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Are the Bills better after offseason additions and departures?
The Bills made some big moves, including trading for DJ Moore and signing Bradley Chubb. Is Buffalo’s roster improved?
Scientists Baffled by Bizarre “Living Fossil” From 275 Million Years Ago
Tanyka amnicola is a newly identified ancient tetrapod known from unusual twisted jawbones adapted for grinding plants. This rare herbivorous “living fossil” helps scientists better understand early evolution and ecosystems in Gondwana. In a dry riverbed in Brazil, deep within a forest near the A
“AI polls” are fake polls
A few weeks after Donald Trump’s second presidential win, I took the train up from London (where I was living at the time) to Oxford to attend a conference on polls and forecasts of the 2024 election. Most of the attendees were pollsters or academics, but I also watched presentations from Aaru and Electric Twin, two companies that do what is interchangeably called synthetic sampling, silicon sampling, or synthetic audiences. Stripped of startup jargon, that means they use large language models (LLMs) to simulate responses to public opinion polls by having AI agents take on the role of survey respondents. I had already heard of Aaru thanks to some articles with eye-catching headlines like “No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans” in the months leading up to Election Day. The founders were making some big, some might even say far-fetched claims, such as: “within two years, we will simulate the entire globe — from the way crops are grown in Ukraine to how that impacts production of oil in Iraq, trade through the strait of Malacca, and elections for the mayor of Baltimore.” When Semafor asked Aaru’s cofounders — Cameron Fink and Ned Koh — about my boss, they said “we respect all those who came before us.” Nate (as he so often does) shared his thoughts on Twitter: Fink and Koh were relatively good-natured about this back-and-forth when we spoke at Oxford. They even offered to mail me one of the t-shirts featuring Nate’s quote they apparently had made. I never took them up on the offer, which I now somewhat regret. These synthetic sampling companies fell off my radar for a while, but they do still exist. In fact, Aaru recently received a $1 billion valuation. Is what they’re doing anywhere close to the most important frontier in AI development? Not by a longshot, especially when Anthropic just developed a model so adept at exploiting software vulnerabilities that it’s only being released to 40 companies. Still, silicon sampling is increasingly finding its way into public polling. Axios reported in March that “a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses” based on findings from Aaru — without mentioning that the “people” in that sentence were actually LLMs. Around the same time, the Public Sentiment Institute “boosted” their online sample of 373 real survey respondents with 114 AI agents.1 (Spoiler alert: even the co-founder of Electric Twin doesn’t think that’s a particularly defensible approach.) Polling companies like Qualtrics and Ipsos are also developing synthetic data panels. So, what should we make of these … “polls”? Let’s get one thing out of the way: whatever they are, they’re not polls in the way that term is usually defined. Subscribe You can’t replace polls with AI On one hand, using LLMs to essentially make up fake survey respondents sort of sounds like the dumbest idea ever, one that will at best imperfectly replicate real polls while introducing all sorts of biases. On the other hand, with LLMs improving at a remarkable, perhaps even alarming rate, maybe that means I’m a dinosaur at the ripe old age of 24 because I still want to rely on polls that talk to actual people. I’m not going to argue that synthetic samples are completely useless. In fact, as I’ll return to later, there is evidence that some techniques can replicate topline survey results quickly and cheaply. But the marketing from certain companies can be slightly optimistic. “No traditional poll will exist by the time the next general election occurs,” said Fink in 2024. We’re just 206 days away from the midterms, and based on the fact that I still have to collect a bunch of polls every day, I’d say he should have run that prediction by a sample of AI agents before the interview.2 To see why synthetic samples can’t replace polls, here’s a quick primer on how they work. The simplest version of these models involves taking a LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude), giving it a demographic profile (e.g., a white, college-educated woman who lives in Utah and makes $70k a year), and then asking it to respond to a survey question. You repeat that process a few thousand times using different demographic profiles and end up with a sample of synthetic survey responses. The actual models used by private companies are more sophisticated than this, usually because they incorporate more hypothesized demographic characteristics for each agent and provide them with extra information. Aaru, for example, feeds agents a diet of news and information they’d be likely to consume, while Electric Twin incorporates their customers’ proprietary data about the audience they’re trying to replicate. The way Ben Warner, the co-founder of Electric Twin, explained it to me was “we have a large amount of data on […] for instance, 5,000 people. Can we make an accurate prediction of how they would respond to another question?” Still, it should be obvious why synthetic samples can’t replace polls. Polling is fundamentally a data collection process. We might use surveys to make predictions by feeding them into election forecasts, but the main purpose of a poll isn’t prediction, it’s gathering new data about what people think and how they feel. Silicon sampling, on the other hand, produces no new data. It’s simply a model: you input LLM training data, demographic prompts, and a bunch of other information, and it spits out a prediction for what a poll would say. We love models here, but models aren’t polls. That difference is an important philosophical sticking point for most pollsters I talk to. “I think politics should stay away from [synthetic sampling], because we’re trying to […] represent the voice of the people,” said Natalie Jackson, a vice president at GQR Insights. Democratic pollster John Hagner told me: “I think I’m just incredibly skeptical of this idea. I don’t think it’s research. At that point, you’re asking the machine to tell you what you already believe.” Hagner has seen some presentations of early synthetic sampling experiments, but so far, “if it’s being used in a campaign, people are keeping it incredibly quiet.”3 But Eli, I hear you saying, aren’t polls themselves increasingly governed by modeling decisions? Indeed they are: pollsters’ choices on which sampling method to use, how to define their likely voter models, and how to weight their samples can and do lead to dramatic differences in the results they publish. Aaru even referenced these limitations in the methodology statement included with that maternal mortality “poll” — although I’m using the term “methodology statement” loosely here, because it doesn’t really explain how the model works at all. We can ignore the (frankly preposterous) implication that synthetic sampling isn’t subject to a separate set of biases. The important point is that there’s still a meaningful difference between using weighting and other statistical techniques on actual polling data and using a model to predict what a poll would say. The latter is far closer to election forecasts or techniques like MRP — potentially useful models, but not a replacement for polls.4 To be fair, other synthetic sampling companies are perfectly happy with the distinction between polls and models. Warner compared polling and synthetic sampling to different tools in a toolbox. “The mistake I think we make is we think that these new tools should either work in exactly the same way or somehow replace these old tools,” he said. “Rather than thinking of it as, okay, so we’ve always had the hammer, we’ve always had the screwdriver, now we’ve got a saw. But don’t use a saw to try [to] do the job of a hammer.” A quick comment from Nate Eli didn’t ask me for a comment — rather rude of him, don’t you think? But since I’m editing this story, I figured I’d add a few quick thoughts rather than putting words in his mouth. Beyond the frequently misleading marketing, what bothers me about the AI “poll” hype is that as AI tools make statistical inference cheaper and/or better (note that these are not synonyms) that actually increases the comparative value of collecting original data. You might be able to train a model to make a reasonable estimate of what some hard-to-reach poll respondent