Wednesday five of the U.S. Republican candidates for president gathered for their third debate in Miami — where they again urged the banning of TikTok in America:

Moderator: Last week congressman Mike Gallagher, who is chairman of the House bipartisan select committee on the Chinese Community party, published a long essay on TikTok... [H]e called the app "predatory... controlled by America's preeminent adversary," used to push propaganda and divide America. It's "spyware," he said — a means of surveillance.

Governor Christie, do you agree with chairman Gallgaher, and if so would you ban or force the sale of TikTok.

Chris Christie: I agree 100% with chairman Gallagher, and let me say this. TikTok is not only spyware. it is polluting the minds of American young people, all throughout this country. And they're doing it intentionally... This is China trying to further divide the United States of America...

In my first week as president, we would ban TikTok. They want to go ahead and sell it, let 'em go ahead and sell it. But I'll tell you another reason we would do it. Facebook's not in China. X is not in China. They're not permitting a free flow of information to the Chinese people from our social media companies. Yet we just open the door and let them do what they're doing. TikTok should be banned because they are poisoning American minds, and I would do it Week One... [Applause from audience.]

Ron DeSantis: [DeSantis began by saying he would also ban TikTok.] I think that China's the top threat we face. They've been very effective at infiltrating different parts of our society... And as the dad of a 6-, 5-, and a 3-year-old, I'm concerned about the data that they're getting from our young people, and what they're doing to pollute the minds of our young people... Their role in our culture? If we ignore that, we're not going to be able to win the fight...

Vivek Ramaswamy: In the last debate [Nikki Haley] made fun of me for joining TikTok? Well her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time, so you might want to take care of your family first... [Audience boos]

Nikki Haley: Leave my daughter out of your voice.

Vivek Ramaswamy: The next generation of Americans are using it, and that's actually the point... Here's the truth. The easy answer is actually to say that we're just going to ban one app. We gotta go further. We have to ban any U.S. company actually transferring U.S. data to the Chinese. Here's a story most people don't know. Airbnb hands over U.S. user data to the CCP. Now that's a U.S.-owned company... Even U.S. companies in Silicon Valley are regularly doing it...

Tim Scott: What we should do is ban TikTok, period... If you cannot ban TikTok, you should eliminate the Chinese presence on the app. Period.
In the previous debate Nikki Haley made her own position clear. "We can't have TikTok in our kids' lives. We need to ban it."

According to Nikkei Asia (paywalled), Indonesia has officially launched Southeast Asia's largest floating solar plant. It covers an area of over 250 hectares (2.5 km^2) and should be able to produce enough renewable energy to power 50,000 homes. Interesting Engineering reports: "Today is a historical day because our big dream of building a large-scale renewable energy plant is finally achieved. We managed to build the largest floating solar plant in Southeast Asia, and the third biggest in the world," Widodo is reported to have said at the opening ceremony. "The Cirata floating solar panel is the largest floating solar panel in Southeast Asia, and also the third largest in the world," he added.

China's PowerChina Huadong Engineering Corporation Limited constructed the power plant with Indonesia's state electricity corporation PLN and the United Arab Emirates energy company Masdar. The project had an investment of $145 million. More than 340,000 solar panels cover the reservoir surface, generating 192 MW of electricity annually, complementing existing hydropower at the site. The project had experienced significant delays before construction finally commenced in December 2020. [...]

PLN and Masdar are discussing plans to expand the facility and increase its power generation capacity to 500 MW. The plant occupies only 4% of the dam's reservoir surface, and according to the Indonesian government, solar panels can occupy up to 20% of the surface of a lake or dam, making it an efficient use of space.

