Wired
중도 성향
IT/기술
The US Has a Plan to Combat Screwworm. It Involves a Lot More Flies
Releasing sterilized flies can crash a local population of flesh-eating screwworms. But the US currently has limited capacity to produce them.
🇺🇸 미국 · IT/기술 · "LIES" · 총 26건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.0
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 11,246건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.0(균형)입니다. 긍정 1건(0.0%)·중립 11,244건(100.0%)·부정 1건(0.0%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 18.6(중도 균형)입니다.
Releasing sterilized flies can crash a local population of flesh-eating screwworms. But the US currently has limited capacity to produce them.
Former DOGE members and Elon Musk allies are backing a startup aimed at using AI to apply "learnings" from DOGE to the private sector.
Artificial intelligence doesn’t create in a vacuum. Rather, it depends on human work to analyze data, discovering patterns and finding anomalies. That work is essential for AI’s machine learning. Therefore, categorizing such work as “fair use” misses the point. As artificial intelligence rapidly advances, a fundamental question is emerging: What happens to creators’ rights — […]
Bitcoin is getting pummeled to kick off June as the market loses its dominant narrative and liquidity continues to rotate into other assets.
Morgan Stanley's move is one of the earliest instances of a major Wall Street bank opening its platforms to external AI tools.
"We do not know when it will be safe to go outside. We only know that day is not this day."
If you’re looking for a way to add a personal touch to Father’s Day or graduation gifts, the Cricut Joy 2 can help you customize everything from water bottles and bookmarks to greeting cards and gift cards. The Cricut Joy 2 Rainbow Essential Bundle includes enough vinyl, cardstock, iron-on materials, and other supplies to create […]
Direct-to-cell technology uses LEO satellites as spaceborne cell towers. It delivers LTE services to existing smartphones without hardware changes, bridging global coverage gaps. What Attendees will Learn How DTC works as a spaceborne cell tower — LEO satellites carry LTE eNodeB payloads in regenerative mode. How they serve unmodified phones using quasi-earth-fixed multi-beam antennas. How the satellite compensates for Doppler shift and time delay on thenetwork side. Why Doppler shift and round-trip time are critical challenges — A LEO satellite’s high velocity causes carrier frequency offsets in OFDMA systems. Pre-compensation at a reference point helps, but cell-edge users still face residual Doppler. How spectrum sharing and regulation shape DTC deployment — DTC has no dedicated spectrum allocation. It relies on spectrum sharing between terrestrial and satellite operators or re-farmed MSS bands. How national regulations like the FCC SCS framework govern access. Where DTC fits in the evolution toward 5G NTN and 6G — DTC is an interim technology offering fast time-to-market satellite services. It bridges the gap until 3GPP NR-NTN matures. How NR-NTN will bring purpose-built NTN features and international spectrum frameworks. Download this free whitepaper now!
Every founder who applies to Startup Battlefield wants the same thing: the Disrupt Main Stage. Here’s how to get there and why the opportunity starts well before the main stage.
“Not in my backyard” is the rallying cry of citizens everywhere resisting projects proposed for their locality. Whether it’s affordable housing, a waste treatment plant, or a new data center, they may recognize the benefit of the activity. They just don’t want it near them. And the roots of that resistance differ from place to place. When it comes to the ongoing transition from fossil fuels to renewables, companies and policymakers need to know where, exactly, people are coming from. The Italian island of Sardinia is a textbook example. As IEEE Spectrum’s power and energy editor Emily Waltz discovered when she traveled there last October, Sardinian opposition to wind and solar projects runs deep. It spurred a quarter of the voting population to queue up in public squares in 2024 to sign a petition banning all construction of renewable energy. Waltz was surprised. She went there to see a promising new grid-scale energy storage system that uses domes inflated with carbon dioxide. While reporting on that project, she interviewed residents, engineers, activists, and professors about their attitudes toward climate change and the Italian government’s grand plans for renewable energy on the island. And Waltz soon learned of Sardinians’ profound antipathy toward renewable energy and its deep ties to a history of invasion, occupation, and exploitation stretching back 2,700 years. It started with the Phoenicians and then extended through the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Iberians. Sardinia was absorbed into a newly unified Italy in 1861, and it became an autonomous region of Italy in 1948. The island’s population is justifiably suspicious of outsiders, including the Italian government. “When you’re in Sardinia, the weight of history—you can feel it like in the air,” Waltz told me. “And it gets passed down from one generation to the next.” Now, Italy needs Sardinia to produce even more power to meet the country’s climate goals—something that Sardinians see as Rome’s problem, not theirs. “Sardinia already exports about 30 percent of its electricity. It’s not like they need more,” Waltz says. “So it’s hard to make the case to build, build, build.” The result of Waltz’s old-fashioned shoe leather reporting is this month’s cover story. She notes that the Sardinians she talked to aren’t climate-change deniers, and they don’t object to renewables per se. They just don’t like the way corporations and Italian policymakers are trying to plug into Sardinia like it’s one giant battery rather than the home of an ancient and proud people. “I think Sardinians would be more receptive to renewable projects if it was more of a ground-up, grassroots approach,” Waltz says. Indeed, this homegrown approach is already working in some places in Sardinia. She knows of more than 50 projects, called energy communities, where the residents are deploying renewables themselves. The idea also holds promise for other places struggling to get locals to buy into the renewable-energy transition. The Sardinian experience is both a cautionary tale and a blueprint. Ignore the weight of history that communities carry and your project risks failure. Meet the people where they are and you might just get somewhere. The same lesson applies whether you’re in Sulawesi or sub-Saharan Africa. You just have to show up to learn it.
