"Good news, everyone! The new version of Mozilla's browser now makes even more extensive use of AI," writes the Register, "providing summaries of linked content and offering developers the ability to add LLM support to extensions." Firefox 142 brings some visible shininess, but due to the combination of regional restrictions and Mozilla's progressive rollout system, not everybody can see all the features just yet... Not geofenced but subject to phased rollout are link previews, for various native-English-speaking regions. Hover over, long-press, or right-click a link and pick Preview Link, and a summary should appear. Mozilla's summary says: "Previews can optionally include AI-generated key points, which are processed on your device to protect your privacy."
"Link Previews is gradually rolling out to ensure performance and quality," Firefox says in their release notes, "and is now available in en-US, en-CA, en-GB, en-AU for users with more than 3 GB of available RAM." (The notes also add a welcome for "the developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 20 of whom were brand new volunteers!")

The Register notes that Firefox 142 also gives developers the ability to add LLM support to extensions using wllama, a Wasm binding interfacing with llama.cpp, which lets you run Meta's Llama LLM and other models, locally or in the cloud.

The Hill reports: Russian state-sponsored hackers have targeted thousands of networking devices associated with U.S. critical infrastructure sectors over the past year, the FBI warned Wednesday. The cyber actors are associated with the Russian Federal Security Service's (FSB) Center 16 and have taken aim at a vulnerability in certain Cisco devices, according to an agency public service announcement.

In some cases, hackers have been able to modify configuration files to enable unauthorized access, which they have used to conduct reconnaissance on networks. This has "revealed their interest in protocols and applications commonly associated with industrial control systems," the FBI said.

Cisco's threat intelligence research arm, Talos, explained in a separate advisory that a subcluster of this group, which it has named "Static Tundra," is targeting a seven-year-old vulnerability in the company's Smart Install feature. The firm has offered a patch for the vulnerability, but it remains a problem in unpatched and end-of-life network devices, it warned.
"Once they establish initial access to a network device, Static Tundra will pivot further into the target environment, compromising additional network devices and establishing channels for long-term persistence and information gathering," warns the Talos blog. "This is demonstrated by the group's ability to maintain access in target environments for multiple years without being detected."

In a statement emailed to The Register, a Cisco spokesperson "said the company is aware of ongoing exploitation targeting this flaw." "We strongly urge customers to immediately upgrade to fixed software versions as outlined in the security advisory and follow our published security best practices," the spokesperson said, directing customers to the FBI's announcement and Cisco Talos blog for additional details.

The ongoing campaign targets telecommunications, higher education, and manufacturing organizations across North America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, "with victims selected based on their strategic interest to the Russian government," according to Talos researchers Sara McBroom and Brandon White. "We assess that the purpose of this campaign is to compromise and extract device configuration information en masse, which can later be leveraged as needed based on then-current strategic goals and interests of the Russian government," McBroom and White wrote.

And while both security alerts focus on the FSB's latest round of network intrusions, "many other state-sponsored actors also covet the access these devices afford," the Talos team warned. "Organizations should be aware that other advanced persistent threats (APTs) are likely prioritizing carrying out similar operations as well."
Some context from Hot Hardware: Cisco indicated in its advisory that "Only Smart Install client switches are affected by the vulnerability". The list of affected devices is in Table A-1 here. For a successful attack, hackers exploit a vulnerability tracked as CVE-2018-0171. This was a vulnerability that was patched way back in 2018.

The Atlantic reports some YouTube users noticed their uploaded videos have since "been subtly augmented, their appearance changing without their creators doing anything..."

"For creators who want to differentiate themselves from the new synthetic content, YouTube seems interested in making the job harder." When I asked Google, YouTube's parent company, about what's happening to these videos, the spokesperson Allison Toh wrote, "We're running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses image enhancement technology to sharpen content. These enhancements are not done with generative AI." But this is a tricky statement: "Generative AI" has no strict technical definition, and "image enhancement technology" could be anything. I asked for more detail about which technologies are being employed, and to what end. Toh said YouTube is "using traditional machine learning to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos," she told me. (It's unknown whether the modified videos are being shown to all users or just some; tech companies will sometimes run limited tests of new features.)

