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University of Chicago study suggests space missions don't affect astronauts' heart health
Researchers from the University of Chicago have uncovered some information on how space travel affects — or actually doesn't affect — the heart.
States set school vaccine requirements. Trump’s new executive order doesn’t change that
As students prepare for a new school year across the US, families are confronted with a fraught national discussion around vaccines and questions about which they’re required to get in order to attend school.
The overlooked Detroit Lion who just ‘does everything right’
One Detroit Lions defensive player is constantly overlooked, but highly appreciated by Dan Campbell.
Does Apple Still Support iTunes?
Apple still supports its legendary iTunes software for legacy Macs and Windows PCs, even though the company started gradually phasing it out in 2019.
Guest Commentary: For rural Floridians, better healthcare starts with better transportation
For many rural residents, access to healthcare doesn’t end with whether a provider or clinic exists. It begins with whether they can get there.
Yessss Drew Gilbert
Drew Gilbert had never hit lead-off before. The vast majority of his plate appearances this season have come out of the 8th and 9th spots in the batting order. There’s plenty of reasons why Gilbert wouldn’t be seriously considered to bat first when constructing a Major League line-up. Mainly, he doesn’t hit for average, he […]
Dragon Quest creator comments on why DQ9 was a Nintendo DS exclusive, team was "a little disheartened" by the fan reaction
Dragon Quest creator reflects on making Dragon Quest 9 Nintendo DS exclusive and the fan response at the time.
When Does The Fortnite Live Event Today Start? How To Watch
When is the Fortnite live event today? This is what we know about the upcoming event and what time it’s going to start today.
Mississippi health officer addresses Trump order on childhood vaccines
Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney said the order does not change vaccine requirements for children attending school in Mississippi.
Opinion: Politics may change. Our commitment to New Hampshire’s children does not.
NH pediatricians warn against a recent federal executive order changing vaccination schedules, citing potential risks to public health.
Boiling Liquid Does Something in Near-Zero Gravity Even Scientists Didn't See Coming
Not what was expected.
Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200 billion 2028 revenue forecast, sources say
As Anthropic prepares for what could be one of the biggest IPOs on record, Wall Street is looking further into the future than it commonly does to put a price on the AI company, valuing it based on how much revenue it could generate two years from now.
DeSantis says he doesn’t support Republican Rep. Cory Mills in Tuesday’s primary
The congressman is running for a third term under a cloud of controversy.
While the public debates antisemitism in politics, Colorado Jews live the consequences (Opinion)
The op-ed in The Denver Post by Krista Kafer on Sunday began by asking, “What does it mean to be antisemitic?” but never asks a single Jew for an answer.
Nintendo reveals physical reward for completing the DK Challenge
Nintendo has just announced a physical collectible card set based on the digital rewards for the DK Challenge. Only players who are able to complete every mission in the DK Challenge before the end of the event will be able to receive it. There are a total of 39 cards to be produced with 24 from the featured challenges in...
What Does Science Say When “the Science” Refuses to Speak?
The data from the COVID-19 pandemic must be objectively reviewed and defended. Invoking science means accepting responsibility for outcomes and interpretations of the results.
More Than Half of CEOs Say Local Governments Don't Support Business. That's a New Low
According to Inc. 5000 data, chief executives say local government isn't embodying a business-friendly mindset. Some experts attribute the shift to one key event.
Oprah Winfrey says she doesn’t ‘have one thing to do with’ the hard right turn Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil’s lives took
Here’s what Oprah Winfrey has to say about the criticism she gets over Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz.
Friday essay: we’re all ‘political’ now – but can that lead to real change?
In our age of ‘hyperpolitics’, what does meaningful change look like? Anton Jäger’s buzzy new book has some answers – but could go harder on neoliberalism.
Raiders’ Latest Maxx Crosby Update Hints at Blockbuster Trade
The Las Vegas Raiders have gone through a rollercoaster offseason with superstar pass rusher Maxx Crosby. Even now, the final conclusion to the situation doesn’t seem to be in place.Crosby entered the NFL offseason as a clear-cut trade candidate. It didn’t take long for the Raiders to agree to a deal that sent him to […] The post Raiders’ Latest Maxx Crosby Update Hints at Blockbuster Trade appeared first on HEAVY.
Cowboys’ Dak Prescott Got High Praise From Former NFL QB
While it doesn’t get talked about as often, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott has continued to prove himself as one of the NFL‘s best at the position.Each year, Prescott keeps statistically being in the top 10 in passing. Unfortunately for the Cowboys, they have not been to the playoffs over the last two seasons.Entering the […] The post Cowboys’ Dak Prescott Got High Praise From Former NFL QB appeared first on HEAVY.
Forbes editor out; report says he took $6M from founder of firm that does business with magazine
The top editor of Forbes has left his job after reportedly being fired for accepting $6 million from the founder of a firm that works with the magazine. The New York Times reported this week that the payment came from RJ Shook, whose company, Shook Research, has collaborated with Forbes since 201...