Both teams are entering tonight's game after sweeping their last series.
If you like to read by the pool or at the beach, the 2021 Kindle Paperwhite remains one of the best e-readers available despite its age. That’s because, unlike Amazon’s latest entry-level Kindle, the last-gen Paperwhite is waterproof. And now through June 14th (or while supplies last), it’s on sale at Woot with ads, 16GB […]
I have been an application-specific IC (ASIC) designer for almost three decades. Over that time, I’ve moved through the full academic trajectory, from graduate student to full professor; later, I transitioned to industry after an unsuccessful stint at entrepreneurship. When I made the switch to the private sector in 2019, I began focusing on a critically important aspect of the electronic industry: silicon intellectual property. As much as 80 percent of the physical area in today’s most advanced chips is occupied by blocks that aren’t made for specific products or even designed by the consumer-facing companies that built them. Instead, chipmakers draw heavily on established silicon IP from companies like Arm, Cadence, Rambus, Synopsys, and the company I work for, Silicon Creations. Throughout my career, I’ve designed chips for very different purposes, including enabling the research program in my academic lab and expanding the IP portfolio of my company. When I joined Silicon Creations, I had no idea how differently the industry approaches IC design and encountered a steep learning curve. Initially, it seemed that much of my two decades of academic research and training did not directly translate to the role. I had to learn new skills and adopt a new mindset. Today, demand for ASICs is rapidly growing, driven by the need for specialized chips in the automotive sector, AI applications, and more. By one market estimate, the ASIC market is expected to grow from US $23.4 billion to $38.8 billion by 2033, and the semiconductor industry as a whole is projected to hit $1 trillion by 2030. The industry needs more chip designers—but if you’re coming from an academic background as I did, there are a few things you’ll need to know. Different goals lead to different strategies The differences between industry and academe begin with a divergence in purpose. In academia, my primary objective was to generate new knowledge: to propose a novel circuit technique, validate an unconventional architecture, or explore the limits of performance in a given domain. A successful chip is one that demonstrates a concept. In industry, it is not nearly enough to prove that something can work. The goal is to ensure that it works reliably, repeatedly, and at scale. Success is measured not by novelty but by whether the silicon meets specifications, yields as expected in production, and supports a competitive product delivered on schedule. This leads to a stark contrast in risk tolerance. Academic designs often deliberately push into unproven territory, where even partial success can yield valuable insight. In industry, however, we systematically minimize risk. The cost of failure makes first-time silicon success a central requirement—especially at advanced technology nodes, where the lithography masks used to transfer circuit designs onto silicon wafers alone can cost tens of millions of dollars. As a result, industry design flows are built around eliminating uncertainty through conservative margins, extensive validation, and careful reuse of proven solutions. “Academia explores the design space, asking what is possible, while industry exploits it, determining what is viable at scale.” This paradigm has existed since the 1970s, when application-specific chip design was established. However, the gulf between academia and industry has expanded since the mid-2010s, when FinFET technology, a 3D architecture using vertical “fins” of silicon, was widely adopted in industry. System designs are also becoming increasingly modular with the advent of chiplets. This fundamentally altered the economics and complexity of ASIC development, with design costs rising by almost an order of magnitude. Initiatives like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s University FinFET Program and new government-funded chip-design hubs now let some well-resourced universities design for more advanced architectures, but the technology is still out of reach for many academics. What the industry-academia split means in practice Consider a startup developing an ASIC. Its engineering team may have deep expertise in a particular