SCROLL NEWS / DISCOVERY
Search headlines
Find the stories shaping the conversation.
Results for " ucl " 957 found 🔀 AI-powered Shuffle
Readers Write: Nuclear power, history, political violence, undocumented workers, wealth
First: the nuclear waste problem.
The Ceasefire Agreement with Iran Is Not Even Close to a “Deal”
The fact that there’s still a sixty-day window on the table for nuclear negotiations doesn’t really inspire hope.
Trump promises a better Iran deal than Obama’s. Here’s what we know
President Donald Trump has made a few guarantees about a deal to end the war he started with Iran.
Trump claims victory over Iran, but deal is silent on nuclear weapons
The president promised oil would resume flowing through Hormuz, though U.S. and Iranian officials differed over the initial agreement’s terms.
Turner on Addressing Poor Mental Health Outcomes of Black and Latino Boys
Assistant professor of social welfare David C. Turner III argues that still more needs to be done to address the structural issues impacting the mental health outcomes of Black and Latino boys
Trump sought to break Iran’s regime. He settled for reopening Hormuz.
The emerging agreement ends a costly war but leaves Iran’s leadership intact and its nuclear future still subject to negotiation.
U.S. and Iran reach agreement to end war, Trump says
The deal commits Tehran to forgo the development or acquisition of nuclear weapons in exchange for helping reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
What to know about Michigan football in 2026
The UCLA Bruins took another step in the wrong direction last season and will look to regain their footing in 2026.
UCLA's John Savage named national baseball coach of year
John Savage, whose UCLA team was ranked No. 1 the entire regular season and won the Big Ten tournament before the Bruins were bounced in the regional round of the NCAA tournament, was named coach of the year by the College Baseball Foundation on Saturday.
Scientists Recreated Nuclear Fallout in a Lab. Here’s What Happened Next.
Nobody wants a nuclear event, other than those prepper weirdos who secretly need one to justify the small fortune they spent on a fallout shelter.
Exclusive: US military rushed to prepare ground mission to capture Iran’s uranium, but Trump paused it, sources say
The US’ top general made a secret, rushed visit to US Central Command headquarters in Florida late last month to be briefed in person on plans for the US military to send ground troops into Iran to forcibly seize its highly enriched uranium, the key component necessary to produce a nuclear weapon, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
Scientists Created Nuclear Fireballs in a Lab—on Purpose
When a nuclear accident happens, it’s vital that scientists have accurate fallout models.
Celebrating four decades of emergency medical service in Santa Monica
UCLA Health’s Dr. Walid Ghurabi has been named grand marshal of Santa Monica’s Fourth of July parade.
UCLA Health receives significant commitment from longtime children’s health donors Dr. Neal and Beth Cutler to endow a chair and support translational cancer research
UCLA Health receives significant commitment from longtime children’s health donors Dr. Neal and Beth Cutler to endow a chair and support translational cancer research
‘CoComelon’ turns to UCLA to prove its videos aren’t addictive
Moonbug Entertainment, the studio behind the popular preschool cartoon 'CoComelon,' enlisted UCLA researchers to win over skeptical parents.
New GreatXML Exploit Bypasses Windows BitLocker via Recovery Partition XML Files
GreatXML can bypass BitLocker on Windows systems where Defender Offline Scan was used, exposing encrypted drive data.
Cal Poly offers first synthetic cell course to students, partnering with network of innovative scientists
A new course offered this spring quarter at Cal Poly introduced upper-division undergraduates to the fundamentals of building synthetic cells while collaborating on innovative projects. The cutting-edge course titled “Engineering Synthetic Cells,” taught by Javin Oza, a Cal Poly biochemistry associate professor, involves a partnership with the San Francisco-based company b.next, an open-source synthetic cell platform Nucleus, and an international science network.
Jeffrey Lewis and Herbert Lin join the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board
The Bulletin is honored to welcome nuclear proliferation and arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis and nuclear risk and disruptive technologies expert Herbert Lin to its Science and Security Board (SASB). As SASB members, they will provide their perspective on nuclear issues and technological threats, represent the nonprofit at public events, and participate in setting the time on the Doomsday Clock.
Rutgers Women’s Basketball Conference Home and Away Opponents Revealed
Earlier today, the Big Ten announced the confirmed conference matchups for the 2026-2027 Big Ten women’s basketball season. As a result, we now know which teams Rutgers will play at home and which teams they will play on the road. That list is as follows: Home: Illinois, Michigan State, Nebraska, Northwestern, Ohio State, Purdue, UCLA, […]
We can create the future of science right now
Paul Litvak is the founder and Executive Director of the Robyn Dawes Institute and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. He has a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon where he studied emotions and the sunk cost bias. Over 15 years in industry, he solved a wide range of challenging technical problems. At Meta he created models optimizing the ad review process. At Google he ran experiments to measure social influence. At Airbnb, he was a product manager leading machine learning teams optimizing search ranking and price suggestions. He also co-founded and led product at Rhythmic Health, a venture-backed biosensing startup, creating an accurate low cost system using a color changing strip and a smart phone to measure salivary lactate. The bottleneck At this point, it is uncontroversial to say that science needs to stop using the PDF article as the unit of knowledge and currency. The unbearable slowness of scientific publishing, the profit motive and margins: I’m not saying anything new. The PDF also sucks because it’s hard to extract structured information, which makes it hard to do evidence synthesis. As a result, we do much less evidence synthesis than is needed. And evidence synthesis ultimately undergirds most policy and medical decision-making. I can see second-by-second real-time odds for any sporting or newsworthy event, but a school board can’t see the best evidence on whether their 8th graders should be taught algebra. As a society, we don’t treat this as an important problem. Again, not controversial. Not only is the problem well understood, but the solution has already been laid out. What we need is AI-assisted living evidence synthesis - (1) an open knowledge graph of atomic claims, (2) claims linked to evidence, (3) assessment and synthesis of each piece of evidence, and (4) continuous updating with new data. What few realize (yet) is that the technical capacity to build this vision for a significant portion of science already exists. Not only that, scientists and startup teams are already building many of these components. I know this because I’ve been surveying the space and talking to many of the builders. There are some missing pieces: for example, evaluations of how well some of the components work. But at this point, most of what’s missing is a fully end-to-end working integration of all of these parts. In the rest of this essay, I’m going to lay out all the parts of a working living evidence layer for science and who is working on them, and propose concrete next steps for building this system. What’s now possible The diagram above outlines the components of a living evidence synthesis platform, including some of the teams working on each component1. Scientific PDFs are processed into claims with associated evidence. The evidence is subjected to a forensic audit, methodological evaluation and robustness and reproducibility checks. Finally it’s given a weight in a continuously updating synthesis. What follows is a description and status of each component and a few of the teams working on them. Document understanding The first thing you need to be able to do is turn an article into structured data. Mostly that means parsing PDFs. There are often multicolumn layouts that confuse non-specialized PDF to text processing libraries. For scientific papers, there is the added complexity of parsing formulas and tables and figures. This is a really hot area - there are startups offering APIs, and it seems like a new open source package gets posted to Github every few weeks. What follows isn’t exhaustive. A package called GROBID was the state of the art for a while, they didn’t update their package for nearly two years until very recently. In the meantime reducto.ai released an AI powered PDF extraction API, PaddleOCR became popular, IBM released a model called Docling, and both Mistral and Gemini created models and libraries. I also know of at least one other well-funded psychology research group working on a paper parser. By contrast, there are few open evals in this space, with no extensive evals for complex table comprehension in particular. Nonetheless, I’m