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Bernie Sandersโs 2016 Campaign Lit a Spark Beyond Elections
Electoral campaigns can feed workplace struggle by politicizing people, raising their expectations, bringing activists together, and giving them experience organizing others. Bernie Sandersโs presiden...
'Thereโs no such thing as democracy' โ Yanis Varoufakis | Radical Thinking with Aditya Chakrabortty
In the first episode of Radical Thinking, a new series from the Guardian, senior economics commentator Aditya Chakrabortty speaks to the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. What does he make of Andy Burnham's plans to 'rewire' the UK economy? Radical Thinking will be published every Saturday in the Politics Weekly feed
Israeli strike kills four people in Gaza, medics say
An Israeli airstrike killed at least four Palestinians in โan apartment building in Gaza City โearly on Saturday, the territoryโs health officials said.
๐๐โ๐๐๐ฅ๐๐ฒ๐ฌ๐ข๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ข๐ง๐๐ฌ๐ฌ ๐๐๐ฒ ๐๐๐๐
๐๐ก๐ ๐๐โ๐๐๐ฅ๐๐ฒ๐ฌ๐ข๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ข๐ง๐๐ฌ๐ฌ ๐๐๐ฒ ๐๐๐๐: ๐๐๐ฅ๐๐ง๐ ๐จ๐ซ ๐ข๐ง ๐ ๐จ๐๐ฎ๐ฌ ๐ซ๐๐ญ๐ฎ๐ซ๐ง๐ฌ ๐จ๐ง ๐๐ ๐๐๐ญ๐จ๐๐๐ซ ๐๐ญ ๐๐๐๐, ๐๐ซ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ญ๐จ๐ ๐๐ญ๐ก๐๐ซ ๐๐ฎ๐ซ๐จ๐ฉ๐๐๐ง ๐๐ง๐ ๐๐๐ฅ๐๐ฒ๐ฌ๐ข๐๐ง ๐๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ข๐ง๐๐ฌ๐ฌ ๐ฅ๐๐๐๐๐ซ๐ฌ, ๐ ๐จ๐ฏ๐๐ซ๐ง๐ฆ๐๐ง๐ญ ๐ซ๐๐ฉ๐ซ๐๐ฌ๐๐ง๐ญ๐๐ญ๐ข๐ฏ๐๐ฌ, ๐๐ ๐๐๐ฆ๐๐๐ซ ๐๐ญ๐๐ญ๐๐ฌ ๐๐ง๐ ๐๐ก๐๐ฆ๐๐๐ซ๐ฌ ๐ฎ๐ง๐๐๐ซ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐ญ๐ก๐๐ฆ๐ โ๐๐ซ๐ข๐๐ ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐ง๐ง๐จ๐ฏ๐๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง โ ๐๐จ๐ฐ๐๐ซ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐ซ๐จ๐ ๐ซ๐๐ฌ๐ฌ.โ
Local hospitals to conduct community health survey
Memorial Health partnered with Lincoln Memorial Hospital, Logan County Department of Public Health, Decatur Memorial Hospital and HSHS St. Maryโs Hospital to gather feedback from their respected communities on their needs.
Padres Prospect Leads Lake Elsinore To Cal League Title
San Diego Padres prospect Orey Lott had an outstanding series for Lake Elsinore as the team won a title.
September Monthly Review: Health MCP Guy?
For all the time I spend talking about APIs and data exchange, this newsletter has had embarrassingly little interoperability of its own. Itโs old-school SaaS, baby - UI or bust. Not all of that is my fault! Substack, for all its popularity, is (as mentioned before) really frustrating as my system of record. The primary user it optimizes towards is the reader, whose attention feeds the app, the Notes feed, and the recommendation network that Substack is actually selling. Health API Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe Theyโre falling into the same trap that Medium once sprinted into, albeit at a much more glacial speed. Younger generations may not remember (or never knew) it, but Medium once lured publications like The Ringer and Signal v. Noise onto its platform, only to lose them as it rebuilt itself around a paywall and an algorithmic feed. Substackโs original pitch circa 2020 was the antidote (you own your list), but every new feed feature chips away at it. I get it: writers are generic supply in the eyes of the Substack product team. Generic supply follows demand, so the consistent pressure on the PMs is to generate demand, which leads to every product cycle going toward discovery (Notes, recommendations, the app, live video). The end result lackluster author tools (laggy and broken analytics are truly crippling) all despite the premium price point. The archive is where it crosses from authorial gripes to actual reader impact, though. Across Substack and LinkedIn, Iโve published 1,218 posts and nearly 900,000 words since 2018. Substackโs native search can see only the 464 posts that live on Substack, and even there itโs woefully inadequate at surfacing relevant content (even for the guy who wrote it)! Readers have the same problem, writ large. Ask the Archive Fixing search (for both my readers and my own use) turned out to be extremely non-trivial, unfortunately: Thereโs no public API for readers to access content RSS exists for new content notification, but it only carries the 20 most recent posts and cuts paid ones off at the preview The only Substack MCP is an admin tool for analytics The export exists for authors, but itโs painfully awkward and slow. So I built something to work around that: the Health API Guy MCP. Itโs a private MCP server holding the full text of everything Iโve written across Substack and LinkedIn. Add it to Claude or ChatGPT as a connector and you can ask things like: It pairs keyword search (for acronyms and case names, of which we have many) with semantic search. Every post is also labeled by topic, form, and court case, so you can pull a lawsuitโs (or multiple casesโ) entire docket across Substack and LinkedIn in one query: Hail, Healthapiguyhydra This is also a bit of me eating my own cooking. Iโve spent the year arguing that headless healthcare is arriving and that developers want primitives over abstractions. Last week in Hail, Benihydra, I watched Salesforce plug its platform into Claude and bet that the records underneath outlive whatever interface sits on top: Salesforce must believe that the Hydraโs immortal head is the records, permissions, and business logic (in that they will survive whatever happens to the interface). It felt a bit hypocritical to keep my own archive behind a Substack search bar. The archive is the body. Substack is one head, and now whatever tool you might use is another. Will the EHRs follow my lead? Probably not imminently, but one can hope! Why Founding Members Only The MCP is available to Founding Member subscribers. A few reasons: It costs money and time to run. Hosting, the database, Clerk usage and AI compute for search and labeling are significant operational costs (that increase with usage). Substack gives me no way to automate access. Thereโs no API to check whether someone is a paid subscriber, so every user is manual operations for now. Itโs a beta. Weโll need to improve things and parts will break. Iโd rather they break for a small group of dedicated readers who will tell me about it. The Founding tier deserved a real benefit. Until now it was mostly a generous tip. Now it comes with something. If youโre already a Founding Member, reply to this email with the address youโd like provisioned. If youโre not and want in, upgrade here. Larger teams (such as companies) can get access too: group subscriptions at the Founding tier come with the group discount. The admin for the subscription can reply with the list of addresses to provision. Get 20% off a group subscription Pricing Founding membership is now a flat $200 a year, replacing the old suggested $150 that readers could adjust. Existing Founding Members will have access grandfathered in at their previous rate. Month in Review Articles Published Make Networks Dumb Again (Sep 11): AI is making old analog networks cheaper to use and flooding them with machine traffic in the process. A plea for agent-native rails with the intelligence at the endpoints, and for Washington to drag them to ubiquity. Interoperability, Unbuttoned (Sep 29): Interoperability is a series of workflows in a trenchcoat, and this post finally takes the trenchcoat off. A color-coded map shows which provider workflows went digital, which are fragmented, and which still run on fax. Video Content Antitrustโs System of Record Problem (Sep 3): The FTCโs investigation into Epic prompted a ninety-minute webinar, now posted with chapters and a smoothed transcript. We get into why market definition, missing B2B share data, and the SSNIP test leave antitrust poorly suited to systems of record, plus why information blocking may be doing more than any pending lawsuit. The Information Exchange: Cerner Milking Edition (Sep 18): This was so fucking fun. Ryan Tucker, Ryan Brickner, Brad Thorson, and I try an Around the Horn format, complete with points, penalties, and a mute button. We debate whether Oracle Health is dead, who would actually buy Cerner (IBM enters the chat), p(Doom), and why the front desk still hands you a clipboard. Regulatory Ask Not What Your Network Can Do (Sep 23): CDCโs RFI on public health data intermediaries lists use cases already served, unevenly, by eCR, lab reporting, IZ Gateway, and syndromic surveillance. The real opportunity sits in one question about AI: a network that can handle the next emergency without another interface project. Court cases Particle v. Epic: The Naughty Schoolteacher (Sep 4): After a summer-long vigil, the answer on Epicโs early summary judgment bid is two paragraphs and a remedial assignment. Particle advances to the next grade, and market definition gets another year of discovery. The Epic Discovery Files (Sep 8): Texasโs motions to compel arrive with a 251-page appendix of requests, objections, and meet-and-confer letters with Cravath. Inside: Epic using generative AI for document review, denied interoperability requests in scope, and Noerr-Pennington raised against lobbying discovery. Epic v. Health Gorilla: โWorking as Designedโ (Sep 9): Epic wants nothing to do with the data breach MDL, and explaining why puts fresh discovery on the public docket. The spiciest allegation: Health Gorilla told GuardDog to scrub its law firm business from its website instead of cutting off access. Veeva v. Epic: Legal Bypass Surgery (Sep 15): Veeva asks the Wisconsin Supreme Court to skip the Court of Appeals, while law professors and three policy groups line up as amici. Meanwhile, Epicโs lawyers apologize for another round of citation errors, including a quote that never existed. Texas v. Epic: Behind the Black Bars (Sep 17): The court portal served up Epicโs unredacted filings, revealing a $5 million document review budget and the AI workflow behind it. Also inside: the 200-plus company names Texas wants searched, and one very expensive Zoom invitation. OpenEvidence v. Doximity: Consequences Will Follow (Sep 25): OpenEvidence tells the court it will not comply with a discovery order, and its own lawyers at Quinn Emanuel say they wonโt defend the choice. Add years of Slack reported unrecoverable, and Rule 37 sanctions come into view. Health Tech Keeps Choosing Violence (Sep 28): Doximity moves to end OpenEvidenceโs case, Epic asks Texas to show its work, and a sleepy Audacious Inquiry patent fight sprouts antitrust and information blocking counterclaims. The main event is a long-sealed Cognizant v. Infosys ruling that hints where system of record antitrust claims can survive. EHRs One Verb for Oracle Health (Sep 14): Oracleโs earnings call quantifies every data center to the decimal point, while Oracle Health gets a single verb: โaccelerate.โ Panning the few healthcare mentions turns up an agentic care management system, a research-to-care ledger play, and the question of whether healthcare gets Larryโs patience. Epicโs Forretress Under Siege (Sep 30): Judy Faulkner tells a panel Epic paused hundreds of projects to harden its software and calls it a โshame,โ while a spokesperson insists the roadmap hasnโt changed. Project Glasswing, a Pokรฉmon-branded QAN sprint, and a trove of Jodel grievances reconcile the two Epics and preview the Jevons paradox coming for all software. Industry Analysis Scanning for a Network (Sep 1): Scan.com raises $220M to build the imaging network labs never got, speedrunning Zocdocโs consumer-to-B2B pivot. Its wedge to network density may be the most American one available: personal injury litigation. The Front Desk Wants the Damn Whole Building (Sep 16): Hello Patient buys Converse Health, pushing its AI front desk into referrals, chart work, and prior auth. The copilot categories keep blurring, and your distribution partner is still your final boss. Cross-industry Comparisons A Different Patchwork Quilt (Sep 10): Healthcare loves to envy open banking, but the US version has no mandate, a toll booth at Chase, and data quality problems of its own. The grass isnโt greener; itโs another American patchwork quilt, and perhaps a worse one. Hail, Benihydra (Sep 21): Salesforce brings its platform into Claude, Slack, and its own agent, inviting the interfaces that might replace it. Cut off one head and more grow back, so long as the records underneath stay put. Living on A Trade Secret Prayer (Sep 22): Six credit unions are suing Fiserv, the Epic of core banking, by claiming their own member records as trade secrets. Banking has no Cures Act, so its lawyers reach for legal alchemy that healthcare has already tried. Other News None this month External Media Nabla Accelerate NYC: I kicked off fall conference season at Nablaโs Accelerate event in New York, where Delphine Groll opened by asking the room to picture the company it wants to become and the one it doesnโt. I liked her framework of bureaucracy, fear, and ego as the blockers. I also love vendor conferences/events in general - different vibe than industry biggies. Healthcare 101 with Nikhil Krishnan: I briefly guest lectured Out-Of-Pocketโs Healthcare 101 class. Appreciated Nikhilโs takeaways cover whether AI doctors can query HIEs, why healthcareโs data-liberation rules beat most industriesโ, and the hi-res graphic is in the comments. HCN: Epic Probed by the FTC: I joined the HCN guys to talk through the FTCโs investigation into Epic. Cedricโs new hairdo was an unexpected plot twist. The episode also covers MFN drug pricing, healthcare M&A and Eli Lillyโs acquisition streak. Fall Conferences: At eHealth Exchangeโs Annual Meeting in Austin on Oct 27, Iโll moderate a panel on the tensions between AI, HIEs, and timely patient access with Jean Ross (Primary Record), Therasa Bell (Kno2), Byron Crowe (Doctronic), and Michael Marchant (Freenome). Hereโs the rest of my schedule if you want to meet up: CommonWell (Redwood Shores, CA): Oct 13-14 Will be participating in a fun Jeopardy event Open@Epic (Madison, WI): Oct 20-23 Will be enjoying Verona, Willy Street, and other local adventures eHealth Exchange and Sequoia Project (Austin, TX): Oct 27-29 Yeehaw HLTH (Vegas): Nov 15-18 Groundhog Day, Venetian Edition RSNA (Chicago): Nov 30-Dec 2 See me at โGoverning AI in Breast Imaging: What Health Systems Are Actually Doingโ Digital Health Counsel 2026 AI Summit (Seattle): December 2-3 Will likely be speaking to a bunch of lawyers about information blocking Posts I Liked ChatGPTโs Epic integration: game changer or nothing burger?: Joshua Liu, MD offers five thoughts on OpenAIโs Epic launch, starting from the point that it rides the same open APIs available to anyone. He argues read-only access leaves ordering to Art and the ambient startups, and asks why HCA is piloting it alongside Commure. Heโs sorta a must-follow at this point - consistently excellent, thought-provoking takes. Epic, Lilly, and the Discovery pass: Seth Chaney reads Epicโs first major Discovery deal (with Eli Lilly), as well as its revised developer terms on commercial displays, as the pipe finally opening between EHRs and pharma. Life sciences and health continue to collide. Scott Rossignol on EHR payer platforms and ePA fees: Scott argues the top ambulatory EHR vendors are turning the prior auth mandate into a per-member-per-year toll on payers, for an API whose operating cost has nothing to do with covered lives. His fix is two lines of regulatory text: put the CRD/DTR/PAS certification criteria in the Base EHR definition, and bring payer-facing ePA connectivity under ยง 170.404โs cost-based fee rules. Itโs a good solution. Health API Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
Scientists explore turning beach sargassum into fish food
As the worldโs population continues to grow, so does the challenge of feeding it.
Dairy farmers look to nutrition tools to improve efficiency, health
Zinpro Corporation discovery researcher Daryl Kleinschmit says heโs visiting with dairy farmers about improving efficiency during World Dairy Expo this week. โImprove transition health, reduce lameness, improve reproduction. So I think itโs the same topics every year, maybe a little different spin. But every year people come with a lot of the same questions, depending [โฆ]
Microsoft Fabric is where AI agents learn how the business works
Microsoft is turning Fabric into the context layer for AI agents, feeding Power BI semantic models into Copilot by default and adding ontologies with rules.
Instagram rolls out an AI video assistant for creators
This conversational AI assistant is intended to provide personalized feedback to creators, rather than generic advice.
Debt service and the Pentagon. Private equity and the politics of the US housing market. The return of black lung disease & the Franco-Prussian War in color.
Thank you for opening your Chartbook email. RALPH BALSON. 1890โ1964. Oil and enamel, signed. Source: Gavekal This going to hurt - the two 7s in the US: diesel and mortgage rates Source: Gavekal In the US housing market, costs are soaring and the role of corporate, private equity-backed buyers is high on the mid-term election agenda. HEY READERS, THANK YOU for opening the Chartbook email. I hope it brightens your day. I enjoy putting out the newsletter, but tbh, what keeps this flow going is the generosity of those readers who clicked the subscription button. If you are persuaded to click, please consider the annual subscription of $60. It is both better value for you and a much better deal for me, as it involves only one credit card charge. Why feed the payments companies if we donโt have to. Subscribe It is striking how, since 2020, big banks have dropped out of the political spotlight in the US. For contributing subscribers only. Subscribe Rates of the lung disease pneumoconiosis among working US coal miners have risen to levels not seen in nearly 40 years Source: Bloomberg Chinese Clean Technology Exports For contributing subscribers only. Subscribe Ralph Balson (1939) Portrait of Grace Crowley Cole, G. O. & Haseman, S. M., (2023) โโThe Substance of Paintโ: Class and Materiality in the Work of Ralph Balsonโ, Open Library of Humanities 9(2). Ralph Balson (1890โ1964) was an English plumber and house painter who emigrated to Australia in 1913 and subsequently became a key member of Sydneyโs artistic avant-garde. He is credited with having the first solo exhibition of purely abstract painting in Australia in 1941. Despite his role in developing Australian non-objective painting, Balson remained principally a house painter, working on his art practice at weekends. In 1955 he retired on a state pension and became a full-time artist. Balsonโs artistic education and methods were critically shaped by his working-class background. He did not travel abroad until 1960 and was an avid auto-didact. His materials, palette, techniques and compositional strategies were likewise informed by his trade. Balsonโs profession as a painter-decorator made him conspicuous within the predominantly middle-class Sydney art scene, though his painting partner Grace Crowley considered it an advantage in their pursuit of constructive painting. This paper explores the impact of Balsonโs trade on his trajectory towards pure abstraction. While his art was at odds with the predominantly figurative mode of class-conscious art in Australian Modernism, we argue that it is embedded in the experience of class through its creative adaptation of labour into aesthetics. Source: OLH Svetlana Alexievich, The Art of Oral History No. 1 Paris Review Issue 257, Fall 2026 Interviewed by Elena Kostyuchenko INTERVIEWER How were you able to go to Chernobyl? Did you need special papers? ALEXIEVICH It was a time of chaos. They let me right into the zone. โฆ More than anything, there was confusion. Adamovich [Ales Adamovich, the Soviet Belarusian writer], I remember, persuaded Gorbachev to send in the scientists, who showed up without even bringing their shaving kits. They were told that there had been an explosion at a nuclear power plant, but for some reason they thought that theyโd be there for only a day or two. The first time I went was several months later, and people kept telling me about things they didnโt understandโhow the fishermen couldnโt find worms, because theyโd burrowed deep into the earth, how the milk wouldnโt curdle at the cheese factories. The honeybees wouldnโt come out of their hives. The evacuations started, I think, in the first month. The old women hid, they wouldnโt leave. I mentioned radiation to one of them and she said, โIโve seen that radiation, all right! Itโs yellow with green in it. I saw puddles of it in my garden, and I told the other women, and we ran and looked, and she had it in her garden, and the other one, too!โ God, it was wild, the way the mind made sense of it. There was a story going around about Gorbachev telling the scientists to show him the radiation. โWe canโt, itโs invisible.โ โBut I want to see it!โ I also ran into the soldiers whoโd been flown in on helicopters from Afghanistan. I asked them, โWhat are you doing here with your machine guns?โ They said, โWeโre collecting the radiation, thatโs what.โ So you had some of them running around with their guns, others out in the village washing off firewood or burying soil in the soil. These were the kinds of things that exploded our worldview. They made you realize that culture was just a chest filled with old manuscripts. There were no books in there that could help me. Our philosophers turned out to be useless when faced with the unprecedented. Derrida, Baudrillardโphilosophy fell silent. What was happening? How would we live with it? Thatโs when I decided it simply needed to be witnessed. Which is what I did. INTERVIEWER I wanted to ask about how you talk to people. โฆ ALEXIEVICH Yes, we sit and we talkโabout what interests me and about life in general. About love, about everything in the world. That way, what comes out is three-dimensional. If you cut straight to the part you need, which is what journalists do, it wonโt be interesting, and it wonโt be the truth, either. Not the whole truth. INTERVIEWER Do people always open up when you ask questions, or can questions get in the way? ALEXIEVICH You have to ask questions, of course. Your job is to scour away the banality and return people to their true selves, to make them face what they rarely tap into. With every new person, you have to find a new way to do it. When you ask an interesting question or you share what happened to you, you help people really think about what theyโre saying and not just repeat whatever theyโve picked up from the newspaper. But not everybody is capable of it, not everyone wants to put themselves through that. Either the chemistry starts to kick in or it doesnโt. A person might be wonderful, but you can tell that the conversation just isnโt going to happen. You can try to push it, but it will be a product of your own intellect, rather than of that mysterious connection. Life doesnโt come from the mind. Some people I can call two years after our last conversation, and theyโll say, โOh, Svetochka! I think of you all the time,โ and weโll start talking again. With others, that wonโt happen. That doesnโt mean theyโre not extraordinary people, just that you canโt connect with them. They might have some insight, but you donโt have the right antenna to pick up their signal. Source: The Paris Review Colorized Franco-Prussian war โฆ the ruins of Strasbourg with a French photographer and his mobile dark room. Ralph Balson (1961) Matter Painting If youโve scrolled this far, you know you want to click: Subscribe
Your feed is political: Social media changes how candidates reach young voters
In 2026, politicians no longer need a press conference, television interview or newspaper story to reach voters. With one post, they can deliver a message directly to millions of people โ including young voters who increasingly encounter news online.