Press2ToContinue writes: 01.AI, a Chinese AI startup, has stockpiled enough Nvidia AI and HPC GPUs to last 18 months, in anticipation of a U.S. export ban. Looks like 01.AI is taking "goo big or go home" to a new level with their GPU shopping spree. They're basically the dragon from "The Hobbit," but instead of gold, they're hoarding Nvidia chips. Maybe they're planning the ultimate LAN party or just really into extreme Minecraft graphics. Either way, it's like they say: "In the land of tech embargoes, the one with the secret GPU stash is king." Or in this case, playing 4D chess while the rest of us are stuck figuring out which port the HDMI cable goes into. "We have stockpiled a lot of Nvidia chips," said 01.AI founder Kai-Fu Lee in an interview with Bloomberg. "The jury is out on whether China in 1.5 years can make equivalent or nearly as good chips."

"We will have two parallel universes. Americans will supply their products and technologies to the U.S. and other countries and Chinese companies will build for China and whoever else uses Chinese products. The reality is that they will not compete very much in the same marketplace."

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Thursday, trades handled by the world's largest bank in the globe's biggest market traversed Manhattan on a USB stick. Industrial & Commercial Bank of China's U.S. unit had been hit by a cyberattack, rendering it unable to clear swathes of U.S. Treasury trades after entities responsible for settling the transactions swiftly disconnected from the stricken systems. That forced ICBC to send the required settlement details to those parties by a messenger carrying a thumb drive as the state-owned lender raced to limit the damage.

The workaround -- described by market participants -- followed the attack by suspected perpetrator Lockbit, a prolific criminal gang with ties to Russia that has also been linked to hits on Boeing, ION Trading U.K. and the U.K.'s Royal Mail. The strike caused immediate disruption as market-makers, brokerages and banks were forced to reroute trades, with many uncertain when access would resume. The incident spotlights a danger that bank leaders concede keeps them up at night -- the prospect of a cyber attack that could someday cripple a key piece of the financial system's wiring, setting off a cascade of disruptions. Even brief episodes prompt bank leaders and their government overseers to call for more vigilance.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Intel may receive billions in U.S. government funding to build secret facilities that produce microchips for the military. SiliconANGLE reports: The facilities, which have not yet been disclosed, would be designated as a "secure enclave" to reduce the military's dependence on chips imported from East Asia, particularly Taiwan, which is at risk of a future invasion from China. The funding for the new facilities would come from the $52.7 billion allocated under the Chips Act, signed into law by President Biden in August 2022. The Chips Act, which had bipartisan support, promotes chipmaking and scientific research through funding and tax credits. The law is aimed at encouraging domestic manufacturing of semiconductors and helping U.S. companies compete with China in developing cutting-edge technologies.

The new Intel facilities, presuming they go ahead, could reside partly at Intel's Arizona factory complex, according to sources referenced in the Journal report. The exact amount of funding that will be made available is not yet known, but "people familiar with the situation" tell the Journal that they could cost about $3 billion to $4 billion, which would come from the $39 billion set aside in the Chips Act for manufacturing grants. Officials from the Commerce Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Defense Department are said to be negotiating the project with Intel but have not yet made a final decision.

The first manufacturing grants under the Chip Act are expected to be announced in the coming weeks. The program was reported to have had more than 500 entities express interest and more than 130 have submitted applications or pre-applications for funding.

Baidu ordered AI chips from Huawei this year, Reuters reported citing two people familiar with the matter, adding to signs that U.S. pressure is prompting Chinese acceptance of the firm's products as an alternative to Nvidia's. From the report: One of the people said Baidu, one of China's leading AI firms, which operates the Ernie large language model, placed the order in August, ahead of widely anticipated new rules by the U.S. government that in October tightened restrictions on exports of chips and chip tools to China, including those of U.S. chip giant Nvidia.

Baidu ordered 1,600 of Huawei's 910B Ascend AI chips - which the Chinese firm developed as an alternative to Nvidia's A100 chip - for 200 servers, the source said, adding that by October, Huawei had delivered more 60% of the order, or about 1,000 chips, to Baidu. The second person said that the order's total value was approximately 450 million yuan ($61.83 million) and that Huawei was to deliver all of the chips by the end of this year. Although the order is tiny relative to the thousands of chips top Chinese tech firms have historically ordered from Nvidia, the sources said it was significant, as it showed how some firms could shift away from the U.S. company.

