Tech companies may be vocal about their love of advanced nuclear power the flashy trend thats been sweeping the energy sector but they continue to add renewable capacity.Meta recently signed a deal with Spanish renewable developer Zelestra for 595 megawatts of solar power in Texas, just two weeks after signing a separate solar deal with utility company Engie. Its a significant purchase for the tech company, representing a nearly 5% bump to the 12-plus gigawatts of renewable capacity it currently has under contract.The announcement comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg maintains the companys ambitious AI strategy which will require hefty capital investments in data centers.Meta is racing to make its open-source Llama 4 model a rival to closed-source competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. And while DeepSeek showed that models could be developed more efficiently, its approach doesnt necessarily apply to leading edge models like Llama 4.Meta plans to spend $60 billion this year on capital investments, most of which would go toward data center infrastructure, calling it a strategic advantage for the company, Zuckerberg said during a Wednesday earnings call.Like many of its peers, Meta is betting that nuclear reactors can provide stable power for its future compute needs, soliciting proposals for 1 to 4 gigawatts of capacity to come online in the early 2030s. One gigawatt is enough to power about 750,000 homes.But the company cant wait until then to add to its data center footprint. Meta and others are deploying enormous sums of capital to build data centers, which need correspondingly large amounts of power. The chokepoint has some experts predicting that half of all new AI data centers will be underpowered by 2027.Nuclear power plants take years to build, and the latest crop of advanced reactors have yet to be commercially proven. Natural gas power plants are slightly faster.Neither can compete with the speed of renewable deployment.A solar farm can be brought online in as few as 18 months, and because the technology is modular, portions of the power plant can start delivering power before the last panel is connected.That speed has allowed renewables like wind, solar, and grid-scale battery storage to continue racking up new contracts from tech companies. In addition to this weeks deal, Meta announced earlier this month it bought 200 megawatts of solar from Engie, which will come online later this year. Elsewhere, Microsoft is helping to deploy $9 billion worth of renewables with Acadia Infrastructure Capital, while Google is anchoring a $20 billion renewable fund with Intersect Power and TPG Rise.

Breakdown & ShowreelsBetter Man: Rock DJ VFX Breakdown by Weta FXBy Vincent Frei - 31/01/2025 Step into the Magic of Regent Street! Weta FX delivers jaw-dropping visuals in Better Man, bringing Regent Street to life like never before. Watch their exclusive breakdown of this stunning sequence and see the artistry behind the VFX magic!Lets watch this sequence here:And a bit more about it:WANT TO KNOW MORE?Weta FX: Dedicated page about Better Man on Weta FX website. Vincent Frei The Art of VFX 2025

Source: Collage of images by Aldo van Eyck / The Aldo van Eyck ArchiveAldo van Eyck wrote: A house must be like asmall city if its to be areal home; a city like alarge house if its to beareal home. Indesigning a house, anarchitect designs the conditions for life to thrive the same conditions thatare conducive to ahealthy city2025-01-31AR EditorsShare

This contemporary house by Andrade Morettin reconnects the owners of the plot with the luxuriant landscape of JaguarinaThis project was shortlisted in the 2024 AR House awards. Read about the full shortlist hereJaguarina means the river of the black jaguars in the Tupi language. Located an hour and a half drive from the urban jungle of So Paulo, this quiet town is surrounded by rolling hills of croplands and areas of forest, home to animals such as toucans and capuchin monkeys. Nearby is Holambra a contraction of Holland, America and Brazil a post-Second World War settlement of Catholic Dutch farmers that has become the largest producer of flowers and ornamental plants in Latin America. Tropical summers bring frequent rainstorms and high humidity, with peak temperatures of up to 35C.The clients, who owned a plot with a fazenda (farm house) commissioned Sao Paulo-based architects Andrade Morettin to redesign a home that has better contact with nature. Project architect Marcelo Morettin describes the original house as big, but very closed off, where you couldnt see the landscape. Instead, he wanted to design a home where even from the inside, you would feel you are outside at the same time.The original fazenda was a single-storey, red-brick structure with a eucalyptus-timber frame and a red-tile pitched roof that extended over a veranda on the south side. The porch overlooked the swimming pool below, with views extending further downhill into an array of trees. The old house was demolished; only the long retaining stone wall was kept to separate the expanded terrace from the gardens steep drop.The new RF residence is a two-storey glass box nestled within a frame of glued laminated timber, or glulam. At the centre of the plan is a double-height living space that opens onto a dining area and kitchen to the east. To the south and west, the living space is wrapped by the L-shaped terrace; large glass panels encased in aluminium frames slide open to connect the two, allowing family meals and conversations to ignore boundaries between inside and outside.The glulam frame extends out, topped by a light steel structure that holds a polycarbonate roof to provide shelter and shade on the terrace. Light filters down via the translucent polycarbonate, while the large sliding doors offer passive airflow, inviting air to circulate through the house and moderate high summer temperatures.Credit: Pedro KokNorth of this living area is the more secluded entrance, with two guest rooms, a TV room and stairs leading to the first floor, where there are an additional four en-suite bedrooms and an office, all connected by a corridor-library that stretches the entire length of the house. Two balconies, suspended within the glulam frame, offer expansive views above the mango tree canopies and onto the surrounding landscape.Andrade Morettins use of industrial materials and, in this particular house, the oversized glulam frame, confer the building with a sense of generosity and open-endedness.The house has the space and volume to breathe the landscape in, and foster symbiotic relationships between humans and their surroundings.Pedro Kok

