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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The retail bookseller plans to open 60 more stores in the US this year:

James Daunt, the CEO of Barnes & Noble, has declared that he has "no problem" with AI-written books being sold in the retailer's stores.

In a recent segment for NBC News' "Business in America" series, Today host Jenna Bush Hager asked Daunt how AI has affected the book publishing industry. The question came amid fierce concerns in creative industries about AI-generated content replacing authentic human art, and artists seeing paid work disappear as their literature is being used to train AI models.

"You have said that if the rise of AI books becomes a thing, you would be willing to sell them within your stores," Bush Hager said.

"Yes, I have actually no problem selling any book, as long as it doesn't masquerade or pretend to be something that it isn't," the British businessman responded. "And that it has an essential quality to it, and that the customer, the reader, wants it."

"So as long as an AI-written book says it's an AI-written book and doesn't pretend to be something else and isn't ripping off somebody else, as long as that's clearly stated and the customer wants to buy it, then we will stock them."

"We have 300,000 titles across all of our stores," Daunt, who became the CEO of Barnes & Noble in 2019, added. "Do we think that some of those may be AI? The chances are that they are, but we're not really conscious of them."

He also argued that in this moment, it doesn't seem like those AI-generated books "are going to get much commercial traction."

"So I think it's something that one should treat with common sense and acceptance, but not allow anything to masquerade [as]," he explained. He said that the "clarity around who the author is and whether they're a real person" is what's crucial.

Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1e24z2q7xqo

PlayStation Plus subscribers will be hit with price rises in some regions, the gaming company has said, citing "market conditions".

A basic monthly subscription to the gaming service will rise by £1, $1 (75p), and €1 (87p) to £7.99, $10.99, and €9.99 respectively. Meanwhile, a basic three-month subscription will go up by £3, $3, and €3 to £21.99, $27.99, and €27.99 respectively.

PlayStation did not specify where the rises would apply, but said they do not apply to current subscribers, except in Turkey or India, unless the existing subscription changes or lapses.

The rises will take effect on Wednesday 20 May and come just a few months after the company increased the price of a PlayStation 5.

PlayStation Plus gives users access to online multiplayer, monthly downloadable games, and exclusive PlayStation Store discounts.

There are three tiers of subscription: Essential, Extra, and Premium. All have different pricing for monthly, three-month, and yearly options.

PlayStation did not say whether there would be any price increases for the other subscription tiers or what might happen to the 12-month subscription.

Some on social media reacted angrily to the announcement, with one person writing: "Online games should be free to play... doesn't even make sense we have to pay to play online."

Another said: "Are the 'market conditions' in the room with us?"

The video game industry has been hit with supply problems due to the US-Israel war with Iran and the price of memory chips has skyrocketed because of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.

In March, PlayStation, which is owned by Sony, the PlayStation 5's price would rise by £90 in the UK and by $100 in the US due to "continued pressures in the global economic landscape".

PlayStation's rival Nintendo also announced this month that it will hike the price of its Switch 2 console $449.99 to $499.99 in the US, and €469.99 to €499.99 in most European countries.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/casimir-force-co-opted-to-generate-free-energy-midichlorians-not-included/

This week, a company called Casimir Inc. emerged from "stealth mode" to announce that it had raised significant funding from venture capitalists willing to roll the dice on free energy. That's right: a startup has gotten serious backing to develop sources of perpetual free energy. The people behind this fantastic new energy generator also brought us the wildly successful WTF thruster EM-drive that could supposedly directly convert electricity into a propulsive force.

(Its one practical application was in the show Salvation, where it was treated with the same detailed attention to physical laws as Galaxy Quest's Omega-13.)

With that success, who are we to be skeptical?
[...]
The Casimir force is a real thing, arising from the fact that a vacuum is not actually nothing. Instead, it is filled with a froth of virtual particles becoming real in pairs, waving to us, annihilating each other, and sinking back into the soup of virtual particles. The Casimir force emerges when we create an imbalance in the spatial distribution of these virtual particles
[...]
Put simply, a mode describes how a photon can spread out and occupy a space.
[...]
The Universe is big, so it has an enormous number of modes. But if you create a confined space within the Universe, such as the gap between two closely spaced metal plates, there are only a few modes available, and they are less likely to be occupied by a particle. Between the plates, we have no particles; outside the plates, we have particles. This excess of particles, as they bounce off the plates, drives them together.

