America's Department of Energy launched a federally funded R&D center in 1946 called the Argonne National Laboratory, and its research became the basis for all of the world's commercial nuclear reactors. But it's now developed an AI-based tool that can "help operators run nuclear plants," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing comments from a senior nuclear engineer in the lab's nuclear science and engineering division: Argonne's plan is to offer the Parameter-Free Reasoning Operator for Automated Identification and Diagnosis, or PRO-AID, to new, tech-forward nuclear builds, but it's also eyeing the so-called dinosaurs, some of which are being resurrected by companies like Amazon and Microsoft to help power their AI data centers. The global push for AI is poised to fuel a sharp rise in electricity demand, with consumption from data centers expected to more than double by the end of the decade, the International Energy Agency said Thursday. The owners of roughly a third of U.S. nuclear plants are in talks with tech companies to provide electricity for those data centers, the Wall Street Journal has reported. PRO-AID performs real-time monitoring and diagnostics using generative AI combined with large language models that notify and explain to staff when something seems amiss at a plant. It also uses a form of automated reasoning — which uses mathematical logic to encode knowledge in AI systems — to mimic the way a human operator asks questions and comes to understand how the plant is operating [according to Richard Vilim, a senior nuclear engineer within the lab's nuclear science and engineering division]. The tool can also help improve the efficiency of the personnel needed to operate a nuclear plant, Vilim said. That's especially important as older employees leave the workforce. "If we can hand off some of these lower-level capabilities to a machine, when someone retires, you don't need to replace him or her," he said... Part of the efficiency in updating technology will come from consolidating the monitoring staff at a utility's nuclear plants at a single, centralized location — much as gas-powered plants already do. It hasn't found its way into a commercial nuclear plant yet, the article acknowledges. But the senior nuclear engineer points out that America's newer gas-powered plants ended up being more automated with digital monitoring tools. Meanwhile the average age of America's 94 operating nuclear reactors is 42 years old, and "nearly all" of them have had their licenses extended, according to the article. (Those nuclear plants still provide almost 20% of America's electricity.)

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Formula One cars, the world's fastest racecars, need to grip the track for speed and safety on the curves — leading engineers to design cars that create downforce. And racing fans are even told that "a Formula 1 racecar generates enough downforce above a certain speed that it could theoretically drive upside down," writes the automotive site Jalopnik. "McMurtry Automotive turned this theory into reality after having its Spéirling hypercar complete the impressive feat..." Admittedly, the Spéirling's success can be solely attributed to its proprietary 'Downforce-on-Demand' fan system that produces 4,400 pounds of downforce at the push of a button... For those looking to do the math, Spéirling weighs 2,200 pounds. With the stopped car's fan whirling at 23,000 rpm, the rig was rotated to invert the road deck... Then, the hypercar rolled forward a few feet before stopping while inverted. The rig rotated the road deck back down, and the Spéirling drove off like nothing happened. The McMurtry Spéirling, as a 1,000-hp twin-motor electric hypercar, didn't have to clear the other hurdles that an F1 car would have clear to drive upside down. Dry-sump combustion engines aren't designed to run inverted and would eventually fail catastrophically. Oil wouldn't be able to cycle through and keep the engine lubricated. The car is "an electric monster purpose-built to destroy track records," Jalopnik wrote in 2022 when the car shaved more than two seconds off a long-standing record. The "Downforce-on-Demand" feature gives it tremendous acceleration — in nine seconds it can go from 0 to 186.4 mph (300 km/h), according to Jalopnik. "McMurtry is working towards finalizing a production version of its hypercar, called the Spéirling PURE. Only 100 will be produced."

