SCROLL NEWS / DISCOVERY
Search headlines
Find the stories shaping the conversation.
Results for " mapping " 107 found 🔀 AI-powered Shuffle
A new tool makes mapping the ocean easier
UCSB marine scientists have developed a new, open-source software package that makes it faster and simpler to find, organize and map data about the world’s oceans.
Epic Games shifts to automation-first development: Tim Sweeney sees a “golden age of gaming”
Epic Games is moving teams toward automation-first development. Tim Sweeney says generative tools could speed up production, lower costs, and open wha
What’s on the Sun’s hidden side? Scientists uncover new clues
A new study reveals how scientists can identify previously unseen solar activity and build more accurate models of the Sun's magnetic field.
Mapping the genetic diversity of Antarctic life
Antarctica is home to organisms that have evolved to survive months of darkness, frigid temperatures and some of the harshest conditions on Earth. Hidden within their genetic material are clues to how life adapts and persists in extreme environments.
The hidden features every Waze user should know about
There are a load of features tucked away in Google's 'other' mapping app.
Mapping the Totality of Childhood Exposures: How Exposome Science Is Rewriting Pediatric Health
A new review in Pediatric Research charts how exposome science, from wearable sensors to multi-omics cohorts, is transforming the measurement and prevention of environmental risks to child health.
Scientists Uncover Two Hidden Forms of Disorder in Next-Generation Semiconductors
A study of twisted two-dimensional semiconductors reveals how subtle material disorder can emerge at different spatial scales. Two distinct forms of hidden disorder may influence how ultrathin semiconductors emit light. One extends across relatively large areas of the material, while the other is concentrated around tiny defects. A new theoretical approach offers a way to
Deep-sea expedition around the Hawaiian Islands includes 10 local scientists, students, educators
The expedition will utilize remotely operated vehicles and seafloor mapping technologies to explore never-before-seen ridges, seamounts and abyssal plains throughout the Hawaiian Archipelago.
Anthropic's Claude Science creates the first complete ultraviolet map of the sky
Astrophysicist Brice Ménard of Johns Hopkins University used Anthropic's Claude Science to map the entire sky in ultraviolet light for the first time. AI agents downloaded data from multiple space missions, calibrated it, and filled in gaps using inpainting. Predictions averaged about ten percent deviation from actual measurements. Ménard sees the project as an example of research that simply wouldn't have gotten done without AI.
Is it possible to preserve your memories before dying? The science is moving beyond science fiction
For most of history, preserving someone’s memories after death meant relying on photographs, letters, stories and the recollections of other people. Technology is now pushing that idea much further. Scientists can record parts of brain activity linked to memory, researchers are mapping the neural networks that store experiences, and digital systems can preserve enormous amounts of a person’s voice, writing, images and personal history. That still falls far short of copying a mind. No technology
Training for Your First Marathon? Avoid These Common Injuries
As fall gets underway, runners, across the country begin mapping out training schedules for upcoming long-distance events. For new distance runners, however, increasing mileage can introduce an unwelcome training partner: injury.
Bishop’s computer science chair says AI is eliminating ‘grunt work’ and reshaping digital jobs
Dr. Russell Butler, chair of Bishop’s University’s Department of Computer Science, says artificial intelligence is increasingly taking over routine digital “grunt work,” changing the skills students and workers may need in the years ahead. Photo courtesy of Bishop’s University. Click here to read our platform! Get local news like this every morning. Subscribe free below. Subscribe Pulse Newsroom Artificial intelligence is already taking over some of the routine digital work once performed by entry-level employees, according to Bishop’s University Computer Science chair Dr. Russell Butler — a shift he believes will make expertise, judgement and the ability to evaluate AI-generated work increasingly important. Butler described the change as automation reaching what he calls the “bottom of the cognitive pyramid” during an interview with The Pulse about AI, university education and the future of digital work. His argument is not that humans are disappearing from the workplace. Instead, he sees their role changing as AI becomes capable of handling more of the repetitive tasks involved in computer-based work. “Everything’s converging on just AI basically doing all the grunt work,” Butler said. The bottom of the cognitive pyramid Butler is from Lennoxville, completed his undergraduate studies at Bishop’s and later earned his PhD at the Université de Sherbrooke. He joined Bishop’s in 2019 and now chairs its Department of Computer Science. He uses AI in research, teaching and other creative work, and said the technology is increasingly capable of handling routine digital tasks that once required substantial human time. “You’ve got the grunt work, like moving things around in Excel, doing basic programming tasks,” Butler said. “That’s like the bottom grunt work that the entry-level worker would have done two or three years ago.” Butler went further, saying in his view that much of this type of work has already been absorbed by AI tools. He connected that change to a shift he sees taking place in computer science, where entry-level roles have declined while experienced workers can use AI to increase what they can produce. “A senior developer now has access to essentially an unlimited amount of junior developers on demand,” Butler said. He was describing AI systems metaphorically, not literal employees. His point was that one experienced developer can now ask AI tools to produce code or other technical work that might previously have been assigned to more junior workers. That raises a broader question for universities and employers. If some of the simpler work traditionally given to newcomers can now be done by machines, how do people gain the experience needed to become senior workers themselves? Students doing work that once required years of programming Butler said he is already seeing the change inside his classroom. He created a Bishop’s course called CS208, Coding in Plain English, to show students — including those without traditional programming backgrounds — what they can accomplish using AI. Some come from disciplines such as psychology or neuroscience with no previous programming experience. “What I’m finding is that students who have zero programming experience, they come in from another discipline like psychology or neuroscience or something, they are now able to get up and running with real data sets,” Butler said. Butler’s own doctoral work involved neuroimaging, and he said he has assigned students work he considers comparable to the kinds of analysis he performed during his PhD. He described giving students a real dataset, an expected result and instructions to use AI to complete the analysis. Butler said those students have been able to carry out work at a level he associates with tasks he once performed after years of programming experience. That does not mean a student using AI instantly acquires the same knowledge as an experienced computer scientist. But Butler sees it as evidence that AI can dramatically lower the technical barrier between having a problem to solve and producing a working result. The role of the person using the system then changes. They need to know what to ask for, understand enough about the subject to judge the answer and take responsibility for what is ultimately produced. What about AI hallucinations? One persistent concern surrounding generative AI is hallucination — when a system produces information that sounds convincing but is false or unsupported. Butler said that problem has improved substantially in newer systems and is not as severe as it was with earlier models. He pointed in particular to newer AI systems’ ability to search the web, consult scientific databases and return source links rather than simply generating a citation from their internal model. Butler nevertheless said users should verify what AI produces. “You should verify,” he said while discussing citations generated with AI. His position is that hallucinations have become less common in the systems he uses, not that incorrect AI output is impossible. Human checking remains part of the process. Hours of work compressed Butler offered another example from his administrative work at Bishop’s. The university has been comparing CEGEP courses with first-year Bishop’s courses to determine where students may qualify for advanced standing. Traditionally, Butler said, that means reviewing two sets of course descriptions and manually matching one institution’s courses with another’s. As department chair, that could require hours of reading and comparison. He said AI can now be given both sets of material and asked to generate an initial mapping automatically. “It saves me hours and hours of work,” Butler said. Butler said the AI-generated mapping can also produce a better result than he would produce himself. He sees similar opportunities in businesses. A company may receive specifications, drawings, emails or other digital material from customers and then have employees convert that information into an internal format before anything can be manufactured or delivered. AI can increasingly perform parts of that intermediate processing. In Butler’s view, the employee does not necessarily disappear. Instead, the job becomes more about checking the result. “The human is still there,” he said. Judgement could become more valuable That change is central to Butler’s view of where digital work may be headed. If AI can produce a first draft, write basic code, compare documents or process large amounts of information, he argues that knowledge and judgement become increasingly important. “The real scarce resource going forward is going to be domain knowledge, expertise, and… credentials, authority, the ability to work with other people,” Butler said. He is therefore encouraging students not only to learn AI tools but also to broaden their education. He mentioned acting, fine art and photography as examples of courses that can help develop what he described as taste and intuition — the ability to recognize what is good, what is not and what should be changed. “And that’s the skill that they need now because the grunt work has been automated and now it’s about evaluating what the AI produces and telling it how to improve or expand the output,” Butler said. That does not remove the need for technical knowledge. Butler’s argument is that the emphasis may shift away from manually completing every step of a task and toward directing, checking and improving work produced with AI assistance. He also stressed that humans remain responsible for final decisions. “At the end of the day, the human has to make the final call,” Butler said, pointing to the question of accountability. Physical work may be different Butler draws a distinction between digital work and jobs requiring people to manipulate the physical world. He expects AI to continue advancing quickly in tasks performed almost entirely on computers. He is more cautious about claims that humanoid robots will soon be able to replace workers such as plumbers or electricians. Butler said those trades would not be replaced “anytime soon” in his view and described some current robotics demonstrations as overhyped. He described the situation as counterintuitive. “It’s almost like we solved the highest level first,” he said, contrasting advances in digital AI with the harder problem of building robots capable of operating reliably in the physical world. Butler’s argument is that some digital occupations could face automation sooner than trades requiring complex physical work. The wider AI shift in the Townships Butler’s comments come as local institutions are increasingly grappling with how AI should be used. The federal government recently announced up to $162 million over five years for 10,000 AI-related placements through Mitacs. The Université de Sherbrooke told The Pulse that the number of its collaborative research and innovation projects supported through Mitacs has approximately doubled since 2018-19, while the number of placements has approximately tripled. UdeS also said it already has projects involving both AI adoption and the application of AI to other fields. At Bishop’s, Butler said part of his role involves building the Computer Science department’s local presence, connecting students with regional partners and strengthening relationships with the Sherbrooke technology ecosystem. Those developments put universities in a difficult position. They have to prepare students to use the tools employers increasingly have available while also making sure graduates understand enough to recognize when those tools are wrong, incomplete or being applied to the wrong problem. The risk of losing human skills Butler does not see AI as risk-free. Later in the interview, he raised a separate concern: as AI becomes better at reading, writing, programming and other cognitive tasks, people could lose some of the underlying skills that historically helped produce new ideas. “The other danger is that we’re going to lose the human skills,” Butler said. He specifically mentioned reading and writing and argued that people could lose some of the lower-level understanding that contributes to breakthroughs. Butler said AI systems are based on existing human knowledge and argued that they become much more powerful when paired with a capable person. That tension runs through his view of the technology. AI can remove hours of routine work. It can allow beginners to perform tasks that once required substantial technical training. It can give experienced workers significant leverage. But the more capable the technology becomes, the more important it may be for people to develop the judgement needed to decide what should be done in the first place. For Butler, that is where education may have to change. Students still need to understand their field. They still need to know when something is wrong. And they still need to be able to make the final decision. But if AI increasingly handles the bottom of the cognitive pyramid, the value of a worker may depend less on how quickly they can perform the grunt work and more on whether they understand what the work is supposed to accomplish. Don’t miss the next story that affects your community. Join thousands of readers getting The Pulse every morning—plus breaking news alerts when it matters most. If you value this kind of local journalism, consider supporting it. Subscribe, share and like! Subscribe Share
Montana State students receive prestigious National Environmental Public Health internships
The students will complete projects involving tick-borne illness in Massachusetts and wastewater system mapping in Utah.