would say — say, a young Black man who voted for Trump. (Such a person checks a number of boxes for a voter who is usually hard to reach in surveys.) Indeed, this is closely related to what models like the Silver Bulletin forecast already do. They essentially smooth out the kinks in noisy survey data by making inferences based on past voting patterns or national polls or surveys of other states. But you don’t actually know what these voters think unless you’re reaching them directly. If there’s a shift in opinion among this subgroup, you’re not going to detect it. So if I were running a campaign, I’d invest more in going the extra mile to find a representative sample of those voters. And then I’d hire some smart quants — or Claude? — to figure out the implications for campaign strategy based on proprietary data that my competitors didn’t have access to. -Nate Silver Are these models any good? If synthetic surveys are just a new type of model, the next obvious question is whether the models are at least accurate. The answer very much depends on who you ask. On one end of the spectrum, you have the maximalist argument that synthetic sampling is more accurate than actual polls. “It’s an incredibly challenging problem to go to someone and say ‘hey, we’re going to be more accurate at predicting human behavior than you, even when you talk to your customers directly’,” Koh recently told CNBC. In his view, synthetic sampling isn’t a saw to polling’s hammer, it’s “magic.” There’s certainly evidence that synthetic samples can replicate certain survey toplines. But if Aaru does have any examples of their approach outperforming the polls, they’re keeping those to themselves.5 Aaru’s 2024 election model, for example, had Kamala Harris leading in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on November 4th. And although they’ve since taken down their forecast page, they gave Harris a 50.5 percent chance of winning the race on November 2nd.6 After the election, Fink told Semafor he was happy enough with those results because they were “within margin of error,” a term that is completely meaningless when applied to a “sample” of AI agents. And of course, Aaru says their models have improved since 2024, so supposedly now they’d be more accurate than the polls? Still, their stronger argument is on cost: “We are significantly faster and cheaper than traditional polling, and still more accurate,” said Fink. The first two claims are undeniably true, but the third brings us to the opposite end of the spectrum. Both Jackson and Hagner are skeptical that these models are reliable for anything beyond replicating common survey toplines. “I just […] don’t think the machines are what we want when we’re looking for nuanced views. My example on this is people in Arizona and Nevada in 2024 who voted for Trump and voted for expanding abortion in their states on ballot initiatives,” said Jackson. Hagner identified another issue. Maybe the synthetic respondents, like sycophantic LLMs, are inhuman in one important way: they’re too nice. “The reports that have come through at the meetings that I’ve been at are that the early experiments on this, they cannot get respondents to be as racist or sexist or, frankly, as negative as human respondents,” he said. Academic research mostly agrees on this point. While there are some papers that show promising results when using LLMs to replicate polling data, most show that LLMs suffer from various quirks like producing too few “don’t know” responses and can seriously overpredict the favorability of politicians like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. They also seem to struggle with too little variation between demographic subgroups, so the difference in predicted opinion between Democrats and Republicans, for example, is too small. When I asked Warner about these studies, his response to these papers was that just because academics can’t get synthetic sampling to work doesn’t mean that the technique doesn’t work in general. “Actually, the argument is, okay, yours does not [work]. That does not mean […] for this complex set of machinery, which uses a lot of investment, a lot of time, a lot of money, you can’t get it to work.” Cards on the table, I’m somewhat sympathetic to this argument because academics aren’t exactly great at making election forecasts. Usually, the people with skin in the game are the most accurate. Warner’s argument is that the approach Electric Twin takes — which includes, for example, making multiple predictions for each synthetic respondent using different models and prompts and subsequently averaging those to get a final prediction in a sort of ensemble forecast — produces better results than the simpler academic models. Warner shared a comparison between his method and the method from a recent academic paper with me, and Electric Twin was indeed able to get more accurate replication. But even still, he acknowledged that synthetic sampling “is not a crystal ball.” “If you asked me, do I think using other data sources will be more accurate than asking somebody who they will vote for, I would probably say no. But if you asked me ‘would your system be useful for our turnout modeling today?’ I would say yes.” For better or worse, it looks like the method is already getting more popular in the market research world. Most of the clients Aaru touts these days are businesses like EY and McDonald’s. And AI will probably begin to pop up in other parts of the political polling process. Pollsters are already using it to code open-ended survey responses, and some firms, like YouGov, are testing using LLMs to ask survey respondents questions. More worryingly, one danger to actual polls is that AI agents can be used to infiltrate online surveys. Most online polls use various checks to prevent that from happening, but there’s conflicting evidence on how effective those filters are and how prevalent AI agents currently are in online panels. If those agents ever become impossible to detect, it might spell the end of online polling, but the solution isn’t to replace all of your respondents with ChatGPT. Silver Bulletin is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe 1 That particular poll obviously doesn’t meet Silver Bulletin standards for aggregation. But we exclude all Public Sentiment Institute polls from our averages because we classify them as an amateur polling firm. 2 You could argue that Fink meant the next presidential election, but (a) I’m also confident we’ll still have real polls in 2028 and (b) in that case he should have asked an LLM to define “general election.” 3 Quick caveat: that’s reporting from a Democratic pollster. It’s possible that Republicans are more willing to use AI in political campaigns. 4 Indeed, Silver Bulletin does not include “polls” produced by MRP in our forecasts or averages, and we think it’s extremely misleading when their practitioners describe them in a way that suggests original data had been collected among a large number of states or Congressional districts. 5 A recent report from Aaru and EY did show two examples of a synthetic estimate being closer than a survey to a real-world benchmark — but I’d take those findings with a grain of salt because the report reads more like an ad and didn’t involve any sort of prediction being made ahead of time. 6 For comparison, our odds for Harris on the same day were 48.2 percent.
Letting kids swear taught me a better way to parent
By dropping the no-swearing rule, I found a calmer, more connected home — and fewer unnecessary arguments with my kids.
Tigers' Casey Mize hopes sunny skies signal success vs. Marlins
Casey Mize made his most recent start in brutal weather conditions, and the Detroit Tigers right-hander hopes better weather will lead to better results on Saturday when he pitches the middle game of a three-game home series against the Miami Marlins on Saturday afternoon.
Two simple eating habits linked to lower weight, study finds
A major study suggests that when you eat could play a key role in staying lean. People who fast longer overnight and start their day with an early breakfast were more likely to have a lower BMI years later. Scientists think this is because eating earlier aligns better with the body’s internal clock. But skipping breakfast as part of intermittent fasting didn’t offer the same advantage—and may even be tied to unhealthy habits.
New metal with triple copper’s heat conduction challenges fundamental physics
With performance three times better than copper’s, this new material could substantially improve heat management of electronics, data centers and energy systems
Job hunter emailed company after getting ghosted post-interview
After multiple interviews and weeks of silence, a job seeker says she emailed the hiring team to push for better communication.
