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Inside the mad gold rush of defense tech startups
Entrepreneurs and tech founders are in a mad gold rush to build the next generation of bombs, missiles, and drones.
Eve Muirhead: Winter Olympic gold medal-winning curler revokes retirement
Winter Olympic gold medallist Eve Muirhead revokes her retirement, saying being Team GB's chef de mission at this year's Games has inspired her to return to curling after four years away.
700-acre motor sports park in Powhatan gets thumbs-down from planning commission
“It’s not going to stay a 700-acre hunting property forever,” said Throttle Therapy owner Scott McAdoo. “We’re just trying to keep Powhatan rural by supporting outdoor recreation.”
Baron Von Opperbean reaches 10,000 visitors. What's next?
An all-ages immersive attraction, Baron Von Opperbean (or BVO) opened May 1 in the former Mississippi River Museum space on Mud Island.
Viewpoint: Europe needs a new scientific contract
The White House's new science strategy should be required reading in the Berlaymont and every European capital.Not because Europe should copy it. Parts of it should concern Europeans deeply. But because it asks the question Europe has so far avoided while steadily losing ground in the global race for technological leadership.Europe already possesses many of the world's finest universities, scientists and research-intensive companies. It produces world-leading research in fields ranging from quantum technologies and biotechnology to climate science. Yet time and again Europe generates the scientific breakthroughs while others build the companies, industries and strategic advantages around them, particularly in digital technologies. Increasingly, we find ourselves regulating technologies whose underlying capabilities were developed elsewhere.This is not primarily a scientific failure. It is an institutional one.The settlement that shaped modern science policy emerged after the Second World War. In Science, the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush argued that governments should invest in fundamental research while protecting scientists from political direction. Public investment was justified precisely because no government, university or company could predict where the next transformative discovery would emerge.That scientific contract served liberal democracies extraordinarily well. It underpinned decades of advances in medicine, computing, energy and communications, but the world for which it was designed no longer exists.Artificial intelligence is transforming not only technology but the production of knowledge itself. Advanced chips, computing power, data and scientific instruments have become strategic assets. Scientific knowledge now diffuses globally almost instantly. Competitive advantage increasingly lies not in making discoveries first, but in possessing the infrastructure, capital, engineering capability and institutions required to translate those ideas into products, industries and strategic advantage.The old boundaries between science, industrial policy, national security and geopolitics have largely disappeared. Dual-use technologies now underpin both economic power and military deterrence.The US has recognised this shift. In July, the White House published Science: A New Golden Age, a comprehensive attempt to rethink the relationship between science and national power. The report builds on Bush's legacy, but departs from his framework in important ways. Science is no longer treated simply as the source of future discoveries. It is presented as the foundation of economic resilience, technological leadership and national security. AI, advanced infrastructure and the capacity to build become as important as discovery itself.Yet the report also reveals a striking paradox. The same administration calling for “a new golden age” of US science has simultaneously proposed deep cuts to the federal research enterprise while expanding political influence over the allocation of public research funding. Europe should therefore distinguish between the report's diagnosis and its prescription. The diagnosis, that science has become a strategic asset, is compelling. But the prescription is self-defeating. Long-term technological leadership depends on strong universities, academic freedom and the institutional autonomy that makes scientific discovery possible. This distinction matters. Bush's achievement was never simply to make science serve national strength. It was to establish a division of labour in which governments invested in research without attempting to direct discovery itself. Scientific breakthroughs emerge precisely because researchers retain the freedom to pursue questions whose value cannot yet be demonstrated and whose conclusions cannot be anticipated.Neither China, nor the USAs science becomes more strategically important, the temptation to politicise it inevitably grows. But scientific freedom is not an obstacle to technological leadership, it is an essential precondition.China represents the opposite model. For decades it has integrated science, manufacturing, infrastructure and industrial policy into a single national strategy. Its ability to mobilise resources around critical technologies is formidable. But it does so within an authoritarian system where scientific priorities are increasingly inseparable from political power.Europe should imitate neither model. It should learn from the strategic ambition of the US without importing its growing politicisation of science. And it should learn from China's capacity to build without adopting its concentration of power.Instead, Europe needs a scientific contract of its own. Bush's scientific contract protected the freedom to discover because the defining challenge of the 20th century was producing new knowledge. Europe's next scientific contract must preserve that freedom while ensuring that scientific discoveries can be converted into technological, industrial and strategic capability. Because in a transactional world, Europe's freedom to shape its own future depends on its capacity to build it.Related articlesThe US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to knowEuropean researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationNIH turmoil risks reciprocal EU-US access to health research fundingThis does not mean subordinating free science to competitiveness or industrial policy. On the contrary. Scientific autonomy remains the first principle of Europe's next scientific contract. Governments should not direct scientific discovery. Their responsibility is to ensure that Europe's scientific, industrial, financial and regulatory institutions work together rather than in isolation.Meeting that responsibility requires far more than research funding. European researchers need access to world-class computing infrastructure, advanced laboratories, shared datasets and scientific facilities. Innovative companies need patient capital, testing environments and a genuine single market in which they can scale without facing 27 different regulatory regimes. Public procurement must evolve from purchasing existing technologies to creating markets for new ones. Regulators must become partners in experimentation rather than guardians of yesterday's rules.A connecting architectureEurope does not need to invent the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) model from scratch. Britain's Aria, Germany's Sprind and Wellcome Leap already show that Europe can build institutions capable of taking high-risk, mission-oriented bets while preserving democratic accountability. The challenge now is not to create more isolated initiatives, but to connect them to Europe's broader scientific, industrial and financial system so that breakthrough discoveries can scale.Above all, Europe must stop treating research, innovation, industrial policy, finance and security as separate policy domains. The challenge is no longer to create excellent institutions in each of these fields, but to make them work as one European innovation system. Europe's strength will increasingly depend not on excellence within institutions, but on excellence across them.Europe's ambition should be neither to imitate the US nor to emulate China. It should demonstrate that scientific freedom, democratic legitimacy and technological capability are not competing objectives, but mutually reinforcing strengths. In an age of geopolitical rivalry, Europe's greatest advantage may ultimately be its ability to attract the world's best talent by combining scientific freedom, democratic openness and technological ambition.Bush's scientific contract helped define the 20th century because it protected the freedom to discover. Europe's challenge is not to abandon that achievement but to extend it. The defining task of Europe's next scientific contract is to preserve the freedom to discover while building Europe's capacity to translate scientific discovery into technological power.Kaare Nielsen is founder of Pomus, a Danish think tank on science and innovation.
