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Peter Higgs: Physicist who theorised the Higgs boson has died aged 94

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Peter Higgs: Physicist who theorised the Higgs boson has died aged 94


Physicist Peter Higgs in Italy in 1996

Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images

Groundbreaking theoretical physicist Peter Higgs has died at age 94. Higgs’s work explaining how elementary particles get their mass won him the Nobel prize in 2013 and formed a key ingredient in the standard model of particle physics. He died in his home in Edinburgh, UK, on 8 April after a short illness.

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In 1964, while working as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, Higgs made a prediction that would prove to have a huge impact on the world of physics: he postulated the existence of a field suffusing the universe that gave mass to particles moments after the big bang. This field would be associated with a particle of its own, which was later named the Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson went on to become a foundational prediction of the standard model of particle physics, nicknamed the “god particle” – a moniker that Higgs himself called “an unfortunate mixing of theoretical physics with bad theology” in a 2017 interview with New Scientist.

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After years of searching for proof of the Higgs boson, it was finally discovered at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland in 2012. A year later, Higgs was awarded the Nobel prize, one of many prizes and honours he received for his work.

The discovery of the Higgs boson is commonly cited as the most consequential work of the Large Hadron Collider, but it also marked the beginning of a strange time in particle physics – with all of the particles predicted by the standard model found, what is next? Higgs himself hoped that we would be able to use colliders to connect particle physics with cosmology and the search for dark matter, but those questions remain open.

Even after his retirement in 1996, Higgs continued to attend physics conferences and to collaborate with colleagues and students. He spoke often about supersymmetry, a framework for physics in which each known particle has a corresponding partner with a different spin. If we do live in a supersymmetric universe, there should be many more particles out there to discover.

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Next U.S. president shouldn’t surrender America’s energy dominance, Total CEO warns

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Next U.S. president shouldn't surrender America's energy dominance, Total CEO warns


The U.S. has a 'clear competitive advantage' on energy, says TotalEnergies CEO

Whoever wins the 2024 U.S. election should work to preserve America’s energy dominance rather than risk losing it, Total CEO Patrick Pouyanne told CNBC on Monday.

The U.S. is the world’s largest oil producer, accounting for 22% of the global total, according to the Energy Information Administration, with Saudi Arabia next, producing 11%. The vast majority of U.S. crude is consumed within the country, which is also the world’s largest oil consumer.

“U.S. energy has been unleashed. In fact, when you look to what happened since the last two, three years, production of oil has never been so high … [the] revolution of U.S. shale is really taking place,” Pouyanne told CNBC’s Dan Murphy at the annual Adipec oil conference in Abu Dhabi.

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Roughly 64% of total U.S. crude oil production is shale and the French international energy firm CEO said the U.S. will also soon be No. 1 in liquified natural gas (LNG) production.

“I think that is part of political rhetoric,” Pouyanne said. “My view is that whoever the [winning] camp is, in fact, energy is really one of the big competitive advantages for the U.S. and whoever will win [will put] U.S. first, I would say.”

Looking ahead to the election, former President Donald Trump and the Republican party have long been proponents of U.S. shale production, pushing for deregulation of the industry and an expansion of drilling projects — drawing the ire of climate activists and many on the left.

Conoco Phillips Eagle Ford Shale Drilling Rig in Texas

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Source: Conoco Phillips

But Democratic contender and Vice President Kamala Harris has now changed her position on fracking, expressing support for the controversial oil and gas extraction process and pledging not to ban it as president, despite years of vocal opposition.

Short for hydraulic fracturing, the process — which uses vast quantities of water and can be damaging to the environment — paved the way for America’s shale revolution, jolting the country’s oil production from a record low of 5.1 million barrels per day in 2008 to its historic high of nearly 13 million barrels per day in 2023.

“Kamala Harris has declared that she’s supportive of shale oil fracking and shale gas. So I think it’s part of the game,” Pouyanne said. “Again, for me, today, the U.S. has a clear competitive advantage on energy compared to many [in the] rest of the world. So I will be surprised to see whoever is elected lose the competitive advantage.”

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Energy dominance also plays a role when it comes to U.S. exports and geopolitical strength, as the country has been able to boost oil and gas supplies to Europe as the continent cuts its Russian imports following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. supplied almost half of Europe’s LNG imports in 2023, according to Cedigaz, with most of that produced by shale drilling.

Pouyanne noted that President Joe Biden’s administration had been more restrictive on opening new acreage for drilling, “but at same time, they approved a project from Alaska,” the Total CEO said.