Plastic Packaging Gets New Life in Xuanhao Lis Elegant Jellyfish LampsJanuary 31, 2025DesignGrace EbertPolyethylene is the most common plastic in the world. Used for food packaging, grocery bags, detergent bottles, and so much more, the often single-use items are ubiquitous in our daily lives.For computational designer Xuanhao Li, polyethylene became a fruitful source for envisioning a new way to repurpose the omnipresent material. While working as a textile developer, Li noticed that the plastic films lining boxes and wrapping textiles during transit were often thrown in the trash. He began to collect the material and experiment with its properties, particularly its transparency, malleability, and smooth texture, as it passed through a heat-press machine. The aim was to fuse polyethylene films into sheets that balanced rigidity and flexibility while achieving a hazy translucency for lampshades, he tells Colossal. No material is inherently unattractive or cheap.When Li watched a documentary about sea turtles that mistook plastic bags for jellyfish, the explorations found their form. The haunting imagery of drifting plastic and its tragic impact on marine life deeply moved me, the designer shares. He also visited the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta to observe the live animals and their bulbous bodies.After developing the material, Li created digital motifs that imitated both a knitted structure and the jellyfish form, which he cut using a CNC machine. He adds: I attached tentacles with varying widths, following rhythmic patterns that abstractly echo the textures of jellyfish tissueFor the top portion of the jellyfish, I employed a smooth, overlapping layering technique, which mimicked the delicate, rounded bell of the jellyfish. For the base, I used an opposing technique, where the pieces were knitted with the edges facing each other, resulting in a ridged texture that evoked the intricate, flowing form of jellyfish tentacles.Resulting is Polycycle Illumination, an elegant collection of tabletop lamps. Standing at different heights, the designs together reflect the changes in shape as a jellyfish pulsates and swims through the water. Li hopes the series functions as both a functional object and a call to reduce plastic waste that threatens marine life. Polycycle Illumination has won numerous awards, including the title of Design Project of the Year for Dezeen China, and is on view at the Red Dot Design Museum in Singapore. Li is currently working on a new lamp series made of discarded silk cocoon trimmings to debut this May at London Craft Week. He plans to focus more on home and fashion design in the coming months, and you can follow his latest projects on his website and Instagram.Next article