Science|Business summer reads of 2026
As most people in the European research and innovation policy bubble are going on a well-deserved summer break, we have come up with a list of our favourite books, podcasts and essays from the past year that ask deeper questions about science, technology and politics.BooksPasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation, by Donald StokesIf you haven’t read Pasteur’s Quadrant yet, now is the time. In the EU and elsewhere, we’re living through a period of dwindling faith that curiosity-driven research automatically leads to economic growth and technological progress. Pasteur’s Quadrant, published in 1997 by the Princeton academic Donald Stokes, is the most influential critique of the standard “linear model” of R&D: the idea that new discoveries made in ivory-tower labs get neatly passed on for commercialisation by start-ups. In reality, Stokes argues, practical applications often inspire more theorical lines of inquiry. Of course, we have long known that things are more complex than the linear model, but even today, it’s still often assumed in Brussels discourse. The book is a useful corrective, and is being used now to argue for new types of scientific institutions. David MatthewsThe Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism, by Jacob Hale Russel and Dennis PattersonAre society’s problems solvable by technical expertise alone? “If only the benighted would listen,” say Jacob Hale Russel and Dennis Patterson, two professors at Rutgers Law School who got frustrated with how scientists and politicians handled public health communication during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the book, they argue that clichéd mantras about scientific evidence and expertise perpetrated by academics, journalists and politicians have harmed public trust in the very institutions they were trying to defend. Paradoxically, slogans such as “we believe in science,” “follow the science” and “defer to the experts” can fuel mistrust in science, experts and democratic institutions. The authors criticise “condescension” and “technocratic paternalism” in the public discourse and make the case for a more nuanced approach to scientific and expert policy advice that rests on humility, doubt, scepticism and open dialogue. “Most complex social questions in fact revolve around values, not the recitation of unambiguous facts,” they say. Florin ZubascuBreakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan WangIn this book, Dan Wang compares the structural differences between the US and Chinese industrial policies, but raises a very timely question for innovation policy wonks: how can advanced manufacturing know-how contribute to technology-intensive economic growth? Wang says technology has three components: the tools, the blueprints and patents, and the process knowledge. The third component represents the “proficiency gained from practical experience, which isn’t easily communicated and requires years of implementation.” According to Wang, rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, policymakers should see them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers. Over the past decades, China has amassed “process knowledge” because capital flowed to complex fabrication facilities, while investors in the West have parked their money in capital-light businesses such as digital platforms or chip companies that focus on design. As it turns out, thanks to its oversized focus on manufacturing, China has gained remarkable advantages in the global technology race. Florin ZubascuBaltic: The Future of Europe, by Oliver MoodyWhat can Europe learn from the nine countries surrounding the Baltic Sea? Alongside the familiar stories about Estonia's digital transformation, the book examines how the region has used technology, resilience, education, governance and long-term thinking to respond to geopolitical, economic and security challenges. Innovation policy wonks might find fresh perspectives on how innovation can strengthen defence, societal resilience and Europe's capacity to adapt in an uncertain world. Whether or not you agree with all of Oliver Moody's conclusions, the book is a useful guide to a region that is increasingly shaping European debates on security, competitiveness and technology. Goda NaujokaityteThe Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf This book chronicles the wild and adventurous life of natural science pioneer Alexander von Humboldt who at some point in the 19th century seems to have been just about the most famous person in the world. Through scientific expeditions to the Andes Mountains and to the depths of Siberia, von Humboldt contributed a host of discoveries and concepts. During his life he met and formed relationships with historical figures as different as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Simon Bolivar, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles Darwin. He is also claimed to be the person in the world with most things named after him, a list that includes an ocean current, a penguin and a region of the Moon. Still venerated in Germany, with numerous scientific institutions named after him, von Humboldt has slipped out of public consciousness in most of the rest of the world. For anyone not familiar with him, this book does a good job of describing his fascinating life. Ole EllekrogCareless People, by Sarah Wynn-WilliamsYou may have heard this referred to as the book Meta doesn’t want you to read. The 2025 memoir from Sarah Wynn-Williams, former director of global public policy at Meta, then just called Facebook, includes explosive claims about everything from a toxic workplace culture to how the company worked with advertisers to target vulnerable teens, and the lengths it was prepared to go to in order to break into China. It’s a fascinating insight into how and why the tech company gradually shifted its approach to policy, whether in the US, Europe or Asia. Meta has denied the allegations in the book, and last year won an emergency ruling to prevent Wynn-Williams from promoting it. In response, the author is now suing her former employer. If that doesn’t make you want to read it. Martin GreenacrePodcastsThe Europeans: Europe’s anti-ElonThis podcast is a great choice for a light-hearted dose of European policy and culture news. Most of it has little to do with research, innovation and technology, but this particular podcast features an interview with Mastadon’s founder Eugen Rochko. He talks about his experience running an open-source, federated, European-made social media platform, and leaving it all behind. The conversation, which starts 14 minutes in, gently encourages us to reflect on what kind of technology we, as Europeans, want to make. Goda NaujokaityteSolarpunk and how we escape dystopiaNew technologies are very often taken from science fiction. Alberto Santos-Dumont, inventor the airship, was inspired as a child by the adventure stories of Jules Verne. OpenAI’s attempt to build a personal assistant with the voice of Scarlett Johansson was lifted from the 2013 film Her, completely ignoring the movie’s cautionary message. So if we want better tech, we need to imagine it first. Unfortunately, the state of current sci-fi is relentlessly dystopian, giving inventors precious few ideas or hope. However, a new genre, Solarpunk, which envisages a technologically advanced but ecologically harmonious future, is now taking off. The actual tech the genre imagines, such as permaculture, renewable energy or community repair workshops, while nice, isn’t all that inspiring or ambitious. But it’s a first step towards rescuing sci-fi from its pessimistic Blade Runner rut. David MatthewsEveryday AbundanceLaunched in June, Everyday Abundance is a podcast that tells the stories of the inventions we now take so for granted that we barely given them a second thought. For example, the washing machine, which liberated women from a lifetime “bent over washtubs and washboards.” Or modern dentistry, which ended the reality that “tooth pain was simply part of human life.” Historians of technology, Virginia Postrel and Charles C Mann are very much on the optimistic end of the spectrum when it comes to the capacity of invention to improve human life. Here, they set out their case: if it wasn’t for progress, you might be hunched over a washtub with toothache rather than reading these words. David Matthews‘We will not know what we lost’: Conservation fallout a year after USAID shutdownSince his return to the White House, Donald Trump has been on a mission to undermine science. He slashed jobs at federal agencies, terminated grants in some research areas, took unprecedented control over university affairs and, within hours of his inauguration, suspended the US Agency for International Development. While its initial focus was to administer health and food aid around the world, it had since expanded to conservation projects. The result? Some of these projects were stopped abruptly. In this Mongabay podcast, environmental reporter Michelle Nijhuis tells the story of the EcoGuard conservation programme in Liberia, whose local patrols had helped protect rainforests, monitor endangered wildlife and track illegal threats. From one day to the next, these were left without salaries. Luckily, she notes, the initiative was able to get emergency funding from international NGOs, but its future remains “incredibly uncertain.” Juliette PortalaEssaysThe Mars Delusion, by Henry WismayerWhy is humankind so fixated on establishing a colony on Mars? asks London-based writer Henry Wismayer. From space evangelists promoting Martian settlement as an insurance policy, to billionaire Jeff Bezos, who said humans should settle on Mars “because it’s cool,” the mission is not running short of advocates. However, in this essay, Wismayer reminds us that some critics expect any future Mars pioneer to end up “irradiated, sick, mad and dead.” Scientists have already looked into the possible effects of prolonged exposure to Martian gravity, and it’s not pretty: muscle shrinking, bones weakening, changes to the central nervous system and other biological modifications to make us all reconsider the journey. “Some researchers have forecast that the future settler, after generations of evolutionary conditioning, will look less like an Übermensch and more like ET,” Wismayer writes. Juliette Portala
Sports' sordid side shows in Ole Miss-LSU transfer lawsuit
Last season, Princewill Umanmielen and Devin Harper helped Ole Miss to the most football victories in school history. This season, they will play for the Rebels' hated rival, LSU.
NASA’s IXPE May Have Proven 90-Year-Old Theory
Scientists using NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) conducted more than 140 hours of observations of the magnetar 1E 1547-5408, between March
The MAX announces Mississippi Arts + Entertainment Hall of Fame 2026-2027 class
Five artists named to state’s highest honor in arts and entertainment
Live entertainment permit approved for Mills Modern Social in Tempe
The Tempe Design Review Commission recently approved a permit to allow live entertainment until 1:55 a.m. at the Mills Modern Social bar and billiards hall in a commercial center at the southeast …
Testing Astronaut Health in 30 Seconds of Weightlessness
UC Davis researcher Rich Whittle joined an international team aboard a parabolic flight to study how microgravity affects blood flow to protect astronauts during long-duration space missions.
Preview: Bull Mania 2026 in Holdenville
The Holdenville Roundup Club’s Bull Mania 2026 event is set for Saturday night at 8 p.m., featuring cowboys competing for $40,000 in prize money as part of the LJ Jenkins Bull Riding Tour at 971 Fairgrounds Road in Holdenville, Oklahoma. Admission is $15 for adults and $5 for kids 10 and under, followed by a dance.