No refund top customer complaint BBB helps with process of complaints and reviews
For many shoppers in Washington, getting a refund is becoming a bigger headache than the original problem.New data from the Better Business Bureau shows complai
Advancing equity for Black mothers through better nutrition
Discover how better nutrition, cultural support and community action can improve Black maternal health and reduce preventable pregnancy risks.
MSI MPG 322UR QD-OLED X24 Review - Less Expensive and Even Better
MSI MPG 322UR QD-OLED X24 brings fifth generation V-Stripe QD-OLED technology to a 32-inch 4K panel, pairing a 3840×2160 resolution with a 240 Hz refresh rate, a 80 Gbps bandwidth DisplayPort 2.1a UHBR20 interface, and a price tag that undercuts its predecessor by $200. Improved text clarity, higher SDR brightness, and an AI Care Sensor make for a strong all-around package.
Have You Used A.I. Chatbots for Nutrition Advice?
Whether you’re looking to manage a health condition, lose weight or simply eat better, we want to hear from you.
Alphabet Is Quietly Building Its Next Major Business -- and It Could Be Bigger Than You Think
Most investors think of AI as a race to build better models. But behind every AI system sits something far more important -- the infrastructure that powers it. And that's where Alphabet is quietly building something big.
Alphabet Is Quietly Building Its Next Major Business -- and It Could Be Bigger Than You Think
Most investors think of AI as a race to build better models. But behind every AI system sits something far more important -- the infrastructure that powers it. And that's where Alphabet is quietly building something big.
The Sonic Paradox: Do we, in fact, gotta go fast?
The human mind simply can't process super-speed, but the game Haste does it better than the famously fast Sonic The Hedgehog games.
A Big, Moving Party for Better Lung Health
Peggy shares her experience with the Trek Across Maine and how one bike ride has expanded into a lifelong purpose.
5 Android phones you should buy instead of the Samsung Galaxy A57
The Galaxy A57 is a really solid Android deal at just $550. But for some people, these five other phones might be better options.
Washtenaw Business Lens: Challenging times for businesses and the banking industry
Interest rates, loans and investment strategies—it all plays into the health of individual businesses and the Washtenaw County business community as a whole. How are we doing right now? WEMU's David Fair and Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Regional Chamber Executive Vice President Andy LaBarre check in with Erik Bakker from Bank of Ann Arbor for a better perspective on well-being of our local business community, now and in the near-term future.
Elk Grove seeks to develop master plan for auto mall
A city request for proposals is looking for firms that can help develop a master plan for Elk Grove's auto mall and make it better.
Matrix Business Systems Builds a Better Way to Manage Print
What began as a leap from corporate to entrepreneurship is now a company redefining how organizations manage print infrastructure.
'At the edge of the future': ASU breaks ground for better health outcomes for Arizona
Arizona State University is taking a huge step toward addressing one of the biggest crises in the U.S. — the disparity in health care, according to ASU President Michael Crow.Crow spoke Thursday in downtown Phoenix at the groundbreaking of the headquarters for ASU Health, the hub of the university’s efforts to improve health outcomes for Arizona residents.He told the crowd that despite great wealth, the U.S. health care system is failing.
3L Rachel Sadler Charts Path in Brain Health, Technology, and Policy Through UC Law SF’s Health Law Concentration - UC Law San Francisco (Formerly UC Hastings)
3L Rachel Sadler studies health law and policy at UC Law SF while researching the legal implications of neurotechnology and other emerging tools that may affect human cognition. 3L student Rachel Sadler shares how UC Law SF’s Health Law Concentration prepared her for a career focused on the intersection of brain health, government policy, and technology. Gained a detailed understanding of how U.S. health care is regulated and where policy reform is needed through coursework and research. Interned with state and federal agencies that regulate health care services and worked with a major health care provider’s bioethics department. Plans to pursue a career focused on protecting cognitive liberty and mental privacy as new technologies reshape healthcare. 3L Rachel Sadler: The Health Law Concentration has given me fluency in one of the most complex regulated industries and the tools to become an effective advocate for better health policy. Before coming to law school, I spent a decade teaching and working with teachers and administrators on high school programming for multilingual learners. Healthcare kept emerging as the most powerful driver of student outcomes. I wanted to understand how to make effective policy change in this area and how to use existing law to defend people’s health rights in California. Through the concentration’s coursework, I gained a sophisticated understanding of how U.S. healthcare is regulated. I also learned where the pressure points for reform exist. The courses gave me space to develop what became my central research interest: how law and policy can be built to protect human cognition and healthy brain development, particularly regarding new technologies such as generative AI and neurotechnology. The health law faculty were instrumental in that process, genuinely invested in helping me and other students define and pursue our own intellectual vision. During law school, I interned at the General Counsel’s Office for Region IX of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I also externed at the California Department of Justice’s Health, Education and Welfare Division. Additionally, I externed at Kaiser Permanente Northern California’s Bioethics Department. Alongside those placements, I conducted extensive independent research on mental privacy and emerging neurotechnology, working closely with Professors Emily Murphy and George Horvath. That research became the throughline of my law school experience and the foundation of my current policy focus. I must also credit Nicole Ozer of the Center for Constitutional Democracy (CCD), whose deep knowledge of California privacy law and the public-interest privacy landscape deeply informed my work. I currently serve a research assistant with the CCD, where I spearhead the development of K-12 educational resources in partnership with law faculty and students. I’ve found UC Law SF to be an ideal place for second-career, nontraditional students. There is a tremendous diversity of life and career experience here, and I felt fully welcomed into the community, despite returning as a student at a different stage of life. I came to law school wanting to promote equity in California’s healthcare system. I am leaving with a sharper and more specific ambition: to build a policy career focused on protecting cognitive liberty and mental privacy from technological intrusion. This is both an urgent and underserved area of law, and I want to be part of defining this landscape going forward. Whether as a practicing attorney or a policy advisor, I plan to work on these issues after law school. I strongly recommend UC Law SF and the Health Law Concentration. When I arrived in law school, I worried the concentration would be narrow and that my non-clinical background would be a disadvantage. The opposite was true. The health law faculty thinks about health expansively, encompassing social determinants of health, structural inequity, and emerging technologies alongside the regulatory mechanics of the industry. The faculty are accessible, intellectually generous, and genuinely invested in students’ development. I found my research vision here, and I deeply appreciate the concentration’s role in this. The Evidence of Success series highlights UC Law SF students as they share how the College’s opportunities equip them with the experience, skills, and confidence to excel in the legal profession.
Women’s Sports See Historic Growth. It’s Time Its Athletes Get Paid Like It
Women's sports viewership is breaking records. Here's how rising audiences can better translate into equal pay for women athletes across leagues and sports.