While running this experiment, YouTube has also been encouraging people to create and post AI-generated short videos using a recently launched suite of tools that allow users to animate still photos and add effects "like swimming underwater, twinning with a lookalike sibling, and more." YouTube didn't tell me what motivated its experiment, but some people suspect that it has to do with creating a more uniform aesthetic across the platform. As one YouTube commenter wrote: "They're training us, the audience, to get used to the AI look and eventually view it as normal."

Google isn't the only company rushing to mix AI-generated content into its platforms. Meta encourages users to create and publish their own AI chatbots on Facebook and Instagram using the company's "AI Studio" tool. Last December, Meta's vice president of product for generative AI told the Financial Times that "we expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that [human] accounts do...."

This is an odd turn for "social" media to take. Platforms that are supposedly based on the idea of connecting people with one another, or at least sharing experiences and performances — YouTube's slogan until 2013 was "Broadcast Yourself" — now seem focused on getting us to consume impersonal, algorithmic gruel.

"Solar and wind accounted for almost 91% of new U.S. electrical generating capacity added in the first five months of 2025..." reports Electrek, citing new data from America's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

"Solar has now been the largest source of new generating capacity added each month for 21 consecutive months, starting September 2023." The 11,518 MW of solar added during the first five months of 2025 was 75.3% of the total new capacity placed into service... Between January and May, new wind provided 2,379 MW of capacity additions, accounting for 15.6% of all new capacity added during the first five months of 2025. For the first five months of 2025, solar and wind comprised 90.9% of new capacity while natural gas (1,381 MW) provided just 9.0%; the remaining 0.1% came from oil (14 MW). Solar + wind are 22.9% of U.S. utility-scale generating capacity.

The installed capacities of solar (11.1%) and wind (11.8%) are now each more than a tenth of the U.S. total. Taken together, they constitute 22.9% of the U.S.'s total available installed utility-scale generating capacity. At least 25-30% of U.S. solar capacity is in the form of small-scale (e.g., rooftop) systems that are not reflected in FERC's data. Including that additional solar capacity would bring the share provided by solar + wind to more than a quarter of the U.S. total. With the inclusion of hydropower (7.7%), biomass (1.1%), and geothermal (0.3%), renewables currently claim a 32.0% share of total US utility-scale generating capacity. If small-scale solar capacity is included, renewables are now about one-third of total US generating capacity....

Taken together, the net new "high probability" capacity additions by all renewable energy sources over the next three years — the bulk of the Trump Administration's remaining time in office — would total 113,097 MW. There is no new nuclear capacity in FERC's three-year forecast, while coal and oil are projected to contract by 24,913 MW and 1,907 MW, respectively... If FERC's current "high probability" additions materialize by May 1, 2028, solar will account for 16.7% of US installed utility-scale generating capacity. Wind would provide an additional 12.7% of the total. Thus, each would be greater than coal (12.2%) and substantially more than nuclear power or hydropower (each 7.2%). In fact, assuming current growth rates continue, the installed capacity of utility-scale solar is likely to surpass that of either coal or wind within two years...

At the end of 2024, the mix of all renewables accounted for 30.96% of total generating capacity. Solar alone was 10.19% while wind was 11.68%. By the end of May, renewables' share had risen to 31.98% with solar at 11.13% and wind at 11.80%.
FERC also says that 43 "units" of solar totaling 1,515 megawatts (MW) were placed into service in May, according to the article, "accounting for 58.7% of all new generating capacity added during the month."

The U.S. government's 10% stake in Intel "is a mistake," writes the Washington Post's editorial board, calling Intel "an aging also-ran in critical markets" that "has spent recent years stumbling on execution and missing one strategic opportunity after another."

But TechCrunch points out that the U.S. government "does not appear to be committing new funds. Instead, it's simply making good on what Intel described as 'grants previously awarded, but not yet paid, to Intel.'" Specifically, the $8.9 billion is supposed to come from $5.7 billion awarded-but-not-paid to Intel under the Biden administration's CHIPS Act, as well as $3.2 billion also awarded by the Biden administration through the Secure Enclave program. In a post on his social network Truth Social, Trump wrote, "The United States paid nothing for these shares..." Trump has been critical of the CHIPS Act, calling it a "horrible, horrible thing" and calling on House Speaker Mike Johnson to "get rid" of it...

According to The New York Times, some bankers and lawyers believe the CHIPS Act may not allow the government to convert its grants to equity, opening this deal to potential legal challenges.
Reuters writes that the money "will not be enough for its contract-chipmaking business to flourish, analysts said. Intel still needs external customers for its cutting-edge 14A manufacturing process to go to production, says Summit Insights analyst Kinngai Chan, "to make its foundry arm economically viable." "We don't think any government investment will change the fate of its foundry arm if they cannot secure enough customers..."

