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WellSpan Health strikes strategic partnership with Philips to deploy, co-develop new healthcare tech
Community health system WellSpan Health inked a seven-year strategic alliance with Philips to drive advanced imaging technology across its network and co-develop new AI and tech tools. | WellSpan Health inked a seven-year strategic alliance with Philips to drive advanced imaging technology across its network and co-develop new healthcare technology.
Business briefs, June 5
Senators push CMS to reinstate nursing home ownership reporting requirements … New DOJ toolkit could turn EMTs, cops into nursing home watchdogs … Combatting racism in senior living and care requires ‘institutional courage’ to avoid status quo … CNA coverage declined, but few other staffing ramifications of COVID immunity … SNFs, aging Americans helping drive strong interest in healthcare property investment … Kendal launches comprehensive ‘brand evolution’
Filtr is a new privacy tool that blocks ads in almost every iPhone and Mac app
This popular ad blocker app for iPhones, iPads, and Macs can now block ads from loading inside apps, including web browsers, thanks to a new feature in the latest Apple software.
Washington earns a B- in maternal mental health report
New moms are commonly screened for postpartum depression, but child care remains a major gap.
More Americans own wearables, connected health devices: survey
Many adults are sharing device data with their providers too. But users are typically healthier and wealthier, suggesting people who could benefit the most from health monitoring are less likely to adopt the tools, according to Rock Health.
She thought she slept great. Her Oura ring said otherwise
Regular visits with your primary care doctor remain the standard health recommendation. But wearable tech devices can be an extra tool.
Code Puppy: Walmart's secret weapon against AI lock-in
Walmart's viral Code Puppy AI tool helps avoid vendor lock-in, cut costs, and reduce dependence on Claude Code and Codex.
Google's Dreambeans, its weirdest-named AI tool to date, will turn your life into a cartoon
Dreambeans is a curated list of AI-illustrated "stories" culled from the personal data in your Google account.
Ultrahuman says hackers accessed customers' wellness data via internal tool
The breach at wearable ring makaer Ultrahuman stemmed from credentials stolen from a malware-infected employee laptop.
Sharks As Climate Scientists?Here’s How They Improve Ocean Forecasts.
A new study shows that data from tagged sharks can improve ocean forecasts by up to 40 percent in some regions, offering a surprising new tool for understanding and predicting climate patterns.
Microsoft drives developers toward native Windows apps at Build 2026
Microsoft wants more WinUI 3 apps across Windows 11, and Build 2026 shows how developers can get there with new tools, agents, and hardware.
Charter Revision Politics: A Primer
What Mayor Mamdani’s COGE might accomplish — and why changing the charter has become so common and so complicated
From spider silk to science: a new way to access hidden fungal diversity
A new study from Thailand demonstrates that the debris-heavy webs of orb-weaving spiders can serve as natural, non-destructive tools for collecting and culturing viable environmental fungi. Through the isolation of living organisms, this innovative approach has already uncovered potentially new, undocumented fungal diversity within tropical rice fields.
The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science
With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!
Microsoft plans Linux tools and an RTX Spark desktop for Windows developers
One hardware announcement and several software highlights from Microsoft Build.
New Microsoft tool lets devs spin up AI behavior tests using text descriptions
Microsoft on Tuesday took the wraps off Adaptive Spec-driven Scoring for Evaluation and Regression Testing, an open-source framework for spinning up AI evaluations.
Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal
Planning documents for "Scout" say the plan is to "make people addicted" to the tool before adding new features.
Joint Commission intros new voluntary AI responsibility certification
The program is designed to recognize hospitals and health systems for adopting and implementing artificial intelligence tools with sufficient governance, monitoring processes and education programs in place.