Cardio vs. Strength: Cardiologist on Which Is Better for Heart Health
In TODAY.com's Expert Tip of the Day, a cardiologist weighs in on the best type of exercise routine for heart health and heart disease prevention.
Better Business Bureau: FTC warns companies about fake reviews
Randy Hutchinson provides information to help consumers protect assets and avoid scams.
Aetna Better Health® of Virginia opens new community resource center in Roanoke
Aetna Better Health of Virginia announces the opening of a new community resource center in Roanoke, expanding access to local health and wellness services.
Anthony Davis vents about leaving the Lakers during podcast appearance
Like everyone else, Anthony Davis was shocked when he was traded for Luka Doncic, and he feels the Lakers should've handled the situation better.
IT’S SCIENCE. IT’S SURREAL. IT’S THE SIBILANCE OF KIM SALMON
KIM SALMON APPEARS on my screen intact, in motion, but not, I assure him, infected by any filters adding bunny ears, cat whiskers or fish scales. Dignity is appropriate for the man who emerged from the most isolated punk scene of all in late ‘70s Perth to become a force of nature, and whose early swamp-rock take on life after punk was to spawn a decade and a half later – for better and worse – the more earnest, less thrilling grunge movement.Yes, somehow that mega selling, decade-defining scene
18 new features coming to Windows 11 in 2026, confirmed by Microsoft
Windows 11 is getting major upgrades with faster performance, improved File Explorer, better updates, native apps, etc. Here is the full list.
The surprising science behind why travel makes you happier
Researchers found a link between new experiences and better moods—here's how it works.
What Oregonians told Gov. Tina Kotek's council to make business better
More than 1,000 people completed a survey for Gov. Tina Kotek's Prosperity Council. Here's what they said about building business in Oregon.
How the Navy's retail business is working to pull off a turnaround
Sales have fallen at the Navy Exchange, the government-owned department store chain that provides tax-free products to enlisted servicemembers and veterans. Its stores are an important benefit to military families stationed across the world, and its profits directly improve the welfare of Navy sailors. The company is working to revamp its fleet of stores with a planned investment of around $100 million to better compete with major e-commerce players like Walmart and Amazon.
Cyberpunk 2077 gets a free PS5 Pro upgrade today that brings PSSR and better ray tracing options
After denying it would happen initially, CD Projekt Red has just dropped a PS5 Pro patch for Cyberpunk 2077 that includes PSSR-boosted resolution and better RT.
The Southern Group rides Southwest Florida wave with Fort Myers expansion
'There’s no better team to lead that effort than Nick and Eddie.'
Prince George’s Co. Council introduces new bills aimed at luring more, better businesses
A majority of the Prince George’s County Council announced a package of new bills that aims to make it easier to lure more nice restaurants to the county.
Aetna Provider Survey Reveals Optimism and Opportunities to Simplify Health Care
Research findings from the inaugural Aetna Provider Survey, a quarterly study that polls a representative sample of the U.S. provider market to better understand their perceptions, opportunities, and challenges today and into the future.
Viewpoint: FP10 should remain open, excellent and secure
Europe is right to worry about research security. Foreign interference is real. So is the misuse of sensitive knowledge. Universities working in sensitive areas such as AI, quantum, semiconductors and advanced materials cannot afford to ignore the geopolitical environment around them.But Europe is in danger of drawing the wrong conclusion, one that would increase, not reduce, its strategic vulnerabilities.If the EU applies an “EU preference” logic to the next Framework Programme for research and innovation (FP10), it will weaken one of its greatest strategic assets: a research system built on openness, excellence and international collaboration. In the name of security, Europe could end up advancing science more slowly, innovating less effectively and making itself less attractive to global talent and partners in advanced science and technology.That would be a serious mistake.The EU preference included in Article 10 of the proposed European Competitiveness Fund may make sense in some industrial or deployment contexts, but is far harder to justify when applied to collaborative research in advanced science and technology, where excellence and global connectivity are crucial. Research is not procurement. It does not thrive when isolated. It advances through access to the best ideas, the best people, the best facilities and the best data, wherever they are found. This is why FP10 should not simply absorb industrial policy logic by default. Doing so would risk importing instruments that are ill-suited to research and that ultimately increase vulnerability rather than resilience.For universities of science and technology, the issue is especially acute. These institutions sit at the frontier of knowledge and technology creation in the very fields Europe sees as critical for its future competitiveness and resilience. They know better than most that security risks are real. But they also know that openness and security are not opposites. In practice, they have to be made to work together. Research security is not about closing doors. It is about building resilience through collective responsibility, trust, proportionate safeguards and better governance. That is a fundamentally different approach from default restriction.The risks of non-collaborationThe real danger in the current debate is that Europe talks too much about the risks of collaboration and not enough about the risks of non-collaboration. Those risks are strategic too. Cut researchers off from international networks and Europe loses access to knowledge, data, infrastructures and talent. Slow down global collaboration in critical technologies and Europe slows down its own progress on cutting-edge science. Make participation rules unpredictable and Europe weakens its attractiveness to researchers and investors alike.In other words, over-restricting collaboration will create strategic vulnerabilities, particularly in advanced science and technologies.This point is often underestimated in policy discussions that frame openness mainly as a value to be defended. Europe’s scientific strength, technological development and long-term competitiveness depend on remaining connected to the best research ecosystems in the world. For a continent that wants to accelerate deep tech, strengthen industrial capacity and reduce strategic dependencies, weakening the excellence base would be self-defeating. That does not mean ignoring risk. Quite the opposite. Universities are already strengthening due diligence, internal governance, awareness-raising, screening procedures and compliance support. Across Europe, institutions are working to manage risks linked to foreign interference, sanctions, export controls and the misuse of research. The right response is not complacency. It is better risk management. But that means targeted, evidence-based and proportionate measures, not blunt top-down restrictions with wide spillover effects. In the daily reality of universities, openness and restriction often coexist. The real challenge is how to apply safeguards without sliding into securitisation that damages academic freedom, open science and international cooperation. Restrict partners, not nationsMore restrictive treatment of collaborators from European Economic Area members Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, or from Switzerland and the UK, is strategically very difficult to justify. These are deeply embedded partners in Europe’s research and innovation ecosystem. Beyond that, Europe should still resist default exclusion and instead rely on case-by-case assessment. The relevant question is not nationality in the abstract. It is the actual risk profile of a collaboration: the institution, the affiliations, the field, the knowledge involved, the intended use and the safeguards available. Screening should focus on institutions and affiliations rather than nationality alone. Related articlesParliament ‘misreads’ link between Horizon Europe and ECF, Commission official saysFrustration grows at governance gap in next Horizon EuropeIf EU preference logic is imported into research without careful calibration, the likely result is a chilling effect. Researchers may step back from legitimate and beneficial collaboration, even where risks are manageable. International partners may see Europe as less predictable. And Europe may end up undermining the very excellence base it needs to compete, scale up and lead in strategic technologies, thereby increasing its dependence on others.FP10 should do the opposite. It should remain open by default, with restrictions used only exceptionally, and then on the basis of clear evidence. It should integrate research security into open science and research integrity frameworks, not set them against each other. And it should recognise that academic freedom, scientific excellence and responsible international collaboration are not obstacles to Europe’s security, they are part of it. Europe needs stronger tools to protect itself. But it also needs the discipline to avoid measures that would weaken it and increase its strategic vulnerabilities in the process. In FP10, that means staying open, excellent and secure.Louise Drogoul is senior advisor for innovation and sustainability at the Cesaer university association.