Reuters has reported that Intel's current 18A process — less advanced than 14A — is facing problems with yield, the measure of how many chips printed are good enough to make available to customers. Large chip factories including TSMC swallow the cost of poor yields during the first iterations of the process when working with customers like Apple. For Intel, which reported net losses for six straight quarters, that's hard to do and still turn a profit. "If the yield is bad then new customers won't use Intel Foundry, so it really won't fix the technical aspect of the company," said Ryuta Makino, analyst at Gabelli Funds, which holds Intel stock.

Makino, who believes that Intel can ultimately produce chips at optimal yields, views the deal as a net negative for Intel compared with just receiving the funding under the CHIPS Act as originally promised under the Biden Administration. "This isn't free money," he said. The federal government will not take a seat on Intel's board and has agreed to vote with the company's board on matters that need shareholder approval, Intel said. But this voting agreement comes with "limited exceptions" and the government is getting Intel's shares at a 17.5% discount to their closing price on Friday. The stake will make the U.S. government Intel's biggest shareholder, though neither Trump nor Intel disclosed when the transaction would happen...

Some analysts say Intel could benefit from the government's support, including in building out factories. Intel has said it is investing more than $100 billion to expand its U.S. factories and expects to begin high-volume chip production later this year at its Arizona plant. "To have access to capital and a new partial owner that wants to see you succeed are both important," said Peter Tuz, president of Chase Investment Counsel.

"Only a tiny fraction of the more than 7,000 languages on Earth are supported by artificial intelligence models," reported SiliconANGLE this week. So Nvidia announced "a massive new AI-ready dataset and models to support the development of high-quality AI translation for European languages." The new dataset, named Granary, is a massive open-source corpus of multilingual audio, including more than a million hours of audio, plus 650,000 hours of speech recognition and 350,000 hours of speech translation. Nvidia's speech AI team collaborated with researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Fondazione Bruno Kessler to process unlabeled audio and public speech data into information usable for AI training... Granary includes 25 European languages, representing nearly all of the European Union's 24 official languages, plus Russian and Ukrainian. The dataset also contains languages with limited available data, such as Croatian, Estonian and Maltese. This is critically important because providing these underrepresented human-annotated datasets will enable developers to create more inclusive speech technologies for audiences who speak those languages, while using less training data in their AI applications and models... The team demonstrated in their research paper that, compared to other popular datasets, it takes around half as much Granary training data to achieve high accuracy for automatic speech recognition and automatic speech translation.

Alongside Granary, Nvidia also released new Canary and Parakeet models to demonstrate what can be created with the dataset... The new Canary is available under a fairly permissive license for commercial and research use, expanding Canary's current languages from four to 25. It offers transcription and translation quality comparable to models three times larger while running inference up to 10 times faster. At 1 billion parameters, it can run completely on-device on most next-gen flagship smartphones for speech translation on the fly.

The Free Software Foundation announced a special photography contest honoring its 40th anniversary: The technology we use every day has changed dramatically since our founding nearly forty years ago, including the way we interact with it... We're incredibly grateful for the countless hours that developers and users have put into the free software programs that exist today. Without all the people who cared enough to make and use software that respects the four freedoms four decades or even a year ago, we wouldn't have much to celebrate.

We want to honor the hard work that has gone into free software and its development with the FSF40 Photo Contest. Starting on August 14, 2025, we're inviting free software supporters worldwide to share how they use free software on a daily basis. While we can think of hundreds of ways that free software can be used, there's almost certainly many of you who have thought of much more creative ways to involve libre software every day!

Shortly after the photo contest closes on August 31, 2025, we will invite you and other free software supporters to vote for your favorite of the #FSF40Photos... We will be displaying the winning photos at our fortieth [anniversary] celebration in Boston, MA on October 4, 2025 — we hope you get to see them on a big screen with us!
Earlier this month the FSF also shared 40 links from around the FSF and GNU sites "that give a sense of what we've been doing all this time as we work for your freedom." (For example, 2007's announcement of the GNU General Public License, version 3.)

"Some joyless ne'er-do-well has loosed a botnet on the community-driven Arch Linux distro," reports the Register, with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that apparently started a week ago.