Summit League unveils 2025-26 Commissioner's List of Academic Excellence
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – The Summit League released a list of more than 1,000 student-athletes named to the 2025-26 Commissioner’s List of Academic Excellence Thursday as that number grew by more than 50 from a season ago. The list includes student-athletes from the League’s 17 different sports.
SpaceX: What can scientists learn from a Falcon 9 rocket hitting the Moon?
While the collision was an accident, it is a unique scientific gift for planetary geologists that could provide important data for future space missions.
SpaceX: What can scientists learn from a Falcon 9 rocket hitting the Moon?
While the collision was an accident, it is a unique scientific gift for planetary geologists that could provide important data for future space missions.
Chartbook 464 The"China squeeze" - the politics of development counterfactuals.
There are three types of China shock discourse. Each has a distinct temporal register. China shock 1.0 was a phrase coined by US academics in the 2010s to retrospectively summarize the impact on particular US labour markets, which they identified through painstaking empirical investigation. China shock 2.0 on everyone’s lips in Europe in the mid 2020s is an alarm raised by trans-Atlantic policy thinkers warning of a coming disaster which they project onto Europe’s ailing car industry. The third type of China shock discourse - commonly known as the “China squeeze” launched most recently by Indian economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in the pages of Foreign Affairs - mobilizes a different, more speculative temporal register: the counterfactual realm of alternate history. The China squeeze argument asks not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what might have been. Specifically, what options for economic development might have been open to Global South economies like India or the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, had it not been for China’s spectacular industrialization since the late 1990s and the persistent competitiveness of China’s manufacture in low-skilled segments. Chatterjee and Subramanian’s argument is that whilst China has built a powerful position in electrical machinery and other high-skill manufacturing, which is now delivering China Shock 2.0, it also continues to run a trade surplus in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing. This surplus is large and has remained largely unchanged in fifteen years. Indeed, in the 2010s, in trade with low-income countries, China’s surplus rapidly increased. On their reading, this squeezes low-income producers in low-skill sectors in which they “should” be able to compete. Source: “China’s Mercantilist Squeeze on Developing Countries” Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. Peterson Institute for International Economics 26-7 May 2026 Chatterjee and Subramanian’s wording is telling: (emphasis mine) The canonical trajectory of economic development in the post-World War II period is for countries to transition from agriculture to manufacturing, first in low-skilled manufacturing and then later on to high-skill manufacturing (Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2013). At the global level, this implies that high-income countries (HICs) that once specialized in low-skilled activities cede manufacturing export space to poorer countries that come along to occupy that space. In 1965, advanced economies accounted for about 60 percent of global value-added exports in four key low-skilled manufacturing sectors, i.e., apparel, leather, textiles, and footwear. Over time this share declined and began to be occupied first by the East Asian tigers and, beginning in the late 1990s, by China. Today China accounts for about 50 percent of the global market. The question is whether China, with its rising prosperity, is continuing to behave like its richer counterparts and ceding export space to poorer followers or to behave unlike them and continuing to occupy space. In terms of the conceptual maneuvers it performs, of the three China shock discourses, the “China squeeze” argument is by far the most ambitious. After all, it bases its critique of China on a counterfactual imagining of the world. Like any counterfactual argument, to construct this alternative reality it must rely on a heuristic model. To make their argument Chatterjee and Subramanian mobilize two key claims. The first reference point is the actual history of rich-country industrialization, what they refer to as the “canonical path”. The idea is that countries transition from agriculture to light industry and low-skilled manufacturing and from there up the value chain. To make this useful as a standard of comparison and a means to construct a normative standard, they adjust sectoral export shares for two factors: 1. the underlying level of economic development of the exporting country, as measured by national income and 2. the degree to which the sector in question is internationalized. The idea being that for a high income country to have a high export share in low-skill sectors is anomalous and even more so if that particular product is highly internationalized and thus suitable for being “conceded” to lower-income competitors. Where should this process end? Here Chatterjee and Subramanian introduce their second benchmark. Their normative idea of a global development path is one in which, in due course, low-skill manufacturing exports are distributed in proportion to a country’s share in the global labour force. They imagine, in other words, a world of proportional, polycentric global development without much national specialization in low-skill manufacturing. A useful benchmark is that, in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, a country’s share of world exports should be broadly commensurate with its share of the world’s low-skilled labor endowment. … In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, this would be true if value added per worker and export propensities, i.e., fraction of output that is exported, are the same across countries. It is this pleasant liberal vista of orderly global development, progressing towards a general distribution of low-skilled manufacturing against which they judge reality and conclude that the low-income countries are suffering a “China squeeze”. China is not exiting low-skill sectors fast enough Allowing for its gdp level and the degree of globalization, China’s share of low-skill manufacturing exports is far higher than it “should” be. Relative to population, its low-skill share of exports is far too high. That in turn yields the conclusion that huge numbers of jobs - the authors suggest tens of millions - are being hoarded by China. For the four sectors captured in figure 4, this excess in value-added exports is $110 billion in 2022. For all low-skilled sectors overall captured in appendix figure D.1, excess value-added exports amount to $365 billion. The crowding out of LMIC exports by China is therefore substantial. Both these claims have in common that they are strong structuralisms. The first is that development paths ought to resemble each other. The second is that broadly speaking as far as low-skilled manufacturing is concerned, all countries are alike. If the world currently diverges from the distribution of trade implied by these assumptions, if China is not following the advanced economy path and has huge exports, this must be the result of “policy”, which the authors then put in question as illegitimate or unfair. Thus the naturalistic construction of a canonical path leading to a “level” distribution of low-skilled manufacturing reveals itself to be a polemical tool. From the point of view of China shock polemics, this discourse is no doubt welcome. But as an account of economic history, it must surely be regarded as nothing short of bamboozling. Development paths do not follow a regular, natural sequence. As David Fishman put it aptly, “development is not a queue”. They are always and everywhere, through and through political. Development is not so much a process, as a project. Each such project is more or less well adjusted to its context. As Gerschenkron taught uneven and combined development implies differentiation rather than simple imitation on a single parth. It may be true that Europe and the US exited relatively early from low-skill work. But clearly technology has changed. As C&S themselves point out, China no longer enjoys a low wage environment. Do they really believe that such huge differences can be accounted for either by industrial policy, which as they admit does not operate powerfully in low-skill sectors, or by exchange rate manipulation? What is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining the persistence of “low-skill” manufacturing in China are surely the network effects of complex supply chains. Indeed the label of “low-skill” may miss the point. The degree of globalization which Chatterjee and Subramanian decide to conjure away in their model of the development path - to allow for the fact that Europe and American textiles exporters did not enjoy just-in-time logistics in the 1950s - obscures the point that the networks through which Chinese factories supply the world are themselves key parts of the low-skill industrialization project. China isn’t knocking out 1970s style “cheap”. It has redefined the entire product cycle. C&S’s casual reference to “T-shirts” is telling. In today’s “fast fashion”, there is weight on both terms. Fashion and fast. China’s success in delivering on both at unprecedentedly high speed and at unprecedentedly low cost, isn’t a low-skill operation at all. If we see development trajectories not as the serial repetition of the same, but as distinctive, crafted projects that cumulate in complex agglomerations of skill, technology and labor, then this explains why the assumption that low-skilled manufacturing should follow the distribution of population flies in the face of all experience. As countless cases attest, low-wage, low-income developed economies are not by themselves the makings of a competitive production base. As Leon Liao puts it quite fairly: “International trade has never been allocated according to population. A country’s population gives it no natural claim to an equivalent share of global exports." And the remarkable fact is that Subramanian alone and with co-authors has long been making this point, not to pillory China, as is the case of the tendentious _Foreign Affair_s and Peterson pieces, but to highlight the great counterpart to China’s industrial success, namely India’s relative failure. The much-quoted Foreign Affairs piece showed low-skill export shares only for China, not for India. If you put both countries in the picture as Chaterjee and Subramanian have done on other occasions, the picture looks like this. China is far above the line, but India, almost as large in terms of population, is no less anomalous, just in the opposite direction. As far as global populations are concerned, and the imagining of tens of millions of “squeezed” jobs, it is this Sino-Indian pair that account for a huge share of the