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Young Mom Randomly Developed Various Health Issues. Even When Doctor Diagnosed Her with a ‘Good Cancer,’ She Was Still Terrified

A mom’s unexplained weight loss and tiredness led to her being diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Emily Greenwood, who initially dismissed her symptoms as being a ‘busy mom,’ was told she had a ‘good cancer’ by medical professionals.

Jul 19 • 6:00 AM EDT • Health • people.com

Disney Jr., Animaj Quietly Launch ‘Ozzy Fox’ On Youtube

Created by Jennifer Oxley and developed by 'Pocoyo' creator Guillermo García-Carsí, the preschool series has drawn nearly 800,000 views in its first two days.

Jul 17 • 6:01 AM EDT • Technology • cartoonbrew.com

New Alzheimer's drug repairs DNA damage and reduces brain inflammation

A drug originally developed for spinal cord injury may offer a fresh approach to treating Alzheimer’s disease. In mouse studies, KCL-286 repaired dangerous DNA damage, reduced inflammation, and targeted multiple disease-related pathways instead of focusing on just amyloid or tau. Since it has already cleared an initial human safety trial, researchers believe it could move more quickly into Alzheimer’s clinical testing.

Jul 16 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

ZeniMax Online Studios leadership to exit as part of Xbox cuts

There are major changes happening atop Maryland-based ZeniMax Online Studios, developer of the Elder Scrolls Online, Game File has learned. Joe Burba, a 14-year veteran of the studio who was appointed to run it last July, is departing, along with ESO executive producer Susan Kath, studio game director Rich Lambert and production director Ala Diaz. Their roles were listed among hundreds of others cut last week from the Maryland offices of ZeniMax, in a WARN letter sent to the state by ZeniMax and obtained today by Game File. Tonight, BUrbam Kath, Lambert and Diaz notified Zenimax Online Studios workers of plans to “transition” to a new leadership team consisting of promoted ZOS veterans. That transition will occur “over the next few months,” they told workers, according to a copy of the notice reviewed by Game File. “We will remain in place during the transition period to help ensure a smooth handoff.” Last week, Microsoft laid off of 1,600 workers across its vast gaming teams in locations around the U.S. and abroad. Just who has been impacted and how hard various studios have been hit has been emerging day by day. Game File reported last week that Microsoft/ZeniMax notified officials in Maryland that 379 gaming jobs were being cut across the state. They tallied cuts in two locations: one for ZeniMax Media Inc. (covering Elder Scrolls/Starfield/Fallout-maker Bethesda Game Studios and central Bethesda game publishing) and one for ZeniMax Online Studios (Elder Scrolls Online). More than 200 jobs were cut at the latter. Last week’s totals did not reveal job titles, nor did Microsoft announce any leadership changes in the ZeniMax group. That has now happened. Earlier today, Game File obtained from Maryland officials a breakdown of the 379 impacted roles, which, extraordinarily, included “studio head.” Microsoft later confirmed to Game File which studio head that referred to: ZeniMax Online Studios’. Microsoft has since has notified studio employees and internally announced new leadership. ZOS will now be run by Josh Henderson, previously head of business operations at the studio, and Nick Giacomini, who was promoted to game director for ESO last August. Game File is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe Last week’s news of 200+ cuts at ZeniMax Online Studios generated public sympathy for those workers and questions about the long-term viability of the Elder Scrolls Online. ESO is a massively multiplayer online game that inherently persists on the strength of new content being developed for it. Earlier today, fans and workers in Maryland protested the cuts at the ZeniMax teams in a rally organized by the Communication Workers of America, the union that represents many of the impacted employees. Regarding concerns around the game, a community manager stated on Saturday: “The plan is still to deliver great content, and we will hopefully have an update soon.” In their note to the studio today, the outgoing leaders of ZeniMax Online Studios predicted “growth” for the game: We have tremendous confidence in Josh and Nick, the future of this studio, and the continued growth of ESO. With exciting experiences still ahead for our players as we wrap up work for Update 51 and beyond, we believe that your passion, creativity, and commitment to each other and the community will continue serving as the heartbeat of ESO. The list of jobs cut in the ZeniMax WARN notice in Maryland includes several very senior roles, including: Studio Head Studio Operations Director Studio Game Director Studio Audio Director Studio Art Manager Vice President and Controller VP, Global Sales & Business Development While some of those job descriptions match the exiting ZOS leadership team, Game File couldn’t verify if all were from that studio. The full list of cut roles shared by Maryland officials also covers workers at Bethesda Game Studios and its central publishing office. The following is an excerpt: The list of 379 eliminated ZeniMax jobs in Maryland also includes: four animators three bilingual CS (community service) leads for Chinese, Italian, and Japanese a creative director for the Elder Scrolls Online Player Life Cycle two food service workers seven producers more than 60 senior QA testers. and many others The WARN notice states that almost all of the 379 workers were notified of their layoff on July 6. In fine print, it states: “Approximately 9 employees were notified of the elimination of their position prior to July 6, 2026.” A 2021 mega-merger scaled back Microsoft announced in 2020 that it intended to buy ZeniMax and its network of game studios in 2020, and closed the $7.5 billion deal in March 2021. The purchase, which preceded Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, added several award-winning studios to Microsoft’s portfolio, including Bethesda (Elder Scrolls, Fallout), Arkane (Dishonored), and id Software (Doom). The studios’ output since then included a 2024 Game of the Year contented from MachineGames in the form of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle along with Starfield from Bethesda and the poorly-received Redfall from Arkane Austin. In recent years, a Microsoft repeatedly in cutback mode closed ZeniMax’s Tango Gameworks (which was reconstituted by Krafton) and closed Arkane Austin. The Xbox cuts last week have hit the ZeniMax group hard, with 158 jobs eliminated in Texas, many of them at id, and 379 from the ZeniMax teams in Maryland. Xbox also said last week that it would be entering a consultation process around Arkane Lyon, a process expected to end in a sale, shutdown or other form of divestment. The Lyon team has been working on a game tied to Marvel’s Blade vampire-hunting super-hero.

Jul 15 • 7:42 PM EDT • Technology • gamefile.news

Daniel Ek's body-scanning startup Neko Health raises another $700M

Neko Health has developed proprietary body-scanning technology, which it couples with bloodwork, to assess a person's health.

Jul 15 • 3:46 PM EDT • Health • techcrunch.com

Go-karts, mini-golf coming to Panama City Beach near Pirates Voyage

The open space adjacent to Dolly Parton's Pirates Voyage Dinner and Show in Panama City Beach to be developed as an entertainment complex.

Jul 15 • 2:59 PM EDT • Entertainment • newsherald.com

County business park to get first infrastructure, new name

New Hanover County’s Holly Shelter Business Park could be getting its first infrastructure and a new name in the coming months. The New Hanover County Board of Commissioners unanimously approved a $6.5 million infrastructure construction contract and renaming on Monday. Once developed, the approximately 300-acre master-planned industrial park is expected to accommodate more than 2 million square feet of industrial space. The construction contract was awarded to Carolina Civilworks, which submitted the lowest responsive bid for the construction of the infrastructure, Akin Akinola, the county’s engineer, told commissioners on Monday. In May 2023, the county approved a development agreement with Sidbury Land & Property Company to establish the business park. The firm then conveyed approximately 52 acres to the county, giving officials the option to purchase another 200 acres, Akinola said. “The county’s role is to construct the initial public infrastructure that will make the site ready for future development,” he said. “Today’s contract award represents the first major construction phase of that project.” The first phase of development will include approximately 2,750 linear feet of business park roadway, a water main and fire hydrants, along with a sanitary sewer pump station, sewer force main and gravity sewer. Other infrastructure will include a right-turn lane on Holly Shelter Road, along with associated drainage, utilities and traffic control improvements. “Completing this work establishes the backbone infrastructure necessary to serve future development and positions the site for future economic investment,” Akinola said on Monday. County staff, in consultation with Wilmington Business Development officials, are also recommending renaming the park as the I-40 Coastal Commerce Park, said Jennifer Rigby, the county’s chief strategy officer. The new name would emphasize the park’s proximity to I-40 and its location on the coast, she said. Several county commissioners also asked to add New Hanover County's name to the business park's name to commemorate the county's contributions. “We are hoping to achieve space for our businesses to grow and expand here in New Hanover County,” Rigby said. “We’ve had great success with out Blue Clay Business Park and this is another opportunity to really provide locations for our businesses to grow and expand.”

