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Russia giving some missiles greater range, larger warheads: Ukraine
The new assessment from Ukraine's military intelligence said Russia has stockpiled thousands of ballistic and cruise missiles.
AI in Life Sciences Market to Worth USD 69.34 Billion by 2031, at a CAGR of 26.3%
Delray Beach, FL , Nov. 04, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MarketsandMarkets™ projects the global AI in life sciences market to grow from USD 21.58 billion in 2026 to USD 69.34 billion by 2031, at a CAGR of 26.3% during the forecast period. Market growth is fueled by accelerating adoption of AI in drug discovery, clinical research, diagnostics, and precision medicine, along with increasing investments in AI-powered life sciences solutions and the growing availability of real-world and genomic data. Ge
Regional business leaders share their perspectives on giving back
This month we asked: In what ways does your organization give back to the community?
Democrats ready healthcare push
Democrats have clear first steps when it comes to healthcare: enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies and reversing Medicaid cuts.
Food contains thousands of overlooked chemicals. This physicist is mapping them
Giulia Menichetti is exploring how food’s vast chemical complexity may shape the microbiome and human health.
Jackson Hole Mountain Resort drops afternoon pass
New pass caters to fans of groomers, free parking, fewer crowds.
AFGHS co-signatory countries ask health care users to help fill the financing gap
Hundreds of thousands of Ugandans living with HIV on antiretrovirals could be targeted for user fees or community health insurance schemes requiring modest premium payments, according to the April 2026 version of the country’s America First Global Health Strategy implementation narrative.1 As part of the “sustainable financing for the private not for profit sector” strategy, 491 facilities will be targeted for a phased introduction of user fees and scale up of community health insurance programs.2 In the Ugandan context, PNFP facilities include faith-based hospitals and other health facilities, US missionary organizations and centers of excellence—services that are often co-located at government facilities but run with additional financial and technical resources. 402,000 people—or about 28 percent of the total Ugandan adult PLHIV population on treatment—get ART from the private not for profit sector. The selected facilities provide the majority of ART and prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT) services. The plan doesn’t give the total number of clients served by the 491 facilities, so it is not possible to give a precise number. But the majority of 402,000 is a figure in the hundreds of thousands—hence the estimate I’m using.3 The April draft of the Ugandan implementation plan narrative is the only one I’ve been able to review. But the government of Uganda is not alone in turning to health care users to help fill the financing gaps caused by the abrupt withdrawal of US funds. In July 2025, the Government of Liberia introduced user fees for previously free services including “registration, accommodation, patient feeding, hospitalization, and a wide range of surgical and diagnostic procedures.”4 Earlier that year, Liberia rolled out a revolving drug fund designed to stabilize drug supplies by “allowing patients to pay a small fee for standardized, quality medications,” according to a Ministry of Health press release.5 (Both of these approaches had been proposed in the National Health Policy 2022-2031; media coverage explicitly connects the launch with the US foreign aid cuts.) The health financing strategies proposed by Uganda and established in Liberia are qualitatively different from user fees officially adopted by specific health facilities to cover funding shortfalls caused by the new US approach.6 The latter is a stopgap, adhoc change. The former is a national governmental adoption of policies that pass costs on to health care users, despite evidence that such approaches can exacerbate inequities and leave deficits unfilled. Two countries does not make a pattern, but they do point to urgent questions: Have other countries, including Liberia, included user fees or community health insurance schemes in their implementation plans? If so, do any of these narratives have what Uganda’s lacks: a fall-back plan in place in case these strategies for sustainable health systems fail to deliver—as they have before? I wonder if you think about it Subscribe Predictable pitfalls Both community-based health insurance and user fees are as old as the hills. And after decades of people climbing up these hills, duking it out, climbing back down—neither strategy has shown the results the Ugandan implementation plan is counting on. This is, in fact, a hill some folks are willing to die on. (You knew I’d get there, right?) In November 2025, an African-led team of health system experts published a paper directed at low- and middle income country governments trying to figure out how to create self-sustaining health systems. The money wasn’t coming back. It had been more than nine months since the season of freezing, waivering and wood-chippering; two months since AFGHS tumbled into the world touting co-financing requirements and reductions in future US government health aid. Governments were looking for strategies for sustainable, self-financed health systems, the authors wrote. For countries considering user fees and community health insurance to fill the financing gaps, they had a simple message: Don’t. On user fees, the paper states: “Reliance on user fees is ultimately a regressive and inequitable approach. It places a disproportionate burden on the poor and undermines health system goals of equity and financial protection. […] There is overwhelming evidence that user fees mobilise very limited resources for the public health sector, making it an inefficient mechanism for revenue mobilisation.” On community health insurance: “Attempting to shift the burden of funding previously donor-funded services, such as HIV care and management, and TB treatment, onto contributory schemes would exacerbate their fragility and fail to protect the population.”7 The WHO says that community-based health insurance “cannot be expected to provide a major source of funding or coverage,” and noted that most schemes offer only moderate benefit to individuals paying into them, and exclude the poorest segment of the population.8 And yet, the US-Ugandan implementation plan says that community health insurance is “the central pillar of this [PNFP] sustainability strategy” and that this approach that will generate “pre-paid pooled funding at facility and community level [that] improves financial risk protection for households, reduces catastrophic out-of-pocket expenditure, and generates structured, transparent revenue streams that can progressively absorb recurrent costs including health worker salaries.” Unfortunately, Uganda’s own history suggests the pillar might not be able to bear this weight. Ugandans Have Been to this Rodeo Before—and Some Want Their Money Back Uganda introduced its first community health insurance scheme in 1996 with support from international donors.9 Thirty years later, somewhere between 0.2 and 0.3 percent of the population