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Bill Gates has helped “break ground” on the development of a new next-generation nuclear reactor. The project, which is run between TerraPower and the Department of Energy, plans to build a new sodium test reactor at a site in Kemmerer, Wyoming by 2030.The nuclear industry has been in decline in the USA for decades. Despite the country being one of the first nations to generate nuclear energy for commercial civilian purposes, there have been few developments since the late 1970s. For instance, since 1978, only two nuclear power plants have started construction, and that only occurred in 2013.This industry has stalled because of various broad challenges related to economics, regulatory frameworks, and technological problems, as well as declining respect within the public sphere.All of the USA's existing nuclear power plants are traditional pressurized water reactors, which rely on technologies developed over 40 years ago. They are expensive to build and even more so to maintain across their lifecycle. Costs do not just concern the initial construction, but also the ongoing price of fuels, operational costs, and engineering fees. And then there’s the problem of the nuclear waste, which in the US is mostly stored in tanks at sites owned by the Department of Energy.The industry was also fatally wounded by the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979, which caused new regulatory delays to the 51 new reactors that were under construction at the time. With the introduction of new safety procedures and back-fit requirements, the speed of construction was slowed down, and the costs skyrocketed for many reactors. After that, many contracts were canceled and the industry ground to a halt.Today, nuclear power provides around one-fifth of the country’s electricity.But in 2008, Bill Gates founded TerraPower with the aim of building a new generation of nuclear reactors in the US. The reactors, called Natrium, are 345-megawatt modular, pool type, liquid sodium reactors that run off low-enriched uranium (this is fuel that contains 5 to 20 percent fissile uranium). The reactors are also hooked up to a 1-gigawatt hour molten salt storage system.This type of reactor operates under the idea that liquid metals are far better than water at absorbing heat while also maintaining a consistent pressure. By using liquid sodium, which has a boiling point that is more than eight times higher than that of water, the Natrium plants can absorb more heat from the nuclear core. Also, sodium doesn’t need to be pumped away, because it gets cooler as it rises. Importantly, even if the reactor loses power, the sodium will carry on absorbing heat without reaching dangerous temperatures that would result in a meltdown."Safety isn’t the only reason I’m excited about the Natrium design," Gates has explained. “It also includes an energy storage system that will allow it to control how much electricity it produces at any given time. That’s unique among nuclear reactors, and it’s essential for integrating with power grids that use variable sources like solar and wind.”The “groundbreaking” new development Gates is celebrating is essentially symbolic. TerraPower has had its construction permit approved for review, which is just another step in a lengthy and slow bureaucratic process.  However, Gates is not wasting any time. His team are going to develop a test facility that will test components and transfer the liquid sodium that will, he hopes, eventually be used in the reactor. If construction is approved, then Gates hopes to have the reactor up and running by 2030.“For a project this big and this important to work, it takes private companies partnering with public leaders and governments. I can’t say enough good things about Mayor Bill Thek, Mayor Mark Langley, and the remarkable communities here in Kemmerer and Diamondville, who have embraced this project,” Gates says.“Today couldn’t have happened without the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which is supporting the project with the largest single contribution the federal government has ever committed to a private project. If we’re going to solve climate change, it’s going to take courage, commitment, and partnership between the federal government and private industry, a point that Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm has made repeatedly.”Despite this small step of progress for Gates' scheme, there will still be those who are skeptical about its overall success or promises. Research has poured cold water on some of the hype surrounding these proposed next-generation reactors, including liquid-sodium reactors. According to a report produced by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2021, Natrium reactors may be less “uranium-efficient”, may not reduce the amount of nuclear waste produced, and may face safety risks that are unique to them and absent from their predecessors.  The future of nuclear power in the US is therefore still an open question, but as the climate disaster continues to play out, we need new alternatives that do not rely on traditional fossil fuels. We will see if Gates does indeed have the answer.