Forbes editor out; report says he took $6M from founder of firm that does business with magazine
The top editor of Forbes left his job last month and was reportedly dismissed for accepting $6 million from the founder of a firm that does business with the magazine. The New York Times reported this…
Mid-August New Jersey Political Update
Editor's Note: Here are some mid-August InsiderNJ thoughts about political doings in New Jersey. Does anyone care?
Drop test claims Pixel 11 Pro, specifically the smaller one, could break more easily
Google is touting better scratch resistance on its new Pixel 11 Pro phones but, apparently, smaller one doesn’t handle drops...
AI needs science’s search history
“Actually, that’s where the gold is,” said Alasdair Russell, my graduate school friend who leads a pre-clinical genome editing group at Cambridge. He was talking about the winding road of science that is omitted from published papers. “When you’re discussing how to do the experiment, and why this way is better than another way, and what does the data really mean? I know what it shows, but what does it mean?” At RAAIS 2026, he described how his group has begun logging the twisting path of discovery as it happens, recording the verbal and written exchanges that normally disappear. Ideas become nodes in a living graph: they branch when a meeting produces two plausible experiments, merge when separate lines of evidence converge, and go dark when someone quietly stops pursuing them. In his implementation, one agent scores novelty, while another tries to learn “how scientists think and how they navigate through a complex world of data,” so that high-potential nodes can trigger deeper investigation. As frontier AI labs deploy agents toward scientific discovery, giving AI authentic scientific taste remains a trillion-dollar dilemma. The bottleneck is that the record we have kept for centuries of science might be insufficient to get us there. The experiments that never make the paper Peter Medawar, 1960 Nobel laureate and “father of transplantation,” asked in 1963 whether the scientific paper was a fraud, and answered yes: the form of the paper misrepresents the thinking that produced it. Sixty years on, the diagnosis is unchanged. A paper presents a clean progression from hypothesis to result to conclusion. Lost along the way are the unconventional theories, the abandoned or unaffordable methods, and the underwhelming and inconclusive data. It reads like a browser history with every dead end deleted: the ten open tabs, the four rephrased queries, the wrong turn down a subforum. All scrubbed, leaving one clean path from question to answer as the canonical path. What has changed since then is that the discarded material is now worth something. No high-impact journal wants these artifacts, but raw trial and error is the most likely source of the training data required to develop scientific intuition, or what researchers call taste. Earlier attempts to capture the discards were motivated by scientific integrity. The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine launched in 2002 to publish rigorous studies that disputed established models or exposed ineffective treatments. Its archive preserved negative conclusions after they had become papers, rather than the live alternatives and arguments that produced them. BioMed Central closed it in 2017, saying the mission had been served now that other journals publish null results. A less generous reading is that in fifteen years it published around 200 papers because almost nobody wants to read a negative result, let alone write one up when it will not count toward academic tenure. AI models are different. Even an uninteresting negative result can be useful, provided it is labeled. Earlier this year, Anthropic put a version of this to the test. The company pulled 129 decision points from real Claude Code sessions between January and March 2026, showed models the work up to a human detour, and asked what should happen next. Claude Mythos Preview beat the human choice 64% of the time, while Opus 4.5 managed 51%. The comparison was tilted toward the models because Anthropic deliberately chose moments where the human decision had room for improvement. On 127 further scenarios where the human action was already strong, the models improved on it only about 20% of the time. The study was possible because Anthropic’s researchers work inside a tool that logs by default. The reasoning, detours and outcome are produced in the same working environment. Biology has no equivalent. Its reasoning happens in hallways, at benches, in Slack threads and on whiteboards, while the outcome arrives weeks later somewhere else. The record has to emerge from the work itself. Ask scientists to reconstruct it afterwards and we’ll create another polished account. Subscribe A log is not a label Before any of this becomes training data, a negative result has to say what failed. The first paper published in the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine examined 234 negative studies across five leading medical journals. Only 30% discussed statistical power, and half clearly defined a primary outcome. Tell a model an experiment failed, without telling it whether the assay was underpowered, a reagent had degraded, or the hypothesis was simply wrong, and it will learn noise with confidence. Decision histories have a second missing label too. When a lab considers five experiments and runs one, only the chosen branch returns an outcome. The other four are experimental counterfactuals. Researchers call this the selective labels problem: the data reveal results only for the actions someone chose to take. Such a record can teach a model to imitate a lab’s taste, but it cannot establish that the taste was good. It also smuggles local constraints into general lessons. A lab that never ran cryo-EM because it did not own a microscope teaches a model that cryo-EM is rarely the right call. Alasdair’s nodes preserve the candidate set, which is the necessary first step. To be useful, each decision record needs six fields: The evidence available at that moment, and nothing that arrived later. The candidates considered, including the ones dismissed in a sentence. For each candidate: the expected result, the confidence attached to it, and the cost in time and money. The route chosen, and the reason. What happened next. How the evidence changed the scientist’s view. These must be timestamped before the outcome, because hindsight turns uncertainty into inevitability. Disagreement also has to survive. Averaging three scientists into one clean rationale reproduces exactly the information loss we are trying to fix. But there