is covered by CHI; just over 1 percent has any kind of health insurance.10 User fees were universally introduced in 1993 as a condition of a World Bank loan.11 They were abandoned in 2001, and in 2004—the year I moved to Uganda to watch the free HIV program get underway—a definitive study found that the fees did not improve health systems and outcomes.12 In 2004, most clinics and hospitals had ‘free’ and ‘fee for service’ options for getting care.13 The fee for service, or “cash and carry” programs had often been established in the years prior to PEPFAR and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. People who could afford to paid for the drugs, often at facilities in the private-not-for-profit (PNFP) sector. When free drugs arrived, some people who’d been paying kept on doing so, perhaps because of shorter wait times, greater confidentiality, convenience or other factors. But in the year that I spent visiting the same clinics around the country week after week—including a “center of excellence” that maintained separate days for cash and carry clients and those accessing free ARVs—lots of people who had been paying tried to switch to the free option. They’d paid because they had no other choice. They’d sold pieces of family land, begged family members for loans, bought pills by the week, and sometimes by the day. Or they were just cash-strapped, like most of us, and wanted the funds for other things. 14 Twenty-two years later, this hasn’t changed. Ugandans pay out of pocket for 30-40 percent of their health care costs, leading one paper to declare that “falling ill is more than a health crisis. It is a financial emergency.”15 One recent study found that up to 48.5 percent of households dealing with tuberculosis sold something, took out a loan or dug into savings to defray the costs of TB care—which is supposed to be universally free.16 The Ugandan implementation plan does anticipate challenges. It proposes a phased approach, with 187 facilities introducing user contribution systems in Year 1, 152 in Year 2, and 153 in Year 3. Willingness to pay and feasibility studies will precede roll out; fees will be tiered by region, and a waiver system is proposed to ensure that no one has to pay who is unable to. Moreover, the plan provides for quarterly reviews of epidemiological data to “ensure that user contributions do not compromise epidemic control gains, ART continuity for the client cohort, TB case management, or PMTCT services.” Alt text: A screenshot of a table included in the implementation plan narrative that is the subject of this stack. It’s got a fetching pink bar at the top. It uses the abbreviation “CHI” which is Community Health Insurance, and FBO which is Faith Based Organizations, and it details the number of facilities that will implement user fees with waivers and community health insurance schemes over the five years of the agreement. As I said in the footnote, this is a super interesting document with a lot of other rich material. Tell me what you see—and what you would have focused on. And if you’ve seen something like this, or anything else that strikes you, in another implementation plan, tell me that too. You can use the Substack message platform or try me on Signal at @endaplague_again.25 (because @mercoonfan was, weirdly, taken). But the plan doesn’t fully explain what will happen if this approach doesn’t work out. Yes, progress will be monitored, and corrective action triggered. However, there is no specified funding replacement if premium and fee revenue prove inadequate. Instead, the authors write, “Currently, COEs serve a total client cohort of over 180,000 across 28 facilities. In the initial years, the U.S. Government (USG) will provide financial support for clients; over time, user fees generated by COEs will become the primary source of funding for sustaining their services.” Failure does not really seem to be an option. Health insurance schemes are more acceptable to the Ugandan population than user fees. Members of Parliament and civil society traveled to Ethiopia to see how that country’s scheme worked. In a follow up report, a veteran civil society group recommended allowing the “health insurance ecosystem to grow organically and [to] keep reviewing the law and regulations as this growth takes root.”17 One study found that more than three-quarters of Ugandans were willing to join a health insurance program.18 However, coverage of community-based health insurance is minimal, as is coverage of any kind of insurance—including private plans.19 A national health insurance scheme bill has been stalled for several years and presently sits with President Yoweri Museveni.20 Community-based health insurance scheme that do exist are expanding in number, but losing enrollees. Between 2022 and 2026, the number of community-based health financing schemes across the country increased by 42 percent, while the number of people enrolled decreased by nearly 11 percent.21 None of this means that community-based health insurance should not happen in Uganda—or that people do not want insurance. It doesn’t even mean that user fees and waivers won’t ever work. But there is highly relevant evidence from Uganda and the surrounding region that it is quite optimistic to describe community health insurance and user fees as central supports for sustainable financing in any sector of the health system. And now for the best-case scenario In the best-case scenario22, the Ugandan approach does exactly what it sets out to do, and so does the Liberian fee structure and revolving pharmacy fund—though I’ve not confirmed that these are in the MoU. In one best-case scenario, Uganda is an outlier, and user fees and community health insurance are not recurrent pillars of self-sustaining financing in other countries’ implementation plans. In another best-case scenario, all countries that include these strategies enjoy success beyond anyone’s evidence-informed wildest dreams: reliable funding generated by health care users fees, great health care outcomes for everyone, no exacerbation of inequities, no crippling household debt. No sold land, repurposed school tuition or high-interest loans. In the best-case scenario, not one of the hundreds of thousands of Ugandans living with HIV receiving antiretrovirals from 491 PNFP facilities misses a refill or leaves care because of user fees or community health insurance premiums. This is the best-case scenario for these people for their own health, and for their families. It is also the best-case scenario if Uganda wants to stay on the path to eliminating HIV as a public health threat. According to the country’s most recent data, 96.5 percent of people living with HIV on antiretrovirals are virologically suppressed. Epidemic control depends ensuring that 95% of people living with HIV know their status, 95 percent of those individuals are on ART, and 95% of those individuals are virologically suppressed. Uganda is still struggling with the first “95"—a frankly abysmal 85.3 percent. If HIV epidemic control and the attendant prevention of new infections, avoidable suffering and premature death matter, the country cannot afford to lose any clients who are currently in care.23 As I write this a couple hours before the polls close for the US elections in the city I live in, I say with soul-deep sincerity: I am rooting for the best-case