Information in Biology: A Mystery for Naturalism
Biology was giving us computer programming and symbolic codes which, by mapping functional structures to functional structures, exhibited a tacit semantics.
Conflict mapping research group founded by OSU researcher wins national award for open science
The American Geophysical Union has awarded the 2026 Open Science Recognition Prize to the Decentralized Damage Mapping Group, an international research team co-founded by Oregon State University Professor Jamon Van Den Hoek and postdoctoral scholar Corey Scher.The prestigious award is in recognition of DDMG’s contributions of satellite mapping data of regions beset by war, conflict or natural disasters to the public sphere, particularly to aid in humanitarian response and provide journalists with up-to-date information.
Alaska Science Forum: Mapping tsunamis, building trust
While taking a quick shower before her son’s fourth birthday party on Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami scientist Elena Troshina heard the phone ring. Deciding it was worth jumping out, she picked it up — with kids, you never know.
How lip-syncing to AI let Forced Entertainment ‘play the game of theatre’
Today we have a fascinating piece by long-time Forced Entertainment fan Ben Kulvichit, speaking to Tim Etchells about their latest show Cold Sweat, how they are integrating lip-sync and AI voices into their work, the question of ‘authenticity’ on stage, and how lip-sync has even opened the door for them to make “something a little bit like drama”. This piece is a paid partnership with the Southbank Centre, where you can see Cold Sweat next month – we’re very grateful to the Southbank Centre for their ongoing support for Exeunt. Holly Williams ‘It was immediately interesting and uncanny’ **By Ben Kulvichit** “Is the microphone on?” So goes one of the opening lines of Signal to Noise, delivered by a human performer lip-syncing to an AI-generated voice. The voice is American, cheery but sluggish, slowed down into a gelatinous drawl. It repeats ad infinitum in a farce of stuckness; an answer never materialises. I find myself asking the same question as I hop on a Google Meet call with Tim Etchells, the artistic director of Forced Entertainment. We spend five or ten minutes frowning at each other, muting and unmuting, me gesticulating in semaphore into my webcam, checking if I am coming through now, restarting the laptop. To Etchells, I appear exaggeratedly mouthing words, my voice missing. In this gloopy purgatory of broken communication, life imitates art imitates life imitates art. We try a Zoom instead. Forced Entertainment, the pioneering British theatre company who have been at the avant-garde of performance since the 1980s, turned an interesting artistic corner with Signal to Noise, created on the occasion of their 40th anniversary. The whole performance employed this lip-sync technique to AI voices; on the face of it a left-field move from a company whose identity has long been grounded in the earthy, immediate presences of its performers and its unassuming, low-tech approach to theatricality. The technique, however, turned out to provide the company with a “rich new seam” of artistic enquiry, and has now spawned a trilogy of works. The second instalment, Cold Sweat, plays at Sheffield Theatres, Southbank Centre, and Lancaster Arts in October, while the third part, Everything Must Go, has been touring in Europe and is slated to come to the UK in 2027. As is often the case with Forced Entertainment shows, the main conceit for this work didn’t arrive until quite late. They were “four or five weeks into rehearsals for Signal to Noise,” Etchells recalls, and getting nowhere. Away from rehearsals, he had been playing around with feeding “weird texts” to AI voices to see how they would cope with them – “basically for my own amusement” – and was compelled by the uniformly “serviceable, benign, good-natured” tone they would read in, no matter how poetic, fractured or experimental the writing. On a hunch, he brought some examples into rehearsals and the performers gave lip-syncing a go. “It was immediately interesting and uncanny,” he recalls, with the performers having to deal in the moment with the problem of mapping themselves onto another artificial ‘performer,’ which itself was dealing with the problem of a very human text. “Almost all the writing for these projects would be useless to us unless it was done in this way,” says Etchells. “We wouldn’t know what to do with it. It’s too poetic. It’s too fictional. It’s too tangled.” But exploring lip-syncing along to the text has opened “an enormous reservoir of ways of thinking about writing and performing.” Subscribe to Exeunt, and get two in-depth pieces on theatre a week, direct to your inbox Subscribe Forced Entertainment have long been sifting through the detritus of popular culture, from daytime TV to end-of-the-pier vaudeville, magic acts and clown shows, to find frameworks for their own unusual entertainments. Lip-syncing, then, makes sense for them to experiment with. As a mode of performance, it’s wired into popular consciousness through pop stars trying to convince stadium audiences of their liveness, or those same voices as channeled through the made-up lips of contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race, or movie dialogue spreading virally through the host bodies of TikTok users. For Etchells, lip-syncing is often about “approaching real voices and trying to take on their aura,” subsuming that original human presence into yours. “There’s a very basic, elemental sort of theatre magic to it, produced in this very easy way.” This broad approach resonates with instances of lip-syncing within contemporary performance, too. In works like Re-Member Me and Showmanism, performance artist Dickie Beau acts as a kind of spirit medium for archival recordings (this process of re-membering – as in, giving corporeal form to voices – relies on his masterfully precise actor’s technique), while Frankie Thompson is similarly possessed by a host of characters ranging from a nine-year-old Jacob Rees-Mogg to Cliff Richards, all of whom she finds compellingly nauseating, in the exorcism ritual that is her latest show, Horrible Things. What’s different about Forced Entertainment’s use of lip-syncing is that here, there is no original presence to be channeled. The performers are instead taking on what Etchells describes as “the voices of nobody,” or rather the “phantasmic, aggregated echoes” of the many many voices on whose data the AI has been trained, and which are now conjuring into existence words they never actually said. There is a sort of mournful, empty quality to these voices, having “washed up” far away from the people they originally belonged to, to find themselves in stranger’s mouths listing objects, wondering if anyone can hear them and glitching in interminable loops. There is a cold, sad anonymity to it all. Etchells remarks that occasionally the software company he used has notified him that particular people are withdrawing their voices from the platform, instructing him to cease use of those voices. Using these technologies in performance certainly brings up ethical questions around digital rights, consent, identity and ownership, although in the grand scheme of things, Etchells is fairly blasé about it: of all the purposes someone’s voice might be put to without their knowledge, “an avant-garde performance is probably the least of their worries.” [ ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/frankie-thompson-horrible-things-essay-mental-health-compulsive-behaviours-pleasance-courtyard-soho-theatre) [ Frankie Thompson: How I manage my own ‘horrible things’ at the Edinburgh Fringe ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/frankie-thompson-horrible-things-essay-mental-health-compulsive-behaviours-pleasance-courtyard-soho-theatre) Exeunt · Aug 25 [ Read full story ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/frankie-thompson-horrible-things-essay-mental-health-compulsive-behaviours-pleasance-courtyard-soho-theatre) For the performers, though, lip-syncing to these strange, artificial voices is an odd task, requiring them to bend their live, human presence into the shapes produced by machines. Politically, it mirrors processes that are already at play in the continued computational automation of human life. Etchells brings up James Bridle’s writings on new technologies as a reference point: one example Bridle gives is of “chaotic storage”, a logistics technique employed by Amazon fulfilment centres whereby items are stored not according to traditional methods of categorisation or alphabetisation, but in a way that an algorithm determines to produce the most efficient routes for ‘picking’ based on customer purchase patterns. This appears completely random and incomprehensible to humans, with paddling pools sitting next to USB sticks sitting next to blowtorches, and so for the warehouse workers, the process of picking items becomes completely reliant on technology which tells them where to go. Our world is increasingly being designed not with humans in mind, but rather machines. As Etchells puts it, “technology malforms the space, and then you end up having to live in it.” Initially, Forced Entertainment tried their best to live in the world of machines: “I was in the it’s-got-to-be-perfect school of lip-sync,” says Etchells. But with their aesthetic being so tied to the failing act, the slipping mask, the shoddy costume, “it’s no surprise really that that didn’t last.” Instead, the performers got to enjoy being late for a line, or playing games with each other, “stealing” each other’s voices. Etchells compares it to the principles of ventriloquism, in which a free-floating voice unattached to a body is fundamentally discomforting and “sort of traumatic”. That discomfort is equally as alluring to Forced Entertainment as the satisfaction of precision, the pretence of authenticity only interesting if shown to be a pretence. Lip-sync has also opened up new avenues for the company. Having been allergic all their lives to Plays-with-a-capital-P, with Cold Sweat Forced Entertainment find themselves approaching something a little bit like drama. Rather than the presentational arena of Signal to Noise’s open white stage, Cold Sweat places us more decisively in a “fictional locale”: what appears to be “the aftermath of some disastrous party or backyard drinking binge” where three figures – family members, or neighbours, perhaps – are the last ones standing. “It’s all quite acrimonious and accusatory, everyone’s talking over each other.” For Etchells, this more fictional mode is “a door that we’ve never been able to open. We’ve just never really gone there.” Perhaps it is the technique of lip-syncing, an extra buffer of mediation, that allows them to venture away from the here-and-now without feeling that they have to commit to the “psychological claptrap” that comes along with acting; to be able to “play the game of theatre, without getting one’s hands too dirty.” As I wonder how else the impulses behind Forced Entertainment’s work have changed over time, it occurs to me that over the last ten years of new creations, with the exception of If All Else Fails, the company’s performers haven’t ever spoken on stage: there were two shows without any language at all, Out of Order and Under Bright Light, and then this trilogy of lip-sync works. Etchells agrees it’s a shift away from earlier productions, that were so often about “the actual voices of the performers and their actual presences. We had a lot of money, in some ways, on an authentic approach to what it might mean to speak on the stage.” But this sense of authentic presence itself had a fakeness to it; these days, Etchells can’t stand that mode of being onstage where performers “are here to be cheeky and witty versions of themselves. I don’t want to be charmed.” Pulling back into a more anonymous space has resulted in works that feel slightly sharper-edged, more brutal in a way. “All of these shows are post-Brexit, post-Trump, post-truth, post-everything,” Etchells notes. Speech, charisma, authenticity – these things feel politically loaded, and perhaps warmth and openness just don’t feel like the right tools to reflect the world we’re living in. “It feels like the space is closing down, and we’re trying to deal with the fact that the system, the structure that you’re in, is more oppressive and more powerful. It probably always was, but I think we’re just more tuned to it now.” Yet even without their voices, the performers’ distinctive presences – ones that many audiences have followed around for years, if not decades – still, inevitably, shine through as they physically navigate whatever unending task the system of the piece has set for them. They’re still trying to keep up with the onslaught of text, still running about, changing costumes, moving stuff around. The human is always stuck in the teeth of the machine, jamming the smooth, frictionless cheeriness of the not-real, gesticulating silently, trying desperately to communicate. Cold Sweat is at Sheffield Theatres, 2 to 3 October; Southbank Centre, London, 9 to 10 October; Lancaster Arts, 14 October [ ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/exeunt-recommends-the-best-autumn-theatre-2026-lives-of-others-standard-of-living-our-friends-in-the-north-lanny-) [ Exeunt recommends... the best autumn theatre ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/exeunt-recommends-the-best-autumn-theatre-2026-lives-of-others-standard-of-living-our-friends-in-the-north-lanny-) Exeunt · Sep 16 [ Read full story ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/exeunt-recommends-the-best-autumn-theatre-2026-lives-of-others-standard-of-living-our-friends-in-the-north-lanny-) This piece was paid for by the Southbank Centre. Such support helps Exeunt to keep publishing the most interesting writing, about the most exciting theatre. Interested in partnering with Exeunt? Visit our Advertise with Exeunt page, where you can get more information, download an advertising pack, and find our contact details.
