An anonymous reader quotes a report from Nature: Google Scholar -- the largest and most comprehensive scholarly search engine -- turns 20 this week. Over its two decades, some researchers say, the tool has become one of the most important in science. But in recent years, competitors that use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the search experience have emerged, as have others that allow users to download their data. The impact that Google Scholar -- which is owned by web giant Google in Mountain View, California -- has had on science is remarkable, says Jevin West, a computational social scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who uses the database daily. But "if there was ever a moment when Google Scholar could be overthrown as the main search engine, it might be now, because of some of these new tools and some of the innovation that's happening in other places," West says.

Many of Google Scholar's advantages -- free access, breadth of information and sophisticated search options -- "are now being shared by other platforms," says Alberto Martin Martin, a bibliometrics researcher at the University of Granada in Spain. AI-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT and other tools that use large language models have become go-to applications for some scientists when it comes to searching, reviewing and summarizing the literature. And some researchers have swapped Google Scholar for them. "Up until recently, Google Scholar was my default search," says Aaron Tay, an academic librarian at Singapore Management University. It's still top of his list, but "recently, I started using other AI tools." Still, given Google Scholar's size and how deeply entrenched it is in the scientific community, "it would take a lot to dethrone," adds West. Anurag Acharya, co-founder of Google Scholar, at Google, says he welcomes all efforts to make scholarly information easier to find, understand and build on. "The more we can all do, the better it is for the advancement of science." Acharya says Google Scholar uses AI to rank articles, suggest further search queries and recommend related articles. What Google Scholar does not yet provide are AI-generated summaries of search query results. According to Acharya, the company has yet to find "an effective solution" for summarizing conclusions from multiple papers in a brief manner that preserves all the important context.

What if across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, six high-voltage power cables stretched — each over 2,000 miles long.

CNN reports that a group of entrepreneurs "wants to build what would be the world's largest subsea energy interconnector between continents, linking Europe and North America...to connect places like the United Kingdom's west with eastern Canada, and potentially New York with western France...

"The Europe-US cables could send 6 gigawatts of energy in both directions at the speed of light, said Laurent Segalen, founder of the London-based Megawatt-X renewable energy firm, who is also part of the trio proposing the transatlantic interconnector. That's equivalent to what six large-scale nuclear power plants can generate, transmitted in near-real time." The interconnector would send renewable energy both east and west, taking advantage of the sun's diurnal journey across the sky. "When the sun is at its zenith, we probably have more power in Europe than we can really use," said Simon Ludlam, founder and CEO of Etchea Energy, and one of the trio of Europeans leading the project. "We've got wind and we've also got too much solar. That's a good time to send it to a demand center, like the East Coast of the United States. Five, six hours later, it's the zenith in the East Coast, and obviously, we in Europe have come back for dinner, and we get the reverse flow," he added.

The transatlantic interconnector is still a proposal, but networks of green energy cables are starting to sprawl across the world's sea beds. They are fast becoming part of a global climate solution, transmitting large amounts of renewable energy to countries struggling to make the green transition alone. But they are also forging new relations that are reshaping the geopolitical map and shifting some of the world's energy wars down to the depths of the ocean...

Already, energy cables run between several countries in Europe, most of them allied neighbors. Not all of them carry renewable power exclusively — that's sometimes determined by what makes up each country's energy grid — âbut new ones are typically being built for a green energy future. The UK, where land space for power plants is limited, is already connected with Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark under the sea. It has signed up to a solar and wind link with Morocco to take advantage of the North African country's many hours of sunlight and strong trade winds that run across the equator. Similar proposals are popping up around the globe. A project called Sun Cable seeks to send solar power from sunny Australia, where land is abundant, to the Southeast Asian nation of Singapore, which also has plenty of sun but very little room for solar farms. India and Saudi Arabia plan to link their respective power grids via the Arabian Sea, part of a broader economic corridor plan to connect Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: On a slice of the ocean front in west Singapore, a startup is building a plant to turn carbon dioxide from air and seawater into the same material as seashells, in a process that will also produce "green" hydrogen — a much-hyped clean fuel.

