On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced that a large collection of tech companies had signed on to what it's calling the Ratepayer Protection Pledge. By agreeing, the initial signatories—Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI—are saying they will pay for the new generation and transmission capacities needed for any additional data centers they build. But the agreement has no enforcement mechanism, and it will likely run into issues with hardware supplies. It also ignores basic economics.

Other than that, it seems like a great idea.

What's being agreed to

The agreement is quite simple, laying out five points. The key ones are the first three: that the companies building data centers pledge to pay for new generating capacity, either building it themselves or paying for it as part of a new or expanded power plant. They'll also pay for any transmission infrastructure needed to connect their data centers and the new supply to the grid and will cover these costs whether or not the power ultimately gets used by their facilities.

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Later this evening—Friday morning local time—the new 1.6 L V6 engines that power this year's crop of Formula 1 machinery will roar into life as practice for the first race of the year gets underway in Melbourne, Australia. After several years in which the teams' performances converged so much that the sport was determined by finer margins than ever, 2026 sees a comprehensive reset.

The cars are smaller and lighter, and they have different aerodynamic configurations for the corners and the straights. The hybrid systems are more powerful, and each runs on its own bespoke sustainable fuel . There's even a new way to watch as F1 makes a $750 million move from ESPN to Apple. Over the offseason, throughout the preseason shakedown in Barcelona, and then two three-day tests in Bahrain , plenty of questions have arisen: Are the new technical regulations a mistake? Can we still watch F1TV? And just what the heck is going on, Aston Martin?

400 kW + 350 kW = headaches?

After more than a decade with the same power units—and the same few manufacturers—the sport wanted to attract some new blood. Drawing in more car companies, which have boards and shareholders to answer to , required acknowledging road relevance and some commitment to sustainability and decarbonization. Since OEMs are all about electrification, that meant a greater emphasis on the hybrid side of the power units. And the veneer of environmental responsibility arrives in the form of heavily audited, fully sustainable fuels.

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James Gunn and Peter Safran injected a much-needed shot of levity into the DC Universe when they took over the franchise and launched their " Gods and Monsters " chapter.  But they're getting a bit more serious with the latest installment: Lanterns , an eight-episode series that reimagines the Green Lantern mythology as a gritty prestige crime drama/spy thriller in the vein of True Detective and Slow Horses .

The logline says the show will focus on two versions of the Green Lantern who find themselves "drawn into a dark, Earth-based mystery as they investigate a murder in the American Heartland" (i.e., Nebraska). Will it work? We'll see. This series was barely on my radar before, but the extended teaser that dropped last night is tonally unique for the DCU and so well done that the show now has a place on my must-watch TV list for 2026.

Kyle Chandler plays Hal Jordan, a former test pilot who is nearing his retirement from the Green Lantern Corps. He's training a new recruit, John Stewart Jr. (Aaron Pierre), to replace him. Nathan Fillion reprises his Superman role as the obnoxious Guy Gardner. The cast also includes Kelly McDonald as Kerry, a small-town family-oriented sheriff; Jason Ritter as Billy Macon, Kerry's husband; Garret Dillahunt as William Macon, Kerry's cowboy father-in-law; Poorna Jagannathan as a woman named Zoe; Ulrich Thomsen as Sinestro, a former Corps member who's gone rogue; and Paul Ben-Victor as an extraterrestrial called Antaan.

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Two months ago, a key staffer for Sen. Ted Cruz said in a public meeting that she was "begging" NASA to release a document that would kick off the second round of a competition among private companies to develop replacements for the International Space Station.

There has been no movement since then, as NASA has yet to release this "request for proposals." So this week, Cruz stepped up the pressure on the space agency with a NASA Authorization bill that passed his committee on Wednesday.

Regarding NASA's support for the development of commercial space stations, the bill mandates the following, within specified periods, of passage of the law:

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Elon Musk has acknowledged that the tweet at the center of a multibillion-dollar lawsuit over his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter “may not have been my wisest” as the world’s richest man defends himself from allegations of market manipulation in court.

He told a San Francisco jury on Wednesday that his post was not intended to manipulate Twitter’s stock price in the midst of the takeover battle.

A group of Twitter investors has alleged they lost money after Musk threatened to walk away from the deal to gain leverage during takeover talks, despite being aware he would be legally forced to complete the $44 billion buyout.

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As part of Apple's flurry of Mac announcements earlier this week, the company announced the new M5 Pro and M5 Max processors . And those chips are shaking up the way that Apple designs and talks about its processor cores: What would have been called "performance" CPU cores are now "super" cores. "Efficiency" cores are still called efficiency cores. And there's a new, third type of CPU core in between that is labeled a "performance" core.

Apple said earlier this week that the "super" name change would retroactively apply to the regular-old Apple M5's performance cores, too. And the macOS Tahoe 26.3.1 update released yesterday formally made the name change official, changing the labeling in both the System Information app and the Activity Monitor.

This "upgrade" should only apply to the M5 MacBook Pro , the sole M5-family Mac released before the name change was announced. It should go without saying that this is just a name change; you shouldn't actually expect different behavior or performance from your Mac after installing the update. The new MacBook Airs and Pros with M5, M5 Pro, and M5 Max chips will likely already be using the new names out of the box.

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On Wednesday, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it had issued its first construction approval in nearly a decade. The approval will allow work to begin on a site in Kemmerer, Wyoming, by a company called TerraPower. That company is most widely recognized as being financially backed by Bill Gates, but it's attempting to build a radically new reactor, one that is sodium-cooled and incorporates energy storage as part of its design.

This doesn't necessarily mean it will gain approval to operate the reactor, but it's a critical step for the company.

The TerraPower design, which it calls Natrium and has been developed jointly with GE Hitachi, has several novel features. Probably the most notable of these is the use of liquid sodium for cooling and heat transfer. This allows the primary coolant to remain liquid, avoiding any of the challenges posed by the high-pressure steam used in water-cooled reactors. But it carries the risk that sodium is highly reactive when exposed to air or water. Natrium is also a fast-neutron reactor, which could allow it to consume some isotopes that would otherwise end up as radioactive waste in more traditional reactor designs.

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DENVER—Last month, President Donald Trump took to social media with an announcement that he would direct the Pentagon and other federal agencies to "begin the process" of disclosing government files related to alien life and UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena). It was the latest chapter in a yearslong slow burn of sensational claims, congressional hearings, and yes, the military's release in 2020 of intriguing videos that do, indeed, appear to show things that defy simple explanations.

Subsequent reports from NASA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) did not find any link between the unexplained phenomena and aliens, but that didn't stop enthusiasts from wanting to know more.

"To date, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, there is no conclusive evidence suggesting an extraterrestrial origin for UAP," a NASA blue-ribbon panel wrote in a 2023 report. "The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP," the DNI report stated in 2021.

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Late in 2025, we covered the development of an AI system called Evo that was trained on massive numbers of bacterial genomes. So many that, when prompted with sequences from a cluster of related genes, it could correctly identify the next one or suggest a completely novel protein.

That system worked because bacteria tend to cluster related genes together—something that's not true in organisms with complex cells, which tend to have equally complex genome structures. Given that, our coverage noted, "It’s not clear that this approach will work with more complex genomes."

Apparently, the team behind Evo viewed that as a challenge, because today it is describing Evo 2, an open source AI that has been trained on genomes from all three domains of life (bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes). After training on trillions of base pairs of DNA, Evo 2 developed internal representations of key features in even complex genomes like ours, including things like regulatory DNA and splice sites, which can be challenging for humans to spot.

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