Jul 14 • 3:24 PM EDT • Business • wilmingtonbiz.com

47 revelatory hours with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced

To review this month’s supposed remake of 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, I must first correct the record. Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced isn’t a game about pirates (and assassins) in the 18th century Caribbean. Sure, sure, that’s what the trailers would have you believe. They’ve go their clips of Edward Kenway swinging his swords and steering his pirate ship into cannon-blasting combat against British frigates. Is Resynced truly a pirate game? Of the 47 hours I spent playing Resynced over the past few weeks, I will admit I spent maybe 44 (?) of them collecting plunder with Blackbeard, drinking rum with Anne Bonny and debating the pros and cons of the lawless pirate-run settlement Nassau with Benjamin Hornigold. I may in fact have spent dozens of hours sailing to remote islands, reading treasure maps, opening messages left in bottles, sinking the odd Man o’ War with a well-timed broadside, collecting sea shanties for my crew, befriending a pet monkey, and hunting whales. I am nevertheless neither so Gullible nor so Narrow-Minded as to call the magnificent Resynced a “pirate remake.” Oh no. Forget any reviews of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced you may have read. Forget what you yourself may have played, if you’ve spent any time with the game since its launch. What Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is really about I’m here to give you the scoop (spoilers for Resynced’s Animus menu lore, which many players are probably not going to see): Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, the new game whose development was led by Ubisoft Singapore, is set in the year 2096. It’s about a societal split, about revolution, about an old Assassin’s Creed adventure repurposed in the series’ distant future as propaganda or samizdat. It’s about the overheated future of 2096, essentially conquered by the series’ well-established nefarious Templar-run company Abstergo. (In this future, Abstergo is, among other things, remaking a 2013 pirate movie called Devils of the Caribbean, but this time in VR. The VR version will be backed by a marketing plan that involves AI influencers, a 10,000-avatar “metaverse premiere event” and that manufacturing of memes aimed at “50 million VR nodes.” See what I mean about Abstergo being evil?) Resynced is about a late 21st-century population mollified by the widespread use of Abstergo’s Animus devices which let people experience the lives of historical figures culled from “genetic memories.” It’s about an insurgent faction of Assassins. And it’s about a plan to wake the population into revolutionary fervor by showing them the memories of 18th century pirate Edward Kenway, who—as depicted in the original Black Flag and again in Resynced—gradually comes to an understanding about the Assassins of his day and their centuries old fight for freedom. Resynced is also about an AI developed within the late 21st-century Animus, called Ego. It has found a way to alter genetic memories, to create and show Animus users false ones. The game is about Ego’s efforts to tell the people experiencing Edward Kenway’s memories that Kenway was wrong, that fighting against order is folly, that we should crave a world where “compliance is rewarded with power.” Who are we in this game? We’re an unnamed Animus user in 2096 who experiences Kenway’s journey virtually. At four moments during Kenway’s exploits in the Caribbean our virtual jaunt can be interrupted for 10-15 minutes, as we explore Animus “rifts” where Ego explicitly tries to tell us how wrong Kenway was. None of this is what 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag was about, of course. That was a different game, even if you also spent dozens of hours pirating as Kenway in that game, across missions and a map that’s been faithfully reintroduced and rebuilt for Resynced. The 2013 Black Flag was about you playing as an unnamed researcher newly hired in 2013 by Abstergo Entertainment, the video game development wing of the Templars’ evil-corp. In that game, you were assigned to use the Animus to dive into the genetic memories of Desmond Miles, a man who died in Assassin’s Creed III and who was descended from a long line of Assassins (and at least one Templar) whose adventures were featured across the prior AC games. In 2013’s Black Flag, your mission was to plumb the Edward Kenway experience for material that Abstergo could use in productions such as the motion picture Devils of the Caribbean, though the Templars had some ulterior motives for the assignment. Resynced is therefore not a remake of 2013’s Black Flag. It’s a sequel. It is a new game about a new exploration of Edward Kenway’s pirate/assassin journey, set 83 years after the framing sequences of the original game. Resynced provides a new narrative framework that, thanks to the concept of an AI that wants to alter historical memories, arrives with creative justification to tweak a now-classic 13-year old game. That makes Resynced, already a hot seller, a tantalizing hint of where Ubisoft could go with a line of Assassin’s Creed remakes. They could remake the first game, the Ezio games, even the recent ones set in ancient Egypt and Greece. And for each, they could not just modernize the graphics and controls but expand and alter their sequences of events to use them as reference points for a conflict set in the late 21st century, as rival factions try to weaponize historical memories. Game File is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, even when that work consists of ravings about Assassin’s Creed’s modern day plot, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe A story most players will probably miss If you didn’t know any of this, I’m not surprised. If you played the game and still didn’t catch it, I’m not a bit shocked. If Ubisoft has no plans to do more of this, I won’t fall down. Almost all of what I’ve described is optional and missable in Black Flag Resynced. I nearly missed it myself, as I planned for a breezy playthrough of an old Assassin’s Creed favorite. Instead, I found myself in a 40+ hour hunt for the “real” story, buried deeper in Resynced than any gold-filled chest. The story of 2096 is Resynced’s meta-story, told in two remote pockets of the game: 1) four optional playable “rifts” that players may find as they proceed through Resynced’s pirate fantasy , 2) in dozens of text files tucked three menus deep in the game’s barely-interactive Animus hub. Assassin’s Creed games have almost always had a meta-story about people in the 21st century (usually matching the game’s release year) and their connections to the main history portions you play. Those meta-stories have always been squeezed into the margins, though seldom as severely and as, uh, graphiaclly simple, as in recent games. Back in 2013, the modern-day exploits of you as an Abstergo Entertainment employee were prominent. They were portrayed via first-person portions that occasionally interrupted the third-person Kenway experience and could be explored for hours, complete with their own missions, side quests and puzzles. Resynced’s 2096 story—of Assassin “Watchers” vs. Abstergo/Tempar goons, of rogue AIs, of panicking scientists, of a woman wondering why her Animus-addicted husband is muttering about Mary Read (“What does he mean by Assassins?”), of a fight for the population’s hearts and minds via varying interpretations of Edward Kenway’s life choices—is mostly told through unlockable text files. The files are interesting. Offered via diary entries, intercepted chats and news reports, they present varied perspectives of a world in crisis. One set works as a narrative puzzle as it reveals the Rashomonic interpretations of a massacre, or was that a successful Assassin hit? Another favorite reveals the rising bitterness of a person who, through Edward Kenway’s journey, now shakes at the ignored evil around him. One surmises that Ubisoft is averse to putting the Assassin’s Creed’s meta-story in the way of more marketable pirate playgrounds and ninja/samurai epics. Instead, we get a better-than-nothing text-in-menus approach introduced in 2025’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows. In Shadows, players unlocked the meta-story text files largely via time-gated missions that called on the user to kill X number of enemy type Y, clear three enemy castles, re-win a three-phase fighting tournament, and other grinds. Time restrictions on accessing these missions and unlocking the files meant it could take players months to access the full story in-game. But even in the most hardcore Assassin’s Creed hangouts, the fanbase instead seemed to throw up their hands rather than grind to keep up. In Resynced, Ubisoft has shown some mercy, diminishing the amount of new text files that are tied to timed grinds. Now, most of the text-based 2096 lore are associated with “data file” collectibles that players can find in the world. That includes a batch of written entries that explain a historical link between the feudal Japan era in Shadows and the piracy adventures in Black Flag. Players who explore a lot will find dozens of data files, though the game does not appear to offer any in-game tracker for finding each one. You just need to keep looking for them. As of this writing, I have most of them, but not all. I can’t find any full guide for them online. And even Ubisoft’s optional $5 microtransaction that reveals lots of items in-game does not appear to reveal the locations of the text files (at least the official description omits them from its collectibles list). That’s not a huge bother, because tracking the data files down compelled me to re-explore the waves and islands of Black Flag. That was a thoroughly pleasant task to do for the first time in a dozen years. I expect many players, though, will be content to wait for the files to be reproduced in an online AC wiki somewhere, the easier to read on a web page. It may not seem enticing to play a video game in order to gradually unlock pages of text to read. Why not, you may ask, just read a book, where they put the pages in order? For one, they’ve not tucked this latest installment of Assassin’s Creed’s meta saga in a book. I also enjoy the unordered delivery, the dawning comprehension of a story about 2096’s desperate people and questionable tech, which I glimpsed first at its middle, then the end, then the front, then other moments in between1. I am also enamored with the idea of the Assassin’s Creed games I’ve previously played, including Black Flag, being repurposed for an information war. The ideas in Resynced’s meta-story, which builds off characters and ideas in Shadows’ chunks of text, are strong. The potential of where they could go with it is exciting. As for the pirate stuff? Looks great, controls pretty well, is fun to play and oh so speedy in terms of how much of a good time you can have with each sit-down. It never gets old to chase a new shanty page across a rooftop, bombard a fort with upgraded mortars or use a diving bell to explore sunken wrecks (hats off to the team at Ubisoft Barcelona that worked on the underwater portions in Resynced; that team is now facing layoffs, such is the misery of modern gaming and oft-troubled Ubisoft). New pirate missions in Resynced involving new ally characters are brief, dramatic and add more to Edward’s story, even if the gameplay perks they provide barely enhance the gameplay. A new denouement for high-class pirate Stede Bonnet is affecting; a new hunt for Blackbeard’s treasure is a welcome extra moment. A new epilogue to hunt down a pirate killer, on the other hand, over-complicates Kenway’s character. The ending credits remain my favorite of any game I’ve ever played. Black Flag provides great source material. The revisit is well-made and a great sign of what could be. It is offered in a different wrapper that hints at an opportunity for more interesting remakes to come, should Ubisoft choose to pursue such treasures—and as we brace to resist or comply with an Abstergo future. 1 The messages that Edward Kenway finds in bottles tell another out-of-order story, one about a man reckoning with the strange memories and voices he’s heard in his head since he was a boy. That tale was also in the 2013 game and develops into one of Black Flag’s most compelling character arcs. In Resynced, it has lost its climax, because the bottle story previously paid off in the halls of the first-person Abstergo Entertainment, which is exclusive to the older game. An altered resolution, written by the 2013 game’s lead writer is fine, doesn’t invalidate the 2013 version, but makes for an inferior final note.

