AI Research
England needs more hosepipe bans and smart water meters
Getty ImagesEngland faces huge future water shortages and needs a “continued and sustained effort” to reduce demand, including more hosepipe bans and ‘smart’ water meters, warns the Environment Agency.
The watchdog says that without dramatic action, England, which uses 14 billion litres of water a day, will have a daily shortage of more than six billion litres by 2055.
It says more homes will need meters reporting how much water is used in real time and in future prices may need to rise when supplies are tight.
The warning came with droughts already declared in Yorkshire and the north-west of England this year following what the Met Office says is the warmest and driest Spring in more than half a century.
The EA made the warning in its five yearly National Framework for Water Resources report. It said 5 billion litres would be needed to supply the public and a further 1 billion for agriculture and energy users.
The EA said customers in England need to cut their water use by 2.5 billion litres a day by 2055 – down from an average of around 140 litres per person per day to 110 litres per day.
It warns future economic growth will be likely be compromised as water becomes scarcer and has already highlighted how water shortages in parts of Sussex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk have limited housing and business growth.
Alan Lovell, the chair of the EA, told the BBC he would like to see water companies making more use of restrictions like hosepipe bans when there are droughts to “bring home to people that the amount of water they use is making a difference.”
Growing pressure on supply
The EA highlights England’s growing population as a key driver of the deficit. Water companies expect it to increase by 8 million people by 2055.
At the same time, climate change is altering weather patterns, creating new challenges for water supply.
The EA says England – like the rest of the UK – is already experiencing warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers. It expects that trend to become more pronounced and warns of more intense rainfall events creating the potential for a greater incidence of both drought and flooding.
Another key factor is the need to reduce how much water is taken – or “abstracted” – by water companies and other users from England’s rivers, the report says.
Over-abstraction risks wrecking some rivers, particularly the fragile ecosystems of the country’s chalk streams, said Mr Lovell.
“It ultimately could see the demise of those rivers to an extent that they will never come back in the same form,” he told the BBC.
Getty ImagesAdding to the pressures on supply is the fact that water companies plan to dramatically increase their drought resilience. By 2040 they aim to cope with the kind of drought you would expect once in every 500 years.
Professor Hannah Cloke, a hydrologist at Reading University, believes we need to change our attitude towards water.
“We really don’t value water,” she says. “We need to think about it as a really, really precious resource.
“Everybody should be looking after water and conserving it and thinking about what they do when they turn on the tap and when they choose not to.”
A joint effort
Everyone involved in the water industry, including domestic customers, will need to play a role in meeting the deficit, the EA says.
It says it is “vital” that water companies deliver on their promise to cut the amount of water that leaks from their pipes by half by 2050 compared to 2017-18 levels. That should save around 900m litres a day.
New infrastructure will play a role too. Last year water companies were given the go-ahead by Ofwat, the body that oversees the water industry, to invest billions of pounds in ten new reservoirs and two desalination plants as well as pipelines and other equipment to enable more water to be transferred between regions.
The aim is to create a “water grid” in the southern half of England, said Bob Taylor, the CEO of Portsmouth Water.
“We’re also looking at using existing rivers, canals and other means to transfer water from areas where it is plentiful in the UK to the south east and east of the country where it is less plentiful,” Taylor explained.
These new investments should ultimately deliver an additional 1.7 billion litres a day, the EA report calculates. But the first reservoir won’t be completed until the end of this decade and the programme isn’t due to be finished until the early 2040s.
A further 2.5 billion litres a day will have to found by reducing customer demand, including from domestic customers, the EA says. And, because of the delays delivering the new infrastructure, initially up to 80% of the deficit will need to be met by customers using less water.
As well as water companies switching customers to the kind of smart meters and variable pricing already seen in the electricity industry, the EA is calling for the government to tighten building regulations on water use of new homes and consider minimum standards for water efficiency of products.
The EA report highlights the rapid growth in the number of data centres in England as an area of growing industrial demand for water.
Pip Squire, head of sustainability at Ark Data Centres, says water companies need to be much clearer with industrial customers about how much water they have available and how resilient the supply is.
“We need to know what the constraints are so we can design the system,” said Squire. “We need energy, we need fibre optic connections, but we can build data centres that don’t use water. They just cost more to run.”
AI Research
On-demand webinar: Artificial intelligence – Next gen tech, next gen risks? : Clyde & Co
Artificial intelligence is an umbrella term for technologies that simulate human intelligence. It is one of the greatest sources of systemic risk that insurers now face. It acts as a multiplier of existing exposures and a source of new liabilities, with the potential to cause catastrophic mass loss events.
In this webinar, we delve into the systemic risks of artificial intelligence, including privacy, security, and legal challenges that insurers must navigate.
Our speakers were joined by Dr. Matthew Bonner, Senior Fire Engineer and Research Lead at Trigon Fire Safety, and Rishi Baviskar, Cyber Risk Consultant at Allianz, for a discussion on the systemic risks of artificial intelligence – including privacy, security, and legal challenges that insurers must navigate.
Key topics include:
- Privacy violations
- Security threats, weaponisation and adversarial manipulation
- The threat of ‘uncontrollable AI’
- Sentient AI and the concept of legal personality
- And more!
Australian scientists have successfully developed a research system that uses ‘biological artificial intelligence’ to design and evolve molecules with new or improved functions directly in mammal cells. The researchers said this system provides a powerful new tool that will help scientists develop more specific and effective research tools or gene therapies.
Named PROTEUS (PROTein Evolution Using Selection) the system harnesses ‘directed evolution’, a lab technique that mimics the natural power of evolution. However, rather than taking years or decades, this method accelerates cycles of evolution and natural selection, allowing them to create molecules with new functions in weeks.