scenario. I think it’s safe to say that we all are.24 I think it’s also safe to say that if the US and co-signatory governments have inked plans that lead to successful expansion of community health insurance and strategic use of user fees, we all would like to know, now, so that we don’t miss the opportunity to celebrate when success happens. The implementation plan narratives have to enter the public domain. They are the fullest expression of a strategy co-created by two governments. There are assumptions and details that people living in the US and co-signatory countries need to understand that are not available in the MoUs or, to date, in the Congressional Notifications. Some of these details can help other countries that are, as I write this, still working on implementation plans. Others, like a solid count of how many other countries have plans for expanding user fees or health insurance, are important for regional and global health architecture reform initiatives. No matter how this election night turns out, there will be a slew of new Congressional member orientations, briefings and talking points papers in the next few months. Release of implementation narratives should be a bullet point in every context that AFGHS is discussed. These documents can be redacted so that procurement sensitive information isn’t disclosed. There is much more historical precedent for sharing such documents than there is for relying on user fees to fill health financing gaps. Let’s look at the information together so we can hope for the best and prepare for, you know, the other thing. Alt text: A substack first: a bicep selfie! It’s my arm - peachy-white skin, black shirt (flannel, notch neck, too hot for this appallingly balmy November weather, if you’re wondering) and a sticker that says I VOTED 2026. Beige letters on red for I voted. Beige on blue for 2026. You bet I did.25 In your wildest dreams. Subscribe 1 This is a really, really rich 95 page document. There are fascinating ideas and detailed plans in it. It is all worth reading AND I have, in this post, highlighted an instance of content that could pose challenges and certainly posits success of strategies that haven’t worked before. I would love to hear what readers’ see that’s interesting and should be lifted up as something to check for in other implementation plans. I will also shortly be adding a static page to the substack site where implementation plan documents will live. I will put the url into this footnote and it will also be there on emilybass.substack.com by the end of the week. Uganda Implementation Narrative Section 4 April 22 2026 Draft 1.51MB ∙ PDF file Download Download 2 User fees are costs charged for visits, labs, medicines or other health services, usually at the time they are provided. Community health insurance, or community-based health insurance, is what the World Health Organization calls “micro insurance,” which is health insurance targeted at low-income people. 3 As usual (by which I mean always), please prove me wrong. 4 https://smartnewsliberia.com/liberias-ministry-of-health-announces-2025-hospital-service-fees-for-public-facilities/?utm 5 https://moh.gov.lr/news/2025/grand-cape-mount-leaders-residents-embrace-new-community-pharmacy-program/?utm 6 https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/09/hiv-usaid-pepfar-africa-foreign-aid-cuts-mission-hospitals/?utm 7 https://gh.bmj.com/content/10/11/e021270 8 https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/community-based-health-insurance-CBHI 9 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2827475/ 10 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10861328/#b3-jpmph-23-110 11 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC527704/ 12 Same citation as the footnote 2 - the article is called “Learning from failed health care reform in Uganda.” To which I say: If only. If. Only. 13 There is a whole taxonomy of user fees to be aware of, if not commit to memory. Out of pocket costs are everything that someone pays for themselves. In this Stack, user fees are planned and policy-supported out of pocket costs. There are also out of pocket costs that people pay to buy drugs or receive tests or health care assessments that would be free if the drugs were on the shelves, or the machines or kits were available, or the staff were on site. A user fee is usually designed to be modest, pegged to willingness to pay, and may be waiveable at the point of care for anyone who is unable to do so. The costs for things that would otherwise be free are whatever the market will bear and people either have to pay them or go without. Out of pocket costs for services and stuff that aren’t available in public facilities are different again from bribes or unofficial fees that some health workers may impose, even though most are indefatigable, tireless and tired, and devoted to their clients. 14 For the record—which really is these footnotes—I would give a whole stack of fridge magnets for a systematic analysis of the economic and social impact of the Mass Unemployment Event in AFGHS countries among the very people who used to be able to afford and cover user fees, both for themselves and vast family networks. Locally employed USAID technical staff, house cleaners, caregivers, drivers and technicians were financial anchors for cousins, friends, friends’ children, friends’ childrens’ cousins, teachers, pastors, neighbors and so many other kinds of kin. Aid recipients lost direct funding; many other people who had not been aid recipients, but parts of the elaborate care webs that function as safety nets for so many people, lost crucial support too. And that’s even before we get to the people who worked at the hotels and restaurants and bars where people employed by the US and its implementing partners used to spend disposable income. Those businesses have lost revenue; those folks have lost jobs. It will be some time coming—and someone will have to fund this work—but I do hope it happens. And I hope, as usual, to be proven wrong. 15 https://eprcug.org/blog/how-out-of-pocket-healthcare-costs-keep-driving-ugandans-into-poverty/ 16 Another straight-to-the-point journal article title. Households experiencing catastrophic costs due to tuberculosis in Uganda: magnitude and cost drivers. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32938411 17 https://www.cehurd.org/download/technical-policy-brief-on-community-health-insurance-scheme/?wpdmdl=13661&refresh=6ae9122f5d4ed1793659439 18 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10125197/ 19 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10861328/#b3-jpmph-23-110 20 https://ugandapost.news/uganda-to-make-health-insurance-mandatory-by-2026/ 21 https://shu.org.ug/download/235 22 With a nod, tip of the stack hat, and wag of the Mercoon tail to a deeply valued reader who told me that I have a tendency to speculate about the worst-case scenarios a little too much of the time. 23 https://news.mak.ac.ug/2026/10/uphia-2025-shows-ugandas-hiv-status-awareness-gap-despite-strong-treatment-outcomes/ As you’ll see in the next footnote, I’ve already written a subSubstack on another topic, so I will be brief with regard to the study referenced in this article. The Uganda Population-Based HIV Impact Assessment, or UPHIA, will never happen in this way again. For more than a decade, PHIAs have been supported by the US government as a way to generate accurate estimates of country progress on key HIV indicators. They are a holdover from the PEPFAR program that was laser focused on ensuring US taxpayer dollars subsidized progress in pandemic control. There may be other population-level surveys and the data may even be publicly released, as the entire set of FY2026 MER data have not. But PHIAs will never happen again. If you’re wondering whether the estimates of HIV progress at country level might get less reliable….you’re not alone. 