This is the Casimir force.
[...]
To get a continuous flow of energy, according to Casimir Inc., the setup needs to be slightly different. The plates are fixed so they can't move together, and a row of pillars is placed between the plates. The plates and pillars are then connected via the device that will be powered (a load). From here, things get hazy because the details are missing—or at least highly obfuscated.

fliptop writes:

On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other [...] Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to [paywalled]:

"We're being told to use [AI] agents for broad changes across our codebase. There's no way to evaluate whether that much code is well-written or secure—especially when hundreds of other programmers in the company are doing the same," a UX designer at a midsized tech company told me. 404 Media granted all the developers we talked to for this story anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements or because they fear retribution from their employers. "We're building a rat's nest of tech debt that will be impossible to untangle when these models become prohibitively expensive (any minute now...)."

[...] Predictably, the huge spike in productivity that these companies claim their own AI products have enabled hasn't resulted in more or better products, shorter work weeks, or better consumer experiences. Mostly, AI implementation in tech companies has been used to justify multiple massive rounds of layoffs. To name just a few examples where tech companies said they reduced headcount because of AI use, more recently, Meta said it would cut 10 percent of its workforce (around 8,000 people), Microsoft said it would offer voluntary retirement to 7 percent of its American workforce (around 125,000 people). Snapchat said it would lay off 16 percent of its full-time staffers (about 1,000 people).

Previously:

• Meta to Cut More than 1,000 Jobs as its Shifts Focus to AI Wearables
• Microsoft Pushes Out Experienced American Talent to Fuel AI Ambitions
• AI Could Wipe Out Most White-Collar Jobs Within 12 Months, Microsoft AI Chief Warns

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

Ollama Out-of-Bounds Read Vulnerability Allows Remote Process Memory Leak:

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security vulnerability in Ollama that, if successfully exploited, could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to leak its entire process memory.

The out-of-bounds read flaw, which likely impacts over 300,000 servers globally, is tracked as CVE-2026-7482 (CVSS score: 9.1). It has been codenamed Bleeding Llama by Cyera.

Ollama is a popular open-source framework that allows large language models (LLMs) to be run locally instead of on the cloud. On GitHub, the project has more than 171,000 stars and has been forked over 16,100 times.

"Ollama before 0.17.1 contains a heap out-of-bounds read vulnerability in the GGUF model loader," according to a description of the flaw in CVE.org. "The /api/create endpoint accepts an attacker-supplied GGUF file in which the declared tensor offset and size exceed the file's actual length; during quantization in fs/ggml/gguf.go and server/quantization.go (WriteTo()), the server reads past the allocated heap buffer."

GGUF, short for GPT-Generated Unified Format, is a file format that's used to store large language models so that they can be easily loaded and executed locally. It's analogous to other popular model saving formats like PyTorch .pt/.pth (based on Python's pickle module), safetensors, and Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX).

The problem, at its core, stems from Ollama's use of the unsafe package when creating a model from a GGUF file, specifically in a function named "WriteTo()," thereby making it possible to execute operations that bypass the memory safety guarantees of the programming language.

In a hypothetical attack scenario, a bad actor can send a specially crafted GGUF file to an exposed Ollama server with the tensor's shape set to a very large number to trigger the out-of-bounds heap read during model creation using the /api/create endpoint. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability could leak sensitive data from the Ollama process memory.

This may include environment variables, API keys, system prompts, and concurrent users' conversation data. This data can be exfiltrated by uploading the resulting model artifact through the /api/push endpoint to an attacker-controlled registry.

[...] "On top of that, engineers often connect Ollama to tools like Claude Code. In those cases, the impact is even higher – all tool outputs flow to the Ollama server, get saved in the heap, and potentially end up in an attacker's hands."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2174433/nasa-psyche-spacecraft-got-an-assist-from-mars-on-way-to-asteroid/

NASA's Psyche spacecraft has just flown closer to Mars than the planet's own moons en route to the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche. It was a planned maneuver so that the spacecraft can get gravity assist from the red planet and conserve fuel, specifically the xenon gas propellant its solar-electric ion thruster system uses. The flyby gave Psyche a speed boost and changed its trajectory so that it's now aligned with its target asteroid's orbit around the sun.

