Vast datacentres are being built worldwide, amid growing concerns about the environmental costs. So should we all be considering a data diet – if not complete digital sobriety? Nearly 20 years ago, the British mathematician Clive Humby coined a snappy phrase that has turned into a platitude: “data is the new oil”. He wasn’t wrong. We have an insatiable appetite for data, we can’t stop generating it, and, just like oil, it’s turning out to be bad news for the environment. So the Guardian set me a challenge: to try to give a sense of how much data an average person uses in a day, and what the carbon footprint of normal online activity might be. To do that, I tried to tot up the sorts of things I and millions of others do every day, and how that tracks back through the melange of messaging services, social networks, applications and tools, to the datacentres that keep our digital lives going. Continue reading...

The project that began in the Canary Islands mimics the way leaves capture water droplets from fog in order to produce water They call it cloud milking, a zero-energy technique to extract water from fog that is revolutionising the recovery of forests devastated by fire and drought. The idea began as a pilot project in the Canary Islands. The plan was to exploit the moisture-laden “sea of clouds” that hangs over the region in order to aid reforestation, and has since been extended to several other countries to produce drinking water, and to irrigate crops. Continue reading...

Tech company orders six or seven small nuclear reactors from California’s Kairos Power * Business live – latest updates Google has signed a “world first” deal to buy energy from a fleet of mini nuclear reactors to generate the power needed for the rise in use of artificial intelligence. The US tech corporation has ordered six or seven small nuclear reactors (SMRs) from California’s Kairos Power, with the first due to be completed by 2030 and the remainder by 2035. Continue reading...

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Ahahahah oh this is gold * Sign up here to get an email whenever First Dog cartoons are published * Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints Continue reading...

Event will push for greater transparency and aims to rank AI firms in terms of ability to meet climate goals World leaders at the next AI summit will focus on the impact on the environment and jobs, including the possibility of ranking the greenest AI companies, it has been announced. Rating artificial intelligence companies in terms of their ecological impact is among the proposals under consideration, while other areas being looked at include the effect on the labour market, giving all countries access to the technology, and bringing more states under the wing of global AI governance initiatives. Continue reading...

Why are so many settler Australians haunted by this almost mythical bird? Why? * Sign up here to get an email whenever First Dog cartoons are published * Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints Continue reading...

Many fear the arrival of tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the state of Querétaro will place too much of a strain on scarce water and electricity resources In a nondescript building in an industrial park in central Mexico, cavernous rooms hold stack after stack of servers studded with blue lights, humming with computations and cooled by thousands of little fans and large vents blasting great columns of air across the room. “Datacentres are the lungs of digital life,” says Amet Novillo, the managing director of Equinix Mexico, a digital infrastructure company, as he stands in the middle of the airflows that stop the hardware overheating. Continue reading...

Do fish feel despair or longing? Do they yearn for a simpler time? * Sign up here to get an email whenever First Dog cartoons are published * Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints Continue reading...

Nordic country, paradoxically a major oil producer, has set target for all new cars sold to be zero emission Electric cars now outnumber petrol cars in Norway for the first time, an industry organisation has said, a world first that puts the country on track towards taking fossil fuel vehicles off the road. Of the 2.8m private cars registered in the Nordic country, 754,303 are all-electric, against 753,905 that run on petrol, the Norwegian road federation (OFV) said in a statement. Continue reading...