 |
|
|
|||||
Ever wonder how much energy it takes when you ask an AI to draft an email, plan a vacation, or role-play as a friend? Google just shed some light: The company calculated the energy, water, and carbon emissions tied to text prompts on its Gemini apps. The energy use for the median text prompt is far less than some previous estimates: Google found that it uses just 0.24 watt-hours, or the equivalent of watching TV for less than nine seconds. Other models might be wildly different: One estimate of OpenAIs GPT-5 model suggested that it might use as much as 40 watt-hours per prompt. (That estimate, unlike Googles calculations, wasnt based on internal data.) Google laid out a detailed methodology for measuring the environmental impact of getting answers from its AI. For energy, that includes the electricity burned as the system converts your text prompt into a form it can process, calculates all the probabilities for which word could come next, and decodes the result into readable text. It also includes the energy for cooling and other infrastructure needed at a data center, and for keeping idle machines running in case demand spikes. The carbon footprint of the median prompt was 0.03 grams of CO2, based on the energy mix for each grid and Google’s own investments in renewable energy. Each prompt also uses 0.26 milliliters, or about five drops, of water. Efficiency is improving rapidly. Over a 12-month period, the company reports that the median energy use per Gemini prompt has fallen 97%, while the carbon footprint has dropped 98%. Google attributes these gains to advances in its language model architecture, more efficient algorithms, custom-designed hardware, and broader system-wide optimizations. Still, even if the footprint per prompt is relatively small, the cumulative impact could be enormous as AI use scales. The research Google shared focuses only on text prompts, not on more energy-intensive tasks like video generation. Other companies footprints may also differ significantly. But as firms race to build more data centersand utilities respond by constructing new power plants, often powered by fossil fuelsthis is at least an initial step toward understanding how much additional energy AI will truly require.
Category:
E-Commerce
Daniel P. Johnson, a geographer at Indiana University at Indianapolis, works with a team of researchers who spend a lot of time catching blowflies, dissecting their iridescent blue-green abdomens, and analyzing the contents of their guts. Johnson and his colleagues are tracking the spread of Lyme disease on a warming planet. But they need a lot of additional data. They get it from NASA. The worlds foremost driver of space science is not a public health agency. But NASAs vast data collection has quietly become important for health research, helping scientists track disease outbreaks and monitor air pollution amid climate change. Now, as President Donald Trumps administration proposes sweeping cuts to the agencys budget, including its Earth Sciences Division, experts are worried that many of these data sources could be lost, and research collaborations halted, with serious consequences for public health. NASA really enabled a whole new world of health research that the public health community hadnt been doing yet, said Susan Anenberg, who directs the George Washington University Climate and Health Institute, and whose own work has been funded by NASA for nearly a decade. NASA, of course, is best known for launching expeditions into space and capturing images of distant galaxies. But NASA also has a mission to Earth. Its satellites surveil what the agency calls vital signs of the planet and supply information to scientists whose work is decidedly Earthbound. A good deal focuses on tracking the effects of climate change on groundwater levels, wildfires, global temperature trends, and more. Those changes come with health hazards, and research funded by NASA or supported by NASA data has helped scientists study the effect of environmental changes on malaria, avian flu, asthma, and other respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, as well as cognitive decline in the elderly and preterm birth, both of which can be affected by heat. The space agency also tracks air pollution and particulate matter, which isnt all caused by global warming, though a warmer planet may make some health hazards of pollution more severe and complex. That interaction is part of what scientists are using NASA data to better understand. In the case of the blowflies, Johnson and his team are using NASA data to track the spread of Lyme. Blowflies feed on fecal matter and decomposing meat, including that of white-footed mice, which are a reservoir for the bacteria that cause Lyme disease. If theres a lot of white-footed mouse DNA in the flies guts, it suggests there are a lot of those mice around, which in turns offers some signal about the prevalence of Lyme. (At one point, his team found tiger and elephant DNA in fly guts, which was puzzlinguntil the researchers remembered that the Indianapolis Zoo was nearby.) Lyme disease is tick-borne, and the ticks bite mice and then bite humans. By tracking the mice via the blowfly guts, Johnson and his team aim to create a rough map of where Lyme is present and how its moving across the landscape. To fill in that map, Johnson relies on NASA data about the physical environmentthe landscape, meteorological conditions, air temperatures, and incoming solar radiation values. The result, he hopes, will inform Indianas public health officials efforts to reduce the spread of Lymeand with time, contribute to a broader understanding about this tick-borne disease on a warming planet. In addition to tracking the disease locally, Johnson and other scientists are looking at how climate change could make Lyme more prevalent, and possibly, as some data suggests, more infectious. Johnson received NASA funding in 2008 to study early strategies to protect urban areas during heat waves. Now, hes hoping to