Sherrill announces film trail mapping iconic New Jersey movie spots
New Jersey is launching a film trail to showcase popular movie locations across the state.
Mapping tsunamis, building trust
While taking a quick shower before her son’s fourth birthday party on Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami scientist Elena Troshina heard the phone ring. Deciding it was worth jumping out, she
Mapping tsunamis and building trust in Alaska’s coastal communities
For more than two decades, Elena Troshina has been traveling to Alaska coastal communities to support the National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program.
I Toured the Company Mapping Space Debris. Then I Polled Worried and Hopeful Scientists
From portable radars in shipping containers to orbital cameras, I asked scientists how the space-junk tracking industry plans to avoid catastrophic crashes.
MIT researchers are mapping extreme weather risks — and building tools to act on them
MIT researchers are translating climate science into actionable tools for extreme weather preparedness. The Climate Grand Challenges project has produced papers, digital tools, and datasets to help planners and utilities assess flood, hurricane, wildfire, and heat risks.
16th Asian Chief Dental Officers Meeting: Advancing universal health coverage for oral health in the WHO Western Pacific and South-East Asia Regions
Session 3 of the 100-Day Sprint BackgroundOral diseases remain among the most prevalent noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) across Asia, affecting people throughout the life course and placing a significant burden on individuals, families and health systems. Countries across the World Health Organization (WHO) Western Pacific Region and South-East Asia Region have committed to strengthening oral health through regional action plans and by advancing universal health coverage (UHC). The 16th Asian Chief Dental Officers Meeting (ACDOM) serves as a regional platform for Chief Dental Officers in Asia to exchange experiences, strengthen collaboration and accelerate implementation of oral health commitments. For the first time, the meeting is being jointly organized by the WHO Regional Offices for South-East Asia and for the Western Pacific and the ACDOM Secretariat. This year's meeting introduces a 100-Day Sprint, bringing together oral health and UHC leads and technical experts to support countries in strengthening integration of oral health within national UHC benefit packages. Through the Sprint, participating countries will develop, refine, cost and operationalize country-specific essential oral health-care benefit packages using WHO tools, including the Service Package Delivery and Implementation (SPDI) Platform. The in-person 16th Asian Chief Dental Officers Meeting represents Session 3 and the midpoint of the 100-Day Sprint, providing an opportunity for countries to review progress, exchange experiences, identify challenges and refine their approaches before continuing with the remaining Sprint sessions. 100-Day SprintSession Date Format Title Session 1 (Day 0) 19 Aug Virtual Setting the Scene and Introducing Key Principles and Frameworks Session 2 16 SepVirtual Introduction to the SPDI Platform and Initial Mapping Exercise Session 3 27-29 Sep In-person, 16th Asian Chief Dental Officer Meeting, Malaysia Review and Refinement of Oral Health Service Packages Session 4 14 Oct Virtual Finalizing National Essential Oral Health Services Packages and Costing Exercise Session 5 (Day 100) 26 Nov Virtual Country Presentations and Closing of the 100-Day Sprint ObjectivesLeverage the 100-Day Sprint to define priority implementation actions for oral health in countries; Strengthen national capacity to design, cost and operationalize country-specific essential oral health care packages using SPDI platform; andExplore cross-country collaboration to expand access to essential oral health supplies and products, including harmonized specifications and pricing, and improve supply chains for essential dental preparations and medicines.Expected outcomesA draft country-specific essential oral health care benefit package developed using the SPDI platform and aligned with WHO’s Essential Oral Health Care packageA strengthened regional network in Asia of oral health and UHC leaders, fostering collaboration among South-East Asia and Western Pacific countries, WHO offices and WHO Collaborating Centres to support sustained implementation beyond the meetingParticipantsChief Dental Officers and national oral health programme leads;National focal points responsible for universal health coverage, health financing and health systems;Representatives from WHO country offices, regional offices and headquarters;WHO Collaborating Centres; andAcademic institutions and technical partners.
Mapping Ed Sheeran's remaining tour dates after Macklemore fallout
Ed Sheeran's Loop Tour has made over a dozen stops across the country since June, but going forward his lineup of opening acts will be different.
House Democrats may use oversight powers to plan for health care overhaul
Democrats are mapping out their post-election strategy, and see health care probes as a winning issue.
USF College Of Marine Science Lands NOAA Deal To Advance Seafloor Mapping
NOAA's Office of Coast Survey has renewed its partnership with USF's Center for Ocean Mapping and Innovative Technologies through a five-year cooperative agreement, funding AI-driven seafloor mapping research that spans autonomous vehicles, crowdsourced bathymetry, and cross-college engineering collaboration.
Health department seeks opioid settlement money for resource mapping
The Springfield-Greene County Health Department has requested up to $500,000 in opioid settlement funds for a health care mapping project.
Scientists find evidence for an ancient supercontinent that covered 80 percent of Earth’s surface
Isotope mapping reveals millions of square kilometers of lost Gondwanan crust hidden beneath Asia, Europe and North America.
Slanted Cartography: The Politics of Mapping
There is much in the nature of a map. The very drawing of a line signifies an assertion, an acceptance, or even a repudiation of power. Borders are
Slanted Cartography: The Politics of Mapping
There is much in the nature of a map. The very drawing of a line signifies an assertion, an acceptance, or even a repudiation of power. Borders are
Mapping the Global Health Landscape: Analysis of Fourteen International Organizations
The global health architecture includes a number of diverse international organizations with different mandates, governance models, financing structures, and operational approaches. This KFF resource looks across a range of variables to provide a descriptive mapping of 14 key global health and related international institutions. It is intended to inform discussions about synergies and coordination, duplication, comparative advantage, shared challenges, and architectural reform.
How MapQuest’s ‘Lake America’ stance sparked a massive App Store surge
MapQuest said its decision to keep the name Lake Ontario fueled a surge in downloads, sending the mapping app to the top of Apple's navigation rankings.
How MapQuest’s ‘Lake America’ stance sparked a massive App Store surge
MapQuest said its decision to keep the name Lake Ontario fueled a surge in downloads, sending the mapping app to the top of Apple's navigation rankings.
Exodus is announced for 2026: a new sci-fi epic
Exodus, the sci-fi game announced for 2026, is probably the closest thing on the horizon if you want The Expanse’s political realism fused with Projec
Scientists detect signals of hydrogen from billions of years ago. Could this help us map out the universe?
"Hydrogen intensity mapping has long been seen as a promising way to map the universe efficiently."
iPhone 18 Pro Chip Leak Indicates Major GPU and Memory Bandwidth Improvements
An alleged solder joint diagram for Apple's A20 Pro chip suggests the processor will deliver a number of significant upgrades, including a seven-core GPU, a wider memory interface, and a larger L2 cache for its efficiency cores. The claims come from a Weibo user who says the layout was reconstructed by mapping the chip's solder ball positions and overlaying them with die level images to sketch out where each block of the processor sits.
August Monthly Review: ChatGPT In Epic
Death, taxes, another frontier lab healthcare launch inspiring truly insane LinkedIn takes. As much as I want to stay away, I repeatedly am the crewman unplugging his ears whenever we pass these sirens. So it’s not the first and probably not the last time we dial up the typewriter rather than tie ourselves to the mast. The full blow-by-blow timeline: Health API Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe The End of the Standalone PHR (Jan 8): ChatGPT Health arrives for consumers, at the time powered by b.well. I was bullish on the approach in that the best way for the PHR to finally solve distribution was to meet consumers were they already are (i.e. When Horizontal Meets Healthcare (Jan 9): OpenAI for Healthcare puts out the shingle for enterprises, with SharePoint ingestion standing in for the EHR integration the product actually needed. Another One: Anthropic’s Healthcare Debut (Jan 16): Claude's version, on HealthEx rails instead of b.well, with Agent Skills for FHIR development as the one true vertical-specific investment. ChatGPT for Clinicians: The Trap Sprung (Apr 24): OpenAI filled in the missing GTM middle with a free product for verified clinicians, effectively peeling the enterprise wrapper off ChatGPT for Healthcare and taking the PLG fight directly to OpenEvidence. OpenAI’s Second Attempt at Health (Jul 31): a relaunch of their patient specific app, now branded Health in ChatGPT, where the privacy partition came out, the connectors thinned, and b.well disappeared in favor of first-party FHIR work against a smaller network Beyond a Shingle So what was announced now? Today, we’re introducing a new electronic health record integration that brings authorized patient context from Epic into ChatGPT for Healthcare, along with the Healthcare Public Data plugin for direct, structured access to official healthcare datasets like PubMed, DailyMed, and CMS Coverage. Together, these capabilities bring ChatGPT closer to the systems and sources healthcare teams trust, while supporting the controls and compliance healthcare work requires. The core portfolio is unchanged from prior announcements we delineated and discussed (aside from the relaunch of patient-facing). Since trade publications still seem to be confusing them by using the wrong names: Enterprise sales motion: ChatGPT for Healthcare Protecting their core product / PLG: ChatGPT for Clinicians Consumer/patient-facing product: Health in ChatGPT So really, this is a feature release (specifically for ChatGPT for Healthcare when it comes to EHR integration). What’s cool about it, though, is that we are moving beyond just putting out a shingle. Everything in the January enterprise launch was horizontalizable: Horizontal tech companies thus generally start verticalization with their “putting out a shingle phase”. Telling the world you’re open for business as a horizontal tech company reliably attracts early inbound interest from buyers who are already trying to force-fit horizontal tools into domain-specific workflows and are eager for any signal that the vendor intends to support their use case more directly. Nothing was really vertical specific, which is exactly what you'd expect from the ultimate hypergrowth horizontal company dipping their toes into specific industries. But eventually you have to stop changing the sign on the door and start changing the product. Can you guess where the horizontal product was going to run out of road? This is the core dilemma writ large: verticalization requires differentiation, while scale economics of consumer and horizontal push toward unification. I’ve buried the lede so deep here it will be painful to some readers, but what should be shocking to no one is that my perspective is that EHR integration is the only path that meaningfully resolves this tension for ChatGPT for Healthcare. Integration with Microsoft Sharepoint is fine, but it is categorically insufficient for any product that hopes to influence clinical decision-making. SMART Money Well here we are, eight months later! Real vertical investment has begun, which surprised a few people. One friend in the industry messaged me: “Absolutely no way Epic gave ChatGPT API access.” Looking forensically at the announcements, the integration is notably read-only