SCROLL NEWS / DISCOVERY
Search headlines
Find the stories shaping the conversation.
Results for " problem " 2,215 found 🔀 AI-powered Shuffle
5 Common Problems Owners Have With Apple AirPods
If your Apple Airpods have some of these common issues, these are ways to troubleshoot.
1 problem Yankees must address before MLB playoffs
The New York Yankees have been battling to stay within reach of the Tampa Bay Rays in the American League East all season. It has largely been an uphill battle because they have had to struggle to find something of a reliable offense this season because of injuries to superstar Aaron Judge and slugger Giancarlo Stanton. While those two have been […] The post 1 problem Yankees must address before MLB playoffs appeared first on ClutchPoints.
Why Polling Chaos Could Create Big Problems for American Politics
Bad polls. Misleading betting odds. Surveys meant to shape narratives. Ahead of the midterms and 2028, there is suddenly serious confusion about candidate strength and voter sentiment.
The Las Vegas Slowdown Comes Down to 1 Mistake Every Business Owner Should Watch
The city’s tourism problem is not just price. It is what happens when customers feel every small friction adding up.
The Dangers of Problem Gambling in Mobile Sports Betting Apps - New York State Bar Association
The increasing prevalence of mobile sports betting and prediction markets comes with an increase in problem gambling. The New York State Bar Association hosted a seminar on the rise of mobile sports betting and prediction markets, which detailed how these platforms can feed into problematic gambling behaviors. Katie Mibaum, team leader at the New York Council on
Ariana Grande Slams Trump for Using Her Song in Transphobic TikTok: “Never Use My Music Again”
The singer made it clear she has a “Problem” with her music being used for evil.
TN Politics: As communities push back against data centers, some politicians push ahead
Local moratoriums on new data center builds could become a problem for lawmakers who want more of them in Tennessee.
Having Duskbloods connectivity issues? FromSoftware says sit closer to your router or use an ethernet cable
FromSoftware has issued a statement on connectivity problems with The Duskbloods network test, pointing to Nintendo support as well as its own suggestions.
Lil Nas X’s bipolar diagnosis and the paradox of treatment
We continue to romanticize the symptoms of mental health problems, especially when we talk about achievement.
Mental Health Is a Warfighting Readiness Problem for the U.S. Navy
“You cannot be at mental peace always. You will be worried. So even my family — they are scared all the time, and they were anxiously praying the vessel
The WNBA Has a Politics Problem
The WNBA has become a battleground for left versus right fighting, sparking culture wars over race, gender and sexual orientation.
Brian Schottenheimer identifies two major Cowboys concerns
Brian Schottenheimer did not allow a preseason victory to hide two Cowboys problems that demand immediate improvement.
Your Business Doesn't Need More Software — It Needs Software That Adapts. Here's How AI Is Making That Possible.
SaaS solved one problem and created another. Here's how AI can help solve it.
The Worldfolio: How Sun-Star Stationery Is Driving Global Growth Through Entertainment, Innovation and Japanese Design
Sun-Star Stationery is expanding globally by combining Japanese craftsmanship, functional innovation and entertainment. Through idea stationery, character collaborations and direct consumer engagement, the company creates products that solve everyday problems while delivering emotional value, with growing opportunities across Asia, North America and Europe.
New CDC director acknowledges agency problems in first large staff meeting
In her first large staff meeting, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promised Wednesday to advocate for the agency while acknowledging that congressionally funded programs lacked staff and employees were feeling burned out.
Google Messages RCS breaks with ‘3100’ error for some, especially Galaxy switchers
An issue with Google Messages appears to be breaking RCS for some users, with much of the problem tracing back...
Red lights are flashing in energy markets
Oil prices are once again uncomfortably high, but the bigger problem is lurking just beneath the surface.
We cannot arrest our way out of a mental health crisis, in Kansas or elsewhere
We cannot arrest our way out of a mental health crisis. Behavioral health professionals can solve problems that police officers cannot.
The four unsolved problems threatening to derail Liverpool’s season
SEASON PREVIEW : Taking over an unfinished squad and an injury prone defence while tasked with fitting in last year’s expensive signings and replacing Mohamed Salah means Andoni Iraola inherits many of the issues that plagued Arne Slot’s second season, writes Richard Jolly
Report: Serious health problems found among residents near Boyle Heights fire
Residents living near the Lineage warehouse in Boyle Heights were treated at mobile clinics for fire-related maladies, according to a new report.
Pollen has a surprising problem — and honeybees have found a way around it
Honeybees can apparently detect when their food has the wrong balance of essential nutrients and adjust how much they eat to avoid potentially harmful excesses. They also transform pollen into remarkably well-balanced “baby food” for their larvae, revealing a sophisticated nutritional strategy hidden inside the hive.