24 Ooh baby, I hate “we” in almost all forms. But sometimes I go there, when I am looking for company, which I am. Because this Stack moves into the somewhat-uncharted territory of assessing what the implementation plan narratives may suggest about co-signatory countries’ roles and responsibilities to the people living within their borders. The MoUs, specimen and data sharing agreements were templates. Countries’ answers fit into pre-specified questions that did not include, “how are you going to fill financing gaps and stabilize your health system as this plan unfolds?” In contrast, the implementation narratives are open form—the product of co-creation between the two governments. Co-creation can mean lots of things, but nothing leads me to believe that implementation plans are ghost-written by the US government, or that contents were imposed by the US counterparts. Instead, I think the parts of the plans that read like country government initiatives are endorsed, if not initiated by, those governments. For instance, the Ugandan implementation plan narrative describes plans for revenue-generation through fees charged for equipment calibration, repair and maintenance provided through Uganda’s National Equipment Calibration Laboratory, and laboratory accreditation through the Uganda National Accreditation Service (UGANAS), targeting private sector, PNFP, research and academic clients. That’s super specific and also quite ambitious. It doesn’t read like an American idea. There’s also a provision for solar panels, and other stuff that feels country owned and driven. This is where it gets interesting. If co-creation is the case, then both the US and co-signatory governments are accountable for the contents and the outcomes. Most discourse about AFGHS to date has focused on the decisions that America has made, or demanded that other countries make. The AFGHS architects have monopolized the hot seat. As they should, in so many ways. America absolutely created the conditions under which countries needed to come up with health financing strategies to fill unanticipated, catastrophic funding gaps. And with not-too-long a lens, we can look back and see that America is also on the hook for its role in the Bretton Woods institutions that made user fees and health system fiscal austerity conditions of loans during the era of structural adjustment. But in the here and now, it is not at all clear to me that the US is requiring Uganda or any other country to implement specific approaches to sustainable financing. Instead, it is as the authors of that paper up in footnote 6 suggest: African governments have agency. As implementation plans roll out—whether or not the narratives are shared—it will be important to understand what this agency looks like and what it means for people, including the poorest of the poor. And it will be important to figure out how to talk about it safely, respectfully and critically in places other than the literal and metaphorical footnotes. 25 This week’s song is “Once upon a time” by the Moody Blues. (I know, this is gonna be a weird, largely banger-free end of 2026 playlist. HMU with requests.) AND please do watch the video and appreciate the truly amazing opening sequence—a drum kit wasteland, a coupla plastic bags, a bit of sand. Sort of like the hill where fiscal austerity policies that put costs on health care users might go to perish. But then there’s a lady with amazing hair. It’s worth it.
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Iowa governor candidates address political agendas in schools
Two Polk County advocacy groups have the same concern: political ideology in the classroom. Moms for Liberty and Annie’s Foundation stand on opposing sides of the debate over what should be allowed in schools and both organizations said they believe the situation has worsened over the years. Jennifer Turner, mom and chair for Polk County’s...
Inside White Dwarf 530 – The forces of the Ten Thousand unleashed
Get your first look inside November’s issue of the official Warhammer magazine.
County officials issue health warning for local beaches after weekend rain
The county said residents should avoid diving, surfing or swimming during rainfall and for 72 hours after recent rainfall.
Commentary: Let the feds know large businesses aren't small businesses
The U.S. Small Business Administration is looking to update its guidelines, affecting thousands of struggling small businesses. This proposal should not be allowed to move forward.
Business jet carrying 9 people crashes in Florida neighborhood, FAA says
Nine people were on board the aircraft bound for North Eleuthera Airport in the Bahamas, authorities said. It was not immediately clear how many people were injured.
Deshaun Watson injury update: Shedeur Sanders replaces injured Browns QB
Shedeur Sanders has entered the Week 8 game between the Browns and Steelers after Deshaun Watson suffered an injury.
As support slips for Prop 40, Bernie Sanders criticizes billionaire spending against it
As support slips from the measure, Senator Bernie Sanders slammed the billionaire-funded efforts to oppose the proposed billionaire tax in California's Proposition 40.
Best Bets: A quick guide to La Jolla entertainment and experiences
Local events and activities
Who's enforcing the rules on billions in political spending?
Super PACs can spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, but they’re prohibited from coordinating that spending with candidates’ campaigns. In the fourth episode of Follow the Money, we examine how campaigns and outside groups navigate those rules, the controversial practice known as redboxing, and why vacancies and staffing shortages at the Federal Election Commission have raised serious questions about oversight of political spending.
Confirmed 2. Bundesliga lineups: Hannover 96 vs. Dynamo Dresden
Sandro Wagner makes three changes from the cup defeat to Kaiserslautern as he chases his first win. Leo Weinkauf, Stefan Teitur Thórdarson and Kolja Oudenne come in for Pascal Loretz, Franz Roggow an...
Yacht brokerage expands into Vermilion
New business brings 25 years of experience
Colorado breaks losing streak with OT win over Kansas State
Deion Sanders and his Colorado Buffaloes pulled off a resounding 27-24 overtime win against Kansas State on Saturday. The win snapped a five-game losing streak and gave Colorado their first win in the Big 12 this season. They won in a thriller as Isaac Wilson found Charlie Williams for an 11-yard touchdown pass in overtime. That was Williams’ only […] The post Colorado breaks losing streak with OT win over Kansas State appeared first on ClutchPoints.
Sandra Bullock shares rare look at past Halloweens with kids in touching throwback photos
The Oscar winner quipped that “nothing is off limits” during Halloween in their household.
