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Whistleblower says USPS system Trump ordered for mail ballots is flawed and untested
An executive order from Trump, which is stymied in the courts, required the Postal Service to rapidly build a complex system to vet mail ballots.
Huawei shows Watch D3’s smarter BP monitoring before September 2
Huawei Watch D3‘s features have started emerging ahead of the September 2 launch event, and one such is a smarter BP monitoring capability. The firm has showcased the new medical smartwatch at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress 2026. ESC Congress is one of the world’s top academic gatherings in cardiovascular medicine. The meeting […]
A 12TB Steam “teraleak” spills more than a decade of lost PC gaming history
Cut content from Portal 2, hints of Half Life 2: Episode 3, and so much more.
Herring Gut Coastal Science Center's Learn-Discover-Grow Series: OCEAN GREENS
Seaweed in the past has been a misunderstood part of our marine world. Until recently it has always been seen through the lens of a slimy gross weed that no one likes to touch while swimming. Now, seaweed is being seen as a way to help diversify careers, feed livestock, and help solve climate change. This Learn Discover Grow event will focus on highlighting the importance of seaweed and how mid coast businesses are utilizing these ocean greens. First we will watch the film “Ocean Greens” (link below) online at the WaterBear network. We will then take time to talk to our wonderful guest speakers about how they use seaweed in their business! Our speakers are, Allison Lakin from Lakin’s Gorges Cheese, Gabriela Acero from wolfpeach, and Lauren & Greg Soutiea from the Causeway Restaurant at the Craignair. Watch the video ahead of time: Title of video: Ocean Greens Link: https://www.waterbear.com/player/62389235111f77a1b677ded9 Create an account, it's free. Guest speakers: Allison Lakin, Lakin’s Gorges Cheese at East Forty Farm Gabriela Acero, Wolfpeach Lauren & Greg Soutiea, The Causeway Restaurant REGISTRANTS WILL RECEIVE A ZOOM LINK PRIOR TO THE EVENT
UFC Shanghai: Nurmagomedov vs. Song live results
The UFC Shanghai live results from China begin at 3 a.m. ET on MMAWeekly.com. 1
Meet the Megadonors Who Have Poured $1.2 Billion Into the Midterms
The leaderboard of the top 20 donors is dominated by the tech industry and ultrawealthy Republicans.
UFC Shanghai Final Face-Offs
The UFC Shanghai: Nurmagomedov vs. Song fighters faced off a final time on Thursday
Say Hello To GTA 6's Awesome New Dialogue System
Netflix's extended look revealed how Jason and Lucia will speak during GTA 6's story, and how NPCs have been reworked for a more realistic experience
‘Trojans, One and All’ wins USA TODAY Sports’ Readers’ Choice Award for best college fight song
Troy University’s fight song, “Trojans, One and All” has been selected as USA TODAY Sports’ 2026 Readers’ Choice Award for Best Fight Song. Announced online on Wednesday morning, “Trojans, One and All” placed first ahead of Michigan State’s “Victory for MSU,” USC’s “Fight On,” Navy’s “Anchors Aweigh,” Tennessee’s “Rocky Top,” Georgia Tech’s “Ramblin’ Wreck,” Wisconsin’s...Read More
SAIC Names 14 Experts to Science Panel as Aquaculture Funding Call Opens
The Sustainable Aquaculture Innovation Cluster has assembled a 14-member science panel drawing on international expertise in fish health, shellfish, seaweed, veterinary science, and technology to guide its first funding call since becoming independent from the University of Stirling.
Persona 4 Revival Hands-On: The New Stuff Still Needs to Be Dialed In, but It Remains Awesome at Its Core
In the pantheon of the Persona series, its fourth entry is held in high regard, and time will tell if Persona 4 Revival will prove to be the best of the bunch. The little bit I got to see is at least making it a pretty strong contender for that award, and it still very much feels like Persona 4. But anyone who has played it before knows it’s a very long game, so we will have to wait and see whether it's worth tuning in for or changing the channel.
Jaguars Reveal Awesome New Rivalries Uniforms For 2026
From teal-gloss helmets to neighborhood-inspired prints, Jacksonville’s new alternate look honors the "904" area code and the "Bold City" team’s 1995 roots.
Gears of War: E-Day Campaign Hands On – Brutal, Brilliant, and Quintessentially Gears
There’s something to be said for a video game so emotionally striking in what it offers that I spend a few seconds just sitting in the lobby, looking at the characters in awe. That’s how I started my first hands-on preview of the Gears of War: E-Day campaign last week, an experience that caught me […]
Free Fall Health Check Coming to Adrian September 24
Community members are invited to take advantage of free health screenings and services during the Fall 2026 Health Check, presented by United Way of Monroe/Lenawee Counties and Family Medical Center o
Bella Mir has some lofty combat sports goals
Bella Mir headlines Tuesday Dana White's Contender Series event against Alex Apodaca.
Happy 35th Birthday, Linux!
Today is Linux’s 35th birthday so join me in wishing Linux many more awesome years to come and to celebrate its amazing journey.
Anthony Hernandez accuses Gregory Rodrigues of cheating
Anthony Hernandez accused Gregory Rodriguez of dirty tactics during their UFC Sacramento bout.
UFC Sacramento Bonuses: Main event takes Fight of the Night
UFC CEO Dana White announced the recipients of the UFC Sacramento bonuses following Saturday's event.
UFC Sacramento Final Face-Offs
During Friday's UFC Sacramento Ceremonial Weigh-ins, the fighters faced off a final time.
Electrochemist Liu Jiawei moves from Singapore to Hong Kong to start her own lab
Liu says Singapore and Hong Kong share a high-standard research setting defined by diversity and connectivity to the West and mainland China.
The wide-screen phone trend is expanding beyond foldables
HUAWEI has launched the Pura X View, bringing a wide 16:9.5 aspect ratio display and 7,000mAh battery to non-foldable glass-slab phones.
Experts slam ‘flawed’ Trump administration Census report on alleged noncitizen voting
Former Census Bureau leaders, statisticians and voting-rights advocates are raising alarms about an unusual, unsigned new report posted on the agency’s website that claims tens of thousands of noncitizens voted in the 2020 presidential election.
SkyCity Entertainment Starts Strategic Review of Adelaide Casino
SkyCity Entertainment Group will start a strategic review of its Adelaide casino after resolving years of regulatory scrutiny over matters including governance standards and compliance with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws.
From college sports to writing a book: Meet the powerhouse athlete balancing athletics and academics
From competing for one of the top programs in college sports to writing a sci-fi novel, Osawese Agbonkonkon is taking "giving it your all" to a whole new level.
Pixel 11 introduces unified ‘Pixel search,’ hides it in the drawer
Google is introducing “Pixel search” as a “dedicated search companion designed to help you find personal information faster than ever.”
Sea Aggie Researchers Make Evening Fun with Science on the Beach
“The environment is where we all meet; where we all have a mutual interest; it’s the one thing all of us share.” – Lady Bird JohnsonOn Galveston Island, beaches rank among the favorite environments to share and study, and, as Texas A&M University at Galveston faculty emphasized last week, are “More Than Just Sand.”A program subtitled “The Secret Life & Value of Sandy Beaches” drew more than 40 people to the Aug. 13 meeting of Surfrider Foundation Galveston, a local chapter of a nonprofit focused on the protection and enjoyment of oceans and beaches.The evening began barefoot with ecology lessons on the sand before moving across Seawall Boulevard for beverages, bites, and more beach talk at an area establishment. Drs. Guilherme Corte and Yasmina Shah Esmaeili show how a mesh bag is used as a sieve to separate organisms from samples of the sand. Credit: TAMUG Divisions of Marketing and CommunicationsNot far from where others were enjoying the attractions at Pleasure Pier, Drs. Guilherme Corte and Yasmina Shah Esmaeili introduced the ecologically curious to species living within the sediments.“When people hear ‘coral reefs,’ they immediately think of fish, live ecosystems, but when they think of sandy beaches, they think party, recreation, vacations – not coastal ecosystems,” said Corte, an assistant professor of marine biology in the College of Marine Sciences and Maritime Studies at TAMUG.Shah Esmaeili co-founded the Gulf eDNA Network and works with Corte in TAMUG’s Benthic Ecology Lab.“Sandy beaches are indeed great places for leisure and recreation,” Corte said. “Let’s keep enjoying them, because they are awesome. But they are also full of life that we most of the time don’t realize is there.”The married couple soon had the beachcombers measuring the slope with PVC poles, searching for ghost shrimp with a stainless-steel pump, sifting for marine worms and sand fleas, and guessing which species would burrow fastest back into the sand once released.Away from the sand, the focus turned to research from Drs. Ashley Ross ’03, ’10, and Virgie Greb, ’25 and those words from Lady Bird Johnson reminding people that the environment isn’t separate from their daily lives.“It’s about things that we value, mostly our communities, strong local economies, outdoor recreation, cultural connections, and our overall quality of life,” said Greb, a proud BOI – born on the island – Galvestonian, who now works in Austin as a project manager for the Texas General Land Office. “Along our coast, these benefits are deeply interconnected.”Greb and Ross, an associate professor in marine and coastal environmental science with the College of Marine Sciences & Maritime Studies, have studied a variety of ways beaches and the sea are important to Galveston and those who live there. Drs. Ashley Ross (left) and Virgie Greb (standing at right) field questions after their presentation. Credit: TAMUG Division of Marketing and CommunicationsIn 2023, using three survey methods – online for Galveston County residents, in-person at beaches, and paper distributed via city water bills – they collected 732 complete responses, 53 percent from residents and 47 percent from visitors.Most were frequent beachgoers who gave the recreation value of Galveston beaches a “B” and rated amenities such as restaurants, lodging, shopping, and beach access highly. Lower rated were water clarity and restroom facilities.“It’s noticeable that primary residents actually rate water quality higher; they’re more tolerant of hard, turbid water,” Ross said, crediting them with better understanding the natural conditions with the Trinity and San Jacinto Rivers bringing sediments and rich nutrients to the area around Galveston.Island residents also were more likely to understand that “clear” isn’t the same as clean beach water and to know that water quality is regularly tested. Clean means absent of disease-causing pathogens.“We need more education and outreach focused on water quality and the benefits of Galveston beaches and shores and water,” Greb said. “And it’s not just for tourism. There are a lot of people who are very lucky to live on an island with beaches and the bay.”
Archeologists used to think women in prehistory wielded no power. Genetic data is upending that idea.
For more than 150 years, leading archaeologists have assumed that women of the past never assumed roles of power. New genetic data shows how flawed that interpretation is.
Coach: 'Islam Makhachev doesn't care who he fights next'
Islam Makhachev's coach, Javier Mendez, doesn't think the champion cares who he fights next.
3 reasons why Von Miller signing is awesome for Cowboys
Here are 3 reasons why the Von Miller signing is awesome
Watch Inside the Business of Ultra Luxury Travel
Luxury Travel and Event Expert Olivia Ferney sits down with Lisa Mateo, Joe Mathieu and Carol Massar on Bloomberg This Weekend and shares how she has built a business catering to ultrawealthy clients whose requests can range from six-figure vacations to elaborate celebrations, while creating a social media following of more than 1 million.
We study autism and vaccines. Trump’s executive order rests on flawed science.
The new childhood vaccine schedule and 6G, in readers' eyes.
Deshaun Watson: I don't doubt myself in any way
Browns coach Todd Monken said it was "cool" and "awesome" to watch Deshaun Watson play on Saturday.
UFC 330 Embedded, Episode 6: 'It's fight time'
The sixth and final episode of UFC 330 embedded was release ahead of Saturday's event.
UFC 330 Final Face-Offs
During the UFC 330 Ceremonial Weigh-In, the fighters faced off with their opponents for a final time.
Health Gorilla lawsuits consolidated into multidistrict litigation
Nine class action privacy suits have been consolidated in federal court, and it could signal that judges are scrutinizing accountability for healthcare data in motion, say privacy experts.
Research showing scientific progress slowing could be flawed
A new paper takes aim at the claim that science has become less disruptive
Xbox unveils two awesome limited-edition Gears of War: E-Day controllers
With the launch of Gears of War: E-Day ebbing ever closer, Microsoft has now announced two limited-edition Xbox controllers to celebrate the shooter.
UFC 330 Countdown: Islam Makhachev vs. Ian Machado Garry
The UFC 330 main event features a welterweight title bout between champion Islam Makhahev and No. 2 ranked Ian Machado Garry. It will be Makhachev's first title defense. UFC 330 Countdown takes an in-depth look at the welterweight title bout ahead of Saturday's event at Xfinity Mobile Arena in ...
Miles McBride Opens Up About Feeling of Knicks’ Championship
Miles McBride is still in awe of the fact that he's a champion.
The Pixel 10 Pro is a flawed and inconsistent phone — and I'm still using it one year later
I've had my Pixel 10 Pro for almost a year, and through ups and downs, it is still the phone I use more than any other.
Business Weekly Agenda for August 9
Events for the Greater Berks business community.
The American Prison Writing Archive Publishes New Book
The American Prison Writing Archive, led by Director and Professor of Political Science Vesla Weaver, has published its first anthology as part of the Building a Prison Witness Collective initiative. Published by Haymarket Books, the anthology titled Harm and Punishment: Incarcerated Writers on Violence and the US Prison is edited by Elizabeth Hinton and Elsa Julien Lora....
Engineers build world's first portable diamond-powered quantum computer — it works at room temperature and can be plugged into an outlet
The world's first portable, room-temperature quantum computer with more than 10 qubits utilizes flawed lab-made diamonds. The quantum system fits into a standard server rack and connects to a typical power grid.
Epic Discounts | Must‑have home, entertainment and tech finds
This week’s Epic Discounts features products for quick cleanups and better indoor air quality, almost endless TV programming and inspiring tech. They’re available at awesome prices, so now is the perfect time to simplify your life and leisure time with these must-have deals.
Huawei confirms MateBook Pro pricing, Kirin X90 Plus and Harmony OS laptop starts at $1,480
Huawei’s 970-gram MateBook Pro returns with the Kirin X90 Plus and higher prices. The base model costs around $1,480, while the top option exceeds $2,000.
Huawei launches MateBook Fold (2026) with 18-inch foldable OLED display and Kirin X90 Plus chip
Huawei has officially unveiled the second-generation MateBook Fold Ultimate Design. The premium foldable laptop features an 18-inch dual-layer OLED display, the new Kirin X90 Plus processor, HarmonyOS 6.1, and support for a new AI-powered M-Pencil stylus.
Former champion lists the 5 most dangerous UFC fighters
Each fighter presents a unique set of challengers for their opponents. Some are proficient strikers, others are grappling gurus. There are knockout artists and cardiovascular kings and queens. But who are the most dangerous fighters on the UFC roster? Former middleweight champion Michael Bisping ...
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.
Business Monday: Colorful orchids breathe a fresh energy to a new Hilo cafe
Faii Metawee and Caleb Houck have opened Blooms Café in Hilo, which has homemade foods and drinks that feature local flavors and seasonal specials, along with beautiful, unique orchids for sale.
17 Awesome Motorcycles You Might’ve Missed from Honda, Harley-Davidson, Kawasaki and More
The red brand has been red hot of late, but other manufacturers (and auction houses) are making noise too.
The Ultra-Rich Are Moving to Miami, and Want Their Money Managers There, Too
Tax incentives, among other benefits, have drawn the ultrawealthy to the city. And they need space for the firms that manage their money.
Business Lunch Meets Convenience as New Onigiri Shop Opens Downtown
By MIKEY HIRANO CULROSSRAFU STAFF WRITER The queue was out the door and around the corner at CAL Marketplace on July 24, as one of Japan’s mainstay snack foods has a new home in the heart of Downtown L.A. Onigiri Sun, a specialty shop offering a selection of the iconic seaweed-wrapped rice balls as well […]
Huge blankets of seaweed are smothering coastlines from the Caribbean to Mexico
Some 27 million metric tons of self-sustaining sargassum have been recorded in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico in July, according to a report released Friday by the University of South Florida’s Optical Oceanography Lab.
How scientists finally confirmed rare pink seaweed as new species
An ancient algae first spotted four decades ago will now join the collection of the Natural History Museum.
UFC Belgrade: Medic vs. Rodriguez weigh-in results
The 28 fighters competing on Saturday's UFC Belgrade fight card will step on the scale on Friday in Belgrade, Serbia. The event marks the first time the fight promotion has held an event in Serbia. The fight card is headlined by a welterweight bout between No. 13 ranked Daniel Rodriguez and ...
Flawed studies linking hormone therapy to breast cancer made doctors reluctant to prescribe it for menopause relief – especially for breast cancer survivors
Menopausal hormone therapy no longer has the highest-level warning label about the risk of breast cancer, opening a gray area on who would benefit most from treatment.
Climate extremes are becoming more extreme, worrying scientists
Heat, sea level rise, polar melting: They’re all picking up pace.
Fetch Scales for Feebas in Pokémon Pokopia
Seek out Prism Scales and collect awesome swimming-themed items during this event.
New thin Huawei laptop undercuts MacBook Neo by a wide margin in weight
The Huawei MateBook Pro S has been officially showcased, and it's set to launch alongside other new products on August 05, 2026. Ahead of the full unveiling, the brand has confirmed that this thin laptop will weigh around 1.5x less than the MacBook Neo.
Clinical chatbots are taking medicine by storm. Should doctors trust them?
As LLMs compete for doctors' attention, some developers say the science of benchmarking their AI tools for safety and accuracy is flawed.
Sizing Up the Sargassum Belt
Seaweed composing the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt hit near-record levels in June 2026, with the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of America both reaching all-time highs.
'Emotional' Zinedine Zidane: Taking Over France National Team A 'Dream'
Zinedine Zidane is France’s new coach, and he's in awe of the opportunity in front of him.
How 209 Mare Turned The Humble Towel Into A Luxury Fashion Business
How 209 Mare turned a €500 towelling blazer into a global luxury business, using Monaco, social media and smart distribution to create Rivierawear.
A planetarium for the brain
Neuroscientists should take a cue from astrophysicists and use planetariums to inspire awe, argues Tyler Sloan. His new film takes a first step.
Mexico's Science Secretary Strengthens Cooperation with China in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
Rosaura Ruiz met with Ambassador Chen Daojiang to advance joint AI, semiconductor, and electromobility projects, plus possible collaboration with Huawei.
The Latest Policy Issue: Sports Prediction Markets
House Agriculture Committee examines regulatory gaps in sports prediction markets. Learn how federal oversight is evolving for this booming industry.
Bidder emerges for bankrupt Triangle startup
Apani Systems, a Raleigh textile recycler, offers $250,000 for Keel Labs' assets in bankruptcy auction, potentially acquiring seaweed fiber technology.
The health and environmental benefits of sugar kelp
Science Under the Sword of Damocles
By Sam Halpern, M.D. I have spent my working life in medicine as a clinician and a medical scientist. I have watched with awe as basic and applied medical science placed new and effective tools in…
Science Under the Sword of Damocles
By Sam Halpern, M.D. I have spent my working life in medicine as a clinician and a medical scientist. I have watched with awe as basic and applied medical science placed new and effective tools in…
Shaky political "science": breakdown of the peer review process
[This article is the latest in our “Shaky Political Science” series. In our 38 page report, “Shaky political ‘science’ misses mark on ranked choice voting,” released in December 2025, we examined over 40 studies focused on ranked choice voting (RCV). Many of these studies suffered from puzzling research methodologies, poorly constructed surveys, unrealistic simulated elections, cherry picked data and faulty analyses that often were contradicted by results from real-world elections (a link to our full paper is here). Here are links to the first four articles in our series: the first one summarizing the overall results of our report; the second one analyzed a study co-authored by University of Minnesota academic Larry Jacobs, which was one of the most error-prone of all the research we reviewed in our report; a third article showing an admirable example of two political scientists holding two other political scientists accountable for their flawed, sloppy research; and a fourth article that analyzed seven studies sponsored by New America’s political reform program that deployed flawed methodology based on “simulated” elections instead of real-world elections, which when combined with some basic misunderstandings of RCV, produced odd and misleading results]. In this fifth article in our “Shaky Political Science” series, we examine two flawed studies on the impact of RCV on voter turnout authored by San Francisco State University professor Jason McDaniel. McDaniel’s research in these two papers stands out for its puzzling methodology, inadequate and cherry-picked data, and faulty analyses that not only misunderstands ranked choice voting but reflects a basic misunderstanding of politics in general. The first of the McDaniel studies actually passed through a peer review process and then was subsequently published by the Journal of Urban Affairs, despite its obvious errors. It is perplexing that a jury of peer political scientists did not catch the errors and send it back to McDaniel for a rewrite or outright rejection. This calls into question the credibility of the peer review process itself. The peer review process is supposed to represent the intellectual pinnacle of the profession – a way for academics to certify the quality of each other’s work, and to act as a check against sloppy research. In the case of the McDaniel study, the peer review process failed. Yet his flawed study has been cited dozens of times by other political scientists in their own flawed works — an unvirtuous circle of academic research. Here is the first Jason McDaniel study that we analyzed: “Writing the Rules to Rank the Candidates: Examining the Impact of Instant-Runoff Voting on Racial Group Turnout in San Francisco Mayoral Elections,” by Jason McDaniel, 2016, Journal of Urban Affairs. This study covered San Francisco’s use of ranked choice voting (RCV) in mayoral elections, purporting to show that RCV reduces voter turnout overall, increases voter errors, and has a negative impact on “marginal populations,” i.e. racial minorities, mainly as the result of the alleged complexity of RCV asking voters to rank candidates and having to be familiar with multiple candidates and related dynamics. McDaniel reached these conclusions by examining five San Francisco mayoral elections taking place in odd years (i.e. where there are no federal or state races on the ballot) from 1995 to 2011, comparing three earlier non-RCV races (in 1995, 1999 and 2003) with the later two RCV races (in 2007 and 2011). Only two RCV races were studied, and as McDaniel acknowledged, only the contest in 2011 was “competitive” (that contest in 2007 was the first mayoral election using RCV, and incumbent mayor Gavin Newsom won easily in the first round of counting, earning 74% of first choices and far ahead of the second place candidate who had just 6.3% of first choices). Yet even the allegedly competitive contest in 2011was won by an incumbent with a landslide margin of nearly 20 points. No other elections were studied by McDaniel, even though San Francisco elects 17 other offices besides mayor with RCV, including the 11 seats on the Board of Supervisors (the name for the city council) in even years, and six other citywide offices in odd years. Previous academic research has found that competitive elections can stimulate greater voter involvement and higher turnout. For unexplained reasons, this study ignored at least 34 other RCV races between the years 2004 to 2011, many of which were very competitive and had high voter turnout. Instead, McDaniel’s analysis based its conclusions on data from only a single, marginally-competitive mayor’s race using RCV. These 2007 and 2011 mayoral elections were the only two RCV elections that McDaniel used as the sole basis for his small data set to determine the impact of RCV on voter turnout. Despite having no meaningful data to inform his study, McDaniel nonetheless concluded that RCV lowered turnout when compared to the previous three mayoral non-RCV elections using two-round runoffs. Then, using the same inadequate database of San Francisco elections, McDaniel also found that “Instant-runoff voting is associated with a significant decline in Black voter turnout and White voter turnout…On average, Black voter turnout decreases by 18 points and White voter turnout decreases by 16 points …” But how could he credibly arrive at that conclusion when his study was based on voter turnout in two RCV contests that were not even remotely competitive? Beyond that, McDaniel tacitly admits that the key determining factor driving Black voter turnout was not RCV vs non-RCV elections, but the presence of a viable Black candidate. McDaniel wrote, “Black voter turnout was about 17 percentage points higher for the two elections that featured an African American candidate compared to the three elections that did not” — but one of those three elections did not use RCV. The same dynamic was present for White voter turnout, in which higher turnout was not correlated with RCV vs non-RCV elections, but the presence of a viable White candidate. Beyond that, McDaniel’s voter turnout results, whether correlated with the race of the candidates or RCV vs non-RCV elections, showed no clear patterns. In his Figure 1, he shows low Asian voter turnout in the non-RCV elections in 1999 and 2003 when there was no viable Asian candidate running, but in the 2007 mayoral election using RCV, there is still no viable Asian candidate, yet Asian turnout increases dramatically. For Latinos, voter turnout is virtually the same in 1999 (no viable Latino candidate, non-RCV elections), 2003 (leading Latino candidate, non-RCV elections), 2007 (no viable Latino candidate, RCV elections) and 2011 (leading Latino candidate, RCV elections). Meanwhile White voter turnout increased dramatically from a low in the 2007 mayoral election, in which the leading candidate was a white incumbent, to the 2011 election in which there were no leading white candidates that finished any higher than sixth place with 5.6% of the vote. Clearly other factors were determining voter turnout than either the race of the candidates or RCV vs non-RCV elections. Despite these inconsistent findings, McDaniel boldly marches forth to render conclusions about the impact of RCV on different groups of racial voters, even though his conclusions are not remotely supported by his data. This looks like the worst kind of “data cherry picking” to cover up a puzzling conclusion based on a poor data set involving only two RCV elections, neither of which were remotely competitive. McDaniel’s cherry picking didn’t stop there. In calculating voter turnout for the three non-RCV mayoral elections in 1995, 1999 and 2003, he failed to mention that in each of these years there was a two-round runoff election, with a first round election in November in which no candidate garnered a winning majority of the vote, followed by the decisive runoff in December. So there were two non-RCV elections in each election year. But McDaniel only decided to include one of the two elections in his data set, apparently the December runoff in each year (which had higher turnout in two out of the three mayor’s races, and lower turnout in the third). So he ignored the November 1995 election, the November 1999 election when turnout was only 45 percent, and the November 2003 election when turnout was only 45.7 percent. This is flawed methodology based on blatant cherry picking, since McDaniel simply omitted three elections worth of data that did not fit within his frame. His study should never have made it through a peer review process, and it is an embarrassment to political science that not only was it approved for publication, but it has been uncritically cited by dozens of other political scientists. Share A “study” without wider context or credible data Lacking a data set that included even a single competitive RCV mayoral race, McDaniel declared that RCV lowered voter turnout in 2011, when turnout was 42.5 percent. But he also ignored -- or did not realize -- that voter turnout in mayoral elections during 2011 had sharply declined in all big cities, including far more steeply in nearby Los Angeles and other cities. In fact, San Francisco’s election in 2011 had the second highest turnout of any mayoral election in the nation’s 22 largest cities from 2008-2011. Was 2011 just a particularly low turnout year all across the country, perhaps because the country was still reeling from the aftermath of the housing market collapse in 2008-2010? McDaniel ignored this factor and did not search for alternative explanations beyond his flawed thesis. Furthermore, while McDaniel suggested that RCV leads to more “overvotes” – which is an invalidated ballot in which a voter, in either a non-RCV or RCV race, makes a mistake and selects two candidates for a single choice – he failed to address that in the June 2012 US Senate primary contest, which used the typical “one-choice” plurality method and did not use RCV, there was more than five times as many overvotes in San Francisco and Oakland than in the RCV mayoral elections in those cities. Additionally, turnout had been significantly higher and more representative in RCV elections for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors races -- that McDaniel didn’t even bother to study -- as compared to previous “delayed two-round runoffs” for those offices, often higher by as much as 40% in the RCV races. Perhaps the most surprising irony was that an earlier study co-authored by McDaniel (Overvoting and the Equality of Voice under Instant-Runoff Voting in San Francisco by Francis Neely and Jason McDaniel, 2015, California Journal of Politics and Policy) found that overvotes are often more common in lower-income precincts, but that the pattern of overvoting is similar in both RCV and non-RCV contests. Wrote Neely and McDaniel: “[Overvote] errors appear to be a function of complexity in general and not IRV per se…. the pattern of overvoting is similar in both IRV and non-IRV contests…Even among votes cast in a top-of-the-ticket race like U.S. Senate, overvoting occurs in an uneven fashion” (IRV, or ‘instant runoff voting,’ is another name for ranked choice voting in single-winner contests). So McDaniel not only contradicted his own conclusion in his earlier study with Neely, but the earlier study had been an important corrective for one of the most frequently made mistakes made by anti-RCV political scientists – a continual failure to provide crucial context by pairing a comparative analysis of real world RCV elections with an analysis of real world plurality or other electoral methods. Unfortunately McDaniel’s earlier study does not get cited much by other researchers, and McDaniel did not even cite it in his own flawed study analyzed above. Incredibly, McDaniel cherrypicked McDaniel, even as his flawed study has been cited dozens of times. Despite being a textbook example of poor political “science,” featuring both inadequate as well as cherrypicked data, the shelf life of McDaniel’s study has been extended endlessly by other political scientists and media outlets who have cited it uncritically. Equally troubling, the Journal of Urban Affairs put this paper through its peer review process and published it despite its numerous flaws. McDaniel gets it wrong, Part II Not content with producing one shoddy, confused paper, McDaniel produced another one a few years later, here is the link: Electoral Rules and Voter Turnout in Mayoral Elections: An Analysis of Ranked-Choice Voting by Jason McDaniel. San Francisco State Univ. (McDaniel, 2019). In this paper, McDaniel extended his previous flawed research focused on San Francisco, about voter turnout and voter impact, to multiple RCV cities through the 2018 elections. In his data set he included San Francisco, Minneapolis, St Paul, Oakland, Berkeley, San Leandro and Santa Fe. He then compared their turnout in mayoral elections to non-RCV cities, and to mayoral elections in those cities held before first RCV usage, and concluded “a significant decrease in voter turnout of approximately 3–5 percentage points in RCV cities after the implementation of RCV.” But he replicated many of the same mistakes as his first study presented above. While in this study McDaniel attempted to distinguish between various factors, such as odd year vs. even year elections, competitive races vs. noncompetitive, contests with open seats and other factors, the