Sony Pictures Entertainment Cuts Hundreds of Jobs in TV, Film
Sony Pictures Entertainment is restructuring its business to better position the company for growth, leading to job cuts across its film, TV and corporate divisions in the coming months.
Vertical browser tabs are better and you should use them
Trust me, this is a better way to Chrome.
NEW: Phil Weiser Unveils ‘Healthy Colorado Plan’ to Lower Costs, Deliver Better Health Care for All Coloradans | Phil Weiser for Colorado
Three-part plan launches ‘Primary Care for All’ to transform Colorado’s "sick care" system into a true "health care" system.
Tesla's Business Has Become Much More Diversified in Just the Past Five Years. Does That Make Its Stock a Better Buy Today?
The company's automotive revenue now accounts for less than three-quarters of its top line.
My life is better after college; made friends and traveled more
After a disappointing college experience, I decided to reclaim my life postgrad. Now, I travel often and have a great community of friends.
Immunic COO highlights the importance of science-led innovation to mark World Health Day
Immunic Inc (NASDAQ:IMUX, FRA:10VA) chief operating officer Jason Tardio talked with Proactive's Stephen Gunnion about the importance of science-led innovation in tackling neurological diseases, particularly multiple sclerosis, on World Health Day 2026. Tardio highlighted that the biotech industry is fundamentally grounded in scientific research and data, noting that “everything we do is rooted in science.” He explained that Immunic is focused on developing innovative therapies designed to improve patient outcomes and address significant unmet medical needs. The discussion centred on multiple sclerosis (MS), a complex neurological disease that continues to present challenges despite decades of progress. Tardio pointed out that while advancements have been made, “the disease is not solved for,” with many patients still experiencing disability progression and requiring safer, more tolerable treatments. He emphasised the urgent need for innovation, particularly in progressive forms of MS where treatment options remain extremely limited. Immunic’s lead asset, vidofludimus calcium, is being developed as a novel approach aimed at addressing the full spectrum of the disease. Tardio also reinforced the broader mission of the healthcare and biotech sectors, stating that the ultimate goal is to help individuals “live a better quality of life” and “a healthier life longer.” Watch the full interview to learn more about Immunic’s approach to advancing MS treatment through science. For more videos like this, visit Proactive's YouTube channel, like this video, subscribe to the channel, and enable notifications so you never miss an update. #Immunic #MultipleSclerosis #BiotechInnovation #Healthcare #MSResearch #DrugDevelopment #ClinicalTrials #Neurology #WorldHealthDay #ScienceDriven #VidofludimusCalcium #PharmaNews #BiotechNews
Scientists just uncovered the secret behind nature’s “proton highway”
Scientists have zoomed in on how phosphoric acid moves electrical charges so efficiently in both biology and technology. By freezing a key molecular pair to extremely low temperatures, they found it forms just one stable structure—contrary to predictions. This structure relies on a specific hydrogen-bond network that may be universal in similar systems. The discovery helps explain how protons travel so quickly and could inspire better energy materials.
Brewing Better Health highlights the power of public health partnerships and celebrates National Public Health Week
A Brewing Better Health podcast conversation with Chad Kingsley, M.D., MBA, and Dean Muge Akpinar-Elci, M.D., MPH, on prevention, community health and what public health is.
Small businesses are ‘doing fine.’ That’s a problem for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Small business owners are feeling uneasy about the Iran war. They're doing just fine, but that's not good considering all of the tax incentives created to help them do much better.
'He's a throwback': Fernando Mendoza keeps business focus as NFL Draft waits
Fernando Mendoza's passion for finance has helped him become a better football player, he says, as the Heisman winner prepares for the 2026 NFL draft.
The science, and luck, behind the early health advantage fueling the Yankees' and Mets' starts
Are the New York Yankees and Mets, specifically, and the sport, in general, getting better at keeping players healthy?
The science, and luck, behind the early health advantage fueling the Yankees' and Mets' starts
Are the New York Yankees and Mets, specifically, and the sport, in general, getting better at keeping players healthy?
Health insurers secured a better Medicare Advantage rate for 2027, and their stocks are soaring
Shares of health insurers rallied in premarket trading on Tuesday after the government improved the initial Medicare Advantage rate increase for next year.
Stressed Out? How Leaders Can Look After Their Health
High levels of physical and mental resilience are critical to leadership success. Here are four ways leaders can better look after themselves.
Big Ten doing college sports better than anyone. They just win more
Big Ten is first conference since 2007 to have national champions in football and men's and women's basketball in the same year.
Empowering Young Hmong to Make Health Choices
A Hmong community has used the Lao PDR Gender Equity Innovation Fund to improve sexual and reproductive health knowledge so they can better plan their futures
Trump administration finalizes better-than-feared Medicare Advantage payment rate in boost to health insurers
The Trump administration will increase average Medicare Advantage payments by 2.48%, or more than $13 billion, in 2027.
New Grant Supports Better Heart Health With a Human Touch
A growing partnership is helping Georgians protect their heart health by meeting them where they are — and walking alongside them every step of the way.
3 Things to Know: Brands and Social Issues, Adult Recreational Sports League Participation Rebounds, and Sports Betting Partnerships
CivicScience has the world’s largest proprietary database of real-time declared intent, allowing brands to activate high-performing advertising that drives up to 80% better performance. See how our partners achieve superior marketing outcomes here. 1. Consumers hold mixed expectations on brand activism, with Democrats more likely to switch or boycott based on personal values, while Republicans [...]Read More... from 3 Things to Know: Brands and Social Issues, Adult Recreational Sports League Participation Rebounds, and Sports Betting Partnerships
Globe unveils new business newsletter
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World Health Day 2026: PAHO/WHO calls for renewed commitment to science to drive better health for all
6 April 2026, Geneva / Washington, DC-- The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) call on people everywhere to renew their commitment to science as the foundation for better health, under the World Health Day 2026 theme: “Together for health. Stand with science.” The campaign marks the anniversary of WHO’s founding on 7 April, launching a year-long public health campaign.
