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Wednesday, November 11, 2026

World faces ‘irrecoverable overshoot’ on warming, report warns

12.11.2026

Photo: Jens Büttner/dpa

The world is heading for an “irrecoverable overshoot” on dangerous global warming unless governments reject fossil fuels and start rapidly cutting emissions, a report has warned.

The latest update from the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) initiative, released as countries meet for the UN Climate Conference (COP31) in Turkey, warns that collective climate action has stalled for the fifth consecutive year.

There are some positive signs, with clean electricity meeting all additional global demand for power in 2025, China and India deploying renewables at a record pace, the electric vehicle roll out reaching new highs and deforestation in the Amazon falling sharply.

But the report from CAT warns progress on deploying alternatives to fossil fuels – which cause most of the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming when they are burned for transport, heating, power and industry – is not happening fast enough.

Increasing demand for energy and new fossil fuel infrastructure being built have led to still rising emissions, the CAT report warns.

It finds that, with the policies on tackling climate change and driving clean energy and technologies that governments have in place today, the world is on track for 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100 – up slightly from 2.6 degrees last year and the same as the years 2021 to 2024.

If governments met 2030 and 2035 targets to cut emissions under the Paris Agreement – a global treaty which aims to curb warming to 1.5 degrees to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change – warming would still be 2.6 degrees, the same as last year.

Under an optimistic scenario in which countries meet all their pledges, targets, long term, and “net zero” targets to cut emissions to zero overall, the world would see warming of 1.9 degrees by the end of the century.

The world is set to exceed the Paris target of 1.5 degrees of warming in the next few years, and experts warn there is now a need to act to limit the size and duration of the overshoot and bring temperatures down to below 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100.

Bill Hare, chief executive of CAT partner organization Climate Analytics, said: “The stark choice for governments is to either continue to support the fossil fuel industry, which would consign humanity to insurmountable economic damages, rising mortality from heat and climate-driven diseases and disasters that they are unable to adapt to – or pivot to the solutions which are available and cheaper than ever.

“The imminence of breaching 1.5 degrees cannot be an excuse to open the door to defeatism – the focus has to be on accelerating action to limit the magnitude and duration of overshoot.

“Every increment of warming above 1.5 degrees means even more significant consequences across climate, nature and human systems.”

Scientists warn that exceeding 1.5 degrees of warming will lead to more severe weather extremes such as deadly heatwaves, floods, storms and drought, rising sea levels and the potential for catastrophic and irreversible collapse of natural systems such as coral reefs and rainforests.

Analysis published earlier this week by the Global Carbon Budget initiative has suggested a slight decline in carbon emissions from fossil fuels this year, of 0.4%, driven by expansion of solar and wind power and the Iran conflict.

Niklas Hohne, of CAT partner organization NewClimate Institute, said: “With the closure of the Strait of Hormuz exposing our vulnerability to geopolitical shocks, the case for renewables and electrification has never been stronger – and it does appear that global emissions could be on the verge of a peak and a much faster decline than we had previously thought.”

But Climate Analytics policy analyst and lead author of the report Sarah Heck warned that collectively governments are “simply not moving fast enough to adopt the policies that would enable us to escape from the emerging overshoot trap”.

“Worse, several are taking their foot off the accelerator and slowing their climate action – or in cases such as the US, Canada and New Zealand – rolling it back at a staggering level,” she added.

That means long-term warming is expected to cross the 1.5 degrees limit in around 2030, CAT said.

To hold the overshoot of the 1.5 degrees threshold to the minimum still possible, the report calculates that emission reductions have to speed up from around 4% a year to 2030, then 7% a year in the first half of the 2030s and 9% a year over 2035-50.

That compares with the 7% drop in carbon emissions from fossil fuels seen in 2020 as a result of Covid-19 lockdowns across the world.

Sunday, November 08, 2026

For the first time, Jain American elected to Congress

(RNS) Dr. Amish Shah, a Jain adherent, and Pia Dandiya, the daughter of practicing Jains, were both elected to the House of Representatives, bringing an ancient Indian faith to Congress.

