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NCAA president says it would be a ‘mistake’ to ‘walk away’ from Protect College Sports Act
Charlie Baker, the president of the NCAA, said the Protect College Sports Act effectively “deals with” many of the issues facing his industry. “What we’re really trying to achieve is some sor…
New study changes what scientists know about lithium and bipolar disorder
Lithium is one of the most effective drugs for bipolar disorder. However, its narrow therapeutic window means the difference between an effective dose and a toxic one is small.
Millions may be getting the wrong cholesterol test
A new study suggests that apoB, a blood test that measures harmful cholesterol particles, is better than standard LDL cholesterol testing for deciding who needs more intensive treatment. Researchers found it could prevent more heart attacks and strokes while remaining cost-effective for the U.S. healthcare system.
Business People: Kenya Bodden to lead Minnesota State Bar Association
LAW The Minnesota State Bar Association announced Kenya Bodden as president, effective July 1. Bodden is a legal risk manager at Amazon; he previously served as the 2022–2023 president of the Ramsey County Bar Association. The new MSBA B…
A hidden weakness in deadly cancers could lead to powerful new treatments
A UCLA study has identified a hidden Achilles' heel in aggressive small cell cancers that have resisted new treatments for decades. Scientists found that tumors lacking the RB gene become critically dependent on the protein E2F3 for survival. Blocking E2F3 shut down tumor growth in laboratory models, and existing FDA-approved drugs may be able to exploit this vulnerability. The discovery could pave the way for faster development of more effective therapies.
Is Six Flags Entertainment (FUN) A Bargain After Its COO Appointment?
Six Flags Entertainment (FUN) is reshaping its leadership team by appointing industry veteran Mark Pauls as Chief Operating Officer effective July 15, 2026, while outgoing COO Tim Fisher moves into a Special Advisor role. See our latest analysis for Six Flags Entertainment. At a share price of $20.99, Six Flags Entertainment has a 1 day share price return of 2.59% and a 90 day share price return of 25.16%, while the 1 year total shareholder return is down 34.71%. This suggests that recent...
Career coach shares résumé template she recommends for AI era
Amy Perrotta, the founder of a career branding company, says an effective résumé makes a recruiter "want to pick up the phone."
Long Reads for the Long Weekend
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) Happy Fourth of July weekend! As has been a tradition of mine going back to the beginning of the EntStrategyGuy website, I’m sharing my favorite long reads of the last year, like I did in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2024, and 2025. Let’s dive right in! Subscribe “Different Prices for the Same Ride: How Uber and Lyft Use AI to Get More Money Out of You“ by Derek Kravitz in Consumer Reports I don’t think surveillance pricing, like the kind described in this brilliant Consumer Reports article, is long for the world—it’s toxically unpopular—but we’ll see if either party takes on this issue. If I ran a political party focused on affordability, I would focus on a few pro-consumer and pro-market policies: Banning non-compete agreements. Ending surveillance pricing Eliminating junk fees (read more here...) Ensuring “right to repair” for consumer (and military!) products Capping excessive app store fees Stopping digital/algorithmic price-fixing tools. Preventing automatic subscription price increases. And more. If you want to fight inflation, there are a lot of great ways to do it quickly. Speaking of higher prices... “Secret Documents Show Pepsi and Walmart Colluded to Raise Food Prices Across the Economy“ by Matt Stoller in BIG Again, I think a political party should focus on lowering prices for consumers. And deals like this—Walmart making a deal/forcing Pepsi to offer the lowest prices at its stores and nowhere else—hypothetically lower prices at Walmart...but raise them everywhere else. “15 DUIs, still driving: California’s failure to take repeat drunk drivers off the road“ by Robert Lewis and Lauren Hepler in CalMatters CalMatters does terrific reporting in California, something the Golden State desperately needs more of, and this article is a great example of that. “PugLips: The next insanely popular thing you’ve never heard of…” by Simon Carless in Game Discover Co I thought that this parody article (and yes, it’s a parody, but I was definitely unsure at first) was hilarious and totally nailed how much tech/business journalism feels these days. Actually, three of my favorite articles this year were on hype in the video game industry, including Georg Zoller’s “The Video Game Industries Very Dark Night”—which I linked to recently and wrote a follow-up here—and Owen Mahoney’s “Derek Zoolander, Videogame Exec”. In particular, I like Mahoney’s focus on user experience as a guide to what trends will actually grab hold of customers. “The Matrix Lies“ by Evan Shapiro in Media War & Peace Evan Shapiro’s first person account of his experience with AI was hilarious. I think LLMs capabilities have significantly grown from last summer, and yet...my editor/researcher just had an abysmal experience using an LLM to do a quite basic task (which our LLM normally does each week) and the LLM made a mistake on every single data entry...along with seven different mistakes affecting twelve of the twenty or so entries, including mistakes that are explicitly spelled out in the prompt. That’s a brutal failure rate. Again, if you use AI/LLM for data collection, you need to take a lot of extra steps to verify and check the data. “Ghosts in the Balcony: A Cross-Country Trip to 58 Theaters Fighting to Survive“ by Matthew Frank in The Ankler I thought Matthew Frank’s pitch to head across America to visit theaters sounded insane aggressive at the time—at least it felt that way to someone a decade older than him; man, to be in your twenties again, am I right?—but I knew the result would be great. And it was, a terrific feature by a great young writer. Also, I loved Matthew’s recent article on who’s getting the precious few entry level jobs in Hollywood. (Hint: nepotism.) “Disney erased FiveThirtyEight“ and “Did Las Vegas get too greedy?” by Nate Silver in Silver Bulletin I love media history and analysis, and there’s no one better to get the history of FiveThirtyEight than from Nate Silver, who wrote about his personal experience in one of my favorite pieces from this year. I also loved Nate’s breakdown of what’s causing Vegas’ woes, but I’ll offer one criticism, summarized as “Might I suggest antitrust?” Many centrists/center-right/libertarian thinkers (Nate is self-described as the latter) often don’t consider consolidation or antitrust as factors in policy issues like housing, America’s military readiness, or, in this case, Las Vegas. Even if libertarians want to debunk antitrust/consolidation concerns, I’d love to read that debunking. In this case, Vegas is incredibly consolidated (though it also has been for a long time) and I’d have loved to read Nate at least contending with this factor, since he addresses almost every other potential factor for Vegas’ decline. “Why Microsoft’s Carbon Removal Pullback Is Such a Big Deal“ by Robinson Meyer in Heatmap News I’m a big supporter of carbon removal efforts, but this nascent industry faces a lot of headwinds, including this big move most recently. I think it’s clear that solar panels and batteries should be able to get the world to its carbon footprint goals, but effective carbon renewal remains necessary to prevent the worst impacts of global warming. “AI is killing the cheap smartphone“ by David Oks LLMs and AI will impact the world in ways we’re not ready for, and already, third world countries are seeing the prices of cheap cellphones skyrocket due to the cost of chips skyrocketing. This article by David Oks is a terrific breakdown. “100 Days of Madness: Netflix, Paramount, Warner and the Future of Hollywood“ by Wade Major at Hollywood Heretic Wade Major dove deep into Hollywood/streaming’s financials in this must read piece. Not that I agree with everything in this article (read my take on Warner Bros./Paramount here) but the analysis is top notch. I think many people discount how quality thinking, regardless of the argument/conclusion, will make you a better thinker. “Erased by the UFC: Frank Shamrock, The MMA GOAT of the 20th Century“ by Nate Wilcox in The MMA Draw Newsletter Growing up playing the UFC fighting game on the Dreamcast, Frank Shamrock was my favorite MMA fighter, and this history/tribute to him was great. Other Fun Reads “The Hardest Part Of History To Tell Is How It Felt“ by Craig Fehrman at Defector “Unmasking the Sea Star Killer“ by Craig Welch at bioGraphic “What Could Save the Industry? Fin-Syn“ by Richard Rushfield in The Ankler Alex Rollins Berg in Underexposed on movie bumpers, pillow shots, Disney trash cinema, cult films, and Casablanca. David H. Montgomery in YouGov’s The Surveyor on punctuation marks, condiments, dinosaurs, and comic strips and kids media. “How Medium finally pivoted its way to profitability“ and “Why the best journalists on YouTube are all former Vox employees“ by Simon Owens in Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter “It’s Not Just You, Netflix Shows Have Gotten Slightly Shorter: Here’s What the Data Says“ by Kasey Moore at What’s on Netflix “Numlock Awards: How Diane Warren became the biggest loser in Oscar history“ by Nathaniel Rakich and “Numlock Awards: The Oscar Bait era is over. The Oscar Chum era is here.” by Walt Hickey & Michael Domanico at Numlock Awards
Reduced sunshine linked to higher demand for mental health care
The study highlights the relationship between weather and mental health care use, suggesting routine weather patterns could forecast service demand effectively.
The real cause of a common stroke may have been missed for decades
Scientists have discovered that a common type of stroke may have a very different cause than doctors once thought. Instead of fatty plaque clogging arteries, the strongest link was found with enlarged and damaged blood vessels deep within the brain. The finding helps explain why standard treatments like aspirin are often less effective and is driving the search for new therapies that target the brain’s tiny blood vessels directly.
Changing COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 mortality in older adults in Australia, 2022-2025
Communications Health - Changing COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 mortality in older adults in Australia, 2022-2025
Palm Beach police union offers backup for Belinda Keiser
'In Washington, she will effectively advocate for the needs of law enforcement, defending the rule of law.'
Why you should wash new clothes before wearing; signs that you are aging well; effective leadership in health care; plus other stories with Vanderbilt Health sources
Jami Miller, MD, Professor of Clinical Dermatology, and David Gaston, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, are quoted in a Southern Living piece about the importance of washing new clothes before wearing them. Dyes, chemicals, mold and bacteria are all potential troublemakers lurking around your new duds. Parul Goyal, MBBS, Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine, was quoted in a Huff Post story outlining signs that you are aging well. Tae Kon Kim, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, was interviewed by Healio for a story headlined, “Effective leadership in health care ‘starts with listening.’” AAMC News reporter Patrick Boyle interviewed Wes Ely, MD, Professor of Medicine and Critical Care, for a story about ICU delirium. PharmaVoice reporter Kelly Bilodeau interviewed Romney Humphries, PhD, Vice Chair and Executive Medical Director, Clinical Services, for a story about the CDC’s new data that shows an alarming increase in the prevalence of a gene that can make “nightmare bacteria” significantly harder to treat. American Community Media interviewed William Schaffner, MD, Professor of Preventive Medicine, for a piece about Ebola that was reused by several media outlets around the U.S., including The Mississippi Link. Stacie Dusetzina, PhD, Professor of Health Policy, was quoted by The Independent in a story about how Medicare will soon cover weight-loss drugs. Courtney Schadt, MD, Associate Professor of Dermatology, was interviewed by Tennessean reporter Beth Warren, about tanning safety and tanning fads circulating social media. WKRN News 2 interviewed Amanda Peltier, MD, Professor of Neurology, about the correlation between head trauma and ALS following the diagnosis of former Titans running back Chris Johnson.
Jon-Paul Maria named interim head of Materials Science and Engineering
Jon-Paul Maria, Dorothy Pate Enright Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State, has been named interim head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, effective July 1.
Oregon Health Authority director Dr. Sejal Hathi resigns
Oregon Health Authority director Dr. Sejal Hathi resigned from her position leading one of the state's largest agencies, effective Aug. 1.
Patient enrolment begins in a scientific trial to identify the first effective treatments for Bundibugyo virus disease
In a major international effort to evaluate potential treatments for Ebola disease due to Bundibugyo virus (BVD), the PARTNERS clinical trial has opened enrolment today for patients in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Croatia criticised for ‘unambitious’ changes to 2022 science law
Croatia’s science ministry has been accused of a lack of ambition, and even incompetence, over proposed changes to the country’s 2022 science law. Critics say an opportunity has been missed to fix wider shortcomings in the research and universities system.“This law, like all the previous ones, will not significantly change the current state of science in Croatia,” Vlatko Silobrčić, a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences, told Science Business. “A small shift here and there will not have a significant impact.”The 2022 law introduced multi-year block grant financing of research, based on results, and changes intended to boost employment and career progression for researchers and lecturers. But implementation of the law has been uneven. “It became apparent that certain of its provisions were subject to different interpretations by higher education institutions and scientific institutes,” the science ministry said in its proposal for change. “This caused legal uncertainty in the system, administrative difficulties in implementation and, in certain cases, unequal treatment of teachers, scientists and students.”Most of the proposed amendments deal with technicalities in hiring and promoting staff, such as extending the committee deadlines from 60 to 90 days, or allowing applicants to cite all of their achievements and not only those since their last appointment.Both the ministry and Croatian media highlighted changes that would raise the retirement age from 65 to 67 years and allow part-time students 15 year rather than 10 years to finish their studies.The change to retirement age has been criticised for reinforcing a weakness in the system. According to Matko Marušić, professor emeritus at the University of Split, this will “allow unproductive teachers to advance and work longer, while hindering and discouraging productive ones.”A longtime campaigner for excellence-based meritocracy, he sees little hope in the new legislation. “I am not optimistic that things will improve,” he told Science Business. “As recent changes to the law in Croatia show, the legal framework is becoming increasingly hypocritical and harmful.”For Marušić, who analyses Croatia's university system in a recently published book, the situation is “unfavourable and constantly deteriorating” due to the criteria used for academic advancement.“The key criterion for advancement should be scientific productivity,” he said. “In Croatia [. . .] scientific criteria are increasingly lowered, and ineffective and absurd criteria such as waiting times for promotion and age limits for remaining in a job are promoted.” He would also like to see better criteria for the quality of teaching at universities. “In practice, teaching is not monitored or evaluated,” he said, estimating that up to a third of teaching simply does not take place. “Under the guise of university autonomy and bad laws, universities and faculties are allowed to earn additional money by increasing enrolment quotas that have nothing to do with the needs of the labour market.” Lack of ambitionDora Kršul, a reporter at Telegram.hr who covers science policy in Croatia, finds the rationale for changes “bizarre.” “The ministry responsible for supervising the uniform application of the law is changing the law because it is being implemented unevenly,” she said. “This primarily speaks to the power relationship in the sphere of science and higher education in Croatia, that is, the question arises as to who actually manages this system.”Rather than raising quality, she continued, the changes appear to be designed to help vocational and applied universities who have not been complying with the law.The Independent Union of Research and Higher Education Employees of Croatia said that the changes were “unambitious” and represent a missed opportunity for more important changes. “We think some of the changes are even negative,” it said in its statement on June 25. One of these is introduction of an “assistant” job title that allows people to be hired only for the duration of a project. Related articles: Elections to top science bodies test Croatia’s gender equality in researchSlovakia revises R&D approach to increase focus on competitivenessLatvia pilots citizen engagement in research grant evaluationsThe union’s president, Tvrtko Smital, who was part of the 15-member working group tasked with drafting the changes, told the local media there was a “worrying lack of ambition” in the process, and “lack of competence” in terms of research experience and understanding the problems in the system.“There is no clear will to deal with the problems,” said Smital, an assistant professor of marine and environmental sciences at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. “It’s a combination of unambitiousness and incompetence,” he went on, expressing his “deep frustration” with the situation. “There is no strategy, no clear thinking, and money is not being spent optimally.”Croatia’s science ministry has not responded to requests for comment.