“So, I mean, it’s more balanced than we think,” the Total CEO added. “And my view is that, again: ‘USA first,’ whoever will be president.”



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How Big Tech intends to power AI’s thirst for energy

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How Big Tech intends to power AI's thirst for energy


Industrial chiller at Yotta Data Services Pvt. data center, in Navi Mumbai, India, on Thursday, Mar. 14, 2024.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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A huge upswing in the number of data centers worldwide shows no signs of slowing down, prompting Big Tech to consider how best to power the artificial intelligence revolution.

Some of the options on the table include a pivot to nuclear, liquid cooling for data centers and quantum computing.

Critics, however, have said that as the pace of efficiency gains in electricity use slows, tech giants should recognize the cost of the generative AI boom across the whole supply chain — and let go of the “move fast and break things” narrative.

“The actual environmental cost is quite hidden at the moment. It is just subsidized by the fact that tech companies need to get a product and a buy-in,” Somya Joshi, head of division: global agendas, climate and systems at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), told CNBC via video call.

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A wave of data center investment is expected to accelerate even further in the coming years, according to the International Energy Agency, primarily driven by growing digitalization and the uptake of generative AI.

It is this prospect that has stoked concerns about an electricity demand surge — as well as AI’s often-overlooked but critically important environmental impact.

There's a water crisis looming. Big Tech and AI could make it worse

Data centers, which consume an ever-increasing amount of energy, represent a key piece of infrastructure behind modern-day cloud computing and AI applications.

Giampiero Frisio, president of electrification at Swiss multinational ABB, said the engineering group’s data center business has enjoyed remarkable growth in recent years — with the segment on track to grow by more than 24% in 2024.

Frisio said ABB has been well placed in the AI demand boom to supply mid-sized and big-name industry players with all the components needed to run a data center.

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“I think the best way to act now is to increase the energy efficiency. That’s the best way because the technology is there, for example the medium voltage HiPerGuard UPS. You can do it, and you can do it tomorrow morning,” Frisio told CNBC via video call.

The HiPerGuard UPS refers to ABB’s industry-first medium voltage uninterruptable power supply, which it says can provide continuous power to large facilities.

A server room at a data center in India.

Dhiraj Singh | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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“The second one is to move on the liquid cooling, there is no doubt. Again, this is in the optic of better energy efficiency. Why? Because a single rack, you know the black boxes that look like a wardrobe with all the servers inside, the power density of those is going to be four to six times than before,” Frisio said.

“After that, we are talking about five to 10 years from now, it is the nuclear modular system,” he added.

Big Tech is going nuclear

U.S. tech behemoths Microsoft, Google and Amazon have all secured nuclear energy deals worth billions of dollars in recent months as they seek to bring additional energy capacity online to train and run the massive generative AI models behind today’s applications.

The upsurge of generative AI demand has coincided with a push to find more efficient cooling solutions in data centers, particularly liquid cooling — a process in which water is used to lower the temperatures of servers and other electronic equipment.

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I think in the summer of every great technology we discover there is a winter — but don’t pay attention to it until winter arrives.

Raj Hazra

CEO of Quantinuum

French power-equipment maker Schneider Electric recently completed an $850 million deal to take a controlling stake in Motivair Corp, a U.S.-based company that specializes in liquid cooling for high-performance computing.

Schneider Electric CEO Peter Herweck told CNBC last month that the all-cash deal, which is designed to bolster its offering to data centers, was “rich, but not overly expensive” and “fits great” with the firm’s strategy.

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Alongside nuclear energy and liquid cooling technology, some tech players have suggested developments within AI could help to decarbonize data centers.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: It's time for us to fully invest in AI infrastructure

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, for example, said last month that since “we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway”, investing in AI could be pivotal to solving some of our biggest environmental challenges.

SEI’s Joshi flatly rejected this point of view.

“These arguments are not new, they are very much in line with the sort of ‘silver bullet’, ‘tech will save us’ rhetoric,” Joshi said.

“There is something inherently at odds with saying we operate within certain finite planetary boundaries and yet by exceeding them and continuing with the same extractive narratives, we are somehow going to solve the problem that we’re in now,” she added.

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Quantum computing

“I think in the summer of every great technology we discover there is a winter — but don’t pay attention to it until winter arrives,” Raj Hazra, CEO of Quantinuum, the world’s largest integrated quantum computing company, told CNBC via video call.