Arch maintainer Cristian Heusel announced Thursday on the project's web site that the attack "primarily impacts our main webpage, the Arch User Repository (AUR), and the Forums." We are aware of the problems that this creates for our end users and will continue to actively work with our hosting provider to mitigate the attack. We are also evaluating DDoS protection providers while carefully considering factors including cost, security, and ethical standards... As a volunteer-driven project, we appreciate the community's patience as our DevOps team works to resolve these issues.
A status update Friday acknowledged "we are suffering from partial outages." The Register reports: The attack comes as the project has been enjoying a boost in mainstream success. The distro was picked by Valve to underpin the SteamOS software running on its Steam Deck handheld gaming gadget, with the company providing the project with funding for further development. Late last year, a new version of the archinstall tool was released, with a view to making the system more friendly to newcomers...

For now, the Arch team is working to mitigate the attack's impact, which highlights a bootstrapping issue. Tools designed to shift traffic to mirrors in the event the main infrastructure is unavailable rely on a mirror list obtained from that same main infrastructure, with Heusel advising that users should "default to the mirrors listed in the pacman-mirrorlist package" if tools like reflector fail. Installation media can be downloaded from a range of mirrors, too, but should be checked against the project's official signing key before being trusted.

British telecommunications service provider Colt Telecom "has offices in over 30 countries across North America, Europe, and Asia, reports CPO magazine. "It manages nearly 1,000 data centers and roughly 75,000 km of fiber infrastructure."

But now "a cyber attack has caused widespread multi-day service disruption..." On August 14, 2025, the telecom giant said it had detected a cyber attack that began two days earlier, on August 12. Upon learning of the cyber intrusion, the telecommunications service provider responded by proactively taking some systems offline to contain the cyber attack. Although Colt Telecom's cyber incident response team was working around the clock to mitigate the impacts of the cyber attack, service disruption has persisted for days. However, the service disruption did not affect the company's core network infrastructure, suggesting that Colt customers could still access its network services... The company also did not provide a clear timeline for resolving the service disruption. A week after the apparent ransomware attack, Colt Online and the Voice API platform remained unavailable.
And now Colt Technology Services "confirms that customer documentation was stolen," reports the tech news site BleepingComputer: "A criminal group has accessed certain files from our systems that may contain information related to our customers and posted the document titles on the dark web," reads an updated security incident advisory on Colt's site.

"We understand that this is concerning for you."

"Customers are able to request a list of filenames posted on the dark web from the dedicated call centre."

As first spotted by cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont, Colt added the no-index HTML meta tag to the web page, making it so it won't be indexed by search engines.

This statement comes after the Warlock Group began selling on the Ramp cybercrime forum what they claim is 1 million documents stolen from Colt. The documents are being sold for $200,000 and allegedly contain financial information, network architecture data, and customer information... The Warlock Group (aka Storm-2603) is a ransomware gang attributed to Chinese threat actors who utilize the leaked LockBit Windows and Babuk VMware ESXi encryptors in attacks... Last month, Microsoft reported that the threat actors were exploiting a SharePoint vulnerability to breach corporate networks and deploy ransomware.
"Colt is not the only telecom firm that has been named by WarLock on its leak website in recent days," SecurityWeek points out. "The cybercriminals claim to have also stolen data from France-based Orange."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for sharing the news.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: All the critical minerals the U.S. needs annually for energy, defense and technology applications are already being mined at existing U.S. facilities, according to a new analysis published in the journal Science. The catch? These minerals, such as cobalt, lithium, gallium and rare earth elements like neodymium and yttrium, are currently being discarded as tailings of other mineral streams like gold and zinc, said Elizabeth Holley, associate professor of mining engineering at Colorado School of Mines and lead author of the new paper.

To conduct the analysis, Holley and her team built a database of annual production from federally permitted metal mines in the U.S. They used a statistical resampling technique to pair these data with the geochemical concentrations of critical minerals in ores, recently compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey, Geoscience Australia and the Geologic Survey of Canada. Using this approach, Holley's team was able to estimate the quantities of critical minerals being mined and processed every year at U.S. metal mines but not being recovered. Instead, these valuable minerals are ending up as discarded tailings that must be stored and monitored to prevent environmental contamination.