British Business Bank bolsters board with four new directors
The British Business Bank has appointed four new non-executive directors across its boards, effective July 1, as chair Stephen Welton CBE is confirmed for a second three-year term
Apple's Hide My Email feature has a bug that's been exposing real email addresses, researcher claims
Research appears to reveal a bug that could render the feature effectively useless.
Dr. Steve Grice appointed Interim Dean of TROY’s Sorrell College of Business
Troy University alumnus and former director of TROY’s William H. Carr School of Accountancy Dr. Steve Grice has been appointed interim dean of the Sorrell College of Business. Grice’s appointment, which is effective July 1, comes after Dean Dr. Judson Edwards was named as the University’s interim Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost. ...Read More
Sony will cease production of discs for new PlayStation games in 2028
New games sold for PlayStation consoles will only be available digitally and won’t be sold on discs effective January 2028, Sony has announced. The move applies to all PlayStation games released from that point on, including those made by Sony and those released by third parties. The PlayStation group calls the change “a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” according to a PlayStation blog post reviewed by Game File in advance of its publication. As movies, TV and music have shifted from physical media to an age of downloads and streaming, Sony’s move could speed the demise of physical media in a gaming. The industry has offered consumers games via cartridges, cassettes, floppy discs, CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays across a 50-year stretch. Sony has been reporting to investors in recent years that PlayStation games have been increasingly purchased as downloads, not as discs. The most recent figures show nearly four in five purchases of full games for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 were purchased digitally in the past year. Stats like that may cause today’s news to carry an air of the inevitable. But Sony’s declaration for 2028 is still likely to produce a shock, as the biggest gaming platform on the planet that uses game discs leaves them behind. Discs going away, but the fate of game boxes is unknown Sony is committing to still selling games in physical retailers even after they drop discs in 2028. Just how those games will be sold—in boxes with codes inside, as cards marked with digital redemption codes—is unclear. Digital games will also continue to be sold in the online PlayStation Store. New games released for PlayStation consoles prior to January 2028 will be unaffected by the policy change, Sony says. That means the PS5 games of 2027, be they a new Madden, a new God of War, a new Call of Duty, a new Sly Cooper (one can dream?), would still potentially be offered on disc. PlayStation 6 implications Sony’s timeline for a transition to a no-disc era will also spin up more speculation about the timing and configuration of Sony’s next-generation console, the probable PlayStation 6. “This pretty much guarantees that PS6 won’t arrive until 2028 at the earliest,” Piers Harding-Rolls, senior games research analyst at Ampere Analysis tells Game File. Harding-Rolls also concludes from today’s news that “the base version of a PS6 will not include a physical media drive,” as Sony looks to keep costs down on the device. Sony itself is saying nothing about the PS6 today: not its timing, nor how it might or might not support internal or external disc drives in order to run disc-based PS4 and PS5 games, should the console be backwards compatible. The many signs this was coming Industry support for games being released on physical media has been waning. As has consumer interest in them. PC games effectively went all-digital years ago, thanks to the popularity of playing games through Steam and other digital storefronts. The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that kept much of the global population home helped shift shopping patterns toward downloads. Sony’s own data shows PlayStation game downloads being an uncommon consumer choice a decade ago and now becoming the norm. On consoles, physical media has been in such decline that Sony and Microsoft both launched their current gen Xbox Series and PS5 consoles in 2020 with cheaper versions that lacked disc drives. In early 2024, Phil Spencer, then head of Xbox, told me that ““[w]e ship games physically and digitally, and we’re really just following what the customers are doing.” He added that the game industry had become an outlier in still supporting disc-based entertainment, even as movies and TV have bailed on discs in favor of downloads and steaming: “Gaming consoles themselves have kind of become the last consumer electronic device that has a drive. And this is a real issue, just in terms of the number of manufacturers that are actually building drives and the cost associated with those. And when you think about cogs that we’re going to go put in a console—and as you have fewer suppliers and fewer buyers—the cost of the drive does have an impact.” Last year, the Nintendo’s Switch 2, which uses cartridges rather than discs, introduced the concept of game-key cards, which are physical media that contain no game, just a prompt for a download. Even disc-based games aren’t what they once were, now frequently containing just stubs of games rather than the whole thing. The website Does It Play has tested over 3000 games and found that, for example, that the disc version of this year’s hit 007: First Light, only contained the game’s first mission, with the rest needing to be downloaded. Beyond all that, last week brought the news that Grand Theft Auto VI, likely the biggest game launch this decade, will debut for PS5 and Xbox Series without a disc-based version. Today’s big news comes to you for free. Game File is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and ensure more of my work is possible, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe Discs helped define PlayStation However the trends in entertainment may be going, it is still remarkable to see PlayStation ditch discs given their importance in PlayStation history: In the late 1990s, the first PlayStation’s support for games on relatively cheap CD-ROMs instead of traditional game cartridges allowed the upstart console to outmaneuver cartridge-based systems from Nintendo and Sega, as it drove down game prices down in the process. (The cheaper disc format even prompted Final Fantasy VII maker Square to taunt Nintendo in a magazine ad, saying that if the game was “available on cartridge, it’d retail for around $1200.”) PlayStation devices often doubled as machines for watching movies and TV on the latest disc-based formats. In the late 2000s, for example, Sony’s pricy PS3 gained traction as a go-to device for playing then-novel Blu-Ray discs. In 2013, Sony effectively roasted the digital game-sharing restrictions proposed by rival Microsoft for its upcoming Xbox One console by showing how games could be shared for the then-upcoming PS4. In a 21-second clip that has over 20 million views on YouTube, one PlayStation executive simply handed a game box—presumably with disc inside—to another, who said “thanks.” Sony’s possible motivations The PlayStation announcement today cites “consumer preferences” and a shift away from discs among “the broader entertainment industry,” but does not delve into the decision-making process that brought Sony to this point. Sony is not discussing the economics of this move (I asked!), but there are a number of potential factors: Abandoning discs will spare Sony the cost of manufacturing and shipping them, which analysts and industry veterans I spoke to said could account for $1 or so of a game’s retail price. For first-party games, that’s direct savings for Sony, though the amount is limited by the winnowing percentage of people who were even buying the disc-based versions. For third-party games, Sony could pass the savings on to partners or just retain the better profit margin for themselves. As the 2024 comments from Phil Spencer alluded to, leaving discs behind could mean leaving disc-drives behind, allowing Sony to produce consoles more cheaply. Switching to digital-only for games could diminish the risks of copies of new games leaking. It would also seemingly make second-hand sales of used games impossible, pushing more people to buy their own copies of games. These economic benefits for Sony could be boons for the games industry overall, Ampere analyst Piers Harding-Rolls tells Game File. Among other things, it could free publishers and retailers from having to worry about securing an inventory of game discs when trying to sell games, he noted. “If there is a way to streamline the business of games retail, I generally think it’s a good thing for the industry as it removes unnecessary costs,” Harding-Rolls said. “This will help offset pressure on margins from other directions – development and staffing costs for example.” Should the industry shift from game boxes that contain discs to smaller, cheaper game cards, Harding-Rolls said, that reduces pressure on publishers and retailers. “The advantage of everything going digital for the industry is that sales can be tracked much more easily and there is less commercial risk for publishers wanting to continue selling via retail,” he said. The shift to no discs will also likely impact game development timelines, as developers will no longer face the same urgency to have a build ready to submit to PlayStation for the production of a disc, as industry experts noted around GTA VI’s no-disc news last week. Instead, projects may gain weeks of development time, in the event delivery deadlines for platform approval move closer to release date. Preservationists’ likely worries While millions of gamers have shifted to digital, there are still people who associate game discs—and only game discs—with actual ownership of PlayStation games. That portion of the gaming community spoke up last week about wanting to buy a version of GTA VI that they could hold in their hands, could lend to a friend and could potentially pop into a well-preserved PS5 console three decades from now and still see it run. Such gamers didn’t want to worry that they’d merely purchased a digital copy that could lose access to the game if, say, the company behind the game someday turns of the servers that transmit downloadable copies. Digital copies of games are inherently less long-lasting, because consumers aren’t actually buying a game (on a disc), just buying access to the game. The fine print in online gaming shops notes this, as does a recent law that went on the books in California in 2025. That lasw requires game publishers doing business in the state to refrain from words like “sell” when offering digital copies of games, unless they explicitly tell consumers that what’s being sold isn’t the game itself but a potentially revocable license to access it. A Sony spokesperson noted to Game File that “[w]ith all digital content, including games, movies, and music, players are purchasing a personal license for non-commercial use.” Regarding the fears of PlayStation games being lost to time in an all-digital era, the rep also noted that Sony remains “committed to delivering experiences from past generations to the new platforms our players are using.” They noted that PlayStation has used emulation and remasters to keep offering its classic games to modern gamers. It’s true that many consumers have become accustomed to not having physical copies of new music albums or movies, but the relative precariousness of digital copies of games is in fact being highlighted today by…. Sony’s other big announcement: the upcoming closure of the PS3 and PS Vita online stores Sony said today that it will be closing the online marketplaces for its PlayStation 3 console and PS Vita handheld in most countries in July 2027 (sooner elsewhere: August 2026 for the PS3 store Mexico, Honduras and Nicaragua; late 2026 for PS3 in other Latin American countries and the Middle East). “We know this news may be disappointing to PS3 and PS Vita players who hold a special place in their hearts for this generation of gaming,” Sony said in its announcement, saying the move “was not an easy decision for us to make.” Sony said that PS3 and Vita marketplaces “are no longer able” to support modern commerce systems, prompting a “need” to close the shops and focus on more modern PlayStation platform stores. The news may spark some deja vu. Sony announced back in March 2021 that it planned to take the PS3, Vita and PlayStation Portable marketplaces offline that summer. The move would have caused some 2,000 digital-only games to become unavailable for new purchasers, according to a VGC analysis at the time. Fans complained loudly. By April 2021, Sony walked back the PS3 and Vita shop closures, with then PlayStation boss Jim Ryan saying “it’s clear that we made the wrong decision here.” This time around, Sony is giving a longer notice period in most regions. The closure of those stores is still likely to cut off access to new purchases of digital-only PS3 and Vita games. The current PlayStation 5 marketplace sells PS5 and PS4 games, as well as a selection of PS1 and PS2 games. It does not sell PS3 games, because games for that platform can’t run on the system (some are offered via a PlayStation Plus streaming option). Vita games also aren’t sold via PS5. Sony says digitally purchased PS3 and Vita games will be downloadable after the stores’ shutdowns “for the foreseeable future.” Sony’s move contrasts with Microsoft’s Xbox platform, which continues to sell and support games from all four Xbox console generations. But it puts it in line with Nintendo, which disabled purchases in the marketplace for its Wii console (a contemporary of the PS3) in 2019. Nintendo discontinued purchases in the online shop for its 3DS portable (a contemporary of the Vita) in 2023. The big questions about Sony’s 2028 post-disc era Will Microsoft follow suit, ending support for new disc-based games on Xbox platforms and therefore all game consoles, too? Whether Microsoft does or not, will third-parties that can no longer release games on discs for PlayStation, simply ditch the disc options across the board? Given the GTA VI no-disc experiment launching this November, will more game publishers decide to forgo disc-based offerings even in 2027? How will no-disc PS5/6 games be packaged and sold in brick-and-mortar retail stores? What becomes of game sharing in an all-digital era? Will Sony modify its current set-up, which currently allows some sharing of digital games across a pair of consoles, to allow more casual lending? (See for example, Nintendo’s year-old system of letting players lend a digital game to another player in a “family group” for up to 14 days.) Will there be a version of a PS6 with a disc drive? Or will a drive be offered as an add-on? And how will gamers who want to retain access to PS4/PS5 disc-based games react to whichever configurations Sony chooses to offer? What will the final disc-based PlayStation game be?
RFK Jr. wants to make it easier to get peptides. FDA scientists disagree.
The health secretary has advocated for deregulating certain peptides, but FDA scientists point to a lack of data about their safety and effectiveness. Some have not been studied in humans.
Stéphane Dion: The case for unified and effective Canadian science diplomacy
Canada sells well; it opens doors. But it needs effective science diplomacy, based on a unified approach, bringing together governments, embassies, businesses and universities.
'You're so full of it': Gee blasts Seattle's 'performative' homelessness politics as city loses nearly 700 shelter beds
Seattle's homelessness policies fall short, with nearly 700 shelter beds cut, revealing a need for more effective solutions.
Yale New Haven Health CEO O'Connor steps down; acting CEO named
Pam Sutton Wallace has been appointed acting CEO of Yale New Haven Health, effective immediately.
ScottsMiracle-Gro names new CEO as longtime leader exits
The Marysville-based national lawn and garden manufacturer has announced some big leadership changes, effective immediately.
KATALIN KARIKÓ
She was met with resistance, got demoted and eventually forced to leave academia – but Katalin Karikó never lost focus, doubling-down on her work to harness mRNA for new vaccines and therapies. Karikó’s Nobel Prize-awarded discovery enabled the development of effective vaccines against COVID-19, offering protection to millions of people.
Elon Musk shares Armie Hammer comeback film banned in Germany for violent anti-immigrant imagery
Elon Musk shared a link to stream Uwe Boll's 'Citizen Vigilante' in its entirety. The Armie Hammer comeback vehicle was effectively banned from distribution in Germany due to violent anti-immigrant imagery.
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
Career coach recommends 4-hour burnout-proof job application routine
A career coach advises job seekers against spending all day applying to jobs. She says a four-hour routine is burnout-proof and more effective.
The sky is not falling. Americans are getting healthier.
Despite declining obesity and heart disease rates, increasing cancer survival rates, and a record high life expectancy, politicians from both parties are pushing costly and ineffective policies to …
FISU reinforces its commitment to the World University Sports Movement
On the second day of the meeting, the Executive Committee focused on the upcoming Universiades and the future of the FISU Forum. After a first day concentrating on updating statutes and strategies for a simpler, more innovative and effective future, FISU’s Executive Committee focused on upcoming events on this second and last day of their […]
How to use AI in your dating life responsibly and effectively
Whether you love or loathe generative AI chatbots, they’re becoming increasingly involved in the business of romance.
David Glew to Lead Cameron School of Business as Interim Dean
The University of North Carolina Wilmington has selected David Glew to serve as interim dean of the Cameron School of Business, effective July 1.
