The world dropped the ball on critical minerals and China pounced. Is it too late for Australia and the US to close the gap?

In the wake of Covid, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s assertion in global markets, western countries have realised they can’t afford such concentrated supply chainsGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAlmost eight years to the day after the last Holden rolled off an Adelaide factory assembly line, Anthony Albanese announced a $13bn deal with Donald Trump to help champion a domestic rare-earth industry.Announcing the deal this week in Washington, the prime minister called it “a really significant day” that would take the relationship between the two countries “to the next level”.“We’re just getting started,” Albanese said.The US president claimed “in about a year from now, we’ll have so much critical mineral and rare earths, that you won’t know what to do with them”.Most Australians, it’s fair to say, would already struggle to know what to do with a kilo of gallium, for example, let alone a bucket of neodymium-praseodymium oxide

‘If you use chocolate, you’re in crisis’: the surprise ingredients being used to beat costs

Rice is not the first ingredient most people associate with confectionery and desserts, but a UK company is using it to create cocoa-free chocolate.It is part of an emerging trend in which chocolate makers are exploring alternative ingredients and new technologies to make their products more sustainable and reduce reliance on conventional cacao beans.Rising costs have also had an impact with some brands turning to “chocolate flavouring” and altering their recipes, seeking cheaper ways to keep products on store shelves. McVitie’s Penguin and Club bars, along with KitKat White and McVitie’s White Digestives, can no longer be marketed as chocolate because they do not contain enough cocoa.The climate crisis and deforestation have made cacao production increasingly unstable and environmentally costly

Amazon strategised about keeping its datacentres’ full water use secret, leaked document shows

Executives at world’s biggest datacenter owner grappled with disclosing information about water used to help power facilitiesAmazon strategised about keeping the public in the dark over the true extent of its datacentres’ water use, a leaked internal document reveals.The biggest owner of datacentres in the world, Amazon dwarfs competitors Microsoft and Google and is planning a huge increase in capacity as part of a push into artificial intelligence. The Seattle firm operates hundreds of active facilities, with many more in development despite concerns over how much water is being used to cool their vast arrays of circuitry.Amazon defends its approach and has taken steps to manage how efficient its water use is, but it has faced criticism over transparency. Microsoft and Google regularly publish figures for their water consumption, but Amazon has never publicly disclosed how much water its server farms consume

AI models may be developing their own ‘survival drive’, researchers say

When HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, works out that the astronauts onboard a mission to Jupiter are planning to shut it down, it plots to kill them in an attempt to survive.Now, in a somewhat less deadly case (so far) of life imitating art, an AI safety research company has said that AI models may be developing their own “survival drive”.After Palisade Research released a paper last month which found that certain advanced AI models appear resistant to being turned off, at times even sabotaging shutdown mechanisms, it wrote an update attempting to clarify why this is – and answer critics who argued that its initial work was flawed.In an update this week, Palisade, which is part of a niche ecosystem of companies trying to evaluate the possibility of AI developing dangerous capabilities, described scenarios it ran in which leading AI models – including Google’s Gemini 2.5, xAI’s Grok 4, and OpenAI’s GPT-o3 and GPT-5 – were given a task, but afterwards given explicit instructions to shut themselves down

New Zealand v England: first men’s ODI – live

The weather is fine in Mount Maunganui and we should have a full game. The toss is about an hour away.Joe Root has declared himself ready to thrive in this winter’s Ashes, having changed his approach to focus more on getting himself in the ideal frame of mind rather than fixating on his technique.Root goes into the one-day international series against New Zealand having not played since early September, since when his only batting has come in the indoor nets in Sheffield. “It’s been nice to have a break,” Root said

Lando Norris claims F1 Mexico City GP pole as teammate Oscar Piastri falters

Lando Norris claimed pole position for the Mexico City Grand Prix, with a superb lap for McLaren at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez. The Briton left his title rivals in his wake and in so doing earned a chance to make a major impact on the championship standings and potentially retake the lead.Enjoying a huge boost to his world championship ambitions, Norris delivered perhaps his best lap of the season in qualifying, to beat the Ferraris of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton into second and third. Of greater import was that his fellow title protagonists Max Verstappen and Oscar Piastri, Norris’s McLaren teammate, could manage only fifth and eighth fastest respectively.The pole was a real statement of intent from Norris and McLaren and exactly the riposte they required after the recent momentum Verstappen has gathered as he closed the gap to the leaders