NUCLEAR 101 (Nuclear Science Week Edition!) ⚛️: The sodium-cooled fast reactor uses liquid metal (sodium) as a coolant instead of water. This allows the coolant to operate at higher temps and lower pressures to improve the efficiency of the system.

WATCH 👀: Incredible archival footage of the world’s first reactivity-initiated accident experiments at TREAT nearly 60 years ago!

Lucid article by Seth, Block, & Tononi: Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be nature.com/articles/d41586-0…

I was ashamed to realize that I did not notice at the time when one of humanity's greatest accomplishments was announced: photos of Pluto, taken from the edge of our solar system looking back. Blue Haze is up there with Earthrise and Pale Blue Dot as stunningly beautiful works of art, testimonies to human ingenuity and daring, and opportunities to reflect on our place in the cosmos.

The race to scale humanoid robots may be decided in factories before it is decided in AI labs. McKinsey identifies actuators, precision gearboxes and advanced sensing systems as potential supply chain bottlenecks. Actuators alone account for an estimated 40–60% of a humanoid robot’s component costs. The challenge is industrial scale. Many critical components require specialized manufacturing, precision engineering and supplier capabilities that are not yet ready for mass production. This creates an opportunity beyond robot manufacturers. Companies that can build reliable, scalable component supply chains may capture significant value as humanoid robotics expands. The competitive advantage may ultimately belong not only to those developing the smartest robots, but also to those capable of manufacturing them economically at scale. Source: McKinsey & Company, “Turning humanoid supply chain constraints into billion-dollar wins” @ramonvidall @ricardo_ik_ahau @timo_vi @ozsilverfox @sulefati7 @faryus88 @DioOmega @Nicochan33 @RLDI_Lamy @jameslhbartlett @corixpartners @Corix_JC @Transform_Sec @TCyberCast @ILoveBooks786 @COSTESLionelEr @FrRonconii @violetainsights @timo_vi @BCAgroup @dinisguarda

BREAKING: Elon Musk just shared this incredible footage of how SpaceX plans to catch the Starship.

🔥 JUST IN: Unitree unveils its H2-X humanoid robot, designed to “serve and guard” with up to 8 hours of endurance.

Researchers proved every LLM is secretly obsessed with Japan. And they finally figured out why. They published a paper investigating hidden cultural biases in large language models. they tested 31,000 questions across 24 different languages on models like gemini, chatgpt, claude, and llama. they stripped out all geographic hints and just asked the models to pick a place and answer. the finding was universal.. across a wide range of models and languages, there is a pervasive "obsession" with japanese culture. even when you prompt them in a language with zero ties to japan, they default to japanese norms, values, and aesthetics at a disproportionately high rate compared to its actual global demographic weight. the craziest part? they tracked down exactly when the ai develops this obsession.. and it is not from reading the raw internet. during pre-training, the models actually have a fairly balanced, global view of the world. the obsession gets injected during the safety phase. when tech companies fine-tune these models to be "helpful, harmless, and polite," the ai starts mapping those corporate safety guidelines directly onto japanese cultural concepts. in the pursuit of creating the perfect, inoffensive, compliant assistant, they warped how the models view the world. the quantization process (compressing models to run faster locally) actually amplifies this determinism. the smaller and faster your local model is, the more stereotypically it behaves, causing japanese cultural tropes to spike hard. we spend all this time worrying about existential ai safety, but the real alignment problem is that our most advanced reasoning engines are hyper-fixated on japanese internet culture. every model upgrade is reinforcing an invisible regional bias that dictates how they generate stories, facts, and code. the cultural commonsense of the internet is not universal.. it’s just localized to whatever the heaviest reddit and anime wiki users were obsessed with.