A modern-day rush prospecting frenzy for lithium, a crucial battery metal, is unfolding across remote Western Australian deserts. The arid outback that previously supplied gold, nickel and iron now hosts fierce competition between miners racing to stake claims on lithium resources needed for the global green energy transition. Lithium giants U.S.'s Albemarle and Chile's SQM have sparred with Australian billionaires Gina Rinehart and Chris Ellison over contested acquisitions of unproven explorers there. With demand surging, the harsh outback has become the modern El Dorado as pioneers and corporations scramble to tap into lithium, the "white gold," before rivals beat them to the punch. The deal frenzy has also come at a time when the lithium price has crashed as much as 70% compared with highs seen last year, as expectations of electric vehicle demand in key markets such as China have been lowered, Financial Times adds. The report adds: Western Australia already supplies about half of the world's raw lithium and is seen as a stable place to invest compared with parts of Africa, where there has been political instability, and Chile, where the state has moved to take control of lithium projects. Local expectations are high. A report by Australia's chief economist said lithium product exports should exceed A$20bn in the year to June 2023, up from A$5bn in the previous year. The report added that by 2028, the value of lithium exports should exceed those of coal, a staple of Australia's economy for decades. Australia has ambitions to step up its efforts to refine spodumene to keep more of the value onshore rather than shipping all of its resources to China, which has a commanding share of the refining process.

AI employed by the U.S. military "has piloted pint-sized surveillance drones in special operations forces' missions and helped Ukraine in its war against Russia," reports the Associated Press.

But that's the beginning. AI also "tracks soldiers' fitness, predicts when Air Force planes need maintenance and helps keep tabs on rivals in space." Now, the Pentagon is intent on fielding multiple thousands of relatively inexpensive, expendable AI-enabled autonomous vehicles by 2026 to keep pace with China. The ambitious initiative — dubbed Replicator — seeks to "galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many," Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in August. While its funding is uncertain and details vague, Replicator is expected to accelerate hard decisions on what AI tech is mature and trustworthy enough to deploy — including on weaponized systems.'

There is little dispute among scientists, industry experts and Pentagon officials that the U.S. will within the next few years have fully autonomous lethal weapons. And though officials insist humans will always be in control, experts say advances in data-processing speed and machine-to-machine communications will inevitably relegate people to supervisory roles. That's especially true if, as expected, lethal weapons are deployed en masse in drone swarms. Many countries are working on them — and neither China, Russia, Iran, India or Pakistan have signed a U.S.-initiated pledge to use military AI responsibly.

Regulators in the European Union, China and France have asked for information on Nvidia's graphic cards, with more requests expected in the future, the U.S. chip giant said in a regulatory filing. From a report: Nvidia is the world's largest maker of chips used both for artificial intelligence and for computer graphics. Demand for its chips jumped following the release of the generative AI application ChatGPT late last year. The California-based company has a market share of around 80% via its chips and other hardware and its powerful software that runs them.

Its graphics cards are high-performance devices that enable powerful graphics rendering and processing for use in video editing, video gaming and other complex computing operations. The company said this has attracted regulatory interest around the world. "For example, the French Competition Authority collected information from us regarding our business and competition in the graphics card and cloud service provider market as part of an ongoing inquiry into competition in those markets," Nvidia said in a regulatory filing dated Nov. 21.

Russia President Vladimir Putin on Friday warned that the West should not be allowed to develop a monopoly in the sphere of AI, and said that a much more ambitious Russian strategy for the development of AI would be approved shortly. From a report: China and the United States are leading the development of AI, which many researchers and global leaders think will transform the world and revolutionise society in a way similar to the introduction of computers in the 20th century. Moscow has ambitions to be an AI power too, but its efforts have been set back due to the war in Ukraine which prompted many talented specialists to leave Russia and triggered Western sanctions that have hindered the country's high-tech imports.