action. What this graph reveals is not China’s cheating, but India’s “greatest development failure”, at least this is the argument made Arvind Subramanian, this time in co-authorship with Devesh Kapur, in their major book, A Sixth of Humanity. Independent India’s Development Odyssey which appeared with Oxford University Press earlier this year. In this highly critical work on India’s development, China is repeatedly evoked, not to criticize but as a benchmark against which to illuminate what India’s political economy has not delivered i.e. large-scale formal employment for hundreds of millions of citizens. Kapur and Subramanian leave no doubt, if you want to understand why China, not India was the main driver of manufacturing globalization from the 1980s, don’t look to slots opening up in the division of labour thanks to the liberal mindedness of advanced economies, look to the contrasting political economy of the Maoist PRC and India’s post-independence political economy. As Kapur and Subramian note: The great divergence between China and India did not begin in 1978 with the Deng reforms—it was well underway by then. In one of the great ironies of modern history, the conditions created by Maoism turned out to be a great launching pad for industrial globalization. As the comparison of India and China in 1980 makes clear, to imagine manufacturing would be equally distributed when populations are so differently endowed in terms of educational and nutritional is fanciful. Here is the data from Kapur and Subramanian, data which I explored back at the very beginning of Chartbook. As Kapur and Subramanian insist, the striking fact is that even as India’s growth accelerated from the 1980s, structural change has not. Formal employment in India lags woefully behind. Why? As Kapur and Subramanian note, the path-dependent impact of India’s poor early start was devastating. The list of factors they mention is long and weighty: We argue for a new five-fold explanation applicable at different stages of Indian history: in the initial stages, the legacy of two key pre-1980s policies, the neglect of agriculture and the strangling of the domestic private sector, were critical. The failure of broad-based agricultural growth militated against rural industrialization, which would have been devoted to satisfying local needs that would have necessarily been labour intensive. Then, when the boom came after 1980, the thicket of regulation and broader labour protections that were legislated prematurely in a nascent democracy, underpinned by a deep ideological aversion to private capital in general and big capital specifically, became a barrier to attaining the size that would be necessary to compete globally. Similarly, the reforms after 1991, while wide-ranging, did not quite encompass non-tradeable inputs critical to manufacturing, namely, land, logistics infrastructure and power. A combination of low investment (logistics infrastructure), regulation (land) and the continued monopoly supply by state governments (power), combined with residual socialism, kept costs at 75–100 per cent above efficient supply. These factors were compounded on the supply side by the government, which dominated the formal labour market and established exorbitantly high wages at the lower end of the skill spectrum. This made their employment in the labour-intensive sector by the private sector less attractive. Finally, when the services sector and its exports boomed, wages soared even further via a Dutch Disease effect: one successful tradeable sector killed and cannibalized another less-skilled tradable sector, namely, manufacturing. Thus, scarcity-inducing policies of the planning era, precocious democracy and a Gandhian aversion to size; inefficient, monopolistic supply of critical non-tradable inputs; the behemoth of government; and super-successful skill-intensive services successively undermined India’s unskilled labour employment opportunities. The employment failure seems to have been over-determined. … Less quantifiable but no less important are some of the sociological factors that have undermined manufacturing and factory jobs. Take the impact of the success of the IT sector—located in urban areas with better working conditions, such as air-conditioned offices, good schools for children and attractive entertainment options. It became a more attractive place for engineering and management graduates to flock to. … Consider manufacturing and female employment. Indian society makes it difficult for women to work, reflected in India’s unusually low female labour force participation (elaborated in Chapter XIII). Indian society, in particular the routine harassment of women in public spaces, makes it even more difficult for them to travel long distances to take up work.37 Combined with onerous regulations on creating hostels and dormitories for women—which, in turn, prevents multiple shifts of operation—factories need to be located in areas with a large female labour pool. While firms can take apparel plants to female labour or bring them to the plants by building large-scale dormitories, this raises costs. If there was a case for subsidies to encourage labour-intensive manufacturing, housing subsidies to build dormitories for women workers would be a good place to start. All of this meant, that when opportunities did open up, in part thanks to adjustments in China, India was in no position to take advantage. Here is the account of the 2020s from Kapur and Subramanian. It stands in dizzying contrast to the one-sided, “China squeeze” argument delivered in the Peterson and Foreign Affairs pieces: In 2022, for example, India’s share of global exports in clothing (the canonical labour-intensive sector) was 3.1 per cent compared to 32 per cent for China. This is extremely disappointing because China started vacating export space in this sector after the Global Financial Crisis as its wages started rising; it then vacated further space in the aftermath of geopolitical developments that led investors to seek alternative investment locations. Between its peak and today, China lost about 7.5 percentage points of global export share (worth about $43 billion in 2022); over this period, India’s export share remained stagnant at 3 per cent, while that of Vietnam and Bangladesh rose by 3.5 to 4 percentage points. China’s loss did not translate into any gain for India in terms of low-skill exports and employment. Put differently, when the conditions for dynamism and prosperity were established after 1991, and even more tantalizingly when the global export opportunities opened up, it was as if India was a high-wage economy and only skilled labour could benefit from the dynamism. It had converted its physically abundant unskilled workforce into an economically expensive resource, penalizing its use. It is not my mission here to argue for or against Kapur and Subramanian’s interpretation of India’s development trajectory. The point in this context is simply that the “China squeeze” such as it is can only be understood, in relation to the heavy burden of domestic constraints that Kapur and Subramanian so unsparingly enumerate. I am concentrating here on India because it is the great counterpart to China and the unspoken reference point of the “China squeeze” discourse. But the point is more general. Can anyone with a straight face suggest that the main problems afflicting the development of South Africa or Nigeria, the great centers of mass underemployment in sub-saharan Africa, are cheap competition from China driven by Beijing’s industrial policy and an undervalued RMB? Likewise, is the main problem of the American working-class the threat of Chinese competition or the manifest crisis of social reproduction in the United States itself? The point here, as in the discourse around China shock 2.0 in Europe, is to insist that we should not normalize the world and pathologize China, without actually investigating what is going on in America’s industrial wastelands, the German car industry, or India’s lopsided labour market. One-sided pathologization should be understood for what it is, a polemical gesture. Concepts like China shock and China squeeze are, what Reinhart Koselleck, following Carl Schmitt, would have described as “asymmetrische Kampfbegriffe”, or “asymmetrical counter-concepts” or “asymmetrical combat concepts”. If the function of arguments like the “China squeeze” is to alert elites in the rest of the world of the need to rejuvenate and energize their development projects, so be it. But let us see the resulting discourses as the mobilizing interventions that they are. Interestingly, a significant slice of China’s public sphere - the so-called industrial party - have been obsessed for the last twenty years with precisely these questions of counterfactual economic history. Since the mid 2000s, a massive online discourse developed around an alternative history in which Chinese techno-patriots were asked to imagine how they would proceed if they had the possibility of traveling back in time to transport modern technology into the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) thus averting the “great divergence” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a fantasy of course, but also a goad. The point was not directed at Westerners. The alternate history is dramatically nationalist, but few n the West had even heard of it until recently. The adherents of the industrial party are not liberal moralists. They don’t project natural ladders of international development and ask why others don’t cede space. They take the Realpolitik of global economic development for granted. Their pointe was directed against fellow Chinese. The rallying cry of the alternative narrative was this: Now that we are beginning to gain steam and push forward on our national development path, now that we are breaking out of the inferior position assigned to us even in the early years following WTO accession, do not lose yourself in humanistic imaginings about better futures. In the spirit of Deng, they called on China to embrace the hard truth of development. Perhaps one might of the Industrial Party as a cultural trend born out of desire for symbolic revenge against those who had inflicted the century of humiliation. In terms of the various temporalities of the “China shock” - retrospective, prospective and counterfactual - one might think of the Industrial Policy discourse as truly speculative, conjuring up the China shock that never was. Or perhaps one might better think of it as imagining a world in which a powerful China was no shock at all, but simply a defining fact of modern history. I love putting out Chartbook. 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Crooked Letter Sports: 111 years of sports writing… | Ep. 308
In Tyler CLeveland's absence, 51-year Mississipppi sports writing vetran Billy Watkins joins the podcast to co-host with Rick Cleveland, who has been covering
Newcastle captain to hold Arsenal medical after £75m fee agreed
Arsenal have agreed a fee for the signing of Bruno Guimaraes, with details of the deal emerging and the player receiving permission from Newcastle United to hold a medical.Photo by Jan Kruger/Getty Im...