Jul 14 • 3:17 PM EDT • Technology • gamefile.news

Michael Dell has nailed his relationship with Trump. It's paying off.

Michael Dell has developed one of the more visible and steady corporate relationships of President Donald Trump's second term in the White House.

Jul 14 • 5:32 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Battery-like device pulls CO₂ from air using electricity and saltwater chemistry

Engineers have developed a new way to pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere using a process similar to charging and discharging a battery—an advance that could help address the planet's excess ...

Jul 13 • 3:40 PM EDT • Technology • techxplore.com

McConnell breaks silence on his health, says a fall led to hospitalisation

After weeks of speculation about the Republican’s wellbeing McConnell, 84, said he developed pneumonia while hospitalised for the fall.

Jul 12 • 7:14 PM EDT • Health • scmp.com

Sen. Mitch McConnell breaks silence, says fall led to hospitalization

Sen. Mitch McConnell says he was briefly unconscious after a fall and later developed pneumonia but is now recovering at a rehabilitation center.

Jul 12 • 6:03 PM EDT • Health • usatoday.com

3rd Annual Youth Farmers Market in Hampstead

The 3rd Annual Youth Farmers Market Saturday, at the Hampstead Farmers’ Market on Panther Drive. Every booth was created, managed, and staffed by young entrepreneurs who have developed their own products, pricing, branding, and…

Jul 11 • 12:50 PM EDT • Business • baltimoresun.com

IndyCar and iRacing Studios spill details on series' first video game in twenty years

"IndyCar Racing The Game" will be released in early 2027 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC via Steam, developed by iRacing Studios.

Jul 10 • 5:00 PM EDT • Technology • foxnews.com

MAGA's attack on science is even worse than it looks

In my post on America’s 250-year anniversary, I argued that respect for the individual was the “secret sauce” in the U.S.’ long-lasting preeminence among nations. But it was certainly not the only factor. There were plenty of institutional innovations that helped the U.S. stay on top — economically, militarily, and in terms of the attractiveness of its society. One of these was American science. Today we take things like the modern research university, government grants for science, public-to-private research spinoffs, etc. for granted, but a lot of that infrastructure wasn’t there before World War 2. It was either invented or scaled up massively by the U.S. government in the postwar period, led by far-sighted scientist-bureaucrats like Vannevar Bush (pictured above). If you want to read about this history, a good place to start would be Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson’s excellent book Jump-Starting America. Those scientific institutions didn’t exist in a vacuum, however. They were backed by the U.S. government’s abiding faith in the power of science — and, even more fundamentally, by deep popular trust in the scientific enterprise. Science gave us radar and the atom bomb in wartime, and in peacetime it gave us plastics, vaccines, cheap food, and a thousand other things that made our lives easier. Science was also the driver behind American industry — chemicals, aerospace, telecommunications, computers, electronics, and so on. We owed science our jobs, our livelihoods, our comfortable living standards, and our greatness and power as a nation. It’s little wonder that both political parties, even as they fought viciously over other issues, were steadfast in their support of science. For a long time, the only people who distrusted science were a hippie fringe on the left who disliked modernity (or thought they did, anyway), who also disliked American industry and American power, and who subscribed to an early version of degrowth environmentalism. America’s scientific enterprise is still strong, especially compared to the systems in Europe, Japan, Korea, and other developed countries. It has lost a lot of ground to China in a relative sense, but a lot of that is because of China’s incredible growth; as China has poured untold amounts of money and talent into its research labs, spending and output have overtaken the U.S. by some measures. There are a few ways in which China’s rise creates problems for American science — for example, top scientists can choose to work in China instead of in the U.S. — and of course there’s the concern that China’s technological strength will help its military to reign supreme. But overall, China’s rise in science should be good for American science, since American scientists can use Chinese discoveries for free and build on them. The much bigger problem is that the scientific enterprise America built during and after World War 2 is now being threatened with absolute decline. The biggest problem, of course, is that much of the country — the Republican half — has basically lost faith in the scientific enterprise. To what degree this loss of faith is justified is an open question, and deserves to be discussed openly. But the larger point — that the system that powered American dominance is under threat — is true either way. Most Americans still trust science, but MAGA Republicans don’t There’s a myth, popular in right-wing circles, that scientists have lost the trust of regular Americans — either due to the increasingly left-wing composition of academic departments, or to misbehavior during Covid, or to DEI-related research taking over science, etc. This also fits with a wider narrative that Americans are losing trust in all of our institutions. But it just isn’t true. Poll after poll shows that on the whole, Americans still trust scientists and want to spend more on science. For example, here’s a Pew poll from late 2025 showing that although about a fifth of Republicans did lose confidence in science in 2020, two thirds still have at least “a fair amount” of confidence: That same poll found that scientists are among America’s most trusted groups — even better trusted than the military! In fact, Americans trust scientists more than people in most other countries do. Other polls show that although Republican trust in science has dropped somewhat, Republican support for spending more on science remains very strong: A Pew poll in 2023 found the exact same thing: So when MAGA types tell you about scientists losing their credibility, or a drop in trust in science, they’re only talking about themselves. Whatever left-wing politicization of science happened during the Biden administration — and there was definitely some of that — it was not enough to make most Republicans lose faith in the scientific enterprise, or favor research cuts in order to purge unwanted ideology from the system. That doesn’t mean I think progressives should continue down the path of politicizing scientific research. They should not, and Biden made real missteps in this area. Objectivity clearly matters for public trust of science in the long term. But as of right now, there’s no crisis of trust in science, except among the smallish minority of people who are running around screaming that there’s a crisis of trust in science. But despite science’s overwhelming popularity and public trust, Trump and his administration are launching an unprecedented and devastating attack on American science — cutting funding, and forcing science projects to undergo ideological review by government commissars. Trump’s comprehensive attack on science

Jul 10 • 11:23 AM EDT • Science • noahpinion.blog

Rams’ guard tandem has become one of the NFL’s best

Steve Avila and Kevin Dotson have developed into one of the NFL’s best tandems at guard entering the 2026 season.

Jul 9 • 8:52 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

UAMS, ACH Present School-Based Mental Health Symposium on July 29-30

LITTLE ROCK — The 2026 School-Based Mental Health Symposium will be presented July 29 and 30 by the Arkansas Mental Health Access for Pediatric Primary Care, a program developed by the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) and Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH) to improve mental health access for children…

Jul 8 • 11:25 AM EDT • Health • news.uams.edu

INCUBASE Studio Accelerates Collectible Entertainment with GochaGocha's 23-Location Asia Debut of a New Photo Card Experience

INCUBASE Studio is expanding its IP entertainment ecosystem with the launch of GochaGocha, a new smart photo card machine platform developed by subsidiary INCUTix. Following a rapid rollout across 23 locations in Hong Kong, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok in early June, GochaGocha introduces a new channel connecting fans with officially licensed content through discovery, collectability and convenience.

Jul 7 • 10:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • finance.yahoo.com

Meta Launches New Image Generation Tool for Consumers and Businesses

Meta has begun rolling out an image generation model available in Meta AI. Muse Image is the first such model developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs,

Jul 7 • 7:32 PM EDT • Business • pymnts.com

Scientists enable DNA synthesis using only temperature instead of chemical reagents

"Complex chemical processes are essential for making DNA." This long-held assumption in the field of biotechnology has been overturned by a Korean research team. A KAIST research team has developed the ...

Jul 7 • 9:20 AM EDT • Science • phys.org

Incredible new material makes heat programmable

A newly developed material can control and "program" heat, allowing it to direct thermal radiation, switch modes, and remember its settings without continuous power. The innovation could lead to smarter infrared sensors, better energy technologies, and memory devices that use light and heat instead of electrical charges.

Jul 7 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Argonne team’s ChemGraph unlocks AI for chemistry and materials science

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have developed a framework, ChemGraph, that uses artificial intelligence to help nonexperts access computational chemistry expertise.

Jul 7 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • anl.gov

Wisconsin STEM shuttle program marks 20 years of taking science on the road

The STEM Shuttle, created by retired Wausau teacher Sharon Ryan, is marking its 20th year traveling to schools across Wisconsin. The program grew out of Dream Flight Wausau, a 1990 project Ryan developed while teaching at John Marshall Elementary School in the Wausau School District.