How Science Works
The 2nd Weather and Climate Livestream is now underway. It is organized by a group of early-career researchers concerned about declining funding for the field and eager to demonstrate how weather and climate research makes a difference in our lives. Last year’s event was a great success, drawing terrific press coverage including a piece in the NY Times. This year features a strong lineup of talks aimed at a general audience — I highly recommend tuning in. Share I gave a talk yesterday about How Science Works in Three Steps. You can see the short presentation here (I’ve appended a transcript below): And please tune into the livestream here. It runs through tomorrow at 6 pm ET. Thanks for reading The Climate Brink! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Subscribe Cleaned up transcript: Thank you, and thanks to everyone tuning in. I want to talk about something I think a lot of people don’t really understand: how science actually works. Arguments over any scientific topic — climate change, vaccines, you name it — revolve around competing claims. For climate change, the claims are: Is the Earth warming? Are humans to blame? What will the impacts be? Over the last 150 years, the scientific community has developed a remarkably robust method for sorting out which claims are true and which aren’t. That method is what I want to walk through. So how does science generate knowledge? If you ask a high schooler, they’ll give you the version they learned in ninth grade: an individual scientist forms a hypothesis, runs an experiment, and draws a conclusion. That’s more or less what happens at the individual level, though in practice it’s more iterative — you design, test, and refine all at once, landing on a slightly different idea each time until you reach a conclusion about whatever hypothesis you’ve ended up with. But this isn’t science. It’s only step one. Any individual scientist can make mistakes — scientists are human. Maybe there’s a bug in the code, maybe there’s an error in the experiment. Just because someone ran an experiment and reached a conclusion doesn’t mean it’s right, and scientists don’t treat a single result as settled truth. Step two is peer review, the first layer of quality control. The scientist writes up what they did and submits it to a journal, which sends the paper to other experts in the field. Those experts judge whether the methods are sound, whether it properly references prior work, and whether the conclusions actually follow from the data. Ask any scientist and they’ll tell you peer review is miserable — the comments come back brutal, often harsh, and you have to revise and resubmit, sometimes multiple times, before an editor finally accepts the paper. Peer review catches an immense amount of bad science, but it can’t catch all of it. Reviewers get sloppy or overworked, they miss obvious mistakes, and they can’t catch hidden errors — a bug in the code, a misread instrument. So a peer-reviewed paper making it into a journal doesn’t mean the paper is right. Nobody treats a single paper as the final word. That’s where step three comes in: the crucible of science. Important results get retested by the broader community. If you publish something interesting, it gets dissected. Sometimes people try to reproduce your work directly but more often they test its implications. If someone claims X is true, and that implies that Y is also true, then scientists will go check Y. If a claim survives this gauntlet long enough, it becomes accepted. That’s how we generate knowledge. Let me give an example: the ozone hole. In 1985 — and I doubt many people watching were around then, but I remember it well — Joe Farman and his colleagues published observations from Antarctica showing that a huge chunk of ozone was disappearing every year. This was shocking because most atmospheric chemists had expected ozone loss to occur at mid-latitudes and high altitudes, not over the South Pole. When scientists see something they don’t understand, they rush to explain it, and several competing hypotheses quickly appeared in the peer-reviewed literature. One pointed to chlorine chemistry from chlorofluorocarbons. A second blamed nitrogen chemistry, possibly driven by solar proton events — meaning the sun was responsible. A third argued it wasn’t chemistry at all but dynamics: winds were carrying naturally low-ozone air from the lower atmosphere up into the stratosphere. Then the community went to work testing which theory could survive the crucible. Aircraft flew into the ozone hole and found no nitrogen, ruling out the nitrogen theory. Measurements showed the air in the polar vortex was descending, not rising — which would bring high-ozone air down, eliminating the dynamics theory. Meanwhile, those same flights measured enormous amounts of chlorine, strongly correlated with exactly the regions where ozone was being destroyed. That became known as the “smoking gun” paper, and it established that chlorine chemistry was the cause. Through this process, a consensus emerged. And it’s worth being clear that this consensus is organic. There’s no vote, no poll, no meeting where it gets decided. Scientists go to conferences, talk to one another, and independently arrived at the same answer. It’s the ultimate free market of ideas. After the consensus was established, the peer-reviewed literature doesn’t even mention the rival theories — it simply takes chlorine chemistry as given. That’s what a consensus looks like. It doesn’t mean every single scientist agrees, but it does mean there’s no longer any legitimate debate. So where can you see what scientists actually think? It’s all in the peer-reviewed literature, which contains the entire historical record of the argument: the discovery, the competing theories, the debate, the testing, and finally the community coalescing around one answer. But there’s a lot of room for misrepresentation. You can dig up an old paper claiming the ozone hole was caused by dynamics and wave it around as if there still was a debate about the cause of the ozone hole — without mentioning that the idea was disproven long ago and that even its own authors no longer believe it. There’s a bigger problem, though: the peer-reviewed literature is written in a language I call “nerd.” It’s extremely hard to read — honestly, some of it is hard for me to follow. It takes graduate students years to work through the literature in a single field, so we can’t expect policymakers or ordinary people to do it. This is where scientific assessments come in. The most famous is the IPCC — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The job of an assessment is to read and summarize the peer-reviewed literature, synthesizing what’s settled, what’s been disproven, and what remains genuinely debated. To ensure the assessments accurately summarize the peer-reviewed literature, assessments are written by large teams, which are far less prone to bias than individuals and which dilute the influence of any one scientist with an axe to grind. The teams are deliberately assembled to avoid stacking the deck, and the reports themselves go through multiple rounds of peer review. That rigorous process is exactly why you can trust them and why people consider the IPCC to be the gold standard of what we know about the climate system. An assessment produced through a different process may well not be credible. You can even watch the consensus evolve across assessments. Take the attribution of warming. The 1990 IPCC report said the observed warming was broadly consistent with model predictions but also comparable to natural variability — in other words, we don’t know whether humans are responsible. By 1995, it concluded that the balance of evidence suggested a discernible human influence — a sentence only a committee could write, and one that barely commits to anything. By 2001, most of the warming over the previous 50 years was judged “likely” due to greenhouse gases; by 2007, “very likely”; by 2013, “extremely likely.” The 2023 report says essentially the same as 2013 — there’s not much stronger language available. So, to wrap up: science is our ultimate tool for deciphering the universe — the most successful method we’ve ever developed for determining what’s true and what isn’t. Our understanding is written into the peer-reviewed literature, so if you want to know what scientists think, that’s where to look. And for those of us who don’t speak nerd, scientific assessments are the Rosetta Stone — they translate nerd into English. Let me open the floor to questions. Thank you.
