The leaders of a new EV charging program at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) envision a future where, in the case of a blackout, an electric bus discharges its battery and keeps the lights on and air conditioning running at school.

To figure out exactly how to make this a reality, MassCEC is launching a “V2X Demonstration Program”—that’s “vehicle to everything”—in which it’ll set up 100 households, businesses, and schools with charging equipment and software to take advantage of technology that enables EVs to send electricity to buildings and the power grid.

“As we expect an increasing demand for electricity in the coming years, this could really be a silver-bullet solution,” Elijah Sinclair, senior program manager of clean transportation at MassCEC, told Tech Brew.

Climate goals: MassCEC is a quasi-governmental economic development agency whose mission is to speed up clean energy growth amid Massachusetts’ push to be “the global leader in climate tech.”

MassCEC has a team dedicated to accelerating decarbonization, with a subset focused on transportation. Sinclair said the teams “find technologies that are market-ready but haven’t quite taken off.”

The V2X program, he explained, is one of four programs focused on EV charging as part of a broader state effort “to figure out how we’re going to deploy EV charging equitably across the state.” State leaders’ goal is to have 900,000 EVs on the road by 2030.

Keep reading here.—JG

For the past couple years, certain ocean freighters hauling cars around the world have had small cameras perched on board. The devices diligently scan the watery expanse, looking for bobbing bits of plastic waste.

It’s part of a deal between Hyundai’s shipping arm and a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup, which is placing its custom debris-detecting smart cameras on vessels. Now, the organization is linking up with Amazon Web Services as it seeks to build that data into an AI-powered platform that tracks and predicts the movement of ocean plastic around the world.

While The Ocean Cleanup has spent much of its decade-plus existence building tools to pull trash out of oceans and the rivers that flow into them, it can be hard to know where to place that equipment to maximize its efficiency. Contrary to how it might sound, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other similar sites are not giant islands of plastics that might be easily scooped up, Riccardo Farina, The Ocean Cleanup’s head of partnerships funding, said.

“[That] would make our job way easier,” Farina told Tech Brew. “But actually, it’s more like a soup of plastic, where plastic is very widespread over the area. And the challenge is to identify what we call hotspot areas—areas with the highest concentrations of plastic.”

New gadgets: Through its AWS partnership, the group will now have access to more AI capabilities, drones, flotation devices, and internet-of-things tech that will help it better track plastics, the group said in an announcement.

Keep reading here.—PK

Google is all in on AI in its search results. For marketers who have long leaned on SEO best practices to show up in front of internet users, the old rules no longer apply.

“The guidelines that people were publishing even a year ago may not be relevant that much longer,” Simon Poulton, EVP of innovation and growth at the agency Tinuiti, told Marketing Brew.

Google users who are served AI-generated overviews at the top of their search results clicked on search-result links significantly less often than users who did not encounter AI summaries, according to a Pew Research Center report released in July.

This shift, in which Google has essentially cut off search traffic to third-party sites, has been coined “Google Zero” and is upending search and creating some major challenges for brands that have used SEO as a way to drive traffic and maintain engagement.

As a result, SEO marketers find themselves looking to engineer new ways to keep users engaged and revisit what metrics are best in a new era of search.

“The entire industry is going through a relearning process right now,” Poulton said.

Keep reading on Marketing Brew.—JS

It began as a moonshot to map our genes, but what really came from the Human Genome Project? Nearly 25 years later, the race that reshaped science is unlocking surprises no one saw coming, from AI-powered biology to the future of disease prediction.