across appointment notes, laboratory results, medications, and specialist documentation. So while I’m not a betting man, I'd wager the house this is a SMART on FHIR launch: That sounds a lot like USCDI! The recommended path for the workflow they outline would be SMART on FHIR Their Health AI lead’s post is evocative of both standalone and EHR launch SMART, which another termed “ChartGPT” and “EHR Plugin” The implementation burden for SMART on FHIR is the lowest of the available integrative paths This is the team who literally did patient-facing SMART on FHIR with Epic last month Most importantly, if you’re a horizontal company, you generally still haven’t taken the full plunge and thus (overly) value reusability. SMART on FHIR is the logical compromise: healthcare-specific enough to matter, but standardized enough to reuse. Nobody Asked Judy Another friend asked “I thought they had to go to each health system, or did they go direct to Epic and now health systems opt in?” Given the trust paradigms in healthcare, this functionally cannot be Epic hoovering up all the data for OpenAI and shoving ChatGPT in their customers’ faces (or they would revolt). However, I do believe the aforementioned terrible coverage by TechCrunch and other outlets is probably responsible for that question, given the 325 million reference. When using FHIR as a business associate to an Epic customer, there is no EHR gatekeeping to speak of, as that isn’t how fhir.epic.com works: You register an app You pick your APIs You test against the sandbox APIs You list as “Ready for Production” Hospitals pick your app You test and go live with them Bluntly, nobody had to say yes or no in Verona (nor were they given the chance). Vendor Services (their next developer tier up that I doubt OpenAI is using quite yet in this initial release) certainly has contractual paperwork that some resent, but even there, the twin pressures of mounting antitrust and information blocking make outright gatekeeping increasingly fraught. My friend’s sentiment is, to me, representative of a broader industry neurosis, perhaps a sort of scar tissue of prior eras: people assume the gate is still there and never actually try the door. There are certainly other ways Epic (and any EHR) can put its thumb on the scale, but they are not so dumb as to stand in front of a federally mandated API and play bouncer at this exact moment in time. So I think they can and probably should go deeper, as this release is at best parity and at worst behind vertical-specific competition. OpenEvidence did a basic SMART launch with Sutter Health in February, allowing for more convenient evidence search by providers. They then add patient-context (the equivalent SMART on FHIR flow to what we see here) when Cedars-Sinai went enterprise-wide in May. UpToDate has four distinct applications across deeper workflows like patient engagement listed in Epic Showroom and announced a partnership with Epic to power Art at UGM Abridge and other ambient scribes have invested deeply into the deepest bidirectional clinical copilot workflow with integrations well beyond SMART on FHIR. In that light, the “Who is OpenAI primarily targeting here?” is clear. This release brings them into striking distance of OpenEvidence, but not the others quite yet. They are the only one of the three you can reach without building something truly Epic-specific. When will they go further? Competition is a great motivator to overcome the horizontal demons and start building things that can’t be reused: not across industries, not across EHRs, maybe not past the customer you built them for. That’s the price of actually verticalizing. The question is if and when OpenAI will be willing to pay it. Month in Review Here is the monthly review. As a reminder, this is a regular round-up of the month’s posts and other content to surface things you may have missed across regulation, litigation, interoperability, and beyond. AI assistance is used in these bullet summaries so I can focus on articles. Articles Published: None this month Video Content: The Information Exchange: Standards-based Thruple Edition (Aug 14): Back to school for us too, with Brad reporting in from the CMS Health Tech Ecosystem’s one year anniversary in DC. We get into the January CMS-0057 deadline, the fall rulemaking reading list, and why enrollment still keeps most apps off FHIR. The Information Exchange: Epic Dúnadan Edition (Aug 25): A UGM roundup with Ryan Brickner joining for the first time to check our takes against what the building actually thinks. Rangers, Ergo sitting on top of EHI, and a down-market lineup that needs some cuts. Regulatory: Stacked Deck, Bad Hand (Aug 05): ONC’s website refresh took the entire HIT Policy Committee record with it, so I rebuilt the archive and went looking for the regulatory capture story everyone assumes is buried in there. Stacking the deck and winning the hand turn out to be very different things. The Sixth Generation of Patient Access (Aug 19): A quick catalog of the five generations of patient access we’ve layered on since HIPAA, and the two candidates now competing to be the sixth. One is planned. The other is the market routing around the plan entirely. Court cases: Three Cases Walk Into a Docket (Aug 06): Two surprise settlements cleared the board in a single week, and then Judge Maddox dropped ninety-four pages on Vyne v. Henry Schein. The sleeper is a DMCA holding that makes direct-to-database a considerably riskier business model. Epic v. Health Gorilla: Into the MDL (Aug 10): Nine class actions are headed to Miami, and the Panel signaled it wants to bring the case that spawned them along too. That would leave Epic arguing the requests were obviously fraudulent in one courtroom and unknowable in the other. Amazon v. Perplexity: Agents Are Legalized! (Aug 11): The Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction against Comet, holding that the user is the one accessing the servers rather than the company that built the agent. A real win for agentic access, and a much narrower one than the headline suggests. Veeva v. Epic: Come At Me, Bro (Aug 26): Epic’s response brief wants the dismissal affirmed and, unusually, wants the opinion published as precedent. Buried in it is Epic’s own description of what its non-competes actually prohibit, which current and former employees should read closely. EHRs: The Contract Epic Would Never Sign Today (Aug 04): A 1999 SEC exhibit catches Epic licensing nearly its entire product line, Tapestry included, to the company that became TriZetto. The marketing services menu attached to it is the part that will make you blink. Forecast from Verona (Aug 07): The Epic Almanac makes one argument six different ways: the AI is only as good as the networks behind it. Emmie headlines, Art’s context stack is the most ambitious part, and Penny finally gets an autonomous coding date on the calendar. Works With Epic MyChart (Aug 17): Epic’s first new Showroom category since the death of Workshop certifies hardware instead of software, badge on the box and all. Made for iPhone, but for blood pressure cuffs, and rough news for anyone selling the RPM stack sitting in between. UGM Hot Takes 2026 (Aug 20): Everyone else covered the AI announcements, so I went after Savvy deleting the payment gateway, Rangers as Boost with the timer removed, and a down-market lineup with too many entries. Plus the Health Grid tidbits I cannot help myself on. MyChart Central Grows Up (Aug 24): Device data and Emmie turn Epic’s identity hub into a full consumer platform, which is both a logical answer to ChatGPT and a bit of a mistake. It also happens to be the best scraping target Epic has ever shipped. Industry Analysis: The Wrong Yardstick (Aug 12): Vertical software keeps getting judged against Superhuman and Notion, which is the wrong bar entirely. Your user is comparing your product to a whiteboard and forty phone calls before lunch. Primitives vs. Abstractions (Aug 27): Developers want building blocks, systems of record prefer to hand out business logic, and both sides have a real case. There’s no test from the outside that separates the engineering reason from the competitive one, which is why this keeps ending up in court. Cross-industry Comparisons: The Two Kinds of Platform Power (Aug 18): Attention power and record power are different problems that keep getting handed the same regulatory toolkit. Congress’s latest swing at Big Tech shows both what’s possible and where it falls apart. The Dogs of (Platform) War (Aug 21): A CourtListener alert turned up a property management fight with healthcare’s exact shape and none of the Cures Act. Shell prospects, ghost accounts, a notetaker bot that came back to haunt someone, and a lawyer arguing both sides of the same theory in two states. Fractals All the Way Down (Aug 31): Yardi dominates property management right up until you zoom into one segment, where AppFolio owns it outright and Yardi doesn’t appear at all. Where you draw the line around a B2B software market is about to decide an awful lot of cases. Other News: If Judy Had the Courage (Aug 13): A short eulogy for the era when software was allowed to look insane: WinAMP, bold colors, and everything the grey chatbot era has taken from us. External Media: Portland Monthly Health Tech Meetup: Erin O’Brien channeled my own feelings - maybe it’s just because it’s August and beautiful, but the monthly edition of the PDX Health community meetup was a ripper. Make sure to reach out if interested to join for the next one. STAT’s Coverage of Epic This Month: Brittany Trang of STAT did a fantastic job of breaking the FTC investigation that’s been lurking, as well as UGM related coverage, so I had to give her her wish of a meme. Fall Conferences: I’m pumped to be kicking off my fall conference season in NYC at Nabla Accelerate next month, which Chrissy provided the link to apply for. Here’s the rest of my schedule in case you want to meet up: Commonwell (Redwood Shores, CA): Oct 13-14 Open@Epic (Madison, WI): Oct 21-22 eHealthExchange (Austin, TX): Oct 27 Sequoia Project (Austin, TX): Oct 28-29 HLTH (Vegas): Nov 15-18 RSNA (Chicago): Nov 29-Dec 3 Posts I Liked: HTI-6 Should Unbundle API Certification: Josh Mandel makes the case that HTI-6 should split (g)(10) into separate authorization and data certifications, so a PACS or a genomics platform can certify only the role it actually performs. Imaging is the urgent example, but the structure solves a much bigger problem. On implementing ePrior Auth with Epic: Scott Rossignol’s field notes from a live ePrior Auth build on Epic, including the two app registrations nobody warns you about and the CPT mapping problem waiting at the end. CMS-0057 implementations are going to be such a beast. Healthcare point solutions are starting to look a lot like streaming services: Spencer Dorn runs the cable-to-streaming arc against health IT and lands squarely on the bundling half of the cycle. Bundling can be good! It can also be bad! Life is nuanced. Health API Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
Ada Yonath, Chemist and First Israeli Woman to Receive a Nobel, Dies at 87
Her mapping of the ribosome, which led to new designs for antibiotics, faced years of derision, as many scientists saw it as a dead-end effort.
Mapping North Carolina’s Climate Health Risks
From the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Atlantic coast, North Carolina's geography does more than shape its landscape. It may also influence the health risks people face.At Duke University School of Medicine, researchers are combining climate data, geographic information, and real-world health records to better understand how environmental conditions affect health and why some communities face greater risks than others.
Mapping Air Pollution With MAIA Sensors in Addis Ababa
This map of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, shows the locations of 10 air sensors that NASA’s Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) mission is using to
Mapping America’s Largest ‘Dead Zone’
In a decades-long crisis, marine life has suffered as oxygen periodically dwindles in waters along the Gulf Coast.
Yankees news: Yanks planning out Carlos Rodón’s return
Mapping out Carlos Rodón's return; Red Sox coming in hot in AL East; Netflix greenlights drama show surrounding Yankees.
Medtronic’s all-in-one mapping and ablation system gains expanded CE mark approval
The Affera Mapping and Ablation System with Sphere-9 Catheter can now be used to treat more patients in Europe. Medtronic also received good news from the FDA about the all-in-one device.
