Ars Technica
중도 성향
IT/기술
Small modular nuclear reactor reaches criticality in first test
The reactor, from a startup called Antares, isn't ready to generate power yet.
IT/기술 · "NUCL" · 총 13건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.3
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 81,722건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.2(균형)입니다. 긍정 4,323건(5.3%)·중립 75,289건(92.1%)·부정 2,110건(2.6%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 15.3(중도 균형)입니다.
The reactor, from a startup called Antares, isn't ready to generate power yet.
The Americans were closing in, the situation was getting more dangerous by the minute — and President Xi Jinping was waiting for my recommendation. The standoff began in May, when the US announced a package of anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles to Taiwan that would significantly upgrade the island’s ability to repel a Chinese invasion. We […]
Democratic senators are hoping to add guardrails on the military’s AI use to an annual defense policy bill as the House Armed Services Committee prepares to debate the massive legislation on Thursday. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill Tuesday that would limit AI use for launching nuclear weapons, surveilling Americans and developing or deploying...
A Harvard fellow and former financial intelligence chief argues the right model for AI governance isn't nuclear arms control — it's the global framework that brought down ISIS financing.
FOR the last three years since ChatGPT was introduced, prominent writers, editors and litterateurs have been openly hostile to the idea of AI being able to write fiction, poetry or prose — indeed, any kind of literature. The tech companies that introduced all these LLMs, imagining ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and Copilot as writing aids, study buddies, collaborators and co-authors, have thrown a nuclear bomb into the literary world, and most of its inhabitants are still in a crouch position, bracing for an impact that detonated back in 2022. But the literary world must call a truce because AI is here to stay. Moreover, any writer who teaches writing, any literary editor or agent who evaluates submissions, any practitioner called upon to judge a literary competition must become AI literate; it’s an unavoidable skill that’s simply part of the job from now on. Last week, the Commonwealth Writing Prize and Granta published five regional short story winners, one of which, Jamir Nazar’s ‘A Serpent in the Grove’, was singled out as possibly AI-generated. It raised a furore on social media but it didn’t surprise me at all. I’ve graded hundreds of student essays, judged creative writing capstones and a major Pakistani literary prize in the last year. So much is now written with the help of AI that I feel overwhelmed. I’ve been using the last two years to learn exactly how AI writes — not just its processes, but its style and its voice. I’ve studied it as much as I would study any human author, looking for how it handles dialogue, description, character and plot. Yet if I’d stuck my head in the sand and refused to touch AI for the sake of artistic integrity, I would be letting down all those people who trust my judgement and expertise. Students are addicted to AI not because they want to cheat, but because they’re terrified of looking stupid or inadequate. I spent hours tinkering with AI, asking it to write things in a Pakistani context: a synopsis for a Harry Potter book set in Lahore; descriptions of Karachi. AI churned out showy, contrived prose that looks like it’s doing a lot without actually saying anything meaningful. It blathered inanities about Karachi being a “city that remembers” and Pakistani women who “sauntered through the bazaar as if their bodies bore the weight of generations of family secrets”. AI wrote verbal pyrotechnics with no emotional connection to the city that I love. It’s too much of a temptation to expect people, especially students, not to use AI to write. Pakistan is a former British colony with a postcolonial hangover about the English language, even though few of us speak it fluently and even fewer can write it well. Yet the language of instruction in top Pakistani schools and universities has remained and always will be English. Students are addicted to AI not because they want to cheat, but because they’re terrified of looking stupid or inadequate. And the LLMs are ever-present to capitalise on that fear. I have to keep telling my students: AI is here not to help you, but to make money off you. Also, there will never be a foolproof AI-detection tool. AI will keep learning more from every person that asks it to help them write a story; AI ‘detectors’ will offer you an answer based on their own algorithms and biases. Differentiating AI writing from human writing requires human discernment, the same faculty we use to know when writing is sublime or terrible. It requires instinct, experience and a close look at the person’s work overall to see if the story is a representation of their usual style — call it the new due diligence in a post-AI world. The culprit in the Commonwealth Writers debacle was not racism or some kind of Western pandering to the postcolonial writer, but sheer ignorance on the part of judges. And underneath that ignorance lies a wilful denial about just how seismic the AI shift is. Everyone who must evaluate writing professionally is scared of the threat that AI poses to the literary arts and the earnings of the publishing industry. They’re terrified of the idea that everyone else is already so far ahead they may never be able to catch up. AI has already learned to mimic cultural inflections. It will talk about any part of the world — Guyana, South Korea, Bosnia — with pompous certainty and try to dazzle you with metaphorically bizarre surface-level descriptors or overwhelm you with atmosphere so you don’t realise there’s actually no plot or insight, no empathy, none of the beauty that makes writing an art as well as a practice. Personally, I resent the tech bros who have turned my relationship with writing from practitioner to policewoman, turning a jaundiced eye to everyone’s writing and suspecting the worst. AI is now influencing young people learning how to write to the extent that even my best students have started to sound like AI. I know that AI recognises patterns and produces only a facsimile of good writing, much like the proverbial broken clock that’s right twice a day. The practice of writing words to connect with a reader, communicate ideas and tell a story is a human endeavour that AI will never be able to match. Fear won’t stop me from looking it straight in the AI and declaring, “You have no power over me.” I urge everyone else — writers, teachers, judges and editors — to do the same. The writer currently teaches Expository Writing at AKUFAS. Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2026
The billionaire investor reportedly moved his family to Buenos Aires as a refuge from high taxes, political turmoil and potential catastrophes like nuclear war and an AI meltdown.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Climate tech companies are going public. What’s next? Solar and battery company Solv Energy went public in February, hitting a $6 billion valuation. X-energy, which builds small modular nuclear reactors, followed…
This year, there’s been a wave of notable energy companies going public via IPO in the US. The solar and battery company Solv Energy went public in February, to the tune of $6 billion. X-energy, which is building small modular nuclear reactors, did the same in April, and its stocks surged on its first day…
Deep Fission is seeking an IPO that could raise $157 million, though investors may have trouble buying the nuclear startup's story.
Sizewell C could add £19 to yearly bills, spending watchdog says, but private investor may fail to keep costs down
The discovery from the Trinity nuclear test site shows how extreme conditions can result in materials never before seen in nature or in the lab.
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.”