Nature Conservancy award supports URI research on salt marsh health
KINGSTON, R.I. – April 6, 2026 – Rhode Island’s salt marshes protect coastlines and provide critical habitat, but many are increasingly threatened by sea level rise and other environmental pressures. Madison Geraci, a Ph.D. student in evolution and marine biology at the University of Rhode Island, is studying organisms hidden within marsh sediments to better […]
‘Building a better future’: UCLA receives $33 million to address LA’s youth mental health crisis
The Ballmer Group investment will support academic and clinical training that will bring more Bruin practitioners into local communities.
Health in a Handbasket: Family Friendly Meals
After work and school, there's nothing better than a meal that's both delicious and nutritious.
Better Business Bureau: Used car dealer sales requirements
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AI Giant Anthropic Leans Into Life Sciences With $400M Coefficient Bio Catch
Anthropic in October last year iterated its Claude AI model to better cater to biopharma purposes. Sanofi, Novo Nordisk, AbbVie and others already use Claude in their operations.
One Of Raleigh's Most Iconic Entertainment Venues Is Getting A Huge Upgrade In 2026
Get your concert shoes on! The Red Hat Amphitheater is getting a major upgrade in 2026 that'll offer better sound, better stage design, and even better snacks.
WHO calls for action: “Together for health. Stand with science.” to mark World Health Day
The World Health Organization (WHO) today calls on people everywhere to renew their commitment to working together and supporting science as the twin engines driving better health, under the World Health Day 2026 theme: “Together for health. Stand with science.” The campaign marks the anniversary of WHO’s founding on 7 April 1948, launching a year-long public health campaign.
WHO calls for action: “Together for health. Stand with science.” to mark World Health Day
The World Health Organization (WHO) today calls on people everywhere to renew their commitment to working together and supporting science as the twin engines driving better health, under the World Health Day 2026 theme: “Together for health. Stand with science.” The campaign marks the anniversary of WHO’s founding on 7 April 1948, launching a year-long public health campaign.
Kids, Competition & Pressure: Keeping sports fun
Research shows adults who played sports as kids report better mental health and higher levels of persistence and “grit” later in life.
As World Cup kick-off nears, a reminder of the power of sport to build bridges and break barriers
The 2026 World Cup final will take place at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, a few miles away from UN Headquarters where, on Wednesday, elite athletes and sports administrators spoke about the power of football and other international sports to change the world for the better.
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Where is the NFC East ranked after NFL free agency?
Two NFC East teams have had a much better offseason than the other two.
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Humans can still beat AI at video games
AI may have teams of engineers on its side, but humans have lived experience and better learning skills.
Album Review: 6WA by BigXthaPlug & 600 Entertainment
BigXthaPlug spent eight months in Nashville making a country-rap album that debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200, put “All the Way” with Bailey Zimmerman at No. 4 on the Hot 100, got him a Rolling Stone cover, and filled arenas with Jelly Roll. And then he came back to Dallas, rounded up four of his signees, and made a gangsta-rap record with N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton on the cover. 6WA is the second group release from 600 Entertainment, named after the 600 block of Meadowridge Street in Ferris, Texas, where BigX and his people grew up. The whole thing is loaded with West Coast samples. From N.W.A.’s “8Ball,” Eazy-E’s “Real Muthaphuckkin G’s” and “Boyz-N-The-Hood,” Ice-T’s “6 in the Mornin’,” Snoop Dogg’s “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” and more. BigX is staking his name on the lineup he built—Rosama, MurdaGang PB, Yung Hood, KevanGotBandz, KaineMusic—and claiming a lineage from 1,400 miles away while insisting Dallas is its own thing. A million dollars in cash, split and handed straight to his mother. That’s the first place BigX goes on “From the Bottom.” He’d probably still be in the streets if he didn’t have his son and daughter. He only started rapping to make life better for Carter. Couldn’t start his car back then, now people get starstruck at Starbucks, and he throws the whole field away in one sentence: “How you think we competin’? You on the same bag, I just made me some millions off country.” Goyard bags off a Nashville payday, and he wants you to know exactly how far he’s come from everybody else. “Safe to Say” does something similar but looser. It’s a straight Ice Cube “It Was a Good Day” flip, and BigX nails it. Wakes up, checks both phones, nobody’s locked up, kid accounts look good. Gets pulled over, only catches a warning. Pulls up on the squad to liquor, ladies, and haze. Rosama takes the second verse and matches him. Wakes up to his girl cleaning his cuticles, twins playing peekaboo, pays off his car, calls a cousin, sees the opps and they don’t trip. Lawyer calls, he beat his case. Rosama is the strongest voice in the 600 camp after BigX, and “Life of a Gangster” is why. Third person, riding low, blacked-out windows, snub-nose revolver. A character who chose sticking people up over selling dope. “Quick eraser like a number-two pencil.” He never breaks character, and his delivery drops lower and slower than anything he does on the group cuts, like he’s telling you something at a cookout that he probably shouldn’t. Then on “Long Live Fre$h” he’s a completely different rapper. “Short-bus diamonds, these bitches retarded,” wide-body Durango he can’t even park. That kind of range matters on a group record. MurdaGang PB’s best verse is on the title track. Feds at his door at 6 AM, cameras busted, flushing dope, ram truck putting everybody on the floor. Yung Hood on “The Hottest” just lays out four reasons to keep hustling. Who wants to be broke, women cost money, you need bail, and home has to be straight. It’s funnier and more honest than most rappers get when they’re trying to explain why they sell drugs. KevanGotBandz on “Ain’t Never Slowin’ Down” talks about his father getting caught on the dope while he’s sitting on $300K somewhere in the hills, which is a specific kind of guilt that doesn’t usually make it onto crew tapes. KaineMusic, the newest signee, takes the back half of “Who Dunnit” and introduces herself in third person—“Took flight just to show these hoes how to perform”—but it’s too short to know if she can hold a full song. The flex tracks fill the middle of the LP and mostly run together. “I Go” is Rosama and PB trading brands, guns, and food punchlines. Rosama’s “anemic, my iron tucked low in this shirt” is a slick gun bar, PB fires back with “.223 with a clip ‘bout as big as a toddler” and “I go Burger King, stay with that whopper.” Quick, funny sometimes, but it’s all shopping lists. “Dopeman” is a chant. “6ixer Party” brings Snoop Dogg, who does exactly what you’d expect Snoop Dogg to do. BigX contributes the night’s wildest overshare: “She say she brought a friend too, well, I’m tryna put sausage on her dental.” These songs move fast and don’t overstay, but three or four of them could trade verses and nobody would catch it. Midway through, The D.O.C. shows up for a spoken-word interlude. Tracy Curry. West Dallas native, former N.W.A affiliate, co-writer on a lot of the records getting sampled on this very album. He thanks BigX for the tribute and then gets direct: “This your time, this DFW time. You need to do it like we do it down here.” Leave bread crumbs so everybody behind you can eat. Keep God in your life. It’s fatherly and generous, and it does raise the question of whether 6WA follows that advice. The album borrows heavy. The cover art, the Eazy-E samples, “Amerikkka’s Most Wanted” opening with a direct “Boyz-N-The-Hood” lift, Yung Hood rapping “Flag on my left side, Crip until I die.” But the stuff that actually stays with you is Dallas. BigX talking about Pleasant Grove, Rosama calling himself a country boy, PB recounting a raid that could’ve been last Tuesday. The record smells most like itself when it smells like Ferris, Texas, and least like Compton. BigX on “The Hottest” says his father was the first person he knew who had chickens. Not the way rappers usually wave at the drug trade. He means his actual father, his actual family. On “600 Degrees,” Rosama compares his chopper’s stutter to a speech disorder, PB claims he still has the block on his back even after leaving the city. BigX closes that one saying he used to spin and smack, and now the plaques are platinum. Thirty-two minutes was right for this. Nobody overstays, Tony Coles and Rance and Charley Cooks keep the production punchy, and BigX gives his signees real room instead of crowding every song. 6WA doesn’t reinvent anything. Five rappers, good beats, short clock. Most of what they say you’ve heard before. Some of it—the million to his mother, the cuticles and peekaboo, the four reasons to hustle—you won’t forget. Solid (★★★½☆) Favorite Track(s): “Safe to Say,” “From the Bottom,” “The Hottest” Subscribe
Crimson Desert on PS5 Pro: 30fps Quality Mode Gets A Big Image Quality Upgrade
PSSR Native AA looks much better, but can impact performance.
