Stephen Shankland
@stshank.bsky.social
Head of Content at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a company commercializing fusion energy: clean, safe, affordable, secure. Former science and technology journalist. Bird nerd. Assigned to the Conehead clique as a teenager.
A reasonable wrap-up on the daylight saving time discussion. There's no simple path out of the twice-yearly clock-change annoyance. (I'm a permanent standard time fan.) www.nytimes.com/2026/07/27/s...
Should We Make Daylight Saving Time Permanent? (Gift Article)
More light at the day’s end comes at a price: much later winter sunrises across much of the U.S. Scientists have documented consequences for public health and the economy.
nytimes.com
Oh good, Web Sharp Pro from @gregbenzphoto.bsky.social now has a Lightroom plugin (though it calls on the $39 Photoshop tool to do the grunt work). Slowly I'm getting closer to actualy sharing HDR photos. gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-photos/l... #HDR #photography
Lightroom Classic plugin for Web Sharp Pro - Greg Benz Photography
For those of you who want to leverage the advanced exporting capabilities of Web Sharp Pro (WSP) but frequently work in Lightroom Classic (LRC), WSP now includes a LRC plugin. This lets you start your...
gregbenzphotography.com
Today, CFS announced another major advance in our fusion energy push: we raised an additional $1 billion in funding. This is the largest investment round in commercial fusion worldwide since our $1.8 billion funding round in 2021, bringing our total capital raised to $4 billion. 1/4 #FusionEnergy
This western tanager has been showing up for the last few days. What a glorious creature! #birds 🐦 #NewMexico
I spotted a humpback whale that's new to Happywhale! Modestly giddy here. happywhale.com/individual/1... #whale
Check out this sighting of Humpback Whale HW-MN0104926!
South of Boothbay Harbor, Maine
happywhale.com
Pure EVs just outsold hybrids, gassers, diesels, and plug-in hybrids in German for the first time, per registration stats. Pretty interesting culture/technology shift for that country in particular. insideevs.com/news/802162/... #EV
EVs Just Beat Gas And Diesel In Europe’s Biggest Car Market For The First Time
EVs and hybrids were neck and neck, but all-electric cars emerged as the top choice in Germany last month.
insideevs.com
We've got tokamaks called BEST, EAST, FAST, WEST... I'm waiting for the new German fusion program to announce a tokamak called WURST #FusionEnergy
Another new startup for AI for materials discovery: CuspAI. www.businesswire.com/news/home/20...
businesswire.com
Wildfire Smoke, the Gas Turbine’s Enemy ...it relies on large, high-efficiency filters on its intakes. Wildfire smoke is almost entirely PM10 and PM2.5 — exactly the particle sizes that foul those filters fast. As the filters load up, airflow drops, and so does output.
Equipment Outages: The Hidden Drag on Reliability
Another eventful week in power system operations.
kilovar1959.substack.com
In the last year, investors brought $4.5 billion of new funding to fusion companies, dwarfing governmental fusion budgets, according to the newest @fusionindustry.bsky.social yearly report on the industry. 1/4
Moving to permanent daylight saving time would end in tears — my own if nobody else's. Everybody hates clock time changes, but there's no consensus on the fix. www.cnet.com/news/politic... In the 1970s the US adopted then dumped permanent daylight saving time. www.nytimes.com/1974/10/01/a...
Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Why It's a Bad Idea
Commentary: The Senate's unanimous vote to set clocks forward year round disagrees with much of public opinion -- and my family's school day routine.
cnet.com
Umm, that image sure looks a lot like our SPARC digital twin, not Realta Fusion's magnetic mirror setup.