analysis is superficial and inadequate. He attempts to incorporate so many often-conflicting variables that his conclusions are once again unsupported by the actual data, and ultimately unconvincing (this second study never underwent a peer review process). For example, McDaniel declared that for RCV cities “in elections that are more competitive than average (margin of victory less than 20%), there is no significant RCV effect on voter turnout.” Yet McDaniel is a professor in a city, San Francisco, in which the 2018 special election using RCV to fill a mayoral vacancy was exceedingly close, decided by a margin of only one percentage point, and resulted in the second highest turnout in San Francisco history for a mayoral election. Illustrating the complexity involved in assessing the critical factors in turnout, that special election was held on the same election day as federal and state offices, which tends to boost turnout. Yet more voters participated in that RCV mayoral election than voted on the same day in the non-RCV primary for governor in which former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom was running. Even more puzzling, in this study McDaniel inaccurately cited his own previous study from 2015 with Neely. McDaniel wrote, “Neely and McDaniel (2015) examine individual ballot image files within a natural experiment, and find higher rates of ballot errors in RCV elections compared to non-RCV elections” (emphasis added). However, we quoted from that 2015 study several paragraphs above, and in actual fact Neely and McDaniel actually concluded the opposite -- that the pattern of overvoting – which is the most common form of ballot error – is similar in both RCV and non-RCV contests. McDaniel also ignored the fact that in Bay Area RCV elections held in even years – at the same time as federal and state elections, when turnout is highest -- the “undervote” (that is, the dropoff in ballots cast for governor or mayor) has declined, which contradicts his thesis that the act of ranking ballots in RCV elections is too complex and presents a barrier for certain demographics of voters. To his credit, McDaniel actually acknowledged another contradiction in his own paper, which found a negative RCV turnout effect in some odd-year elections but not others, admitting that “may present a challenge to the theory that increased complexity [from RCV] will have a marginal negative effect on voter turnout.” But he tried to wallpaper over that contradiction by blaming it on an unlikely source -- bad election administration. McDaniels wrote, “This would suggest that the negative impact of RCV on voter participation may be alleviated by high quality election administration,” without presenting any data or even anecdotes to support such an unfounded theory. While competent election administration of any election, whether RCV or non-RCV, is crucially important, there is no credible research that supports the far-fetched notion that the quality of election administration has much of an impact on voter turnout in US elections, whether using RCV or otherwise. Upgrade to a $5 subscription The unvirtuous circle of academic research It is puzzling how McDaniel’s first study could have survived the peer review process for the Journal of Urban Affairs. The mistakes in McDaniel’s first study above should have been obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of ranked choice voting as well as elections in general, and elections in San Francisco specifically. It undermines faith in the credibility of the peer review process to think that a jury of peer political scientists did not catch the egregious errors and reject McDaniel’s sloppy research and paper. And it remains a black mark on political science that this thoroughly discredited study has been cited dozens of times by other researchers. Indeed, in our research paper it became apparent that many political scientists cite each other’s flawed research to pad their list of citations and to legitimize their own flawed research, creating an unvirtuous circle of political science. More broadly, McDaniel’s voter turnout studies, like other studies evaluating RCV’s impact on turnout, lacked a recognition that no credible opinion or research can claim that RCV increases voter turnout merely because so many voters are excited to vote for their favorite candidates instead of “lesser evil” candidates without worrying about spoilers. Instead, with respect to turnout, the advantage of RCV has always been that, in most places where it has been used, it has eliminated a pre-November primary or post-November runoff, which usually saw about half the turnout of the November general election. This is especially true during even years when there are state and federal elections on the ballot which substantially drive turnout more than local contests. Any study that does not adequately account for this non-November primary/runoff vs November general election dynamic, or odd year vs even year election factors, is simply not credible. Both of McDaniel’s studies largely failed on those grounds. Steven Hill and Paul Haughey Share Upgrade to a $5 subscription Thanks for reading DemocracySOS…your digital portal for the pro-democracy movement. Subscribe for only $5 per month to receive full benefits and to support our work. Subscribe
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