Derek Hough gets frustrated after being cut off by โDWTSโ producers while giving feedback
Derek Hough appeared frustrated after being cut off by the โDancing with the Starsโ producers while giving feedback to Jenna Dewan and Val Chmerkovskiy during week 3โs โYach Rock Night.โ
Plant lovers wanted: Study highlights demand for citizen science
Over the last several years, invasive plant and insect species have found their way into more and more social media feeds. From the tree of heaven to Bradford pear trees and the ubiquitous spotted lanternfly, ...
Des Moines seeks public input on Greenwood Park improvements
The Des Moines Parks and Recreation Department will host two public input sessions Oct. 7 to gather residentsโ ideas and priorities for the future of Greenwood Park. The sessions will be from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 5 to 7 p.m. at the park. Feedback will help shape a plan for potential improvements, whichโฆ
The Grand Theft Auto VI Digital Issue Is Now Live
Subscribers can read the digital version of our latest magazine starting today. - Game Informer
The Beclowning of Scott Bessent
One iron law of current politics is that nobody who associates themselves with Donald Trump emerges with a shred of credibility. For some, thatโs not a big loss โ itโs not as if anyone respected Pete Hegseth even before he decided that the key to military success in an age of drones and AI was more testosterone. For others, however, the costs are real. Iโm old enough to remember when Marco Rubio was widely considered a reasonable, thoughtful politician. Right now, however, my candidate for the biggest loser is Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury. Bessent started out with significant reputation to lose: When Trump selected him, this was the headline in the Financial Times: Jason Furman, Barack Obamaโs chief economist, described him as a โcredible Treasury secretary who has a real understanding of the global economyโ. But Bessent has now transformed himself into the Baghdad Bob of bonds. Three weeks ago, after intervening (for reasons that remain somewhat unclear) to support the Japanese yen, Bessent boasted about his ability to move markets and dared investors to bet against his, declaring โI am the house now.โ He then tried to push long-term interest rates down, buying 30-year U.S. Treasuries in a move some have compared to paying down part of your mortgage by running up your credit card balance. Hereโs how thatโs going so far: To get some perspective on how high interest rates have gone, hereโs a longer-term perspective: We havenโt seen interest rates this high since the fading days of the dotcom bubble. Why are interest rates hitting new records? The backdrop, as I argued in last Sundayโs primer, is the huge AI-driven investment boom; more on that next week. But the immediate cause of the latest interest rate spike was Trumpโs rejection of an Iranian proposal to end the war. This rejection sent crude oil prices, which for a while had fallen considerably, shooting back up: Itโs notable, by the way, that oil prices remain high even though a significant amount of oil is now being shuttled through the Strait of Hormuz by night, on smaller vessels. Thatโs an interesting story, which has a lot to do with the fact that oil from the Hormuz shuttle runs must be transferred to larger vessels before being shipped to markets in Europe and Asia; around 15 percent of the worldโs large crude carriers are now parked off the coast of Oman, waiting to be tanked up. This is creating a shipping crunch: But thatโs a topic for another day. For now, the point is that with oil still high and refined products, especially diesel, still close to record levels, inflation will remain elevated. And this in turn means that the Federal Reserve will keep short-term interest rates high, an expectation that is feeding into longer-term rates. Hence Bessentโs bond-market humiliation. The truth is that Bessent might not have been able to get interest rates down even in the best of circumstances. But he certainly wonโt get anywhere as long as Trump keeps believing that he can somehow convert his Iran debacle into a triumphant victory. And Trump will keep believing that as long as he is surrounded by sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear. Sycophants like, for example, Scott Bessent, who is predicting the imminent collapse of the Iranian economy, possibly within two weeks. Bessent is right to say that the embargo on Iranian oil exports is placing the country under great economic strain. But his implicit prediction that this will quickly produce a deal that Trump can call victory looks no more plausible than his boasts about the bond market. The big question now is, why would anyone with a reputation to lose work for Donald Trump? As the beclowning of Bessent shows, joining the Trump team wonโt just damage your reputation; it will utterly destroy it.
Trump Doesnโt Need to Be a Prop in Xiโs Political Show
Whether he means to or not, the U.S. president is feeding Chinaโs active disinformation campaigns โ especially on Taiwan.
iPhone Duo StandBy Leak Reveals Five Unannounced Faces
We've seen previews of iOS 27 running on the iPhone Duo, including a new StandBy mode that activates even when the iPhone isn't charging. Apple showed the mode in press materials, but leaker pdfu today shared a more in-depth look at some of the options. There are multiple StandBy faces available on the iPhone Duo, five of which we weren't aware of. A Home Camera view will show a single camera feed or a grid of up to nine camera feeds.
Kickstarter campaign lessons from small-business owner Emily Byrne
Emily Byrne's Kickstarter campaign for her alarm clock business helped her learn financial mistakes and get valuable customer feedback early on.
Bobby Kotickโs lawyers sent me a bad email (and later apologized)
The message I had received was unsettlingโfor a moment. Then it was just really confusing. Back on January 20 of this year, at 5:15pm ET, I received an email with the subject line โLegal Correspondence re Bobby Kotick.โ It was from the law firm Clare Locke, a firm Iโd heard had been emailing reporters in recent years about their coverage of Kotick, the former, longtime CEO of Activision Blizzard. The letter was threatening. A lawyer from the firm introduced themselves as โdefamation counsel to Bobby Kotick.โ They issued a โdemandโ that I โcorrectโ a Game File article Iโd published a week prior. The article that had irked them had been a scoop of sorts. Iโd written about a a 2022 lawsuit brought by a Swedish pension fund, AP7, over Microsoftโs purchase of Activision Blizzard. The suit wasnโt news, but I was first to review and report about Kotickโs extensive pushback to the fundโs claims. The pension fundโs core contention was that the sale had been rushed by Kotick to avoid the consequences of sexual misconduct scandals swirling around the company in 2021. (Heโd not been accused of misconduct himself in those suits, to be clear.) As I wrote at the time, Kotick had denied the allegations of the rushed sale. Beyond that, Kotick used a December 2025 reply to the Swedish fundโs lawsuit to assign blame for those workplace scandals, the bad press and even for the AP7 lawsuit. Iโd found Kotickโs arguments novel and newsworthy. Across nearly 3,000 words, I explained Kotickโs take: that a Swedish gaming company was behind the Swedish fundโs lawsuit (the Embracer group; they denied it); that the Microsoft-Activision deal was not rushed and was secured at what Kotick felt history had proven to be an optimal price for shareholders; that he believed a conspiracy of people at unions government agencies, PR firms and the media had spun up claims of widespread workplace misconduct at Activision Blizzard in 2021. The article gave context for all of this, letting readers assess the claims and weigh their credibility. As Iโd later write to Kotickโs lawyers: I would be surprised if you could point to any news article about Bobby Kotick in the last five years that has spent more of its wordcount articulating his point of view. He is welcome to do an interview with Game File any time. Nonetheless, there they were in my inbox that Tuesday evening: Clare Locke, the law firm that secured a $787.5 million settlement from Fox News over false statements about voting machines. They were emailing me, threatening that failure to comply with their demand could support a claim of โactual malice,โ a legal standard for libel. Unlessโฆ Unless, they said, I added a key paragraph to my article. This was a paragraph that I already knew Kotickโs lawyers had been emailing reporters about for at least a year, and it was a paragraph that was already in my article. The paragraph they wanted is from a 2023 settlement that Californiaโs Civil Rights Department struck with Activision Blizzard. The settlement had closed a two-year-old lawsuit over alleged sexual discrimination at the game maker. The paragraph basically said that claims of systemic or widespread sexual harassmentโor of execs like Kotick tolerating such behaviorโhad never been proven. Iโd already seen proof that Kotickโs lawyers had pushed for the settlementโs language to be added to reports about 2021 sexual discrimination and misconduct lawsuits brought against Activision Blizzard by California and, separately, by the U.S. federal government (both suits were since settled). I knew that Kotick and his lawyers felt that the California settlement language should be mentioned in the same breath as references to an article he hated and denied, a November 2021 Wall Street Journal article claiming Kotick knew โfor yearsโ of sexual misconduct at Activision Blizzard. So, in the Game File article that Clare Locke emailed me about, in the interest of ensuring I was being fair and balanced regarding the person I was covering, I had already included the following excerpt from the California settlement [emphasis added in bold]: (Kotick has repeatedly pushed back against that November article in the Wall Street Journal, citing among other things, language from a court-approved consent decree as part of Activisionโs 2023 $54 million settlement over the California suit. It states: โno court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations that: there has been systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard [or] that Activision Blizzard senior executives ignored, condoned, or tolerated a culture of systemic harassment, retaliation, or discrimination.โ) On the evening of January 20, I was incredulous. How do you write a four page legal threat about a week-old article and miss this? While scrambling to also make my kids dinner, I wrote a lengthy reply to Clare Lockeโs lawyers, basically asking them to cool it with the threats and to start making sense. In part, I wrote: I hope you can understand why I am having trouble understanding what youโre asking for, when the statement youโre demanding to see in Game Fileโs article already appears in Game Fileโs article. Actual malice, as you know, refers to a reckless disregard for the truth. Iโm not sure what your argument is when my article already states your clientโs position. Here is where I should remind you, the reader, that I am an independent journalist. I publish on Substack, and have availed myself of the Substack Defender program that provides writers on the platform with legal support. But Iโm no Wall Street Journal or New York Times, nor even IGN or GameSpot when it comes to such things as, well, having a legal department. There are more fun things for me to do as an independent journalist than writing back to a powerful law firm representing a very rich person. On the evening of January 20th, I was just trying to cook some pasta, broccoli and chicken nuggets for hungry twins. Nevertheless, I wrote back to them. Two hours later, I got a reply. Summarizing: A lawyer for Clare Locke said theyโd โreviewed an incomplete versionโ of my article and they โapologize for the confusion.โ (My guess: Someone didnโt read past the pieceโs paywall, even though theyโd had a full week to scrounge up the funds to do so. What Iโd published above the paywall was balanced, as was what came after.)1 That was almost that, but something about the situation bothered me. The letter had been marked โconfidential.โ I hadnโt agreed to that, and I disliked the idea that powerful people on the beat that I cover would act like they could unilaterally control what I might tell my readers about. On the morning of the 21st, having already gotten the powerful law firm to back off, I oh-so-wisely re-approached them with just one more thing. I thanked them for clearing things up the night before but noted that Iโd never agreed to keep their letter confidential. Iโm all for agreeing with a source to keep things off the record, but thatโs the thing. We have to agree. You canโt just declare it. Iโm not bound by that. I wrote to Clare Lockeโs lawyer and said, in part: I trust the matter is resolved. It was disappointing to have to spend less time with my kids last night in order to address your legal letter. Family timeโs precious. I will add, for clarityโs sake, that, while your letter stipulated that it was confidential, I did not agree to those terms. In the future, should you wish to communicate with me confidentially, I am happy to agree to classifying our communication as โoff the recordโ prior to the actual communicationโas is standard with any professional journalist. The firmโs lawyer replied, not directly addressing the confidentiality issue but asserting that the matter was resolved. Why I didnโt write about this until now In May, I told this story on an episode of Simon Parkinโs podcast My Perfect Console, but I held off on sharing it directly with Game File readers. I held off to avoid stepping on the toes of another reporter, the journalist Mikhail Klimentov. Heโd interviewed me in the spring of 2025 about an investigation he was working on regarding Bobby Kotick lawyers pressing the media to add the California settlement language to stories referencing the 2021 lawsuits. And about how some outlets had changed their stories and how some simply deleted them. Initially, I was a third-party source for Klimentovโs reporting, providing on-the-record context about the state of the games media. Iโd heard about the letters but hadnโt put the time into pursuing the story. I thought it was interesting, and I was glad he was covering it. When the outlet that Klimentov was going to run his reporting in dropped the story, I began talking to him about potentially publishing his reporting on Game File. This was tentative. Then, in January, when I got my own Clare Locke letter, I told Klimentov that I didnโt think it would make sense for me to publish him, not with me now being part of the story. I had my own version of this situation to tell. But I wished him well and said Iโd refrain from telling my tale until he could get his reporting out there. Last Friday, Klimentov finally ran his investigation, in a nearly 48-minute video report for People Make Games. It covers various Clare Locke letters, how media outlets reacted to them and what to make of all this. His video weighs the merits of Kotickโs request and looks at some of the articles that were changed (one of which had a glaring error). I highly recommend watching it: (Note, I did some editorial consulting for a People Make Games video last year but nothing to do with this report.) While many outlets havenโt left any public evidence that they updated their Kotick coverage at Kotickโs counselโs request, at least one has. Back in October 2025, the mainstream outlet Reuters applied the most transparent article update Iโve seen. On the 3rd of the month, they published an article about the state of the Swedish pension fundโs lawsuit. Days later, they added this: In an October 7 letter sent after publication of this article, Kotickโs defamation counsel disputed claims of widespread harassment at Activision. โNot a single investigation, court finding, verdict, or ruling ever concluded that there was any meritโ to the allegations of widespread harassment at Activision, Tom Clare and Nick Brechbill of Clare Locke wrote. Iโve never added a statement to my article on Game File, because none was needed. Not for fairnessโ sake, nor to meet any demands of Kotickโs lawyers. Iโve nevertheless wanted to be transparent with Game File readers. If someone powerful is questioning my reporting, is threatening a lawsuit over itโฆ if that threat is part of a pattern involving other games media outlets and if, in my case, the whole thing ran into a ridiculous ditch, I want you to know about it. I also share this as a real example of how I handle threats to Game File. I stand up for my own reporting, even when itโs not comfortable to do so. (In that same category of standing up for the work I do, Iโll point to an incident in late August. Asocial media post I published to X/Twitter regarding reporting I did about Take Two and GTA VI was hit by bogus copyright claim by a firm working for the publisher. I pushed back and got it reversed; even while a bigger games media outlet let themselves be censored. This is the other reason Iโm sharing this story: To emphasize that dealing with threats from powerful people is one of the costs of covering the video game industry independently and as fearlessly as possible. This is where you come in. Your support, through free and paid subscriptions (sign up here!), can help me keep doing that. It can ensure that Iโve got the back-up I need. And it can help make fiascoes like this even less of a worry, so I can spend my evenings dealing with more important things, such as making sure I steam the kidsโ broccoli just right. 1 That pension fund lawsuit I wrote about in January has all but gone away. In May, the fund and Activision Blizzard owner Microsoft agreed to settle. Lawyers for the fund brokered a $250 million settlement for former Activision Blizzard shareholders. In the settlement, the fundโs lawyers changed their rhetoric. Where once theyโd questioned the meaning of the California settlement language, they adopted a version of it for themselves. Several weeks ago, while seeking to get a court to sign off on the terms of the settlement, they proposed their fee for their work in the case: $60 million.
Penguins Finalize Roster; Lots of Same
The Pittsburgh Penguins are as close to running it back as possible after the team finalized its 2026-27 NHL roster [โฆ]
Magnetism may have helped kick-start our solar system
Ancient meteorites reveal a powerful magnetic field that may have helped feed the growing sun.
27 Flight Attendants Share Unhinged Passenger Questions
No, we can't turn off the engines because you think they're too loud, ma'am.
This โsoup-to-nutsโ smal business will feed your guests and plan the party too
Andrea Dettelbach started the D.C.-area catering and event planning business Soup to Nuts after a lifetime around food.