confident this will be a solved problem soon, given the combination of LLM advances and developer interest. Hypothesis level extraction There has been increasing interest in comprehending the extracted text of papers and linking information to evidence for each hypothesis. A lot of work has already been done. Trialstreamer (Marshall et al. 2020) and RobotReviewer LIVE (Marshall et al. 2023) demonstrated automated extraction of trial population, intervention, and outcome at scale on clinical RCTs. PaperQA2 (Skarlinski et al. 2024) and Ai2 ScholarQA (2024) extended this to retrieval-augmented question answering with citation grounding. Elicit, Consensus, and SciSpace operationalized claim-level extraction for end users. OpenEval (Booeshaghi et al. 2026) is the most recent and most ambitious: 1.96 million atomic claims extracted from 16,087 eLife manuscripts using Claude Sonnet 4.5, grouped into ~299,000 results, with LLM evaluations showing 81% agreement with human peer review on a 2,487-paper subset. None of these solutions link claims to test-statistics, as you would need to evaluate randomized controlled trials. This is why I built the evidence.guide API - to extract hypotheses and associated test statistics from behavioral science papers. The best public eval of this kind of extraction I’m aware of comes from the recent SCORE project - they had humans code thousands of psychology papers to extract their claims by hand. It would be extremely helpful to the world if all scientific PDFs were available as structured open data. I’ve been working to make this happen, both directly at Berkeley and through coordination with large entities I can’t yet speak of; as hard as it is to do, I think it’s possible2. Forensic audit A lot of work has been done on forensic audit, but some gaps remain. Of course, for biology papers that rely on images for evidence, there are a variety of tools (notably Proofig and ImageTwin) to spot anomalies. These are still well short of what sleuths like Elizabeth Bik can do on her own, but these tools are constant companions among fraud analysts. There’s someone working on auditing Excel files for anomalies, and a number of teams are automating numerical checks like GRIM and SPRITE, including Scrutiny project, the INSPECT-SR team as well as statcheck. The regcheck team is building a way to use AI to compare preregistrations to analyses in papers, to ensure there aren’t significant deviations. Nonetheless, there are many other kinds of anomalies to screen for, both public and less publicly known. And there are no formal evals for anomaly detection that I’m aware of. Still, there’s a lot to draw from in this space and I’m pretty certain we will be able to scan papers for most kinds of obvious anomalies in the near future. Methodological review This area has been white hot, though I fear for many of the startups in this space, because this capability may become commoditized. There are at least six different AI peer review companies, including Refine.ink, Reviewer3, ReviewerZero.ai, Q.E.D. Science, Paper Wizard, and Isitcredible. Coarse (a pun on refine) was also recently created as an open source alternative. These systems provide qualitative feedback on the content of papers, spotting methodological weaknesses and mathematical errors. They seem to work pretty well, and many academics report bitterly that they exceed the average quality of typical peer reviewers. But there are few evals here either. What evals exist so far involve using LLM-as-judge (circularity problems abound) or comparing against human reviews of questionable quality. What you’d ideally want is an eval that measures capturing known errors in papers3. Reproducibility and robustness Another active area has been using AI agents to automate computational reproducibility4 and robustness5 checks in papers that report numerical results. For more recent papers where data and code are available, AI agents can see whether they can re-run the analyses and produce the numbers reported in the published paper. In addition to a handful of individual academics who have been experimenting using Claude Code for this, the Institute for Replication is a leading group working on building an end to end system. The evals related to this problem are the most mature, with CORE-Bench (Siegel, Kapoor, Narayanan 2024) and PaperBench (OpenAI 2025) available to benchmark agents on this task. There is also work on getting AI agents to test alternative ways of analyzing the data to ensure the results are robust to small analytic design choices. Synthesis This is the most underdeveloped area where significant investment is required. Although some automated evidence synthesis systems exist — for example, otto-sr is building an AI agent to write systematic reviews — none of these incorporate the full range of paper level signals to weight evidence appropriately. Nor is there anything like an eval or a gold standard for a good systematic review. Arguably Cochrane reviews are the closest we have to gold standard human systematic reviews, though I’ve heard academics in the know complain about their uneven quality. A key question for a synthesis platform is how to weight anomalies and methodological issues in assessing the quality of a piece of evidence. This is an unsolved problem and one I’m very keen to work on. Continuous updating There are many pieces of basic infrastructure available for monitoring for new research and initiating updates. OpenAlex is the current open citation graph. Retraction Watch integrated into Crossref in October 2023. Scite tracks how citations support, contrast, or mention prior claims. The Living Evidence Network demonstrated continuous-update workflows in clinical guidelines. Engineering this is a relatively straightforward task. When you look over this technical architecture and all the progress being made, it’s hard not to be optimistic that a living guide to scientific evidence will be built. The stakeholders are ready The social infrastructure for this is starting to coalesce — it’s not just a pie in the sky academic exercise to imagine this coming into existence. Institutions like the Center for Open Science, the Institute for Replication, the INSPECT-SR, the Living Evidence Network and more are all working on scaling work to improve research quality. Funders are also aligned. The Sloan Foundation has funded living evidence work through COS. Coefficient Giving supports the Institute for Replication and COS. The Astera Institute and the Institute for Progress have shown interest in this space. NIH has established an Office for Replication and Reproducibility. Although there are (very unfortunately) serious headwinds in science funding generally, there is an active group of funders interested in metascience. A brief word about what I’ve been doing at RDI. First, as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley I’ve been actively figuring out how a non-profit and a public university can conduct and make public the results of large-scale academic article data mining. With some of the money I raised from donors, I commissioned a legal analysis of recent case law and publisher text data mining (TDM) agreements in order to understand whether a massive open data mining of academic articles is possible (with caveats, it is). I’ve also been working to bring together stakeholders in this space, and identify gaps. I’ve also been doing some software development in this space, with more to come. A pilot proposal The assumption undergirding all of this is that an AI, given all this information, would make the right judgment about a scientific claim with lots of conflicting evidence, weighing all the factors appropriately. That’s the hypothesis we need to test. Randomized control trial research is the best place to focus on first. RCTs are used to make many of the important decisions in society - from medical trials to public policy changes. And they use a relatively uniform set of inferential statistics with lots of known and available diagnostics. Behavioral science experiments, within the broader realm of RCTs, should be first used as a testbed whose results can be generalized. Because behavioral science is at the vanguard of open science practices, replications abound (there are thousands of them) to serve as ground truth training data. Key Hypothesis Therefore the pilot would test, in behavioral RCTs that have been replicated, whether the quality of evidence for a claim can be used to accurately predict whether that claim will replicate. Secondary Hypotheses Compared to claims that replicated, non-replicated claims demonstrate a greater share of forensic anomalies in their source literatures. Hypothesis level claim and statistic extraction is accurate enough to scale living evidence without onerous human review costs. Replication prediction is more accurate than prediction markets6 or journal prestige. If all the different quality signals we gather do accurately predict which studies will replicate, then we can use that model to score evidence to power the living evidence layer. Why this is informative regardless of outcome If the pilot succeeds, the architecture extends to medical RCTs (where Living Evidence already operates and integration is mostly about claim representation), then to slices of basic biology with stable replication structure. If it fails, the field learns which quality