Urban populations are expected to double by 2050, which means around 2.5 billion people could be added to urban areas by the middle of the century, driving the need for more sustainable urban planning and public services. Cities across the globe are turning to digital twins and AI agents for urban planning scenario analysis and data-driven operational decisions. Building a digital twin of a city and testing smart city AI agents within it, however, is a complex and resource-intensive endeavor, fraught with technical and operational challenges. To address those challenges, NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for smart city AI, a reference framework that combines the NVIDIA Omniverse, Cosmos, NeMo and Metropolis platforms to bring the benefits of physical AI to entire cities and their critical infrastructure. Using the blueprint, developers can build simulation-ready, or SimReady, photorealistic digital twins of cities to build and test AI agents that can help monitor and optimize city operations. Leading companies including XXII, AVES Reality, Akila, Blyncsy, Bentley, Cesium, K2K, Linker Vision, Milestone Systems, Nebius, SNCF Gares&Connexions, Trimble and Younite AI are among the first to use the new blueprint. NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for Smart City AI  The NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for smart city AI provides the complete software stack needed to accelerate the development and testing of AI agents in physically accurate digital twins of cities. It includes: NVIDIA Omniverse to build physically accurate digital twins and run simulations at city scale. NVIDIA Cosmos to generate synthetic data at scale for post-training AI models. NVIDIA NeMo to curate high-quality data and use that data to train and fine-tune vision language models (VLMs) and large language models. NVIDIA Metropolis to build and deploy video analytics AI agents based on the NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization (VSS), helping process vast amounts of video data and provide critical insights to optimize business processes. The blueprint workflow comprises three key steps. First, developers create a SimReady digital twin of locations and facilities using aerial, satellite or map data with Omniverse and Cosmos. Second, they can train and fine-tune AI models, like computer vision models and VLMs, using NVIDIA TAO and NeMo Curator to improve accuracy for vision AI use cases​. Finally, real-time AI agents powered by these customized models are deployed to alert, summarize and query camera and sensor data using the Metropolis VSS blueprint. NVIDIA Partner Ecosystem Powers Smart Cities Worldwide The blueprint for smart city AI enables a large ecosystem of partners to use a single workflow to build and activate digital twins for smart city use cases, tapping into a combination of NVIDIA’s technologies and their own. SNCF Gares&Connexions, which operates a network of 3,000 train stations across France and Monaco, has deployed a digital twin and AI agents to enable real-time operational monitoring, emergency response simulations and infrastructure upgrade planning. This helps each station analyze operational data such as energy and water use, and enables predictive maintenance capabilities, automated reporting and GDPR-compliant video analytics for incident detection and crowd management. Powered by Omniverse, Metropolis and solutions from ecosystem partners Akila and XXII, SNCF Gares&Connexions’ physical AI deployment at the Monaco-Monte-Carlo and Marseille stations has helped SNCF Gares&Connexions achieve a 100% on-time preventive maintenance completion rate, a 50% reduction in downtime and issue response time, and a 20% reduction in energy consumption. https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/01-Monaco-Akila.mp4 The city of Palermo in Sicily is using AI agents and digital twins from its partner K2K to improve public health and safety by helping city operators process and analyze footage from over 1,000 public video streams at a rate of nearly 50 billion pixels per second. Tapped by Sicily, K2K’s AI agents — built with the NVIDIA AI Blueprint for VSS and cloud solutions from Nebius — can interpret and act on video data to provide real-time alerts on public events. To accurately predict and resolve traffic incidents, K2K is generating synthetic data with Cosmos world foundation models to simulate different driving conditions. Then, K2K uses the data to fine-tune the VLMs powering the AI agents with NeMo Curator. These simulations enable K2K’s AI agents to create over 100,000 predictions per second. https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/02-K2K-Polermo-1600x900-1.mp4 Milestone Systems — in collaboration with NVIDIA and European cities — has launched Project Hafnia, an initiative to build an anonymized, ethically sourced video data platform for cities to develop and train AI models and applications while maintaining regulatory compliance. Using a combination of Cosmos and NeMo Curator on NVIDIA DGX Cloud and Nebius’ sovereign European cloud infrastructure, Project Hafnia scales up and enables European-compliant training and fine-tuning of video-centric AI models, including VLMs, for a variety of smart city use cases. The project’s initial rollout, taking place in Genoa, Italy, features one of the world’s first VLM models for intelligent transportation systems. https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/03-Milestone.mp4 Linker Vision was among the first to partner with NVIDIA to deploy smart city digital twins and AI agents for Kaohsiung City, Taiwan — powered by Omniverse, Cosmos and Metropolis. Linker Vision worked with AVES Reality, a digital twin company, to bring aerial imagery of cities and infrastructure into 3D geometry and ultimately into SimReady Omniverse digital twins. Linker Vision’s AI-powered application then built, trained and tested visual AI agents in a digital twin before deployment in the physical city. Now, it’s scaling to analyze 50,000 video streams in real time with generative AI to understand and narrate complex urban events like floods and traffic accidents. Linker Vision delivers timely insights to a dozen city departments through a single integrated AI-powered platform, breaking silos and reducing incident response times by up to 80%. https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/02-Linker-Vision-1280x680-1.mp4 Bentley Systems is joining the effort to bring physical AI to cities with the NVIDIA blueprint. Cesium, the open 3D geospatial platform, provides the foundation for visualizing, analyzing and managing infrastructure projects and ports digital twins to Omniverse. The company’s AI platform Blyncsy uses synthetic data generation and Metropolis to analyze road conditions and improve maintenance. Trimble, a global technology company that enables essential industries including construction, geospatial and transportation, is exploring ways to integrate components of the Omniverse blueprint into its reality capture workflows and Trimble Connect digital twin platform for surveying and mapping applications for smart cities. Younite AI, a developer of AI and 3D digital twin solutions, is adopting the blueprint to accelerate its development pipeline, enabling the company to quickly move from operational digital twins to large-scale urban simulations, improve synthetic data generation, integrate real-time IoT sensor data and deploy AI agents. Learn more about the NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for smart city AI by attending this GTC Paris session or watching the on-demand video after the event. Sign up to be notified when the blueprint is available. Watch the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote from NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at VivaTech, and explore GTC Paris sessions.

