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Measure C renewal takes wild turns in Fresno. Here’s a recap of the political mess
A recap of a wild four weeks in Fresno politics over a transportation tax plan.
The Senate eked out a summer break. But bigger fights are coming
The Senate went out with a bang, ‒ passing a government funding bill, confirming Todd Blanche and bucking a voter ID measure.
No political saviors: The Tennessee primary election cycle and the politics of maturity
Rep. Justin J. Pearson had nearly every objective measure for political success in his Democratic primary for the 9th Congressional District.
Google quietly discontinues its Earth AI feature a day after its rollout after users made no-no images
Google’s “Nano Banana” AI allowed users to generate any images they wanted from Google Earth—and Google didn’t measure the consequences.
Google quietly discontinues its Earth AI feature a day after its rollout after users made no-no images
Google’s “Nano Banana” AI allowed users to generate any images they wanted from Google Earth—and Google didn’t measure the consequences.
Health of Portland must be measured by its residents
Neither visitors nor developers are going to contribute to our quality of life.
Federal Rule of Evidence 702 Could Help End Junk Science in Courtrooms
Following the exoneration of Jimmie "Chris" Duncan, legal experts have urged states to adopt Federal Rule of Evidence 702 standards, a measure intended to prevent wrongful convictions stemming from unreliable forensic testimony, commonly termed "junk science."
EXCLUSIVE: Oversight Project sues to block Maryland Democrats’ redistricting measure backed by Gov Moore
A redistricting lawsuit alleges Maryland officials missed mandatory deadlines for HB 2100 and used a last-minute clause to bypass certification rules.
First rule of politics: Make no enemies
Politics is often described as the art of winning. History suggests otherwise. The greatest political leaders understood that success is not measured merely by defeating opponents but by preserving relationships. Elections are won through competition. Governments are sustained through coalition. That is why the first rule of politics is remarkably simple: Make no unnecessary enemies. […]
Wearable fingertip sensor identifies physical patterns linked to stress and anxiety
Researchers have shown that measurements taken from a person's fingertip could help identify physical patterns associated with stress, anxiety and depression. The international study, involving experts ...
Supporters of a bipartisan bill say America’s biotechnology future depends on measurement science
I think the success will be that there are uniform standards that could be used by AI, by international scientists," said Congresswoman April McClain Delaney.
Reimagining Rural Maternal and Child Health
Rural Health Transformation Program Insights (Download) Maternal and child health (MCH) outcomes continue to raise national concern despite ongoing targeted initiatives, community-based interventions, and executive measures aimed at improving population health and saving lives. Although maternal mortality rates have decreased in recent years, the United States has seen maternal deaths well above global rates compared […]
Ebola in DR Congo: River boat under quarantine after five deaths
The health minister says all the passengers are being screened as a precautionary measure.
US Stand Up for Science movement expands to Europe
A grassroots movement by scientists in the US pushing back against threats to academic freedom is setting up a Swiss outpost to take the movement global. Stand Up for Science started in February 2025 to protest against politically-motivated grant cancellations by the Trump administration. Since then, it has organised numerous rallies by scientists and turned into a broader campaigning organisation, supporting “pro-science” political candidates and attempting to impeach Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary the group accuses of advancing “quack” science. Now, Stand Up for Science is establishing a Swiss office to take some of its campaigning beyond the US, and its leader is urging European academics to organise similar pro-science groups in case they face similar threats in Europe. There will likely be “spillover” to Europe from what the Trump administration is attempting in the US, said Colette Delawalla, chief executive of Stand Up for Science, who last month returned from a tour of Europe. “Are we going to see a Trump-style scientific [. . .] take over in the same way?” she asked.Delawalla, who is doing a PhD in clinical psychology, said she was driven to help found the organisation after the Trump administration started cancelling health research grants in politically taboo topics, such as transgender people, diversity and HIV, in early 2025. Since then, the administration has introduced several other measures that infringe academic and institutional autonomy.It threatened to cut Harvard University’s federal funding unless the university accepted a “critical mass” of new faculty and students to create “viewpoint diversity.” And this year, it proposed explosive new rules that would allow political appointees at research funders to screen grants to make sure they “advance the president's policy priorities.”US scientists have been at times stunned by the volume of announcements, and the country’s researchers were relatively unprepared. “We sit in front of the fire hose every day,” said Delawalla. For this reason, European scientists need to prepare now for similar assaults. “If you've got a little bit of extra time to start thinking through, and making those preparations and building community and solidarity,” then European researchers will “start five steps ahead of where we were.” She plans to return to Paris in September to share experiences with concerned French academics. Is Le Pen the same?During her European tour, Delawalla said that French academics were beginning to worry about a National Rally (RN) victory in presidential elections next year. She said there were “chilling similarities” between Trump and Marine Le Pen, the RN’s likely candidate. However, so far, the RN hasn’t proposed anything nearly as radical as the Trump administration has carried out. Its current manifesto is all but silent on university and research policy. Le Pen’s 2022 manifesto bemoaned a lack of French R&D spending, including in fundamental research, and promised to modernise labs and strip away grant bureaucracy. The party’s 2024 European election manifesto explicitly supported the Erasmus+ student exchange programme, scientific exchange and joint European technology projects. However, a Le Pen victory next year could see France drastically cut its contribution to the EU, which would hit the budget for science and innovation. Meanwhile, more restrictive immigration policies could hit university recruitment of faculty and students. Climate science denial?As heatwaves and wildfires have ravaged France, the RN has sought to distance itself from previous comments casting doubt on climate science.In the UK, the radical-right party Reform UK, now second in the polls, denied climate research in a draft of its 2024 election manifesto, but its leader, Nigel Farage, then appeared to quietly U-turn and said he was “not arguing the science.” By contrast, Trump has repeatedly and explicitly denied climate change science, in 2025 calling it “the greatest con job.” Like the RN, Reform UK has been light on research and university policy. However, it did say in its 2024 manifesto that universities should suffer “heavy financial penalties” for allowing “political bias or cancel culture” on campus, building on laws brought in by a previous Conservative government. Ahead of September state elections in Saxony-Anhalt in Germany, the poll-leading Alternative for Germany has proposed abolishing gender studies and postcolonial studies, and promised money for “critical” climate research and studies of Islam. Starts with rhetoricEven if European radical right parties aren’t currently planning the draconian policy measures of the Trump administration, Delawalla said that academics should not be complacent, and fight even small funding restrictions or anti-science talk from the start. “It starts off with sowing distrust about institutions,” she said. “It starts off with these small things, and then all of a sudden it's there.” There are other, more established science and university advocacy groups in the US aside from Stand Up for Science. But the group stands out because of Delawalla’s refusal to attempt to appear politically bipartisan or conciliatory. “I firmly believe that the US is experiencing fascism,” she said. “We’re not trying to win over the super Maga people,” she said, “and we never have been.” The lesson of the US is that even if universities or other institutions capitulate to government demands, this doesn’t save them from cuts and restrictions. “It doesn’t matter what people do,” she said. Global “pseudoscience”Another aim of Stand Up for Science’s push into Europe is to better coordinate a campaign to protect people in poorer countries from what the group describes as “pseudoscientific exploitation,” trials outside the US used to build a case against things like vaccines. Earlier this year, the group sent an investigator to Guinea-Bissau to investigate a controversial, Danish-run Hepatitis B vaccine project funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The study would have withheld a proven vaccine from newborns, Stand Up for Science argued in a briefing it presented to Congress, risking their health. Significantly, the research group based in Guinea-Bissau, known as Bandim, focuses on the “non-specific effects” of vaccines: impacts on health beyond preventing the target disease. Related articlesEuropean researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationData corner: which fields of health science is the US curbing? The US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to know The suspicion is that the study was funded as part of an attempt to shop around for results that could help build a case against vaccines in the US, said Delawalla. “This is just code for vaccines cause autism,” she said.Bandim has put out a rebuttal of Stand Up for Science’s criticisms, arguing its work has uncovered a number of vaccine side effects, both positive and negative, which need to be taken into account in public health. However, Congressional Democrats took up the Stand Up for Science cause, and in February, Guinea-Bissau said it had permanently halted the study. WatchdogBut for Delawalla, this is not the end of the fight. Kennedy has made a number of health claims that scientists think lack evidence, such as the idea that seed oils cause inflammation, for example. Delawalla worries that more studies could be launched in poorer countries to fish around for evidence to support this agenda. Stand Up for Science is talking to African science organisations to create a kind of “watchdog” to scrutinise any further trials. “Outsourcing the investigation to some of the most vulnerable children in the world who are desperate [. . .] is fundamentally wrong,” she said.
