geek

26 Apr 2026

Slashdot

40 Years After the Chernobyl Disaster, More Countries Are Turning To Nuclear Power

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."

Is AI Cannibalizing Human Intelligence? A Neuroscientist's Way to Stop It

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.

Trump Fires All 24 Members of America's National Science Board

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."

25 Apr 2026

Ars Technica

Artemis II broke Fred Haise's distance record, but he is happy to pass it on

"It wasn't a big deal. It just coincided with the fact that Moon was farther away from the Earth."

25 Apr 2026 11:40am GMT

Palantir employees are talking about company's "descent into fascism"

Slack messages, interviews with current and former works paint picture of company in turmoil.

25 Apr 2026 10:49am GMT

This is who's developing Golden Dome's orbital interceptors—if they're ever built

"If boost-phase intercept from space is not affordable and scalable, we will not produce it."

25 Apr 2026 2:52am GMT

24 Apr 2026

OSnews

If 64bit Windows 11 contains a copy of 32bit explorer.exe, could you run it as its shell?

Raymond Chen published a blog post about how a crappy uninstaller on Windows caused a mysterious spike in the number of Explorer (Windows' graphical shell) crashes. It turns out the buggy uninstaller caused repeated crashes in the 32bit version of Explorer on 64bit systems, and - hold on a minute. The how many bits on the what now? The 32-bit version of Explorer exists for backward compatibility with 32-bit programs. This is not the copy of Explorer that is handling your taskbar or desktop or File Explorer windows. So if the 32-bit Explorer is running on a 64-bit system, it's because some other program is using it to do some dirty work. ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing So I had no idea that 64bit Windows included a copy of the 32bit Explorer for backwards compatibility. It obviously makes sense, but I just never stopped to think about it. This made me wonder though if you could go nuts and do something really dumb: could you somehow trick 64bit Windows into running this 32bit copy of Explorer as its shell? You'd be running 32bit Explorer on 64bit Windows using the 32bit WoW64 binaries where you just pulled the 32bit Explorer binary from, which seems like a really nonsensical thing to do. Since there's no longer any 32bit builds of Windows 11, you also can't just copy over the 32bit Explorer from a 32bit Windows 11 build and achieve the same goal that way, so you'd really have to go digging around in WoW64 to get 32bit versions. I guess the answer to this question depends on just how complete this copy of 32bit Explorer really is, and if Windows has any defenses or triggers in place to prevent someone from doing something this uselessly stupid. Of course, there's no practical reason to do any of this and it makes very little sense, but it might be a fun hacking project. Most likely the Windows experts among you are wondering what kind of utterly deranged new designer drug I'm on, but I was always told that sometimes, the dumbest questions can lead to the most interesting answers, so here we are.

24 Apr 2026 11:07pm GMT

8087 emulation on 8086 systems

Not too long ago I had a need and an opportunity to re-acquaint myself with the mechanism used for software emulation of the 8087 FPU on 8086/8088 machines. ↫ Michal Necasek Look, when a Michal Necasek article starts out like this, you know you're in for a learnin' ol' time. The 8087 was a floating-point coprocessor for the 8086 and 8088 processors, since back in those early days, processors did not include an integrated floating-point unit. It wouldn't be until the release of the 486DX, in 1989, that Intel would integrate an FPU inside the processor itself, negating the need for a separate chip and socket. Interestingly enough, Intel also released a cut-down version of the 486 with the FPU removed, the 486SX, for which an optional external FPU did exist.

24 Apr 2026 10:42pm GMT

How hard is it to open a file?

Sebastian Wick has a great explanation of why opening files - programmatically - is a lot more complex and fraught with dangers than you might think it is. This issue was relevant for Wick as he is one of the lead developers of Flatpak, for which a number of security issues have recently been discovered, and it just so happens that many of these issues dealt with this very topic. The biggest security issue found was a complete sandbox escape, originating from the fact that flatpak run, the command-line tool to start a Flatpak application, accepted path strings, since flatpak run is assumed to be run by a trusted user. The problem lay in a D-Bus service sandboxed applications could use to create subsandboxes, and this service was built around, you guessed it, flatpak run. The issues in question, including this complete sandbox escape, have been addressed and fixed, but they highlight exactly the dangers that can come from opening files. This subsandboxing approach in Flatpak is built on assumptions from fifteen years ago, and times have changed since then. If you're a programmer who deals with opening files, you might want to take a look at your own code to see if similar issues exist.

24 Apr 2026 8:24pm GMT