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Phantom Blade Zero pre-orders now available, 11-minute trailer

S-GAME has opened pre-orders and released an 11-minute trailer for Wuxia action RPG Phantom Blade Zero.

Aug 11 • 10:06 PM EDT • Technology • gematsu.com

Microsoft Patches 398 Flaws Including a Windows Driver Zero-Day Under Active Attack

Microsoft patches 398 flaws, including exploited CVE-2026-68820 that lets local attackers reach SYSTEM, plus four unauthenticated 9.8 RCEs.

Aug 11 • 4:10 PM EDT • Technology • thehackernews.com

Microsoft August 2026 Patch Tuesday fixes 400 flaws, 3 zero-days

Today is Microsoft's August 2026 Patch Tuesday, and with it comes security updates for a massive 400 flaws, including one actively exploited and two publicly disclosed zero-day vulnerabilities.

Aug 11 • 2:08 PM EDT • Technology • bleepingcomputer.com

GOP senators rally behind 9/11 families in push to ban Mamdani from anniversary ceremony: 'He's a disgrace'

Republican senators back 9/11 families' petition to block Zohran Mamdani from attending the 25th anniversary remembrance ceremony at Ground Zero.

Aug 11 • 6:02 AM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

As regulations fade, electric truck adoption will hinge on business cases

Rather than plan around a national transition to zero-emission trucks, fleets are weighing total cost of ownership, operational feasibility and customer expectations.

Aug 8 • 7:00 AM EDT • Business • ttnews.com

AI-Assisted HTTP Terminator Finds Novel HTTP Desync Techniques and Apache Zero-Day

PortSwigger says HTTP Terminator generated 30,000 desync vectors, found roughly 700 vulnerable targets, and helped uncover an Apache zero-day.

Aug 7 • 6:09 AM EDT • Technology • thehackernews.com

Does He Have the Most Stressful Job in Sports?

Brian Cashman has presided over four titles and zero losing seasons. Yankees fans want more.

Aug 6 • 5:02 AM EDT • Sports • nytimes.com

Phantom Blade Zero pre-orders open August 11

Pre-orders for Phantom Blade Zero will open on August 11 at 7:00 p.m. PT / 10:00 p.m. ET alongside the release of an 11-minute trailer, developer S-GAME announced.

Aug 5 • 10:00 PM EDT • Technology • gematsu.com

Why Don't We Put More Turbines Underwater? The Pros And Cons Of Tidal Energy

Underwater turbines would be great for zero-carbon and high power output, but it has some drawbacks, including high upfront costs and some inconsistency.

Aug 5 • 3:17 PM EDT • Technology • bgr.com

DuckDuckGo Is Selling Anti Pervert Glasses That Contain Zero AI, Cameras, or Even Electronics Whatsoever

"0/10... Useless for perverts."

Aug 4 • 1:48 PM EDT • Technology • tech.yahoo.com

DuckDuckGo Is Selling Anti Pervert Glasses That Contain Zero AI, Cameras, or Even Electronics Whatsoever

"0/10... Useless for perverts."

Aug 4 • 1:48 PM EDT • Technology • ca.news.yahoo.com

DuckDuckGo Is Selling Anti Pervert Glasses That Contain Zero AI, Cameras, or Even Electronics Whatsoever

Google alternative DuckDuckGo has come up with a pair of plastic, non-pervert glasses in response to Meta's controversial smart glasses.

Aug 4 • 1:48 PM EDT • Technology • futurism.com

If Not AOC, Then Who?

