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Scoop: Adler's next generation keeps jewelry business alive
Two Adler siblings have launched their own jewelry ventures.
Lawsuit targets Chicago broadcasters over ads for financial planner accused of fraud
Three Chicago broadcasters have been accused of fraudulently lending their institutional credibility to a man running what state officials called a “Ponzi-like scheme.”
Stitch Fix and AMC Entertainment Stocks Trade Up, What You Need To Know
A number of stocks jumped in the afternoon session after the consumer discretionary sector recovered alongside a broad market rebound, helped by easing geopolitical risk and a retreat in Treasury yields from the levels that triggered the previous week's selloff.
Big spending by Super PACs in congressional primaries
Millions of dollars have already been spent by outside groups known as Super PACs to try to sway voters in the upcoming congressional primaries
Trump’s grip on the GOP leaves Netanyahu with few places to turn
As Trump clamps down on Netanyahu, the Israeli leader is finding he has few avenues of appeal among American politicians.
Download the official macOS 27 Golden Gate wallpapers here
And even though macOS 27 Golden Gate won’t launch for a few more months, you can already get the new light and dark wallpapers from the gallery below.
4 of the best iOS 27 features Android already has
Apple rarely does things first, which is one of the reasons we love Android so much.
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.
Nick Pachota flexes fundraising, first responder support in HD 74 bid
The Primary is already hard-fought, with multiple candidates taking significant strides forward as the race moves along.
Who's building and who's buying in Greater Baton Rouge
A look at the latest property transactions and issued permits in East Baton Rouge Parish. Los Angeles investor Andrew Fay purchased an industrial property at the corner of South Choctaw Road and … Already an INSIDER? Sign in. Already an INSIDER? Sign in
Science Museum Oklahoma offers free admission for dads on Father's Day
Science Museum Oklahoma invites fathers to enjoy free admission on Father's Day with a child's ticket purchase, encouraging family learning and exploration.
St. Pete faith leaders endorse Ken Welch for re-election
The endorsements add to backing from many local elected officials, unions and community figures already supporting Welch's campaign.
The Latest: Trump dismisses idea that Iran betrays his ‘no new wars’ campaign message
President Donald Trump is dismissing the idea that launching the war with Iran this year betrayed his refrain of “No new wars” that he made repeatedly as he campaigned again for the White House
Honeywell lifts annual profit forecast ahead of aerospace spinoff
Honeywell on Monday raised its annual adjusted profit forecast weeks ahead of the spinoff of its aerospace business.
Seven ways to trick yourself into eating better
We might believe we are in control of what we choose to eat, but our senses are constantly manipulating what we buy and how much we consume. Here's how to turn them to your advantage.
Trump Escalates War on Science
The Trump administration, having already made cuts to research on topics it disfavors, now wants scientists to submit to political control.
Fable is getting some post-launch DLC already, with an extended look at gameplay planned for later this week
Fable: Order of the Hero will bring a new region and storyline to the upcoming fantasy RPG.
Major sports investor wants to bring MLB to Raleigh. Is it competition or collaboration with Dundon?
Marc Lasry’s Avenue Sports Fund is already invested in the NC Courage. He now wants to invest in big-league baseball in Raleigh, telling WRAL he’s willing to partner with Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon, who also has MLB ambitions.
Buffalo Bills ranked best new quarterback-head coach duo in NFL
The Bills changed their head coach, but Josh Allen's familiarity with Joe Brady already has Buffalo's new pairing ranked No. 1 in the NFL.
Chancellor visits Institute of Marine Sciences, its researchers
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee H. Roberts spent Tuesday in Carteret County meeting with researchers at the university's Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City as part of his second summer tour.
Jon Cryer thought Andrew McCarthy was a 'dick' amid 'all kinds of issues' filming 'Pretty in Pink'
Jon Cryer initially thought his 'Pretty in Pink' costar Andrew McCarthy was a 'dick' amid 'all kinds of issues' on the 1986 film set, before learning that McCarthy was 'battling his own demons.'
Sea of Stars gets a Nintendo Switch 2 version
Sea of Stars is receiving a dedicated Nintendo Switch 2 version. That’s according to a listing on the Japanese Nintendo eShop. It’s already live on the store with other regions to follow – likely tomorrow. Sea of Stars previously launched on Nintendo Switch. Note that the new release is not a Nintendo Switch 2 Edition, so save data will not...
'Scary Movie' tops box office, slaying 'Masters of the Universe' and adding to low-budget streak
The summer box office is booming — but not because of the usual suspects.