signals are load-bearing and which ones metascience has oversold. Either result is a contribution to knowing what the literature supports. Implications for funders Because this burgeoning ecosystem of builders already exists, a well-informed philanthropic or government funder could play a crucial catalyzing role in bringing this future about. They could play at least three roles: creating open structured datasets, publishing open benchmarks and incentivizing the solving of key technical challenges. First, open archives of papers that the government maintains, like PubMed, could be turned into structured data amenable to large scale metascience and claim aggregation. I know the US government already has an interest in doing this, though some key open questions remain unanswered. How do you determine the best models and systems for accurately extracting information from papers? How can you establish a robust way to allow researchers to flag errors and correct them? And finally, how do you create a legal regime in working with publishers to maximize the scope of available papers? For the latter, a university or a private philanthropy may be better positioned to make structured data publicly available under journal subscription terms or fair use. Philanthropists or government funders could also coordinate to create or commission benchmarks that evaluate whether important problems have been solved. For example, an open benchmark for claim extraction from a range of different scientific article types would be extremely helpful. Ensuring the underlying data are accurate is vital for creating these evaluations. I’ve discussed opportunistically using various human-created datasets for this purpose, but a consistent problem is that errors in human data make it difficult for them to serve as a gold standard. Finally, with structured data and benchmarks available, the government or private philanthropy could use them to incentivize groups to develop machine learning systems that meet these benchmarks. Prizes are one potentially valuable tool for this. For example, you could establish a prize for a system that accurately updates a living meta-analysis for a small set of claims. Prizes are particularly useful as signals of problem importance, and can help create vibrant ecosystems of public and private research—see, for example the role the government played in kickstarting the current work on nuclear fusion. Conclusion The drawbacks of the current scientific publishing system are known. Scientists agree, metascientists agree, philanthropists agree: the published PDF plus citation graph isn’t the right substrate for maintaining a representation of the evidence base in science. The pieces needed to build the alternative either already exist or are rapidly taking shape. The community is forming around exactly this problem, with concrete partnerships and shared infrastructure. A pilot should start on behavioral science RCTs because that’s the slice of empirical science most amenable to legibility, where replication ground truth is richest, and where the failure modes are best documented. What’s been missing is the galvanizing mission to assemble these pieces into something that works. That’s what I’m proposing to build. *** 1 I have a broader field map that I’ll release publicly soon. This is me, building in public! 2 If this is something that you are excited about, please reach out and talk to me. 3 More on this very soon too! 4 This tests whether, given the code and the data, you can get the same statistics as reported in the published paper. 5 This tests whether the results are the same as a paper’s given alternative analytical decisions in conducting the analysis (like outlier omission). Closely related is the idea of a “multiverse” where you come up with many different ways of answering the same underlying research question with the same data, and test whether the results hold in all those alternative methods. There’s been work on the latter as well. 6 Some of the replications, e.g. those from the SCORE project, had paired the experiments with forecasts from prediction markets. So we get to look at this for free.
The ultimate hostage negotiation: Why Iran talks are deadlocked
As President Donald Trump searches for a way to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Washington and Tehran appear to be engaged in a standard negotiation.
Top Moments: Daily Bruin Sports reviews the highlights of UCLA Athletics' 2025-26 year
The 2025-26 year saw momentous occasion after momentous occasion take place for UCLA Athletics. From championship banners to program records, Westwood saw another year of history being made.
Superlatives: Daily Bruin Sports spotlights UCLA’s standout 2025-26 athletes
As the 2025-26 academic year comes to a close, so does another UCLA Athletics chapter. The past year was filled with standout plays, broken records and national championships.
UCLA Women’s Basketball Adds Second Freshman to Roster
UCLA women’s basketball signed Slovenian freshman guard Lina Jerkovic for the 2026-27 season, the team announced on Sunday. Jerkovic is just the second incoming freshman to join the squad alongside Spanish guard Somto Okafor. UCLA is entering a rebuilding phase after winning the national championship last season. Part of that rebuild involved signing five players […] The post UCLA Women’s Basketball Adds Second Freshman to Roster appeared first on LA Sports Report.
UCDC program connects students to US politics at Capitol
UCLA students interning in Washington, D.C., this year navigated anti-immigration enforcement protests, congressional budget negotiations during appropriations season and uncertainty surrounding federal funding. The UC Washington Program, created in 1997, sends at least 31 UCLA undergraduate students to the United States Capitol each quarter.
Trump Says Iran Has Made a ‘Big’ Nuclear Promise. It Isn’t New.
President Trump’s boasts of securing a commitment from Iranian leaders not to develop a nuclear weapon have puzzled nuclear experts who note that Tehran has made that pledge for more than 50 years.
BEAM raises awareness of Alzheimer’s disease through community outreach, research
A UCLA club is partnering with local senior living homes and engaging in research to raise awareness about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Brain-Health Education and Advocacy Movement at UCLA works with the Mary S.
Readers Write: Immigration, fraud, science funding, ‘Nuclear Family Month,’ the GOP, Target
This is home. We’re staying put.
How Nuclear Science Enhances Seafood Safety in Namibia
Namibia's 1,500 km coastline powers a fishing industry worth over 15% of the country's foreign income. But meeting export demand means meeting strict international standards.
A quantum leap: INL discovers new behavior in plutonium that could reshape nuclear science
Plutonium is one of the most complex elements in the periodic table.
Orange County business owner supplied Iran with U.S. technology, federal prosecutors say
A Newport Coast man running a business out of Iran was arrested and charged with violating federal law Wednesday after prosecutors say he spent years illegally importing American technology into the country, including to Iran's nuclear establishment, without notifying the U.S. government.
Rep. Ogles deletes homophobic tweet, blames staff amid rare GOP pushback
A post on Ogles’s official X account Tuesday stated: “Homosexuality has no place in America. Happy Nuclear Family Month.”
Scientists simulated a nuclear fireball and found a surprise in the fallout
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recreated part of the intense chaos inside a nuclear fireball to better understand how radioactive fallout forms. Their experiments revealed that the way vaporized materials cool can dramatically change the particles that eventually form, especially for volatile elements like cesium.
NCAA Men’s Golf: Arizona falls to UCLA in semifinals
Arizona men’s golf’s best postseason in decades ended just short of competing for a national championship. The Wildcats fell to UCLA in the NCAA semifinals Tuesday at Omni La Costa Resort in Carlsbad, Calif. after knocking off Vanderbilt earlier in the day in quarterfinals action. Arizona’s run to the semifinals marks the program’s best finish […]
Westinghouse Appoints Johan Lundberg to Lead Global Quality, Environment, Health & Safety
Westinghouse Electric Company announced the appointment of Johan Lundberg as Executive Vice President of its Global Quality, Environment, Health & Safety function, effective August 3.
Senior dean of the College, dean of Physical Sciences to step down next June
The senior dean of the UCLA College and dean of the Division of Physical Sciences will step down in June 2027, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Darnell Hunt announced Tuesday.
The World's First Nuclear Waste Tomb Is Nearly Ready to Open
To seal spent radioactive fuel underground for 100,000 years.
No. 1 UCLA's stunning exit headlines chaotic baseball regional weekend
It's been a wild weekend to begin the NCAA baseball tournament, and the regional round could get even wilder on Monday.
Another NATO ally signs onto European nuclear umbrella as continent boosts self-defense
Norway becomes the ninth country to join France's nuclear deterrence initiative as European governments seek greater self-reliance from U.S. defense.