With a speed of 12,300 mph, Psyche passed within 2,800 miles of the planet in its closest approach at approximately half past 3PM Eastern time on May 15. The Martian moon Phobos orbits the planet from 3,700 miles away, while the moon Deimos is much farther away and is located 12,470 miles above the planet's surface.

Psyche has been approaching Mars since early May and has been taking photos of the planet. From the angle of its approach, the planet appeared as a bright, thin crescent, as its surface and the dust particles around it reflect light from the sun. Psyche's cameras took more images during its flyby, and it will beam them back over the coming days and weeks via the giant antennas of NASA's Deep Space Network. Those images will be uploaded to the mission's official page.

Psyche started its six-year, 2.2-billion-mile journey towards its namesake asteroid in late 2023. It's expected to reach its destination in July 2029 and to start working on its objectives the next month. The spacecraft will spend two years orbiting the asteroid "to take pictures, map the surface and collect data to determine Psyche's composition."

Scientists think that Psyche, the largest known metallic asteroid in our solar system, could be part of the iron-rich core of a planetesimal. That's the solid building block of a planet formed in the early days of the solar system. As such, it could offer us insight into the core of our own planet and show us how it formed. "We can't bore a path to Earth's metal core — or the cores of the other rocky planets — so visiting Psyche could provide a one-of-a-kind window into the violent history of collisions and accumulation of matter that created planets like our own," NASA explained.

Details: https://t.co/v4t8DRi6XW

— NASA Solar System (@NASASolarSystem) May 15, 2026

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/texas-county-passes-data-center-moratorium-for-a-year-follows-other-local-governments-pausing-similar-projects-but-state-senator-says-counties-cannot-impose-these-bans

AI hyperscalers are increasingly looking to unincorporated county land to reduce regulatory friction, allowing them to get their projects online much quicker. While they still have to go through county commissions and other authorities that work at the county level, they get to skip city-level rules and debates, which can get testy at times.

However, it seems that some county officials are catching on with this pattern and are actively moving to block or at least delay these power-hungry projects. This is especially true as an increasing number of Americans are opposing the construction of these AI data centers in their neighborhood. “The data center folks have found a sweet spot in the state that has limited regulations, limited enforcement, limited code, and they’re coming faster than we can keep up with,” Hill County Commissioner Jim Holcomb told the publication. “I think it’s imperative … that we tap the brakes and we get our arms around what we’re faced with and do the research, do the studies.”

One of the biggest issues that communities have around data centers is the increased power rates caused by the power-hungry infrastructure. The U.S. power grid companies are upgrading their infrastructure to handle the increased loads that AI infrastructure demands, but these expenses are evenly distributed to all ratepayers. This meant that even residential users and small businesses are slapped with higher utility bills, with electricity costs across the U.S. rising by more than 30% since 2020. In fact, the state of Maryland complained to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) after PJM Connection, LLC., the grid operator for the state (and 12 others), slapped it with a $2 billion bill to be passed on to all consumers for its grid upgrade costs.

Some projects are bypassing the electricity grid problem by building their own power. One data center project in Utah plans to use this approach by running entirely off-grid using natural gas. However, residents are concerned about the potential air pollution that such an operation could bring, especially as the site has a 9GW capacity — more than twice the amount of power that the entire state needs. Some people are also complaining about the noise pollution that these sites can bring, as well as raising issues about inaudible but “felt” infrasound that is suspected of causing adverse health effects.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/cell-phones-users-cant-stop-incriminating-themselves/

"What kind of doctor was dr. pepper," Utah real estate agent Kouri Richins once asked a search engine. (Sadly, there was no actual Dr. Pepper.)

