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Dating apps are a notoriously hostile space towards transgender users. If they list their transness in their profiles, theyre outing themselves to the world. If they dont, matches could accuse them of catfishing. Picking the right time to tell matches can feel impossible. With Match Note, Hinge wants to help these daters out. The feature, which launched this morning, lets users send a must-read note to their match before starting a conversation. The use cases extend far beyond trans users: The tool can also benefit neurodivergent daters, daters with children, and more. Listing these sensitive identity traits on a public profile can feel daunting; now, Hinge is offering a chance for users to keep some of their privacy. When youre dating, it can be vulnerable to open up to others, Hinge CMO Jackie Jantos writes in an email to Fast Company. Match Note gives all daters an opportunity to share what they feel is importantprivately and directlywith people theyve matched with.Hinges ploy to help minority datersIts a hard time to be trans in the United States. President Donald Trump has rolled back trans civil protections and encoded anti-trans language into his executive orders. His actions have also fed into an increasingly anti-trans corporate culture, as American companies continue to cow to Trump by cutting DEI initiatives. Even more companies, it seems, are afraid to say the word trans nowadays.Thats why its meaningful when Hinge announces new features specifically trying to help their trans customers. Match Note gives them more options, choosing exactly when and how they want to disclose their gender identity to other matches. Its popular, too: Of 2,000 daters who tested Match Note, 83% of trans and non-binary respondents thought the feature improved their ability to show up as their authentic self on Hinge, per Jantos.In the LGBTQIA+ community, trans, nonbinary, and queer+ folks used Match Note during testing to share more about their gender identity upon matching like highlighting from their profile that theyre trans or reminding matches about their pronouns, Jantos writes. Other members of the community, such as gay men, are using this surface to share more about their preferred sexual positions because it feels important to align on from the beginning. The tool could be useful for neurodivergent daters, too. Hinge users may not want the swiping world to know that theyre on the spectrum, for example. But that could affect their messaging patterns; with Match Note, that user could disclose their neurodivergence after matching. Or, imagine the single parent who needs their partner to love children, but doesnt want to breach the childs privacy by listing them on a public profile. With Match Note, they could save that information for just those they match with. How much do we share on dating apps?Even for traits that arent as personally sensitive, disclosures are becoming increasingly difficult. Think of the sober dater. While they may not care whether the world knows about their sobriety, its difficult to cram that into Hinges witty prompt boxes. (Generally, users dont look close enough to see a No next to Hinges glass icon.) Those disclosures also break the feeling of nonchalance that many users seek to create. What if they come off as overly earnest? Now, they can list their sobriety in a Match Note. [Animation: Hinge]Knowing when to share or repeat or go into detail about certain information can be tricky, Jantos writes. We hope this optional moment can save daters from any unnecessary confusion or heartache down the line and help you get on dates with the people youre excited about.
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E-Commerce
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright says it’s critical that the nation be out in front when it comes to artificial intelligence, and that means having reliable and affordable sources of electricity to meet the growing demands of the technology sector.Wright made the comments Tuesday before touring Sandia National Laboratories. On Monday, he visited Los Alamos National Laboratory, home to the top secret project during World War II that created the atomic bomb.A fossil fuel executive and graduate of MIT, Wright highlighted the labs’ legacies and said they will play a role in what he described as this generation’s Manhattan Projecta critical scientific undertaking that will change the course of the world in ways yet to be imagined.To win the AI race, he said the nation needs reliable and affordable electricity and the infrastructure to move it around.“I’m a believer,” Wright said, adding that nuclear power will be part of the solution. How big is the nuclear piece of the energy pie? Federal energy analysts say the U.S. has generated more nuclear electricity than any other country and that plants here have supplied close to 20% of the nation’s total annual electricity since 1990. That’s enough to power more than 70 million homes.Nuclear power makes up less of the world’s portfolio when it comes to generating energy than other sources, Wright said. That’s despite plants having small footprints and running on small amounts of material that pack a big punch.“It’s playing a shrinking role in our energy pot,” he said. “That doesn’t square.”However, many states are looking to nuclear energy to fill the gap as more data centers come online and tech companies develop more energy-thirsty AI tools.Arizona already is home to one of the nation’s largest nuclear plants and utilities there have teamed up to explore the potential for building more. Meanwhile, California extended the life of its last operating nuclear plant with the help of more than $1 billion in federal funding. Officials say the Diablo Canyon plant is vital to California’s power grid.In Wyoming, TerraPower, a company started by Bill Gates, broke ground last summer on what officials say will be one of the first advanced reactors to operate in the U.S. What does it take to feed nuclear power plants? Nuclear power plants are fueled with uraniumthe mining and milling of which is a major sticking point for environmentalists who point to legacy contamination from early operations in western U.S. states and on Native American lands. Concerns still swirl today, with