Science

2024 was another record-breaking year—global temperatures continued to rise; an especially active hurricane season left a trail of destruction in the U.S; catastrophic floods rattled Spain and Central Europe; and wildfires decimated parts of North and South America—to name just a few of the headlines. But it was also a year filled with exciting opportunities for collaboration, bringing together people from diverse fields within academia, policy and research, alongside community members, to discuss new ways to combat, mitigate and prevent the effects of climate change during Climate Week NYC, COP29 and the World Water Film Festival, among other initiatives. For the first time in almost nine years, the seismic vessel R/V Marcus G. Langseth also made a stop in New York City for some mu...

Imagine taking a hammer to your laptop. You smash it apart and shards of plastic, batteries and circuit board go flying. It would be an act of vandalism, a shocking waste of money and resources, so much so that it sounds absurd. But the truth is that, every time we use a computer, we are dealing with a machine that is, at the fundamental level, even more wasteful than this. It all goes back to a decision made decades ago about the deep workings of computer logic and how these machines delete data, a process that inevitably produces a large amount of waste heat. For a long time, we have muddled through with wasteful computers. But with the rise of artificial intelligence, which has pushed the power demands of computing to new heights, this seemingly inconsequential dec...

The author, left, and filmmaker Sumit Rezwan Shahriar, at COP29 My journey from New York City to Baku, Azerbaijan, host of this year’s UN climate change conference (COP29), took me over seven thousand miles of earth and sea. I arrived in Baku at night, where colorful, flame-shaped towers define the landscape of this city. Once a Soviet Republic and now an oil rich petrostate, Azerbaijan shares borders with Iran, Armenia and Russia. Over the next two weeks, more than 60,000 world leaders, experts and members of civil society exchanged ideas and information, while high-level negotiations with delegates from nearly 200 countries took place in secured rooms. I serve on the steering committee for UNFCCC Entertainment & Culture for Climate Action Film & TV (ECCA). As an educator...

OpenAI announced a breakthrough achievement for its new o3 AI modelRokas Tenys / Alamy OpenAI’s new o3 artificial intelligence model has achieved a breakthrough high score on a prestigious AI reasoning test called the ARC Challenge, inspiring some AI fans to speculate that o3 has achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI). But even as ARC Challenge organisers described o3’s achievement as a major milestone, they also cautioned that it has not won the competition’s grand prize – and it is only one step on the path towards AGI, a term for hypothetical future AI with human-like intelligence. The o3 model is the latest in a line of AI releases that follow on from the large language models powering ChatGPT. “This is a surprising and important step-function increase in A...

The bartender says: “We don’t serve time travellers in here.” A time traveller walks into a bar. OK, yes, I will almost certainly regret starting this article with such a hoary old joke. At some point, most of us have wished we could travel back in time to repair some misstep or faux pas. But it’s impossible, right? Well, not necessarily. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity suggests that time travel may indeed be possible. We know that matter can bend space-time, and if you bend it enough, you may be able to create a time loop. Caveats abound, of course, and researchers are yet to announce a working time machine. But that hasn’t put them off exploring the possibilities. Here are five ways that time travel might just be feasible, from science fiction st...