10 Shows Like 'The 100' You Should Watch Next
The 100 remains our most thoroughly explored TV dystopia. In its absence, explore these other hellscapes near and distant, particularly when they involve throwing teenagers at apocalyptic problems.
The locksmith and the conservation scientist
Why well-intentioned but uninformed guessing cannot and will not solve conservation problems, and what we should do instead. Picture this scene: you’re walking down the street, and you see your nei…
Loneliness Is A Health Crisis, But Doctors Alone Can't Cure It, Analysis Argues
By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterTUESDAY, Aug. 18, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Loneliness is contributing to illness, but it’s a fool’s errand to expect doctors alone to cure this particular ailment, a new study says. Social isolation — whether it be from loss, health problems or other factors that ...
From spheres to 12-fanged grains, scientists tame unruly sand in graphics and simulations
On a sunny summer's day, children build sandcastles on the beach. But behind every castle and crumbling dune lies a surprisingly difficult scientific problem. In fact, the physics of sand is not yet fully ...
Abdul El-Sayed is a problem for Democrats. Republicans appear to have more problems
A new poll last week confirmed the Democratic establishment’s fears that Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed could hurt its hopes of winning the chamber’s majority.
For Aidan Park, comedy is a way to turn shame into connection
Aidan Park is teaching people dealing with mental health problems how to own their story through comedy.
Kratom poison center cases have surged 6,500% in the U.S.
Kratom use and serious health problems linked to it have risen dramatically across the United States over the past decade. Poison center reports jumped from just 19 cases in 2010 to more than 1,200 in 2023, while severe outcomes—including life-threatening complications, disability, and death—also climbed sharply. Researchers warn that kratom can trigger seizures, abnormal heart rhythms, liver damage, and breathing problems, with risks potentially increasing when it is combined with other drugs.
Former OHSU Health CEO sues for $15.5 million, says he was fired for speaking up
Tarek Salaway says federal regulators later flagged some of the safety problems he raised before OHSU fired him.
Collectors Want A Stick-Shift, Lamborghini’s Boss Says That’s Exactly The Problem
Lamborghini's boss has ruled out a manual comeback even as McLaren and Ferrari race to bring three pedals back
The problem with Trump’s foreign policy by empty threat
Monday should be a very scary day for the small Middle Eastern country of Oman after a threat from President Donald Trump. But he’s done this before.
Making computer science more accessible beyond English
When Siddhartha Jayanti sat down to write the first computer science paper in Telugu, an Indian language with approximately 100 million speakers, he realized he first had to solve a problem that had little ...
Breece Hall leaves Jets practice with apparent injury
The problem with training camp is that every fan of every team is constantly bracing for the lightning bolt that could screw up the coming season.
PlayStation 6 release date still hasn’t been decided, Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki says
The global component shortage has created problems for the PS6 company…
Viewpoint: When politics becomes a business, we pay the price
Russell Cleveland writes, This initiative won't solve every problem in our politics, but restoring transparency, accountability and a reasonable balance of power between ordinary citizens and wealthy political interests is a critical first step toward restoring something we desperately need: Trust.
Viewpoint: When politics becomes a business, we pay the price
Russell Cleveland writes, This initiative won't solve every problem in our politics, but restoring transparency, accountability and a reasonable balance of power between ordinary citizens and wealthy political interests is a critical first step toward restoring something we desperately need: Trust.
Insurance premiums, copays top Americans’ list of healthcare gripes
A new survey from the nonprofit research group the Commonwealth Fund found that the cost to access healthcare was the top concern across political divides. Americans do disagree, however, on how to solve the problem.
It’s Obvious Now Why “Woke 1” Failed. I Have an Idea for How Progressives Can Be Less Annoying Next Time.
It wasn’t the ideas that were the problem. It was the execution.
Sauer: Mass. must get ahead of health care fraud
If policymakers drag their feet, Medicare Advantage’s waste, fraud, and abuse problems could erode public trust, drive up taxpayer costs, and threaten the long-term viability of the program.
Amid scorching summer, heat-related health problems spike in New Mexico
About 14% of New Mexico households don't have air conditioning, according to census estimates published earlier this year.
Canonsburg businesses flooded again as recurring culvert problem causes more damage
Flooding caused by a clogged culvert on McBurney Street continues to disrupt operations for businesses on West Pike Street in Canonsburg, leaving owners frustrated and seeking solutions.
Anthropic confirms Claude is down in major outage affecting multiple services
Claude is experiencing a major outage, with users reporting login problems and degraded performance across several Anthropic services.
