Author: openjargon

• A fusion reactor in southern France achieved a significant milestone toward clean, limitless energy.
• The fusion reactor, WEST, created a super-hot plasma and sustained it for a record-breaking 6 minutes.
• The experiment is laying the groundwork for a larger fusion reactor called ITER.

A fusion reactor in southern France, called WEST, just achieved an important milestone that brings us one step closer to clean, sustainable, nearly limitless energy.

Scientists at New Jersey's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, who collaborated on the project, announced today that the device created a super-hot material called a plasma that reached 90 million degrees Fahrenheit (50 million degrees Celsius) for 6 straight minutes.

The ultimate goal is to sustain a super-hot plasma for many hours, but 6 minutes is a new world record for a device like WEST. Other nuclear reactors similar to WEST have created hotter plasmas, but they haven't lasted as long.

WEST is what's called a tokamak. It's a donut-shaped fusion reactor the size of an 8-by-8-foot room with 8-foot-tall ceilings, capable of generating the same type of energy that powers our sun. That's why scientists sometimes call these machines "artificial suns."

"What we are trying to do is create a sun on Earth," Luis Delgado-Aparicio, PPPL's head of advanced projects, told Business Insider. "And that is extremely, extremely challenging," he said, but this new record suggests they're headed in the right direction.

The sun runs on nuclear fusion (when atomic nuclei combine and release energy) not to be confused with the nuclear fission process (when atomic nuclei split apart and release energy) that powers today's nuclear reactors.

Fusion energy is more powerful than any form of energy we have today. If we can harness that power, it could produce almost 4 million times more energy per kilogram of fuel than fossil fuels. Plus, it's carbon-free.

Significant challenges remain before that becomes a reality, which is where experimental reactors like WEST come in.

While WEST won't be used to generate fusion for electricity to power homes, it's critical for the research that's laying the groundwork for future commercial reactors.

WEST creates more energy and lays the groundwork for ITER

WEST has a lot in common with ITER, a nearby reactor being built in southern France, which will be the world's largest tokamak capable of self-sustaining burning plasmas when it's finished. Creating that self-heating mix is a crucial step to harnessing the power of fusion for commercial purposes.

However, due to cost and technology setbacks, it's unclear when ITER will be finished. In the meantime, other facilities are conducting experiments to figure out how best to operate the giant reactor. That includes WEST.

The two reactors are practically neighbors, Delgado-Aparicio said, and the experiments at WEST are directly applicable to ITER.

For fusion to happen on Earth, the fuel needs to reach at least 50 million degrees Celsius. One of the main obstacles fusion power faces is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to generate those extreme temperatures, and, so far, reactors can't sustain a plasma long enough to gain an energy surplus that could be put toward commercial use. So, for now, fusion reactors typically consume more energy than they produce.

WEST's latest breakthrough was no exception. However, it did generate 15% more energy from fusion compared to earlier attempts, PPPL reported in a statement. Moreover, the plasma was twice as dense, another important component of creating more energy.

The key to WEST's record success: tungsten

WEST is helping scientists test the best materials for building the walls inside a fusion reactor, which isn't easy since these environments can reach temperatures more than three times hotter than the sun's center.

Originally, WEST contained carbon walls. While carbon is easy to work with, Delgado-Aparicio said, it also absorbs tritium, a rare hydrogen isotope that fuels the fusion reaction.

"Imagine you have a wall that is not only a wall, but it's some sort of a sponge," he said, "a sponge that absorbs your fuel."

So, in 2012, scientists decided to test a different material for the tokamak's walls, tungsten — the same material that ITER will use for some of its main components.

Because of tungsten's ability to withstand heat without absorbing tritium, Delgado-Aparicio believes it is the ideal material for tokamak walls.

That said, tungsten isn't perfect. One of its downfalls is it can melt and enter the plasma, contaminating it. In turn, this can counteract the process, radiating a lot of energy away and cooling the plasma.

Therefore, to optimize the system, scientists need to understand how exactly tungsten behaves and interacts with the plasma. That's what researchers are doing with WEST.

The team at PPPL, for example, modified a diagnostic tool that they used in this latest experiment from WEST. The tool helped the team accurately measure the plasma's temperature to better understand how tungsten migrates from the wall of the device to the plasma.