WHO recognizes healthy, innovative cities across the Western Pacific Region
Nine Healthy City champions from across the World Health Organization (WHO) Western Pacific Region received special recognition at an awarding ceremony during the 11th Global Conference of the Alliance for Healthy Cities in Sydney, Australia.The WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific has presented the Healthy Cities Recognition Awards every two years since 2004 to celebrate innovative and impactful city-led initiatives that improve the health and well-being of urban populations.Eight cities received awards for their best practices, and one National Forum received the WHO Regional Directorโs Special Award in recognition of its long-standing leadership in advancing the Healthy Cities movement.Awardees were selected through a rigorous evaluation process and recognized for demonstrating measurable, innovative and sustainable approaches to health challenges faced by cities.Remarking on the significance of the awards, Dr Huong Tran, Director of the Division of Health Promotion, Disease Prevention and Control at the Regional Office, said that, โThere is no single blueprint for a healthy city. What works in one context may need to be adapted to another. But by sharing our experiences, including what worked, what was challenging, and what we learnt along the way, we can help one another move faster and further.โAward-winning cities and initiativesThis year's awards recognize outstanding city-led initiatives that have demonstrated measurable impact, innovation and sustainability in advancing health initiatives for urban populations.Baguio City (Philippines) โ Data for equity: informing action, improving healthDr Donnabel Tubera-Panes, City Epidemiologist โ Medical Officer IV of the Health Services Office accepted the award on behalf of Baguio City. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisBaguio City was recognized for developing a pioneering Livability Index that provides village-level data across all 128 barangays (villages), enabling evidence-based planning and more equitable allocation of resources. By integrating community participation and institutionalizing the index within city planning and budgeting processes, the city has demonstrated how data can drive action to reduce health and social inequities.Eunpyeong-gu (Seoul, Republic of Korea) โ Communities living in vulnerable situations: advancing health equity through community engagementVice Mayor Honourable Ahn Hyoung Jun accepted the award on behalf of Eunpyeong-gu. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisEunpyeong-gu was recognized for its inclusive health equity programme supporting vulnerable populations, including isolated older adults and LGBTQI+ communities. Through peer-led community networks, social cooperatives and inclusive service design, the district has strengthened access to care, promoted social inclusion and advanced community ownership of health initiatives.Madiun City (Indonesia) โ Adapting and mitigating climate-related crises: building heat resilience and preventing flood-related health risksMs Yuni Dwi Purwani, Secretary General of the National Forum for Indonesian Healthy Cities/Regencies, accepted the award on behalf of Madiun City. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisMadiun City was recognized for its SUPERMIE (Sustainable Public Environmental Management Initiative) โ a community-based environmental governance model that addresses urban flooding, climate resilience and environmental sustainability. The initiative contributed to reductions in flood-prone areas, greenhouse gas emissions, diarrhoeal disease and dengue fever, while at the same time improving food security through neighbourhood food gardens. The programme has already been replicated in 15 cities and regencies across Indonesia.Macao Special Administrative Region (China) โ Protecting communities from tobacco and alcohol-related harms: tackling commercial drivers of riskDr LO Iek Long, Director of the Health Bureau, Macao SAR, China accepted the award on behalf of Macao. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisMacao SAR was recognized for implementing a comprehensive and integrated approach to tobacco and alcohol control. Through legislation, monitoring systems, enforcement, public awareness campaigns and multisectoral partnerships, the programme has strengthened protection against major risk factors for noncommunicable diseases and established a model that is highly transferable to other urban settings.Phnom Penh Capital City (Cambodia) โ Safe, active and health-enabling transport: advancing health and reducing inequities in urban mobilityH.E. Khoung Sreng, Governor of Phnom Penh Capital City accepted the award on behalf of Phnom Penh Capital City. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisPhnom Penh received the award for its Safe School Zone Project, which combines infrastructure improvements, speed management, enforcement, education and stakeholder engagement to protect children and communities. The initiative has demonstrated measurable reductions in crashes and vehicle speeds while providing a scalable model for safer urban mobility across the country.Quezon City (Philippines) โ Transforming food environments: addressing policy, market and urban design drivers of health and nutritionMs Jirah Asa M. Sideco, Chief of the Nutrition Section of the Quezon City Health Department accepted the award on behalf of Quezon City. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisQuezon City was recognized for its public food procurement policy that promotes healthier diets through government-run institutions and feeding programmes. Supported by strong policy frameworks and monitoring systems, the initiative improves access to nutritious food for vulnerable populations while serving as a benchmark for other local governments.Samarinda City (Indonesia) โ Preventing violence and promoting gender equality: transforming urban systems, norms and spaces Mrs Rinda Wahyuni, Chairperson of Samarinda Healthy City Forum accepted the award on behalf of Samarinda City. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisSamarinda City was recognized for its multisectoral approach to preventing violence and advancing gender equality. Responding to local evidence on violence against women and children, the city has positioned violence prevention as a public health priority, bringing together health services, schools, social welfare institutions, law enforcement, civil society and community leaders to strengthen prevention, reporting, survivor-centred support and legal protection. Through inclusive policies, community engagement and sustainable city financing, Samarinda has developed a locally owned and scalable model for creating safer, more equitable and inclusive urban communities.Singapore โ Age-friendly cities: transforming systems to bridge generations for a healthier tomorrowDr Tan Weng Mooi, Director, Integrated Health Promotion, accepted the award on behalf of Singapore. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisSingapore received recognition for its Healthy Precinct Framework, which translates national healthy ageing priorities into neighbourhood-level action. The initiative integrates preventive care, social support, service coordination and age-friendly environments while actively engaging older persons, caregivers and community organizations. Its expansion across multiple precincts demonstrates its scalability and ยญlong-term sustainability.WHO Regional Directorโs Special AwardNational Forum for Indonesian Healthy Cities/Regencies (Indonesia)Ms Yuni Dwi Purwani, Secretary General of the National Forum for Indonesian Healthy Cities/Regencies, accepted the award on behalf of the National Forum. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisThe WHO Regional Director's Special Award was presented to the National Forum for Indonesian Healthy Cities/Regencies (FKKSI) in recognition of its long-standing leadership in advancing the Healthy Cities movement across Indonesia. As a national platform bringing together local governments, communities, academia and civil society, FKKSI has played a critical role in promoting collaboration, capacity-building, knowledge exchange and advocacy. Its efforts have strengthened and institutionalized healthy urban development nationwide and established a model for multisectoral engagement in the Region. Healthy Cities for allThe 2026 Healthy Cities Recognition Awards highlight how cities can lead transformative action on health by addressing climate change, inequity, ageing, nutrition, mobility, social inclusion, violence prevention and the commercial determinants of health. The recognized initiatives demonstrate that local governments, communities and partners can work together to create healthier, safer and more resilient urban environments for everyone. As urban populations continue to grow across the Western Pacific Region, WHO remains committed to supporting cities in advancing health, equity and sustainable development through the Healthy Cities approach and the Alliance for Healthy Cities. ###Note to editorsSince 2004, the WHO Healthy Cities Recognition Awards have provided a platform for cities to share innovative and effective approaches to improving health and well-being. The awards recognize achievements in areas including climate resilience, healthy ageing, health equity, gender equality, tobacco and alcohol control, urban mobility, nutrition and data-driven governance. In 2026, more than 150 submissions were received from cities and local governments across the Western Pacific Region. The titles and affiliations of awardees are presented as they were at the time the photo was taken.______________For more information, or to arrange media interviews, contact: WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific: wprocom@who.int
Health Department withdraws proposed regulations for rewrite
The Pennsylvania Department of Health has pulled its 502-page update of regulations, citing a โhistorically high volume of feedbackโ during the comment period that ended last week.
'Sony's Hearing a Lot of the Feedback from Customers': NIS America Boss Weighs in on PS5 Disc Debate
"We'll have to see what happens"
New soil test could reveal how soil microbes help feed plants
Scientists have streamlined a method for measuring DNA-bound phosphorus in soil, making it cheaper and easier while preserving its accuracy. The technique could reveal how soil microbes help recycle phosphorus and ultimately support more sustainable fertilizer and nutrient management.
[Science Through Covers] Young orangutans learn โspoon-feedingโ through lessons and review
Max Planck and UNAS track 12 Sumatran orangutans for 8.75 years to reveal social and individual learning dynamics
LinkedIn Is Rolling Out a Split Feed. Businesses Can Win the โFor Youโ Tab by Making Expertise Obvious
The platformโs latest change separates who you already know from who LinkedIn thinks you should discover.
Real Madridโs Midfield Woes Resurface After Atlรฉtico Loss
Real Madridโs 2-1 defeat at Atlรฉtico Madrid on Sunday has left Josรฉ Mourinhoโs side fourth in La Liga after seven matches, six points behind leaders Barcelona, according to The Athletic. The res...
Intel Panther Lake Teardown, 18A, BSPD, GAAFET, SemiAnalysis STEEL
Panther Lake debuts the first commercial implementation of backside power delivery (BSPDN), introduces Intelโs first iteration of gate-all-around (GAA) transistors, and showcases their advanced packaging capabilities with its Foveros-S assembly. With Panther Lake, Intelโs manufacturing arc has shifted from nebulous roadmaps to shipped silicon, a significant milestone on their long road back to competitive semiconductor manufacturing. To evaluate the extent of Intelโs comeback, we tore down Panther Lake. The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WEโRE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Our teardown traces 18A from its four-sheet RibbonFETs (Intelโs marketing name for GAAFETs) and gate stacks through contacts, frontside and backside wiring, and the bonded carrier. We explain how these material and integration choices improve gate control and reduce resistance, while adding capacitance, thermal resistance, and process complexity. Our measurements put Panther Lakeโs 18A compute logic and TSMC N3E GPU logic at similar logic density. However, 18A does not lead TSMC N3P, N2 or Samsung SF2 in peak density. Panther Lakeโs CPU cores are incremental updates, and the high-end GPU still uses TSMC N3E. Panther Lake assembles one compute tile, one GPU tile, and one I/O tile atop a passive base tile using Intelโs Foveros-S advanced packaging. Both compute tile variants use Intel 18A. The Xe3 GPU options are a 4-core GT1 tile on Intel 3 and a larger 12-core GT2 tile on TSMC N3E. Both I/O tile variants use TSMC N6. [1], [2] Our analysis centers on the PTL-U compute tile, both the 4-core and 12-core GPU tiles, as well as the 12-lane I/O tile. In conventional chips, power and signal are routed through the same frontside metal stack towards the device frontend. Power rails consume scarce routing resources near the transistors, while tall via stacks carry VDD and VSS from the coarse upper wires to local rails. Backside power delivery (BSPD) moves the main power network behind the transistor layer, to the backside, separating it from frontside signal routing. We covered BSPD and its impacts in 2024. [3], [4], [5] Intelโs BSPD implementation, branded as โPowerViaโ, routes power through dedicated backside metals to nano-TSVs, which connect those rails to local source/drain (S/D) contacts. Implementing that separation requires Intel to build the interconnect stacks from both sides of the wafer. The frontside comprises the M0-M14 signal stack, while the backside comprises the BM0-BM5 power stack. M0 and BM0 are closest to the transistors. The nano-TSVs connect the two sides, but Intel patterns and etches each via from the front after forming the contacts. A narrow via runs from the side of the contact deep into the silicon substrate. Intel then completes the frontside signal metal stack, bonds the wafer to a carrier, flips it and removes the original substrate until the buried via tips are exposed. The backside metal stack is then deposited directly on the revealed vias. The nano-TSV and backside-via profiles taper in opposite directions because Intel forms them from opposite sides of the wafer. The transistor structures form the FEOL. Local contacts and nano-TSVs connect them to the wiring. M0 begins the frontside interconnect stack. The silicon carrier remains attached above the frontside interconnects. It supports the device wafer during substrate removal and backside processing and remains part of the finished chipโs thermal path. PowerVia removes the main power distribution from the congested frontside metals, routing supply through shorter and wider backside wires. Its lateral landing still occupies area in the standard cell, so it recovers less cell area than a direct backside contact. [3] Nano-TSVs beside the logic devices carry VDD or VSS from the backside power network, while signal connections continue upward through the frontside metals. Backside Interconnects Samsung SF2 data is included for comparison to Panther Lakeโs within this article. SF2 is the incumbent GAA foundry node but lacks BSPD, serving as a useful reference to evaluate 18A. A full teardown of Samsungโs S26 products, processed on SF2, will be shared soon.Nanosheet-cut EDS comparison. The PowerVia supply path runs from the backside Cu rails through Mo-lined W nano-TSVs to the local transistor contacts. In this cross section, the tapered connection spans roughly 150 nm from the contact level to BM0. The Ta liner confines Cu and promotes adhesion to the surrounding stack; the AlOโ etch stop controls the next dielectric etch above the rail. Dielectric beneath the ribbons electrically separates the devices from the backside wiring and removes the conducting silicon body below the channel. [6] AlOโ serves as an etchstop (ES), enabling endpointing and protecting the underlying layers. Low-volatility aluminum fluoride reaction products resist the fluorinated plasma, allowing a thin AlOโ film to protect the metal while the surrounding low-k dielectric is removed. [6], [7]. While the BM0 and layers above the M1 lines show double AlOx layers, Our SMIC N+3 teardown showed single AlOโ layers. SMIC uses a simpler local AlOโ substack, while the remaining cap and etch sequence provide the required landing protection. So why double layers? The closely spaced AlOโ doublets provide two protected endpoints in the etch sequence. Intel documents an AlOโ/SiN/AlOโ stack that explains the benefit. The main dielectric plasma etch stops on the first AlOโ film; a selective wet clear opens that film; a second plasma etch removes the intermediate SiN and stops on the second AlOโ film. The final wet clear exposes the metal landing surface. SiN is the intermediate dielectric in Intelโs published example. [8] The second stop protects the metal through a cap breakthrough. Wide openings can etch faster than narrow ones, and etch depth varies across the wafer. Metal under an early-clearing opening would otherwise be exposed while other openings still need more etching. Staged protection widens the process window and reduces metal erosion, corrosion and void formation. [8] TSMC documents AlN/AlOโ/SiOC/AlOโ above Cu, with AlN blocking Cu diffusion, and a simpler AlN/SiOC/AlOโ variant that omits one AlOx film. [9] Levels with different opening sizes, aspect ratios, pattern densities and cap materials need different etch margins. A double AlOx stop is useful where another protected endpoint justifies the added processing. The extra film adds formation, selective opening and cleaning steps, plus another set of interfaces to control adhesion, moisture, and stress. These blanket films are opened through the existing via pattern, so each film does not require another lithography mask. AlOโ adds parasitic capacitance when it replaces lower-k dielectric; two thin AlOโ films can nevertheless contain less AlOโ than one thick film. Total thickness, placement, and theintermediate dielectric determine the electrical cost. Deposition chemistry also changes AlOx permittivity and residual hydroxyl content, which can oxidize the underlying metal. [7], [8], [10], [11] The backside stack separates into relatively fine BM0-BM2 wiring near the devices and coarser BM3-BM5 power distribution. The largest pitch increase occurs between BM2 and BM3. BM0โs pitch closely matches the logic-row height, fitting local power delivery to the cell rows. Higher levels aggregate current through larger conductors: routing density becomes less important than low resistance and current capacity as the network approaches the package. This hierarchy provides wide power wiring for the power delivery network without consuming scarce frontside signal-routing resources. [3] The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WEโRE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Frontside Interconnects Intel 18A combines Mo-lined W contacts and nano-TSVs with a separate backside Cu power network. Samsung SF2 keeps power on the frontside, using Ti-based contact interfaces and Ta-based barriers and Co liners around Cu wiring. In 18A standard-cell rows, backside power rails supply the devices through nano-TSVs within the cells, freeing frontside routing resources. Samsungโs M0 accommodates both power and signal connections. From the device toward M0, the connection runs through a Ti-based S/D interface, W contact fill, a Mo-lined W via, and the Cu M0 wire. Mo supplies a conductive nucleation and adhesion layer for W, replacing the resistive TiN liner used in conventional W integration. This increases the effective conduction volume within the feature while retaining W fill and its established polishing, cleaning and etching processes. Intelโs Mo/W patent describes this integration tradeoff. The nano-TSV uses the same Mo-lined W construction in the backside supply path. [12] The move from TiN to Mo is an incremental change. While a full Co or Mo fill can also reduce the volume lost to liners in very small features, it requires new integration schemes that increase complexity and risk. Cu remains attractive for wider wires due to its low resistance. As wires and vias shrink, the diffusion barrier consumes an increasing fraction of their cross-section. [12], [12], [14] Intel uses Co/Ru liners at M0-M1, Co at M2-M4, and Nb at M5-M9. The lower-level liners help Cu adhere and reduce void formation during trench fills. Applied Materialsโ Endura has new thermal control that facilitate wetting process, so the thin film continuity is good enough that good capillary pressure will drive Cu atoms to the via bottom without voiding. Intelโs choice to use Nb is particularly interesting. Intelโs Nb patent describes a conductive diffusion barrier intended to reduce the barrierโs contribution to resistance relative to conventional Ta-based barriers, particularly at via bottoms where all current crosses the barrier. The patent pairs Nb in coarser levels with the option of lower-cost PVD processing. [15], [16] The upper metal layers support thicker barriers formed through physical vapor deposition (PVD) despite its worse coverage and uniformity. Meanwhile, the lower metal layers require thinner barriers deposited through conformal atomic layer deposition (ALD). Co/Ru adds another material interface and requires controlled deposition and Cu fill. Changing liners and barriers by metal layer allows Intel to optimize interconnect resistance, process complexity, and reliability. [15, 16] RibbonFET, Intelโs name for its gate-all-around FETs (GAAFETs), replaces the FinFETโs vertical fins with four stacked horizontal silicon nanosheets, allowing the gate to surround the channel on every side. The path to GAAFET begins with the planar transistor. A planar MOSFET places the gate above the channel between its source and drain. Pairing an NMOS with a PMOS transistor creates a CMOS inverter, in which the NMOS pulls the output low for a high input, and the PMOS pulls it high for a low input. The gate must retain electrostatic control of the channel to ensure clean switching. As gate lengths shrank, the drain began to compete with the gate for that control, increasing off-state leakage. Electrostatic control was restored through an architectural evolution that raised the channel into a vertical fin and wrapping the gate around three sides. Called โFinFETโ, this new architecture packed more effective channel width into a smaller footprint. Further scaling made it harder to maintain both drive current and leakage within smaller cells, and reintroduced the same problems planar MOSFETs faced. Nanosheet GAAFETs close the fourth side by replacing the vertical fin with a stack of horizontal nanosheets, each surrounded by the gate. The tighter electrostatic control suppresses leakage at shorter gate lengths while stacking adds effective channel width within the cell footprint. In a FinFET process, channel width changes in discrete steps as designers must add or remove whole fins. Nanosheet width can instead be adjusted continuously within the processโs design rules. Wider sheets increase drive current, while narrower sheets reduce capacitance at the cost of drive current. Intel 18A uses stacks of four nanosheets each and varies their widths across logic and SRAM. At the process level, adding more sheets to each stack increases effective channel width and drive current, but complicates fabrication. RibbonFET vs MBCFET Samsung began GAAFET production in 2022 with SF3E, following with SF3 and now SF2. Its โMBCFETโ provides a useful structural comparison with Intelโs first RibbonFET implementation. [17] STEEL is digging deeper into SF2, used in the Exynos 2600, and TSMCโs GAAFET N2, used in Appleโs A20 Pro, in upcoming newsletter articles. Weโre throwing some teasers on X. Letโs compare Samsung SF2โs MBCFET with Intel 18Aโs RibbonFET. Subscribe Even to the untrained eye, Intelโs extra nanosheet is obvious. Intel stacks four ribbons to Samsungโs three. Samsungโs sheets are much wider in these fields, so both sheet count and width matter to the available channel perimeter. Sheet width also changes which silicon surfaces carry current. On conventional (001) silicon, wide nanosheets emphasize the broad top and bottom surfaces, favoring electron transport; the larger sidewall contribution in a narrow sheet favors hole transport. Thinner sheets improve gate control but increase confinement and scattering. This makes width and thickness part of the NMOS/PMOS balance, alongside strain and threshold voltage. [18], [19] GAAFET designs like 18A use different work-function-metal (WFM) stacks for NMOS and PMOS. Around each ribbon, a thin SiOx interfacial layer separates the silicon channel from the HfOx high-k dielectric, with La providing dipole tuning and the WFM wrapping the dielectric. NMOS uses a TiAl-based stack, while PMOS uses TiN WFM. W fills the remaining gate trench, providing a lower-resistivity path where the work-function layers are no longer needed. In this field, the PMOS stacks leave room for W between ribbons, while the NMOS stacks occupy more of those gaps. A silicon-based dielectric marks the P/N boundary, allowing the PMOS and NMOS gates, sharing the same gate trench, to be processed sequentially. Fast logic paths, retention circuits, and SRAM need a family of threshold options. Changing threshold without substantially changing device dimensions, capacitance or fabrication complexity is valuable. FinFET processes typically use different work-function-metal stacks. In a four-ribbon GAA stack, the narrow sheet-to-sheet gap limits how much WFM can fit around each channel. La in the gate dielectric creates interfacial dipoles at the SiOx/HfOx boundary, shifting effective work function and tuning threshold voltage. This gives Intel another control alongside its NMOS and PMOS WFM stacks. Low-threshold devices improve critical-path drive; higher thresholds reduce leakage elsewhere. Dipole tuning is especially useful in GAA because it changes threshold without consuming the narrow intersheet gap with thicker WFM. Precise control of La incorporation, diffusion and interface quality has long been a challenge, limiting viability in high volume production but is now seen from every leading-edge foundry. Intelโs patent describes depositing a dipole-forming oxide above HfOx and annealing it toward the interfacial