Analysis: More than 40% of names on DOJ list of alleged noncitizens not on California's voter rolls
It's the first outside analysis of a list that the Department of Justice has used to threaten prosecution of election officials. The analysis also found that thousands of U.S. citizens appear to be flagged as ineligible to vote on the government's list.
New Orleans business sustainably preserves furniture pieces through caning, weaving
The ancient heritage craft of caning requires weaving with the glossy, flexible bark or skin of the rattan palm (Calamus rotan). The practice dates back thousands of years. Archaeologists found
Halloween maze is 'phenomenal' business for Caverswall Creamery
Caverswall Creamery says it gets thousands of visitors visiting its Halloween scare maze.
McDonald's dealt legal setback as judge allows McRib meat lawsuit to proceed
A federal judge dealt McDonald's a legal setback, allowing a lawsuit accusing the fast-food giant of misleading customers about the meat in its McRib sandwich to move forward.
Halloween party brings crowds and business to Palm Springs
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. (KESQ) — Halloween celebrations are bringing thousands of people to downtown Palm Springs this weekend, giving local businesses a chance to bring in more customers. The annual Halloween party on Arenas Road is taking place Friday and Saturday, with music, dancing, entertainment and costume contests. The free event runs from 4 p.m.
For many, striped bass fishing is a way of life. But the iconic species could face collapse
Scientists who study striped bass say anglers on the East Coast are right to be concerned, and they say years of overfishing are just part of the problem.
Red Wings Ship Out ASP; Recall JBD
On Thursday, Detroit Red Wings coach Todd McLellan discussed the lack of action defenseman Axel Sandin-Pellikka has seen so far this season. […]
Op-Ed: What if falling test scores have little to do with our public schools, and everything to do with NH politics?
New Hampshire is asking its schools to hold back the flood while it pulls away the sandbags
Kevin Federline allegedly faces thousands of dollars in debt after Britney Spears’ child support payments ended
The former rapper has been sued by City National Bank and Bank of America this year.
Jacob Misiorowski First Since Sandy Koufax To Accomplish This
It hadn't happened in over 60 years
Jay Craven: When Sandman Sims Came To Town
I was taking down my podcast set-up at the Co-op last Saturday when I saw pioneering St. Johnsbury bookseller Caroline Demaio, my longest running friend in the Northeast Kingdom. She
5 Questions With: Kristen Fitzpatrick, Harvard Business School's Senior Managing Director Of Career & Professional Development
HBS’s Kristen Fitzpatrick explains how coaching, alumni connections, and AI help MBA students navigate today’s job market.
Marsh Netherlands appoints new chief
U.S. firm Marsh McLennan Companies Inc. has appointedKristof De Bremme as chief executive officer of Marsh Netherlands, succeeding David Sanderse, who will become chairman of the Netherlands business…
Brewers fans flood streets for a long-awaited championship victory parade
Brewers fans were lining the streets of Milwaukee early Friday morning, with thousands expected for a parade celebrating the franchise’s first World Series title.
Minnesota Carlson Moments: Why Mental Health Matters in College
A senior shares how she overcame stress and doubt as a transfer student
Roma among clubs interested in Lisandro Martinez
Roma are also looking to England to strengthen their defense. Among the names linked to the Giallorossi is Lisandro Martinez, the Argentine center-back from Manchester United, whose future at Old Traf...
The midterms could open a new chapter for Republicans and an old fight for Democrats
The midterm elections might be the final nail in the coffin of the Trump era of the Republican Party, while Democrats will likely continue battling under roughly the same Hillary Clinton-versus-Bernie Sanders construct they have been operating under for the past 11 years.
For Palestinian citizens of Israel, a historic vote borne of fear and frustration
SAKHNIN, Israel (AP) — For Palestinian citizens of Israel, it was a rare moment of political triumph.Hundreds of thousands voted in record numbers, giving two Arab-led parties their largest-ever numbe...
AI Moves to the Heart of Particle Accelerator Science
A new editorial collection documents how artificial intelligence is reshaping particle accelerator science, from surrogate models already in practical use to reinforcement learning still confined to sandboxed studies.
Seventh graders explore science careers at Lake Charles Chem Expo
Thousands of seventh graders explored science and industry career paths at the annual Chem Expo at the Lake Charles Event Center.
Memorial Health System awaiting $80 million as payment delays slow hospital project
MARIETTA — Memorial Health System is awaiting about $80 million in anticipated Medicaid payments, a delay President and CEO Scott Cantley said is straining hospital operations and slowing financing for its women’s and children’s hospital project. Cantley said the outstanding payments include about $60 million through the Rural Ohio Hospital Tax Pilot Program for 2025 […]
NC House candidate sues political group, saying it made false claims about him
North Carolina House candidate Charles Taylor is suing the Sandhills Citizens Alliance over campaign mailers. He alleges the political group made false claims about his involvement with a purported gambling operation in Lee County.
Money Is Pouring Into San Diego Politics. Where Is It Coming From?
A look at the top spenders in the region, and where they got their money
Where is Elvira now? Inside Cassandra Peterson’s life beyond the Mistress of the Dark
The real Elvira is even more interesting than her macabre alter-ego.
‘Business Is Good At Providing A Solution … But We Don’t Have The Only Solution’: Wharton’s Dean Answers Chris Marquis
On NPR, Erika James calls Chris Marquis’ essay an oversimplification – but agrees business schools must evolve.
TAAG Angloa partners with AirFi to deliver In-Flight Entertainment
TAAG Angola Airlines, the national carrier of Angola, has entered into a partnership with AirFi to deploy AirFi’s portable streaming in-flight entertainment solution (IFE) across the airline’s mixed fleet of long-haul and regional aircraft. Together, the partners aim to enhance the digital journey for TAAG Angola passengers by delivering modern in-flight entertainment services, which they […]
Marlins’ 2026 Awards Show Promise Despite Missing Playoffs
Javier Sanoja and Otto Lopez earned top honors while Sandy Alcantara returns to form, proving the Marlins have talent even without a playoff berth.
