Extreme Wildfires Have Doubled in Frequency and Intensity | Permanent Nuclear Waste Storage | AI-Powered Super Soldiers Are More Than Just a Pipe Dream, and more

AI-Powered Super Soldiers Are More Than Just a Pipe Dream  (Jared Keller, Wired)
The day is slowly turning into night, and the American special operators are growing concerned. They are deployed to a densely populated urban center in a politically volatile region, and local activity has grown increasingly frenetic in recent days, the roads and markets overflowing with more than the normal bustle of city life. Intelligence suggests the threat level in the city is high, but the specifics are vague, and the team needs to maintain a low profile—a firefight could bring known hostile elements down upon them. To assess potential threats, the Americans decide to take a more cautious approach. Eschewing conspicuous tactical gear in favor of blending in with potential crowds, an operator steps out into the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare to see what he can see.
With a click of a button, the operator sees … everything. A complex suite of sensors affixed to his head-up display start vacuuming up information from the world around him. Body language, heart rates, facial expressions, and even ambient snatches of conversation in local dialects are rapidly collected and routed through his backpack supercomputers for processing with the help of an onboard artificial intelligence engine. The information is instantly analyzed, streamlined, and regurgitated back into the head-up display. The assessment from the operators’ tactical AI sidekick comes back clear: There are a series of seasonal events coming into town, and most passersby are excited and exuberant, presenting a minimal threat to the team. Crisis averted—for now.
This is one of many potential scenarios repeatedly presented by Defense Department officials in recent years when discussing the future of US special operations forces, those elite troops tasked with facing the world’s most complex threats head-on as the “tip of the spear” of the US military. Both defense officials and science-fiction scribes may have envisioned a future of warfare shaped by brain implants and performing enhancing drugs, or a suit of powered armor straight out of Starship Troopers, but according to US Special Operations Command, the next generation of armed conflict will be fought (and, hopefully, won) with a relatively simple concept: the “hyper enabled operator.”

Extreme Wildfires Have Doubled in Frequency and Intensity in the Past 20 Years  (Victor Fernandez Garcia, Wired)
It feels like we are getting used to the Earth being on fire. Recently, more than 70 wildfires burned simultaneously in Greece. In early 2024, Chile suffered its worst wildfire season in history, with more than 130 people killed. Last year, Canada’s record-breaking wildfires burned from March to November, and in August, flames devastated the island of Maui, in Hawaii. And the list goes on and on.
Watching the news, it certainly feels like catastrophic extreme wildfires are happening more often, and unfortunately this feeling has now been confirmed as correct. A new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution shows that the number and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on Earth have doubled over the past two decades.

The Thorny Social Problem of Permanent Nuclear Waste Storage  (Austyn Gaffney, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
The world’s first permanent depository for nuclear fuel waste opens later this year on Olkiluoto, a sparsely populated and lushly forested island in the Baltic Sea three hours north of Helsinki.
Onkalo — the name means “cavity” or “cave” in Finnish — is among the most advanced facilities of its kind, designed for an unprecedented and urgent task: safely storing some of the most toxic material on Earth nearly 1,500 feet underground in what’s called a deep mined geologic repository.
The process requires remarkable feats of engineering. It begins in an encapsulation plant, where robots remove spent nuclear fuel rods from storage canisters and place them in copper and cast iron casks up to two stories tall. Once full, these hefty vessels, weighing around 24 metric tons, will descend more than a quarter-mile in an elevator to a cavern hollowed out of crystalline bedrock 2 billion years old. (The trip takes 50 minutes.) Each tomb will hold 30 to 40 of these enormous containers ensconced in bentonite clay and sealed behind concrete. As many as 3,250 canisters containing 6,500 metric tons of humanity’s most dangerous refuse will, the theory goes, lie undisturbed for hundreds of thousands of years.
Nothing assembled by human hands has stood for more than a fraction of that. The world’s oldest known structure, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, is a bit more than 11,000 years old. Designing Onkalo to endure for so unfathomably long is necessary because the material left behind by nuclear fission remains radioactive for millennia. Safely disposing of it requires stashing it for, essentially, eternity. That way nothing — be it natural disasters, future ice ages, or even the end of humanity itself — would expose anyone, or anything, to its dangers.