is an obvious failure mode here. Once decisions are logged and scored, people log for the record post-facto. Anyone who has watched an electronic lab notebook fill up with retrospective tidying knows how quickly a research tool becomes a compliance exercise. A record that costs a scientist ten minutes of honest reflection per decision is worth far more than one that costs an hour of performance. A publication initiative called Registered Reports offers a useful starting point. Here, researchers submit their rationale, methods and analysis plan for peer review before the data exist, and the journal commits in principle to publish if they follow the approved plan. Nature has now expanded the format across every field it covers. This approach to paper writing timestamps intent before the outcome, but it freezes one plan. A useful search history must also preserve how the plan changed, which alternatives were rejected, when, and on what evidence. Subscribe Run the runner-up Autonomous labs show what happens when decisions and outcomes are connected in a loop. Liverpool’s mobile robotic chemist ran 688 experiments over eight days in a ten-variable formulation space. A batched Bayesian search used each result to choose the next experiments and found photocatalyst mixtures six times more active than the starting formulations. Every completed experiment changed what the system did next. The robot optimized within a goal and search space that humans had already chosen. It did not decide which scientific question mattered. So what this work demonstrates is narrower, but still useful: a search history pays off when the options return standardized outcomes quickly. Open-ended biology is harder because branches can take weeks and the discarded alternatives may never be run. Some exploration therefore has to be bought. Where two branches are plausible and the stakes justify the cost, a lab should sometimes run the runner-up. Otherwise the record captures what today’s scientists usually chose and stays silent on what they systematically overlooked. A funder could ring-fence a small fraction of a grant for the branch not taken, provided that the decision record and the outcome are both deposited. That costs money, but so does having every lab rediscover the same abandoned path. Test whether taste transfers When it comes time to evaluate if our new AI system exhibits taste, the comparison should run across laboratories and fields. At selected decision points in a live research campaign, we should freeze the six fields: the evidence, the candidates, expected results, confidence, costs and the choice made. Experts then rank the options before the outcomes are known, and those outcomes are checked independently later. We could give models one of two diets - papers alone, or papers plus decision histories - and ask them to rank the next experiment on unfamiliar projects. Then, we score information gained per dollar and week, calibration, and how quickly weak branches are abandoned. If histories improve choices only inside the lab that produced them, they amount to useful organizational memory. If they improve choices on unfamiliar problems elsewhere, Alasdair’s group will have captured something science has never managed to write down: a transferable record of taste. Until that happens, a scientific search history is a promising record, not yet a training set.
Inside Venezuela’s high-stakes political negotiations
Maria Corina Machado’s absence does not mean they will fail
Pokemon Bank is shutting down, announcement released
Today, The Pokemon Company announced that it’s shutting down Pokemon Bank. The service goes offline on February 26, 2027. Once we reach that day, players will not be able to transfer Pokemon from Pokemon Bank to Pokemon Home. It will not be possible to store Pokemon there any longer. Players are advised to send their creatures to Pokemon Home before...
Michigan State Football Recruiting: Where Does 2027 Class Stand?
Pat Fitzgerald has hit the 2027 recruiting class hard.
What does Wisconsin’s chaotic Democratic primary for governor mean for progressive politics?
Feverish punditry about the significance of Wisconsin’s primary has distorted the real meaning of the results.
UCR researchers join DOE effort to speed scientific discovery
Two UC Riverside computer scientists are joining federally funded projects that use artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery. Their work will focus on making quantum computing faster and more reliable and building smarter networks for sharing scientific data and research resources.
Top Aides Shut Down Trump Health Questions With Foul-Mouthed Attacks
The White House doesn’t like to talk about the president’s health—instead, it deflects questions and attacks the people who ask them.
Browns’ Deshaun Watson makes health promise that doesn’t seem to be adding up
Is Watson truly healthy?
Russia: Why is the Yabloko party barred from the elections?
Russia's supreme court has banned the anti-war opposition party Yabloko from September's parliamentary elections. What does this mean for the election campaign, opponents of the war and for the political mood in Russia?
Predicting Winners of 49ers Biggest Position Battles
Position battles are one of the most interesting things about training camp and the preseason. The San Francisco 49ershave an elite roster, but that doesn't mean some spots still aren't being fought for. Since then, we've seen several more practices and we've had a depth chart release.
DOE’s Office of Science is now Accepting Applications for Graduate Student Research Awards
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science announced today that the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program is now accepting applications for the 2026 solicitation 2. Applications are due on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. ET.
Elon Musk Says AI Will Be SpaceX's Biggest Business by September: Does the Math Check Out?
SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) CEO Elon Musk says artificial intelligence will overtake everything else the company sells as soon as next month. In an all-hands meeting, Musk said AI revenue “will exceed all other SpaceX revenue probably in September, like next month,”...
Orbitals dev on why the game was made for Nintendo Switch 2
Exclusives are becoming less prominent these days, but when Orbitals launches next month, it will only be on Nintendo Switch 2. Shapefarm has now spoken about why it’s a perfect fit for the console. Orbitals is all about cooperative multiplayer. Given that style of gameplay, having it on Nintendo Switch 2 made sense, especially because of its GameShare features. Game...
