Free Republic

The first generation-IV nuclear reactor design has been approved for certification by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). NuScale's small modular reactor design promises safe, clean energy at radically reduced cost, land use and installation time.The NRC released news last week that its staff have been directed to make a final rule certifying the NuScale reactor design for use in the United States. This is just the seventh design approved by the NRC since it was established in 1974, and the first of a coming generation of next-gen technologies designed to make nuclear power cheaper, easier and safer to implement...

A bill currently in the works in the North Carolina legislature would allocate $50,000 to get rid of free public EV chargers unless free gas pumps are built alongside. Politicians have to run on some kind of platform, and Ben Moss—my incoming state House representative here in North Carolina's District 52—decided that his animating principle is Being Mad at Electricity. To prove his animosity toward this invisible menace, he's sponsoring House Bill 1049, which would allocate $50,000 to destroy free public car chargers. It contains some other enlightened ideas, but that's the main theme: We've simply got to do something...

Car thieves are turning to a two-person system that, with the help of technology, allows them to pop the locks on cars with keyless entry and then – if the vehicle has keyless start – drive off. “They’re very bold,” Jason Flenniken of south Austin, Texas said, according to WOIA-TV. Flenniken said his neighborhood has been hit by thieves using what are known as relay devices to get into locked vehicles. “There were at least three people that were roaming around our particular street,” said Flenniken. “I know in the neighborhood that night we had a lot more valuables stolen,...

Twitter employees have reportedly struggled with the news that the company is on the verge of being acquired by Tesla CEO Elon Musk with some of them too "shocked" to speak over the billionaire’s plans to promote freedom of speech. Several Twitter employees expressed serious concerns and fear over Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the company including a prominent worry that Musk would undo censorship mechanisms they had worked to implement over the years, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The Mask Studies You Should KnowFirst, a primer on the levels of the different levels of quality of research and the “Hierarchy of evidence.” Not all studies are equal in their level of certainty or quality, but the absolute most reliable and most certainty we can get usually comes from Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Control Trials. See the chart below from the Center for Evidence Based Medicine:Luckily we have the highest possible evidence we can get on the effectiveness of masks. A Systematic Review of Randomized Control Trials. Cochrane Library (widely considered a gold standard in evidence based...

I have a new noun for your vocabulary: Holoportation. It's an amalgam of "hologram" and "teleportation," and though it may seem like it, it isn't just a niche sci-fi term buried somewhere in Isaac Asimov novels and Star Trek episodes. NASA flight surgeon Dr. Josef Schmid gives a space greeting Oct. 8, 2021, as he is holoported on to the International Space Station. In October, NASA used this mind-boggling, futuristic mechanism to bring NASA flight surgeon Dr. Josef Schmid onto the International Space Station while he was safely planted on our planet. No rockets necessary. Schmid was joined on this...

“When porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) showed up, I was boots on the ground. When porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) rolled in, I was boots on the ground,” [Scott] Dee says. He’s served the pork industry as a swine practitioner for 12 years, a university professor for 12 years, and a researcher for 11 years – allowing him to see the industry from so many different perspectives. Maybe it was that unique vantage point, combined with his different way of looking at the problems at hand that helped him achieve legendary success over the years and is behind his...

Pinterest has become the first major social network to implement a ban on users posting misinformation about climate change. The image-focused social platform is putting in place new rules that means it will no longer be possible to post content that denies the existence or impacts of climate change, the human influence on climate change, or that climate change is backed by scientific consensus. Misleading posts, including those that misrepresent scientific data will also be banned.

Facebook's corporate parent sought to cast its rival as harmful to teenagers and a danger to society. In an increasingly desperate bid to reduce the appeal of TikTok, Facebook’s parent company Meta quietly paid a Republican consulting firm to smear the social media rival as a danger to society. Internal emails obtained by The Washington Post show how Targeted Victory, a GOP strategy group, seeded anti-TikTok stories in local media across the country at the behest of Meta as Meta’s family of apps failed to attract young users. One email from a Targeted Victory director in February, for instance, instructed...

Okta, the $25 billion market cap company that handles logins for more than 100 million users, today confirmed it suffered a breach in January via a third party customer support provider. But for some customers who spoke to Forbes, the disclosure was too late and too scant with information. Okta’s admittance came after a hacking crew called LAPSUS$, which extorts its targets after stealing their data and often leaks victims’ information in public forums, claimed it had breached the company. LAPSUS$ had previously claimed to have stolen data from major security companies including NVIDIA and Microsoft, leading both to investigate...