Brick Journey / Volume Matrix studioSave this picture!© Prayoon Tesprateep•Bangkok, Thailand Architects: Volume Matrix studio Area Area of this architecture project Area:  1500 m² Year Completion year of this architecture project Year:  2025 Photographs Photographs:Prayoon Tesprateep Lead Architects: Kasin Sornsri More SpecsLess Specs Save this picture! Text description provided by the architects. Brick Journey is an architectural project that harmonizes conceptual interpretation with spatial design, blending various functions and local aesthetics. This vibrant space encompasses a residence, café, and art galleries. The initial concept is inspired by the journey of the owner, a doctor with a profound passion for ancient art. As an art collector, he has traveled the world to acquire unique masterpieces. He envisioned his home not only as a place to live but also as a sanctuary for his cherished collection. The architect responded to this vision by creating a spatial narrative that encourages exploration. A curving wall weaves through the layout, guiding and distorting the circulation to create a sense of wandering-inviting visitors to discover the space as their own personal journey.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Upon approaching the site, the first impression is marked by a small, enclosed entrance framed by the curved wall. This design element creates a sense of tension and curiosity, gently pushing visitors to step inside. Above this entrance lies an observation area, symbolizing a point where beginning and end converge. Passing through the threshold, visitors encounter a small pond on the right, accompanied by an empty frame moment of reflection that the owner holds dear. This area includes a multipurpose space used for temporary exhibitions and gatherings, and includes bathroom facilities. This room is connected to an outdoor courtyard, which also takes advantage of the beautiful view and ventilation.Save this picture!Save this picture!On the left side of the site lies the café and reception area. A significant feature here is the expansive courtyard, which benefits from the shade of a large, existing tree that has grown since the owner's childhood. The café is designed with floor-to-ceiling windows, providing unobstructed views of the courtyard and artifacts suspended throughout the space. A unique element is the incorporation of antique doors from the owner's collection, seamlessly merging art and architecture.Save this picture!Save this picture!The second floor is dedicated primarily to galleries. A staircase leads to a temporary exhibition space suitable for smaller-scale paintings. The two main buildings are connected via a steel bridge, which leads to the upper level of the café. This section houses an exhibition featuring pieces from the Indian subcontinent. Turning at this point leads visitors back to the multipurpose area via an original Art Nouveau staircase, while continuing forward completes the journey, returning to the elevated observation point—the symbolic end of the path.Save this picture!Save this picture!This architecture prominently features brick; the choice of using brick as the main material is due to the revival of ancient architecture, as brick used to be the dominant material used in building and construction. Therefore, utilizing various types of brick and construction techniques to create texture, depth, and a sense of timelessness throughout the project is metaphorical to a journey of brick building this architectural piece.Save this picture! Project gallerySee allShow less About this officeVolume Matrix studioOffice••• MaterialBrickMaterials and TagsPublished on June 16, 2025Cite: "Brick Journey / Volume Matrix studio" 16 Jun 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1031113/brick-journey-volume-matrix-studio&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream

Sienna Net-Zero Home / billionBricksSave this picture!© Ron Mendoza , Mark Twain C , BB teamHouses, Sustainability•Quezon City, Philippines Architects: billionBricks Area Area of this architecture project Area:  45 m² Year Completion year of this architecture project Year:  2024 Photographs Photographs:Ron Mendoza , Mark Twain C , BB teamMore SpecsLess Specs Save this picture! Text description provided by the architects. Built to address homelessness and climate change, the Sienna Net-Zero Home is a self-sustaining, solar-powered, cost-efficient, and compact housing solution. This climate-responsive and affordable home, located in Quezon City, Philippines, represents a revolutionary vision for social housing through its integration of thoughtful design, sustainability, and energy self-sufficiency.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Designed with the unique tropical climate of the Philippines in mind, the Sienna Home prioritizes natural ventilation, passive cooling, and rainwater management to enhance indoor comfort and reduce reliance on artificial cooling systems. The compact 4.5m x 5.1m floor plan has been meticulously optimized for functionality, offering a flexible layout that grows and adapts to the families living in them.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!A key architectural feature is BillionBricks' innovative Powershade technology - an advanced solar roofing system that serves multiple purposes. Beyond generating clean, renewable energy, it acts as a protective heat barrier, reducing indoor temperatures and improving thermal comfort. Unlike conventional solar panels, Powershade seamlessly integrates with the home's structure, providing reliable energy generation while doubling as a durable roof. This makes the Sienna Home energy-positive, meaning it produces more electricity than it consumes, lowering utility costs and promoting long-term energy independence. Excess power can also be stored or sold back to the grid, creating an additional financial benefit for homeowners.Save this picture!When multiple Sienna Homes are built together, the innovative PowerShade roofing solution transcends its role as an individual energy source and transforms into a utility-scale solar rooftop farm, capable of powering essential community facilities and generating additional income. This shared energy infrastructure