China's presence is growing in cybersecurity technology, with companies such as Huawei and Tencent accounting for six of the top 10 global patent holdings in the sector as of August. From a report: Chinese companies have made headway in technological fields that affect economic security, according to industry insiders, as they focus on fostering their own tech amid the growing standoff between the U.S. and China. The rankings, compiled by Nikkei in cooperation with U.S. information services provider LexisNexis, are based on patents registered in 95 countries and regions, including Japan, the U.S., China and the European Union. Patent registrations were screened for the cybersecurity field using such factors as the international patent classification, with filings of the same patent in multiple countries counted as a single patent.

As of August, IBM led the rankings with 6,363 patents. Huawei Technologies came in second with 5,735 patents and Tencent Holdings placed third with 4,803. Other Chinese companies in the top 10 included financial services provider Ant Group in sixth with 3,922 patents, followed by power transmission company State Grid Corp. of China with 3,696, Alibaba Group Holding with 3,122 and sovereign wealth fund China Investment with 3,042. Patent applications filed by Chinese companies have increased since around 2018, when the U.S. began to impose full-scale export controls on Chinese high-tech companies. Compared with 10 years ago, IBM's patent holdings increased by a factor of 1.5. In contrast, holdings for Huawei and Tencent were 2.3 times and 13 times higher, respectively.

Canon plans to price its new chipmaking gear at a fraction of the cost of ASML Holding NV's best lithography machines, seeking to make inroads in the cutting-edge equipment now playing a central role in the US-China tech rivalry. From a report: The Tokyo-based company's new nanoimprint technology would open up a way for smaller semiconductor makers to produce advanced chips, now almost wholly the domain of the sector's biggest firms, Chief Executive Officer Fujio Mitarai said. "The price will have one digit less than ASML's EUVs," said the 88-year-old, now on his third stint as Canon's president after last stepping back from day-to-day operations in 2016. He added that a final pricing decision hasn't been made.

Veldhoven, Netherlands-based ASML is the only supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography tools, the world's most advanced chipmaking machines costing hundreds of millions of dollars each. The product of decades of research and investment, EUV rigs are essential for mass-producing the fastest and most energy-efficient chips, which cram millions of transistors into every square millimeter of silicon. Only a handful of cash-rich companies can afford to invest in the tools, which are now under scrutiny for their linchpin status in the tech supply chain. ASML is banned from exporting EUV systems to Chinese customers, following US pressure on its allies to restrict technology flows to Beijing.

Smartphones and electric cars are both powered by lithium-ion batteries, notes the Economist. These "Li-ion" batteries "form the guts of a growing number of grid-storage systems that smooth the flow of electricity from wind and solar power stations. Without them, the electrification needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming would be unimaginable." But unfortunately, building them requires scarce metals.

"A clutch of companies, though, think they have an alternative: making batteries with sodium instead..." And the idea of building "Na-ion" batteries at scale is "gaining traction." Engineers are tweaking designs. Factories, particularly in China, are springing up. For the first time since the Li-ion revolution began, lithium's place on the electrochemical pedestal is being challenged... [A]ccording to Rory McNulty, a research analyst at Benchmark, Chinese firms have 34 Na-ion-battery factories built, being built or announced inside the country, and one planned in Malaysia. Established battery-makers in other places, by contrast, are not yet showing much interest. Even without a five-year plan to guide them, though, some non-Chinese startups are seeking to steal a march by developing alternatives to layered oxides, in the hope of improving the technology, reducing its cost, or both.