Wisconsin Dem touts endorsement from union pushing back against CDL crackdowns on illegal alien truckers
Wisconsin Democrat Rebecca Cooke promotes ties to AFSCME, which published a toolkit on circumventing CDL restrictions for undocumented immigrants.
Racial Equity Impact Assessments as Tools for Advancing Population Health and Equity in Local Policy
Racial equity impact assessments (REIAs) are used by local governments to integrate equity considerations into policymaking and decision-making processes by evaluating potential impacts of proposed legislation before enactment.
Wisconsin-based Packer Fastener opens Lebanon site
Green Bay, Wisconsin-based Packer Fastener, which supplies fasteners, tools, welding supplies and other products to manufacturers, contractors and fabricators, has entered the Indiana market.
How to Rebuild US Science and Technology Policy From the Rubble of Trump 2.0
Policymakers are going to need tools to clear the rubble and build a better foundation for policy upon which the future can be built, writes Cole Donovan.
National Lab Makes Science and AI-Enabled Cybersecurity Move Faster
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s commercially available artificial intelligence tool breaks down cybersecurity data silos.
Trump flips script on left, maneuvers to use foreign influence law against the them
Trump aims to use FARA and other legal tools against alleged foreign influence on the left after years of probes targeting his allies, experts say.
NVIDIA, Foxconn and Taiwan Medical Centers Bring Agentic and Physical AI to ‘Healthy Taiwan’
NVIDIA, Foxconn and Taiwan Medical Centers Bring Agentic and Physical AI to ‘Healthy Taiwan’ Foxconn is deploying NVIDIA AI across Taiwan’s leading medical centers, transitioning from using individual AI tools to coordinated AI agent workforces that help clinicians reason, document and orchestrate care. News Summary: Foxconn is deploying NVIDIA AI across Taiwan’s leading medical centers, transitioning from using individual AI tools to coordinated AI agent workforces that help clinicians reason,
Drag icon Frank Marino shares what he learned over 40 years in Vegas
Las Vegas icon Frank Marino is set to retire after his final show on May 31. He spoke to USA TODAY about his more than 40 years in Sin City.
Small Business Tech News This Week: Uber, Starbucks, OpenAI, TikTok And 20 Great AI Tools
AI hype meets reality: Uber questions ROI, Starbucks drops AI inventory, TikTok shopping booms, and 20 AI tools worth exploring.
No more expensive roaming: the data trick business travelers swear by - Futura-Sciences
Stay connected across borders—without the roaming bill shock If you’re a frequent flyer for work, your data needs are probably sky-high. Between video meetings, sending files on the go, and keeping your cloud tools synced, staying online isn’t just convenient—it’s essential. Traditional mobile plans and public Wi-Fi networks often leave...
Quantum light gives a 20-fold boost to ultrafast laser processes
Nonlinear interactions between light and matter are at the heart of some of the most powerful tools in modern optics, but pushing these processes to their limits has long been hampered by a fundamental ...
Google's Agentic AI Tool Gemini Spark Is Now Available
Gemini Spark is currently only available to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US, meaning you’ll need to spend at least $100 per month to access it.
Perplexity gifts Mac Minis in push for Personal Computer tool
Perplexity is sending out Mac Minis for people to test its new Personal Computer technology with.
NFIB Thanks LA Legislature for Passing Landmark Small Business Workforce Bill
The bill gives employers a new tool to train workers.