Dr. Amish Shah won Arizona’s 1st Congressional District on Tuesday. (Photo by Jeff Shear)

Trisha Mukherjee

November 5, 2026

RNS

(RNS) — Dr. Amish Shah, a physician, Democrat and Arizona state legislator who said he was “promoting the Jain way of life” during his campaign, won Arizona’s 1st Congressional District on Tuesday, becoming the first Jain American elected to Congress.

In Florida, Democrat Pia Dandiya, a former high school principal whose parents are practicing Jains, won the 22nd Congressional District. Her campaign did not respond to questions about whether she practices the faith. Indian American Impact, a group backing South Asian candidates, counts both as Jain Americans.

There are an estimated 150,000 adherents to Jainism in the U.S., according to the Arihanta Institute, a nonprofit that promotes Jain-related education and research.

Some Jains celebrated the prospect of having representation in Congress for the first time ever.

“With Amish and Pia, the timeless Jain values of nonviolence, non-attachment and the multiplicity of viewpoints will carry forward,” said Manish Mehta, chair of the diaspora committee of the Federation of Jain Associations in North America. Mehta is Jain and said he knows Dandiya’s parents. “They will be really good examples of people who rule with their heads and their hearts together.”

Jainism, which originated in India more than 2,500 years ago, is often summarized by three principles: ahimsa (nonviolence toward all living beings), aparigraha (non-attachment) and anekantavada (the understanding that truth has many dimensions).

Pia Dandiya. (Photo courtesy of Dandiya campaign)

As a state legislator and a self-described lifelong vegetarian, Shah introduced legislation promoting animal welfare, including banning cat declawing and puppy mills, aligning with ahimsa. He also sponsored bills supporting public health, gun safety and education. His Jain father and Hindu mother immigrated from India in the 1960s, according to his Arizona State Legislature biography.

Dandiya won a district that was gerrymandered to favor Republicans. According to Mehta, Dandiya’s parents are practicing Jains who have donated to Jain organizations. Dandiya’s parents immigrated from Jaipur, India, to Jupiter, Florida, where she was born and raised. Jupiter is about a 30-minute drive from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

Of the 56 candidates endorsed by Indian American Impact, 41 won in races ranging from Congress to state legislatures and local offices, said communications director Sarah Shah. Ten races were still being counted as of 2 p.m. Thursday (November 5). The winners include Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Unitarian Universalists and non-affiliated, said Indian American Impact’s executive director, Chintan Patel.

As in the current Congress, there will be six South Asian representatives. But the group will be more religiously diverse. Indian American Impact counts two Hindu members, one Unitarian Universalist, two Jain, and one unaffiliated representative. Four are incumbents who won re-election. Shah and Dandiya are newcomers.

“The South Asian community is made up of people from lots of different faiths,” Patel said. “We’re seeing that diversity reflected in the Indian and South Asian American candidates who are running and winning. I think that is an incredible source of pride.”

Saturday, November 07, 2026

FERENGI SCIENCE

Our ears reveal our feelings: The path to machines with super-emotional intelligence?

The discovery could have important implications for the debate surrounding artificial intelligence

Saarland University

Our ears reveal our feelings — image:
Neurotechnologist Sophie Bonnaire conducts research at the 'Systems Neuroscience & Neurotechnology Unit' in Saarbrücken and Homburg.
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Credit: Hans-Peter Bonnaire

The muscles of the human ear reveal what and how we feel. This is the finding of Dr. Farah Corona-Strauss and Sophie Bonnaire, researchers at the Systems Neuroscience & Neurotechnology Unit in Saarbrücken and Homburg. Their research shows that activity in our ear muscles indicates not only who we are listening to and how attentively, but also the intensity of our emotional response, all within a fraction of a second. The discovery could have important implications for the debate surrounding artificial intelligence, raising the question of what a machine should be permitted to do if it can recognize emotions more accurately than any human.

The work has now been presented in two publications by the team led by Professor Daniel J. Strauss. The research findings appear in the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, while a ‘Perspective’ article in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence introduces and defines the term ‘super-emotional intelligence’.

