How can data center planning reduce carbon emissions: A case study in China

Tsinghua University Press

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Spatial transfer results of carbon emissions for data centers in China in 2030.

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Credit: iEnergy

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly increased the computational load on data centers, resulting in substantial carbon emissions. To mitigate these emissions, future data centers should be strategically planned and operated to fully utilize renewable energy resources while meeting growing computational demands. This study aims to investigate how much carbon emission reduction can be achieved by using a carbon-oriented demand response to guide the optimal planning and operation of data centers. An empirical study based on the proposed models is conducted on real-world data from China. The results from the empirical analysis show that newly constructed data centers are recommended to be built in Gansu Province, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Sichuan Province, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and Qinghai Province, accounting for 57% of the total national increase in server capacity. 33% of the computational load from Eastern China should be transferred to the West, which could reduce the overall load carbon emissions by 26%.

 

The authors published their study on March 24, 2025, in iEnergy.

 

“We propose a carbon-oriented data center planning model that considers the carbon-oriented demand response of the AI load. In the planning model, future operation simulations comprehensively coordinate the temporal‒spatial flexibility of computational loads and the quality of service (QoS). Additionally, we conduct an empirical study on real-world data from China based on the proposed model”, says Bojun Du, a Ph.D. student at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Tsinghua University.

 

Optimal planning results of data centers considering the carbon-oriented demand response

 

This study provides practical insights into how to configure data centers across different provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government. The empirical results indicate that Gansu Province, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Sichuan Province, and Qinghai Province will have the highest number of newly built data centers, accounting for 57% of the total new server racks.

 

“However, owing to longer distances and data transmission times, batch loads are processed primarily by servers in the west, whereas online workload transfer from the east is relatively limited.” Yaowang Li, a researcher majoring in carbon reduction of power systems, says.

 

Data centers in the eastern region are used mainly to handle online loads. And data centers in the western region, with more renewable energy outputs and greater variability in carbon emissions at different times, are suitable for batch load processing.

 

Carbon emission reduction through AI load shifting of data centers

 

This study shows the carbon reduction through carbon-oriented demand response. Among all computational demands nationwide, 83% are generated in the eastern region, and 17% are generated in the western region. On the basis of the planning and operation simulation results, 32% of the computational demand in the east will be transferred to the west for processing.

 

After spatial transfers of computational demand, the total national electricity carbon emissions were reduced by 26%. In East China, Central China, and South China, computational demand is significant, but due to high carbon emission factors and limited renewable energy, a large amount of demand has been transferred out, resulting in significant reductions in carbon emissions. Southwest China and Northwest China have large renewable energy installations and low carbon emission factors. Thus, a substantial amount of load is transferred from Eastern China, leading to a significant carbon emission increase in Southwest China and Northwest China.

 

The above research is published in iEnergy, which is a fully open access journal published by Tsinghua University Press. iEnergy publishes peer-reviewed high-quality research representing important advances of significance to emerging power systems. At its discretion, Tsinghua University Press will pay the open access fee for all published papers from 2022 to 2026.

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About iEnergy

iEnergy is a quarterly journal launched on March 2022. It has published 4 volumes (13 issues). Authors come from 21 countries, including China, the United States, Australia, etc., and world’s top universities and research institutes, including University of Nebraska Lincoln, Columbia University, Imperial College of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, etc. 12 published articles are written by academicians from various countries. The published papers have also attracted an overwhelming response and have been cited by 179 journals, including top journals in the field of power and energy like Nature Materials, Advanced Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, Advanced Energy Materials, etc., from 45 countries.

About Tsinghua University Press

Established in 1980, as a department of Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University Press (TUP) is a leading comprehensive higher education and professional publisher in China. TUP publishes 58 journals and 42 of them are in English. There are 18 journals indexed by SCIE/ESCI. Three of them have the highest impact factor in its field. In 2022, TUP launched SciOpen. As a publishing platform of TUP, SciOpen provides free access to an online collection of journals across diverse academic disciplines and serves to meet the research needs of scientific communities. SciOpen provides end-to-end services across manuscript submission, peer review, content hosting, analytics, identity management, and expert advice to ensure each journal’s development.

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Journal

iEnergy

DOI

10.23919/IEN.2025.0007 

Article Title

Estimating the carbon emission reduction potential of using carbon-oriented demand response for data centers: A case study in China

Article Publication Date

24-Mar-2025

 

Increase in hot–dry events in China with a high mortality risk over the past two decades

Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

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Schematic diagram of the mechanism by which the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation impacts the interdecadal variation of hot–dry events with a high risk of mortality in China.