Jul 7 • 6:00 AM EDT • Science • wpr.org

Two More Retro Arcade Collections Are On The Way To Switch

Featuring 16 Jaleco-developed titles each

Jul 7 • 1:55 AM EDT • Technology • nintendolife.com

Jaleco Arcade Collection Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 launch this winter for PS5, Switch, and PC

Jaleco Arcade Collection Vol. 1 and Jaleco Arcade Collection Vol. 2, each featuring 16 Jaleco-developed arcade titles from the 1980s and 1990s, will launch for PlayStation 5, Switch, and PC via Ste…

Jul 6 • 11:55 PM EDT • Technology • gematsu.com

New workflow tool gives scientists a clearer view of how DNA is regulated

Researchers from the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore (CSI Singapore) at NUS have developed a new method that allows scientists to better understand how DNA is organized and regulated inside cells. ...

Jul 6 • 8:40 AM EDT • Science • phys.org

Science should be developed away from being 'exclusive club' - Nobel prize winner to F24

Jul 6 • 5:44 AM EDT • Science • france24.com

For the 2014 film Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan hired Caltech physicist Kip Thorne as his science consultant — and the visual simulations Thorne helped design for the film's black hole were so mathematically accurate that they generated two peer-reviewed scientific papers and became the model for how astrophysicists visualize black holes today

In late 2012, when the American film director Christopher Nolan formally took over the production of a Warner Brothers science-fiction project that had been drifting through Hollywood development since approximately 2005 (originally intended for Steven Spielberg, based on a screenplay concept the film producer Lynda Obst had developed jointly with the Caltech theoretical physicist Kip […]

Jul 5 • 4:45 AM EDT • Science • spacedaily.com

Entrepreneur behind Matthew's Mattress reflects on over three decades in business

Kevin Matthews launched his first Matthew’s Mattress store over three decades years ago in the Bay Area. At his peak, he developed his own mattress brand and managed a total of 12 stores. Now he’s ready to retire, he says.

Jul 4 • 6:38 PM EDT • Business • citrusheightssentinel.com

The New Anthropic Tool That Could Change How Drugs Are Developed

Introducing Claude Science, the AI platform designed to expedite the discovery of promising new therapies. Anthropic will also use it in-house to pursue innovative treatments for 'neglected' diseases.

Jul 3 • 8:21 PM EDT • Science • inc.com

This satellite constellation transformed earth science by creatively tuning in to GPS signals

When NASA's Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, or CYGNSS, launched into orbit in 2016, none of the University of Michigan Engineering researchers who developed the system expected it to transform ...

Jul 2 • 7:40 PM EDT • Science • phys.org

NHS to reward people who walk 30 minutes a day

The "marathon a month" scheme, developed with former Olympic medallist Sir Brendan Foster, will launch early next year.

Jul 2 • 7:13 PM EDT • Health • bbc.com

Scientists teach human cells to compute like tiny computers

Researchers have developed a way to program human cells to perform calculations and make autonomous decisions, similar to how computer chips work.

Jun 30 • 2:10 PM EDT • Science • phys.org

FAIR Health Price-Informed Tools Support Healthcare Decisions Among Diverse Older Adults

/PRNewswire/ -- Price-informed shared decision-making tools developed by FAIR Health, a national, independent nonprofit, can facilitate meaningful healthcare...

Jun 29 • 8:36 AM EDT • Health • prnewswire.com

Efzimfotase alfa demonstrated improvements in bone health in treatment-naïve pediatric patients with hypophosphatasia achieving median difference of 1.67 vs placebo in RGI-C Score at week 25 in MULBERRY Phase III trial

Positive results from the MULBERRY Phase III trial showed that efzimfotase alfa (ALXN1850), an investigational enzyme replacement therapy, demonstrated a statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in bone health in children (2 to

Jun 28 • 3:45 PM EDT • Health • astrazeneca-us.com

AI designs the ideal burger for taste, health, and planet

Stanford researchers developed an AI tool that creates novel burger recipes optimized for individual preferences. The implications for science go well beyond food.

Jun 25 • 8:00 PM EDT • Health • news.stanford.edu

How should European scientists respond to the US AI kill switch?

Earlier in June, Europe’s worst fears of technological dependence were confirmed when the White House ordered the AI firm Anthropic to stop non-US citizens using its leading models. This kill-switch moment crystalised anxieties in Brussels that the continent, lagging the US on the creation of leading-edge AI models, is now a technological of vassal of Washington. The shock has specific implications for European scientists and universities. Some governments are now worried that with AI being integrated into labs, Donald Trump now has his finger hovering over an off switch for European science. “Having restrictions on this tool, it can have an impact on our own research,” said France’s research minister, Philippe Baptiste, at the VivaTech conference in Paris on June 18.Baptiste, himself a former academic, said that colleagues in mathematics had recently warned him they were now cut off from leading-edge US models, risking their work. “This model is not available anymore now because of the US restriction, and for the first time this had an impact on mathematics,” a field where large language models (LLMs) are making a significant contribution, said Baptiste. So, should European scientists avoid relying on US models in the future? Or would this be a self-harming overreaction? And how is AI being used in science, anyway? What happened?On June 12, it emerged that Washington, citing cybersecurity concerns, had ordered Anthropic to stop non-US citizens using two models: Claude Mythos 5, and Claude Fable 5, a version of Mythos but with guardrails to prevent abuse. Anthropic said Washington’s concerns were overblown. But forced to follow the order, yet with no way to check who was using the models, the company suddenly shut down access for everyone, US citizens included. There’s still no agreement on how to restore broad access. But last week, Bloomberg reported that select US companies, and the US government, still had access to Mythos despite the ban, but the EU’s cybersecurity agency Enisa had been shut out. Class division of researchersIn the longer term, access outside the US should be restored, said Marcel Salathé, co-director of the AI centre at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL), because a permanent restriction would be financially ruinous to US AI firms. “Even Trump will eventually budge to economic pressure,” he said.However, US AI firms might end up operating rather like banks, doing due diligence on users of their leading-edge AI models, he went on.European scientists are unlikely to fall foul of such checks, he said. But having a Chinese postgraduate in their lab, or doing a type of research the US disapproved of, could potentially result in access being denied. “It will create a sort of class division of researchers,” he said. More than frontier modelsHowever, successfully deploying AI in science is about far more than just having access to leading LLMs such as Mythos.Instead, many science-specific tools, most famously Alphafold, which predicts protein folding structures, require “far less” computing power to train than frontier models, well within the capabilities of European supercomputers, according to a recent analysis by the Arq Foundation, a Brussel-based AI think tank. Instead, tools such as Alphafold are possible because certain fields, like protein folding, weather prediction or astronomy, have large, clean, standardised datasets that can be used to train predictive models. Rather than compute, “data is the central constraint for AI for science,” the report says. For example, a less powerful physics model trained on CERN’s data “will be more valuable than the best model without certain data,” said Bengüsu Özcan, author of the report. European advantage?Europe could therefore steal a march by using its scientific data and infrastructure to create models US digital giants cannot. “They might actually match or go even beyond what these big [US] companies are doing,” said Özcan.Indeed, some European start-ups hope to create automated testing labs to create the kind of standardised data that could speed up the discovery of new materials. Materials scientists say there’s currently too little data to train models. AI scientistsHowever, even if the bottleneck for AI in science is often data, rather than compute, being at the mercy of the US for LLM access could still become a problem for European scientists. A new class of “AI scientists” based on leading LLMs is also emerging, Özcan’s report says.Unlike domain-specific tools like Alphafold, these try to automate day-to-day scientific work, by providing an overarching tool that coordinates specific models to synthesise existing literature, generate hypotheses or run analysis of data. The problem for Europe, however, is that these tools are sometimes based on US leading models. Google Deepmind’s AI Co-Scientist, for example, is built on Google’s Gemini LLM. Systematic failureThese scientific automation tools are still in their early stages, and still exhibit “systematic failures on scientific tasks,” Özcan’s report says. One of the problems is that the messy, day-to-day process of scientific discovery is largely not documented, meaning LLMs don’t have a good source of data to learn how scientists actually work. Meanwhile, some tasks, such as literature synthesis, don’t typically require access to leading edge models.However, the performance of AI scientific assistants could improve as companies such as Google pour resources into developing them. Rely on US“Unfortunately, for scientific assistants, there is not much we can do right now except rely on US frontier AI,” said Antoine Bosselut, a natural language processing expert based at EPFL. Chinese-built open models, which can run on local computers, lessening the risk of a shutdown, are touted as one alternative to US dependence. There’s also Mistral, once seen as Europe’s main AI hope, but the Paris-based company has seen its recent models fall behind in performance. But the Chinese alternatives are generally not as capable as US frontier AI models, said Bosselut, unless paired with fiddly, custom tools that allows them to act as independent agents. “Most scientists do not have the time,” he said. Don’t jump ship yetAlthough the kill switch moment is seen a warning shot for European scientists, it doesn’t mean labs should abandon US AI tools immediately. “I do not think the right response is simply to abandon US-based models and systems under the banner of sovereignty or independence,” said Mattias Björnmalm, secretary general of the Cesaer university association. “That would be an overreaction.”Related articlesEuropean sovereignty in AI requires ‘ugly trade-offs,’ say experts Robotic lab start-up makes case for €500M EU-funded materials testing facilityAI in science: is it useful? Instead, European researchers need to ask themselves whether they’re becoming dependent on technology that could be turned off in Washington, said Özcan. “They might not see this today, but they should really start asking this question,” she said. European researchers need a plan B, said Salathé. “I would recommend to every researcher, very proactively explore alternatives.”Own toolsIn addition, Björnmalm and others want European research institutions to develop their own scientific AI tools.Instead of signing AI deals with US digital giants, European universities should be using this money to create their own models, which may end up being superior for research, said Sabine Leonelli, an expert on the use of AI in science at the Technical University of Munich. “Universities in Europe seem to be happy to sign commercial contracts with US companies on the assumption [their AI tools] are better,” she said. But US frontier LLMs are typically opaque, and have been developed without independent scientific input, she said. “This is not good enough for science.”Last year, Swiss researchers released Apertus, an LLM designed to be completely transparent, from its development methods to its training data. The idea is that this makes scientific tools built on top of the model far more reproducible than with closed, commercial alternatives.“Europe needs more of this: serious capacity-building that gives researchers, universities and companies credible options,” said Björnmalm.