NASA’s IMAP Mission Releases New Data From 7 Science Instruments
Science data from NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) mission is now available. After its successful launch on Sept. 24, 2025, IMAP’s
The Beauty Of Settled Science
Commenters convinced me I made a subtle mis-step in my framing of Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine. My framing emphasized that social priming studies had failed to replicate, but that many other subfields of psychology hadn’t. This naturally led commenters to point to failed replications in other subfields. Although none of these were as bad as social priming, few or none were entirely problem-free. Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have emphasized the difference between settled science and novel research. Here are some of my favorite psychology findings: The brain is sculpted by reinforcement learning, and a key driver of this learning is a prediction-error-based algorithm located in the nucleus accumbens and implemented through dopamine. Psychedelic drugs exert their effects through 5-HT2A receptors, pointing to a role for these receptors in some sort of construct like the balance between priors and new evidence. Certain cognitive functions are localized to certain brain areas (for example, impulse control to the frontal lobes; linguistic structure to Broca’s area, linguistic meaning to Wernicke’s area. But injure one of these areas, or render a certain function useless (eg a blind person having no more use for their visual cortex), and these mappings can gradually shift - suggesting that neurons are general-purpose compute whose specialization is a contingent fact about convenience and efficiency rather than a necessity. Most personality traits and general capabilities are about 50% genetic and 50% random, with little role for family environment or childhood history, with a few notable exceptions like partisan preference. Recent research complicates this story, but the further you go from this basic picture, the gnarlier the chains of indirect causation you require. Neurons fire together in “brain waves”, whose exact frequency corresponds with the character of consciousness; These divide neurons into natural subpopulations and linked graphs. The gamma rhythm corresponds surprisingly well to items in conscious awareness. GABA receptors seem to be involved in something like relaxation. By hitting different GABA receptors in different ways, you can modulate the exact type of relaxation you produce. Hitting GABA-A directly is too powerful and can cause dangerous levels of sedation, but allosteric modulation of GABA is an incredibly fruitful strategy that underlies drugs from benzos to barbituates to alcohol. If you know your GABA-A subunits, you can target specific subtypes of relaxation; for example, Ambien hits GABA-A1 and induces sleep. Memory divides somewhat fuzzily into bins of immediate-sensory, short-term, and long-term, with separate retrieval and storage functions, and separate systems for declarative vs. procedural learning. These can be harmed selectively, usually by hippocampal injury, so that some patients can remember their life stories but not form new long-term memories, or learn new skills like bike-riding but not new facts. The exact substrate of memory is unclear but seems to involve new synaptic connections between neurons in at least some way. The ability of modern psychology and psychiatry to treat mental illness is real but limited. SSRIs work for half or slightly fewer than half of patients; antipsychotics work with extreme side effects; benzodiazpines work but produce addiction and tolerance in many (not all) people. Most supplements are stuck in Poor Quality Study Replication Crisis Hell, but melatonin and l-theanine stand out as especially promising. Psychotherapy works with moderate effect size, but (with a few exceptions) seems to be more about the relationship with the provider than the details of the therapy itself. Mental hospitalization can sometimes defuse immediate crises but work less well than mental hospitals would like, with some studies showing overall negative effects. Schizophrenia is mostly genetic, but risk also increases with prenatal infection (especially rubella) and obstetric complications; there is suggestive evidence for roles of social stress and drug use (with psychedelics and marijuana making things worse, and nicotine if anything making things better). Bipolar and schizophrenia are so closely linked on a pathophysiological level that it seems like they might be the same disease; on the clinical level, they do seem to follow two separate courses/prognoses but can sometimes surprise clinicians by eg someone who seemed condemned to permanent schizophrenia unexpectedly recovering. The brain’s native reinforcement learning algorithms cash out in the phenomena of classical and operant conditioning; different reinforcement schedules reinforce at different levels, which can be exploited by bad actors to make especially compelling products (eg slot machines). None of these are immune to doubt. A few are speculative; one or two are genuinely unorthodox. But they’re all a step above one p = 0.049 paper that might not replicate. If they get overturned, they’ll be overturned by the same sort of genuine scientific shift that replaced Ptolemy with Copernicus or Lamarck with Darwin, not some sort of sordid discovery about someone entering random numbers into a spreadsheet. In 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about The Beauty Of Settled Science: If you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage. The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news. Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention. Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun. Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty [...] A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid. Psychology isn’t centrally the new paper in Annals Of Recently-Breaking News saying that an n=5 study showing that large portion sizes increase support for terrorism. Psychology is centrally ideas like brain waves, GABA receptors, reinforcement learning, twin studies, and connectionism. People who think differently are worrying too much about BREAKING NEWS!!!, and should stop. The key distinction isn’t “recent research in social psychology” vs. “recent research in cognitive/bio/behavioral psychology”, as my essay last week unfortunately implied. It’s recent research in general vs. the deposit of settled science, battle-tested hypotheses, and carefully-earmarked speculation. And part of the reason social priming in particular was such a disaster was that it defied that heuristic, building itself up over hundreds of studies until it approached or even entered the pantheon of settled science - before collapsing (5-HTTLPR was also sort of like this). This isn’t a claim that settled science is always right - Freud was “settled science” for a long time - just that there’s an intuitive distinction between the level of credence you should have in the existence of power posing vs. the existence of Broca’s Area. (I compounded this error by calling the last post “Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine”, which suggested I was talking about the new research rather than the settled science. I actually meant to distinguish between research-psychology-the-field vs. clinical-psychology-aka-therapy, but this framing unintentionally pushed against the point I wanted to make) Some commenters on the previous article understood this point, but challenged its weight. It’s very cool, they said, to know how many neurons are in which brain lobe, but the main way that Psychology affected their lives was through bad clickbait studies used to buttress dumb policies; some p = 0.049 study says that exposure to microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel into raisins, and now their company has to implement punitive DEI or be sued for hazardous work conditions. I won’t dispute this as an accurate description of how the sausage gets made, but it’s worth examining the trains of thought that connect this observation to a campaign against psychology in general: The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad, and I don’t have good heuristics for distinguishing dumb woke psychology from other psychology, so I’m going to assume it’s all wrong and bad. The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad; it seems useful to punish/discredit psychology as a whole to assist my campaign against it, so for propaganda purposes I will try to discredit psychology as a whole. To people in the first camp, my response is: come on, your heuristics aren’t that bad. “Microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel up like raisins” is in the woke category; “the hippocampal theta rhythm seems to be associated with both memory and pathfinding, suggesting an unexpected yet surprisingly compelling relationship between the two” is in the not-woke category, don’t play dumb here. To people in the second camp, my response is: deliberately exaggerated propaganda campaigns are bad and this is a confession, not an excuse. Inability to view science through anything but a political lens was what got us into this problem; doubling down on it is a temporary solution but a recipe for permanent disaster. If you pronounce entire fields of science to be acceptable collateral damage in your campaign against bad political actors, you will alienate not just scientists but patients, clinicians, and general lovers of truth. Instead, you can say the thing you mean - that woke partisans shouldn’t try to occupy and exploit the otherwise-noble science of psychology for their own political gain - and wage the same campaign with a halo rather than a comic-book-villain goatee. From the font of oracular wisdom that is Weird Sun Twitter: [ Vessel Of Spirit@VesselOfSpirit i love you all conditionally but i love the good part of you unconditionally. even if it becomes a very small part 2:11 AM · Jan 22, 2015 1 Reply · 5 Reposts · 29 Likes ](https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/558084551772471298) This is how I feel about psychology1, too, but with a touch more optimism. The good part of psychology is enormous, a hoard of endless treasures. You just have to look past the headlines! 1 To play devil’s advocate - should one always be so magnamious? Astrology? Phrenology? These seem different in that their entire orientation was flawed from the start; they didn’t simply fail to find the correct constellation-personality connections, the whole project of searching for connections between constellations and personality was doomed from the start. More difficult might be asking the same question about education research, which is notoriously bad. I don’t know enough about education research to know if there’s some settled science of correct and enlightening results lurking in the background beyond the day-to-day froth of poorly-conducted and politically-motivated studies. I think if it’s 90% bad, 10% good, it’s correct to call it bad as a compact way of communicating a useful truth; I think psychology is better than that, but admit it’s a tough judgment call.
Scientists went looking for giant trees in Taiwan and found a lost world
Taiwan’s steep, remote mountains have sheltered extraordinary forests containing hundreds of giant Taiwania firs. After years of difficult expeditions, LiDAR mapping, and citizen-science detective work, researchers discovered an 84.1-meter (276-foot) tree, the tallest known in East Asia. They also found dense “temples of giants” where dozens of enormous trees grow together. These ancient forests rank among the world’s most carbon-rich ecosystems.
Medtronic leads $37M investment in CoreMap’s AFib mapping tech
The company's flagship technology was invented by Peter Spector, MD, a practicing electrophysiologist. It uses advanced electrodes to visualize details of AFib typically missed by other mapping systems.
“Graphic Talk About Science: Adventures in Science Engagement”
Mount Wilson Observatory (MWO), Southern California’s esteemed home to several of the most groundbreaking astronomical discoveries in history, welcomes the public to the third Saturday Evening Talks & Telescopes of the season on Saturday, July 25, 2026. MWO is honored to present “Graphic Talk About Science: Adventures in Science Engagement,” a lecture by Clifford V. Johnson, from UCSB. This lecture explores how graphic storytelling can make cutting-edge physics more accessible, as Johnson discusses the science and creative process behind his illustrated book, “The Dialogues: Conversations About the Nature of the Universe.” Tickets are available here: www.mtwilson.edu/events/lecture072526 During the six-month season, each Talks & Telescopes event runs from 5:30pm to 11:30pm with the “talk” portion of the evening beginning in the Observatory’s Auditorium. The 60+ minute presentation is followed by picnic dining—bring your own, or purchase from a food truck or caterer—and then, after the sun goes down, stargazing through Mount Wilson’s immense telescopes, the largest in the world made available to the public. Additional stargazing around the grounds will be available thanks to members of the Los Angeles Astronomical Society. Both the 60-inch telescope and the 100-inch—the latter famously used by Edwin Hubble to discover the expanding universe—will be available for viewing the night sky. Priced at $50, this event series offers the most economical stargazing event option on the mountain. Tickets and more information are available on Mount Wilson Observatory’s website here: www.mtwilson.edu/lectures. Advance purchases are highly recommended. UPCOMING SATURDAY EVENING TALKS & TELESCOPES OF THE 2026 SEASON August 22: “Towards a Functional Cosmology” www.mtwilson.edu/events/lecture082226 Join artist Lita Albuquerque for a lecture on her multidisciplinary practice at the intersection of art, science, and cosmology. Drawing on decades of work across painting, land art, performance, and installation, she reflects on projects created in remote, astronomy-linked environments and how they shape her exploration of time, space, and human perception. September 19: “The Brightness of Stars: Henrietta Leavitt and the Transformative Nature of Attention in Art and Science” www.mtwilson.edu/events/lecture091926 Visual artist and author Anna Von Mertens explores the life and legacy of Henrietta Leavitt, whose study of variable stars enabled the first reliable measurements of cosmic distances. Working among the Harvard Computers, Leavitt laid the foundation for breakthroughs at Mount Wilson, including Harlow Shapley’s mapping of the Milky Way and Edwin Hubble’s discovery of an expanding universe. Drawing from her book “Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt,” Von Mertens shares archival materials alongside her own artwork inspired by Leavitt’s life, to celebrate how careful attention leads to both scientific discovery and a meaningful life. October 17: “The Duality of Genius and Struggle: G.E. Hale” www.mtwilson.edu/events/lecture101726 This talk, presented by Sam Hale, explores the extraordinary life and legacy of his grandfather, George Ellery Hale—the visionary behind some of the world’s most important astronomical institutions. Drawing on both history and personal connection, Sam Hale offers insight into a legacy that continues to shape science and culture today. VISITING MWO The gate to Mount Wilson’s campus opens at 10:00am daily and closes at 5:00pm from early April through November. Entrance to the grounds is free. Visitors can hike, gaze at the telescope domes and towers that dot the landscape, and take a look at historic Mount Wilson photos and letters in the Museum. The Cosmic Cafe (www.mtwilson.edu/cosmic-cafe), located above the main parking lot at the Observatory entrance, is open on weekends in the spring, summer, and fall. In addition to traditional menu items such as hot dogs, drinks, and snacks, the Cafe offers wraps, salads, and sweet treats from Little Flower. PARKING A U.S. Forest Service Adventure Pass is required to park at the Observatory. A $5 day pass or a $30 dollar annual pass may be purchased at the Cosmic Cafe on weekends between 10:00am and 5:00pm. During the week, passes are available at locations around Los Angeles. The most convenient location before heading up is at the Shell station in La Canada Flintridge at the bottom of the Angeles Crest Highway (https://find.shell.com/us/fuel/10007957-4530-angeles-crest-hwy/en_US). Visit the U.S. Forest Service website for more information about Passes and other locations to buy them: www.fs.usda.gov/r05/passes/adventure-pass For more information about Visiting Mount Wilson Observatory, please visit: www.mtwilson.edu/visiting NOT ADA-COMPLIANT Please be advised that access to the 100-inch dome is via an open-air, 53-step staircase inside the building. There is no ADA-compliant access.