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Credit: Yuting Ma

As global warming intensifies and populations continue to grow, the likelihood of extreme high-temperature events is increasing. Hot–dry compound events, in particular, pose a direct threat to human health. High temperatures can have prolonged and delayed effects on people’s health; and under conditions of low relative humidity, the mortality associated with extreme heat rises significantly.

Previous climate risk analyses have largely focused on the abnormal state of a single variable, but concurrent extreme events, i.e., compound extreme events, tend to have more severe impacts on the environment and human systems than individual extremes. Therefore, the study of compound extreme events related to both is urgently needed.

A recent study by a Chinese joint team from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, and the National Climate Center, China Meteorological Administration, reveals a decadal-scale increase in hot–dry events with a high risk of mortality over the past 20 years. The findings have recently been published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters.

The study integrates meteorological and mortality data across China to identify high-risk mortality thresholds for hot–dry events. Based on these thresholds, the frequency of the compound extreme events was quantified.

According to the study, hot–dry events with a high risk of mortality occur frequently in the northwestern–western and southwestern–southern regions in China, exhibiting an interdecadal upward trend. This type of compound event exhibits interdecadal variability, with an abrupt change occurring in the late 1990s.

"The interdecadal variability of hot–dry events with a high risk of mortality is associated with phase transitions of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation," says one of the corresponding authors, Dr. Zhao, a researcher from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. "In the late 1990s, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation shifted from a negative to a positive phase, inducing anomalous circulation over the North Atlantic. These anomalies propagated eastward, leading to an increase in the frequency of this type of compound event."

The researchers demonstrate that anticyclonic circulation over northern China facilitates a reduction in moisture transport to the Yangtze River Basin, thereby weakening the East Asian summer monsoon, which leads to an interdecadal increase in hot–dry events with a high risk of mortality in the regions south of the Yangtze River.

Overall, when dealing with extremely high-temperature and low-humidity environments, it is not only necessary to strengthen the protection of human health in the cities of Northwest and North China, but also to closely monitor the populations of cities close to the south of the Yangtze River basin, to prevent harm being caused by such hot–dry compound extreme events.

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Journal

Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters

DOI

10.1016/j.aosl.2025.100609 

Article Title

The increase in hot–dry events with a high risk of mortality in China associated with the phase transition of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation

 

After 80 years stumping scientists, strange Philippine frog unmasked as hybrid

University of Kansas

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Distribution of the frogs studied and examples of their finger disc widths. Distribution of the Kaloula conjuncta complex A and B K. picta. Diamond = location of samples sequenced for this study; star = type locality of K. c. stickeli; red box = location of the putative hybrid zone where K. c. meridionalis, K. c. stickeli, and K. picta co-occur. C Differences in widths of the finger discs in the focal taxa.

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Credit: Chan et al

LAWRENCE — Evolutionary biologists working in the Philippines long have puzzled over a hard-to-find amphibian mystery: the Leyte Chorus Frog. It’s a small, ground-dwelling frog from Leyte Island in the Visayan province of the eastern Philippines. The country is an island archipelago once blanketed with dense forests that today exist in small fragments — an unfortunate consequence of intensive logging.

The Leyte Chorus Frog was collected in 1944 and noted for its odd toe discs when it was described in an academic paper in 1954, then not seen again for decades despite a concerted hunt by researchers.

Now, a report from the University of Kansas appearing in the Genetics Society journal Heredity confirms that Kaloula conjuncta stickeli (the scientific name of the strange chorus frog) is a hybrid of two species with overlapping ranges whose intermingling likely was driven by deforestation. 

“It’s this really weird, enigmatic frog in the Philippines,” said Chan Kin Onn, a postdoctoral researcher at KU’s Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum, who served as lead author on the paper. Chan credits his mentor Rafe Brown, curator-in-charge of the herpetology division at the iInstitute, for years of fieldwork that undergird the findings.

“The reason the frog’s enigmatic is that it was collected a long time ago,” Chan said. “It looks really distinct — you can just eyeball a specimen and immediately tell it's not this, it's not that; it's something else. When it was originally described, it was classified as a subspecies.”

Chan said evolutionary biologists tend to think of a “subspecies” as a population that looks slightly different, but not obviously unique enough to qualify as a separate species.

The problem was that only a few Leyte Chorus Frogs were ever discovered despite regular sampling by scientists in the region — its rarity was a puzzle that raised questions about its status as a subspecies.