"We can detect how it moves inside, we can follow it, we can study its transport inside the machine," Delgadot-Aparicio said, which could help build future methods for keeping the plasma free of impurities like blobs of tungsten that cool it down.

"Now we understand how that cooling needs to be taken care of," he said, "and that experience is going to be exported next door to ITER."

WEST and ITER aren't the only reactors that use tungsten.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), for example, is using tungsten walls for SPARC, its demonstration fusion reactor. And Korea's KSTAR has a tungsten divertor and recently demonstrated a 30-second, 100-million-degree plasma.

Whether tungsten proves to be the key to unlocking commercial fusion energy remains to be seen.

Commercial fusion energy is still likely decades away, but Delgado-Aparicio thinks they're making steps toward "this big goal of giving energy to humankind."

PPPL said it will publish the results of its experiment in a peer-reviewed journal in a few weeks.

• Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas was indicted by federal prosecutors on Friday.
• He and his wife are accused of taking bribes from Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank.
• The growing scandal is drawing some comparisons on the right to George Santos.

Rep. Henry Cuellar is in the midst of a growing bribery scandal involving Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank.

The Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against the Texas Democrat and his wife on Friday, accusing the duo of accepting nearly $600,000 in bribes over the course of nearly seven years.

Cuellar is the third sitting lawmaker to be indicted this Congress, following former Republican Rep. George Santos of New York and Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New York.

Here's everything to know about the charges against Cuellar, who the Texas Democrat is, and why some on the right are comparing his situation to that of Santos.

Cuellar and his wife are accused of bribery, money laundering, and acting as an unregistered foreign agent

According to the 54-page indictment, Cuellar and his wife accepted bribes from both Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank from December 2014 to November 2021, doing so through a series of shell companies and intermediaries.

The indictment alleges that the couple collected roughly $600,000 in bribes — $360,000 from the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic and $236,390 from Banco Azteca.

In the case of Azerbaijan, Cuellar's been accused of using his position as a member of the House Appropriations Committee to influence legislation to the benefit of the oil-rich state.

With Banco Azteca, Cuellar has been accused pressuring officials in the executive branch to pursue policies favorable to the bank, as will as introducing legislation to shield the payday lending industry from federal regulation.

The criminal counts against Cuellar and his wife include:

• 2 counts of conspiracy to commit bribery of a federal official and to have a public official act as an agent of a foreign principal;

• 2 counts of bribery of a federal official;

• 2 counts of conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud;

• 2 counts of violating the ban on public officials acting as agents of a foreign principal;

• 1 count of conspiracy to commit money laundering;

• 5 counts of money laundering.

Cuellar has denied any wrongdoing, saying in a statement that he and his wife are "innocent of these allegations" and that he still plans to seek reelection.

He's the only anti-abortion House Democrat left — but party leadership helped save him two years ago

Aside from his bribery scandal, Cuellar has been a top target of progressives for years, owing to his relatively conservative politics. He is the only House Democrat who voted against a bill to protect abortion rights nationwide during the last Congress, and he has previously received an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association.

Cuellar faced a stiff challenge in 2022 from immigration lawyer Jessica Cisneros, who had the backing of progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. Ultimately, Cuellar won his primary by less than 300 votes.

He was endorsed by the entirety of House Democratic leadership, who opted to endorse him again last year.

That's even after the congressman faced an FBI raid on his home in 2022.

The George Santos comparison

It's only been a few days, but so far, Democrats have largely held off on calling for Cuellar to resign.

A spokesperson for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on Friday that Cuellar would "take leave" as the top Democrat on a key House subcommittee until the issue is resolved.

That's led some to point to an apparent hypocrisy between how they're handling this situation versus George Santos, who was indicted on several criminal charges but was not yet convicted when Democrats and nearly half of House Republicans voted to expel him in December.

Santos himself has made an issue out of it, claiming in a post on X that he's "ready to go to the Supreme Court to fight the constitutionality of my expulsion if the standard isn't maintained."

But it's more complicated than that.

For one, Republicans don't seem to be on the same page about this. While House Republicans' campaign arm has sought to tie other Democrats to Cuellar's scandal, former President Donald Trump has defended the congressman, argued that he's being targeted by President Joe Biden because of his conservative politics.