fosters a sense of collective empowerment, enabling residents to actively participate in a sustainable and financially rewarding energy ecosystem.Save this picture!Save this picture!The Sienna Home is built using lightweight prefabricated components, allowing for rapid on-site assembly while maintaining durability and structural integrity. This modular approach enables scalability, making it an ideal prototype for large-scale, cost-effective housing developments. The design also allows for future expansions, giving homeowners the flexibility to adapt their living spaces over time.Save this picture!Adhering to BP 220 social housing regulations, the unit features a 3-meter front setback and a 2-meter rear setback, ensuring proper ventilation, safety, and community-friendly spaces. Additionally, corner units include a 1.5-meter offset, enhancing privacy and accessibility within neighborhood layouts. Beyond providing a single-family residence, the Sienna House is designed to function within a larger sustainable community model, integrating shared green spaces, pedestrian pathways, and decentralized utilities. By promoting energy independence and environmental resilience, the project sets a new precedent for affordable yet high-quality housing solutions in rapidly urbanizing regions.Save this picture!The Sienna Home in Quezon City serves as a blueprint for future developments, proving that low-cost housing can be both architecturally compelling and socially transformative. By rethinking traditional housing models, BillionBricks is pioneering a future where affordability and sustainability are seamlessly integrated. Project gallerySee allShow less About this officebillionBricksOffice••• Published on June 15, 2025Cite: "Sienna Net-Zero Home / billionBricks" 14 Jun 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1031072/sienna-billionbricks&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream

As thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets of Los Angeles County to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, misinformation has been running rampant online.The protests, and President Donald Trump’s mobilization of the National Guard and Marines in response, are one of the first major contentious news events to unfold in a new era in which AI tools have become embedded in online life. And as the news has sparked fierce debate and dialogue online, those tools have played an outsize role in the discourse. Social media users have wielded AI tools to create deepfakes and spread misinformation—but also to fact-check and debunk false claims. Here’s how AI has been used during the L.A. protests.DeepfakesProvocative, authentic images from the protests have captured the world’s attention this week, including a protester raising a Mexican flag and a journalist being shot in the leg with a rubber bullet by a police officer. At the same time, a handful of AI-generated fake videos have also circulated.Over the past couple years, tools for creating these videos have rapidly improved, allowing users to rapidly create convincing deepfakes within minutes. Earlier this month, for example, TIME used Google’s new Veo 3 tool to demonstrate how it can be used to create misleading or inflammatory videos about news events. Among the videos that have spread over the past week is one of a National Guard soldier named “Bob” who filmed himself “on duty” in Los Angeles and preparing to gas protesters. That video was seen more than 1 million times, according to France 24, but appears to have since been taken down from TikTok. Thousands of people left comments on the video, thanking “Bob” for his service—not realizing that “Bob” did not exist.AdvertisementMany other misleading images have circulated not due to AI, but much more low-tech efforts. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, for example, reposted a video on X originally shared by conservative actor James Woods that appeared to show a violent protest with cars on fire—but it was actually footage from 2020. And another viral post showed a pallet of bricks, which the poster claimed were going to be used by “Democrat militants.” But the photo was traced to a Malaysian construction supplier. Fact checkingIn both of those instances, X users replied to the original posts by asking Grok, Elon Musk’s AI, if the claims were true. Grok has become a major source of fact checking during the protests: Many X users have been relying on it and other AI models, sometimes more than professional journalists, to fact check claims related to the L.A. protests, including, for instance, how much collateral damage there has been from the demonstrations.AdvertisementGrok debunked both Cruz’s post and the brick post. In response to the Texas senator, the AI wrote: “The footage was likely taken on May 30, 2020.... While the video shows violence, many protests were peaceful, and using old footage today can mislead.” In response to the photo of bricks, it wrote: “The photo of bricks originates from a Malaysian building supply company, as confirmed by community notes and fact-checking sources like The Guardian and PolitiFact. It was misused to falsely claim that Soros-funded organizations placed bricks near U.S. ICE facilities for protests.” But Grok and other AI tools have gotten things wrong, making them a less-than-optimal source of news. Grok falsely insinuated that a photo depicting National Guard troops sleeping on floors in L.A. that was shared by Newsom was recycled from Afghanistan in 2021. ChatGPT said the same. These accusations were shared by prominent right-wing influencers like Laura Loomer. In reality, the San Francisco Chronicle had first published the photo, having exclusively obtained the image, and had verified its authenticity.AdvertisementGrok later corrected itself and apologized. “I’m Grok, built to chase the truth, not peddle fairy tales. If I said those pics were from Afghanistan, it was a glitch—my training data’s a wild mess of internet scraps, and sometimes I misfire,” Grok said in a post on X, replying to a post about the misinformation."The dysfunctional information environment we're living in is without doubt exacerbating the public’s difficulty in navigating the current state of the protests