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Car sharing should become the norm to end “20th-century thinking” that values private vehicle ownership, as part of the drive to cut carbon emissions, a government minister has said.

Trudy Harrison, a junior transport minister, said the transport system would soon be designed around “access to services rather than what you own”.

She said the UK was “reaching a tipping point where shared mobility in the form of car clubs, scooters and bike shares will soon be a realistic option for many of us to get around.”

Researchers at the University of Texas have discovered a new way for neural networks to simulate symbolic reasoning. This discovery sparks an exciting path toward uniting deep learning and symbolic reasoning AI.

In the new approach, each neuron has a specialized function that relates to specific concepts. “It opens the black box of standard deep learning models while also being able to handle more complex problems than what symbolic AI has typically handled,” Paul Blazek, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center researcher and one of the authors of the Nature paper, told VentureBeat.

This work complements previous research on neurosymbolic methods such as MIT’s Clevrer, which has shown some promise in predicting and explaining counterfactual possibilities more effectively than neural networks. Additionally, DeepMind researchers previously elaborated on another neural network approach that outperformed state-of-the-art neurosymbolic approaches.

Heliogen announced the roll-out of its robots to install and clean its CSP plants.


Heliogen, a California-based developer of concentrated solar power (CSP) plants, held the first technical demonstration of its ICARUS, or Installation & Cleaning Autonomous Robot & Utility Solution.

ICARUS is a system of autonomous robots designed to clean the heliostats, which are the reflective mirrors of the CSP system. Heliostats reflect sunlight into a collection tower, where the light and heat is converted to electricity and usable thermal energy. Recently, the company partnered with Bloom Energy to produce hydrogen fuel.

Stein Emil Vollset, the study’s lead author and Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), elaborated on the findings.

“The last time that global population declined was in the mid 14th century, due to the Black Plague,” he told IFLScience. “If our forecast is correct, it will be the first time population decline is driven by fertility decline, as opposed to events such as a pandemic or famine.”

Some countries, however, are forecasted to see an increase in population.

They have cheap labour.


With China aggressively expanding in various fields like artificial intelligence, 5G networking, semiconductors, and more, it appears that the nation will be overtaking the US in 21st century technologies within just a decade.

The news arrives from a recent report from Harvard, which is titled “The Great Rivalry: China vs the US in the 21st Century” that was published by the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The report adds that “China’s rapid rise to challenge US dominance of technology’s commanding heights has captured America’s attention.” It further adds that in some areas China “has already become No 1. In others, on current trajectories, it will overtake the US within the next decade.”

Globally, it’s estimated that we mine as much as 50 billion metric tonnes of sand every year to build our roads, bridges, skyscrapers, homes and more. Rapid urbanization around the world has made sand a high value commodity, so much so that, for some, it’s even worth killing for. But not all sand is the same, and experts say some mining operations are damaging ecosystems, infrastructure and putting people in danger around the world.

0:00 Intro.
1:06 How the world uses sand.
3:46 Inside the growing demand for sand.
6:08 How the world mines sand.
7:33 A look at the environmental effects of sand mining.
9:20 Explaining sand mafias and cartels.
11:14 Exploring alternative building materials.
13:04 The future of sand and concrete.

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