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In a bold, strategic move for the U.S., acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy announced plans on August 5 to build a nuclear fission reactor for deployment on the lunar surface in 2030. Doing so would allow the United States to gain a foothold on the moon by the time China plans to land the first taikonaut, what China calls its astronauts, there by 2030. Apart from the geopolitical importance, there are other reasons why this move is critically important. A source of nuclear energy will be necessary for visiting Mars, because solar energy is weaker there. It could also help establish a lunar base and potentially even a permanent human presence on the moon, as it delivers consistent power through the cold lunar night. As humans travel out into the solar system, learning to use the local resources is critical for sustaining life off Earth, starting at the nearby moon. NASA plans to prioritize the fission reactor as power necessary to extract and refine lunar resources. As a geologist who studies human space exploration, Ive been mulling over two questions since Duffys announcement. First, where is the best place to put an initial nuclear reactor on the moon, to set up for future lunar bases? Second, how will NASA protect the reactor from plumes of regolith (loosely fragmented lunar rocks) kicked up by spacecraft landing near it? These are two key questions the agency will have to answer as it develops this technology. Where do you put a nuclear reactor on the moon? The nuclear reactor will likely form the power supply for the initial U.S.-led moon base that will support humans wholl stay for ever-increasing lengths of time. To facilitate sustainable human exploration of the moon, using local resources such as water and oxygen for life support and hydrogen and oxygen to refuel spacecraft can dramatically reduce the amount of material that needs to be brought from Earth, which also reduces cost. In the 1990s, spacecraft orbiting the moon first observed dark craters called permanently shadowed regions on the lunar north and south poles. Scientists now suspect these craters hold water in the form of ice, a vital resource for countries looking to set up a long-term human presence on the surface. NASAs Artemis campaign aims to return people to the moon, targeting the lunar south pole to take advantage of the water ice that is present there. Dark craters on the moon, parts of which are indicated here in blue, never get sunlight. Scientists think some of these permanently shadowed regions could contain water ice. [Photo: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center] In order to be useful, the reactor must be close to accessible, extractable, and refinable water ice deposits. The issue is we currently do not have the detailed information needed to define such a location. The good news is the information can be obtained relatively quickly. Six lunar orbital missions have collected, and in some cases are still collecting, relevant data that can help scientists pinpoint which water ice deposits are worth pursuing. These datasets give indications of where either surface or buried water ice deposits are. It is looking at these datasets in tandem that can indicate water ice hot prospects, which rover missions can investigate and confirm or deny the orbital observations. But this step isnt easy. Luckily, NASA already has its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover mission built, and it has passed all environmental testing. It is currently in storage, awaiting a ride to the moon. The VIPER mission can be used to investigate on the ground the hottest prospect for water ice identified from orbital data. With enough funding, NASA could probably have this data in a year or two at both the lunar north and south poles. How do you protect the reactor? Once NASA knows the best spots to put a reactor, it will then have to figure out how to shield the reactor from spacecraft as they land. As spacecraft approach the moons surface, they stir up loose dust and rocks, called regolith. It will sandblast anything close to the landing site, unless the items are placed behind large boulders or beyond the horizon, which is more than 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) away on the moon. Scientists already know about the effects of landing next to pre-positioned asset. In 1969, Apollo 12 landed 535 feet (163 meters) away from the robotic Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which showed corrosion on surfaces exposed to the landing plume. The Artemis campaign will have much bigger lunar landers, which will generate larger regolith plumes than Apollo did. So any prepositioned assets will need protection from anything landing close by, or the landing will need to occur beyond the horizon. Until NASA can develop a custom launch and landing pad, using the lunar surfaces natural topography or placing important assets behind large boulders could be a temporary solution. However, a pad built just for launching and landing spacecraft will eventually be necessary for any site chosen for this nuclear reactor, as it will take multiple visits to build a lunar base. While the nuclear reactor can supply the power needed to build a pad, this process will require planning and investment. Human space exploration is complicated. But carefully building up assets on the moon means scientists will eventually be able to do the same thing a lot farther away on Mars. While the devil is in the details, the moon will help NASA develop the abilities to use local resources and build infrastructure that could allow humans to survive and thrive off Earth in the long term. Clive Neal is a professor of civil and environmental engineering and Earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