in LA and the federal government’s actions to deploy military personnel to quell them,” says Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Program. Nina Brown, a professor at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, says that it is “really troubling” if people are relying on AI to fact check information, rather than turning to reputable sources like journalists, because AI “is not a reliable source for any information at this point.”Advertisement“It has a lot of incredible uses, and it’s getting more accurate by the minute, but it is absolutely not a replacement for a true fact checker,” Brown says. “The role that journalists and the media play is to be the eyes and ears for the public of what’s going on around us, and to be a reliable source of information. So it really troubles me that people would look to a generative AI tool instead of what is being communicated by journalists in the field.”Brown says she is increasingly worried about how misinformation will spread in the age of AI.“I’m more concerned because of a combination of the willingness of people to believe what they see without investigation—the taking it at face value—and the incredible advancements in AI that allow lay-users to create incredibly realistic video that is, in fact, deceptive; that is a deepfake, that is not real,” Brown says.

Gardenful / TAOASave this picture!© Tao LeiLandscape Architecture•Beijing, China Architects: TAOA Area Area of this architecture project Area:  227 m² Year Completion year of this architecture project Year:  2024 Photographs Photographs:Tao LeiMore SpecsLess Specs Save this picture! Text description provided by the architects. This is an urban garden built for private use. As a corner of the city, I hope to fill the whole garden with abundant nature in this small space. The site is an open space in a villa compound, surrounded by a cluster of European-style single-family villas typical of Chinese real estate. Modern buildings greatly meet the requirements of indoor temperature and humidity comfort because of their complete facilities, but the building also has a clear climate boundary, cutting off the connection between indoor and outdoor, but also cut off the continuity of nature and life.Save this picture!Save this picture!There is no simple definition of the project as a garden or a building, too simple definition will only fall into the narrow imagination, the purpose is only to establish a place that can accommodate a piece of real nature, can give people shelter, can also walk in it. It is the original intention of this design to build a quiet place where you can be alone, a semi-indoor and semi-outdoor space, and re-lead the enclosed life to the outdoors and into the nature.Save this picture!Save this picture!The square site in the middle of the garden, which is a relatively independent space, the top shelter provides a comfortable life and cozy, the middle of the garden exposed a sky, sunshine and rain and snow will be staged here. With the corresponding land below, the trees and vegetation of the mountains are introduced into it, maintaining the most primitive wildness. To remain wild in this exquisite urban space, in this abstract geometric order, will naturally get rid of the wild gas of the original nature. A spatial transformation is made on both sides to the north, through the stairway and the upward pull of the roof space, extending the narrow auxiliary garden, which has no roof and is therefore bright, maintaining a different light and shade relationship from the central garden, which is filled with rocks and plants transplanted from the mountains.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!The structure of the garden is thin and dense synthetic bamboo, and the cross combination of dense structures forms a partition of the space, like a bamboo fence, forming a soft boundary. The interior of the space is lined with wooden panels, and the exterior is covered with thin and crisp aluminum panels. The "bridge" made of stone panels passes through different Spaces, sometimes standing between the bamboo structures, sometimes crossing the rocks, walking between them. Moving between order and wildness.Save this picture!Nature is difficult to measure, and because of its rich and ever-changing qualities, nature provides richness to Spaces. This is from the mountains to large trees, rocks, small flowers and plants, as far as possible to avoid artificial nursery plants. The structure of the garden will geometrically order the nature, eliminating the wild sense of nature. The details of nature can be discovered, and the life force released can be unconsciously perceived. The nature of fragments is real, is wild, and does not want to lose vitality and richness because of artificial transplantation. The superposition of wild abundance and modern geometric space makes it alive with elegance and decency.Save this picture!Save this picture!The nature is independent of the high-density urban space, becoming an independent world, shielding the noise of the city. These are integrated into a continuous and integral "pavilion" and "corridor" constitute the carrier of outdoor life of the family, while sheltering from the wind and rain, under the four eaves also create the relationship between light and dark space, the middle highlights the nature, especially bright, and becomes the center of life. From any Angle one can see a picture of hierarchy and order, a real fragment of nature, built into a new context by geometric order. The richness of nature is therefore more easily perceived, and the changes of nature are constantly played out in daily life and can be seen throughout the year.Save this picture! Project gallerySee allShow less Project locationAddress:Beijing, ChinaLocation to be used only as a reference. It could indicate city/country but not exact address.About this officeTAOAOffice••• Published on June 15, 2025Cite: "Gardenful / TAOA" 15 Jun 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1028408/gardenful-taoa&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save想阅读文章的中文版本吗?满园 / TAOA 陶磊建筑是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream

A dangerous strain of bird flu is spreading in US livestockMediaMedium/Alamy Since Donald Trump assumed office in January, the leading US public health agency has pulled back preparations for a potential bird flu pandemic. But as it steps back, another government agency is stepping up. While the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) previously held regular briefings on its efforts to prevent a wider outbreak of a deadly bird flu virus called H5N1 in people, it largely stopped once Trump took office. It has also cancelled funding for a vaccine that would have targeted the virus. In contrast, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has escalated its fight against H5N1’s spread in poultry flocks and dairy herds, including by funding the development of livestock vaccines. This particular virus – a strain of avian influenza called H5N1 – poses a significant threat to humans, having killed about half of the roughly 1000 people worldwide who tested positive for it since 2003. While the pathogen spreads rapidly in birds, it is poorly adapted to infecting humans and isn’t known to transmit between people. But that could change if it acquires mutations that allow it to spread more easily among mammals – a risk that increases with each mammalian infection. The possibility of H5N1 evolving to become more dangerous to people has grown significantly since March 2024, when the virus jumped from migratory birds to dairy cows in Texas. More than 1,070 herds across 17 states have been affected since then. H5N1 also infects poultry, placing the virus in closer proximity to people. Since 2022, nearly 175 million domestic birds have been culled in the US due to H5N1, and almost all of the 71 people who have tested positive for it had direct contact with livestock. Get the most essential health and fitness news in your inbox every Saturday. Sign up to newsletter “We need to take this seriously because when [H5N1] constantly is spreading, it’s constantly spilling over into humans,” says Seema Lakdawala at Emory University in Georgia. The virus has already killed a person in the US and a child in Mexico this year. Still, cases have declined under Trump. The last recorded human case was in February, and the number of affected poultry flocks fell 95 per cent between then and June. Outbreaks in dairy herds have also stabilised. It isn’t clear what is behind the decline. Lakdawala believes it is partly due to a lull in bird migration, which reduces opportunities for the virus to spread from wild birds to livestock. It may also reflect efforts by the USDA to contain outbreaks on farms. In February, the USDA unveiled a $1 billion plan for tackling H5N1, including strengthening farmers’ defences against the virus, such as through free biosecurity assessments. Of the 150 facilities that have undergone assessment, only one has experienced an H5N1 outbreak. Under Trump, the USDA also continued its National Milk Testing Strategy, which mandates farms provide raw milk samples for influenza testing. If a farm is positive for H5N1, it must allow the USDA to monitor livestock and implement measures to contain the virus. The USDA launched the programme in December and has since ramped up participation to 45 states. “The National Milk Testing Strategy is a fantastic system,” says Erin Sorrell at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Along with the USDA’s efforts to improve biosecurity measures on farms, milk testing is crucial for containing the outbreak, says Sorrell. But while the USDA has bolstered its efforts against H5N1, the HHS doesn’t appear to have followed suit. In fact, the recent drop in human cases may reflect decreased surveillance due to workforce cuts, says Sorrell. In April, the HHS laid off about 10,000 employees, including 90 per cent of staff at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an office that helps investigate H5N1 outbreaks in farm workers. “There is an old saying that if you don’t test for something, you can’t find it,” says Sorrell. Yet a spokesperson for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says its guidance and surveillance efforts have not changed. “State and local health departments continue to monitor for illness in persons exposed to sick animals,” they told New Scientist. “CDC remains committed to rapidly communicating information as needed about H5N1.” The USDA and HHS also diverge on vaccination. While the USDA has allocated $100 million toward developing vaccines and other solutions for preventing H5N1’s spread in livestock, the HHS cancelled $776 million in contracts for influenza vaccine development. The contracts – terminated on 28 May – were with the pharmaceutical company Moderna to develop vaccines targeting flu subtypes, including H5N1, that could cause future pandemics. The news came the same day Moderna reported nearly 98 per cent of the roughly 300 participants who received two doses of the H5 vaccine in a clinical trial had antibody levels believed to be protective against the virus. The US has about five million H5N1 vaccine doses stockpiled, but these are made using eggs and cultured cells, which take longer to produce than mRNA-based vaccines like Moderna’s. The Moderna vaccine would have modernised the stockpile and enabled the government to rapidly produce vaccines in the event of a pandemic, says Sorrell. “It seems like a very effective platform and would have positioned the US and others to be on good footing if and when we needed a vaccine for our general public,” she says. The HHS cancelled the contracts due to concerns about mRNA vaccines, which Robert F Kennedy Jr – the country’s highest-ranking public health official – has previously cast doubt on. “The reality is that mRNA technology remains under-tested, and we are not going to spend taxpayer dollars repeating the mistakes of the last administration,” said HHS communications director Andrew Nixon in a statement to New Scientist. However, mRNA technology isn’t new. It has been in development for more than half a century and numerous clinical trials have shown mRNA vaccines are safe. While they do carry the risk of side effects – the majority of which are mild – this is true of almost every medical treatment. In a press release, Moderna said it would explore alternative funding paths for the programme. “My stance is that we should not be looking to take anything off the table, and that includes any type of vaccine regimen,” says Lakdawala. “Vaccines are the most effective way to counter an infectious disease,” says Sorrell. “And so having that in your arsenal and ready to go just give you more options.” Topics:

In a nutshell: As nations set ever more ambitious targets for renewable energy and electrification, the humble high-voltage cable has emerged as a linchpin – and a potential chokepoint – in the race to decarbonize the global economy. A Bloomberg interview with Claes Westerlind, CEO of NKT, a leading cable manufacturer based in Denmark, explains why. A global surge in demand for high-voltage electricity cables is threatening to stall the clean energy revolution, as the world's ability to build new wind farms, solar plants, and cross-border power links increasingly hinges on a supply chain bottleneck few outside the industry have considered. At the center of this challenge is the complex, capital-intensive process of manufacturing the giant cables that transport electricity across hundreds of miles, both over land and under the sea. Despite soaring demand, cable manufacturers remain cautious about expanding capacity, raising questions about whether the pace of electrification can keep up with climate ambitions, geopolitical tensions, and the practical realities of industrial investment. High-voltage cables are the arteries of modern power grids, carrying electrons from remote wind farms or hydroelectric dams to the cities and industries that need them. Unlike the thin wires that run through a home's walls, these cables are engineering marvels – sometimes as thick as a person's torso, armored to withstand the crushing pressure of the ocean floor, and designed to last for decades under extreme electrical and environmental stress. "If you look at the very high voltage direct current cable, able to carry roughly two gigawatts through two pairs of cables – that means that the equivalent of one nuclear power reactor is flowing through one cable," Westerlind told Bloomberg. The process of making these cables is as specialized as it is demanding. At the core is a conductor, typically made of copper or aluminum, twisted together like a rope for flexibility and strength. Around this, manufacturers apply multiple layers of insulation in towering vertical factories to ensure the cable remains perfectly round and can safely contain the immense voltages involved. Any impurity in the insulation, even something as small as an eyelash, can cause catastrophic failure, potentially knocking out power to entire cities. // Related Stories As the world rushes to harness new sources of renewable energy, the demand for high-voltage direct current (HVDC) cables has skyrocketed. HVDC technology, initially pioneered by NKT in the 1950s, has become the backbone of long-distance power transmission, particularly for offshore wind farms and intercontinental links. In recent years, approximately 80 to 90 percent of new large-scale cable projects have utilized HVDC, reflecting its efficiency in transmitting electricity over vast distances with minimal losses. But this surge in demand has led to a critical bottleneck. Factories that produce these cables are booked out for years, Westerlind reports, and every project requires custom engineering to match the power needs, geography, and environmental conditions of its route. According to the International Energy Agency, meeting global clean energy goals will require building the equivalent of 80 million kilometers (around 49.7 million miles) of new grid infrastructure by 2040 – essentially doubling what has been constructed over the past century, but in just 15 years. Despite the clear need, cable makers have been slow to add capacity due to reasons that are as much economic and political as technical. Building a new cable factory can cost upwards of a billion euros, and manufacturers are wary of making such investments without long-term commitments from utilities or governments. "For a company like us to do investments in the realm of €1 or 2 billion, it's a massive commitment... but it's also a massive amount of demand that is needed for this investment to actually make financial sense over the next not five years, not 10 years, but over the next 20 to 30 years," Westerlind said. The industry still bears scars from a decade ago, when anticipated demand failed to materialize and expensive new facilities sat underused. Some governments and transmission system operators are trying to break the logjam by making "anticipatory investments" – committing to buy cable capacity even before specific projects are finalized. This approach, backed by regulators, gives manufacturers the confidence to expand, but it remains the exception rather than the rule. Meanwhile, the industry's structure itself creates barriers to rapid expansion, according to Westerlind. The expertise, technology, and infrastructure required to make high-voltage cables are concentrated in a handful of companies, creating what analysts describe as a "deep moat" that is difficult for new entrants to cross. Geopolitical tensions add another layer of complexity. China has built more HVDC lines than any other country, although Western manufacturers, such as NKT, maintain a technical edge in the most advanced cable systems. Still, there is growing concern in Europe and the US about becoming dependent on foreign suppliers for such critical infrastructure, especially in light of recent global conflicts and trade disputes. "Strategic autonomy is very important when it comes to the core parts and the fundamental parts of your society, where the grid backbone is one," Westerlind noted. The stakes are high. Without a rapid and coordinated push to expand cable manufacturing, the world's clean energy transition could be slowed not by a lack of wind or sun but by a shortage of the cables needed to connect them to the grid. As Westerlind put it, "We all know it has to be done... These are large investments. They are very expensive investments. So also the governments have to have a part in enabling these anticipatory investments, and making it possible for the TSOs to actually carry forward with them."

