In Abilene, about 200 miles west of Dallas, Natura Resources is building the nation’s first advanced liquid-fuel research reactor in nearly 40 years. The project is housed at Abilene Christian University, where a $25 million research facility was completed in September 2023.

Natura has raised $120 million in private funding and received another $120 million from the Legislature.

Natura’s technology uses molten salt as both fuel and coolant — a design last tested at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s. The company is first building a 1-megawatt research reactor in Abilene, intended to demonstrate to regulators and investors that the technology works and is safe.

...

Aalo Atomics is taking a different approach. The startup, founded by Canadian-born engineer Matt Loszak and based in Austin, is designing a sodium-cooled fast reactor, a technology that uses solid fuel, like conventional nuclear plants, built specifically for factory mass production.

Each unit would produce 10 megawatts, enough to power roughly 6,000 to 7,000 homes in Texas, and the reactors will be sized to fit on a standard truck. Aalo’s commercial model would consist of five of these units, totaling 50 megawatts.

Loszak said the company plans to activate its first 10 megawatt test reactor within about five months, after completing prototype testing at the end of December, as part of its effort to move toward commercial deployment.

A recording from Pablo Manríquez's live video

Hi all, I’m relatively new to this whole self-hosting thing and I have been loving it. I have several instances setup on my Debian server except for an audiobooks one. My wife loves audiobooks and asked me a way she can get audiobooks on the fly. I have searched online and found many.

Audiobookshelf is the most recommended one, but I don’t really know much about it beside what I read. Most of it I didn’t understand since I’ve never set up anything like that before. I don’t know the technical details on audiobooks like I do on music for example. So I’m not sure. Audiobookshelf has an app for iOS in test flight but its beta is full. And every client for it has an “in-app purchase” tag and I’m not sure what they hide behind a paywall. I’ve also read that Navidrome (which I already have set up on the sever) works, too but it needs to be “tagged” correctly. I’m not sure how to and what to use to tag audiobooks. I use kid3 for music, would it work for books, too?

I don’t want to commit and go through the whole setup then end up hitting roadblocks. So any info would be very much appreciated.

Thank you all.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is suing Coles in a lawsuit described as "the case of the century" by a former ACCC boss.

Yesterday, the ACCC accused Coles of a "planned" campaign to mislead customers with fake or "illusory" discounts on hundreds of common household items from dog food to yoghurt and bottles of Coke.

The consumer watchdog claims the supermarket giant jacked up prices for a short time before cutting them and including items in the "Down Down" promotion.

It claims the "Down Down" price was actually more than, or the same as, the regular price.

In evidence this morning the judge overseeing the case, Justice Michael O'Bryan, asked Coles to explain what it was telling customers with its prominent marketing campaign, featuring giant red hands pointing down.

"It's really asking a bigger question about what ordinary consumers understand about the Down Down program," Justice O'Bryan said.

"I don't know if I've seen a statement from Coles which directly answers that question."

In response, legal counsel for Coles John Sheahan KC said: "In terms of what consumers would take from the advertising campaigns and the red hand — not much."

"It's an indication that Coles is trying to keep prices low," he said.

Justice O'Bryan probed further, asking if Coles would accept that "Down Down" was a promotion and showed a discount.

"Yes," Mr Sheahan responded.

Looks like there's going to be another wide-spread outage

[Mace Windu gets killed by Xi who's Palpatine]

Or is it just my home? My wife's phone, my phone, the TV....

I can watch videos posted here, but I can't scroll through any other videos.

The East African country is making use of cheap hydropower and Chinese electric vehicles to ditch the internal combustion engine.

Shorter version: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OnXBDts8nbs

Europe Correspondent Saskia Dekkers Spoke With Gerald Knaus, Architect of 2016 Turkey Deal who Warns of Failure in Europe’s Migration Pact, he says it could trigger the ultra right to demand an ICE-like force

Russian attacks and Ukrainian civilian deaths rose as President Trump’s peace talks dragged on during his first year back in the White House.

President Trump repeatedly promised during his campaign that he would end the war in Ukraine in one day.

But by most measures, the war has grown worse for Ukrainians since Mr. Trump returned to the White House, not better. More civilians were killed and injured in 2025 than in the previous year. More missiles and drones are hitting city centers. Russia captured more territory in its slow-moving advances in 2025 than in any year since 2022, when it launched its full-scale invasion. Moscow has practically destroyed Ukraine’s power grid during the country’s harshest winter in more than a decade.

