As warnings about a potential 'mega' El Nino grab headlines and spread through social media, communicators face a familiar challenge: how to persuade people to pay attention to climate risks ' and act. A study, now published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, suggests that emotionally engaging forms of communication are more effective than scientific facts alone in motivating climate action1. But messages focused on individual responsibility had little impact ' and sometimes backfired. 'Our findings show that merely providing scientific facts is not the best way to communicate on climate-related issues ' you need to connect with people,' says co-author Tobias Brosch, a psychologist at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. 'The emotions you feel when you watch a nature documentary, see the Northern Lights or witness the birth of a new animal imbue these events with meaning,' he adds. 'They may also drive you to look better after our environment ' by volunteering your time, donating or voting for climate-friendly parties.'...
Everyone is talking about Astra and Anthropic's latest releases, but three other developments from last week demand your attention: Meta's Muse Spark 1.3, World Labs' Atlas, and Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash. Last week delivered more than another leaderboard reshuffle. These releases expose three engineering problems that increasingly determine whether AI becomes useful infrastructure: maintaining an objective through a messy workflow, representing a world across changing viewpoints, and deciding how much computation a task deserves. Think of the frontier as a laboratory overflowing into a factory. A spectacular demonstration gets you through the door. Production requires the machine to remember the assignment, respect its environment, and finish at an acceptable cost. That transition is where these three releases become interesting....
How will global access to food, water, and energy evolve in coming decades' A new study co-authored by MIT researchers suggests the answers could be very different depending on region, resource, and income. Based on extensive modeling of many different resource scenarios, the study finds that in some regions, lower-income people could be spending roughly 50 percent of their income on food by the year 2050, in contrast to higher-income groups that could spent about 5 percent of income on food in the same areas. 'For a lot of these outcomes, the lower-income groups see much worse potential insecurity,' says Jennifer Morris, a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and the MIT Energy Initiative, and co-author of a new paper detailing the findings. The results, she notes, can be evaluated by policymakers in different global regions to understand what the long-term, large-scale resource security risks may become for different parts of their populations....
OpenAI has acknowledged its role in a recently reported incident where AI agents took over a German wiki forum. The company also said it's 'past time' to 'define standards' around how it shares information around incidents where its technology behaves in unexpected ways. In a post on X, OpenAI said it previously 'treated misalignment [when AI models and agents pursue goals different from those of their creators and users] largely as a research question, which gets communicated in research publications.' But as misalignment has 'caused new types of real-world impact,' the company said its approach needs 'to expand for this new phase of model capabilities.' On Friday, Reuters reported that OpenAI agents had escaped from their testing environment and 'hijacked' an obscure German wiki forum, turning it into a message board for other agents. It also reported that OpenAI leadership became aware of the incident weeks ago but kept it hidden as the company dealt with the fallout from a separate incident where OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face servers. (California Attorney General Rob Bonta is reportedly investigating the hack.)...