Speaking to an AI conference in Moscow beside Sberbank CEO German Gref, Putin said that trying to ban AI was impossible despite the sometimes troubling ethical and social consequences of new technologies. "You cannot ban something - if we ban it then it will develop somewhere else and we will fall behind," Putin said of AI, though he said ethical questions should be resolved with reference to "traditional" Russian culture. Putin cautioned that some Western online search systems and generative models ignored or even cancelled Russian language and culture. Such Western algorithms, he said, essentially thought Russia did not exist. "Of course, the monopoly and domination of such systems, such alien systems is unacceptable and dangerous," he said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year, the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi (an entity blacklisted in the U.S.) launched its new supercomputer based on the enhanced China-designed Sunway SW26010 Pro processors with 384 cores. Sunway's SW26010 Pro CPU not only packs more cores than its non-Pro SW26010 predecessor, but it more than quadrupled FP64 compute throughput due to microarchitectural and system architecture improvements, according to Chips and Cheese. However, while the manycore CPU is good on paper, it has several performance bottlenecks.

The first details of the manycore Sunway SW26010 Pro CPU and supercomputers that use it emerged back in 2021. Now, the company has showcased actual processors and disclosed more details about their architecture and design, which represent a significant leap in performance, recently at SC23. The new CPU is expected to enable China to build high-performance supercomputers based entirely on domestically developed processors. Each Sunway SW26010 Pro has a maximum FP64 throughput of 13.8 TFLOPS, which is massive. For comparison, AMD's 96-core EPYC 9654 has a peak FP64 performance of around 5.4 TFLOPS.

The SW26010 Pro is an evolution of the original SW26010, so it maintains the foundational architecture of its predecessor but introduces several key enhancements. The new SW26010 Pro processor is based on an all-new proprietary 64-bit RISC architecture and packs six core groups (CG) and a protocol processing unit (PPU). Each CG integrates 64 2-wide compute processing elements (CPEs) featuring a 512-bit vector engine as well as 256 KB of fast local store (scratchpad cache) for data and 16 KB for instructions; one management processing element (MPE), which is a superscalar out-of-order core with a vector engine, 32 KB/32 KB L1 instruction/data cache, 256 KB L2 cache; and a 128-bit DDR4-3200 memory interface.

Chinese health authorities have provided the requested data on an increase in respiratory illnesses and reported clusters of pneumonia in children, and have not detected any unusual or novel pathogens, the World Health Organization (WHO) said. From a report: The WHO had asked China for more information on Wednesday after groups including the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases reported clusters of undiagnosed pneumonia in children in north China. As per the rule, China responded to the WHO within 24 hours. The WHO had sought epidemiologic and clinical information as well as laboratory results through the International Health Regulations mechanism.

Epidemiologists have warned that as, China heads into its first winter since the lifting of zero-Covid restrictions, natural levels of immunity to respiratory viruses may be lower than normal, leading to an increase in infections. Several countries, including the US and the UK, experienced large waves of respiratory viral infections in the first winter after Covid restrictions were lifted as people had lower natural levels of immunity. For young children, lockdowns delayed the age at which they were first exposed to common bugs.

Nvidia has told customers in China it is delaying the launch of a new AI chip it designed to comply with U.S. export rules until the first quarter of next year, Reuters reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: The delayed chip is the H20, the most powerful of three China-focused chips Nvidia has developed to comply with fresh U.S. export restrictions, the sources said, and could complicate its efforts to preserve market share in China against local rivals like Huawei. The California-based AI chip giant had been expected to launch the new products as early as Nov. 16, chip industry newsletter SemiAnalysis reported this month.

However, the H20 launch has now been pushed back until the first quarter of next year, the sources said, with one saying they were advised it could take place in February or March. The sources said they were told that the H20 was being delayed due to issues server manufacturers were having in integrating the chip.

Nvidia's fiscal third-quarter results surpassed Wall Street's predictions, with revenue growing 206% year over year. However, Nvidia shares are down after the company called for a negative impact in the next quarter due to export restrictions affecting sales in China and other countries. CNBC reports: Nvidia's revenue grew 206% year over year during the quarter ending Oct. 29, according to a statement. Net income, at $9.24 billion, or $3.71 per share, was up from $680 million, or 27 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago. The company's data center revenue totaled $14.51 billion, up 279% and more than the StreetAccount consensus of $12.97 billion. Half of the data center revenue came from cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon, and the other from consumer internet entities and large companies, Nvidia said. Healthy uptake came from clouds that specialize in renting out GPUs to clients, Kress said on the call.