“Damnatio ad bestias” were probably the three most feared Latin words in Roman times, and signaled a truly horrifying fate for those unlucky enough to be sentenced with this awful phrase. Literally meaning “condemnation to beasts”, this cruel and unusual punishment saw criminals ripped apart by wild animals for the entertainment of the general public.Much of what we know about this barbaric execution method comes from the Roman poet Martial, who recounts numerous wildlife-facilitated annihilations in his book Liber Spectaculorum. Dedicated to the various shows held at Rome’s Colosseum, the book explains how criminals were cast as famous characters from Greek and Roman myths, with their deaths choreographed to re-enact these popular fables.For example, Martial describes how a bandit named Laureolus was put to death while playing the role of Prometheus, the Greek god of fire who was sentenced to have his liver pecked by an eagle for all eternity. In Laureolus’s case, however, the bird was substituted for a bear which took far more than just his liver, leaving him with “mangled limbs” and “dripping with blood.”In another repulsive case, Martial explains how a woman convicted of adultery was sentenced to re-enact the story of Pasiphae, who mated with a bull before giving birth to a hideous creature known as the Minotaur. Recreating this twisted legend, the poor woman was raped to death by a bull before the Colosseum's baying crowd.Seeking an explanation for this depravity, scholars have suggested that damnatio ad bestias may have helped to uphold social norms. For instance, by executing a criminal in the role of Pasiphae, so too did the authorities condemn Pasiphae as a criminal for her sexual transgressions.At the same time, the horrific spectacles served as a constant reminder of the protection provided by the Roman Empire from the dangers of the natural world. Those who broke the law, however, were stripped of their right to this protection and thrown back into the deadly wild – with the consequences evident for all to see.The practice also helped the Roman authorities suppress the rise of Christianity, with converts making up a large proportion of those condemned. According to some reports, a Christian martyr named Saturus became so drenched in blood after being attacked by a leopard that the crowd mockingly celebrated his “baptism”.Overall, it’s estimated that an incredible 400,000 people were condemned to beasts over a period of about 400 years, with lions and other big cats – imported from the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire – being the most common executioners. In one event, a single lion is said to have put 200 criminals out of their misery, while elephants, crocodiles and other dangerous creatures were sometimes invited to take part in these fatal performances too.

Here are two facts about math that often go unadvertised: firstly, there are some problems that are simply unsolvable. It’s not that you personally aren’t smart enough, or that you’re using the wrong method to figure it out; the question, or conjecture, or concept will simply never be solved by anyone, ever. And secondly, inspiration for high-level math ideas can sometimes come from the most unexpected places.Case in point: a recent paper, currently residing on the arXiv preprint server (that is to say, not yet peer-reviewed), concerning none other than… Super Mario Bros. “Of the 2D Mario Games released since New Super Mario Bros., we have shown that all except for Super Mario Wonder are undecidable,” reports the paper, authored by a research team from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory’s Hardness Group. Even for Super Mario Wonder, “there is evidence which suggests that it might be[,] based on the presence of events and infinitely spawning Goombas,” they add, “but the game is still very new, and more research is needed to understand the mechanics of the game well enough to make further claims about undecidability.”So what does that mean, in practice? An undecidable problem, basically, is what it sounds like: it’s a question for which it is impossible to correctly find a yes or no answer. In this case, the problem is one that, as a gamer, you’d really hope was more straightforward – it is, quite simply, “Can the game be beaten?”“You can’t get any harder than this,” Erik Demaine, professor of computer science at MIT and one of the authors of the paper, told New Scientist. “Can you get to the finish? There is no algorithm that can answer that question in a finite amount of time.”Now, proving something like that is no easy task – after all, simply playing the game ad infinitum, while a fun use of a research grant, is evidently out of the question. So, instead, the team used a technique already employed a decade ago by MIT grad student Linus Hamilton for the game Braid.“The central idea was to represent the value of each counter in a Braid level by the number of enemies occupying a particular location in the level,” the paper explains, “exploiting that this number can be arbitrarily large even in a bounded-size level.”In formal language, the team was setting up a counter machine: a theoretical machine that models how a computer works by manipulating a set of “counters”. They’re very simple – one counter in Super Mario Bros. was equipped only with “up”, “down”, and “jump” instructions, nothing more – but incredibly useful, being able to reduce the problem of potentially infinite Goombas into something much easier: the halting problem.What does that mean? Well, start up a computer program and press “go” – will it ever terminate? Or just continue running forever? It may sound like a silly question, but this is the halting problem – a classic example of an undecidable problem. If a game can be reduced to the halting problem – as Braid can, and so many of the Super Mario Bros. games – then it, too, is undecidable.“The idea is that you’ll be able to solve this Mario level only if this particular computation will terminate, and we know that there’s no way to determine that,” Demaine told New Scientist, “and so there’s no way to determine whether you can solve the level.”In other words: next time someone says you’re wasting time playing silly video games, don’t worry – you can instead inform them you’re actually resolving an undecidable problem in the field of complexity theory. The Goombas and sentient dinosaurs are just window-dressing.The study is posted to arXiv.

