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Irene Paoletti, EU Project Manager for Energy Efficiency in Industrial Processes (EEIP), explains how city-industrial symbiosis connects cities and industry to share resources, reduce energy use and emissions, and build resilient and competitive regional partnerships that support Europe’s sustainable energy transition. The EU’s industry is decarbonising and at the same time becoming more resilient and competitive to meet the EU’s long-term climate and energy goals. However, the role of industrial symbiosis is often overlooked in industrial and energy policies and remains underutilized. By effectively linking industry and cities, city-industrial symbiosis provides a powerful pathway to reduce energy demand, strengthen resilience,…
This article describes the scientific motivation and high-level concept for a warning system for advanced space weather prediction with increasing accuracy. As humanity’s reliance on microelectronics and orbital infrastructure reaches critical levels, our civilisation faces an unprecedented vulnerability to solar volatility. While the original Dyson sphere was a thought experiment in energy harvesting, the “new Dyson sphere” is a pragmatic necessity for planetary defence: a distributed, interplanetary framework of information-capture constellations. By integrating multipoint spacecraft clusters, standardised mass-produced units, and real-time AI forecasting, this proposed system moves beyond the 30-minute warning window of current Lagrange-1 point monitors. It offers a…
Kais Khimji has spent most of his professional career as a venture investor, including six years as a partner at the prominent VC firm Sequoia Capital. But like several other former Sequoia partners, including David Vélez, who founded Brazilian digital bank Nubank, Kimji (pictured left) always wanted to be a startup founder. He announced Thursday that he has revived an idea he started working on as a student at Harvard University nearly a decade ago and reborn as Blockit, an AI calendar scheduling company. In a major vote of confidence, Kimji’s former employer Sequoia led the company’s $5 million seed…
Defense technology company Anduril on Thursday announced plans to expand its Southern California presence with the opening of a large campus in Long Beach, the coastal town where founder Palmer Lackey grew up. The expanded campus is expected to eventually support approximately 5,500 jobs. Lackey told TechCrunch that these will be new jobs, not transfers from other roles. Anduril’s headquarters are in nearby Costa Mesa, California, and it also has a large manufacturing facility in Ohio. The Long Beach campus spans 1.18 million square feet across six buildings and combines office space and industrial areas dedicated to research and development.…
In Silicon Valley, when a unicorn stumbles, there’s a sense of schadenfreude. So when the Journal broke the news Thursday afternoon that Capital One would acquire Brex for $5.15 billion in cash and stock (Capital One issued an official release confirming the details a half-hour later), you could almost hear the collective laughter from Sand Hill Road to San Francisco’s South Park. This figure represents less than half of the final private market valuation of Brex’s 2022 Series D-2 round of $12.3 billion. Before anyone sharpens their knives, consider that this sale is a win for the VCs who originally…
It’s been nearly two years since Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted that knowledge work (the white-collar jobs held by lawyers, investment bankers, librarians, accountants, IT, etc.) would be replaced by AI. However, despite the great advances made with basic models, changes in knowledge work have been slow to emerge. Models have mastered thorough research and agency planning, but for some reason, most white-collar jobs remain relatively untouched. This is one of the biggest mysteries in AI, and thanks to new research from training data giant Mercor, we finally have some answers. New research examines how leading AI models drawn from…
The experimental treatment uses specialized neurons derived from stem cells to “absorb” triggers of pain and inflammation in arthritic knees of mice.The experiments in laboratory mice suggest that this treatment could help people with chronic pain caused by diseases such as osteoarthritis, for example. Researchers say a “pain sponge” could help patients stop relying on opioid drugs for pain relief.And as a bonus side effect, the engineered neurons also promoted bone and cartilage repair in the mice tested, the researchers reported in a preprint posted on the server bioRxiv in December 2025. This study has not yet been peer-reviewed. you…
The extreme cold from the incoming winter blast could cause some trees to “explode,” a viral social media post claims, but don’t expect them to start blowing away like cars in an action movie.”Trees are likely to explode across the Midwest and northern Plains on Friday and Saturday as temperatures are expected to drop to 20 degrees below zero,” Max Velocity (real name Max Schuster), a weather-based content creator with a degree in meteorology, wrote in a post on social platform X.The frigid temperatures are caused by a wave of arctic air moving south. The National Weather Service (NWS) predicts…
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said he was “surprised” that OpenAI was already moving to introduce advertising within its AI chatbots. In an interview with Axios at Davos, the AI leader answered a question about using advertising to monetize AI services, saying the idea is something Google’s team is considering “very carefully.” Hassabis also said that despite how important advertising is to Google’s core business, his team feels no pressure from the tech giant to make decisions about advertising “on the fly.” The DeepMind co-founder’s remarks came on the heels of Friday’s news that OpenAI will launch Test ads as…
Although AI chatbots are getting better at answering questions, summarizing documents, and solving mathematical equations, they still act like helpful assistants for one user at a time. They aren’t designed to manage the heavy lifting of real collaboration, like coordinating people with competing priorities, tracking decisions over time, and keeping teams aligned over time. Humans&, a new startup founded by alumni from Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, believes bridging that gap is the next major frontier for foundational models. This week, the company raised $480 million in a seed round to build a “central nervous system” for the…