One of the most intriguing of these neophytes is Natron Energy, of Santa Clara, California... Natron claims that its cells can endure 50,000 cycles of charging and discharging — between ten and 100 times more than commercial Li-ion batteries can manage. The firm has built a factory in Michigan, which it says will begin production later this year. Other non-Chinese firms are less far advanced, but full of hope. Altris, in Sweden, which is also building a factory, employs a material called Prussian white that substitutes some of the iron in Prussian blue with sodium. Tiamat, in France, uses a polyanionic design involving vanadium. And Faradion, in Britain (now owned by Reliance, an Indian firm), intends to stick with a layered-metal-oxide system.
Thanks to Slashdot reader echo123 for sharing the article.

David Shepardson reports via Reuters: The top members of a U.S. House committee on China are introducing a bill that seeks to ban the U.S. government from buying Chinese drones. Mike Gallagher, the Republican chair of the committee, and Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking Democrat, are introducing the "American Security Drone Act" on Wednesday, the lawmakers said in a statement to Reuters. "This bill would prohibit the federal government from using American taxpayer dollars to purchase this equipment from countries like China," Gallagher said. "It is imperative that Congress pass this bipartisan bill to protect U.S. interests and our national security supply chain."

The bill would also bar local and state governments from purchasing Chinese drones using federal grants and require a federal report detailing the amount of foreign commercial off-the-shelf drones and covered unmanned aircraft systems procured by federal departments and agencies from China. Krishnamoorthi said the bill "helps protect against any vulnerabilities posed by our government agencies' reliance on foreign-manufactured drone technology and will encourage growth in the U.S. drone industry."

Separately, the U.S. Senate on Tuesday unanimously approved an amendment proposed by Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn and Democrat Mark Warner that would prohibit the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) from operating or providing federal funds for drones produced in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela or Cuba. "Taxpayer dollars should never fund drones manufactured in regions that are hostile toward our nation," Blackburn said. China recently announced export controls on some drones and drone-related equipment, saying it wanted to safeguard "national security and interests." The U.S. Commerce Department in 2020 added dozens of Chinese companies to a trade blacklist, including the country's top chipmaker SMIC and Chinese drone giant DJI.

According to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple will start introductory production on the standard iPhone 17 in India, marking the first time the company begins development of a new iPhone outside of China. MacRumors reports: Apple will opt to assemble the standard iPhone 17 in India because it has a "lower difficulty" design that will minimize risk. Apple has been manufacturing older iPhones and other devices in India since for several years now in an effort to move more of its manufacturing out of China. Apple has slowly started giving factories in India more responsibility, and began iPhone 14 production in the country just a few weeks after the device launched in September 2022. iPhone 15 production started even earlier, with factories in the country assembling the base iPhone 15 model prior to launch, but assembly still started in China first.

As of now, Kuo believes that 12 to 14 percent of global iPhone shipments are made in India, with that proportion to increase to 20 to 25 percent by 2024. In addition to allowing Apple to move manufacturing away from China, increasing production in India provides Apple with an opportunity to strengthen its relationship with the Indian government. India is a key market for Apple due to growing demand for Apple products in the country.

Twenty-eight countries including the US, UK and China have agreed to work together to ensure artificial intelligence is used in a "human-centric, trustworthy and responsible" way, in the first global commitment of its kind. From a report: The pledge forms part of a communique signed by major powers including Brazil, India and Saudi Arabia, at the inaugural AI Safety Summit. The two-day event, hosted and convened by British prime minister Rishi Sunak at Bletchley Park, started on Wednesday. Called the Bletchley Declaration, the document recognises the "potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm" to be caused by advanced AI models, but adds such risks are "best addressed through international co-operation." Other signatories include the EU, France, Germany, Japan, Kenya and Nigeria.