Tech World's first AI-designed, 3D-printed shoe wants to be the next Crocs Is this the AI-driven future of custom 3D-printed shoes? Published January 31, 2025 3:00pm EST Move over, Crocs. There's a new contender in the world of unconventional footwear.Syntilay, a startup with a sparkle in its eye and artificial intelligence on its mind, has just unveiled what it claims to be the world's first entirely AI-designed and 3D-printed shoe.This futuristic footwear is turning heads and raising eyebrows in equal measure. AI-designed, 3D-printed shoe (Syntilay)The birth of SyntilaySyntilay, whose name is derived from "scintillate" (meaning to sparkle), is the brainchild of 25-year-old entrepreneur Ben Weiss. The company's journey from concept to creation is as unique as the shoes themselves. Using Midjourney AI, they generated the basic shape, which was then sketched by an artist. This sketch was transformed into a 3D model using Vizcom AI, and finally, generative AI added the distinctive patterns and textures.WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?Ben tells CyberGuy,"AI designing shoes is going to disrupt the category because of the incredible speed to go to market. New releases for traditionally made shoes take around 18 months for a model to release, with AI making them and 3D printing, that is now only a few months." AI-designed, 3D-printed shoe (Syntilay)Customization meets comfortOne of Syntilay's standout features is its commitment to personalized comfort. Before you can slip your feet into these futuristic slides, you'll need to scan your feet using your smartphone. This ensures a custom fit for each customer, even accommodating those with different-sized feet. Available in five colors blue, black, red, beige and orange these shoes are priced at a not-so-modest $149.99 per pair.GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE Before you can slip your feet into these futuristic slides, you'll need to scan your feet using your smartphone. (Syntilay)The grand planWhile Syntilay is pushing the boundaries of shoe design, they've also got some serious old-school cred in their corner. Joe Foster, the co-founder of Reebok, is lending his expertise to the project. With Foster's experience in building a $4 billion shoe empire, Syntilay is hoping to make big strides in the footwear market. Syntilay's ambitions extend far beyond selling a few thousand pairs of quirky slides.They're eyeing the $85.8 billion U.S. footwear market, with plans to open their platform to brands and content creators. This could potentially allow influencers and brands to design and sell their own AI-created footwear, tapping into a market that has traditionally been difficult for non-shoe companies to crack. AI-designed, 3D-printed shoe (Syntilay)Sustainability stepsIn an age where environmental concerns are at the forefront, Syntilay is putting its best foot forward. The shoes are 100% recyclable, with customers able to return them at the end of their life to be transformed into new products. This closed-loop system could potentially revolutionize the footwear industry's approach to sustainability. AI-designed, 3D-printed shoe being packaged for shipment (Zellerfeld)Kurts key takeawaysWhether Syntilay becomes the next Crocs or fades into obscurity remains to be seen. However, their innovative approach to design and manufacturing is undoubtedly pushing the boundaries of what's possible in footwear. As AI and 3D printing technologies continue to evolve, we may be witnessing the first steps towards a revolution in how we design, produce and consume fashion.What do you think? Are AI-designed, 3D-printed shoes the future of footwear or just a passing fad? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/Contact.For more of my tech tips and security alerts, subscribe to my free CyberGuy Report Newsletter by heading to Cyberguy.com/Newsletter.Follow Kurt on his social channels:Answers to the most asked CyberGuy questions:New from Kurt:Copyright 2025 CyberGuy.com. All rights reserved. Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on "FOX & Friends." Got a tech question? Get Kurts free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.

alexandrink1966 - stock.adobe.coNewsDeepSeek API, chat log exposure a rookie cyber errorSecurity researchers at Wiz find a trove of DeepSeek data including API secrets and chat logs publicly exposed via an open source database management tool, raising questions about the fast-growing services approach to securityByAlex Scroxton,Security EditorPublished: 31 Jan 2025 16:56 Days after a significant cyber attack of unknown provenance caused significant disruption for users of emergent Chinese generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) model DeepSeek, persistent security issues continue to dog the fast-growing application, and reports are emerging of a fundamental lack of attention paid to basic cyber security measures at DeepSeek itself.This is according to researcher Gal Nagli of Wiz, a cloud security specialist, who on Wednesday 29 January published details of a publicly accessible DeepSeek database containing a trove of data, which he said enabled full control over database operations.Nagli said he was motivated to assess DeepSeeks external cyber security posture and identify possible vulnerabilities in light of the platforms meteoric rise to global prominence.Within minutes, we found a publicly accessible ClickHouse database linked to DeepSeek, completely open and unauthenticated, exposing sensitive data. It was hosted at oauth2callback.deepseek.com:9000 and dev.deepseek.com:9000, said Nagli.This database contained a significant volume of chat history, back-end data and sensitive information, including log streams, API secrets, and operational details.More critically, the exposure allowed for full database control and potential privilege escalation within the DeepSeek environment, without any authentication or defence mechanism to the outside world, he added.Nagli found the exposed database through a standard mapping exercise of DeepSeeks publicly accessible domains. He found about 30 internet-facing subdomains, most of which were benign, but on expanding his search beyond standard HTTP ports 80 and 443, he found two open ports, 8123 and 9000, associated with the vulnerable hosts.Leveraging ClickHouses HTTP interface, he was then able to access a specific path that enabled direct execution of arbitrary SQL queries in a web browser; running a show tables query returned the list of exposed datasets.This level of access posed a critical risk to DeepSeeks own security and for its end-users. Not only could an attacker retrieve sensitive logs and actual plain text chat messages, but they could also potentially exfiltrate plain text passwords and local files along with propriety information directly from the server depending on their ClickHouse configuration, said Nagli.Nagli informed DeepSeek of the exposed ClickHouse service through responsible disclosure channels, and Computer Weekly understands they have now been locked down.ClickHouse is an open source database management tool used for processing, log storage and analytics which was initially developed at Yandex in Russia, although it is now based in Silicon Valley.William Wright, CEO ofClosed Door Security, a consultancy based in Scotlands Western Isles, said the issues were highly concerning given DeepSeek was giving some of the worlds most well-established AI leaders a run for their money.Security must be a priority, but leaving a database like this exposed is a rookie mistake, he said. In the last week, DeepSeek has been thrust into the public eye, but the company is clearly now learning that not all publicity is good publicity.Having plain text conversations in a public-facing database could provide criminals with access to confidential information relating to businesses and individuals. Criminals could also exploit further commands to steal more information from users, which would put them at even greater risk.This is also one of the key reasons why organisations must run proactive assessments across their networks, so weaknesses can be identified and mitigated before they are exposed by researchers or threat actors, said Wright.Read more about DeepSeekDeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm, is disrupting the industry with its low-cost, open source large language models, challenging US tech giants.The introduction of DeepSeeks GenAI models has been met with fervour, but security issues have created apparent challenges for the Chinese startup.DeepSeek, which gained popularity recently for its AI platform, did not specify the cause of large-scale malicious attacks, which continue to disrupt new account registrations.In The Current Issue:World Economic Forum: Digital supply chains at risk as world faces two years of turbulenceData sovereignty and security in the UKDownload Current IssueConfluent: Shifting the paradigm to (real-time) data engineering CW Developer NetworkVision for the technology landscape of 2025 Data MattersView All Blogs