Launch of new WHO Heat–Health Action Plans Guidance
On 11 June 2026, WHO/Europe will launch the new WHO Heat–Health Action Plans Guidance, an international point of reference for systematic, evidence-based health action in preparation for and response to extreme heat. The launch of the new Guidance will take place in Berlin, at a joint hybrid press conference hosted by the Federal Minister for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, together with the WHO Regional Director for Europe, the Senator for Science, Health and Care of the State of Berlin, and a senior representative from the European Commission Directorate-General for Climate Action.
Women's College World Series: UCLA's offensive juggernaut runs out of juice at crucial juncture
The most dangerous hitting lineup in softball had its chance on Sunday, but it was bested by one of the best pitching groups in the game.
Top-seeded UCLA eliminated from NCAA baseball tournament
Makoa Sniffen's run-scoring single in the 10th inning gave the Saint Mary's Gaels an improbable 6-5 victory over UCLA on Sunday in Los Angeles, eliminating the top-seeded Bruins, who were 51-6 headed into the weekend, from the NCAA baseball tournament.
Terry, Texas Tech top UCLA at Women's College World Series
Kaitlyn Terry drove in the go-ahead run against her former team, and Texas Tech eliminated the UCLA Bruins 8-7 in nine innings on Sunday at the Women's College World Series in Oklahoma City, and next, the No. 11 Red Raiders will take on Alabama on Monday.
UCLA softball’s record-setting season ends in extra-inning loss to Texas Tech
Jordan Woolery homers twice and helps force extras for the Bruins. Former UCLA pitcher Kaitlyn Terry drives in the go-ahead run in the ninth as Texas Tech advances with an 8-7 win.
No. 1 overall seed UCLA eliminated in baseball regionals after Saint Mary's walks it off in extras
For the second time this weekend, the Bruins fell to the Gaels by one run; this time, it ended their season.
What's next for Arsenal? With Premier League secured and UCL window open, Gunners eye 'another level'
The elite individual magic in attack needed to conquer Europe may not be there in abundance, but the foundation is there to contend on all fronts again next season, especially if they make the right moves this summer
UCLA Baseball Hits Back-to-Back Homers in Crucial Walk-Off Win
After St. Mary’s shockingly upset No. 1 overall seed UCLA baseball in the regional opener on Saturday, the Bruins needed a win on Sunday to keep their season alive. Going into the bottom of the ninth, UCLA was down by two runs against Virginia Tech. That’s when first baseman Mulivai Levu, who was named the […] The post UCLA Baseball Hits Back-to-Back Homers in Crucial Walk-Off Win appeared first on LA Sports Report.
Richard E. Carson, Ph.D., receives SNMMI 2026 Paul C. Aebersold Award for Outstanding Achievement in Basic Nuclear Medicine Science
Richard E. Carson, PhD, has been named the 2026 recipient of the prestigious Paul C. Aebersold Award. Carson is professor of Biomedical Engineering and of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as emeritus director of the Yale PET Center. The award was announced by the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) during its 2026 Annual Meeting.
UCLA Stuns Virginia Tech With Ninth-Inning Rally
UCLA erased a late deficit with three runs in the bottom of the ninth, walking off Virginia Tech to keep its postseason hopes alive in the Los Angeles Regional.
How PSG have gone from contenders to potential European dynasty after conquering Champions League once again
After securing a second straight Champions League title against Arsenal, Luis Enrique has his youthful French giants primed for a historic three-peat
Megan Grant sets UCLA record with 91st career HR in WCWS rout of Ark.
Megan Grant broke the UCLA career homer record and all nine Bruins in the lineup scored in the second inning of an 11-0 run-rule win over Arkansas at the Women's College World Series.
Megan Grant sets UCLA record with 91st career HR in WCWS rout of Ark.
Megan Grant sets UCLA record with 91st career HR in WCWS rout of Ark.
Trump’s inconsistent rhetoric about getting Iran’s nuclear stockpile
As the United States and Iran try to hammer out a deal to start winding down the war, few particulars loom as large as what happens with Iran’s nuclear stockpile.
Gordon, UCLA 2-sport freshman, in transfer portal as track athlete
UCLA's Karson Gordon has entered the NCAA transfer portal as a track and field athlete with plans to play football, he confirmed on social media Friday.
2026 MLB Mock Draft: White Sox take UCLA star at No. 1 as three shortstops go in top four
The 2026 MLB Draft is less than two months away, and UCLA's Roch Cholowsky is the favorite to go first
Alabama overcomes UCLA, Megan Grant's 41st home run at WCWS
Top-seeded Alabama rallied to beat UCLA on Thursday night in the opening round of the Women's College World Series after Megan Grant clubbed her NCAA-record 41st home run this season.
“Everybody Loves Raymond”'s Patricia Heaton fires back at critics of her gray hair
"The people in my life love me no matter what color my hair is," she said.
USA TODAY Sports Network 2026 All-American softball awards, coach and player of the year
UCLA slugger Megan Grant and Nebraska two-way star Jordy Frahm earned top honors in the USA TODAY Sports Network All-American softball team.
NFL executives are buying in on the Cincinnati Bengals
This is good to hear if you’re a Bengals fan.
Trump says he’s not thinking about politics during Iran nuclear talks
President Trump said he’s not thinking about the midterms as he tries to wrangle a deal to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. All as former first lady Jill Biden made new comments about her husband’s disastrous 2024 debate. NBC News’ Gabe Gutierrez reports.
Reiner Kruecken Named Berkeley Lab’s Associate Laboratory Director for Physical Sciences
Reiner Kruecken, an internationally recognized nuclear physicist, has been named the ALS for the Physical Sciences Area.
SEC considers nuclear option: If you want it fixed, do it yourself
An SEC breakaway has more legs than anyone in the league cares to (publicly) admit.
Eating less meat can improve gut microbiome
I read about a study that says it's possible for someone who eats meat to have a gut that's as healthy as someone who is vegan. I know your gut microbiome is an important part of good health, but I'm just not cut out to be a vegan. I'd like to know more about that research.
Cleveland Metroparks announces lineup for summer concert series
There will be four concerts at Euclid Beach and then the other four will be at Edgewater Beach.
Imaging societies clash over bill to require that docs consult appropriate-use criteria
The American College of Radiology is seeking to revive the shelved AUC program, while nuclear cardiologists are speaking against these efforts.
UCLA Baseball Earns No. 1 Overall Seed in NCAA Tournament
UCLA baseball went wire-to-wire this season as the No. 1 ranked baseball team in the nation. After winning both the Big Ten regular season title outright and the Big Ten Tournament title, the Bruins earned the No. 1 overall seed in the 2026 NCAA Tournament. The NCAA announced the tournament bracket on Monday. The tournament […] The post UCLA Baseball Earns No. 1 Overall Seed in NCAA Tournament appeared first on LA Sports Report.
UCLA (51-6) earns top seed for NCAA baseball tournament
UCLA was rewarded for its dominant wire-to-wire run through the regular season with the No. 1 seed for the NCAA tournament.