The communique represents the first global statement on the need to regulate the development of AI, but at the summit there are expected to be disagreements about how far such controls should go. Country representatives attending the event include Hadassa Getzstain, Israeli chief of staff at the ministry of innovation, science and technology, and Wu Zhaohui, Chinese vice minister for technology. Gina Raimondo, US commerce secretary, gave an opening speech at the summit and announced a US safety institute to evaluate the risks of AI. This comes on the heels of a sweeping executive order by President Joe Biden, announced on Monday, and intended to curb the risks posed by the technology.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Peru's Kimberly Garcia set a world record in her gold-medal winning turn at the women's 20 kilometer race walk event at the Pan American Games this weekend. Until she didn't. Once the race was over, organizers determined there was a serious "measuring problem" with the track, making the race times of Garcia, fellow medal winners Glenda Morejon of Ecuador and Peru's Evelyn Inga, and their competitors null and void. The athletes guessed the track had been drawn up roughly 3 kilometers (about 1.9 miles) shorter than it was supposed to be. Garcia crossed the finish line in 1 hour, 12 minutes and 26 seconds. The world record of 1 hour, 23 minutes and 49 seconds is held by China's Jiayu Yang. The athletes suspected something was amiss mid-race, according to the Associated Press.

The Santiago 2023 Corporation, the group in charge of the 2023 Pan American Games, placed the blame on the Pan American Athletics Association, which reportedly chose the person who measured the race course. In a statement following the race, Santiago 2023 said the official who measured the course "did not take accurate measurements of the route the athletes took during the race." The group continued, "We deeply regret the inconvenience for the athletes, their coaches, the public and the attending press, but this situation cannot be attributed to the Organizing Committee."

China's popular social media platforms are requiring "self-media" accounts with over 500,000 followers to disclose real-name information, prompting concerns over increased doxxing and privacy among some users. Reuters reports: China's most popular social media platforms on Tuesday announced that "self-media" accounts with more than 500,000 followers will be asked to display real-name information, a controversial measure that has prompted concerns over doxxing and privacy among some users. "Self-media" includes news and information not necessarily approved by the government, a genre of online content regulators have cracked down on in recent years to "purify" China's cyberspace. [...]

Rumors of the new policy had prompted lively debate among users. Some, like former state media editor Hu Xijin, have defended the measure as necessary in order to force influential accounts to use more responsible speech. Others, however, have expressed concerns that the measure would make doxxing easier and platforms would further remove online users' anonymity in the future.

The new measures will remove the anonymity of thousands of influencers on social media platforms that are used daily by hundreds of millions of Chinese. Several of the platforms said that accounts with over 1 million followers would be affected first and those that do not comply would face restrictions in their online traffic and income as a consequence.

Winter has come early for Apple, and it might last a while. From a report: The world's largest company by market value has become worth considerably less over the past three months. Apple's share price has slid 11% since the company reported its fiscal third-quarter results on Aug. 3, erasing nearly $400 billion in market value. It is hardly a typical swing given the fact that the company has long used the fall season to launch its biggest products for every year, including new iPhones. This is the first year since 2015 that Apple shares have lost ground between the company's key Worldwide Developers Conference in June and its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report that typically takes place in late October.

That report is expected Thursday afternoon, and it will be the first to reflect sales of the iPhone 15 family that was launched in late September. Investors are worried that Apple's largest business is now facing new and potentially long-term threats. The growing geopolitical rift between the U.S. and China has finally caught Apple in its vortex, spurring reports of Chinese authorities considering a ban on the use of iPhones and other Apple devices by government employees. To make matters worse, Apple's old China-based rival Huawei appears to have made a comeback. The company launched a new smartphone called the Mate 60 Pro in September that reportedly is capable of 5G speeds, even though U.S. sanctions were supposed to deny the company the chips necessary for such an accomplishment.

The Washington Post's editorial board looks at America's "net neutrality" debate.