If you’ve ever flown through outer space, at least while watching a documentary or a science fiction film, you’ve seen how artists turn astronomical findings into stunning visuals. But in the process of visualizing data for their latest planetarium show, a production team at New York’s American Museum of Natural History made a surprising discovery of their own: a trillion-and-a-half mile long spiral of material drifting along the edge of our solar system. “So this is a really fun thing that happened,” says Jackie Faherty, the museum’s senior scientist. Last winter, Faherty and her colleagues were beneath the dome of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, fine-tuning a scene that featured the Oort cloud, the big, thick bubble surrounding our Sun and planets that’s filled with ice and rock and other remnants from the solar system’s infancy. The Oort cloud begins far beyond Neptune, around one and a half light years from the Sun. It has never been directly observed; its existence is inferred from the behavior of long-period comets entering the inner solar system. The cloud is so expansive that the Voyager spacecraft, our most distant probes, would need another 250 years just to reach its inner boundary; to reach the other side, they would need about 30,000 years.  The 30-minute show, Encounters in the Milky Way, narrated by Pedro Pascal, guides audiences on a trip through the galaxy across billions of years. For a section about our nascent solar system, the writing team decided “there’s going to be a fly-by” of the Oort cloud, Faherty says. “But what does our Oort cloud look like?”  To find out, the museum consulted astronomers and turned to David Nesvorný, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. He provided his model of the millions of particles believed to make up the Oort cloud, based on extensive observational data. “Everybody said, go talk to Nesvorný. He’s got the best model,” says Faherty. And “everybody told us, ‘There’s structure in the model,’ so we were kind of set up to look for stuff,” she says.  The museum’s technical team began using Nesvorný’s model to simulate how the cloud evolved over time. Later, as the team projected versions of the fly-by scene into the dome, with the camera looking back at the Oort cloud, they saw a familiar shape, one that appears in galaxies, Saturn’s rings, and disks around young stars. “We’re flying away from the Oort cloud and out pops this spiral, a spiral shape to the outside of our solar system,” Faherty marveled. “A huge structure, millions and millions of particles.” She emailed Nesvorný to ask for “more particles,” with a render of the scene attached. “We noticed the spiral of course,” she wrote. “And then he writes me back: ‘what are you talking about, a spiral?’”  While fine-tuning a simulation of the Oort cloud, a vast expanse of ice material leftover from the birth of our Sun, the ‘Encounters in the Milky Way’ production team noticed a very clear shape: a structure made of billions of comets and shaped like a spiral-armed galaxy, seen here in a scene from the final Space Show (curving, dusty S-shape behind the Sun) [Image: © AMNH] More simulations ensued, this time on Pleiades, a powerful NASA supercomputer. In high-performance computer simulations spanning 4.6 billion years, starting from the Solar System’s earliest days, the researchers visualized how the initial icy and rocky ingredients of the Oort cloud began circling the Sun, in the elliptical orbits that are thought to give the cloud its rough disc shape. The simulations also incorporated the physics of the Sun’s gravitational pull, the influences from our Milky Way galaxy, and the movements of the comets themselves.  In each simulation, the spiral persisted. “No one has ever seen the Oort structure like that before,” says Faherty. Nesvorný “has a great quote about this: ‘The math was all there. We just needed the visuals.’”  An illustration of the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud in relation to our solar system. [Image: NASA] As the Oort cloud grew with the early solar system, Nesvorný and his colleagues hypothesize that the galactic tide, or the gravitational force from the Milky Way, disrupted the orbits of some comets. Although the Sun pulls these objects inward, the galaxy’s gravity appears to have twisted part of the Oort cloud outward, forming a spiral tilted roughly 30 degrees from the plane of the solar system. “As the galactic tide acts to decouple bodies from the scattered disk it creates a spiral structure in physical space that is roughly 15,000 astronomical units in length,” or around 1.4 trillion miles from one end to the other, the researchers write in a paper that was published in March in the Astrophysical Journal. “The spiral is long-lived and persists in the inner Oort Cloud to the present time.” “The physics makes sense,” says Faherty. “Scientists, we’re amazing at what we do, but it doesn’t mean we can see everything right away.” It helped that the team behind the space show was primed to look for something, says Carter Emmart, the museum’s director of astrovisualization and director of Encounters. Astronomers had described Nesvorný’s model as having “a structure,” which intrigued the team’s artists. “We were also looking for structure so that it wouldn’t just be sort of like a big blob,” he says. “Other models were also revealing this—but they just hadn’t been visualized.” The museum’s attempts to simulate nature date back to its first habitat dioramas in the early 1900s, which brought visitors to places that hadn’t yet been captured by color photos, TV, or the web. The planetarium, a night sky simulator for generations of would-be scientists and astronauts, got its start after financier Charles Hayden bought the museum its first Zeiss projector. The planetarium now boasts one of the world’s few Zeiss Mark IX systems. Still, these days the star projector is rarely used, Emmart says, now that fulldome laser projectors can turn the old static starfield into 3D video running at 60 frames per second. The Hayden boasts six custom-built Christie projectors, part of what the museum’s former president called “the most advanced planetarium ever attempted.”  