Trump’s Science Advisor Calls Nuclear EO ‘Most Consequential Day’ Since Atoms for Peace in 1953
When a sitting administration’s top science advisor invokes Eisenhower’s 1953 Atoms for Peace speech to frame a present-day policy move, investors should pay attention. That is exactly what happened at the Operation Gigawatt Summit, where Michael Kratsios, Chief Science and Tech Policy Advisor to President Trump, anchored the case for a structural reordering of US ... Trump’s Science Advisor Calls Nuclear EO ‘Most Consequential Day’ Since Atoms for Peace in 1953
Trump's Science Advisor Calls Nuclear EO 'Most Consequential Day' Since Atoms for Peace in 1953
When a sitting administration’s top science advisor invokes Eisenhower’s 1953 Atoms for Peace speech to frame a present-day policy move, investors should pay attention. That is exactly what happened at the Operation Gigawatt Summit, where Michael Kratsios, Chief Science and Tech Policy Advisor to President Trump, anchored the case for a structural reordering of US ... Trump’s Science Advisor Calls Nuclear EO ‘Most Consequential Day’ Since Atoms for Peace in 1953
Big Ten Tournament: Day 6
UCLA gets their first B1G championship
Trump says U.S., Iran are 'getting a lot closer,' but questions remain about concessions
Iran reportedly says the draft pact will be a “framework agreement” that defers talks toward limiting Iran’s nuclear program until later.
U-2 spy plane arrives at National Museum of Nuclear Science and History
Albuquerque visitors can now see a Cold War U-2 spy plane up close at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History.
Loss of retail business raises concerns for Euclid City Council members
The recent closure of Burlington’s Coat Factory in Euclid is leaving some City Council members with questions regarding the state of retail businesses in the city. The store, which was located at 22400 Shore Center Drive, closed earlier …
How the Clinical & Translational Science Institute at UCLA Health advances medicine from bench to bedside
Clinical trials are at the heart of UCLA Health’s Clinical & Translational Science Institute
2026 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship Award
Undergraduate senior biochemistry student Lillian Ott (Mohanty group) has been awarded the 2026 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship, one of the country’s most prestigious honors for graduate students in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). The program, jointly sponsored by the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force, supports doctoral students across a broad range of scientific and technological fields of strategic importance. This highly competitive fellowship provides full tuition, fees, and a monthly stipend for three years. In 2026, only 102 fellowships were awarded nationwide. Lillian also received an honorable mention for the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Studying biochemistry at UCLA, Lillian became excited about how her physical science background could be applied to solve environmental issues. She joined the Subsurface Engineering Analysis Laboratory (SEA Lab) led by Professor Sanjay Mohanty in the Samueli’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. In the SEA lab, she has studied the fate and transport of per and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). PFAS are ubiquitous “forever chemicals” and known carcinogens that impact water quality worldwide. This fall, she will begin her Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University with Professor Nina Zhao. Her research will be focused on metabolomics and the discovery of unrecognized chemical determinants of environmental and human health. “I have seen the serious and unforeseen environmental and health consequences from man-made chemicals like PFAS and microplastics, which are often only appreciated after the damage has been done. I hope that my research can lead to more sustainable chemical design and inform policy and solutions-based innovation in public health and water quality engineering,” Lillian said. Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penjen@g.ucla.edu.
The 2025-26 Clarion Sports Awards
Athletics at the University of Denver had yet another successful year. Highlighted by hockey’s national championship, gymnastics and women’s lacrosse making runs into the NCAA tournament and the
New MatterChat Model Helps AI to ‘See’ the Language of Science
From writing emails to generating computer code, much of the artificial intelligence prevalent in our daily lives has succeeded by mastering one domain: text. However, this leaves a major blind spot in the physical sciences, where models depend on the high-resolution, three-dimensional data of the physical world, like the intricate lattice of atoms in a crystal. Delivering on the promise of using AI for science requires teaching these data-driven text models to seamlessly “talk to” physics-based models. Now, a new AI framework from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), called MatterChat, solves this problem by creating a specialized “bridge.” It connects the conversational power of a Large Language Model (LLM) with a physics-based AI that models “interatomic potentials”: the complex physical forces between atoms. The resulting system already significantly outperforms general-purpose AI tools like GPT-4 at predicting material properties, and the team hopes it can accelerate scientific discovery by serving as a robust research partner that provides grounded insights and generates step-by-step instructions for synthesizing novel materials. A paper describing this work was recently published in Nature Machine Intelligence. “Traditional simulations can provide the physical rigor required for materials science, yet their computational cost remains prohibitive for high-throughput screening. Conversely, while LLMs excel at rapid knowledge synthesis, they inherently lack the ‘structural vision’ to interpret materials directly from their underlying atomic coordinates,” said Yingheng Tang, a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Applied Math and Computational Research Division (AMCR) and lead author on the paper. “MatterChat was built to solve this dilemma, empowering LLMs with a structural ‘vision’ that allows researchers to leverage their full potential for solving complex, real-world materials challenges.” Empowering language models to solve complex challenges in materials science To build MatterChat, the Berkeley Lab team drew inspiration from technologies like Vision Question Answering (VQA) and Text-to-Image (T2I) generation. In these tasks, AI must translate high-level text concepts into visual images, or vice versa. Doing so requires developers to build tools that “bridge” two fundamentally different forms of data. The researchers adapted this concept to the physical sciences. With MatterChat, they created a “bridge model” that successfully connects an LLM’s general knowledge with the deep understanding of the atomic-scale world encoded in scientific interatomic potentials. Until now, researchers using LLMs to solve materials problems usually had to feed them raw data files as if they were just strings of text. It’s like asking an AI to understand a complex 3D engine based only on a parts list: the LLM can read the names, but it can’t “see” how the atoms fit together in space. MatterChat solves this by training a specialized AI bridge model, pre-trained on millions of crystal structures and an LLM, to align the LLM’s representation of the world with the interatomic potential’s representation of the world. The bridge model can translate physical insights into a format the LLM can actually understand. By giving the LLM these “scientific eyes”— a scientific “inductive bias” in the terminology of AI — the Berkeley Lab team has transformed it into a robust research tool capable of providing grounded scientific insights into complex materials challenges, such as predicting thermal stability or analyzing electronic band gaps. “We think of atoms as living in a physical space, but from a machine learning perspective, they are just vectors living in some very non-trivially structured manifold in a high-dimensional Euclidean space; and, of course, the same is true for the sentences and paragraphs that we use to express our ideas about those atoms,” said co-author Michael Mahoney, Berkeley Lab’s Scientific Data Division (SDD) AI Initiative Research Lead. “The bridge model basically gets those two structures to ‘talk with’ each other.” As a proof-of-concept of this general approach, the team trained their bridge model on a dataset curated by pairing nearly 143,000 stable atomic structures from the Materials Project with their corresponding physical properties. This training data was automatically assembled using the Materials Project’s API and deliberately enriched with properties fundamental to microelectronics design — like formation energy and bandgap — allowing MatterChat to learn the complex patterns connecting a material’s atomic blueprint to its functional performance. To validate their model, the researchers benchmarked MatterChat against a suite of other AI systems, from general-purpose LLMs to other specialized scientific AI methods. The results show that MatterChat consistently outperformed