It’s that time again, for Google to announce that real-time translation has come to one of its communication apps. This time, it’s Google Meet, which can translate between English and Spanish as you speak in a video call. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s not the first time Google has announced something like this.
Google Translate has had features that let you speak to someone in another language in real time for a while. For example, back in 2019, there was a real-time translation feature called Interpreter Mode built into Google Assistant. It’s also been possible on Pixel phones for a while (and even Samsung phones). Most of these, however, have been either text-to-text, or speech-to-text. You can use the Google Translate app for a speech-to-speech experience, but like with Google Assistant’s Interpreter Mode, that only works in person.
So, what’s different here? Well, during its I/O keynote, Google demoed two users in a video chat speaking in their native languages. Google Meet then translates and speaks the translation back in a relatively human-sounding voice. This new feature is available now for Google Workspace subscribers (plans start at $7/month), but unfortunately, it’s not in the free version. On the plus side, additional languages are promised to start coming out in just a few weeks.
While I haven’t tested it out yet, it does seem to be a more convenient way to access a feature that you might otherwise have to hack together with another tab, or by opening your phone and holding it up to a speaker. Plus, it can be a bit more natural to hear translations spoken out for you, rather than having to rely on translated captions. I do wonder whether it can keep up with the natural speed and flow of a conversation, though—nobody likes to feel interrupted.
Almost no one hits it big in music. The odds are so bad it’s criminal. But on a late spring evening in Louisville, Kentucky, Mike Smith and Jonathan Hay were having that rare golden moment when everything clicks. Smith was on guitar. Hay was fiddling with the drum machine and keyboard. Dudes were grooving. Holed up in Hay’s living room, surrounded by chordophones and production gizmos, the two musicians were hoping that their first album as a jazz duo would finally win them the attention they’d been chasing for years.
Finding such reservoirs could help accelerate a global energy transition, but until now, geologists only had a piecemeal understanding of how large hydrogen accumulations form — and where to find them.
"The game of the moment is to find where it has been released, accumulated and preserved," Chris Ballentine, a professor and chair of geochemistry at the University of Oxford and lead author of a new review article on hydrogen production in Earth’s crust, told Live Science in an email.
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Ballentine’s new paper starts to answer those questions. According to the authors, Earth’s crust has produced enough hydrogen over the past 1 billion years to meet our current energy needs for 170,000 years. What’s still unclear is how much of that hydrogen could be accessed and profitably extracted.
In the new review, published Tuesday (May 13) in the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment, the researchers draw up an "ingredient" list of geological conditions that stimulate the creation and build-up of natural hydrogen gas belowground, which should make it easier to hunt for reservoirs.
"The specific conditions for hydrogen gas accumulation and production are what a number of exploration companies (e.g. Koloma, funded by a consortium led by Bill Gates Breakthrough Energy fund, Hy-Terra funded by Fortescue, and Snowfox, funded by BP [British Petroleum] and RioTinto) are looking at carefully and this will vary for different geological environments," Ballentine said.
Natural hydrogen reservoirs require three key elements to form: a source of hydrogen, reservoir rocks and natural seals that trap the gas underground. There are a dozen natural processes that can create hydrogen, the simplest being a chemical reaction that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen — and any type of rock that hosts at least one of these processes is a potential hydrogen source, Ballentine said.
"One place that is attracting a lot of interest is in Kansas where a feature called the mid continental rift, formed about 1 billion years ago, created a huge accumulation of rocks (mainly basalts) that can react with water to form hydrogen," he said. "The search is on here for geological structures that may have trapped and accumulated the hydrogen generated."
Based on knowledge of how other gases are released from rocks underground, the review’s authors suggest that tectonic stress and high heat flow may release hydrogen deep inside Earth’s crust. "This helps to bring the hydrogen to the near surface where it might accumulate and form a commercial resource," Ballentine said.
Within the crust, a wide range of common geological contexts could prove promising for exploration companies, the review found, ranging from ophiolite complexes to large igneous provinces and Archaean greenstone belts.
