In 1942, scientists working on what became the Manhattan Project confronted a disturbing possibility: could an atomic explosion become hot enough to ignite a self-sustaining nuclear reaction in the atmosphere?

They took the question seriously and did the physics. Hans Bethe, Emil Konopinski and others examined whether the reactions could release energy faster than the atmosphere could dissipate it, and their calculations showed they could not. Three years later, the Trinity test went ahead.

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In Brief

●  Stanford GSB researchers are building frameworks that keep AI under human control even as they become more autonomous.

●  In a cooperative game, an AI agent learns when to check in with a person and when to act alone.

Another framework sets up effective oversight of an untrusted model by pools of human or AI supervisors.

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Over the weekend, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for artificial intelligence (AI) companies, including his own, to slow down their work. Sam Altman and Elon Musk, heads of rivals OpenAI and xAI respectively, agreed.

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Artificial intelligence systems are starting to do more than answer questions. New AI “agents” can remember information from previous interactions, plan a series of steps and use digital tools to complete tasks.

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The argument in Washington over the past few months has been about whether to ban Chinese AI models or restrict them. What has been less examined is what Beijing intends to do with the open-weight – that is, publicly available and downloadable – models its labs have built. Beijing has started to answer that question, and not with one voice.

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As much as 15.2 terawatt-hours of electricity could be generated annually at non-powered dams — enough to supply more than 1.4 million homes, according to an updated assessment of hydropower technical potential across the nation compiled by researchers at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Idaho National Laboratory (INL).

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With rockets propelling it down the sled track at Sandia National Laboratories, a semitrailer loaded with mock nuclear weapons slammed into a barrier. It took mere moments to complete the second and final full-scale crash test of the Mobile Guardian Transporter, a next-generation system that will carry nuclear weapons and other sensitive materials for the Department of Energy’s Office of Secure Transportation.

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Argonne researchers study the movement of dust particles from concrete surfaces during a simulated radiological contamination scenario, measuring how pedestrians and moving cars affect the spread of the particles.

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Twenty-five years after 9/11, the surveillance infrastructure built and expanded in its aftermath has become part of a far larger digital ecosystem — producing tools that can collect and analyze information on a scale unimaginable in 2001.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did more than reshape the nation’s approach to terrorism. They changed the architecture of American intelligence and policing. They expanded how government agencies collect, share and analyze information, and brought national security tools deeper into ordinary law enforcement.

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Count on the AI crowd to have a full-blown culture war over the idea of anthropomorphism.

True, many AI researchers and commentators are deep in the weeds of its philosophical implications. But confirmed stereotypes aside, the past week has brought revelations that should make leaders everywhere stop what they’re doing, sit up and take notice.

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The case for racing to dominate the cognitive domain is, by now, familiar.

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Kairos Power announced the Nuclear Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Precast (NuCAMP), an initiative focused on maturing new manufacturing and construction methods and developing vocational training for skilled workers in East Tennessee to support the deployment of advanced nuclear reactors.

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Luther “Sunny” Miller is nearly 80, but in his younger days, he worked at Aerojet, a rocket and missile manufacturer located quite literally in his backyard. He can’t prove it, but he worries that his thyroid and bladder problems, and his wife’s kidney disease, can be traced to the plant.

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Energy security concerns augmented by recent years of war in Ukraine and the Middle East have fueled a global resurgence of nuclear energy. In Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, governments are looking to nuclear energy as a stable power source in the face of geopolitical uncertainty, increasing electricity demand, and accelerating climate change. This includes the United States, which recently signed a thirty-year civil nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia, though it has yet to go into effect. This resurgence marks a stunning reversal.

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As vice president and director of RAND Global and Emerging Risks, Matan Chorev oversees research on some of the most consequential challenges facing the United States and the world. That portfolio ranges from the rapid advance of artificial intelligence to growing 

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Innovation is a concept that has become mythologized in the modern era: what it is, how to manage it, how to teach it, and how to get it to work for us. Despite these explorations, it remains fundamentally misunderstood, writes Eugene Fitzgerald, the Merton C. Flemings SMA Professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, in his latest book, “The Invisible Engine: Why Innovation Evades Control.”

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Scientists have crossed an important line in biological engineering. In a recent study, researchers used artificial intelligence to design complete sets of genetic instructions for bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. Some of those computer-generated designs produced working viruses when they were built and tested in the laboratory.

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During election seasons or major national issues, online news comment sections often become heated spaces of conflict across gender, generation, and political lines. For years, there have been persistent concerns that behind some of these conflicts may lie “foreign winds,” or interventions by foreign actors seeking to manipulate public opinion and deepen social divisions.

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Mirror life is a hypothetical form of life built from biomolecules with the opposite chirality—or molecular orientation—of those used by all known life on earth. Although mirror life does not yet exist, scientific advances have produced mirror-image biomolecules and components that could serve as the building blocks of mirror organisms, and some laboratories have articulated the goal of constructing a viable mirror cell. Experts estimate that mirror life could become a reality within the next few decades.

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Do you ever see comments on social media that seem way off topic, but still manage to wrench the discussion around to divisive political debate?

A discussion about the cost of living suddenly becomes an argument about immigration. A conversation about the war in Ukraine turns into claims about government corruption. It can feel jarring – and sometimes this is deliberate.

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