This could have a direct impact on finding new, more effective medicines. For example, this system can be applied to improve gene editing technology like CRISPR to improve its effectiveness.
“This means PROTEUS can be used to generate new molecules that are highly tuned to function in our bodies, and we can use it to make new medicine that would be otherwise difficult or impossible to make with current technologies.” says co-senior author Professor Greg Neely, Head of the Dr. John and Anne Chong Lab for Functional Genomics at the University of Sydney.
“What is new about our work is that directed evolution primarily work in bacterial cells, whereas PROTEUS can evolve molecules in mammal cells.”
PROTEUS can be given a problem with uncertain solution like when a user feeds in prompts for an artificial intelligence platform. For example the problem can be how to efficiently turn off a human disease gene inside our body.
PROTEUS then uses directed evolution to explore millions of possible sequences that have yet to exist naturally and finds molecules with properties that are highly adapted to solve the problem. This means PROTEUS can help find a solution that would normally take a human researcher years to solve if at all.
The researchers reported they used PROTEUS to develop improved versions of proteins that can be more easily regulated by drugs, and nanobodies (mini versions of antibodies) that can detect DNA damage, an important process that drives cancer. However, they said PROTEUS isn’t limited to this and can be used to enhance the function of most proteins and molecules.
The findings were reported in Nature Communications, with the research performed at the Charles Perkins Centre, the University of Sydney with collaborators from the Centenary Institute.
Unlocking molecular machine learning
The original development of directed evolution, performed first in bacteria, was recognized by the 2018 Noble Prize in Chemistry.
“The invention of directed evolution changed the trajectory of biochemistry. Now, with PROTEUS, we can program a mammalian cell with a genetic problem we aren’t sure how to solve. Letting our system run continuously means we can check in regularly to understand just how the system is solving our genetic challenge,” said lead researcher Dr. Christopher Denes from the Charles Perkins Centre and School of Life and Environmental Sciences
The biggest challenge Dr. Denes and the team faced was how to make sure the mammalian cell could withstand the multiple cycles of evolution and mutations and remain stable, without the system “cheating” and coming up with a trivial solution that doesn’t answer the intended question.
They found the key was using chimeric virus-like particles, a design consisting of taking the outside shell of one virus and combining it with the genes of another virus, which blocked the system from cheating.
The design used parts of two significantly different virus families creating the best of both worlds. The resulting system allowed the cells to process many different possible solutions in parallel, with improved solutions winning and becoming more dominant while incorrect solutions instead disappear.
“PROTEUS is stable, robust and has been validated by independent labs. We welcome other labs to adopt this technique. By applying PROTEUS, we hope to empower the development of a new generation of enzymes, molecular tools and therapeutics,” Dr. Denes said.
“We made this system open source for the research community, and we are excited to see what people use it for, our goals will be to enhance gene-editing technologies, or to fine tune mRNA medicines for more potent and specific effects,” Professor Neely said.
More information:
Alexander J. Cole et al, A chimeric viral platform for directed evolution in mammalian cells, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-59438-2
Citation:
Scientists create biological ‘artificial intelligence’ system (2025, July 8)
retrieved 8 July 2025
from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-07-scientists-biological-artificial-intelligence.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
Research aims to guide decision-makers on real-world effects of artificial intelligence on American workers
Case Western Reserve University economics professor Mark Schweitzer has joined a new, multi-university research collaboration examining the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on workers and the labor market—an urgent area of inquiry as AI adoption accelerates across industries.
The $1.6 million project is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and led by Carnegie Mellon University’s Block Center for Technology and Society and MIT’s FutureTech. Researchers from eight academic institutions—including the University of Pittsburgh, Northeastern University, the University of Virginia and the California Policy Lab—are contributing their expertise, along with collaborators from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.
“This is an important opportunity to bring rigorous, data-driven insights to some of the most pressing economic questions of our time,” said Schweitzer, whose research at Case Western Reserve and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland focuses on labor markets and regional economics. “By pooling knowledge across institutions, we can better understand where AI is helping workers—and where it’s leaving them behind.”
During the next two years, the team will work to improve labor-market data and produce both academic research and policy-relevant reports, he said. The goal is to support research-driven decision-making by employers, labor organizations and government.
More information on the Block Center’s AI and Work initiative.
For more information, contact Colin McEwen at colin.mcewen@case.edu.
-
Funding & Business1 week agoKayak and Expedia race to build AI travel agents that turn social posts into itineraries
-
Jobs & Careers1 week ago
Mumbai-based Perplexity Alternative Has 60k+ Users Without Funding
-
Mergers & Acquisitions1 week ago
Donald Trump suggests US government review subsidies to Elon Musk’s companies
-
Funding & Business7 days ago
Rethinking Venture Capital’s Talent Pipeline
-
Jobs & Careers7 days ago
Why Agentic AI Isn’t Pure Hype (And What Skeptics Aren’t Seeing Yet)
-
Funding & Business5 days ago
Sakana AI’s TreeQuest: Deploy multi-model teams that outperform individual LLMs by 30%
-
Jobs & Careers7 days ago
Astrophel Aerospace Raises ₹6.84 Crore to Build Reusable Launch Vehicle
-
Jobs & Careers7 days ago
Telangana Launches TGDeX—India’s First State‑Led AI Public Infrastructure
-
Funding & Business1 week agoFrom chatbots to collaborators: How AI agents are reshaping enterprise work
-
Jobs & Careers5 days ago
Ilya Sutskever Takes Over as CEO of Safe Superintelligence After Daniel Gross’s Exit