Dolly Parton Skips Dollywood Ride Opening Amid Ongoing Health Problems
Dollywood opened NightFlight Expedition on Friday, but Dolly Parton was unable to attend due to ongoing health issues.
Before Abrupt Ouster, Oregon State Hospital’s Chief Flagged Staffing Problems, Union Says
The Oregon Health Authority fired Sean Murphy from leadership at the vital, much scrutinized state-run psychiatric hospital, just four weeks into a tenure that began July 13.
Business Owners Have a New Security Problem: AI Agents With Keys to Company Secrets
Cybersecurity experts raise the alarm about AI agents and hacking vulnerabilities.
“I Have A Lot Of Problems”- Novak Djokovic Opens Up About Health Struggles In Heat After Shock Cincinnati Open Exit
The sweltering heat of Ohio has put an end to Novak Djokovic’s Cincinnati run, but losing the match is just one part of the story. The Serb has now revealed that an underlying health issue, which gets worse during humid conditions, was the real factor behind his untimely demise from Cincinnati.
Not Asus, Not MSI: Consumer Reports Says This Laptop Brand Is The Most Reliable
Consumer Reports found that Apple's line of MacBooks are the most reliable of all laptops based on estimated problem rates derived from over 75,000 surveys.
I reviewed the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra and it has a problem. It's called the Galaxy Z Fold 8
It's an excellent phone, but there's more fun elsewhere
Trump embraces a political strategy of being in charge of everything but responsible for nothing when things go badly
His unwillingness to accept blame sometimes leads him to deny that there are problems at all.
I don’t think the foldable iPhone stands a chance against the Galaxy Z Fold 8
Apple appears so mired in problems that getting ahead of Samsung feels impossible.
Turning science students into problem solvers
BELIEVE Academy science teacher Seyi Akoko can trace his love of science back to a seventh-grade classroom. Curious about a lesson on evaporation, he went home and mixed salt with water in an attempt to recreate the experiment for himself. His experiment may have gotten him into trouble at home, but it also ignited a […]
Anthropic’s $2 trillion problem: Its underlying business is nowhere near the IPO valuation it wants
Everything you need to know before you reach the office this morning.
U.S., U.K. health care systems share a fatal flaw
“The default to biomedical responses means that clinics and hospitals are increasingly absorbing the costs of social problems,” writes Kyle Vanelli.
‘We’re seeing lots of people who feel dizzy’: how heatwaves are taking a toll on people’s health and the NHS
Doctors and nurses describe rise in fall injuries and other heat-related problems on top of stifling working conditions
The cruelty of turning Jewish children’s pain into political theater (Opinion)
Parents are justifiably frustrated that it took this long for the Boulder Valley School District to address antisemitism in schools. But Superintendent Anderson has acknowledged the problem and proposed concrete action. The district now has…
Montgomery County sues social media companies over youth mental health harm
Research shows using social media for three or more hours a day doubles the risk of certain mental health problems for teens.
Yankees have major Heliot Ramos problem after Giants trade
The Yankees need Ramos to start producing soon.
My Cup of IT: AI Protests, Plugs, & Politics
AI is moving from pilot project to procurement problem. The Army is already facing a protest over a $450 million contract award that allegedly relied on AI in the acquisition process. Translation: AI may be helping agencies buy technology — and soon it may be helping lawyers protest those purchases. Meanwhile, NIST wants to put […]
Families concerned about reports of mental health crisis on USS Lincoln
Families of marines are voicing concern over reports about the USS Abraham Lincoln, a naval aircraft carrier based in San Diego that has been in the Middle East supporting the Iran war for over 200 days. Families say their loved ones onboard are dealing with food shortages, plumbing problems and mental health issues. NBC News’ Dan De Luce reports on the lawmakers demanding answers and the broader implication that the war in Iran is having on the military.
4,000 Meters Below Sea Level, Scientists Have Found the Spectacular ‘Dark Oxygen’
What if it could solve all of our energy problems?
