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How to safely watch and photograph the total solar eclipse

Before the eclipse begins, take the time to focus the camera exactly where you want the sun and moon to appear in your shot, and turn off any autofocus function. While some... Read more »

The Download: Harvard’s geoengineering failure, and extending nuclear plants’ lifetimes

In March 2017, at a small summit in Washington, DC, two Harvard professors, David Keith and Frank Keutsch, laid out plans to conduct what would have been the first solar geoengineering experiment... Read more »

Why the lifetime of nuclear plants is getting longer

Two main components determine a plant’s lifetime: the reactor pressure vessel and the containment structure, says Jacopo Buongiorno, a professor of nuclear engineering at MIT.  The reactor pressure vessel is the heart... Read more »

The hard lessons of Harvard’s failed geoengineering experiment

The basic concept behind solar geoengineering is that by spraying certain particles high above the planet, humans could reflect some amount of sunlight back into space as a means of counteracting climate... Read more »

The Download: fixing space weather-forecasting, and reopening a nuclear power plant

As the number of satellites in space grows, and as we rely on them for increasing numbers of vital tasks on Earth, the need to better predict stormy space weather is becoming... Read more »

How to reopen a nuclear power plant

Step 2: Line up money and permission Support has poured in for Palisades, with the state of Michigan setting aside $300 million in funding for the plant’s restart in the last two... Read more »

Threads is giving Taiwanese users a safe space to talk about politics

3. The US government is considering cutting the so-called de minimis exemption from import duties, which makes it cheap for Temu and Shein to send packages to the US. But lots of... Read more »

The race to fix space-weather forecasting before next big solar storm hits

The satellite era has so far experienced only one major geomagnetic storm. Dubbed the Halloween storm because it pummeled Earth in the last week of October 2003, the CME affected nearly 60%... Read more »

Purpose-built AI builds better customer experiences

Once the interaction begins, we can use data, artificial intelligence, to measure sentiment, customer sentiment. And in the course of the interaction, an agent can get a notification from their supervisor that... Read more »

The Download: inside chipmaking giant ASML, and why Taiwan loves Threads

On a drab Monday February morning in California, at the drab San Jose Convention Center, attendees of the SPIE Advanced Lithography and Patterning Conference gathered to hear tech industry luminaries extol the... Read more »