oxide before completing the work-function and fill metals. This separates threshold tuning from the space available for metal. Newer research addresses the thermal cost: imecโs 2026 dipole-middle research inserts the shifter between two HfOx depositions, shortening the diffusion path while protecting SiOx during patterning. [20], [21]Matched-cut EDS, Intel 18A (left) vs. Samsung SF2 (right). Intel retains raised source/drain epi beneath its contacts, while Samsung recesses W deep into the epi to form a V-shaped Ti-lined interface. The deeper contact increases metal-to-semiconductor area and shortens the current path from the lower sheets, reducing contact and spreading resistance. It also removes epi volume and brings the contact etch closer to the channel ends. Retaining more epi preserves the material available for strain transfer, especially from SiGe into PMOS. These geometries balance contact access against stress engineering and etch margin. [22], [23] Samsung stacks three sheets to Intelโs four ribbons, and both processes use sheet width to tune drive strength. In our Samsung cross-sections, widths range roughly from 19 to 30 nm in the NPU rows and 37 to 50 nm in the CU cell. The Samsung nanosheets taper, with the widest sheet at the bottom and the narrowest at the top. Both processes use HfOx gate dielectric and Ti-based work-function stacks, with Al in the NMOS stack. In the Samsung devices shown here, the dielectric and WFM occupy the intersheet gaps, leaving W above the top sheet. Intelโs PMOS stack leaves more room between ribbons, and W fills those gaps while the thicker NMOS stack leaves W mainly in the upper trench. Gate-stack EDS maps. The W between Intelโs PMOS ribbons provides a conductive path close to the lower gates. Where WFM fills the entire gap, the gate still surrounds the channel, but voltage reaches it through the more resistive work-function films. Thinner WFM and dipole tuning preserve room for low-resistivity fill; Mo and Ru are alternative fill metals being developed for further scaling. [24] A masked, sequential WFM flow explains the different gate heights and inter-nanosheet fill. The proposed sequence below shows how separate NMOS and PMOS work-function steps produce that geometry. Enabled by the BSPDN process, Intel replaces the dense-logic silicon subfin with dielectric, removing the parasitic conduction path below the ribbons and reducing substrate-related capacitance. A retained silicon body as in classical, non-SOI, planar and FinFET designs needs junction and punchthrough-stop engineering to suppress leakage. Dielectric isolation makes that leakage less sensitive to the subfin doping profile but adds removal and fill steps. It also weakens the direct thermal path through silicon, making the contacts, metal stacks and package more important for heat extraction. [24], [26] Fluorine is concentrated around selected Intel device structures in the maps. WF6 is a standard precursor for W nucleation and fill, while barrier films protect adjacent dielectrics from fluorine attack. Low-fluorine W processes reduce the residual-F burden. Chloride-based precursors avoid introducing F during W deposition, but require control of chlorine attack, nucleation and fill quality. The integration target is a continuous, low-resistance W path with a thin protective liner and minimal chemical damage to the surrounding stack. [20], [27], [28] The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WEโRE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. We measured cell height, gate pitch, metal geometry, and ribbon dimensions at the XTEM sites shown below. The tables group these dimensions by site and device polarity. Our โsheet cutsโ cross the silicon channel and show the ribbons end-on. โgate cutsโ run along the channel through successive gates. The 18A logic cell dimensions point to a five-track logic library while the N3E and Intel 3 cell dimensions evidence a seven-track logic library. The DDR-PHY uses wider M0 wires and much larger spacing than core logic. That trades routing density for lower wire resistance and weaker coupling between neighboring nets. The geometry suits the current delivery and coupling requirements of analog, clock, and I/O circuitry. PowerVia lets 18A combine a compact cell height with wider M0 geometry by moving the main power rails off the signal-routing tracks. That relaxes local wire scaling while preserving a small cell footprint. Cell height and gate pitch set the geometric density; pin access and routability determine how much of it a real block can use. [29] The biggest takeaway from our gate-pitch measurements is that Intel 18A compute logic and TSMC N3E GPU logic have similar density in the Bohr representative-cell model. The 18A example is 18.6% denser than the Intel 3 GPU example. Gate pitches are nearly identical across the three sites, so cell height drives most of the difference. The Bohr model combines a four-transistor NAND2 spanning three gate pitches and a 32-transistor scan flip-flop (SFF) spanning nineteen pitches, weighting their densities 60:40. The sensitivity column shows how independently changing cell height and gate pitch by ยฑ1 nm changes the result. This compares representative cell geometries; whole-die density also depends on cell mix and placement. The 18A P-core gives M0 substantially more metal cross section than the N3E vector engine. Treating each profile as a trapezoid gives 2.63 times the area per line and 1.84 times the area after normalization by routing pitch. The larger section reduces the geometric contribution to line resistance and lowers current density for a given current. Taller and wider wires also add capacitance, so circuit delay depends on the balance of resistance and capacitance. The DDR-PHY has less metal area per routing width than the 18A core fields, while remaining above N3E. [30] Area = height ร (top CD + bottom CD) / 2, including liners. Area/pitch normalizes by routing width. Taper is the symmetric sidewall angle from vertical, with the largest angle belonging to the DDR-PHY. Compute tile The measurements show how ribbon dimensions and gate-stack geometry vary across the compute tile and between NMOS and PMOS to balance channel drive, gate load and the space needed for the dielectric/WFM stack across logic, SRAM and the DDR-PHY. Width mainly changes available channel perimeter; thickness also changes electrostatic control and carrier confinement. Gate-stack thickness then determines the space left for low-resistivity fill P-core and LP E-core logic Both the P-core and LP E-core use multiple nanosheet widths. Widths are measured on high-magnification XTEMs while wider-field images demonstrate additional width choices within the LP E-core. Multiple widths are expected even within an LP E-core. Timing-critical paths, buffers and cells with different fanout need different drive strengths. The lower-magnification fields show this width diversity beyond the sites quantified in the table. L2 and L3 SRAM GAA gives SRAM designers another way to balance the pull-up (PU), pass-gate (PG), and pull-down (PD) transistors. FinFET bitcells set device strength through fin count while GAA adds nanosheet width as a sizing knob. In a 6T SRAM cell, a strong pull-down relative to the pass-gate limits read disturbance, while a strong pass-gate relative to the pull-up improves writability. During a write, the pass-gate and write driver pull the node storing โ1โ below the inverter trip point. During a read, the pull-down holds the node storing โ0โ low. Bias, threshold voltage, mismatch and assist circuitry set the remaining margin. FinFET high-current cells commonly use a PU:PG:PD fin-count pattern of 1:2:2, a device-sizing ratio rather than a current ratio. Ribbon width lets Intel balance SRAM strengths without adding whole fins. The L2 cell uses its narrowest ribbons for PU and widest for PD, improving writability and read stability respectively. Intelโs disclosed HCC operates without assist; its denser HDC uses negative-bitline write assist. Pulling the selected bitline briefly below ground increases pass-gate overdrive so it can overpower the pull-up at lower supply voltage. That buys density and low voltage writability at the cost of boosting circuitry, switching energy, and additional voltage stress that must be controlled. [31], [32] Four rectangular ribbons give the perimeter = 8 ร (width + thickness), before corner rounding. PG/PU is 1.49 and PD/PG is 1.16. The L3 structures closely resemble L2 in layout and cell height. Fewer L3 nanosheet widths are tabulated because fewer high-magnification images were available. DDR PHY The DDR-PHY trades density for controlled analog behavior and reliable off-chip signaling. It contains drivers, receivers, delay circuits, and calibration logic that set drive strength, sampling time, and voltage margin. Repeated four-sheet devices with similar widths fit the use of regular transistor units for matching and programmable drive. Its wider local wiring provides room for current delivery and separation of sensitive signals, while consuming more area than a dense core-logic grid. The layout serves the memory channelโs electrical requirements as well as digital logic density. [33] The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WEโRE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Intel 3 GPU devices Vector engine logic Intel 3โs XVE logic uses two-fin PMOS and NMOS devices with power rails in M0. Its cell height and M0 pitch give a seven-track geometry, two tracks more than the 18A logic. One-fin groups also appear among the two-fin devices. Intel 3 L2 SRAM The Intel 3 L2 SRAM uses the familiar HCC sizing pattern: one PU fin, two PG fins, and two PD fins. N3E GPU devices Vector engine logic The N3E XVE field contains repeated two-fin devices with seven-track cell geometry. N3E remains a FinFET process, giving Panther Lake a direct FinFET-to-RibbonFET comparison. N3E L2 SRAM The N3E L2 SRAM uses the same PU:PG:PD fin-count pattern of 1:2:2. Panther Lake-U follows Lunar Lakeโs floorplan quite closely. Both pair 4 P-cores with 4 LP E-cores and NPU, media and display engines in similar locations. Lunar Lake also uses Xe2, the direct predecessor to Panther Lakeโs Xe3 GPU. This makes Lunar Lake the most direct basis for our comparisons. Arrow Lake differs in core count and uses the older Xe-LPG GPU architecture, so we only use it where it offers a more direct component-level comparison. Compute tile Panther Lake compute-tile floorplans remain sparse even months after launch. Intel 18Aโs backside metal and dielectric stack must be removed without damaging the underlying structures before a clean transistor-level floorplan can be imaged. Most published die shots hide or heavily process the background, but we are quite proud of the die shot we achieved and are excited to show the work we have done. We measured the areas of the key components on the compute tile and compared them with their Lunar Lake predecessors on TSMC N3B. These help us to capture changes in block area and compare the two chips across process nodes and designs. Our total tile areas exclude the scribe-line area. The compute-plus-GPU subtotal below uses the PTL-U compute tile and GT1 GPU; it excludes the I/O tile and passive base. Individual block areas use the boundaries marked on the floorplans The compute-plus-GPU row is recomputed from the displayed PTL-U and GT1 areas. Component rows use their stated per-region counts and are not an additive partition of the whole tile. The P-core area remains almost unchanged between Lunar Lake and Panther Lake, despite L2 capacity increasing from 2.5 MiB to 3 MiB. Arrow Lake uses the same Lion Cove core as Lunar Lake but also has a 3 MiB L2. Cougar Cove fits 20% more L2 into the same P-core area. The larger private cache keeps more of each coreโs working set close to its execution units, reducing access to shared L3 and DRAM. Extra capacity adds storage leakage and lookup energy, so designers balance it against avoided lower-level accesses. The shared P-core L3 cache also shrank by 14.8%. [2] Cougar Cove combines a similar footprint with Intelโs reported power-efficiency improvements. RibbonFETโs tighter channel control reduces leakage, while PowerVia reduces supply droop and allows tighter voltage guardbands. [1] Darkmontโs four-core LP E-core cluster is 5.0% smaller than Skymontโs on Lunar Lake, with most of the reduction in its L2 regions. The 1 MiB region shrank by 8.4% and the 1.5 MiB region by 14.9%. The tag arrays also use one fewer visible row. Tags identify which memory addresses the data array holds, so rearranging them changes the cacheโs layout and wiring without requiring less data capacity. [2] The LP E-cores share one L2. This pools capacity and avoids duplicating all the cache machinery, but the four cores contend for its banks and bandwidth. Their separate cluster also keeps light work away from the performance cluster and its L3, allowing that larger domain to sleep. [1], [2] Cache area includes more than the storage cells. Tags identify each line, decoders select rows, sense amplifiers read the small bitline signal, and wires connect to the banks. Splitting an array into smaller sections shortens wordlines and bitlines, improving access speed, but duplicates peripheral circuits. Panther Lakeโs smaller cache regions therefore reflect the complete memory implementation, including how much of each region is devoted to storage. [34] Unlike Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake, Panther Lake has no separate SoC tile. The NPU, LP E-cores, memory controllers, PHYs, media and display engines now share the compute tile. This removes an active die and keeps CPU memory traffic on one die. The cost is moving PHY and I/O-related circuitry onto 18A: drivers, receivers and analog circuits must still meet external voltage, loading and signal-integrity requirements, so their area does not shrink like dense digital logic. [1], [2] The biggest shrink comes from the NPU, which occupies 36.9% less area. NPU 5 consolidates the same total INT8 MAC count into half as many neural compute engines. Each of the three NCEs has a larger MAC array to make the complete NCE envelope 22.6% larger than an NPU 4 engine. Consolidation also halves the number of scratchpads and SHAVE DSPs, from 12 to 6. The MAC array handles matrix multiplication and convolution, while SHAVE executes vector and custom operations that fit the array poorly. [1], [2], [35] The paired floorplans identify each NCE envelope and its scratchpad, MAC, and SHAVE regions. Each measured MAC polygon is counted once per NCE in the area accounting below. The scratchpads store weights, activations, and intermediate results near the MAC arrays, allowing repeated use without fetching them again from DRAM. Halving their number delivers the largest measured area saving but leaves less local storage for the same total MAC count. Layers that no longer fit locally require smaller working tiles or more transfers of intermediate data. The benefit depends on keeping the enlarged arrays busy while managing that tighter storage budget. [36] NPU 5 also adds native FP8. Using half the operand width of FP16 reduces storage and transfer demand, helping workloads fit the smaller local memory budget. Lower precision and format-dependent range make scaling and model validation part of deployment. Hardware activation functions further reduce work that would otherwise occupy the programmable DSPs. [1], [2] Microsoft requires an NPU to deliver at least 40 TOPS for Copilot+ PCs. Both Lunar Lake and Panther Lake meet this threshold, but Panther Lake uses significantly less silicon. GPU tiles Panther Lake is Intelโs first product with Xe3, its latest GPU architecture. It offers two different GPU tiles: a smaller GT1 tile with 4 Xe3 cores on Intel 3 and a larger GT2 tile with 12 Xe3 cores on TSMC N3E. Panther Lake allows us to compare the same GPU architecture across both Intel 3 and TSMC N3E. Wildcat Lake adds a third Xe3 implementation on Intel 18A. A future newsletter will detail Xe3 and its implementation differences across all three process nodes. GT2 scales Xe3 to a different physical layout, with render slices arranged vertically instead of GT1โs horizontal arrangement. Slice placement sets the distances to shared cache banks and the D2D interface. Those wires consume area and add delay, so scaling the number of Xe cores also requires a new balance of cache placement, routing and timing. [1] Whatโs immediately obvious is that the GT2 tile on TSMC N3E has much smaller Xe cores than GT1. These block areas include logic, caches, and routing. An Xe core on the GT1 tile is ~69% larger than one on Lunar Lake, and ~55% larger than one on GT2. Intel 3 therefore uses substantially more area per Xe core. The block-area gap exceeds the measured logic and SRAM density gaps, bringing routing, timing targets, cell mix, and floorplan allocation into the comparison. The measured vector/matrix engine region is almost unchanged between Lunar Lake and Panther Lakeโs GT2 tile. Xe3 retains eight 512-bit vector engines and eight 2048-bit XMX engines per core. Its gains also come from feeding those engines more effectively: more resident threads hide stalls, and variable register allocation lets shaders trade registers per thread against the number of threads kept active. [1] The shared L1/SLM capacity increased by 33% from 192 KiB to 256 KiB, while its area increased only 5%, raising effective density by 27%. L1 retains reused cache lines, while software-managed SLM lets a thread group share data locally. Both reduce traffic to more distant memory. Allocating more SLM per group can also limit how many groups reside on a core at once. [1], [37] The GT1 tile carries 4 MiB of L2 against 16 MiB on the GT2 tile. GT1 divides its L2 cache into four 1 MiB banks, while GT2 uses eight 2 MiB banks. Each bank contains 128 macros, but each N3E macro stores 16 KiB, twice the Intel 3 macroโs 8 KiB capacity. The N3E macro is only 54% larger while holding twice as many bits, giving it 30% higher density: ~23.7 Mbit/mmยฒ versus 18.3 Mbit/mmยฒ. Including bank-level circuitry, the gap widens to ~16.9 Mbit/mmยฒ on GT2 versus ~10.4 Mbit/mmยฒ on GT1. GT2 gains density with its macros storing more bits per unit area, and those macros occupy more of each cache bank. Larger macros spread decoder and sense-amplifier overhead across more storage, while a more compact bank layout reduces the share spent on control and routing. The compromise is longer wordlines and bitlines that carry more capacitance. [34] I/O tile Panther Lake uses two I/O tile variants, both fabricated on TSMC N6. The smaller one provides 4 PCIe 5.0 and 8 PCIe 4.0 lanes and serves lower-tier systems as well as those without a discrete GPU, while the larger one adds 8 PCIe 5.0 lanes, bringing the total to 20 lanes, for discrete-GPU connectivity. Panther Lake SKUs with the larger 10- or 12-Xe GPUs use the smaller I/O tile. [38] The smaller I/O tile adds a PCIe 4.0 block and a Thunderbolt block to Lunar Lakeโs I/O layout, providing four additional PCIe 4.0 lanes and another Thunderbolt 4 port. Its repeated N6 blocks retain nearly identical areas and layouts. Reusing these proven PHYs and controllers avoids porting and requalifying external interfaces on 18A, where faster digital logic offers less benefit to circuits constrained by the off-chip link. [38] SemiAnalysisโs teardown lab (STEEL) dives deep into the worldโs advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. Weโre hiring technical experts from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Panther Lake offers scalability and modularity through its disaggregated packaging that partition compute, GPU, and I/O silicon into separate tiles allowing for a suite of tile configurations. This partitioning makes the package part of Intelโs node economics as it determines how much leading-edge wafer area each product consumes, which functions can remain on other processes, and how much configuration freedom Intel can offer from a shared set of tiles. Furthermore, fabricating the compute and GPU tiles separately confines the new 18A process to the compute tile and allows graphics and I/O to use other, more established, and more cost-effective processes. For Panther Lake, the GPU and I/O tiles are assembled alongside the compute tile on a passive silicon base using Foveros-S. Intelโs current technology brief lists a nominal 36 ยตm pitch for Foveros-S. Through-silicon vias (TSVs) in the base connect the fine wiring above to the larger package connections below. The functional tiles sit side by side on that passive base in a 2.5D configuration. [39] Our cross-section through the compute and GPU tiles shows the packageโs wiring hierarchy. Microbumps connect each active tile to the passive silicon base; its fine redistribution layer (RDL) carries the short, dense tile-to-tile links. TSVs carry connections through the base to the package substrate, which fans them out to the much coarser motherboard solder joints. The base supplies interconnect, while computation remains in the active tiles above it. [39] At the compute-tile edge, the higher-magnification inset shows a local microbump spacing of approximately 25.24 ยตm and a feature width of 12.33 ยตm. These local spacings are finer than Intelโs nominal Foveros-S value. The X-ray fields further confirm tighter neighboring bumps, consistent across every die-to-die area found on each tile. Additional X-ray analysis is offered after the paywall. Putting the memory controller beside the CPU removes the D2D transfer that CPU memory requests required in Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake. This avoids the extra transmitter, receiver, and link traversal, saving interface energy and latency. Panther Lakeโs separate GPU still crosses a D2D link to reach DRAM, so its larger local caches also help contain package traffic. [1], [40] Smaller dies are less likely to contain a random fatal defect, and screening them before assembly prevents one bad tile from consuming a complete package of good silicon. Reuse also spreads design and qualification work across more products. Against those gains, Intel pays for the passive base, D2D circuits, extra bonding and test steps, and losses during assembly. Cost per working product across the portfolio captures the combined effect of wafer yield, reuse, test, and assembly. [29] Wildcat Lake packaging Intel launched Core Series 3, formerly Wildcat Lake, on 16 April 2026 for value mobile and edge systems. Wildcat Lake keeps 18A but removes the passive base and combines more functions on one die to simplify the package. The two products therefore reveal two distinct ways to commercialize the same leading-edge process. [41] Wildcat Lakeโs 18A die combines up to two Cougar Cove P-cores, four Darkmont LP E-cores, two Xe3 cores and a smaller NPU. A separate platform-controller die supplies I/O, connected through UCIe, Intelโs first processor implementation of the standard. Consolidating graphics remove a tile boundary and the passive base, reducing assembly complexity for a modest-bandwidth value product. It also ties CPU and graphics scaling to the same die, giving up Panther Lakeโs ability to swap in a much larger GPU. [42], [43] In July 2021, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger set out an ambitious process roadmap aimed at regaining performance leadership by 2025, later described as five nodes in four years. Five years and one CEO later, Intelโs comeback story is not as unambiguously positive as Pat may have hoped. [44], [45] Intel once set the pace for process technology, bringing high-k metal gate technology and FinFETs into volume production years ahead of the rest of the industry. Its 22 nm FinFET process reached consumers with Ivy Bridge in 2012. [46] Intelโs integrated device manufacturing (IDM) model allowed its architects and process engineers to co-optimize products and processes. Starting with Sandy Bridge, Intel dominated x86, while AMD struggled with Bulldozer. That lead faltered at 14 nm and broke at 10 nm. Intel targeted a massive 2.7ร density increase, but the node arrived years late and required several revisions before it could support Intelโs full lineup. This delay forced Intel to stretch 14 nm across six generations, while TSMC moved ahead in process technology and AMD recovered in x86. By 2019, Intel was still shipping 14 nm across most of its product stack, with its 10 nm client ramp focused on Ice Lake mobile processors. Meanwhile, TSMC was shipping N7 and N7+, and AMDโs Zen 2 compute chiplets used N7 to raise core counts and improve efficiency. Intelโs process failures were central to its decline, but unsound business decisions furthered their downward slide. Product delays compounded product mistakes, pushing client, server, and FPGA roadmaps off schedule. Several attempts to enter AI (Nervana and Gaudi) and networking (Tofino) also failed to establish lasting businesses. Intelโs recovery has focused on consumer CPUs and advanced packaging. Tiger Lake, Alder Lake, Lunar Lake and now Panther Lake have restored Intelโs consumer roadmap. On the process side, Intel 4 shipped with Meteor Lake, Intel 3 with Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest, and Intel 18A with Panther Lake. Intel has also made advanced packaging part of its foundry offering. However, Intel is still playing catch-up in servers. Several Xeon generations arrived years late and trailed contemporary AMD and Arm server CPUs in performance, efficiency, and core count. The process roadmap is back, but Intel does not hold the same process-technology leadership position it held prior to 10 nm. The introduction of gate-all-around nanosheets and backside power delivery are two of the biggest changes to transistor integration in a decade. Intel took on both changes at once: 18A paired its first RibbonFET with PowerVia in Panther Lake. Panther Lake is a substantial manufacturing milestone. Our cross-sections show how RibbonFET and PowerVia reshape local contacts and wiring, while the floorplans show where architectural consolidation and process choices save area. A sustained competitive lead depends on product performance, cost, yield, and the next implementation. The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WEโRE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page.. 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Florida grocer's donation to help provide 1 million meals
Winn-Dixie is giving $100,000 to 10 Feeding America food banks, including organizations serving Tampa Bay, Sarasota and Southwest Florida.