The analysis looks at a total of 70 elements used in applications ranging from consumer electronics like cell phones to medical devices to satellites to renewable energy to fighter jets and shows that unrecovered byproducts from other U.S. mines could meet the demand for all but two -- platinum and palladium. Among the elements included in the analysis are:
- Cobalt (Co): The lustrous bluish-gray metal, a key component in electric car batteries, is a byproduct of nickel and copper mining. Recovering less than 10% of the cobalt currently being mined and processed but not recovered would be more than enough to fuel the entire U.S. battery market.
- Germanium (Ge): The brittle silvery-white semi-metal used for electronics and infrared optics, including sensors on missiles and defense satellites, is present in zinc and molybdenum mines. If the U.S. recovered less than 1% of the germanium currently mined and processed but not recovered from U.S. mines, it would not have to import any germanium to meet industry needs.

Clean-energy growth helped China's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fall by 1% year-on-year in the first half of 2025, extending a declining trend that started in March 2024. From a report: The CO2 output of the nation's power sector -- its dominant source of emissions -- fell by 3% in the first half of the year, as growth in solar power alone matched the rise in electricity demand. The new analysis for Carbon Brief shows that record solar capacity additions are putting China's CO2 emissions on track to fall across 2025 as a whole.

Other key findings include:

The growth in clean power generation, some 270 terawatt hours (TWh) excluding hydro, significantly outpaced demand growth of 170TWh in the first half of the year.
Solar capacity additions set new records due to a rush before a June policy change, with 212 gigawatts (GW) added in the first half of the year.
This rush means solar is likely to set an annual record for growth in 2025, becoming China's single-largest source of clean power generation in the process.
Coal-power capacity could surge by as much as 80-100GW this year, potentially setting a new annual record, even as coal-fired electricity generation declines.
The use of coal to make synthetic fuels and chemicals is growing rapidly, climbing 20% in the first half of the year and helping add 3% to China's CO2 since 2020.
The coal-chemical industry is planning further expansion, which could add another 2% to China's CO2 by 2029, making the 2030 deadline for peaking harder to meet.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A lawyer representing the online message board 4chan says it won't pay a proposed fine by the UK's media regulator as it enforces the Online Safety Act. According to Preston Byrne, managing partner of law firm Byrne & Storm, Ofcom has provisionally decided to impose a 20,000-pound fine "with daily penalties thereafter" for as long as the site fails to comply with its request. "Ofcom's notices create no legal obligations in the United States," he told the BBC, adding he believed the regulator's investigation was part of an "illegal campaign of harassment" against US tech firms.

"4chan has broken no laws in the United States -- my client will not pay any penalty," Mr Byrne said. Ofcom began investigating 4chan over whether it was complying with its obligations under the UK's Online Safety Act. Then in August, it said it had issued 4chan with "a provisional notice of contravention" for failing to comply with two requests for information. Ofcom said its investigation would examine whether the message board was complying with the act, including requirements to protect its users from illegal content. "American businesses do not surrender their First Amendment rights because a foreign bureaucrat sends them an email," law firms Byrne & Storm and Coleman Law wrote. "Under settled principles of US law, American courts will not enforce foreign penal fines or censorship codes. If necessary, we will seek appropriate relief in US federal court to confirm these principles."

The statement calls on the Trump administration to intervene and protect American businesses from "extraterritorial censorship mandates."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Expect record-breaking temperatures to change the workplace, the World Health Organization (WHO) and World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned today in a new report. When workers don't have adequate protections from heat stress, their health and productivity suffer.

It's a risk employers and lawmakers have to take more seriously if they want to keep workers safe and businesses prosperous, the agencies say. That means finding ways to adapt in a warming world, and paying close attention to groups that might be more vulnerable than others.

[...] More than 2.4 billion people around the world -- 71 percent of the working population -- experience workplace heat stress, according to estimates from the ILO. Each year, 22.85 million occupational injuries and 18,970 fatalities are linked to excessive heat at work. The report also says that worker productivity falls 2-3 percent with every degree increase above 20 degrees Celsius in wet-bulb globe temperature, a measure that takes humidity and other environmental factors into account.

President Donald Trump said on Friday the U.S. would take a 10% stake in Intel under a deal with the struggling chipmaker and is planning more such moves, the latest extraordinary intervention by the White House in corporate America. Reuters: The development follows a meeting between CEO Lip-Bu Tan and Trump earlier this month that was sparked by Trump's demand for the Intel chief's resignation over his ties to Chinese firms.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is narrowing the capabilities and reducing the number of next-generation weather and climate satellites it plans to build and launch in the coming decades, two people familiar with the plans told CNN.