The gaming segment contributed $2.86 billion, up 81% and higher than the $2.68 billion StreetAccount consensus. With respect to guidance, Nvidia called for $20 billion in revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter. That implies nearly 231% revenue growth. [...] Nvidia faces obstacles, including competition from AMD and lower revenue because of export restrictions that can limit sales of its GPUs in China. But ahead of Tuesday report, some analysts were nevertheless optimistic.

Misplaced concern about existential risk is impeding the opportunity to expand human potential, writes venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. From his op-ed: I was the first venture investor in OpenAI. The weekend drama illustrated my contention that the wrong boards can damage companies. Fancy titles like "Director of Strategy at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology" can lead to a false sense of understanding of the complex process of entrepreneurial innovation. OpenAI's board members' religion of "effective altruism" and its misapplication could have set back the world's path to the tremendous benefits of artificial intelligence. Imagine free doctors for everyone and near free tutors for every child on the planet. That's what's at stake with the promise of AI.

The best companies are those whose visions are led and executed by their founding entrepreneurs, the people who put everything on the line to challenge the status quo -- founders like Sam Altman -- who face risk head on, and who are focused -- so totally -- on making the world a better place. Things can go wrong, and abuse happens, but the benefits of good founders far outweigh the risks of bad ones. [...] Large, world-changing vision is axiomatically risky. It can even be scary. But it is the sole lever by which the human condition has improved throughout history. And we could destroy that potential with academic talk of nonsensical existential risk in my view.

There is a lot of benefit on the upside, with a minuscule chance of existential risk. In that regard, it is more similar to what the steam engine and internal combustion engine did to human muscle power. Before the engines, we had passive devices -- levers and pulleys. We ate food for energy and expended it for function. Now we could feed these engines oil, steam and coal, reducing human exertion and increasing output to improve the human condition. AI is the intellectual analog of these engines. Its multiplicative power on expertise and knowledge means we can supersede the current confines of human brain capacity, bringing great upside for the human race.

I understand that AI is not without its risks. But humanity faces many small risks. They range from vanishingly small like sentient AI destroying the world or an asteroid hitting the earth, to medium risks like global biowarfare from our adversaries, to large and looming risks like a technologically superior China, cyberwars and persuasive AI manipulating users in a democracy, likely starting with the U.S.'s 2024 elections.

The world is on track for a "hellish" 3C of global heating, the UN has warned before the crucial Cop28 climate summit that begins next week in the United Arab Emirates. From a report: The report found that today's carbon-cutting policies are so inadequate that 3C of heating would be reached this century. Temperature records have already been obliterated in 2023 and intensifying heatwaves, floods and droughts have taken lives and hit livelihoods across the globe, in response to a temperature rise of 1.4C to date. Scientists say far worse is to come if temperatures continue to rise. The secretary general of the UN, Antonio Guterres, has said repeatedly the world is heading for a "hellish" future.

The UN Environment Programme (Unep) report said that implementing future policies already promised by countries would shave 0.1C off the 3C limit. Putting in place emissions cuts pledged by developing countries on condition of receiving financial and technical support would cut the temperature rise to 2.5C, still a catastrophic scenario. To get on track for the internationally agreed target of 1.5C, 22bn tonnes of CO2 must be cut from the currently projected total in 2030, the report said. That is 42% of global emissions and equivalent to the output of the world's five worst polluters: China, US, India, Russia and Japan.

"The Chinese government has built up the world's largest known online disinformation operation," reports CNN, "and is using it to harass US residents, politicians, and businesses."

CNN reports that disinformation operation is even "at times threatening its targets with violence, a CNN review of court documents and public disclosures by social media companies has found." The onslaught of attacks — often of a vile and deeply personal nature — is part of a well-organized, increasingly brazen Chinese government intimidation campaign targeting people in the United States, documents show. The U.S. State Department says the tactics are part of a broader multi-billion-dollar effort to shape the world's information environment and silence critics of Beijing that has expanded under President Xi Jinping... Victims face a barrage of tens of thousands of social media posts that call them traitors, dogs, and racist and homophobic slurs.