NFL top 5 richest teams in 2026 according to Sportico
This proves that being worth a lot of money doesn't mean your football team wins games.
Small Business Spotlight: Specialty dental practice takes root on Market St.
WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO OPEN BLUE HERON ROOT CANAL SPECIALISTS? OWNER SARAH ERMOSHKIN: “I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart. When I was 23 years old, I owned a cafe in Seattle, where I even fought to oppose oppressive sales taxes on espresso drinks. After selling that business, I got married and started a family. Once my children were in school, I attended dental school through the Navy Health Professions Scholarship Program (HPSP), which covered my tuition and provided a stipend. From the beginning, my goal was to eventually own my own practice after completing my military service. The work I do is incredibly rewarding and being able to create an environment that puts patients first while helping employees grow professionally makes every day as a business owner meaningful.” WHAT DOES YOUR BUSINESS PROVIDE? ERMOSHKIN: “Endodontists are often called ‘pain doctors’ because our primary mission is to relieve pain and save natural teeth. We specialize in root canal therapy, retreatment of nonhealing root canals, treatment of root resorption, apicoectomies – microsurgical root-end procedures – and vital pulp therapy for children. Our goal is to preserve teeth that might otherwise need to be extracted and replaced with implants. Saving a patient’s natural tooth is almost always the best long-term solution for their oral health.” HOW DOES YOUR MILITARY TRAINING HELP YOUR BUSINESS? ERMOSHKIN: “My military service taught me how to lead, collaborate and make decisions under pressure. I worked closely with senior leadership while treating a large patient population and collaborating with specialists across multiple disciplines. During the COVID-19 pandemic, (I) served a dual role as Navy dentist and as the public affairs officer for Naval Health Clinic Annapolis, where I helped develop medical and dental communications for the midshipmen and support staff, while coordinating with the broader Navy Capital Region. We worked closely with other military treatment facilities to share best practices and deliver consistent public health messaging. Those leadership experiences continue to shape how I lead my team and serve our patients today.” WHAT CHALLENGES ARE YOU FACING RIGHT NOW IN YOUR BUSINESS? ERMOSHKIN: “One of our biggest challenges is overcoming the misinformation surrounding root canal treatment. Root canals are safe, effective and often the best way to relieve pain while preserving a natural tooth. Unfortunately, many people choose extraction because they believe it’s less expensive or because they’ve seen misleading information online. What they may not realize is that losing a tooth can lead to shifting teeth, changes in the way they bite and chew and significantly higher costs to restore their smile later.”
Thrivent CEO Terry Rasmussen: Everything I need to know about business I learned from cleaning people’s teeth
‘You can have expertise, but if people don’t trust you, it doesn’t go very far.’
Lakers Projected Trade Package for Klay Thompson Revealed
The Los Angeles Lakers have been somewhat unpredictable so far this offseason. Other than the Walker Kessler deal, they ditched the blockbuster trade and instead opted to prioritize complementary additions. The front office doesn’t appear to be done yet, and there is an opportunity to further increase guard depth and veteran shooting. Dallas Mavericks star […] The post Lakers Projected Trade Package for Klay Thompson Revealed appeared first on HEAVY.
CBS Sports president says there’s no timeline for a decision on Tony Romo’s future
CBS Sports president David Berson said Tuesday he does not have a timeline for a decision about Tony Romo’s future.
Real-time X-ray data analysis with DONUT accelerates materials science
What if scientists could get a taste of discovery as soon as their experiment finishes? Thanks to a new machine learning tool called DONUT, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne ...
CBS Sports president says there's no timeline for a decision on Tony Romo's future
NEW YORK (AP) — CBS Sports president David Berson said Tuesday he does not have a timeline for a decision about Tony Romo's future.
Crimson Desert dev comments on status of Nintendo Switch 2 port, targeting first half of 2027
Pearl Abyss has commented again on the Nintendo Switch 2 port of Crimson Desert, providing the most encouraging update we’ve had thus far. In its latest earnings letter, the company said that it’s now “currently playable at a foundational level, and technical evaluations are underway to ensure performance optimization and compliance with our quality standards.” The other piece of important...
Mason Rudolph Doesn’t Hold Back About Former Steelers Coaches
New Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike McCarthy has dedicated himself to developing the team’s quarterbacks, which is a welcome sight for Mason Rudolph, who opened up about the lack of tutelage under the previous coaching staff.“He brings a level of expertise that I just have not been around,” Rudolph told reporters, including Gerry Dulac of […] The post Mason Rudolph Doesn’t Hold Back About Former Steelers Coaches appeared first on HEAVY.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma Gushes About Elder Scrolls VI, Does Not Seem To Notice Giant Rat On Bethesda Office Lawn
Please clap (instead of talking about layoffs)
What does Trump’s executive order on vaccines mean for my kids?
Implementing the president’s directives would require a lengthy administrative process and probably a legal battle.