Ford bets on Apple for its next-generation of EVs
Ford is the first automaker to use a new set of developer tools that will let it embed Apple Maps navigation and mapping directly into its vehicles' infotainment systems.
A Quebecer noticed a strange circular pit on Google Maps while planning a trip; scientists have now confirmed it is a 390-million-year-old meteorite impact crater
In late 2023, amateur astronomer Joël Lapointe was doing something very ordinary: Mapping out forest roads for a summer road trip in Quebec. While zooming around northern regions on Google Maps, he spotted something that looked anything but ordinary.
Scientists discovered the brain doesn't make decisions the way we thought
A new study suggests the brain begins making decisions much earlier than scientists previously thought. Researchers found that even primary sensory regions are influenced by higher brain areas through rapid feedback loops, rather than simply passing information forward. This more dynamic view of brain function could help engineers design future AI systems that think more like biological brains while using far less power.
Exploring key breakthroughs in VT ablation
Today's sophisticated mapping systems allow clinicians to visualize VT circuits with unprecedented detail.
Pokémon GO turns 10 today: Anniversary Party brings bonus XP and a special Gimmighoul
Pokémon GO turns 10 today. The mobile AR hit from Niantic, first released in July 2016, is celebrating in July 2026 with a 10th Anniversary Party even
Case-led working group proposes gerrymandering solutions
The proposal advocates the use of independent commissions, national standards and algorithmic mapping to prevent partisan interference
Scientists have detected a giant fan-shaped structure buried beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, suggesting the frozen continent may be hiding the geological scars of the breakup that helped separate Antarctica from Australia
East Antarctica can look, from above, like the quiet half of the frozen continent: old, thick, cold and buried under kilometres of ice. But beneath that ice, new mapping suggests the bedrock may carry the shape of a much more violent past. In a Nature Geoscience study published in June 2026, researchers described a giant […]
Computer scientists develop a new AI tool that rivals AlphaFold 3 in mapping RNA
The method, called RNAbpFlow, was described in a study published on June 30 in Nature Methods, among the most selective journals in computational life sciences.
'Titan is actually a very reasonable destination for humans': Scientists start mapping out crewed mission t...
Researchers met recently for the first "Humans to Titan Summit 2026," which explored how to send astronauts to the huge Saturn moon.
Connie Cepko: A Life in Science Mapping the Retina — and Working to Save It
Over a five-decade career, HHMI Investigator Connie Cepko has reshaped our understanding of how the retina develops and forged new paths toward treating blindness and inherited retinal disease. This story is part of a series exploring the careers of HHMI scientists.
Making Our Own Luck
We are cross-posting a piece that former NIH official Kris Willis wrote for Macroscience. Kris is now the President and Founder of the Woodley Park Institute, for which I’m a board member. Picking winners or hedging bets? Federal science agencies have long wrestled with the question of how to ensure their billions of dollars of grants and contracts result in maximum benefits for Americans. On the surface, it might seem that a goal-oriented, interventionist style of management would be the best policy: prioritize our most pressing problems and distribute funding accordingly.This top-down strategy creates a unique hazard, though: bad choices can send resources in the wrong direction, resulting in slow progress that impedes the delivery of tangible benefits to citizens. Moreover, if decision makers pursue an applied advance when the underlying scientific principles remain poorly understood, they risk costly failures and a loss of support for the research enterprise at large. Examples include Nixon’s 1971 War on Cancer, undertaken on the premise that a cure could be achieved in less than a decade, the drive to build an operational commercial fusion plant by the mid-1990s, and the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease, which failed to produce the effective treatments and prevention strategies promised by 2025. The contrasting laissez-faire approach is to hedge your bets. If the path to an advance is impossible to predict, then the wisest choice might be to distribute funding to as widely as possible. The main risk of this strategy is that spreading funding thinly may limit the resources available to the most promising research, resulting in the same negative outcomes as the interventionist approach: limited support for the most promising topics, slow progress, and delayed returns. In reality, at science agencies like the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, program managers navigate between these two extremes, setting some funds aside to target high-priority areas and using the rest to cover the widest possible range of meritorious proposals. This middle path seems like the most rational way to proceed, but it still requires making choices. How much should be set aside for high priority topics? What should those topics be? How should we define merit? Expert opinion can provide a helpful guide, but leading experts can have remarkably different opinions about what matters and what should be prioritized. Moreover, experts and administrators alike can be risk averse, giving an edge to high-profile, well-established concepts. What’s really needed is a data-driven framework to help guide decision-making, one that doesn’t simply repackage prestige or incumbency. Recognizing breakthroughs years in advance Many breakthroughs fail to attract funding or recognition at the earliest stages of development. Katalin Karikó, for example, spent years struggling to win grants for work on mRNA that would eventually win her and Drew Weissman a Nobel Prize. Similar stories can be told about Jim Allison’s groundbreaking studies leading to the development of cancer immunotherapy, Stan Pruisner’s demonstration that prions can self-replicate without DNA, or Robin Warren and Barry Marshall’s proof that Helicobacter pylori, not stress, causes ulcers. Yet at some point, the scientific community recognizes and responds to transformative breakthroughs like these. How does that change happen? And what if science funders could identify the areas that are on the cusp of a breakthrough? Those questions led my collaborators and me to study how scientists responded to past breakthroughs. Based on patterns in that data, we developed a means of predicting future breakthroughs, using biomedicine as a proof of concept. It’s worth taking a moment to describe how our approach works. Briefly, our prediction process begins by grouping the 18 million or so peer-reviewed papers in PubMed, the authoritative database of biomedical research, into roughly 50,000 unique topics. A small subset of these topics are so widely acclaimed as breakthroughs that they have been recognized with a major prize like a Nobel or a Lasker Award. We theorized that studying the development of these outliers over time, especially before they gained acclaim, was the key to identifying future instances of them. After defining topics, we chose 21 representative breakthroughs and asked what they looked like before they won prestigious prizes. To answer that question, we re-ran our topic-mapping algorithm repeatedly, winding back the clock one year each time, stringing together the years to follow the progress of each field as it grew and advanced. We found that in each case, the years leading up to a discovery followed a pattern: a burst of papers on a new, rapidly evolving topic, many of which quickly became influential. These characteristics—the percent of papers that are new, the percentage of papers that are brought in from other topics, and the influence of each individual paper—can all be measured separately for any given topic. Together, they act as a predictive signal that is detectable an average of five years before a transformative discovery is made, and up to thirty years before the discovery receives a major prize. Scanning the current research landscape for topics that display this signal allows us to predict what work will likely produce a future breakthrough. Each year we analyzed includes four or five signals, a number that appears to have remained constant across a twenty year time frame. In their classic work on the sociology of science, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar established that the desire to participate in a major discovery is an important motivator for scientists as they consider whether they should take up (or abandon) a research problem. Although further work is needed, the simplest explanation for our results is that this behavior is widespread enough to detect at scale. A foundational advance, or something like it, draws the attention of scientists and causes them to change the direction of their research. They vote with their feet, staking their own reputation and careers by publishing on and citing the new idea. That upswell of interest is the foundation of our breakthrough signal. What kind of research does our model identify as a breakthrough? After building a model based on the patterns in our 21 preselected breakthroughs, we tested it by identifying all early signals of discovery from 1994 through 1997. Of the 18 signals we found in that time period, 17 can be traced forward in time to a breakthrough. Examples include super-resolution fluorescence microscopy (see the image above), the directed evolution of proteins and enzymes (Chemistry Nobel, 2018), and sequencing the human genome (National Medal of Science, 2008). The discovery of the role of leptin signaling in obesity is a particularly interesting case study. Around 1950, scientists noticed the existence of a type of lab mouse that suffered from a unique inherited form of obesity. When given the freedom to choose their own diet, these mice ate more than normal and preferred food that was high in fat. Researchers had few clues as to why the animals overate; early experiments pointed to the existence of a soluble ob factor found circulating in the bloodstream that regulated appetite, but its identity was unknown. In 1994, Jeffrey Friedman and colleagues identified and sequenced the ob gene, noting that the protein it encoded appeared to fit the profile of a circulating factor. A year later, a trio of high-profile publications demonstrated that ob was a hormone that regulated body weight and fat deposition by regulating appetite. One of these was co-authored by Friedman, who christened it leptin from the ancient Greek word for thin. Using our model, the data from 1996 make it clear this advance would become a breakthrough. Scientists had flocked to study the biology of the new hormone, generating the flurry of new papers and citations required to produce a signal. One of these demonstrated that serum leptin concentrations reflected the amount of adipose tissue in the human body, providing clinical validation of the earlier mouse studies. Before the identification of leptin, scientists were unable to point to a specific molecule that controlled appetite and adiposity, so that it was impossible to rule out non-physiological causes of obesity; its characterization fundamentally changed our concept of weight gain. In 2010, Friedman and fellow pioneer Douglas Coleman were awarded a Lasker for the discovery. Our work also identifies breakthroughs in clinical practice and behavioral and social sciences, even though these areas are less likely to draw the attention of major prize committees. One example that falls into this category is the introduction of endovascular aneurysm repair, a minimally invasive surgical procedure for the treatment of abdominal aortic aneurysm, a leading cause of death among Americans over the age of 65. Relative to the previous standard of care, it reduces in-hospital mortality by almost four-fold. In 2017, Timothy Chuter received the American College of Surgeons’ prestigious Jacobsen Innovation award for his multiple refinements to the technique. Another under-recognized breakthrough identified by our model is the development of standardized survey instruments to assess the quality of life for HIV+ patients. The antiretroviral cocktails introduced in the mid-1990s reduced AIDS mortality, but treatment came with serious side effects. The new evaluations showed that patients whose disease progressed had worse physical functioning than Americans with other chronic diseases, while those who were asymptomatic maintained a health-related quality of life on par with the overall US population. This evidence made it possible for patients and activists to argue that even in the absence of a total cure, and in spite of the side effects, alleviation of symptoms was a worthwhile priority for clinicians. My colleagues and I have failed to identify any significant recognition for the physicians and health policy experts who pioneered this advance, although in 2016, researchers called for the World Health Organization to set targets for good health-related quality