But it was Richins' less innocuous online searches that helped a jury find her guilty of murdering her husband Eric via fentanyl overdose—and of hoping to collect life insurance policies she had opened in his name but without his knowledge.
[...]
it was her second iPhone that really made headlines. In April 2022, Kouri bought a replacement for her seized device and soon began searching for things which, at the very least, looked suspicious. Here are the five searches prosecutors decided to present to the jury during opening statements (which you can still watch on CourtTV) at Kouri's trial earlier this year:

• "can you delete everytginv off an old iphind without actually having ut" [sic throughout]
• "can deleted text messages be retrieved from an iphone"
• "how.to.compleltley.wipe.a.iphkne.clear remotely"
• "can cops force you to do a lie detector test"
• "women utah prison"

[...]
The New York Times notes that a "forensic analysis of burner phones used by Ms. Richins showed searches for... 'how long does life insurance companies takento.pay' and 'what is a lethal.does.of.fetanyl.'"
[...]
And a local news channel said that she had accessed articles called "Signs of Being Under Federal Investigation" and "Delay in Claim Payment for Death Certificate with Pending Cause of Death."
[...]
In HBO's The Wire, criminal mastermind Stringer Bell famously had the good sense to know that one should not be "taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy." But in case after case (after case!) that I cover, this is a lesson that defendants simply seem not to learn. Many will blab specific and even lurid details of their alleged crimes into search engines, text messages, and now AI tools.
[...]
there was the strange 2024 case from Minnesota in which Samantha Petersen, high on meth, hit an Amish buggy with her car.
[...]
The evidence against Samantha included, as usual, phone information, which revealed Internet searches for "what happens if you get in an accident with an Amish buggy and kill two people" and "if you hit a buggy and kill two people are you going to prison?"

Thanks to other phone data, this wasn't a particularly tough case to crack.
[...]
Petersen pleaded guilty in 2025 and was later sentenced to four years in prison.
[...]
Examples can be multiplied almost infinitely.

hubie writes:

Humans' exposure to high temperature burn injuries may have played an important role in our evolutionary development, shaping how our bodies heal, fight infection, and sometimes fail under extreme injury, according to new research:

For more than one million years, the control of fire has powered human success, from cooking and heating to technology and industry, driving genetic and cultural evolution and setting us apart from all other species. But this relationship has also exposed humans to high temperature injuries at a scale unmatched in the natural world.

Humans burn themselves – and survive burns – with a frequency likely much greater than any other animal. Most animals avoid fire completely, while in contrast, humans live alongside fire and most humans will experience minor burns throughout their lives.

A new study published in BioEssays, led by Imperial College London researchers, suggests that this increased exposure to burn injuries may have driven notable genetic adaptations which differentiated humans from other primates and mammals. This may also explain both beneficial and maladaptive responses to severe burn injury.

Burn injuries exist on a spectrum of severity, with most small injuries healing on their own while severe burns can lead to lifelong disability or death. Burns damage the skin, the body's main protective barrier against infection, sometimes over large areas of the body. The longer the skin is damaged, the greater the risk that bacteria can enter the body and cause overwhelming infection.

The researchers argue that natural selection would have favoured traits that helped humans survive small to moderate burns. These may include faster inflammation, faster wound closure (to prevent infection) and stronger pain signals.

However, while these traits are helpful for less severe injuries, they can become harmful for large burns, which may explain why modern humans can experience extreme inflammation, scarring, and organ failure from major burns.

Using comparative genomic data across primates, the researchers found examples of genes associated with burn injury responses which show signs of accelerated evolution in humans. These genes are involved in wound closure, inflammation and immune system response – likely helping to rapidly close wounds and fight infection; a major complication after burn injury, particularly before the widespread use of antibiotics.

canopic jug writes:

El País has a short interview with Vint Cerf about his thoughts on the Internet and speculation about the future. He has been there since the beginning when, among other things, he and Robert Kahn developed TCP/IP.

Vinton Cerf: 'I refuse to take responsibility for those who abuse my beautiful internet'

Previously:
(2023) Vint Cerf on 3 Mistakes He Made in TCP/IP
(2023) IEEE Medal of Honor Goes to Vint Cerf
(2020) On the Disappearance of Open Access Journals Over Time
(2018) Vint Cerf: Internet is Losing its Memory - SoylentNews
(2016) Vint Cerf's Dream Do-Over: 2 Ways He'd Make the Internet Different
(2015) Interplanetary Internet about as Useful as Flying Pigs says Vint Cerf

Original Submission

ted-ious writes:

65% of U.S. doctors reportedly use OpenEvidence, which is supported in part by pharmaceutical ads:

How would you like it if, when stumped or just in need of some help with an unfamiliar situation, your doctor consulted a free, ad-supported AI chatbot? That's not actually a hypothetical. They probably are doing that, a new report from NBC News says.

