Author: n John Timmern

Worries about the US grid’s ability to handle the surge in demand due to data center growth have made headlines repeatedly over the course of 2025. And, early in the year, demand for electricity had surged by nearly 5 percent compared to the year prior, suggesting the grid might truly be facing a data center apocalypse. And that rise in demand had a very unfortunate effect: Coal use rose for the first time since its recent collapse began.

But since the first-quarter data was released, demand has steadily eroded. As of yesterday’s data release by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), which covers the first nine months of 2025, total electricity demand has risen by 2.3 percent. That slowdown means that most of the increased demand could have been met by the astonishing growth of solar power.

Better than feared

If you look over data on the first quarter of 2025, the numbers are pretty grim, with total demand rising by 4.8 percent compared to the same period in the year prior. While solar power continued its remarkable surge, growing by an astonishing 44 percent, it was only able to cover a third of the demand growth. As a result of that and a drop in natural gas usage, coal use grew by 23 percent.

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Many dog breeds are noted for their personalities and behavioral traits, from the distinctive vocalizations of huskies to the herding of border collies. People have worked to identify the genes associated with many of these behaviors, taking advantage of the fact that dogs can interbreed. But that creates its own experimental challenges, as it can be difficult to separate some behaviors from physical traits distinctive to the breed—small dog breeds may seem more aggressive simply because they feel threatened more often.

To get around that, a team of researchers recently did the largest gene/behavior association study within a single dog breed. Taking advantage of a population of over 1,000 golden retrievers, they found a number of genes associated with behaviors within that breed. A high percentage of these genes turned out to correspond to regions of the human genome that have been associated with behavioral differences as well. But, in many cases, these associations have been with very different behaviors.

Gone to the dogs

The work, done by a team based largely at Cambridge University, utilized the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study, which involved over 3,000 owners of these dogs filling out annual surveys that included information on their dogs’ behavior. Over 1,000 of those owners also had blood samples obtained from their dogs and shipped in; the researchers used these samples to scan the dogs’ genomes for variants. Those were then compared to ratings of the dogs’ behavior on a range of issues, like fear or aggression directed toward strangers or other dogs.

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Our explanation of the outer Solar System has revealed a host of icy moons, many with surface features that suggest a complex geology. In some cases, these features—most notably the geysers of Enceladus—hint at the presence of oceans beneath the icy surfaces. These oceans have been ascribed to gravitational interactions that cause flexing and friction within the moon, creating enough heat to melt the body’s interior.

Something that has received a bit less attention is that some of these orbital interactions are temporary or cyclical. The orbits of any body are not always regular and often have long-term cycles. That’s also true for the other moons that provide the gravitational stress. As a result, the internal oceans may actually come and go, as the interiors of the moons melt and refreeze.

A new study, released today by Nature Astronomy, looks at one of the consequences of the difference in density between liquid water and ice (about 10 percent): the potential for the moon’s interior to shrink as it melts, leaving an area of low pressure immediately below its icy shell. If the moon is small enough, this study suggests, that could cause the surface of the ocean to boil.

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Since early July, telescopes around the world have been tracking just our third confirmed interstellar visitor, the comet 3I/ATLAS—3I, for third interstellar, and ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) for the telescope network that first spotted it. But the object’s closest approach to the Sun came in late October during the US government shutdown. So, while enough people went to work to ensure that the hardware continued to do its job, nobody was available at NASA to make the images available to the public or discuss their implications.

So today, NASA held a press conference to discuss everything that we now know about 3I/ATLAS, and how NASA’s hardware contributed to that knowledge. And to say one more time that the object is a fairly typical comet and not some spaceship doing its best to appear like one.

Extrasolar comet

3I/ATLAS is an extrasolar comet and the third visitor from another star that we’ve detected. We know the comet part because it looks like one, forming a coma of gas and dust, as well as a tail, as the Sun heats up its materials. That hasn’t stopped the usual suspect (Avi Loeb) from speculating that it might be a spacecraft, as he had for the earlier visitors. NASA doesn’t want to hear it. “This object is a comet,” said Associate Administrator Amit Kshatrya. “It looks and behaves like a comet, and all evidence points to it being a comet.”

