The Third Eye: Moving from Information Age to ‘Age of Intelligence’

New Delhi, (IANS): The success of Information Technology revolution caused the transition of the world from the Industrial Age to the Age of Information but the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expediting another transformational shift- from the Information Age to the Age of Intelligence propelled by the basic fact that ‘all intelligence is information but all information is not intelligence’.This shift is compelled by the reality that there was no competitive gain from having information that everybody else also had and that it is the ownership of ‘exclusive knowledge’ called Intelligence that gave one advantage over the others.AI applications are becoming a means of generating and accessing such knowledge largely through Data Analytics. Any information of intelligence value has to be ‘reliable’ but also ‘futuristic’ in the sense that it indicates the ‘opportunities’ and ‘risks’ lying ahead and thus opens the pathway to gainful action. To the extent a system of algorithms can be put in place to produce ‘insights’ during the analysis of data, this came closer to bridging the gap between ‘Artificial’ and ‘Human’ intelligence. Fundamentally, however, AI was an ‘assistant’ for and not a ‘substitute’ for human intelligence.Someone rightly said that Artificial Intelligence backed by Large Language Models(LLMs) can become the...

Read More........→July 17, 2025

Mercury Emissions Fall 70% Over the Last Four Decades Thanks to UN Treaty, Coal Phase-Out

A coal power plant in India – credit RawpixelA study examining mercury concentrations in the leaves of alpine plants has revealed that humanity has reduced worldwide exposure to this most toxic of heavy metals substantially.Controlled via a UN treaty called the Minamata Convention on Mercury Emissions, mercury (Hg) enters the atmosphere through a variety of natural and anthropogenic avenues.Artisanal and small-scale gold mining, coal burning, and cement and nonferrous metals production all release several thousands tons of mercury into the atmosphere every year.Much like carbon dioxide, the oceans also emit mercury—between 400-1,300 metric tons per year. Terrestrial sources include volcanic eruptions and other geothermal features, the weathering of mercury-containing rocks, soil erosion, and wildfires, and contribute around the same amount as the oceans.Anthropogenic sources, however, contribute as much as the land and oceans together; or at least they once did.A team of Chinese scientists from schools in Tianjin, Beijing, Tibet, and Nanjing has found that Hg concentrations in the atmosphere reduced by 70% since a peak in the year 2000. For the next 20 years, the levels continually dropped, corresponding with a reduced reliance on coal for power and the implementation of the Minamata Convention in 2013.The scientists were able to...

Read More........→July 14, 2025