Additionally, the standard that lawmakers set for Santos's expulsion was the release of a House Ethics Committee report. Once that committee did so — revealing, among other things, that Santos had bilked his campaign donors to pay for Botox — a broad bipartisan majority of lawmakers opted to expel Santos.

• Marketing has long struggled to establish an standard measurement for brand value.
• Quantifying emotional impact in consumers using AI could be the next major marketing trend.
• Companies like Equinox have started leveraging emotion in their campaigns. 

The number one thing on the minds of CMOs in 2024 is proving measurable brand value.

There have been many ways of assessing brand value in the past including revenue, the value of future net earnings, and net promoter scores. But nothing has ever been precise enough to become a singular industry standard.

Net promoter score has come close, but having been invented over two decades ago, new times warrant additional methods of determining brand valuation. Gartner validated this shift in 2021 by predicting that NPS will be obsolete within 75% of organizations by 2025.

Recommending a brand is not a complex enough metric on its own to determine a brand's overall worth. Quantifiable brand trust and loyalty have been kicked around as more modernized ways to assess a brand's valuation, particularly as loyalty in particular dissipated during the COVID-19 pandemic, usurped by convenience. Meanwhile as the cost of acquisition continues to rise, retention is a new mandate.

Developing the means to quantify a brand's true value is the most important part of a marketing organization that needs to evolve.

Some new disruptive thinking on brand value deserves consideration — the power of emotion. While we all know a lot about how customers behave or act, we know little about how they feel.

The power of emotion — the Equinox example

Emotion is the new currency driving quantifiable brand growth. So, what is emotion exactly? It's often defined as instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge. Conventional wisdom holds that thought precedes emotion but in fact, science has consistently proven that emotion precedes thought.

Imagine if you could take this thinking even further to precisely score how trusting of and loyal your customers are to your brand to get to a precise total valuation, that is inarguable, no different than the accuracy of a stock's price. One can debate if a stock should trade higher or lower, but what it trades at on a given day based on how the markets are performing is an uncontested benchmark.

A great example of a company that reinvented largely around having a deeper emotional understanding of customer needs and loyalty is Equinox.

Equinox is built upon getting a consumer to subscribe to them holistically — to derive joy from the brand in some way every day versus just purchasing a membership. The brand has used a mix of innovation and unparalleled customer understanding to do so. As a result, it has become not just a stand-out in the luxury space, but among the most highly regarded brands related to emotional understanding, trust, and loyalty in the world.

"Equinox pioneered a membership model that is set up to drive loyalty and engagement," Julia Klim, Equinox's VP of strategic partnerships told me."This is done in two ways. A top-down approach enticing emotion via wholly aspirational campaigns."

Equinox's "Want It All" campaign exemplifies its emotional approach. "It sold the theme of desire as the engine that drives us all," Klim said.

"There was also a complementary bottom-down approach, via sophisticated customer segmentation, that allowed us to create a personalized and entirely intuitive customer experience once you join," Klim said. "Another great example of how this played out was using deeper emotional intelligence of customers to help reimagine our personal training offer earlier this year."

AI enables new tools, new ways to measure

AI-enabled tools can deliver actual quantifiable scores around brand trust and loyalty, if they are used in combination with data science and direct human input. This can be done by enriching datasets or creating emotional lookalikes that highlight the "why" that is missing from existing segmentation and most first-party data.

At Brandthro, we have created a Net Emotion Score tool using a proprietary AI and data science model to gauge how much brand love customers are feeling at any moment. This calculation is based off of emotional scores that tabulate brand trust and loyalty.

Look for emotion to emerge as one of the most vital currencies that can solve the most common CMO pain points: de-risking investment, doing more with less, elevating loyalty, lowering the cost of customer acquisition and generating quantifiable brand value.

Billee Howard is CEO of Brandthro.

• Full Social Security benefits are expected to run out in 2035, per the program's trustees.
• That's a year later than expected, and at that point, 83% of the benefits will be available.
• Still, the uncertain fate of the program worries retirees who rely on Social Security.

As more Americans fear being unprepared for retirement — and rely solely on Social Security — those full benefits might not be long-lived.

The latest Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees report found that the program will only be able to pay out full benefits for the next 11 years or so. That's later than the most recent estimates.

"There's a little bit more breathing room, but not enough to alter the conclusion, which is Congress must act," William Arnone, the CEO of the non-partisan National Academy of Social Insurance, told BI.