Digital Science launches Altmetric MCP
Launch is intended to help organisations move beyond traditional citation-based measures of research impact
Pa. House Democrats introduce measure to bar corporations from political contributions
A new legislative proposal would bar corporations from contributing to political campaigns in Pennsylvania.
Sanofi suspends chronic lung disease phase 2 study, tied to ‘strategic business reasons’
Sanofi halted a phase 2 trial testing a monoclonal antibody, SAR445399, in non-cystic fibrosis bronchiectasis, Fierce Biotech has learned. The trial, which began only back in April, was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study to measure the reduction in mucus plug score following treatment with SAR445399 compared with placebo in adults aged 18 to 80 years with NCFB, a chronic lung disease. The trial was officially reported as halted on July 29, the day before Sanofi’s second-quarter earnings call. The decision to pause the trial was made “as part of a company-wide portfolio review for strategic business reasons,” and not due to safety concerns, a Sanofi spokesperson told Fierce. The move to pause the NCFB trial comes during a trying time for Sanofi following a year filled with a series of trial fails. In February, the French pharma ousted CEO Paul Hudson and appointed Merck KGaA leader Belén Garijo, M.D., Ph.D., to steer the ship. Since then, Garijo has been doing a deep dive on correcting the company’s strewn R&D and clinical strategies. On July 24, Sanofi scrapped amlitelimab for atopic dermatitis, despite its lore as being a potential $5 billion blockbuster. During its second-quarter report, the company abandoned two more assets, balinatunfib and itepekimab, following failed trial results in psoriasis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, respectively. SAR445399, only first revealed by Sanofi in 2023, is an anti-interleukin-1 receptor 3 monoclonal antibody developed to block the interleukin 1, 33, and 36 cytokine pathways. These pathways can be important in chronic immune-related dermatologic diseases, such as atopic dermatitis and hidradenitis suppurativa, as well as respiratory conditions, such as NCFB. Related Sanofi’s new CEO ‘looking deeply’ at late-stage pipeline as clinical clearout continues NCFB affects roughly half a million people in the U.S., with a global incidence of greater than one million cases. In August 2025, Insmed received FDA approval for Brinsupri, a DPP1 inhibitor targeting neutrophil activation, for treatment of NCFB in adults and kids ages 12 and older. The British biotech Infex Therapeutics showed promising NCFB phase 2a data using their monoclonal antibody, INFEX702, which acts by disabling Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacteria known to be a major pathogen of NCFB. Sanofi is currently running a separate phase 2 study testing SAR445399 as a potential treatment for the inflammatory skin condition hidradenitis suppurativa.
Chartbook 464 The"China squeeze" - the politics of development counterfactuals.
There are three types of China shock discourse. Each has a distinct temporal register. China shock 1.0 was a phrase coined by US academics in the 2010s to retrospectively summarize the impact on particular US labour markets, which they identified through painstaking empirical investigation. China shock 2.0 on everyone’s lips in Europe in the mid 2020s is an alarm raised by trans-Atlantic policy thinkers warning of a coming disaster which they project onto Europe’s ailing car industry. The third type of China shock discourse - commonly known as the “China squeeze” launched most recently by Indian economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in the pages of Foreign Affairs - mobilizes a different, more speculative temporal register: the counterfactual realm of alternate history. The China squeeze argument asks not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what might have been. Specifically, what options for economic development might have been open to Global South economies like India or the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, had it not been for China’s spectacular industrialization since the late 1990s and the persistent competitiveness of China’s manufacture in low-skilled segments. Chatterjee and Subramanian’s argument is that whilst China has built a powerful position in electrical machinery and other high-skill manufacturing, which is now delivering China Shock 2.0, it also continues to run a trade surplus in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing. This surplus is large and has remained largely unchanged in fifteen years. Indeed, in the 2010s, in trade with low-income countries, China’s surplus rapidly increased. On their reading, this squeezes low-income producers in low-skill sectors in which they “should” be able to compete. Source: “China’s Mercantilist Squeeze on Developing Countries” Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. Peterson Institute for International Economics 26-7 May 2026 Chatterjee and Subramanian’s wording is telling: (emphasis mine) The canonical trajectory of economic development in the post-World War II period is for countries to transition from agriculture to manufacturing, first in low-skilled manufacturing and then later on to high-skill manufacturing (Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2013). At the global level, this implies that high-income countries (HICs) that once specialized in low-skilled activities cede manufacturing export space to poorer countries that come along to occupy that space. In 1965, advanced economies accounted for about 60 percent of global value-added exports in four key low-skilled manufacturing sectors, i.e., apparel, leather, textiles, and footwear. Over time this share declined and began to be occupied first by the East Asian tigers and, beginning in the late 1990s, by China. Today China accounts for about 50 percent of the global market. The question is whether China, with its rising prosperity, is continuing to behave like its richer counterparts and ceding export space to poorer followers or to behave unlike them and continuing to occupy space. In terms of the conceptual maneuvers it performs, of the three China shock discourses, the “China squeeze” argument is by far the most ambitious. After all, it bases its critique of China on a counterfactual imagining of the world. Like any counterfactual argument, to construct this alternative reality it must rely on a heuristic model. To make their argument Chatterjee and Subramanian mobilize two key claims. The first reference point is the actual history of rich-country industrialization, what they refer to as the “canonical path”. The idea is that countries transition from agriculture to light industry and low-skilled manufacturing and from there up the value chain. To make this useful as a standard of comparison and a means to construct a normative standard, they adjust sectoral export shares for two factors: 1. the underlying level of economic development of the exporting country, as measured by national income and 2. the degree to which the sector in question is internationalized. The idea being that for a high income country to have a high export share in low-skill sectors is anomalous and even more so if that particular product is highly internationalized and thus suitable for being “conceded” to lower-income competitors. Where should this process end? Here Chatterjee and Subramanian introduce their second benchmark. Their normative idea of a global development path is one in which, in due course, low-skill manufacturing exports are distributed in proportion to a country’s share in the global labour force. They imagine, in other words, a world of proportional, polycentric global development without much national specialization in low-skill manufacturing. A useful benchmark is that, in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, a country’s share of world exports should be broadly commensurate with its share of the world’s low-skilled labor endowment. … In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, this would be true if value added per worker and export propensities, i.e., fraction of output that is exported, are the same across countries. It is this pleasant liberal vista of orderly global development, progressing towards a general distribution of low-skilled manufacturing against which they judge reality and conclude that the low-income countries are suffering a “China squeeze”. China is not exiting low-skill sectors fast enough Allowing for its gdp level and the degree of globalization, China’s share of low-skill manufacturing exports is far higher than it “should” be. Relative to population, its low-skill share of exports is far too high. That in turn yields the conclusion that huge numbers of jobs - the authors suggest tens of millions - are being hoarded by China. For the four sectors captured in figure 4, this excess in value-added exports is $110 billion in 2022. For all low-skilled sectors overall captured in appendix figure D.1, excess value-added exports amount to $365 billion. The crowding out of LMIC exports by China is therefore substantial. Both these claims have in common that they are strong structuralisms. The first is that development paths ought to resemble each other. The second is that broadly speaking as far as low-skilled manufacturing is concerned, all countries are alike. If the world currently diverges from the distribution of trade implied by these assumptions, if China is not following the advanced economy path and has huge exports, this must be the result of “policy”, which the authors then put in question as illegitimate or unfair. Thus the naturalistic construction of a canonical path leading to a “level” distribution of low-skilled manufacturing reveals itself to be a polemical tool. From the point of view of China shock polemics, this discourse is no doubt welcome. But as an account of economic history, it must surely be regarded as nothing short of bamboozling. Development paths do not follow a regular, natural sequence. As David Fishman put it aptly, “development is not a queue”. They are always and