It's called OpenEvidence, and NBC says it was "used by about 65% of U.S. doctors across almost 27 million clinical encounters in April alone." An earlier Bloomberg report on OpenEvidence from seven months ago said it had signed up 50% of American doctors at the time—so reported growth is rapid.

The OpenEvidence homepage trumpets the bot as "America's Official Medical Knowledge Platform," and says healthcare professionals qualify for unlimited free use, but non-doctors can try it for free without creating accounts. It gives long, detailed answers with extensive citations that superficially look—to me, a non-doctor—trustworthy and credible.

NBC interviewed doctors for its story, and apparently pressed them on how often they actually click those links to the sources of information, and "most said they only do so when they get an unexpected result," NBC's report says.

While it's free, OpenEvidence is not a charity. It's a Miami-headquartered tech unicorn with a billionaire founder named David Nadler, and as of January it boasted a $12 billion valuation. NBC says it's backed by some of the all stars of Sand Hill Road: Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, along with Google Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Nvidia.

And its revenue comes from ads (for now), which NBC says are often for "pharmaceutical and medical device companies."

[...] At a recent doctor's appointment, my doctor asked my permission to use an AI tool on their phone (I don't know if it was OpenEvidence). I didn't know what to say other than yes. Do I want that for my doctor's appointment? Not especially. But if my doctor has come to rely on a tool like this, then what am I supposed to do? Take away their crutch?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Citizens complain high- and low-frequency sounds do not register on decibel meters but cause adverse health effects:

Data center projects have faced resistance from residents and communities over their impact on power prices, but another complaint is being raised more frequently — noise pollution. One form of sound pollution is called infrasound, which is inaudible to humans but can be felt, and some claim it causes headaches, insomnia, nausea, and anxiety. Then there's the normal garden-variety sound pollution. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), a non-profit organization, said that high- and low-frequency sounds emitted by these industrial sites can be heard and felt for hundreds of feet in surrounding areas, with noise levels reaching as high as 96dB for 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

Infrasound is another complaint that researchers are studying. Heatmap Plus reports that this is the phenomenon of frequencies so low they’re inaudible to humans. Nevertheless, some people can feel it, and there have been claims linking them to various negative health effects such as headaches, insomnia, nausea, and anxiety. Infrasound and its effects need further study, but it’s one of the issues local governments have been raising as they place a moratorium on data center projects. [...]

Normal noise pollution remains an issue, and communities living near off-grid data centers that generate their own power have it the worst. These sites generate their own power, typically using natural-gas-powered turbines — essentially jet engines bolted to the floor and used to turn generators that produce electricity. Aside from pollution concerns, such as those raised by residents around Elon Musk’s Colossus Supercomputer, which used over 30 mobile gas turbines for power, these turbines can be as loud as a passenger jet, making the site sound as loud as an airport. What’s worse is that, unlike backup generators, which only operate occasionally, these machines run continuously, meaning nearby communities will lose the peace of the neighborhood as long as these data centers operate.

[...] The United States does not lack flat, open land away from population centers on which to build data centers. However, AI hyperscalers prefer to locate their campuses near existing infrastructure so they don’t have to spend massive amounts of time and resources building everything from scratch. A few data centers are being built on former industrial sites, like shuttered factories and abandoned paper mills, but there are not enough of these around for the number of projects being proposed and built. As the negative effects of building these sites too close to population centers are slowly being revealed, we expect opposition to these projects to keep increasing.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Tiny molecules in the blood can strongly predict short-term survival in older adults:

As people get older, it can be difficult to tell who is likely to remain healthy and who may face a higher risk of serious decline. New research suggests that clues to that risk may already be present in the blood.

A study led by Duke Health, in collaboration with the University of Minnesota, found that small RNA molecules called piRNAs can help predict whether older adults are likely to live at least two more years.

Published in Aging Cell, the findings suggest that a simple blood test could eventually help doctors identify short-term survival risks earlier and guide strategies aimed at healthier aging.