Our galaxy's supermassive black hole actually doesn't devour everything
Cosmic dust and water is withstanding radiation near the Milky Way galaxy's black hole, Saggitarius A*.
Stop Killing Games Joins Lawsuit Against Sony's Digital 'Monopoly'
Both Stop Killing Games and DoesItPlay are lending their support to a lawsuit against the digital 'monopoly'
Tesla's New 'Preferred Routes' Doesn't Require the Summer Update
One of Tesla's most exciting Summer Update features does not require receiving the 2026.26 vehicle update.
Human rights groups sue Trump administration over International Criminal Court sanctions
The president signed an executive order in 2025 placing sanctions on the ICC, whose jurisdiction the U.S. does not recognize.
Much-wishlisted 100-player shooter Wardogs gets an early access release date and promises refunds for anyone unhappy with the closed beta
Indie multiplayer shooter Wardogs will soon be available to anyone who doesn't want to wait around of a closed alpha invite.
Zelda Nintendo Switch 2 system and Pro Controller leaked, first images
Get a first look at the brand new Nintendo Switch 2 system and Pro Controller based on The Legend of Zelda with this new leak.
Kalshi CEO slams founders for being over-reliant on ‘mostly trash’ business advice—he founded his now-$22 billion prediction market as a college grad
Kalshi’s 30-year-old CEO says most business advice is ‘trash’—he doesn’t read management books or listen to podcasts: ‘I’m gonna make it up as I go’
Trump pretends he has credibility on medicine, science and public health. He doesn’t.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but on scientific matters, the president is about as reliable a source as a Magic 8 ball.
College sports bill doesn’t get vote, but does get spot on the Senate’s September calendar
The Protect College Sports Act failed to reach a vote during an all-night, pre-recess session in the Senate that ended early Saturday, though the bill did gain a spot on next month’s calendar after the chamber comes back from its summer break.
Politics & Power: Big opportunities, real risks, ethics & oversight as AI reshapes the legal industry
AI can make legal work faster, cheaper, and more accessible, but it doesn't come without risk. The organizations that come out ahead won't just be the ones that adopt the best tools. They'll be the ones that pair those tools with clear oversight, honest communication with clients, and a genuine commitment to getting it right.
Hawkeye Football Opponent Preview: Iowa State
It’s out with the old and in with the new in Ames. Does that mean a Hawkeye W in Iowa City?
The U.S. Healthcare System is Already Mostly Socialized
Now that Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the outcome of this crucial race will depend mainly on two things: Whether Republicans succeed in demonizing El-Sayed because he’s brown and a Muslim, and whether they succeed in demonizing him as a left-wing radical. I will defer for the now the question of whether bigotry will be effective this year, although I will address it another day. What I want to address instead is El-Sayed’s signature issue — healthcare. Yes, El-Sayed advocates Medicare for All, a position the usual suspects denounce as “socialism.” I will get to the politics of his stance soon. Today, however, I want to talk about the substance. We should be clear that El-Sayed doesn’t even call himself a socialist. On the contrary, he explicitly disavows the label, saying “I’m a capitalist who just knows about capitalism”. In fact, as I explained in a previous post, the policies that El-Sayed advocates qualify him as a social democrat, not a socialist. Still, El-Sayed advocates a system under which the government would pay almost all medical expenses. Isn’t that socialism? Well, if that is the criterion then much of U.S. healthcare is already socialist. In fact, the government’s role is so large that U.S. healthcare is better described as partially privatized socialism than as anything resembling a free market. Let’s start with the raw numbers on health insurance, which pays the bulk of Americans’ medical expenses. Americans receive health insurance either from private companies or from public programs, overwhelmingly Medicare and Medicaid. Here’s what the breakdown of coverage and spending between private and public looked like in 2024: While a majority of Americans with health insurance get it from private companies, well over 100 million of us are covered by government programs instead. And these government programs pay more total dollars for medical bills than the private insurers do. Why do government programs that cover a minority of the population account for a majority of health insurers’ outlays? Mainly because Medicare covers seniors, and we’re expensive. Also, while Medicaid covers many younger Americans, disabled and elderly beneficiaries account for most of its spending. Even by the raw numbers, then, U.S. health insurance looks as much public as private. But that understates the government’s role: Private health insurance in the U.S. is both highly regulated and heavily subsidized. This is obviously true for the insurance coverage purchased by tens of millions of Americans through the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. But employment-based health insurance, which covers 161 million Americans, is far more of a government creation than most people realize. For employment-based insurance exists largely because of huge implicit government subsidies that come with major strings attached. Here’s how that works. If your employer pays you $10,000, that’s taxable income. But if your employer pays $10,000 toward a company health insurance