‘Strength doesn’t mean silence’: Men talk mental health at Jacksonville field day
On the surface, it looked like a day of friendly competition, laughter, and games. But organizers say a Men’s Mental Health Awareness Field Day held in Jacksonville was built around a much deeper mission: breaking the silence surrounding men’s mental health.
Where to watch Boston Red Sox vs. New York Yankees: Live stream, start time, TV channel, odds for Sunday, June 7
The Red Sox and Yankees meet in the latest chapter of their AL East rivalry.
The business of AI's 4 harsh realities
Investors are starting to realize that things may not be as rosy as they wanted.
It Safe To Eat Green Bananas? Here's What the Science Says
Are green bananas safe to eat? We did the research to find out. Here’s how their flavor, texture, and nutrition change as they ripen.
Euro giants confirm what Liverpool already knew about 'special' star
Liverpool are going to go through a lot of changes this summer. The Anfield outfit massively underperformed this season and, without some new faces being brought in, it's hard to see how they'd do any...
Vampire Survivors getting a Nintendo Switch 2 version
A new Nintendo Switch 2 version of Vampire Survivors is in development, according to Poncle. The game is already on the original Nintendo Switch where it’s had a ton of success. It’s also playable on Nintendo Switch 2 via backwards compatibility. However, now the console is getting its own dedicated version. According to Poncle, Vampire Survivors will have better performance...
High School Science Teacher Dies Suddenly from Aggressive Form of Leukemia: ‘Her Illness Came Without Warning’
Michelle Eynon is being remembered by colleagues and loved ones as a devoted teacher, wife and mother of two
Kyle Pitts ascension just getting started for Atlanta Falcons
The NFL offseason has already delivered a few surprises. One of the biggest involves the Atlanta Falcons and tight end Kyle Pitts. After weeks of trade speculation leading up to the NFL Draft, Atlanta appears committed to keeping Pitts on…
James Handy's final film scrapped after late actor's murder, producer says
Handy died after being found with a stab wound to his chest on June 3. He was 81.
Liverpool Transfer Talk Grows After Chiesa Comments on Midfielder
Liverpool Transfer Talk: Chiesa Offers Insight on Jones and AlissonFederico Chiesa has added another layer to what already feels like a summer of considerable change at Liverpool, with the Italian for...
Borussia Dortmund president expects Erling Haaland to join Real Madrid
As part of his Real Madrid presidency push, Enrique Riquelme claimed that he will bring Jurgen Klopp and Erling Haaland to the Bernabeu. However, the representatives of both have already dismissed the...
What’s that? Bay City restaurateur adding new cocktail lounge to business mix
The new restaurant represents the latest business venture undertaken by local restaurateur Vince Stuart, who already owns multiple eateries in the Bay City area.
A tale of two debates
By Vince Bzdek Ballots go out Monday as the June 30 state primary elections bear down on us. As a result, it is suddenly the season of proliferating political debates, and there have been some doozies already. I had the chance to see two very different debates in the last week, and comparing and contrasting them speaks […]
A tale of two debates
By Vince Bzdek Ballots go out Monday as the June 30 state primary elections bear down on us. As a result, it is suddenly the season of proliferating political debates, and there have been some doozies already. I had the chance to see two very different debates in the last week, and comparing and contrasting them speaks […]
Riq Woolen already making strong impression on Eagles in spring
Free agent pickup Riq Woolen is just a handful of practices into his Eagles career but is already making a strong impression.
Wildlife ecologist says her favorite science talk this year was in her children's classroom
"The kids are alright, and they sure are ready to protect the natural world into the future."
Column: Summer screen selections
Summer officially doesn’t start until June 21, but on the big screen, we’re already weeks into the summer movie season.
Mock political party for India's young 'cockroaches' set to hold first protest in New Delhi
The Cockroach Janata Party, a social media movement in India, faces a major test as its founder leads a demonstration in New Delhi
Trump says he wants Pulte to further slash staffing at national intelligence office
President Donald Trump said Friday that he wants his new acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, to cut the office, which has already been significantly scaled back during his second term.
HP announces the most powerful Windows AI PC ever built — Nvidia GB300 workstation can handle one trillion parameters thanks to its 784GB unified memory, but it won't be cheap
Server-grade power, now on your desk.
EAST TEXAS POLITICS: Moran on backing losing candidate in Senate runoff, Tyler mayor weighs in on successor race
Congressman addresses political retribution fears, outgoing Tyler mayor reflects on term
Trump's deportation agenda is about to get a $70B infusion from Congress
For those aligned with Trump’s campaign promise for the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history, it all but guarantees an uninterrupted flow of money to carry out the administration's immigration enforcement operations — and comes on top of some $170 billion Congress already approved for the department last summer, as part of Trump's big tax breaks bill.