Homewood planning commission approves entertainment venue and student housing proposals
The Homewood Planning Commission has unanimously approved plans for an outdoor entertainment venue and new student housing at Samford University, advancing both projects to the city council.
Michigan Science Center Offers FREE Admission on August 15 for Axalta Community Free Day
Whether you have a curious preschooler or a future engineer, the Michigan Science Center offers something for every age. Families can spend hours exploring interactive exhibits that make learning…
NASA Engineers Help Prolong Voyager 2’s Science Mission
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have successfully freed up power on Voyager 2, extending how long the spacecraft can continue to do
The Beauty Of Settled Science
Commenters convinced me I made a subtle mis-step in my framing of Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine. My framing emphasized that social priming studies had failed to replicate, but that many other subfields of psychology hadn’t. This naturally led commenters to point to failed replications in other subfields. Although none of these were as bad as social priming, few or none were entirely problem-free. Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have emphasized the difference between settled science and novel research. Here are some of my favorite psychology findings: The brain is sculpted by reinforcement learning, and a key driver of this learning is a prediction-error-based algorithm located in the nucleus accumbens and implemented through dopamine. Psychedelic drugs exert their effects through 5-HT2A receptors, pointing to a role for these receptors in some sort of construct like the balance between priors and new evidence. Certain cognitive functions are localized to certain brain areas (for example, impulse control to the frontal lobes; linguistic structure to Broca’s area, linguistic meaning to Wernicke’s area. But injure one of these areas, or render a certain function useless (eg a blind person having no more use for their visual cortex), and these mappings can gradually shift - suggesting that neurons are general-purpose compute whose specialization is a contingent fact about convenience and efficiency rather than a necessity. Most personality traits and general capabilities are about 50% genetic and 50% random, with little role for family environment or childhood history, with a few notable exceptions like partisan preference. Recent research complicates this story, but the further you go from this basic picture, the gnarlier the chains of indirect causation you require. Neurons fire together in “brain waves”, whose exact frequency corresponds with the character of consciousness; These divide neurons into natural subpopulations and linked graphs. The gamma rhythm corresponds surprisingly well to items in conscious awareness. GABA receptors seem to be involved in something like relaxation. By hitting different GABA receptors in different ways, you can modulate the exact type of relaxation you produce. Hitting GABA-A directly is too powerful and can cause dangerous levels of sedation, but allosteric modulation of GABA is an incredibly fruitful strategy that underlies drugs from benzos to barbituates to alcohol. If you know your GABA-A subunits, you can target specific subtypes of relaxation; for example, Ambien hits GABA-A1 and induces sleep. Memory divides somewhat fuzzily into bins of immediate-sensory, short-term, and long-term, with separate retrieval and storage functions, and separate systems for declarative vs. procedural learning. These can be harmed selectively, usually by hippocampal injury, so that some patients can remember their life stories but not form new long-term memories, or learn new skills like bike-riding but not new facts. The exact substrate of memory is unclear but seems to involve new synaptic connections between neurons in at least some way. The ability of modern psychology and psychiatry to treat mental illness is real but limited. SSRIs work for half or slightly fewer than half of patients; antipsychotics work with extreme side effects; benzodiazpines work but produce addiction and tolerance in many (not all) people. Most supplements are stuck in Poor Quality Study Replication Crisis Hell, but melatonin and l-theanine stand out as especially promising. Psychotherapy works with moderate effect size, but (with a few exceptions) seems to be more about the relationship with the provider than the details of the therapy itself. Mental hospitalization can sometimes defuse immediate crises but work less well than mental hospitals would like, with some studies showing overall negative effects. Schizophrenia is mostly genetic, but risk also increases with prenatal infection (especially rubella) and obstetric complications; there is suggestive evidence for roles of social stress and drug use (with psychedelics and marijuana making things worse, and nicotine if anything making things better). Bipolar and schizophrenia are so closely linked on a pathophysiological level that it seems like they might be the same disease; on the clinical level, they do seem to follow two separate courses/prognoses but can sometimes surprise clinicians by eg someone who seemed condemned to permanent schizophrenia unexpectedly recovering. The brain’s native reinforcement learning algorithms cash out in the phenomena of classical and operant conditioning; different reinforcement schedules reinforce at different levels, which can be exploited by bad actors to make especially compelling products (eg slot machines). None of these are immune to doubt. A few are speculative; one or two are genuinely unorthodox. But they’re all a step above one p = 0.049 paper that might not replicate. If they get overturned, they’ll be overturned by the same sort of genuine scientific shift that replaced Ptolemy with Copernicus or Lamarck with Darwin, not some sort of sordid discovery about someone entering random numbers into a spreadsheet. In 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about The Beauty Of Settled Science: If you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage. The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news. Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention. Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun. Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty [...] A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid. Psychology isn’t centrally the new paper in Annals Of Recently-Breaking News saying that an n=5 study showing that large portion sizes increase support for terrorism. Psychology is centrally ideas like brain waves, GABA receptors, reinforcement learning, twin studies, and connectionism. People who think differently are worrying too much about BREAKING NEWS!!!, and should stop. The key distinction isn’t “recent research in social psychology” vs. “recent research in cognitive/bio/behavioral psychology”, as my essay last week unfortunately implied. It’s recent research in general vs. the deposit of settled science, battle-tested hypotheses, and carefully-earmarked speculation. And part of the reason social priming in particular was such a disaster was that it defied that heuristic, building itself up over hundreds of studies until it approached or even entered the pantheon of settled science - before collapsing (5-HTTLPR was also sort of like this). This isn’t a claim that settled science is always right - Freud was “settled science” for a long time - just that there’s an intuitive distinction between the level of credence you should have in the existence of power posing vs. the existence of Broca’s Area. (I compounded this error by calling the last post “Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine”, which suggested I was talking about the new research rather than the settled science. I actually meant to distinguish between research-psychology-the-field vs. clinical-psychology-aka-therapy, but this framing unintentionally pushed against the point I wanted to make) Some commenters on the previous article understood this point, but challenged its weight. It’s very cool, they said, to know how many neurons are in which brain lobe, but the main way that Psychology affected their lives was through bad clickbait studies used to buttress dumb policies; some p = 0.049 study says that exposure to microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel into raisins, and now their company has to implement punitive DEI or be sued for hazardous work conditions. I won’t dispute this as an accurate description of how the sausage gets made, but it’s worth examining the trains of thought that connect this observation to a campaign against psychology in general: The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad, and I don’t have good heuristics for distinguishing dumb woke psychology from other psychology, so I’m going to assume it’s all wrong and bad. The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad; it seems useful to punish/discredit psychology as a whole to assist my campaign against it, so for propaganda purposes I will try to discredit psychology as a whole. To people in the first camp, my response is: come on, your heuristics aren’t that bad. “Microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel up like raisins” is in the woke category; “the hippocampal theta rhythm seems to be associated with both memory and pathfinding, suggesting an unexpected yet surprisingly compelling relationship between the two” is in the not-woke category, don’t play dumb here. To people in the second camp, my response is: deliberately exaggerated propaganda campaigns are bad and this is a confession, not an excuse. Inability to view science through anything but a political lens was what got us into this problem; doubling down on it is a temporary solution but a recipe for permanent disaster. If you pronounce entire fields of science to be acceptable collateral damage in your campaign against bad political actors, you will alienate not just scientists but patients, clinicians, and general lovers of truth. Instead, you can say the thing you mean - that woke partisans shouldn’t try to occupy and exploit the otherwise-noble science of psychology for their own political gain - and wage the same campaign with a halo rather than a comic-book-villain goatee. From the font of oracular wisdom that is Weird Sun Twitter: [ Vessel Of Spirit@VesselOfSpirit i love you all conditionally but i love the good part of you unconditionally. even if it becomes a very small part 2:11 AM · Jan 22, 2015 1 Reply · 5 Reposts · 29 Likes ](https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/558084551772471298) This is how I feel about psychology1, too, but with a touch more optimism. The good part of psychology is enormous, a hoard of endless treasures. You just have to look past the headlines! 1 To play devil’s advocate - should one always be so magnamious? Astrology? Phrenology? These seem different in that their entire orientation was flawed from the start; they didn’t simply fail to find the correct constellation-personality connections, the whole project of searching for connections between constellations and personality was doomed from the start. More difficult might be asking the same question about education research, which is notoriously bad. I don’t know enough about education research to know if there’s some settled science of correct and enlightening results lurking in the background beyond the day-to-day froth of poorly-conducted and politically-motivated studies. I think if it’s 90% bad, 10% good, it’s correct to call it bad as a compact way of communicating a useful truth; I think psychology is better than that, but admit it’s a tough judgment call.