plan that meets certain criteria, it isn’t taxable. That’s a huge effective subsidy, running at more than $300 billion a year. Take that subsidy into account, along with the more than $100 billion per year spent subsidizing policies purchased under the ACA, as well as the outlays on Medicare and Medicaid, and net effect is that the government pays for more than two-thirds of Americans’ health insurance. Granted, there are strings attached. Roughly speaking, employment-based health plans can’t discriminate based on medical history — that is, they can’t deny coverage to employees with pre-existing conditions — and they also can’t offer the plans only to highly compensated employees — a health plan that is only for the C-suite is considered taxable income. So given the restrictions of the federal tax code, employer-based health insurance is a lot like Obamacare, which also prohibits discrimination based on medical history and provides subsidies to make insurance affordable to lower-paid workers. The fact is that virtually all of private healthcare insurance is already well under some form of government control through regulation and tax subsidies. How should we think about this system? First of all, is Medicare socialist? Don’t tell anyone, but the way Medicare operates — it covers every senior’s medical expenses, whatever they turn out to be, while being funded by taxes that depend on one’s income — could be summarized by the old Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And back in 1961, when Ronald Reagan was the face of a last-ditch effort by the American Medical Association to block the creation of Medicare, he denounced Medicare as “socialized medicine” and warned that it would destroy our freedom. In reality, American freedom survived until Jan. 20, 2025, while Medicare is immensely popular, with an 82 percent favorable rating in the most recent KFF survey. Medicaid, government health insurance for lower-income Americans, comes in at 73 percent. This is in sharp contrast to public views about private insurers, who are widely disliked if not hated and accused of denying essential care. Furthermore, if Medicare is socialism, then the whole U.S. health insurance system, with the government paying most of the bills and placing conditions on private insurers, is almost equally socialist. If you insist on calling any program the government pays for and regulates socialist, then U.S. healthcare would best be described as a partially privatized form of socialism. And one must ask, what is the point of the part that is privatized? Do private insurers add anything positive? Or are they simply parasites, skimming off money that could have been paying for care? The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare. Assessing the waste from employer-based insurance is harder, but most evidence suggests that private insurers have substantially higher administrative costs than Medicare does. Furthermore, the complexity of private insurance, with multiple payers all trying to deny care when they can, is a huge burden both on providers — doctors, nurses, and hospitals — and on patients. What do private insurers offer to compensate for these costs? One must go through intellectual contortions to avoid the conclusion that they are, in fact, parasites. Which brings me back to El-Sayed. In supporting Medicare for All, he’s basically calling for an end to the partial, parasitic privatization of a healthcare system that is already hugely dependent on public funding. When one looks at it that way, it’s not at all a radical proposal. Admittedly, the political lift requires overcoming the opposition to higher taxes to pay for Medicare for All. Political realism rather than economics was the reason I and many other progressives supported Obamacare, with all its complexities, rather than demanding an immediate move to Medicare for All. But the political calculus may very well have shifted since the 2000s, as Americans are fed up with a system of unaffordable premiums, rampant claim denials, and byzantine claim administration. Moreover, funding healthcare insurance through taxation would allow for a much more progressive distribution of the cost. That is, compared to the present system, middle-income households would pay less as high-income households would pay more. And the U.S. would stop wasting large sums on pointless administrative costs. So let’s be clear: El-Sayed’s healthcare platform is perfectly reasonable on the merits of cost, fairness and health efficacy. And with private insurers never more hated, while millions of Americans are losing their health insurance, 2026 may be its time. MUSICAL CODA
What Does Fenway Sports Group's Latest Business Moves Say About Upcoming Lockout?
What Does Fenway Sports Group's Latest Business Moves Say About Upcoming Lockout?
Leaked Galaxy S26 FE specs confirm another battery disappointment from Samsung
Samsung doesn’t seem to even try to surprise anyone with its next Fan Edition phone.
What Does Alibaba (BABA) Qwen Royalty Model Mean For Its AI Business?
Alibaba Group Holding (NYSE:BABA) plans to introduce a revenue-sharing model for commercial users of its upcoming Qwen3.8-Max open-source AI model. The company aims to monetize open-weight AI deployments through royalties paid by businesses that use Qwen3.8-Max in commercial products and services. This move makes Alibaba the first Chinese AI lab to formally tie open-weight model usage to a royalty-based revenue framework. As large language models start to reshape how software and services...
Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand how to live
An AI future of sleek, streamlined, and totally empty relationships.