But first they note that America's communications-regulating FCC has "limited authority to regulate unless broadband is considered a 'common carrier' under the Telecommunications Act of 1996." The FCC under President Barack Obama moved to reclassify broadband so it could regulate broadband companies; the FCC under President Donald Trump reversed the change. Dismayed advocates warned the world that, without the protections in place, the internet would break. You'll never guess what happened next: nothing. Or, at least, almost nothing. The internet did not break, and internet service providers for the most part did not block and they did not throttle.

All the same, today's FCC, under Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, has just moved to re-reclassify broadband. The interesting part is that her strongest argument doesn't have much to do with net neutrality, but with some of the other benefits the country could see from having a federal watchdog keeping an eye on the broadband business... Broadband is an essential service... Yet there isn't a single government agency with sufficient authority to oversee this vital tool. Asserting federal authority over broadband would empower regulation of any blocking, throttling or anti-competitive paid traffic prioritization that they might engage in. But it could also help ensure the safety and security of U.S. networks.

The FCC has, on national security grounds, removed authorization for companies affiliated with adversary states, such as China's Huawei, from participating in U.S. telecommunications markets. The agency can do this for phone carriers. But it can't do it for broadband, because it isn't allowed to. Or consider public safety during a crisis. The FCC doesn't have the ability to access the data it needs to know when and where there are broadband outages — much less the ability to do anything about those outages if they are identified. Similarly, it can't impose requirements for network resiliency to help prevent those outages from occurring in the first place — during, say, a natural disaster or a cyberattack.

The agency has ample power to police the types of services that are becoming less relevant in American life, such as landline telephones, and little power to police those that are becoming more important every day.
The FCC acknowledges this power would also allow them to prohibit "throttling" of content. But the Post's editorial also makes the argument that here in 2023 that's "unlikely to have any major effect on the broadband industry in either direction... Substantial consequences have only become less likely as high-speed bandwidth has become less limited."

Bloomberg thinks they've identified the source of the advanced chips in Huawei's newest smartphone, citing to "people familiar with the matter". In a suggestion that export restrictions on Europe's most valuable tech company may have come too late to stem China's advances in chipmaking, ASML's so-called immersion deep ultraviolet machines were used in combination with tools from other companies to make the Huawei Technologies Co. chip, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing information that's not public. ASML declined to comment.

There is no suggestion that their sales violated export restrictions... ASML has never been able to sell its EUV machines to China because of export restrictions. But less advanced DUV models can be retooled with deposition and etching gear to produce 7-nanometer and possibly even more advanced chips, according to industry analysts. The process is much more expensive than using EUV, making it very difficult to scale production in a competitive market environment. In China, however, the government is willing to shoulder a significant portion of chipmaking costs.

Chinese companies have been legally stockpiling DUV gear for years — especially after the U.S. introduced its initial export controls last year before getting Japan and the Netherlands on board... According to an investor presentation published by the company last week, ASML experienced a jump in business from China this year as chipmakers there boosted orders ahead of the export controls taking full effect in 2024. China accounted for 46% of ASML's sales in the third quarter, compared with 24% in the previous quarter and 8% in the three months ending in March.
Another article from Bloomberg includes this prediction: The U.S. won't be able to stop Huawei and SMIC from making progress in chip technology, Burn J. Lin, a former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. vice president, told Bloomberg News. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp should be able to advance to the next generation at 5 nanometers with machines from ASML Holding NV that it already operates, said Lin, who at TSMC championed the lithography technology that transformed chipmaking.
The end result is that Huawei's profit "more than doubled during the quarter it revealed its biggest achievement in chip technology," the article reports, "adding to signs the Chinese tech leader is steadying a business rocked by US sanctions." The Shenzhen company reported a 118% surge in net profit to 26.4 billion yuan ($3.6 billion) in the September quarter, and a slight rise in sales to 145.7 billion yuan, according to Bloomberg News calculations from nine-month results released Friday. Those numbers included initial sales of the vastly popular Mate 60 Pro, which began shipping in late August... The gadget sold out almost instantly, spurring expectations it could rejuvenate Huawei's fortunes and potentially cut into Apple Inc.'s lead in China, given signs of a disappointing debut for the iPhone 15...