It's Xbox's turn (again), as console prices keep going up
Microsoft announced a price hike for the Xbox Series consoles today, the third in little over a year. Effective August 1, the Xbox Series S, which launched in 2020 for $300, will cost $500 in the U.S. The Xbox Series X, which launched in 2020 at $500, will go for $800. This follows a round of PlayStation 5 price increases from Sony this spring, and a slow-motion increase for Nintendo’s Switch 2, which will kick in in the U.S. in September. (Mind you, there were also eight video game industry price hikes in six months of 2025). The chart up top shows the sudden ascent of console prices over the past year, a sudden surge in an already unusual hardware generation. Prices had been flat for years, now “up” is the new “flat.” Game console prices used to go down across the length of a console generation, but not this time around. Microsoft’s explanation for the new price hike today: We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and we have spent the last several months working with suppliers on options. Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027. The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles. Unlike phones, computers, speakers, and other consumer devices, consoles are typically not sold at a profit, but instead for less than they cost to make. This is an issue well beyond game consoles. Apple announced price hikes on its computers and tablets today as well. Game File is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe Item 2: Brutal Bungie cuts Bungie laid off “most” of its Destiny development team and some developers who worked on Marathon, the newest game from the struggling Sony-owned studio. A WARN notice issued by Sony to Washington State, where Bungie is based, tallied cuts impacting 292 workers, effective next month. That’s strictly for Bungie/Sony jobs in Washington and wouldn’t account for any elsewhere. The video I clipped below shows the redacted list of Bungie cuts filed to Washington State officials. As you’ll see, I had to scroll for a while… In a note emailed to PlayStation workers and published online, PlayStation game studios chief Hermen Hulst offered the following explanation for these latest cuts at Bungie: This is painful news, especially for talented colleagues whose roles have been eliminated. This decision was made only after extensive discussion and careful consideration, and I want to provide some context on how we arrived here. Over the past several months, together with Bungie leadership, we reviewed the studio’s long-term direction, development priorities, resource needs, and role within our broader portfolio strategy. We explored multiple alternatives before concluding that a reduction was necessary to align the studio’s resources with its current priorities and long-term goals. In 2022, Sony bought Bungie for $3.7 billion. The studio’s marquee game, the multiplayer live service shooter Destiny 2 was losing popularity at the time. Its next game Marathon, released earlier this year, has been well-reviewed but had a slow start. Bungie is renowned for making great shooter games, and Destiny fans have mourned the wind-down of Destiny 2. They’ve also expressed bewilderment over reports that Destiny 3 is not, per Bloomberg, immediately in the cards.
Making Our Own Luck
We are cross-posting a piece that former NIH official Kris Willis wrote for Macroscience. Kris is now the President and Founder of the Woodley Park Institute, for which I’m a board member. Picking winners or hedging bets? Federal science agencies have long wrestled with the question of how to ensure their billions of dollars of grants and contracts result in maximum benefits for Americans. On the surface, it might seem that a goal-oriented, interventionist style of management would be the best policy: prioritize our most pressing problems and distribute funding accordingly.This top-down strategy creates a unique hazard, though: bad choices can send resources in the wrong direction, resulting in slow progress that impedes the delivery of tangible benefits to citizens. Moreover, if decision makers pursue an applied advance when the underlying scientific principles remain poorly understood, they risk costly failures and a loss of support for the research enterprise at large. Examples include Nixon’s 1971 War on Cancer, undertaken on the premise that a cure could be achieved in less than a decade, the drive to build an operational commercial fusion plant by the mid-1990s, and the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease, which failed to produce the effective treatments and prevention strategies promised by 2025. The contrasting laissez-faire approach is to hedge your bets. If the path to an advance is impossible to predict, then the wisest choice might be to distribute funding to as widely as possible. The main risk of this strategy is that spreading funding thinly may limit the resources available to the most promising research, resulting in the same negative outcomes as the interventionist approach: limited support for the most promising topics, slow progress, and delayed returns. In reality, at science agencies like the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, program managers navigate between these two extremes, setting some funds aside to target high-priority areas and using the rest to cover the widest possible range of meritorious proposals. This middle path seems like the most rational way to proceed, but it still requires making choices. How much should be set aside for high priority topics? What should those topics be? How should we define merit? Expert opinion can provide a helpful guide, but leading experts can have remarkably different opinions about what matters and what should be prioritized. Moreover, experts and administrators alike can be risk averse, giving an edge to high-profile, well-established concepts. What’s really needed is a data-driven framework to help guide decision-making, one that doesn’t simply repackage prestige or incumbency. Recognizing breakthroughs years in advance Many breakthroughs fail to attract funding or recognition at the earliest stages of development. Katalin Karikó, for example, spent years struggling to win grants for work on mRNA that would eventually win her and Drew Weissman a Nobel Prize. Similar stories can be told about Jim Allison’s groundbreaking studies leading to the development of cancer immunotherapy, Stan Pruisner’s demonstration that prions can self-replicate without DNA, or Robin Warren and Barry Marshall’s proof that Helicobacter pylori, not stress, causes ulcers. Yet at some point, the scientific community recognizes and responds to transformative breakthroughs like these. How does that change happen? And what if science funders could identify the areas that are on the cusp of a breakthrough? Those questions led my collaborators and me to study how scientists responded to past breakthroughs. Based on patterns in that data, we developed a means of predicting future breakthroughs, using biomedicine as a proof of concept. It’s worth taking a moment to describe how our approach works. Briefly, our prediction process begins by grouping the 18 million or so peer-reviewed papers in PubMed, the authoritative database of biomedical research, into roughly 50,000 unique topics. A small subset of these topics are so widely acclaimed as breakthroughs that they have been recognized with a major prize like a Nobel or a Lasker Award. We theorized that studying the development of these outliers over time, especially before they gained acclaim, was the key to identifying future instances of them. After defining topics, we chose 21 representative breakthroughs and asked what they looked like before they won prestigious prizes. To answer that question, we re-ran our topic-mapping algorithm repeatedly, winding back the clock one year each time, stringing together the years to follow the progress of each field as it grew and advanced. We found that in each case, the years leading up to a discovery followed a pattern: a burst of papers on a new, rapidly evolving topic, many of which quickly became influential. These characteristics—the percent of papers that are new, the percentage of papers that are brought in from other topics, and the influence of each individual paper—can all be measured separately for any given topic. Together, they act as a predictive signal that is detectable an average of five years before a transformative discovery is made, and up to thirty years before the discovery receives a major prize. Scanning the current research landscape for topics that display this signal allows us to predict what work will likely produce a future breakthrough. Each year we analyzed includes four or five signals, a number that appears to have remained constant across a twenty year time frame. In their classic work on the sociology of science, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar established that the desire to participate in a major discovery is an important motivator for scientists as they consider whether they should take up (or abandon) a research problem. Although further work is needed, the simplest explanation for our results is that this behavior is widespread enough to detect at scale. A foundational advance, or something like it, draws the attention of scientists and causes them to change the direction of their research. They vote with their feet, staking their own reputation and careers by publishing on and citing the new idea. That upswell of interest is the foundation of our breakthrough signal. What kind of research does our model identify as a breakthrough? After building a model based on the patterns in our 21 preselected breakthroughs, we tested it by identifying all early signals of discovery from 1994 through 1997. Of the 18 signals we found in that time period, 17 can be traced forward in time to a breakthrough. Examples include super-resolution fluorescence microscopy (see the image above), the directed evolution of proteins and enzymes (Chemistry Nobel, 2018), and sequencing the human genome (National Medal of Science, 2008). The discovery of the role of leptin signaling in obesity is a particularly interesting case study. Around 1950, scientists noticed the existence of a type of lab mouse that suffered from a unique inherited form of obesity. When given the freedom to choose their own diet, these mice ate more than normal and preferred food that was high in fat. Researchers had few clues as to why the animals overate; early experiments pointed to the existence of a soluble ob factor found circulating in the bloodstream that regulated appetite, but its identity was unknown. In 1994, Jeffrey Friedman and colleagues identified and sequenced the ob gene, noting that the protein it encoded appeared to fit the profile of a circulating factor. A year later, a trio of high-profile publications demonstrated that ob was a hormone that regulated body weight and fat deposition by regulating appetite. One of these was co-authored by Friedman, who christened it leptin from the ancient Greek word for thin. Using our model, the data from 1996 make it clear this advance would become a breakthrough. Scientists had flocked to study the biology of the new hormone, generating the flurry of new papers and citations required to produce a signal. One of these demonstrated that serum leptin concentrations reflected the amount of adipose tissue in the human body, providing clinical validation of the earlier mouse studies. Before the identification of leptin, scientists were unable to point to a specific molecule that controlled appetite and adiposity, so that it was impossible to rule out non-physiological causes of obesity; its characterization fundamentally changed our concept of weight gain. In 2010, Friedman and fellow pioneer Douglas Coleman were awarded a Lasker for the discovery. Our work also identifies breakthroughs in clinical practice and behavioral and social sciences, even though these areas are less likely to draw the attention of major prize committees. One example that falls into this category is the introduction of endovascular aneurysm repair, a minimally invasive surgical procedure for the treatment of abdominal aortic aneurysm, a leading cause of death among Americans over the age of 65. Relative to the previous standard of care, it reduces in-hospital mortality by almost four-fold. In 2017, Timothy Chuter received the American College of Surgeons’ prestigious Jacobsen Innovation award for his multiple refinements to the technique. Another under-recognized breakthrough identified by our model is the development of standardized survey instruments to assess the quality of life for HIV+ patients. The antiretroviral cocktails introduced in the mid-1990s reduced AIDS mortality, but treatment came with serious side effects. The new evaluations showed that patients whose disease progressed had worse physical functioning than Americans with other chronic diseases, while those who were asymptomatic maintained a health-related quality of life on par with the overall US population. This evidence made it possible for patients and activists to argue that even in the absence of a total cure, and in spite of the side effects, alleviation of symptoms was a worthwhile priority for clinicians. My colleagues and I have failed to identify any significant recognition for the physicians and health policy experts who pioneered this advance, although in 2016, researchers called for the World Health Organization to set targets for good health-related quality of life as part of its framework to end the AIDS pandemic. From forecasting to funding How should science funders use our predictions? Any serious discussion of what we should do with this new capability needs to begin with an understanding of its limitations. We can’t (and shouldn’t) invest all of our resources in the small number of topics predicted to produce breakthroughs. Innovative new fields are born from existing ones; they rarely arise de novo. If funders don’t maintain a diverse portfolio, the breakthroughs of tomorrow will have no antecedents. Think of this as eating the seed corn, or killing the goose that lays the golden egg. There are also multiple goals of funding beyond basic scientific discovery, including translating discoveries into clinical practice, developing new technologies, supporting economic development, and training new scientists. The investments needed to accomplish these goals are likely different from those required to support emerging breakthroughs. Finally, we must be aware that we may not capture every instance of a breakthrough. The concept is fuzzy, and not every significant discovery is recognized with a major award. Further, breakthroughs are rare, meaning that our dataset is, by necessity, small. This makes formal estimates of accuracy challenging. Although our overall success rate appears to be high, any one signal may turn out to be a false positive. We found one apparent example: the development of the third generation COX-2 inhibitors, Vioxx and Celebrex, which were much celebrated in the early 2000s as effective but non-addictive pain relievers, meets all the algorithmic criteria of a breakthrough. Five years after it received FDA approval, researchers demonstrated that Vioxx was associated with serious cardiovascular complications, and the manufacturer voluntarily pulled the drug from the market. Celebrex remains available, although like other NSAIDs, it carries an FDA warning for increased cardiovascular risk. Decision makers who were overly focused on the breakthrough potential of this research might have wasted substantial resources nurturing an area that ultimately proved to be a failure—but so would those who relied on expert opinion at the time. That said, the potential benefits of funding the next mRNA vaccine or cancer immunotherapy years earlier than we might have are large. When we can’t assume the outcome of an action, it’s worth conducting an experiment. Can targeted support for areas that are poised to produce a breakthrough increase the return on scientific investment without cannibalizing future advances? With the necessary administrative infrastructure in place, conducting this experiment would be straightforward. First, identify all the breakthrough signals between 2018 and 2023, select half at random, and commit to a decade of investment. For biomedicine, a six year window should yield about 30 topics with the potential to produce a breakthrough. Providing strong support to half of these might be accomplished for $300 million a year. That’s roughly half of the recent annual budget of the NIH Common Fund or around 20% of the fiscal year 2025 budget for ARPA-H. After five years, then again at ten, compare to see which group — the one that was actively managed, or the control — produced more breakthroughs, and on what timescale. Although we used biomedicine as an example, the same experiment could just as well be run for physics, materials science, or any other discipline. Any attempt to undertake such an experiment should keep three points top of mind. First, we can predict the topic of future breakthroughs, but the people and vision for how to move the work forward are still important. In practice, this means success requires active program managers with the expertise to develop the science and the authority to do so, including by recruiting investigators. Second, we would be wise to learn from the failures of past attempts to fund transformative research. High among these are funding modestly repackaged work, confusing the genuinely novel with the merely unfamiliar, and relying too much on incumbent investigators. All of these risks can be mitigated by thoroughly and intelligently integrating high quality data into portfolio management. Finally, we need to have patience. Even with strong funding support, producing a breakthrough takes time. If supporting breakthroughs is the best way to nurture the birth of new fields, we also need to accurately describe and properly manage the other two stages, so that we invest wisely throughout the productive lifetime of ideas and divest once they reach the point of diminishing returns. We would benefit from more study of all of these phases, especially the transition from one to another. More research could answer questions like: When does a breakthrough become an established field? How do the availability of funding, the size and characteristics of the available workforce, and the accumulation of evidence that disagrees with prevailing models affect a field’s decline? Exactly how do old ideas give birth to new ones, and can we speed up the process? The more we understand about the dynamics of scientific progress, the better we can maximize the odds that our curiosity leads to results. I’d call that finding a way to make our own luck.
Takeaways: Supreme Court hands Trump massive wins on immigration agenda
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority delivered President Donald Trump a pair of significant affirmations of his immigration policy Thursday, paving the way for the administration to effectively remove more than 1 million people from the US and keep many others from entering in the first place.
UT Health San Antonio identifies the first potential probiotic treatment for lupus
Contact: Steven Lee, (210) 450-3823, lees22@uthscsa.edu Content provided by Claire Kowalick SAN ANTONIO, June 25, 2026 – Scientists at UT Health San Antonio, the academic health center of The University of Texas at San Antonio, found a link between a bacterium in the gut microbiome, or ecosystem, and lupus, which could lead to more effective […]
Fed Rule Effectively Puts Automaker Polestar Out Of Business In The U.S.
Volvo’s upscale electrified division pulls the proverbial plug on future U.S. sales because of its ties to China.
Updated XBOX Console Prices
Effective August 1, 2026, the price of XBOX consoles will be increasing by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models.