algorithm, sensor interface, or system architecture, the features that define its competitive advantage. But it is unlikely to possess world-class expertise in every supporting function. Developing each of these blocks internally would require significant time, capital, and specialized talent. Doing so could delay market entry beyond the startup’s viability. Even large semiconductor companies face similar constraints. Advanced-node development demands intense focus. Allocating a team to redesign a standard interface block that has already been implemented elsewhere may be difficult to justify when differentiation lies at the system level, such as an inference chip’s ability to speed up neural network computations. The time it takes to move a new chip from conception to market and risk mitigation, not self-sufficiency, govern most decisions about in-house development versus outsourcing. The economics of advanced IC manufacturing reinforce this reality. When the development cost of a leading-edge chip reaches hundreds of millions of dollars, minimizing risk becomes a central design imperative. In this context, silicon IP emerged as a practical solution. Similar to how software developers rely on preexisting libraries rather than writing every function from scratch, ASIC designers license predesigned, preverified silicon blocks—such as processor cores, memory interfaces, and security engines—from highly specialized IP vendors. These blocks can then be integrated into larger, increasingly complex systems. Design scope, verification, and time horizons With the use of silicon IP, industry is able to widen the scope of its designs. Academic efforts tend to focus on block-level innovation: a new analog-to-digital converter architecture or an ultralow-noise amplifier, for instance. These designs typically abstract away many of the complexities of bringing a chip to market, such as packaging constraints, long-term reliability, and manufacturing yield. In industry, the focus shifts to system-level integration. Modern systems on chips, or SoCs, incorporate dozens or even hundreds of functional blocks. Managing signal integrity, timing, firmware interaction, and system-level validation becomes as critical as the design of any individual block. Verification philosophy also diverges sharply. In academia, the goal of verification is to demonstrate that the concept works under nominal conditions, which may not always reflect how it would perform in real applications. Even if only a fraction of fabricated chips from a multiproject wafer operates correctly, the design may still be considered a success if it validates the underlying idea. At my academic lab for instance, we used to receive 40 chips from a TSMC prototyping service and started testing them in batches of five. If the first five or 10 chips proved functional, we had already collected more than enough data for a publication. If some of them failed, we weren’t required to mention this when publishing the results. In industry, verification is exhaustive, critical, and often dominates the development schedule. Failures are measured in parts per million, and even rare anomalies are carefully analyzed and documented to identify root causes and prevent recurrence. When I started at Silicon Creations, I was surprised by the level of detail and scrutiny designs face. Differences in time horizons and economic constraints reinforce each of these contrasts. Academic projects operate on flexible timelines aligned with research and funding cycles. If I missed a deadline, I just had to wait for the next cycle. Industry projects are driven by fixed product schedules and market windows, frequently targeting costly leading-edge nodes to achieve competitive performance, power, and area efficiency. Missing a deadline can negate the value of an entire design and may have major financial consequences along the entire supply chain. In essence, academia explores the design space, asking what is possible, while industry exploits it, determining what is viable at scale. Both are indispensable, but they operate under fundamentally different definitions of success. As ASIC complexity continues to grow, understanding both perspectives will be essential for the next generation of engineers navigating the evolving semiconductor landscape. This article appears in the June 2026 print issue.
Pope Leo XIV’s AI warning shows split among Trump officials as the White House resists new guardrails, upping stakes with Catholic voters and Silicon Valley allies.