Jun 25 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencebusiness.net

X-Ray Specs for the World’s Oldest, Sealed Letters

A team of historians, scientists and engineers has developed a portable X-ray scanner to study 4,000-year-old letters encased in clay envelopes.

Jun 23 • 5:02 AM EDT • Science • nytimes.com

Researchers develop new 'emotionally aware' model for classifying mental health conditions

Researchers have developed a new "emotionally aware" AI-based model for classifying mental health conditions, which could help clinicians better diagnose patients' mental health conditions. The Emo-MHC ...

Jun 22 • 10:00 AM EDT • Health • medicalxpress.com

A Big Change Is Coming to Roku TVs

A big transformations are underway across the Roku TVs home screen as leading manufacturers, including TCL, begin implementing standardized home screen interfaces on their devices. This shift replaces the previous customized designs that each brand had developed independently with the uniform Roku platform experience. The result is a more consistent visual presentation that emphasizes the […]

Jun 21 • 9:14 AM EDT • Technology • cordcuttersnews.com

Health Ministry investigates suspected Ebola case after traveler develops symptoms

Israel’s Health Ministry is investigating a suspected Ebola case after a traveler returning from the Democratic Republic of Congo developed fever and headache.

Jun 19 • 8:48 PM EDT • Health • jpost.com

I quit alcohol to be more present for my 4 kids

Chris Rojas developed a drinking problem when he entered the restaurant profession at 18. He quit alcohol to be more present with his kids.

Jun 19 • 1:13 PM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Researchers found a Wordle strategy that wins 99% of the time

Researchers developed a Wordle-solving strategy that succeeds 99% of the time by focusing on information gain rather than likely answers. The method uses Shannon entropy to identify guesses that reveal the most about the hidden word. Each guess is designed to slash uncertainty and narrow the possibilities faster. The result significantly outperformed more traditional Wordle tactics.

Jun 19 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

What if there is no one to farm? Scientists reveal a hidden risk to future food security

The cause of future food shortages may not be a lack of farmland, but a shortage of agricultural workers. Amid low birth rates and rural decline, a joint international research team from KAIST has developed ...

Jun 18 • 11:20 AM EDT • Science • phys.org

Discovery Supercomputer’s first applications selected for Day-One Science

Scientific computing experts at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have selected the first nine research projects that will run on Discovery, the nation’s next flagship supercomputer, slated for deployment in 2028. The projects will be developed through the Discovery Center for Accelerated Application Readiness program at ORNL’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. The program is designed to ensure that a suite of leading-edge scientific applications is optimized and ready to deliver results as soon as Discovery becomes operational.

Jun 17 • 5:15 PM EDT • Science • eurekalert.org

Multilingual benchmark evaluates how well AI interprets clinical text and health records in nine languages

Researchers at Mass General Brigham recently developed BRIDGE, a multilingual benchmark that evaluates how well large language models (LLMs) understand clinical patient care text, including language used ...

Jun 17 • 5:00 PM EDT • Health • medicalxpress.com

Princeton Engineering - Senior thesis combined passions for computer science and linguistics

Nora Graves has always looked at language as a fascinating puzzle to piece together. Growing up in Wayne, Pennsylvania, she developed a passion for

Jun 17 • 4:57 PM EDT • Science • engineering.princeton.edu

Discovery Supercomputer’s First Applications Selected for Day-One Science

Scientific computing experts at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have selected the first nine research projects that will run on Discovery, the nation’s next flagship supercomputer, slated for deployment in 2028.The projects will be developed through the Discovery Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) program at ORNL’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF).

Jun 17 • 4:55 PM EDT • Science • newswise.com

Albertsons Media Collective Unveils Industry-First Branded Entertainment Model, Co-Developed with Procter & Gamble

Albertsons Media Collective, the retail media arm for Albertsons® Companies, Inc. (NYSE:ACI), today opened a new lane for brands inside its retail media netw...

Jun 17 • 7:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • businesswire.com

Early-Onset Cancers Are On The Rise. Knowing Your Family History Is Crucial.

By Cara Anthony and Blake Farmer - Nashville Public Radio and KFF Health News HealthDay ReportersWEDNESDAY, June 17, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Bryce Ramsey of Madison, Mississippi, was 33 when she was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Upon noticing blood in her stool, she blamed the hemorrhoids she’d developed after delivering her son eight years earlier. Ramsey didn’t initially link her symptoms ...

Jun 17 • 5:30 AM EDT • Health • usnews.com

WHO Step-by-Step programme recognized as a promising innovation for mental health in humanitarian settings

WHO, in collaboration with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and Lebanon’s National Mental Health Programme, showcased Step-by-Step at the World Bank Group’s biennial Fragility Forum in Washington, DC. The forum convened more than 1500 representatives from governments, international organizations and civil society to advance the development agenda in the world’s most fragile and crisis-affected communities. WHO was invited to demonstrate Step-by-Step – a digital self-help intervention for depression, alongside innovations presented by Stanford University and Google. The World Bank Group selected Step-by-Step from among more than 50 innovations that they reviewed in the lead up to the Forum.About Step-by-StepStep-by-Step is a free digital tool developed by WHO in collaboration with Lebanon’s National Mental Health Programme and other partners, that helps people manage depression and anxiety on their own, with light guidance from a trained supporter. It uses a picture-based story to walk users through evidence-based techniques for managing common mental health conditions. Users complete five modules, with weekly contacts – of around 15 minutes each – from a trained non-specialist helper, such as a community health worker.Evidence-basedClinical trials in Lebanon involving nearly 1250 participants – including 680 Lebanese participants and 569 Syrian participants – showed that Step-by-Step significantly reduced depression, anxiety and stress, and improved daily functioning. By the end of the programme, a reduction in depressive symptoms of more than 50% was reported by almost half (46%) of Lebanese participants and more than one third (37%) of Syrian participants compared to approximately 14% of those who did not use the programme. Cost-effectiveness analyses further suggest that Step-by-Step may offer a cost-saving response to depression in humanitarian emergencies in low- and middle-income countries.Used globallyStep-by-Step is already in use nationwide in Lebanon and Thailand, as part of each country’s mental health system. In India, the NGO – Kaya Guides – has adapted Step-by-Step for delivery through a widely used messaging app. Together, these programmes have provided thousands of people with evidence-based support for depression. The content is freely available from the WHO website for any organization or country to adapt for their own context.A new implementation guideThe Fragility Forum coincided with the recent launch of WHO’s new practical guide: Psychological self-help interventions: delivering self-help for individuals, featuring Step-by-Step and Doing What Matters in Times of Stress (WHO, 2026). The guide is designed to help governments, health workers, organizations and planners bring evidence-based mental health support to more people, particularly in low-resource and crisis-affected settings.

Jun 16 • 8:00 PM EDT • Health • who.int

Testing longitudinal gene–environment interactions

Nature Computational Science - A gene–environment interaction test (SAGELD) is developed to speed up large-scale genome-wide analyses using longitudinal data, facilitating novel discoveries...

Jun 15 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • nature.com

Fluorescent nanosensor enables rapid, first-of-its-kind detection of key gut health biomarker

Researchers developed an optical nanosensor to rapidly detect a key gut biomarker, enabling faster, accessible screening for conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, Type 2 diabetes, and liver disease.

Jun 15 • 3:35 PM EDT • Health • news.mit.edu

Globally significant volcanic event formed Giant’s Causeway, scientists find

Geochronologists say Antrim coastline’s basalt columns developed over 5.5m years – 8m less than thought

Jun 14 • 7:01 PM EDT • Science • theguardian.com

Interpretable AI in materials discovery: Uncovering how models make predictions

A method to interpret artificial intelligence (AI) models used in materials discovery by analyzing their learned features has been developed by researchers from Japan. The method extracts key features from an AI model trained on atomic structural data and optical absorption spectra, and then groups materials with similar structural and spectral characteristics. This approach can be extended to reveal how atomic arrangements influence other material properties, paving the way for more efficient materials design.