everywhere, through and through political. Development is not so much a process, as a project. Each such project is more or less well adjusted to its context. As Gerschenkron taught uneven and combined development implies differentiation rather than simple imitation on a single parth. It may be true that Europe and the US exited relatively early from low-skill work. But clearly technology has changed. As C&S themselves point out, China no longer enjoys a low wage environment. Do they really believe that such huge differences can be accounted for either by industrial policy, which as they admit does not operate powerfully in low-skill sectors, or by exchange rate manipulation? What is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining the persistence of “low-skill” manufacturing in China are surely the network effects of complex supply chains. Indeed the label of “low-skill” may miss the point. The degree of globalization which Chatterjee and Subramanian decide to conjure away in their model of the development path - to allow for the fact that Europe and American textiles exporters did not enjoy just-in-time logistics in the 1950s - obscures the point that the networks through which Chinese factories supply the world are themselves key parts of the low-skill industrialization project. China isn’t knocking out 1970s style “cheap”. It has redefined the entire product cycle. C&S’s casual reference to “T-shirts” is telling. In today’s “fast fashion”, there is weight on both terms. Fashion and fast. China’s success in delivering on both at unprecedentedly high speed and at unprecedentedly low cost, isn’t a low-skill operation at all. If we see development trajectories not as the serial repetition of the same, but as distinctive, crafted projects that cumulate in complex agglomerations of skill, technology and labor, then this explains why the assumption that low-skilled manufacturing should follow the distribution of population flies in the face of all experience. As countless cases attest, low-wage, low-income developed economies are not by themselves the makings of a competitive production base. As Leon Liao puts it quite fairly: “International trade has never been allocated according to population. A country’s population gives it no natural claim to an equivalent share of global exports." And the remarkable fact is that Subramanian alone and with co-authors has long been making this point, not to pillory China, as is the case of the tendentious _Foreign Affair_s and Peterson pieces, but to highlight the great counterpart to China’s industrial success, namely India’s relative failure. The much-quoted Foreign Affairs piece showed low-skill export shares only for China, not for India. If you put both countries in the picture as Chaterjee and Subramanian have done on other occasions, the picture looks like this. China is far above the line, but India, almost as large in terms of population, is no less anomalous, just in the opposite direction. As far as global populations are concerned, and the imagining of tens of millions of “squeezed” jobs, it is this Sino-Indian pair that account for a huge share of the action. What this graph reveals is not China’s cheating, but India’s “greatest development failure”, at least this is the argument made Arvind Subramanian, this time in co-authorship with Devesh Kapur, in their major book, A Sixth of Humanity. Independent India’s Development Odyssey which appeared with Oxford University Press earlier this year. In this highly critical work on India’s development, China is repeatedly evoked, not to criticize but as a benchmark against which to illuminate what India’s political economy has not delivered i.e. large-scale formal employment for hundreds of millions of citizens. Kapur and Subramanian leave no doubt, if you want to understand why China, not India was the main driver of manufacturing globalization from the 1980s, don’t look to slots opening up in the division of labour thanks to the liberal mindedness of advanced economies, look to the contrasting political economy of the Maoist PRC and India’s post-independence political economy. As Kapur and Subramian note: The great divergence between China and India did not begin in 1978 with the Deng reforms—it was well underway by then. In one of the great ironies of modern history, the conditions created by Maoism turned out to be a great launching pad for industrial globalization. As the comparison of India and China in 1980 makes clear, to imagine manufacturing would be equally distributed when populations are so differently endowed in terms of educational and nutritional is fanciful. Here is the data from Kapur and Subramanian, data which I explored back at the very beginning of Chartbook. As Kapur and Subramanian insist, the striking fact is that even as India’s growth accelerated from the 1980s, structural change has not. Formal employment in India lags woefully behind. Why? As Kapur and Subramanian note, the path-dependent impact of India’s poor early start was devastating. The list of factors they mention is long and weighty: We argue for a new five-fold explanation applicable at different stages of Indian history: in the initial stages, the legacy of two key pre-1980s policies, the neglect of agriculture and the strangling of the domestic private sector, were critical. The failure of broad-based agricultural growth militated against rural industrialization, which would have been devoted to satisfying local needs that would have necessarily been labour intensive. Then, when the boom came after 1980, the thicket of regulation and broader labour protections that were legislated prematurely in a nascent democracy, underpinned by a deep ideological aversion to private capital in general and big capital specifically, became a barrier to attaining the size that would be necessary to compete globally. Similarly, the reforms after 1991, while wide-ranging, did not quite encompass non-tradeable inputs critical to manufacturing, namely, land, logistics infrastructure and power. A combination of low investment (logistics infrastructure), regulation (land) and the continued monopoly supply by state governments (power), combined with residual socialism, kept costs at 75–100 per cent above efficient supply. These factors were compounded on the supply side by the government, which dominated the formal labour market and established exorbitantly high wages at the lower end of the skill spectrum. This made their employment in the labour-intensive sector by the private sector less attractive. Finally, when the services sector and its exports boomed, wages soared even further via a Dutch Disease effect: one successful tradeable sector killed and cannibalized another less-skilled tradable sector, namely, manufacturing. Thus, scarcity-inducing policies of the planning era, precocious democracy and a Gandhian aversion to size; inefficient, monopolistic supply of critical non-tradable inputs; the behemoth of government; and super-successful skill-intensive services successively undermined India’s unskilled labour employment opportunities. The employment failure seems to have been over-determined. … Less quantifiable but no less important are some of the sociological factors that have undermined manufacturing and factory jobs. Take the impact of the success of the IT sector—located in urban areas with better working conditions, such as air-conditioned offices, good schools for children and attractive entertainment options. It became a more attractive place for engineering and management graduates to flock to. … Consider manufacturing and female employment. Indian society makes it difficult for women to work, reflected in India’s unusually low female labour force participation (elaborated in Chapter XIII). Indian society, in particular the routine harassment of women in public spaces, makes it even more difficult for them to travel long distances to take up work.37 Combined with onerous regulations on creating hostels and dormitories for women—which, in turn, prevents multiple shifts of operation—factories need to be located in areas with a large female labour pool. While firms can take apparel plants to female labour or bring them to the plants by building large-scale dormitories, this raises costs. If there was a case for subsidies to encourage labour-intensive manufacturing, housing subsidies to build dormitories for women workers would be a good place to start. All of this meant, that when opportunities did open up, in part thanks to adjustments in China, India was in no position to take advantage. Here is the account of the 2020s from Kapur and Subramanian. It stands in dizzying contrast to the one-sided, “China squeeze” argument delivered in the Peterson and Foreign Affairs pieces: In 2022, for example, India’s share of global exports in clothing (the canonical labour-intensive sector) was 3.1 per cent compared to 32 per cent for China. This is extremely disappointing because China started vacating export space in this sector after the Global Financial Crisis as its wages started rising; it then vacated further space in the aftermath of geopolitical developments that led investors to seek alternative investment locations. Between its peak and today, China lost about 7.5 percentage points of global export share (worth about $43 billion in 2022); over this period, India’s export share remained stagnant at 3 per cent, while that of Vietnam and Bangladesh rose by 3.5 to 4 percentage points. China’s loss did not translate into any gain for India in terms of low-skill exports and employment. Put differently, when the conditions for dynamism and prosperity were established after 1991, and even more tantalizingly when the global export opportunities opened up, it was as if India was a high-wage economy and only skilled labour could benefit from the dynamism. It had converted its physically abundant unskilled workforce into an economically expensive resource, penalizing its use. It is not my mission here to argue for or against Kapur and Subramanian’s interpretation of India’s development trajectory. The point in this context is simply that the “China squeeze” such as it is can only be understood, in relation