The Download: abandoning carbon offsets, and creating new materials

Within the fall of 2018, the College of California tasked a staff of researchers with figuring out tasks from which it might confidently buy carbon offsets that will reliably cancel out greenhouse gasoline emissions throughout its campuses. They discovered subsequent to nothing.

The findings helped immediate the complete college system to radically rethink its sustainability plans. Now the researchers are sharing the teachings they discovered over the course of the undertaking, within the hopes of serving to different universities and organizations take into account what position, if any, offsets ought to play in sustainability methods, MIT Expertise Assessment can report.

The undertaking’s leaders have three major takeaways for what others ought to do. Read our story to find out what they are.

—James Temple

Google DeepMind’s new AI instrument helped create greater than 700 new supplies

The information: Google DeepMind has created a instrument that makes use of deep studying to dramatically pace up the method of discovering new supplies. The know-how, which is named graphical networks for materials exploration (GNoME), has already been used to foretell buildings for two.2 million new supplies, of which greater than 700 have gone on to be created and examined within the lab.

Why it issues: From EV batteries to photo voltaic cells to microchips, new supplies can supercharge technological breakthroughs. However discovering them often takes months and even years of trial-and-error analysis. Because of GNoME, the variety of identified secure supplies has grown nearly tenfold, to 421,000. Read the full story.

—June Kim