What do we do if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decides not to run for president in 2028? It makes sense that many leftists are currently focused on calling on her to take the plunge. But the absence of a Plan B, or even much discussion about one, is worrisome. The US Left can’t afford to sit out the 2028 Democratic primary. Doing so in 2024 was a disaster: our abstention self-marginalized anti-billionaire politics from the national conversation and thereby gave space for Harris to pivot to the “center” (i.e. the policy preferences of corporate donors, establishment hacks, and AIPAC). Abstaining again in 2028 would be especially counterproductive since democratic socialists now have so much wind in our sails after our big electoral wins in NYC and across the country. It’s time to deepen our momentum, organization, and profile — not to retreat to the margins during America’s single most important political battle. Even more urgently, keeping Trump’s heir out of the White House may depend on whether leftists and the party’s unprecedentedly disenchanted base can force the Democrats in 2028 to take meaningful steps towards a very angry electorate and away from the corporate-consultant blob that has helped get us into this mess. If AOC (or Abdul El-Sayed) decides to run, we should enthusiastically go all in — DSA, fighting unions, progressive organizations, anybody who wants to see a better country and world. But, as far as I can tell from the outside, there’s a real chance that she doesn’t run. And we can’t just wait and see where she lands before discussing alternatives, since AOC’s decision might not come for quite a while, giving us little time to scramble at the last minute for an alternative. So we should start working now on getting a Plan B into motion, and recruiting a good candidate for the role. Here’s one idea. A Worker Candidate — Healthcare Not Warfare 2028 Run a union worker Leftists don’t need to always run experienced, well-known socialist politicians for high-profile contests. Lula, the current president of Brazil, began his political career as a metalworker militant who ran for governor of São Paulo in 1982. Especially in an era of institutional distrust, it’s possible to lean hard into making a virtue out of a working-class comrade’s distance from traditional politics. Experience abroad shows this clearly. Rachel Kéké — an immigrant hotel housekeeper — ran as the candidate of the leftist La France Insoumise for the National Assembly in 2022, defeating a former minister in the Macron government. The Belgian Workers’ Party in 2024 won its first Flemish seat in the European Parliament by running Rudi Kennes, a three-decade veteran of the Opel Antwerp auto factory. And the South Korean left in 2024 elected auto factory militant Yoon Jong-oh to the National Assembly. If a tiny French Trotskyist organization could make such a big splash in 2002 and 2007 by running a well-spoken postal worker cadre for office — the LCR’s Olivier Besancenot received about 1.5 million first-round votes — it’s not far-fetched to expect that a much larger organization like DSA, together with a broader coalition of the willing, could run this playbook to much greater effect. This is especially the case now that almost everything DSA does immediately becomes a national news story. We don’t need someone famous. We just need a charismatic, well-vetted comrade who works in a relatable working-class occupation — e.g. a nurse, or a worker in auto or construction, or at Amazon. Ideally, they have a compelling personal story or have been part of a significant strike or organizing campaign, but even those criteria don’t necessarily have to be deal-breakers. The main lesson of the Graham Platner fiasco isn’t that we should never run outsiders for office (the momentum he generated proves the exact opposite), but that they need proper vetting and roots in democratic membership organizations like DSA or a union. In any case, there are plenty of ways to signal working-class authenticity without resorting to Platner’s or Fetterman’s performative macho white dude affect. Better to have someone of any gender or race who is actually working class, with firm socialist politics, who can speak from experience about the day-to-day realities of trying to make it in America. There are surely at least a dozen such worker leaders in our movement nationwide; we just need to sit down and convince one that their personal sacrifice for the greater good (i.e. running for president) will be worth it. If we don’t have a frontrunner with a clear path to victory like AOC (or El-Sayed, were he to win Michigan), it’s better to embrace someone whose decision to run in itself tells an important story about US politics: workers have been iced out of our political system and are now fighting hard to break back in. The novelty factor, in itself, would generate press. And it would help democratic socialists signal to the American public that our movement’s defining characteristic is that we represent workers vs. bosses, not that we’re “the furthest left” force in American politics — a framework that suggests we’re extremists and that helps our opponents isolate us from non-college-educated voters by highlighting extremely minoritarian (and misguided) stances included in DSA’s platform like prison abolition. We don’t get many opportunities to speak to tens of millions of Americans; we need to use these opportunities to broaden our appeal beyond those already in our orbit. Run to polarize the 2028 primary and general election around “Medicare for All” and “End All Aid to Israel” Why should democratic socialists use our scarce time and volunteer energy to run in a race we’re unlikely to win? Running in the 2028 primary will not only recruit us scores of members (imagine having a DSA member intervening in eleven nationally televised primary debates!), but — more importantly — it has the potential to be a decisive leap forward towards an America that finally starts meeting the needs of working people instead of HMO and AIPAC billionaire donors. Polarizing litmus tests are good, actually — as long as they’re fought for around popular demands in a thoughtful and