I had a choice the other day in Shanghai: Which Tomorrowland to visit? Should I check out the fake, American-designed Tomorrowland at Shanghai Disneyland, or should I visit the real Tomorrowland — the massive new research center, roughly the size of 225 football fields, built by the Chinese technology giant Huawei? I went to Huawei’s.

Can exploring polyamory both break you and make you?

Expecting a spouse to be both friend and lover is a relatively new concept. Some think it's asking too much.
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Until the mid-1800s, marriage in the United States mostly revolved around ensuring partners had their basic needs (like food and shelter) met — what Dr. Finkel calls the "pragmatic era." Between 1850 and 1965, marriage entered the "love-based era" — in which the primary relationship functions were about love and companionship, he said. Since then, we have been in the "self-expressive" era — in which marriage is about not only love, but also personal growth.
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"The marital relationship has taken on more and more responsibility for our social and psychological needs," Dr. Finkel said.
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“Couples need some kind of ‘glue’ — commitment, shared values, sex, finances — something,” he said, but it doesn’t need to be friendship.

Ms. Lopez is opting out of the bedmate-as-BFF paradigm.

“I think we put so many expectations and responsibilities on our partners,” she said. “I’m not here to be everything and all things to you.”

The Embryo Question is a three-part series about the cluster of cells at the crossroads of science, ethics and the law.

On June 24, 2022, the same day the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I received a call from the fertility clinic where I’d been undergoing in vitro fertilization, informing me that seven of my fertilized eggs had made it to the five-day-old blastocyst stage.

The next morning, I went to the clinic, lay down on a table and watched on a black-and-white screen as one of the seven — the one the embryologist had deemed the most likely to develop into a child — was transferred into my uterus. It was an unsettling moment to find myself responsible for half a dozen embryos.

The Embryo Question is a three-part series about the cluster of cells at the crossroads of science, ethics and the law. Read the introduction.

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The artificial intelligence start-up said the new system, OpenAI o3, outperformed leading A.I. technologies on tests that rate skills in math, science, coding and logic.

Mr. Achim, the chief executive and co-founder of a Silicon Valley start-up called Harmonic, is part of growing effort to build a new kind of A.I. that never hallucinates. Today, this technology is focused on mathematics. But many leading researchers believe they can extend the same techniques into computer programming and other areas.
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Because math is a rigid discipline with formal ways of proving whether an answer is right or wrong, companies like Harmonic can build A.I. technologies that check their own answers and learn to produce reliable information.



Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s central A.I. lab, recently unveiled a system called AlphaProof that operates in this way. Competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad, the premier math competition for high schoolers, the system achieved “silver medal” performance, solving four of the competition’s six problems. It was the first time a machine had reached that level.



“This is a path around hallucinations,” said David Silver, a principal research scientist at Google DeepMind. “Proof is a form of truth.”

How is a reasoning chatbot different from earlier chatbots?
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You could ask earlier chatbots to show you how they had reached a particular answer or to check their own work. Because the original ChatGPT had learned from text on the internet, where people showed how they had gotten to an answer or checked their own work, it could do this kind of self-reflection, too.



But a reasoning system goes further. It can do these kinds of things without being asked. And it can do them in more extensive and complex ways.

Let me put it another way: We use cost-benefit analysis when we are operating in a prosaic frame of mind. But I don't think anything great was ever accomplished in a prosaic frame of mind. People commit to great projects, they endure hard challenges, because they are entranced, enchanted. Some notion or activity has grabbed them, set its hooks inside them, aroused some possibility, fired the imagination.
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By the time you've reached craftsman status, you don't just love the product, you love the process, the tiny disciplines, the long hours, the remorseless work. You may want to be a rock star, but if you don't love the arduous process of making music and touring, you won't succeed.
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"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." That's an exaggeration, but not by much.
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Henry Moore exaggerated but still captured the essential point: “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is — it must be something you cannot possibly do!”

As the Trump administration has responded with a mixture of denials, brush-offs, lies and vitriolic attacks on Mr. Goldberg, I’ve found myself worrying less about the leak and more about the character of the people in charge of our nation’s defense. The breach is serious, but security breaches can be plugged. Men and women who have shown themselves to have no character, though, can never be trusted. Not with national security, not with anything.

Perhaps it seems old-fashioned to talk of character. We’re cynical modern Americans, after all. When idealism feels exhausted and the old order seems insufficient to meet the challenges of the modern world, candid appeals to raw interest, however amoral, can feel like a breath of fresh air. That’s part of Donald Trump’s appeal.
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But there remains constant talk of character in the military — of integrity and accountability. This is not just for moral reasons but also for practical ones: You cannot ask men and women to go to war in a group bound by nothing stronger than self-interest. How could they trust their comrades and their leaders when their lives are on the line?

This is why a military career starts not with training in lethality but with character formation.

For the last couple of months, I have had this strange experience: Person after person — from artificial intelligence labs, from government — has been coming to me saying: It’s really about to happen. We’re about to get to artificial general intelligence.

What they mean is that they have believed, for a long time, that we are on a path to creating transformational artificial intelligence capable of doing basically anything a human being could do behind a computer — but better. They thought it would take somewhere from five to 15 years to develop. But now they believe it’s coming in two to three years, during Donald Trump’s second term.

They believe it because of the products they’re releasing right now and what they’re seeing inside the places they work. And I think they’re right.

.Behold the decade of mid tech!

That is what I want to say every time someone asks me, “What about A.I.?” with the breathless anticipation of a boy who thinks this is the summer he finally gets to touch a boob. I’m far from a Luddite. It is precisely because I use new technology that I know mid when I see it.

