Lanturn Glow: The Quiet Side of AI

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 03:00:00 -0600

If you’ve followed AI news at all in the past year, you’ve probably developed a specific feeling about it. Maybe it’s anxiety about jobs disappearing. Maybe it’s frustration at chatbots confidently making things up. Maybe it’s unease about deepfakes and misinformation. All of those concerns are legitimate. But they’ve also crowded out a different kind of AI story — the kind where a researcher points a machine-learning model at a genuinely hard scientific problem and gets an answer that would have taken humans decades to find on their own.

Lanturn Weekly: The Grid Is Shifting

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 03:00:00 -0600

Welcome back. Three stories this week that share an unlikely thread: systems that quietly shape your daily life — your electricity, your technology, your family budget — are being rebuilt in real time, often in ways you’d never hear about on cable news. Here’s what’s happening and what you can do about it.

The U.S. Just Had Its Best Year Ever for Renewable Energy

Last year, one out of every four watts of electricity produced in the United States came from a renewable source — wind, solar, hydro. That’s a record, up 10% from the year before, and according to federal data the U.S. Energy Information Administration released this past week, it was enough to power roughly 108 million homes for a year. To put that another way: the country’s renewable output in 2025 was equivalent to nearly 300 Hoover Dams running at full capacity, every hour, all year long. That tells a story you’d never pick up from the political fights over energy policy.

AI on Lanturn Weekly

Lanturn Glow: The Quiet Side of AI

Lanturn Weekly: The Grid Is Shifting

The U.S. Just Had Its Best Year Ever for Renewable Energy