strategic way. Democratic socialists have an opportunity and responsibility to make the 2028 primary about two of the most widely and deeply felt issues of our moment: domestically, America’s unaffordable, family-breaking private healthcare system; internationally, America’s bankrolling of the genocidal Israeli government. A candidacy relentlessly demanding Medicare for All and No Aid to Israel would pose a sharp question to the American public, the Democratic Party, and other 2028 contenders: Why can’t working-class Americans afford their healthcare bills at the same time that our government is spending at least $3.8 billion yearly to fund an Israeli regime eager to keep dragging us and the world into more forever wars? Our candidate can agitate around a clear message: I’m running to give voice to all those working-class Americans who are struggling to get by. No matter what state you live in, who you voted for in 2024, or your background, it’s just plain common sense that we should make healthcare more affordable instead of spending billions to enable the Israeli government’s crimes against humanity. Every American who agrees with me when I say ‘Medicare for All — Not a Dime for Israel’ should make their voice heard through our campaign. Racking up a high number of votes for this agenda is a crucial way to show the Democratic Party and the country as a whole that we can’t keep supporting a life-destroying status quo in our healthcare system and in the Middle East. If we want to defeat Trump’s handpicked crony this coming November, we need to speak to ordinary people’s frustrations with the status quo — we can’t keep running the same tired establishment playbook and expecting a different result. For those highly engaged voters (or skeptical media pundits) who raise concerns about wasting votes, the candidate can take the time to explain why this isn’t the case: It's true I'm a long shot. But Zohran showed anything can happen — and voting for me is a pragmatic decision, not a wasted vote. In a heavily divided primary with a large number of candidates and a very discredited establishment, my campaign and the democratic socialist movement I’m part of are positioned to be the balance of power if we can get a large enough number of voters to loudly demand Healthcare Not Warfare. Since there’s a high chance no candidate will get to 50% in the 2028 primaries, the Democrats could very well be heading towards a brokered convention, where a disciplined, principled current committed to breaking from corporate donors can play an outsized role in making sure whoever ends up with the nomination raises the banner of single-payer healthcare and cutting aid to Israel. How exactly could running this sort of primary campaign be translated into actual leverage? The candidate replies: I’m aiming to win the nomination, but if I don’t achieve that goal, my delegates and I will pledge our support in the primary only for a candidate who agrees in the general election to call for ending US aid to Israel and establishing Medicare for All at home. These are both winning planks for November against the Republicans, and the only reason I can see that other candidates haven’t yet raised these is that they’re still more scared of the donor class than they are of the people. That needs to change. If Democratic leaders want young people, workers, and those sick of the status quo to show up in big numbers this November, they need to meet us halfway. In this way, whether or not we win the nomination, democratic socialists could still play a decisive role in 2028. The approach outlined here is similar to what radical left parties periodically do in parliamentary democracies like Denmark or Sweden when they find themselves as a junior partner electorally: they dictate to center-left allies what their terms would be for enabling, from the outside, the formation of a new government. Running a Healthcare Not Warfare candidate will make it significantly more likely that the 2028 Democratic candidate stands with ordinary people instead of donors on these two pivotal planks — a shift that will, in turn, make it easier to achieve the existentially important task of defeating MAGA’s heir in November. Look at how much popular traction the Uncommitted movement got with a similar strategy in 2024 with so little on-the-ground organization — surely we can go much further with a working-class candidate, a much bigger DSA, and a Democratic Party base that has turned against Israel, billionaires, and the hacks in the party who prop them up. Objections and Responses There are quite a few objections to this proposal, many of which are very reasonable. Let me briefly address each here. Socialists shouldn’t waste their scarce time and resources on a candidate unlikely to win. This is a good rule in general, but there are important exceptions, and presidential elections are the main one. There’s no other political contest that gets anything like this level of attention and engagement in the US, so if you want to be a serious force in nationwide politics, you basically can’t afford not to have a candidate. Far from being an overall drain on our resources, running a dynamic 2028 campaign would likely result in a major net increase in members and capacity. In that spirit, the very pragmatic Milwaukee sewer socialists — who mostly ran to win at home in Wisconsin — supported Eugene Debs’s propagandistic presidential campaigns, which they correctly saw as a crucial means of recruiting to the Socialist Party. And now that the (post-1972) Democratic Party gives more weight to voters than party operatives in determining its presidential nomination, it’s become feasible to run as a socialist in primaries without risking a split in the vote against the Republicans in November. We should just support Ro Khanna, who also supports M4A and ending aid to Israel. I like Ro Khanna and would enthusiastically vote and canvass for him for president were he to get the nomination. But there’s a real chance that Khanna’s bid for office doesn’t catch on; he lacks the grassroots organizational apparatus of DSA, and, because he’s not really of the Left or labor (despite his current very good positions), he’s