Resident sues over $57 million Western Hills Sports Mall development
A lawsuit alleges the Cincinnati Planning Commission violated open meeting laws before approving the $57 million Westline Flats project in Westwood.
Planned VHC Health facility raises questions for county-owned site on S. Carlin Springs
Plans for a behavioral health facility on S. Carlin Springs Road are raising questions about the future of a nearby county-owned parcel. Forestry and Natural Resources Commission member Alex Sanders took a moment at a July 23 meeting to ask about the county's plan for a 4.5-acre site near VHC Health's proposed behavioral health and rehabilitation center.
Fans Upset Over Some New Vinyl Records Missing Content And Final Mixes
Artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Raye are catching flak from collectors and fans for selling incomplete records
Drazan nonprofit paid her consulting firm while lacking conflict policy
The Oregon governor candidate says the nonprofit complied with all laws. Experts say the missing safeguard raises questions.
Commissioners vote to keep health insurance spending the same as 2026
The county will likely need to change health insurance plans to avoid an anticipated 20% increase for next year under its current plan.
Bridging the Political Divides: Rural Women Running
Rural women running for political office this year gathered in a park near the Mississippi River in central Minnesota. Here is some of what they said. "It is going to be fast, and it is going to be hard, but we can get this done. I am done hearing that women cannot win, because look at us here.”
Advancing Science and Its People Through a Unified ACS Identity
The American Chemical Society (ACS) unveiled its evolved brand that reflects the organization's evolution, its growing global impact, and its vision for a world built on science. Launching during ACS' 150th anniversary year, the evolution strengthens how the organization delivers its mission to advance scientific knowledge, empower a global community, and champion scientific integrity.
NASA Engineers Help Prolong Voyager 2’s Science Mission
By switching off certain powered devices and substituting them with lower-powered alternatives, the team has been able to avoid turning off more science instruments.
Ben Nelson '28 is Blending Sports, Data, and Community
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Hackensack Meridian Health first to earn Joint Commission’s responsible health AI certification
Private consortiums have been attempting to put guardrails around the use of AI as federal regulations lag. HMH has been refining its AI governance structure for years, its medical informatics chief said.
Renovations at natural science museum making a great museum even better
The Mississippi Museum of Natural Science is getting a makeover and there are new fun things to do including having a sleepover at the museum.
Phillies Still Missing One Glaring Piece After Busy Trade Deadline
More Entertainment, More Fun: The Great New York State Fair Reveals 2026 Grounds Entertainment
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MLS Taps Private Equity Veteran As Next Commissioner
Don Garber had led the league since 1999.
Tommy Sullivan and John Ziegler to Perform at LI Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame on Aug 16th
As part of the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame Soundtrack to Summer Series, Musician Tommy Sullivan (a member of the Brooklyn Bridge) will perform LIVE music and Comedian John Ziegler will open with comedy set at the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame in Stony Brook Village (97 Main Street, Stony Brook, NY) on Aug. 16th from 3-4pm. The event is free for members or with general admission ticket purchase or $10 at the door concert ticket purchase. For details on this and upcoming events please visit https://www.limusichalloffame.... About Tommy Sullivan A life-long Long Islander and proud U.S. Army veteran, Tommy Sullivan enlisted in 1965 and was accepted to the United States Military Academy Band, where he created the first official rock group at West Point. Reentering civilian life in 1968, he helped create the Rhythm Method, a 7-piece Long Island band which was discovered by Johnny Maestro, then singing lead with the Del-Satins. The combined groups became the Brooklyn Bridge. As band leader and musical director, Tommy penned the group’s horn arrangements on every Bridge hit, including their gold record, Worst that could happen. Upon leaving the Bridge, Tommy co-founded Atlantic Records’ supergroup Ramatam, which was Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell’s first group following Hendrix’ death. For the second Ramatam LP Tommy wrote and orchestrated original material which featured select members of the NY Philharmonic Orchestra. Together with Johnny Maestro, Tommy co-produced Johnny’s final CD, Peace on earth. The critically acclaimed album features Tommy’s arrangements & orchestrations, plus several of his original songs. A Charter Inductee to the LI Music Hall of Fame, Tommy Sullivan continues to write, record, arrange and produce records, serve as musical director/ arranger/conductor for projects across many musical genres plus donates dozens of performances annually for numerous charity events. Tommy Sullivan’s dynamic and unique one-man show, A thousand memories, featuring his vocals and performances on four instruments, has been packing concert auditoriums, nightclubs, private parties–even vineyards-for the past several years. John Zeigler Born and raised in New York, John has performed stand-up comedy for close to 20 years and was the winner of the 2016 "Funniest Comic on the East Coast" Contest at Mohegan Sun. John's opened for such comics as Sebastian Maniscalco, Gilbert Gottfried, Jim Breuer and Robert Klein. He currently headlines clubs across the country and regularly tours with legendary comedian Bobby Collins. John recently released his Dry Bar Comedy Special and Getting My Affairs in Order.
Acoustirats and Jordan Lauterbach to Perform at LI Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame on Aug 23rd
As part of the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame Soundtrack to Summer Series, the band Acoustirats will perform LIVE music and Comedian Jordan Lauterbach will open with comedy set at the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame in Stony Brook Village (97 Main Street, Stony Brook, NY) on Aug. 23th from 3-4pm. The event is free for members or with general admission ticket purchase or $10 at the door concert ticket purchase. For details on this and upcoming events please visit https://www.limusichalloffame.... About AcoustiRats AcoustiRats is an acoustic duo dedicated to stripping Good Rats classics down to their raw, essential form. Fronted by Stefan Marchello, lead singer and 36-year veteran of the Good Rats, alongside guitarist Matt McCarthy, who also did a run on guitar with the band. Between them, they've got decades of Good Rats DNA in their blood. After years of playing these songs loud and electric, Stefan and Matt are thrilled to break them down to the bare bones. No frills, no amps cranked to 11 — just voice, acoustic guitar, and the songwriting that made the Good Rats legendary. It's the same attitude and stories fans know, delivered in a raw, intimate format. For diehard Good Rats fans, it's a new way to hear the classics. For first-timers, it's proof that great songwriting doesn't need to be loud to hit hard. About Jordan Lauterbach Jordan Lauterbach is a fast-rising comedian who features prominently in clubs around the country. His autobiographical style and supreme wit keep audiences laughing for hours after they leave the club. Lauterbach is likable, relatable, and tremendously funny. He has opened for some of comedy's best and is quickly carving out an audience of his own.