to the heavy burden of domestic constraints that Kapur and Subramanian so unsparingly enumerate. I am concentrating here on India because it is the great counterpart to China and the unspoken reference point of the “China squeeze” discourse. But the point is more general. Can anyone with a straight face suggest that the main problems afflicting the development of South Africa or Nigeria, the great centers of mass underemployment in sub-saharan Africa, are cheap competition from China driven by Beijing’s industrial policy and an undervalued RMB? Likewise, is the main problem of the American working-class the threat of Chinese competition or the manifest crisis of social reproduction in the United States itself? The point here, as in the discourse around China shock 2.0 in Europe, is to insist that we should not normalize the world and pathologize China, without actually investigating what is going on in America’s industrial wastelands, the German car industry, or India’s lopsided labour market. One-sided pathologization should be understood for what it is, a polemical gesture. Concepts like China shock and China squeeze are, what Reinhart Koselleck, following Carl Schmitt, would have described as “asymmetrische Kampfbegriffe”, or “asymmetrical counter-concepts” or “asymmetrical combat concepts”. If the function of arguments like the “China squeeze” is to alert elites in the rest of the world of the need to rejuvenate and energize their development projects, so be it. But let us see the resulting discourses as the mobilizing interventions that they are. Interestingly, a significant slice of China’s public sphere - the so-called industrial party - have been obsessed for the last twenty years with precisely these questions of counterfactual economic history. Since the mid 2000s, a massive online discourse developed around an alternative history in which Chinese techno-patriots were asked to imagine how they would proceed if they had the possibility of traveling back in time to transport modern technology into the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) thus averting the “great divergence” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a fantasy of course, but also a goad. The point was not directed at Westerners. The alternate history is dramatically nationalist, but few n the West had even heard of it until recently. The adherents of the industrial party are not liberal moralists. They don’t project natural ladders of international development and ask why others don’t cede space. They take the Realpolitik of global economic development for granted. Their pointe was directed against fellow Chinese. The rallying cry of the alternative narrative was this: Now that we are beginning to gain steam and push forward on our national development path, now that we are breaking out of the inferior position assigned to us even in the early years following WTO accession, do not lose yourself in humanistic imaginings about better futures. In the spirit of Deng, they called on China to embrace the hard truth of development. Perhaps one might of the Industrial Party as a cultural trend born out of desire for symbolic revenge against those who had inflicted the century of humiliation. In terms of the various temporalities of the “China shock” - retrospective, prospective and counterfactual - one might think of the Industrial Policy discourse as truly speculative, conjuring up the China shock that never was. Or perhaps one might better think of it as imagining a world in which a powerful China was no shock at all, but simply a defining fact of modern history. I love putting out Chartbook. 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The first study of its kind shows that ecosystems experience far more cumulative heat than standard measurements reveal. A marine heatwave may have an official beginning and end, but the warm water affecting an ecosystem often does not. Like a pot that continues absorbing heat over time, coastal waters can remain unusually warm for weeks
California voters could make it harder to increase taxes with Prop 43
California voters will decide in November whether to approve Proposition 43, a measure that would make it more difficult to pass new special taxes in cities and counties.
Watch Why Think Tanks are a Billion Dollar Business
Think tanks bring together experts and shape debates in Washington, but how do you measure the value of an idea? From the Aspen Institute to the Heritage Foundation, this episode explores the business of ideas, the billions of dollars behind America's leading think tanks, and how they measure success.
Panama: Haemophilus influenzae meningitis case reported in Veraguas Health Region
The Veraguas Health Region, located in the central-western region of Panama, confirmed a case of meningitis caused by the Haemophilus influenzae bacteria in a 12-year-old student from La Primavera School, diagnosed on July 29. The patient remains hospitalized, is receiving appropriate treatment, and is in stable clinical condition. The regional health director of Veraguas, Xavier A. Torres Domínguez, reported that, once the diagnosis was confirmed, the Ministry of Health (Minsa), in coordination with the Social Security Fund (CSS), immediately activated the epidemiological investigation and health response protocols established for this type of event. Canada: Haemophilus influenzae type B outbreak in Calgary As part of the actions implemented, the Epidemiology teams carried out the identification and monitoring of the patient’s close contacts, applying the corresponding preventive measures to reduce the risk of transmission and safeguard the health of the educational community. Health authorities explained that meningitis caused by Haemophilus influenzae is a bacterial disease that requires timely medical attention. In that regard, they urged the population to immediately seek medical attention if they experience symptoms such as high fever, severe headache, stiff neck, vomiting, drowsiness, or altered mental status. They also reiterated that vaccination is the main preventive measure against this disease, and therefore called on parents and guardians to verify that their children’s immunization schedules are complete, in accordance with the Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI). Outbreak News Today is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
Science Inquiry Comes Alive for Jacket Middle Schoolers
Snails, sidewalks and Double Stuff Oreos... At Partnership Middle School, instructors are finding innovative ways to help students connect the classroom to what they see in the real world every day. By integrating hands-on experiences and scientific investigations into weekly lessons, 6th and 7th grade science teachers push their classes to explore the curriculum standards through the lens of critical thinking, communication with their peers, experimentation, and scientific inquiry. Last week, two different approaches for two different grade levels saw Jacket teachers ignite the same spark for learning. On Tuesday, 6th graders in Lydia Jones' science class took their lessons outside as they explored the school grounds to identify living and non-living things. Despite the warm temperatures, they engaged in discovering unexpected objects on the campus and connecting that to what they learned in class about the criteria for what qualifies a thing as "living". Ms. Jones tasked students with walking the grounds and listing as many living and non-living things they could find in just a few minutes. Students spotted a fire hydrant, construction vehicles, grass, trees, soccer equipment, rocks, sidewalks, and even a snail hidden in the plants. After they finished the exploration, students returned to the regular classroom to discuss their results and whether their objects were classified correctly. On Thursday, 7th graders in Omini Parks' science class participated in their first lab of the semester as they explored and identified the physical properties of a favorite snack -- Oreos. Ms. Parks identified the class objective before the lab activity began by writing the academic standard on the dry erase board in a declarative statement: "I can collect and evaluate qualitative data to describe substances using physical properties." Students watched a video about how Oreo sandwich cookies are made, and then engaged in a question and answer discussion to give observations on the manufacturing process, review various types of physical properties and their scientific terminology, and talk generally about how the lab inquiry would work. The Q&A ended with a predictable question from students... "Will we be able to eat the Oreos?" The hands-on lab exercise required the 7th grade scientists to observe and record the differences between regular Oreos and the Double Stuff variety based on their physical properties. They followed the instructions in their lab brief to chart a comparison between the two types of cookies by observing properties with their magnifying lenses, measuring the height and diameter of both, and weighing the cookies with and without their filling. The activity let students put their lessons about physical properties into practice with real objects while also practicing vocabulary and writing skills to record their observations and using math skills from the last school year like taking measurements and calculating averages. Of course, they ended the lab by charting the taste of the cookies as well! These types of activities allow students to see the science standards they are learning come to life in the real world and engage with the content in new ways. Beyond that, they serve as a foundation for encouraging and growing scientific inquiry. Later in the school year, students will use the scientific method they are learning to complete science projects that require real research and the ability to explain and answer questions about their process and results. At the school-level competitive Science Fair last year, 41 Partnership students earned a place in the 2026 regional Science Fair held at MSU. From there, 14 advanced to the State Science Fair conducted at Northeast Mississippi Community College in April.