“The person who first discovered it collected only two specimens,” Chan said. “Over the course of several decades, despite many researchers returning to the same locations, only five more specimens have been found. The lack of material makes it really difficult to study — only seven specimens exist in collections worldwide. For the longest time, we didn’t have the tools to figure it out, so people considered it either a subspecies or questioned its validity. Some hypothesized that it might be a full species, one that might already be extinct. No one really knew for sure, so it remained in this gray area.”

Fieldwork in the Philippines by co-author Brown, who also serves as KU professor of ecology & evolutionary biology, turned up several of the Leyte Chorus Frogs specimens — but this time from the southern island of Mindanao. Today, they’re housed in collections of the National Museum of the Philippines, the Texas Memorial Museum and the University of Texas at Austin.

“Ever since catching these curious, oddball specimens in 1996, the summer before I started grad school at UT Austin, the unanswered question of what they really were — or what they could possibly represent — has bugged me on and off, occasionally resurfacing from memory,” Brown said. “It has been like a note-to-self: Don’t forget to get back to those weird frogs from Mindanao because we still don’t know the answer.”

Following up on Brown’s questions, Chan looked into the mystery of the Leyte Chorus Frog using the same specimens from 1944 and 1996, as well as the latest tools of the evolutionary biology trade. He used genetic material from specimens in biodiversity collections and analyzed relevant portions of the genome using labs at KU and offsite, looking to accurately place the frog in its family tree.  

“Today we have a bunch of those ‘Star Trek’-style science gizmos,” Brown said. “We’ve got genomic resources, bioinformatic tools, really powerful computers, and most importantly Dr. Chan, whose insight provided the final pieces to come together, for a much anticipated resolution of the mystery.”

“We thought, ‘Let’s see if genomics can answer this question,’” Chan said. “So, we did, and the result was surprising — this frog is actually a hybrid. Not just any hybrid — an ‘F1 hybrid,’ meaning it's the first-generation offspring of two distinct parent species. Because of that, it has 50% of its genetic material from one parent and 50% from the other.”

The analysis found the odd Leyte Chorus Frogs are a hybrid between K. c. meridionalis and K. picta.

“Normally, these two frog species wouldn’t meet because one lives in trees and bushes, but the other on the ground, and they breed in completely different places,” Chan said. “But deforestation changed their environment, creating new open spaces where their habitats overlapped. This led to tree-dwelling females being drawn to the calls of ground-dwelling males, resulting in unexpected hybridization. Scientists suspected this years ago when they observed the frogs interacting in the wild, but they lacked the tools to prove it.”

Chan said the hybrid Leyte Chorus Frogs were particularly interesting because their two parent species look and act so differently.

“One is large, with big expanded toe pads for climbing,” he said. “The other is smaller, with almost no expanded toe pads because it’s a ground dweller. This enigmatic frog is a perfect intermediate between them — it has intermediate-sized toe pads. Just by eyeballing the size of the toe pads, you can tell what’s what.”

In the end, the KU researchers determined the hybrid isn’t a distinct species and doesn’t warrant its own scientific name. Further, it’s rarity comes down to the fact that it cannot reproduce and is an evolutionary dead end.

“When they breed, we think it likely that genetic incompatibilities form,” Chan said. “Apparently, the hybrids are incompatible with each other, and with the two species that produced them, so they cannot progress beyond that first generation F1 hybrid. At least, this is what we suspect, and it opens the door for future research to verify this.”

Brown emphasized the critical role played by specimen-based museum research for deciphering biological problems that rely on clues only to be gleaned from biological specimens properly preserved and cared for in natural history museums.

“Chan’s work is really impressive, and with this new publication he closed the book on the Leyte Chorus Frog ‘stickeli’ mystery,” Brown said. “That’s thanks to his hard work, analytical abilities, writing skills and cutting-edge genomic data. That said, this project would not have been possible if we had been unable to access the exact same museum specimens that stupefied field biologists 30 to 80 years ago. Lucky for us, they made note of their observations, collected the specimens and preserved them for use by future researchers.”

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Journal

Heredity

DOI

10.1038/s41437-025-00748-y 

One of just seven specimens of the mysterious Leyte Chorus Frog collected by W. H. Stickel on Nov. 20, 1944, from Leyte, Philippines. Part of the collection of the Field Museum of Natural History. 

Credit

Photo by Sarah Drasner.

Avalonlibrary.netavalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Arthur Koestler - The Case of the Midwife Toad.pdf

The Case of the Midwife Toad | Avalon Library

Paul Kammerer in 19Z4, age 44. ARTHUR KOESTLER. The Case cf the. <:/Y.lidwife t;ad.