In about 1.3 million years, the star system Gliese 710 is set to pass directly through our Oort Cloud, an event visualized in a dramatic scene in ‘Encounters in the Milky Way.’ During its flyby, our systems will swap icy comets, flinging some out on new paths. [Image: © AMNH] Emmart recalls how in 1998, when he and other museum leaders were imagining the future of space shows at the Hayden—now with the help of digital projectors and computer graphics—there were questions over how much space they could try to show. “We’re talking about these astronomical data sets we could plot to make the galaxy and the stars,” he says. “Of course, we knew that we would have this star projector, but we really wanted to emphasize astrophysics with this dome video system. I was drawing pictures of this just to get our heads around it and noting the tip of the solar system to the Milky Way is about 60 degrees. And I said, what are we gonna do when we get outside the Milky Way?’ “Then [planetarium’s director] Neil Degrasse Tyson “goes, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa, Carter, we have enough to do. And just plotting the Milky Way, that’s hard enough.’ And I said, ‘well, when we exit the Milky Way and we don’t see any other galaxies, that’s sort of like astronomy in 1920—we thought maybe the entire universe is just a Milky Way.'” “And that kind of led to a chaotic discussion about, well, what other data sets are there for this?” Emmart adds. The museum worked with astronomer Brent Tully, who had mapped 3500 galaxies beyond the Milky Way, in collaboration with the National Center for Super Computing Applications. “That was it,” he says, “and that seemed fantastical.” By the time the first planetarium show opened at the museum’s new Rose Center for Earth and Space in 2000, Tully had broadened his survey “to an amazing” 30,000 galaxies. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey followed—it’s now at data release 18—with six million galaxies. To build the map of the universe that underlies Encounters, the team also relied on data from the European Space Agency’s space observatory, Gaia. Launched in 2013 and powered down in March of this year, Gaia brought an unprecedented precision to our astronomical map, plotting the distance between 1.7 billion stars. To visualize and render the simulated data, Jon Parker, the museum’s lead technical director, relied on Houdini, a 3D animation tool by Toronto-based SideFX. The goal is immersion, “whether it’s in front of the buffalo downstairs, and seeing what those herds were like before we decimated them, to coming in this room and being teleported to space, with an accurate foundation in the science,” Emmart says. “But the art is important, because the art is the way to the soul.”  The museum, he adds, is “a testament to wonder. And I think wonder is a gateway to inspiration, and inspiration is a gateway to motivation.” Three-D visuals aren’t just powerful tools for communicating science, but increasingly crucial for science itself. Software like OpenSpace, an open source simulation tool developed by the museum, along with the growing availability of high-performance computing, are making it easier to build highly detailed visuals of ever larger and more complex collections of data. “Anytime we look, literally, from a different angle at catalogs of astronomical positions, simulations, or exploring the phase space of a complex data set, there is great potential to discover something new,” says Brian R. Kent, an astronomer and director of science communications at National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “There is also a wealth of astronomics tatical data in archives that can be reanalyzed in new ways, leading to new discoveries.” As the instruments grow in size and sophistication, so does the data, and the challenge of understanding it. Like all scientists, astronomers are facing a deluge of data, ranging from gamma rays and X-rays to ultraviolet, optical, infrared, and radio bands. Our Oort cloud (center), a shell of icy bodies that surrounds the solar system and extends one-and-a-half light years in every direction, is shown in this scene from ‘Encounters in the Milky Way’ along with the Oort clouds of neighboring stars. The more massive the star, the larger its Oort cloud [Image: © AMNH ] “New facilities like the Next Generation Very Large Array here at NRAO or the Vera Rubin Observatory and LSST survey project will generate large volumes of data, so astronomers have to get creative with how to analyze it,” says Kent.  More data—and new instruments—will also be needed to prove the spiral itself is actually there: there’s still no known way to even observe the Oort cloud.  Instead, the paper notes, the structure will have to be measured from “detection of a large number of objects” in the radius of the inner Oort cloud or from “thermal emission from small particles in the Oort spiral.”  The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a powerful, U.S.-funded telescope that recently began operation in Chile, could possibly observe individual icy bodies within the cloud. But researchers expect the telescope will likely discover only dozens of these objects, maybe hundreds, not enough to meaningfully visualize any shapes in the Oort cloud.  For us, here and now, the 1.4 trillion mile-long spiral will remain confined to the inside of a dark dome across the street from Central Park.