Clearing the cache and removing temporary files can speed up your PC. Even better: all of these utilities are already on your computer.

Google's Gemini gets a major upgrade with a new AI model and an improved image generator.

Shanghai,China-Nov.22nd 2024:Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT AI app icon on screengettyOne of the hallmarks of the early days of 2025 is this rapid-fire news coming from the AI industry. Models are evolving, week after week. Companies are throwing enormous amounts of money at everything from hardware to specialized use cases. Some of the fruits of this labor are now coming out as consumer technology, too.One very good example is the two-fold process over at Google. Right now, Gemini 1 is getting put into endpoint devices, and introduced to the average user. But Gemini 2 is also underway in a big way, and people close to the project are coming around with demos of the new AI agent technology.And then theres Googles Notebook LM. Its turning heads because through its quick evolution, Notebook LM is now much more than just a note-taking tool. Google is showcasing new Notebook LM capabilities. I saw one of these demos recently, and it was really illuminating. Google is embracing the idea of AI agents, and showing the world how this kind of thing works.Agents and TasksIf you look at the Google blog where Sundar Pichai and others are explaining the building of this agentic technology, theyre talking about native tool use. That means that AI entities are going to be able to use tools in the same ways as humans do.MORE FOR YOUWere getting 2.0 into the hands of developers and trusted testers today, the leadership team writes in an announcement that will likely have a big impact on the industry. And were working quickly to get it into our products, leading with Gemini and Search. Starting today our Gemini 2.0 Flash experimental model will be available to all Gemini users. We're also launching a new feature called Deep Research, which uses advanced reasoning and long context capabilities to act as a research assistant, exploring complex topics and compiling reports on your behalf. It's available in Gemini Advanced today.So the AI agents are coming. What that means, in in turn, is that theyre going to start doing the tasks that have always been assigned to people.The DemoLooking at an actual demo of Notebook LM recently, I saw how a sales person, for example, could automate various parts of their day. The AI agent can contact the person who was the last touch point in the sales funnel, and get information from them. The AI agent can create a roadmap to opportunities. The AI agent can go through a proprietary content management system, and look at everything thats been posted in the last two weeks, and make decisions accordingly.The sky is the limit.And it raises questions about what our roles are as people in a business processAgents and PlanningHeres another part of that demo that caught my attention. Its where the presenter used Notebook LM to come up with long-term planning results. Suppose you want a five-year plan for a project rollout. Or you just want some swot analysis. Prior to, lets say, 2021, people would put up Post-it notes with various parts of the process, and arrange them to get their results. Now we can just let the AI agents do it. We dont have to ask them how its done, necessarily - just sit back and let them do their work.I also came across this interview with Geoff Hinton with him explaining how agentic AI could likely take over a lot of control from its human handlers. Thats sort of the other side of the coin to think about, as we see these technologies evolving by leaps and bounds.And then theres search.No product has been transformed more by AI than Search, Sundar Pichai writes. Our AI Overviews now reach 1 billion people, enabling them to ask entirely new types of questions quickly becoming one of our most popular Search features ever. As a next step, were bringing the advanced reasoning capabilities of Gemini 2.0 to AI Overviews to tackle more complex topics and multi-step questions, including advanced math equations, multimodal queries and coding. We started limited testing this week and will be rolling it out more broadly early next year. And well continue to bring AI Overviews to more countries and languages over the next year.All of that is pretty exciting.Taking Stock of Your AssetsThere was one other use case that I mentioned personally, because I think that its probably going to be more popular than most others. That relates to the use of Gmail.Our inboxes are overflowing with content. Theres so much that we have trouble keeping up sometimes, at least, I know I do. What if the AI agent could simply scrape through your Gmail account and bring you whats most relevant and most actionable?That would be one of those blue star applications for a technology that, in my estimation, fits the bill for its zeitgeist. So lets keep an eye on this emerging product, because it just might be one of the primary catalysts of AI agent use in our time.