Chile declares health alert for hantavirus
The Chile Ministry of Health issued a Health Alert for hantavirus and other diseases, such as some arboviruses and avian influenza. This is the first time this measure has been taken and it will be in effect until July 31, 2027 and it extends from the Atacama region to the Magallanes region. “Hantavirus causes a disease that is endemic to Chile, transmitted by the long-tailed pygmy rice rat that lives in rural and semi-rural areas throughout almost the entire country. As a ministry, we are constantly monitoring its behavior and are very concerned and actively working because this year the virus's lethality has increased, and for this reason, we decided to declare this alert. As of last week, there were 46 confirmed cases and 18 deaths, representing a 39% lethality rate,” reported the Undersecretary of Public Health, Dr. Alejandra Pizarro. Cases have occurred in the regions of Valparaíso, Metropolitan, O'Higgins, Maule, Ñuble, Biobío, La Araucanía, Los Ríos, Los Lagos, and Aysén. By comparison, in 2025, there were 44 infections and eight deaths (18% case fatality rate). The health alert, which is preventative and prepared, will allow for the granting of extraordinary powers in the event of serious health emergencies to strengthen surveillance, ensure timely resource management, hire specialized personnel, implement health control measures, and expedite the acquisition of supplies through direct procurement. The alert does not imply that there is an ongoing epidemic or that the healthcare system is overwhelmed. Subscribe to Outbreak News TV on YouTube “Hantavirus is not exclusively a summer virus, as the long-tailed pygmy rice rat is present year-round. Therefore, we urge everyone to take extreme precautions: avoid touching rodents, ventilate homes before entering if they have been closed, clean unused spaces with water and bleach, and keep garbage covered and food stored away. Furthermore, it is crucial to be aware of the symptoms: fever, intense muscle pain, and difficulty breathing. If someone experiences these symptoms and has been in rural or semi-rural areas where the long-tailed pygmy rice rat may have been present, they should immediately go to a health center and inform the medical staff so that a hantavirus diagnosis can be considered promptly,” the official added. Since December 2025, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has maintained an epidemiological alert due to the rise in hantavirus cases throughout the Southern Cone, and that the Ministry of Health had an epidemiological alert in place since November of last year. Chile eliminates leprosy As mentioned above, the Health Alert decree also covers diseases transmitted by the Aedes aegypti, Aedes vexans, and Anopheles pseudopunctipennis mosquitoes, such as dengue and Zika, which, according to the alert, “have a high epidemic potential, which could generate high demand and overload for health facilities.” For these diseases, the alert is in effect from Arica to Los Ríos. The authority stressed that it is essential to prevent mosquitoes from breeding in stagnant water and to monitor any suspected cases of people arriving from abroad infected with any of these diseases, in order to prevent any of these vectors from biting a sick person and starting to spread the disease. In the case of avian influenza, the alert was extended to the entire country, because unlike other years, the disease has been concentrated in wild and farm birds, not in poultry farms, increasing the risk of exposure for people. Outbreak News Today is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
Help Business Report recognize the Capital Region’s most charitable companies
Baton Rouge Business Report is building a new ranking of the Capital Region’s most charitable companies—and we want your organization to be part of it. For our December philanthropy edition, we’re surveying businesses across the region to measure the scale and reach of their corporate giving. Companies will be ranked by their total cash and in-kind […]
Gregg Meyer, Harvard Physician and Health System Leader, Affiliates with Cornerstone Research
Dr. Meyer brings more than thirty years of experience in value-based care, hospital operations, vertical integration, and healthcare quality measurement.
Cerberus, former Steward Health Care private equity owner, settles with creditors
The resolution provides a measure of restitution for the financial backers of Steward, who took substantial dividend payments even as the hospitals struggled.
Will business back smaller lot sizes?
Business groups are considering backing a ballot measure that would reduce minimum lot sizes in Massachusetts.
Why Democrats Won’t Stop Forcing Votes On Trump’s Iran War Powers
Even after winning approval of a measure calling on President Trump to end the war, they continue to call votes to force Republicans to answer for it.
This smart ring can measure your blood sugar using sweat, no needles required
For the millions of people with type 1 diabetes (and some with type 2 and other forms of the disease) who must monitor their glucose levels, the...