‘Our ear muscles respond immediately when an individual event moves us emotionally, such as hearing a sound or a face appearing briefly in a scene. This happens within a fraction of a second and it’s not something we can perceive visually,’ says Professor Daniel J. Strauss, explaining his group’s new findings. What makes this particularly remarkable is that in 1871 Charles Darwin described the human ear muscles as vestigial, and a year later, he concluded that humans, unlike animals, had lost the ability to express emotions through their ears. In animals, he described such responses in precise detail: ears flattened in fear or anger and pricked up in attention, as will be familiar to anyone who lives with a dog or cat.

‘We have now been able to show that this evolutionary remnant in our heads, the neural control of the ear muscles, reveals not only who we are listening to but also how we feel while listening,’ says Strauss, a neuroscientist and computer scientist, adding: ‘Although we can no longer point our ears towards a sound, the muscle signal remains. What Darwin believed had been lost is actually still there – it has merely grown quieter.’

Back in 2020, Strauss’s neurotechnology research group reported in the journal eLife that the muscles around the human ear become active whenever a new or significant sound occurs. In those experiments, participants unconsciously made minute ear movements in precisely the direction in which they were focusing their attention. The researchers demonstrated this, among other things, by recording electrical signals from the ear’s vestigial motor system (see the press release ‘Our animal inheritance: Humans perk up their ears, too, when they hear interesting sounds’). In subsequent studies, the group showed that activity in the ear muscles can also indicate how much effort listening requires, including in people who wear hearing aids.

Laughter leads to a new line of research

During the 2020 experiments, Farah Corona-Strauss noticed that the tiny intrinsic muscles of the outer ear also became active when participants laughed, with the onset of muscle activity occurring shortly before the laughter began. This observation led the neurotechnologist to ask a new question: If the ear responds to sounds that matter to us, does it also respond to things that affect us emotionally? Together with research associate Sophie Bonnaire, she set out to investigate. Bonnaire made the question the subject of her doctoral research at Saarland University and conducted a thorough, systematic examination. The research involved showing participants short film clips, some pleasant, some unpleasant, while surface electrodes recorded activity in their intrinsic auricular muscles. The participants were asked to rate the degree of emotional arousal evoked by each clip. ‘As the emotional arousal elicited by a scene increases, the muscles become more active within a fraction of a second – irrespective of whether the scene is pleasant or unpleasant. And we also find that the muscular response corresponds to the participants’ own reports,’ Sophie Bonnaire explains. What’s particularly striking is the speed with which the muscles respond to an individual stimulus, whether it’s a sound, a face flashing up briefly on screen or, as in the group’s latest research, even a single word encountered while reading.

Could bodily signals pave the way for super-emotional intelligence?

For Daniel Strauss, the discovery that a person’s ear muscles spontaneously and unconsciously reveal their emotional response has important implications for the current debate surrounding artificial intelligence. ‘Until now, debate has focused almost exclusively on “superintelligence”, in other words, on the question of how much more intelligent than us machines might become.’ Strauss believes that a new concept can now be placed alongside it: ‘super-emotional intelligence’ – an attribute ascribed to technical systems capable of interpreting emotions more accurately than any human being, including physiological signals that no human can perceive directly in others. ‘What we definitely do not mean here is a machine that experiences feelings,’ he clarifies. ‘Super-emotional intelligence describes a system that can recognize, understand and respond to a person’s emotions more effectively than trained human experts.’

In a Perspective article published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, Strauss’s doctoral researcher Sophie Bonnaire provides the first definition of Super-Emotional Intelligence (SEI). She describes the capabilities that such a super-emotionally intelligent system would need to display, explains why today’s AI systems are still a long way from achieving them and considers how clearly defined rules could aid the development of technology that works for people rather than against them. ‘Unlike today’s “empathetic” chatbots, which appear compassionate without really monitoring the state of the person they are interacting with, a super-emotionally intelligent system would need to be capable of self-regulation. The SEI system would select the response most likely to help the person reach their desired objective, while also learning from the effects of its own responses,’ Bonnaire explains.