Science panel to present hardened structure report findings
The North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission is expected to hear from its science advisory panel its findings on the effects hard structures have on sandy, open-ocean coastlines.
Takeaways from the appeals court hearing on the White House ballroom project
President Donald Trump’s push to construct a massive ballroom at the White House without congressional approval was sharply questioned by a federal appeals court on Friday during a high-stakes hearing in a case testing the president’s power.
Cobolli through to final as Arnaldi withdraws with virus
Flavio Cobolli is through to the French Open final as Matteo Arnaldi withdraws before their semi-final with a virus.
Here's how you can win tickets to the “Heated Rivalry” season 2 premiere
The show is giving away two tickets to the big event next year.
Jon Maples has big lead over Jonathan Rubin in HD 87 GOP Primary, and he’s got room to grow
Even with more than 1/3 of voters undecided, Maples already has majority support.
Joel Klatt replaces Kirk Herbstreit as color commentator in EA Sports College Football 27
It was recently reported that Kirk Herbstreit will not be in EA Sports’ College Football 27. Herbstreit served as the color commentator alongside play-by-play announcer Chris Fowler for the “Big Game” broadcast team in College Football 25 and 26, after EA Sports relaunched the popular video game franchise that was previously known as NCAA Football.…
The Latest: Senate passes $70B immigration enforcement bill
The Senate has passed legislation to fund President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agencies after weeks of delays and fierce backlash to an unrelated $1.776 billion settlement fund that threatened to derail the bill
Hospitals Are Leading Efforts to Make Health Care More Affordable
Affordability is front and center in conversations across the country, as Americans feel pressure from the rising cost of living and policymakers search for solutions. Hospitals and health systems share their concerns because we see the impact of high costs every day on the patients and families we serve. Hospitals are not waiting to do their part. Across the nation, they are already implementing efforts to make healthcare more affordable and accessible, as well as providing solutions that could lower costs across the entire health care system.
Norway's crown princess placed on listed for lung transplant, palace says
Norway's Crown Princess Mette-Marit has been placed on a waiting list for a lung transplant after a further deterioration of her health, the royal household said in a statement on Friday.
Work begins on Butler entertainment venue tailored to students
The Allen Whitehill Clowes Ballroom is being built adjacent to Clowes Memorial Hall and the Schrott Center for the Arts.
Democrats spar over big tech during debate for coveted congressional district in Manhattan
Democrats competing over a coveted congressional district in Manhattan have slugged it out during a heated debate
Google Health App Gets Massive Update Fixing 15+ Core Bugs After...
The Google Health app rollout hasn't been received well, but Google has at least committed to making big changes over the next few weeks and months. Some have already arrived, while the rest are...
Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8 to have both Exynos and Snapdragon chips
Which one you get will depend on where you're located, apparently. We've already heard that Samsung would be using the Exynos 2600 SoC in the upcoming...
Weekend Entertainment Roundup for June 4, 2026
Eric Harrison joins LRPR to share upcoming arts and culture events on the weekend entertainment roundup.
Would Bengals already trade second-round project?
An interesting name comes up as a Bengals trade candidate.
2026 Memorial Tournament Friday tee times: Round 2 pairings
Full 2026 Memorial Tournament tee times for Friday's second round at Muirfield Village, featuring Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy and more.
Baton Rouge’s economy is booming, report says
Baton Rouge is outperforming many of its regional competitors on several key economic measures, from job growth and pay to housing affordability and worker productivity. That’s according to the G… Already an INSIDER? Sign in. Already an INSIDER? Sign in
Newcastle Announce Matt Targett News After 2025-26 Season
Newcastle United confirmed on Tuesday that defender Matt Targett will leave the club following the expiry of his contract at the end of June. The full-back was named on the club’s retained list for summer 2026, with Newcastle announcing that four more senior players will depart after Kieran Trippier and Emil Krafth had already been […]
New Dignity Health program helps identify mental health risks for pregnant and postpartum women
A new maternal mental health initiative in the Sacramento region is already helping connect pregnant and postpartum women with critical support services, according to Dignity Health.
Packers’ Keisean Nixon facing backlash after blunt words for Bears
The 2026 NFL season is still months away, but the rivalry between the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears never stops. It simply does not take a pause. Just recently, Packers defensive back Keisean Nixon further fueled that with a statement on Chicago. Via Dave Schroeder of WBAY-TV: Keisean Nixon on the Bears: “Free [...]