AI needs science’s search history
“Actually, that’s where the gold is,” said Alasdair Russell, my graduate school friend who leads a pre-clinical genome editing group at Cambridge. He was talking about the winding road of science that is omitted from published papers. “When you’re discussing how to do the experiment, and why this way is better than another way, and what does the data really mean? I know what it shows, but what does it mean?” At RAAIS 2026, he described how his group has begun logging the twisting path of discovery as it happens, recording the verbal and written exchanges that normally disappear. Ideas become nodes in a living graph: they branch when a meeting produces two plausible experiments, merge when separate lines of evidence converge, and go dark when someone quietly stops pursuing them. In his implementation, one agent scores novelty, while another tries to learn “how scientists think and how they navigate through a complex world of data,” so that high-potential nodes can trigger deeper investigation. As frontier AI labs deploy agents toward scientific discovery, giving AI authentic scientific taste remains a trillion-dollar dilemma. The bottleneck is that the record we have kept for centuries of science might be insufficient to get us there. The experiments that never make the paper Peter Medawar, 1960 Nobel laureate and “father of transplantation,” asked in 1963 whether the scientific paper was a fraud, and answered yes: the form of the paper misrepresents the thinking that produced it. Sixty years on, the diagnosis is unchanged. A paper presents a clean progression from hypothesis to result to conclusion. Lost along the way are the unconventional theories, the abandoned or unaffordable methods, and the underwhelming and inconclusive data. It reads like a browser history with every dead end deleted: the ten open tabs, the four rephrased queries, the wrong turn down a subforum. All scrubbed, leaving one clean path from question to answer as the canonical path. What has changed since then is that the discarded material is now worth something. No high-impact journal wants these artifacts, but raw trial and error is the most likely source of the training data required to develop scientific intuition, or what researchers call taste. Earlier attempts to capture the discards were motivated by scientific integrity. The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine launched in 2002 to publish rigorous studies that disputed established models or exposed ineffective treatments. Its archive preserved negative conclusions after they had become papers, rather than the live alternatives and arguments that produced them. BioMed Central closed it in 2017, saying the mission had been served now that other journals publish null results. A less generous reading is that in fifteen years it published around 200 papers because almost nobody wants to read a negative result, let alone write one up when it will not count toward academic tenure. AI models are different. Even an uninteresting negative result can be useful, provided it is labeled. Earlier this year, Anthropic put a version of this to the test. The company pulled 129 decision points from real Claude Code sessions between January and March 2026, showed models the work up to a human detour, and asked what should happen next. Claude Mythos Preview beat the human choice 64% of the time, while Opus 4.5 managed 51%. The comparison was tilted toward the models because Anthropic deliberately chose moments where the human decision had room for improvement. On 127 further scenarios where the human action was already strong, the models improved on it only about 20% of the time. The study was possible because Anthropic’s researchers work inside a tool that logs by default. The reasoning, detours and outcome are produced in the same working environment. Biology has no equivalent. Its reasoning happens in hallways, at benches, in Slack threads and on whiteboards, while the outcome arrives weeks later somewhere else. The record has to emerge from the work itself. Ask scientists to reconstruct it afterwards and we’ll create another polished account. Subscribe A log is not a label Before any of this becomes training data, a negative result has to say what failed. The first paper published in the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine examined 234 negative studies across five leading medical journals. Only 30% discussed statistical power, and half clearly defined a primary outcome. Tell a model an experiment failed, without telling it whether the assay was underpowered, a reagent had degraded, or the hypothesis was simply wrong, and it will learn noise with confidence. Decision histories have a second missing label too. When a lab considers five experiments and runs one, only the chosen branch returns an outcome. The other four are experimental counterfactuals. Researchers call this the selective labels problem: the data reveal results only for the actions someone chose to take. Such a record can teach a model to imitate a lab’s taste, but it cannot establish that the taste was good. It also smuggles local constraints into general lessons. A lab that never ran cryo-EM because it did not own a microscope teaches a model that cryo-EM is rarely the right call. Alasdair’s nodes preserve the candidate set, which is the necessary first step. To be useful, each decision record needs six fields: The evidence available at that moment, and nothing that arrived later. The candidates considered, including the ones dismissed in a sentence. For each candidate: the expected result, the confidence attached to it, and the cost in time and money. The route chosen, and the reason. What happened next. How the evidence changed the scientist’s view. These must be timestamped before the outcome, because hindsight turns uncertainty into inevitability. Disagreement also has to survive. Averaging three scientists into one clean rationale reproduces exactly the information loss we are trying to fix. But there is an obvious failure mode here. Once decisions are logged and scored, people log for the record post-facto. Anyone who has watched an electronic lab notebook fill up with retrospective tidying knows how quickly a research tool becomes a compliance exercise. A record that costs a scientist ten minutes of honest reflection per decision is worth far more than one that costs an hour of performance. A publication initiative called Registered Reports offers a useful starting point. Here, researchers submit their rationale, methods and analysis plan for peer review before the data exist, and the journal commits in principle