By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Private U.S. nuclear fusion company Helion Energy will provide Microsoft with electricity in about five years, the companies said on Wednesday, in the first such deal for the power source that fuels the sun but has been elusive on Earth. Government labs and more than 30 companies are racing to…
By Marc Jones and Rodrigo Campos LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Ecuador sealed the world’s largest “debt-for-nature” swap on record on Tuesday, selling a new “blue bond” that will funnel at least $12 million a year into conservation of the Galapagos Islands, one of the world’s most precious ecosystems. Having bought back roughly $1.6 billion of…
(Reuters) – The metaverse could contribute as much as $760 billion or about 2.4% to U.S. annual gross domestic product (GDP) by 2035, according to a study commissioned by Facebook owner Meta Platforms. The concept of the metaverse includes augmented and virtual reality technologies that allow users to immerse themselves in a virtual world or…
By Helen Reid BARCELONA (Reuters) – Amazon plans to open new warehouses and hire more people in Europe, an executive said on Tuesday, even as squeezed consumer spending forces the tech giant to cut costs globally and lay off some employees. Amazon has invested 142 billion euros ($156 billion)in Europe since 2010, and its growth…
(Reuters) – A pioneer of artificial intelligence said he quit Google to speak freely about the technology’s dangers, after realising computers could become smarter than people far sooner than he and other experts had expected. “I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google,” Geoffrey Hinton…
(Reuters) – Space-tourism company Virgin Galactic Holdings said on Monday that a four-member test flight will take place in May and that it aims to launch its first commercial flight in late June. Shares jumped 4% after the company said the May mission would be the final test of the spaceflight system and astronaut experience…
By Natalie Grover LONDON (Reuters) – Diabetes drugs that also promote weight loss such as Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic, becoming a darling of celebrities and investors, are being studied to tackle some of the most difficult-to-treat brain disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease. Diabetes regimens, from Ozempic to old mainstays like insulin and metformin, appear to address several…
By Jane Lanhee Lee Santa Clara, California (Reuters) – Silicon Valley’s U.S. Democratic Representative Ro Khanna and the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) warned on Friday against delays to funding for U.S. research in the face of surging technology investment by rivals such as China. While the CHIPS and Science Act authorized the…
By Ahmed Aboulenein WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Friday it would stop reporting or monitoring COVID-19 case data and transmission rates after the government ends the pandemic’s public health emergency designation next week. The agency will stop using its color-coded COVID-19 Community Levels (CCL) system, which…
By Mike Stone WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The drones that crashed over the Kremlin earlier this week probably evaded an extensive number of defenses in and around Moscow, suggesting they might have been launched from inside Russia, U.S.-based drones experts said. Footage of the unmanned aircraft has sent governments and open source intelligence analysts on a…