“The combination of just a few piRNAs was the strongest predictor of two-year survival in older adults—stronger than age, lifestyle habits, or any other health measures we examined,” said Virginia Byers Kraus, M.D., Ph.D., senior author of the study and professor in the departments of Medicine, Pathology, and Orthopaedic Surgery at Duke University School of Medicine. “What surprised us most was that this powerful signal came from a simple blood test,” Kraus said.

The team analyzed piRNAs in blood samples from adults aged 71 and older and found that lower levels of certain piRNAs were closely associated with longer survival. Earlier studies have shown that these small RNA fragments help regulate development, regeneration, and immune activity.

[...] Older adults who survived longer consistently had lower levels of specific piRNAs, matching a pattern previously seen in simple organisms, where reducing these molecules can extend lifespan. Kraus said the results raise the possibility that piRNAs may play a direct role in longevity.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Fortunately, it happened early in the morning, so nobody was around:

At 5:26 am local time on August 10, 2025, a massive wedge of rock with a volume of at least 63.5 million cubic meters detached from a mountain above Alaska's Tracy Arm fjord. The falling rock plummeted into the deep waters at the terminus of the South Sawyer Glacier and caused an initial 100-meter-high breaking wave that tore across the fjord at speeds exceeding 70 meters a second. When this wave hit the opposite shoreline, it surged up the steep rocks to a height of 481 meters above sea level.

"It was the second highest tsunami ever recorded on Earth," says Aram Fathian, a researcher at the University of Calgary and co-author of a recent Science study that reconstructed this event in detail. "But until now, almost nobody heard about it because it was a near-miss event," he adds. There were no injuries or fatalities reported following the Tracy Arm fjord tsunami, mostly because it happened early in the morning. But we might not be so lucky next time.

Earthquake-generated tsunamis usually reach runup heights of a few tens of meters when they strike land. Landslide tsunamis, like the one that happened in Tracy Arm, are often more localized but also way more violent. When millions of tons of rock suddenly fall into a confined body of water like a narrow fjord, the variation in water depth and the direct displacement of the water column produce extremely high waves. Since 1925, scientists have documented 27 such events with runups exceeding 50 meters. The highest was the 1958 Lituya Bay tsunami, which reached 530 meters.

The source of the 2025 Tracy Arm tsunami was a steep rock wedge on the northern side of the fjord. Its headscarp, the uppermost boundary of a landslide or rockfall, sat roughly 1,025 meters above sea level. For centuries, the structural integrity of this slope was maintained by a massive wall of ice known as the South Sawyer Glacier. But South Sawyer, like many other glaciers in the Stikine Icefield, has been in a state of retreat due to the warming climate.

[...] Retrospective analysis of optical and radar satellite imagery from the weeks preceding the slide showed no visible tension cracks or major deformational scarring on the slope. From the outside, it looked perfectly sound. But deep within the rock, surfaces were already grinding. Regional seismometers registered localized repeating earthquakes beginning as early as August 5. By August 9, these mini earthquakes were happening once every hour. In the six hours leading up to the main failure, the gaps between these seismic signals shrank to between 30 to 60 seconds.

The cause of this uptick in microseismicity was the small patches of rock and ice snapping as a huge part of the cliff began to inch its way downward. About an hour before the landslide, the signals merged into a continuous, grinding slip. And then, the rock fell.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

America's aging electric grid is struggling to meet modern demands—especially amid the AI boom. Overhauling it will be no small feat:

Most of America’s power grid infrastructure is 40 to 70 years old. That may not sound ancient, but modern-day pressures are exposing cracks in the system.

Across the nation, aging power systems are crumbling under the strain of the AI boom, extreme weather, and policy paralysis. In several regions, operating reserves are tightening, increasing the risk that supply could fall short during peak conditions when routine outages are factored in. As a result, consumers are grappling with rising utility costs and reduced reliability.

For this Giz Asks, we asked experts what it will take to modernize the U.S. power grid. They pointed to numerous challenges but also outlined clear ways to bring each component of this outdated system up to speed, from generation to distribution.

TFA presents answers from four experts on the challenges with generation, transmission, and distribution, and potential ways forward.

Original Submission