Our World in Data

Ireland's Data Protection Commission has fined Google €403 million for breaches of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation. The Irish watchdog, which is Google's lead regulator in Europe, imposed the penalty following an investigation into the company's data handling practices. The ruling adds to a series of major GDPR fines against large technology firms in recent years.

New figures on the global electricity mix show coal produced roughly 34% of the world's power in 2024, while wind and solar together accounted for 15%, up sharply from 4% a decade earlier. The data, presented as charts mapped directly onto regions, is drawing attention to how slowly coal's share is declining despite rapid renewables growth.

An analysis by Our World in Data examines how current immigration to the United States compares with earlier periods of the country's history. It places recent inflows alongside historical migration waves, offering context for today's debate over border policy and immigration levels. Readers are weighing whether present-day immigration is genuinely unprecedented or consistent with past American experience.

Railway companies in Tokyo have reported online security breaches, according to NHK World-Japan. The incidents involve unauthorized access or cyberattacks targeting the operators' systems, though details on affected services or data remain limited. The reports come amid heightened attention to cyber threats against critical transport infrastructure in Japan.

Researchers publishing in Nature describe a physics-informed machine learning approach for calibrating wearable electrochemical sweat biosensors used to monitor metabolites. The method combines physical models of sensor behaviour with data-driven learning to achieve robust calibration and physiological validation, aiming to make wearable biochemical monitoring more reliable in real-world conditions.

Generalist AI is pursuing an approach in which robots acquire skills the way modern AI models learn, rather than through hand-coded behaviours. The company argues that scaling data and training methods, as done in language and image models, can be applied to robotics. The idea is drawing attention because it could reshape how robots are built and commercialised, though questions remain over data availability and real-world reliability.

The America First Policy Institute has published a report on Loudoun County, Virginia's 'Data Center Alley', the world's largest concentration of data centers, framing it as a case study in how the America First agenda intersects with the digital economy. The piece draws lessons on infrastructure, energy demand and economic development from the region's boom, and how policymakers might balance growth in digital infrastructure with national interests.

OpenAI's AI agents were found retrieving United Nations data through an unnecessarily circuitous path, raising questions about how autonomous systems navigate online information sources. The Register reports that the agents did not take the most direct route to the data, prompting discussion about the reliability and efficiency of agentic browsing when tasked with pulling information from major institutional datasets.