to publish if they follow the approved plan. Nature has now expanded the format across every field it covers. This approach to paper writing timestamps intent before the outcome, but it freezes one plan. A useful search history must also preserve how the plan changed, which alternatives were rejected, when, and on what evidence. Subscribe Run the runner-up Autonomous labs show what happens when decisions and outcomes are connected in a loop. Liverpool’s mobile robotic chemist ran 688 experiments over eight days in a ten-variable formulation space. A batched Bayesian search used each result to choose the next experiments and found photocatalyst mixtures six times more active than the starting formulations. Every completed experiment changed what the system did next. The robot optimized within a goal and search space that humans had already chosen. It did not decide which scientific question mattered. So what this work demonstrates is narrower, but still useful: a search history pays off when the options return standardized outcomes quickly. Open-ended biology is harder because branches can take weeks and the discarded alternatives may never be run. Some exploration therefore has to be bought. Where two branches are plausible and the stakes justify the cost, a lab should sometimes run the runner-up. Otherwise the record captures what today’s scientists usually chose and stays silent on what they systematically overlooked. A funder could ring-fence a small fraction of a grant for the branch not taken, provided that the decision record and the outcome are both deposited. That costs money, but so does having every lab rediscover the same abandoned path. Test whether taste transfers When it comes time to evaluate if our new AI system exhibits taste, the comparison should run across laboratories and fields. At selected decision points in a live research campaign, we should freeze the six fields: the evidence, the candidates, expected results, confidence, costs and the choice made. Experts then rank the options before the outcomes are known, and those outcomes are checked independently later. We could give models one of two diets - papers alone, or papers plus decision histories - and ask them to rank the next experiment on unfamiliar projects. Then, we score information gained per dollar and week, calibration, and how quickly weak branches are abandoned. If histories improve choices only inside the lab that produced them, they amount to useful organizational memory. If they improve choices on unfamiliar problems elsewhere, Alasdair’s group will have captured something science has never managed to write down: a transferable record of taste. Until that happens, a scientific search history is a promising record, not yet a training set.
Should ‘The Downfall Of ARC Raiders’ Be Studied?
'ARC Raiders' has seen a significant player drop in less than a year. Is this nothing to worry about, or a huge problem?
A Public Health Approach: Using Alcohol Regulation Strategies to Reduce Online Sports Betting Harms in Higher Education
The O’Neill Institute believes that the law is a fundamental tool for solving critical health problems.
Americans want lower health care costs. This is how they'd get it
More than 4 in 10 adults cited the cost of health insurance as the biggest problem that needs to be fixed in the U.S. health care system.
In China, treatment for mental-health problems is a luxury
The government wants to improve a patchy and uneven systyem
Poll: Are the Eagles Messing With Jalen Hurts?
The headaches have started early for the Philadelphia Eagles. The Super Bowl LIX champions have won 50 games in the last four seasons, yet it always seems like there’s a problem. Head coach Nick Sirianni is on the hot seat… Until he got traded, wide receiver A.J. Brown was a distraction… Every year, there’s a new offensive coordinator… And then there’s quarterback Jalen Hurts.
BMI, obesity and the problem with how we talk about weight
Here’s what BMI is, when it’s useful, where it falls short and what else to pay attention to.
Energy drinks are more popular than ever. Here’s what we know about the health risks.
Highly caffeinated energy drinks have been linked to heart problems, obesity and anxiety.
Canucks Could Finally Solve Problem Thanks to Division Rival
The Vancouver Canucks could finally solve a complex problem thanks to a division rival with an even bigger one. The post Canucks Could Finally Solve Problem Thanks to Division Rival appeared first on HEAVY.
Study finds structural weaknesses in N.Y.'s sprawling ethics system
Those problems, the report says, can leave watchdog agencies vulnerable to the political officials they oversee.
Pirate Problems: Bucs Facing old Friend Sean McVay
New coordinator Zac Robinson faces his mentor in a high-stakes showdown, leveraging intimate knowledge of Sean McVay’s system to neutralize Matthew Stafford’s explosive Rams offense.
Building Science fellowships give UMaine students real-world experience engineering solutions for Maine companies
Under a microscope at TimberHP’s manufacturing plant in Madison, Maine, Brian Waterbury studied plant fibers used to make insulation for homes while learning how engineers solve problems. Waterbury, a University of Maine senior from Topsham, Maine, who is majoring in chemical engineering, works as a quality control and process engineer…
Inspector general finds California High-Speed Rail business plan incomplete
California’s high-speed rail project has made progress in meeting legal reporting requirements, but state oversight officials say major gaps and clarity problem
Lenders urged to solve business problems before adopting AI
HW AI Summit panelists said AI needs human oversight, vendor controls and monitoring to meet fair lending requirements.
Cheese industry struggling under weight of tariffs, inflation and war
Rising costs of milk and shipping are impacting makers
We’re reading less. And it’s making us stupid
Books have never been trendier, but studies show that as more and more things compete for our frazzled attention spans, we’re reading less and less. This is a problem because reading has a wealth of cognitive benefits that we’re in danger of missing out on.To find out why declining literacy could affect everything from memory to IQ, Madeleine Finlay speaks to the Guardian’s science editor, Ian Sample. She also hears from Prof Falk Huettig, an experimental psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and author of The Perks of Being a Bookworm
Broncos Struggle To Manage Injuries As Dobbins Goes Down
The Denver Broncos have been dropping like flies in training camp, and soft tissue injuries are the problem.