New kind of AI audio chip transforms earbuds into always-on 'intelligent' devices that run without a smartphone. How does it work?
A new AI audio chip will give future headphones on-device apps and sensors that gather data about your daily movements to feed AI "agents" that will speak directly into your ear.
PS5 Fans Encouraged to Give Feedback on Discs in New Sony Survey
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โDWTSโ judge Carrie Ann Inaba elaborates on Giada De Laurentiis critiques beyond new 1-word review rule
โDancing With the Starsโ implemented a new rule that only allowed two judges to provide feedback, while a third had to react in one word.
Rangers Turn to deGrom in Biggest Series of Season
The Texas Rangers will send Jacob deGrom to the mound as they open a three-game series with the Minnesota Twins on Friday night.
Zelenskyy says he urged Trump to enlist Chinaโs help in ending Russiaโs invasion
Zelenskyy told reporters he has not yet received feedback from the White House
Mississippi Department of Health to host maternal and infant health conference
The conference will also break down the newly released dietary guidelines for Americans and what they mean for pregnancy, postpartum and breastfeeding.
Live cattle futures mixed ahead of direct business
At the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, live cattle were mixed, feeders were lower waiting on widespread direct business. October live cattle closed $1.85 lower at $219.07 and December live cattle closed $1.25 lower at $221.10. October feeder cattle closed $1.57 lower at $331.75 and November feeder cattle closed $1.42 lower at $328.07. Direct cash cattle trade [โฆ]
13 Terrifying Statistics That Will Keep You Up At Night
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Control Resonant Made Easier After Player Feedback, PS5 Patch Live Now
Small update makes a big difference
Local business feels the impact of diesel prices
Sierra Feed received 100% of its inventory through diesel powered transportation, they say the price of diesel has doubled and they have to get tough and creative to continue business.
Latest Dylan Larkin update reignites monster trade rumors
A new development in Detroit has once again raised major questions about what comes next for the former captain.
YouTube announces Custom Feeds, GIF comments, and โYour podcast lineupโ
At Made on YouTube 2026 today, YouTube announced a slew of new features. Weโve highlighted the capabilities that will impact...
Why scientists still cannot say how much plastic infants are actually consuming
A systematic review of 22 primary studies and four reviews found plastic-derived contaminants across infant foods and feeding equipment, but major differences in sampling, analytical methods, and quality control made exposure estimates difficult to compare. The authors found substantial evidence gaps for nanoplastics and oligomers and concluded that better-standardized exposure assessment is needed before infant health risks can be reliably evaluated.
Oregon Health Authority scraps proposed psilocybin fee increases
(KTVZ) -- The Oregon Health Authority will not move forward with proposed fee increases for state psilocybin licensees. State health officials decided to halt the rulemaking process after receiving feedback from advisory groups and the public. The decision stops a rulemaking process that would have made significant fee adjustments across the state's psilocybin program. The
What CDC's new teen health survey shows, and what it skips
Teen suicide risk hit a 10-year low in 2025. Guns, sexual violence, and self-harm. Where are the 2025 data on transgender teens? Missing data changes public health policy. Teen suicide risk hit a 10-year low in 2025. CDC asked more than 10,000 high school students over 100 questions in spring 2025. Yesterday, it published a report covering a fraction of them. The report focsed on five areas: diet, physical activity, sleep, digital behaviors, and mental health, reflecting the priorities of the Make America Healthy Again movement. There was good news. Fewer teens seriously considered suicide in 2025 than in any survey year since 2015: 14%, down from 20% in 2023. Sadness fell. Underlying Conditions is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe Sports participation, which dipped to 49% in 2021, is back to its 2015 level of 58%. Daily PE fell from 27% to 20% in two years, while fewer students eat breakfast daily than a decade ago. Guns, sexual violence, and self-harm. The questionnaire is public, and it goes well beyond those five areas. Students answered questions about sexual violence, self-harm, and whether they got help when they felt sad or anxious. They said how quickly they could get a loaded gun. They reported whether food ran out at home and whether they felt close to people at school. There were questions about sexual identity, including whether they were transgender. The report did not publish any of the answers students gave to those questions. CDC posts the raw survey data online, so anyone can see what the report left out. The report doesnโt cover the health of sexual minority students. Among students who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, questioning, or another non-straight identity, persistent sadness fell from 66% to 57% between 2023 and 2025. Serious thoughts of suicide fell from 41% to 30%. Those drops were bigger than the ones among straight students, although the gap remains wide: 28% of straight students reported persistent sadness, about half the rate of LGBQ+ students. About 1 in 7 girls reported sexual violence in the past year. One in 6 students hurt themselves on purpose. Among students who needed help for sadness or anxiety, half rarely or never got it. And among students who had seriously considered suicide, 43% said they could get a loaded gun without an adultโs permission. One protective factor rose sharply. In 2023, 55% of students said they felt close to people at their school; in 2025, 63% did. CDCโs earlier research ties that kind of connection to better mental health. Where are the 2025 data on transgender teens? In 2023, CDC's national survey asked high school students, for the first time, whether they were transgender. Their answers are the only nationally representative data on transgender teens, and their mental health is by far the worst of any demographic. That year, 71% of transgender students reported persistent sadness, 54% seriously considered suicide, and 26% attempted it, compared with 38%, 18%, and 8% of cisgender students. But we donโt have 2025 data. The timing matters because students took the survey in spring 2025, as federal policy toward transgender youth shifted. On January 28th, an executive order directed agencies to end federal support for gender-affirming care for people under 19, and several hospitals paused that care within days. In February, the CDC said it would no longer process transgender identity data. Later in 2025, the Supreme Court upheld Tennesseeโs ban on gender-affirming care for minors, and HHS ended the 988 Lifelineโs dedicated line for LGBTQ+ youth. Researchers disagree about how much state policy shapes trans teensโ mental health. A 2024 Trevor Project study estimated that anti-trans laws increased suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth. Critics dispute its methods and its estimates. The 2025 survey could have added national evidence to that fight. CDC collected the data but hasnโt publicly released it. Missing data changes public health policy. Surveillance works as a feedback loop. It can show officials whether their policies help or hurt. The CDC didnโt provide data on the students most exposed to transgender policy shifts. The report kept measures that frame health as personal choice, like fruit, breakfast, and sports. It left out measures that track policy, like gun access, mental healthcare, food at home, and school climate, all of which respond to what legislators and agencies decide. HHS did not respond to questions that I sent on September 21st.
17 Celebrities Whose Health Struggles Stayed Private Until They Died
We truly had no idea. ๐
Pens Points: Preseason Positives
Back on PPG Paints Arena ice for the first time since April, the Pittsburgh Penguins opened their preseason slate with a 4-1 victory over the Buffalo Sabres. Sergei Murashov got the nod in goal and pitched a shutout, stopping 13 shots, in his 30 minutes of action before Joel Blomqvist took over. Connor Dewar, Bryan [โฆ]
How lip-syncing to AI let Forced Entertainment โplay the game of theatreโ
Today we have a fascinating piece by long-time Forced Entertainment fan Ben Kulvichit, speaking to Tim Etchells about their latest show Cold Sweat, how they are integrating lip-sync and AI voices into their work, the question of โauthenticityโ on stage, and how lip-sync has even opened the door for them to make โsomething a little bit like dramaโ. This piece is a paid partnership with the Southbank Centre, where you can see Cold Sweat next month โ weโre very grateful to the Southbank Centre for their ongoing support for Exeunt. Holly Williams โIt was immediately interesting and uncannyโ **By Ben Kulvichit** โIs the microphone on?โ So goes one of the opening lines of Signal to Noise, delivered by a human performer lip-syncing to an AI-generated voice. The voice is American, cheery but sluggish, slowed down into a gelatinous drawl. It repeats ad infinitum in a farce of stuckness; an answer never materialises. I find myself asking the same question as I hop on a Google Meet call with Tim Etchells, the artistic director of Forced Entertainment. We spend five or ten minutes frowning at each other, muting and unmuting, me gesticulating in semaphore into my webcam, checking if I am coming through now, restarting the laptop. To Etchells, I appear exaggeratedly mouthing words, my voice missing. In this gloopy purgatory of broken communication, life imitates art imitates life imitates art. We try a Zoom instead. Forced Entertainment, the pioneering British theatre company who have been at the avant-garde of performance since the 1980s, turned an interesting artistic corner with Signal to Noise, created on the occasion of their 40th anniversary. The whole performance employed this lip-sync technique to AI voices; on the face of it a left-field move from a company whose identity has long been grounded in the earthy, immediate presences of its performers and its unassuming, low-tech approach to theatricality. The technique, however, turned out to provide the company with a โrich new seamโ of artistic enquiry, and has now spawned a trilogy of works. The second instalment, Cold Sweat, plays at Sheffield Theatres, Southbank Centre, and Lancaster Arts in October, while the third part, Everything Must Go, has been touring in Europe and is slated to come to the UK in 2027. As is often the case with Forced Entertainment shows, the main conceit for this work didnโt arrive until quite late. They were โfour or five weeks into rehearsals for Signal to Noise,โ Etchells recalls, and getting nowhere. Away from rehearsals, he had been playing around with feeding โweird textsโ to AI voices to see how they would cope with them โ โbasically for my own amusementโ โ and was compelled by the uniformly โserviceable, benign, good-naturedโ tone they would read in, no matter how poetic, fractured or experimental the writing. On a hunch, he brought some examples into rehearsals and the performers gave lip-syncing a go. โIt was immediately interesting and uncanny,โ he recalls, with the performers having to deal in the moment with the problem of mapping themselves onto another artificial โperformer,โ which itself was dealing with the problem of a very human text. โAlmost all the writing for these projects would be useless to us unless it was done in this way,โ says Etchells. โWe wouldnโt know what to do with it. Itโs too poetic. Itโs too fictional. Itโs too tangled.โ But exploring lip-syncing along to the text has opened โan enormous reservoir of ways of thinking about writing and performing.โ Subscribe to Exeunt, and get two in-depth pieces on theatre a week, direct to your inbox Subscribe Forced Entertainment have long been sifting through the detritus of popular culture, from daytime TV to end-of-the-pier vaudeville, magic acts and clown shows, to find frameworks for their own unusual entertainments. Lip-syncing, then, makes sense for them to experiment with. As a mode of performance, itโs wired into popular consciousness through pop stars trying to convince stadium audiences of their liveness, or those same voices as channeled through the made-up lips of contestants on RuPaulโs Drag Race, or movie dialogue spreading virally through the host bodies of TikTok users. For Etchells, lip-syncing is often about โapproaching real voices and trying to take on their aura,โ subsuming that original human presence into yours. โThereโs a very basic, elemental sort of theatre magic to it, produced in this very easy way.โ This broad approach resonates with instances of lip-syncing within contemporary performance, too. In works like Re-Member Me and Showmanism, performance artist Dickie Beau acts as a kind of spirit medium for archival recordings (this process of re-membering โ as in, giving corporeal form to voices โ relies on his masterfully precise actorโs technique), while Frankie Thompson is similarly possessed by a host of characters ranging from a nine-year-old Jacob Rees-Mogg to Cliff Richards, all of whom she finds compellingly nauseating, in the exorcism ritual that is her latest show, Horrible Things. Whatโs different about Forced Entertainmentโs use of lip-syncing is that here, there is no original presence to be channeled. The performers are instead taking on what Etchells describes as โthe voices of nobody,โ or rather the โphantasmic, aggregated echoesโ of the many many voices on whose data the AI has been trained, and which are now conjuring into existence words they never actually said. There is a sort of mournful, empty quality to these voices, having โwashed upโ far away from the people they originally belonged to, to find themselves in strangerโs mouths listing objects, wondering if anyone can hear them and glitching in interminable loops. There is a cold, sad anonymity to it all. Etchells remarks that occasionally the software company he used has notified him that particular people are withdrawing their voices from the platform, instructing him to cease use of those voices. Using these technologies in performance certainly brings up ethical questions around digital rights, consent, identity and ownership, although in the grand scheme of things, Etchells is fairly blasรฉ about it: of all the purposes someoneโs voice might be put to without their knowledge, โan avant-garde performance is probably the least of their worries.โ [ ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/frankie-thompson-horrible-things-essay-mental-health-compulsive-behaviours-pleasance-courtyard-soho-theatre) [ Frankie Thompson: How I manage my own โhorrible thingsโ at the Edinburgh Fringe ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/frankie-thompson-horrible-things-essay-mental-health-compulsive-behaviours-pleasance-courtyard-soho-theatre) Exeunt ยท Aug 25 [ Read full story ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/frankie-thompson-horrible-things-essay-mental-health-compulsive-behaviours-pleasance-courtyard-soho-theatre) For the performers, though, lip-syncing to these strange, artificial voices is an odd task, requiring them to bend their live, human presence into the shapes produced by machines. Politically, it mirrors processes that are already at play in the continued computational automation of human life. Etchells brings up James Bridleโs writings on new technologies as a reference point: one example Bridle gives is of โchaotic storageโ, a logistics technique employed by Amazon fulfilment centres whereby items are stored not according to traditional methods of categorisation or alphabetisation, but in a way that an algorithm determines to produce the most efficient routes for โpickingโ based on customer purchase patterns. This appears completely random and incomprehensible to humans, with paddling pools sitting next to USB sticks sitting next to blowtorches, and so for the warehouse workers, the process of picking items becomes completely reliant on technology which tells them where to go. Our world is increasingly being designed not with humans in mind, but rather machines. As Etchells puts it, โtechnology malforms the space, and then you end up having to live in it.โ Initially, Forced Entertainment tried their best to live in the world of machines: โI was in the itโs-got-to-be-perfect school of lip-sync,โ says Etchells. But with their aesthetic being so tied to the failing act, the slipping mask, the shoddy costume, โitโs no surprise really that that didnโt last.โ Instead, the performers got to enjoy being late for a line, or playing games with each other, โstealingโ each otherโs voices. Etchells compares it to the principles of ventriloquism, in which a free-floating voice unattached to a body is fundamentally discomforting and โsort of traumaticโ. That discomfort is equally as alluring to Forced Entertainment as the satisfaction of precision, the pretence of authenticity only interesting if shown to be a pretence. Lip-sync has also opened up new avenues for the company. Having been allergic all their lives to Plays-with-a-capital-P, with Cold Sweat Forced Entertainment find themselves approaching something a little bit like drama. Rather than the presentational arena of Signal to Noiseโs open white stage, Cold Sweat places us more decisively in a โfictional localeโ: what appears to be โthe aftermath of some disastrous party or backyard drinking bingeโ where three figures โ family members, or neighbours, perhaps โ are the last ones standing. โItโs all quite acrimonious and accusatory, everyoneโs talking over each other.โ For Etchells, this more fictional mode is โa door that weโve never been able to open. Weโve just never really gone there.โ Perhaps it is the technique of lip-syncing, an extra buffer of mediation, that allows them to venture away from the here-and-now without feeling that they have to commit to the โpsychological claptrapโ that comes along with acting; to be able to โplay the game of theatre, without getting oneโs hands too dirty.โ As I wonder how else the impulses behind Forced Entertainmentโs work have changed over time, it occurs to me that over the last ten years of new creations, with the exception of If All Else Fails, the companyโs performers havenโt ever spoken on stage: there were two shows without any language at all, Out of Order and Under Bright Light, and then this trilogy of lip-sync works. Etchells agrees itโs a shift away from earlier productions, that were so often about โthe actual voices of the performers and their actual presences. We had a lot of money, in some ways, on an authentic approach to what it might mean to speak on the stage.โ But this sense of authentic presence itself had a fakeness to it; these days, Etchells canโt stand that mode of being onstage where performers โare here to be cheeky and witty versions of themselves. I donโt want to be charmed.โ Pulling back into a more anonymous space has resulted in works that feel slightly sharper-edged, more brutal in a way. โAll of these shows are post-Brexit, post-Trump, post-truth, post-everything,โ Etchells notes. Speech, charisma, authenticity โ these things feel politically loaded, and perhaps warmth and openness just donโt feel like the right tools to reflect the world weโre living in. โIt feels like the space is closing down, and weโre trying to deal with the fact that the system, the structure that youโre in, is more oppressive and more powerful. It probably always was, but I think weโre just more tuned to it now.โ Yet even without their voices, the performersโ distinctive presences โ ones that many audiences have followed around for years, if not decades โ still, inevitably, shine through as they physically navigate whatever unending task the system of the piece has set for them. Theyโre still trying to keep up with the onslaught of text, still running about, changing costumes, moving stuff around. The human is always stuck in the teeth of the machine, jamming the smooth, frictionless cheeriness of the not-real, gesticulating silently, trying desperately to communicate. Cold Sweat is at Sheffield Theatres, 2 to 3 October; Southbank Centre, London, 9 to 10 October; Lancaster Arts, 14 October [ ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/exeunt-recommends-the-best-autumn-theatre-2026-lives-of-others-standard-of-living-our-friends-in-the-north-lanny-) [ Exeunt recommends... the best autumn theatre ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/exeunt-recommends-the-best-autumn-theatre-2026-lives-of-others-standard-of-living-our-friends-in-the-north-lanny-) Exeunt ยท Sep 16 [ Read full story ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/exeunt-recommends-the-best-autumn-theatre-2026-lives-of-others-standard-of-living-our-friends-in-the-north-lanny-) This piece was paid for by the Southbank Centre. Such support helps Exeunt to keep publishing the most interesting writing, about the most exciting theatre. Interested in partnering with Exeunt? Visit our Advertise with Exeunt page, where you can get more information, download an advertising pack, and find our contact details.
