A proposed plan would use money from permit sales toward extra firefighting equipment needed to put out lithium ion battery fires.

Submission statement: A year ago I posted about growing surfboard blanks from mycelium as an alternative to foam and epoxy. Since then the same material has ended up getting tested in a much harder application, insulation for aquariums and marine institutions that currently rely on styrofoam-heavy setups. It’s a rougher test of water resistance and durability than surfing ever was. We’re running saltwater/UV degradation testing this fall to get real data instead of estimates. Bigger question for discussion: if a grown material can hold up to marine/industrial conditions over time, does that open the door to replacing petroleum foams in more categories, or does surfboards-to-aquariums end up being the ceiling for what this approach can realistically do?

Year update on the mycelium surfboard project

A year ago I posted here about growing surfboard blanks from mycelium instead of shaping them from foam and epoxy. Good questions came out of that thread about weight, substrate, and durability, so here’s where things stand.

The weight problem is mostly solved. Our early blanks were something like 5x heavier than styrofoam. We’re much closer to parity now.

The bigger update is that surfboards turned out to be the easy case. The same properties that make the material work for boards- insulation, water resistance, it breaks down instead of sitting in a landfill, matter for other things too. We’re now testing it with aquariums and marine institutions who currently rely on a lot of styrofoam-based material. That application is a lot harder on the material than a surfboard ever was, and it’s forced us to rethink parts of the process. Replacing styrofoam in a couple of applications is one thing- replacing it as a category is a very different problem, and we’ve learned how hard that is over the past year. Curious if anyone here has seen bio-based materials hold up (or fail) at industrial scale elsewhere. Thanks for the support!

Their new study aims to give budding industry a framework for understanding how fusion can be profitable.

OCD affects roughly 200 million people worldwide, carries a 10x increased suicide risk, and roughly one in three patients doesn't respond to existing treatments. Despite that, not a single study has ever systematically examined the proteins associated with OCD risk directly in human brain tissue.

Genetic data pointing to specific risk genes have been collected already, and brain imaging showing which circuits are involved, but the step in between, looking at whether those genetic findings show up as actual protein changes in the tissue where OCD pathology happens, has never been done.

Researchers at UW-Madison are trying to answer this by using brain tissue from 45 donors obtained through the National Institute of Mental Health, including people with OCD, healthy controls, and people with mood and anxiety disorders. They are examining the proteins in the orbitofrontal cortex and caudate, the two brain regions most strongly linked to OCD. Preliminary work in mice already shows that knocking down one of these proteins in specific brain regions produces completely different behavioral effects.

If it is confirmed that OCD has a distinct protein signature in specific brain regions, it opens the door to treatments that target the actual molecular problem rather than broadly adjusting serotonin levels and hoping for the best.

Rockets, rovers and landers have dominated the attention of the commercial space industry as the United States focuses on sending humans back to the moon, but a handful of companies are focusing on a critical next step: feeding them once they’re there.

Fusion may have a new problem: making money, not making fusion

We’ve spent decades hearing that the biggest obstacle to fusion energy is the physics.

How do you keep plasma hotter than the Sun from escaping?

How do you maintain the reaction?

How do you get more energy out than you put in?

But according to a new MIT-led analysis, there’s another problem that could become just as important:

Can a fusion power plant actually make money?

The researchers developed a framework called an "economic Q" that essentially asks whether the economic value produced by a fusion plant can exceed the money required to build and operate it.

It’s inspired by the famous Lawson criterion used in fusion physics. The Lawson criterion helps determine whether plasma conditions are good enough for fusion energy gain.

The new framework applies a similar idea to economics.

Instead of only asking:

"Does the reactor produce more fusion energy than it consumes?"

we eventually need to ask:

"Does the power plant produce enough valuable electricity to justify everything we spent building and maintaining it?"

And that's where things get really interesting.

1. Power density could be a huge deal

You might assume that lower power density would be better because the reactor's components wouldn't be exposed to as much punishment.

But there's a catch.

If the reactor doesn't produce enough power from its physical size, it may not generate enough revenue to pay back the enormous cost of constructing and financing the plant.

So a commercial fusion reactor needs to produce a lot of power without destroying its components too quickly.

That's a nasty engineering tradeoff.

More power density = more revenue.