. . .

After taking office in January 2025, Mr. Trump tossed out the American playbook for the war. He made overtures to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the aggressor in the conflict and an avowed opponent of the West, while distancing the United States from Ukraine. U.S. aid to Ukraine fell by 99 percent in 2025 compared with the year before, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research center. Mr. Trump stopped giving American weapons to Kyiv, unless it or its Western allies paid for them.

MBFC
Archive

We’ve been covering Australia’s monumentally stupid social media ban for kids under 16 since before it went into effect. We noted how dumb the whole premise was, how the rollout was an immediate mess, how a gambling ad agency helped push the whole thing, and how two massive studies involving 125,000 kids found the entire “social media is inherently harmful” narrative doesn’t hold up.

But theory and data are one thing. Now we’re getting real-world stories of actual kids being harmed by a law that was supposedly designed to protect them. And wouldn’t you know it, the harm is falling hardest on the kids who were already most vulnerable. Just like many people predicted.

If you thought this was a good idea you are part of the harm against these kids, wake the fuck up and use your brain, this is a moral panic, you are hardly different than villagers yelling for a witch to be burned at the stake and you should feel ashamed of your stupidity.

Do better fediverse and if you are one of those people who casually waxes lyrical about denying kids access to the tools you use everyday because you honestly believe letting young people on social media is equivalent to giving them physically addictive drugs and that this place should have young people restricted from it because it is fundamentally unhealthy, please leave. You bring this place down and you undermine any sense of optimism about digital communities that motivates the rest of us to be here.

“The current research does not support the usefulness of banning kids from social media. Research studies do not suggest there is a correlation between time spent on social media and youth mental health. Further, reducing social media time does not improve mental health. This ban is likely to be a waste of time and resources. Further, it prevents opportunities to teach kids how to use social media responsibly. Like most moral panics, these kinds of efforts do harm in distracting us from real sources of youth mental health problems, mainly families in distress and failing schools. We have to remember we’ve been through this all before many times from video games, to rock and roll, books to the radio. These panics over media and technology never do anything to help kids.”

...

“Perhaps because of that balance and because many other factors are known to have a much larger impact on childhood, current evidence suggests very small effects at a population level when it comes to associations between social media/smartphone use on wellbeing e.g., McCrae et al., 2017; Vahedi & Zannella, 2021; Yoon et al.,2019). Note that not all the above reviews involve children. Also, that these are all reporting associations, not cause and effect.

“When it comes to the general use of social media and smartphones, the effects on mood or wellbeing are so small ‘that they require implausibly large behavioral changes to produce even minor mood shifts.’ (Winbush et al., 2025; p6)

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-comments-on-evidence-on-benefits-and-harms-of-social-media-and-social-media-bans-on-young-people/

https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/022293/brain-science-social-media-and-modern-moral-panic

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-time-does-not-increase-teenagers-mental-health-problems-study

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2026/01/26/social-media-age-bans-toxic-business-model/

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-01-23-expert-comment-under-16-social-media-ban-right-course

https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/center-of-excellence-on-social-media-and-youth-mental-health/the-good-and-bad-of-social-media-what-research-tells-us/?srsltid=AfmBOoojcZwZjG9eD7lPvXtLXnzx9iLkcNaJ0r5jbUdJZsW-ntK8HmpM

https://www.businessinsider.com/kids-parenting-social-media-bans-meta-2026-2

https://cacbrevard.org/should-teens-be-banned-from-social-media/

https://publications.ieu.asn.au/ie-220/article1/help-or-harm?cookies=true

https://medium.com/@pradeenmania123/banning-social-media-for-teens-is-dangerous-and-doomed-to-fail-7e4946f08561

https://theconversation.com/i-research-the-harm-that-can-come-to-teenagers-on-social-media-i-dont-support-a-ban-273835

https://www.humanrights.unsw.edu.au/students/blogs/australia-social-media-ban-under-16s

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026-01-27/a-social-media-ban-for-under-16s-would-be-popular-but-would-it-be-smart

https://www.jezebel.com/social-media-bans-teens-europe-uk-spain-greece-elon-musk-traitor-x-ai-chatbots-twitter

https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/social-media-regulation-is-being-shaped-by-fear-not-evidence

Well said.