Tracking AI in Federal Health Agencies: Key Trends from HHS's FY2025 Inventory
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Ebola, chemical plants and health, hantavirus, common colds, heat and more
As they say, bugs have ears. Public health has had a relentless May. Chemical plant (near) explosions, Ebola, hantavirus, and that's before you even get to the usual suspects: common colds, heat, and ticks. Here’s an attempt to keep you up to speed and, more importantly, what it means for you and your community. But first, an announcement: World Cup The World Cup starts in 15 days (not like anyone is counting down), and we are hanging TVs in the Health Security Operations Center. It’s going to be a gorgeous, chaotic celebration of basically every culture on earth. And it’s going to take a team effort—from communities to individuals, from public health to health care—to keep people healthy. That’s where you come in. If you’re going to the games or live within 30 miles of a stadium, we would love to hear from you. Sign up for a weekly survey here. Thanks to the more than 1,280 people who have already signed up…you will be hearing from us soon!! Global disease “weather report” Hantavirus: Two more cases The global count of cruise ship passengers with hantavirus has now increased to 13 cases (11 confirmed), with three deaths. The two new cases are overseas and among people who were already quarantining: A crew member in the Netherlands. A Spanish national passenger who was quarantining at home tested positive through daily monitoring. They are now in a biocontainment unit. In the U.S., everyone remains negative. There may be more cases, given that the incubation period of hantavirus (the time from exposure to infection) is 45 days. But this week, we will reach a major milestone: the median incubation window is 18 days, and that will pass on May 29. What this means for you: Your risk from this cruise ship outbreak remains essentially nil at this point. Ebola rages on in Central Africa Big thanks to Dr. Craig Spencer, a humanitarian physician who has treated and survived Ebola, for jumping in to provide the YLE community with an update. Craig, take it from here… The combined confirmed and suspected Ebola cases in DRC are now more than 1,000. All signs are pointing to a very long and catastrophic outbreak in Central Africa: This is a vast undercount. We know this because the test positivity rate is hovering around 50%, only 20% of contacts are being traced (and in some areas, no contacts at all), and more cases keep popping up with no known connection. This all points to widespread and undetected community transmission. This is in only a week of detection. Compared to previous outbreaks, the growth is very fast, as the huge West Africa outbreak in 2016 was first detected at 49 cases and rose to 208 cases a month later. It took four months for that outbreak to reach the size of the current one in the DR Congo. The cases are spread out across 16 health zones. There are now multiple epicenters, making containment very difficult. Next door in Uganda, the case count is seven. While this number is low compared to DRC, a concerning development is that two health care workers recently tested positive with uncertain exposure histories. If they weren’t treating known Ebola cases, this means it’s spreading undetected in Uganda as well. On the ground, backlash, including the burning of health centers, has emerged, a pattern seen in nearly every outbreak and rooted in deep community distrust. It often stems from outside actors working in communities without fully understanding or addressing local priorities. Affected populations may recognize the severity of Ebola while still holding other concerns as more pressing, such as where their loved ones are buried. Community trust is essential to an effective response, but difficult to build during an active emergency. It is best established long before a crisis begins. U.S. priorities are made clear, and may backfire. The U.S. Administration has shown that its first priority is keeping Ebola out, with helping end the outbreak in the DRC a secondary concern. That's meant travel restrictions broader than anything we've imposed before — covering travelers from across the region, and reportedly some green card holders and permanent residents as well. For example, just these past two days, news broke that high-risk American travelers will be subject to a mandatory quarantine in Kenya before they are allowed to return. If an American is infected, the U.S. government plans to send them to a hospital it is standing up from scratch in Kenya. (Currently, Americans who were in the area are allowed to return but are diverted to three airports—Houston, Atlanta, and DC—for further screening.) Past administrations have used travel notices and stepped-up screening; this goes much further. At first blush, these strict precautions may sound prudent. But this approach could backfire in three ways: Restrictions this blunt give people every reason to hide where they’ve been and whom they’ve been near — making the people we most need to find harder to track, not easier. They also breed a false sense that this is someone else’s problem. But diseases are humbling. They find the small cracks in even the most impenetrable-seeming defenses. Lives lost. There is no treatment for this Ebola strain, which means survival depends heavily on the quality of the health system. We have that system in the States, but we are choosing not to use it for infected Americans. This is unbelievable and infuriating. (See a deeper dive from me here.) The only real way to lower the risk to Americans — and everyone else — is to end the outbreak in the DRC and across the region. What this means for you: If you have travel plans to this region, it’s time to cancel them. This is a high-risk situation in Central Africa, and CDC released a Level 4 Travel Advisory. There is also great uncertainty if and when the Administration will let you back in. To the general public in the U.S., your risk remains very, very low right now. U.S. disease “weather report” Ticks: past peak season? Good news, especially for people in the Northeast and Midwest: tick numbers continue to decline. Though we are at the peak of the season, this unusually early year is trending favorably. Heat-related illnesses in the North Heat risk is certainly not blanketing the entire country yet, but this week it will be moderate in the Midwest and the Southeast. What this means for you: Be sure to check the CDC HeatRisk tool. A red day isn’t the best day for that soccer game for a kid with asthma, and a stretch of orange days is a great time to check on your elderly neighbor. Common colds surging As far as respiratory viruses go, the only thing really going around right now is the common cold. It is higher this year than last year, but should peak very soon before returning this fall. Spotlight: Chemical plants Over the weekend, YLE California covered the serious situation that unfolded around a chemical plant in Orange County, California. Thankfully, the worst-case scenario (a chemical explosion) was mitigated, but only through luck. The health implications in a densely populated area could have been catastrophic. As the situation was winding down, another chemical explosion struck Washington State. This one was fatal. Health officials say the risk to surrounding residents from chemicals in the air and ground remains low, though the community deserves far greater clarity. Clean air and clean water consistently rank as Americans’ top public health concerns — yet when chemical disasters strike, communities are too often met with reassurances rather than transparency and accountability. Residents near the 2023 East Palestine, Ohio train derailment, for example, are still waiting to understand the long-term impact on their health, with few