A resurgent Huawei would pose problems not just for Apple but also local brands from Xiaomi Corp. to Oppo and Vivo, all of which are fighting for sales in a shrinking market.

The World Science Fiction Society "administers and presents the Hugo Awards, the oldest and most noteworthy award for science fiction," according to Wikipedia. Its members vote on each year's winners, and this year they received 1,847 nominating ballots.

This year the 81st edition of their World Science Fiction Convention was held from October 18 to 22 in Chengdu, China. More details from Gizmodo: While fan-favorite cozy fantasy novel Legends & Lattes lost Best Novel to T. Kingfisher's excellent horror-fantasy Nettle & Bone, Legends & Lattes author Travis Baldtree won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Everything Everywhere All at Once snagged film's top honor, and The Expanse's finale episode did the same for televsion, beating out both nominated Andor episodes among others. Some other great standouts include short fiction editor Neil Clarke, who has kept Clarkesworld magazine running despite getting swamped by AI-generated submissions earlier this year.
And "By winning Best Graphic Story or Comic, [Bartosz] Sztybor-who also served as a producer on the overwhelmingly popular Netflix anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners-also becomes the first Polish author to win a Hugo," reports Forbes: [Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams] is set in Night City-as seen in Cyberpunk 2077-and follows the story of two small-time thieves, Tasha and Mirek, who are trying to survive the harsh metropolis together. "Tasha and Mirek make a living for themselves stealing cyberware and indulging in parties and braindances," the official teaser explains...
Other highlights from this year's awards:

• Best novella: Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom)
• Best Novelette: "The Space-Time Painter", by Hai Ya (Galaxy's Edge, April 2022)
• Best Short Story: "Rabbit Test", by Samantha Mills (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2022)
• Best Series: Children of Time series, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Pan Macmillan/Orbit)
• Best Related Work: Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins (Doubleday)

Efforts to curb emissions of a powerful greenhouse gas commonly produced as a by-product of refrigerant manufacture might be falling short, and it seems eastern China is a major culprit. Nature: The hydrofluorocarbon gas, HFC-23, is around 14,700 times as powerful as carbon dioxide at warming the globe and has long been the subject of national and international climate-change mitigation efforts. Those efforts gained new traction nearly a decade ago when China and India -- the world's largest producers of the chemical -- agreed to dial down its emissions. New research, however, confirms that emissions continued to rise in subsequent years, and an analysis of data from atmospheric-monitoring stations suggests that factories in eastern China are responsible for nearly half of the total.

The rogue emissions are one of several air-pollution sources under discussion at the latest meeting of the Montreal Protocol, held in Nairobi, Kenya, this week. Signed in 1987, the Montreal Protocol is generally considered the most effective international environmental treaty in history, having halted the destruction of the ozone layer while also slowing down global warming. But scientists have often played a role, scanning the atmosphere for chemicals, such as ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), that governments have agreed to phase out. "Science has been instrumental in evaluating compliance under the treaty," says Megan Lickley, a climate scientist at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has announced the creation of a 39-member advisory body to address issues in the international governance of artificial intelligence. From a report: Members include tech company executives, government officials from Spain to Saudi Arabia, and academics from countries such as the U.S., Russia and Japan. Sony Chief Technology Officer Hiroaki Kitano, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and Microsoft Chief Responsible AI Officer Natasha Crampton are among the executives representing technology companies.

Representatives also come from six continents with diverse backgrounds ranging from U.S.-based AI expert Vilas Dhar to Professor Yi Zeng fom China and Egyptian lawyer Mohamed Farahat. "The transformative potential of AI for good is difficult even to grasp," Guterres said in a statement. "And without entering into a host of doomsday scenarios, it is already clear that the malicious use of AI could undermine trust in institutions, weaken social cohesion and threaten democracy itself," he said.