The Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan, the Crane Clean Energy Center at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa are being brought back online after years of shutdown, together expected to add 2.25 GW to the grid. Palisades, which had begun decommissioning, is furthest along and is projected to generate 800 MW by March 2027, while Crane's Unit 1 is expected to add 835 MW in 2027 under a 20-year supply deal with Microsoft. Each project relied on Department of Energy loans, with Palisades funded under a 2024 Biden-era program and the others under a 2025 Trump administration initiative.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-20
Figure, the U.S. robotics company, decommissioned its older F.02 humanoid robots by having them jump into a 75-ton vat of molten steel at a foundry in Finland. CEO Brett Adcock said disassembly was impractical due to proprietary technology and limited staff, and crowdsourced the idea on X, where Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested melting them. The robots performed the jump and melt sequence successfully across six melts within a 24-hour window, with the resulting steel bars shipped back to the U.S.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-04
Figure AI retired its F.02 humanoid robot fleet as the newer F.03 fleet scales up, choosing to melt the robots in a 75-ton electric arc furnace at a foundry in Imatra, Finland rather than disassemble them. The company trained the robots in simulation to jump into molten steel using stunt-artist movement data, and Arnold Schwarzenegger took part in the project after suggesting the melting idea online. The robots executed the jumps autonomously during a 24-hour window at the foundry despite extreme heat and electromagnetic interference.
figure.ai
· 2026-10-02
A review published in Consciousness and Cognition by Derek Arnold, Loren Bouyer, Blake Saurels and Samuel Schwarzkopf argues that mental imagery is not simply visual perception run backward through the primary visual cortex. Drawing on cases of aphantasia—a lifelong inability to form mental images—and patients who retain imagery despite losing visual cortex tissue, the authors contend that imagination arises from cooperation among frontal and other distributed brain regions rather than a single visual 'screen.'
dailyneuron.com
· 2026-09-14
WIRED's roundup of the best standing desks for 2026 includes expert commentary questioning whether standing desks are truly beneficial. Kinesiologist Anne-Kristina Arnold of Simon Fraser University notes that prolonged standing carries its own cardiovascular risks and that research on standing workstations remains mixed. The guide also breaks down the tradeoffs between electric and manual standing desks for buyers.
wired.com
· 2026-09-12
Autodesk is offering a limited-time 40% discount on its Media and Entertainment Collection, a software bundle that includes Maya, 3ds Max, Arnold and MotionBuilder. The collection comes in four variants tailored to modeling, motion capture, animation, and rendering workflows, all priced identically with the same discount applied.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-09
NextEra Energy has received a $1.9 billion federal loan to refurbish the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa, a nuclear plant shuttered since 2020 that Google pledged to help revive last October. The plant is slated to restart in 2029, with Google reportedly planning up to six data centers nearby, while only 50 megawatts of output will go to the local power cooperative.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-08
NextEra Energy has received a $1.9 billion loan from the US Department of Energy to restart the Duane Arnold Energy Center, a 615-megawatt nuclear plant in Iowa that was shut down after storm damage in 2020. Google will buy power from the reopened plant to run its AI data centers, with NextEra targeting a restart by 2029 and citing job creation and grid reliability benefits.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-08
StudioCanal is bringing James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day back to theaters this weekend to mark the film's 35th anniversary and the franchise's fictional 'Judgment Day' date of August 29, 1997. The re-release prompted a retrospective look at the sequel's production history, including Schwarzenegger's push for a follow-up and Cameron's decision to reframe the original Terminator as a protective figure for young John Connor.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-08-28
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