The AI takeover of mathematics has begun
OpenAI showed that AI can tackle long-standing problems in mathematics. Experts are excited about the possibilities — and worried about what comes next for their field.
Canva’s Former CFO Says AI Cannot Fix A Broken Business
More than half of CEOs report no measurable AI return. The CFO who scaled Canva from $10 million to $2 billion says the problem was never the model you picked.
The U.S. Healthcare System is Already Mostly Socialized
Now that Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the outcome of this crucial race will depend mainly on two things: Whether Republicans succeed in demonizing El-Sayed because he’s brown and a Muslim, and whether they succeed in demonizing him as a left-wing radical. I will defer for the now the question of whether bigotry will be effective this year, although I will address it another day. What I want to address instead is El-Sayed’s signature issue — healthcare. Yes, El-Sayed advocates Medicare for All, a position the usual suspects denounce as “socialism.” I will get to the politics of his stance soon. Today, however, I want to talk about the substance. We should be clear that El-Sayed doesn’t even call himself a socialist. On the contrary, he explicitly disavows the label, saying “I’m a capitalist who just knows about capitalism”. In fact, as I explained in a previous post, the policies that El-Sayed advocates qualify him as a social democrat, not a socialist. Still, El-Sayed advocates a system under which the government would pay almost all medical expenses. Isn’t that socialism? Well, if that is the criterion then much of U.S. healthcare is already socialist. In fact, the government’s role is so large that U.S. healthcare is better described as partially privatized socialism than as anything resembling a free market. Let’s start with the raw numbers on health insurance, which pays the bulk of Americans’ medical expenses. Americans receive health insurance either from private companies or from public programs, overwhelmingly Medicare and Medicaid. Here’s what the breakdown of coverage and spending between private and public looked like in 2024: While a majority of Americans with health insurance get it from private companies, well over 100 million of us are covered by government programs instead. And these government programs pay more total dollars for medical bills than the private insurers do. Why do government programs that cover a minority of the population account for a majority of health insurers’ outlays? Mainly because Medicare covers seniors, and we’re expensive. Also, while Medicaid covers many younger Americans, disabled and elderly beneficiaries account for most of its spending. Even by the raw numbers, then, U.S. health insurance looks as much public as private. But that understates the government’s role: Private health insurance in the U.S. is both highly regulated and heavily subsidized. This is obviously true for the insurance coverage purchased by tens of millions of Americans through the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. But employment-based health insurance, which covers 161 million Americans, is far more of a government creation than most people realize. For employment-based insurance exists largely because of huge implicit government subsidies that come with major strings attached. Here’s how that works. If your employer pays you $10,000, that’s taxable income. But if your employer pays $10,000 toward a company health insurance plan that meets certain criteria, it isn’t taxable. That’s a huge effective subsidy, running at more than $300 billion a year. Take that subsidy into account, along with the more than $100 billion per year spent subsidizing policies purchased under the ACA, as well as the outlays on Medicare and Medicaid, and net effect is that the government pays for more than two-thirds of Americans’ health insurance. Granted, there are strings attached. Roughly speaking, employment-based health plans can’t discriminate based on medical history — that is, they can’t deny coverage to employees with pre-existing conditions — and they also can’t offer the plans only to highly compensated employees — a health plan that is only for the C-suite is considered taxable income. So given the restrictions of the federal tax code, employer-based health insurance is a lot like Obamacare, which also prohibits discrimination based on medical history and provides subsidies to make insurance affordable to lower-paid workers. The fact is that virtually all of private healthcare insurance is already well under some form of government control through regulation and tax subsidies. How should we think about this system? First of all, is Medicare socialist? Don’t tell anyone, but the way Medicare operates — it covers every senior’s medical expenses, whatever they turn out to be, while being funded by taxes that depend on one’s income — could be summarized by the old Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And back in 1961, when Ronald Reagan was the face of a last-ditch effort by the American Medical Association to block the creation of Medicare, he denounced Medicare as “socialized medicine” and warned that it would destroy our freedom. In reality, American freedom survived until Jan. 20, 2025, while Medicare is immensely popular, with an 82 percent favorable rating in the most recent KFF survey. Medicaid, government health insurance for lower-income Americans, comes in at 73 percent. This is in sharp contrast to public views about private insurers, who are widely disliked if not hated and accused of denying essential care. Furthermore, if Medicare is socialism, then the whole U.S. health insurance system, with the government paying most of the bills and placing conditions on private insurers, is almost equally socialist. If you insist on calling any program the government pays for and regulates socialist, then U.S. healthcare would best be described as a partially privatized form of socialism. And one must ask, what is the point of the part that is privatized? Do private insurers add anything positive? Or are they