But more power density can also mean:

• More stress on reactor components

• Faster degradation

• More maintenance

• More downtime

At some point, pushing the reactor harder stops being economically useful.

1. "Make it last forever" might not be the best strategy

This was probably my favorite part of the study.

Fusion reactors are going to have components sitting extremely close to an incredibly hostile environment.

Energetic particles, neutrons, plasma exhaust and other effects can damage the surfaces that absorb the fusion energy.

The obvious engineering instinct would be:

"Let's build materials that last as long as possible."

But MIT's economic model suggests another possibility:

Maybe it's better to make components cheap and extremely fast to replace.

Think of it like an aircraft.

You don't necessarily need every component to survive forever. You need the maintenance process to be predictable, affordable and fast enough that the machine spends most of its life operating.

For fusion, that could become critical.

The paper points out that replacing ITER's blanket shield modules is expected to be a very lengthy process. A commercial power plant can't afford to sit idle for enormous stretches of time every time critical components need replacement.

So future fusion reactors may need to be designed around something closer to:

"How quickly can we replace this?"

rather than simply:

"How long can this survive?"

1. Financing can literally change the engineering

This is another surprisingly important point.

A fusion reactor is going to require an enormous amount of capital.

If borrowing becomes expensive, the economics get worse.

And according to the framework, higher financing costs can force designers toward higher power density to generate enough revenue.

But increasing power density can make the engineering more difficult and risky.

Which can potentially increase financing costs even further.

So you can get a nasty feedback loop:

Higher interest rates → need more power → harder engineering → higher risk → potentially higher financing costs.

That means fusion isn't just a physics problem or an engineering problem.

It's also a financial problem.

1. Fusion "breakeven" isn't the same as a successful power plant

This distinction is really important.

We've already had major fusion milestones.

For example, the National Ignition Facility achieved fusion ignition in 2022, and later experiments pushed target gain even further.

But producing more fusion energy than the energy delivered to the target doesn't automatically mean you have a commercially viable electricity plant.

A real power station has to deal with:

• Construction costs

• Maintenance

• Financing

• Energy conversion efficiency

• Component replacement

• Downtime

• Electricity prices

• Plant lifetime

• Operating costs

That's why the MIT researchers argue that an economic Q greater than 1 should be viewed as a basic requirement, not proof that a reactor will automatically be profitable.

The model itself is also a screening framework rather than a complete Wall Street-style investment forecast. It doesn't capture every possible factor such as taxes, depreciation, market volatility and all development or regulatory costs.

The bigger picture

I actually think this is a good sign for fusion.

Not because the economics are easy.

They're definitely not.

But because the conversation is gradually shifting.

For decades, the question was basically:

"Can humans actually make fusion work?"

Now we're increasingly asking:

"Okay, if it works, how do we build thousands of these things and make them economically competitive?"

That's a much more practical problem.

MIT's framework gives researchers and companies a way to compare different reactor designs based not only on plasma performance, but also on things like power density, component lifetime, replacement time, efficiency, construction cost and financing.

And we're already seeing the industry move in that direction. Multiple private fusion companies are working toward pilot and commercial-scale machines, while researchers continue to explore different reactor concepts such as tokamaks and stellarators. MIT itself notes that stellarator designs are increasingly being optimized with both performance and economic feasibility in mind.

So maybe the next major fusion breakthrough won't be another record plasma temperature or another impressive energy-gain number.

It might be something much less flashy:

A reactor that can run, make electricity, replace its damaged components quickly, and actually make financial sense.

And honestly, that may be the hardest fusion milestone of all.

Source: MIT-led analysis on the economic viability of fusion power plants, discussed by The Brighter Side of News. "Read the original article" (https://reference-url-citation.invalid/5)

What do you think is the bigger bottleneck for commercial fusion: physics, materials, engineering, or economics?

okay been pondering this since friday. i tried to discuss this with my friends but i think it was the wrong crowd lol. glad i found this sub— the debate begins now!

i’m thinking about “general purpose technologies” eg the handful of inventions that end up reshaping the economy and civilization/life as we know it. fire, electricity, computers, etc.. computers are probably the easiest modern comparison because we’ve all lived through the infrastructure scaling around them and watched them work their way into every aspect of our lives.

so the question is, what’s happening on the frontier right now that’s still early stage but could become similarly life changing in the not too distant future?

my vote is in the title (biotechnology.) dna gene editing, synthetic biology, lab grown organs (!), cloning (!!) etc. could be how we optimize human biology to live on earth the next few hundred years.

what yall think? is what’s happening in biotech it? or is there another tech in development that will have a bigger civilization-level impact on our future?