clear answers. What this means for you: Many are wondering if facilities processing potentially dangerous materials are in their neighborhoods. This interactive map allows you to enter your ZIP code and see all facilities monitored by the EPA, including any violations. Good news Ebola vaccines and treatment for the Bundibugyo species are in development. Two vaccine platforms are being explored, at least one of which may be deployable in as little as 2 months. One vaccine is being developed by Oxford, and the other uses the same biotechnology as the FDA-approved Zaire species of Ebola. (It may provide cross-protection, but it’s unclear at this point.) On the treatment side, two promising monoclonal antibody cocktails are likely to be deployed, though doses are limited and logistical hurdles remain significant challenges. Anni over at The Biotech Tea had a great explainer about the Ebola vaccine gap, if you want to read more. [ The Biotech Tea The Ebola vaccine gap, reading vessel damage, & the Makary exit 🗝️ Paid subscribers get the Biotech Term of the Week at $30/year (~$2.50/month). I try to keep it intentionally accessible, but if cost is ever a barrier, send me a message. A few people asked about expensing your subscription, so I put together a short email template… Read more 6 days ago · 10 likes · Annicka Evans, PhD ](https://www.thebiotechtea.com/p/the-ebola-vaccine-gap-reading-vessel?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web) Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) has been officially renamed polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), following more than a decade of debate and input from roughly 22,000 clinicians, researchers, and patients worldwide. This is good because the old name was medically misleading, leading to patients without visible cysts being dismissed or overlooked entirely. The WHO estimates that 70% of people with the condition remain undiagnosed. A more accurate name should improve recognition, reduce stigma, and ultimately help the millions of people living with this condition get diagnosed and treated sooner. Poll Loading... Bottom line Public health situations are everywhere right now. Staying healthy takes public health professionals and systems working tirelessly behind the scenes and each of us showing up for our neighbors and communities. Love, YLE Big thanks to Ed Nirenberg for staying on top of the Ebola vaccines, Hannah Totte for all the figures, Dr. Craig Spencer for the Ebola insight, and Dr. Matt Willis for covering the chemical situation in CA. Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) comprises a team of experts, ranging from physicians to immunologists to epidemiologists to nutritionists, working together with one goal: to “Translate” ever-evolving public health science so that people are well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions. YLE suite of newsletters reaches over 475,000 people across more than 132 countries. This newsletter is free to everyone, thanks to the generous support of fellow YLE community members. To support the effort, subscribe or upgrade below: Subscribe
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Advancing high-threat pathogen preparedness in WHO South-East Asia Region: 2025 in review
Effective preparedness for high-threat pathogens demands more than technical tools — it requires a coherent strategy, sustained country engagement, and the institutional infrastructure to translate evidence into action. In 2025, the Pandemic and Epidemic Management (PEM) Unit advanced all three, working across the full spectrum of high threat pathogen (HTP) preparedness: from methodology development and evidence generation to country-level technical support, emergency response, and regional workforce strengthening.At the core of the PEM unit's work is building the regional evidence and policy architecture needed to prioritize and respond to HTPs systematically. A major milestone was the development of the HTP Prioritization Methodology — a structured, multi-criteria approach to ranking pathogens by epidemic potential, severity, and national context — and its national pilot in Bangladesh, where SARS-CoV-2, Nipah, dengue, and cholera emerged as the highest-priority threats, informing the PEM unit's contribution to 2026–27 biennium prioritization and workplan development (Access link here).Underpinning this work, the PEM unit advanced the peer-reviewed evidence base for HTP preparedness in the South-East Asia Region (SEAR), with three publications in international journals in 2025: Development of a zoonotic influenza distribution assessment and ranking system (ZIDAR): Technical application in Nepal to support cross-sectoral risk-based surveillance in One Health; Implications for influenza A virus surveillance in Southeast Asian Region countries: a scoping review of approaches for the surveillance of swine influenza viruses at human-swine interfaces in BMJ Public Health; and Operationalizing multisector partnerships: a Theory of Action and Reflection tool for zoonotic influenzas in Health Policy and Planning. Together, these contributions move the Region’s HTP preparedness agenda from practice to science — generating the transferable methodological foundations that will inform evidence-based capacity strengthening in Member States.Country-level engagement in 2025 reflected the breadth of contexts in which HTP preparedness must function. Technical support was provided for Mpox and cholera events across the Region, including coordination of cholera and acute watery diarrhea prevention and control in Myanmar in the wake of the March 2025 earthquake. In Myanmar, the PEM unit contributed technical leadership to the earthquake emergency response — one of the most complex humanitarian emergencies in the SEAR — as Health Operations and Technical Support lead within the Incident Management Support Team. This included strengthening emergency response planning, supporting operational and after-action reviews, and providing monitoring and evaluation support for both acute and protracted crisis response. The breadth of HTP support provided to emergency operations across the SEAR was documented in the PEM unit’s contribution to the regional report for the Health Security Interface Technical Advisory Group.In Sri Lanka, technical collaboration with the WHO Country Office and the Ministry of Health laid the groundwork for the National Steering Committee's 2026 annual meeting, development of Standard Operating Procedures for specialized emergency response, and a national training programme — all structured around evidence-based risk assessment for specialized hazards including HTPs.Across the SEAR, the unit contributed to strengthening the workforce architecture that underpins HTP response. Technical inputs shaped the WHO South-East Asia Regional Health Emergency Workforce Strategy 2025–2030, and the PEM unit supported conceptual development of the health emergency workforce framework for the Pandemic Fund Round 3 proposal.Alongside this, the unit's sustained engagement on the meningitis agenda culminated in the launch of the Regional Implementation Framework to Defeat Meningitis in South-East Asia by 2030 at the Seventy-eighth Session of the Regional Committee, ensuring the Region's priorities were reflected in the Global Technical Task Force and expanding the unit's HTP engagement beyond outbreak-prone zoonotic pathogens (Regional Implementation Framework to Defeat Meningitis in South-East Asia by 2030).Taken together, 2025 demonstrated that meaningful HTP preparedness is built incrementally — through methodology, engagement, and the steady accumulation of institutional capacity across Member States.Bangladesh piloted the HTP Prioritization Methodology and identified the highest-priority pathogens in the country context (Photo credit: WHO Country Office, Bangladesh).