“That is my way of describing what is happening with generative AI, the infrastructure needed to support it [and] the massive data centers that have to be built.”

Hazra said optimism over the generative AI boom is already straining the cost of running the technology.

Aerial view of a data center owned by the US multinational and technology company Google in Santiago on October 9, 2024. The drought that is affecting part of South America, coupled with public pressure, is forcing technology giants such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to reformulate their data center projects in the region in favor of low-water consumption ones.

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Rodrigo Arangua | Afp | Getty Images

“One of the things that has become quite apparent is it’s no longer OK to say I have a solution to a problem; you have to say I have a sustainable solution to a problem,” Hazra said.

The CEO said one of quantum’s biggest contributions to society can be to make AI both sustainable and responsible.

“I predict that in the next three to five years, you will see people say, what is my compute infrastructure for running my business? It will be a combination of high-performance computing, AI and quantum,” he added.



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Prince William returns to ‘special place’ Africa for Earthshot Prize awards

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Prince William returns to 'special place' Africa for Earthshot Prize awards


PA Media Prince William head and shoulders, wearing a beard.PA Media

Prince William wants this year’s Earthshot event to boost African environmental projects

The Prince of Wales has spoken of his deep personal connections with Africa – ahead of his environmental Earthshot Prize awards ceremony in Cape Town in South Africa next week.

“Africa has always held a special place in my heart – as somewhere I found comfort as a teenager, where I proposed to my wife,” said Prince William ahead of his visit.

Prince William’s mother, Diana, had many associations with the continent, including supporting a mine-clearing charity, and his return there as a young man seemed to have left an emotional impact.

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It was in Kenya that the prince proposed to Catherine during a romantic trip in 2010.

Earthshot Prize Man on a board in litter-strewn seaEarthshot Prize

A project to revive the ocean and promote the use of seaweed is among the finalists

At the time he said he’d been carrying the engagement ring – which previously belonged to his mother – around in his rucksack for several weeks, building up to the proposal.

Prince William says he is taking his environmental prize back to its African roots – as a visit to Namibia had been the “founding inspiration” and the “birthplace” of the awards.

“It was in Namibia in 2018 that I realised the power of how innovative, positive solutions to environmental problems could drive transformative change for humans and nature,” says Prince William.

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The Earthshot Prize, first awarded in 2021, supports sustainable, eco-friendly projects from around the world, with five winners each receiving £1m.

There is a focus on ideas from Africa for this year’s event, with more than 400 African-led projects nominated and another 350 linked to the continent.

Although Africa generates the fewest emissions for global warming, many of its countries are among the most vulnerable to climate change.

The emphasis of the awards is on tangible results, scaling up good ideas to make a bigger impact. For instance, one of last year’s finalists was a project to reduce air pollution from car tyres and that’s now being developed in a partnership with Uber in the UK and US.

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“By the end of the week, I want the Earthshot Prize to have provided a platform to all those innovators bringing about change for their communities, encouraged potential investors to speed African solutions to scale and inspired young people across Africa who are engaged in climate issues,” says Prince William.

In keeping with the green theme, guests will arrive on a green carpet rather than red and South African landmarks will be illuminated in green light.

The prince will attend the awards ceremony on 6 November, which will feature a performance of a song from the Lion King on top of Table Mountain, with the event available on BBC iPlayer.



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Politicians not ambitious enough to save nature, say scientists

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Politicians not ambitious enough to save nature, say scientists


Getty Images A delegate at the UN biodiversity summit, COP 16Getty Images

UN biodiversity summits happen every two years – this year in Cali, Colombia

Scientists say there has been an alarming lack of progress in saving nature as the UN biodiversity summit, COP 16, draws to a close.

The scale of political ambition has not risen to the challenge of reducing the destruction of nature that costs the economy billions, said one leading expert.

Representatives of 196 countries have been meeting in Cali, Colombia, to agree on how to halt nature decline by 2030.

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The biodiversity summit is separate from the more well-known COP climate summit, which is set to take place in Baku later this month.

Countries were meant to come to the table with a detailed plan on how they intended to meet biodiversity targets at home, but most missed the deadline.

Getty Images Frog on a small leaf in the AmazonGetty Images

Megadiverse countries such as Brazil hold much of the world’s remaining biodiversity

However, plans were agreed to raise money for conservation through making companies pay for using genetic resources from nature.

The summit comes as one million species face extinction and nature is declining at rates unprecedented in human history.