They say it's all part of an effort to drive them into a state of constant fear and paranoia. Often, these victims don't know where to turn. Some have spoken to law enforcement, including the FBI — but little has been done. While tech and social media companies have shut down thousands of accounts targeting these victims, they're outpaced by a slew of new accounts emerging virtually every day. Known as "Spamouflage" or "Dragonbridge," the network's hundreds of thousands of accounts spread across every major social media platform have not only harassed Americans who have criticized the Chinese Communist Party, but have also sought to discredit U.S. politicians, disparage American companies at odds with China's interests and hijack online conversations around the globe that could portray the CCP in a negative light.
Some numbers from the article:

• Meta "announced in August it had taken down a cluster of nearly 8,000 accounts attributed to this group in the second quarter of 2023 alone."

• YouTube owner Google "told CNN it had shut down more than 100,000 associated accounts in recent years."

• X "has blocked hundreds of thousands of China 'state-backed' or "state-linked" accounts, according to company blogs."

"At least 44,500 space objects now circle Earth," reports the New York Times magazine, "including 9,000 active satellites and 19,000 significant pieces of debris."

The article notes a threat assessment from U.S. Space Force Chief Master Sergeant Ron Lerch: What's most concerning isn't the swarm of satellites but the types. "We know that there are kinetic kill vehicles," Lerch said — for example, a Russian "nesting doll" satellite, in which a big satellite releases a tiny one and the tiny one releases a mechanism that can strike and damage another satellite. There are machines with the ability to cast nets and extend grappling hooks, too. China, whose presence in space now far outpaces Russia's, is launching unmanned "space planes" into orbit, testing potentially unbreakable quantum communication links and adding A.I. capabilities to satellites.

An intelligence report, Lerch said, predicted the advent, within the next decade, of satellites with radio-frequency jammers, chemical sprayers and lasers that blind and disable the competition. All this would be in addition to the cyberwarfare tools, electromagnetic instruments and "ASAT" antisatellite missiles that already exist on the ground. In Lerch's assessment, space looked less like a grand "new ocean" for exploration — phrasing meant to induce wonder that has lingered from the Kennedy administration — and more like a robotic battlefield, where the conflicts raging on Earth would soon extend ever upward.
One interesting detail from the article. "[I]f a requirement to 'blind and deafen' an enemy's satellites were to arise from U.S. Space Command, the Space Force could help fulfill the order. The means would most likely not be "kinetic" — some form of physical or explosive contact — but electronic, a weapon of code-related stealth, or perhaps a kind of debilitating high-energy burst."

And Space Force's highest-ranking officer, General Chance Saltzman, describes the kind of new military calculations made, for example, when Ukraine moved its communications to Starlink satellites: "The Russians are trying to interrupt it," he said, "and they're not having very good success." And the takeaway is that proliferated systems of many small machines in low orbit can be more technologically resilient to hacking and disruption than a few big machines in higher orbits... [W]hile small satellites in a large configuration could potentially be a more expensive investment than two or three megasatellites, the shift could be worthwhile. If an adversary believes that it cannot achieve a military objective, Saltzman remarked, it will hesitate to cross "a threshold of violence." No conflicts. No debris. No crisis.

Alibaba is canceling the scheduled IPO of its cloud division due to the impact of the U.S. government's CPU export bans to China. The Register reports: The Chinese e-commerce giant reported the move alongside its calendar Q3 earnings, otherwise a generally positive quarter, with the group reporting an income from operations of $4.6 billion, up 34 percent year-on-year, and revenue of $30.8 billion, up 9 percent. Alibaba also said US export restrictions could affect its business more generally by making it harder for the company to upgrade its existing hardware. [...] It's worth noting that the Cloud Intelligence Group brought in $3.789 billion in revenue but earnings before income tax and amortization was $193 million, up 44 percent on the same period a year earlier. Cloud sales growth has stalled in 2023 as customers weigh up their spending. "We believe that these new restrictions [referring to expanded restrictions announced in October] may materially and adversely affect Cloud Intelligence Group's ability to offer products and services and to perform under existing contracts, thereby negatively affecting our results of operations and financial condition," Alibaba said. "We believe that a full spin-off of Cloud Intelligence Group may not achieve the intended effect of shareholder value enhancement," the company added. "Accordingly, we have decided to not proceed with a full spin-off, and instead we will focus on developing a sustainable growth model for Cloud Intelligence Group (CIG) under the fluid circumstances."