MDE names 15 Mississippi Science of Reading School awardees
JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) – The Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) designated 15 Mississippi elementary schools with state recognition for excellence in the Science of Reading (SOR) for th…
Galaxy S27 Ultra reportedly ditches a telephoto camera for the sake of cost-cutting
According to a new report, Samsung’s next-gen flagship, the Galaxy S27 Ultra, will be missing one of its telephoto camera...
FIRST ON FOX: Trump to open direct line with military families in ground-up readiness push
Trump's executive order creates a Military Spouse Commission chaired by Jennifer Hegseth to address childcare, housing, employment and health care.
Health department turns to communities to address infant mortality
Mississippi recorded an infant mortality rate of 9.7 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2024, the highest the state has seen in more than a decade.
Farage admits he discussed returning as Reform leader months earlier than previously stated
Admission may undermine Farage’s account of circumstances surrounding £5m gift from crypto billionaire
Dr. Crystal Miller Named Public Health Hall of Fame Distinguished Leader
The Lexington-Fayette County Health Department is proud to announce that our Commissioner of Health, Dr. Crystal Miller has been selected as this year’s Public Health Hall of Fame Distinguished Leader by the University of Kentucky College of Public Health. This honor recognizes Dr. Miller’s exceptional leadership, unwavering commitment to public health, and the lasting impact
Read the key chapter in dispute
Here is the section that the author of the Democratic Party’s 2024 autopsy says was missing when the Democratic National Committee released a draft of the overall document in May. The party denied ever receiving the chapter.
Top officials leave hospital rate-setting commission amid AHEAD model transition
As Maryland begins the transition into a new hospital rate-setting system, the state commission authorized to establish those rates is heading into its own transition – a change in leadership.
New study torpedoes mental health treatment mandate
The first-of-its-kind evaluation of Kendra’s Law was commissioned at the direction of the state Legislature.
The Fauci-Paul battle shows real cracks in public health. One group has answers.
a nonpartisan commission — which includes a former Kentucky governor — is pushing for better relationships between elected and public health officials.
Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. $LYV Shares Purchased by Quantinno Capital Management LP
Quantinno Capital Management LP raised its stake in shares of Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE:LYV - Free Report) by 12.1% in the 1st quarter, according to the company in its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The fund owned 114,421 shares of the company's stock
Kickstarted governor race tops Fancy Farm Kentucky politics highlights
Fancy Farm was missing familiar faces this year without Mitch McConnell and Andy Beshear. It wasn't missing big Kentucky politics moments, though.
Sei Investments Co. Increases Holdings in Flutter Entertainment PLC $FLUT
Sei Investments Co. raised its holdings in shares of Flutter Entertainment PLC (NYSE:FLUT - Free Report) by 28.7% in the first quarter, according to its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The fund owned 74,851 shares of the company's stock after purchasing an
Edgestream Partners L.P. Buys Shares of 84,184 Caesars Entertainment, Inc. $CZR
Edgestream Partners L.P. bought a new stake in Caesars Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ:CZR - Free Report) in the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The institutional investor bought 84,184 shares of the company's sto
Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp. $MSGE Shares Sold by Dimensional Fund Advisors LP
Dimensional Fund Advisors LP lessened its stake in Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp. (NYSE:MSGE - Free Report) by 3.3% in the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The fund owned 810,201 shares of the company's sto
Yankees Land Luis García Jr. to Fix Slugging Woes
The Yankees traded four prospects for Luis García Jr., bringing a .560 slugging percentage and 23 home runs to a lineup missing Judge and Stanton.
Town and Country Fair returns to Napa Valley Expo starting Thursday
Starting Thursday, Aug. 6 the Town & Country Fair will take over the Napa Valley Expo, with live music, livestock exhibits, carnival thrills and lots more family friendly activities included with admission.
Musical entertainment to accompany Mendota Sweet Corn Fest Queen Pageant
The Mendota High School Jazz Choir and Marching Band will provide pre-pageant and intermission entertainment for visitors at the pageant.
I almost returned my Google Fitbit Air for broken sleep tracking until I changed one setting
A single tweak in Google Health revived the sleep points I'd been missing
Mississippi startup brings military-tested tech to footwear made in state
Paul Thomas returned to Mississippi to launch Numadx, a startup using air-pressure technology for better insoles.
Why I support a National Science Mission on cow urine
Support for a National Science Mission on cow urine aims to validate its medicinal claims through rigorous scientific research.
Bobby Halford inducted into Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame
William Carey coach headlines seven-member class of 2026 alongside football legends and an Olympic gold medalist
Hospitals Can Save the Environment and Your Health — Or At Least Not Make Them Worse - Petrie-Flom Center
The provision of healthcare is responsible for roughly 8.5 percent of total carbon emissions in the United States. In turn, carbon emissions cause climate change and harm human health.
Panama: Haemophilus influenzae meningitis case reported in Veraguas Health Region
The Veraguas Health Region, located in the central-western region of Panama, confirmed a case of meningitis caused by the Haemophilus influenzae bacteria in a 12-year-old student from La Primavera School, diagnosed on July 29. The patient remains hospitalized, is receiving appropriate treatment, and is in stable clinical condition. The regional health director of Veraguas, Xavier A. Torres Domínguez, reported that, once the diagnosis was confirmed, the Ministry of Health (Minsa), in coordination with the Social Security Fund (CSS), immediately activated the epidemiological investigation and health response protocols established for this type of event. Canada: Haemophilus influenzae type B outbreak in Calgary As part of the actions implemented, the Epidemiology teams carried out the identification and monitoring of the patient’s close contacts, applying the corresponding preventive measures to reduce the risk of transmission and safeguard the health of the educational community. Health authorities explained that meningitis caused by Haemophilus influenzae is a bacterial disease that requires timely medical attention. In that regard, they urged the population to immediately seek medical attention if they experience symptoms such as high fever, severe headache, stiff neck, vomiting, drowsiness, or altered mental status. They also reiterated that vaccination is the main preventive measure against this disease, and therefore called on parents and guardians to verify that their children’s immunization schedules are complete, in accordance with the Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI). Outbreak News Today is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
7 entrepreneurs among latest grads of local business academy
It was mission accomplished for seven entrepreneurs who recently completed a 12-week program designed to help small business owners build stronger, more sustainable enterprises.
Source: Former MLB executive Tim Brosnan to head Big East
The Big East is expected to hire former MLB executive Tim Brosnan as the league's next commissioner, sources told ESPN.
5 Disadvantages Of Using YouTube Music You Should Know About
YouTube Music offers plenty of content, but some missing features and persistent frustrations may leave listeners wanting more.
Eagles training camp Day 3 injury report
The Eagles were missing 2 players to injuries and several others were excused from practice (not injury related).
Colorado Politics Calendar Aug. 3-9
CoPo’s weekly political calendar will help you find political and public-policy events throughout Colorado. It includes candidate and issue campaign events, public policy meetings, court hearings, state and local party conventions, assemblies, debates, rallies, parades, speaking engagements, traveling dignitary appearances, water meetings, book signings, county commission hearings, city council meetings and more. As a subscriber, […]
Meet The Highest-Ranking Black Executive In Sports
NBA Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum runs the league’s business operations that generate more than $14 billion in revenue. These are the five business leaders who inspire him.
I spent a week with the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2: Why can't I see my workout stats?
The Watch Ultra 2 has many pros, but also some missing features.