A golden age of science is coming
It’s almost hard to remember, but just a few years ago, a lot of very smart people thought that science was in terminal decline. Respected researchers were writing papers with titles like “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time”, and “Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science”. In 1996, science writer John Horgan even published a book called The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age. The fundamental idea was that the Universe only has so many insights to discover, and that we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit. It was the idea that Joseph-Louis Lagrange expressed when he said that “we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.” As the big ideas and the simple ideas get mined out, we’re forced to throw ever more brains at the mysteries of nature just to keep scientific progress going at a fraction of its old pace: It looked like science was hitting a wall. Then along came AI. It’s far too early to tell how much AI will eventually speed up the growth of total factor productivity. But already we can see signs of a speedup in science. Anthropic Founder Jack Clark assembled some of the hopeful data points in a recent lecture: [ Dror Poleg@drorpoleg "If you pick different parts of science, you see the same pattern show up: Progress is accelerating, and it has started to accelerate in the last two years." Jack Clark @jackclarkSF I’m speaking at the IMF in an hour about the singularity and why I believe it has begun and the choices we'll need to make. Watch live here: https://t.co/Hj9HzcXx5h 6:08 PM · Oct 18, 2026 · 21.2K Views 2 Replies · 10 Reposts · 123 Likes ](https://x.com/drorpoleg/status/2111882070376980529) Anthropic is accelerating its investment into drug discovery, and is already announcing some impressive preliminary results: [ BioTender@Junioryu136689 BREAKING: Anthropic unveils early results from six Claude-powered drug development collaborations. • 70% shorter CAR-T signaling domain • ~35,000 antibody designs • >10× tighter antibody binding • 89% less batch-record review time Still largely preclinical. Anthropic @AnthropicAI Over the past few months, Anthropic scientists have engaged in deep research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines. We've also begun drug discovery efforts of our own. In doing so, we’ve learned much more about how Claude can support the many stages of 9:43 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 11.2K Views 3 Replies · 24 Reposts · 205 Likes ](https://x.com/Junioryu136689/status/2115197821150495150) Claude also appears to be enabling rapid progress toward a treatment for food allergies. OpenAI, meanwhile, announced a possible breakthrough treatment for neurodegenerative disease. Meanwhile, Google Cloud Chief Scientist Pushmeet Kohli has a list of recent scientific advances that have been enabled by its new Gemini model, including breakthroughs in nuclear fusion reactor design, rare disease research, and quantum computing: [ Pushmeet Kohli@pushmeet Gemini 4 Argon is a step change in model performance. In recent weeks, it has had a transformative impact on the Science projects in our team at @GoogleDeepMind and our external collaborators, and helped make a number of remarkable advances across scientific disciplines. 🧵👇 4:47 PM · Oct 13, 2026 · 36.5K Views 8 Replies · 41 Reposts · 497 Likes ](https://x.com/pushmeet/status/2110049807385702623) But as cool as these stories sound, they’re just very minor, preliminary efforts. There are a number of reasons to think that AI is going to propel us into a golden age of scientific discovery. That age might not last forever — AI might still run into diminishing returns eventually. But the next few decades are probably going to be an absolutely amazing time for human science. The number of “effective researchers” is no longer limited The most important input into science is scientists themselves. Until this year, that meant human brains — talented, highly trained human brains. The number of trained human brains could be increased by sending more people to grad school, but only to a point — the smartest people tend to be sent into the hardest research fields first, and if you 10x the number of researchers, the average quality will go down. This constraint was already starting to bite, as Ekerdt and Wu argued in 2024: We argue that a substantial portion of the downward historical trend in U.S. research productivity is a composition effect resulting from self-selection in researcher ability and the dramatic expansion of the research sector…[W]e find that this composition effect has lowered average researcher ability by between 37% and 53%[.] And of course, low fertility was making the problem worse, because fewer children meant fewer people who were able to become future scientists. AI just blows up this constraint completely. If an AI agent can function as an autonomous researcher, there’s no constraint on the number of researchers in the world — you can just build more of them, by building more computer chips and data centers that enable the running of more AI agents. Whether or not massive hordes of agents can collaborate to solve individual problems much faster, increasing the number of agents allows them to tackle many different research questions in parallel. What’s more, these AI “researchers” can be trained incredibly quickly compared to human beings. A human scientist takes decades to train, and more years to reach the frontier of their research field by diligent reading and conversation. This is the “burden of knowledge”, and it’s commonly believed to be one reason ideas have been getting harder to find — by the time human scientists can get up to speed, they’re often so old that their ideas are no longer novel. AI just annihilates this constraint — it can assimilate the entire literature and reach the frontier of research extremely quickly, and it can also tell human scientists where the frontier lies without forcing them to discover that for themselves. It can also pivot to new research directions more easily than humans can. And there’s also a self-reinforcing economic cycle here. Because scientific advances enable higher GDP, they enable more resources to be invested into the creation of yet more electronic “scientists”. Now that doesn’t mean the amount of scientific research goes to infinity — there may still be some essential bottleneck task that human researchers are still needed to perform. There are some indications that AI’s progress on open-ended conceptual research tasks is slower than in other dimensions, and it may be that humans are still needed to provide some of this long-term conceptual thinking. I’d bet against this being true for much longer, but it might be true for a long time. Even in this most “pessimistic” case, though, the amount of effective capital that scientists can use to leverage their work just went up by a lot. AI eliminates the theory bottleneck Science proceeds by an iterative process of theory and experiment. The theory part of that cycle is typically short, but non-trivial — it took a couple of years after the blackbody radiation spectrum was observed for Max Planck to come up with the quantum hypothesis to explain it, and decades longer before quantum theory as we now know it was created. It took about a year for Watson and Crick to figure out the shape of DNA after the requisite data was gathered. AI will basically eliminate the theory bottleneck entirely — or at least shorten the turnaround time between experiment and theory by an order of magnitude. AI is an absolute beast at math. Recently, an OpenAI model solved some of the most important open problems in computer