some groups criticizing the revival of mining near the Grand Canyon.The back end of the fuel cycle also is an issue, with commercial reactors across the country producing more than 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel annually, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Most of the waste remains at the sites that produce it because there’s nowhere else to put it.Private companies plan to temporarily store spent fuel in New Mexico and West Texas. In the case of Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court is weighing whether federal regulators have the authority to grant licenses for such facilities to operate.Barring a permanent solution, both Republican and Democratic leaders in the two states have said they don’t want to become the nation’s nuclear dumping ground.Wright acknowledged the challenge of spent fuel, saying there are “some creative ideas” on the horizon that could lead to long-term storage solutions at multiple sites around the U.S. Is there a clear path for more nuclear power? U.S. President Donald Trump has set the stage, signing executive orders aimed at stoking American innovation when it comes to AI, declaring a national energy emergency, and establishing a national council that will be focused on “energy dominance.”The administration also supports a multibillion-dollar venture by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank that involves building data centers and the electricity generation needed for further AI development.The Biden administration, too, had touted nuclear power as a way to meet demands without emitting greenhouse gases. The administration last year set a target of at least tripling nuclear power in the U.S. by 2050.Standing in a corner of the national nuclear science museum in Albuquerque, Wright noted that the nation’s nuclear history began in large part in New Mexico with the development of the atomic bomb.There are many reasons for the lack of progress over recent decades, including government regulations he called overly burdensome. Beyond ensuring human safety, he said the high bars that have been set have stifled the development of next-generation nuclear power.“Our goal is to get that out of the way, bring private businesses together, and figure out what kind of nudge we might need to get shovels in the ground and next-generation small modular reactors happening,” he said. “I think they will be part of the solution.” Susan Montoya Bryan, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
A new federal lawsuit in Maryland is challenging a Trump administration memo giving the nation’s schools and universities two weeks to eliminate “race-based” practices of any kind or risk losing their federal money.The lawsuit, filed Tuesday by the American Federation of Teachers union and the American Sociological Association, says the Education Department’s February 14 memo violates the First and Fifth Amendments. Forcing schools to teach only the views supported by the federal government amounts to a violation of free speech, the organizations say, and the directive is so vague that schools don’t know what practices cross the line.“This letter radically upends and re-writes otherwise well-established jurisprudence,” the lawsuit said. “No federal law prevents teaching about race and race-related topics, and the Supreme Court has not banned efforts to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in education.”The memo, formally known as a Dear Colleague Letter, orders schools and universities to stop any practice that treats people differently because of their race, giving a deadline of this Friday. As a justification, it cites a Supreme Court decision banning the use of race in college admissions, saying the ruling applies more broadly to all federally funded education.President Donald Trump’s administration is aiming to end what the memo described as widespread discrimination in education, often against white and Asian American students.At stake is a sweeping expansion of the Supreme Court ruling, which focused on college admissions policies that considered race as a factor when admitting students. In the February 14 memo, the Education Department said it interprets the ruling to apply to admissions, hiring, financial aid, graduation ceremonies, and “all other aspects of student, academic and campus life.”The lawsuit says the Education Department is applying the Supreme Court decision too broadly and overstepping the agency’s authority. It takes issue with a line in the memo condemning teaching about “systemic and structural racism.”“It is not clear how a school could teach a fulsome U.S. History course without teaching about slavery, the Missouri Compromise, the Emancipation Proclamation, the forced relocation of Native American tribes,” and other lessons that might run afoul of the letter, the lawsuit said.The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In the memo, Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, had said schools’ and colleges diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts have been “smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.“But under any banner, discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin is, has been, and will continue to be illegal,” Trainor wrote in the memo.The lawsuit argues the Dear Colleague Letter is so broad that it appears to forbid voluntary student groups based on race or background, including Black student unions or Irish-American heritage groups. The memo also appears to ban college admissions practices that weren’t outlawed in the Supreme Court decision, including recruiting efforts to attract students of all races, the lawsuit said.It asks the court to stop the department from enforcing the memo and strike it down.The American Federation of Teachers is one of the nation’s largest teachers unions. The sociological association is a group of about 9,000 college students, scholars and teachers. Both groups say their members teach lessons and supervise student organizations that could jeopardize their schools’ federal money under the memo. The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Collin Binkley, AP Education Writer
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E-Commerce
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