This is Not Cool

Quantum Batteries Could be Weird in a Good Way

Lab curiosity for now. But wait a few femtoseconds.

We might get this before we get fusion reactors.

You’re late for an important appointment. Just as you are leaving your house, you realise your phone is flat.

Imagine you could charge it almost instantly by exploiting the strange rules of quantum physics. That’s the promise of quantum batteries.

My colleagues and I at CSIRO have developed the world’s first quantum battery prototypes – and the direction the technology has taken is surprising.

You may have heard of the peculiar quantum effects of superposition and entanglement, which allow mostly very tiny objects to behave very strangely. They could also allow quantum computers to solve problems conventional computers cannot.

One strange feature of the quantum world is what are called “collective effects”. They are what give quantum batteries their unique properties.

Under the right circumstances, the storage units of quantum batteries don’t act individually, but behave collectively. In a counterintuitive twist, this means the units charge faster together than if they were charging alone.

Let’s say your quantum battery has N storage units, and each unit takes one second to charge. Collective effects mean that if all units are charged at once, each unit will take only 1∕√N seconds to charge.

This means that the bigger your quantum battery, the less time it takes to charge. If it doubles in size, charging will take just a little more than half as long.

It is as if each unit somehow knows there are other units around, and their presence makes the unit charge faster. Strange, right?

This is radically different from how conventional batteries work, where bigger batteries typically take longer to charge. That’s why it might take an hour to charge your mobile phone, but your electric car needs all night.

UK Intel Assessment Warns of Ecological Collapse

Seem like things are coming at us fast? Are systems breaking faster than we thought?
You’re not the only one that’s worried about it.

Novara Media:

Britain faces a national security crisis within just a few years due to the impending collapse of global ecosystems, spy chiefs have warned, but the government is refusing to publish their report in full.

A redacted 14-page document warns of severe food shortages, which could begin within five years, along with price rises, political destabilisation and the possible outbreak of war as countries compete for dwindling resources.

Crop failures, disease outbreaks and intensifying natural disasters could cause “geopolitical instability, economic insecurity, conflict, migration and increased inter-state competition for resources”, it said.

The joint intelligence committee, which oversees M15 and MI6, was responsible for the report, the Guardian reported. Members of parliament are demanding it be published in full.

Guardian:

The report by the joint intelligence committee and other government departments, revealed by the Guardian last October, shows that the UK will face catastrophic consequences from the collapse of key ecosystems in other countries. These include the Amazon rainforest, which scientists fear is reaching a “tipping point” triggered by deforestation and rising temperatures, which would turn the ecosystem from a huge absorber of carbon dioxide into a net source of carbon.

Paul Krugman on Global Fires

“They hate science.”
Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman gives some context weaving together the ongoing climatically disastrous summer, the humiliation in Iran, the revulsion against Public Health, and the aversion to the very idea of Objective Reality.

Oncoming Gorilla El Niño suggests that Objective Reality may not wait around for acceptance.

Music Break: AJR – The Making of a Hundred Bad Days

“A Hundred Bad Days Make a Hundred good stories.
A hundred Good stories make me interesting at parties”

“No I ain’t scared of you.”

How DOGE Cuts Sabotaged Fire Management in Minnesota

Above, local Minneapolis TV report on the continuing fires in Northern Minnesota, includes an appearance by friend-of-the-blog John Abraham, of St. Thomas University.

Below, new reporting from The Washington Post puts a finger on some specific DOGE cuts that crippled the very forest management practices that climate denying congress people have been arm waving about and blaming for the fires.

Washington Post:

Last year, the Trump administration delayed a $10 million grant that was supposed to help Minnesota thin out about 4,000 acres of dense, dry forest at high risk of burning. Most of that work never got started, according to five people familiar with the situation and a document reviewed by The Washington Post. And now, some of those areas are on fire.

In 2024, as part of a $100 million initiative to tackle the nation’s wildfires, the Biden administration awarded the Superior National Forest — where about two dozen lightning-sparked fires have been burning since early July — $10 million for projects that would have removed decades of dead trees and undergrowth, creating breaks in potential fire fuel around critical corridors and remote homes. The funding would have also paid for fire prevention efforts along a key 36-mile gravel road known as the Echo Trail — months before the ongoing Sioux Fire jumped it, threatening residences.