Jun 14 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • eurekalert.org

Science & Medicine: Relaxing excited neurons may lead to more effective treatments for schizophrenia

A new medication to treat schizophrenia has been developed by scientists who discovered that a neuron that inhibits the activity of other cells may be in short supply in those with the disorder.

Jun 14 • 7:00 AM EDT • Science • tpr.org

NMSU helps launch biotech game that lets students explore science careers

NMSU and UConn Extension developed a free 4-H biotech game that lets students explore 10 science careers through hands-on tasks.

Jun 13 • 6:21 PM EDT • Science • organmountainnews.com

Former Katy Area Theatre Transforming into Family Entertainment Destination

A former movie theatre near Katy will be redeveloped into a 70,000-square-foot entertainment center perfect to serve families in the growing Katy and Fulshear communities.

Jun 13 • 11:49 AM EDT • Entertainment • katymagazineonline.com

Laredo health officials headed to nation's largest public health event

Five research projects developed in Laredo will be presented at one of the nation's largest public health gatherings later this year.

Jun 13 • 9:59 AM EDT • Health • lmtonline.com

The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure for PS5, Switch 2 launch September 10

The PlayStation 5 and Switch 2 versions of Falcom-developed story RPGs The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure will launch on September 10, publisher NIS Am…

Jun 11 • 9:18 AM EDT • Technology • gematsu.com

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.

Jun 11 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

How to tell if your dog is left-pawed or right-pawed, according to science

A step-by-step guide to the “Doginburgh Inventory,” a new pawedness test developed by dog behavior researchers

Jun 10 • 11:56 AM EDT • Science • scientificamerican.com

Swine industry unites behind national plan to improve herd health

The director of swine health for the National Pork Board says there is a lot of disease pressure pork producers are struggling with right now. Speaking to Brownfield during the World Pork Expo in Des Moines last week, Dr. Marisa Rotolo said NPB has developed the National Swine Health Strategy, which is focused on advancing […]

Jun 10 • 10:33 AM EDT • Health • brownfieldagnews.com

New entertainment center being developed in Maricopa

MARICOPA — Plans for new entertainment options in Maricopa are progressing, as developer Scott Bartle is reportedly bringing a new indoor-outdoor entertainment center to the city near Copper Sky Regional

Jun 10 • 5:16 AM EDT • Entertainment • pinalcentral.com

Why Model Flows Are the Key for Reproducibility in AI for Science

Reproducibility is absolutely critical in science, but it’s a troublesome characteristic when it comes to AI. Frontier models developed by Big AI may deliver superior accuracy and reasoning capabilities, but they do so largely as black boxes with little regard for reproducibility. If AI is going to turbo-charge scientific productivity, it must do so without […]

Jun 9 • 6:16 PM EDT • Science • hpcwire.com

Seattle Parks and Recreation Hosts Racquet Sports Strategy Meetings

Seattle Parks and Recreation (SPR) is hosting a second round of public engagement meetings for the Outdoor Racquet Sports Strategy to present findings from the first phase of public engagement and to hear additional feedback from the public. This strategy was developed in response to growing popularity of both sports, as well as from feedback […]

Jun 9 • 12:27 PM EDT • Sports • parkways.seattle.gov

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.

Jun 8 • 4:44 PM EDT • Science • goodscience.substack.com

Lighter X-ray aprons could spare health care workers from chronic pain

A light, flexible polymer material developed at the University of Waterloo could replace the lead in heavy X-ray aprons, providing the same protection from harmful radiation while reducing their weight ...

Jun 8 • 12:20 PM EDT • Health • phys.org

See fLEX Device developed by University of Tennessee Turfgrass Science, Management

The fLEX Device uses a cleat to test the playability of a natural turfgrass pitch.

Jun 8 • 5:02 AM EDT • Science • knoxnews.com

Scientists achieve the first total synthesis of a complex alkaloids isolated from plant

Monoterpenoid indole alkaloids (MIAs) are plant-derived molecules with unique pharmaceutical potential, but their highly complex and intricate structures make them difficult to produce in the laboratory. Now, researchers from Japan have developed a new strategy that enables the total synthesis of bisleuconothine A and bousigonine B, two biologically relevant oligomeric MIAs. Their findings lay the foundation for further studies of this family of molecules. Monoterpenoid indole alkaloids (MIAs) are plant-derived molecules with unique pharmaceutical potential, but their highly complex and intricate structures make them difficult to produce in the laboratory. Now, researchers from Japan have developed a new strategy that enables the total synthesis of bisleuconothine A and bousigonine B, two biologically relevant oligomeric MIAs. Their findings lay the foundation for further studies of this family of molecules.

Jun 7 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • eurekalert.org

Lighter X-ray aprons could spare health-care workers from chronic pain

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed a lightweight, flexible polymer material that could replace lead in X-ray aprons while providing comparable protection from harmful radiation. By incorporating specially engineered tungsten nanoparticles into a silicone-based nanocomposite, the team created a shielding material that is nearly 90 per cent lighter than traditional lead aprons, potentially reducing the back and neck injuries commonly experienced by health-care workers who wear them for extended periods.

Jun 7 • 8:00 PM EDT • Health • eurekalert.org

Epic Games Publishing and genDESIGN announce gen ATLAS

gen ATLAS is the official title of the new open-world action adventure game developed by genDESIGN and published by Epic Games Publishing, the companies announced. It will be available for PlayStat…

Jun 5 • 5:16 PM EDT • Technology • gematsu.com

Scientists unveil 'living bandage' that could dramatically speed wound healing

Rice University researchers developed a "living bandage" that uses engineered cells to deliver healing proteins directly to wounds in animal trials.

Jun 5 • 2:41 PM EDT • Health • foxnews.com

BofA Says Foreign Buyers Lured by UK Yields Despite Politics

Bank of America predicts a streak of gilt purchases by foreign buyers extended through May, as some of the highest government yields in major developed nations offset political turbulence and inflation fears.

Jun 4 • 4:12 AM EDT • Politics • bloomberg.com

AIRM Sets a New Standard for Brand Reputation Management in AI Search

SINGAPORE, June 04, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rankpage has launched AIRM, an AI Reputation Management system developed to help businesses monitor...

Jun 4 • 3:07 AM EDT • Business • markets.businessinsider.com

Ontario Science Centre Celebrates National Indigenous History Month with Free Family-Friendly Event June 6

The Ontario Science Centre is proud to honour National Indigenous History Month with a free, family-friendly, event Indigenous Celebration 2026. Developed in collaboration with Indigenous artists, knowledge keepers and organizations, the community-led event will take place on Saturday, June 6 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Evergreen Brick Works.

Jun 3 • 10:15 AM EDT • Science • finance.yahoo.com

This new diabetes pill burns fat without the downsides of Ozempic

Scientists have developed an experimental diabetes and obesity pill that works in a completely different way from drugs like Ozempic. Rather than reducing hunger, it activates metabolism in skeletal muscle, helping lower blood sugar and increase fat burning while preserving muscle mass. Early clinical results suggest the treatment is safe and well tolerated.