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10 years ago "certificate authorities normally issued certificate lifetimes lasting a year or more," remembers a new blog post Thursday by the EFF's engineering director. So in 2015 when the free cert authority Let's Encrypt first started issuing 90-day TLS certificates for websites, "it was considered a bold move, that helped push the ecosystem towards shorter certificate life times." And then this January Let's Encrypt announced new six-day certificates... This week saw a related announcement from the EFF engineering director. More than 31 million web sites maintain their HTTPS certificates using the EFF's Certbot tool (which automatically fetches free HTTPS certificates forever) — and Certbot is now supporting Let's Encrypt's six-day certificates. (It's accomplished through ACME profiles with dynamic renewal at 1/3rd of lifetime left or 1/2 of lifetime left, if the lifetime is shorter than 10 days): There is debate on how short these lifetimes should be, but with ACME profiles you can have the default or "classic" Let's Encrypt experience (90 days) or start actively using other profile types through Certbot with the --preferred-profile and --required-profile flags. For six day certificates, you can choose the "shortlived" profile. Why shorter lifetimes are better (according to the EFF's engineering director): If a certificate's private key is compromised, that compromise can't last as long. With shorter life spans for the certificates, automation is encouraged. Which facilitates robust security of web servers. Certificate revocation is historically flaky. Lifetimes 10 days and under prevent the need to invoke the revocation process and deal with continued usage of a compromised key.

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Late Friday news broke that U.S. President Trump's new tariffs included exemptions for smartphones, computer monitors, semiconductors, and other electronics. But Sunday morning America's commerce secretary insisted "a special-focus type of tariff" was coming for those products, reports ABC News. President Trump "is saying they're exempt from the reciprocal tariffs," the commerce secretary told an interviewer, "but they're included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two.... This is not like a permanent sort of exemption." The Wall Street Journal notes that Sunday the president himself posted on social media that "NOBODY is getting 'off the hook' for the unfair Trade Balances, and Non Monetary Tariff Barriers... There was no Tariff 'exception' announced on Friday. These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff 'bucket.'" "The administration is expected to take the first step toward enacting the new tariffs as soon as next week," reports the New York Times, "opening an investigation to determine the effects of semiconductor imports on national security." More from ABC News: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that the administration's decision Friday night to exempt a range of electronic devices from tariffs implemented earlier this month was only a temporary reprieve.. Lutnick said on "This Week" that the White House will implement "a tariff model in order to encourage" the semiconductor industry, as well as the pharmaceutical industry, to move its business to the United States. "We can't be beholden and rely upon foreign countries for fundamental things that we need," he said.... "These are things that are national security that we need to be made in America."

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Stanford law school graduate Peter Thiel later co-founded Facebook, PayPal, and Palantir. But in 2010 Thiel also created the Thiel Fellowship, which annually gives 20 to 30 people under the age of 23 $100,000 "to encourage students to not stick around college." (College students must drop out in order to accept the fellowship.) And now Palantir "is taking a similar approach as it maneuvers to attract new talent," reports financial news site The Street: The company has launched what it refers to as the "Meritocracy Fellowship," a four-month internship program for recent high school graduates who have not enrolled in college. The position pays roughly $5,400 per month, more than plenty of post-college internship programs. Palantir's job posting suggests that the company is especially interested in candidates with experience in programming and statistical analysis. Palantir's job listing specifically says they launched their four-month fellowship "in response to the shortcomings of university admissions," promising it would be based "solely on merit and academic excellence" (requiring an SAT score over 1459 or an ACT score above 32.) "Opaque admissions standards at many American universities have displaced meritocracy and excellence..." As a result, qualified students are being denied an education based on subjective and shallow criteria. Absent meritocracy, campuses have become breeding grounds for extremism and chaos... Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree... Upon successful completion of the Meritocracy Fellowship, fellows that have excelled during their time at Palantir will be given the opportunity to interview for full-time employment at Palantir.

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Remember how last weekend Meta claimed its "Maverick" AI model (in the newly-released Llama-4 series) beat GPT-4o and Gemini Flash 2 "on all benchmarks... This thing is a beast." And then how within a day several AI researchers pointed out that even Meta's own announcement admitted the Maverick tested on LM Arena was an "experimental chat version," as TechCrunch pointed out. ("As we've written about before, for various reasons, LM Arena has never been the most reliable measure of an AI model's performance. But AI companies generally haven't customized or otherwise fine-tuned their models to score better on LM Arena — or haven't admitted to doing so, at least.") Friday TechCrunch on what happened when LMArena tested the unmodified release version of Maverick (Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct). It ranked 32nd. "For the record, older models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, released last June, and Gemini-1.5-Pro-002, released last September, rank higher," notes the tech site Neowin.

