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A trial that could reshape social media is underway, as Meta faces comparisons to big tobacco in what observers are calling a blockbuster legal moment. The parallel is striking — allegations that the company knew its platforms caused harm and pressed forward anyway. The outcome could redefine corporate accountability in the attention economy.
Shifting to the frontier of space exploration, nuclear power programs are running into serious headwinds. Engineers and policymakers are wrestling with both near-term regulatory hurdles and longer-horizon technical gaps that could delay missions depending on compact nuclear reactors for deep-space propulsion and surface power. The ambition is enormous, but so are the obstacles.
And in a quieter corner of mathematics, Fields Medal winner Terence Tao has announced Palomar, a new registry designed to catalog Lean-verified mathematical proofs. It is an attempt to bring machine-checkable rigor to the broader mathematical community, making formally verified results easier to discover and build upon. Whether mathematicians embrace it at scale remains the open question.
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