Saber's newest game trailer takes a shot at Gearbox's CEO, if you look closely
The first hint that something might be up with the recent debut trailer for Saber Interactive’s Rideshare Stimulator is an unusual choice of words—aside from that second one in the game’s title. “Don’t take your passengers too seriously,” the trailer’s narrator says, as he describes this upcoming game. It a car game about the gig work of driving eccentric people to their destinations, a riff on Crazy Taxi. And then, he says: “When I think I’ve met the randiest of passengers, someone even stranger gets in.” “Randiest”? That suggests “randy,” which usually means having strong sexual desire. Yet none of the oddball backseat occupants featured in the trailer seem particularly lustful. One is an old man who considers his grandson a failure, another shares the theory that birds might control traffic lights, another says he’s banned from an aquarium. A little later, there’s a license plate, shown 63 seconds into the trailer, on the front of an SUV: USB DRV It’s a Texas plate. The symbol between those letters is a cog wheel. If you know, you know. That’s a reference to Texas-based Borderlands game development studio Gearbox Software (their logo features a cog wheel). More specifically, it’s a reference to Gearbox’s CEO Randy Pitchford, who in 2018 found himself explaining the nature of video he’d saved on a USB drive that was found at a Medieval Times restaurant before being returned to the studio: “It was ‘barely legal’ porn. This girl’s handle was ‘Only 18.’” The “girl” in the video had committed a solo sex act that Pitchford, an avid practitioner of magic, found remarkable. “I realized, this is not a sex worker…This is a fucking magician.” Back then, the USB drive was central to competing lawsuits against Gearbox by the studio’s former lawyer and by Gearbox against him. A settlement in late 2019 “exonerated” Pitchford, per the Hollywood Reporter. The USB story has resurfaced at times, now in a trailer from a company that not long ago was corporate brethren with Gearbox. Saber vs. Gearbox The head of Saber told Game File that the reference is payback. “The dig is because Randy took shots at Embracer in Borderlands 4,” Saber CEO Matt Karch told me when I asked him about the license plate. “Without Embracer, Randy is performing magic tricks at birthday parties for a living.” Having interviewed Karch during a cross-country flight in late 2024, I can confirm that Karch was unimpressed with Pitchford during their time both working in the Embracer group. I’d approached him not out of surprise that there was animosity but that it was manifesting publicly now. Gearbox was founded in 1999, worked on a port of Halo early on, and developed hit series such as the loot-based sci-fi shooter Borderlands before it was purchased by The Embracer Group in early 2021 for $363 million (with a possible earn-out of over $1 billion, if certain targets were hit by 2027). Saber was founded in 2001, worked on a remaster of Halo early on, had a big hit with zombie shooter World War Z and was purchased by Embracer in early 2020 for $150 million, with a potential earn-out of up to $375 million. For a few years, the Embracer group was a voracious acquirer of game studios. Then, as investment dried up, it choked. In March 2024, Embracer sold Saber to an investment company controlled by Saber CEO Matt Karch, and it sold Gearbox in an all-stock deal to long-time Borderlands publisher Take Two Interactive. Other studios were shut down. Hundreds of developers were laid off. Gearbox didn’t say much about their Embracer experience, nothing too direct, at least. In the summer 2024, Pitchford told reporter and occasional Game File contributor Nicole Carpenter that Borderlands 4’s story was in some way thematically connected to Gearbox’s experience at Embracer: “There’s this cultural and emotional shift in me, personally, and at the studio. What does it mean to trade some autonomy for organization?” When Borderlands 4 came out, there was something stranger: the matter of “Embracer’s Bluff,” a location in the game featuring an AI-powered toilet and a large trash dump, according to a detailed Kotaku account of the place. Gearbox never commented on it; Take Two never got back to me about it when I asked them last year. By contrast, since Saber exited Embracer, Karch has been one of Embracer’s biggest defenders, casting their management as well-meaning and supportive despite the layoffs and studio closures that resulted from their excessive expansion. Like others, Saber’s Karch saw Embracer’s as a shot. With Rideshare Stimulator’s trailer, he’s returned fire. “It’s amazing to me how fast people forget those who went above and beyond for them,” Karch told Game File. A rep for Gearbox did not comment by press time. Game File is a reader-supported publication. Your backing makes my reporting—including any coverage of trailer-based beefs—possible. Good news! I’m currently running Game File’s first big sale of 2026. You can get a one-year subscription for 23% off. Click here to take advantage of the limited-time offer. And thank you for your support! Item 2: In brief… 🚫 Wal-Mart has laid off the staff of Restart, a games media outlet launched in 2024, Aftermath reports. 🟥 A GTA VI preview is on the way, at last, via an “extended look” that will premiere, unusually, on Netflix at 3pm ET on August 27, then officially go live elsewhere six hours later. Last week, Game File noted that Take Two label Rockstar Games is overdue for showing off GTA VI, based on the timing of the initial hands-off previews of GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2. During a call with investors, Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said pre-orders for GTA VI were “unprecedented and astonishing,” but added the company can’t predict how many of those pre-orders represent bonus sales vs. sales that otherwise would have been made at launch. During the same call, Zelnick was noticeably bullish on the future of playing games over streaming cloud connections (predicting wider adoption in three or so years). He sounded unbothered by Sony’s plans to stop making discs for new games (he said the business is 90% digital already and predicted that there could still be limited edition physical editions of games “in the same way there’s still vinyl in the recorded music business.”) 👀 Take Two wrote off $43 million in their spring quarter after deciding “not to proceed with further development of an unannounced title in its pipeline from a third-party developer.” 🤔 Some rare age-demographics from a big publisher: Capcom recently told investors that “users in their 20s account for approximately half of the users of both Pragamata and Resident Evil Requiem.” Item 3: The week ahead Tuesday, August 11 Game releases: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (Switch 2; already out for PC, PS5, Xbox) continues the Bethesda strategy of putting Elder Scrolls games on everything; Royalty Free-For-All is a Smash Bros.-style fighting game featuring public domain characters such as Mother Goose brawling with Oliver Twist in a stage based on the original Little Shop of Horrors movie. Wednesday, August 12 Game release: Pro Jank Footy (PC, console) is an arcade-style Australian Rules Football game with increasingly ridiculous rules, the more you play (I enjoyed the Steam demo) Thursday, August 13 Game release: Super Mario Sunshine (Switch 2, originally released in 2002 on the GameCube) is released for Switch 2’s Nintendo Switch Online service. This game is the black sheep of 3D Mario games. It’s the successor to the breakthrough Super Mario 64 and the rare Mario game built around a single (vacation resort) theme. Mario’s got a water-spraying backpack, a Yoshi pal and a lot of blue coins to collect.