 

Smart insoles that could change the game for sports and health

The University of Portsmouth in England and technology company TG0 have created a smart insoles system that can accurately measure the body's interaction with the ground

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Portsmouth

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Experimental setup with the smart insole and force plate. The participant wore a pair of smart insoles inside the shoe while moving on the force plate.

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Credit: Tim Excell

• Smart insole accurately measures 3D ground reaction forces (GRFs), providing real-world movement analysis

• Highly accurate and portable, the insole system outperforms existing wearable technologies

• Potential to help athletes optimise performance, reduce injury risks, and support doctors in rehabilitation and mobility monitoring

What if your insoles could do more than just cushion your feet? Imagine a pair that could track your movements, help athletes avoid injuries, or even assist doctors in monitoring recovery. 

A new study by scientists at the University of Portsmouth and technology company TG0, funded by Innovate UK via a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP), has brought us closer to making this idea a reality. 

A team of researchers have successfully designed a new smart insole system that can accurately measure the body's interaction with the ground, opening new possibilities in sports science and healthcare by estimating ground reaction forces (GRFs).

This data is crucial in sports science, rehabilitation, and even injury prevention, but until now, capturing it outside of a lab was nearly impossible.

Currently, researchers and medical professionals use force plates to measure GRFS, which are large, expensive machines. But these systems are bulky, costly, and can’t track movement in everyday environments. 

The TG0 Smart Insole uses built-in pressure sensors and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to track foot pressure and movement with impressive accuracy. 

Combined with artificial intelligence (AI), they can predict ground reaction forces with just a 4.16 per cent error rate, making them one of the most precise wearable movement trackers available. Earlier methods, such as motion sensors or pressure insoles, typically had error rates ranging from 8 per cent to 20 per cent. 

The smart insoles are equipped with an integrated battery that supports approximately eight hours of continuous data collection. The insoles communicate with a PC-based receiver (USB dongle) via Bluetooth low energy (BLE). During operation, all collected data are stored in CSV file format with timestamps on the user’s PC through the user interface, as shown below.

Smart insole applications:

• Sports performance and injury prevention – Athletes can track their movement, optimise training, and reduce the risk of injuries.

• Healthcare and rehabilitation – Doctors and physiotherapists can use the insoles to monitor patients recovering from injuries or mobility issues.

• Wearable tech and research – Scientists can use the data from the insoles to advance sports science and biomechanics research.

Co-author, Dr Dinghuang Zhang, from the University of Portsmouth’s School of Computing and a research associate at TG0, explained: "We wanted to create an affordable and portable alternative to expensive lab equipment. These insoles could help athletes improve performance, assist doctors in rehabilitation, and even help people track their movement for general health."

The research involved both the University’s School of Computing and School of Psychology, Sport, and Health Sciences. 

Dr Tim Exell, Senior Lecturer in Biomechanics and Rehabilitation Science at the University of Portsmouth, said: “This partnership has really highlighted the benefit of collaboration to bring together different skill sets. All human movement, whether in elite sports, recreational activities or rehabilitation, is caused by forces and being able to accurately measure those forces outside a lab environment is a game-changer to improve sporting performance, identify injury risks and improve recovery after injury or other conditions.”

TG0's development of smart insoles was inspired by the pressing need to enhance diabetic foot care. Diabetic patients often suffer from peripheral neuropathy, leading to reduced sensation in their feet and an increased risk of foot ulcers. If untreated, these ulcers can result in severe infections and, in some cases, amputations. 

By integrating pressure mapping technology into insoles, TG0 aims to provide early detection of high-pressure areas, allowing patients and healthcare providers to take preventive measures. 

Dr Liucheng Guo, Co-founder and CTO at TG0, said: "TG0’s mission is to use embedded AI and low-cost material to revolutionise the human machine interfaces, make them accessible, sustainable and smart. By combining academic research with industry expertise, we’ve improved our low-cost smart sensing technology that could change the way we interact with the world - both in sports and healthcare. The study not only showcases our commitment to innovation but also paves the way for next-generation smart sensing solutions that extend beyond sports into broader health applications.”

The full study has been published in Intelligent Sports and Health, and a public dataset has been made available to help researchers develop even better wearable technology.

It was made possible through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) between the University of Portsmouth and TG0, and funded by Innovate UK. KTPs are programs that connect universities with businesses to develop real-world solutions using academic expertise.

Find out about other KTPs at the University of Portsmouth here.

Smart insoles prototype

Credit

TG0

Journal

Intelligent Sports and Health

DOI

10.1016/j.ish.2024.12.005 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Estimation of three-dimensional ground reaction forces using low-cost smart insoles