Daily Digest for

Taiwan and Canada signed an MOU granting Taiwan access to Canada’s Dark Vessel Detection (DVD) system to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

• Signed by outgoing Canadian representative Jim Nickel and Taiwan’s envoy to Canada Harry Tseng; Action: grants Taiwan Coast Guard Administration access to Canada’s Dark Vessel Detection (DVD) system; Value: DVD system valued at 7 million Canadian dollars (US$5.09 million); Source: statements from MOFA and CTOT. Agencies did not specify the signing date (confirmed action: MOU signed).
• DVD capabilities: the system “uses satellite imagery and analytics to identify and track vessels operating illegally by concealing their location or intentions”; Context: CTOT represents Canadian interests in Taiwan in absence of official ties; Precedent: Canada signed a similar DVD access agreement with the Philippines in 2023 (confirmed past agreement).

PrairiesCan announced investments totalling CAD $1,311,900 for three Saskatchewan projects to catalyze innovation using artificial intelligence (AI).

• Confirmed investments: PrairiesCan provided CAD $1,311,900 across three projects — Ground Truth Agriculture Inc. (CAD $586,900) to complete and commercialize an AI-driven benchtop and on-combine grain grading system for grain quality assessment and predictive grading; Greenwave Innovations Inc. (CAD $425,000) to implement AI features in an energy monitoring platform for commercial and industrial buildings (including leak detection and predictive maintenance); and Offstreet Technology Inc. (CAD $300,000) under the BSP program to enhance its cloud-based guest parking registration technology and expand its North American market.
• Program and funding context: The Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative (RAII) is a CAD $200 million program (part of the government’s 2024 budget commitment) offering repayable and non-repayable, interest-free funding; PrairiesCan announced two repayable RAII investments (Ground Truth and Greenwave). The Business Scale-up and Productivity (BSP) program provides interest-free, repayable funding to incorporated businesses operating for at least two years (Offstreet’s CAD $300,000 award).

MIT researchers published a study identifying innovations that contributed to dramatic declines in photovoltaic (PV) costs since 1970.

• Key findings: The team identified 81 unique innovations affecting PV system costs (modules and balance-of-system). They separate PV module vs BOS innovations and note that many pivotal advances originated outside the solar sector (semiconductor fabrication, metallurgy, glass manufacturing, oil and gas drilling, software, utilities). The study appears in PLOS ONE (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320676) and is funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energies Technology Office.
• Quantified examples & methodology: Using their combined quantitative/qualitative framework, the authors estimate wire sawing (1980s) reduced system costs by $5 per watt by lowering silicon losses and increasing throughput. The team plans to apply the methodology to other renewable technologies and further study soft technologies (permitting, automated review) for deployment cost reductions. Authors and affiliations are listed (Jessika Trancik, Goksin Kavlak, Magdalena Klemun, Ajinkya Kamat, Brittany Smith, Robert Margolis).

RMI published the report “Financing Zero-Emission Trucking Infrastructure,” summarizing financing needs, solutions, and localized actions to scale zero-emission truck (ZET) charging infrastructure in India.

• Financing needs & scale: The report quantifies that deploying 10,000 ZETs over the next three years would require an estimated ₹11 billion (US$132 million) in charging infrastructure; it notes proposed subsidies of ₹3.46 billion (US$39.8 million) for bus and truck charging. It provides concrete project assumptions used for viability analysis (starting utilization 7%, 3% annual increase, 15% IRR, 15-year period).
• Confirmed solutions & implementation pathways: Recommends practical financing models—PPPs for public charging, Charging-as-a-Service (CaaS) for private depot charging, and coordinated planning for grid upgrades—and specifies stakeholder roles: governments (land, grants, concessional finance, loan guarantees), DISCOMs and CPOs (ownership/cost allocation), and DFIs/NBFCs/banks (blended finance, concessional debt).

Joseph Omode (Editor in Chief, Alexa News Nigeria) calls for Nigeria to substantially increase investment and policy support for agricultural biotechnology to secure food security and climate resilience.

