Technology articles from across Nature Portfolio

Sourcing rare earth elements (REEs) from unconventional feedstocks has substantial environmental and societal–economic benefits. Here the authors develop tools to evaluate the economic viability of unconventional REE feedstocks to facilitate the implementation of a sustainable REE supply.

Ecologically valid data collected during the 2018 and 2020 US elections show that exposure to and engagement with partisan or unreliable news on Google Search are driven not primarily by algorithmic curation but by users’ own choices.

In this Perspective, the authors survey potential water-system-wide benefits of AI applications from catchments to end-users and then highlight potential systemic barriers, direct risks and exposures to cascading failures, which may prove catastrophic for communities. In response, they make three recommendations for safe and responsible deployment of AI across potable water supply and sewage disposal systems.

The implementation or insertion of medical devices into the body can lead to infections and inflammation, which are often challenging to treat because of the presence of microbial biofilms and antimicrobial-resistant microorganisms. This Review outlines preclinical testing strategies for medical devices with antimicrobial properties to avoid and reduce medical-device-associated infections.

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique to learn complex behaviours, but in the context of self-driving vehicles it might result in unsafe behaviour in previously unseen situations. Cao et al. create a confidence-aware method that improves through reinforcement learning but reverts to safe behaviour when a situation is new.