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Climate impacts of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation on Australia

El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) profoundly affects Australian weather, climate, ecosystems and socio-economic sectors. This Review presents the progress made in understanding ENSO teleconnections to Australian weather over the past 40 years, describing the atmospheric dynamics, complexities and impacts of this climate phenomenon.

Elon Musk, Richest Man On Earth, Predicts Money Will Disappear ‘As A Concept’ When AI And Robotics ‘Satisfy All Human Needs’

Money is supposed to be the reward for effort. Elon Musk thinks it eventually becomes unnecessary paperwork.

While talking with Indian entrepreneur and investor Nikhil Kamath on the “People by WTF” podcast last month, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO and richest man in the world returned to a theme he’s raised before. It’s one he treats less like a theory and more like an inevitability. As artificial intelligence and robotics accelerate, Musk believes society moves past jobs, past income debates, and straight into something stranger.

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The Coming Ecological Cold War

But the report was also marked by the flaws of its technocratic conception. Crucially, the broader stakes of the global energy transition went ignored. This is a mistake in urgent need of correction. The decarbonization agenda is not simply about reordering markets or industrial policies, but in fact represents the crucible for a new geopolitical order.

Four years ago, the International Energy Agency (IEA) published a landmark report, “Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector,” that proposed a technical blueprint for a global green energy transition by the middle of this century. The report focused on the economic and technological dimensions of this energy transition. It was an admirable effort that calls for careful study.

The Universal Law Behind Market Price Swings

Analysis of a large dataset from the Tokyo Stock Exchange validates a universal power law relating the price of a traded stock to the traded volume.

One often hears that economics is fundamentally different from physics because human behavior is unpredictable and the economic world is constantly changing, making genuine “laws” impossible to establish. In this view, markets are never in a stable state where immutable laws could take hold. I beg to differ. The motion of particles is also unpredictable, and many physical systems operate far from equilibrium. Yet, as Phil Anderson argued in a seminal paper [1], universal laws can still emerge at the macroscale from the aggregation of widely diverse microscopic behaviors. Examples include not only crowds in stadiums or cars on highways but also economic agents in markets.

Now Yuki Sato and Kiyoshi Kanazawa of Kyoto University in Japan have provided compelling evidence that one such universal law governs financial markets. Using an unprecedentedly detailed dataset from the Tokyo Stock Exchange, they found that a single mathematical law describes how the price of every traded stock responds to trading volume [2] (Fig. 1). The result is a striking validation of physics-inspired approaches to social sciences, and it might have far-reaching implications for how we understand market dynamics.

Why we can’t stop clicking on rage bait

Stanford research reveals creators feel exhausted, depressed, and financially unstable due to constant pressure to post, algorithm unpredictability, and frequent “demonetization.” While rage bait may work short-term, it’s unsustainable. Creators eventually seek other revenue streams, only to be replaced by new outrage merchants.

Bottom line: Rage bait is a symptom of platforms’ engagement-based economic incentives—not an isolated phenomenon, but a “highly visible result” of the ecosystem social media companies have created.


“Rage bait” is Oxford’s Word of the Year. What makes anger so appealing?

Global shift to sustainable pest management expected to yield long-term benefits

What would happen if farmers around the globe were to switch over to sustainable pest management? An international study headed by the University of Bonn and ETH Zurich focused on precisely this question. The study is based on assessments provided by more than 500 leading experts from around the world who work in various disciplines from ecology to economics.

Reservoir thermal energy storage offers efficient cooling for data centers

The rise of artificial intelligence, cloud platforms, and data processing is driving a steady increase in global data center electricity consumption. While running computer servers accounts for the largest share of data center energy use, cooling systems come in second—but a new study by researchers at the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), formerly known as NREL, offers a potential solution to reduce peak energy consumption.

Published in Applied Energy, a techno-economic analysis led by Hyunjun Oh, David Sickinger, and Diana Acero-Allard—researchers in NLR’s energy storage and computational science groups—has demonstrated a system to cool data centers more efficiently and cost-effectively.

The approach, called reservoir thermal energy storage (RTES), stores cold energy underground then uses it to cool facilities during peak-demand periods.

Carbon monoxide, the ‘silent killer,’ becomes a boon for fuel cell catalysts

Researchers have developed a technology that uses carbon monoxide, typically harmful to humans, to precisely control metal thin films at a thickness of 0.3 nanometers. This technology enables faster and simpler production of core–shell catalysts, a key factor in improving the economic viability of fuel cells, and is expected to significantly boost related industries.

The findings are published in the journal ACS Nano. The team includes Dr. Gu-Gon Park, Dr. Yongmin Kwon, and Dr. Eunjik Lee from the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Laboratory at the Korea Institute of Energy Research.

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