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macOS 27 Golden Gate Gains Native Ultrawide Display Support
Apple adds native ultrawide display support in macOS 27 Golden Gate, bringing higher resolutions and persistent display arrangements to users of widescreen monitors. The update allows ultrawide displays to run at resolutions up to 5K at 120Hz. Apple also says that display arrangements are now preserved across connections, so the layout automatically restores exactly as the user left it each time they plug in.
Cat ladies aren’t that ‘crazy’ after all - the social science behind the stereotype
Felines have long been associated with feminine power – and these women are embracing a cliché used to bring them down
The Wallflowers celebrate 30th anniversary of breakthrough album at the Englert
While touring to mark The Wallflowers' 30th anniversary of “Bringing Down the Horse,” Jakob Dylan also spotlights Tom Petty’s underrated 1982 album “Long After Dark,” bridging the connection between two influential catalogs.
Trump brings blood sport to White House with UFC cage match
The White House's South Lawn has hosted many sports over the decades but never a UFC fight like the one President Donald Trump is organizing for his 80th birthday.
Northampton entertainer raises curtain on affordable shows for marginalized communities
Matt Dibrindisi will unveil his company's summer and fall entertainment lineup at the Northampton Center for the Arts on June 10.
Northampton entertainer raises curtain on affordable shows for marginalized communities
Matt Dibrindisi will unveil his company's summer and fall entertainment lineup at the Northampton Center for the Arts on June 10.
Analysis | Maine is bringing Iraq War politics back. This governor is feeling déjà vu.
The state's long-awaited primary is Tuesday.
Carolina Country Music Festival brings business boost to Myrtle Beach
Businesses along Ocean Boulevard reported a busy weekend as thousands of people flooded the Grand Strand for the Carolina Country Music Festival.
North Carolina nut butter company grows from love story into award-winning business
"We really bonded over our love of food and cooking and how food brings people together."
Brind'Amour not disclosing goaltender decision for Game 4 of Stanley Cup Final
Brandon Bussi replaced Frederik Andersen after Vegas took a 4-0 lead in Game 3 on Saturday night.
Brind'Amour not disclosing goaltender decision for Game 4 of Stanley Cup Final
Brandon Bussi replaced Frederik Andersen after Vegas took a 4-0 lead in Game 3 on Saturday night.
Win over Knicks puts Spurs back in it
NEW YORK — Victor Wembanyama shook off his miss at the buzzer in Game 2 by taking over Game 3 of the NBA Finals and preventing the San Antonio Spurs from getting pushed to the brink of elimination. Wembanyama made the first two shots he attempted on Monday night on the way to scoring 32 […]
Meet the woman who helped bring several major sports events to Minnesota
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.
Apple Brings AI Tab Organization and AI-Generated Extensions to Safari
Apple today unveiled a raft of Safari upgrades powered by Apple Intelligence, including automatic tab organization, AI-generated custom extensions, and new privacy-first browsing tools. The centerpiece feature is automatic tab organization, which uses Apple Intelligence to group a user's open tabs into relevant topics without any manual intervention. If someone is planning a weekend trip, for example, Safari can pull all of their travel-related tabs into a single topic.
Apple announces Siri AI and its next generation of Apple Intelligence
Apple’s second chance at an AI Siri should bring improved capabilities to Apple devices.
Apple to Bring Custom EQ to AirPods
Apple today announced that AirPods will gain a custom EQ (equalizer) feature, allowing users to further personalize how their AirPods sound. The new capability is part of Apple's next-generation software platform updates, which the company unveiled today. Custom EQ lets listeners adjust audio output to match their personal preferences, going beyond the fixed audio profiles AirPods have offered previously.
KTTC and North Star Sports to air Rochester FC matches starting June 10th
KTTC and the Rochester Football Club are partnering together to bring several USL soccer matches to the North Star Sports & Entertainment Network.
Challenge filed in transgender athlete case
The brief asserts that Bellows, a Democrat who is running for governor, didn’t abide by the state constitution, which gives Mainers broad powers to bring forward citizen initiatives.
Local small business “pop up" in downtown Atlanta thanks to unique program
The World Cup is about to bring visitors from around the globe to Atlanta — and more than a dozen locally-owned businesses are ready to take advantage of the tourism to grow their brands.