its competitors across a range of tasks. The model was more accurate in classifying material types and demonstrated superior precision in predicting numerical properties. For example, it excelled at predicting a material’s bandgap, a property critical for designing new electronics from high-capacity energy storage to next-generation computer chips. “Our design is significantly more efficient because we don’t have to build a massive AI model from the ground up,” said co-author Zhi (Jackie) Yao, a research scientist in Berkeley Lab’s AMCR. “Instead, we take two powerful, pre-trained models — a structural encoder for materials physics and an open-source LLM — and use them off-the-shelf. The only component we actually train is the lightweight ‘bridge model’ that translates between them. It’s the difference between building an entire car factory and simply designing a smart adapter that connects a world-class engine to a world-class navigation system. This approach is not only computationally efficient, but also makes the system modular, so we can easily upgrade components or adapt the bridge for other scientific domains in the future.” Crucially, this modular design highlights exactly how institutions like Berkeley Lab and the Department of Energy are carving out a highly valuable niche in the booming AI landscape. Rather than competing with Silicon Valley tech giants to build ever-larger language models from scratch, the lab is focusing on the specialized connective tissue that makes commercial AI useful for hardcore science. Because the bridge model approach underlying MatterChat is forward-compatible, it is perfectly positioned to leverage these parallel tracks of innovation. As Mahoney pointed out, “We expect that industry will continue to develop improved LLMs, and we expect domain scientists and facilities will continue to generate new data. An important part of scientific machine learning is not simply to solve problems on today’s data, but instead to develop general methods that will be forward-compatible with orders of magnitude more data, whether from scientific domains or from LLMs.” According to Yao, the MatterChat project, which was initially developed and enhanced with funding from a Berkeley Lab Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) Program, will now expand its capabilities. In a collaboration with Fermilab, MatterChat is already contributing to a U.S. Department of Energy Genesis Mission project — called Accelerating eXtreme Environment Specs-to-Silicon (AXESS) — that aims to speed up the development of next-generation, high-speed, radiation-hardened detectors for challenging particle physics experiments by using advanced 3D integrated circuits (chiplets) and AI-driven data analysis. In addition to the LDRD support, the team also credits supercomputing resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), located at Berkeley Lab, with MatterChat’s success. “We are incredibly grateful to NERSC; this research simply would not have happened without access to the Perlmutter supercomputer through their AI for Science program,” said Tang. Wenbin Xu, a NERSC postdoctoral fellow at the time, was also a major co-author of the work, as was Benjamin Erichson, a research scientist in Berkeley Lab’s SDD, highlighting the benefits of AMCR-SDD collaboration on AI for science. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Wolves 1-1 Fulham
The so-called best players could not hack it in the Premier League so we will sell them and buy real quality to play in the Championship. If Mr Edwards can't design and motivate the team that will most likely form the nucleus of next season's offering, how do we think the results will be any different in the Championship? Fulham were stringing passes together when attacking but we struggled.
UCLA softball pummels South Carolina, advances to super regional
UCLA senior Megan Grant hit a grand slam and three other Bruins hit home runs during a 15-1 win over South Carolina Sunday to win their NCAA regional.
Kids narrate new audio tour at Albuquerque's National Museum of Nuclear Science & History
Third graders at Lavaland Elementary recorded a new audio tour at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History.
2026 Best 40-Under-40 Business Professors: Shohini Kundu, UCLA Anderson School of Management
Over the last decade, Poets&Quants has honored more than 540 up-and-coming star MBA and graduate business professors from around the world.
Drone strike sparks fire at UAE nuclear plant
Israel is coordinating with the U.S. about a possible resumption of attacks, said two people familiar with the situation.
Toronto Tempo say UCLA star Kiki Rice has not disappointed
The Toronto Tempo used the first pick in franchise history to select UCLA star Kiki Rice and has no regrets as the rookie has immediately contributed.
Scientists May Have Solved Two of Fusion Energy’s Biggest Problems at Once
Scientists have demonstrated a new plasma operating regime that could help solve two of fusion energy’s biggest challenges at once.
Now What? With Carbon Pricing Eroded and Pipeline Politics Advancing, Here Are the Pathways for Climate Success
At the end of a whirlwind week of news on carbon pricing and electricity strategy, capping a madcap year of pretty much non-stop, dramatic change, the word across much of Canada’s climate and energy transition community is that climate policy in this country has been shredded. Eviscerated. Hit with a sledgehammer by policy rollbacks that have pushed the country’s 2050 net zero target “well out of reach”. That means it’s never been more important to look for the rays of hope and glimmers of possibility. To glimpse the seeds of the next set of strategies to get Canada’s climate pollution under control and the country into the accelerating global dash away from fossil fuels. And then, once we’ve spotted those possibilities, get on with the hard, day-to-day slog of trying to make them a reality. Nothing takes away from the frustration and the deep disappointment so many climate and energy hawks are expressing, the sense of betrayal by the author of Value(s) and the former UN special envoy for climate action and finance. But we knew two things as the week drew to a close. We’re looking at the world as it most definitely is. And we don’t get to give up finding the pathways to confront climate change and deliver faster, deeper carbon cuts that leave no one else behind. So really, the first question we all have to ask ourselves is: What’s next? Subscribe All the Oxygen in the Room The outpouring of anger and grief over the carbon pricing deal between Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has been absolutely understandable. So much of the climate community poured years, more than a decade, into dragging the current federal pricing regime across the finish line, then defending it from a deluge of three-syllable rhymes after the Trudeau government proved utterly incapable of delivering its own message. The policy foisted on us by neo-classical economists took up all the oxygen in the room, burned through years of climate response time that we won’t get back, while cornering climate hawks into the position that the best response to the crisis of our lifetimes is a new tax…in an era of historic anti-tax sentiment. I mean, really—what could possibly have gone wrong? Against that history, let’s appreciate columnist Max Fawcett’s point that even a modest carbon pricing agreement with a government as off-the-wall libertarian/conspiracist as Danielle Smith’s—those adjectives are mine, not Max’s—is a win worth savouring (as long as Smith keeps her promises for a change). But part of living in the world as it is (no, I’m not letting that go) is to be clear-headed about what we can and can’t control. And one thing we get to decide, after seeing this week’s carbon price festivities take up all the oxygen yet again, is whether we want to keep letting that happen. Particularly when success down that road depends on a factor that no one with a climate agenda can control or influence—a provincial carbon pricing mechanism that has been manipulated and eroded beyond its lowest possible denominator. Thankfully, that’s not the way it has to go. Not when we have so many other powerful, practical tools at our disposal, including the ones still available to us through this abominable Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Canada and Alberta. Tools In Our Toolbox When I started roughing out this list, I didn’t expect it to grow to nearly a dozen bullet points. It’s probably still incomplete. Some of the greatest hits in today’s climate solutions toolbox include: • No Carbon Capture, No Pipeline: On Friday, Prime Minister Mark Carney explicitly stated that there’s been no change to the MOU provision that there will be no West Coast pipeline without an industry commitment to build its massive, $16.5-billion carbon capture and storage (CCUS) hub in Northern Alberta, and vice versa. The two megaprojects were joined at the hip when the MOU was signed Nov. 27, and the implementation agreement this week affirmed that they still are. A parade of independent analysts have spent years pointing to the economic and technical flaws in CCUS, while the industry kept postponing its investment decision until it could arm-twist the government for more “clarity” (by which it meant even more lavish taxpayer subsidies) on the project. Now the industry itself is running away from the CCUS hub and insisting the pipeline should proceed without it, but Carney doesn’t seem to be budging from a central tenet of the MOU to which Smith has signed on. • No Subsidies, No Investors: Climate analysts and advocates have quite rightly been hammering away at Carney and his team, insisting that any new capacity the industry wants to build must proceed without new subsidies. The government has responded with a growing collection of funding and financing mechanisms for the very wide menu of industrial development and nation-building projects they say they want to take on, and that menu always includes fossil fuel infrastructure. But it’s hard to see how even the combined fiscal clout of the federal and supportive provincial governments will deliver the financial backing private investors would need when the business case for new fossil fuel development is evaporating before their eyes. Particularly when… • No Market, No Demand, No Investors: As our friend Markham Hislop at Energi Media (our apparently sleepless friend, given the massive volume of great material he’s been churning out) points out this morning, the biggest vulnerability in any pipeline deal is the assumption that Asian buyers will want the oil or liquefied natural ga that our fossil industry is so keen to send them. Hislop writes in part: Ottawa and Alberta are effectively betting that countries like China and India will continue increasing oil imports for decades as their economies grow and energy consumption rises. That assumption underpins the entire economic rationale for expanding oil sands production and building billions of dollars in new export infrastructure. But Asian energy systems are changing rapidly… China, India, South Korea, and other major hydrocarbon importers are now investing hundreds of billions of dollars into electricity systems built around wind, solar, batteries, nuclear, hydro, and expanded transmission infrastructure. Domestic “energy sovereignty” is increasingly replacing the old energy-security model based on stable oil and gas imports. Those investments are expected to sharply slow oil demand growth and eventually reverse it, even as overall energy consumption continues rising. There are also refining constraints. Many Asian refineries and petrochemical complexes are already optimized to process discounted heavy crude from the Middle East and Latin America. That raises serious questions about how much additional Canadian bitumen Asian markets can absorb at profitable prices. Small wonder that there’s still no private sector investor for the project, despite Smith’s government desperately beating the bushes to put together a deal. For now, Alberta is acting as proponent and covering early start-up costs for a pitch to the federal Major Projects Office, which could actually turn into the next tough hurdle for Smith and her pipeline to jump. • Canada Day Looms: How ironic that Canada’s birthday this year could become a major chokepoint for the provincial premier who’s been working so diligently to tear the country apart! The July 1 target date for Alberta’s pipeline proposal is baked into the MOU, was reaffirmed by the implementation plan, but it hadn’t dawned on me that it cuts both ways. As one very smart colleague wrote in an email yesterday, “they’ve thrown the ball into Alberta’s court to get the project proposal on the table really quickly and to have to do a whole pile of work to put together a massive, complicated project that would typically take years to assemble, and they’ve given them weeks to do it.” That makes July 1 a looming deadline that Smith won’t be able to run away from politically, especially with the separatists in her party and her caucus breathing down her neck. (See previous ref to off-the-wall.) But if Alberta comes in with a sloppy, incomplete submission, even after Carney bent over backwards to simplify the application process and the rules that govern it, it may be harder for the province or the industry to blame Ottawa and insist on the faster process they claim their investors are demanding. (Oh, wait—which investors would those be??) • We’ll See You In Court (Then We’ll See You Again): If Carney did cave, that would be just one more reason for Indigenous and other affected communities to take the government and the process to court—Just as Alberta First Nations did, successfully, in response to Smith’s half-baked separation referendum. Veterans of the Harper era have been warning that a shoddy process around fossil fuel infrastructure or other major projects will be a recipe for the very delays that process seeks to avoid. And now more than ever, with renewable energy and energy storage eating fossil fuels’ lunch in import markets around the world, a delayed pipeline or LNG terminal may be as good as a cancelled one. • Charged Up, Ready to Go: With its goal of doubling Canada’s electricity supply to meet a doubling of demand by 2050, the national electricity strategy that Carney unveiled Thursday has a lot to like. With its explicit language about speeding the shift from fuels to more efficient and affordable electricity, global investment and deployment patterns that already favour that shift, an emerging bidirectional power grid, the role of front-line options like rooftop solar and heat pumps, the emergence of electric vehicles as behind-the-meter energy storage, and the domestic jobs and manufacturing to make it all happen, the document doubles down on the essential cornerstone of a faster shift off fossil fuels. The strategy envisions a more prominent role for gas and nuclear power. But some of those provisions were already in the Clean Electricity Regulations that climate hawks are now fighting so hard to defend, inserted as a compromise in a futile attempt to mollify the industry and its political representatives in Alberta and Saskatchewan. But once again, gas will be a tougher sell when it’s more expensive and now so much more unpredictable than the clean alternatives. The new nuclear technologies are still speculative and deeply vulnerable to cost overruns. Increasingly, utilities, developers, and investors know it. Carney declared Thursday that “it doesn’t do us good to be sitting in court all the time with provinces. It doesn’t do us good to be talking past each other. What does do us good is to come together with specific projects.” There are no guarantees, but so much of the language and narrative-building in the electricity strategy suggests the lion’s share of those projects will be renewable. • The Party Has Already Started: The electricity strategy only rarely digs down to specific projects, but provinces representing three-quarters of Canada’s population are already embracing a faster transition. Hydro-Québec is working on a 10-year, $185-billion renewable energy and grid buildout by 2035. Ontario recently brought 10 provinces and territories together in a National Energy Corridor Agreement to boost interprovincial and -territorial transmission infrastructure. And the MOU implementation agreement commits Alberta to facilitate investment in renewable energy projects, a big step back from its continuing, punitive restrictions on renewables development. The electricity strategy envisions much of the financing and infrastructure that will be needed to pull those advances together into an integrated whole. • Delivering on Affordability: The MOU implementation plan has little or nothing to say about affordability (are you surprised?), but the electricity strategy does, with a top-line pledge to reduce home energy costs for seven out of 10 Canadian households by 2050, a total saving of $15 billion across the board. It’s just a start, but it puts affordability on the government’s narrative map. If they’re serious and deliberate about patching together a least-cost energy strategy, it’ll have little if any room for oil, gas, or nuclear—not with powerful evidence, for example, that electricity prices are higher when those prices are set by gas. • Smith Proves that Canada Works: By signing a deal that makes it harder to claim the federal government is blocking a new pipeline, Smith has helped prove Carney’s constant anti-separatist refrain that “Canada works”—incurring the rage, no doubt, of her own political base. Canada also needs to work for anyone who depends on a clean environment, healthy and thriving ecosystems, and safe, stable climate. But with Smith and her separatist constituents setting up as a fifth column for annexation by Donald Trump’s United States, let’s set aside any notion that 51st state status for Canada is a recipe for anything other than climate disaster (and so much else). Resisting and withstanding Trump (just 170 more sleeps until mid-term elections, which is a damn sight better than the 730 we started with) doesn’t mean a free pass for a pipeline, but we can still appreciate it that keeping Canada whole and sovereign is still Carney’s Job One. • The Words Not Spoken: Apart from a commitment to export a million barrels of “low-emission” Alberta bitumen per day (memo to Smith and Carney: You realize that that’s less than the industry is already exporting??), the MOU implementation plan says nothing about the international