This sponsored article is brought to you by Master Bond. Outgassing is the release of volatile substances from a cured adhesive over time. These released materials, which may include residual solvents, unreacted monomers, or other chemical species, can deposit on nearby surfaces, causing contamination that interferes with sensitive components. What Is Outgassing and How Is It Measured? The industry standard for measuring outgassing is ASTM E595, developed by NASA. This test exposes a cured sample to 125 °C at high vacuum (10⁻⁵ to 10⁻⁶ torr) for 24 hours, measuring Total Mass Loss (TML) and Collected Volatile Condensable Materials (CVCM). To meet NASA low outgassing requirements, materials must exhibit less than 1 percent TML and less than 0.1 percent CVCM. Optical assemblies need contamination-free bonding and prevention of fogging the optics to maintain clarity. High-vacuum scientific equipment, semiconductor manufacturing tools, and aerospace electronics also demand low outgassing materials. Key Applications Low outgassing adhesives are essential wherever contamination could compromise performance and this is particularly relevant for space and satellite systems. Optical assemblies, including cameras, telescopes, and laser systems, need contamination-free bonding and prevention of fogging the optics to maintain clarity. High-vacuum scientific equipment, semiconductor manufacturing tools, and aerospace electronics also demand low outgassing materials. Even terrestrial optical devices benefit from reduced outgassing to ensure long-term reliability. EP30-2 is a versatile system can be used in a variety of applications in aerospace, electronic, optical and specialty OEM industries, especially when optical clarity and low outgassing are important criteria.Master Bond Ensuring Low Outgassing Performance Through Proper Handling Achieving specified outgassing performance requires attention to storage, mixing, and curing. For two-part systems, use the correct mix ratio and mix thoroughly to ensure complete reaction. Follow recommended cure schedules — adding heat, even at modest temperatures of 150-200 °F, significantly improves cross-linking and reduces outgassing. For UV-curable adhesives, ensure complete cure by using the correct lamp wavelength (typically 365 nm), adequate intensity, and proper exposure time with no shadowed areas. Troubleshooting Outgassing Issues If contamination appears on optical surfaces or outgassing test results are higher than expected, an incomplete cure might be one of the root causes. The first step is to verify that the adhesive has fully hardened to its specified Shore hardness. The next step is to consider adding or extending heat cure to improve cross-linking. Master Bond Product Recommendations Master Bond offers a range of adhesives meeting NASA low outgassing requirements. EP30-2 and EP21TCHT-1 are some examples of two-part epoxy systems that have been successfully deployed in demanding vacuum applications, including ultra-high vacuum environments. For applications requiring UV cure, Master Bond provides specialty UV formulations such as UV16 meeting ASTM E595, as well as dual-cure systems (UV plus heat) such as UV22DC80-10F for assemblies where shadows prevent complete UV exposure. These dual-cure products initiate with UV light and complete curing with heat as low as 180 °F (80 °C).
Leo compares AI to the Tower of Babel, yet that image applies at least as well to the UN.
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Patients who use mobile applications to manage medical conditions including depression and chronic pain might assume the apps have been evaluated by regulatory agencies to be safe and effective. But that isn’t necessarily the case. Most of the more than 55,000 medical apps that claim to diagnose or treat a condition—or ones that provide clinical decision support, known as “therapeutic” apps—have never been assessed by any trusted neutral bodies or regulatory agencies to evaluate them for technical soundness, ethical design, or clinical benefit. The apps often don’t comply with regional data security and privacy laws to protect people’s sensitive health information. Medical apps differ from traditional wellness apps, which provide users with insights into becoming healthier by, for example, tracking fitness activities, monitoring blood pressure, and analyzing sleep patterns. There is no reliable way to verify that therapeutic apps deliver the results they indicate. To help ensure such apps are credible, the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) recently launched the IEEE Global Medical Mobile App Assessment and Registry. The publicly searchable directory is designed to list apps that have been vetted by experts across several criteria including technical soundness, ethical design, compliance with data security and privacy regulations, and clinical efficacy, which is evidence of a clinical benefit for the patient. “Patients, clinicians, payers, and health care systems often struggle to distinguish clinically meaningful therapeutic apps from those that are simply well-marketed,” says IEEE Senior Member Yuri Quintana, chair of the assessment and registry program. He is chief of the clinical informatics division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston. “Our goal is to establish a standardized review method using criteria developed by experts.” Why regulation is lacking Because the apps are intended for medical use without being part of a medical implement, they fall under the designation of software as a medical device (SaMD), according to the International Medical Device Regulators Forum. SaMD is supposed to be regulated by public health agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but the apps have developed and grown in popularity so quickly that regulators haven’t been able to keep up, Quintana says. Some companies have received approval, but most have not, he says. Many users are unaware of the regulatory gap, he