Scientific Games and Hellenic Lotteries Partner to Provide World-Class Scratchcard Entertainment Experiences to Greek Players
/PRNewswire/ -- Scientific Games, the world's largest lottery games company, and Hellenic Lotteries, part of Allwyn Hellas, the leading gaming group in Greece,...
FIFA World Cup 2026 bold predictions
The 2026 FIFA World Cup starts on Thursday. Running from June 11th to July 19th, the much-anticipated tournament will bring exciting matches in the world’s sport. 48 teams, through 104 fixtures, will give their all to achieve world glory. Argentina…
Kustom Entertainment, Inc. Announces Partnership with Gilley’s Gambling Hall to Bring Multi-Season Music Festivals to Park City, Kansas
Kustom Entertainment, Inc. Announces Partnership with Gilley’s Gambling Hall to Bring Multi-Season Music Festivals to Park City, Kansas
Kustom Entertainment, Inc. Announces Partnership with Gilley’s Gambling Hall to Bring Multi-Season Music Festivals to Park City, Kansas
Country Stampede KANSAS 2027 to take place June 25–27, 2027, at Gilley’s Park City Overland Park, KS., June 08, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kustom...
'Rec Your Hood' brings block parties to Dayton neighborhoods
The goal of the event series is to bring communities together for family-friendly block parties.
Huntsville business owner Natalia Infante brings human intuition to national brands through Hola Insights
Huntsville may be known for rockets, defense, and technology, but Natalia Infante, Ph.D., owner and founder of Hola Insights, a market research and insights agency, is proving the Rocket City is also a place where nationally recognized research firms can thrive. Infante recently sat down with the Huntsville Business Journal to share how her multicultural […]
Fable is getting some post-launch DLC already, with an extended look at gameplay planned for later this week
Fable: Order of the Hero will bring a new region and storyline to the upcoming fantasy RPG.
Major sports investor wants to bring MLB to Raleigh. Is it competition or collaboration with Dundon?
Marc Lasry’s Avenue Sports Fund is already invested in the NC Courage. He now wants to invest in big-league baseball in Raleigh, telling WRAL he’s willing to partner with Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon, who also has MLB ambitions.
Paul Jr.’s American Motor Fest Set to Bring Major Entertainment Weekend to Clearfield County
CLEARFIELD — Engines will roar, music will fill the air, and thousands of visitors are expected to descend upon the
Startup Stage: Bliink targets Southeast Asia's SME business travel market
The startup is building an AI-powered corporate travel platform designed to bring managed travel services to small and medium-sized enterprises across Southeast Asia.
Politics, Pubs, Parades, and the Parish: Joan Quigley
Quigley reflects on her upbringing in an Irish-American family in Jersey City, her early involvement in civic activism
St. Paul's Grand Old Day brings together community while spotlighting local businesses
Spurs-themed market brings small businesses, community together on Northwest Side
Senua Brings A 'Different Kind' Of Hellblade Game To Xbox Game Pass In 2027
We're here for it
Trump walks out on 'Meet the Press' interview after clash with NBC journalist: 'I've had enough'
President Donald Trump did not take kindly to NBC's Kristen Welker bringing up the results of the 2020 election and walked out, ending the interview early.
Health workers at center of Congo's Ebola outbreak labor with little pay or rest
Health workers are handling the disease with minimal resources, because agencies have been scrambling to bring aid into the region.
Intel was on the brink of downfall. A twist in the AI race could boost its revival
When Lip-Bu Tan took the helm of Intel in March 2025, the company was in desperate need of a turnaround.
Day Out With Thomas returns to Tweetsie June 12-15 and 18-21
Thomas the Tank Engine, everyone’s favorite #1 blue engine, is coming to town and bringing all his favorite musical instruments.
Piecework’s jigsaw puzzles are making ‘grandma hobbies’ cool
From maximalist pizzas to retro beaches, Piecework brings canvases with a coffee-table book flair to gen Z’s homes
Tribeca 2026 After Hours: A Guide to the Fest’s Best After Parties and Events
As New York City braces for a stretch of 80-degree days this week, Tribeca’s 25th anniversary edition is also bringing some serious heat to New York’s after-hours circuit. Running June 3-14, this year...