trade and economic sovereignty deals that Carney has been travelling the world to negotiate. It didn’t have to. Carney doesn’t need permission from Danielle Smith, her American enablers, or her separatist allies to continue building the alliances that will ratchet down our economic dependency on our unstable, unreliable neighbour to the south. But every connection he builds with countries outside North America helps align our economy and our future with a faster shift off fossil fuels. Little if any of this was on our bingo cards a year or two ago. But it’s the pathway that has opened up to us. And if it gives Canada any climate or energy gains at all in an era still dominated by Trump and his increasingly ridiculous tariffs, his loutish trade negotiations and his continuing annexation threats, we have to take the wins. Not least because they’ll be the point of departure for what we can achieve in 2027, 2029, and beyond, as Trump’s grip and this era begin to loosen and then fade. What is Carney Doing? If this line of thought is right—and it’s a possibility, not a prediction—it means that Carney’s actions and decisions are largely about buying time. Time for Trump’s power to wane. Time for Alberta’s separatist/conspiracist virus to spread, mutate, die out, or at least die back, with help from a vaccine of federal steadiness and calm (appropriate enough, for a movement populated largely by vaccine deniers) that no conspiracy theory can dismiss. And time for the government’s trade and investment agenda to deliver results—even knowing that some of those results will bring impacts that front-line communities will not and should not accept. In the immediate moment, none of this changes the way the wider climate community has to respond, from campaigners to investors to front-line practitioners. All of our voices are still essential. But those voices will be stronger and more confident if we have a clearer sense of the brutal game we’ve been pulled into, and a plausible path (or two it three) for playing it to the win we need. This conversation also underscores our biggest task for the remaining years of what was supposed to be the “decisive” decade for climate response: if we can shift the energy narrative in Canada, make it a mainstream view that the country’s preoccupation with oil and gas has us falling farther behind a changing world, we’ll see far better results in the 2030s and beyond. For many veteran climate advocates, taking on that part of the fight will begin with recognizing that most of our friends and family, neighbours and colleagues already understand that climate change is real and right in front of us: they’re looking away and staying silent because they don’t have what climate communicator Katharine Hayhoe calls “efficacy”. As Hayhoe recently pointed out in a feature interview with The Energy Mix, it amounts to science denial to keep hammering away at the dire news about global warming without also helping audiences understand what they can do about it, with multiple studies telling us why that won’t work. Far better to open those conversations with the dominant crises like energy security, food security, emergency preparedness and business continuity, affordability, and financial security that have knocked climate change far lower on the list of public priorities, and will likely keep it there. We Knew This Would Happen Climate hawks have always known this day would come. For decades, we warned that everyone had to pay attention to climate change right now, because it would be much tougher to respond once the crisis itself started affecting our daily lives. We were right, and here we are. But now, thanks to decades of hard work, communities and countries have an alternative to doubling down on fossil fuels. “In 10 years everyone will have ‘always known’ that solar and batteries were going to win,” Morgan Solar Executive Chair Mike Andrade writes on LinkedIn. With the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz roiling energy priorities around the world, Canada and the United States are among the shrinking number of countries that are still very keen on fossil fuel development. Understanding that gap is a first, essential step in spotting the opportunities ahead, and averting the deep economic as well as environmental and social risk we face if we don’t seize them. Thanks for reading The Energy Mix Weekender! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Subscribe Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix and The Energy Mix Weekender. Chart of the Week BYD Eyes 20 Dealership Locations After Canada Greenlights Chinese EV Imports ‘Sledgehammer’ Carbon Price Deal Boosts Emissions by 230Mt, Aims for Fall 2027 Pipeline Approval ‘Worse Than Harper’: Regulatory Rollback Would Stop Canada from Assessing Project Impacts, Critics Warn Electricity Strategy Aims for Doubling by 2050, Allows ‘Flexibility’ for Gas Power Plants Opposition Mounts as O’Leary’s Data Centre Approved in Drought-Stricken Utah Diluted Carbon Price Misses ‘Reality of the World We’re In’, Could Impede Diversified Trade: Climate Institute $200B in Clean Energy Investment Will Need On-Time Delivery, Reliable Policies, Trade Association Says ‘Sovereign Pipeline’: CEO Pitches to Keep Trans Mountain in Government Hands What a Supercharged El Niño Could Mean for Canada Canada’s future is electric, and here’s how a power grid superhighway would get us there (Toronto Star) The Perilous Waters of Hecate Strait (Globe and Mail) Saudi Aramco profits jump despite conflict in Middle East (The Guardian) Farmers confront rising cost of fertilizer and fuel as spring seeding under way (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Clarkson forecasts 24% decline in offshore oil, gas capital expenditures (Oil & Gas Journal) Pipe Dreams: How Oil and Gas Fail to Deliver Economic Development in Africa (Oil Change International) Developing countries must hold the pen to script the fossil fuel transition (Climate Home News) Iran war threatens the dream of a post-oil economy in the Gulf (Washington Post) U.S. Oil, Gas Work Force Hits Lowest Level Since 2022 (Rigzone) Why Polestar Is Doubling Down on Net Zero as Rivals Pull Back on EVs (Bloomberg) Why this Michigan utility plans to sell its hydro dams for $13 (E&E News/Politico) Levees can no longer save New Orleans (Vox)
Trump says Iran war worth economic pain and these rural voters agree
Rural Trump supporters in Colorado say they will accept higher gas prices for Iran policy goals and to prevent Iranian nuclear threat.
Science news this week: PCOS has a new name, Neanderthals were the world's oldest dentists, and the first nuclear bomb explosion spawned an 'alien' crystal
May 16, 2026: Our weekly roundup of the latest science in the news, as well as a few fascinating articles to keep you entertained over the weekend.
Notre Dame Recruiting Roundup: Irish Stay Hot On The Trail
The Irish bolster their 2027 class by landing two massive offensive tackles, including a crucial flip from UCLA, while aggressively expanding their 2028 board across Florida and California.
The anti-inflammatory diet: What cancer survivors need to know
Dietitian Eve Lahijani, of the Simms/Mann UCLA Center for Integrative Oncology, discussed the benefits of an anti-inflammatory diet, at the Women's Cancer Survivors Conference.
MU's Radioisotope Science Center aims for global impact with medical, nuclear innovation
Local, state and federal leaders gathered in Columbia Thursday morning to celebrate state-of-the-art technology in cancer treatment.
NANO Nuclear Reports Q2 FY 2026 Financial Results and Provides Business Update
Management to hold webcast today at 5:00 pm Eastern
Recent WSU graduate Bhargav Iyer wants to blend science and public policy
Iyer discovered a passion for public service while researching nuclear waste disposal and advocating for students in Olympia.
'Extreme' crystal that formed in 1945 nuclear bomb test is unlike anything scientists have seen
Samples of "trinitite" created during the world’s first nuclear bomb test in 1945 contain unique crystals never seen before.
Adriana Galván and Lisa Lawson on Using Brain Science to Help Gen Z Thrive
Lisa Lawson joins Adriana Galván for a fireside chat about how to better support young people as they navigate the path to adulthood.
Amid war, Trump says he doesn’t ‘think about Americans’ financial situation’
Trump said he is only concerned about Iran not having a nuclear weapon. “I don’t think about anybody,” he added.
Trump says he’s not thinking about Americans’ finances ‘even a little bit’ in Iran talks
Trump said the “only thing” that matters is Iran “can’t have a nuclear weapon.”
80 years after the Trinity nuclear test, scientists identify new molecule-trapping crystal formed in the blast
Matter behaves strangely under extreme conditions, and often, remnants of these behaviors are left behind even when conditions return to normal. The Trinity nuclear test in 1945 left behind such remnants, ...
ASNC speaks to policymakers about prior authorization, Medicare cuts and more
The American Society of Nuclear Cardiology visited Capitol Hill to advocate for a variety of issues. Cardiovascular Business spoke to the group's president to learn more.
The World's First Nuclear Explosion Forged an 'Impossible' Crystal
The bomb that changed the world.