simply parasites, skimming off money that could have been paying for care? The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare. Assessing the waste from employer-based insurance is harder, but most evidence suggests that private insurers have substantially higher administrative costs than Medicare does. Furthermore, the complexity of private insurance, with multiple payers all trying to deny care when they can, is a huge burden both on providers — doctors, nurses, and hospitals — and on patients. What do private insurers offer to compensate for these costs? One must go through intellectual contortions to avoid the conclusion that they are, in fact, parasites. Which brings me back to El-Sayed. In supporting Medicare for All, he’s basically calling for an end to the partial, parasitic privatization of a healthcare system that is already hugely dependent on public funding. When one looks at it that way, it’s not at all a radical proposal. Admittedly, the political lift requires overcoming the opposition to higher taxes to pay for Medicare for All. Political realism rather than economics was the reason I and many other progressives supported Obamacare, with all its complexities, rather than demanding an immediate move to Medicare for All. But the political calculus may very well have shifted since the 2000s, as Americans are fed up with a system of unaffordable premiums, rampant claim denials, and byzantine claim administration. Moreover, funding healthcare insurance through taxation would allow for a much more progressive distribution of the cost. That is, compared to the present system, middle-income households would pay less as high-income households would pay more. And the U.S. would stop wasting large sums on pointless administrative costs. So let’s be clear: El-Sayed’s healthcare platform is perfectly reasonable on the merits of cost, fairness and health efficacy. And with private insurers never more hated, while millions of Americans are losing their health insurance, 2026 may be its time. MUSICAL CODA
When a physician’s ‘noble’ reassurance leads to a patient’s unsought treatment
When a doctor tells a patient that his or her symptoms are normal within some given context, the patient may ignore the contextualization and only hear “You’re normal.” As shown in a new study, the partially received message can be a problem.
Business owners reflect on anniversary of fire that destroyed historic restaurant
On the night of August 11th, 2025, a crippling problem erupted.It tested the spirit of endurance of Jason LeCates and Matt Crandall, business partners at The Bo
Study links student gambling problems to mental health
As gambling becomes more accessible to college students, a statewide study of Mississippi's public universities found gambling problems frequently occur alongside depression, anxiety and substance use.
"They don't understand art" - id Software lead slams Xbox, says it's "impossible" to make games like 2016's Doom now
id's lead services provider Chris Hayes spoke to the Well Played podcast about the studio, and the problems he has with the company post-layoffs.
Scientists Release Biggest 2D Map of the Universe
Key Takeaways The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys combined more than 263,000 telescope exposures to make the largest 2D map of the universe in visible and near-infrared light. Astronomers can pair the Legacy Surveys map with their own observations to explore our universe and search for rare phenomena. The 2D map serves as the foundation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument survey to measure the universe in 3D and investigate dark energy. Hold on to your telescopes: the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team has released the largest-ever 2D color map of the universe. The 5.6-trillion-pixel map contains nearly 4 billion celestial objects, primarily stars and galaxies. The data is available for all to use and publicly viewable through the Legacy Survey Sky Viewer. Astronomers and citizen scientists can explore the map or combine it with their own observations to better understand our universe. Researchers can search for rare phenomena like gravitational lenses, observe fleeting events like supernovae, and investigate two of physics’ biggest mysteries: dark matter, the invisible substance that accounts for most of the mass in our universe, and dark energy, the force driving our universe’s accelerating expansion. The new map builds on earlier versions from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys that have already proved invaluable. To date, more than 1,800 science papers that reference the Legacy Surveys data have been published. “It’s part of the fabric of astronomy research now,” said David Schlegel, a co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). “When you’re working with astronomical objects today, you often start by pulling up the Legacy Imaging Viewer to see what you’re looking at.” Covering roughly 75% of the sky in visible and near-infrared light, the updated map provides a deep view of the extragalactic universe not blocked by the dust and stars of our own Milky Way. Researchers expect it will remain the most comprehensive 2D map of our universe for years to come. More than 160 scientists contributed to data collection for the project, and a team of 20 produced the final dataset released today. It was built by combining 263,407 telescope exposures from three ground-based sky surveys: the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS) at NSF Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS) at NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory, and the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS) at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. That was supplemented by years of data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite mission and additional public data. “For our team, these data are fundamental to our investigation of the expansion history of the universe and the formation of our galaxy,” said Arjun Dey, co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and an astronomer at