Ramtech VP of Business Development Kelly Williams to Speak on Modular Construction Benefits in Panel Discussion at 2026 InterFace Houston Multifamily Conference
Ramtech Building Systems, Inc., a leading design-build provider of permanent and relocatable modular building solutions, today announced that Vice President of Business Development Kelly Williams will serve as a panelist at the 2026 InterFace Houston Multifamily Conference. The one-day event takes place June 9, 2026, at The Briar Club in Houston, Texas, and will bring together multifamily developers, owners, investors, architects, contractors, and other industry professionals to examine trends s
Arizona Sunshine announced for Nintendo Switch 2
Today, Vertigo Games announced that it’s working on Arizona Sunshine for Nintendo Switch 2. Launch timing will be provided at a later date. Arizona Sunshine is a third-person zombie apocalypse shooter. Online play and multiplayer splitscreen modes will both be supported. Further details can be found in the following overview: Sharpen your machete, reload your shotgun, and bring your friends....
How The Story Is Shifting For Phibro Animal Health (PAHC) As Analysts Reset Fair Value
The latest analyst update trims Phibro Animal Health’s assessed fair value from US$48.50 to US$45.60, bringing it closer to a cluster of price targets around US$44 to US$45.60. This shift aligns with more cautious commentary around regulatory risks and how the stock compares with peers. Read on to see what this may mean for you and how to keep track of the evolving analyst story around Phibro Animal Health. Wall Street's queuing for one rocket. While SpaceX counts down to its IPO, other...
Borussia Dortmund president expects Erling Haaland to join Real Madrid
As part of his Real Madrid presidency push, Enrique Riquelme claimed that he will bring Jurgen Klopp and Erling Haaland to the Bernabeu. However, the representatives of both have already dismissed the...
Fourth annual health and wellness resource fair brings free essential services to Charleston’s tri-county community
The Charleston Police Department, along with the South Carolina Department of Mental Health, is teaming up with local partners to host its fourth annual free Unity Day Health and Wellness Resource Fair on Saturday.
Student-loan transfer to Treasury may bring back aggressive collectors
The transfer of defaulted student-loan from the Education Department to the Treasury brings back agencies once criticized for predatory behavior.
What to know about Pope Leo's trip to Spain, from political scandal to Barcelona's architectural gem
Pope Leo XIV’s weeklong visit to Spain will bring him to a once-staunchly Catholic country that has long been in the throes of waning religious practice. Leo is expected to double down on his messages of unity amid polarization, peace as war rages, welcome for migrants and hope for young Spaniard...
Dmen
The top defenseman available at the 2026 NHL Draft took the stage at the Combine. The San Jose Sharks are in need of their star blueliner of the future. Their core of Macklin Celebrini, Will Smith, Michael Misa, William Eklund, and Collin Graf is outstanding, but lacks a top blueliner to pair with Sam Dickinson. […] The post Dmen appeared first on San Jose Hockey Now.
FIFA World Cup 2026 brings economic boost to Richmond businesses
As the FIFA World Cup 2026 approaches, Richmond business owners are preparing for what could be one of the busiest stretches of the summer.
The Wolf Among Us Remastered, The Wolf Among Us 2 announced for Nintendo Switch 2 and Switch
Today, it was revealed that The Wolf Among Us Remastered as well as The Wolf Among Us 2 are planned for Nintendo Switch 2 and Switch. They’ll launch this holiday and in 2027 respectively. The Wolf Among Us Remastered brings back Telltale’s adventure classic from 2013 – now on Nintendo platforms for the first time. The Wolf Among Us 2,...
NC State Health Plan board approves Medicare Advantage plan benefit changes despite retiree concerns
Retirees on the state's Medicare Advantage will face higher out-of-pocket maximums next year, as well as higher copays for many medical services.
Kustom Entertainment Bringing Massive EDM Event to Kansas City With Alison Wonderland, DJ Diesel and More
Kustom has big ambitions for the region's blossoming EDM community, with 'Global Frequencies' setting the tone.
Meet America’s 43 Self-Made Billionaire Queens Of Capitalism. Plus: Questions To Ask Before Turning Your Hobby Into A Business
Welcome to this week’s ForbesWomen newsletter, which every Thursday brings news about the world’s top female entrepreneurs, leaders and investors straight to your inbox.
