Author: easyfilo

Enlarge / Vapor rises from the cooling towers of the nuclear plant of Dampierre-en-Burly near Orleans, central France, on October 23, 2018. (credit: GUILLAUME SOUVANT/AFP/Getty Images)

France is planning to build up to 14 nuclear reactors in an attempt to shore up the country’s aging nuclear fleet while also reducing the country’s carbon emissions. And while the first reactors won’t open for years, the announcement could serve to undercut Russia’s attempts to keep Europe dependent on natural gas.

President Emmanuel Macron announced the decision last week, saying that state-backed Électricité de France, also known as EDF, will build six new plants starting in 2028, with the option to build another eight by 2050. EDF estimates that six next-generation pressurized water reactors will cost around €50 billion ($57 billion). The first could be commissioned as early as 2035.

The move is a sharp reversal of Macron’s earlier pledge to close several reactors over the next decade or so. National politics almost certainly play a role—the nuclear power sector in France employs around 220,000 people, according to one estimate. “What our country needs is the rebirth of France’s nuclear industry,” Macron said at a nuclear turbine factory that EDF had just purchased from GE. “The time has come for a nuclear renaissance,” he said.

Enlarge / The Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, with S-Pen and outrageously slim bezels. (credit: Samsung)

People like Android tablets? That is the bizarro world presented to us by the latest news from Samsung. The company made the Galaxy Tab S8 lineup available for preorder last week, and now Samsung says the tablet is so popular that it had to stop taking preorders.

XDA Developers noticed preorders were shut down for some models and got the following statement from Samsung:

We are thrilled by the consumer response to our new Galaxy Tab S8 lineup. Due to the overwhelming demand in the last 48 hours, we will be pausing preorders at Samsung.com for the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra and Galaxy Tab S8. We are working quickly to meet consumer excitement and demand. Please stay tuned for more updates

Samsung launched three models of the S8 last week: the base model Tab S8, the Tab S8+, and the Tab S8 Ultra. Only the Tab S8+ is still up for sale, with the $699 Tab S8 and $1,099 Ultra model listed as “sold out.”

Enlarge / The white areas on the walls near Lake Mead provide an indication of how much its waters have dropped. (credit: Lingqi Xie)

About half of the contiguous US is currently experiencing moderate to extreme drought—including almost all of the West. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, as widely pervasive drought has been present for quite a while now in this region, where major reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead are hovering around all-time low-water levels. But how does this ongoing drought compare to the past? After all, the region is no stranger to dry stretches.

A 2020 paper examined the 2000-2018 data in the context of a tree ring reconstruction going back to the year 800 and stretching from Southern California to Wyoming. That team found that this was likely the second-driest period in the record, beat out only by a megadrought in the late 1500s.

At the time, the paper’s authors guessed that good precipitation in 2019 would be enough to end the extended drought. But instead, a particularly wicked 2021 kept the drought alive. As a result, three of those researchers—UCLA’s Park Williams and NASA’s Benjamin Cook and Jason Smerdon—decided to update the numbers through 2021.

Enlarge / Actress Reese Witherspoon during an interview on Thursday, December 17, 2021. (credit: NBC)

At 12:24 pm on January 11, the actor and entrepreneur Reese Witherspoon made a startling announcement to her 2.9 million Twitter followers. “In the (near) future, every person will have a parallel digital identity,” she wrote. “Avatars, crypto wallets, digital goods will be the norm. Are you planning for this?”

That final line struck a note of urgency. The metaverse is coming, was her message, and you haven’t packed your go bag yet?

Witherspoon’s tweet arrived amid a backlash against celebrities cheerleading the virtual world and pushing their fans into cyber currency. It was bad enough that for years we had been pummeled by crypto dudes for not diverting all of our cash reserves to bitcoin and HODLing no matter what. The Twitter history of “Bitcoin Billionaire” Tyler Winklevoss (who, with his twin bro, Cameron, has done very well since being punked by Mark Zuckerberg back at Harvard) is an endless barrage of FOMO pitches, delivered with the enigmatic faux-wisdom of a blockchain Buddha. “Because of bitcoin, the universe will never be the same,” he tweeted recently. Got that, God?