Campaign spending accelerates as Missouri primary election draws near
Ballot measure spending continues to dominate this year’s elections
The US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to know
The US has unveiled what officials claim is the most radical overhaul of the public R&D system in a generation, which if implemented could have significant implications for transatlantic research collaboration. Science: A New Golden Age derides universities as “legacy institutions” and instead wants to prioritise funding on technological challenges, new research labs and funding that follows individual scientists, rather than being linked to their institutions. “Too much of our research enterprise has come to serve itself rather than the scientists within it,” writes Michael Kratsios, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the only named author of the report. “Federal funding agencies should support a broader range of performers.” But some critics argue that the strategy is a smokescreen, using genuine problems in academia as an excuse to further weaken US universities, which US vice-president JD Vance has labelled “the enemy..”Even as it talks of a “golden age” for science, the White House has proposed halving the 2027 budget of the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and has put forward double-digit cuts for other funding bodies, such as the National Institutes for Health. It asked for similarly steep savings in 2026, but Congress stopped them going through. Science: A New Golden Age says success will be measured by the extent to which scientists are “free” to pursue the most “vital questions,,” painting academia as currently hidebound by bureaucracy, sluggishness and consensual conservatism. And yet the Trump administration is simultaneously planning new rules that will hand political appointees unprecedented powers to screen and cancel grants. The report has pretentions to be the successor to Science: The Endless Frontier, the seminal 1945 document in which presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush set out the case for post-war government funding of basic research, helping to spur the creation of funders such as the NSF. Even the title page font is the same. But it remains unclear if the latest report will leave anything like as lasting a legacy.Here, Science|Business explains some of the biggest proposed changes in Science: A New Golden Age, and how Europeans think it might change the landscape of their biggest science partner.Universities under fireA key target of the report are US universities, which it repeatedly suggests are outmoded as research institutions. It criticises the NSF for channelling resources “overwhelmingly to a single type of performer, the university-based, principal investigator-led research group..” Universities “extract” money from researchers’ grants to support “growing administrative bloat,” alongside legitimate uses. The Trump administration has been trying to cut the overhead costs in federal research grants that flow to universities. Instead, new institutions are being built. In May, the NSF announced it would spend $1.5 billion on two new so-called X-Labs, focused on scientific instrumentation and quantum systems. The idea is that they fill a niche in the landscape, tackling problems that are too big for a university lab, but too early stage for private start-up funding. Parallel with Europe?This shift to new research organisations parallels moves in Europe to set up new innovation agencies, such as Germany’s Sprind, the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, and the EU’s European Innovation Council. The Dutch and French governments are looking to set up their own entities too. There’s now an emerging consensus, evident in a number of new strategies, that public R&D needs to be shaken up, Charles McIvor, an economist at the OECD, has written in response to Kratsios’s plans. “What stands out for me across these strategies [in the US, Germany, South Korea and Japan] is that governments are realising that the old ways of delivering STI [science, technology and innovation] programming no longer works,” he said in a LinkedIn post. Metascience wins?The document is, at least on the face of it, also a big win for some policy thinkers in the US who want far more experimentation with new forms of research grant and institution.It name-checks a litany of new public R&D ideas, from focused research organisations and advance market commitments to “golden tickets,” which allow grant reviewers the power to hand applicants money without requiring the consensus of other review panellists.Related articlesEuropean researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationFocused research organisations: what are they, and how do you set them up? NIH turmoil risks reciprocal EU-US access to health research funding In addition, every federal research funding agency should set up a metascience unit, the strategy says, “with authority to run controlled experiments on review and funding mechanisms.” The UK has already set one up, the strategy points out. This mirrors recommendations to the European Commission. In 2024, a report led by former Portuguese science minister Manuel Heitor also advised the EU to set up an “experimental unit” to test out new methods of funding research. So far, however, Brussels hasn’t put forward any plans to do so. Bypass universitiesBut there’s a worry that the Trump administration is using the metascience movement to justify an overhaul of public R&D that punishes universities, which it sees as centres of political resistance. Last year, it threatened to cut Harvard University’s federal funding unless it hired and admitted a “critical mass” of new faculty and students to create “viewpoint diversity” across campus. It’s also attempted to strip academics of funding for working on politically forbidden areas, like LGBTIQ people’s health.The new strategy appears to be a “move to bypass the power of universities full stop and allow funders and political bureaucracies to handpick the projects and people who will execute them,” said Jean-Claude Burgelman, a former senior official in the Commission’s research directorate, on LinkedIn.The EU’s science counsellor in Washington, Florent Bernard, wrote that the plans risk diverting public research funding so that it “solely serves private interests.” “Who, if not independent universities, will do research that demonstrates the impact of tobacco on lung cancer or the role of human activities in our current climate crisis?” he wrote.Should we take it seriously?“I would view the overall document as a bad faith argument,” said Cole Donovan, director of science policy at the campaigning group Stand Up for Science, and a former OSTP official. “I don’t see the project itself as something that can be isolated from the broader attack on the system.” He thinks the argument that academia has become dysfunctional and in need of radical reform is being deployed as part of a “PR argument” to legitimate moves against US scientists. The strategy presents ideas like metascience units as new, whereas there were moves to set them up at the NSF during the previous administration of Joe Biden, Donovan said. The other caveat here is that the OSTP has limited power to carry out any of these recommendations. While Kratsios has issued a memo to research agencies telling them to implement the recommendations in the report, he doesn’t have direct budgetary control. “As a former OSTPer myself, this does not seem like a document that is realistic,” said Donovan.
After Hobbes vs Rousseau: Politics must move beyond human nature
Since the great debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, our political theory has been organised around a single question: is human nature essentially good or essentially corrupt? Graham Harman, the philosopher behind object-oriented ontology, argues that this is simply the wrong question to be asking. The real forces governing our collective fate - climate change, artificial intelligence, geography, and pandemics - are non-human; therefore, questions about human nature are not the central ones. Instead, Harman proposes a politics reorganised around our relationship to non-human objects and environments, in which quasi-government institutions incentivise and deter actions with the aim of extending the survival of the human race. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This has become one of the most popular phrases among twenty-first-century intellectuals. Often misattributed to Fredric Jameson, it has been warmly embraced by such influential authors as Slavoj Žižek and the tragically departed Mark Fisher, and has fueled the notion that the major problem with the political Left is that it simply needs to become more speculative and creative. Naturally, this is never a bad idea in any human pursuit. But what if the political distinction between Left, Right, and Center itself results from a failure of imagination? SUGGESTED READING Hobbes vs Rousseau: are we inherently evil? By Robin Douglass This particular division has been with us only since the summer of 1789. During the simmering prelude to the French Revolution, it referred originally to the physical position in the National Assembly of radical figures on one side and loyal monarchists on the other. These positions are linked with two entirely different camps of modern political theory. On the Left we find a series of authors ranging from the moderate (Locke) to the supercharged (Rousseau) to the truly radical (Marx), all of them contending that exploitation of the many by the few justifies revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. On the Right they are countered by the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Schmitt, a group of thinkers convinced that corrupt human nature can be tamed only by force. In the words of the Nazi supporter Schmitt: “One could test all theories of nature and state and political ideas according to their anthropology and classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose [humans] to be by nature evil or by nature good.” This is the division we continue to face today, even in the daily retail politics of Western democracies.___Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims.___The most refreshing feature of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was their awareness that the forced choice between Rousseau and Hobbes (as they put it) is no longer sufficient. Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims. Far from being stationed “beyond good and evil,” we seem to be fully entangled with both. We are not naturally good or evil, Graeber and Wengrow contend, but naturally experimental and imaginative. They rest their case on the archaeological record, which seems to bear witness to numerous episodes of seasonally shifting governments and festivals, which vacillate in the same society (even in the same year) between the egalitarian and the dictatorial. Such praise of political experiment makes a good fit with the generally anarchist position defended by these authors. Yet it is also what I find most disappointing in their position. Although they are right that the forced choice between Hobbes and Rousseau falls short of what our new situation requires, the authors simply replace it with praise for the human being as a political tinkerer and performer. In other words, they give us just another theory of human nature, one that would not have been out of place in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. What other options might we have?___The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature… We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them___One fresh approach would be to treat politics within a broader framework than human nature, given that the polis does not exist in a vacuum filled exclusively with people. When Bruno Latour went to observe the baboons of Kenya with the San Diego anthropologist Shirley Strum, they jointly concluded that these primates were more socially interdependent than our own species. Each baboon is so reliant on the dynamics of the group that they find themselves locked into constant surveillance of their potentially dangerous peers. The group structure turns out to be inherently volatile. Humans, by contrast, are able to stabilize their societies to a large degree through the mediation of inanimate objects. Although one’s position in society may seem to fluctuate over time, considerable stability is produced through such items as apartment keys, wedding rings, and identification cards, all of them serving to secure us a place distinct from that of our fellows. The Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has written at length about the crucial role of documents in establishing social relations, making him a hero among notaries in his country. Proper names and license plates cement our position amidst other humans, as do symbolic achievements such as graduation from a top university or distinguished wartime service with its various medals and ribbons. None of this is found among baboons, despite their closeness to us on the evolutionary tree: after all, we did share a common ancestor just 25 to 30 million years ago. SUGGESTED VIEWING The goodness paradox With Richard Wrangham The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature, whether understood in the manner of the Left or of the Right. We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them. But initially, it is true, we face non-human things primarily in the form of constraints. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to form a human civilization underwater, deep underground, atop Mount Everest, or in outer space. Human dependence on the non-social background takes on subtler form in discussions of political geography, especially unloved on the more idealistic Left. Consider the luckless position of Poland during World War II, sandwiched between Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other. By contrast, note the good fortune of the United States in not having a military peer positioned on any land border. Anglo-American geopolitics, since the writings of the American naval commander Alfred Thayer Mahan and the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, has been wedded to the notion that one or more liberal offshore naval powers should prevent any authoritarian “heartland” regime from gaining effective control of Eurasia. That remains the case whether the opponent is the impatient Napoleon, the swashbuckling German Kaiser, the villainous Hitler, the murderous Stalin, or the industrial juggernaut Chinese. In their current Foreign Affairs article “Heartland vs. Rimland,” Michael Beckley and Hal Brands analyze the current and coming state of the world on the basis of these same rather durable principles. In recent years a similar outlook has been embraced, in inverted form, by the Putin-loving Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, an icon of the Rightist intellectual underworld. For Dugin, the Anglo-Saxons are an evil force bent on destroying the spiritually superior people of the land: much like Athens in its failed war with Sparta, or Carthage in its eventual collapse against Rome. But the shared notion on both sides is that any strategy that fails to take geography into account is likely to end up as a defeated form of excessive optimism.___When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole.___More striking for us today than geography is the non-human object called climate, which threatens rimland and heartland equally. Even if we contend that humans are one hundred percent responsible for triggering the climate crisis, it remains non-human in the sense of being an independent force beyond our effective control. In a major work published just before his death in 2002, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, the American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted the tendency of evolutionary theorists to focus too closely on the fate of individuals in view of their successful or failed adaptation to circumstances. With climate change, however, we confront a force that goes well beyond the scope of any individual life. Whereas Richard Dawkins extended evolutionary questions downward from individuals to the sub-individual gene, Gould pushed it upward, speaking of entire species or clades as impacted by environmental change. The asteroid that struck the Yucatán 66 million years ago is only the most famous example of this sort. In the wake of that catastrophe, large animals needing abundant supplies of food were at a fatal disadvantage by contrast with the smaller birds and mammals of the planet. When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole. The effect is to shift our attention away from individual beings towards the survival of the group.In the United States in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked considerable backlash among those who asserted a nearly absolute degree of individual freedom. In California I encountered those who demanded that their businesses be allowed to reopen, that it was enough to cover their mouths but not their noses, or that they should have the right to enter any public area despite refusing vaccination. Yet public health is probably the clearest argument against libertarianism, which often merely asserts the autonomy of individuals against any claims of the commons. In normal times the individual is worth defending; under conditions that threaten the survival of part or all of our species, compulsion may be our only resort, as with perfectly reasonable blackouts and rations in wartime. To rebuild human society under the constraints of climate change will be one of the great challenges of the century to come, as will our improvised grappling with artificial intelligence. Such phenomena pose existential risks for humanity, and leave far less room for tolerance of individual brattiness. Cases are mounting of devastating wildfires caused by arson. Recently it was reported that there is even a website where one can bet on the location of coming wildfires, raising the specter of deliberate blazes set to collect on wagers. The death penalty has steadily lost support in a world where many stress the infinite value of human life. But if we focus instead on entire ecosystems, those who purposely burn the forests may begin to look worse than serial murderers.___The politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere.___So far I have spoken of force, authority, and punishment: measures sure to have greater appeal to those who identify with what we know as the Right. But other implications of the post-anthropocentric world are likely to have different backers. If non-human objects are seen as structuring political space, it stands to reason that they can no longer be introduced solely by the pace of technical breakthrough. Fields ranging from cybernetics to energy will demand increased politicization once they are reconceived not just as products of individual human investment, but as renovations of collective political geography. This need not involve world government, with its inherent risk of tyranny, but may involve quasi-governmental enforcers of prestige along the lines of a less corrupt FIFA or International Olympic Committee, punishing deviant states not with violence but with less tangible incentives.Politics will never lose its historic links with conflict and faction. But rather than factions aligned by differing theories of human nature, the politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere. This will prove just as incommensurable with the modern Left/Right spectrum as a globe is with a two-dimensional map.
Cyclospora outbreak clouds strong earnings for Taco Bell’s parent company
Taco Bell’s parent company, Yum Brands, reported robust sales and profit in the second quarter, surpassing Wall Street’s expectations by several measures. But the earnings cover the April-June quarter, or the three months before a cyclospora outbreak plunged the company’s most important brand into a food-safety crisis.
Vikings Rookie’s Latest Comments Have Fans Watching Closely
The Minnesota Vikings were able to get an important injury update from one of their confirmed that he was healthy and ready to go for the start of the season.Banks was selected with the 18th overall pick in the first round of the 2026 NFL draft. The former Florida Gators star measures in at six-foot-six, […] The post Vikings Rookie’s Latest Comments Have Fans Watching Closely appeared first on HEAVY.
ArcelorMittal Posts Fall in Net Profit But Sees Improved Outlook for European Business
The steelmaker said supportive trade measures had improved the prospects for its European business and expects second-half sales to outperform those of the first.
Consumer confidence falls on worse business, labor views
An indicator of present conditions dropped to the lowest since 2021, while a measure of expectations for the next six months was unchanged.
Prototype smart ring cracks the holy grail of non-invasive blood sugar measurement
A prototype smart ring developed by engineers at the University of California appears to have cracked one of the holy...