FDA-approved drug may finally help immunotherapy defeat rare liver cancer
Researchers found that a rare liver cancer evades immunotherapy by luring immune T cells away from the tumor and trapping them in nearby fibrous tissue. An FDA-approved drug called AMD3100 freed those T cells to attack the cancer, significantly improving the effectiveness of immunotherapy in tumor samples.
Utah State Joins Mountain Pacific Sports Federation as Affiliate Member in Indoor Track & Field
LOGAN, Utah – Utah State has accepted an invitation to join the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation as an affiliate member in men's and women's indoor track & field, it was announced by the conference on Thursday. Utah State's membership in the conference will be effective on July 1.
Federal judge bars Trump from implementing proof of citizenship requirement to vote
The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston effectively converts a preliminary injunction she issued a year ago, in which she temporarily blocked many of Trump’s efforts to overhaul elections, into a permanent ban.
Online violence against women in politics: what shapes political party responses to technology-facilitated gender-based violence?
Political parties have a primary role to play in tackling online violence against women and gender diverse politicians. While the prevalence and impact of TFGBV, such as coordinated disinformation campaigns, deepfake image-based sexual abuse or trolling are well documented, many parties are still building their knowledge on how to respond effectively and have not put in place internal practices and policies that respond to the rapidly evolving, poorly regulated digital ecosystem. About the ReportIn order to promote and protect fair and democratic participation in politics, this ALIGN Report explores what political parties are doing in response to TFGBV and what factors shape their action. The findings, based on existing literature and interviews with gender and politics professionals, indicate there are three sets of factors which donors, civil society and practitioners should consider when designing action to support political parties to respond to TFGBV internally. These are: (1) gender norms; (2) socio-political environment; and (3) internal party factors.Key messagesUnequal gender norms are ubiquitous across politics, shaping expectations of leaders to be strong and assertive, and practices of political parties to uphold masculinist values and sustain cultures of silence. These often lead to weak response to TFGBV against women politicians.The socio-political context can incentivise or disincentivise action, depending on the salience of gender issues, which are increasingly weaponised. Electoral competitiveness, domestic laws (i.e. quota requirements), and even the political system or global normative frameworks influence political will to act.Internal party factors that shape responses will vary across countries and contexts, but include: structures to enforce codes of conduct, policies and reporting mechanisms on (TF)GBV, political ideology, extent of centralisation of leadership, and crucially the meaningful participation of women in decision-making positions, not least through internal women’s wings.Party responses can be seen as a spectrum, with actions falling between active discouragement to address TFGBV to commitment to transform unequal norms and practices within the party.About the ToolkitTogether with the report, this ALIGN toolkit offers gender professionals and others working on democratic strengthening a set of guiding questions and reflection prompts to identify which responses could be most effective and suitable in different contexts. These actions can complement other solutions to TFGBV, such as regulations promoting safety by design. The assessment spans a broad range of factors including: (1) different manifestations of gender norms, (2) the socio-political environment and (3) internal party structures.Key messagesPolitical parties are duty-bound to take action internally to respond to the significant threats posed to women members and candidates, including from their own party colleagues, affiliates and political peers.Existing party approaches to TFGBV can be assessed along a spectrum which ranges from active discouragement and passive acceptance to minimal response and transformative change.To generate effective and context-appropriate solutions to TFGBV, it is important to consider how gender norms shape leadership expectations and internal party practices, while also analysing the impact of the socio-political environment. While actions to support women to stay safe online are very common, codes of conduct and measures to strengthen women’s voice and power in the parties are proposed as most transformative solutions.
Megan McKnight named director of Health Promotion and Wellness at Penn State
Megan McKnight brings extensive experience in health promotion, prevention education and student well-being initiatives to her new role as director of Health Promotion and Wellness at Penn State, effective June 29.
Dean Simon Sheather to retire after transformative tenure at UK Gatton College of Business and Economics
After more than three decades in higher education — and nearly eight years of transformative leadership at the University of Kentucky — Simon Sheather, Ph.D., will retire as dean of the Gatton College of Business and Economics, effective June 26.
12 Things Health Agencies Need to Know About Enterprise AI
Learn how Minnesota's health agency is effectively adopting AI tools for public health work.
Hahn can lead Boise State University, Idaho business into the future
To ensure continued success, we must have effective education institutions with strong leadership at the helm. | Opinion
Harrington chosen as Charlotte's interim mayor
Harrington replaces Vi Lyles, who stepped down as mayor effective June 30 in early May.
National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association et al. v. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. et al.
The National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA) and its member, the Family Health Council of Central Pennsylvania (FHCCP), sued the Trump administration to protect the integrity of the Title X family planning program. Title X is the country’s only dedicated federal program for family planning services. For more than 55 years, the program has provided access to effective contraceptive methods, cancer screenings, testing and treatment for STIs, and other preventive services, with priority given to patients with low incomes.
The Leadership Advantage Hidden Inside Effective Business Plans
Business plans can give entrepreneurs an edge as they launch a business. But you have to write them the right way.
Deepak Adwani Promoted to Executive Director of Miraj Entertainment Ltd.
Miraj Entertainment Ltd. has announced the promotion of Deepak Adwani from Vice President – P&L to Executive Director of Miraj Cinemas, effective immediately. This announcement comes in the wake of the untimely passing of Managing Director Bhuvanesh Mendiratta, and marks the next chapter in Miraj Cinemas’ journey. Adwani brings over two decades of experience in […]
A common vitamin could help fight one of the deadliest brain cancers
A clinical trial is exploring whether high doses of vitamin B3 could give patients with glioblastoma a better chance against the aggressive brain cancer. Scientists found that niacin may help revive immune cells that tumors shut down, allowing them to attack cancer more effectively. Early results have been promising, with patients showing significantly better progression-free survival than expected.
KSU master’s graduates benefit from NIH-funded bridge program
Recent Kennesaw State University graduate April Ford engaged in a program designed to help master’s students in the College of Science and Mathematics gain the experience they needed to pursue doctoral degrees elsewhere. She’ll stand as an example of the Peach State Bridges to the Doctorate program’s effectiveness, having earned her Master of Science in Integrative Biology (MSIB) and acceptance into a Ph.D. program. Ford, Jojo Croffie, and Lindsey Knight all earned their MSIB degrees, and thanks to enrichment through the Peach State Bridges to the Doctorate program, each will start a Ph.D. in the fall.
Business People: More high-level changes at Target
RETAIL Target Corp., Minneapolis, announced it has hired Grant McGee as executive vice president and chief legal and compliance officer, effective May 31, and Jeff England as chief supply chain and logistics officer to accelerate our…
Ezekiel Emanuel: My father lived into his 90s. He understood something many successful men miss
The wellness industry wants you obsessing over biomarkers and supplements. One physician's life offers a simpler—and more effective—blueprint for aging.
Science & Medicine: A San Antonio researcher is studying magnets and money to treat alcohol use disorder
Alcohol use disorder affects millions of Americans, but treatment options remain limited, and relapse is common. A UT Health San Antonio researcher is studying two unconventional approaches that he hopes could one day be combined into a single, more effective treatment.
Ozempic changed obesity treatment, but experts say the real revolution is next
The obesity treatment landscape is changing fast, with GLP-1 drugs opening the door to more effective care than ever before. Experts now envision a future where medications, minimally invasive procedures, surgery, and precision medicine work together to deliver better long-term results.
Apple Explains Why watchOS 27 Drops Support for So Many Models
Apple today detailed why five Apple Watch models will miss out on watchOS 27 and the new Siri AI features that come with it. The Apple Watch Series 6, 7, 8, SE 2, and the original Apple Watch Ultra will not receive watchOS 27, and will only get basic security updates going forward. With the update, Apple is effectively dropping three years' worth of device support in a single software update, which is unprecedented for the product line.
Perceptive Capital Solutions Corp and Freenome Announce Effectiveness of Registration Statement for Proposed Business Combination
/PRNewswire/ -- Perceptive Capital Solutions Corp ("PCSC") (Nasdaq: PCSC), a special purpose acquisition company ("SPAC") sponsored by an affiliate of...
Bayer Welcomes Kacy Perry as New Country Division Head for Crop Science Canada
CALGARY, Alberta, June 18, 2026--The Crop Science division of Bayer announced that Kacy Perry has been appointed the Country Division Head (CDH) for Crop Science Canada, effective July 1. In this role, she will lead 550+ employees working at multiple sites across Canada and serves as a member of Bayer’s North American Leadership Team for Crop Science.
Titan Alum Tam Nguyen to Lead Center for Family Business
President of Advance Beauty College and Cal State Fullerton business alum Tam Nguyen ’05 (MBA) will be the director of the CSUF Center for Family Business, effective July 1. For more than a decade, Nguyen has been involved in the center through teaching, speaking and outreach capacities. Nguyen taught the Family Business Dynamics course from […]
Sullivan to lead basic and preclinical science at Duke School of Medicine
Beth A. Sullivan, PhD, has been appointed vice dean for basic and preclinical science at Duke University School of Medicine, effective July 1, 2026.
More than 11K bottles of blood pressure drug recalled
Certain lots of a popular diuretic have been recalled due to concerns about the drug's effectiveness.
Rumble Announces Realignment into Two Core Business Units and Renames Newly Acquired Cloud And AI-Infrastructure Business “Quake AI”
Post-merger, Rumble Cloud Renamed Quake AI, Integrating Northern Data Offerings Rumble to Remain the Video and Media Platform’s Core Brand Name Corporate Parent to be Renamed RUM Group Inc. and Will Oversee Two Business Units: Rumble and Quake AI LONGBOAT KEY, Fla., June 17, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rumble (NASDAQ: RUM) today introduced a new business unit and legal name for the company following the closing of its acquisition of Northern Data AG (“Northern Data”). Effective June 18, 2026, under
Georgia Republican leaders nix redistricting plans amid pushback
Republican leaders feared the issue would give Democrats an effective issue to campaign on during the midterms.
Chronotherapy considerations in lithium treatment for bipolar disorder
Nature Mental Health - In this Perspective, Ray and colleagues review 50 years of studies on the effectiveness and toxicity of lithium and argue that its effects depend on dosing time. They propose...
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.
Apple plans to change its Hide My Email privacy feature that could make it less effective
In the coming weeks, Apple will move anonymously generated emails addresses to a different domain.
Scientists just found a hidden weakness in forever chemicals
Researchers discovered that hydrogen radicals generated by intense UV light can break down stubborn PFAS “forever chemicals” without added chemicals. The breakthrough reveals a key mechanism that could lead to greener and more effective technologies for permanently destroying these pollutants.
Why Marketing Feels Harder as Your Business Grows by Nathan Tayloe
At some point, most growing businesses hit the same moment. What used to feel straightforward starts to feel more complicated. Marketing takes more effort. Results feel less predictable. What once worked consistently begins delivering mixed outcomes. It is easy to assume something is broken. In many cases, nothing is. The business has simply reached a different stage. What Worked Before Starts to Lose Its Edge Early on, growth is often driven by a few things working well at the same time: Referrals are strong The value of the offering is clear The team is aligned Decisions are made quickly Marketing, in that stage, tends to feel easier because the business itself is easier to understand. As the company grows, that simplicity fades. The audience expands. Services evolve. New people join the team. More channels are added. More decisions are made across more touchpoints. Marketing is no longer communicating one clear story. It is trying to represent a more complex business. Complexity Creates Friction That added complexity does not always show up immediately. It builds over time. Messaging starts to drift. Different parts of the business describe what they do in slightly different ways. The website no longer reflects how the company actually operates. Sales conversations evolve faster than the brand. At the same time, more activity is introduced to try to keep growth moving: New campaigns More content Additional platforms More tools and reporting The volume increases. The clarity does not always keep pace. That is when marketing starts to feel harder. It’s Not a Lack of Effort Most teams respond to this stage by doing more. More output More meetings More adjustments More experimentation That effort is not misplaced. It is often pointed in the wrong direction. When the underlying issue is a lack of alignment, more activity tends to create more noise. Results become harder to interpret. Decisions take longer. Progress feels inconsistent. From the outside, everything looks active. From the inside, it feels less certain. The Real Shift As businesses grow, marketing becomes less about execution and more about alignment. The companies that navigate this transition well tend to refocus on a few fundamentals: A clearly defined audience A strong, consistent position in the market Messaging that reflects how the business actually operates Alignment between leadership, marketing, and sales When those elements are in place, execution becomes more effective again. Marketing does not necessarily become easier, but it becomes more consistent. A Different Kind of Discipline Growth introduces more opportunity, but it also demands more discipline. What worked when the business was smaller often cannot be scaled without adjustment. The systems, messaging, and decision-making that once felt intuitive need to become more intentional. That is not a sign of failure. It is a normal part of growth. Marketing feels harder because the business has become more complex. The solution is not to outwork that complexity. It is to bring clarity to it. The companies that do that well tend to regain momentum quickly. Those who do not often stay busy without seeing the same level of progress. — Learn more about how we help organizations align strategy, brand, and execution. Visit tayloegray.com, or reach out directly at nathan@tayloegray.com.
Period pain: Simple shopping swap for better pain relief, study reveals
Many women are buying less effective pain medication for period cramps, supermarket data suggests.
Is SMIC N+3’s Metal Pitch Smaller than Intel 18A’s?