says. “Seeing an app from a well-known company often creates the impression that it has been meaningfully vetted for safety and efficacy, even when that is not the case,” he says. Some companies are using deceptive advertising to sell their product, he adds. Marketing materials might claim that all of a company’s health apps are certified, even though only one app has been approved by a regulatory body to treat a particular condition. Or the verbiage might imply the company has clinical evidence proving its application works, even though the app has never been tested independently. Another concern is that updated apps aren’t being vetted, says Maria Palombini, IEEE SA’s director of health care and life sciences global practice lead. “The original app might have received approval from a regulatory agency, but not the updated version,” Palombini says. “There could have been significant changes from the original.” “Not every medical-related app triggers the same regulatory classification or review across jurisdictions,” Quintana adds. “That leaves a large gray zone of clinically relevant but lower-risk apps that haven’t undergone an independent assessment. The IEEE registry was created to help fill these gaps. “IEEE is the best organization to address this problem because this is fundamentally a standards, trust, interoperability, and conformity assessment challenge,” he says. IEEE “is the world’s largest technical professional organization, with deep expertise in developing globally recognized standards including in health care, cybersecurity, AI ethics, and interoperability.” “Through the IEEE Conformity Assessment Program, we already run rigorous assessment and registry programs,” Palombini says. “Our neutral, consensus-driven, multidisciplinary approach—bringing together clinicians, regulators, developers, and ethicists without commercial bias—makes IEEE uniquely positioned to create trustworthy global guardrails that can scale across jurisdictions and support regulatory harmonization.” How the registry works The assessment framework was developed by a multidisciplinary group of 35 volunteer experts from 10 countries, Quintana says. The panel includes academics, AI experts, app developers, clinicians, ethicists, mental health experts, patient advocates, regulators, researchers, technologists, and those who assess safety in health care. The registry is for any app used for clinical care or therapeutics that claims to demonstrate a medical benefit. That includes apps designed for cardiology, diabetes, mental health, neurology, oncology, rehabilitation, and respiratory diseases, Quintana says. Initially, he says, the focus will be on apps that aim to treat mental health conditions, given the large number of offerings in that area and the registry committee’s expertise. The submission of apps is voluntary. There is no government mandate that requires a company to use the IEEE registry. The products will be evaluated against about 150 consensus-based criteria across three major areas: Clinical efficacy including therapeutic effectiveness, any sustained benefits, risk management, comparison to standard care, user engagement, and real clinical value. Technical soundness including accessibility, privacy and security, error handling, interoperability, AI governance, usability, and operational quality. Ethical design including bias prevention, patient consent, data governance, conflict-of-interest transparency, responsible use of AI and large language models, and prioritization of public health benefits. IEEE charges a nonrefundable submission fee that covers the cost of the assessment plus the registry’s annual subscription for the first year. Developers first must demonstrate they are a legally established entity before they can complete the app publisher registration form and then submit documentation and attestations about the product. The IEEE review of an app is estimated to take six to eight weeks, Palombini says. The assessment results will be privately shared with the app publisher, she says, and to be listed in the registry, an app must achieve more than 85 percent compliance in each category. Upgraded apps must be submitted and reassessed, Palombini says. Similar to how users are notified when an app on their smart devices has , the registry will be notified when listed apps have a new update available, she says. Applicants who do not pass the assessment are to receive feedback explaining why. They will be given an opportunity to make changes or provide additional documentation, Palombini says. “It’s a pretty methodological process, with checks and balances,” Quintana says. “We’re being very transparent about the process.” Approved apps added to the registry receive an IEEE certification badge and submission identifier, which the company can display on its website, app store listings, and marketing materials. “The badge serves as visible proof that the app has met the independent, consensus-based assessment for clinical value, technical robustness, and ethical design,” Quintana says. The registry will be publicly available at no cost, he says. Patients and families seeking safe, trustworthy apps—and payers and insurers evaluating reimbursement potential—will find the registry helpful, he says. The application website is open. The public registry page does not yet list a specific count of approved apps because assessments are ongoing. Approved apps and their unique identifiers are to be published when the initial reviews are completed. To learn more, you can watch a webinar recorded in March. The assessment framework that underpins the registry is supporting the formal recognition of IEEE P3962 Standard for Criteria Assessment Framework f
