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Category: innovation

Bill Gates’ TerraPower gets NRC green light for safety in construction of its first nuclear plant

Nuclear power company TerraPower has passed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff’s final safety evaluation for a permit to build a reactor in Wyoming. The Washington-based company backed by Bill Gates and NVIDIA could be the first to deploy a utility-scale, next-generation reactor in America.

TerraPower’s Natrium design pairs a small modular reactor (SMR) with an integrated thermal battery. The SMR generates 345 megawatts of continuous electrical power. The thermal battery, which stores excess heat in molten salt, allows the system to surge its output to 500 megawatts for more than five hours, generating enough energy to power 400,000 homes at maximum capacity.

“Today is a momentous occasion for TerraPower, our project partners and the Natrium design,” said company CEO Chris Levesque in a statement issued Monday. The favorable assessment “reflects years of rigorous evaluation, thoughtful collaboration with the NRC, and an unwavering commitment to both safety and innovation.”

Scalable thermal drawing method creates liquid metal fibers for wearable electronics

Over the past decades, many research teams worldwide have started working on electronic fibers. These are yarn-like components with electronic properties that can be weaved or assembled to create new innovative textile-based electronics, clothes or other wearable systems that can sense their surroundings, monitor specific physiological signals or perform other functions.

Electronic fibers typically contain both regions via which electric current can flow (i.e., conductive domains) and insulating regions that store electric charge (i.e., dielectric domains). Reliably arranging these domains into complex architectures to produce fibers with desired properties can be difficult and most previously introduced methods are difficult to implement on a large scale.

Researchers at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne recently demonstrated the potential of a scalable technique known as thermal drawing for creating highly performing, elastomer and liquid metal-based electronic fibers. This approach, outlined in a paper published in Nature Electronics, allowed them to create electronic fibers that were successfully used to fabricate a new textile-based capacitive strain sensor.

Samsung launches its first multi-folding phone as competition from Chinese brands intensifies

Samsung Electronics’s Galaxy Z TriFold media day at Samsung Gangnam in Seoul, South Korea, on Dec. 2, 2025.

Anadolu | anadolu | getty images.

Samsung Electronics on Monday announced the launch of its first multi-folding smartphone as it races to keep pace with innovations from fast-moving rivals.

Why your faucet drips: Water jet breakup traced to angstrom-scale thermal capillary waves

Some phenomena in our daily lives are so commonplace that we don’t realize there could be some very interesting physics behind them. Take a dripping faucet: why does the continuous stream of water from a faucet eventually break up into individual droplets? A team of physicists studied this question and reached surprising conclusions.

The breakthrough in understanding how a water jet breaks up into droplets was made by a team consisting of Stefan Kooij, Daniel T. A. Jordan, Cees J. M. van Rijn, and Daniel Bonn from the University of Amsterdam (Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute / Institute of Physics), along with Neil M. Ribe from the Université Paris-Saclay. The study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

New Breakthrough to Strengthen Bone Could Reverse Osteoporosis

A recent study points to a key bone-strengthening mechanism at work in the body, which could be targeted to treat the bone-weakening disease, osteoporosis.

Led by researchers from the University of Leipzig in Germany and Shandong University in China, the study identified the cell receptor GPR133 (also known as ADGRD1) as being crucial to bone density, via bone-building cells called osteoblasts.

Variations in the GPR133 gene had previously been linked to bone density, leading scientists to turn their attention to the protein it encoded.

Underwriting Superintelligence: AIUC’s Insurance, Standards & Audits to Accelerate AI Adoption

Rune Kvist and Rajiv Dattani, co-founders of the AI Underwriting Company, reveal their innovative strategy for unlocking enterprise AI adoption. They detail how certifying and insuring AI agents, through rigorous technical standards, periodic audits, and insurance, builds crucial \.

Biology Breakthrough: Scientists Discover First New Plant Tissue in 160 Years — and It Supercharges Crop Yields

A research group led by Dr. Ryushiro Kasahara has discovered a new plant tissue essential for seed formation, which will be named in his honor. A research team at Nagoya University in Japan has identified a previously unknown plant tissue that plays a crucial role in forming seeds. This marks the

Meteorite crater hosts methane-making microbes—a clue to life on Mars?

Scientists have discovered living microbes producing methane in the fractured rocks deep inside Sweden’s Siljan impact crater, offering insights into Earth’s earliest life and the search for life beyond our planet.

This breakthrough not only sheds light on one of Earth’s most ancient metabolic processes —methanogenesis—but also strengthens the link between meteorite impact structures and microbial survival in extreme environments. The findings are published in the journal mBio.

Methanogenesis is considered one of the earliest metabolisms on Earth, and its presence in deep subsurface environments has long intrigued scientists. Now, for the first time, active microbial methane production has been confirmed in a terrestrial impact crater. Using cultures enriched from fluids 400 meters below the surface, the team demonstrated methane generation from several carbon sources, including indigenous oil.

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