Care, not control: Safeguards against misuse are essential

Caution is nevertheless essential. ‘If directed towards a different objective, the same technology could become a “hypermanipulative machine”, detecting states that we ourselves are unaware of and steering us towards goals we have never chosen,’ warns Daniel Strauss. The EU AI Act, which prohibits emotion-recognition systems in schools and workplaces, underscores the contemporary relevance of the issue. ‘We argue that human beings must set the objectives and determine what such a machine should and should not be permitted to do. The guiding principle must be care, not control.’

From hearing aids and earbuds to smart glasses

Farah Corona-Strauss and her lab team are already working on a practical technological application. ‘Hearing aids, earbuds and the arms of smart glasses are positioned exactly where the ear-muscle signals originate. The ear is therefore a natural interface between humans and machines. That’s why we are working with hearing-aid manufacturers and international technology partners. An empathetic AI system that detects when listening fatigue sets in or when something triggers an emotional response could adapt accordingly, without requiring either a camera or a questionnaire,’ explains the neurotechnologist.

Background: The research unit

The Systems Neuroscience & Neurotechnology Unit (SNNU) is jointly affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine at Saarland University and the Faculty of Engineering at Saarland University of Applied Sciences (htw saar). Dr. Farah Corona-Strauss heads the unit’s MINDSCAN Lab, where Sophie Bonnaire also conducts her research. The SNNU currently leads a wide range of national and international research projects at the interface of neuroscience, medicine and technology.
Further information: www.snnu.uni-saarland.de

The two publications:

Sophie Bonnaire, Mayur J. Bhamborae, Daniel J. Strauss, Farah I. Corona-Strauss: Unraveling Affective States from the Auriculomotor System. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. DOI: 10.1109/taffc.2026.3717435
Sophie Bonnaire, Farah I. Corona-Strauss, Daniel J. Strauss: The Rise of Super-Emotional Intelligence (Perspective). Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. DOI: 10.3389/frai.2026.1975692

Questions can be addressed to:

Prof. Dr. Dr. Daniel J. Strauss

www.snnu.uni-saarland.de

Sophie Bonnaire, the lead author of both publications, is also available for press interviews. Please send interview requests using the contact details shown above.

Journal

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence

DOI

10.3389/frai.2026.1975692

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

The rise of super-emotional intelligence

A map of the realm of infinities

There are different sizes of infinity — a fact that has puzzled mathematicians for a long time. At TU Wien, a surprisingly simple new way has now been found to organize a large class of infinities

Vienna University of Technology

It is one of the great questions of mathematics: What does “infinity” actually mean? Which infinities are larger than others? Can infinities be arranged in a sequence, like the rungs of an endless ladder, so that for any two of them we can always say which one lies above the other?

In the 20th century, mathematicians discovered that some of these questions are, in principle, impossible to answer. William Chan of TU Wien has now taken a somewhat more modest approach: He abandons the requirement that there must be one single, clear hierarchy of infinities. And precisely by doing so, he arrives at something remarkable. If infinities are not arranged along a single line but placed in a two-dimensional system, apparent difficulties disappear and a surprisingly simple order emerges — a kind of two-dimensional map of infinities.

Infinitely Many Cats

How can two numbers be compared in the first place? Quite simply: We match every element of one set with an element of another. If there are five cats and five food bowls, we can place one cat in front of each bowl. We then know that the number of cats and the number of bowls are the same. If some bowls are left over, there are more bowls than cats.

“The same idea can be applied to infinite sets,” explains William Chan from the Institute of Discrete Mathematics and Geometry at TU Wien. “For example, the set of natural numbers is the same size as the set of even numbers.”

That may sound strange, because only half of all natural numbers are even. But the even numbers can all be numbered: 2 gets number 1, 4 gets number 2, 6 gets number 3, and so on. No even number is ever left out.

