How much will heat, flooding, drought and storms increase as a result of human-induced climate change? In a groundbreaking study, climate researcher Gottfried Kirchengast and his team at the University of Graz have developed a new method for computing the hazards from extreme events: it can compute all relevant hazard metrics for events such as heat waves, floods and droughts in any region worldwide with unprecedented information content. Using it for Europe, the researchers found that anthropogenic climate change has caused a tenfold increase in extreme heat in recent decades. The study, published in the journal Weather and Climate Extremes, also provides a basis for better quantifying the damage to people, ecosystems and infrastructure.

Gland, Switzerland, 23 February 2026 – The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and CGIAR celebrated the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to strengthen cooperation at a critical moment for global food and agricultural systems.

A new study by the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology’s (SMART) Mens, Manus & Machina (M3S) interdisciplinary research group, alongside collaborators from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and National University of Singapore (NUS), has identified a strong statistical association between global air connectivity and patterns of where multinational corporations (MNCs) invest and set up subsidiaries. This is the most comprehensive global study merging 7.5 million firm records with 30 years of international flight data across more than 800 cities in 142 countries.

A research team from Merck (China) has proposed Jigsaw-LightRAG, a novel method that improves how artificial intelligence systems manage and update knowledge graphs.  It decomposes a global knowledge graph (KG) into per-document subgraphs and leverages document lifecycle states (New, Modified, Persistent, Deleted) so that LLM-based extraction is invoked only for changed documents. The updated global KG is then reconstructed via code-level aggregation and strict string-matching deduplication without additional LLM token consumption. Experiments across public benchmarks (LongBench, PubMedQA, and QASPER) demonstrate that in localized corpus changing scenarios, LLM token consumption drops by orders of magnitude (with DELETE operations requiring 0 tokens), while KG structural integrity remains stable and question-answering performance stays on par with full-rebuild baselines.

A research team led by Professor Taesung Kim from the School of Mechanical Engineering has developed a technology that precisely controls the internal structure of semiconductors using heat, much like stamping out “bungeoppang” (fish-shaped pastry) in a mold. The team reported that this approach improves the performance of next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) hardware. With this technology, complex AI computations can be processed more quickly using significantly less electricity than before.

Fighting fires could be done remotely without the need to place firefighting crews directly in potentially dangerous situations by using collaborative teams of artificial intelligence-powered robots with extinguishing equipment on board, with an initial soft trial of the technology proving successful.