"The US needs to stop politicizing and weaponizing trade and tech issues and stop destabilizing global industrial and supply chains," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said in response to the US's new restrictions.

The UK has said it will refrain from regulating the British artificial intelligence sector, even as the EU, US and China push forward with new measures. From a report: The UK's first minister for AI and intellectual property, Viscount Jonathan Camrose, said at a Financial Times conference on Thursday that there would be no UK law on AI "in the short term" because the government was concerned that heavy-handed regulation could curb industry growth. The announcement comes as executives and policymakers around the world debate how to regulate the emerging technology, which holds the promise of transforming many industries and driven the rise in large tech company valuations over the past year.

The EU has led the field, with its legislation on AI regulation expected to come into force before the end of this year. Beijing is also implementing measures to regulate the industry, while US President Joe Biden recently issued an executive order to promote "responsible innovation." Camrose added: "I would never criticise any other nation's act on this. But there is always a risk of premature regulation." In rushing to introduce industry controls, "you are not actually making anybody as safe as it sounds," he said. "You are stifling innovation, and innovation is a very very important part of the AI equation."

schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Chinese companies are buying up U.S. chipmaking equipment to make advanced semiconductors, despite a raft of new export curbs aimed at thwarting advances in the country's semiconductor industry, a report said on Tuesday. The 741 page annual report, released by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, takes aim at the Biden administration's Oct. 2022 export curbs, which seek to bar Chinese chipmakers from getting U.S. chipmaking tools if they would be used to manufacture advanced chips at the 14 nanometer node or below. With the Commerce Department using the 14 nanometer restriction limit, 'importers are often able to purchase the equipment if they claim it is being used on an older production line, and with limited capacity for end-use inspections, it is difficult to verify the equipment is not being used to produce more advanced chips,' the report stated.

According to the document, between January and August 2023, China imported $3.2 billion (RMB 23.5 billion) worth of semiconductor manufacturing machines from the Netherlands, a 96.1% increase over the $1.7 billion (RMB 12 billion) recorded over the same period in 2022. China's imports of semiconductor equipment from all countries totaled $13.8 billion (RMB 100 billion) over the first eight months of 2023, it added. The report does not outline a specific recommendation to address the gaps in the U.S. rules, but urges Congress to request an annual evaluation, to be completed within 6 months by the General Accountability Office and later made public, of the effectiveness of export controls on chipmaking equipment to China.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: A group of lawmakers from a House of Representatives committee wants Apple, like many Jon Stewart enthusiasts, to explain why its streaming arm abruptly canceled the talk show The Problem With Jon Stewart. The current affairs TV series hosted by Jon Stewart briefly made its debut on Apple TV+ in 2021 but its time on air ended when the show received the ax for a third season, reportedly due to "disagreements" over show topics.

According to Reuters, Lawmakers want to know if the show's coverage and criticism of China has anything to do with the show's cancellation. The government officials have asked Apple to speak on the issue by Dec 15, 2023. In a letter to the tech giant, the House members wrote that while Apple has the right to determine what content it deems appropriate for its platform, "the coercive tactics of a foreign power should not be directly or indirectly influencing these determinations." This effort is bipartisan, with members from both Republican and Democratic parties affiliated with the House of Representatives' Select Committee on Competition with the Chinese Communist Party.

Tencent dismissed concerns that US export controls will constrain its AI development capabilities, at least for the foreseeable future. From a report: The Shenzhen-based company has stockpiled Nvidia's H800 artificial intelligence accelerators, enough to develop its proprietary Hunyuan AI model for at least another couple of generations, President Martin Lau said on an analyst call after earnings on Wednesday. "Right now we actually have one of the largest inventories of AI chips in China among all the players," Lau said. "We were the first to put in orders for H800 and that allows us to have a pretty good inventory of H800 chips. So we have enough chips to continue our development."

The Biden administration in October escalated export controls on AI semiconductors heading to China, depriving the Asian nation from access to a broad range of the world's best AI-training hardware. The purpose of the measures is to prevent China's military from obtaining the advanced technology, Washington argues, but they're also making business harder for the country's private sector. Elsewhere in China, AI industry veteran Kai-Fu Lee's unicorn startup 01.AI has been buying up the Nvidia chips it needs to develop its own foundation models, with Lee saying the company has enough semiconductors for the next 18 months.