Almost four years ago, we published that SMIC had started shipping 7 nm (N+1) chips. Now, SMIC is shipping its third-generation 7 nm (N+3) process in Huawei’s Kirin 9030, with a minimum metal pitch of 32.5 nm, about 10% tighter than the 36 nm minimum metal pitch shipping in Intel’s latest Panther Lake CPUs on 18A. The headline is true, but incomplete cherry picked metric. N+3 reaches the density of TSMC N6 through aggressive DUV multi-patterning and design-technology co-optimization (DTCO), but it pays for that in complexity, efficiency and process control. We found this and more in our reverse engineering and teardown where we cover SMIC’s N3 process technology, Huawei’s packaging, memory, architecture, and more. SemiAnalysis has been building a state-of-the-art teardown lab in Oregon capable of analyzing the world’s most advanced and important chips over the last year and half. We have already generated revenue on advanced datacenter chip teardowns including our recent reverse engineering of a major TSMC customer’s COUPE CPO optical engine + EIC 3D stack. This is the first public report from the SemiAnalysis Teardown Engineering & Evaluation Lab, or STEEL for short. The lab is aggressively scaling up and out and we’re excited to announce it publicly. This is a bit of inconvenient timing for TechInsights as they are private equity owned and currently being sold while having enjoyed virtually no credible competition for decades. This has led to TechInsights underinvesting in CAPEX. SemiAnalysis exceeds TechInsights in revenue despite no venture or private equity ownership and being founded only 6 years ago. Because we have no external investors and are founder led, we move faster, build faster, and we can release client chip teardowns for free regularly, while focusing on datacenter for our major clients. Here’s the first public image from our lab, the HiSilicon Kirin 9030 Pro SoC: This report will detail our teardown of the Kirin 9030 and our findings on SMIC’s N+3 process, the most advanced in China. For comparison, we’ll show our teardown of the MediaTek Helio G99, made on TSMC N6. Through this comparison, we can look at the effect of export controls – SMIC N+3 and TSMC N6 are comparable nodes, but one is heavily export-controlled, the other free to use the West’s most advanced equipment. Here we see both China’s progress and constraints. SMIC N+3 reaches TSMC N6-class logic density, but it requires far more aggressive DUV multi-patterning, so it does not match N6 on process maturity or cost. The Kirin 9030 Pro performs similarly to three-year-old Android flagships, and trails far behind the current flagship SoCs from Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Samsung. The efficiency gap is even wider. Export controls have not stopped Huawei and SMIC from shipping advanced silicon, but they have forced a different path. Without EUV, SMIC is leaning harder on DUV multi-patterning, DTCO, and increasingly complex integration. The roadmap continues forward through tighter design rules and backside power, but each step adds cost and process risk. Huawei’s τ scaling and LogicFolding show another path: stacking active logic and recovering density through advanced packaging and system-technology co-optimization (STCO). To understand the Kirin 9030, we must first understand Huawei’s SoC history. HiSilicon is Huawei’s chip design arm, responsible for the Kirin smartphone SoCs, Kunpeng server CPUs, Ascend AI accelerators, and switch/router networking silicon. Before export controls, Huawei was TSMC’s largest customer – the only customer on TSMC’s first EUV node, N7+, and among the first on N5, alongside Apple. That ended in late 2020. Huawei switched to Qualcomm SoCs in its flagship smartphones, though export controls limited them to 4G-only variants. In late 2023, Huawei returned to in-house silicon with the Kirin 9000s, a successor to the Kirin 9000, fabricated on SMIC N+2 instead of TSMC N5. In the following years, they released the Kirin 9010 and 9020 on the same N+2 process. These chips used Huawei’s in-house TaiShan CPU cores and Maleoon GPU. We have not torn down a Kirin 9020 ourselves, so the predecessor die shot is from Kurnal. The die shots show how Huawei spent its silicon budget: which functional blocks are where, and how their areas compare to the predecessor. First, a quick guide to the major blocks on the die. The total die area is nearly identical, but the 9030 uses that area more aggressively. A denser process lets Huawei fit an extra middle CPU core, more GPU and NPU cores, and larger caches into the same footprint. In contrast, the Helio G99 is a much smaller, low-cost SoC, built for budget smartphones rather than a flagship device. While the Kirin 9030 is ~140 mm², the G99 is only ~29 mm², roughly one-fifth the area. The underlying TSMC process technology, however, is directly comparable as a baseline for analyzing SMIC’s. The Kirin 9030 is an evolutionary refresh, not a clean-sheet design. Its CPU, GPU and NPU cores carry over the 9020’s families, and the gains come from three levers: the SMIC N+2-to-N+3 process step, DTCO and floorplan work, and incremental microarchitecture. Area is where the first two show up, and the 9030 scales well here. Performance and efficiency are the harder test. Huawei’s design holds up better than its node would suggest, but the chip still trails, both because N+3 sits behind the leading-edge nodes and because its cores, while competent, remain a few generations behind the newest designs. The new prime core is an incremental update. The main changes are a 10% frequency increase from 2.5 GHz to 2.75 GHz and a doubling in the L2 cache from 1 MiB to 2 MiB. Despite the increased cache, the core size decreased by 7.6%. Excluding the private L2 cache, the core size decreased by 21%. This is a large reduction for an incremental node. Compared with the TaiShan New V120 core in the Kirin 9020, the Kirin 9030’s middle core is almost unchanged architecturally, yet each core shrinks by ~22%. Most of that comes from the move from N+2 to N+3, with layout likely accounting for the rest. Visually, the most noticeable change is the increase from 3 middle cores to 4. There is also a 20% increase in the shared L3 cache of the big cluster. This helps to improve multi-core performance without sacrificing much in terms of area. Even with each core shrinking, the big CPU cluster’s total area is essentially unchanged. The per-core savings went back into an additional middle core and larger caches. The tiny cores shrank less than the prime core (excluding its L2 cache) and less than the middle cores. This is likely because fixed overhead is a larger share on a small core. We cannot resolve any architectural changes from the die shot alone, but the per-clock and efficiency gains shown below point to more than pure process and layout scaling. The area reduction was offset by a doubling of the shared L2 cache from 2 MiB to 4 MiB, leaving the total tiny CPU cluster area slightly larger. Area is the easiest improvement to see from a die shot, but it is only one part of PPA (power, performance, area). For modern logic, power and performance matter just as much, and often more. Since Dennard scaling broke down in the mid-2000s, voltage and frequency have not scaled in step with transistor dimensions, so each node has had to fight harder for gains in performance and efficiency. The starkest comparison is not Kirin 9020 versus Kirin 9030 Pro. Apple’s efficiency cores run circles around Huawei’s prime core. Apple’s low-power core delivers 20% higher integer performance while drawing only 1 W, compared with 4.5 W for Huawei’s prime core. N+3 matches TSMC N6, but N6 is several generations old. Apple and Qualcomm build on N4 and N3P, which are denser and sit on a better voltage-frequency curve, giving them a larger transistor budget and more performance per watt. The 9030’s own cores did improve. The middle and tiny cores gained 17% and 14% in per-clock integer performance over the 9020, with floating-point flat on the middle core and up 11% on the tiny. The tiny core improves cleanly, with performance rising while power falls and efficiency increases by 45% in integer and 24% in floating point. The middle core is mixed: integer performance rises but power rises faster, cutting integer efficiency by 7%, while lower power lifts floating-point efficiency 16%. Per-clock gains at the same or lower frequency are microarchitectural, so the cores are tuned, not just shrunk. Both also failed to hold their rated maximum frequencies, pointing to thermal, power, or stability limits. Per clock, the middle core sits around Arm Cortex-A720 and the tiny core near the Cortex-A520; absolute performance trails because Huawei clocks them much lower. The prime core is roughly Cortex-X2 class per clock, a 2021 design. Apple’s 2020 M1 Firestorm core is still 35% higher per clock and 57% faster in absolute integer performance at a similar 4.5 W. The current leading edge is further ahead again: the Apple M5 P-core is 60% higher per clock and 2.7× faster, the Arm C1 Ultra 45% higher and 2× faster. Matching older high-end cores per clock is a genuine design achievement. What Huawei cannot match is the voltage-frequency curve and transistor budget of leading-edge nodes, which let Apple, Qualcomm and others spend more transistors in the same area on wider cores, larger caches and deeper buffers while running at lower voltage. Huawei’s LogicFolding roadmap is one answer, stacking active logic to recover density and shorten signal paths. We return to it later. The GPU compute units (CUs) changed more visibly than the CPU cores, moving to a more rectangular layout for both the arithmetic logic unit (ALU) clusters and the CU overall. Even with ray-tracing support added, a CU shrank ~28%. However, that shrink is offset by the increase from 4 to 6 CUs and the area outside the CUs grew 33%. Overall, the GPU cluster is larger by ~10%. The GPU is where Huawei makes its biggest gains. The Maleoon 935 is not competitive with current flagships, but it is a large step up from the 920 and reaches older-flagship territory. In 3DMark it is 70% faster in Wild Life Extreme (WLE) and 79% faster in Steel Nomad Light (SNL) than the 920; with 11% higher clocks and 50% more CUs, the ~67% theoretical uplift roughly matches WLE and is beaten by SNL. It edges ahead of the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 in WLE and SNL, and the Dimensity 9200 and Apple A16 in WLE, but stays far behind newer parts: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and Dimensity 9500 are ~2.4–2.6× faster in WLE and ~3.2× faster in SNL. The Maleoon 935 is Huawei’s first GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing; there it lands slightly ahead of the Exynos 2200, and on par with the Apple A16, with current flagships up to 3.7× faster. The Neural Processing Unit (NPU) saw the largest structural changes of any block, moving from a Lite and a Tiny core in the Kirin 9020 to a Lite and two Tiny cores in the Kirin 9030. Both core types also show significant layout changes. This is a reversal in Huawei’s NPU design. The Kirin 9000 5G, its last flagship chip on TSMC N5, used two Lite and one Tiny core. The series of SoCs on SMIC N+2 moved to one Lite and one Tiny core, likely for area savings. With the Kirin 9030, Huawei has shifted back toward a larger multi-core NPU cluster, but with the additional area going to a Tiny core rather than a Lite core. We’re diving deep into the most advanced datacenter and AI hardware hitting the market. To learn more about what’s in the pipeline or to commission a custom teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. Interested in joining us on this ride and think you can be a difference maker? Check out our Careers page. Before diving into the process stack, the package and memory are worth separating from the SoC itself. The Pro variant of the Kirin 9030 carries 12 GB of Samsung DRAM, with two stacks of four dies each. The dies were identified as the K4L2E165YD, a 12 Gb LPDDR5X-9600 device fabricated on Samsung’s 1a node, the fourth generation of its 10 nm-class DRAM after 1x, 1y and 1z. 1a has shipped in volume since 2022, so this is current memory rather than older-node inventory. The 16 GB Pro Max variants we obtained were found with both CXMT and Samsung packages. The CXMT package is marked CXDD7JEDM, with two stacks of four dies, packaged in week 45 of 2025. The inferred die dimensions from X-ray computed tomography (CT) are consistent with a known density of ~0.3 Gib/mm² for the CXMT G4 process, roughly equivalent to other manufacturers’ 1z processes. The Kirin 9030 uses a typical integrated package-on-package (iPoP) stack: multiple DRAM dies in a memory package sit above an organic redistribution layer (RDL) interposer, which sits above the SoC and package substrate. The full package is then mounted to the printed circuit board (PCB) through ball-grid array (BGA) solder bumps. The memory package substrate is a thin bismaleimide-triazine (BT) laminate carrying the LPDDR5X stack. The organic RDL interposer over the SoC routes the PoP signals around the die and carries possible dummy thermal copper pillars. The package substrate, a thicker Ajinomoto Build-up Film (ABF) build-up over a BT core, fans the flip-chip bumps out to BGA pitch and embeds the power planes. The whole stack is organic. The only silicon is the SoC and the LPDDR5X dies; there is no silicon interposer. Keeping it all-organic brings the package’s coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) close to the PCB’s, reducing board-level warpage, and avoids the cost of a silicon interposer the SoC’s bandwidth does not need. In an iPoP stack, the memory package connects to the organic RDL interposer through an array of solder bumps. Underfill fills the gap around those bumps, adding stiffness and protecting the joints from mechanical stress. The Pro and Pro Max variants differ here, which we cover behind the paywall. The die shot and architecture tell us how Huawei allocated its silicon budget. The process tells us what SMIC can manufacture. We use the Helio G99 as the process reference for TSMC N6. Both SMIC N+3 and TSMC N6 are evolutions of previous 7 nm-class nodes. We used targeted TEM cross-sections through logic and memory regions, imaged in both fin-cut and gate-cut directions. Each cross-section caption gives its horizontal field width (HFW), the real width of the imaged area. We start at the transistor fins, then move up through standard cells, local interconnect, and SRAM. SMIC has not overtaken Intel or TSMC. It uses aggressive DUV scaling and DTCO to reach N6-class density, but that density doesn’t translate into comparable performance and efficiency, for two reasons: the node gap to leading-edge nodes, and Huawei’s core designs. Fin Profile One of the most important knobs in a FinFET process is the fin profile: the shape of an individual fin and the channel where current passes from source to drain. The ideal fin is tall, narrow, and nearly vertical. A taller fin increases effective channel width, while a narrower fin improves electrostatic control by thinning the body the gate must control. Push either too far, and the process pays for it: weaker drive current, fragile fins, taper, footing and line-edge variation that hit yield and device variability. The Intel 22 nm, 14 nm, and 10 nm fin cross-sections show how FinFET nodes have improved over time. 22 nm fins were a first-generation structure, relatively short, wide and strongly tapered. The shape limits current density and reduces gate control uniformity across the height of the fin. At 14 nm and 10 nm, Intel pushed the fins taller and narrower while also making the sidewalls more vertical. Rather than shrinking the device, these changes increase the effective channel width per fin and improve electrostatic control. The trade-off is that taller fins at tighter pitches are much more difficult to manufacture. Now, let’s compare the Helio G99 on TSMC N6 with the Kirin 9030 on SMIC N+3. Both processes are in the same class, with fin pitch of 30-32 nm on N+3 and 34 nm in our N6 cross-section. The pitch for N6 is especially interesting as N7’s HD library is generally listed with a 33 nm fin pitch, and N6 did not shrink pitches directly. Its density gains came from DTCO instead of tighter pitches. The 34 nm pitch was stable across our sampled region and serves more as a comparison against the SMIC N+3 we have not investigated further. Pinning down N+3’s fin patterning scheme takes more than one core unit. The CPU cores show a dense ~32 nm pitch, with the pitch between N-P fin pairs alternating between 78 and 88 nm. Logic alone may be consistent with dual-pitch mandrels of 120 and 110 nm, but this is a complex and unusual approach. Combining the pitch from the the 8T SRAM, which has more complex repeat unit, with the CPU core sequence allows us to reverse engineer the patterning steps with more confidence. As both the logic and SRAM should share the same base grid, a single CD mandrel lithography pattern with 128 nm pitch undergoing SAQP produces a die-wide ~32 nm grid (128 nm/4), which supports the pitch