get a NASA grant to continue his Lyme research, still in its early stages. Without it, continuing this work, now backed by his university and local health departments, would be more difficult over the long haul. The geographer is one of many researchers and policymakers who have benefitted from a focus within NASA on examining conditions on Earth. We have a constellation of over 20 satellites and sensors in Earths orbit, including several on board the International Space Station, that are continuously monitoring Earths weather, climate, and environment for research and applications purposes, John Haynes, a meteorologist and program manager in NASAs Earth Science Division, said on a NASA broadcast last year. We get a ton of data on the Earths system, and how it is changing, downloaded every day from that constellation. And that data gives us information on things like land surface temperature, ocean surface temperature, vegetation density, air pollution, wildfires, you name it, Haynes added. That ton of data, he said, is almost 25 terabytes every day. NASA makes data available at no charge to researchers and to federal, state, and local public health agencies in the United States, and around the globe. A lot of Anenbergs work at George Washington University involves making some of that data more accessible, she said. NASA has wanted it to reach people in local government, people in school boards, people in any walks of life. Her group, she said, has created several websites, one of which allows users to look up local levels of fine particulate matter or carbon dioxide, or example, and compare it to cities elsewhere. The future of some of that public health work is now unclear. The Trump administrations proposed budget for the coming fiscal year would, if enacted, bring NASAs spending back to 1961 levels, with cuts to science divisions including Earth science tantamount to an extinction-level event, according to a piece by Asa Stahl, science editor for The Planetary Society, a nonprofit that advocates for space science and exploration. The overall budget would be cut by nearly 25%, and Earth science more than halved. The White House has described these cuts as an attempt to refocus NASA on space exploration by prioritizing missions to the Moon and Mars. In May, NASA closed a New York office that housed the Goddard Institute for Space Studies lab, part of the agency dedicated to studying climate change and other Earth sciences. The researchers who worked at that site werent fired, but a brain drain of NASA scientists has begun and may well accelerate. As of late July, nearly 4,000 NASA staff had opted for early retirements and similar arrangements, according to a statement from the agency. The number of departures may still rise. [T]he last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASAs wokforce, a group of current and former agency employees wrote in a recent open letter. NASAs chief scientis and senior climate adviser, Katherine Calvin, was let go earlier this year. The cutting-edge science taking place at NASA has far-reaching societal benefits, more than many people are aware. The climate crisis is a public health crisis, and fighting these crises will not happen in a vacuum, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the top Democrat on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, wrote to Undark in an emailed statement. Unleashing chaos on the agency by gutting science programs, firing employees without cause, and proposing draconian budget cuts for NASA, she added, will hurt Americans and jeopardize the future of our rising generations. Several NASA spokespeople, as well as Haynes and other scientists at the agency, as well as House and Senate Republicans involved with space policy, did not respond to requests for interviews, or referred Undark to public budget documents. In a brief emailed statement, NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens said the agency remains committed to our mission as we work with a more prioritized budget. She did not address how proposed cuts could affect environmental data and public health work. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has partnered with NASA on climate research, also did not comment. While Republican lawmakers have mostly endorsed the Trump administrations overall vision for the agency, Congressional appropriators have approved spending bills that would largely leave NASAs funding intact. But the Trump administration has withheld money appropriated by Congress in other agencies, and presidential appointees have made clear they plan to keep doing so. Some conservative policy thinkers champion a dramatic realignment of NASA spending. My view is that NASA should not be chasing climate, period, said Anthony Watts, a senior fellow of the Heartland Institute, a think-tank known for arguing that climate change is not a crisis. Its fine if NASA launches satellites for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the U.S. Geological Survey, he said, but NASA should concentrate on space and space missions. NASA used to widely promote its climate and public health work. The agency had a presence at last years American Public Health Association conference, complete with a big high-definition video screen the agency calls its hyperwall, which illustrates how researchers can draw on NASA data to map, for instance, where water-borne diseases are likely to emerge. In recent years, the public health work has become more varied and more urgent, touching both global and domestic health. Theres a lot of possibility for conducting public health research with NASA data and tools, said Anenberg, the George Washington University researcher. And the reason the field exists the way it does now, with a lot of people doing that research, is because of support from NASA. [Photo: Dominic Hart/NASA] But it requires money. And if those funds get cut as deeply as the White House has proposed, the impact could be vast. Its not yet clear, though, precisely which