Chief of staff to House member charged with carrying a gun into US Capitol complex
The chief of staff for Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican, was charged Wednesday with bringing a firearm into the US Capitol complex, according to court documents obtained by CNN.
Trump's UFC fight at White House combines punches and politics
U.S. President Donald Trump is bringing his affinity for mixed martial arts to the White House, staging a night of cage fighting on the South Lawn on June 14 — his 80th birthday — as part of celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.
Factbox-Trump's UFC Fight at White House Combines Punches and Politics
By Bo Erickson WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump is bringing his affinity for mixed martial arts to the White House, staging a night of cage fighting on the South Lawn on June 14 — his 80th birthday — as part of celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of U.S.
Festa Italiana brings packed entertainment lineup to Lodi
Festa Italiana returns to Lodi for its 12th year on Sunday. Here's what to know before you go.
How a Citizen Science Organization Aims to Preserve the Places It Brings Tourists to Study
The actual eco-friendliness of ecotourism varies considerably. One research station in the Peruvian Amazon is out to prove it can bring visitors to the area without disrupting the environment.
This viral NYC World Cup festival brings Africa’s biggest stars to Brooklyn
As New York prepares for one of the busiest weekends of the summer with FIFA World Cup festivities set to draw visitors from around the globe, a
Alaska Science Forum: Research team seeks answers from a changing river
A shifting climate is bringing big, sudden changes to the Kuskokwim River and the people who rely on it
How ASUS Is Bringing AI into Healthcare Workflows
Move from pilot to production with ASUS AI Hub and NVIDIA NemoClaw. Deploy scalable, secure on-premises enterprise Agentic AI with robust data governance and custom knowledge RAG workflows.
New initiative aims to bring more business to Buffalo's Electric District
As part of District Live, businesses near the Electric Tower are teaming up to host indoor and outdoor special events and promotions.
JUVENTUS AND WWE ANNOUNCE STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP TO CONNECT SPORT, ENTERTAINMENT AND GLOBAL FAN CULTURE
Juventus and WWE today announced a new strategic partnership designed to develop original experiences, content and activations that bring together...
NC State Health Plan to propose benefit structure aimed at shifting care to 'preferred providers'
The new structure is necessary, plan administrators say, because costs are continue to outpace premiums. Those premiums are likely to increase next year.
Dolphins wrap up minicamp
Welcome to the Splash Zone, the quickest way to get your day started off right. We bring you a rundown of Miami Dolphins news from the last 24 hours.
Personnel note: Molly Bargmann joins ICF as Vice President
She brings more than 15 years of disaster recovery and emergency management experience.
🥐 Florentino unleashed, Casillas and Del Bosque... 5️⃣ for Friday
The football world is experiencing a day of institutional upheaval and hot seats on the bench just before the World Cup. The electoral race for the Real Madrid presidency has exploded completely, brin...
Santa Clara County businesses eye World Cup boost after Super Bowl brings in $195M
A massive wave of economic revenue poured into the Bay Area during Super Bowl week, signaling a major financial victory for local economies as the region prepares for its next giant sporting event.
Greater Des Moines Partnership brings Iowa business leaders to D.C.
More than 100 business and community leaders from Central Iowa are in Washington, D.C., advocating for regional priorities and economic development projects during the Greater Des Moines Partnership's annual trip.
Science is HERE All Summer at The Tech Interactive
San Jose’s Science Center Announces Packed Lineup Headlined by Summer Camp, Tech Topple, DOME Series, Workshops, and Tech at Nite The Tech Interactive is bringing a summer full of hands-on science experiences to downtown San Jose, featuring STEM camps, immersive dome shows, interactive exhibits, workshops, and family-friendly activities designed for visitors of all ages. Learn more at https://www.thetech.org San Jose, CA, June 04, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Summer is HERE at The Tech Interactive,
Bayonne Mayor-Elect Nadrowski Selects Andrew Casais as Business Administrator
Mayor-Elect Sharon Nadrowski today announced her selection of Andrew J. Casais as the next Business Administrator for the City of Bayonne. Casais brings more than 15 years of municipal management experience, including nearly three years as Bayonne’s Chief of Staff from 2014 to 2017. During his career, he has championed major infrastructure investments, operational reforms,[...]
Apple’s Messages app on iPhone now has a third-party AI agent
Third-party AI service Poke is now in Apple’s Messages app on iPhone, bringing an AI agent directly into iMessage for the first time.
Experience the Excitement of The World’s Game in EA SPORTS FC™, Where History Is Playable
Fans worldwide can experience The World’s Game like never before with the latest international football update, available at no additional cost* in EA SPORTS FC™ 26 and EA SPORTS FC™ Mobile. Plus, fans yet to jump into the action in EA SPORTS FC™ 26 can pick up The World’s Game Edition to receive a Gold Starting XI Pack and three untradeable Player Picks. As the summer of international football begins, EA SPORTS FC™ brings fans closer to the drama, intensity, and passion of global competition with The World’s Game Update, available now at no additional cost in EA SPORTS FC™ 26 and EA SPORTS FC™ Mobile. History is playable in EA SPORTS FC™, as fans can play, celebrate, and engage with football culture across multiple modes in an experience inspired by the global game. EA SPORTS FC The World's Game Edition - Play Now WATCH THE WORLD’S GAME TRAILER FEATURING JUDE BELLINGHAM, ENDRICK, PEDRI, WESTON MCKENNIE, ZLATAN IBRAHIMOVIĆ, AND DAVID BECKHAM With 53 fully licensed national teams,
Small Business Development Center Growth Summit brings statewide network to Penn State
The Penn State Small Business Development Center recently welcomed professionals from 15 centers across Pennsylvania for the annual PASBDC Growth Summit, a statewide professional development event designed to strengthen the network’s ability to support entrepreneurs and small businesses throughout the commonwealth.
Banana Ball World Tour brings three nights of baseball entertainment to Truist Field
Banana Ball World Tour brings three nights of baseball entertainment to Truist Field
Banana Ball is back in Charlotte, bringing its fast-paced, fan-focused version of baseball to Truist Field for three nights beginning Thursday. The Firefighters and Texas Tailgaters will face off June 4-6 as part of the Banana Ball World Tour and the inaugural season of the Banana Ball Championship League. Created by the Savannah Bananas, Banana Ball was designed to put entertainment at the center of the game.
After hospitals, patients get a turn to bring AI into the doctor’s office
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Belinda Keiser brings South Florida trailblazer star power to CD 22 race
'I will fight alongside President Trump to lower costs for families.'
2026 K League 2 Round 15 Preview
The final round before the World Cup break brings several intriguing storylines across the K League 2. In-form Hwaseong FC put their eight-match unbeaten run on the line against promotion contenders S...
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EA SPORTS™ launch the 2026 Season Pack on F1® 25 worldwide today | Formula One World Championship Limited
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May's top PlayStation games by copies sold
Yesterday’s State of Play gave us an idea of where PlayStation’s heading next. But we’ve had our May estimates for a couple of days now (we always update our data daily for clients), so it’s time to look at what performed best on PlayStation last month. We’ve got a new IP at the top, two evergreens doing their evergreen thing, FC26 smashing it ahead of the World Cup Plus pivot, and a quiet but promising result for Lego Batman. Let’s have a look at the state of Play…Station’s top games for May. 007 takes #001 007 First Light sold 1M copies on PS5 in May, easily making it the month’s top PS5 game by copies sold. Over 80% of those May copies were digital, which is broadly in line with where PlayStation’s digital share has settled for new releases this year. To date, 007 First Light has sold through 2.2M copies across platforms (so no unsold retail copies in that figure). The platform split is 55.1% PS5, 33.1% Steam, and 11.8% Xbox (console, Windows, and cloud combined). In gross revenue terms, 007 First Light has generated $150M. Owing to regional pricing and audience composition differences, the consoles make up a higher share of revenue than they do copies. Of the $150M, 60.5% came via PlayStation, 27.6% via Steam, and 12.9% via Xbox. Part of this is because over two-thirds of 007 First Light‘s PlayStation audience is in North America (43.4%) or Western Europe (23.2%), where local currency means the game generates more revenue per player. On Steam, under half of First Light‘s audience is from those same regions (31.8% North America, 15.1% Western Europe). As we covered in last week’s 007 Steam piece, the Steam version is pulling in higher-than-expected numbers in China, which now accounts for 17.3% of First Light‘s Steam audience. 007 is the equivalent of $44 USD in China, which is roughly 37% cheaper than the US price and about 44% cheaper than Western Europe. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe The crossover data backs up what we’ve seen all year about launch-window cohorts. 