I compared the Galaxy S26 Ultra to a 13-year-old phone, and I wasn't expecting this
Newer cameras aren't always better
90 Painfully Relatable Programming Memes That Might Just Break Your Brain (New Pics)
Every job has its quirks. But some feel almost like a world of their own. Like programming—we (indirectly) interact with it every day, yet many of us know surprisingly little when it comes to what actually goes on behind the screens. The subreddit ‘Programmer Humor’ is the perfect place to bridge this gap. It allows them—and pretty much everyone involved in computer science—to air their frustrations and give the rest of us a better understanding of what their day-to-day really looks like. Here a
Gemma 4 and what makes an open model succeed
Having written a lot of model release blog posts, there’s something much harder about reviewing open models when they drop relative to closed models, especially in 2026. In recent years, there were so few open models, so when Llama 3 was released most people were still doing research on Llama 2 and super happy to get an update. When Qwen 3 was released, the Llama 4 fiasco had just gone down, and a whole research community was emerging to study RL on Qwen 2.5 — it was a no brainer to upgrade. Today, when an open model releases, it’s competing with Qwen 3.5, Kimi K2.5, GLM 5, MiniMax M2.5, GPT-OSS, Arcee Large, Nemotron 3, Olmo 3, and others. The space is populated, but still feels full of hidden opportunity. The potential of open models feels like a dark matter, a potential we know is huge, but few clear recipes and examples for how to unlock it are out there. Agentic AI, OpenClaw, and everything brewing in that space is going to spur mass experimentation in open models to complement the likes of Claude and Codex, not replace them. Especially with open models, the benchmarks at release are an extremely incomplete story. In some ways this is exciting, as new open models have a much higher variance and ability to surprise, but it also points at some structural reasons that make building businesses and great AI experiences around open models harder than the closed alternatives. When a new Claude Opus or GPT drops, spending a few hours with them in my agentic workflows is genuinely a good vibe test. For open models, putting them through this test is a category error. Something else to be said about open models in the era of agents is that they get out of the debate of integration, harnesses, and tools and let us see close to the ground on what exactly is the ability of just a model. Of course, we can’t test some things like search abilities without some tool, but being able to measure exactly the pace of progress of the model alone is a welcome simplification to a systematically opaque AI space. Share The list of factors I’d use to assess a new open-weight model I’m considering investing in includes: Model performance (and size) — how this model performs on benchmarks I care about and how it compares to other models of a similar size. Country of origin — some businesses care deeply about provenance, and if a model was built in China or not. Model license — if a model needs legal approval for use, uptake will be slower at mid-sized and large companies. Tooling at release — many models release with half-broken, or at least substantially slower, implementations in popular software like vLLM, Transformers, SGLANG, etc due to pushing the envelope of architectures or tools. Model fine-tunability — how easy or hard it is to modify the given model to your use-case when you actually try and use it. The core problem is that some of these are immediately available at release, e.g. general performance, license, origin, etc. but others such as tooling take day(s) to week(s) to stabilize, and others are open research questions — with no group systematically monitoring fine-tunability. In the early era of open models, the days of Llama 2 or 3 and Qwen pre v3.5, the architectures were fairly simple and the models tended to work out of the box. Some of this was due to the extremely hard work of the Llama, Qwen, Mistral, etc. developer teams. Some is due to the new models being genuinely harder to work with. When it comes to something like Qwen 3.5 or Nemotron 3, with hybrid models (either gated delta net or mamba layers), the tooling is very rough at release. Things you would expect to “just work” often don’t. I’ve been following this area closely since we released Olmo Hybrid with a similar architecture, and Qwen 3.5 is just starting to work well in the various open-source tools that need to all play nice together for RL research. That’s 1.5 months after the release date! This is just to start really investing more into understanding the behavior of the models. Of course, others started working on these models sooner by investing more engineering resources or relying on partially closed software. The fully open and distributed ecosystem takes a long time to get going on some new models. All of this is lead-in for the most important question for open models — how easy is it to adapt to specific use-cases? This is a different problem for different model sizes. Large MoE open-weight models may be used by entities like Cursor who need complex capabilities in their domain, e.g. Composer 2 trained on Kimi K2.5. Other applications can be built on much smaller models, such as Chroma’s Context-1 model for agentic search, built on GPT-OSS 20B. The question of “which models are fine-tunable” is largely background knowledge known by engineers across the industry. There should be a thriving research area here to support the open ecosystem model. The first step is to understand characteristics of different base and post-trained models to understand what they look like. The second step is to tune pretraining recipes for open models so they’re more flexible. Interconnects AI is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe For The ATOM Project and other Interconnects endeavors, we’ve put in substantial effort to measuring adoption trends in the open ecosystem. Everything takes a long time to unfold after a model is first publicly available — and adaptability is why. What we know for sure now, when Qwen has been going from strength to strength with its releases, is that technical staff across the industry has gotten comfortable working with Qwen models. Countless research methods and datasets were made to work with Qwen. It’ll take patience for any other model family to get to this point — a patience I’m not sure many open model builders have. This takes us to Gemma 4, Google’s latest open models. Gemma 3 was released more than a year ago, in March of 2025, and is a bit underrated. Gemma 4 comes in 4 sizes for now, with a bigger, MoE model of over 100B total parameters rumored but not released yet. The models we have today come in sizes of ~5B dense, 8B dense, 26B total 4B active MoE, and 31B dense. I’m most excited that they’re finally adopting a standard Apache 2.0 open source license. This’ll massively boost adoption. The standard of better licenses for strong open-weight LLMs was set by mostly Chinese open model labs in the last 1-2 years, and now U.S. companies are following suit. I will personally be so happy if the horrible Llama licenses and Gemma terms of service were an ~18-month transient dynamic of the industry being nervous about releasing strong open models. The Gemma 4 scores look very solid, the small models have incredible benchmark scores (especially in general domains like LMArena) and the 31B model rivals the recent Qwen 3.5 27B, which