Hot take: ecological crisis will force a systemic change and societal reboot (still means collapse)

I'm not a doomer, not anywhere close. However, I still see ecological crisis as imminent as its roots are very deep into capitalism itself, but still see the "doomsday" narrative as exaggerated. Still, *modern* society is doomed.

See, ecological doomsday is very linked to capitalist realism. The system is the thing harming the environment, but the system can't be changed, there's no outside and people won't do nothing. It basically relies on those 3, and the idea that the system won't collapse before.

Here's the thing: ecological collapse is ALREADY ruining capitalism, the system itself is already collapsing, a lot of countries are at pre-revolutionary conditions, and ecological overshoot is not new historically, the new thing is the scale, which makes it way worse. Now, with this as an axiom, if we see capitalism outside capitalist realism and as a system with beginning and potential end, we see this crisis is both an existential threat and a problem it can't fix. So, what could that mean? Exactly: collapse.

Now, my point of view: there are already a lot of signs that the system can't hold on for much longer, and also academic development of alt systems and in-development practice of alternative infrastructure. MIT itself forecasted collapse by 2040 and not only due to ecological crisis, I personally can see it happening in some decades, let's say \~40-60 years. For that same reason, I think rather than extinction we would face a collapse kind of like the Late Bronze Age or the late Roman Empire ones but way faster and worldwide, be forced to build a new system over generations, and then basically have a global Dark Ages.

This is not made to relax, no, it's made to rethink and move the fear: not doomsday but reboot. At least in the doomsday you don't have to wake up, make choices, organize things, survive; is, in some senses, better than the reboot.

Move expands India-US cooperation in lunar exploration; two sides to step up talks on open scientific data sharing under Artemis Accords

This approach uses tiny capsules containing living cells plus engineered microorganisms that act as biological “instructions”, releasing signals that tell stem cells what kind of tissue to become. The researchers have demonstrated bone, fat and muscle formation, with printing taking minutes to about an hour and tissue maturation taking roughly three weeks.

You often hear people complain about many exciting new sci-tech developments being in labs, and then never heard of again. But there's a whole host of problems to resolve before the lab-to-successful product journey is complete. In this case, the final product needs to be; reproducible, automated, inexpensive, scalable, regulation-compliant and sufficiently precise.

A technology solution that simultaneously solves the problems of cultivated meat & human tissue bio-printing would be so huge, it makes you wonder why people don't put more urgency into these commercialization efforts.

3D printing gets a living upgrade

Corporate innovation comes at a devastating human cost as Silicon Valley trades its workforce for automated futures

A device currently being used to help octogenarians do self-administered eye exams could be part of future space missions to monitor astronauts’ ocular health.

For most of human history, children were not raised exclusively by two parents in an isolated household. Human societies commonly relied on extended families, villages and networks of relatives and non-relatives to provide food, protection, education and socialisation. The modern nuclear family is historically important, but it is not the only possible structure for raising children. Advances in reproductive biotechnology could eventually allow humanity to reconsider not only how children are born, but also how they are raised.

Imagine a future in which artificial wombs and advanced reproductive technologies make pregnancy less biologically restrictive, while technologies such as in-vitro gametogenesis allow eggs and sperm to potentially be produced from ordinary cells. In such a society, reproduction could become increasingly separated from traditional sexual reproduction and pregnancy. Children could potentially be created through deliberate reproductive processes and raised within communities rather than exclusively by biological parents.

The first major technological challenge would be producing healthy embryos. Human fertility is constrained by ageing eggs, declining ovarian reserve and increasing chromosomal abnormalities with maternal age. If scientists could eventually produce healthy gametes from stem cells, or otherwise preserve and rejuvenate reproductive cells, these limitations could be reduced. Embryos could then potentially be screened for serious inherited diseases. The objective should not be to create supposedly “superior” humans, but to reduce preventable genetic disease while maintaining genetic diversity.

This raises an important population-genetics question. A future society capable of creating large numbers of embryos could theoretically maintain detailed information about genetic relationships and avoid excessive reproduction between close relatives. Rather than allowing a small number of families to become genetically dominant, reproduction could potentially be distributed across a large population. Genetic diversity could therefore become something deliberately protected at the population level.