The storage capacity of amber was showcased in Jurassic Park when a prehistoric mosquito was mined for information, namely the “dino DNA” stored within its last blood meal. Now, scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have taken than idea and run with it to create an amber-like polymer that could store anything from genomes to photo and music files.The frozen skin of dead rhinos recently demonstrated the frosty temperatures required to store DNA, housed at San Diego’s “Frozen Zoo”. Keeping things so cold requires a lot of energy and constant access to power, something that isn’t possible in some parts of the world, which got scientists wondering about a less demanding alternative.Enter MIT, where scientists have shown how a new amber-like polymer can be used to store DNA and digital memory at room temperature, all while keeping its contents safe from fluctuations in heat or humidity.“Freezing DNA is the number one way to preserve it, but it’s very expensive, and it’s not scalable,” said James Banal, a former MIT postdoc, in a statement. “I think our new preservation method is going to be a technology that may drive the future of storing digital information on DNA.”Most of us think of DNA as that stringy thing that tells cells what to do, but it’s also a remarkably stable way of storing massive amounts of information, biological or digital. In the same way that the binary system can encode information in a series of 0s and 1s, DNA can store information using the chemical bases Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Guanine (G), and Thymine (T) that make up our DNA.The approach has been dubbed the T-REX (Thermoset-REinforced Xeropreservation) method, and it builds on previous attempts to encode other materials in speeding up the embedding time, taking just a few hours versus the few days that were required when they tried it with silica.       As a hat-tip to John Hammond and his covetable amber fossil cane, the team were able to use the T-REX method to encode the theme music to Jurassic Park, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the MIT logo, and remove it without any errors. The hardy approach can tolerate up to 75°C (167°F) and isn’t damaged by water, so now the team are going to try and make the polymer into capsules that act as long-term storage devices.It would apparently only take a coffee mug’s worth of DNA to store all of the world’s data, so a polymer capsule the size of the amber lump atop Hammond’s staff could pack in more information than you might think.“The idea is, why don’t we preserve the master record of life forever?” concluded Banal. “Ten years or 20 years from now, when technology has advanced way more than we could ever imagine today, we could learn more and more things. We’re still in the very infancy of understanding the genome and how it relates to disease.”The study is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

At Arthur’s Acres Animal Sanctuary, a 12-pound pig named Mikey has brought a fresh perspective on the bond between animals and humans. His story is not just about survival but also about the incredible resilience and unwavering love that can blossom in the face of adversity. Mikey’s journey, marked by critical health battles and the... The post Special needs piglet can’t contain emotions when he meets man of his dreams appeared first on Animal Channel.

Animal workers are renowned for their kindness and selflessness, dedicating their lives to rescuing and caring for animals in dire need. Their work often involves rescuing animals from situations ranging from simple cases of lost pets to horrifying stories of abuse. Betsy the pit bull’s story falls into the latter category. It showcases the darkest... The post Boy can’t resist hugging pit bull saved from dogfighting and it quickly turns heart melting appeared first on Animal Channel.

Music has long been celebrated for its remarkable ability to heal and calm the human mind. From bringing joy and reducing stress to enhancing workout efficiency and improving focus, music’s benefits are widely acknowledged. It even holds the power to alleviate pain, providing a soothing escape from physical discomfort. This incredible influence of music extends... The post Horse melts 5M hearts with ’emotional’ response to musician giving him private concert appeared first on Animal Channel.