science, math, and theoretical physics, and no one even batted an eyebrow because that sort of triumph is becoming increasingly commonplace. One of those solutions was a proof that the Standard Model of Particle Physics could be mathematically well-defined — a problem that human theorists had so far been unable to tackle. Not all research relies equally on theory, but understanding novel experimental results almost always involves some important component of either mathematical or spatial reasoning. That part of the task has now been made much, much faster. And on top of that, science is now open to a greater number of humans who aren’t naturally good at theorizing. AI can read the whole literature Much of the work of human scientists involves reading and understanding endless amounts of papers and going to endless conferences and seminars. The purpose of that work is to understand the existing scientific literature. Understanding the literature allows scientists to do the following things: Come up with new ideas for hypotheses to test Avoid doing research that someone else has already done Synthesize approaches from different areas or fields AI can reduce this effort to almost zero. Consider this excerpt from OpenAI’s blog post about their new research into neurodegenerative disease: The team divided the analysis among thousands of AI agents powered by GPT‑Rosalind, an approach we call distributed biological reasoning. The agents examined a whole-brain CRISPR atlas…a dataset showing how gene disruptions affect different types of cells across the mouse brain. Each agent investigated a gene disruption, analyzed cellular responses, searched scientific literature, and proposed explanations for the results. Their reports were combined into a reasoning atlas linking genes, cellular effects, relevant publications, and possible biological mechanisms. The research team estimated that comparable human analysis and literature review, conducted one perturbation at a time, would take months to a year. The agents reproduced findings from human analyses while uncovering additional leads. Their assessments of novelty and scientific value also aligned with judgments from blinded human experts. These findings help prioritize further experiments needed to test the proposed biological mechanisms. Some of these insights point to new leads for understanding brain disease. [emphasis mine] This is one case in which parallel work by a large number of agents really does make a huge difference: [ Haider.@haider1 this is actually insane openai deployed thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents to analyze millions of mouse brain cells in 32 minutes, work that could take human researchers months to a year also the agents uncovered new leads for brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's OpenAI @OpenAI GPT-Rosalind surfaced a new lead for drug discovery: could restoring cholesterol transport protect neurons from degeneration? DCTN1 is a gene linked to Perry syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder. In mouse-brain data, disrupting it increased expression of genes involved in 2:41 PM · Oct 21, 2026 · 51.5K Views 26 Replies · 95 Reposts · 1.26K Likes ](https://x.com/haider1/status/2112917197903540516) Not only does instantaneous literature review vastly speed up the research process, but it allows AI to make novel conceptual leaps from combining approaches from wildly different fields of research. AI regularly does this in math research, combining results, approaches, and theorems from far-flung places that no human mathematician would have thought to combine. It can do it in science, too. Much of scientific innovation, historically, has been “recombinant” innovation — scientists applying insights from one field to another. With AI, essentially all research is now cross-disciplinary — AI can read not just the literature on a particular subject, but the literature on a million other subjects that might have produced useful techniques or insights for the problem at hand. Superscience So far, all of the factors I’ve listed are ways that AI can speed up science as it’s already done. I’ve basically described how AI can send gigantic hordes of superhumanly fast, superhumanly well-read, superhumanly mathematically gifted researchers to re-accelerate scientific discovery. But it’s also possible that AI will enable types of discovery — and ways of understanding the natural world — that no network of humans, no matter how large or how brilliant it was or how long it had to work, would ever be able to discover. In a post back in July, I wrote about how that might work: What if there are lots of…aspects of the Universe that [are] too complex to understand in terms of simple laws, but not so complex that they just dissolve into unknowable chaos? It’s possible that we can reliably control these complex phenomena with AI, even if we never reduce them to the kind of principles that we can teach a grad student in a textbook… Another way of saying this is that there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can. I call these “cloud laws” — causal regularities that can be exploited by technology, but which are too diffuse and complex for an individual human being to either intuit or communicate… Perhaps social sciences like economics, sociology, and political science obey similarly complex regularities, and AI can help us find them. Perhaps there are physical processes — plasma, or topological materials, or aerial turbulence, etc. — that obey cloud laws instead of chaos?… [H]uman collaboration is bottlenecked — it’s limited by our ability to intuit patterns at an individual level, and to communicate these patterns from one individual to another. AI, being a computer, just doesn’t have this sort of limitation; it can work with vast, diffuse patterns without having to break them into pieces or simplify them in order to compress them into the tiny pipelines of person-to-person explanation… If much of the Universe turns out to be ruled by cloud laws, we could be on the precipice of a scientific renaissance. In order to discover cloud laws, AI will need huge amounts of data about the natural world. AI figured out human speech by assimilating essentially all of the text humans have ever written. If it’s going to figure out hidden patterns in biology, neuroscience, materials science, etc., it’s going to need similarly massive amounts of data from physical instruments. That data will be far, far more than humans — individually or collectively — would be able to parse, label, characterize, or model. But AI was built to do this. If scientists simply build huge arrays of sensors to measure complex phenomena like the brain, the cell, the economy, etc., they may be able to feed this flood of data to AI directly and bypass human cognitive intermediation entirely. AI would then learn about the world directly, and it might learn things that humans never could. This “superscience”, if you want to call it that, would actually go beyond the kind of science humans have done heretofore. Many of the technologies it yielded would be beyond human comprehension — indistinguishable from magic. But to the AIs, they would make perfect scientific sense. In any case, it seems clear that the scientific slowdown that threatened human progress will now be delayed — at least for a while. Unless humans have somehow found most of the actual exploitable regularities in our Universe, we’re about to enter a new golden age of science. Subscribe Share
Longtime Hornell business owners launch downtown artisan sandwich shop
Krissy and Ryan Bale are taking on a new challenge with a Main Street sandwich shop in downtown Hornell, the Herb N’ Spice Sandwich Co.