is the leading member of that class. The ~30B size range is an important one, as it’s accessible both to researchers and to enterprises looking to deploy the model in real use-cases. Where the 7B model scale is the default for tinkering and research, a 30B model is the default for seeing if an open model can unlock substantial value in your specific workflow — a good mix of intelligence, low price, tractability for downstream training, etc. This takes us back to the above adoption criteria I mentioned for open models and the bigger question — do I think Gemma 4 will be an overwhelming success? Previous Gemma models have been plagued by tooling issues and poorer performance when being finetuned. Gemma 4’s success is going to be entirely determined by ease of use, to a point where a 5-10% swing on benchmarks wouldn’t matter at all. It’s strong enough, small enough, with the right license, and from the U.S., so many companies are going to slot it in. I’m cautiously optimistic that Gemma 4 is going to work better here. Winds are shifting for open models built in America. We saw GPT-OSS go through a bumpy launch to become an overwhelming success. There’s a collective energy around the likes of Reflection, Arcee, Nemotron, Gemma, Olmo, and peers that show substantial demand for building new stacks around open models. There’s capital to be spent on AI stacks across the economy by those who want more ownership of everything, including the model. After launching The ATOM Project 240 days ago, the conversation is shifting into the next stage. Summer of 2025 was a crisis moment where the U.S. AI scene realized it can’t wait and figure out open models after building AGI. The two markets will capture different areas and proceed in parallel. Now that more companies in the U.S. are releasing strong models, we need to improve the ecosystem so that these models are easy to use, understand, and build value around. It’s the hard work to build another inflection point in these adoption plots I’ve been updating consistently, but that’s the work to be done. Join me in it. More data coming soon! Here’s a sneak peek:
AI tax scams surge ahead of filing deadline, Better Business Bureau says
With the tax filing deadline fast approaching, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) in San Antonio is warning taxpayers about a growing and increasingly sophisticated threat: scams powered by artificial intelligence.
Modernizing Paid Medical Leave Would Support New York's Small Business Owners: New Op-Ed
In a new op-ed for the Brooklyn Downtown Star, small business owner Lena DeGloma explains why updating New York's Temporary Disability Insurance program would be a lifeline for businesses and workers alike.
We all need to become better science storytellers. Here’s why and how.
Last week, in a lovely New Haven bar, six people gathered in front of a crowd to tell stories that were somehow related to science and public health. It was magical. One person talked about learning how social determinants of health helped them forgive their mother’s alcoholism. Another shared what it’s been like navigating a dementia diagnosis. Another described their last dinner with their mother before they left Nigeria to come to the U.S. and how that moment, plus the diagnosis that followed, shapes their career goals today. As the Executive Director of The Evidence Collective at Your Local Epidemiologist, I was ecstatic to bring this event, “Science and Storytelling,” to the community surrounding the Yale School of Public Health. Stories are not the default way most people communicate about science and public health. In fact, we are taught to take all the emotion out of data, but that makes it pretty darn boring to everyone else. And if people can’t see themselves in it, feel themselves in it, or influence it, how can we ask them to support it? Why do stories stick? How can we all—from community members to public health scientists—do better? And what are some examples?
Islanders Gameday: Get busy winning or get busy dying
If the regular season ended this morning, the New York Islanders would qualify for the playoffs by virtue of having more points, thanks to having played one more game, than Detroit, Columbus, or Philadelphia. Tonight that will not change but it can get either better or more fragile as they host the Flyers, who desperately […]
I replaced 7 daily tasks with NotebookLM — how the mobile app actually saves me time
NotebookLM is great on desktop but it’s even better on your phone
Innovative UC Health tool leads to better blood pressure control
‘These are real Californians who didn’t end up in an emergency room, didn’t have a disability, didn’t lose time with their families.’
These Good Health snacks pass the lunchbox test (and taste good too!)
Looking for healthier snacks for you and your kiddos? Good Health has a guilt-free lineup of veggie straws, chips and more.
Sharks' Macklin Celebrini is breaking Wayne Gretzky's all-time NHL record
It's hard to do better than this.
Why AI health chatbots won’t make you better at diagnosing yourself
A chatbot might know what’s wrong with you, but when people try to use them to understand symptoms, they may end up no closer to the answer.
What to Eat for Better Heart Health, According to New Guidelines
The American Heart Association updates its advice for what to eat to maintain a healthy heart.
Zoo Blooms returns with spring displays and live entertainment at the Cincinnati Zoo
DAYTON, Ohio (WKEF) -- Spring is in full bloom, and there's no better place to see it than at the Cincinnati Zoo.Zoo Blooms is underway with stunning displays a
Scientists are working on “everything vaccines”
Scientists are developing broad-spectrum vaccines that could protect against multiple virus families by targeting more conserved areas of pathogens and also better-training the body’s innate immune system.
How to poop better, according to a gastroenterologist | Science Friday
For many of us, what happens in the bathroom stays in the bathroom: According to a recent survey, 1 in 3 Americans are too embarrassed to talk about their poop or gut issues with thei...
Better Business Bureau: Beware of bogus tax relief offers
President and CEO of BBB of the Mid-South Randy Hutchinson discusses ways for consumers to protect their assets and avoid scams.
Energy crisis: why ‘keep calm but cut down’ may be a better message for Labour
Government keen to avoid panic as oil price surges, but perhaps households need advice on reducing consumption
Subprime Lender Goeasy Sees Elevated Writeoffs Before Business Improves
Subprime lender Goeasy Ltd., which surprised investors weeks ago with a surge of bad debts in its vehicle financing business, said it expects loan writeoffs to remain elevated for a while before getting better later in the year.
Running local models on Macs gets faster with Ollama's MLX support
Apple Silicon Macs get a performance boost thanks to better unified memory usage.
The March Windows 11 Insider Update adds 9 fresh features and improvements worth knowing
Microsoft closes March with a wave of Windows 11 upgrades across Insider channels, improving security, better accessibility, and deeper NPU insights.
20-hour Amtrak trip from Chicago to New York: What it's really like
Amid the long TSA wait lines, I took a 20-hour Amtrak trip instead of flying. Perks like easier boarding and comfortable seats made the trip better.
New Siri multitasking upgrade detailed in latest iOS 27 report
Siri may not be any better in iOS 26.5 beta, but we’re continuing to learn a lot more about iOS...