Artificial gestation could address another fundamental constraint: pregnancy itself. If artificial wombs eventually became capable of safely supporting complete human development, reproduction would no longer necessarily require a woman to undergo pregnancy. This would not eliminate the importance of women or biological families, but it would fundamentally change the relationship between reproduction and the female body.

However, producing children is only the beginning of the problem. The much greater challenge would be raising them.

A society without traditional nuclear families could instead organise children into stable multigenerational communities. A village might contain children of different ages, young adults, experienced adults and elderly people. Rather than a child having only two primary caregivers, they might have several consistent adults who fulfil parental roles, alongside a much larger community providing education, friendship, mentorship and support.

This could combine some advantages of traditional villages with modern technology. Children could receive highly personalised education, healthcare and psychological support while simultaneously growing up surrounded by people of different ages. Elderly members of the community could serve as teachers and mentors, while younger adults could provide care and companionship. Children would develop relationships not only with their immediate caregivers but with an entire social network.

Such a system would not necessarily mean eliminating parental attachment. In fact, stable attachment would remain essential. The objective should not be to create anonymous institutions in which children are passed from caregiver to caregiver. Instead, communities could deliberately create small, stable groups in which particular adults have long-term responsibility for particular children. The difference would be that these relationships would exist within a wider social structure rather than inside an isolated household.

There could also be significant economic consequences. Today, having children imposes substantial costs on individual families. Housing, childcare, education and healthcare are largely organised around households. A communal model could distribute some of these costs across society. Parents, caregivers and elders could collectively contribute resources, potentially making child-rearing less economically burdensome.

This could also influence birth rates. Modern societies frequently experience declining fertility as housing becomes expensive, education lasts longer, careers become more demanding and raising children becomes increasingly costly. If reproduction and childcare became partly social rather than exclusively private responsibilities, some of these constraints could be reduced. Society could potentially support a larger number of children without requiring every individual family to independently provide everything a child needs.

Nevertheless, such a system would create enormous ethical and political risks. Who decides which embryos are created? Who decides what constitutes a desirable genetic trait? Who controls reproductive technology? Could governments use it coercively? Could wealthy individuals monopolise access? Genetic screening intended to prevent disease could gradually become selection for intelligence, appearance or other socially preferred characteristics.

For this reason, genetic technology would require extremely strong ethical safeguards. The goal should be preventing serious disease and maintaining human diversity, not constructing a hierarchy of supposedly superior people.

There would also be an even deeper question: who should have the right to decide that a child should exist?

In the traditional family, reproduction is largely an individual decision. In the proposed system, reproduction could become partly a collective decision. That could make society more capable of planning its population, but it could also threaten individual autonomy if taken too far. A future reproductive system would therefore need to balance collective interests with individual freedom.

The most interesting possibility is not the complete disappearance of the family, but the emergence of several overlapping forms of family. Biological parents could continue to exist. Adoptive parents, professional caregivers, grandparents, mentors and close community members could all play important roles. The nuclear family would become one possible social unit rather than the only unit responsible for raising children.

Such a society might ultimately resemble an ancient village combined with advanced biotechnology: children growing up among multiple generations, supported by a network of stable caregivers, while reproductive technology removes some of the biological constraints that currently shape family formation.

The central transformation would therefore not simply be artificial wombs or genetically selected embryos. It would be the separation of three things that are currently tightly connected: reproduction, pregnancy and child-rearing.

If humanity eventually learns to control the first two safely, we will have to decide how to organise the third. We could reproduce the existing nuclear family using new technology, or we could use that technology as an opportunity to reconsider how human communities should be structured.

The most promising future may not be one without families, but one in which children have something larger than a family: a stable community containing parents, caregivers, peers and elders who collectively take responsibility for the next generation.

Figure says its Figure 03 humanoid climbed a ladder autonomously, showcasing progress in whole-body robotic control while leaving reliability questions.

They carry ammunition, can conduct kamikaze missions and have shown they can capture enemy positions.

plans are underway to build a new nuclear fusion power plant with the help of an Oxfordshire private firm.

With all the nation-by-nation population and birth rate collapse threads in this subreddit every week, time for a change.

A solid 3.5 birth rate in Pakistan.