sequencing seen in both logic and SRAM cells. In the sampled cross-sections, N+3 shows a taller, narrower, higher-aspect-ratio fin than N6. The measured fin aspect ratio is ~9.5:1 on N+3 versus 7.8:1 on N6. N+3 also shows less top rounding, with an estimated radius of ~2 nm, compared with 2.8 nm on N6. Even though the fin widths differ, the ratio of top rounding to fin width tells the same story, with N+3 at 0.37 and N6 at 0.44. In a geometric sense, lower is better; a perfectly rectangular fin would have no top-rounding penalty. These are single-digit-nanometer features measured from a handful of cuts, so treat the absolute numbers as approximate. The important result is the relative gap: N+3’s fins are consistently taller, narrower and less rounded than N6’s. We’re diving deep into the most advanced datacenter and AI hardware hitting the market. To learn more about what’s in the pipeline or to commission a custom teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. Interested in joining us on this ride and think you can be a difference maker? Check out our Careers page. Standard Cell A standard cell is the basic building block of chip layout: a fixed-height row pairing one NMOS and one PMOS transistor that share a gate, tiled in a grid to build logic blocks. The key dimensions are contacted gate pitch (CGP), cell height (CH), fin count, and the lower-metal routing grid. To measure density, we use the Bohr metric: a weighted average of NAND2 gate area (60%) and scan flip-flop area (40%). This represents a realistic mix of combinational and sequential logic. This metric has its limitations, especially for complex cell layouts like TSMC’s FinFLEX, which alternates cells with different fin counts. Even so, it is the best metric for a pure process-level comparison. Another important measurement is the fin pitch; it refers to the distance between two fins of the same transistor. In a FinFET process, multiple fins are used in each transistor to increase the drive current and thus performance. TSMC N6 ships both a high-density (HD) library with 2 PMOS and 2 NMOS fins per cell, and a high-performance (HP) library with 3 of each. More fins under the shared gate mean more effective channel width. HP cells switch harder at the cost of area. Designers mix the two on a die, primarily spending HP cells on timing-critical paths, and matching their PPA targets. In the Cortex-A55 core of the Helio G99, we found a cell height of 240 nm for the HD cell. MediaTek has used HD cells in the G99 to minimize die size and thus cost. As an SoC for budget smartphones at ~$100, this is essential. By contrast, we found only one library in the Kirin 9030, with 2 NMOS and 2 PMOS fins. This suggests a narrower library strategy than TSMC N6, where both HD and HP libraries are widely used. This likely reflects the smaller customer base and the more constrained domestic design and electronic design automation (EDA) ecosystem. In all three CPU cores of the Kirin 9030, we found cell heights of 228 nm, 5% smaller than on N6. This is also a reduction of 9.5% over SMIC N+2’s cell height of 252 nm. SMIC N+3 and TSMC N6’s HD library both feature a CGP of 57 nm. For SMIC, this is a 9.5% shrink over N+2. In the past, CGP and cell height alone may have been enough to compare transistor density. Now, however, we must consider scaling boosters and DTCO as well. SMIC’s density gain does not come from EUV. It comes from using every available DTCO booster aggressively. First is fin depopulation: reducing the number of NMOS and PMOS fins in each cell. The first FinFET nodes started with 3 or 4 fins for each transistor. SMIC N+3 and TSMC N6 HD both use only 2 fins per transistor, trading drive strength for density. Next is contact over active gate (COAG). By landing the gate contact directly over the active gate, instead of out over the isolation region, the cell height drops. N+3 integrates COAG while N6 does not. Our N+3 gate-cut cross-sections indicate COAG, with the gate contact sitting over the active region, while N6 shows an off-gate contact. Last is single diffusion break (SDB). Diffusion breaks are inserted between cells in the same row to provide electrical isolation, but they also introduce local layout effects (LLE), layout-dependent shifts in electrical characteristics. In the past, a double diffusion break was used, consuming the space of two CGPs. SMIC N+3 and TSMC N6 instead use SDB, saving area but increasing LLE sensitivity. This must be controlled at the process level and accurately modeled in the process design kit (PDK) so that EDA tools can account for it. Overall, SMIC N+3 has a transistor density of 113.4 MTr/mm², slightly above TSMC N6 at 107.7 MTr/mm². Even without EUV, SMIC has achieved density beyond TSMC’s mature N6 node which utilizes EUV. Metal Stack The smallest critical dimension in the teardown is M0; SMIC N+3 uses a 32.5 nm local metal pitch. That is smaller than the 36 nm M0 pitch on Intel 18A in Panther Lake. However, this does not mean that SMIC has a better process than Intel 18A or TSMC N3P. M0 is a local intra-cell routing layer. Its usefulness depends on the full interconnect stack: M1 and M2 pitch, track count, via and line resistance, design rules, mask count, overlay control, and routing flexibility. The 32.5 nm M0 is consistent with self-aligned quadruple patterning (SAQP), whose four-population line-width loading we read coarsely as alternating widths of 21.5 to 24 nm; M1 and M2, at 38 and 40 nm, are consistent with self-aligned double patterning (SADP), a single A/B split. On TSMC N6, M0, M2, and M3 sit at a relaxed ~40 nm and are consistent with SADP-class double patterning, with no need for quadruple patterning. That said, we measure M2 for example at ~43 nm, likely inflated by sparse routing. We do not assign any specific layer to EUV from our cross-sections; the distinction we can draw is double versus quadruple patterning, not lithography wavelength. Transistor-level density in the front-end-of-line (FEOL) sets an upper bound, but the design is ultimately limited by what the interconnect stack can route. The lowest metals are the most important for standard-cell density, but the semi-global and global layers determine how usable that density is at the block and chip level. Two axes are commonly used for chip cross-sections: the fin-cut and the gate-cut. The micrograph above is a fin-cut and shows metals 0 through 3. This axis lets us see the even-numbered metals, with M0 right above the fins. There are two kinds of M0 lines. The first are the power rails; these are wide wires for the VDD and VSS running horizontally at the top and bottom edges of each standard cell. The wide wires measure 55 nm across, more than double the other M0 lines. Their width minimizes resistance and reduces IR drop. The second kind are intra-cell wires, short segments within the cell that connect terminals to M1. These have alternating widths between 21.5 and 24 nm. The M0 pitch is 32.5 nm, a 19% reduction versus N+2 and N6. At this pitch, DUV patterning requires more aggressive multi-patterning, increasing mask count, overlay sensitivity, process complexity and cost. M0 is below what a single DUV-defined spacer (SADP) can resolve, so SMIC cascades a second spacer step (SAQP). The cross-section reflects the cost: the M0 trenches are visibly more re-entrant (narrower at the bottom than the top) than M1 or M2 on the same chip and carry a bright barrier-rich foot where the trench meets the etch-stop layer. That shape is partly the intended damascene profile, as a slightly narrow bottom helps void-free copper fill, but its magnitude at M0 is driven by the tight pitch and the higher trench aspect ratio. Intel 18A supports an M0 pitch of 32 nm, although Panther Lake has only shipped with a looser 36 nm pitch. This is due to Intel’s heavy usage of HP libraries. Among leading-edge nodes, 18A has the loosest M0 pitches due to PowerVia. With power routing moving to the backside, congestion is reduced, and the entire front-side metal stack can be used for signal routing. M2 is the first true inter-cell routing layer. It runs horizontally like M0 but spans across multiple cells to carry block-level signals. The M2 pitch sets the cell’s track height – the number of M2 tracks that fit between the VDD and VSS rails, defining what the library calls a 6-track or 7.5-track cell. This layer is the most important, limiting the routing of entire blocks. SMIC N+3 features a 5.7-track cell. The M2 pitch is 40 nm, a 5% decrease over N+2 and the same as N6. This shrink keeps the pitch at the edge of what is possible with double patterning. Future nodes will need to increase the number of masks for M2 as reducing the number of tracks is much harder due to the limitations in routing. The micrograph above is in the perpendicular direction, the gate-cut, and shows metals 0 through 4. This allows us to see and measure the odd-numbered vertical metal layers. The M1 pitch is 38 nm, 9.5% less than N+2 and 33% less than N6. The M1-to-gate ratio matters because it sets local routing flexibility. N+2 and N+3 use a 3:2 ratio, while N6 uses a 1:1 ratio, explaining the huge differences in M1 pitch. The more M1 lines there are compared with the gates, the more flexibility there is for power and signal crossing within the cell. Routing flexibility enables more complex and better cells. Clean fractional ratios are also preferred as a grid is periodic and improves layouts. The 3:2 ratio gives SMIC more local routing flexibility than a strict 1:1 grid, but it also complicates layout and patterning. This is a DTCO choice, with SMIC increasing process complexity to recover density and routability without EUV. This 3:2 ratio is not very popular in the leading-edge nodes. TSMC has only used it on N7+, the N5 family, and the short-lived N3(B). They have switched back to a 1:1 ratio for N3E. Intel has only used it on the 10 nm/Intel 7 family, with Intel 4, 3 and 18A all using a 1:1 ratio. Samsung is the only one still using a 3:2 ratio at the leading edge, using it in the SF4 and SF3 families. It remains to be seen if SMIC will remain at a 3:2 ratio or move to a 1:1 ratio with its future nodes. The industry is still actively exploring these local-routing ratios. At VLSI 2026, imec will be presenting work on even higher ratios, including a 2:1 scheme that can reduce area by up to 14%. We will be covering the conference in a future newsletter article. Subscribe We’re diving deep into the most advanced datacenter and AI hardware hitting the market. To learn more about what’s in the pipeline or to commission a custom teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. Interested in joining us on this ride and think you can be a difference maker? Check out our Careers page. The final local interconnect layer for N+3 is M3, with a pitch of 44 nm. The M3 pitch is the same as on N+2 and 10% larger than on N6. The semi-global layers carry the majority of block-level signal routing. They have a coarser pitch than the lower local layers. On leading-edge nodes, they are designed to sit at the limit of DUV single patterning. M4 through M11 pitches were found divided between 80–82 nm (M4–M6), 128 nm (M7–M10), and 148 nm (M11). Given limited sampling, it is possible these are divided further in dense routing areas. At the top are two giant metal layers, M12 and M13. These have kept the same pitches as N+2 at 1920 nm and 4600 nm respectively. While the lower layers’ pitches are generally fixed by the process and library, the upper layers vary much more in pitch and count, depending on the design. Even two smartphone SoCs on the same process can have wildly different metal stacks. The Helio G99 carries fewer routing layers, reaching coarse metal pitches of 850 nm by M9, while the larger and higher-performance Kirin 9030 keeps fine pitches until M11. SRAM At the leading edge, SRAM is much more difficult to scale than logic. TSMC’s latest nodes have seen little to no bitcell scaling, while logic still has more DTCO levers to pull. While looking for other logic libraries in the GPU compute units, we stumbled upon the SRAM. The most common type of SRAM has 6 transistors (6T), but this cell had 8 transistors (8T) instead. 8T SRAM adds two transistors to form a dedicated read port. Unlike a 6T cell, where reading disturbs the storage, the decoupled read port removes read-disturb, improving read stability and letting the cell be pushed harder for performance. At first glance, the cut looked like an unusual logic library, with each cell row having 3 fins of one polarity and 5 fins of another. The rows also alternated in orientation. Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) resolved our confusion. The cut had not landed on the GPU logic, but on the SRAM macro beside it. The unusual fin pattern was due to the SRAM library. We return to EDS in the process flow analysis behind the paywall. SRAM libraries are not like traditional logic libraries. Due to the unequal number of PMOS and NMOS transistors, they require specialized rules and layout libraries. They do not need the flexibility of logic libraries, so they are hyper-optimized for one purpose: dense, reliable memory. The SRAM cell we found is a 1:2:2-2:2 cell. This means there is 1 fin per pull-up (PU) PMOS transistor, and 2 fins per pull-down (PD) and pass-gate (PG) NMOS transistor. These 2 PU, 2 PD and 2 PG transistors would usually form a single 6T high-current cell (HCC). An 8T HCC adds a read-pull-down (RPD) and a read-pass-gate (RPG) NMOS transistor, each with two fins. We measured a cell height of 406 nm, which brings the bitcell size to 0.0463 µm². That is a theoretical peak density of 21.6 Mib/mm². We estimate that a 6T HCC would have a cell height of 292 nm and a size of 0.0337 µm². This is ~12% larger than a 6T HCC on Intel 3 and 4. We also estimate the 6T high-density cell (HDC) to have a cell height of 228 nm and a size of 0.0260 µm². This is coincidentally the same as the logic standard-cell height measured earlier. The estimate puts the cell near Samsung 7LPP/5LPP and slightly below TSMC N7/N6. That is a theoretical peak density of 38.5 Mib/mm². 6T HDC is arguably the most important cell as it is used for the largest caches in a chip, the L3 caches and system-level cache (SLC). Both the Kirin 9020 and 9030 have split the SLC into 4 banks to raise total SLC bandwidth. In the Kirin 9030, the SLC increased from 2 MiB to 3 MiB per bank. Correspondingly, the number of arrays within the bank also increased by 50%, from 16 to 24. Each array can store 128 KiB and forms an orderly pattern on the die shot. From the Kirin 9020 to the Kirin 9030, the area of a 128 KiB SLC array decreased from 0.0477 mm² to 0.0392 mm², an 18% shrink. The achieved density is 25.5 Mib/mm², 66% of the theoretical maximum. While the SLC was quite similar across both chips, the L3 has seen some major changes, particularly in terms of its layout. The total capacity also went up from 10 MiB to 12 MiB. Much like the SLC, the L3 is also split into 4 banks. In the Kirin 9020, an L3 bank consisted of 16× 128 KiB arrays and 16× 32 KiB arrays. However, an L3 bank in the Kirin 9030 instead consists of 48× 64 KiB arrays. In the Kirin 9020 L3, a 128 KiB array was 0.0513 mm² and a 32 KiB array was 0.0154 mm². The size of the 128 KiB array is different on the L3 and SLC as the assist circuitry for the two arrays differs depending on their purpose. In the Kirin 9030 L3, a 64 KiB array is 0.0210 mm². Although not a like-for-like comparison, normalized for capacity, it is 18% smaller than the 9020’s 128 KiB L3 array and 31% smaller than its 32 KiB L3 array. The achieved density is slightly lower than the SLC, at 23.8 Mib/mm², 62% of the theoretical maximum. Unlike the L3 and SLC, the prime cores’ private L2 cache uses a 2-bank design. As the prime cores’ L2 is latency-critical, it likely uses 6T HCC instead of 6T HDC. The 9020 has 16 arrays in each bank while the 9030 has 32. Each array has a capacity of 32 KiB. A 32 KiB array in the L2 shrank from 0.0171 mm² to 0.0142 mm², ~17% smaller. The density is 17.6 Mib/mm², ~59% of the theoretical maximum for 6T HCC. SRAM scaled well from N+2 to N+3, shrinking by ~19%, close to the theoretical logic shrink. The caveat is that N+2’s bitcells were unusually large, bigger than comparable 7 nm-class nodes, so part of the gain is catch-up rather than true scaling. With the insights from STEEL’s teardowns, we will be doing a deep dive into SRAM in a future newsletter article. Subscribe Everything above came out of a single STEEL teardown: die annotation, block-level area analysis and TEM cross-sections through logic and SRAM. We’re diving deep into the most advanced datacenter and AI hardware hitting the market. To learn more about what’s in the pipeline or to commission a custom teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. Future Roadmap The same cross-sections that pin down N+3 also show where SMIC can go next. Although N+3 is already close to the practical limits of DUV multi-patterning in several layers, SMIC still has a few scaling levers left. A theoretical N+4 would likely start with cell height. N+3 uses 5 M0 tracks between its power rails. Moving to 4 M0 tracks, as