specific programs within Earth sciences could be axedthough firing the top climate scientist may be a signal. So, too, might recent news that the Trump administration is moving to have NASA decommission two satellites that gather information on greenhouse gases. Many scientists and public health experts want earth science and health research to remain squarely within NASAs mission. NASA satellite imagery, for example, has been used to develop tools that can predict cholera outbreak risks in countries like Bangladesh. Health teams can mobilize to avert or minimize illness. NASA data has also been used to study malaria, which is widespread, often seasonal, and endemic in many parts of the world. As the climate changes and rainy spells and dry spells shift, the timing and contours of the malaria season are changing, said Richard Steketee, who spent 25 years at the CDC, mostly working on malaria. That adds an unwelcome amount of guesswork for health teams that need to know where and when to preposition the bed nets, insecticide, and prophylactic drugs. Mapping those changes is complex, but NASA satellites and computer modeling can help, said Steketee, who served as deputy coordinator for the U.S. Presidents Malaria Initiative in his final five years at the CDC before retirement. The focal point for much of the work in the last few years is NASAs Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team, or HAQAST. The research cohort, consisting of scientists from within and outside NASA, is led by Tracey Holloway, a professor of energy analysis and policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Recently, Holloway has been studying how to best utilize satellite data to fill in environmental health knowledge gaps in rural areas, given that many counties dont even have a single ground-based monitor to track ozone, fine particulate matter, and other pollutants. In public health, more information can lead to better risk characterization, better forecasts, better outreach, she said in an interview. That includes better tracking of wildfire smoke with satellite data to support emergency public health response. Funding for the current round of HAQAST work was approved by the Trump administration this year, with the goal of connecting NASA with private- and public-sector information needs, Holloway wrote in a follow-up email. But there are no guarantees, she wrote, and no alternative source of financial support. Drew Shindell, a professor of Earth science at Dukes Nicholas School of the Environment, has both worked at NASA and been funded by NASA as a grantee. Over 30-plus years, his own professional trajectory has aligned with the growing urgency of the climate crisis. Originally a researcher of the stratosphere, he has shifted his work to focus on modeling climate change, including its impacts on health. When connections between public health and this kind of research came up, he recalled, there were people both within NASA and on the Hill who didnt think that was NASAs job, that it was mission creep. While Shindell agreed that NASAs work in this area should be coordinated with other agencies to avoid duplication, he disagreed withany arguments that NASA shouldnt be involved in such research at all. In part, the desire to study health, as well as his increasing interest in looking at the economic impact of climate change, propelled him to move to an academic setting at Duke. He still uses NASA data, NASA computers, and NASA supercomputers to model the effects of a warming world. He and his colleagues develop scenarios and do physical science in order to model those scenarios impact on climate, health, and economies. In the academic world, he can work on that whole continuum in a way he could not had he remained at NASA. And now, whether even that work can continue may be uncertain. Joanne Kenen is the Journalist in Residence at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where the Kresge Foundation supports her work on climate and health. Earlier, she spent a decade overseeing health coverage at Politico. This story originally appeared at Undark.
Category:
E-Commerce
The list of summertime scourges grows longer each year: wildfires, heat waves, floods. And we can now add to that a veritable infestation of biting, Lyme-disease-carrying ticks. Emergency room visits for tick bites in the Northeast are at their highest levels in at least five years. This June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 229 tick bites per every 100,000 visits to ERs around the Northeast, up from 167 bites per 100,000 visits a year earlier. Nationwide, more than 89,000 cases of Lyme disease were reported to the CDC in 2023 through state health departments. But a CDC analysis of insurance claims suggests that actual cases of people seeking treatment for Lyme diseasetransmitted by black-legged ticks infected with Borrelia burgdorferi bacteriacould be about 476,000 annually. While most cases still occur in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and upper Midwest regions, climate change is expanding the ticks habitat, and the transmission season is getting longer, starting earlier each spring and stretching well into late fall. (Ticks can be active any time the temperature is above freezing.) If you spot the symptomsa target-like rash, fever, headache, extreme fatigueearly enough, treating Lyme disease with antibiotics has a high success rate. But Lyme disease is often undetected and untreated, and that can lead to long-term, chronic problems with the joints, heart, and nervous system. The only prevention at the moment is covering up and wearing insect repellant when youre in tick-y habitat, and carefully checking for ticks when you come back inside. Since the preadult tick nymphs that actually cause most Lyme disease are only about the size of a poppy seed, theyre easy to miss. But a far more powerful form of protection is on the horizon. Nearly 25 years after the only approved vaccine against the disease was discontinued by its manufacturer, a