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On Friday, a US District Court issued a preliminary injunction blocking the United States government from halting federal funding at UCLA or any other school in the University of California system. The ruling came in response to a suit filed by groups representing the faculty at these schools challenging the Trump administration’s attempts to force UCLA into a deal that would substantially revise instruction and policy.

The court’s decision lays out how the Trump administration’s attacks on universities follow a standard plan: use accusations of antisemitism to justify an immediate cut to funding, then use the loss of money to compel an agreement that would result in revisions to university instruction and management. The court finds that this plan was deficient on multiple grounds, violating legal procedures for cutting funding to an illegal attempt and suppressing the First Amendment rights of faculty.

The result is a reprieve for the entire University of California system, as well as a clear pathway for any universities to fight back against the Trump administration’s attacks on research and education.

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The end of the year is usually a busy time in the quantum computing arena, as companies often try to announce that they’ve reached major milestones before the year wraps up. This year has been no exception. And while not all of these announcements involve interesting new architectures like the one we looked at recently, they’re a good way to mark progress in the field, and they often involve the sort of smaller, incremental steps needed to push the field forward.

What follows is a quick look at a handful of announcements from the past few weeks that struck us as potentially interesting.

IBM follows through

IBM is one of the companies announcing a brand-new architecture this year. That’s not at all a surprise, given that the company promised to do so back in June; this week sees the company confirming that it has built the two processors it said it would earlier in the year. These include one called Loon, which is focused on the architecture that IBM will use to host error-corrected logical qubits. Loon represents two major changes for the company: a shift to nearest-neighbor connections and the addition of long-distance connections.

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The Event Horizon Telescope only recently gave us the first images of the environment immediately surrounding a black hole. Since then, it has been boosting the resolution and filling in the details of an environment dominated by the most extreme gravity in the Universe.

But which gravity are we talking about? Because of its incompatibility with quantum mechanics and our current inability to explain dark matter, people have proposed all sorts of variants of gravity that go beyond general relativity and clean up some of the physics’ awkwardness. It’s possible that the extreme environment near a black hole amplifies the differences among at least some of these hypotheses. So, a group of physicists decided to see whether any of those differences might be large enough that the next generation of telescopes might be able to rule out some potential replacements for relativity.

Searching for subtlety

Any replacement for general relativity faces an awkward challenge: General relativity does pretty well at explaining everything from the large-scale structure of the Universe to phenomena we can measure right here on Earth. So, any alternative theories would have to differ from relativity in very subtle ways that might be extremely difficult to detect.

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Quantum computers based on ions or atoms have one major advantage: The hardware itself isn’t manufactured, so there’s no device-to-device variability. Every atom is the same and should perform similarly every time. And since the qubits themselves can be moved around, it’s theoretically possible to entangle any atom or ion with any other in the system, allowing for a lot of flexibility in how algorithms and error correction are performed.

This combination of consistent, high-fidelity performance with all-to-all connectivity has led many key demonstrations of quantum computing to be done on trapped-ion hardware. Unfortunately, the hardware has been held back a bit by relatively low qubit counts—a few dozen compared to the hundred or more seen in other technologies. But on Wednesday, a company called Quantinuum announced a new version of its trapped-ion hardware that significantly boosts the qubit count and uses some interesting technology to manage their operation.

Trapped-ion computing

Both neutral atom and trapped-ion computers store their qubits in the spin of the nucleus. That spin is somewhat shielded from the environment by the cloud of electrons around the nucleus, giving these qubits a relatively long coherence time. While neutral atoms are held in place by a network of lasers, trapped ions are manipulated via electromagnetic control based on the ion’s charge. This means that key components of the hardware can be built using standard electronic manufacturing, although lasers are still needed for manipulations and readout.

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