of life as part of its framework to end the AIDS pandemic. From forecasting to funding How should science funders use our predictions? Any serious discussion of what we should do with this new capability needs to begin with an understanding of its limitations. We can’t (and shouldn’t) invest all of our resources in the small number of topics predicted to produce breakthroughs. Innovative new fields are born from existing ones; they rarely arise de novo. If funders don’t maintain a diverse portfolio, the breakthroughs of tomorrow will have no antecedents. Think of this as eating the seed corn, or killing the goose that lays the golden egg. There are also multiple goals of funding beyond basic scientific discovery, including translating discoveries into clinical practice, developing new technologies, supporting economic development, and training new scientists. The investments needed to accomplish these goals are likely different from those required to support emerging breakthroughs. Finally, we must be aware that we may not capture every instance of a breakthrough. The concept is fuzzy, and not every significant discovery is recognized with a major award. Further, breakthroughs are rare, meaning that our dataset is, by necessity, small. This makes formal estimates of accuracy challenging. Although our overall success rate appears to be high, any one signal may turn out to be a false positive. We found one apparent example: the development of the third generation COX-2 inhibitors, Vioxx and Celebrex, which were much celebrated in the early 2000s as effective but non-addictive pain relievers, meets all the algorithmic criteria of a breakthrough. Five years after it received FDA approval, researchers demonstrated that Vioxx was associated with serious cardiovascular complications, and the manufacturer voluntarily pulled the drug from the market. Celebrex remains available, although like other NSAIDs, it carries an FDA warning for increased cardiovascular risk. Decision makers who were overly focused on the breakthrough potential of this research might have wasted substantial resources nurturing an area that ultimately proved to be a failure—but so would those who relied on expert opinion at the time. That said, the potential benefits of funding the next mRNA vaccine or cancer immunotherapy years earlier than we might have are large. When we can’t assume the outcome of an action, it’s worth conducting an experiment. Can targeted support for areas that are poised to produce a breakthrough increase the return on scientific investment without cannibalizing future advances? With the necessary administrative infrastructure in place, conducting this experiment would be straightforward. First, identify all the breakthrough signals between 2018 and 2023, select half at random, and commit to a decade of investment. For biomedicine, a six year window should yield about 30 topics with the potential to produce a breakthrough. Providing strong support to half of these might be accomplished for $300 million a year. That’s roughly half of the recent annual budget of the NIH Common Fund or around 20% of the fiscal year 2025 budget for ARPA-H. After five years, then again at ten, compare to see which group — the one that was actively managed, or the control — produced more breakthroughs, and on what timescale. Although we used biomedicine as an example, the same experiment could just as well be run for physics, materials science, or any other discipline. Any attempt to undertake such an experiment should keep three points top of mind. First, we can predict the topic of future breakthroughs, but the people and vision for how to move the work forward are still important. In practice, this means success requires active program managers with the expertise to develop the science and the authority to do so, including by recruiting investigators. Second, we would be wise to learn from the failures of past attempts to fund transformative research. High among these are funding modestly repackaged work, confusing the genuinely novel with the merely unfamiliar, and relying too much on incumbent investigators. All of these risks can be mitigated by thoroughly and intelligently integrating high quality data into portfolio management. Finally, we need to have patience. Even with strong funding support, producing a breakthrough takes time. If supporting breakthroughs is the best way to nurture the birth of new fields, we also need to accurately describe and properly manage the other two stages, so that we invest wisely throughout the productive lifetime of ideas and divest once they reach the point of diminishing returns. We would benefit from more study of all of these phases, especially the transition from one to another. More research could answer questions like: When does a breakthrough become an established field? How do the availability of funding, the size and characteristics of the available workforce, and the accumulation of evidence that disagrees with prevailing models affect a field’s decline? Exactly how do old ideas give birth to new ones, and can we speed up the process? The more we understand about the dynamics of scientific progress, the better we can maximize the odds that our curiosity leads to results. I’d call that finding a way to make our own luck.
At ISC, JUPITER Shows What Exascale Science Looks Like
Europe’s first exascale supercomputer — running on NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips — is mapping the brain, modeling climate, advancing 6G AI and breaking records in quantum computing simulation.
Sony files DualSense login patent for PSN: an extra security layer
On May 21, 2026, Sony filed a patent called “Controller-Driven Video Game Console Login.” It describes a PlayStation Network sign-in system that would
Social media platforms spread hate music in India despite policy violations, new report says
The report, “Profiting From Hate Music,” documents what researchers describe as the first comprehensive mapping of hate music across India's digital landscape.
Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length, study finds
First ever global mapping of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi shows scale of hyphal systems that sustain plant life
SpaceX by the numbers: Six charts mapping businesses driving its IPO ambitions
SpaceX's market debut on Friday is expected to be the largest-ever IPO, capping the meteoric rise of a company that has reshaped the space business with reusable rockets and internet beamed from orbit and which now targets space-based AI.
The weather and climate science AI revolution isn’t revolutionary
Machine learning has its limits—how is it being used?
Future-proofing the Asia-Pacific region: risk mapping exercise yields insights on preparing for future health crises
In this age of seeming permacrisis, how might countries across Asia and the Pacific collectively anticipate, prepare for and respond to public health emergencies – including possible pandemics – that lie ahead? Key answers could be found from the outcomes of a regional mapping exercise launched by the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for the Western Pacific during the WHO-led Asia Pacific Health Security Action Framework (APHSAF) Stakeholders Meeting held on 11 June 2026 in Malaysia. For the exercise, WHO mobilized an extensive network of contributors, synthesizing 228 distinct inputs from 11 Member States - including Australia, Japan, the Philippines and Viet Nam from the Western Pacific Region - alongside leading academic institutions and regional partner organizations, as well as WHO regional and country offices. The exercise identified a diverse range of opportunities to boost regional operational readiness, transitioning the focus on health security investment in individual countries to a unified, interoperable health security collective for the entire Asia-Pacific region.
Leading Global Brain Science Conference OHBM 2028 to Be Held in Yokohama
YOKOHAMA, Japan, June 03, 2026--The 2028 Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM 2028) will be held in Yokohama, Japan.
The Business-First IP Playbook: David Hyams on Mapping Business Value and the Limits of General LLMs
In the latest episode of IP Innovators, host Steve Brachmann sits down with David Hyams, Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer of Longship Legal, to explore what it looks like to build an IP practice around business value rather than patent volume.
Scientists create global treasure map pointing to hidden rare earth deposits
Scientists have created a global “treasure map” for rare earth elements by uncovering where the strange volcanic rocks that contain them are most likely to form. By combining thousands of rock samples with seismic images of Earth’s deep interior, the team discovered that these metal-rich rocks tend to appear along the ancient, thick roots of continents. These unusual rocks, once seen as geological oddities, are now incredibly important because they hold many of the materials used in smartphones, electric vehicles, and wind turbines.
Mapping the avoid-ome: a systematic open-science approach to predictive ADMET
Nature Communications - Mapping the avoid-ome: a systematic open-science approach to predictive ADMET
Oxford Population Health: Global study of HIV variants underscores challenges for vaccine development
The largest-ever study mapping genetic variants of HIV-1 around the world shows the regional distribution of different subtypes of the virus continues to evolve.
Steam Controller gains SDL support for games outside Steam
Steam Controller mappings are now part of SDL Simple DirectMedia Layer, better known as SDL, is a cross-platform software library used by games,
Sustainable science mapping: benchmarking green AI against transformers for cross-disciplinary abstract classification using arXiv
Scientific Reports - Sustainable science mapping: benchmarking green AI against transformers for cross-disciplinary abstract classification using arXiv
Scientists discover hidden math secret inside Chinese money plant leaves
Scientists have uncovered a hidden mathematical secret inside the leaves of the Chinese money plant: a naturally occurring geometric pattern known as a Voronoi diagram, something typically associated with city planning, computer science, and network design. By mapping tiny pores and looping veins in the plant’s leaves, researchers discovered that the plant organizes itself using the same kind of elegant spatial logic humans use to solve complex distance problems — without ever “measuring” anything.
Mapping the Market: UK politics risks dragging down the pound
UK political turbulence has pushed sterling to price levels that technical analysts expect could lead to a new round of losses.
CEPHR: Advancing Patient Care Through Environmental Health Research
The Center for Environment, Place and Health Research connects clinicians with mapping tools and other real-world data resources to help guide medical insights.
Fruit flies are mapping the ecological cost of urbanization
A citizen science project in Vienna combines social media and in-house events to reveal how urbanization is reshaping fruit fly communities.
Scientists just found the Milky Way’s edge and it’s closer than expected
Scientists have uncovered the true boundary of the Milky Way’s star-forming region using stellar “age mapping.” They found a telltale U-shaped pattern showing that star formation drops sharply around 35,000–40,000 light-years from the center. Beyond that, stars are mostly migrants, slowly drifting outward rather than forming in place. The discovery gives a long-sought answer to where our galaxy’s stellar nursery really ends.
The travellers mapping their holiday by the stars
From cruises to girls' trips, astrocartography – a once-niche form of astrology – is shaping how some travellers choose where to go next.
Galaxy S25 Ultra gets Ocean Mode update for your summer dives
Samsung’s Ocean Mode, originally made for coral reef mapping, is now rolling out to the Galaxy S25 Ultra running One UI 8.5 beta.
Google finally adds a long-requested gaming feature to Android 17
You can now try system-level controller remapping in Android 17 Beta.
Scientists map the brain’s hidden wiring using RNA barcodes in major breakthrough
Researchers have developed a cutting-edge technique that uses RNA “barcodes” to map how neurons connect, capturing thousands of links with single-synapse precision. The method transforms brain mapping into a sequencing task, making it faster and more scalable than traditional approaches. In mice, it revealed surprising new connections between brain cells that were previously unknown. This could open the door to earlier detection and targeted treatment of neurological diseases.
Mapping pesticide mixtures to cancer risk at the country scale with spatial exposomics
Nature Health - Using an integrative spatial Bayesian framework that merges high-resolution environmental pesticide risk modelling with comprehensive cancer registry data, this analysis reveals...
Memorial fund honors patient whose life was saved by Vanderbilt Health neurosurgeons
Charlotte Davis underwent groundbreaking brain mapping surgery at Vanderbilt Health in 1995 to treat a deep-seated brain tumor. The procedure preserved areas controlling speech and movement. She lived 30 more years after her surgery.