In HelloNation, Business Strategy Expert Martin Rowan of Naperville, IL, Details How SAP Misuse Impacts EBITDA and Enterprise Value
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How integrating tradition and self-care has strengthened public health in the Americas
On 13 May 2026, a regional dialogue for the Americas titled, Innovative Experiences to Strengthen Health and Self-Care through Traditional, Complementary, and Integrative Medicine, was hosted by EsSalud, the government agency responsible for social security and health care in Peru.The event brought together representatives from the World Health Organization (WHO), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), WHO collaborating centres, the health sector and academia. It presented regional perspectives from BrBolivia, Brazil, Mexico and Peru to explore how self-care and traditional medicine can strengthen public health, empower communities and support more inclusive models of care. Across all four countries, a clear message emerged: traditional medicine is not being positioned as an alternative to formal systems, but as a way to strengthen them. In the Americas region, the challenge is to consolidate intercultural and holistic care, with the aim of strengthening the healthcare system – making care more preventive, culturally relevant and community-based.Peru: institutionalizing complementary care over 28 years Dr Martha Villar López from EsSalud Peru demonstrated how integration can be institutionalized over time. With nearly three decades of investment, including a research programme dating back to 1998, traditional medicine is now embedded within public health infrastructure. EsSalud’s flagship programme, Reforma de Vida, operating as Prevenir, takes multidisciplinary teams into workplaces to reduce and detect risk factors for chronic noncommunicable diseases. Education cycles are structured around three pillars: celestial nourishment, focused on life purpose and movement; terrestrial nourishment, centred on regional food and healthy diets; and human nourishment, addressing identity, relationships, stress and spirituality. Grounded in Andean cosmovision and the principle of the ayllu, the programme aligns with local cultural values. Since 2007, it has trained over 6600 health leaders, certified more than 3100 health-friendly organizations and built alliances with nearly 11 000 employers.Bolivia: legal recognition and medical pluralism Adelino Pau Carpacheco, an 82-year-old Callawaya healer, described working with more than 220 medicinal plants, supported by deep generational knowledge. Traditional healers and plant medicine are highly respected in the country. Bolivia’s contribution also highlighted the role of policy in enabling integration. Through Law 459, traditional medicine has been formally recognized within a legal framework and led the country to medical pluralism where traditional medicine coexists with biomedicine, and both are now offered free of charge through the public health system. Mexico: preserving Indigenous knowledge and reinventing food culture Mexico presented two complementary approaches focused on knowledge preservation and food systems. In Veracruz, communities partnered with a university to safeguard Totonac traditional medicine through a diploma programme launched in 2019. This collaboration has already produced practical outputs, including manuals and a dictionary, helping to sustain knowledge at risk due to migration and generational change. Alongside this, Dr Hernán García, Directorate of Traditional Medicine and Intercultural Development – Mexico, explained how the Dieta de la Milpa programme addresses Mexico’s dual burden of malnutrition and rising noncommunicable diseases. Rooted in traditional Mayan cultivation systems and ingredients, it promotes healthier diets through community-led, intercultural approaches involving local authorities, Indigenous leaders and cooks. By reconnecting food, culture and health, it offers a practical pathway to prevention. Brazil: community therapy as a public health tool Brazil’s experience centred on Integrative Community Therapy, a methodology developed over 40 years ago by Dr Adalberto Barreto and now used in more than 47 countries. Therapy circles create spaces where participants share experiences and coping strategies, building social support networks at very low cost. Within Brazil’s Unified Health System, the approach has expanded rapidly since its inclusion in national policy in 2017. By 2025, more than five million integrative practice procedures were delivered annually in primary care, with registrations for this therapy increasing by over 500% in eight years. The main challenge now is equity, with access still concentrated in urban areas such as São Paulo. A shared regional direction against a global backdrop Drawing these experiences together, Dr Natalia Aldana of the TCIM Network of the Americas highlighted the shared outcomes of the interventions discussed. Such approaches strengthen healthy behaviours, social networks and community resilience; they are low-cost, adaptable and enable active participation in care, while showing potential to reduce the burden of noncommunicable diseases.The regional momentum mirrors a broader global shift. Dr João Paulo Souz, Director of BIREME (Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information), the specialized center of PAHO/WHO, emphasized that the Global Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025–2034 promotes a vision centred on people, evidence and integrated use. He noted that health should be understood through the relationships between people, community, nature and spirituality. Self-care interventions as a critical pathway towards universal health coverage Dr Manjulaa Narasimhan, Unit Head for Sexual Health and Well-being across the Life-course at WHO, delivered a presentation titled Advancing Self-Care in Traditional Medicine: Aligning the WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025–2034 with the WHO Self-Care Framework, co-authored by Dr Geetha Krishnan Gopalakrishna Pillai, Unit Head for Research, Data and Innovation at the WHO Global Traditional Medicine Centre. WHO recommends self-care interventions for every country and economic setting as