Arsenal is considering a move for Nottingham Forest star
Morgan Gibbs White remains one of the best midfielders in the Premier League and one of the most in form English players since the start of 2026. His performances have continued to attract attention, ...
LโHumanitรฉ festival renews commitment to popular front politics in France
PARISโโIโm always on the side of the people, of those who fight to defend their livelihoods, of those fighting for the dignity to feed their children and pay their bills,โ declared Fabien Roussel, national secretary of the French Communist Party (PCF) to a crowd of thousands last weekend. โI know which side I am on when there are barricades.
Law Roach Is Styling Kim Kardashian After Being Accused Of Shading Her
I still can't decide what he was trying to say with that response...
Whether you like it or not, celebrities have an impact on politics
The global groundswell of support for Macklemoreโs pro-Palestinian advocacy serves to remind us that maybe celebrity activism really is that deep after all, writes Cheekโs Varsha Yajman. Subscribe In the last week, publications, podcasts, and influencers that have either rarely or never spoken about Israelโs genocide in Palestine have flooded my social feed. And it was all because singer Ed Sheeran and his team dropped Macklemore as his opener for saying โFree Palestineโ on stage. Millions raised, millions speaking up in support of Palestine - all of this confirming my view that, whether I like it or not, celebrities do have an impact on political outcomes. And this is interesting when much of the time celebrity activism can induce an eye roll - I love to see Charli XCX pointing out a Palestinian flag in the crowd, but itโs hardly the bold symbol of allyship that some fans would make it out to be. But thereโs a line between healthy scepticism and outright dismissal - and Iโd argue that the latter lets the rich and powerful off far too easily. For instance, actress Jennifer Lawrence, once outspoken about her political views, last year told The Times she no longer believes celebrities have a role to play: โCelebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for. So then what am I doing? Iโm just sharing my opinion on something thatโs going to add fuel to a fire thatโs ripping the country apart.โ While itโs a narrative she might find comfort in, it simply is not true. Grassroots movements often garner worldwide attention when celebrities and other high-profile spokespeople bring a mainstream platform to their causes. And this frustrates me. We have had three years of a live-streamed genocide. Macklemore himself has been calling for a Free Palestine long before he booked the Sheeran concert. Yet itโs the high-profile fallout of the last week that finally seems to have made saying โFree Palestineโ socially acceptable in the mainstream. It feels like the collective mood has shifted, where calling out censorship is now the obvious response - not just the business of โradicalโ activists. To recap, Sheeranโs decision followed an ultimatum from billionaire Robert Kraft, owner of Gillette Stadium, one of the venues Sheeran was scheduled to perform at: either drop Macklemore as your opener after only two of the eight scheduled shows, or you do not play at any stadiums. Sheeranโs disappointing decision to stand on the side of billionaire-led censorship has ultimately seen a surge in support for Free Palestine. It began when all his openers and his backing band pulled out of Sheeranโs tour, in solidarity with Macklemore and with the Palestinian cause. It was met with an uproar of support from those who had never or barely touched politics before: influencers lip-syncing to Macklemoreโs music, singers like Jack Antonoff singing โFree Palestine,โ and publications and podcasts standing with Macklemore. And finally, we saw material support: Macklemore donated $1 million in profits from his two nights opening for Sheeranโs tour to several Palestinian aid groups and called for Sheeran and Kraft to match it, which they have since promised to do. Weโve also seen childrenโs entertainer Ms Rachel follow suit with a $1 million donation to Palestinian aid, and publication PopBase has donated $10,000. Anera, a humanitarian aid group working in Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan, said donations since Macklemoreโs announcement were more than triple this monthโs daily average. The groupโs Instagram page has also gained 8,000 followers. Macklemore far from the first celebrity to speak and participate in politics in the Western World. In 1924, singer Al Jolson supported Republican candidate Warren G. Harding for president, and decades later, celebrities such as Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and Aretha Franklin voiced their public support for the Civil Rights movement. More recently, in the lead-up to the 2024 US election, โThe Daily Show with Trevor Noah partnered with the organisation Power the Polls to recruit poll workers to address shortages- a problem disproportionately affecting voters of colour. The campaign saw 170,000 new sign-ups - 35,000 of which came directly through the TV showโs link - resulting in the recruitment of 713,000 total poll workers that year, an almost three-fold increase on the organisationโs goal. Alongside recruiting workers, celebrities in the US (where voting in elections is not compulsory) have made a huge difference by calling for people to register to vote. Taylor Swiftโs endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024 saw over 400,000 visitors on the voter registration site within 24 hours of her Instagram post. In 2023, Swift had urged her fans to register, resulting in 35,000 new voter registrations. Similarly, Ariana Grande promoted voter registration in 2019 by setting up booths at concerts on the American leg of her tour, resulting in over 33,000 voters registering. And the same thing is happening closer to home. This year, musician Jack River successfully called for government action to ensure creatives in Australia do not have their work scraped by generative AI companies. Celebrity as the mediator between the punter and the politician Celebrity activism isnโt just a feel-good news story - research tells us it actually makes a difference. By directing attention to issues affecting the average person, like voting inaccessibility or a lack of action on a genocide, researchers Alfred Archer and Amanda Cawston state that โcelebrities can play a useful bridging role between political elites and the people they representโ. Alternatively, in a world where talking about politics is โnot cool,โ or where people lack exposure or knowledge to engage with politics, celebrities can act as an educational resource or an entry point into the political world - when they speak up about an issue, their audience gets exposed to it. Olivia Rodrigoโs Daisy Chain Fields festival is a perfect example. Rodrigo partnered with twelve organisations focused on womenโs issues, such as reproductive rights. These organisations had stalls at the festival for people to meet them and were also featured heavily on social media, giving their issues global attention and raising $20 million for the organisations. We have also seen celebrities at award shows such as the Emmys wearing F*CK ICE pins, referring to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcementโs treatment and detainment of people - generally people of colour. When celebrities speak up about political issues in public forums, they put the issue at the forefront of mainstream media, rally their supporters, and make it clear that, however much they disagree, the government cannot simply ignore it. Our over-reliance on celebrities versus our politicians As much as I love seeing my favourite celebrity use their platform for a good cause, there is an important question to ask: not whether celebrity activism is good or bad, but whether we should have to rely on celebrities. And the answer would, in an ideal world, be no. In an ideal world, or merely a just world, action on Palestine wouldโve happened decades ago, climate change would be taken seriously, and most importantly, people would understand their democratic rights. However, that is not our reality. Only around 28 per cent of Australian Year 10 students reach proficiency in civics and citizenship. In the US, almost two-thirds of people under 30 say high school civics education didnโt prepare them to understand voting deadlines, how to research candidates, or how to vote by mail. When civics education is weak, our trust in these institutions and our understanding of change-making processes also decline. โThis is where celebrity steps in and becomes our main source of reliance. As Mary R. Connelly notes in _The Tartan, โ_Celebrities will always be involved in campaigns in one form or another, but their presence is not what causes people to vote blindly. The lack of political engagement and literacy is what allows celebrities to wield their influence on the political sphere so impactfully.โ About the author โVarsha Yajman is the Digital Content Producer at Cheek Media. She is a youth advocate and lawyer with a background in climate litigation and is passionate about looking at the intersection between race, climate justice, and mental health. Thanks for reading Cheek Media Co. ! This post is public so feel free to share it. Share
High diesel prices pressure Colorado agriculture
Silage harvest has begun in earnest in Colorado, and the choppers and trucks and pack tractors are all rolling and making east-slope mountains of cow chow. The silage will be used as part of cattle rations at dairies, ranches and feedyards across the area and the availability and growing conditions for silage and the stateโs [โฆ]
Scientists tracked 21 oilbirds in Venezuela, and five disappeared from their cave for up to 73 days to stay closer to food
Oilbirds spend their nights flying through tropical forests in search of fruit, but some of them take an unexpected approach to reach their feeding grounds. Some birds regularly returned to the same main cave after feeding.
Sports Entertainment Group (ASX:SEG) Shares Advance as Media Stock Draws Attention
Sports Entertainment Group (ASX:SEG) Shares Advance as Media Stock Draws Attention
Why politicians should pay more attention to the polls (reprise)
Welcome to the 231st edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), a polling newsletter that always welcomes new readers. So please donโt keep TWIP a secret; share it with your friends and colleagues: Share The Week in Polls With all the stories swirling around Reform, JL Partners and political polling, I am finally tearing myself away from talking about the regulation of polling this week - and instead re-running a previous piece reminding us why the solution to problems with polls isnโt simply to ban or ignore them. Rather, we need them to play a vital role in making our politics - and politicians - better. This is followed by summaries of the latest national voting intention polls, seat projections from MRPs and the most recent party leader ratings. Subscribers who pay for the full edition can also read ten insights from the latest polls and analyses, including: A trio of organisations and a pair of professors have been casting their eyes over the Liberal Democrats ahead of the partyโs autumn conference; What impact did the summer heatwave have on views on climate change? and Which wins out between chocolate and cheese? If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can read all ten by starting a free trial now: Get FREE 7-day trial For more polling news as it comes in ahead of next weekโs edition, you can also follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky. Picking up on my doubt last week about whether or not 35% of British train travellers have tried to order a takeaway for delivery to a railway station or carriage, thank you to reader Iain, who has been in touch to say he has done just thatโฆ in India. Another quick pair of updates, this time on the controversies around Reform and polling. Politico has a further scoop - โFarage aide caught in donor sting attended Egypt retreat with JL Partnersโ - and Ian Dunt has written about the problems with polling too: โSeeing the response of many polling experts in the last few weeks suggests that they are nervous about what is happening and keen to mitigate against it. Seeing the response of journalists, which has been basically non-existent, suggests the precise opposite.โ My usual reminder as well: please do hit reply if youโve spotted a poll, focus group or new piece of poll-based research that you think should be in contention for coverage in a future edition. Thank you! And with that, on with the show. How politicians get public opinion wrong I have written before about the benefits that come from widespread availability of high-quality political polling. We need more polls and more good coverage of polls. However, what Iโve not dug into before is the research into how accurately politicians estimate public opinion on issues. Thankfully we have academic research to tell us. First, the bad news: We present results from a study of 866 politicians in four countries.1 Politicians were asked to estimate the percentage of public support for various policy proposals. Comparing more than 10,000 estimations with actual levels of public support, we conclude that politicians are quite inaccurate estimators of peopleโs preferences. They make large errors and even regularly misperceive what a majority of the voters wants. Politicians are hardly better at estimating public preferences than ordinary citizens. Walgrave, S., Jansen, A., Sevenans, J., Soontjens, K., Pilet, J.B., Brack, N., Varone, F., Helfer, L., Vliegenthart, R., van der Meer, T., Breunig, C., Bailer, S., Sheffer, L. & Loewen, P.J. (2023a), โInaccurate Politicians: Elected Representativesโ Estimations of Public Opinion in Four Countriesโ, The Journal of Politics, 85(1): 209-222. The bad news is not quite as bad as that makes it sound because, when asked whether the majority of public opinion was for or against various policies, politicians picked the wrong option โonlyโ 29% of the time. However, this included getting it wrong even when public opinion is far from evenly split on an issue: They do not only get it wrong when the public is divided and hard to read (e.g., when there is a 51%:49% distribution). Seventy percent of the misplacements occur for policies with a relatively clear distribution of at least 60% (dis)agreeing citizens. Moreover, the public scored only slightly worse than politicians, picking the wrong option 2.7 out of 8 times on average, compared with 2.3 times for politicians. Turning to the other measure of accuracy (not which side is in the lead but what the percentage support is for each side), politicians on average were 18 percentage points out in their guesses. Again, this was only slightly better than the public, whose error came in at 21 percentage points.2 Further research, using the same mix of countries, gives a little more comfort about how (in)accurate perceptions are: We show that politicians have a better understanding of public opinion when they think the issue matters to voters. Further, when an issue is personally important to politicians they more accurately estimate their party supportersโ opinions. The results confirm that politicians hold more accurate perceptions of votersโ preferences when they think it is important to do so but not necessarily when the issues actually are important to voters. Butler, C., Walgrave, S., Soontjens, K. & Loewen, P.J. (2024), โPoliticians are better at estimating public opinion when they think it is more salientโ, Party Politics: 1โ13. Even so, itโs not a good picture. The remedy for this? Politicians should spend more time reading the polls. So forward this newsletter to someone you knowโฆ Share For a more general argument against banning polls, see my 2024 piece. Is โLet Bartlet Be Bartletโ good advice or not? The latest episode of my Political Fictions podcast heads across the Atlantic for a dip into one of the political TV classics: Mark and Cory talk about a giant of American political drama for the first time this week, as they tackle The West Wing. They talk about Let Bartlet Be Bartlet, the nineteenth episode of series one. In it, Mark wonders if The West Wing is actually the epitome of the โBoris Johnson school of politicsโ, Cory outmanoeuvres Mark into confirming we will record a Christmas Special about Love, Actually and they debate whether the central message of this episode has been misunderstood. Coryโs email newsletter is Paperback Rioter and Mark has a family of email newsletters. Subscribe to our newsletter for some additional bonus content and to get alerted whenever a new episode comes out. Our theme tune is โMonkeys Spinning Monkeysโ by Kevin MacLeod/incompetech.com and licensed under the Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. You can also listen to our episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the web or YouTube. Elsewhere from meโฆ [ A Lord's Eye View How to fix the problem of money in our politics Welcome to my latest update on work in the House of Lords. This time I am taking a look at how our political system is regulated, and the protections we need to keep democracy safe from becoming simply a contest to see who has the biggest bank accountโฆ Read more 5 days ago ยท 3 likes ยท 2 comments ยท Mark Pack ](https://lordseyeview.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-the-problem-of-money-in?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embedding_publication_id=1269283) If you spot a factual errorโฆ Borrowing an idea from Stuart Ritchie and others, if you spot a factual error in an edition of this newsletter, I will give you a free 12-month subscription to the paid-for version (or an extra 12 months on your existing one). Factual errors qualify, but grammatical errors or disagreements over interpretation do not, and my decision is final. Messages about both of those are always welcome, though. Voting intention and leadership ratings Here are the latest voting intention polls from different pollsters. It is all pretty static at the moment, with a small and consistent Labour lead in nearly all the polls. The table is also online here, along with explanations about what is included. It is updated regularly throughout the week as new polls are released. Next are the seat projections from MRPs, also sorted by fieldwork dates, listing those which are based on dedicated fieldwork (rather than models based on averages of other polls). Because such MRPs are published infrequently, some of the entries below are quite old. Finally, here is a summary of leadership ratings, with a graph from PollCheck: Detailed numbers from the latest polls are online here, and both that and the graph are updated regularly throughout the week as new data comes out. For historical figures on both voting intention and leader approval stretching back to the 1930s, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase. Catch up on the previous two editions [ ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/a-crisis-point-for-political-polling) [ A crisis point for political polling Sep 13 ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/a-crisis-point-for-political-polling) [ Read full story ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/a-crisis-point-for-political-polling) [ ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/extra-questions-about-the-polls-in) [ Extra questions about the polls in Reformโs funding scandal Sep 6 ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/extra-questions-about-the-polls-in) [ Read full story ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/extra-questions-about-the-polls-in) My privacy policy and other legal information are available here. Links to purchase books or other items are usually affiliate links which pay a commission for each sale. Quotes from social media messages are occasionally lightly edited for punctuation and clarity. If you are subscribed to other email lists of mine, please note that unsubscribing from this one will not automatically remove you from the others. If you wish to be removed from all my lists, simply reply to this email to let me know. A quintet of Lib Dem polling analyses, and 9 other polling insights you shouldnโt miss The following ten findings from the most recent polls and analyses are only for subscribers who pay for the full edition, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away. Ahead of the start of Liberal Democrat conference, we have a trio of organisations and a pair of professors with pieces out about Ed Daveyโs party:
How will California's new law restricting social media for kids work?
California will implement a new law in January that bans social media platforms from offering addictive features, such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and algorithm-driven "For You" feeds, to kids under the age of 16.
Loudoun mental health center opening
People in a mental health crisis need treatment, but too often end up in jail or handcuffed to a hospital emergency room gurney through an emergency custody order or temporary
I'm a CEO and I hired a board member to argue with me
RiseGuide's CEO said he purposefully hired outspoken employees and a board member to challenge his decisions and provide the feedback leaders lack.
Bar Harbor Parents Again Raise Concerns About How Some Science Education In Sixth Grade.