Government Control of What You Buy Grows More Popular With governments, that is. You’d be surprised at how far along they are with digital currency and how detailed the control could beRecently, we looked at a new idea governments are looking at — programmable digital currency. It’s all digital, issued by government, constantly trackable, and can’t be spent on items not approved by government (or only with penalties). The Federal Reserve Board (the United States’ central bank) explains, bureaucratically,Potential benefits of the “digital cash” model using programmable UTXOs are the ability to specify spending constraints on any discrete amount...

The Chips are DownA Chinese invasion of Taiwan would crater American tech dominance and military readiness.Russia’s nuclear arsenal is the principal reason given by the United States and NATO for refusing to engage Russia directly in Ukraine. Nuclear war also will be a risk if China invades Taiwan.There are, of course, differences in an analysis of the U.S. response to a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. For one, without NATO, the U.S. would largely face China on its own. Also, China has a stronger claim on Taiwan than Russia does on Ukraine. On the other hand, much more importantly to...

Will a mass transition to electric vehicles (EVs) cause the electric power grid to collapse? Some argue that EVs will make the grid unstable, which could mean hefty investments to upgrade existing infrastructures in order to withstand the electricity uptake

Quaise Energy, a startup out of MIT, based in Boston and Houston, recently secured $40 million in funding to help it get the first drilling rig off the drawing board. The system works by drilling down to base rock, then firing high-power millimeter waves into the ground, without the need for complex mechanical drills that are limited by the pressure and intense heat deep into the crust. Regular metal drills get broken or just melt beyond a certain depth, when the heat and pressure becomes too much for them to handle. The goal is to be able to repurpose existing...

(Reuters) - Donald Trump's new social media venture, Truth Social, appears set to launch in Apple's App Store on Monday, according to posts from an executive on a test version viewed by Reuters, potentially marking the return of the former president to social media on the U.S. Presidents Day holiday. The launch would restore Trump's presence on social media more than a year after he was banned from Twitter Inc, Facebook and Alphabet Inc's YouTube.

How the CDC Abandoned ScienceMass youth hospitalizations, COVID-induced diabetes, and other myths from the brave new world of science as political propagandaThe main federal agency guiding America’s pandemic policy is the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which sets widely adopted policies on masking, vaccination, distancing, and other mitigation efforts to slow the spread of COVID and ensure the virus is less morbid when it leads to infection. The CDC is, in part, a scientific agency—they use facts and principles of science to guide policy—but they are also fundamentally a political agency: The director is appointed by the president of the...

If your mobile phone is more than a few years old, you may need to upgrade your device before your mobile provider shuts down its 3G network, to avoid losing service. For more information on your mobile providers' plans for 3G retirement and how you can prepare, contact your provider directly. What is happening? Mobile carriers are shutting down their 3G networks, which rely on older technology, to make room for more advanced network services, including 5G. As a result, many older cell phones will be unable to make or receive calls and texts, including calls to 911, or use...

Coming to Grips With the Facts About Masks Allegations that “masks work” and “don’t cause harm” have been enforced by governments and corporations around the world for more than 18 months through arrests, firings, censorship, fines, and denial of access to schools, supermarkets, hospitals, streets, and other public spaces. This has made it virtually impossible for many people to live without complying with mask mandates. In recent weeks, however, more medical scholars and media outlets are coming to grips with facts about masks that Just Facts has been documenting for more than a year and painstakingly compiled in a September...

The supply chain for electric-vehicle batteries is uncomfortably dependent on China—for now, at least Competing with a much better-established Chinese industry isn’t an obvious proposition for investors, even with subsidies thrown in. That leaves U.S. car makers tentatively leading even the upstream supply-chain push, in alliance with the Energy Department. The future of EVs is often assumed to depend on solving consumer problems such as slow charging infrastructure and range anxiety. Instead, they could be slowed down more by the conundrum of building the foundations of a battery industry.

It used to be that 90% of the time, you accessed stuff only on your computer’s local network. Then in 1993 at the University of Illinois, Marc Andreessen developed Mosaic, the first internet browser, which allowed users to wander around the World Wide Web 90% of the time. He moved to Silicon Valley and founded Netscape. Mr. Andreessen is now a general partner at a top-decile venture-capital firm, better than 90% of its peers. Andreessen Horowitz recently raised $9 billion in new funds.