The 2025 Polestar 4: Great Steering And A Small Carbon Footprint Stand Out

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Justin Sullivan) The US government will pay Moderna $176 million to develop an mRNA vaccine against a pandemic influenza—an award given as the highly pathogenic bird flu virus H5N1 continues to spread widely among US dairy cattle. The funding flows through BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, as part of a new Rapid Response Partnership Vehicle (RRPV) Consortium.

Enlarge Researchers have warned of a critical vulnerability affecting the OpenSSH networking utility that can be exploited to give attackers complete control of Linux and Unix servers with no authentication required. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-6387, allows unauthenticated remote code execution with root system rights on Linux systems that are based on glibc, an open source implementation of the C standard library.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Kathryn8) The US Supreme Court today agreed to hear a challenge to the Texas law that requires age verification on porn sites. A list of orders released this morning shows that the court granted a petition for certiorari filed by the Free Speech Coalition, an adult-industry lobby group. In March, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that Texas could continue enforcing the law while litigation continues.

Cooling pipes at a Google data center in Douglas County, Georgia. (credit: Google) Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48 percent in the past five years due to the expansion of its data centers that underpin artificial intelligence systems, leaving its commitment to get to “net zero” by 2030 in doubt. The Silicon Valley company’s pollution amounted to 14.3 million tonnes of carbon equivalent in 2023, a 48 percent increase from its 2019 baseline and a 13 percent rise since last year, Google said in its annual environmental report on Tuesday. Google said the jump highlighted “the challenge of reducing emissions” at the same time as it invests in the build-out of large language models and their associated applications and infrastructure, admitting that “the future environmental impact of AI” was “complex and difficult to predict.”Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Tires are a growing source of microplastic pollution. Michelin says it wants to change that. (credit: Getty Images) Reduce, Reuse, Recycle—it's more than just a fun alliteration tagline. It's also a set of instructions for how to consume in a way that's less destructive to our environment. We reduce our consumption and reuse what we already have, then recycle it once it no longer has any use.

Enlarge / US President Joe Biden (C) speaks during a tour of the TSMC Semiconductor Manufacturing Facility in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 6, 2022. (credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / Contributor | AFP) In the hopes of dodging a significant projected worker shortage in the next few years, the Biden administration will finally start funding workforce development projects to support America's ambitions to become the world's leading chipmaker through historic CHIPS and Science Act investments. The Workforce Partner Alliance (WFPA) will be established through the CHIPS Act's first round of funding focused on workers, officials confirmed in a press release.