Editor’s note: If you’d like to pinpoint the instant when the world entered the nuclear age, 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time on 16 July 1945, is an excellent choice. That was the moment when human beings first unleashed the power of the nucleus in an immense, blinding ball of fire above a gloomy stretch of desert in the Jornada del Muerto basin in New Mexico. Emily Seyl’s Trinity: An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test (The University of Chicago Press) offers hundreds of startlingly vivid photographs of the Manhattan Project that emerged from a 20-year restoration effort. This excerpt and the accompanying photos record the massive effort to capture the awesome detonation of “the Gadget.” aspect_ratioReprinted with permission from Trinity: An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test by Emily Seyl with contributions by Alan B. Carr, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2026 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. In the North 10,000 photography bunker, Berlyn Brixner was listening to the countdown on a loudspeaker, his head inside a turret loaded with cameras and film. He was one of the only people instructed to look toward the blast—through his welder’s glasses—ready to follow the path of the fireball as it launched into the sky. The two Mitchell movie cameras at his station would deliver the best footage to come of the Trinity test, used by Los Alamos scientists to make some of the first measurements of the effects of a nuclear explosion. Related: New Trinity Book Uncovers Images of the First Atomic Test When the detonators fired, the cameras captured what Brixner could not have seen—the very first light of a violent, silent sea of energy unfurling into the basin. As 32 blocks of high explosives erupted all together, their incredible force surged inward toward the sleeping plutonium core, compressing the dense sphere of metal instantaneously from all sides and bringing its atoms impossibly close together. A carefully timed burst of neutrons sowed momentary, uncontrolled chaos, and then, as quickly as it began, the fission chain reaction ended. Footage from a high-speed Fastax camera in Brixner’s bunker, shot through a thick glass porthole, shows a translucent orb bursting through the darkness less than a hundredth of a second after detonation, as a rush of heat, light, and matter blew apart the Gadget. When the brightness faded enough for witnesses to make out ground zero, they saw a wall of dust rise up around a brilliant, shape-shifting, multicolored ball of flames—forming a fiery cloud that shot into the sky atop a twisting stream of debris. The camera footage tells a story no less dramatic but hundreds of times more intricate, preserving the moment for scientists to return to again and again to measure and describe the behavior of the fireball and other visible effects with exacting detail. On balance, the photography effort was a huge success, despite only 11 of the 52 cameras producing satisfactory images. By arranging those cameras at intentionally staggered distances, complementary angles, and with a broad spectrum of frame rates and focal lengths, the Spectrographic and Photographic Measurements Group was able to piece together a remarkably complete picture of their subject. On 12 July 1945, Herbert Lehr, a U.S. Army sergeant and electrical engineer assigned to Los Alamos, delivered the plutonium core to the McDonald ranch house, where the bomb was assembled. Los Alamos National Laboratory According to the group’s leader, Julian Mack, the more than 100,000 frames that were captured still “give no idea of the brightness, or of time and space scales.” Mack attributed fortune, as much as foresight, to the photographic record that was made, especially during the earliest phase of the blast. Indeed, the explosion was several times more powerful than predicted, and the intensity of its effects overwhelmed many of the cameras and diagnostic instruments. The human observers were similarly overcome. “The shot was truly awe-inspiring,” said Norris Bradbury, the physicist who would succeed Robert Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos. “Most experiences in life can be comprehended by prior experiences, but the atom bomb did not fit into any preconception possessed by anybody. The most startling feature was the intense light.” Norris Bradbury, the physicist responsible for the final assembly of the Gadget, stands next to the partially assembled bomb at the top of the shot tower. The cables on the outside of the bomb would transmit the signals to trigger the synchronized detonations of conventional explosives, which would then create the inward-directed shock wave that would compress the bomb’s plutonium core. Bradbury would go on to succeed Robert Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos on 17 October 1945.Los Alamos National Laboratory It is a common sentiment that words and even pictures pale in comparison to the experience of the explosion. Even so, soldiers, scientists, and many other witnesses have added their firsthand accounts—often absorbing and poetic—to complement the trove of hard data collected during the test shot. They describe an intense and blinding brightness that filled the basin with daytime; an ominous, darkening cloud rearing its head in eerie silence; the wait for the invisible wave rushing out from the heart of the Gadget; and the mighty roar that arrived at last, in a thunder, and seemed never to leave. Physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi, watching from 20 miles away, remembered, “It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you.” James Chadwick, head of the British contingent of scientists who joined the Manhattan Project, later said, “Although I had lived through this moment in my imagination many times during the past few years and everything happened almost as I had pictured it, the reality was shattering.” The blast, captured with an assortment of high-speed and motion-picture cameras, shows the fireball expanding between 25 milliseconds and 60 seconds, by which time the mushroom cloud is over 3 kilometers high.Los Alamos National Laboratory And physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.”