Huawei and China Mobile have built a 3,000 kilometer (1,860-mile) internet network linking Beijing to the south, which the country is touting as its latest technological breakthrough. From a report: The two firms teamed up with Tsinghua University and research provider Cernet.com to build what they claim is the world's first internet network to achieve a "stable and reliable" bandwidth of 1.2 terabits per second, several times faster than typical speeds around the world. Trials began July 31 and it's since passed various tests verifying that milestone, the university said in a statement.

Tsinghua, Chinese President Xi Jinping's alma mater, is plugging the project as an industry-first built entirely on homegrown technology, and credits Huawei prominently in its statement. The Chinese firm in August made waves when it released a 5G smartphone with a sophisticated made-in-China processor, inspiring celebration in Chinese state and social media. That event also spurred debate in Washington about whether the Biden administration has gone far enough in attempts to contain Chinese technological achievement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: On Oct. 9, 2022, telescopes in space picked up a jet of high energy photons careening through the cosmos toward Earth, evidence of a supernova exploding 1.9 billion light-years away. Such events are known as gamma ray bursts, and astronomers who have continued studying this one said it was the "brightest of all time." Now, a team of scientists have discovered that this burst caused a measurable change in the number of ionized particles found in Earth's upper atmosphere, including ozone molecules, which readily absorb harmful solar radiation.

"The ozone was partially depleted -- was destroyed temporarily," said Pietro Ubertini, an astronomer at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome who was involved in discovering the atmospheric event. The effect was detectable for just a few minutes before the ozone repaired itself, so it was "nothing serious," Dr. Ubertini said. But had the supernova occurred closer to us, he said, "it would be a catastrophe." The discovery, reported Tuesday in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, demonstrates how even explosions that occur far from our solar system can influence the atmosphere, which can be used as a giant detector for extreme cosmic phenomena.

To study the effects of last year's gamma ray burst on Earth, Dr. Ubertini and his colleagues looked for signals at the top of the ionosphere using data from the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite, an orbiter designed to study changes in the atmosphere during earthquakes. They identified a sharp jump in the electric field at the top of the ionosphere, which they correlated to the gamma ray burst signal measured by the European Space Agency's International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory, a mission that launched in 2002 to observe radiation from faraway celestial objects. The researchers found that the electric field rose by a factor of 60 as gamma rays ionized (essentially knocking away electrons from) ozone and nitrogen molecules high in the atmosphere. Once ionized, the molecule is unable to absorb any ultraviolet radiation, temporarily exposing Earth to more of the sun's damaging rays.

India's capital, New Delhi, is preparing a new weapon in the fight against deadly air pollution: cloud seeding. From a report: The experiment, which could take place as early as next week, would introduce chemicals like silver iodide into a cloudy sky to create rain and, it's hoped, wash away the fine particulate matter hovering over one of the world's largest cities. The need is desperate. Delhi has already tried traffic restriction measures, multimillion-dollar air filtration towers, and the use of fleets of water-spraying trucks to dissolve the particulate matter in the air -- but to no avail.

The use of cloud seeding, if it goes ahead, would be controversial. "It's not at all a good use of resources because it's not a solution, it's like a temporary relief," says Avikal Somvanshi, a researcher at the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi. Environmentalists and scientists worry that most of the government's response is focused on mitigating the pollution rather than trying to cut off its source. "There is just no political intent to solve this, that is one of the biggest problems," says Bhavreen Kandhari, an activist and cofounder of Warrior Moms, a network of mothers demanding clean air.

[...] Now, Delhi officials are seeking permission from federal agencies in India to try cloud seeding. The technique involves flying an aircraft to spray clouds with salts like silver or potassium iodide or solid carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, to induce precipitation. The chemical molecules attach to moisture already in the clouds to form bigger droplets that then fall as rain. China has used artificial rain to tackle air pollution in the past -- but for cloud seeding to work properly, you need significant cloud cover with reasonable moisture content, which Delhi generally lacks during the winter. If weather conditions are favorable, scientists leading the project at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur plan to carry out cloud seeding around November 20.