NSF NOIRLab. “But the skies belong to everyone, and this survey gives everyone the chance to explore the sky and marvel at its wonders.” Here be galaxies The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys were originally conducted to prepare for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. The Legacy Surveys’ 2D map is essentially a deep photograph of the sky; it records where galaxies and stars appear and how bright they appear. This crucial step enables DESI to select objects and measure their light in different wavelengths to determine their distances, building the largest high-resolution 3D map ever made. Scientists study the way galaxies have clustered at different ages of the universe to track dark energy over time. In April 2026, DESI completed its original five-year survey ahead of schedule and with vastly more objects than expected. The early results have shown surprising hints that dark energy’s impact may be weakening over time — a paradigm shift that could potentially shape the predicted fate of our universe. DESI expects to publish improved results using their first five years of data in 2027 and is continuing observations into 2028. DESI was so efficient at observing galaxies, the Legacy Surveys map needed to expand. Early on, “it became clear we might run out of galaxies to look at and run out of sky, and we better start doing something about that,” said Schlegel, who also works on DESI. The new Legacy Surveys map has been used to select DESI targets since June 2026 and will guide the telescope’s operations over the coming years. Computing the cosmos Merging hundreds of thousands of images taken on 2,285 nights, each with unique atmospheric and telescope conditions, was a massive computational effort. It took about a year to develop the computer code and eight weeks to process all the images at the Perlmutter supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab. Beyond supporting DESI, the Legacy Surveys will be a foundational reference for the next generation of telescopes. As new observatories like the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory (jointly funded by NSF and DOE’s Office of Science) and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope come online, researchers can compare their observations with one of the deepest and most comprehensive views of the sky ever assembled. The Legacy Surveys data will also help scientists train artificial intelligence tools to analyze petabytes of astronomical data and accelerate new discoveries. It will be among the datasets used in an astrophysics pilot project within the American Science Cloud, part of the DOE’s Genesis Mission. The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of High Energy Physics; the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility; the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Astronomical Sciences; and the partner institutions. DESI is supported by the DOE Office of Science and NERSC. Additional support for DESI is provided by the NSF; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (SECIHTI) of Mexico; the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain; and by the DESI member institutions. ### 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.
Trump has a Carter-style Iran problem as the economy drags before the midterms
Donald Trump is staring down two stark liabilities that threaten to damage his Republican Party in the midterms and ruin his second term-legacy.
15 Mini Gadgets That Can Easily Fit Into Your Pocket Or Backpack
If you're looking for useful everyday carry gear, these compact gadgets will slip into your pocket and solve real problems wherever you go.
Problem in America? Sports betting, marijuana use soars
In 2025, Americans spent $166 billion betting on sports, and 21.4 million people used marijuana on a near-daily basis.
Problem in America? Sports betting, marijuana use soars
In 2025, Americans spent $166 billion betting on sports, and 21.4 million people used marijuana on a near-daily basis.
'His urine goes on tour around Europe, showing the kings and queens this glowing pee': The weird world of alchemy before chemistry
Editor Hannah Osborne spoke with science writer Kit Chapman about his book "The Age of Alchemy." In it, he explores how, long before modern science existed, people were finding extraordinary ways to solve problems and understand the world around them.
AI isn’t the biggest cybersecurity problem. People are
Cases of AI escaping the lab, infiltrating other companies and trying to deceive people have all made headlines in recent weeks. And in one case, AI models even worked together to break free from their test environments.
Why haven't Mississippi Democrats found a governor candidate?
The election for governor in 2027 is a crucial moment for the Mississippi Democratic Party. The problem? The party still doesn't have a candidate.
A 0.42-nanometer breakthrough could push transistors beyond silicon
Atomically thin semiconductors could enable dramatically smaller and more efficient chips, but a stubborn problem at the boundary between materials has limited their performance. Researchers have now engineered that atomic interface to protect electron flow while still allowing extremely thin insulating layers. The resulting transistors delivered an unusually strong combination of electrical control and performance.
49ers’ Nick Bosa gets injury update after missing practice
Nick Bosa misses practice for the 49ers with soreness, but Kyle Shanahan is not overly worried about a lingering problem
Indiana Fever have a Lexie Hull problem to deal with
Lexie Hull’s 2026 numbers have raised an interesting question for the Indiana Fever.
The Atlanta Braves Have a Raisel Iglesias Problem
The Atlanta Braves have a problem regrading closer Raisel Iglesias' performance since July 1st.
AI framework rooted in cognitive science could complete tasks more efficiently
In recent years, computer scientists have developed a wide range of artificial intelligence (AI) models that can rapidly recognize patterns in data, generate content and solve other computational problems. ...