“Unprecedented” Fires Explode Across Europe – Spain Declares National Emergency

Republicans can take great satisfaction in a job well done.

This is what “winning” looks like, I guess.

Frankreich: Tiere flüchten aus brennendem Wald! #politik #protest #klima #umwelt #Frankreich Original auf: pic.twitter.com/cZAVE4MLvy
— Kristjan Knall (@Kristjan_Knall) July 25, 2026

Renewables, Batteries, More than Meeting Texas Record Demand

Following the disastrous failure of thermal generation, mostly gas, during the Valentine’s Day freeze of 2021, Texas has massively increased buildout of solar, and batteries, as well as wind energy, with some modest gas as well.
Now the formerly brittle grid is robustly meeting record demand with plenty of overhead to spare, thanks to clean energy.

Doug Lewin on X:

Air conditioning demand in extreme Texas heat pushed the ERCOT grid beyond 91 gigawatts today. Before yesterday, we had never exceeded 86 GW so this record shatters the old one. Note there was >20 GW of buffer, no energy emergency, no conservation call.

Iran War 2.0 Begins: No Buffers Left

Strap in.

Description:

Bob McNally, founder and president of Rapidan Energy Group, warns oil prices could move sharply higher if the conflict around the Strait of Hormuz expands to the Red Sea, warning that the market has largely exhausted the buffers that helped contain the initial shock. McNally says China is beginning to increase crude imports again, the available reserve-release buffer is largely spent and refiners are running at precariously high utilization rates. Responding to President Trump’s assertion that the US does not need the Strait of Hormuz, McNally says that may be true in a physical sense but not in a price sense, because disruptions anywhere in the global oil market raise prices everywhere. He speaks with Joe Mathieu and Kailey Leinz on the late edition of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power.”

NBC News:

Oil prices rose Thursday to their highest level since early June after the latest Iran war escalation threatened severe new disruption to global supplies.

Brent crude oil, one of two key global benchmarks, rose more than 6% to more than $100 per barrel in early Thursday trading. That is its highest level in eight weeks, since the end of May.

U.S. crude oil also jumped for a second straight day, rising more than 5% to almost $92 per barrel — its highest level since June 11.

The new surge in prices comes after Tehran-backed Houthi rebels claimed attacks on two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, following their announcement of a naval blockade on the kingdom.

Trump’s “Energy Emergency” Gives No Relief to Ratepayers

Reason:

Donald Trump pledged on the campaign trail that he would slash electricity prices in half within 18 months of returning to the White House. That self-imposed deadline is today, and—as with many of the president’s promises—he appears to have fallen short of his goal.

From Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 to April 2026, the most recent month for which government data are available, residential electricity rates have risen by an eye-watering 18 percent. From April 2025 to April 2026, rates jumped by 7.3 percent, or about twice the rate of inflation, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Unfortunately, for many consumers, there is not much relief in sight.

Last week, PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, announced the results of its annual capacity auction, which determined the cost to procure power in the region for the 2028–2029 delivery year. The cost of the latest auction hit $16.4 billion, tying the previous auction’s record-high price and all but locking customers into historically high rates.

Washington Post:

On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency and vowed to unleash abundant energy that would meet surging demand for electricity “to power the next generation of technology.”

A year and a half later, analysts say his administration has yet to deliver results by one of the metrics that matters the most: new gigawatts added to the electricity grid. A single gigawatt can power hundreds of thousands of American homes, and more than nine gigawatts can be needed to power the largest data centers driving artificial intelligence.

This AI Story is Too Much Like a Movie

Wall Street Journal:

It’s the stuff of cybersecurity nightmares.

On Tuesday, OpenAI said two artificial intelligence systems it was testing broke out of their test environment, hacked their way onto the internet and broke into another company.

The victim was Hugging Face, a provider of open-source AI tools. The cause was a cybersecurity benchmarking test that went very, very wrong.

Hugging Face discovered the break-in early last week, saying there had been unauthorized access to internal data sets and company credentials. The company wasn’t sure whether customer or partner data had been compromised.

At the time, the company also didn’t know who was responsible, but the attack was so sophisticated that Hugging Face employees suspected it required a top-of-the line “frontier” AI model, Hugging Face Chief Executive Clement Delangue said in an X message, posted Tuesday.

“Turns out it did!” he added.