Jun 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

How Science Works

The 2nd Weather and Climate Livestream is now underway. It is organized by a group of early-career researchers concerned about declining funding for the field and eager to demonstrate how weather and climate research makes a difference in our lives. Last year’s event was a great success, drawing terrific press coverage including a piece in the NY Times. This year features a strong lineup of talks aimed at a general audience — I highly recommend tuning in. Share I gave a talk yesterday about How Science Works in Three Steps. You can see the short presentation here (I’ve appended a transcript below): And please tune into the livestream here. It runs through tomorrow at 6 pm ET. Thanks for reading The Climate Brink! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Subscribe Cleaned up transcript: Thank you, and thanks to everyone tuning in. I want to talk about something I think a lot of people don’t really understand: how science actually works. Arguments over any scientific topic — climate change, vaccines, you name it — revolve around competing claims. For climate change, the claims are: Is the Earth warming? Are humans to blame? What will the impacts be? Over the last 150 years, the scientific community has developed a remarkably robust method for sorting out which claims are true and which aren’t. That method is what I want to walk through. So how does science generate knowledge? If you ask a high schooler, they’ll give you the version they learned in ninth grade: an individual scientist forms a hypothesis, runs an experiment, and draws a conclusion. That’s more or less what happens at the individual level, though in practice it’s more iterative — you design, test, and refine all at once, landing on a slightly different idea each time until you reach a conclusion about whatever hypothesis you’ve ended up with. But this isn’t science. It’s only step one. Any individual scientist can make mistakes — scientists are human. Maybe there’s a bug in the code, maybe there’s an error in the experiment. Just because someone ran an experiment and reached a conclusion doesn’t mean it’s right, and scientists don’t treat a single result as settled truth. Step two is peer review, the first layer of quality control. The scientist writes up what they did and submits it to a journal, which sends the paper to other experts in the field. Those experts judge whether the methods are sound, whether it properly references prior work, and whether the conclusions actually follow from the data. Ask any scientist and they’ll tell you peer review is miserable — the comments come back brutal, often harsh, and you have to revise and resubmit, sometimes multiple times, before an editor finally accepts the paper. Peer review catches an immense amount of bad science, but it can’t catch all of it. Reviewers get sloppy or overworked, they miss obvious mistakes, and they can’t catch hidden errors — a bug in the code, a misread instrument. So a peer-reviewed paper making it into a journal doesn’t mean the paper is right. Nobody treats a single paper as the final word. That’s where step three comes in: the crucible of science. Important results get retested by the broader community. If you publish something interesting, it gets dissected. Sometimes people try to reproduce your work directly but more often they test its implications. If someone claims X is true, and that implies that Y is also true, then scientists will go check Y. If a claim survives this gauntlet long enough, it becomes accepted. That’s how we generate knowledge. Let me give an example: the ozone hole. In 1985 — and I doubt many people watching were around then, but I remember it well — Joe Farman and his colleagues published observations from Antarctica showing that a huge chunk of ozone was disappearing every year. This was shocking because most atmospheric chemists had expected ozone loss to occur at mid-latitudes and high altitudes, not over the South Pole. When scientists see something they don’t understand, they rush to explain it, and several competing hypotheses quickly appeared in the peer-reviewed literature. One pointed to chlorine chemistry from chlorofluorocarbons. A second blamed nitrogen chemistry, possibly driven by solar proton events — meaning the sun was responsible. A third argued it wasn’t chemistry at all but dynamics: winds were carrying naturally low-ozone air from the lower atmosphere up into the stratosphere. Then the community went to work testing which theory could survive the crucible. Aircraft flew into the ozone hole and found no nitrogen, ruling out the nitrogen theory. Measurements showed the air in the polar vortex was descending, not rising — which would bring high-ozone air down, eliminating the dynamics theory. Meanwhile, those same flights measured enormous amounts of chlorine, strongly correlated with exactly the regions where ozone was being destroyed. That became known as the “smoking gun” paper, and it established that chlorine chemistry was the cause. Through this process, a consensus emerged. And it’s worth being clear that this consensus is organic. There’s no vote, no poll, no meeting where it gets decided. Scientists go to conferences, talk to one another, and independently arrived at the same answer. It’s the ultimate free market of ideas. After the consensus was established, the peer-reviewed literature doesn’t even mention the rival theories — it simply takes chlorine chemistry as given. That’s what a consensus looks like. It doesn’t mean every single scientist agrees, but it does mean there’s no longer any legitimate debate. So where can you see what scientists actually think? It’s all in the peer-reviewed literature, which contains the entire historical record of the argument: the discovery, the competing theories, the debate, the testing, and finally the community coalescing around one answer. But there’s a lot of room for misrepresentation. You can dig up an old paper claiming the ozone hole was caused by dynamics and wave it around as if there still was a debate about the cause of the ozone hole — without mentioning that the idea was disproven long ago and that even its own authors no longer believe it. There’s a bigger problem, though: the peer-reviewed literature is written in a language I call “nerd.” It’s extremely hard to read — honestly, some of it is hard for me to follow. It takes graduate students years to work through the literature in a single field, so we can’t expect policymakers or ordinary people to do it. This is where scientific assessments come in. The most famous is the IPCC — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The job of an assessment is to read and summarize the peer-reviewed literature, synthesizing what’s settled, what’s been disproven, and what remains genuinely debated. To ensure the assessments accurately summarize the peer-reviewed literature, assessments are written by large teams, which are far less prone to bias than individuals and which dilute the influence of any one scientist with an axe to grind. The teams are deliberately assembled to avoid stacking the deck, and the reports themselves go through multiple rounds of peer review. That rigorous process is exactly why you can trust them and why people consider the IPCC to be the gold standard of what we know about the climate system. An assessment produced through a different process may well not be credible. You can even watch the consensus evolve across assessments. Take the attribution of warming. The 1990 IPCC report said the observed warming was broadly consistent with model predictions but also comparable to natural variability — in other words, we don’t know whether humans are responsible. By 1995, it concluded that the balance of evidence suggested a discernible human influence — a sentence only a committee could write, and one that barely commits to anything. By 2001, most of the warming over the previous 50 years was judged “likely” due to greenhouse gases; by 2007, “very likely”; by 2013, “extremely likely.” The 2023 report says essentially the same as 2013 — there’s not much stronger language available. So, to wrap up: science is our ultimate tool for deciphering the universe — the most successful method we’ve ever developed for determining what’s true and what isn’t. Our understanding is written into the peer-reviewed literature, so if you want to know what scientists think, that’s where to look. And for those of us who don’t speak nerd, scientific assessments are the Rosetta Stone — they translate nerd into English. Let me open the floor to questions. Thank you.

Jun 2 • 10:35 AM EDT • Science • theclimatebrink.com

Clutch is Maverick Games' new AAA cinematic driving game, coming in 2027

Developed by a team of Playground Games and Codemasters veterans, Clutch aims to “break the mould of modern driving games,” combining professional circuit competitions, underground street racing and cinematic chases.

Jun 2 • 6:00 AM EDT • Technology • traxion.gg

Brooks senior develops national index tracking AI healthcare policy

As artificial intelligence reshapes health care, new questions are emerging about oversight, accountability, and patient safety. Brooks senior Will Moss ’26 developed the Health and AI Policy Index (HAPI), a public database designed to help policymakers, researchers, and health systems track emerging health care AI governance efforts.

Jun 1 • 9:37 AM EDT • Health • news.cornell.edu

NVDA Stock Set For Strong Open Today: CEO Unveils First PC Chips At Computex 2026

During a keynote address at Taiwan’s Computex conference, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled a new N1X processor developed in partnership with Microsoft.

Jun 1 • 3:38 AM EDT • Technology • finance.yahoo.com

‘Molecular movie’ technology reveals a better way to thwart environmental pollutant

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The latest production from the “molecular movie” imaging technology developed at Oregon State University is a new, inexpensive way of dealing with a common environmental pollutant. Based on short-pulse lasers, the imaging technology allows chemical and biological actions to be measured as they are occurring, one high-speed frame at a time. The measurements occur on the level of the femtosecond – one-millionth of one-billionth of a second. A femtosecond is to a second roughly as a second is to 32 million years.

May 31 • 3:41 PM EDT • Science • news.oregonstate.edu

Which Ravens’ rookies are in the best mentoring spots?

For rookies, having veteran mentors to lean on for guidance and assistance in their first year is crucial to their early development. The Baltimore Ravens have developed a reputation for drafting well and putting young players in positions to succeed, which can in part be attributable to often having great mentors throughout the roster. Looking […]

May 31 • 9:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

New solar desalination breakthrough makes fresh water without toxic brine

Scientists have developed a solar desalination system that turns seawater into drinking water without creating environmentally damaging brine. Special laser-textured metal panels use sunlight to evaporate water while automatically moving salt deposits away from the working surface, preventing clogging. The process was successfully tested with water from three oceans and can recover nearly all salts as solids. Those leftover materials could even become a source of valuable lithium for batteries.

May 31 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

A quantum metasurface breakthrough could finally close the terahertz gap

Researchers have developed a compact quantum detector that makes terahertz radiation much easier to detect. A specially designed metasurface funnels incoming energy into tiny active regions, greatly strengthening the electrical signal produced. The approach boosted efficiency by roughly 20 times compared to earlier designs and could pave the way for more practical THz devices in healthcare, communications, and scientific research.

May 31 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Scientists develop 'smart paint' that reflects 97% of sunlight and could reduce AC use during heatwaves

As heatwaves become more frequent and intense around the world, scientists are exploring new ways to keep buildings cool without increasing energy consumption. Researchers at the University of Sydney, working with startup Dewpoint Innovations, have developed a nano-engineered coating that reflects up to 97% of sunlight and stays significantly cooler than conventional surfaces.

May 29 • 5:23 PM EDT • Science • timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Team develops open-source framework to accelerate health AI research

A research team led by Columbia University has developed an open-source framework designed to streamline and accelerate artificial intelligence research using health data, addressing longstanding challenges ...

May 29 • 12:40 PM EDT • Health • medicalxpress.com

Troy's Take: Politics Is Central To Leadership

The origin of the word politics can be traced back to ancient Greece, where the word “polis” meant “city” or “city-state.” Over thousands of years, the word has developed a

May 29 • 12:00 AM EDT • Politics • capenews.net

Nithya Rajan’s journey from the field to the forefront of crop science

Nithya Rajan, Ph.D., Texas A&M AgriLife agronomist and cropping system researcher, developed a producer-outcome perspective for soil science.

May 28 • 12:05 PM EDT • Science • agrilifetoday.tamu.edu

Garner Health Raises $100 Million to Expand Best-Doctor Ranking

Garner Health, a startup that’s developed a financial incentive for patients to go to high-quality doctors, raised $100 million in a late-stage funding round to expand the company’s reach.