a critical path to reach universal health coverage – and traditional medicine acts as a bridge for self-care. Dr Narasimhan explained that traditional medicine contributes most effectively to self-care when embedded directly into primary health care, not operating in parallel, siloed systems. This, she stated, “is possibly the only sustainable way to deliver continuity of care that meets the needs, rights and priorities of communities and individuals”. The Global Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025–2034 is a move towards a more people-centred approach to health care that champions holistic approaches to health equity and patient autonomy.The integration of traditional medicine and self-care requires collaboration across disciplines, clear referral pathways, trained health and care workers, and strong leadership that supports integration. The WHO self-care competency framework defines 10 key competencies for health and care workers to support self-care in their clinical practice, supported by the WHO guideline on self-care interventions for health and well-being. These documents help health-care workers safeguard their own well-being and ensure that care is consistent, safe and grounded in shared standards and values.Together, the discussion through this dialogue points to a fundamental shift in how health systems are designed in the region, and globally, towards models that are more inclusive, culturally-grounded and responsive to the needs of the communities they serve. It is a move towards a system where traditional medicine is respected and responsibly integrated, where self-care provides empowerment and evidence-based care, and where health systems are supportive rather than being distant from these systems.Traditional medicine perspectives from Bolivia, Mexico and Peru - WHO's "Restoring Balance" seriesInnovative Experiences to Strengthen Health and Self-Care through Traditional, Complementary, and Integrative Medicine was streamed in Spanish, with Spanish and Portuguese subtitles. Recordings are available through the CABSIN YouTube channel with Portuguese subtitles and on the BVS MTCI Americas YouTube channel with Spanish subtitles. Dr Narasimhan’s session can be watched in English on both channels.
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World Health Assembly endorses resolution on precision medicine
At the Seventy-ninth World Health Assembly, Member States endorsed a new resolution on Precision medicine: a path towards targeted, personalized and equitable care, taking an important step towards advancing precision medicine as part of efforts to strengthen equitable, effective and sustainable health systems. Precision medicine refers to the use of clinical, molecular, genomic and other health data to inform prevention, diagnosis and treatment, taking into account variability while applying appropriate ethical and legal safeguards. When integrated responsibly into health systems, precision approaches can improve outcomes across different disease areas and across the life course – from cancer and rare diseases to infectious diseases, maternal, newborn and child health, mental health and noncommunicable diseases. The resolution reflects rapid advances in genomics, diagnostics, data science and digital health, alongside widening global inequities in access to these innovations. Many populations – particularly in low- and middle-income countries – remain underrepresented in data and research, limiting the public health impact of precision medicine and risking the widening of health disparities if action is not taken now. "Precision medicine is not an aspirational idea for health delivery in the future – it is already transforming lives across the world. But its benefits remain out of reach for too many and the research driving progress is concentrated in high income countries. This WHA resolution gives global health leaders, ministries of health, and WHO a clear mandate: to act. From infant screening to setting up genomic databases WHO will work with countries to bring about the power of these innovations." Dr Meg Doherty, Director Science for HealthThrough the resolution, Member States commit to developing and strengthening national policies, infrastructure, workforce capacity and governance frameworks to support the safe, ethical and equitable integration of precision medicine into health systems, aligned with universal health coverage. This includes promoting affordability, ensuring inclusive research and data systems, strengthening regulation and data governance, and fostering collaboration across sectors and regions.WHO is requested to provide technical and normative support, review and coordinate existing guidance, facilitate global and regional collaboration, and develop a Global Strategy on Precision Medicine to guide equitable and context‑appropriate implementation. WHO stands ready to support Member States through tools such as a country maturity model for countries to self-assess capacity in implementing precision medicine depending on their context. In the immediate term WHO will map all existing guidance and frameworks and host extensive consultations with interest holders globally.By placing equity, inclusion and public value at the centre of precision medicine, the resolution reinforces WHO’s commitment to ensuring that scientific advances benefit all people, everywhere, and that no one is left behind in the next era of health innovation."By uniting people-centered healthcare with innovation, precision medicine has the potential to transform lives. This resolution helps ensure those advances serve the shared goal of health for all." Dr Sylvie Briand, Chief Scientist For further information please visit the Health Topic: Genomics
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Scientists discover hidden weakness shared by hundreds of cancer mutations
Scientists have unveiled a powerful new tool called PerturbFate that could change how researchers tackle diseases driven by huge numbers of genetic mutations, including cancer and Alzheimer’s. Instead of trying to target every faulty gene individually, the system tracks how different mutations reshape cells over time and identifies the hidden “control hubs” where those pathways converge.