This move -- which comes as hurricane season ramps up with Erin lashing the East Coast -- fits a pattern in which the Trump administration is seeking to not only slash climate pollution rules, but also reduce the information collected about the pollution in the first place. Critics of the plan also say it's a short-sighted attempt to save money at the expense of understanding the oceans and atmosphere better.

Two planned instruments, one that would measure air quality, including pollution and wildfire smoke, and another that would observe ocean conditions in unprecedented detail, are no longer part of the project, the sources said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Denmark is to stop charging VAT on books in an attempt to get more people reading. At 25%, the country's tax rate on books is the highest in the world, a policy the government believes is contributing to a growing "reading crisis." The culture minister, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, announced on Wednesday that the government would propose in its budget bill that the tax on books be removed. The move is expected to cost 330 million kroner ($51 million) a year.

"This is something that I, as minister of culture, have worked for, because I believe that we must put everything at stake if we are to end the reading crisis that has unfortunately been spreading in recent years," Engel-Schmidt told the Ritzau news agency . "I am incredibly proud. It is not every day that one succeeds in convincing colleagues that such massive money should be spent on investing in the consumption and culture of the Danes." [...]

"It is also about getting literature out there," said Engel-Schmidt. "That is why we have already allocated money for strengthened cooperation between the country's public libraries and schools, so that more children can be introduced to good literature." [...] If prices do not fall as a result of the measure, Engel-Schmidt said he would reconsider whether it was the right course of action. "I will of course monitor how prices develop. If it turns out that abolishing VAT only means that publishers' profits grow and prices do not fall, then we must consider whether it was the right thing to do," he said. Further reading: Denmark Ending Letter Deliveries Is a Sign of the Digital Times

Light pollution extends the active hours of birds worldwide by nearly an hour, fundamentally altering the natural rhythms of over 500 species across multiple continents. Analysis of 60 million bird call recordings reveals that artificial lighting causes birds to begin vocalizing 20 minutes earlier each morning and continue 30 minutes later each evening. The effect varies significantly by species anatomy and behavior.

Birds with proportionally larger eyes experience the strongest responses, with American Robins in highly illuminated areas beginning their songs up to two hours before sunrise. Species nesting in tree cavities or enclosed spaces show minimal changes, as opaque barriers shield them from artificial light. The research, drawing from BirdWeather devices deployed globally by birdwatchers, is the largest analysis of light pollution's biological impacts to date.

Solar panels in space could cut Europe's terrestrial renewable energy needs by 80% by 2050, a study has found. The Guardian: Using a detailed computer model of the continent's future power grid, the researchers found that a system of space-based panels designed by Nasa could reduce the cost of the whole European power system by as much as 15%. It could also cut battery use by more than two-thirds.

The study, led by researchers at King's College London, is the first to assess the possible impact of space solar energy on Europe. The space-based solar power (SBSP) panels that yielded the positive results uses a heliostat design. The design, which the system imitates, uses mirror-like reflectors to collect sunlight in orbit. The sunlight is then transmitted to stations on Earth and converted to electricity before it is delivered to an energy grid. The computer model of the continent's power grid spans 33 countries, and simulates electricity demand, generation and storage to identify the lowest-cost option to meet Europe's electricity needs.

President Donald Trump says his administration will not approve solar or wind power projects, even as electricity demand is outpacing the supply in some parts of the U.S. From a report: "We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar," Trump, who has complained in the past that solar takes up too much land, posted on Truth Social. "The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!"

The president's comment comes after the administration tightened federal permitting for renewables last month. The permitting process is now centralized in Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's office. Renewable companies fear that projects will no longer receive permits that were once normal course of business.

Abu Dhabi is gathering the DNA of Emirati newborns in a significant expansion of a national genomic sequencing project that aims to put the UAE on the cutting-edge of health care. From a report: The UAE capital has so far mapped the genomes of 68% of Emirati citizens, a spokesperson for M42, the firm running the program, told Semafor, while at-birth sequencing is being offered to parents on a voluntary basis across several hospitals, and aims to detect over 800 treatable childhood genetic conditions. Only around 1% of the world's mapped genomes are of Arab descent. The UAE is looking to address the gap while tackling public health issues and expanding personalized health care offerings.