DETAIL

• With the Digital Young Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem established within the Digital Transformation Office of the Presidency of Turkey, student clubs for artificial intelligence experts at universities will be gathered under one roof. - The workforce potentially gathered in the field of artificial intelligence will be supported with career awards after competitions and training, thus the contributions of national artificial intelligence systems will be presented. DETAIL

• U.S. edutech platform Coursera, opens new tab added a new user every minute on average for its artificial intelligence courses in 2023, CEO Jeff Maggioncalda said on Thursday, in a clear sign of people upskilling to tap a potential boom in generative AI. DETAIL

• In an interview with Business Insider, former OpenAI executive Zack Kass went off about all the ways he thinks AI will save the world. He's such a believer in that idea that he left OpenAI to "support the AI revolution" last fall, becoming something of a self-appointed PR agent for the algorithms. DETAIL

• Sisecam has started work on an artificial intelligence project to reduce production waste as well as carbon emissions. The Turkish glass manufacturer will implement a Glass Colour Optimisation Project (CROP) using artificial intelligence and Machine Learning Methods. The project, alongside partners Koç University, TÜBİTAK Artificial Intelligence Institute, Analythinx, and Şişecam aims to eliminate colour issues during glass manufacturing. DETAIL

ENERGY / TRANSPORTATION

• LG Electronics on Friday opened its first factory in the U.S. for assembling electric-vehicle charging stations as the South Korean electronics giant looks to capture a share in the fast-growing market dominated by market leader ChargePoint. DETAIL

• The world’s largest offshore wind farm started powering the UK grid. A joint venture between Britain’s SSE and Norway’s Equinor and Vårgrønn, the Dogger Bank site will eventually power 6 million homes once all turbines are operational in 2026. DETAIL

  

• In the USA, aviation service provider Atlantic Aviation is joining forces with three developers of electric air cabs to set up charging stations for them at airports. DETAIL

CYBERSECURITY

• U.S. lawmakers have urged the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to review its cyber security preparedness after the financial regulator's X account posted market material information earlier in the week due to a hack. DETAIL

• New breach: The Naz.API stealer logs and cred stuffing lists were posted to a hacking forum in Sep. Data included 71M email addresses and 100M plain text passwords, often alongside the service they were used for. 67% were already in @haveibeenpwned. DETAIL

HUMAN

• By now, everyone has seen those Tiktoks arguing that taking birth control causes low sex drive, drastic weight gain, and mood swings. Being constantly inundated by content like that is probably why, in one poll last year, over half of the 4,000 women surveyed said they worried about the potential impacts of hormonal contraception on their mental and physical health. DETAIL

• An enormous ancient civilization has been discovered in Ecuador’s Upano Valley, hidden for millenia by rainforest vegetation, reported the BBC. The existence of the intricately laid development rewrites previous assumptions about the human history of the Amazon. The settlement — located beneath a volcano — has a web of canals and roads connecting homes and plazas. The volcano’s rich minerals meant fertile soil for the agricultural community, but may have also been the cause of its demise. DETAIL

  

• Aiming to reduce loneliness, Oma's Soep introduces green 'chat baskets' in supermarkets. By grabbing one, people signal they're happy to engage in a chat. DETAIL