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We are stuck in a “vicious cycle where economic woes reduce political focus on the environment” while the destruction of nature costs the economy billions, said Tom Oliver, professor of biodiversity at the University of Reading.

Getty Images Loss of fir trees to disease in a national park in EuropeGetty Images

Tree extinctions are increasing due to habitat loss and pests and diseases

“Until we have world leaders with the wisdom and courage to put nature as a top political priority then nature-related risks will continue to escalate,” he told BBC News.

The UN biodiversity summit, COP 16, was the first chance to take stock of progress towards a landmark deal to restore nature agreed in 2022.

However, scientists lamented the pace of progress. Nathalie Seddon, professor of biodiversity at the University of Oxford, said while some meaningful progress was made, the overarching picture was “undoubtedly deeply concerning”.

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“Biodiversity still takes a back seat to climate action – even though the science speaks strongly to the need for fully coordinated approaches,” she said.

What was agreed at the summit?

  • An agreement was reached that companies profiting from nature’s genetic data should pay towards its protection through a global fund
  • The fund, to be known as the Cali fund after the COP16 host city, will be financed with payments from companies who make use of genetic information from living things
  • The role of Indigenous Peoples as vital stewards of nature was officially recognised through the setting up of a permanent body to represent their interests

The next biodiversity summit will take place in 2026, with time running out for solutions. Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, said through such gatherings governments, NGOs and scientists could share knowledge and resources.

“This collective spirit is critical as we work to develop and implement effective policies to confront the complex and interconnected crises facing our planet’s ecosystems,” she said.

Commenting on the talks, the renowned scientist, Dr Jane Goodall, said our future is “ultimately doomed” if we don’t address biodiversity loss.

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She told BBC News: “We have to take action too. We can’t only blame the government and big corporations, although a huge part of the blame lies on them.”

Additional reporting by Victoria Gill.



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We’ve seen particles that are massless only in one direction

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We've seen particles that are massless only in one direction


Mass-shifting particles have finally been spotted

LAGUNA DESIGN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Strange particles that have mass when moving one direction but no mass when moving in another were first theorised more than a decade ago. Now, these mass-shifting particles have been glimpsed in a semimetal exposed to extreme conditions.

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“This [particle] is very bizarre. You can imagine walking on the streets of New York and if you go straight, you are super light, you are massless. But turn 90 degrees east or west, and you become super massive,” says …



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Dominion is discussing small nuclear reactors with other tech companies

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Dominion is discussing small nuclear reactors with other tech companies


The Dominion coal burning power plant is seen in Saint Paul, Virginia on Tuesday, February 7, 2023. Community leaders in Southwestern Virginia are giving serious consideration to the idea of utilizing formerly mined coal sites to house small modular nuclear reactors.

Mike Belleme | The Washington Post | Getty Images

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Dominion Energy is talking with other tech companies about developing small modular nuclear reactors, after the Virginia utility entered into an agreement with Amazon last month to look at advancing the next generation technology .

“It’s very encouraging to see large power users, including technology companies, express a willingness to invest, partner and collaborate to bring this exciting base load carbon free technology into fruition,” Dominion CEO Robert Blue told investors on the company’s third-quarter earnings call Friday.

Dominion and Amazon have signed a memorandum of understanding to explore developing a small modular reactor near the utility’s North Anna nuclear station in Louisa County, Virginia. The small reactor would bring 300 megawatts of power to Virginia.

Virginia is one of the most nuclear friendly states in the nation with strong bipartisan support for next-generation nuclear initiatives, Blue said.

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“It’s not surprising that our large customers would be interested as they think about us as a good operator of nuclear, to work together on maybe advancing those kinds of technologies,” the CEO told investors.

“So we’ve been talking with Amazon obviously and others,” the CEO said.

Tech companies are investing in nuclear power as they hunt for carbon-free, reliable electricity to support the growing energy needs of artificial intelligence data centers. Dominion serves the largest data center market in the world, northern Virginia.

Earlier this year, Amazon bought a data center campus from Talen Energy that will be powered by the Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Microsoft has signed an agreement to purchase power from Three Mile Island as Constellation Energy aims to restart the plant in 2028. And Alphabet‘s Google agreed last month to purchase power from the startup Kairos Power, a developer of small modular reactors.

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Small modular reactors promise to reduce capital costs and speed the deployment of nuclear plants. They have a smaller footprint than large reactors, making them easier to site in principle, and promise a simpler manufacturing process.

But the technology has struggled to reach the commercial stage. There is no operating small modular reactor in the U.S. right now.



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