In Silicon Valley boardrooms, a small group of executives is quietly making decisions that will shape the lives of billions. And most of us wont know what those decisions are until its too late to change them. In July, the White House published “Americas AI Action Plan,” a 28-page document that reads like an industrial policy for a new arms race. Buried in Pillar I is a line that tells you exactly where U.S. policy is headed: Revise the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to eliminate references to misinformation, diversity, equity, inclusion, and climate change. When governments start crossing out those words by design, its fair to ask who is setting the terms of our technological futureand for whose benefit. This is more than rhetoric. The same plan boasts of rolling back the prior administration’s AI order, loosening oversight, and fast-tracking infrastructure and energy for data centers. It recasts artificial intelligence primarily as a geopolitical race to “win,” not as a societal system to govern. Its a perspective less about stewardship and more about deal-making, a style of governance that treats public policy like a term sheet. That framing matters: When the policy goal is speed and dominance, accountability becomes a nice-to-have. The European path Europe has chosen a completely different sequence: Set guardrails first, then scale. The EU AI Act entered into force in August 2024 and phases in obligations through 2026, with enforcement designed around risk. Imperfect? Sure. But the message is unambiguous: Democratic institutionsnot just corporate PRshould define acceptable uses, disclosures, and liabilities before the technology is everywhere. Meanwhile, the center of gravity in AI sits with a handful of firms that control compute, models, and distribution. Consider computethe acceleratorbased computing capacity (GPU/TPU time) required to train and run modern AIas well as models and distribution. Analysts still peg Nvidias share of AI accelerators at around 90%, and hyperscalers lock up capacity years in advance. That scarcity shapes who can experiment, who cant, and who pays whom for access. When the head of state approaches technology policy like an investment banker, those negotiations arent about public interest; theyre about maximizing a deal, often for the states coffers, and sometimes for political capital. Opacity compounds the problem. OpenAIs own GPT4 technical report declines to disclose the training data, model size, or compute used, explicitly citing competition and safety. Whatever you think of that rationale, it means society is being asked to accept consequential systems while remaining largely blind to what went into them. Trust us” is not governance. Concentrated power If you want a small but vivid example of how private choices ripple into public life, look at what happened when OpenAI released a flirty voice called Sky that many thought sounded like Scarlett Johansson. After public backlash, the company paused the voice. A cultural boundary was drawn not by a regulator or a court, but by a product team, a crisis comms cycle, and a corporate decision. Thats a lot of power for a very small group of people. Power also shows up on the utility bill. Googles latest environmental reporting links a 48% increase in greenhouse emissions since 2019 to datacenter growth for AI, and documents 6.1 billion gallons of water used in 2023 for coolingnumbers that will rise as we scale. Mistrals life cycle analysis goes further, estimating perprompt energy and water use for its models. Every ask the model has a footprint; multiply by billions and you cant pretend its free, no matter how much of a climate change denialist you may be. So yes, the United States is winning the raceto concentrate decisions that affect expression, employment, education, and the environment in a tiny crcle of boardrooms. The result is a democratic deficit. The public is reduced to spectators, reacting to faits accomplis instead of setting the rules. The alternative What would it look like to flip the script? Start by treating AI as infrastructure that requires public capacity, not just private CapEx. The National AI Research Resource pilot reflects the right instinct: Give researchers and startups shared access to compute, data, and tools so that inquiry isnt gated by hyperscaler contracts. Make it permanent, wellfunded, and independent, because open science dies when access is controlled by NDA. Second, attach conditions to public money and public procurement. If agencies and schools are going to buy AI, they should demand basic disclosures: which data were used for training; what guardrails govern outputs; which independent tests the model has passed; and an energyandwater ledger tied to time and place, not annual averages. If a vendor cant meet those bars, they dont get the contract. Thats not antiinnovation. Its market discipline aligned with public values. Third, separate layers to curb lockin. Cloud providers shouldnt be able to mandate that their model must use their chips to run their services as the default. Interoperability and data portability arent romantic ideals; they are how you keep a sector competitive when three firms control the stack. Fourth, transparency must mean more than model cards written by the vendor. For systems above a certain scale, we should require auditable disclosures to qualified third partieson training data provenance, evaluation suites, and postdeployment performance. If that sounds onerous, thats because consequence at scale is onerous. Weve learned this in every other critical infrastructure. Finally, align the environmental story with reality. Water and energy disclosures must be realtime, facilityspecific, and verified. Water positive by 2030 doesnt help a town whose aquifer is being drained this decade. If companies want to be first to ship frontier models, they should also be first to implement 24/7 carbonfree energy procurement and hard water budgets tied to local hydrology. A deeper danger Theres a deeper danger when national technology strategy is run like a business portfolio: Efficiency and revenue become the primary metrics, overshadowing the harder-to-quantify needs of citizens. In the private sector, sacrificing ethics, transparency, or long-term stability for a profitable deal can be chalked up to shareholder value. In government, that same trade-off erodes democracy itself, concentrating decisions in even fewer hands and normalizing a profit-first lens on matters that should be about rights, safeguards, and public trust. The point is not to slow AI. It is to decide, in public, which AI we want and on what terms. The U.S. is capable of both ambition and restraint; we did it with aviation, with medicine, with finance. AI should be no different. If we leave the big choices to a few firms and a few political appointees, well get a future built for us, not by us. And the price of rewriting it later will be higher than anyone is admitting today.