According to the report, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund — one of the key funds comprising Social Security benefits — will be able to pay out full benefits through 2033. When taken together with Disability Insurance Fund, benefits will start becoming "depleted" in 2035 if Congress does not act.

That doesn't mean that Social Security benefits will completely dry up by 2035. Instead, the Trustees estimate that beginning that year, 83% of benefits will be available.

"This year's report is a measure of good news for the millions of Americans who depend on Social Security, including the roughly 50 percent of seniors for whom Social Security is the difference between poverty and living in dignity — any potential benefit reduction event has been pushed off from 2034 to 2035," Martin O'Malley, Commissioner of Social Security, said in a statement.

The report credited a strong economy for the extra time.

"More people are contributing to Social Security, thanks to strong economic policies that have yielded impressive wage growth, historic job creation, and a steady, low unemployment rate. So long as Americans across our country continue to work, Social Security can — and will — continue to pay benefits," he said.

Still, the uncertain fate of Social Security has worried many Americans, particularly the ones who are close to retirement, who fear changes to the program could put their financial security at risk. For example, one 63-year-old previously told BI that "everybody my age is a little worried right now" given the looming retirement crisis that Social Security won't solve.

"It's simple math," she said. "You're talking about retiring, needing about $4,000 a month, at least, just to cover expenses. Just Social Security isn't going to cover that."

There's a growing need for federal benefits to be bolstered. According to the Census Bureau's Population Survey, just over half of Americans over the age of 65 make $30,000 or less annually. Meanwhile, among the income that typical retirees do receive, just under 80% see income from Social Security.

The latest estimates on Social Security also come as the US economy braces for a "peak boomer" wave of new retirees. The Alliance for Lifetime Income's Retirement Income Institute found that over 30 million boomers are set to start reaching the retirement age of 65 this year. That's the biggest group of boomers retiring yet, and, per that analysis, many will end up having to rely on Social Security benefits to stay afloat.

Meanwhile, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have vowed to protect Social Security. While some Democrats have accused Republican lawmakers of jeopardizing the program through proposals to raise the age at which Americans can receive federal benefits, Republican leaders have been adamant that they are not pushing forth any proposals that would cut the program.

"We cannot be clearer: we WILL NOT adjust or delay retirement benefits for any senior in or near retirement," GOP Rep. Kevin Hern, head of the Republican Study Committee, wrote in the committee's budget proposal for 2025.

Are you feeling financially unprepared for retirement, or worried about Social Security drying up? Contact these reporters at jkaplan@businessinsider.com and asheffey@businessinsider.com.

• TikTok is sponsoring the Met Gala this year, and CEO Shou Chew is expected to be there.
• The "ban or divest" law was just passed 2 weeks ago, and TikTok plans to fight it in court.
• It will be interesting to see if Chew says anything about the bill.

Celebrities like Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Rihanna, and Doja Cat will attend the Met Gala on Monday night, and as a human who likes beautiful things, I am excited to see what glamorous outfits they'll be wearing

But I am more interested to see TikTok CEO Shou Chew — who hasn't done a public appearance or interview since the "TikTok ban" law was passed about two weeks ago.

TikTok has said that it will challenge this law in the courts, and it's likely that this could tie things up for some time. (So don't expect it to disappear from your phone anytime soon.)

It just so happens that TikTok is a main sponsor for this year's Met Gala, so that's why Chew is expected to be there. This won't be his first time at the gala — he attended in 2022. Other tech leaders have attended, too, like Jeff Bezos (who is expected to be there this year with his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez), Adam Mosseri, and Elon Musk.

The Met Gala is a beloved, fun event with a highbrow sheen. It can be a way for celebrities to forge a defining image. It's a perfect venue for the leader of a company being accused of being a national security risk to appear charming and dapper in a tux.

Unlike Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, Chew isn't a household name, and the general public doesn't appear to have a solid opinion about him. (Even US senators have questioned him on his nationality.)

It will be interesting to see if the images of Chew from Monday's gala will affect the public's current understanding of him and TikTok.

The Met Gala isn't exactly a place where an embattled tech leader expects to get grilled, and it's unclear if Chew will be doing any red-carpet interviews that will go too far beyond who he's wearing. (According to The New York Times, he is expected to wear Ralph Lauren.)