The cluster of low-slung buildings starting to take shape in Tuas will become the "world's largest" ocean-based carbon dioxide removal plant when completed later this year, according to Equatic, the startup behind it that was spun out of the University of California at Los Angeles. The idea is that the plant will pull water from the ocean, zap it with an electric current and run air through it to produce a series of chemical reactions to trap and store carbon dioxide as minerals, which can be put back in the sea or used on land... The $20 million facility will be fully operational by the end of the year and able to remove 3,650 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, said Edward Sanders, chief operating officer of Equatic, which has partnered with Singapore's National Water Agency to construct the plant. That amount is equivalent to taking roughly 870 average passenger cars off the road. The ambition is to scale up to 100,000 metric tons of CO2 removal a year by the end of 2026, and from there to millions of metric tons over the next few decades, Sanders told CNN. The plant can be replicated pretty much anywhere, he said, stacked up in modules "like lego blocks...."

The upfront costs are high but the company says it plans to make money by selling carbon credits to polluters to offset their pollution, as well as selling the hydrogen produced during the process. Equatic has already signed a deal with Boeing to sell it 2,100 metric tons of hydrogen, which it plans to use to create green fuel, and to fund the removal of 62,000 metric tons of CO2.
There's other projects around the world attempting ocean-based carbon renewal, CNN notes. "Other projects include sprinkling iron particles into the ocean to stimulate CO2-absorbing phytoplankton, sinking seaweed into the depths to lock up carbon and spraying particles into marine clouds to reflect away some of the sun's energy." But carbon-removal projects are controversial, criticized for being expensive, unproven at scale and a distraction from policies to cut fossil fuels. And when they involve the oceans — complex ecosystems already under huge strain from global warming — criticisms can get even louder. There are "big knowledge gaps" when it comes to ocean geoengineering generally, said Jean-Pierre Gatusso, an ocean scientist at the Sorbonne University in France. "I am very concerned with the fact that science lags behind the industry," he told CNN.

Africa's most-populous nation showed more interest in cryptocurrencies than any other country since the digital assets began to decline in April, according to a study by price tracker CoinGecko. From a report: Nigeria scored 371 in the study that looked at Google Trends data for six searches such as "buy crypto" or "invest in crypto" that were then combined to give each English-speaking nation a total search ranking. The West African country was followed by the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. "This study provides interesting insight into which countries remain most interested in cryptocurrency in spite of market pullbacks," CoinGecko's co-founder Bobby Ong said in an emailed statement. "The countries at the top of this list appear to be keenest to buy the dip, and highlight their long-term outlook for cryptocurrencies."

Alphabet's Google and Facebook announced their participation in a new subsea cable system for 2024 set to improve internet connectivity across the Asia-Pacific region. Bloomberg: Dubbed Apricot, the infrastructure project will link Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines and Indonesia and help serve growing demand for broadband access and 5G wireless connectivity, Facebook said. In March, the company announced two new transpacific subsea cables connecting Singapore to the U.S. west coast, Bifrost and Echo, with Google participating in the latter. The Echo and Apricot cables are complementary submarine systems, Google said in a blog post, and will improve the resilience of Google Cloud and the company's other digital services. The new fiber-optic link spanning the Asia-Pacific has an initial design capacity of more than 190 terabits per second, according to Facebook.

After initial success, Japan is facing a reality check on the coronavirus. From a report: The country garnered global attention after containing the first wave of Covid-19 with what it referred to as the "Japan Model" -- limited testing and no lockdown, nor any legal means to force businesses to close. The country's finance minister even suggested a higher "cultural standard" helped contain the disease. But now the island nation is facing a formidable resurgence, with Covid-19 cases hitting records nationwide day after day. Infections first concentrated in the capital have spread to other urban areas, while regions without cases for months have become new hotspots. And the patient demographic -- originally younger people less likely to fall seriously ill -- is expanding to the elderly, a concern given that Japan is home to the world's oldest population.