Academics are rarely good stand-ins for typical workers. But the mid technology revolution is an exception. It has come for us first. Some of it has even come from us, genuinely exciting academic inventions and research science that could positively contribute to society. But what we’ve already seen in academia is that the use cases for artificial intelligence across every domain of work and life have started to get silly really fast. Most of us aren’t using A.I. to save lives faster and better. We are using A.I. to make mediocre improvements, such as emailing more. Even the most enthusiastic papers about A.I.’s power to augment white-collar work have struggled to come up with something more exciting than “A brief that once took two days to write will now take two hours!”

Mid tech’s best innovation is a threat.

A.I. is one of many technologies that promise transformation through iteration rather than disruption.

The political fights over abortion demand a great deal of attention. But embryos also demand and warrant a meaningful conversation about everything they represent: values, knowledge, family, religion, health, life, death and more. The boundaries of what we are doing with embryos are shifting quickly. Any attempt to shape the future of how we treat them has to engage with these questions now.

In "Self-Organization of the Human Embryo in the Absence of Maternal Tissues," published in 2016, she and her co-authors detailed how, even with no mom in sight, a human embryo is capable of ambling down its developmental path on autopilot, well past the point when it would have normally implanted in the uterus.

After Dr. Zernicka-Goetz and her team's successful experiment, another group, led by Ali Brivanlou at Rockefeller University, cultured embryos to Day 14. There is still more to be discovered within the bounds of the 14-day rule, as Dr. Zernicka-Goetz acknowledges. But many in the scientific community are already anticipating that crucial breakthroughs — the discoveries that might teach us why some babies are born with developmental defects, why some organs fail to grow properly and what causes miscarriages later in pregnancy — await us on the other side.
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Most scientists working on these models, including Dr. Zernicka-Goetz, say the chances are almost nonexistent that any of them, for now, could go on to become a baby. (Models like these are being developed by teams elsewhere in the United States and in Israel, Britain and China, among other places.) In any case, implanting one in a human uterus would be an ethical breach, prohibited in countries that regulate this type of research, and a scientific scandal of the highest order.

But from a research perspective, the most important question is that of fidelity: How similar are these models to the real thing? If they skip a few of the developmental steps that a natural embryo passes through, as the models currently do, can we trust whatever they do next? As a group of scientists and medical ethicists, writing in Nature Methods, argued, if it's not permissible in many countries to create egg-and-sperm embryos specifically for research purposes, why is it ethically preferable to create stem-cell-derived models that will become increasingly similar to natural embryos? And how can we assess their faithfulness to real embryos after 14 days without continuing to learn about the development of natural embryos anyway?
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After the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996, Dr. Kass argued in his essay "The Wisdom of Repugnance" that certain prospects — incest, cannibalism and, he would add, human cloning — inspire a revulsion that needs no rationalization. This repugnance, he writes, is a sign that "we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things we rightfully hold dear."

It is too early to tell how President Trump will govern embryo research in his second term. It took until two years into his first administration for the Department of Health and Human Services to address the issue, but its actions were severe: It cut nearly all of its spending on research involving human fetal tissue. To add an extra layer of review for any projects that involved such tissue, the agency appointed an ethics review board whose members included many outspoken opponents of abortion
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In February the president signed an executive order that calls for policy recommendations to protect access to I.V.F. and lower its costs (“because we want more babies,” Mr. Trump said in an accompanying statement).

The administration has a more limited ability to affect the 14-day rule, which in the United States isn’t a law but a guideline. Embryo research and research on fetal tissue are permitted on a state-by-state basis — New York, for example, has no limit on how long embryos may be grown for research purposes, whereas in California the guideline is 12 days — mirroring in some ways the current state of abortion access. The government has imposed restrictions through its federal funding, but much of the research on early human development relies on private funding from wealthy donors, foundations or venture capitalists.

So far, the issue has not yet garnered much public attention. It is possible this lack of awareness reflects the way that abortion — which has always been a proxy for a thousand other questions about gender, social roles and autonomy — has sucked almost all the air out of the room.

But pushing the frontiers of scientific research demands a broader discussion that transcends niche communities, especially in an area that could transform the nature of reproduction.

By Mira Rojanasakul March 20, 2025
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A constellation of satellites orbiting 250 miles above Earth’s surface shows how solar and wind have taken off in recent years:


China leads the world in installed solar and wind capacity by a wide and growing margin. The pace has rapidly increased, with sprawling projects marching across the country’s interior. But in China and many other developing nations, the use of coal and gas is also still rising.

In the United States, electricity from solar and wind combined surpassed coal for the first time last year. Solar alone accounted for more than 80 percent of new capacity added in 2024, a third of which was installed in Texas. And in California, the addition of utility-scale battery storage helped to extend solar power after dark and to stabilize nearby grids.

In the European Union, solar and wind generated nearly a third of the region’s electricity, more than all fossil fuels combined.

An explosion in proposed clean energy ventures has overwhelmed the system for connecting new power sources to homes and businesses.

The sites fight climate change and can help with another global crisis: the collapse of nature. But so far, efforts to nurture wildlife habitat have been spotty.

Legal experts said the president was testing the boundaries of executive power with aggressive orders designed to stop the country from transitioning to renewable energy.

By Lisa Friedman Coral Davenport and Brad Plumer
Jan. 21, 2025

Beijing is set to further increase its manufacturing and installation of solar panels as it seeks to master global markets and wean itself from imports.
.Keith Bradsher
Reporting from Beijing

The solar sector shows how China conducts industrial policy: It chooses industries to dominate, floods them with loans and lets companies fight it out.

The added capacity for the year was the most from any single source in more than two decades.

The department’s analysis provides only a broad outline, and many of the details will be decided by congressional lawmakers.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute