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Running a small business has become almost impossible
Letter: Rosie Wolfenden says that under the current tax system, and with rising costs, traditional business models are no longer viable
Commission to examine how precision approaches improve healthcare effectiveness, cost-efficiency, equity, and scalability worldwide.
Prof. Michèle Ramsay at the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience is one of four co-chairs of the Lancet Commission on Precision Health.
I quit teaching to build a fidget business with my dad—it brings in $428,000/year
Victoria Baumann, 32, and Charlie Moreton, 51, are the father-daughter duo behind Victoria Essie Studio that produces fidget toys and other knickknacks out of their homes in North Carolina. The business averages about 1,500 orders a month, Moreton says. Standard-sized or hand-held fidgets cost between $5 to $30, while life-sized fidgets run $100 to $125.
Trump's rural support slips as fuel and food prices climb, poll shows
Rural disapproval of Trump rises, driven by concerns over cost of living and economy.
NH's Business: New Hampshire's Manufacturing Sector
Fred Kocher sits down with Sabrina Costabile with the NH Manufacturing Alliance and David Richardson of Richardson Manufacturing to talk about spending in the NH manufacturing industry.
New rules expand ACA insurance choices but could come with risks
Plans could offer 30 percent higher out-of-pocket costs or no set hospital networks. Critics say the changes may reduce enrollment by 2 million.
Why businesses are concerned about Allegheny County's proposed paid leave policy
Meredith Boyle is one of hundreds of small business owners concerned about how to cover the costs of paid parental leave if Allegheny County eventually...
Middle-aged adults taking GLP-1s for obesity can save over $192K on lifetime medical costs, higher if they don’t have college degrees, new study finds
The National Bureau of Economic Research paper's lead author hopes putting a dollar value on the benefits of GLP-1s will lead to better access
Costs, careers and choice: Why Indians are having fewer children
India’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) has dropped to 1.9 children per woman - lower than the benchmark level of 2.1.
Health care costs drive changes to Laredo employee insurance
City officials selected a compromise health insurance option projected to leave a small deficit while preserving employee coverage choices.
New housing, higher costs, expanded bakery. See top Miami-area business stories
What to know about spending your money in South Florida.
Brexit ten years on: a decade of national ‘Bregret’?
Economists are still squabbling about how much Brexit has cost
Delaware Senate passes key healthcare bills designed to combat rising costs
Three Senate bills, aimed at addressing rising healthcare costs in the state, were passed June 11.
ACA Enrollment Could Fall By 5 Million As Enhanced Health Insurance Subsidies Expire
Millions of Americans face higher health insurance costs as enhanced ACA subsidies expire. New projections show marketplace enrollment could fall by 5 million people.
AI was supposed to cut health care costs. One of its first jobs was charging you more, PwC report shows
AI is one of five potential drivers of health costs climbing up to 9% in 2027, according to PwC.
'Still very immature': Texas sports bar owner sounds alarm on NFL's streaming pivot
Texas restaurateur Jim Hallers warns Congress that NFL streaming fragmentation threatens sports bars, citing $30,000 to $40,000 upgrade costs per venue.
Workplace benefits face cuts as costs rise
Companies are trimming benefits as health costs and AI spending climb.
State Choices, Unequal Access: Policies Shaping Reproductive Health Care Across the United States
Access to sexual and reproductive health care varies widely by geography, and state-level policies play a major role in establishing the contours that govern the coverage, provision, availability, and costs of services.
GI Doctor’s 3 Favorite Cheap, High-Fiber Dinners to Boost Gut Health
In TODAY.com’s Expert Tip of the Day, a gastroenterologist and mom of two reveals the low-cost dinners she makes on repeat without ultraprocessed foods.
Xbox Memo Predicts over 5x Increase in Storage and Memory Costs by Holiday 2027
"While the entire industry is facing a components crisis, we believe we have been impacted more greatly than many of our peers".
Democrats seek next ObamaCare ahead of midterms amid rising health costs
There is growing momentum within the Democratic Party to find its next ObamaCare heading into the midterms, as healthcare costs become more untenable and American anger over affordability persists.…
‘Winning at all costs:’ Trump wraps himself in UFC’s bareknuckle image
UFC Freedom 250 marks the culmination of a decades-long relationship between a president and a sport which harnessed bravado to reach the White House.
War-wary Hill Republicans question Trump’s Iran strategy with control of Congress at stake
A growing number of Hill Republicans say they are frustrated with President Donald Trump’s ever-changing strategy in Iran — dangling a ground invasion one day, touting progress in peace talks the next — in a conflict many fear will cost them their majority this fall.
At hospital finance conference, a call to end the friction that’s keeping costs high
Hospital execs agree that affordability is a major issue. What to do about it is less clear.
At hospital finance conference, a call to end the friction that’s keeping costs high
Hospital execs agree that affordability is a major issue. What to do about it is less clear.
Flutter Entertainment to Delist From London, Trade Solely in New York
The FanDuel owner said trading volumes and regulatory costs meant delisting from the U.K. exchange was in the best interests of the company and shareholders.
Flutter Entertainment to Delist From London, Trade Solely in New York
The FanDuel owner said trading volumes and regulatory costs meant delisting from the U.K. exchange was in the best interests of the company and shareholders.
Free military health services available in Henderson through June 21
U.S. military members provide medical, dental and mental health care at no cost as part of training mission.
El Nino is here. It'll be big, bad and costly, scientists fear
El Nino, Nature's chaotic climate agent, has formed in a warmed-up Pacific Ocean and is expected to grow to historic strength, meteorologists announced Thursday.
Why Switzerland might cap its population at 10M
The anti-immigration measure comes amid cost and crime concerns
Lovelace Health System cuts 43 employees amid 'challenging policy environment'
Lovelace Health System confirmed they cut around 43 people from its workforce, citing rising costs and a "challenging policy environment."
Juliano Valdi takes us behind-the-scenes of Michael Jackson biopic (exclusive)
'Michael' star Juliano Krue Valdi is sharing happy memories from the set of the Michael Jackson biopic, including hilarious moments with costar Colman Domingo and winning $50 in a bet with director Antoine Fuqua.
Health plans say AI is pushing healthcare costs higher
Nearly 70% of surveyed health plans said providers’ use of AI documentation and coding tools was a top three trend inflating commercial healthcare costs next year, according to a new report from PwC.
The inflation surge is hitting businesses, too
The Producer Price Index, which tracks costs businesses pay, rose at its fastest rate since 2022, adding to worries that higher energy costs tied to the war with Iran are mounting.
Xbox CEO Gives A Good Explanation For Why A Console Now Costs $800
Xbox prices have skyrocketed, but there's a reason for that which is out of Microsoft's control, as the brand's new CEO explains.
US Workers’ Health Insurance Costs Set to Rise, Survey Finds
Employers say higher prices are forcing them to raise premiums. Some will also stop covering GLP-1s.
US wholesale inflation rose sharply last month as Iran oil shock continues to drive up business costs
US businesses’ input costs are rising rapidly as the Iran war’s oil shock continues to ripple through the economy.
News | Nashville entertainment investor strikes deal for Hard Rock site in Chicago
Josh Joseph has contract to buy property in River North
NFIB: SQ 832 will destroy small-business jobs, raise prices
According to the National Federation of Independent Business, SQ 832's substantial increase in labor costs would force many employers to raise prices,…
Scientists built a battery-free device that turns sunlight into fuel
Scientists have developed an artificial photosynthesis system that essentially regulates itself, eliminating the need for batteries used in many current designs. The key innovation is an electrolyzer that automatically adapts to changing sunlight by altering its electrical properties as it heats up. This keeps solar fuel production more stable while reducing cost and complexity.
Social Security is Facing a Political Crisis
On Tuesday the Social Security Trustees released their latest report on the system’s finances. The numbers didn’t change much: Unless something is done, the Old Age Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program, Social Security’s official name, will be unable to pay full benefits starting in either 2032 or 2034, depending on some technical issues. That’s not far away: If the Trustees are right, the prospect of a Social Security crisis will loom over the next presidential administration. It’s important to understand, however, the nature of the looming crisis. It won’t be an economic crisis. It won’t even be a serious fiscal crisis. Whatever you may have heard, Social Security isn’t in danger of going bankrupt. What we’re facing, instead, is potential political crisis. Congress and the White House could easily take action to sustain America’s retirement system. But given the current state of our politics, there’s no guarantee that they will. There is a widespread misunderstanding of how Social Security works. While Social Security was designed to look like a pension fund, it isn’t. A pension fund pays benefits out of a stock of assets it has accumulated over time. In contrast, Social Security operates as a government transfer program, like food stamps or Medicaid. Now, unlike food stamps — but like the highway trust fund — Social Security is on paper supported by a dedicated tax, the payroll tax, that is assigned to that program. But I say “on paper” because from an economic point of view assigning the payroll tax to Social Security is just an accounting convention. What matters for the U.S. economy is the overall balance between government spending and government revenue, not the difference between one type of spending and one source of revenue. So there’s no inherent economic significance to the fact that by 2034 payroll tax receipts will be insufficient to cover promised benefits. There is, however, a legislative issue. As long as the Social Security Administration can pay benefits out of payroll taxes and its cash reserve, there’s no need for Congress to vote each year to authorize benefits — they just keep going out until further notice. However, once those resources become insufficient, benefits will fall —by 17 percent according to the Trustees — unless Congress passes new legislation that “tops up” Social Security’s finances. Yet the current administration and Republican party are such extremists that there is a real risk that Social Security will be held hostage on behalf of their goals. If this should come to pass, the hostage-takers will claim that shoring up Social Security is unaffordable. Right on cue, Mike Johnson, the Trump-sycophant Speaker of the House, declared on Monday that “entitlement programs” like Social Security “have to be adjusted and fixed,” and that Republicans will introduce a plan to that effect next year. But this is a ploy, because while the cost of maintaining Social Security benefits at their promised level isn’t trivial, it is in fact affordable. According to the Trustees’ report, the actuarial balance of OASDI up through 2050 — the amount of additional funds it would need to keep paying full benefits for the next 25 years — is 1.06 percent of GDP. To put that number in perspective, the Trump administration proposes increasing military spending next year by $420 billion, equivalent to about 1.4 percent of GDP – without any discussion of whether that’s affordable Yet how did we get to the point where Social Security will need to be topped up? The main answer is that we have an aging population, with a growing ratio of retirees collecting benefits to workers paying into the system: Trump’s anti-immigration policies are making this problem worse. According to the Trustees’ report, lower immigration will deepen Social Security’s financial hole because many immigrants are working-age adults who will pay into the system for decades before they collect benefits. In fact, this problem may be much bigger than the report acknowledges: The report’s baseline assumption is that we’ll have net immigration of almost 1.2 million people a year, and even the pessimistic case assumes 750,000 a year. Meanwhile actual net immigration has already been cut far below that — and may now be negative. Moreover, Social Security is being financially damaged by growing income inequality in America. Payroll taxes are levied only on wages up to $184,500, and they don’t touch capital income. With the distribution of income increasingly shifting from labor to capital, as well as becoming more unequal among wage-earners, revenue from the Social Security payroll tax has been falling as a share of national income. From 1990 to 2024, it fell from 5.02 percent of gross domestic income to 4.46 percent. Which brings me to the question that, these days, we ask about everything: How might Social Security be affected by the advent of AI? A short answer: If, as many of us fear, AI accelerates rising income inequality, it will further reduce the payroll tax receipts that currently pay for Social Security and further endanger its finances. On the other hand, if AI, as its advocates promise, leads to faster economic growth, it will increase the potential tax base that could and should be used to support Social Security and other social insurance programs. But to take advantage of that larger base, we’ll have to get serious about taxing wealth and capital income. Is Social Security in trouble? Yes, but only because of the way its financing is currently structured — a structure that no longer works well because our society and economy have become so unequal. Moreover, Trump’s immigration policies are further endangering its already deteriorating financial condition. So don’t believe Republicans’ gaslighting that it will be necessary to cut Social Security benefits. All that is necessary to preserve Social Security is political will to raise taxes on the wealthy and a sensible immigration policy. MUSICAL CODA Actually 67 under current law.
New Jersey business climate still worst in region, according to NJBIA analysis
NJBIA’s 2026 Regional Business Climate Analysis shows N.J. continues to rank last in the region in cost competitiveness and business taxes.
A Youthful Crop of Politicians Run on Housing, and Their Own Rent
A cohort of young Millennial and Gen Z politicians have centered their campaigns this year on housing costs, and the divide is more generational than partisan.
RadNet secures $250M new loan, gets downgrade from Moody’s
The ratings agency contends RadNet is constrained by its geographic concentration in 11 states and high fixed costs, including sizable interest expenses.
Satya Nadella has a message for Microsoft's tokenmaxxers
Microsoft's CEO said workers should use the right AI model for the job as companies look for ways to control rising AI costs.
England player ratings: Anthony Gordon proves his value but has Jude Bellingham done enough to guarantee World Cup start?
England finished their pre-tournament warm-up campaign with a much-improved 3-0 win over Costa Rica; Goals were scored by Declan Rice, Anthony Gordon and Ollie Watkins; Thomas Tuchel has a few starting spots still up for grabs - so, who made their mark?
Texas governor proposes new data center regulations
Gov. Greg Abbott proposed new regulations for Texas data centers, citing concerns about energy consumption and costs for local residents.
Trump administration warns hundreds of hospitals to increase price transparency or face fines
The Trump administration has warned more than 500 hospitals that they are failing to provide the public with basic pricing information — arguing that the lack of disclosure is keeping healthcare costs higher than they should be.
England's Ollie Watkins scores header, extending lead over Costa Rica
Ollie Watkins scored a header that extended England's lead to 3-0 over Costa Rica.
A $1,500 foundation model that rivals larger LLMs
Sapient researchers trained a 1B reasoning model on just 40B tokens — scoring competitively with 2B-7B models at a fraction of typical pretraining cost.
More cuts could be coming at UVM Health amid statewide cost-cutting push
Sweeping job cuts at UVM Health announced Tuesday will likely not be the last in an effort to bring down the cost of Vermonters’ health care.
Low-cost laptops with smartphone RAM in metal chassis: Intel reveals details of Project Firefly
The DRAM crisis is making entry-level laptops more and more expensive – or forcing manufacturers to use very old components. Intel Wildcat Lake and Project Firefly are set to change this and provide serious competition for the Apple MacBook Neo. Intel now reveals more details about Project Firefly.
College sports bill sparks unusual alliances
A push on Capitol Hill to craft legislation to rein in college sports amid skyrocketing costs and roster upheaval has created strange alliances across both the political and athletic spectrums, as was on display Wednesday at a roundtable hearing to rally support for the Senate’s version. The head football coaches at the University of Memphis […]
Why the World Cup Could Cost U.S. Employers $30 Billion This Summer
For the first time in 32 years, the tournament will return to the U.S. However, that's not necessarily good news for American business leaders.
Farage suddenly returns to political stage – but dodges questions about £5m gift
Reform UK leader has been unusually quiet in recent weeks – at great cost to the party during a crucial byelection
Back to Business Program expands with increase to grant amounts
We designed the Back to Business Program to help small business owners recover from unexpected costs to repair and prevent vandalism and property damage. To meet the needs of businesses, we expanded the program to increase the grant amounts business owners can receive. Applications are open through December 2026, or until funds run out. Changes to […]
The number of uninsured Californians could nearly double by 2030, says new report
Historic cuts to Medicaid and low-cost California health insurance could leave 4.6 million residents with no coverage. A new report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center says the working poor, older workers and undocumented workers could bear the brunt.
David Harbour confirms past 'disagreement' with Millie Bobby Brown amid bullying rumors
David Harbour confirms prior 'arguments, disagreements' with 'Stranger Things' costar Millie Bobby Brown while addressing rumors that she filed a bullying and harassment claim against him.
Defying Trump ended some Republicans' careers. It could help Susan Collins
She is the rare Republican who sometimes can boost her own popularity back home by keeping her distance from President Donald Trump, and she has perfected that delicate dance even as his tightening grip on the party has cost two of her Senate Republican colleagues their reelection.
The Biggest Problem Facing Small Businesses Right Now Just Hit a 53-Year High
Due to high supply costs and global energy concerns, small business owners aren't expressing optimism about the state of the economy.
http://democrats-energycommerce.house.gov/media/press-releases/pallone-opening-remarks-subcommittee-hearing-health-care-transparency
Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) delivered the following opening remarks at a Health Subcommittee hearing on "Lowering Health Care Costs for All Americans: Examining Policies to Increase Health Care Transparency:"
Minneapolis ICE raids cost city $700M in wages, business losses
Minneapolis leaders say that Operation Metro Surge cost residents and businesses nearly $700 million.
Business Travel Holds Steady as Travel Costs Rise
SAP Concur data shows companies have maintained business travel in 2026 despite rising fuel prices and higher travel costs. Learn more.
Split verdict on California health taxes as cost-of-living anxiety takes its toll
LA County's Measure ER clung to a narrow lead while Contra Costa's similar measure went down in defeat — a divide experts attribute to growing anxiety over the cost of living.
Xbox exploring ‘radically different’ console business models
Microsoft is re-evaluating its plans for Project Helix and considering new ways to lower Xbox console costs.
Xbox exploring ‘radically different’ console business models
Microsoft is re-evaluating its plans for Project Helix and considering new ways to lower Xbox console costs.
Xbox Boss Says a Mass Audience Can't Afford 'Thousands of Dollars' to Spend on a Next-Gen Console, So Microsoft Must 'Look at New Business Models'
The spiralling cost of new and existing consoles will require "radically different business models" over the coming generation, Xbox boss Asha Sharma has said.
SpaceX Owns a Real Business That Makes Big Money
A simple view of SpaceX is that it’s a low-cost rocket launcher that created the profitable Starlink satellite business and which is now burning cash to build orbital data centers and colonize Mars. Starlink doesn’t have the lead role in SpaceX’s $1.8 trillion initial public offering. But it is the real business inside the company, and the telecoms industry and its regulators can ill afford to be complacent about the disruptive threat it poses.
New OMB rule could break science in the United States
The drug that saved your mother. The treatment your doctor recommended. The clinical trial that bought someone you love more time. None of it was inevitable. It required a system built to operate outside politics and sustained over decades, because science doesn’t operate on the timeline of a politician. That system is now under direct threat. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has proposed a new rule to regulate all federal grants, not just science, but housing, education, defense, NASA and everything in between, that would fundamentally change how research is conducted in the United States. There have been a lot of fires in the past 16 months, and if everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. But this is a very big deal. These rules would strip away the independence that has kept science from becoming a political tool. The good news is there’s still something we can all do. How the grant system was designed to work When I was a new faculty member, I was full of millions of ideas, so I sat down and wrote an NIH proposal. I worked on it for months and thought it was so good. Then I sent it to my mentor. It came back covered in comments. Places where my reasoning wasn’t as airtight as I’d thought, methods that could be stronger, gaps in my thinking that I had been too close to the work to see. It stung, as honest feedback always does, but peer review almost always makes the work better. In fact, it’s the backbone of how American science has functioned for generations. At NIH, submitted proposals go to a panel of scientists who have experience in the field. These are the people who can read research methods and spot their weaknesses, who understand when an experiment is designed well and when it isn’t. Applications are scored rigorously, and often only the top 3-20% of proposals receive funding. The people making funding decisions are required to justify them based on these reviews. To be clear: this is not a perfect system, and good science still goes unfunded more often than any of us would like due to limited resources. There is also criticism that peer review may undervalue bold ideas that are risky but could have high payoffs. But the peer review system is nonetheless a meaningful part of the grant selection process. While thoughtful and careful changes could improve the system, the changes being proposed by OMB will not make things better. The rule that could change everything Through this OMB proposal, the system that helps decide what gets funded is being dismantled. There are many troubling elements buried in this proposal, but three provisions stand out in particular. Each would be damaging alone. Together, they would change what kind of science gets done in America, and who it serves. 1. Political appointees would decide which science gets funded, and peer review would be explicitly sidelined or ignored. The guidelines your doctor follows, the standards that determine what’s in your air and water, the drugs that get approved for your family: all of it starts with a funding decision. Right now, that decision is made by scientists who can evaluate whether the work is actually sound and whether it could move the needle forward. Under this proposal, funding decisions could be made by political appointees. The careful, expertise-driven review process that shapes grant funding would be effectively sidelined. That means that a poorly designed study could get funded simply because someone in a political office liked the sound of it, while rigorous, important work doesn’t get funded because it no longer aligns with the administration’s priorities. In other words, critical work that benefits all of us could now be missed just because it has become politically inconvenient. 2. Grants could be canceled at any point, without warning, in the middle of ongoing work. Say your tax dollars have been paying for a cancer study for two years. The grant was awarded for five years, so the team is mid-experiment. There are three additional years’ worth of answers that could change how the disease is treated for hundreds of thousands of people. With this new rule, the federal government could cancel the remaining funding tomorrow, walk away from the commitment it made with your money, and have no legal obligation to finish what it started. This is a huge waste of money. There are rarely other sources of funding for this work, which means the team, the graduate students, postdocs, and research staff who have dedicated years of their careers to this project could lose their jobs. Patients who have contributed their time to studies may not see it turn into useful learnings for others. Every hour of work already completed could result in nothing useful. Science can take decades to get to tangible outcomes. It needs a stable funding system to flourish. 3. Researchers would have a harder time communicating their findings without pre-approval from the federal government. There is a saying from Sir Mark Walport: “Science isn’t finished until it’s communicated.” Science is no use to anyone if it is kept locked away in the labs that produced the data. The proposed rule could make communicating research findings harder in a number of ways: Make it harder for scientists to widely share their findings in scientific journals. Publication costs, including journal fees that allow for broad public access, could not be paid for by federal funds which is often how scientists pay these costs. Restrict researchers from engaging publicly about how their findings should inform policy or public health guidelines. This would restrict scientists from doing the work that transforms years of lab work into decisions that actually affect people’s lives. Make it harder for scientists to attend conferences. Conferences would now need to be approved by the federal agency at the time of grant award. This disadvantages conferences or publications that are not politically aligned. Conferences are a key way in which scientists learn about work happening in their field so they can collaborate and build on each other’s findings. What good is science with a muzzle? The long-term impact These changes could (and hopefully would) be reversed under the next administration. But by then, damage has been done. Once projects are halted or denied funding by political appointees, people leave their science careers for other paths or even leave the country to do their amazing science elsewhere. You cannot pause a scientific study the way you pause a subscription you decided isn’t useful anymore. You cannot freeze a research team that depends on salaries to feed their families, causing a scramble for replacement funding that, in most cases, simply does not exist. When the money stops, everything stops, and all the work in progress and its potential are lost. Despite all of the language about reducing waste, fraud, and abuse, this new proposed rule increases the administrative burden tremendously. Every researcher watching this unfold will make a rational decision: don’t start anything that will take a decade to finish. This includes not building a team around funding that could vanish, or asking the big questions that need patience and stability to answer. The most consequential science, the kind that produces the treatments and the breakthroughs that reach your doctor’s office twenty years from now, is exactly the science that would be abandoned first. This is still a proposal, so we can all do something Some worry this rule is already a done deal. But by law, OMB is required to open a public comment period. Those comments matter because they inform members of Congress, they can be used in litigation, and they create a public record. So here’s what you can do: Submit a public comment. The public comment period on this proposed change is open until July 13. Anyone can submit a comment, and OMB is required to respond to substantial ones. Each comment must be different to count as distinct; identical comments will be counted only once. Comment as an individual, not on behalf of your organization. Here’s a full resource to help you, with useful examples, but in general: Share a story about how science or federal funding has benefitted you or is involved in your work. Are you or someone you loved a cancer survivor? Do you know someone with Alzheimer’s? Have you received NIH/NSF or other federal funding? All of these can be stories you use to highlight why you care. Explain why you’re worried about these proposed changes. You can use the wording found here or in other resources to help you. Ask them to withdraw this proposed rule. Contact your elected representatives. Congress allocates money to federal agencies to spend, and it has oversight of how that process works. You can let your representatives know this proposed change concerns you and ask them to intervene. There are levers they can push that can help at this moment. Let others know why federal funding matters. This isn’t just about science, but ALL federal grants, including for education systems, defense projects, and more. The process, including the importance of federal funding, is invisible to many. We can all make it more visible by sharing how science benefits us and why we value it. You can also share this article, or any of the resources linked here, to help spread awareness! Bottom line We are quickly losing ground in scientific research in the U.S. More changes, like the proposed rule by OMB, would decimate our ability to conduct research here, leaving us all worse off: fewer treatments for pancreatic cancer, less research on pollution impacts, fewer answers for patients with rare disease, and more unaddressed health needs. The impact will be very real for all of us, regardless of where we stand politically. Using our voices for science is more important than ever. Love, LM Big thanks to Dr. Megan Ranney for reading this over and providing brilliant insights, as always. Dr. Liz Marnik, PhD, is Executive Director of The Evidence Collective at YLE and a science communicator and immunologist working at the intersection of public trust, science, and public health. You can find her on Substack, LinkedIn, Instagram and Threads. Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) comprises a team of experts, ranging from physicians to immunologists to epidemiologists to nutritionists, working together with one goal: to “Translate” ever-evolving public health science so that people are well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions. The YLE suite of newsletters reaches over 475,000 people across more than 132 countries. This newsletter is free to everyone, thanks to the generous support of fellow YLE community members. To support the effort, subscribe or upgrade below: Subscribe
Medicaid cuts reignite clash between health worker unions, hospitals
The looming impact of federal Medicaid cuts has reignited a costly battle between California’s medical industry and one of its largest health worker unions.
NJBIA’s 2026 Regional Business Climate Analysis Shows NJ Still Worst in Region
NJBIA’s 2026 Regional Business Climate Analysis, released today, shows New Jersey continues to rank last in the region in cost competitiveness and business taxes for an eighth consecutive year. The analysis, found here, shows New Jersey remains a regional outlier with the top corporate tax rate (11.5%) and highest property tax paid as a percentage of personal income (4.38%). Additionally, New Jersey[...]
iPhone 17's 8GB Limit Costs It These Two Siri AI Features in iOS 27
Apple this week revealed what its most advanced on-device AI model does, and the feature list is shorter than the hardware requirements might suggest. In its Siri AI announcement during WWDC 2026, Apple confirmed that the model powers two things: more expressive Siri voices and a major accuracy gain for systemwide dictation. Both require 12GB of unified memory.
The Hidden Cost of AI Search That Business Leaders Are Missing
Despite its size and reach, Google's latest innovation makes it vulnerable to disruption now more than ever.
Xbox CEO outlines strategy to prioritise cost-efficiency and exclusive titles over premium hardware
"We will continue to look at new business models – that's what is needed rather than premium, high-performance consoles," says Asha Sharma
Pollinators in peril: scientists reveal the hidden human health costs of the world’s disappearing bees
Crops and flowers rely on them for survival, but wild bees are declining – and crucial nutrients will go missing from our diets as a result
Policy and politics are hitting CT families with rising summer costs
If you wanna get away this summer, the economic cost of a far-away war in Iran might affect your ability to spend here at home.
Xbox Getting Creative About Next-Gen Consoles To Deal With Cost
Asha Sharma keeps hinting at a big problem
UMass Chan research finds Medicaid-funded nutrition, housing programs linked to improved health outcomes, lower costs
New research finds Medicaid-funded nutrition and housing programs are linked to improved health outcomes and lower healthcare costs in Massachusetts.
Dan Oborn hosts roundtable with Omaha small business owners
The handful of business owners said inflation was the common theme hurting their businesses because of increases input costs.
Despite hot jobs report, small businesses pull back on hiring amid cost concerns
Small business owners appear to be pulling back on hiring plans, despite the government's release of a hotter-than-expected jobs report just days ago.
160,000 people drop Pennie health plans following price hikes
A critical federal incentive program ended in January, raising costs for many.
Google makes its AI Plus plan cheaper, doubles the cloud storage that comes with it
Previously, the Google AI Plus plan cost $8 a month and came with 200GB storage. Google scored a big victory yesterday as its Gemini model became the...
Is Social Security keeping up with your cost of living? Share your story
Many older Americans are finding it even harder to keep up with the ever-rising cost of living these days.
Bryan Cranston misses “The Studio ”costar Catherine O'Hara 'so much': 'Just heartbreaking to lose her'
O'Hara appeared in the ensemble cast as Patty Leigh, the outgoing head of Continental Studios, while Cranston's Griffin Mill took over.
Democratic National Committee: Local small businesses continue to suffer under Trump and his cost-spiking Republicans, forcing them to raise prices on families and cut jobs for workers
According to new data released today by The National Federation of Independent Business, small businesses throughout America continue to suffer under Donald Trump and his cost-spiking Republicans. With everything — from food and utilities to gas and building materials — becoming more...
UVM Health cuts 142 jobs — an estimated $9 million in staff positions
The cuts come as the hospital network faces an expected $300 million budget deficit and increasing pressure to cut costs.
High construction costs delay plans for Visit Baton Rouge office relocation
Visit Baton Rouge estimated the renovation of 232 Lafayette St., in shell condition, to cost $5 million, but the four contractors’ estimates range from $1.6 million to $2.6 million more than the estimate.
How Employee Recognition Breaks Down as Businesses Grow — and How to Fix It Before It Costs You
Recognizing employees positively impacts engagement and the broader business culture. As businesses scale, leaders need a reliable way to deliver recognition in the moment. Here's how.
Searching for health insurance? Keep scrolling to avoid government impersonators
When you search online, do you click the first result you see? You’re not alone. But that habit could cost you — especially if you’re searching for health insurance or government healthcare programs like Medicare.
Can California afford to cover Ozempic for public employees?
California may require CalPERS health plans to cover Ozempic and other GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. The insurer warns it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
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We can create the future of science right now
Paul Litvak is the founder and Executive Director of the Robyn Dawes Institute and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. He has a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon where he studied emotions and the sunk cost bias. Over 15 years in industry, he solved a wide range of challenging technical problems. At Meta he created models optimizing the ad review process. At Google he ran experiments to measure social influence. At Airbnb, he was a product manager leading machine learning teams optimizing search ranking and price suggestions. He also co-founded and led product at Rhythmic Health, a venture-backed biosensing startup, creating an accurate low cost system using a color changing strip and a smart phone to measure salivary lactate. The bottleneck At this point, it is uncontroversial to say that science needs to stop using the PDF article as the unit of knowledge and currency. The unbearable slowness of scientific publishing, the profit motive and margins: I’m not saying anything new. The PDF also sucks because it’s hard to extract structured information, which makes it hard to do evidence synthesis. As a result, we do much less evidence synthesis than is needed. And evidence synthesis ultimately undergirds most policy and medical decision-making. I can see second-by-second real-time odds for any sporting or newsworthy event, but a school board can’t see the best evidence on whether their 8th graders should be taught algebra. As a society, we don’t treat this as an important problem. Again, not controversial. Not only is the problem well understood, but the solution has already been laid out. What we need is AI-assisted living evidence synthesis - (1) an open knowledge graph of atomic claims, (2) claims linked to evidence, (3) assessment and synthesis of each piece of evidence, and (4) continuous updating with new data. What few realize (yet) is that the technical capacity to build this vision for a significant portion of science already exists. Not only that, scientists and startup teams are already building many of these components. I know this because I’ve been surveying the space and talking to many of the builders. There are some missing pieces: for example, evaluations of how well some of the components work. But at this point, most of what’s missing is a fully end-to-end working integration of all of these parts. In the rest of this essay, I’m going to lay out all the parts of a working living evidence layer for science and who is working on them, and propose concrete next steps for building this system. What’s now possible The diagram above outlines the components of a living evidence synthesis platform, including some of the teams working on each component1. Scientific PDFs are processed into claims with associated evidence. The evidence is subjected to a forensic audit, methodological evaluation and robustness and reproducibility checks. Finally it’s given a weight in a continuously updating synthesis. What follows is a description and status of each component and a few of the teams working on them. Document understanding The first thing you need to be able to do is turn an article into structured data. Mostly that means parsing PDFs. There are often multicolumn layouts that confuse non-specialized PDF to text processing libraries. For scientific papers, there is the added complexity of parsing formulas and tables and figures. This is a really hot area - there are startups offering APIs, and it seems like a new open source package gets posted to Github every few weeks. What follows isn’t exhaustive. A package called GROBID was the state of the art for a while, they didn’t update their package for nearly two years until very recently. In the meantime reducto.ai released an AI powered PDF extraction API, PaddleOCR became popular, IBM released a model called Docling, and both Mistral and Gemini created models and libraries. I also know of at least one other well-funded psychology research group working on a paper parser. By contrast, there are few open evals in this space, with no extensive evals for complex table comprehension in particular. Nonetheless, I’m confident this will be a solved problem soon, given the combination of LLM advances and developer interest. Hypothesis level extraction There has been increasing interest in comprehending the extracted text of papers and linking information to evidence for each hypothesis. A lot of work has already been done. Trialstreamer (Marshall et al. 2020) and RobotReviewer LIVE (Marshall et al. 2023) demonstrated automated extraction of trial population, intervention, and outcome at scale on clinical RCTs. PaperQA2 (Skarlinski et al. 2024) and Ai2 ScholarQA (2024) extended this to retrieval-augmented question answering with citation grounding. Elicit, Consensus, and SciSpace operationalized claim-level extraction for end users. OpenEval (Booeshaghi et al. 2026) is the most recent and most ambitious: 1.96 million atomic claims extracted from 16,087 eLife manuscripts using Claude Sonnet 4.5, grouped into ~299,000 results, with LLM evaluations showing 81% agreement with human peer review on a 2,487-paper subset. None of these solutions link claims to test-statistics, as you would need to evaluate randomized controlled trials. This is why I built the evidence.guide API - to extract hypotheses and associated test statistics from behavioral science papers. The best public eval of this kind of extraction I’m aware of comes from the recent SCORE project - they had humans code thousands of psychology papers to extract their claims by hand. It would be extremely helpful to the world if all scientific PDFs were available as structured open data. I’ve been working to make this happen, both directly at Berkeley and through coordination with large entities I can’t yet speak of; as hard as it is to do, I think it’s possible2. Forensic audit A lot of work has been done on forensic audit, but some gaps remain. Of course, for biology papers that rely on images for evidence, there are a variety of tools (notably Proofig and ImageTwin) to spot anomalies. These are still well short of what sleuths like Elizabeth Bik can do on her own, but these tools are constant companions among fraud analysts. There’s someone working on auditing Excel files for anomalies, and a number of teams are automating numerical checks like GRIM and SPRITE, including Scrutiny project, the INSPECT-SR team as well as statcheck. The regcheck team is building a way to use AI to compare preregistrations to analyses in papers, to ensure there aren’t significant deviations. Nonetheless, there are many other kinds of anomalies to screen for, both public and less publicly known. And there are no formal evals for anomaly detection that I’m aware of. Still, there’s a lot to draw from in this space and I’m pretty certain we will be able to scan papers for most kinds of obvious anomalies in the near future. Methodological review This area has been white hot, though I fear for many of the startups in this space, because this capability may become commoditized. There are at least six different AI peer review companies, including Refine.ink, Reviewer3, ReviewerZero.ai, Q.E.D. Science, Paper Wizard, and Isitcredible. Coarse (a pun on refine) was also recently created as an open source alternative. These systems provide qualitative feedback on the content of papers, spotting methodological weaknesses and mathematical errors. They seem to work pretty well, and many academics report bitterly that they exceed the average quality of typical peer reviewers. But there are few evals here either. What evals exist so far involve using LLM-as-judge (circularity problems abound) or comparing against human reviews of questionable quality. What you’d ideally want is an eval that measures capturing known errors in papers3. Reproducibility and robustness Another active area has been using AI agents to automate computational reproducibility4 and robustness5 checks in papers that report numerical results. For more recent papers where data and code are available, AI agents can see whether they can re-run the analyses and produce the numbers reported in the published paper. In addition to a handful of individual academics who have been experimenting using Claude Code for this, the Institute for Replication is a leading group working on building an end to end system. The evals related to this problem are the most mature, with CORE-Bench (Siegel, Kapoor, Narayanan 2024) and PaperBench (OpenAI 2025) available to benchmark agents on this task. There is also work on getting AI agents to test alternative ways of analyzing the data to ensure the results are robust to small analytic design choices. Synthesis This is the most underdeveloped area where significant investment is required. Although some automated evidence synthesis systems exist — for example, otto-sr is building an AI agent to write systematic reviews — none of these incorporate the full range of paper level signals to weight evidence appropriately. Nor is there anything like an eval or a gold standard for a good systematic review. Arguably Cochrane reviews are the closest we have to gold standard human systematic reviews, though I’ve heard academics in the know complain about their uneven quality. A key question for a synthesis platform is how to weight anomalies and methodological issues in assessing the quality of a piece of evidence. This is an unsolved problem and one I’m very keen to work on. Continuous updating There are many pieces of basic infrastructure available for monitoring for new research and initiating updates. OpenAlex is the current open citation graph. Retraction Watch integrated into Crossref in October 2023. Scite tracks how citations support, contrast, or mention prior claims. The Living Evidence Network demonstrated continuous-update workflows in clinical guidelines. Engineering this is a relatively straightforward task. When you look over this technical architecture and all the progress being made, it’s hard not to be optimistic that a living guide to scientific evidence will be built. The stakeholders are ready The social infrastructure for this is starting to coalesce — it’s not just a pie in the sky academic exercise to imagine this coming into existence. Institutions like the Center for Open Science, the Institute for Replication, the INSPECT-SR, the Living Evidence Network and more are all working on scaling work to improve research quality. Funders are also aligned. The Sloan Foundation has funded living evidence work through COS. Coefficient Giving supports the Institute for Replication and COS. The Astera Institute and the Institute for Progress have shown interest in this space. NIH has established an Office for Replication and Reproducibility. Although there are (very unfortunately) serious headwinds in science funding generally, there is an active group of funders interested in metascience. A brief word about what I’ve been doing at RDI. First, as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley I’ve been actively figuring out how a non-profit and a public university can conduct and make public the results of large-scale academic article data mining. With some of the money I raised from donors, I commissioned a legal analysis of recent case law and publisher text data mining (TDM) agreements in order to understand whether a massive open data mining of academic articles is possible (with caveats, it is). I’ve also been working to bring together stakeholders in this space, and identify gaps. I’ve also been doing some software development in this space, with more to come. A pilot proposal The assumption undergirding all of this is that an AI, given all this information, would make the right judgment about a scientific claim with lots of conflicting evidence, weighing all the factors appropriately. That’s the hypothesis we need to test. Randomized control trial research is the best place to focus on first. RCTs are used to make many of the important decisions in society - from medical trials to public policy changes. And they use a relatively uniform set of inferential statistics with lots of known and available diagnostics. Behavioral science experiments, within the broader realm of RCTs, should be first used as a testbed whose results can be generalized. Because behavioral science is at the vanguard of open science practices, replications abound (there are thousands of them) to serve as ground truth training data. Key Hypothesis Therefore the pilot would test, in behavioral RCTs that have been replicated, whether the quality of evidence for a claim can be used to accurately predict whether that claim will replicate. Secondary Hypotheses Compared to claims that replicated, non-replicated claims demonstrate a greater share of forensic anomalies in their source literatures. Hypothesis level claim and statistic extraction is accurate enough to scale living evidence without onerous human review costs. Replication prediction is more accurate than prediction markets6 or journal prestige. If all the different quality signals we gather do accurately predict which studies will replicate, then we can use that model to score evidence to power the living evidence layer. Why this is informative regardless of outcome If the pilot succeeds, the architecture extends to medical RCTs (where Living Evidence already operates and integration is mostly about claim representation), then to slices of basic biology with stable replication structure. If it fails, the field learns which quality signals are load-bearing and which ones metascience has oversold. Either result is a contribution to knowing what the literature supports. Implications for funders Because this burgeoning ecosystem of builders already exists, a well-informed philanthropic or government funder could play a crucial catalyzing role in bringing this future about. They could play at least three roles: creating open structured datasets, publishing open benchmarks and incentivizing the solving of key technical challenges. First, open archives of papers that the government maintains, like PubMed, could be turned into structured data amenable to large scale metascience and claim aggregation. I know the US government already has an interest in doing this, though some key open questions remain unanswered. How do you determine the best models and systems for accurately extracting information from papers? How can you establish a robust way to allow researchers to flag errors and correct them? And finally, how do you create a legal regime in working with publishers to maximize the scope of available papers? For the latter, a university or a private philanthropy may be better positioned to make structured data publicly available under journal subscription terms or fair use. Philanthropists or government funders could also coordinate to create or commission benchmarks that evaluate whether important problems have been solved. For example, an open benchmark for claim extraction from a range of different scientific article types would be extremely helpful. Ensuring the underlying data are accurate is vital for creating these evaluations. I’ve discussed opportunistically using various human-created datasets for this purpose, but a consistent problem is that errors in human data make it difficult for them to serve as a gold standard. Finally, with structured data and benchmarks available, the government or private philanthropy could use them to incentivize groups to develop machine learning systems that meet these benchmarks. Prizes are one potentially valuable tool for this. For example, you could establish a prize for a system that accurately updates a living meta-analysis for a small set of claims. Prizes are particularly useful as signals of problem importance, and can help create vibrant ecosystems of public and private research—see, for example the role the government played in kickstarting the current work on nuclear fusion. Conclusion The drawbacks of the current scientific publishing system are known. Scientists agree, metascientists agree, philanthropists agree: the published PDF plus citation graph isn’t the right substrate for maintaining a representation of the evidence base in science. The pieces needed to build the alternative either already exist or are rapidly taking shape. The community is forming around exactly this problem, with concrete partnerships and shared infrastructure. A pilot should start on behavioral science RCTs because that’s the slice of empirical science most amenable to legibility, where replication ground truth is richest, and where the failure modes are best documented. What’s been missing is the galvanizing mission to assemble these pieces into something that works. That’s what I’m proposing to build. *** 1 I have a broader field map that I’ll release publicly soon. This is me, building in public! 2 If this is something that you are excited about, please reach out and talk to me. 3 More on this very soon too! 4 This tests whether, given the code and the data, you can get the same statistics as reported in the published paper. 5 This tests whether the results are the same as a paper’s given alternative analytical decisions in conducting the analysis (like outlier omission). Closely related is the idea of a “multiverse” where you come up with many different ways of answering the same underlying research question with the same data, and test whether the results hold in all those alternative methods. There’s been work on the latter as well. 6 Some of the replications, e.g. those from the SCORE project, had paired the experiments with forecasts from prediction markets. So we get to look at this for free.
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