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Restaurant Barn. BAR HARBORโParents again raised concerns this week about how Bar Harbor students receive science instruction after fifth grade, months after the same issue came before the Bar Harbor School Board. The concern centers on a past scheduling change at Conners Emerson School that gives fifth graders a full year of science rather than switching between science and social studies at midyear. Principal Dr. Heather Weir Webster told the board that the school has been monitoring test scores, teacher feedback, and the experience of students as it considers whether the current approach is working. If it is not, the approach may be changed, but that would not likely occur this school year. In fifth and sixth grade, the school used to have one semester of social studies and one of science in each year. That schedule shifted because switching at midyear often broke up the learning units. So, approximately two-three years ago, they decided to shift that a bit. Science became a dedicated focus in fifth grade. Social studies was the dedicated focus in sixth grade. The school staff members are hoping to dive deeply into the data and see if the students are having a more quality experience throughout their time in those grades when it comes to science and social studies. If not, things could shift again. This year, Dr. Webster said at the September meeting, potential changes to curricula have been a bit complicated by moving into the schoolโs new building in late October and early November. โThere have been no changes this year because itโs hard enough to handle the move. That allows them to have consistency,โ Dr. Webster said. Dr. Webster said that after the Covid pandemic which prevented students from attending school in person, many fifth graders were struggling. โWe tried several different configurations,โ she said, including a co-teaching model to help with that struggle, but to also see how to best schedule and support those students. โWe found that a January switchโ where classes switched from social studies to science was really difficult. Part of the decision making stemmed from science being more hands-on and accessible to fifth graders. Social studies was a bit more abstract content, which was why the school tried the current configuration. In a letter submitted as public comment, parent Beth Dumont wrote, โIn May 2026, I wrote to express my concern that our middle school students are not receiving consistent instruction in science and social studies. I appreciate that the Board took this concern seriously and requested a presentation from Principal Webster. I am also grateful for the opportunity to meet with Principal Webster and Julie Keblinsky in July to learn more about the current curriculum and scheduling. โDuring that meeting, I learned that the current model is intended to integrate science and social studies into other subjects during the years or semesters when they are not offered as standalone courses. โWhile I appreciate the intent behind this model, I remain concerned about its premise. Science and social studies are core academic disciplines that provide students with essential knowledge, skills, and ways of thinking. Yet under the current schedule, students are not guaranteed consistent instructional time in these subjects. Instead, exposure to content in these disciplines may depend on whether opportunities for integration arise within other classes. โTo be clear, I strongly support interdisciplinary learning. Integrating science and social studies across the curriculum can enrich studentsโ educational experiences and help them make meaningful connections across subject areas. My concern is not with integration itself, but with relying on integration as a substitute for dedicated instruction in core disciplines.โ Dr. Webster said that theyโve been monitoring test scores, talking to teachers, seeing how the pilot program works. Itโs in its third year now of this schedule. One science teacher, she said, told her heโd seen positive outcomes with full year science and that there was a stronger classroom community. Another science teacher had concerns over the readiness last year, but she isnโt feeling that way about this yearโs current class. A third teacher for social studies said he loves the full year. A fourth teacher of social studies hasnโt said that anything has changed. For the three fathers who spoke at the school committee meeting, the fractured science curriculum caused concerns. One father said that when he spoke to others, โall were surprised and confused as to why there was no dedicated, continuous science education,โ at the school. Though students are testing well in science and math, he worried that without continuity in education, learning is lost. โWe shouldnโt have to choose between key learning disciplines,โ he said. Matthew Bergin, another father, agreed, adding, โIโm just a little concerned.โ In her letter, Dumont wrote, โAs the parent of a recent sixth grader who completed an entire year without a dedicated science course, I saw very little evidence that this integration was occurring in a consistent, systematic, or readily identifiable way. This is not a criticism of our middle school teachers, who have been uniformly excellent. Rather, it is a structural criticism of the current schedule.โ Dr. Webster gave an update about all aspects of the schedule and how itโs created and she also spoke to social and emotional learning (SEL) in middle school. Itโs explicitly taught but also embedded. Science is embedded as well and explicitly taught at all but that one grade. The school schedule is built from lunch out, then electives like art and physical education are placed, before going into the instruction time, teacher planning time, multi-tier support systems (MTSS), and then social and emotional learning. Teachers have to have 250 minutes a week of planning time per their contracts. Thatโs the minimum and occurs when their students are at specials. โThe schedule is really not the purview of the board,โ School Board Chair Marie Yarborough reminded the other board members and the public and thanked Dr. Webster for the presentation. The parents were also thanked for coming. LINK TO LEARN MORE [ ](https://barharborstory.substack.com/p/despite-strong-rankings-some-bar) [ Despite Strong Rankings, Some Bar Harbor Parents Raise Concerns About School's Science Education ](https://barharborstory.substack.com/p/despite-strong-rankings-some-bar) Carrie Jones ยท Jun 4 [ Read full story ](https://barharborstory.substack.com/p/despite-strong-rankings-some-bar) HELP SUPPORT THE BAR HARBOR STORY When we started The Bar Harbor Story, we didnโt know if anyone would read it. But you showed up. You shared. You sent tips. Nowโover 400,000 views every month laterโitโs clear: people here care about their community and each other. Weโve kept everything free because news should never be out of reach, but every one of our stories takes time to write, and your support keeps The Bar Harbor Story going. If you value our work, please consider a paid subscription, a founding membership, or a sponsorship. It truly helps us cover one more meeting, tell one more story, shine one more light. Even $5 a month makes a difference. Click here to become a one-time supporter now. Thank you so much for being here. Founding member information can be found here. Have questions about sponsorships? Just send Shaun an email at sfarrar86@gmail.com, heโd love to hear from you. Subscribe Share Bar Harbor Story Share Leave a comment
The Big Holes in Wearable Heart Rate Variability And Readiness Scores
On September 9th, Apple announced it was revamping its Apple Watch Health Sensing System, rolling out a Readiness score (0 to 10), and increasing the frequency of heart rate variability (HRV) outputs 24-fold. This can be viewed as upping its competition with various other consumer wearable sensors. These โreadiness scoresโ as a composite of multiple metrics, with heart rate variability (HRV) being front and center for most. The majority of Americans are now using wearable sensors, which equates to well over 100 million adults. HRV and Readiness scores are increasingly being marketed as a measurement of autonomic nervous system health, a digital marker for future disease, a clock for biological age, and a holistic metric to promote healthspan and even longevity. (Apple also introduced a new longevity tab and โHealth Ageโ.) None of this has been proven. In this edition of Ground Truths I am going to review what we know about heart rate variability and readiness scores. Heart Rate Variability HRV is the variation in normal heart cycle timing. The variability of the heart rate, the barely perceptible millisecond changes in time between consecutive heart beats (see R-R intervals in the Figure below, left panel), is due to interplay between the sympathetic and parasympathetic (vagal nerve) inputs. Distinct from heart rate, individuals with the same heart rate can have very different HRVs. It is a rough reflection of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity, inadequate to say whether a personโs ANS function is abnormal. For more than three decades, heart rate variability (HRV) has been measured and several studies have found an association of low HRV and clinical outcomes, particularly a link with higher all-cause and cardiovascular mortality. There have also been less well established links of low HRV to risk of early cognitive impairment, dementia, mental illness, Type 2 diabetes and substance abuse. An important reminder is that HRV is a surrogate marker without any established cause-and-effect relationship. If you increase your HRV, that doesnโt mean it will improve health outcomes. In fact, there is no hard evidence for that. All that work linking to health outcomes was done with electrocardiogram (ECG) derived HRV. Now, in the era of consumer wearables, this is getting assessed differently, by optical pulse (yes, the lights you see) plethysmography (PPG) or what is called pulse rate variability (PRV). They are not the same, as shown below (right panel) and only concordant when the delay between the ECG and pulse is kept constant, which basically means at rest. I should mention thereโs also what I will call MPV, a mattress mechanical movement sensor, a derived heart rate variability, that companies like Eight Sleep use, even further away from directly measuring HRV. HRV has not one uniform measurement but many different types of quantification, such as RMSSD, the magnitude of difference between successive R-R intervals of normal sinus beats (N-N) or SDNN, the standard deviation of NN intervals, both in milliseconds. SDNN is one of the so-called frequency domain HRVs (others are LF, HF, LF/HF). Different wearable sensors use different metics; Apple has relied on SDNN and nearly all of the others use RMSSD, which is generally considered the more accurate metric. Thereโs also the different length of time measured, such as for a matter of minutes, all day, or an overnightโs sleep. Short measurements are especially problematic since they donโt capture enough of respiratory modulation and other factors that influence HRV. Share Ground Truths How well does HRV correlate with PRV? There are very limited studies, especially independently done. One that is commonly cited was conducted by Air Force researchers in only 13 healthy adults assessing Oura ring 3 and 4, Whoop 4.0, and Garmin Fenix 6 and showed a correlation coefficient of 0.88 to 0.97 and a mean absolute percentage error from 6 to 10%. The correlation is not a perfect 1.0, but thereโs at least a fairly high level of correlation. HRV is supposed to increase during the night due to takeover of the parasympathetic nervous system, and higher during deep sleep. A recent example of my 1 week, all day โHRV,โ and one during sleep is shown below. As you can see, the N of 1 data are inconsistent for the same days from different sensors (Oura, AppleWatch, Fitbit Air, and Eight Sleep) by patterns, absolute numbers, and comparison with prior days and weeks. The largest study in over 8 million Fitbit users (the old version, not Google Fitbit Air, introduced in May 2026) gives you a sense of the effect of age, sex, and the 2 different main HRV (here PRV) metrics, with RMSSD on the left and SDRR (=SDNN) on the right below. That study, from data collected in 2018, is a major outlier, since all the more recent ones are tiny with respect to sample size. Many of the companies have not had independent evaluation of their HRV, such as Eight Sleep, but have published a low standard error on their website. There are some other published studies on the correlation between HRV and PRV, but they are all small and only in healthy adults. A scoping review emphasized the lack of study in underrepresented individuals, including the aged, people of color (which affects the PPG signal), and individuals who are underweight or obese. Add the typical adult age 60 plus with one or more chronic diseases. For example, one study in over 900 adults found poor correlation of HRV and PRV, non-uniformly underestimated across many chronic diseases (cardiovascular, endocrine, neurological, respiratory, and others), concluding PRV is โan invalid surrogate for HRV.โ A recent systematic review of 43 studies comparing HRV and PRV found reasonable pooled absolute standardized error (HRV as gold standard) but only 10 of the studies provided quantitative synthesis in ideal conditions. Their main conclusion was similarly cautious: โPPG-derived HRV [PRV] should not be regarded as universally interchangeable with ECG-derived HRV across all devices, populations, and recording contexts.โ Factors Affecting HRV and PRV That gets me to the long list of factors that affect HRV (and PRV) besides the device, the type of measurement (RMSSD, SDNN or others), the personโs signal, the sensor site, the duration of data capture, if weighting by sleep stage is used, how artifact is processed and corrected. And this list is not complete!: Oura puts out data from their community of users (who input data) on what affects their overnight HRV. The factors currently provided are: no alcohol (increase 8%), melatonin (increase 2%, float tank (increase 2%), wine (decrease 4%), and party (decrease 14%) in overnight HRV. Must be some big parties! Subscribe What is a PRV measurement good for? It has been falsely characterized as an index of โautonomic balanceโ and a specific indicator of stress. A 2018 review of the studies available for HRV and its relationship to stress, not using any of the current wearables, found that stress can lower HRV. But so can many other factors. The non-specificity of the signal, indexed to the table above, is striking. Evidence from a UK Biobank study of over 46,000 participants with actual HRV looked at genetically predicted HRV, a genetic risk score, that failed to show the expected HRV-mortality link, indicating that _HRV is likely not causa_l, but rather a reflection of personโs physiologic state. A review of consumer wearable HRV data from 5 longitudinal studies showed that nighttime PRV was not associated with perceived stress, and surprisingly higher HRV, in the largest cohort (N=717 participants), was correlated with higher stress. An Oura ring cohort of 525 first-year college students found a link between overnight PRV and perceived stress, but that was also seen with resting heart rate, sleep, and respiratory rate. Several very small studies have examined the relationship of HRV and athletic injuries or guiding training with mixed, and predominantly negative results. HRV biofeedback training with paced breathing had no significant effect on reducing stress or raising HRV, as demonstrated with sham controlled trials. When HRV for multiple days showed a decline in conjunction with body temperature, the Oura ring published data for prediction of Covid. The WHOOP company sponsored an observational study, published in 2026, of 30,000 users for 72 weeks, without a control group, that reported reduced alcohol intake (5.8 % points) by self-report. That doesnโt tell us much, and particularly about the merits of HRV for behavioral change. If you use the same device and conditions as longitudinal trends for multiple (at least 2-3) weeks that may be the one way to get something useful from the measurements. Data for overnight sleep with minimal motion and using RMSSD is the best proxy for real HRV. The reason to look at trends rather than any given night is that it more likely represents something, even though you wonโt know with certainty what the โitโ is. Keep in mind there are no data, no peer-reviewed evidence, to show that HRV fluctuation in-person has any correlation with health outcomes. Share Readiness Scores These are proprietary scores that integrate different metrics for each of the wearables: no algorithms have been disclosed. They are unvalidated against health outcomes. In a review of 14 composite health scores of readiness and recovery, HRV contributed 86% to the scores, followed by reading heart rate (79%), physical activity and sleep duration (both at 71%). That review noted the substantial variability in measurement protools and lack of standardization. Sleep staging is notoriously inconsistent and inaccurate by these sensors, which adds further to the HRV uncertainties for what the scores, which use sleep stage data, mean. Only resting heart rate has been shown consistently across devices to be extremely accurate. Iโve made a Table to summarize what we know about which metrics are included, the scores, any peer-reviewed studies that compared the readiness score with health outcomes, and the corresponding (if any, NA-not available) citation. You will note that some companies do not use the term โreadiness," such as WHOOP for recovery, and Garmin, which has 2 different scores, one of which is Body Battery. Eight Sleep uses the term โFitness Score.โ They all include HRV; Apple includes a new metric they call โRecovery HRVโ which among other components uses 7-days of sleep, but it is unclear what this means or how it is differentiated from other scores (there are clearly no data for outcomes). We have no knowledge of how the different components are weighted or whether any of these scores are better than resting heart rate, HRV alone, physical activity, or any other single metric. Since none of these are standardized, they are not interchangeable, so if you get a 90 for Oura that has no relationship to a 90 on a Google Fitbit Air. Notably, the company can update its algorithm for readiness score at any point without notification to device users. Without any useful evidence of actionability for these scores or established relationship with health outcomes, it is hard to make a case for their value. At the Apple recent announcement they showed their Readiness score (0-10) on the watch (Figure below) but there are no published data on this score, not even on their website. Itโs available only on their new Watch Series 12 or Ultra 4 [of course, ;-)]. That exemplifies the problems with these scores, lack of data and evidence for being meaningful to promote health. Perhaps the best study (which isnโt saying much) is the WHOOP Recovery for golfer performance, because it did correlate with an objective outcome, even though there was no control group and the authors were all from the company. Among the 389 pro golfers, an absolute 10-per cent point increase in Recovery score was associated with about 0.5 fewer strokes per round. But thatโs hardly a health outcome! WHOOP is also conducting a study in over 2,700 runners to see if their recovery score will be linked to less injuries and improved performance, but that is not yet published and has no control group or randomization. Putting This in Context For two decades Iโve been enthusiastic about the potential for digital health and particularly wearable biosensors. Over the years, weโve seen some great progress for their ability to promote physical activity and accurately detect atrial fibrillation (the first FDA cleared deep learning AI for consumers). That work was the subject of rigorous research. But there are holes in the data and evidence for other metrics. One notable one is the โVO2 maxโ story that I wrote about earlier this year. At that time many subscribers asked me to cover heart rate variability, which I finally got to here. When I dived into the research and publication for HRV and readiness scores, I expected to find at least some that were of high quality and demonstrated their utility by linkage to health outcomes. To my surprise, I found none. The wearable sensor measurements for HRV (PRV) are, for the most part, accurate, but that validation work has only been done in small studies of healthy adults and does not take into account the long list of factors, from the device, software side, and the user side, that affect HRV measurements. Moreover, this metric chiefly relies on optical sensing and, as we have learned for heart rate PPG sensing, may be less accurate in people of color. Keep in mind that all of the health outcome association evidence comes from ECG-derived HRV; none are from wearable sensor data. I will repeat the key point: there's no peer-reviewed evidence to show that in-person HRV fluctuationโor efforts to raise your HRVโ has any correlation with health outcomes. For those of you who look at your HRV on awakening, or even 2+ week trends of it being low, I hope this context helps to relieve any anxiety. Yes, low HRV (not PRV) has been shown to increase risk of some diseases as summarized above. But efforts to raise your HRVโa surrogate metricโ has not been established for improving any health outcomes. HRV does not have any evidence of causality (the genetic evidence actually goes against this possibility). In this summary, I have not included data for other wearable sensors such as Polar, Samsung, Withings, Suunto, Amazfit, Coros, Ultrahuman, or additional mattress sensors. These are beyond my first-hand experience, and as far as I know from my in-depth review none have any peer-reviewed published data that differ from the 6 sensors Iโve reviewed here. From the points Iโve gone over above, weโre not ready for readiness scores. Besides being proprietary, they are predominantly based on metrics that have their own issues. Itโs compounding the problem, like building a house without a solid foundation that has never undergone a rigorous inspection, and then selling it. Like I mentioned for PRV, you can look at trends over weeks rather than any single day, to get a handle, but even that may not be helpful. Thereโs simply no evidence that these scores meaningfully relate to health outcomes. Iโd emphasize they might, but that requires doing prospective or randomized studies to prove it. None exist. Thereโs great promise for HRV/PRV utility_. For example**,**_ Prof Maiken Nedergaard, who discovered the brain glymphatics that are essential in eliminating metabolic waste products from the brain during sleep, has posited that HRV could be a non-invasive marker for neuromodulator oscillations, brain-body regulatory circuits, and brain clearance. That would be extremely useful, but like everything else on HRV and readiness scores it requires solid research and validation. The lay media isnโt helping much to get the story straight. Earlier this year The Economist published a piece entitled โThe most useful indicator of your overall healthโ which ordained HRV as an โaccumulated stress score.โ Thatโs akin to the false assertion about VO2max: โV02 max is the singular most powerful marker for longevity.โ As Iโve summarized here, that is not established. The fact is that so many things can lower HRV, including physical exercise (especially an intense workout), reduced sleep quality, stress, the list above, no less the device, signal, and software. Whatever fluctuations observed have not been correlated with any health outcome. Sadly, โdatamaxxersโ are widely using HRV and readiness scores that have never been validated to mean anything. We already know that for some people using the sensors for sleep metrics, it can induce โorthosomnia,โ an obsession to get high sleep quality, with associated high levels of anxiety. In an experiment done by a company to promote sleep quality for its employees, โFor those employees who did use the trackers, many reported feeling perfectly rested until their tracker told them they had had a terrible night. Others were told that they had slept like a baby when they had actually been lying awake worrying about the quality of their sleep. โ The same problem can result from preoccupation with HRV or readiness scores, with anxiety that would lead to further reduction in both. It you are using a wearable like >100 million American adults, itโs OK to look at these data, but contextualized with the major caveats reviewed here. If you are one to require evidence that HRV or readiness scores are linked to health outcomes, you may not even want to look. The companies make it hard to turn them off! Let me end with the companies that make and sell wearables. Appleโs doubling down on HRV (24-fold more reporting and heart rate very 5 seconds) and introduction of a Readiness score tells us that consumers have bought into these metrics and they are joining the club. However, all of this is occurring with a backdrop of tens millions of users, claims about the data that are not backed up by adequate evidence, marketing way out in front of whatever limited data exists, and not being transparent about their readiness score algorithms. The companies can well afford to do the research that is needed to connect these metrics with health outcomes show, once and for all, that increasing HRV or using readiness scores promotes our health. If they believed and invested in the products they are selling, weโd not be in this position of not knowing. Thatโs essentially where we are with HRV and readiness scores. Perhaps someday this will change and weโll have good reason to embrace them. NB: I wrote this post. No AI. I have no conflicts of interest with any of its content. Loading... Ground Truths has 215,000 subscribers from every US state and 214 countries. There are over 300,000 followers of Ground Truths so more than 90,000 folks who can easily convert to be free subscribers. Your subscription to these free essays and podcasts makes my work in putting them together worthwhile. If youโre not a subscriber, please join! If you found this interesting PLEASE share it! Share Ground Truths The proceeds from all voluntary paid subscriptions go to support our summer internship program. It enabled us to accept and support a record number of 62 summer interns that joined us in 2026! These are high school, college and medical students selected from thousands of applicants. We couldnโt do this expanded program without the funds coming in through Ground Truths. Thank you!
