December 27, 2024

The world’s first industrial-scale plant for green steel promises a cleaner future

As of 2023, nearly 2 billion metric tons of it were being produced annually, enough to cover Manhattan in a layer more than 13 feet thick.  Making this metal produces a huge amount of carbon dioxide. Overall, steelmaking accounts for around 8% of the world’s carbon emissions—one of the largest industrial emitters and far more…

November 2024

Africa’s AI researchers are ready for takeoff

November 12, 2024
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When we talk about the global race for AI dominance, the conversation often focuses on tensions between the US and China, and European efforts at regulating the technology.  But it’s high…

Generative AI taught a robot dog to scramble around a new environment

November 12, 2024
Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by humans, but that’s scarce, and expensive to collect. Digital simulations are a rapid, scalable way to teach them to do new things, but the robots often fail when they’re pulled out of virtual worlds…