• Recommended actions (planned/advocated): Increase funding for R&D (NBRDA, universities, agricultural research institutes); streamline approvals and biosafety monitoring; adopt clear genome editing guidelines (e.g., CRISPR not overregulated as GMOs); support demonstration farms, farmer training, subsidies/credit for smallholders, and expand seed distribution networks. The article lists five main focus areas for policy and investment and cites TELA maize as an approved biotech crop example. These are presented as recommendations rather than enacted policies.
• Implementation & funding details (confirmed/planned): Calls for mobilisation of funds from African Development Bank (AfDB) and other international agencies for establishing agricultural processing zones in all Nigerian states, and support for mechanized equipment, farmer training, and service centers. The piece states that Nigeria has set up regulatory institutions and approved crops but that domestic funding remains limited and large investments have been mostly external (e.g., Brazil, AfDB).

NVIDIA announced Metropolis updates and partnerships to advance Physical AI for smart cities and industrial operations.

• Partnerships & deployments: NVIDIA is collaborating with Accenture and Belden on smart virtual fences using Omniverse and Metropolis digital twins; Avathon integrated Metropolis VSS to improve safety during construction of Reliance British Petroleum Mobility Limited gas stations; DeepHow used Metropolis VSS to convert SOPs and reduced onboarding time by 80% for Anheuser-Busch InBev; Milestone Systems is building Project Hafnia, a large real-world computer-vision data library and fine-tuned VLMs; Telit Cinterion integrated NVIDIA TAO Toolkit 6 and models like FoundationPose for defect detection and quality control. (Confirmed actions: integrations and deployments described.)

• Metropolis product updates & availability: Release of Cosmos Reason (open, customizable, 7-billion-parameter VLM) for contextual video reasoning and edge/cloud deployment; VSS 2.4 (upcoming) to augment vision pipelines with Cosmos Reason; NVIDIA TAO Toolkit 6.0 and new vision foundation models plus a DeepStream Inference Builder to deploy TAO 6 models; Isaac Sim extensions for synthetic data generation; expanded hardware support for RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell, DGX Spark and Jetson Thor. Cosmos Reason 1 and NVIDIA TAO 6.0 are now available for download; users can sign up to be alerted when VSS 2.4, Cosmos Reason fine-tuning update and DeepStream 8.0 become available. (Distinguishes available releases vs features pending release.)

EIA reports that five countries account for more than two-thirds of the world’s nuclear electricity generation capacity as of June 2025 (IAEA data).

• Global totals & principal countries: 416 nuclear reactors operating in 31 countries with 376 gigawatts (GW) total installed net generating capacity (IAEA, June 2025). The top five countries by capacity are United States, France, China, Russia, and South Korea; together they account for more than 71% of world nuclear generation capacity. Specific country figures: United States — 94 reactors, 782 GWh nuclear generation in 2024 (19% of U.S. generation), 30% of global nuclear electricity in 2023, fleet capacity factor 92% in 2024; France — 57 reactors, 63 GW installed, >320 GWh in 2023 (~65% of France’s generation); China — 57 reactors operating, 28 reactors under construction totaling 30 GW, >433 GWh in 2023; Russia — 36 reactors, 27 GW installed, 4 units under construction totaling 4 GW; South Korea — 26 reactors, 2 under construction.

• Historical, technical, and confirmed/planned actions: The U.S. commercial nuclear program began with the Shippingport Atomic Power Station (late 1950s); most U.S. capacity was built 1967–1990. China has adapted Westinghouse’s AP1000 into its CAP1000 design (confirmed adaptation). Rosatom is updating Russia’s fleet from RBMK units to VVER-1000 and VVER-1200 designs (confirmed action). Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP) is an international vendor — built the UAE’s Barakah plant and will be the vendor for the Dukovany power plant expansion in the Czech Republic (vendor selection/implementation noted). Principal contributor: Slade Johnson.

Governor Vitaly Khotsenko briefed President Vladimir Putin on the Omsk Region’s socioeconomic situation and requested federal support for a package of investment and infrastructure projects, including relocation of the airport and applying for the treasury infrastructure loan programme; President Putin responded favourably.