Science Inquiry Comes Alive for Jacket Middle Schoolers
Snails, sidewalks and Double Stuff Oreos... At Partnership Middle School, instructors are finding innovative ways to help students connect the classroom to what they see in the real world every day. By integrating hands-on experiences and scientific investigations into weekly lessons, 6th and 7th grade science teachers push their classes to explore the curriculum standards through the lens of critical thinking, communication with their peers, experimentation, and scientific inquiry. Last week, two different approaches for two different grade levels saw Jacket teachers ignite the same spark for learning. On Tuesday, 6th graders in Lydia Jones' science class took their lessons outside as they explored the school grounds to identify living and non-living things. Despite the warm temperatures, they engaged in discovering unexpected objects on the campus and connecting that to what they learned in class about the criteria for what qualifies a thing as "living". Ms. Jones tasked students with walking the grounds and listing as many living and non-living things they could find in just a few minutes. Students spotted a fire hydrant, construction vehicles, grass, trees, soccer equipment, rocks, sidewalks, and even a snail hidden in the plants. After they finished the exploration, students returned to the regular classroom to discuss their results and whether their objects were classified correctly. On Thursday, 7th graders in Omini Parks' science class participated in their first lab of the semester as they explored and identified the physical properties of a favorite snack -- Oreos. Ms. Parks identified the class objective before the lab activity began by writing the academic standard on the dry erase board in a declarative statement: "I can collect and evaluate qualitative data to describe substances using physical properties." Students watched a video about how Oreo sandwich cookies are made, and then engaged in a question and answer discussion to give observations on the manufacturing process, review various types of physical properties and their scientific terminology, and talk generally about how the lab inquiry would work. The Q&A ended with a predictable question from students... "Will we be able to eat the Oreos?" The hands-on lab exercise required the 7th grade scientists to observe and record the differences between regular Oreos and the Double Stuff variety based on their physical properties. They followed the instructions in their lab brief to chart a comparison between the two types of cookies by observing properties with their magnifying lenses, measuring the height and diameter of both, and weighing the cookies with and without their filling. The activity let students put their lessons about physical properties into practice with real objects while also practicing vocabulary and writing skills to record their observations and using math skills from the last school year like taking measurements and calculating averages. Of course, they ended the lab by charting the taste of the cookies as well! These types of activities allow students to see the science standards they are learning come to life in the real world and engage with the content in new ways. Beyond that, they serve as a foundation for encouraging and growing scientific inquiry. Later in the school year, students will use the scientific method they are learning to complete science projects that require real research and the ability to explain and answer questions about their process and results. At the school-level competitive Science Fair last year, 41 Partnership students earned a place in the 2026 regional Science Fair held at MSU. From there, 14 advanced to the State Science Fair conducted at Northeast Mississippi Community College in April.
‘Premium entertainment lounge’ proposed for 100 Block of W. Yosemite Ave.
The Manteca Planning Commission will consider a conditional use permit for a “premium entertainment lounge” in downtown when they meet Thursday at 6 p.m.
Scientists May Have Finally Solved The Sun's Missing Silver Mystery
This makes more sense.
Scientists May Have Finally Solved The Sun's Missing Silver Mystery
This makes more sense.
Trump administration plans to upend Head Start by deregulating it
The administration is preparing a rollback of Head Start, a change that supporters of the childcare program fear could gut its long-held anti-poverty mission.
Missing Underscore in Name Sent Innocent Man to Prison
Canadian man served 18 months because police didn't notice difference in usernames
EAST TEXAS POLITICS: Smith County commissioners and constable weigh in on budget challenges
All four Smith County commissioners and Pct. 4 Constable Josh Joplin join Blake Holland for this week’s show
EAST TEXAS POLITICS: Smith County commissioners and constable weigh in on budget challenges
All four Smith County commissioners and a constable join Blake Holland on this week’s edition of East Texas Politics on East Texas Now for an in-depth look at the county budget.
Efforts Continue to Stabilize LINK Spacecraft for NASA’s Swift Boost
Teams at Katalyst Space are making progress slowing the spin of their LINK spacecraft, which is designed to boost the orbit of NASA’s Swift.
St. Louis nonprofit seeks consultant to model city re-entering county
A St. Louis nonprofit commissioned a study examining costs of city-county consolidation, with support from business leaders and labor groups.
In Pursuit of Precision: Remembering John Barker
John L. Barker, who passed away on July 6, 2026, at age 88, was a seminal force who fundamentally transformed Landsat into a rigorous science mission through his relentless pursuit of precision remote sensing calibration standards.
Innovation Politics at the FDA - Petrie-Flom Center
The relationship between innovation and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has become a central topic of concern for a whole host of parties: academics, members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and several former FDA commissioners.
Ice Ice Maybe: New Ways to Search for Frozen Water on the Moon
Scientists used a unique vacuum chamber that mimics moon conditions to design an approach for ice prospecting with seismic waves. The work could help future Artemis missions find water.
Fresno County Jail earns distinguished honor for health care standards
The Fresno County Jail has earned Full Accreditation from the National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC), recognizing its medical, dental, and ment
NYU Faculty Drive Three US Department of Energy Genesis Mission Projects to Accelerate AI-Driven Discovery
Faculty across Arts and Science, Courant, and Tandon will help develop AI tools for quantum computing, decentralized scientific reasoning, and automated hypothesis generation
FTC Sues Hims & Hers Over Health Privacy And Billing Practices
By Ellyn Vohnoutka HealthDay ReporterFRIDAY, July 31, 2026 (HealthDay News) — The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sued telehealth company Hims & Hers, alleging it shared consumers' private health information with advertising platforms and unknowingly charged some customers for ...
New York City health department says UES Legionnaires' cluster exposure has ended
The New York City health commissioner shared encouraging news on Friday morning about the deadly Legionnaires' outbreak.
‘Fluff Piece’: Sylvia Brindis (Creator/Star) on Making Entertainment that Inspires Kindness and Develops Critical Thinking in Young Viewers
We recently sat down with Stan Jantz to chat about The Chosen, the Come and See foundation, and an ambitious mission to translate the series into 600 languages and share the authentic Jesus with 1 billion people around the globe.
Noncompliance issues plague Mission Health. But time might be on its side.
Even if HCA's operation of Mission Health is found in noncompliance, it may be able to wait out the expiration of the purchase stipulations.
Few signs of talks between US and Iran as Trump hears from different corners on path forward
Despite President Donald Trump’s claims Iran is “begging” for a deal, some US officials fear regime figures appear more committed than ever to wielding leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and firing missiles toward American troops.
Power List interview: Amanda LeFever
Amanda LeFever joined High Point University President Nido Qubein in the Power List interview, a partnership for discussions with influential leaders. The interview was edited for clarity. Amanda LeFever is president and co-founder of Greensboro-based Mission Mobile Medical Group, which launched in 2020. From a single unit, it now has more than 250 partners […]
For college students, a school’s state politics can matter as much as its academics
Students are looking beyond the usual admissions rankings and tuition prices to consider whether a campus — and the state its in — reflects the rights and values they need to feel safe.
College Sports Commission approves reworked NIL deals worth total of $7.5M for 18 Nebraska players
The College Sports Commission has approved $7.5 million in restructured name, image and likeness opportunities spread among 18 Nebraska football players after those deals initially were rejected in a decision upheld by an arbitrator two months ago.
Utah joins FTC in lawsuit accusing Hims & Hers of sharing sensitive health information
Utah has joined the Federal Trade Commission and California in a lawsuit accusing telehealth company Hims & Hers of sharing consumers’ sensitive health informat
‘There was no other option’: Inside Fauci’s intensely planned hearing strategy
Dr. Anthony Fauci arrived at a high-stakes Senate hearing on Wednesday with a single, modest goal: Survive. The former top government scientist felt he accomplished that mission, people close to Fauci told CNN.
Tuli Tuipulotu returns to practice after missing Wednesday
After not practicing Wednesday, Tuli Tuipulotu took the field for the Chargers, but only went through individual drills.
Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame to Host ‘Blotto Fest’ This November 8th
Long Island’s Blotto band member ‘Broadway Blotto’ (L) will host the upcoming Blotto Fest event. Photo credit Steve Leung. Classic Blotto Band photo (R) circa 1980's. Photo credit Martin Benjamin. Stony Brook, NY —Long Island Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame (LIMEHOF) will host Blotto Fest at its Stony Brook Village location (97 Main Street) Fest on Sunday, Nov. 8th at 3pm. The event is free for members and included with general admission ticket or $10 at-the-door concert ticket. LIMEHOF is giving local bands a chance to participate in this unique tribute to the iconic New York group.
Packers rookie OL Jager Burton missing practice with hamstring injury
The Packers are without rookie OL Jager Burton on Thursday due to a new hamstring injury suffered on Wednesday.