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Ryan Tyson says it's still unlikely Democrats win statewide in Florida, but not impossible
He spoke on a panel alongside Florida Politics' Peter Schorsch about the 2026 races.
ChatGPT’s new ‘Thinking’ mode just hit a 94% reasoning score — 7 prompts it can solve that standard AI can’t
OpenAI's latest flagship model, GPT-5.4, introduces an "Extended Thinking" toggle — here is how to use its 94% reasoning power to solve "impossible" tasks
Fraud allegations may spark additional probe
Staff found 15 instances when this occurred but noted that time limits for making a decision made it “impossible to determine the exact number of fraudulent QC’s claimed by Collector 1.”
Opinion - When scientists believed Artemis II space travel was impossible
Artemis II reminds us of just how much science and our perspective can change.
Chagos Islands treaty is now ‘impossible to agree at political level’, UK minister says
Stephen Doughty says US withdrawal of support means bill cannot complete passage through parliament
How to Build a Balanced Plate in 30 Seconds
Building a balanced plate can feel like one more impossible task. But it doesn’t have to be complicated. Here's how to do it.
Pacoima business owners say Montague Street conditions are driving customers away
Montague Street in Pacoima has become nearly impossible to ignore. Trash, abandoned furniture, and human waste line parts of the sidewalk and street, creating conditions that business owners say ar…
A Look At Madison Square Garden Entertainment (MSGE) Valuation After New Impossible Foods Partnership
Partnership with Impossible Foods puts food trends in focus for MSGE stock Madison Square Garden Entertainment (MSGE) is in the spotlight after announcing a multiyear partnership with Impossible Foods that introduces a dedicated plant-based concession concept inside The Garden. The agreement ties Impossible Foods branding to New York Knicks and New York Rangers home games and expands plant-based menu options across concourses and premium areas, giving investors a fresh angle on how MSGE...
Seniors: Dennis Ouellette, 80
Ontario Orchards owner not slowing down as he grows his farm market By Stefan Yablonski The seeds for Dennis Ouellette’s career path were sown when he was 6 years old — and he isn’t slowing down. “Since age 6, I grew up an agriculturalist. That is 72 years. Started out with a 37-acre farm when I bought it from my parents and built it up to almost 300 acres. Brought it back down to around 200 acres now,” he said. The location of his business was just a barn, a horse barn, he said. “In 1967, it officially became Ontario Orchards Farm Market. My wife [June] and I graduated [high school] in 1964 and three years later we became Ontario Orchards. We have been here more than 60 years,” he explained. “It is the same location. We have expanded over the years as the customers mentioned different things; we have expanded to bring in different products. “What keeps me going is I totally enjoy what I am doing. I enjoy the people that I work with. The customers are wonderful. Mostly, more important than anything, is my family — my wife, my daughters, grandchildren, son-in-law — we are still very much a family business I’m not going to retire just yet.” He also enjoys the changing seasons. “Ontario Orchards is a four-season business. There is always something new; more energy, more interest. Not only for the business but for my staff, the people that work here. Things keep changing, changing. We are always looking forward to something new and exciting,” he said. They work with quite a number of local farmers within the area and throughout the state, throughout the country and from around the world.” “We do have things from different countries around the world. But specifically, we are very excited about the local. We have an over 200-acre farm. We sell just about everything we raise on that farm right here at the farm market. For example, we press cider year-round. We make baked goods every day, year-round. We sell our apples 12 months a year.” “Today, there are so many products in Ontario Orchards that we never would have thought of in 1967,” he continued. “I attribute a lot of that to my daughters. I like the young blood and new energy. That is very crucial to a business, it keeps it vibrant.” What’s his favorite part of the job? “I don’t have a favorite part. I enjoy it all. I have a lot of intertest in other things,” he said. “I have staff that knows so much. I can go to the staff and say, ‘I don’t know what this is, you tell me what this is.’ They are so knowledgeable. It is impossible for one person to know everything in this place. In the summer, staff is about 60; in the winter about 20, 25.” He added that he plans on being around for several more years.
“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.
World Champion of Magic brings “Impossible Science Live!” to Buffalo Museum of Science
"Very difficult, perhaps altogether impossible": Smith's political science at Econlib
We’re joining our friends at Liberty Matters in their celebration of the 250th anniversary of the publication of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations through a series of six weekly essays. In this fifth essay, Jacob T. Levy explores one of Smith’s most famous claims in Book V of Wealth […]
“Very difficult, perhaps altogether impossible”: Smith’s political science
Yet the argument of Book V is something quite different. Over hundreds of pages, Smith patiently shows why both peace and a tolerable administration of justice are historically rare, and continually fragile. To the extent that some society or other happens to have them, it seems to be neither the natural course of things nor […]
“Very difficult, perhaps altogether impossible”: Smith’s political science
Yet the argument of Book V is something quite different. Over hundreds of pages, Smith patiently shows why both peace and a tolerable administration of justice are historically rare, and continually fragile. To the extent that some society or other happens to have them, it seems to be neither the natural course of things nor […]
It's Becoming Almost Impossible To Get A Mac Studio Or Mac Mini In 2026
Having trouble getting your hands on a Mac Studio or Mac mini in 2026? You're not alone, as both popular products are on long-term backorder.
Times Opinion: Big money in politics makes progress in Tennessee impossible
Take a look at governmental policy and the public's broad position on any given issue, and you'll see a glaring disconnect.
Teen Science Cafe/ AI in Everyday Life and Healthcare
We are excited to invite you to the Alexandria Teen Science Café on April 16, where we’ll explore how emerging technologies are reshaping the future of health. This month’s café will show you how the data behind everyday apps is being transformed into powerful tools that help solve medical challenges once considered impossible, even predicting
I Personally Guarantee You Won't Be Able To Keep A Straight Face While Looking At These 31 Pictures That Are Impossible Not To Laugh At
Just what the doctor ordered.
‘We watched them die before our eyes’: Sudan health workers helpless amid medical shortages
As violence forces tens of thousands to flee Sudan’s South Kordofan state, doctors in a key maternity hospital are facing impossible choices – with too few supplies, too many patients, and lives slipping away.
Trey Gowdy: Bondi inherited a challenging job in an 'impossible' political environment
Fox News host Trey Gowdy discusses the firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi and his interaction with her on ‘Special Report.’
The Federal closes in Waltham after 7 years in business
The Main Street seafood and steak restaurant said rising costs made it “impossible to continue.”
Central banks' inflation mood puzzle: more judgment than science
The world's central bankers may be attempting the impossible: to get into the psyche of business executives, labour unions and ordinary households in real time to understand how they are navigating their finances through yet another energy shock.
‘Impossible for Chinese’: Yale scientist Zhang Kai leaves US for China
Pioneering work involves observing proteins inside the body during exercise, effectively capturing their activity in a natural state.
📸 Italy, historic humiliation! 📰 Front pages 🫣 Abroad: Disaster
Italy lose on penalties in Bosnia and fail to book their place at the World Cup in the United States. What had seemed impossible has become reality.Watch the entire Serie BKT live on OneFootball for j...
Scientists achieve ‘impossible’ solar efficiency in renewables breakthrough
‘Spin-flip’ technique promises to shatter efficiency limits
NI Health Service: Budget uncertainty threatens major cuts
Permanent Secretary Mike Farrar claims that another one-year budget would make it almost impossible to deliver savings.
Scientists stretched a liquid and it snapped like a solid
Scientists have discovered something that seems almost impossible: under the right conditions, ordinary liquids can snap apart like solid objects. In experiments, researchers found that when certain liquids are stretched with enough force, they don’t just thin and flow—they suddenly fracture with a sharp break, much like metal under stress. This surprising behavior appears to be tied to viscosity, not elasticity, challenging long-held assumptions about how liquids behave.
Malnourished children and desperate mothers: the healthcare facility on the frontline of Nigeria’s hunger crisis
About 6.4 million Nigerian children are expected to be acutely malnourished by the end of the year, putting impossible pressure on scarce treatment centres
High Points of the Valley
* There’s something special about high school sports programs in the Mid-Ohio Valley — that’s no secret. But the Wood County Board of Education had an opportunity last week to recognize the accomplishments of local teams who live up to the nearly impossible high precedent that has been set for them. Parkersburg High School’s girls’ […]
Fielder’s health crisis fallout. Plus: New poll on congressional race
Jackie Fielder’s health crisis has SF’s political world on edge. And a supermajority of moderates that once seemed impossible suddenly isn’t. Plus: new Pelosi race polling.
Opinion | When Sports Heroes Have Terrible Opinions
Sports used to be an oasis from political squabbling. But now the bad opinions of star athletes have become impossible to escape.
Opinion | When Sports Heroes Have Terrible Opinions
Sports used to be an oasis from political squabbling. But now the bad opinions of star athletes have become impossible to escape.
Solar cells just did the “impossible” with this 130% breakthrough
A new solar breakthrough may overcome a long-standing efficiency barrier. Researchers used a “spin-flip” metal complex to capture and multiply energy from sunlight through singlet fission. The result reached about 130% efficiency, meaning more energy carriers were produced than photons absorbed. This could lead to much more powerful solar panels in the future.
Impossible Science Live! with World Champion of Magic Jason Latimer
Impossible Science Live! with World Champion of Magic Jason Latimer From bending light with physics, to shaping water with chemistry and walking through solid glass with engineering, World Champion of Magic Jason Latimer’s mind-blowing live show delivers an inspiring message of how “The right question changes everything.” Impossible Science LIVE! expands on Jason Latimer’s inspiring TED Talk “ Seeing Beyond the Illusion of Knowledge ” with family-friendly, mind-blowing illusion entertainment. Uniting his favorite illusions from his illustrious career, Latimer reveals the secret to his magic is not special powers but simply a pursuit of challenging the impossible with curiosity. During your museum visit from April 7-11, 2026, drop into the auditorium for one of Latimer’s shows throughout the day. Shows are included with your Spring Break admission and FREE for museum members. Add a membership to your cart for free Spring Break admission! Available showtimes: 10:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 1 p.m., 2 p.m. daily, with a 3:30 p.m. show on Saturday, April 11. Open seating; first come, first seated. About Jason Latimer: Jason Latimer has been featured on television around the world as both a scientist and magician. While Latimer is both a curator of the iconic Fleet Museum in San Diego, CA, and a World Champion Magician his network specials, TV series, and appearances span the globe. Jason has been featured as a science host on the Science Channel, Roku, Amazon, and as a magician on the Syfy Channel, History, BBC ONE, and Japan’s NHK. In 2021, SONY partnered with Latimer to bring his unique blend of science and magic to online and to PBS to assist with distance learning. Impossible Science’s growth has been exponential ever since, garnering over a hundred million views and multiple streaming awards as an educational series.
California’s good government dream has a nightmare flaw for state Democrats
Voters in the biggest blue state could theoretically be choosing between two Republican candidates for governor in in November — a wacky but not impossible outcome of the state’s nonpartisan primary system.
Rescuers scramble to aid pets abandoned after ICE raids
The exact number of displaced pets is impossible to quantify
Webb Telescope spots “impossible” atmosphere on ancient super Earth
Astronomers have uncovered surprising evidence of a thick atmosphere surrounding TOI-561 b, a scorching, fast-orbiting rocky planet once thought too extreme to hold onto any gas. Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, researchers found the planet is far cooler than expected for a bare rock, hinting at a heat-distributing atmosphere above a churning magma ocean. This strange world—where a year lasts just over 10 hours and one side is locked in eternal daylight—may even be rich in volatile materials, behaving like a “wet lava ball.”
There Aren't a Lot of Reasons to Get Excited About a New Amazon Smartphone
The company is reportedly building a new AI-powered mobile device. If Amazon follows through on the plan, experts warn it would be next to impossible to break into a crowded market.
Galaxy S26 wireless charging is a mess, Qi2 25W speeds sound near-impossible to find
Wireless charging is very much moving in the direction of Qi2 and magnetic alignment, but Samsung stubbornly continues to avoid...
Foldable iPhone prices are almost impossible to believe
The foldable iPhone is going to cost the same as its biggest rival. How is that even possible?
Meet Renita Williams Thomas, Business Report’s Executive of the Year
Renita Williams Thomas had parented five children and spent years as a pediatric nurse before she understood the impossible choice facing parents of medically fragile children: Keep working or keep your child safe and healthy. That understanding came with her sixth child—Kai-Li, a baby girl born severely premature that she and her husband adopted. “When […]
A small US grocer is calling out the lower prices at big chains
It is 'impossible for us to compete', says the boss of a New York grocery store.
Anthony J. Leggett Dies at 87; Won Nobel for Theories on Superfluids
When scientists unwittingly turned helium into a superfluid — a feat many thought was impossible — Dr. Leggett not only recognized what had happened but also explained how.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is reviving 'Conan the Barbarian' with 'Mission: Impossible' filmmaker
'Mission: Impossible' filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie will write and direct Arnold Schwarzenegger in 'King Conan,' a revival of 'Conan the Barbarian.'
Dulio: If faith calls for reflection, politics should too
There are often calls to “lower the temperature.” Real change is impossible until both our leaders and our neighbors accept that their side is part of the problem.
This is why you only breathe out of one nostril at a time
One of the most bothersome things about being sick or having seasonal allergies is that it makes your nose stuffy and blocked. This makes breathing in through your nostrils frustrating – if not altogether impossible.
‘Sound Science’ Bills Limiting State Environmental Regulations Set ‘Insurmountable Burden of Proof,’ Scientists Say
Bills in four states require state environmental regulations to show “direct causal link” to “manifest bodily harm,” not just increased risk of disease. Scientists say that’s all but impossible.
5 Questions: For Erik Langendal, small businesses are the rising tide that lifts all boats
Erik Langendal hadn’t exactly planned on going into the family business, Anders Langendal Boatbuilder & Sons, in the Clarke Shipyard at the end of East Front and Carpenter streets in Greenport. But a life lived on and ruled by the water was in his hardy half Swedish blood — and impossible to refuse. He knows...
UFC champion gives Max Holloway vs. Charles Oliveira 2 prediction
The UFC's symbolic BMF title bouts pit fighters known to put it all on the line each time out against each other for fan-friendly scraps that are nearly impossible to disappoint. Former featherweight champion Max Holloway looks to defend the BMF belt for a second time in the UFC 326 main event ...
The Science-Backed Method to Hit Perfect Pickleball Drops Every Time
The third shot drop isn't magic; it's mechanics. Get the science right, and suddenly that impossible shot becomes far more manageable.
Santiago Bernabeu demanded Florentino Perez’s resignation after Getafe defeat
Last night ended in frustration at the Santiago Bernabeu. Real Madrid’s 0-1 defeat to Getafe was a loss that sparked a reaction from the stands that made the mood inside the stadium impossible to i...
For every known vertebrate species, two more may be hiding in plain sight
Earth’s vertebrate diversity may be far richer than anyone realized. A sweeping analysis of more than 300 studies suggests that for every known fish, bird, reptile, amphibian, or mammal species, there are about two nearly identical “cryptic” species hiding in plain sight—genetically distinct but visually almost impossible to tell apart. Thanks to advances in DNA sequencing, scientists are uncovering these long-separated lineages, some evolving independently for over a million years.
A political killing risks tearing the French left apart – and the far right is taking full advantage
The fallout from the violent death of Quentin Deranque exposes Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s flaws – and leaves the wider left facing an impossible dilemma, says UCL professor of European politics, Philippe Marlière
Albany woman says soaring utility bills force impossible choices between health and basic needs
Experts say extreme temperatures force heating and cooling systems to work harder and longer, meaning the more energy you use and higher bills.
Business Lessons From Curt Cignetti And The Indiana Hoosiers
Indiana acheived the impossible this year, winning a national championship for an historically losing team. Their story is ripe with leadership lessons for your business.
50 year quest ends with creation of silicon aromatic once thought impossible
After nearly 50 years of failed attempts and scientific speculation, chemists at Saarland University have achieved what many thought might be impossible: creating a long-sought silicon-based aromatic molecule. By replacing carbon atoms in a famously stable ring-shaped compound with silicon, the team synthesized pentasilacyclopentadienide — a breakthrough published in Science.
Once believed impossible, scientists manage to transform lead into gold
For a trillionth of a second, lead became gold in CERN’s collider. The fleeting transformation may shape the future of high-energy physics.
Berlinale Tried to Avoid Politics. Its Winners Made That Impossible.
Winners used the stage to address Israel and Palestine while jury president Wim Wenders praised festival leadership after a turbulent week.
Pokémon Fans Are Worried FireRed and LeafGreen Won't Be Compatible With Pokémon Home, Making the PokéDex Impossible to Finish
Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen are coming to Nintendo Switch next week. And while The Pokemon Company and Nintendo have already answered a number of questions about the releases, there's one we still don't know the answer to: will these games be compatible with Pokemon Home?
After Decades of Global Searching, Scientists Finally Create the Silicon Aromatic Once Thought Impossible
A long-standing chemistry challenge has been solved with the synthesis of a five-atom silicon aromatic ring.
Helen Chandler-Wilde: Can any Politician Focus on Core Issues?
I’m currently reading a book called The Revolt of the Public. Written by a former CIA media analyst, Martin Gurri, it traces the effects of the internet on politics, and argues that fragmenting information has broken the communication channels between leaders and voters. Politicians stop delivering what voters want, sometimes because their demands are impossible, and often because they don’t even know what they are.
Scientists discover a new state of matter in quantum material that was believed to be impossible
European scientists discover a new state of quantum matter in CeRu4Sn6 that challenges physics and changes our view of the universe.
'Impossible' mantle earthquakes actually occur all over the world, study finds
Researchers were once unsure whether mantle earthquakes existed. Now they have a global map of this mysterious phenomenon.
Weekend reads: CDC’s ‘unethical’ vaccine trial; The Lancet ‘refuses to retract’ letter; on the methods used to correct science
If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed. The week at Retraction Watch featured: Journal tags ‘impossible’ case report with short erratum Guest post: …
It's Becoming Impossible To Buy A Steam Deck
Valve's popular handheld PC is sold out and people are getting nervous about what this means for the future
'Quad God' Ilia Malinin and the science of figure skating's near-impossible jumps
How do figure skaters like Ilia Malinin keep landing harder and harder jumps?
Politicians ‘don’t live how we live’, voters tell me. The Mandelson scandal won’t change their minds
Whoever succeeds Keir Starmer will have an almost impossible task: convincing voters that politicians will serve the people, not themselves, says Guardian columnist John Harris
He Built A Million-Dollar Business, Then Stopped Filing Taxes — Dave Ramsey Says '2,561 People Went To Jail Last Year' For That'
Early success can mask slow-moving financial disasters until they are impossible to ignore. Carlos called "The Ramsey Show,” saying his janitorial business grew into a million-dollar operation before years of unfiled tax returns, unpaid payroll taxes, and mounting debt left him considering bankruptcy. "I haven't filed taxes since 2017 or 2018," he told personal finance expert Dave Ramsey, saying he also has not paid payroll taxes since that time. Don't Miss: Fast Company Calls It a ‘Groundbreaki
In the Bay Area, sticking to sports is impossible with Super Bowl LX
OPINION NEWSLETTER: The backlash over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show is part of the overflow of politics into sports.
‘Everything is quagga mussel now’: can invasive species be stopped?
While ecologists believe invasive species play a major role in more than 60% of plant and animal extinctions, stopping them in their tracks is almost impossible. Biodiversity reporter Phoebe Weston tells Madeleine Finlay how invasive species spread, how conservationists are trying combat them and why some think a radical new approach is needed.
Surgeons Kept a Man Alive With No Lungs For 48 Hours. Here's How.
The impossible made possible.
Does Joe Brady have impossible Bills task with Josh Allen?
There will be no grace period for the first-time head coach.
From 'impossible task' to 'hope' - will West Ham stay up?
Back-to-back Premier League wins have taken West Ham United to within two points of 17th.
Scientists just overturned a 100-year-old rule of chemistry, and the results are “impossible”
Chemists at UCLA are showing that some of organic chemistry’s most famous “rules” aren’t as unbreakable as once thought. By creating bizarre, cage-shaped molecules with warped double bonds—structures long considered impossible—the team is opening the door to entirely new kinds of chemistry.
Irony alert: Hallucinated citations found in papers from NeurIPS, the prestigious AI conference
Research from startup GPTZero points to the impossible problem prestigious conferences face in the age of AI slop.
'Business as usual impossible': EU freezes trade deal with US; comes after Trump's Davos speech - The Times of India
International Business News: The US-EU trade deal is \"on hold until further notice\", as announced by the chair of the European parliament’s trade committee Bernd Lange.\"Now offici.
Scientists Discover a New Quantum State of Matter Once Considered Impossible
This could be incredibly useful.
Impossible to Google: Indiana Completes Unlikeliest Turnaround in Sports History
Hoosiers quarterback Fernando Mendoza’s fourth-down touchdown run becomes the most iconic play in the team’s unbelievable romp to their first national title.
Fact check: Trump’s Detroit economic speech
Inflation hasn’t “stopped.” Consumer prices are up during this presidential term, not “down.” Grocery prices are rising, not starting to fall “rapidly.” US businesses and consumers, not China, pay US tariffs on Chinese imports. It’s impossible to reduce prescription drug prices by “thousands” of percentage points, since this would mean Americans would be getting paid to acquire their medicines.
Daniel Perez warns of tough choices in 2026 as House braces for tax, insurance, drug-cost battles
‘But difficult doesn’t mean impossible, and hard isn’t an excuse for cowardice.’
The politics of removing Nicolas Maduro
The White House has an uphill battle in selling its actions in Venezuela to the American people, but it should not be an impossible task.
WellSpan Health Announces Comprehensive Migration of Technology Portfolio to AWS
Add to FavoritesWellSpan Health, the leading health care system serving Central Pennsylvania and Northern Maryland, today announced plans for a comprehensive cloud migration of its full technology infrastructure. Together with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider, WellSpan will transition its applications, data and environments from traditional data centers to AWS. This migration will establish the foundation for delivering next-generation, AI-enabled health care solutions that reduce administrative burden and improve outcomes for patients across the region and beyond. Supercharging Innovation, Efficiency and Patient Outcomes WellSpan's migration of systems and clinical applications, which serve 1.2 million patients across nine hospitals and 250+ facilities, is expected to be complete by April 2026, one of the fastest full-scale migrations in the health care industry. This transformation enables WellSpan to unify disparate data systems for care teams and patients alike, achieving operational efficiencies and care improvements that fragmented systems are unable to deliver. “Our comprehensive migration to the cloud accelerates our ability to deploy new clinical capabilities that transform patient care while advancing our overall innovation strategy,” said Roxanna Gapstur, Ph.D., R.N., president and CEO, WellSpan Health. “When a physician can access complete patient imaging in seconds instead of hours, we're not just modernizing technology—we're improving patient outcomes. Our new cloud infrastructure also enables us to quickly implement solutions that will free our clinicians from thousands of hours of administrative work annually so they can focus on what they do best: caring for our communities.” The transition allows WellSpan to move away from a data center-based model and enables the rapid deployment and scale of AI technology. WellSpan’s strategic partner, General Catalyst’s Health Assurance Transformation Company (HATCo), facilitated the collaboration with AWS to support the migration. WellSpan’s transformation journey benefits from HATCo’s specialized technology solutions, as well as General Catalyst and AWS’s significant partnership to improve patient outcomes, which was announced in January 2025. “Our decision to go all-in on AWS will enable insights and innovations impossible in traditional siloed environments,” said Kasey Paulus, executive vice president and chief operating officer, WellSpan Health. “This is the largest health care technology transformation in our region's history, and it positions WellSpan to be a premier partner for technology leaders across the country.” “WellSpan is building a foundation with AWS that will improve care and outcomes for patients across their health system by bringing data together into standardized formats that are optimized for AI applications,” said Dan Sheeran, vice president and general manager, Healthcare and Life Science, AWS. “To do this, it is essential to have the most secure and compliant cloud when handling patient data, along with AWS’s built-in AI governance and responsible AI frameworks that follow the industry’s highest standards to protect patient information. We look forward to continuing to work alongside WellSpan as they unlock the cloud and AI’s full potential to deliver exceptional care to their patients.” Key Benefits of the AWS Collaboration Full Portfolio Migration: WellSpan will transition its applications and data from on-premises data centers to AWS, including full IT environments and specialized applications for functions such as nursing, cardiology, pharmacy and the company’s supply chain systems. This represents approximately 7.5 petabytes of clinical and non-clinical data and more than 300 applications—the most comprehensive health system cloud migration in the Mid-Atlantic region. Approved Architectures: AWS will deliver secure, WellSpan-specific architectures tailored to each build, ensuring compliance and reliability across the health system. Unified, AI-Ready Data: Migrating to AWS enables WellSpan to harmonize data across separate systems, transforming unstructured clinical notes and multi-modal datasets into standardized, AI-ready formats. Accelerated Results and Improved Outcomes: Automated data normalization and processing will enable the deployment of applications that reduce turnaround times for items such as analyzing medical imaging or patient records from days to minutes, helping clinicians get patient results faster and improving overall health outcomes. Reduced Administrative Burden: The transition to AWS will enable swift deployment of AI-powered solutions that reclaim thousands of hours for WellSpan’s clinical and corporate teams, allowing them to focus on patient care rather than paperwork. Elastic Infrastructure: Cloud architecture will enable WellSpan to scale computing resources dynamically, supporting seasonal demand fluctuations without infrastructure investments, as well as the rapid deployment of new services across multiple locations simultaneously. Most Secure, Compliant Cloud: AWS offers the highest network availability of any cloud provider, with more than 166 HIPAA-eligible services and certifications for global compliance standards, including HITRUST CSF. Built-in AI governance and responsible AI frameworks ensure that WellSpan’s data is protected under the industry’s most rigorous standards. Tags:News releaseInnovation and partnerships
First-person essay: Tariff bills are making business all-but impossible for my Morningside store
I opened a fabric store because serving my customers brings me joy. Running a small business was never easy. Tariffs just made it harder.
Scientists Discover Impossible Object in Deep Space
"In fact, at first I was skeptical about the signal as it was too strong to be real."
Tariff bills are making business all-but impossible for my Morningside store
Firecracker Fabrics owner Erin Love cuts fabric for a customer on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025 at her store in Morningside. (Photo by Alex Jurkuta/Pittsburgh’s Public Source) I opened a fabric storefront because serving my customers brings me joy. But running a small business was never easy — and Trump’s tariffs just made it harder. “Pittsburgh’s […]
A missing flash of light revealed a molecular secret
Scientists have found a way to see ultrafast molecular interactions inside liquids using an extreme laser technique once thought impossible for fluids. When they mixed nearly identical chemicals, one combination behaved strangely—producing less light and erasing a single harmonic signal altogether. Simulations revealed that a subtle molecular “handshake” was interfering with electron motion. The discovery shows that liquids can briefly organize in ways that dramatically change how electrons behave.
Tariff bills are making business all-but impossible for my Morningside store
Erin Love runs Firecracker Fabrics in Morningside. Tariff bills are making her business of serving Pittsburgh’s maker community all-but impossible.
Bonkers rumor puts the Galaxy Z Flip 8 at an impossible 150g, Z Fold 8 at 200g
Pass the salt – yeah, the big bucket full of salt – for this leak right here.
AI’s errors may be impossible to eliminate — what that means for its use in health care
In the past decade, AI’s success has led to uncurbed enthusiasm and bold claims – even though users frequently experience errors that AI makes.
Unforgettable performances: 2025 sports year in review of local athletes' amazing achievements | Los Gatan
As the calendar turns, it’s impossible to reflect on the past year without celebrating the remarkable memories created by the Los Gatos High School sports teams and the student-athletes. From Friday Night Lights to packed gyms and early-morning practices, individuals and teams delivered performances that went far beyond the scoreboard. There were unforgettable comebacks, record-setting […]
The disunity of science is a feature, not a bug
Mathematical models wield miraculous power, but mistaking them for reality has trapped science in a destructive quest for a “Theory of Everything.” Physicist and philosopher Ragner Fjelland argues that this leads to bloated, Frankenstein theories kept alive by clumsy, ad-hoc amendments, which reduce rather than boost science’s power. Fjelland calls for a radical shift in our attitude: we must reorientate towards creating entirely new theories, celebrating rather than lamenting disunity and diversity in science. Science, from the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century to the present day, has more or less developed in a “reductionist” way. The fundamental assumption is that all sciences may be ordered in a hierarchy that can be represented as an upside-down pyramid. At the top we find the human sciences, and at the bottom physics. Strong (or “ontological”) reductionism maintains that all theories at one level can be completely reduced to the lower level, all the way down to theories of atoms and elementary particles, or whatever is “at the bottom.” In the end, all diversity in the world can be unified in one fundamental theory. Hence it is called a final theory, or a Theory of Everything.One of the central figures in developing the idea of a Theory of Everything is the Dutch theoretical physicist Gerard 't Hooft, who received a Nobel Prize in physics in 1999 for his work. He emphasizes the non-empirical status of the theory:There exists no closely resembling alternative theory. This means that any slight change brought about in the rules would make the theory unlikely or inelegant. The theory will be a "package deal": take it, or leave it. This should hold both for the local laws and for the boundary conditions.This endeavor is not new. On the contrary, it goes all the way back to the birth of Western philosophy 2,500 years ago. The Babylonians made regular astronomical observations during a period of 600 years, from 747 BCE until 150 ACE. They developed mathematical techniques to predict astronomical phenomena, but they made no attempts at explaining them. However, the Greeks developed models, both material and theoretical, to explain the observed phenomena.The best example is Plato’s late dialogue Timaeus. Here he introduces a divine craftsman, the Demiurge, who has constructed the universe according to an original plan. Plato seems to have thought that the original plan is what is actually real, while the material world is merely an imperfect realization of it. He therefore does not, in the Timaeus, reconstruct the material universe, but the original plan, which can then be used to explain the material universe.Plato’s aim in producing a theoretical model is to reconstruct the original plan. That is what he carries out in Timaeus—and some modern physicists have embarked on the same project. For example, Einstein’s basic attitude is reflected in the title of Abraham Pais’ biography: “Subtle is the Lord...,” echoing Einstein’s comment, “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.” In an interview Einstein compared our situation to a child who enters a huge library. The child knows that someone has written the books, but he does not know the languages in which they are written. He suspects that there is a mysterious order, but he does not know what it is.___“We have all been working in what Husserl called the Galilean style; that is, we have all been making abstract mathematical models of the universe to which at least the physicists give a higher degree of reality than they accord the ordinary world of sensation.”Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize in Physics (1979)___This Platonist view is contrary to a widespread impression of science, symbolized by the picture of the “father” of modern science, Galileo Galilei, with his telescope. According to this impression, Galileo liberated himself from the dominating metaphysics of his day—basically Aristotelian philosophy—and constructed a telescope that he directed towards the sky, showing that Jupiter has four moons. He also performed experiments with bronze balls rolling down inclined planes and found the law of freely falling bodies.However, in other cases Galileo emphasized the unreliability of our senses. It is easy to see why. He defended Copernicus’ heliocentric hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, we are not at rest at the center of the universe, but moving at a tremendous speed through space. Why don’t we observe this motion? Galileo praises Copernicus because “with reason as his guide he resolutely continued to affirm what sensible experience seemed to contradict.” In other places he directly refers to Plato. SUGGESTED VIEWING The quest for a final theory With Michio Kaku Galileo’s Platonism goes back to his early writings. In The Assayer, published as early as 1623, Galileo compared the universe to a grand book that is written in the language of mathematics, and “its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.” Therefore, things that cannot be described by mathematics—for example, colors, smells and odors—are not real. They are merely subjective.This division into subjective and objective, advocated by Galileo and his younger contemporary René Descartes, is normally associated with a mechanistic world view, which is regarded as the opposite of Platonism. When we reduce something to, for example, molecules and atoms, we move “downwards.” In contrast, the Platonist moves “upwards,” to abstract entities. However, it only shows that when we address fundamental questions, we should be careful in applying everyday spatial metaphors like “up” and “down.”___Nature is complex, and we cannot in general construct mathematical models that adequately describe the world.___The endeavor of finding a Theory of Everything has been heavily criticized. In 2006, the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin published “The Crisis in Fundamental Physics.” He argued that one of the most fundamental principles of science is that we should only regard theories as scientific if we have the possibility to show that they are false by experiments. Although he did not refer to Karl Popper, other critics have referred to Popper and argued that a theory is not scientific if it cannot be falsified (see for example Ellis & Silk 2014).These were not the first physicists to be anti-reductionists. In 1972, the journal Science published an article by the physicist Philip Anderson with the title “More Is Different.” This is the kind of article a scientist would normally write only after he has won a Nobel Prize. However, Anderson won the Nobel Prize for physics five years later, in 1977. The article is amazing, not primarily because it argues in favor of anti-reductionism in general, but because it argues for anti-reductionism within physics itself. Anderson’s conclusion was:At each stage entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry.We may say that Plato started the “unity of science movement,” based on Euclidean geometry as the model of all knowledge. A distinguishing mark of geometry is that all possible constructions can be reduced to a few fundamental principles. We have to acknowledge that this approach has limitations. In general, we can easily model technological systems. In addition, we may construct simplified and idealized models that capture important aspects of systems, from various perspectives and for various purposes. But nature is complex, and we cannot in general construct mathematical models that adequately describe the world. In a complex system, each level has its distinct, emergent, properties that are characteristic of this level. Therefore, a complex system should be investigated at different levels and from different perspectives. Instead of exclusively pursuing a scientific ideal based on the unity of science, we should acknowledge the diversity—or even the disunity—of science.
US bans new foreign drone models in a blow to Chinese giant DJI
A new rule by the Federal Communications Commission will make it impossible for US consumers to buy the next generation of foreign made drones.
The women’s sports moments of 2025 – as chosen by The Athletic’s writers
It feels impossible to sum up another beautifully chaotic year in women’s sports in a series of moments, but that challenge didn’t stop us.
Caltech pulls off a trick that scientists thought was impossible
Engineers manage to intertwine several qubits at once, taking the biggest leap yet toward a functional quantum internet.
Science news this week: Japan laser weapon trial, comet 3I/ATLAS bids farewell, and AI solves 'impossible' math problems
Dec. 20, 2025: Our weekly roundup of the latest science in the news, as well as a few fascinating articles to keep you entertained over the weekend.
Las Vegas tech CEO lands on Forbes 30 Under 30
TensorWave CEO Darrick Horton has set out to do the impossible and is being rewarded for it.
What Car Never Lived Up To Its Potential?
Building cars is a very hard thing to do, so making them everything they can be is a nearly impossible task.