Photo Essay: College of Science and Engineering Research Showcase
Fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major Jess Visaya and Fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major Dorette Pirie show off their soft robots. The robots are made to mimic worms, whose bodies bunch up before extending to propel themselves forward. The robots use pneumatic actuators to make linear movement outwards. Visaya and Pirie set up two of their worms with syringes attached to tubing which was then threaded through the end cap into the worms. Visitors to their station were encouraged to race the two worms by pumping the attached syringes. Third-year Biochemistry major Ira Evetts worked in Dr. Christopher Whidbey’s lab studying the vaginal microbiome, in an attempt to better understand the different microbes that build it up and how it affects health outcomes. Evetts’ research was specifically focused on lactobacillus iners, one of several bacteria naturally present in a healthy vaginal microbiome, and methylation systems. Fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major John Diesko Boehm and Fourth-Year Mechanical Engineering major Ian Agopsowicz hold up their “DAQMobile.” They built their project, a modified RC kit car, to help teach mechanical engineers about circuits and electrical design through real-world application. Fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major Ben Murphy holds up his mole crab and crawfish-inspired burrower. Murphy wanted to imitate the motion of a crab’s legs through robotics, with the primary goal to “turn the rotation of one motor into four alternating legs that would successfully displace soil.” Murphy was inspired by works that take inspiration from the natural world, and he found mole crabs particularly interesting. Although a mole crab is at an advantage with its burrowing being underwater, thus the sand being fluidized and easier to displace, Murphy’s machine is able to successfully burrow three centimeters into the ground. Second-year Mechanical Engineering major and Physics major Arabelle Miller shows off her rubber gripper, inspired by kirigami and origami. She took a piece of rubber and strategically cut slits into it to make it fold the way she needed, then glued googly eyes to the front. The gripper is able to hold up to 38 times its weight, or 226 grams. Third-year Mechanical Engineering major Joonseong Park talked about how his project took an unused and broken 3-D printer and transformed it into a testing platform for soft robotic grippers. The former-printer was reprogrammed and had its extruder part modified to be a mount for the grippers. Park shows off some of the other grippers that can be attached to the testing platform. Park classified grippers into two large categories. The first set of grippers is designed to deal with small delicate objects with great precision, and the second is made to lift heavy or large objects. Third-year Mechanical Engineering major Jiashuo Liu set out with a goal to deploy free open-source AI models to pre-existing robots to integrate object recognition and retrieval and command. The models are used to process the data received from the robots’ cameras in order to detect certain objects and their locations. Fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major Cole Purohit focused on agricultural automation of raspberry picking. His project utilizes kirigami to make grippers to close around a raspberry when the two ends are pulled. “Nobody wants to eat a squished raspberry,” Purohit said. Fourth-Year Biochemistry major Mariel Nolan’s project focused on bacteria and proteins within the bacteria whose functions are unknown. Nolan’s research is finding a way to isolate those proteins with the ultimate goal of determining their functions. Fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major Kai Boydon and Fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major Evan Nguyen show off their project, which uses custom extensors to help with the rehabilitation of stroke patients. They compared their project to a “party-popper” in the way it unfurls itself when placed under a patient’s fingers, helping the stroke patient rehabilitate finger movement. Boydon shows off the testing rig built for their project. It works as a mount for their extensor, as a way to test against resistance. Their program inflates the extensor through an air pump, which then makes the extensor push against the bed whilst an arduino calculates the force created and air pressure associated with the force. Navigate Left Navigate Right
Browns QB Shedeur Sanders Makes Rare Post Amid Trade Talks
Browns quarterback Shedeur Sanders made a post on social media amid ongoing and consistent trade rumors. The post Browns QB Shedeur Sanders Makes Rare Post Amid Trade Talks appeared first on HEAVY.
The Key: Politics in Research a Danger to Innovation
Since the Bayh-Dole Act passed in 1980, the commercialization of federally funded research has contributed trillions of dollars to the American economy and made possible the launch of tens of thousands of start-ups, according to the Bayh-Dole Coalition. Inventions like Google’s search engine, tests for cervical cancer, lithium car battery recycling and high-definition video and audio are all products of the Bayh-Dole system. U.S.
All 16 D&D World of Warcraft Species Revealed
We head into the heart of Azeroth and break out all the lore and mechanics for the 16 key species featured in the new D&D World of Warcraft supplement.
7,000 victims compensated in $23 million Kansas health care fraud case
Thousands of fraud victims are receiving compensation after federal prosecutors in Kansas forfeited millions of dollars from a Kansas-based health care company.
Cheraw recycling business shut down after stolen railroad materials, wiring found
Authorities ordered Cheraw Iron and Metal, Inc. to temporarily close on Tuesday after law enforcement executed a search warrant at 179 Legion Lane in Cheraw, recovering thousands of pounds of stolen r...
YouTube Down for Thousands of Users Wednesday, Downdetector Reports
Thousands of users are facing issues with YouTube today. Discover the current status and reported problems affecting video streaming.
Texas Nonprofit Hospitals Must Offer Charity Care, But Many Patients Never Realize They Can Apply
Thousands of Texans turn to outside help to navigate an often confusing application process for financial assistance. Many say their hospital did little to inform them.
Politics is medicine on a large scale
In February 1848, a 26-year-old doctor named Rudolf Virchow arrived in Upper Silesia, a poor, rural corner of Prussia that’s now part of Poland. A typhus epidemic was killing thousands, and the Berlin government wanted a doctor to assess how to contain this pathogen, advise local authorities, and propose a plan. Virchow spent a few weeks going from villa…
Medicaid work requirements, mental health access in last Lahn-Sand debate
In their last face-to-face debate, Zach Lahn and Rob Sand clashed over mental health access and upcoming Medicaid work requirements in Iowa.