THE WEEK OF AUG 10, 2026
- Scientists decry Fauci prosecution threat - National Academies orders probe of peer-review process - DOE secretary referred to DOJ
Scientists Release Biggest 2D Map of the Universe
Key Takeaways The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys combined more than 263,000 telescope exposures to make the largest 2D map of the universe in visible and near-infrared light. Astronomers can pair the Legacy Surveys map with their own observations to explore our universe and search for rare phenomena. The 2D map serves as the foundation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument survey to measure the universe in 3D and investigate dark energy. Hold on to your telescopes: the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team has released the largest-ever 2D color map of the universe. The 5.6-trillion-pixel map contains nearly 4 billion celestial objects, primarily stars and galaxies. The data is available for all to use and publicly viewable through the Legacy Survey Sky Viewer. Astronomers and citizen scientists can explore the map or combine it with their own observations to better understand our universe. Researchers can search for rare phenomena like gravitational lenses, observe fleeting events like supernovae, and investigate two of physics’ biggest mysteries: dark matter, the invisible substance that accounts for most of the mass in our universe, and dark energy, the force driving our universe’s accelerating expansion. The new map builds on earlier versions from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys that have already proved invaluable. To date, more than 1,800 science papers that reference the Legacy Surveys data have been published. “It’s part of the fabric of astronomy research now,” said David Schlegel, a co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). “When you’re working with astronomical objects today, you often start by pulling up the Legacy Imaging Viewer to see what you’re looking at.” Covering roughly 75% of the sky in visible and near-infrared light, the updated map provides a deep view of the extragalactic universe not blocked by the dust and stars of our own Milky Way. Researchers expect it will remain the most comprehensive 2D map of our universe for years to come. More than 160 scientists contributed to data collection for the project, and a team of 20 produced the final dataset released today. It was built by combining 263,407 telescope exposures from three ground-based sky surveys: the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS) at NSF Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS) at NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory, and the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS) at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. That was supplemented by years of data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite mission and additional public data. “For our team, these data are fundamental to our investigation of the expansion history of the universe and the formation of our galaxy,” said Arjun Dey, co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and an astronomer at NSF NOIRLab. “But the skies belong to everyone, and this survey gives everyone the chance to explore the sky and marvel at its wonders.” Here be galaxies The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys were originally conducted to prepare for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. The Legacy Surveys’ 2D map is essentially a deep photograph of the sky; it records where galaxies and stars appear and how bright they appear. This crucial step enables DESI to select objects and measure their light in different wavelengths to determine their distances, building the largest high-resolution 3D map ever made. Scientists study the way galaxies have clustered at different ages of the universe to track dark energy over time. In April 2026, DESI completed its original five-year survey ahead of schedule and with vastly more objects than expected. The early results have shown surprising hints that dark energy’s impact may be weakening over time — a paradigm shift that could potentially shape the predicted fate of our universe. DESI expects to publish improved results using their first five years of data in 2027 and is continuing observations into 2028. DESI was so efficient at observing galaxies, the Legacy Surveys map needed to expand. Early on, “it became clear we might run out of galaxies to look at and run out of sky, and we better start doing something about that,” said Schlegel, who also works on DESI. The new Legacy Surveys map has been used to select DESI targets since June 2026 and will guide the telescope’s operations over the coming years. Computing the cosmos Merging hundreds of thousands of images taken on 2,285 nights, each with unique atmospheric and telescope conditions, was a massive computational effort. It took about a year to develop the computer code and eight weeks to process all the images at the Perlmutter supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab. Beyond supporting DESI, the Legacy Surveys will be a foundational reference for the next generation of telescopes. As new observatories like the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory (jointly funded by NSF and DOE’s Office of Science) and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope come online, researchers can compare their observations with one of the deepest and most comprehensive views of the sky ever assembled. The Legacy Surveys data will also help scientists train artificial intelligence tools to analyze petabytes of astronomical data and accelerate new discoveries. It will be among the datasets used in an astrophysics pilot project within the American Science Cloud, part of the DOE’s Genesis Mission. The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of High Energy Physics; the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility; the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Astronomical Sciences; and the partner institutions. DESI is supported by the DOE Office of Science and NERSC. Additional support for DESI is provided by the NSF; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (SECIHTI) of Mexico; the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain; and by the DESI member institutions. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
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