May 28 • 8:30 AM EDT • Health • bloomberg.com

Ebola, chemical plants and health, hantavirus, common colds, heat and more

As they say, bugs have ears. Public health has had a relentless May. Chemical plant (near) explosions, Ebola, hantavirus, and that's before you even get to the usual suspects: common colds, heat, and ticks. Here’s an attempt to keep you up to speed and, more importantly, what it means for you and your community. But first, an announcement: World Cup The World Cup starts in 15 days (not like anyone is counting down), and we are hanging TVs in the Health Security Operations Center. It’s going to be a gorgeous, chaotic celebration of basically every culture on earth. And it’s going to take a team effort—from communities to individuals, from public health to health care—to keep people healthy. That’s where you come in. If you’re going to the games or live within 30 miles of a stadium, we would love to hear from you. Sign up for a weekly survey here. Thanks to the more than 1,280 people who have already signed up…you will be hearing from us soon!! Global disease “weather report” Hantavirus: Two more cases The global count of cruise ship passengers with hantavirus has now increased to 13 cases (11 confirmed), with three deaths. The two new cases are overseas and among people who were already quarantining: A crew member in the Netherlands. A Spanish national passenger who was quarantining at home tested positive through daily monitoring. They are now in a biocontainment unit. In the U.S., everyone remains negative. There may be more cases, given that the incubation period of hantavirus (the time from exposure to infection) is 45 days. But this week, we will reach a major milestone: the median incubation window is 18 days, and that will pass on May 29. What this means for you: Your risk from this cruise ship outbreak remains essentially nil at this point. Ebola rages on in Central Africa Big thanks to Dr. Craig Spencer, a humanitarian physician who has treated and survived Ebola, for jumping in to provide the YLE community with an update. Craig, take it from here… The combined confirmed and suspected Ebola cases in DRC are now more than 1,000. All signs are pointing to a very long and catastrophic outbreak in Central Africa: This is a vast undercount. We know this because the test positivity rate is hovering around 50%, only 20% of contacts are being traced (and in some areas, no contacts at all), and more cases keep popping up with no known connection. This all points to widespread and undetected community transmission. This is in only a week of detection. Compared to previous outbreaks, the growth is very fast, as the huge West Africa outbreak in 2016 was first detected at 49 cases and rose to 208 cases a month later. It took four months for that outbreak to reach the size of the current one in the DR Congo. The cases are spread out across 16 health zones. There are now multiple epicenters, making containment very difficult. Next door in Uganda, the case count is seven. While this number is low compared to DRC, a concerning development is that two health care workers recently tested positive with uncertain exposure histories. If they weren’t treating known Ebola cases, this means it’s spreading undetected in Uganda as well. On the ground, backlash, including the burning of health centers, has emerged, a pattern seen in nearly every outbreak and rooted in deep community distrust. It often stems from outside actors working in communities without fully understanding or addressing local priorities. Affected populations may recognize the severity of Ebola while still holding other concerns as more pressing, such as where their loved ones are buried. Community trust is essential to an effective response, but difficult to build during an active emergency. It is best established long before a crisis begins. U.S. priorities are made clear, and may backfire. The U.S. Administration has shown that its first priority is keeping Ebola out, with helping end the outbreak in the DRC a secondary concern. That's meant travel restrictions broader than anything we've imposed before — covering travelers from across the region, and reportedly some green card holders and permanent residents as well. For example, just these past two days, news broke that high-risk American travelers will be subject to a mandatory quarantine in Kenya before they are allowed to return. If an American is infected, the U.S. government plans to send them to a hospital it is standing up from scratch in Kenya. (Currently, Americans who were in the area are allowed to return but are diverted to three airports—Houston, Atlanta, and DC—for further screening.) Past administrations have used travel notices and stepped-up screening; this goes much further. At first blush, these strict precautions may sound prudent. But this approach could backfire in three ways: Restrictions this blunt give people every reason to hide where they’ve been and whom they’ve been near — making the people we most need to find harder to track, not easier. They also breed a false sense that this is someone else’s problem. But diseases are humbling. They find the small cracks in even the most impenetrable-seeming defenses. Lives lost. There is no treatment for this Ebola strain, which means survival depends heavily on the quality of the health system. We have that system in the States, but we are choosing not to use it for infected Americans. This is unbelievable and infuriating. (See a deeper dive from me here.) The only real way to lower the risk to Americans — and everyone else — is to end the outbreak in the DRC and across the region. What this means for you: If you have travel plans to this region, it’s time to cancel them. This is a high-risk situation in Central Africa, and CDC released a Level 4 Travel Advisory. There is also great uncertainty if and when the Administration will let you back in. To the general public in the U.S., your risk remains very, very low right now. U.S. disease “weather report” Ticks: past peak season? Good news, especially for people in the Northeast and Midwest: tick numbers continue to decline. Though we are at the peak of the season, this unusually early year is trending favorably. Heat-related illnesses in the North Heat risk is certainly not blanketing the entire country yet, but this week it will be moderate in the Midwest and the Southeast. What this means for you: Be sure to check the CDC HeatRisk tool. A red day isn’t the best day for that soccer game for a kid with asthma, and a stretch of orange days is a great time to check on your elderly neighbor. Common colds surging As far as respiratory viruses go, the only thing really going around right now is the common cold. It is higher this year than last year, but should peak very soon before returning this fall. Spotlight: Chemical plants Over the weekend, YLE California covered the serious situation that unfolded around a chemical plant in Orange County, California. Thankfully, the worst-case scenario (a chemical explosion) was mitigated, but only through luck. The health implications in a densely populated area could have been catastrophic. As the situation was winding down, another chemical explosion struck Washington State. This one was fatal. Health officials say the risk to surrounding residents from chemicals in the air and ground remains low, though the community deserves far greater clarity. Clean air and clean water consistently rank as Americans’ top public health concerns — yet when chemical disasters strike, communities are too often met with reassurances rather than transparency and accountability. Residents near the 2023 East Palestine, Ohio train derailment, for example, are still waiting to understand the long-term impact on their health, with few clear answers. What this means for you: Many are wondering if facilities processing potentially dangerous materials are in their neighborhoods. This interactive map allows you to enter your ZIP code and see all facilities monitored by the EPA, including any violations. Good news Ebola vaccines and treatment for the Bundibugyo species are in development. Two vaccine platforms are being explored, at least one of which may be deployable in as little as 2 months. One vaccine is being developed by Oxford, and the other uses the same biotechnology as the FDA-approved Zaire species of Ebola. (It may provide cross-protection, but it’s unclear at this point.) On the treatment side, two promising monoclonal antibody cocktails are likely to be deployed, though doses are limited and logistical hurdles remain significant challenges. Anni over at The Biotech Tea had a great explainer about the Ebola vaccine gap, if you want to read more. [ The Biotech Tea The Ebola vaccine gap, reading vessel damage, & the Makary exit 🗝️ Paid subscribers get the Biotech Term of the Week at $30/year (~$2.50/month). I try to keep it intentionally accessible, but if cost is ever a barrier, send me a message. A few people asked about expensing your subscription, so I put together a short email template… Read more 6 days ago · 10 likes · Annicka Evans, PhD ](https://www.thebiotechtea.com/p/the-ebola-vaccine-gap-reading-vessel?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web) Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) has been officially renamed polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), following more than a decade of debate and input from roughly 22,000 clinicians, researchers, and patients worldwide. This is good because the old name was medically misleading, leading to patients without visible cysts being dismissed or overlooked entirely. The WHO estimates that 70% of people with the condition remain undiagnosed. A more accurate name should improve recognition, reduce stigma, and ultimately help the millions of people living with this condition get diagnosed and treated sooner. Poll Loading... Bottom line Public health situations are everywhere right now. Staying healthy takes public health professionals and systems working tirelessly behind the scenes and each of us showing up for our neighbors and communities. Love, YLE Big thanks to Ed Nirenberg for staying on top of the Ebola vaccines, Hannah Totte for all the figures, Dr. Craig Spencer for the Ebola insight, and Dr. Matt Willis for covering the chemical situation in CA. 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. 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

May 27 • 7:43 AM EDT • Health • yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com

Scientists create supercharged vitamin K that helps the brain heal itself

Scientists in Japan have created powerful new vitamin K-based compounds that may help the brain regenerate lost neurons — a breakthrough that could one day change how diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are treated. By combining vitamin K with components related to vitamin A, the researchers developed compounds that were about three times more effective at turning neural stem cells into neurons than natural vitamin K alone.

May 26 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

UCF Alumnus Makes Epic Mark in the World of Themed Entertainment

As a performance coordinator at Universal Orlando Resort, Christian Spencer ’23 ’26MS is applying the unique insight he’s developed through UCF’s hospitality management and themed experience programs to elevate guest experiences.

May 26 • 3:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • ucf.edu

Scientists say they’ve reversed brain aging with a simple nasal spray

Researchers at Texas A&M have developed a nasal spray that appears to reverse brain aging by calming inflammation and restoring the brain’s energy systems. After just two doses, memory and cognitive function improved for months, raising hopes for future treatments targeting dementia and brain fog.

May 26 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Inhaled fine particulate matter travels beyond the lungs to the brain

A research team led by Drs. Byung-Yong Yu and Gwan-Ho Lee at the Advanced Analysis and Data Center of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST; President Sang-Rok Oh) announced that it has developed a new analytical platform that can precisely measure the accumulation of fine particulate matter in individual organs, overcoming the limitations of existing analytical technologies.

May 26 • 12:30 AM EDT • Science • eurekalert.org