• Regional economic indicators: Gross regional product exceeded one trillion rubles; industrial output +3.3%; record grain yield over four million tonnes (ranked eighth nationwide); construction sector +17% (vs 2023); salaries +17.8%. Population declines: -9,500 (2022), -5,000 (2023), -1,400 (2024). Defence manufacturing employment rose from 20,000 (pre‑2022) across 16 enterprises to over 40,000 today.
• Confirmed/planned investments and infrastructure actions: A new investment cycle involving Gazprom Neft, Titan Group, ECO-Culture, and ROST (including new greenhouse complexes) and other projects worth over a trillion rubles in total; the airport will be transferred to the Omsk suburbs by 2028; the region intends to apply for the treasury infrastructure loan programme to finance these projects and has received favourable response from President Putin.

The independent Nuclear Taskforce, led by John Fingleton, published an interim report (11 August) calling for a once-in-a-generation radical reset to remove regulatory barriers slowing UK nuclear projects.

• Interim report published (11 August): The Nuclear Taskforce (led by John Fingleton, former CEO of the Office of Fair Trading) finds an “unnecessarily slow, inefficient and costly” regulatory system and calls for a “once-in-a-generation” reform; the taskforce has invited views from interested parties and will publish a final report and recommendations in the autumn.
• Government actions and timelines: The government will work with the taskforce to develop a new strategic direction for nuclear operators and regulators; the Chancellor earlier announced action to reduce the administrative cost of regulation by 25%; projects referenced to come online in the 2030s include small modular reactors and Sizewell C, combined with Hinkley Point C to deliver substantial new nuclear capacity.

The Finnish Meteorological Institute (Ilmatieteen laitos) and international collaborators published a study finding that reductions in China’s aerosol (fine particulate) emissions are the primary cause of accelerated global warming since 2010.

• Study results: China’s aerosol emission reductions increased global mean temperature by ~0.07 °C from 2010 to 2023 (≈0.05 °C per decade). The analysis used 8 climate models and 160 simulations, including simulations run with the EC-Earth3 model. The study was published in July in Communications Earth and Environment. (Confirmed: peer-reviewed publication.)
• Context and contacts: The study reports that reduced aerosols remove temporary cooling, revealing greenhouse gas warming; the article notes WHO estimates >4 million annual premature deaths from outdoor fine particulate matter. The work is part of the ACCC flagship (Atmosphere and Climate Competence Center). Contact: Joonas Merikanto, Vanhempi tutkija, Ilmatieteen laitos, phone 040 566 8512, email joonas.merikanto@fmi.fi.

Working paper by Kyle C. Meng and Vincent Thivierge (NBER) develops a framework and empirical estimator to measure changes in allocative efficiency from market-based air pollution policies and applies it to two U.S. programs.

• Key results: Using administrative data and a quasi-experimental estimator, the authors find a 3.3 percentage point annually improvement in allocative efficiency under California’s RECLAIM program, and no detectable change under the U.S. NOx Budget Trading Program. The paper reports these program-specific, empirical estimates (Issue Date: August 2025, DOI: 10.3386/w34111).
• Data & implementation details: Analysis uses data accessed under the Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC) with multiple FSRDC project numbers (e.g., CBDRB-FY22-P2581-R10061, CBDRB-FY24-P2581-R11664). The authors cite greater heterogeneity in baseline facility characteristics under RECLAIM and differences in program implementation as factors supporting the results. Distinct statement: the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Bureau of Economic Research or the U.S. Census Bureau.

Lucas W. Davis and Paul Gertler find air conditioning adoption in Mexico accelerated faster than their 2015 predictions.

• Revisited analysis: Used household-level microdata from Mexico and 12 years of additional data to reassess predictions from Davis and Gertler (2015); found air conditioning in Mexico has accelerated, significantly exceeding our predictions; the gap is not explained by income growth, rising temperatures, migration patterns, or an overly restrictive model.
• Identified drivers & data commitments: The authors attribute the prediction gap to falling electricity prices and technological improvements in air conditioner efficiency; they state all code and data will be posted on their websites upon completion and report no financial compensation or financial relationships for this project.