on SMIC N+2 and TSMC N6, could reduce cell height by roughly 15%. The routing grid is only one side of the shrink; the front end also must fit into the smaller cell. One possible FEOL lever is reducing the p-to-n isolation spacing from two diffusion grid units to one. Intel used this scaling booster on Intel 4, and TSMC did so on its N3 family. This path trades layout flexibility for density. Fewer M0 tracks reduce local routing resources, while tighter p-to-n spacing raises integration and design-rule difficulty. M2 is also constrained by the cell height shrink. For SMIC to maintain a ~5.7-track cell, M2 would need to move toward ~35 nm. That would move another layer into SAQP territory. SMIC could also reduce the CGP from 57 nm to 54 nm. Intel reached a similar CGP on Intel 10 nm/Intel 7 without EUV. The local interconnect is also tougher. If SMIC keeps the 3:2 M1-to-gate ratio, M1 would need to shrink to 36 nm and would likely require SAQP as well. If SMIC moves to a 1:1 ratio, M1 could relax to 54 nm, but it would give up routing flexibility. Under this theoretical path, we estimate that SMIC N+4 could reach a cell height of 198 nm and a CGP of 54 nm, implying a Bohr density of 137.8 MTr/mm², on par with TSMC N5 or Samsung SF4. However, the difficulty is cumulative. Each step is individually plausible, but together they make N+4 harder than the transition from N+2 to N+3. It will likely take longer, cost more, and carry less process margin. A theoretical N+5 would require a larger integration shift. One possible path is backside contacts (BSCon), moving power routing and source/drain contacts to the backside, which would reduce front-side routing pressure and enable another reduction in cell height. The front-side metal pitches could relax to reduce the process complexity. M0 would likely relax slightly to ~34 nm, and M2 and M4 pitches could relax further. CGP is unlikely to shrink much further. Even with EUV, 48 nm has been the practical limit for yield and process control. This approach would allow N+5’s cell height to fall to 170 nm and its CGP to 53 nm. This implies a Bohr density of 163.6 MTr/mm², on par with Intel 18A’s HP library. However, this would not make N+5 cost-competitive with the leading edge. It would reach a similar density through a much more expensive route. The integration difficulty rises sharply, with new process flows for backside alignment, wafer thinning, contact reveal, and backside metallization. Past this point, standard density and interconnect scaling become increasingly unattractive. That is where Huawei’s roadmap stops looking like a normal foundry roadmap and starts looking like a packaging roadmap. At ISCAS 2026, Huawei unveiled its tau (τ) scaling law, reframing process scaling in the time domain. τ is the time cost of data movement and processing: switching delays in transistors, RC signal propagation delays in circuits, compute, memory, and networking latency. Outside Huawei’s terminology, this is called system-technology co-optimization. This is Huawei’s answer to its lack of EUV lithography. Without EUV, planar density cannot keep pace with TSMC, Intel, or Samsung. If transistor density cannot shrink further, Huawei’s alternative is to shorten wires, reduce buffering, and stack logic vertically. “LogicFolding”, Huawei’s implementation of this new scaling idea, is, in practice, an aggressive 3D stacking approach. AMD V-Cache places SRAM above or below a CPU die. AMD’s MI350X places active interposer dies (AIDs) underneath accelerator and compute dies (XCDs), with the AIDs handling cache, IO interfaces, the network-on-chip (NoC) and embedded metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitors. With LogicFolding, parts of the same logic block are split across multiple active dies bonded face-to-face at ultra-fine pitch. This allows Huawei to shorten some critical paths and reduce buffer overhead, not merely add cache capacity or offload the IO and interconnect. Shortening wires is where the higher clocks come from. A large share of a modern core’s delay and energy budget goes into driving long interconnects and the repeater buffers along them. LogicFolding distributes a block’s critical-path gates across multiple stacked tiers bonded at a very fine pitch, so the bond interface behaves like an additional metal layer and the longest paths get shorter. That is how Huawei expects to recover frequency and efficiency it cannot get from the process alone. Huawei’s roadmap shows its intent. Prime core frequency is targeted to rise from 2.75 GHz in the Kirin 9030 to roughly 5 GHz by 2031, far beyond what planar scaling alone could deliver. Prime cores with 3.1 and 3.39 GHz clocks are being tested in its labs, although their power consumption is unknown. Beyond that, chips are in the design, simulation or pathfinding phase, meaning the frequencies are targets. However, the direction matters more: LogicFolding also helps with performance, not just density. The catch is that Huawei’s density claim is not directly comparable to foundry densities. A stacked design can report more transistors per package footprint by adding active layers, even if each patterned die remains well behind TSMC or Intel in front-end density. This is how Huawei can claim to reach foundry 14A-equivalent density by 2031. This is not a like-for-like foundry comparison, with Huawei using stacked logic and measuring density per package footprint. On a normalized Bohr-density basis, SMIC N+3 is ~114 MTr/mm², 38% less than Intel 18A’s HD library. Huawei’s 3D roadmap closes the gap by stacking active logic, reaching 215 MTr/mm² by 2030. In 2031, the roadmap density jumps to 295 MTr/mm², implying either a third active layer, partial EUV insertion or aggressive planar DUV scaling. Huawei’s methodology makes other foundries look much denser as well. Applying it to AMD’s MI450X with an N2 top die on an N3P base die yields a theoretical density of 460.2 MTr/mm² in 2026, compared with Huawei’s 295 MTr/mm² in 2031. This Kirin 9030 does not use LogicFolding, remaining in a conventional mobile SoC package. Instead, it forms the baseline for how far Huawei and SMIC can push planar scaling. Future teardowns of Kirin and Ascend chips will show both planar logic density and Huawei’s hybrid bonding solutions. Export controls changed China’s optimization problem rather than ending it. EUV restrictions raised the cost and complexity of leading-edge manufacturing without freezing it. SMIC reaches N6-class logic density through DUV immersion, SAQP and DTCO, while Huawei shifts more of the burden onto architecture, packaging and system-level integration. Future nodes will be tougher. N+3 still had room to tighten local metals and reduce cell height and CGP. Further scaling without EUV leaves fewer levers. More aggressive multi-patterning adds masks and overlay error. SMIC can keep pushing DUV, but each step will get more expensive and less forgiving. The design side is just as critical. Huawei had domestic EDA tools and flows before the Kirin 9030, with the Kirin 9000s, 9010 and 9020 making that clear. Huawei was able to ship multiple consumer SoCs on SMIC N+2 and N+3 while cut off from the Western EDA stack. US export controls restricted EDA tools for advanced chips in 2022 but did not target tools for more mature chips. In 2025, the US government briefly placed much broader restrictions on EDA software from Synopsys, Cadence, and others, before lifting them less than two months later as part of a trade deal tied to rare earths. Huawei has been unable to access those tools because it remains on a US trade blacklist. That forced Huawei, SMIC and Chinese academic institutions to build their own tools and flows. Researchers at Peking University recently announced a prototype EDA tool for Huawei’s LogicFolding architecture, which requires a new flow to handle the multilayer layout and floorplan. This is not the same as replacing the full Synopsys or Cadence stack, but it shows where domestic EDA is headed: toward tighter co-optimization between architecture, process and packaging. These advances are also diffusing into the Chinese ecosystem. SMIC is licensing its N+2 and N+3 processes to HLMC/Hua Hong at the government’s direction rather than by choice. If the same process learning feeds into Ascend accelerators for AI training and inference, the choke point shifts from one named fab to an ecosystem. Alibaba’s T-Head silicon arm and Cambricon, a Chinese AI chip designer that is expected to supply ByteDance, could also be major beneficiaries. Sanctions aimed at SMIC alone become less effective once the manufacturing knowledge has spread to other fabs and design houses. China is not closing the gap with Intel, Samsung and TSMC. The teardown shows the opposite in several places: no EUV, no backside power, higher process complexity, and visible trade-offs. But China is still advancing. If domestic chips become good enough for phones, inference, networking and security-sensitive workloads, they can matter strategically without matching TSMC at the leading edge. Behind the paywall, we show what else STEEL can do, with material and process flow analysis of SMIC N+3, and analysis of the Kirin 9030 package. We’re diving deep into the most advanced datacenter and AI hardware hitting the market. To learn more about what’s in the pipeline, access the full Kirin 9030 and SMIC N+3 analysis or to commission a custom teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com.
Commission to examine how precision approaches improve healthcare effectiveness, cost-efficiency, equity, and scalability worldwide.
Prof. Michèle Ramsay at the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience is one of four co-chairs of the Lancet Commission on Precision Health.
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.
AI can be a ‘secret sauce’ or a way of ‘democratizing mediocrity’—Here’s how business leaders are getting the best of the technology
AI tools can be the most effective and well-designed in the world, but two people can use the same tool and get to vastly different results.
SkyBlue Cinematix Enters Türkiye, Bringing Its Global Content, Brand Integration and Entertainment Ecosystem to One of the World’s Leading Production Hubs
As part of its Türkiye launch, SkyBlue Cinematix has appointed two highly experienced media executives to lead its local operations, effective June 1, 2026.ISTANBUL, Türkiye, June 11, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SkyBlue Cinematix, the entertainment division of SkyBlue Media Group, today announced its official entry into the Turkish market, marking another major milestone in the company’s global expansion strategy. By establishing its presence in one of the world’s most influential television and fi
What Lyndon B. Johnson’s Toothbrushes Show Us About Public Health Today
The most effective public health tools are often small, writes Jean Paul Laurent.
WHO urges targeted action to strengthen emergency workforce capacities for shared health risks across the Asia-Pacific region
At a time when the world is more interconnected than ever, the World Health Organization (WHO) is disseminating a comprehensive regional analysis of shared health risks across Asia and the Pacific, urging Member States to invest in enhancing workforce capacities regionwide to mitigate these risks and ensure health systems are better prepared to anticipate, tackle and withstand a range of crises and shocks. Over 100 delegates from 49 countries and areas in the Asia-Pacific region reviewed results from the regional risk analysis during the WHO-led Asia Pacific Health Security Action Framework (APHSAF) Stakeholders Meeting in Malaysia. Synthesizing insights from 21 strategic risk assessments and more than 800 multisectoral experts, the regional analysis highlighted an urgent imperative: countries must proactively invest in emergency workforce preparedness to navigate a landscape where climate hazards, disease outbreaks and geophysical events increasingly overlap. These complex converging crises create devastating, compounding impacts on health systems and communities – reiterating the need for investing in a fit-for-purpose regional health workforce and multisectoral action.Key findings: an evolving risk landscape More than half of the participating countries ranked flooding, cyclones, dengue and pandemic-potential respiratory pathogens as being of high or very high risk, while antimicrobial resistance, landslides and gastroenteritis remain widespread concerns as well. “Given that 51% – over half – of these assessed hazards are deeply interconnected, isolated health interventions are no longer sufficient,” said Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific. “Extreme weather events like cyclones and floods directly trigger subsequent disease outbreaks, while environmental degradation – driven by sea-level rise, coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion – fuels health risks across the Pacific. Mitigating these cascading risks requires unified, cross-sectoral action linking environmental, agricultural and public health policies to build true regional resilience.” Priority recommendations for action To address critical vulnerabilities, WHO calls on Member States in the Asia-Pacific region to urgently prioritize the following strategic actions: Bridge workforce capacity gaps. Embed and standardize emergency preparedness within academia to promote regional workforce interoperability. Foster multisectoral coordination. Address ad-hoc taskforce responses and fragmented surge support through formalized contingency plans and standard operating procedures that are frequently updated and tested. Secure sustainable financing for emergencies. Overcome systemic barriers to access dedicated funding for both immediate anticipatory actions and long-term emergency preparedness initiatives. Enable emergency-ready primary health care. Embed emergency management into public health workforce readiness planning. Ensure that emergency planning is inclusive. Establish clear pathways for inclusive emergency planning that actively involves communities most at risk and other vulnerable groups. Optimize communication. Update risk communication and community engagement strategies, aligning them with seasonal risk calendars. Elevating workforce readiness to meet regional health risks While the gaps identified are significant, the Asia-Pacific region possesses solid foundational pillars, including dedicated clinicians, laboratory staff, rapid response teams, emergency medical teams and extensive community networks. However, to adequately address the compounding nature of modern crises, the various components of the emergency workforce must collaborate cohesively. True resilience depends entirely on transforming this currently fragmented workforce into a highly trained, interconnected and rapidly deployable asset. To achieve this, WHO is actively advancing regional workforce capacities through the Global Health Emergency Corps initiative. This initiative – supported by the Gates Foundation and the Institute of Philanthropy – seeks to build a seamless network of emergency workforce across borders and sectors, ensuring that when a crisis strikes, a standardized, well-coordinated and trained workforce is immediately ready to respond. “Scaling up emergency workforce readiness is no longer optional,” said Dr Gina Samaan, Regional Emergency Director for WHO in the Western Pacific. “It is the definitive factor that will determine how effectively the Asia-Pacific region safeguards health and protects lives in an increasingly unpredictable future.” ____________________For more information, or to arrange media interviews, contact: Ara Johannes, WHO Western Pacific Health Emergencies Division: johannesa@who.int WHO Western Pacific Communications: wprocom@who.int
Small business optimism falls to lowest level since October 2024
Market Domination host Josh Lipton welcomes NFIB Research Center Executive Director Holly Wade to discuss the latest NFIB Small Business Optimism Index, which fell to its lowest level since October 2024 as inflation concerns continue to weigh on business owners. The decline effectively erases much of the optimism gained following President Trump's return to office.
Extreme heat health alert issued in Chester County amid high temperatures
The alert, effective from June 10 through June 13, marks the first extreme heat health alert issued by the Chester County Health Department in 2026.
What Brands Get Wrong About Sports Sponsorships—and How to Get Them Right
Companies spend billions sponsoring major sporting events, yet many still evaluate success primarily through exposure metrics such as logo visibility and immediate brand recall. New research suggests those measures increasingly misrepresent sponsorship effectiveness because consumers form long-lasting, overlapping associations among brands, events, and competitors within crowded sponsorship ecosystems. Brands generate more enduring value when they focus less on visibility and more on authentic participation, distinctive experiences, and emotional engagement that strengthen trust and meaningful long-term recall.