handful of new ones are making their way through the approval processand could hit the market as soon as next year. The vaccine pipeline The only Lyme disease vaccine previously marketed in the U.S. was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1998. Developed by SmithKline Beecham (which became GlaxoSmithKline), Lymerix was delivered in a series of three shots and was 75% effective in reducing new infections in clinical trials. But the company stopped selling the drug in 2002, after reports of possible side effectsnever causally provenand related lawsuits drove down demand. Its been a quiet space since then. In 2013, Baxter International announced promising data from an early trial of a vaccine candidate but never initiated a Phase 3 study. Nearly a decade later, MassBiologics, a nonprofit that develops vaccines and other biologic products, explored a PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) drug that used a monoclonal antibodya human blood proteinto confer immediate protection from the disease. (Vaccines, by contrast, induce the recipients body to produce these antibodies, which can take weeks.) No trial results for that drug were ever published, though. Today, the quest for a Lyme disease vaccine is a two-horse racewith a pretty clear favorite. Moderna has two Lyme disease vaccine candidates in development, which like the companys COVID-19 vaccine use mRNA to encode immunity-inducing antigens. The first, mRNA-1982, is designed to elicit antibodies against Borrelia burgdorferi, the most common culprit in U.S. Lyme disease cases. The second, mRNA-1975, aims to stimulate antibodies against four major species of Borrelia that cause Lyme disease in the U.S. and Europe. Phase 1/2 clinical trialsto determine safety, dosage, and initial efficacyare currently wrapping up, according to a Moderna spokesperson. Under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s term as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Moderna has faced unscientific criticism of its mRNA-based vaccines. The HHs recently canceled more than $700 million in funding for the companys mRNA-based late-stage avian flu vaccine candidate. That means there could be challenges ahead for an mRNA-based Lyme disease vaccineregardless of what the trials show for its safety and efficacy. Moderna did not say when it will release data from the Lyme vaccine study. (We would prefer to hold off on any discussion until we have that data readout so we can speak more tangibly about the benefits, Moderna said via email.) The most advanced effort in the Lyme vaccine race is a collaboration between Pfizer and French drugmaker Valneva, whose vaccine candidate VLA15 is currently in Phase 3 trialsthe furthest any company has progressed since Lymerix was pulled from the market. The challenges of Lyme disease Raphael Simon, senior director of bacterial vaccines at Pfizer, explains that developing a vaccine for Lyme disease presents unique challenges. Bacteria are very different from viruses, he says, speaking from Pfizers vaccine headquarters in Pearl River, New York. Viruses are essentially discrete packages of information inside a delivery system. Bacteria are living things. The Borrelia bacteria that causes Lyme is different from the bacteria that cause food poisoning or other types of diseases, which are usually shaped like rods or small spheres. Borrelia is a kind of spirochete bacteria, which have a long spiral shape but can change form and employ other tools to evade the immune system and resist antibiotics. To outflank the bacteria, Pfizer and Valnevas VLA15a so-called protein subunit vaccineuses engineered antigens to target outer surface protein A (ospA), which the Lyme-causing bacteria expresses while inside the tick. “The vaccine works inside of the tick to block transmission out of the tick into the person, which is actually rather unique in terms of the mechanism for how this vaccine works compared to any other vaccine, Simon says. When a tick starts to feed on an uninfected host, the bacteria travels from the insects midgut, through its version of a lymphatic system, and into the salivary glands, which are very large in a tick. From the salivary glands, the bacteria makes its way into the bite site, and then moves through the hosts skin and into other parts of the body. But if a person has antibodies against the Borrelia bacteria in their blood, they will neutralize the bacteria before it can even get to the ticks salivary glands. It’s essentially trapped, and in some instances totally destroyed inside the ticks midgut, Simon explains. A kid-safe vaccine A key advancement of the Pfizer-Valneva vaccine is its broad coverage. Unlike the Lymerix vaccine, which protected only against the Borrellia strain found in North America, VLA15 is a six-valent vaccine designed to protect against all the main types of Borrelia found in both North America and Europe (where an estimated 129,000 Lyme disease cases are reported annually). The clinical trials aim to address a notable gap by including participants ages 5 and older. Children represent a high-risk group for Lyme disease but have been left out of earlier vaccine research. The key risk for getting Lyme disease is being out in nature somewhere, says Simon. Ideally, kids spend a lot of time in nature, in parks. My kids are currently in summer camp in a forest somewhere. So there’s exposure hat happens, and being able to have coverage [for] kids, as well, is really important. Simon says that Phase 3 trial is fully enrolled and everythings going as expected. Pending a successful outcome, he says, were looking to be able to submit for licensure at some point next year. (The FDA granted VLA15 fast-track designation in July 2017, which expedites regulatory review.) If approved, the vaccinewhich is being tested as a three-injection series with an additional boostercan be made at scale using a well-established manufacturing technology. Tall grass, here we come!
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||