University of Valladolid

Burying woody biomass in wooden vaults would allow carbon to be extracted and stored from the atmosphere, according to a study published in Science. The authors were inspired by an eastern red cedar log preserved underground for more than 3,700 years in Canada. The team proposes burying wood from sustainable sources in a domed wooden structure designed to extend the duration of carbon storage. The authors estimate that up to 10 gigatonnes of CO₂ could be sequestered annually using this technique.

Large language models - Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems based on deep learning, such as the generative AI that is ChatGPT - are not as reliable as users expect. This is one of the conclusions of international research published in Nature involving researchers from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. According to the authors, in comparison with the first models and taking into account certain aspects, reliability has worsened in the most recent models, such as GPT-4 with respect to GPT-3.

Research with Spanish participation concludes that, in European countries, tropospheric ozone pollution from beyond national borders was associated with 88% of ozone-attributable deaths, and only 12% were due to domestic sources. The authors, whose research is published in Nature Medicine, used epidemiological and air quality modelling to quantify the burden of mortality in Europe associated with ozone pollution from various geographical sources. This included more than six million deaths in 813 regions in 35 European countries - including Spain - in the 2015-2017 warm seasons. 

Research led by ISGlobal and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) shows that air pollution in 35 European countries - including Spain - has decreased in terms of levels of suspended particulate matter (PM_2.5 and PM₁₀) and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂). However, ozone (O₃) pollution increased in southern Europe, as shown by daily data collected between 2003 and 2019 and published in the journal Nature Communications. The study also looked at the number of days on which limits for two or more pollutants were exceeded simultaneously: despite improvements, 86.3% of the European population experienced at least one day with compound pollution per year. 

The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced last night at the welcome dinner of the GSMA Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona 2024, the construction of a foundational model of artificial intelligence language, trained in Spanish and co-official languages, in open and transparent code, and with the intention of incorporating Latin American countries. For its development, the Government will work with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the Spanish Supercomputing Network, together with the Spanish Academy of Language and the Association of Spanish Language Academies.

Babies' brains specialise in their native language from pregnancy, according to a study carried out in France. The research team used encephalograms to measure the brain activity of 33 infants born to French-speaking mothers while listening to a story in French, English or Spanish. The results provide "the most compelling evidence to date that language experience already shapes the functional organization of the infant brain, even before birth," the authors write in Science Advances.

In a work published in the journal Nature, two researchers from New York University (USA) and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona claim to have demonstrated that an artificial neural network can have systematic generalization capabilities similar to human ones, that is, to learn new concepts and combine them with existing ones. This statement calls into question the 35-year-old idea that neural networks are not viable models of the human mind.

The Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, today announced that face masks will no longer be compulsory indoors after Easter. The measure will come into force on 20 April. It will continue to be compulsory in public transport, health centres and residences, but the final details of the new scenario are not yet known.