An ophiolitic landscape in Italy’s Sondrio province. The rocks are rich in iron, which gives them a reddish-brown color.
Michele D’Amico supersky77/Getty Images
Ophiolites are chunks of Earth’s crust and upper mantle that once sat beneath the ocean, but were later thrust onto land. In 2024, researchers discovered a massive hydrogen reservoir within an ophiolite complex in Albania. Igneous rocks are those solidified from magma or lava, and Archaean greenstone belts are up to 4 billion-year-old formations that are characterized by green minerals, such as chlorite and actinolite.
The conditions discussed in the review are the "first principles" for hydrogen exploration, study co-author Jon Gluyas, a professor of geoenergy, carbon capture and storage at Durham University in the U.K., said in a statement. The research outlines the key ingredients that companies should consider when developing their exploration strategies, including processes through which hydrogen might migrate or be destroyed underground.
"We know for example that underground microbes readily feast on hydrogen," co-author Barbara Sherwood Lollar, a professor of Earth sciences at the University of Toronto, said in the statement. So environments where bacteria could come in contact with hydrogen-producing rocks may not be great places to look for reservoirs, Sherwood Lollar said.
Hydrogen is used to make key industrial chemicals such as methanol and ammonia, which is a component in most fertilizers. The gas could also aid the transition away from fossil fuels, as hydrogen can power both cars and power plants.
But hydrogen today is produced from hydrocarbons, meaning manufacture of the gas comes with huge carbon emissions. "Clean" hydrogen from underground reservoirs has a much smaller carbon footprint, because it occurs naturally.
Earth’s crust produces "plenty of hydrogen," Ballentine said, and it is now a question of following the ingredient list to find it.
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Ventiva’s fanless PC cooling technology is evolving from a curiosity to what appears to be a genuine game-changer: not only is it demonstrating 45W cooling capabilities with two partners, but Ventiva is also claiming that its ICE9 system can cool up to 100 watts of thermal energy as well.
Dell — the partner with which Ventiva originally worked with — is one of the companies interested in the 45W cooling solution. The other is Compal, a “white box” contract manufacturer that builds PCs for any number of vendors who then claim them as their own.
Ventiva surfaced late last year, and we sat down with company executives at CES 2025. Rivals like Frore or xMEMS use a vibrating membrane to replicate the actions of a fan, moving cool air over heated elements within a PC and then outside the system. Ventiva essentially ionizes the air, which is pushed away from a charged wire and creates airflow.
The amount of air moved, and how much cooling is applied, depends on a few factors: the size of the cooling component (which Ventiva calls an ICE), how much charge is applied, and how many ICE devices are working together. At CES 2025, however, Ventiva was talking about moving just 25 watts’ worth of thermal energy, enough for the 15W of an Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake”-U chip, for example., but not quite enough for the 28W “Arrow Lake” chips or the rival Ryzen AI 300 processors, whose TDPs are also about 28W.
By pushing up to 40W, Ventiva’s partnerships with Compal and Dell would allow both companies to design laptop reference designs that could accommodate a wider variety of PC processors, including while they were running in excess of their rated TDP in turbo mode. The ICE technology is less than 12mm high, allowing thinner laptops to be made.
Ventiva is also looking at the future. The company is demonstrating a 100W test laptop at Computex 2025 this week, which it will presumably use to strike even more partnerships.
“AI-driven laptops are transforming the way we work, create, and play, but their increasing thermal output requires a new level of device heat management,” said Carl Schlachte, chairman, president and chief executive of Ventiva, in a statement. “This is our highest-performing thermal management system to date, enabling laptop OEMs and ODMs to push power to the limit, and stay totally cool, under any workload, from 3D design to AI development to immersive game playing.”
While 100 watts of cooling is well below what gaming laptops can consume under full load, there’s certainly a chance that a midrange laptop might be able to use Ventiva’s solution for some sort of gaming application. And boy, wouldn’t a silent gaming laptop — without the need to dunk it in a vat of coolant — be a thing of beauty?