Experts say that Japan's focus on the economy may have been its undoing. As other countries in Asia, which experienced the coronavirus earlier than those in the West, wrestle with new flare ups of Covid-19, Japan now risks becoming a warning for what happens when a country moves too fast to normalize -- and doesn't adjust its strategy when the outbreak changes. While Japan declared a state of emergency to contain the first wave of the virus, it didn't compel people to stay home or businesses to shut. That was ended in late May and officials quickly pivoted to a full reopening in an attempt to get the country's recessionary economy back on track. By June, restaurants and bars were fully open while events like baseball and sumo-wrestling were back on -- a stark contrast to other places in the region like Singapore which were re-opening only in cautious phases.

Malaysia will return 450 tonnes of contaminated plastic waste to the countries that shipped it, in a refusal to become a dumping ground for the world's trash. From a report: Nine shipping containers at Port Klang, west of Kuala Lumpur, on Tuesday were found to contain mislabeled plastic and non-recyclable waste, including a mixture of household and e-waste. Yeo Bee Yin, minister of energy, science, technology, environment and climate change, said the plastic was shipped from the US, the UK, Australia, Japan, China, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, the Netherlands and Singapore. Five containers of waste were returned to Spain last month.

On April 24, Malaysia launched a joint task force to crack down on the growing problem of illegal plastic waste imports. The authorities have since carried out 10 operations. Last year, China banned plastic waste imports as part of an initiative to clean up its environment. That move caused a ripple effect through global supply chains, as middlemen sought new destinations for their trash, including Malaysia. A recent Greenpeace report found that during the first seven months of 2018, plastic waste exported from the US to Malaysia more than doubled compared to the previous year.

By April 2020, a total of 11 public pools in Singapore will feature a state-of-the-art computer vision drowning detection system (CVDDS). The CVDDS uses a network of overhead infrared cameras to detect if anyone in the pool becomes unconscious while swimming. It reportedly has a detect response time of 15 seconds, allowing lifeguards to spot distressed swimmers more quickly.

"[T]he system will be installed at pools in Bukit Batok, Jurong West and Our Tampines Hub this year, with another seven to follow by April 2020," reports Channel NewsAsia. "The system will be implemented following a successful year-long trial at Hougang Swimming Complex. MCCY said that the system was assessed to have complied with international standards and had a low false-alarm rate."

Facebook is planning to open a new data center in Singapore in 2022. The more than $1 billion facility will be located in the west of the country, according to the BBC. From the report: It has been designed as an 11-floor structure, in an attempt to conserve space in the crowded nation, according to Facebook. One analyst told the BBC it was another sign of the country's popularity with large technology companies. The new, 170,000-sq-m (1.8-million-sq-ft) data centre will support "hundreds" of local jobs. Facebook said it expected the building to be powered by 100% renewable energy and noted that it would feature a liquid cooling system that minimized water and power use.

An anonymous reader writes: Government workers in Singapore will return to a 1990s-level of net connectivity from May of 2017, as the domestic government has decided to block internet access on all of its 100,000 office computers. The decision has been made in the interests of national security, although the Draconian policy will still permit workers to forward work mails to private email addresses as necessary. Workers' own devices will be allowed to connect to the internet normally by special terminals being provided in early trials, while intra-departmental connectivity will presumably be maintained via VPN tunneling. The move comes in the direct wake of a visit to Singapore from the U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter late last week, promoting stronger security ties with Singapore in the face of the rise of China in the region.BBC News has more details.

An anonymous reader writes "Singapore and South Korea are playing key roles helping the United States and Australia tap undersea telecommunications links across Asia, according to top secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Indonesia and Malaysia have been key targets for Australian and Singaporean intelligence collaboration since much of Indonesia's telecommunications and Internet traffic is routed through Singapore. The NSA has a stranglehold on trans-Pacific communications channels with interception facilities on the West coast of the United States and at Hawaii and Guam, tapping all cable traffic across the Pacific Ocean as well as links between Australia and Japan. Japan had refused to take part."