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E-Commerce
Everywhere you turn these days, you’ll find someone wearing a fabulous pair of cowboy boots. Throughout the summer, Beyoncé and her legions of fans wore bedazzled pairs for her Cowboy Carter tour. Some of the hottest TV shows right now, from Yellowstone to The Hunting Wives, feature fabulous Western style. Then there’s fashion: Brands ranging from Louis Vuitton to Gap to Mother Denim have recently released cowboy-inspired collections. The market for cowboy boots alone is expected to hit $289.7 million in 2025 and reach $538.6 million by 2035. Lizzie Means Duplantis and Sarah Means, the sisters who founded cult cowboy boot brand Miron Crosby, are keen observers of this footwear style. They point out that even as cowboy boots periodically break into mainstream American culture, in many parts of the country people wear cowboy boots everyday, with all kinds of outfits. “We grew up on a cattle ranch in West Texas that has been in our family since 1884,” says Means. “We had rugged everyday boots, but also fancy boots we would wear on special occasions. We would wear them with jeans and with ball gowns.” [Photo: Besita] The sisters are on a mission to turn the cowboy boot into a closet staple across America. They launched their direct-to-consumer brand in 2017, selling luxurious, fashion-forward Miron Crosby boots worn by everyone from Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves to supermodel Gigi Hadid. The label is known for boots with unique embellishments (like hearts and stars that look hand-drawn) crafted from exceptionally supple leathers in artisanal factories. With its designs priced from $1,096 to $3,295, Miron Crosby is a more upscale version of Tecovas, a direct-to-consumer brand focused on making affordable, everyday cowboy boots. But Duplantis and Means now want to bring their fashion-forward aesthetic to a broader audience. So today they’re launching Besita, a new label with more accessibly priced boots (ranging from $395 to $795) selling at Anthropologie, LoveShackFancy, Boot Barn, and other retail stores. “People have been awakened to the romance of the West,” says Means. “But we believe this isn’t just a trend. I think people are beginning to realize that cowboy boots are a versatile shoe that is central to the American aesthetic.” [Photo: Besita] The Craft of the Cowboy Boot Growing up in Texas, Duplantis and Means saw cowboy boots as heirlooms. On their ranch, beautiful pairs crafted with intricate designs were passed down from their grandparents and great-grandparents. “There’s a lot of craftsmanship that goes into creating these boots,” Duplantis says. “Where other people would ask for jewelry to mark special occasions, we would ask for boots.” When they launched Miron Crosby, their goal was to create fashionable cowboy boots with a high level of craftsmanship. This was an unusual move. Whenever cowboy boots come into fashion, brands seem to capitalize by making Western-looking styles in the same mass-market factories where their other shoes are made. In contrast, Duplantis and Means sought out factories that had been making boots for generations, including one in Mercedes, Texas, and several in Leon, Mexico, known as the capital of cowboy boot-making. [Photo: Besita] The sisters launched Miron Crosby with Caroline Cree, an Irish designer who has worked at American legacy brands like Coach, Lands End, and Gap. Cree has brought a keen interest in fine arts to her work. Every season, her new designs start with hand-drawn sketches, often inspired by nature. In her recent collections for Miron Crosby, there are boots covered in stars, flowers, and feathers. There’s a tall boot full of complex drawings of constellations and zodiac signs. And since the sisters’ family farm is called Moon Ranch, moons are a common motif. Cree digitizes the hand drawings, then the artisans in the factory begin incorporating them into the boots, using all kinds of complex, labor-intensive techniques. For instance, they create inlays of designs, which involves cutting out shapes on the leather, revealing a different color underneath. They also do appliqué, which involves cutting out shapes and stitching them onto the boots. “Each boot takes hours of labor and generational knowledge,” Cree says. [Photo: Besita] Making A More Affordable Pair For Besita, the team wanted to create boots that were just as beautiful and expertly made, but at a more affordable price. To do this, Cree created designs that were slightly less labor intensive to make. While the Miron Crosby boots are covered in inlays, Besita boots have just a few. And while artisans often cut out the Miron Crosby designs by hand, Cree created Besita designs that can be more easily laser cut by machine. Another difference is the leather itself. Miron Crosby uses some of the most expensive leathers on the market, like exotic pythons, and kid skins typically used in expensive gloves. It also uses fashion-forward leathers such as gold and iridescent foils. The Besita boots use high-quality but more commonly available cow hides. But the Besita boots are made in the same Leon factories that make Miron Crosby boots. “Besita means little kiss in Spanish,” says Cree. “It’s a way of paying homage to the Mexican factories.” Ultimately, Duplantis and Means hope that Besita introduces the cowboy boot to an even wider audience. They’ve partnered with a range of retailers that are styling the boots in many ways. The boots will be sold in the Texas-based department store St. Bernard, where consumers will likely be familiar with the cowboy boot aesthetic. But they will also be available at LoveShackFancy, which has a distinctively feminine, Victorian-inspired vibe, and Anthropologie, where they will be styled with the retailer’s characteristically boho-chic flair. “It will be fun to create a whole look around your cowboy boots at these stores,” says Duplantis.
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E-Commerce
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