Can we trust nuclear power again?
He tells Helen Pidd it is an energy source long misunderstood – unfairly tainted by the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. It is a safe technology, he says, and despite the billions it costs to build nuclear plants, it represents good value for money.
Across the world – from the UK and Denmark to Italy and the US – countries seem willing to look at nuclear again. So can we trust it?
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The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Robot surgery on humans could be trialled within decade after success on pig organs
Automated surgery could be trialled on humans within a decade, say researchers, after an AI-trained robot armed with tools to cut, clip and grab soft tissue successfully removed gall bladders without human help. The robot surgeons were schooled on video footage of human medics conducting operations using organs taken from dead pigs. In an apparent research breakthrough, eight operations were conducted on pig organs with a 100% success rate by a team led by experts at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the US. The Royal College of Surgeons in the UK called it 'an exciting development that shows great promise', while John McGrath, a leading expert on robotic surgery in the UK, called the results 'impressive' and 'novel' and said it 'takes us further into the world of autonomy'. It opens up the possibility of replicating, en masse, the skills of the best surgeons in the world. The technology allowing robots to handle complex soft tissues such as gallbladders, which release bile to aid digestion, is rooted in the same type of computerised neural networks that underpin widely used artificial intelligence tools such as Chat GPT or Google Gemini. The surgical robots were slightly slower than human doctors but they were less jerky and plotted shorter trajectories between tasks. The robots were also able to repeatedly correct mistakes as they went along, asked for different tools and adapted to anatomical variation, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Science Robotics. The authors from Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Columbia universities called it 'a milestone toward clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems'. Almost all the 70,000 robotic procedures carried out annually in the NHS in England were fully controlled under human instruction, with only bone-cutting for hip and knee operations semi-autonomous, McGrath said. Last month the health secretary, Wes Streeting, said increasing robotic surgery was at the heart of a 10-year plan to reform the NHS and cut waiting lists. Within a decade, the NHS has said, nine in 10 of all keyhole surgeries will be carried out with robot assistance, up from one in five today. In the Johns Hopkins trial, the robots took just over five minutes to carry out the operation, which required 17 steps including cutting the gallbladder away from its connection to the liver, applying six clips in a specific order and removing the organ. The robots on average corrected course without any human help six times in each operation. 'We were able to perform a surgical procedure with a really high level of autonomy,' said Axel Krieger, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. 'In prior work, we were able to do some surgical tasks like suturing. What we've done here is really a full procedure. We have done this on eight gallbladders, where the robot was able to perform precisely the clipping and cutting step of gallbladder removal without any human intervention. 'So I think it's a really big landmark study that such a difficult soft tissue surgery is possible to do autonomously.' McGrath, who chairs NHS England's robotics steering committee, said autonomous surgery, while still years away, could one day lead to a human surgeon overseeing several autonomous robotic operations at the same time, carrying out simple procedures such as hernia operations or gall bladder removals more rapidly, with greater precision than humans and with less damage to surrounding bodily structures. But he cautioned that autonomous surgery remained a long way from being clinically deployable, because tests on dead pig organs do not test the robots' capacity to react to a patient moving and breathing, blood running in the field of operation, an inadvertent injury, smoke from cauterisation or fluid on the camera lens. Nuha Yassin, who leads on robotic surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, said: 'The next step must involve a careful exploration of the nuances within this rapidly evolving field to assess how these findings can be safely and effectively translated into a human pilot. Only then can this approach move toward, becoming a sustainable model for the future.' She said training, education and patient safety must remain at the forefront.
The Independent
4 hours ago
- The Independent
The simple verbal cues that can make you run faster without training
A study from the University of Essex involving 20 Tottenham Hotspur academy players, aged 14-15, showed that specific verbal cues can instantly enhance athletic performance and improve sprint times. Moran and researchers found that young soccer players run faster when focusing on their environment, rather than their body. While simple analogies worked to speed up sprints by 3 percent over 65 feet. Focusing on external cues, such as 'push the ground away' or 'sprint as if you are a jet taking off', led to better results than internal cues. The method sped up sprints by 3 per cent over a distance of 65 feet, an improvement typically requiring weeks of targeted training. Researchers suggest that using simple, evocative analogies can help coaches and parents maximise performance in young athletes across various sports.
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
We must count the real costs of nuclear power
Tim Gregory (Can we afford to be afraid of nuclear power? 6 July) makes a series of assertions that are incompatible with recent evidence about the transition to zero-carbon energy. Two stand out. The first is that the world needs more energy. Poor countries certainly do. But the clean-energy transition involves shifting to much more efficient technologies, such as electric vehicles and heat pumps. Many studies, including by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, show that these can enable rich countries to halve their energy use while improving living standards. The whole world could have western European lifestyles and still use less energy. The second error is to argue that wind and solar energy cannot power a reliable electricity grid. A major study by the Royal Society showed that a system based on these resources with some long-duration storage is not only feasible, but will be cheaper than a system with any level of nuclear power. Nuclear power is a costly distraction from building an efficient and renewable EyreEmeritus professor of energy and climate policy, University of Oxford Your author, in his enthusiasm to highlight the cheaper costs to build new nuclear plants, failed to include the ever-increasing costs of decommissioning nuclear plants at the end of their working life. This must be included in any comparison of costs. He also failed to mention the problems of vast amounts of highly dangerous radioactive nuclear waste and accidents, freak weather – such as the tsunamis causing radioactive leaks in Japan – and potential terrorist attacks. Nuclear may not cause atmospheric carbon waste but it does create hugely toxic radioactive waste that remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. A problem that threatens the health of all life. He mentions that Finland has made a deep burial site for nuclear waste, and the probability of geological activity and disturbance has obviously been factored in. However this does not mean it is guaranteed to stand the tests of time – and stable rock formations found at the site in Finland may not be so readily found AskewHayling Island, Hampshire Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