New Flipper One Multi-Tool Computer Is Official, Built for Tinkerers
This doesn't replace the popular Flipper Zero. The One sits alongside it with advanced connectivity options.
The Company Behind the Flipper Zero Hacking Tool Is Making a Cyberdeck
Flipper co-founder Pavel Zhovner told Gizmodo he hopes to make PCs personal again.
Google Reveals Gemini For Science, An AI Research Tool And Science Skills Platform
Google introduced Gemini for Science, a new collection of AI-powered scientific tools and experiments designed to accelerate discovery and support researchers across disciplines. The initiative combines multiple Google DeepMind technologies, including Co-Scientist, AlphaEvolve, Empirical Research Assistance (ERA), and NotebookLM, to streamline key parts of the scientific method.
Soil science: How AI could help scientists secure a vital global resource
Soils store carbon, sustain ecosystems, and underpin global food and water systems. A new Frontiers in Science paper details how AI tools can help us adapt soils—and the systems they nurture—to a changing ...
Scientists discover strange “narwhal” waves that trap light beyond known limits
Physicists at Peking University have uncovered a new way to confine light far beyond conventional limits — without relying on metals and their inherent energy dissipation. By formulating the singular dispersion equation, the team discovered narwhal-shaped wavefunctions that trap light at deep-subwavelength volumes in purely dielectric materials. The advance, dubbed singulonics, could pave the way for ultra-efficient photonic chips, new quantum technologies, and imaging tools with unprecedented resolution.
How AI can help soil scientists secure a vital global resource
AI tools can accelerate soil science by speeding up early-stage work, improving predictions to support decisions on land-use, carbon, and climate adaptation, handling complex data, and freeing scientists to focus on questions that require expert judgment.
Lawmakers, health leaders make bipartisan push to expand clinical trials access
A House Democrat and Republican on Wednesday highlighted their push to expand access to clinical trials, saying artificial intelligence could be one tool used to reach more underrepresented communi…
Google Advances AI for Science with New Tools and Tech
Google is launching a series of new tools to help scientists leverage AI technology as a force multiplier to accelerate the pursuit of scientific knowledge and discovery. In addition to the collection of tools under the Gemini for Science banner, it is also launching Science Skills, which centralizes data from more than 30 life science […]
Subnautica 2 Devs Respond To Combat Debate, Promise Changes
Unknown Worlds has promised 'improvements to creature behavior and player mitigation tools,' but no knife
Google launches Gemini for Science AI research toolkit
The Gemini for Science suite includes three experimental tools covering hypothesis generation, computational testing, and literature review
I Hiked Using Robot Legs in the Grand Canyon. I Didn’t Even Need My Cane
After testing out the Hypershell X Ultra S exoskeleton on a Grand Canyon hike, I learned that this tech is a tool, not a cure for my disability. Here’s what it can do for you.
Google expands AI push at I/O with enterprise-focused Gemini upgrades and smarter search tools
Alphabet Inc. ’s Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) on Tuesday introduced a range of new artificial intelligence tools at its annual I/O developer conference, including AI agents integrated directly into Search and a faster, lower-cost Gemini model aimed at enterprise customers.
Sharks are helping scientists improve weather forecasts
Forecasters already rely on satellites, buoys and hurricane hunter aircraft to monitor ocean conditions. Sharks, however, may offer a way to fill gaps in places where traditional tools are sparse or expensive.
Outscraper Sees Continued Growth in Use of Its Google Maps Scraper for Business Intelligence Needs
Outscraper has announced increased adoption of its Google Maps Scraper as more agencies, marketers, and researchers use automated tools to collect publicly available business data from Google Maps. Outscraper Sees Continued Growth in Use of Its Google Maps Scraper for Business Intelligence Needs Outscraper has announced increased adoption of its Google Maps Scraper as more agencies, marketers, and researchers use automated tools to collect publicly available business data from Google Maps. Ancho
Google is launching an Android version of its AI Studio vibe coding tool.
The app, which you can pre-register for on Google Play, will let you use AI and prompts to starting building other apps. [Image: https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-19-at-5.10.01PM.png?quality=90&strip=all]
Lost for 150,000 years: Rainforest discovery upends human history
For decades, scientists believed ancient humans avoided dense rainforests, treating them as nearly impossible environments for early survival. But a groundbreaking discovery in West Africa is rewriting that story. Researchers uncovered evidence that humans were living deep within rainforest environments in present-day Côte d'Ivoire around 150,000 years ago — far earlier than anyone thought possible.
T. rex’s tiny arms may have evolved for a surprisingly brutal reason
Why did T. rex have such tiny arms? Scientists now think it’s because its giant head became the ultimate hunting tool. Across multiple dinosaur groups, stronger skulls and crushing jaws evolved alongside shrinking forelimbs, especially in predators hunting enormous prey. In other words, once the bite became deadly enough, the arms may have stopped mattering.
Google I/O 2026: Every new AI tool you can try for free
Spoiler: It's a short list this year.