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"More than three million children around the world are thought to have died in 2022 as a result of infections that are resistant to antibiotics," reports the BBC, citing a study by two leading experts in child health that used data from sources including the World Health Organization and the World Bank: Experts say this new study highlights a more than tenfold increase in AMR-related infections in children in just three years. The number could have been made worse by the impact of the Covid pandemic... The report's lead authors, Doctor Yanhong Jessika Hu of Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia and Professor Herb Harwell of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, point to a significant growth in the use of antibiotics that are meant to only be held back for the most serious infections. Between 2019 and 2021 the use of "watch antibiotics", drugs with a high risk of resistance, increased by 160% in South East Asia and 126% in Africa. Over the same period, "reserve antibiotics" — last-resort treatments for severe, multidrug-resistant infections — rose by 45% in South East Asia and 125% in Africa. The authors warn that if bacteria develop resistance to these antibiotics, there will be few, if any, alternatives for treating multidrug-resistant infections. "Antibiotics are ubiquitous around us," Professor Harwell warns in the article. "They end up in our food and the environment and so coming up with a single solution is not easy." The article also quotes a senior lecturer in microbiology at King's College London, who says the new study "marks a significant and alarming increase compared to previous data". "These findings should serve as a wake-up call for global health leaders. Without decisive action, AMR could undermine decades of progress in child health, particularly in the world's most vulnerable regions." Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

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"It is somewhat remarkable that work on AmigaOS 3.X continues in 2025," notes Tom's Hardware, "given that Commodore International released AmigaOS 3.0 in 1992..." AmigaOS 3.1 came in 1993. And now... Work continues on AmigaOS 3.2 with the stewards of this classic Motorola 680x0 friendly operating system, Hyperion Entertainment, releasing version 3.2.3 a few days ago. In a news bulletin on the official site, Hyperion highlighted that the third update for AmigaOS 3.2 includes two years of (more than 50) fixes and enhancements... Hyperion began its quest to modernize and improve this classic version of AmigaOS for Motorola 680x0 platforms in 2018 when it released version 3.1.4. The AmigaOS 3.2 lineage began in 2021... This release is provided as a free update to owners of AmigaOS 3.2. If you don't already have this OS, you can get it now at official resellers like RetroPassion UK... Nowadays, Arm-based accelerators seem to be the path forward for modern Amiga, as opposed to retro Amiga, enthusiasts. AmigaOS 3.2.3 has a feather in its cap as it also supports classic 68K Amigas boosted by Arm accelerators such as the PiStorm.

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"Can you help me take down the Texas lottery?" That's what a London banker-turned-bookmaker asked "acquaintances" in 2023, reports the Wall Street Journal. The plan was to buy "nearly every possible number in a coming drawing" — purchasing $1 tickets for 25.8 million possible combinations, since "The jackpot was heading to $95 million. If nobody else also picked the winning numbers, the profit would be nearly $60 million." Marantelli flew to the U.S. with a few trusted lieutenants. They set up shop in a defunct dentist's office, a warehouse and two other spots in Texas. The crew worked out a way to get official ticket-printing terminals. Trucks hauled in dozens of them and reams of paper... [Then Texas announced no winner in an earlier lottery, rolling its jackpot into another drawing three days later.] The machines — manned by a disparate bunch of associates and some of their children — screeched away nearly around the clock, spitting out 100 or more tickets every second. Texas politicians later likened the operation to a sweatshop. Trying to pull off the gambit required deep pockets and a knack for staying under the radar — both hallmarks of the secretive Tasmanian gambler who bankrolled the operation. Born Zeljko Ranogajec, he was nicknamed "the Joker" for his ability to pull off capers at far-flung casinos and racetracks. Adding to his mystique, he changed his name to John Wilson several decades ago. Among some associates, though, he still goes by Zeljko, or Z. Over the years, Ranogajec and his partners have won hundreds of millions of dollars by applying Wall Street-style analytics to betting opportunities around the world. Like card counters at a blackjack table, they use data and math to hunt for situations ripe for flipping the house edge in their favor. Then they throw piles of money at it, betting an estimated $10 billion annually. The Texas lottery play, one of their most ambitious operations ever, paid off spectacularly with a $57.8 million jackpot win. That, in turn, spilled their activities into public view and sparked a Texas-size uproar about whether other lotto players — and indeed the entire state — had been hoodwinked. Early this month, the state's lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, called the crew's win "the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas." In response to written questions addressed to Marantelli and Ranogajec, Glenn Gelband, a New Jersey lawyer who represents the limited partnership that claimed the Texas prize, said "all applicable laws, rules and regulations were followed...." Lottery officials and state lawmakers have taken steps to prevent a repeat. The article also looks at a group of Princeton University graduates calling themselves Black Swan Capital that's "won millions in recent years" by targetting state lottery drawings with unusually favorable odds. "State lottery directors say they are seeing more organized efforts to buy lottery tickets in bulk," according to the article, "but that the groups are largely operating legally and transparently..."

