An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: The 1986 Chernobyl disaster fueled global fears about nuclear power and slowed its development in Europe and elsewhere. Four decades later, however, there's a revival around the world, a trend that has been given a big boost by war in the Middle East. Over 400 nuclear reactors are operational in 31 countries, while about 70 more are under construction. Nuclear power accounts for producing about 10% of the world's electricity, equivalent to about a quarter of all sources of low-carbon power. Nuclear reactors have seen steady improvements, adding more safety features and making them cheaper to build and operate. While Chernobyl and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan diminished the appetite for such power sources, it was clear years ago that there probably would be a revival, said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. With the war in the Middle East, "I am 100% sure nuclear is coming back," he added... The United States is the world's largest producer of nuclear power, with 94 operational reactors accounting for about 30% of global generation of nuclear electricity. And it is increasing efforts to develop nuclear energy capacity with a goal to quadruple it by 2050... China operates 61 nuclear reactors and is leading the world in building new units, with nearly 40 under construction with a goal to surpass the U.S. and become the global leader in nuclear capacity. European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen has acknowledged that it was Europe's "strategic mistake" to cut nuclear energy and outlined new initiatives to encourage building power plants. [In 1990, nuclear energy accounted for roughly a third of Europe's electricity, the article points out, but it's now only about 15%.] Russia, meanwhile, has taken a strong lead in exporting its nuclear know-how, building 20 reactors worldwide... Japan has restarted 15 reactors after reviewing the lessons of the earthquake and tsunami that damaged the Fukushima plant, and 10 more are in the process of getting approval to restart. South Africa has the only nuclear power plant on the African continent, although Russia is building one in Egypt, and several other African nations are exploring the technology... With 57 reactors at 19 plants, France relies on nuclear power for nearly 70% of its electricity. The article includes an interactive graphic that shows the growth in the world's nuclear capacity slowing down soon after the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown — with that capacity broken down by country. But it's still increased by roughly 50%. Even Ukraine — the site of the accident — now "still relies heavily on nuclear plants to generate about half of its electricity," the article points out. But Germany "switched off its last three nuclear reactors in 2023."

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The AI industry is largely failing to ask a key design question, argues theoretical neuroscientist/cognitive scientist Vivienne Ming. Are their AI products building human capacity or consuming it? In the Wall Street Journal Ming shares her experiment about which group performed best at predicting real-world events (compared to forecasters on prediction market Polymarket) — AI, human, or human-AI hybrid teams. The human groups performed poorly, relying on instinct or whatever information had come across their feeds that morning. The large AI models — ChatGPT and Gemini, in this case — performed considerably better, though still short of the market itself. But when we combined AI with humans, things got more interesting. Most hybrid teams used AI for the answer and submitted it as their own, performing no better than the AI alone. Others fed their own predictions into AI and asked it to come up with supporting evidence. These "validators" had stumbled into a classic confirmation bias-loop: the sycophancy that leads chatbots to tell you what you want to hear, even if it isn't true. They ended up performing worse than an AI working solo. But in roughly 5% to 10% of teams, something different emerged. The AI became a sparring partner. The teams pushed back, demanding evidence and interrogating assumptions. When the AI expressed high confidence, the humans questioned it. When the humans felt strongly about an intuition, they asked the AI to come up with a counterargument... These teams reached insightful conclusions that neither a human nor a machine could have produced on its own. They were the only group to consistently rival the prediction market's accuracy. On certain questions, they even outperformed it... We are building AI systems specifically designed to give us the answer before we feel the discomfort of not having it. What my experiment suggests is that the human qualities most likely to matter are not the feel-good ones. They're the uncomfortable ones: the capacity to be wrong in public and stay curious; to sit with a question your phone could answer in three seconds and resist the urge to reach for it. To read a confident, fluent response from an AI and ask yourself, "What's missing?" rather than default to "Great, that's done." To disagree with something that sounds authoritative and to trust your instinct enough to follow it. We don't build these capacities by avoiding discomfort. We build them by choosing it, repeatedly, in small ways: the student who struggles through a problem before checking the answer; the person who asks a follow-up question in a conversation; the reader who sits with a difficult idea long enough for it to actually change one's mind. Most AI chatbots today default to easy answers, which is hurting our ability to think critically. I call this the Information-Exploration Paradox. As the cost of information approaches zero, human exploration collapses. We see it in students who perform better on AI-assisted tasks and worse on everything afterward. We see it in developers shipping more code and understanding it less. We are, in ways that feel like progress, slowly optimizing ourselves out of the loop. The author just published a book called " Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All The Answers, Build Better People." They suggest using AI to "explore uncertainty.... before you accept an AI's answer, ask it for the strongest argument against itself." And they're also urging new performance benchmarks for AI-human hybrid teams.

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America's National Science Board (NSB) "was established in 1950 to guide the governance of the National Science Foundation," writes the Washington Post, "in an unusual structure within the federal government that echoes the setup of a company board in the private sector. It helps guide an agency that operates Antarctic research stations, telescopes, a fleet of research vessels and supports basic science research in laboratories across the United States." (NSF research has helped evolve the technology used in MRIs, cellphones and LASIK eye surgery.) But yesterday President Trump fired all 24 members of the National Science Board (NSB), the body that oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF), reports Science magazine: In addition to advising the administration and Congress on national science policy, it has statutory authority to oversee the actions of the $9-billion NSF, setting policy and approving large expenditures. Its presidentially appointed members, typically prominent academics and industry leaders, serve 6-year terms, with eight members chosen every 2 years.... Keivan Stassun, one of the dismissed board members, says the mass firing is the latest indication that the White House is ignoring the board's authority and dictating policies at NSF, which has been without a permanent director since Sethuraman Panchanathan resigned exactly one year ago. Stassun, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University who was appointed to the board in 2022, thinks the board's public criticism in May 2025 of Trump's proposed 55% cut to NSF's current budget — which Congress ultimately ignored — antagonized the administration. "Maybe one way to say it from the administration's perspective," Stassun says, "is that this group of presidential appointees was advising the Congress to not follow the president's wishes." The Washington Post adds that "The White House did not immediately respond to inquiries about why the members were terminated."

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After Australia banned social media for users younger than 16, teenagers "immediately worked to circumvent the restrictions," reports Fortune: 14-year-old in New South Wales, told The Washington Post in December 2025, just before the implementation of the ban, she planned to use her mother's face ID to log in to Snapchat and . In a Reddit thread on ways to bypass the ban, one user suggested using a printed mesh face mask from Temu to outsmart apps' facial recognition tools. Others still have tried VPNs that obscure their locations. A new report suggests these efforts are working. In a survey of 1,050 Australians ages 12 to 15 conducted last month, the UK-based suicide prevention organization the Molly Rose Foundation found more than 60% of teens who had social media accounts before the ban still had access to at least one of those platforms. Social media sites including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, have retained more than half of their users under 16. About two-thirds of young users say these platforms have taken "no action" to remove or reactive accounts that existed before the restrictions. The survey comes at the heels of the Australian internet regulator calling for an investigation into the five largest social media platforms over potential breaches of the ban. The article points out that "Greece, France, Indonesia, Austria, Spain, and the UK have or are considering similar action, and eight U.S. states are weighing legislation that would put guardrails or ban social media use for minors.

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