The mathematician Georg Cantor proved that the same trick does not work for the real numbers. The set of numbers with infinitely many decimal places cannot be put into such a list. It is larger than the set of natural numbers — even though both sets are infinite.

A Great Question — and Its Failure

This led to a major question that generations of mathematicians struggled with: Are there infinities of arbitrary sizes, including arbitrary intermediate sizes? Is there a set with more elements than the natural numbers, but fewer than the real numbers?

To investigate such questions, mathematicians usually rely on a basic framework known as Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, together with the so-called Axiom of Choice. It says that if we have any collection of non-empty sets, we can select one element from each of them. That may sound obvious: If there is a bowl of strawberries, of course I can pick a strawberry from it. But with infinitely many sets, and with no explicit rule telling us which element to choose, it is no longer obvious that such a “choice function” must exist.

The Axiom of Choice makes it possible to arrange infinite sets by size — one infinity after another, like the rungs of an infinitely long ladder. We can then ask: If the first rung corresponds to the infinity of the natural numbers — the smallest infinity we know — on which rung does the infinity of the real numbers appear? On the very next one? Or much higher up?

After decades of research, this question was answered — but not in the way mathematicians had expected. It was shown that within the usual mathematical axioms — Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory together with the Axiom of Choice — the question cannot be answered. The generally accepted basic rules of mathematics do not determine an answer.

Mathematics Without the Axiom of Choice

“But what happens if we leave out the Axiom of Choice?” William Chan asked. In doing so, he drew on ideas developed in the 1960s. It had already been shown that instead of the Axiom of Choice, one can work with the Axiom of Determinacy — a different kind of regularity principle that is incompatible with the Axiom of Choice.

The Axiom of Determinacy says that if two players follow certain rules in an infinitely long process, together producing an infinite sequence of numbers, then one of them must always have a strategy that allows them to force the outcome of the game. This may be somewhat more technical and less intuitive than the Axiom of Choice, but it too provides mathematical structure.

In a mathematical system based on the Axiom of Determinacy rather than the Axiom of Choice, one can investigate how new infinite sets arise from other infinite sets.

A typical construction is to consider all possible mappings from one set to another. The real numbers, for example, can be thought of in terms of numbers with infinitely many decimal places. At every decimal position, there are ten possible digits, from 0 to 9, and there are infinitely many such positions. So we repeatedly choose one of ten digits, once for every natural number. In this sense, the real numbers arise from infinitely many choices among ten possibilities. Symbolically speaking, ten to the power of aleph-zero gives the cardinality of the continuum.

Instead of taking the finite set of ten digits and raising it to an infinite power, one can also take one infinite set to the power of another infinite set. The infinitely many possible mappings between them then define new infinities.

Ordering Infinities: Not on a Line, but on a Map

William Chan now asked: What if we do not try to place all such infinities in a single sequence, but instead arrange them in a two-dimensional scheme, like points on a map?

Let A, B, C and D be different infinities. Can we compare A to the power B with C to the power D? It depends, says Chan. If A is larger than C and B is larger than D, the comparison is straightforward: A to the power B is larger.

But what happens if we compare something smaller raised to something larger with something larger raised to something smaller? Which one is bigger?

Chan's answer is: These two sizes need not be comparable at all. There is no single linear ordering of these infinities — they have to be described using two coordinates. A and B define one point on the map of infinities; C and D define another.

And remarkably, once the idea of a single “ladder of infinities” is abandoned, the algebra of infinities suddenly becomes strikingly simple and reveals a rich structure. Results that are already known about infinities can be incorporated into this map without producing contradictions. All of this becomes possible once the Axiom of Choice — and with it the idea of one universal ladder of infinities — is set aside.

Does this solve the age-old puzzle of the sizes of infinite sets? Probably not for a very long time. “But it is a remarkably simple and fruitful new way of thinking about how infinite sets can be organized,” says William Chan.

With the Axiom of Choice, infinities can be arranged in order, like rungs on a ladder. Without it, a map emerges: The yellow point represents a larger infinity than the green one because it has a higher value on both axes. The blue and red points, however, are incomparable.

Credit

TU Wien