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Engrams Embedding Entendre: Codesign for Efficient DRAM/SSD Offloading
Engram extends standard token embeddings with learned multi-token lookups. Recurring local patterns retrieve vectors directly, reducing the need to reconstruct them through attention and feed-forward layers. With Engram model architecture optimization, it allows for lower HBM capacity to be needed for models at the same quality. This does not mean there wonโt be an insane demand for HBM but it just means that model architecture will continue to innovate around constraints. This model architecture design is naturally codesigned for parameter offloading: each token accesses a few embedding rows whose addresses depend on token IDs, not hidden states. The runtime can prefetch those rows from host DRAM while earlier layers compute, keeping the table outside HBM without transferring entire weight matrices. Our Memory model contains our latest estimates of quarter by quarter HBM, DRAM, & NAND supply and demand. Offloading frees HBM for model weights and KV cache, potentially supporting larger batches or more concurrent sessions. When DRAM becomes the next constraint, NVMe offers another tier. Recommendation systems already cache frequently or recently accessed embedding rows in faster memory while backing colder rows with SSDs. After NVIDIA roadmap had to change due to massively despecโing Rubin Ultra from 1024GB to now ~200GB of HBM per chip, model architecture optimizations like emgram maybe helpful. Our DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash configuration uses roughly 189 GiB of memory for Engram. We replace it with a memory-mapped (mmap) file and measure serving performance with offload to SSD. Later on in our report, we will show our Engram offloading experiments along with the official InferenceX agentic inference serving results on Engram models like DeepSeekv4.1 Flash across all 6 NVIDIA GPU SKUs along with MI355X. Unsurprisingly, the CUDA Moat is still mogging MI355X on the ultra popular DeepSeekV4.1 Flash model. We also show how even on high capacity HBM SKUs, offloading emgrams to DRAM could result in even better performance for most of the pareto than keeping the emgram in HBM. Our benchmark has been widely reproduced, validated and/or supported by almost every major buyer of compute from Google Cloud to Microsoft Azure to Oracle, to Meta and many more. Furthermore, it has the support of the ML community including from vLLM, LMCache, SGLang, PyTorch, Huggingface and the support of major labs like OpenAI, MiniMax, ZAI, Qwen, Moonshot Kimi, etc. Star the InferenceX GitHub repository if you find the open-source benchmark and data useful!. InferenceX is the only inference benchmark in the world to have TPUv7, Jalapeรฑo, Nvidia Rubin NVL72, AMD, and soon, SambaNova and Trainium. Due to how realistic AgentX scenario is to real world agentic inference workloads, AMD has committed to collaborating on MI455X UALoE72 too. DeepSeek did not release the original paperโs two trained Engram models. We replicated its setup on fineweb-edu using the released code and training hyperparameters, at an estimated 6E18 FLOPs per run. We observed the same U-shape scaling: Engram improved performance over pure MoE baselines. We also reproduced DeepSeekโs results, where earlier-layer representations with Engram resembled those of later layers. Like the original Engram paper, it is possible to probe Engramโs gate scores to see what n-grams DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash makes the most use of. Our gate scan finds names, code fragments, relational phrasing, and boilerplate. These examples prioritize interesting-ness over gate strength. One unexpected result was Wright : Ace Attorney. These examples suggest learned memory optimizes the training objective, not a judgment of which facts deserve storage. Licenses, bibliography fragments, API scaffolding, and website furniture can provide prediction shortcuts, so the value of additional Engram capacity may depend on what survives data preparation. This does not show that table capacity is โwastedโ: the evaluation-corpus scan establishes neither training exposure nor the capacity occupied by each category. For offloading, strong gates do not identify cache-hot rows. Low gates do not automatically save reads either: computing the gate requires the retrieved key and undoes the performance gain of a fused kernel. Skipping reads would require a separate usefulness predictor before retrieval. In the original paperโs inference-time ablation, factual-knowledge benchmarks retained just 29โ44% of their original performance, while reading comprehension retained 81โ93%. This is due to the trainingโinference mismatch. The resulting degradation therefore measures this trained modelโs dependence on Engram, not the performance difference between models trained with and without it. In our ablations, suppressing Engram worsens token likelihood across all evaluated domains, especially encyclopedia text and several code corpora. Surprisingly, GSM8K accuracy stays within measured run-to-run variation and removing Engram has no effect. Engram is not a detachable dictionary beside an unchanged MoE. Removing it changes downstream features and expert selection. We tested whether rerouting hurts or compensates by holding tokens fixed in a teacher-forced experiment on CRUXEval, a code-reasoning benchmark of small Python functions where the model predicts a functionโs output from its code and an input, and scoring the reference answer. Removing Engram raised answer loss from 0.2848 to 0.3093 bits/token. Forcing the ablated model to use the original Engram-on expert choices made it worse still, at 0.3375 bits/token. Rerouting partially compensates for the missing memory. Memory features and expert selection work together, rather than following a clean โmemory stores facts; experts reasonโ division. On the same CRUXeval, removing Engram during either phase reduced accuracy and increased generated tokens; removing it throughout produced the largest changes. Keeping Engram for prefill leads to more correct answers than keeping for decode likely due to semantically richer KV cache transferred to decode workers, allowing it to mitigate some of the performance loss. Engramโs table is large, but each lookup is small. DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash requests 24 rows at each of two Engram layers, about 12.4 KiB per processed token position across the model, or 3.1 KiB per GPU when split across four GPUs. Currently as of Day 7 since Model Release, MI355X is still 2-4x worse performance per dollar compared to B200 even when normalized by Mi355Xโs lower TCO. Our full total cost of ownership breakdown comes from our AI Cloud TCO Model along with monthly market surveys of over 100+ gpu clouds & gpu cloud customers. On the Day 0 release of DeepSeekv4.1 Flash, NVIDIA vLLM works out of the box with zero issues across all 6 SKUs: H100, H200, B200, B300, GB200, GB300! This was thanks to the amazing work by the NVIDIA & Interact teams! In comparison, AMD vLLM did not work on day 0 for DeepSeekv4.1 Flash.Source: SemiAnalysis InferenceX AMDโs vLLM documentation points to using vllm/vllm-openai-rocm:deepseekv41-flash-0909, but from hour 0 of the model release to hour 23, AMD has not publicly released the image. AMD claims, โSPEED IS THE MOAT,โ yet it has still not released it by the 23rd hour. We wish that, going forward, the AMD team has a better process for hour 0 model releases. Eventually when they did publicly release for โday 0โ image support, performance-wise, it is currently up to 14.8x worse perf per dollar than H200 and up to 42x worse perf per dollar than B200/B300. The power of the CUDA MOAT is NVIDIAโs collaboration with its massive 6 million-developer community ecosystem including most of the vLLM & SGLang & Tokenspeed maintainers which means that CUDA is optimized on day 0. Overall, AMD did make significant improvements but the performance per dollar is still currently 2-4x worse than B200. AgentX Engram DRAM Offloading Improving Performance The HBM and DRAM offload use the same GPU kernel to select and dequantize rows. With HBM, it reads GPU memory; with Unified Virtual Addressing (UVA), it reads pinned host memory directly. Both support full decode graphs. Moving the table into HBM accelerates only the sparse lookup, leaving decoder computation and communication unchanged, resulting in little overall benefit while consuming memory otherwise available to KV cache. Another benefit of Engram offloaded to DRAM which means you can reduce the communication overhead by using less HBM GPUs per replica. For example, when enabling Engram offloading on B300, we are able to switch from TP4 to now TP2 which improves the pareto curve by up to 1.6x. When iso-model quality, less HBM is required as the engrams could be offloaded to host DRAM. Thus HBM bandwidth matters way more than HBM capacity. For inference workloads where memory bandwidth matters the most, 4-hi HBM provides the best $/bandwidth and therefore lowest cost per token. If China continues to make more and more revolutionary model architecture innovations, soon it could potentially 0Hi HBM stacks. [ ](https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/long-live-the-short-king-why-4-hi) [ Long Live the Short King: Why 4-hi HBM Wins ](https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/long-live-the-short-king-why-4-hi) Myron Xie, Bryan Shan, and 3 others ยท Sep 13 [ Read full story ](https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/long-live-the-short-king-why-4-hi) Moreover, on B300 and week-0 stack, moving the Engram table back to HBM did not improve results and stay within run-to-run variance. This is a result of the work optimizing DRAM offload, such as async, and overlap. SSD Offloading On B200, we created a unoptimized vLLM fork and stored the Engram tables in memory-mapped files on local SSDs. File backing lets the OS reclaim table pages when other applications need RAM. Pages already cached in memory can be served without reading the SSD again. Furthermore, note that we were unable to turn on GDS The unoptimized SSD implementation changes how rows reach the GPU. It copies row IDs to the CPU, deduplicates them, gathers the requested rows into pinned buffers, copies those rows back to the GPU and dequantizes them. This work runs between segments of the GPU execution graph. Native UVA performs row selection and dequantization directly on the GPU, avoiding the CPU round trip. A warm filesystem cache removes physical SSD reads, but leaves the coordination, row gathering and transfers. This is why a file already cached in RAM can still perform worse than a pinned DRAM table. The comparison measures the whole serving path; it does not separate the time spent on each of these operations. B200 DRAM dominates both measured SSD serving curves in total tokens per dollar and P90 interactivity. Near 125 tokens/s/user, DRAM delivers 121 million total tokens per dollar versus 52 million for SSD. For production serving, SSD offloading is likely not worth the tradeoff. On the B200 configurations we measured, SSD offloading loses on both measures: every observed SSD point has a DRAM alternative that delivers higher P90 interactivity and more total tokens per dollar. The only points where Cheaper storage does not automatically produce a cheaper inference service. Moving Engram to SSD leaves the same four expensive GPUs and the rest of the server in place. Reclaiming RAM only creates an economic benefit if it enables a cheaper server configuration or additional useful capacity. The current unoptimized path provides neither benefit, and the filesystem cache still consumes RAM when table pages are resident. Next we will look at the mechanisms and specific implementation of ngrams from DeepSeekv4.1 Flash, LongCat, Qwen3.8 Flash Next.
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Can researchers trust that AI models wonโt leak their ideas?
Research funders are asking how they can stop confidential scientific ideas in grant proposals from leaking out through large language models (LLMs), for example if reviewers use AI to help them judge applications. Last week, a row erupted in mathematics after OpenAI announced it had solved a notoriously difficult problem, only for another mathematician to demand answers over whether the company had used ideas he had fed into its models. The spat, and the broader issue of idea leakage through AI models, was discussed by funders at an R&D policy conference held in Paris on September 14. At worst, it threatens to undermine the correct attribution of breakthroughs, one of the foundations of modern science. The mathematics dispute around OpenAI is โcertainly something we're looking atโ Jason Gallo, head of the newly established Office of Metascience at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), told the Blue Sky Forum, hosted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The controversy started on September 8, when OpenAI announced it had cracked a mathematical problem that had gone unsolved for 90 years. Using a swarm of AI agents, millions of dollarsโ worth of computing power and a new internal model, the company said it had finally proved that a long-used formula for modelling fluid dynamics breaks down under certain conditions. However, Tristan Buckmaster, a New York University mathematician who had been independently working with collaborators on the same problem using OpenAIโs Codex tool, hit back with a statement questioning whether the company had snooped on his Codex sessions to gain an advantage. OpenAI has always denied it looked up the โspecific user dataโ of Buckmaster and colleagues. However, the company initially admitted that โwhile unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our modelsโ ,โ although its proofs โdiffer significantlyโ from Buckmasterโs. The firm later said that, following an investigation, it concluded that Buckmasterโs Codex prompts โcould not have influenced the [OpenAI] system in any way, including through training.โFunder concernYet OpenAIโs initial admission that its model might have ingested Buckmasterโs ideas, then spat them out to its own mathematicians, has scientistsworriedthat their work could leak out if shared with AI. Some AI tools give users an opt-out option to stop their sessions from training the model. If such guarantees can be trusted, this gives scientists some confidence they can use an LLM to develop an idea without the risk of it leaking out.But thereโs a bigger potential vulnerability. To win money to investigate ideas, scientists have to share them with funding bodies. These grant proposals are normally kept strictly confidential, to prevent other scientists from scooping them, or to protect commercially valuable intellectual property. To preserve this confidentiality, when the NSF uses AI models, โwe have to be sure that it's not making server calls out to an external party, leaking that data,โ said Gallo to delegates in Paris. Leaks through reviewersHowever, funders normally use external academic reviewers to assess proposals. And there are growing worries that these reviewers are feeding grant ideas into AI models to help them make a judgement. Research funders have noticed that peer review reports and funding recommendations have โsuddenly become much longer, more detailed and complex,โ said Diogo Machado, head of the data science unit at Technopolis, a science and technology-focused consultancy. โThe sense is that reviewers are increasingly using generative AI in their review work, even where guidelines sometimes forbid it,โ he told Science|Business. โThis is very difficult for funders to control or prove.โ Happening at scaleThis sharing of confidential proposals with AI models is โhappening at scale already,โ said James Wilson, executive director of the Research on Research Institute, based at University College London, during the debate in Paris. In response, Gallo said the NSF had โstrict guidanceโ around the uploading of proposals to AI models. But he added the NSF was mulling new types of assessment to make sure applicants were truly the originators of their ideas, such as following a short-form proposal with an oral presentation, which would allow the foundation to โreally interrogate the investigator on their intellectual contribution.โ Related articlesHow can Europe cope with a flood of AI-assisted research grant proposals?The risks and benefits of AI in screening research grant proposals Viewpoint: AI could make scientific overload worseโFor us as funders, a lot of the ways to ensure that the application remains the applicant's own intellectual contribution, those ways are quite regressive,โ Peter Clifford, head of strategy at Research Ireland, told delegates. โThey're maybe ten or 15 or 20 years old, and they don't scale particularly well.โ Disputes over the origin of ideas are as old as modern science. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent more than a decade arguing over who invented calculus, for example. And long before LLMs emerged, academics would agonise over how much of their early work to reveal at conferences, in case their colleagues scooped them, Jack Leahy, a senior metascience advisor to the UK government, told delegates. But AI was โacceleratingโ the โproblems of the system,โ he said.
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Ukrainian defence tech seeks new ways to scale up
Since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine's defence sector has expanded several-fold, becoming a significant source of military innovation, especially in unmanned systems, counter-drone technologies, electronic warfare and AI-driven combat systems. But finding the funds and personnel to scale up and to reach international markets remains a challenge.Spurred on by the demands of the front-line, Ukrainian defence companies say they can develop a minor component in a couple of weeks, or major hardware or software solutions within a year. This is several times faster than the usual development cycles in the sector. Tencore, founded in 2024, is now one of Ukraineโs largest providers of unmanned ground vehicles, well exceeding the production of NATO members in this category. Odd Systems, a Ukrainian combat cameras developer founded in 2023, launched its first thermal camera in 2024. Less than two years later, it is developing the fourth generation of the product, one that has evolved into a full vision system.According to Michael Singer, managing partner at Verne Capital, a venture capital fund supporting defence companies in Europe, this speed is down to the short feedback loop between the developer and the end user. โUkrainian companies develop technologies in close interaction with soldiers and military units, test them under real combat conditions and rapidly incorporate feedback into the next generation of the product,โ he says. โSometimes we need to react to feedback and deploy an upgrade within hours,โ says Polina Tymchenko, the spokesperson for Himera, which develops electronic warfare-resistant walkie-talkies. โIt means that, as a company, you have to have a higher tolerance for risk, and also design your products in a way that fosters those quick changes.โGetting a product deployed by a combat command involves no paperwork other than a purchase order, says Perry Boyle, co-founder and chief executive of Mits Capital, a Ukrainian-US investment group focused on attracting capital for Ukraine's defence tech sector. โNew weapons can be developed and deployed based largely on handshakes.โNevertheless, the speed of development is largely subject to the level of funding, says Iryna Sukhomlyn, head of business development at RMachine, a developer of unmanned ground systems. โFinancial support needs to start much earlier, particularly at technology readiness level 3-5, not only when most of the technological risk has already been removed,โ she says.In 2025, Ukrainian defence tech companies attracted about $129 million in investment, with the true figure likely higher given the share of undisclosed security-sensitive deals, according to a report published by the Kyiv School of Economics. These investments were primarily concentrated in the AI and software segment, as they are considered a lower financial risk.Scaling production is a major barrierAccording to Iryna Supruniuk, business development director at Odd Systems, proving a defence product in Ukraine is not the end of the development process, but the beginning of a continuous evolution, since operational requirements change rapidly. โContinuous iteration remains our highest priority,โ she says.It's also when production must scale up, which represents a major hurdle. โScaling production requires capital, manufacturing capacity, components, certification, procurement access and reliable supply chains,โ Singer says. Scale-up is also hampered by demographic pressures, especially a shortage of young specialists needed to expand engineering teams. Companies have reported struggling to replace specialists lost due to Russian attacks, mobilisation and emigration. In order to meet this scale-up challenge and finance arms production, begun allowing defence technologies to be exported, assuming it has an excess capacity. It has also announced the creation of ten defence and weapons export centres across Europe by the end of 2026.According to Singer, a technology that has demonstrated its value under real combat conditions has a fundamentally different credibility than a product that has only been tested in a laboratory or training environment. But combat validation alone doesnโt automatically create an international business. โCompanies still need access to foreign defence ministries and procurement organisations, international certification, financing for production scale-up and, in many cases, local industrial partners,โ he says.Already in 2026, the EU has signed several agreements with Ukraine that aim at joint defence technology development and production. These include allowing Ukraine to join the European Defence Fund, signing a financing agreement under the European Defence Industry Programme, and setting up the EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance.For Singer, it is important that European defence companies donโt just see their Ukrainian partners as technology suppliers, but rather as potential innovation partners. โUkrainian companies bring speed, operational experience and an exceptional ability to iterate. European partners can provide industrial capacity, capital, established supply chains and access to European procurement markets.โProcurement possibilitiesWhen it comes to exports, the procurement and compliance processes involved require time, taking months or even years, and money. In other words, resources that small defence tech companies need if they are to improve and scale up their technologies. According to Sukhomlyn of RMachine, if the priority is to rapidly increase available defence capabilities, then the processes need to reflect that urgency. โIf Europe wants defence innovation at wartime speed, its administrative processes also need to operate much closer to wartime speed,โ she says, highlighting a need for support with certification, market access and mutual recognition of relevant testing. โOtherwise, we risk having excellent technology available but spending years making it administratively eligible to be purchased.โRelated articlesRussia widens targeting of European research centresEU must support research managers in central and eastern Europe, says Visegrad fund headThis is a lesson Europeโs defence sector would do well to learn, Singer says. โDefence innovation needs to be organised around the speed and requirements of the end user, not around the speed of the bureaucracy.โSupruniuk says the European defence sector should rethink the balance between quality and quantity. โIn many cases, a good-enough system available in thousands of units creates greater operational value than a perfect system available in dozens.โโFor decades, everyone has been looking for that all-powerful, exquisite system that can protect everyone,โ adds Tymchenko. โWe see in crime that only scalable, dedicated, affordable solutions can actually defend democracies.โ
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