Scientists Stunned: Colossal Eggs Discovered 3,500 Meters Beneath an Active Volcano
Beneath an active seafloor volcano off Vancouver Island, researchers have documented a congregation of giant eggs at roughly 3,500 meters, a discovery that reframes how life can flourish under extreme conditions. The eggs belong to the Pacific white skate, an elusive deep‑sea species adapted to cold, crushing pressure and perpetual darkness. What seemed an unlikely nursery is actually a geothermally warmed refuge, where subtle heat helps embryos survive a marathon incubation. The finding links volcanic energy to a quiet engine of biodiversity, turning a hostile landscape into an incubator. A living volcano, a hidden nursery The seamount long assumed dormant now exhales mineral‑rich, shimmering plumes, proof of hydrothermal life at depth. Expedition cameras swept across black basalt and pale bacterial mats, revealing vents that pulse with warmth. That warmth, though modest by human standards, alters the physics of development for cold‑adapted embryos. In a realm where metabolism creeps, even a few degrees can mean faster growth and higher survival. The volcano is not only active; it is ecologically formative, drafting a blueprint for a thriving oasis. Giant eggs and a skate built for the abyss The Pacific white skate, Bathyraja spinosissima, is built for the abyss: broad wings, armored spines, and a life history that trades speed for endurance. Females lay outsized, rectangular “mermaid’s purses,” often 46–50 centimeters long, packed with rich yolk to fuel years of growth. In the frigid deep, embryos can require around four years to hatch, a timeline that magnifies every energetic advantage. The scale is striking—large eggs, large adults, and a textbook case of deep‑sea gigantism. The volcano’s gentle heat may literally shave months or years from the wait. Why heat matters at the bottom of the sea Hydrothermal circulation delivers low‑level warmth without the turbulence that would scatter fragile egg‑cases. Slightly elevated temperatures accelerate enzyme kinetics, nudging development along while keeping embryos within a safe range. Mineral‑laden fluids likely shape local microbiomes, which, in turn, can influence biofilms on egg surfaces. The environment acts like a slow, steady incubator, countering the deep sea’s tyrannies of cold and scarcity. For a species with long maturation and few offspring, every incremental boost compounds across generations. An ecosystem sculpted by fire and water Seafloor volcanoes create steep environmental gradients, stitching together hot vents, cool eddies, and mineral gardens into mosaic habitats. Microbes harvest chemical energy, seeding food webs that support crustaceans, fishes, and skates. Cameras documented egg‑cases nestled among rocky ledges, near communities nourished by vent‑driven chemistry. These islands of productivity behave like deep‑sea oases, sustaining life far beyond the vent orifice’s flickering light. The nursery’s success underscores how geological forces engineer biological opportunity. “Finding a cradle of life tucked beneath a breathing volcano reminds us that the planet’s harshest places can be profoundly generous.” What the discovery could change The nursery reframes conservation priorities in regions where volcanism quietly underwrites reproduction. Protecting hydrothermal corridors could safeguard entire lifecycles, not just charismatic adults spotted during occasional surveys. It also sharpens questions about how climate‑driven shifts in ocean circulation might influence vent activity, temperature fields, and embryo survival. With methodical mapping, time‑series cameras, and environmental DNA, scientists can track whether nurseries remain stable or drift with geologic rhythms. Key implications include: Enhanced understanding of deep‑sea reproduction at hydrothermal sites. New conservation targets centered on geothermal nurseries. Comparative studies with other volcanic regions, from the Galápagos to rift zones. Biotechnological insights from organisms adapted to long, cold development. Better models of how seafloor heat shapes regional biodiversity. Methods behind the revelation Remotely operated vehicles threaded through chimney fields, gathering video, temperatures, and mineral signatures. High‑definition imagery captured the distinctive, horned egg cases, their edges dusted with fine volcanic silt. Geochemical profiles mapped how heat and chemicals disperse, outlining the “thermal lanes” where eggs most cluster. Combined, these datasets reveal a nursery organized by geothermal topography, with egg‑cases concentrated in pockets of gentle, sustained warmth. A fragile boon in a changing ocean Deep‑sea environments feel remote, yet they intersect with global pressures: mining proposals, cable routes, and shifting oxygen levels. The nursery’s resilience hinges on stable heat flow, intact substrates, and minimal disturbance from noise or sediment. Safeguarding such places is not just about protecting novelty; it preserves a slow, ancient strategy that lets large, long‑lived animals endure in the coldest reaches of the Pacific. Where geology and biology meet, the planet’s deep time still writes living stories. This volcano‑warmed nursery adds a vital chapter to that story, revealing how subtle thermal gifts can tip the scales toward life in the abyss. With each dive, researchers trace the contours of an unseen world, where fire feeds water, and water—against all odds—feeds the future.
Science, mapping and art collide at ArtReach
A river story unfolds at ArtReach St. Croix with the opening of two exhibitions, Deep Mapping and Valley Pottery: 2,000 Years. Both exhibitions show a deep love for the valley
4 Things You Never Knew Your PS5 Could Do
The PlayStation 5 lets users create custom button mapping, play from a PC and Mac, use motion control to aim, and amplify sounds with headphones.
Mapping a career in electron microscopy
Nature Reviews Chemistry - Ahead of his 60th birthday, Paul A. Midgley, Professor of Materials Science at the University of Cambridge, discussed his life in science.
David Botstein, Gene-Mapping Pioneer, Dies at 83
His method of locating genes in human DNA allowed researchers to find disease-causing genes, and later to map the entire, sprawling human genome.
Strengthening One Health Field Epidemiology Capacity in the WHO South-East Asia Region
Recent public health emergencies—including the COVID-19 pandemic, recurrent zoonotic disease outbreaks, and the high level of antimicrobial resistance—have underscored the urgent need for strong, multisectoral field epidemiology capacities. This reinforces the importance of a workforce equipped with One Health field epidemiology competencies. To address this need, WHO works with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), as part of Quadripartite Alliance for One Health, to strengthen field epidemiology training programmes using a One Health approach.These efforts are aligned with WHO SEARO’s Strategic Framework for Action for Strengthening Surveillance, Risk Assessment and Field Epidemiology and the Regional Roadmap to Advance Field Epidemiology Capacities 2025–2029 emphasize workforce development, multisectoral collaboration, and enhanced preparedness for health emergencies. With funding from the Pandemic Fund, The Competency for One Health Field Epidemiology (COHFE) integration within Field Epidemiology Training Programmes (FETPs) or similar initiatives has been initiated in Bangladesh and India and is planned in Sri Lanka.BangladeshIn Bangladesh, COHFE is being adapted to strengthen the Field Epidemiology Training Programme, Bangladesh (FETP-B) Advanced programme. Initiated in July 2025 and led by the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR), the process brought together stakeholders from human, animal, and environmental health sectors, academia, and laboratories.A Multisectoral Working Group (MWG) was established to guide implementation, conduct readiness assessments, and identify opportunities to institutionalize One Health collaboration. Through national multisectoral consultations and a competency prioritization workshop held in Dhaka in November 2025, stakeholders identified priority technical competencies for surveillance, outbreak investigation, data analysis, and risk assessment, alongside functional competencies related to leadership, coordination, and the laboratory–epidemiology interface. The process also surfaced systemic barriers—such as challenges in data sharing and limited joint investigations—enabling targeted recommendations. These outcomes are guiding curriculum revision, the introduction of One Health simulations and joint field exercises, and the development of a national multisectoral mentorship pool, with updated training materials expected to be implemented in the upcoming cohort.Figure 1. Competency prioritization involving multisectoral stakeholders“COHFE represents a significant step forward in operationalizing the One Health approach. The collaboration between national institutions and the Quadripartite partners is critical for building resilient systems to address complex health challenges in the region.”, Prof. (Dr) Tahmina Sirin, Director, Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR), Bangladesh.Aligning India’s One Health Training with COHFEIn India, the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has strengthened One Health workforce development through its SectorConnect initiative. WHO supported a comprehensive competency mapping and curriculum review to align the Field Epidemiology Programme in One Health (FEP-OH) with all 14 COHFE domains. The review identified strong foundations while generating actionable recommendations to strengthen One Health learning outcomes, expand joint field-based learning, and enhance competency-based assessment. These improvements are informing programme refinement and phased scale-up across additional states.Figure 2. Strengthening learning outcomes for the SectorConnect FEP OH CurriculumThrough these efforts, WHO SEARO will continue to support countries to move from separate sector-based training toward an integrated, impact-driven One Health field epidemiology workforce capable of addressing complex health threats at human-animal-environment interface.ReferencesFood and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, World Health Organization, & World Organisation for Animal Health. (2024). Competencies for One Health field epidemiology (COHFE) framework. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240080058World Health Organization. (2023). Strategic framework for action for strengthening surveillance, risk assessment and field epidemiology for health security threats in the WHO South-East Asia Region. WHO Regional Office for South-East Asia. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789290210030World Health Organization. (2024). Regional roadmap to advance field epidemiology capacities in the WHO South-East Asia Region 2025–2029. WHO Regional Office for South-East Asia. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789290229544
Traditional Pacific navigators bring the intricate science of wayfinding to the Bay Area
Organized by Sophia Perez, Indigenous Technology Coordinator for the Berkeley Center for New Media, a weeklong series of public workshops beginning March 9 will feature master navigators teaching everything from traditional canoe technology to ancient star-mapping.
IMAP opens a new era for heliosphere science and space weather
The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, a Princeton-led NASA mission to study the Sun and everything it touches, has officially begun its science mission. Princeton marked the occasion with a panel discussion of IMAP leaders, science talks and a reception hosted by the Center on Science and Technology.
Real-Time 3D Room Mapping With ESP32, VL53L5CX Sensor And IMU
ST’s VL53L5CX is a very small 8×8 grid ranging sensor that can perform distance measurements at a distance of up to 4 meters. In a recent video,[Henrique Ferrolho] demonstrated that this…
American high school student stuns scientists by mapping 1.5 million previously unknown space objects - Futura-Sciences
A young mind builds an AI breakthrough Matteo Paz, a student at Pasadena High School, joined the Planet Finder Academy in the summer of 2022. The program immerses students in real world astronomy challenges. Under the mentorship of Caltech scientist Davy Kirkpatrick at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC),...
NASA’s IMAP Begins Primary Science Mission
NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) began its two-year primary science mission on Feb. 1 to explore and map the boundaries of our
My internship mapping toxic microbes: The power of community in coastal health monitoring
Hello! I’m Taylor Hart, a 2024 NOAA Hollings scholar studying earth system science with a minor in biological sciences at the University of California, Irvine. This summer, I had the amazing opportunity to intern at the National Coastal Centers for Ocean Science Hollings Marine Laboratory in Charleston, South Carolina! My research was focused on mapping the dis
Science Pub: Cyborg Jellies Exploring Our Oceans
From shark tracking to oil spill mapping, marine research requires unique tools to gather data. In this free public talk,
The New Gold Rush in Brain Science
Fueled by advances in biomarkers, brain mapping, and AI, investment in neuro and CNS innovation shows no signs of slowing, even amid costly setbacks. BioSpace spoke to investors at JPM26 to get their take on recent bets in new therapies and neurotech.
Mapping the science–technology translational landscape in biomedicine
Nature Biotechnology - A systematic, prospective analysis of the interplay between science and technology in biomedicine can illuminate the pathway for translating scientific insights into tangible...