Business Restructuring Review Vol. 25 No. 3 May-June 2026
In This Issue Texas Bankruptcy Court Adopts Barnet Rule Requiring Foreign Debtor to Have U.S. Assets to Be Eligible for Chapter 15 Relief In In re Siu-Fung Ceramics Holdings Limited, No. 24-33299, 2026 WL 382424 (Bankr. S.D. Tex. Feb. 10, 2026), the court denied petitions for chapter 15 recognition of Hong Kong bankruptcy and liquidation proceedings commenced on behalf of an individual debtor and a group of companies that he owned or controlled. According to the court: (i) the corporate debtors' Hong Kong liquidation proceeding was not eligible for chapter 15 recognition because the attorney retainer upon which such relief was based was not funded until nine months after the chapter 15 petition date; and (ii) the individual debtor's Hong Kong bankruptcy case could not be recognized because the debtor's "center of main interests" on the chapter 15 petition date was not in Hong Kong, and he did not even maintain an "establishment" there. [read more …] Southern District of Texas Clarifies Post-Purdue Course for Consensual Third-Party Releases and Gatekeeping Provisions In In re Container Store Group, Inc., 676 B.R. 356 (S.D. Tex. 2026), appeal filed, No. 26-20166 (5th Cir. Apr. 14, 2026), cross appeal filed, No. 26-20166 (5th Cir. Apr. 24, 2026), the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas addressed consensual third-party releases and gatekeeping provisions in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma L.P., 603 U.S. 204 (2024). Consistent with existing Fifth Circuit precedent, the court confirmed that, in appropriate circumstances, consent for third-party releases may be obtained through a creditor's failure to opt out of granting that consent. But, the court ruled, consent through an opt-out mechanism essentially can never be inferred for creditor classes that stand to receive no recovery under a chapter 11 plan and that are deemed to reject the plan by operation of applicable bankruptcy law. Instead, those classes must affirmatively opt in to any release. The court also narrowed and remanded the bankruptcy court's acceptance of a broad gatekeeping provision, ruling that such provisions must correspond to the restrictions established by Fifth Circuit precedent. [read more …] Delaware Bankruptcy Court: Initial Transferee Need Not Be Defendant in Fraudulent Transfer Avoidance and Recovery Litigation The Bankruptcy Code gives a bankruptcy trustee the power to avoid asset transfers that are either made with the intent to defraud creditors or that are "constructively" fraudulent because an insolvent debtor did not receive adequate value in exchange. The Bankruptcy Code also permits recovery of an avoided transfer from not only the initial recipient, but also from subsequent transferees. Courts disagree over whether a transfer must actually be avoided before the trustee can seek recovery from a subsequent transferee and whether the initial transferee must also be a defendant in the recovery litigation against a subsequent transferee. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware weighed in on this debate in Phillips v. SS Associates LLC (In re ONH AFC CS Investors, LLC), No. 23-10931 (CTG), 2026 WL 312892 (Bankr. D. Del. Feb. 4, 2026). The court adopted the majority view, ruling that the initial transferee need not be a defendant in avoidance and recovery litigation against a subsequent transferee, but that the trustee must establish the elements necessary to avoid the initial transfer as part of the recovery litigation. [read more …] New York Bankruptcy Court Weighs In on Adequate Assurance of Future Performance under Assigned Leases and Chapter 11 Plan Exculpation Provisions In order to assume and assign an executory contract or unexpired lease, a bankruptcy trustee must cure most defaults under the agreement and provide "adequate assurance" of the assignee's future performance. However, the Bankruptcy Code provides no guidance as to the meaning of "adequate assurance" other than with respect to shopping center leases. In In re Broadway Realty I Co. LLC, No. 25-11050, 2026 WL 147505 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. Jan. 19, 2026), the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York examined this issue in connection with a proposed assignment of thousands of residential leases as part of a free-and-clear sale of debtors' properties. The court held that "adequate assurance" does not mean a guarantee of the assignee's future performance, but merely demonstration that the assignee has the ability to satisfy the underlying obligations. The bankruptcy court also ruled that an exculpation provision in the debtors' chapter 11 plan exonerating non-estate fiduciaries from liability for actions taken in connection with the chapter 11 case was unobjectionable, provided it was limited in scope to postpetition conduct and actions taken in connection with implementation of the plan after its effective date. [read more …] Newsworthy Corinne Ball (New York) (Hall of Fame), Bruce Bennett (Los Angeles), Carl E. Black (Cleveland), Jeffrey B. Ellman (Atlanta), Brad B. Erens (Chicago), Gregory M. Gordon (Dallas), Heather Lennox (Cleveland/New York), Joshua M. Mester (Los Angeles), and Kevyn D. Orr (Washington) were included in the 2026 edition of Lawdragon 500 Leading Bankruptcy and Restructuring Lawyers. The Daily Business Review selected Isel M. Perez (Miami) as an "On the Rise" winner for the Florida Legal Awards. The Florida Legal Awards annually recognize those who have made significant contributions to the legal industry in Florida. Dan T. Moss (Washington/New York) was inducted as a Fellow in the 37th Class of the American College of Bankruptcy at its Annual Meeting in March 2026 in San Antonio, Texas. Christine Borries (Munich) was ranked in the practice area Restructuring/Insolvency in the 2026 edition of Chambers Germany. The 2027 edition of The Best Lawyers in Singapore™ recognized Sushma Jobanputra (Singapore) in the practice area Insolvency & Reorganization. The restructuring transaction involving Eissmann Automotive North America, Inc. received the "2025 Turnaround of the Year (Large Company)" at the Turnaround Management Association (Detroit) Annual Awards Reception. T. Daniel Reynolds (Cleveland) and Nick Buchta (Cleveland) represented subsidiaries of Eissmann Group Automotive in connection with the parent company's German insolvency proceedings. Roger Dobson (Sydney) is among 40 Jones Day lawyers recognized by The Best Lawyers in Australia 2027 for his contributions in Banking and Finance Law; Distressed Investing & Debt Trading; Insolvency and Reorganization Law; Litigation. An article written by Corinne Ball (New York) titled "Ard Finance—A Global Enterprise Combining an LME With a Foreign Insolvency Proceeding and Chapter 15" was published in the April 21, 2026, edition of the New York Law Journal. An article written by Alex Sapp (New York) titled "Recent Developments in Section 510—Subordination" was published in the 2025 edition of the Norton Annual Survey on Bankruptcy Law. An article written by Brad B. Erens (Chicago) titled "New York Bankruptcy Court Approves Insider DIP Litigation Financing" was published on April 6, 2026, by Lexis Practical Guidance. An article written by Corinne Ball (New York), Dan T. Moss (Washington/New York), David S. Torborg (Washington), and Isel M. Perez (Miami) titled "New York District Court Affirms Narrow Scope of 'Public Policy Exception' in Chapter 15 Cases" was published on April 6, 2026, by Lexis Practical Guidance. An article written by Jeffrey B. Ellman (Atlanta) titled "Statutory Cap on Lease Rejection Damage Claims in Bankruptcy Applies to Solvent Debtors" was published on April 6, 2026, by Lexis Practical Guidance. An article written by Trisha L. Mowbray (Real Estate; Chicago) and Ryan Sims (Washington) titled "Chapter 11 Plan that Abridged Non-Debtor Lessee's Rights to Remain in Possession After Rejection Unconfirmable as Having Been Proposed in Bad Faith" was published on April 6, 2026, by Lexis Practical Guidance. Lawyer Spotlight: Ben Rosenblum Ben Rosenblum, a partner in the New York Office, represents debtors, creditors, and other parties in out-of-court restructurings and court-supervised proceedings, including chapter 11 cases, municipal bankruptcies, international insolvency matters, and stockbroker liquidations. His experience spans industries such as manufacturing, shipping, mining, aviation, energy, real estate, and telecommunications. Ben's notable debtor representations include Peabody Energy, the City of Detroit, Chrysler LLC, Spansion Japan, and Dana Corporation. Significant creditor representations include General Maritime Corporation, Calpine Corporation, American Home Mortgage, and Murray Energy. He currently represents creditors in Puerto Rico's restructuring. He also has extensive experience advising financial institutions on bankruptcy law as applied to derivatives.
Arlington council renames entertainment district in bid to add the area to statewide network
The change is effective immediately at the local level, but state approval will be needed before the reclassification is official in the eyes of Texas law.
New OMB rule could break science in the United States
The drug that saved your mother. The treatment your doctor recommended. The clinical trial that bought someone you love more time. None of it was inevitable. It required a system built to operate outside politics and sustained over decades, because science doesn’t operate on the timeline of a politician. That system is now under direct threat. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has proposed a new rule to regulate all federal grants, not just science, but housing, education, defense, NASA and everything in between, that would fundamentally change how research is conducted in the United States. There have been a lot of fires in the past 16 months, and if everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. But this is a very big deal. These rules would strip away the independence that has kept science from becoming a political tool. The good news is there’s still something we can all do. How the grant system was designed to work When I was a new faculty member, I was full of millions of ideas, so I sat down and wrote an NIH proposal. I worked on it for months and thought it was so good. Then I sent it to my mentor. It came back covered in comments. Places where my reasoning wasn’t as airtight as I’d thought, methods that could be stronger, gaps in my thinking that I had been too close to the work to see. It stung, as honest feedback always does, but peer review almost always makes the work better. In fact, it’s the backbone of how American science has functioned for generations. At NIH, submitted proposals go to a panel of scientists who have experience in the field. These are the people who can read research methods and spot their weaknesses, who understand when an experiment is designed well and when it isn’t. Applications are scored rigorously, and often only the top 3-20% of proposals receive funding. The people making funding decisions are required to justify them based on these reviews. To be clear: this is not a perfect system, and good science still goes unfunded more often than any of us would like due to limited resources. There is also criticism that peer review may undervalue bold ideas that are risky but could have high payoffs. But the peer review system is nonetheless a meaningful part of the grant selection process. While thoughtful and careful changes could improve the system, the changes being proposed by OMB will not make things better. The rule that could change everything Through this OMB proposal, the system that helps decide what gets funded is being dismantled. There are many troubling elements buried in this proposal, but three provisions stand out in particular. Each would be damaging alone. Together, they would change what kind of science gets done in America, and who it serves. 1. Political appointees would decide which science gets funded, and peer review would be explicitly sidelined or ignored. The guidelines your doctor follows, the standards that determine what’s in your air and water, the drugs that get approved for your family: all of it starts with a funding decision. Right now, that decision is made by scientists who can evaluate whether the work is actually sound and whether it could move the needle forward. Under this proposal, funding decisions could be made by political appointees. The careful, expertise-driven review process that shapes grant funding would be effectively sidelined. That means that a poorly designed study could get funded simply because someone in a political office liked the sound of it, while rigorous, important work doesn’t get funded because it no longer aligns with the administration’s priorities. In other words, critical work that benefits all of us could now be missed just because it has become politically inconvenient. 2. Grants could be canceled at any point, without warning, in the middle of ongoing work. Say your tax dollars have been paying for a cancer study for two years. The grant was awarded for five years, so the team is mid-experiment. There are three additional years’ worth of answers that could change how the disease is treated for hundreds of thousands of people. With this new rule, the federal government could cancel the remaining funding tomorrow, walk away from the commitment it made with your money, and have no legal obligation to finish what it started. This is a huge waste of money. There are rarely other sources of funding for this work, which means the team, the graduate students, postdocs, and research staff who have dedicated years of their careers to this project could lose their jobs. Patients who have contributed their time to studies may not see it turn into useful learnings for others. Every hour of work already completed could result in nothing useful. Science can take decades to get to tangible outcomes. It needs a stable funding system to flourish. 3. Researchers would have a harder time communicating their findings without pre-approval from the federal government. There is a saying from Sir Mark Walport: “Science isn’t finished until it’s communicated.” Science is no use to anyone if it is kept locked away in the labs that produced the data. The proposed rule could make communicating research findings harder in a number of ways: Make it harder for scientists to widely share their findings in scientific journals. Publication costs, including journal fees that allow for broad public access, could not be paid for by federal funds which is often how scientists pay these costs. Restrict researchers from engaging publicly about how their findings should inform policy or public health guidelines. This would restrict scientists from doing the work that transforms years of lab work into decisions that actually affect people’s lives. Make it harder for scientists to attend conferences. Conferences would now need to be approved by the federal agency at the time of grant award. This disadvantages conferences or publications that are not politically aligned. Conferences are a key way in which scientists learn about work happening in their field so they can collaborate and build on each other’s findings. What good is science with a muzzle? The long-term impact These changes could (and hopefully would) be reversed under the next administration. But by then, damage has been done. Once projects are halted or denied funding by political appointees, people leave their science careers for other paths or even leave the country to do their amazing science elsewhere. You cannot pause a scientific study the way you pause a subscription you decided isn’t useful anymore. You cannot freeze a research team that depends on salaries to feed their families, causing a scramble for replacement funding that, in most cases, simply does not exist. When the money stops, everything stops, and all the work in progress and its potential are lost. Despite all of the language about reducing waste, fraud, and abuse, this new proposed rule increases the administrative burden tremendously. Every researcher watching this unfold will make a rational decision: don’t start anything that will take a decade to finish. This includes not building a team around funding that could vanish, or asking the big questions that need patience and stability to answer. The most consequential science, the kind that produces the treatments and the breakthroughs that reach your doctor’s office twenty years from now, is exactly the science that would be abandoned first. This is still a proposal, so we can all do something Some worry this rule is already a done deal. But by law, OMB is required to open a public comment period. Those comments matter because they inform members of Congress, they can be used in litigation, and they create a public record. So here’s what you can do: Submit a public comment. The public comment period on this proposed change is open until July 13. Anyone can submit a comment, and OMB is required to respond to substantial ones. Each comment must be different to count as distinct; identical comments will be counted only once. Comment as an individual, not on behalf of your organization. Here’s a full resource to help you, with useful examples, but in general: Share a story about how science or federal funding has benefitted you or is involved in your work. Are you or someone you loved a cancer survivor? Do you know someone with Alzheimer’s? Have you received NIH/NSF or other federal funding? All of these can be stories you use to highlight why you care. Explain why you’re worried about these proposed changes. You can use the wording found here or in other resources to help you. Ask them to withdraw this proposed rule. Contact your elected representatives. Congress allocates money to federal agencies to spend, and it has oversight of how that process works. You can let your representatives know this proposed change concerns you and ask them to intervene. There are levers they can push that can help at this moment. Let others know why federal funding matters. This isn’t just about science, but ALL federal grants, including for education systems, defense projects, and more. The process, including the importance of federal funding, is invisible to many. We can all make it more visible by sharing how science benefits us and why we value it. You can also share this article, or any of the resources linked here, to help spread awareness! Bottom line We are quickly losing ground in scientific research in the U.S. More changes, like the proposed rule by OMB, would decimate our ability to conduct research here, leaving us all worse off: fewer treatments for pancreatic cancer, less research on pollution impacts, fewer answers for patients with rare disease, and more unaddressed health needs. The impact will be very real for all of us, regardless of where we stand politically. Using our voices for science is more important than ever. Love, LM Big thanks to Dr. Megan Ranney for reading this over and providing brilliant insights, as always. Dr. Liz Marnik, PhD, is Executive Director of The Evidence Collective at YLE and a science communicator and immunologist working at the intersection of public trust, science, and public health. You can find her on Substack, LinkedIn, Instagram and Threads. Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) comprises a team of experts, ranging from physicians to immunologists to epidemiologists to nutritionists, working together with one goal: to “Translate” ever-evolving public health science so that people are well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions. The YLE suite of newsletters reaches over 475,000 people across more than 132 countries. This newsletter is free to everyone, thanks to the generous support of fellow YLE community members. To support the effort, subscribe or upgrade below: Subscribe
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