The Science Behind the AI Panic Is Shakier Than You Think
A column by Sascha Lobo Is AI making us dumb? So asked DER SPIEGEL on its cover a while ago. After a few weeks of recovery and a therapeutic intervention with the help of my AI, I feel able to respond. That’s a bit unfair, of course; the article itself is more nuanced than the loud cover, the image of a schoolkid with dull prompt questions, or the subtitle: “AI is conquering the schools, and educators fear a disaster.” The short answer to “Is AI making us dumb?” is: no. The long answer is more interesting, and even carries a preliminary glimmer of the spectacular. Unfortunately, it requires a detour into the sphere of artificial intelligence, into the mogul-field terrain of technology assessment, the attention economy, and the destructive virus of cultural pessimism. Along with narrowing the scope to AI’s effects on education and work rather than on intelligence. Because the honest version of the question would be: Does AI help us learn and work, or not? Generative AI, which set off the still-ongoing hype with ChatGPT, has only existed in relevant distribution since late 2022, early 2023. For a technology-driven transformation of people and society, that is extremely short. For that reason alone, research is still in its infancy. And technology assessment is not a fast discipline anyway. Prominent voices from Elizabeth Eisenstein to RAND to Tom Wheeler say we still cannot conclusively judge the consequences of the printing press. Its invention is a mere 580 years back, and some scholars would rather not circulate assessments that might have to be retracted in two or three hundred years. We’re Going Through Growing Pains A phenomenon that already caused upheaval in social media research makes serious assessment of AI’s consequences even harder: the “moving target” problem of LLM-ology, as the linguist Sean Trott called it in 2025. AI develops so quickly and so unpredictably that researchers often end up studying snapshots of the past. There are concepts, from morphological analysis to anticipatory governance, for keeping research, planning, and regulation halfway meaningful anyway. But even with those, universally valid statements are rare. DER SPIEGEL - The German View is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe We should therefore treat findings about the interplay between humans and AI as far more procedural and situational. Unfortunately, this challenge comes at the worst possible time. We are going through growing pains: AI’s everyday impact has grown very large very fast, and with it the longing for guidance. Annoyingly, the body of solid knowledge has not exploded along with it. Experts cannot be moved to broad consensus on even banal statements about AI. Sascha Lobo, born in 1975, is an author and strategy consultant focusing on the internet and digital technologies. Together with Jule Lobo, he explores the debates of the day in the podcast “Feel the News – Was Deutschland bewegt” (”What Moves Germany”). Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says software developers are dying out. Bill Gates considers coders one of only three professions that will survive the AI tsunami. Top tech economists find virtually irrefutable arguments both for and against an AI bubble. The same naturally applies to the structurally youth-hostile debate over whether AI is good or bad for young people. The gap between the demand for insight and the supply of solid knowledge creates an orientation vacuum. This vacuum of AI cluelessness is filled, as the attention economy described by Georg Franck in 1998 would have it, with half-knowledge (funnily enough, often AI-generated), marketing, and self-marketing. After all, infinite money is at stake, along with academia’s best current shot at global fame. But this iridescent froth of interpretation operates more by the algorithmic principles of the digital public sphere than by seriously earned insight. That is why dramatized, fear-feeding claims about AI are so promising. It tempts parts of academia into distorted drivel, and parts of the media then sensationalize the published drivel once more. Was the Research Aimed at a Desired Result? How badly this can influence academia and public perception is demonstrated by one of the most-discussed studies on AI’s effects: “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” The MIT study by Nataliya Kosmyna also gets plenty of space in the SPIEGEL cover story. What was measured and interpreted: lower brain activity in people who write with AI assistance, compared to people who only google or write without any tools. As is common with preprints, the study has not yet been peer-reviewed, and it contains substantial weaknesses that experts have sharply criticized. The first round had 54 participants in three groups, the second only 18, who reportedly also came from MIT’s own orbit. There was no preregistration (committing in advance to what you want to find out with which data). In their analysis, Stanković et al. even discovered an opposite effect that the study does not further explain. Some measurement data has not (yet) been published. And the EEG analysis method used is considered too imprecise to support such far-reaching conclusions. The biggest criticism, though, is the suspicion of an activism-driven study. In an interview with Time, lead author Kosmyna said she published the study immediately, rather than after full peer review, because she feared politicians might otherwise decide to put ChatGPT in kindergartens. She considers that absolutely harmful. It is legitimate to hold such a view. It just seems unscientific to approach a study with it, and then to design the setup so that the chance of a fitting desired result remains as high as possible. Ideologies Collide It is not easy to separate genuine AI insights from studies that trivialize and weaken well-founded AI criticism. The same goes for the opposing, AI-enthusiastic narratives, because the pro-AI side works against it with billions in resources. Ideologies collide, fed by egos, PR strategies, moral posturing, and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Doomsday marketing makes the search even harder: AI companies can profit from warnings about the dangers of AI, whether through the notoriety of apocalypse narratives or because, in some target groups, danger translates into power. Some seemingly negative findings are therefore quite welcome in the AI industry. If you try to get at the findings presumably less influenced by interest groups, the picture in education seems relatively clear: AI can improve educational outcomes when the right AI is used the right way, namely pedagogically. Simply dumping an AI chatbot into a classroom, by contrast, accomplishes little. Huge surprise. But something else is also obvious: whether they are allowed to or not, kids use AI for school, which is why the controlled integration of AI tools into education is, in the medium term, entirely without alternative. In the world of work, the landscape of findings is more complex and requires more differentiation. A series of serious studies points to an AI effect that suits neither the alarmists, regulation fetishists, and AI opponents, nor the trillion-dollar corporations with their armada of paid scientists, PR professionals, and ecosystems: working with AI helps the inexperienced (at least for now) considerably more than it helps the pros, in certain fields of work, and provided they know how to use it correctly. Missing Domain Knowledge Among the experienced, the professionals, and the high flyers, by contrast, despite frequent time savings, partially negative effects and new problems are emerging. Take the jagged frontier problem: AI solves task A brilliantly and fails completely at task B, even though both look similar even to professionals. Or the verification-cost problem, in which AI’s greater productivity gets eaten up by the enormous effort of checking its output. Or the illusion of competence, because AI makes new domains seem easily penetrable, until you painfully discover that deep domain knowledge is missing. Taken as a whole, the effects of working with AI do lean positive. But the promise that AI works as a turbocharger for everyone and boosts practically everything simply refuses to materialize. The AI magic the world has been feeling since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022 has so far barely shown up in most companies’ numbers. The consulting firm McKinsey has coined a term for this, the “gen AI paradox,” and believes that work processes and corporate structures would have to be rebuilt quite fundamentally to realize AI’s benefits at scale. Reuters just reported that only 3.3 percent of Microsoft’s customers have subscribed to the AI package Copilot. That may be down to the product; in other areas we continue to see soaring successes and new AI triumphs. But after the first quarter of 2026, disillusionment is the word for all too many AI projects at traditional companies: because the promised revolution of AI agents has so far failed to arrive or been postponed, and because of the leveling effect that many of the studies cited here suggest. Against Inequality The societal effects, on the other hand, appear rather encouraging. Many previous technologies operated on the Matthew principle, named for the Gospel verse about giving to those who already have: they tended to reward the more competent and more privileged. AI, however, seems more often to have an equalizing effect once a threshold of access and education is crossed. Some anecdotal insights point in this direction, for example, how an unemployed man in Leipzig successfully defended himself in court in 2025 against fraud accusations from Germany’s federal employment agency — without a lawyer, armed only with ChatGPT. The AI made mistakes and cited invented court rulings, but in the end the man walked away unpunished. And a key capability of artificial intelligence is its capacity to learn: set up correctly and fed with data, it can keep getting better. It is a question of time, or more precisely of AI innovations and training data, until even free AI chatbots write better legal briefs than law graduates with perfect exam scores. Whether that will make anyone dumb is something the world’s press will surely inform us of in due time. Subscribe Leave a comment
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“Graphic Talk About Science: Adventures in Science Engagement”
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When It Comes to Fusion, Materials Matter
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Instead, researchers found a surprising plateau: Some samples showed elevated fusion rates roughly a quintillion times higher than bare fusion reactions. (A quintillion is a 1 followed by 18 zeroes.) Researchers are not exactly sure why that’s happening, though they have some ideas and ways to test them. The electrons and defects within the material might partially shield repulsive electrostatic forces between deuterium nuclei, making it easier for them to get close together and fuse. Tuning the electronic structure, defects, and composition of materials could help make nuclear reactions happen more readily. “It comes down to better understanding the mechanism so that we can try to enhance it,” said corresponding author Jeremy Munday, a professor at UC Davis. “We’ve seen that we can increase fusion rates, but what is the limit? Can we bring it to lower temperatures or energies? There’s obviously a lot of interest and excitement about fusion, so if there’s something we can learn about the physics at these lower energy scales, maybe there’s something we can translate to other areas of nuclear science.” The team plans to explore a wider range of materials and continue probing the unexpected fusion plateau at lower energies. Their work establishes a reproducible experimental platform to study how solid materials influence nuclear reactions, creating a new area of research that links fusion science with materials science and chemistry. “The work shows conclusively that the material environment where fusion occurs at low temperatures is an active participant rather than a passive container,” said Cameron Geddes, director of ATAP. “That adds a new dimension to fusion research.” This work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
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