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Somewhere in Montana sits the only coal-fired power plant in America that hasn't installed modern pollution controls to limit particulate matter, according to the Environmental Protecction Agency. Mining.com notes that it has the highest emission rate of fine particulate matter out of any U.S. coal-burning power plant. When inhaled, the finest particles are able to penetrate deep into the lungs and even potentially the bloodstream, exacerbating heart and lung disease, causing asthma attacks and even sometimes leading to premature death. Yet America's dirtiest coal-fired power plant — and dozens of others — "are being exempted from stringent air pollution mandates," reports Bloomberg, "as part of US. President Donald Trump's bid to revitalize the industry: Talen Energy Corp.'s Colstrip in Montana is among 47 plants receiving two-year waivers from rules to control mercury and other pollutants as part of a White House effort to ease regulation on coal-fired sites, according to a list seen by Bloomberg News. The exemptions were among a slew of actions announced by the White House Tuesday to expand the mining and use of coal. The Trump administration has argued coal is a vital part of the mix to ensure sufficient energy supply to meet booming demand for AI data centers. The carve-out, which begins in July 2027, lasts until July 2029, according to the proclamation. In an email to Bloomberg, a White House spokesperson said the move meant that America "will produce beautiful, clean coal" while addressing "necessary electrical demand from emerging technologies such as AI."

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Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 "will come with full support for OEM installations," according to their monthly newsletter, so Linux Mint "can be pre-installed on computers which are sold throughout the World. It's a very important feature and it's one of the very few remaining things which wasn't supported by Linux Mint Debian Edition." Slashdot reader BrianFagioli speculates that "this could be a sign of something much bigger." OEM installs are typically reserved for operating systems meant to ship on hardware. It's how companies preload Linux on laptops without setting a username, password, or timezone... Mint has supported this for years — but only in its Ubuntu-based version. So why is this feature suddenly coming to Linux Mint Debian Edition, which the team has repeatedly described as a contingency? In other words, if the Debian variant is merely a plan B, why make it ready for OEMs? Their blog post goes on to speculate about possible explanations (like the hypothetical possibility of dissatisfaction with Snap packages or Canonical's decisions around telemetry and packaging). Slashdot reached out to Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre, who responded cheerfully that "I know people love to speculate on this. There's no hidden agenda on our side though. "Improving LMDE is a continuous effort. It's something we do regularly." "Any LMDE improvement facilitates a future potential transition to Debian, of course. But there are other reasons to implement OEM support. "We depend on Ubiquity in Linux Mint. We have a much simpler installer, with no dependencies, no technical debt and with a design we're in control of in LMDE. Porting LMDE's live-installer to Linux Mint is something we're looking into. Implementing OEM support in live-installer kills two birds with one stone. It improves LMDE and opens the door to switching away from Ubiquity in Linux Mint."

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