11% of PS5 players who played 007 First Light in May also played Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, which launched just a few days before. Last month was a great month for Denmark! IO Interactive is Copenhagen-based, and Lego Group is headquartered in Billund (TT Games is UK-based but produces work under Lego Group licence and direction). Speaking of which… A very blocky #2 and #3 Minecraft sold another 788K copies on PlayStation consoles last month. Business as usual, since Minecraft hasn’t sold fewer than 760K copies in a single month all year. With over 350M copies sold across all platforms, Minecraft is the best-selling game in history and one of the strongest brands in the world. Every month, a new cohort of children reaches Minecraft age, which guarantees a constant volume of new sales regardless of what the broader market is up to. The demographic refresh rate is truly impressive, with the audience renewing itself faster than it’s churning. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight shifted 757K copies on PS5 last month, bringing its lifetime total on the platform to over 800K. Across all platforms, Legacy of the Dark Knight has now passed 1.5M sold through, so PlayStation accounts for over half of the game’s players. The May crossover data for Legacy of the Dark Knight on PS5 is also useful. 27% of those players also played Fortnite, 16% Roblox, 16% FC 26, and 14% NBA 2K. That’s the household-and-family cohort showing up, plus the launch-window cohort of core gamers who buy practically everything. FC 26 gets players through the door ahead of the World Cup FC 26 sold 411K copies on PlayStation last month (90% via PS5), the fewest copies FC 26 has sold all year and down heavily from April’s 700K. Part of this dropoff is because FC 26 has been available as a PlayStation Plus monthly game since 6 May, cannibalising premium sales. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe The strategic logic is straightforward for EA, which is sacrificing premium unit sales in May to build up the player base ahead of the FIFA World Cup, which kicks off on 11 June. Obviously, a bigger player pool going into the tournament means a bigger pool of potential Ultimate Team spenders during the period when football attention is at its peak. The early returns are around what you’d expect, with 4.4M new players accessing FC 26 via PS Plus last month – a substantial new spender pool. Anecdotally, a few of my mates who were ‘’skipping FIFA and Ultimate Team this year’’, were drawn back in via PS Plus. Lo and behold, one of them is buying packs like it’s going out of fashion. Whether this is all a smart trade for EA depends entirely on the Ultimate Team conversion rate over the next six weeks. Either way, the short-term engagement impact on the game as a whole is evident. FC 26‘s MAUs hit a record 24M on PlayStation in May, up 30% from the previous record set in April. GTA V does what GTA V always does Rounding out the top five is another evergreen title. Grand Theft Auto V shifted another 387K copies on PlayStation last month. No matter what else is happening in the industry, GTA V keeps pulling players in. It’s sold another 1.8M copies on PS5 in the first half of this year alone, helping the franchise pass the 230M-sold milestone across all platforms. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe I have a theory that Minecraft and GTA V are doing the same thing at different demographic levels. Both are functioning as generational gateway games that the audience ages into faster than it ages out of. Minecraft captures kids around age 6-10, GTA V captures much of the same audience around age 12-15 (unofficially, of course). The crossover data suggests this: 40% of GTA V‘s monthly PlayStation players typically play Fortnite in any given month, while 30% play Roblox. Household accounts aside, that’s not the original GTA V audience from 2013. Of course, the under-12 audience would love to get their hands on GTA, too. It’s always been the way of things, and some parents are happy to oblige. Mine did too back in the day, and I turned out just fine. Right? Right!? Want to get your hands on our data for yourself – for free? We’re offering a free trial of our platform for games companies. Send us a message here, or reply to this email, and we’ll set you up. The last word Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover. [Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]
Artists and Scientists Partner to Bring Atmospheric Data to Life
In the fluxART project, scientists using eddy covariance to study atmospheric flux partnered with artists to help communicate the “breath of the biosphere.”
The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science
With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!
Pokémon GO Fest Chicago 2026: Top Spawns, Shinies & Best Pokémon to Catch (Raid & PvP Guide)
Good day, Pokémon Trainers! Pokémon GO Fest season is upon us and it promises to bring about some big changes to the formula! But this brings up the ever-popular question, What are the best Pokémon to catch? Well, not to worry fellow trainer, I’m here to help narrow the field! But before we get to […]
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