My mom bought "Fiery Feast" birdseed infused with chile pepper that birds are supposed to like while squirrels don't. Here's the scorecard on who actually likes to eat it, based on my last week visiting her in New Mexico: ❌ birds ✅ black bears ✅ skunks ✅ squirrels
Time for our newest 6-month update. Meet DDR. No, it doesn't stand for Dance Dance Revolution. #FusionEnergy
Commonwealth Fusion Systems@cfs.energy · 4w agoIt's been a busy six months at Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). In the newest of our twice-yearly video updates, CEO Bob Mumgaard discusses how dry dress rehearsal is occurring in parallel with #SPARC assembly, and shares other recent progress: 1/3
This is one of those test facilities that stands to help a lot of fusion energy companies, not just @cfs.energy. Tritium production is a technology many will need to master.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems@cfs.energy · last mo.The @ukaeaofficial.bsky.social has established a program to test technology that’s crucial for producing fusion fuel — and CFS will be the first organization to take advantage of it. Today, we announced this new collaboration with the UKAEA’s Lithium Breeding Tritium Innovation (LIBRTI) program. 1/4
It’s time for another Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) — only this time it’s more of an Ask Us Anything. From 9:30–11:30 a.m. ET on June 30, four of our physicists will answer your questions on our five new peer-reviewed papers about the physics basis of our ARC fusion power plant. 1/5 #FusionEnergy
Have any burning questions on fusion physics — disruptions, runaway electrons, heat exhaust, cranking 1.1 GW of power? The second @cfs.energy AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit is 9:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday, June 30, with 4 co-authors of our ARC power plant physics basis papers. 🧵1/2 #FusionEnergy
From the fusion community on Reddit
Explore this post and more from the fusion community
reddit.com
Northern cardinal this morning in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Such a good song. #birds #birding #Massachusetts #NaturePhotography 🐦
Nice new video of us hoisting our SPARC tokamak's 3rd toroidal field (TF) magnet as we assemble the fusion demonstration machine at @cfs.energy HQ. These electromagnets (each strong enough to lift a small aircraft carrier) will help confine a plasma, our superhot fusion fuel. #FusionEnergy
Installing SPARC's third superstrong TF magnet #SPARC #Magnets #FusionEnergy
YouTube video by Commonwealth Fusion Systems
youtube.com
Commonwealth Fusion Systems@cfs.energy · last mo.So how do you confine a superhot, 100M°C fusion plasma? With superstrong magnets, of course. 🧲 1/3 #SPARC
Does time spent on word puzzles count toward the kid's daily reading requirement?
Indeed, the papers don't confirm the ARC fusion power plant design is done and fully proved out — but they do confirm the hardest part, the physics, is solid. That's the foundation for the whole enterprise.
Elizabeth Gibney@lizziegibney.bsky.social · 2mo agoCFS published 5 papers last week outlining their "early 2030s" fusion power plant & physics Researchers say it's great they're publishing & plans are promising. But the papers far from "confirm" the plant will deliver net electricity Lots of engineering Qs remain ⚛️🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...
As with many things in fusion energy, I hadn't fully appreciated the importance of diagnostics until I started digging in. Diagnostic systems gather visible and invisible information so you can understand your plasma characteristics like temperature and density that are difficult to infer. 🧵 1/3
I learned a ton reading these papers, talking to the authors, and writing up a blog post about them. Three of these papers deal with the biggest plasma physics challenges we'll encounter.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems@cfs.energy · 2mo agoToday, we laid the physics foundation for our ARC fusion power plant. ⚛️ With 5 deeply researched papers — validated by independent peer review and published in the Journal of Plasma Physics from @universitypress.cambridge.org — we’ve shown we've nailed the science of producing fusion power. 1/7
In fusion energy, everything starts with the plasma physics. These five papers lay the foundation for our ARC fusion power plant. 58 authors, 226 pages, and the physics checks out. #FusionEnergy
Commonwealth Fusion Systems@cfs.energy · 2mo agoToday, we laid the physics foundation for our ARC fusion power plant. ⚛️ With 5 deeply researched papers — validated by independent peer review and published in the Journal of Plasma Physics from @universitypress.cambridge.org — we’ve shown we've nailed the science of producing fusion power. 1/7
We have scads of experts at @cfs.energy, but strong plasma physics is the first challenge we have to tackle to build a functioning fusion power plant. Now we've taken our next physics step by publishing 5 peer-reviewed papers on the ARC fusion power plant's physics basis. #PowerMoves #FusionEnergy
New physics papers lay firm foundation for CFS’ ARC fusion power plant design | The Tokamak Times
With the publication today of five deeply researched and peer-reviewed papers, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) and dozens of collaborating physicists have cemented our confidence in the core plasma ...
blog.cfs.energy
Overprovisioning could help help, and better surveillance could be a deterrent, but defending subsea internet cable infrastructure is a hard problem and repairs are slow. www.cnn.com/2026/05/31/w...
‘The arteries of modern civilization’: The US and allies take action to protect seabed cables | CNN
The United States, Australia and the United Kingdom have taken a big step towards tackling growing threats to undersea pipelines and cables, which carry huge amounts of energy and data around the worl...
cnn.com
I tried YouTube Music for podcasts and can't remember why I ended up picking Pocket Casts instead, but it wasn't any of these reasons. In general I don't like blending music and podcasts, which I use very differently, e.g. pre-downloading and queueing up podcasts. techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/y...
YouTube adds new podcast features, including an AI recommendation tool and 'Auto speed' | TechCrunch
The update signals YouTube's ongoing efforts to compete with other platforms for podcast audiences.
techcrunch.com
A huge pile of new AI-predicted protein shapes. (Protein folding is a notoriously hard computational problem.) www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Move over, AlphaFold: open source model predicts shape of 1 billion proteins
The new open-source atlas, generated by an AI tool called ESMFold2, vastly increases the known protein universe.
nature.com