GOP leaders shunned Bo French for racist posts. Now they want him to regulate Texas’ oil and gas
After Bo French asked his social media followers whether Jews or Muslims were a "bigger threat to America," Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called for him to step down from his position at the Tarrant County GOP. Patrick is now backing French in his bid to be the next Texas railroad commissioner.
World Cup 2026: Top 🔟 contenders for the title
With the 2026 World Cup set to take place in the United States, Canada and Mexico, excitement is already building around the biggest sporting occasion on earth.Recent form, squad depth, tournament ped...
Ben Affleck’s visit to Luna’s Mexican Grill in Swarthmore sends business to the ‘next level’
Cristina Luna Ramirez's restaurant runs on family and the flavors of northern Mexico. Her current success comes after years of hard work, practice, and adaptability.
Kayshon Boutte reportedly ‘interested in a trade’ from Patriots
Kayshon Boutte is apparently looking to leave New England.
Watch Commanders' Jayden Daniels connect with Chig Okonkwo during OTAs
Could the Commanders' WR2 already be on the roster and not who you think?
Dave Roberts says Dodgers have the capital to trade for Tigers ace Tarik Skubal: 'They would go ballistic'
Nvidia takes AI battle from the data centre to the laptop
Chipmaker opens new front in rivalry with Apple, Intel, AMD and Qualcomm
President Trump says he will nominate Todd Blanche to serve as attorney general
President Donald Trump says he will nominate Todd Blanche to serve as attorney general, tapping his former personal attorney who has aggressively pursued the Republican president’s agenda while leading the Justice Department in an acting role
SpaceX sets the stage for a record $75 billion IPO
Elon Musk’s SpaceX unveiled plans Wednesday to set a $135 share price in its initial public offering price, for a sale worth $75 billion. The blockbuster debut would make Musk – already the world’s richest person – the first-ever trillionaire.
Senate Republicans drop plans for $1bn to fund security at Trump’s ballroom
Fears that push for ballroom spending could jeopardize $70bn funding for immigration enforcement
CMA Fest puts spotlight on Music Row's mental health work
Potentially life-saving work is taking place backstage at CMA Fest.
Fertitta Entertainment to Acquire Caesars Entertainment, Inc. (CZR): A Top Sin Stock to Buy
Caesars Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ:CZR) is one of the best sin stocks to buy now. On May 15, reports emerged indicating Tillman Fertitta is moving closer to acquiring Caesars Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ:CZR). Several banks have already committed to a multi-billion-dollar debt financing package. Following these reports, on May 28, Caesars Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ: CZR) officially announced […]
Martin Bashir recalls being 'gobsmacked' by Michael Jackson telling him he slept in the same bed as children
Journalist Martin Bashir appears in the new Netflix documentary 'Michael Jackson: The Verdict,' in which he details filming the controversial 2003 special 'Living With Michael Jackson.'
Senate Republicans drop Trump ballroom funding from immigration bill
Senate Republicans have formally removed funding for President Donald Trump’s ballroom security as part of their sprawling immigration funding package, according to revised legislative text released Wednesday.
‘Tulsa King’ Season 5 Could Introduce Big Change: All the Details
Season 4 hasn't yet hit the streamer but already details about what might be next are in.
Meta launches enterprise-focused AI 'business agent' to automate daily operations
Meta Platforms on Wednesday unveiled an artificial intelligence agent aimed at helping businesses carry out day-to-day operations, positioning the social media giant as a player in the enterprise AI market.
Culpeper Police Department
Last Thursday, we attended a Health and Wellness Fair hosted by Encompass Community Supports at Culpeper Technical Education Center! We had great conversations and handed out wellness information and...
Popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs linked to lower risks of addiction and overdose
A massive study of more than 600,000 U.S. veterans suggests that popular GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide may do far more than help with diabetes and weight loss—they could also fight addiction itself. Researchers found that people taking these medications were less likely to develop substance use disorders involving alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, cocaine, opioids, and other drugs, while those already struggling with addiction experienced fewer overdoses, hospitalizations, emergency visits, and drug-related deaths.
From spider silk to science: a new way to access hidden fungal diversity
A new study from Thailand demonstrates that the debris-heavy webs of orb-weaving spiders can serve as natural, non-destructive tools for collecting and culturing viable environmental fungi. Through the isolation of living organisms, this innovative approach has already uncovered potentially new, undocumented fungal diversity within tropical rice fields.
The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science
With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!
UTC REACH Fund supports community-driven health research across the Chattanooga region
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