unlikely to generate the type of buy-in and enthusiasm that a DSA candidate would. Moreover, Khanna would be running as an individual, not as someone emerging from and building an organized movement — his campaign would not likely focus on building sustained power from below, nor would it likely polarize the 2028 primary around M4A and Israel aid. Also, and not inconsequentially, the poor electoral results for Tom Steyer and Saikat Chakrabarti this spring suggest that there’s perhaps not much of a popular appetite in the Democrats’ base to support multi-millionaire class traitors. Much better, then, to run a democratic socialist worker. If by Super Tuesday it’s clear that our campaign has captured the main left lane in the primary, Khanna should drop out and endorse us; conversely, if he’s managed to capture this lane, DSA could at that point transform its Healthcare Not Warfare campaign into an independent campaign to elect Ro Khanna focused on winning (and holding him accountable to) those two critical planks. An openness to consolidating an anti-corporate candidate by Super Tuesday is a necessary component of the strategy I’m proposing, because otherwise we risk splitting the primary votes (per DNC rules, you need at least 15% to get any delegates to convention). We should convince Shawn Fain or Sara Nelson to run for president instead. I agree it’d be great if either ran for president, but my impression is that there’s basically no chance that will happen in 2028, because both are firmly focused on their union leadership duties (and, in the case of Fain, beating back a federal witch-hunt). This plan could have DSA end up endorsing a non-socialist, non-DSAer for president. That’s against our principles. It’s a myth, and bad politics, that socialists can’t ever support candidates who aren’t members of their organization and/or who don’t call themselves socialists. Bernie, after all, was not a DSAer. And socialists abroad regularly make tactical decisions about if and when supporting a non-socialist candidate makes sense from the standpoint of promoting working-class interests, defending democracy, and building a socialist current in the process. If your “principles” prevent you and DSA from helping achieve the momentous stride forward of having a Democratic candidate in 2028 run on Medicare for All and ending aid to Israel, those “principles” are not very good. In fact, they actively undermine the causes they’re aiming to support. We shouldn’t confuse principles (working-class independence) with tactics (the best way to advance this in a given context). In my recent article in Catalyst on Milwaukee sewer socialism (I’ve uploaded the full text here), I have a section showing how similarly rigid rules about endorsements had to be eventually discarded in the old Socialist Party nationwide after WWI because they tended to lead socialists towards a sectarian abstention from broader anti-corporate electoral insurgencies beyond their party’s control. For what it’s worth, Lenin’s current under Tsarism frequently backed bourgeois candidates in the second round of elections and Lenin himself advocated that British Communists support Labour Party candidates; for his part, Kautsky in 1912 defended the German Social Democracy’s electoral pact with the Progressives in the runoffs. If our predecessors could be that tactically flexible in an era before the limits of their underlying strategic assumptions about intransigent class politics in capitalist democracies were made clear, then there’s no need to insist on being more tactically rigid today, after a century’s worth of accumulated experience. As long as you maintain your own political profile and organization while engaging in broader coalitional efforts, there’s zero inherent contradiction with the principle of political independence. More specifically: DSA and allied organizations should enthusiastically back Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed if AOC declines to run and he throws his hat in the presidential ring. (I have no idea whether he’s even considering this path, but there’ll surely be chatter about it if he wins his Senate race this November.) Though he doesn’t call himself a socialist, El-Sayed is a principled Berniecrat, a consistent fighter for Palestine, and would have a clear path to victory. Using the “s” word is far less important than whether a campaign fights for the interests of working people at home and abroad — and whether actively participating in it can grow the organized working class and the Left. And the same holds true if a less anti-corporate candidate were, under pressure, to adopt our two Healthcare Not Warfare planks. Why focus only on M4A and ending US aid to Israel? There are so many other important issues to fight for! Obviously there are many pivotal issues beyond healthcare and Israel, and our candidate — and especially our organizations involved in the campaign — should be prepared to speak on all of these. But one of the crucial lessons of the Zohran campaign is that you have to relentlessly stay on message if you want to cut through the noise. CNN and Fox News will want to talk about DSA’s views on Venezuela and abolishing the police; we need to polarize the debate on the widely and deeply felt issues that are most favorable for growing the Left, isolating our opponents, and winning urgently needed changes. One recent poll found 63% of Americans support M4A, even after respondents were told it would raise taxes and eliminate most private insurance. Another found that 74% of Democrats opposed “providing additional economic and military support to Israel.” And focusing on two demands sets the campaign up to be able to leverage its mandate to make clear demands upon other candidates (which we can’t do if we run with a laundry list of demands). Talking about a Plan B is a distraction from the more urgent work of building a groundswell of calls on AOC to run. It’s good for DSAers, fightback unionists, and progressive organizations to try to convince AOC to run. This proposal is meant as an addendum to pushes to get AOC to run and to line DSA up for that eventuality, not as a substitute for those efforts. But I’m worried that, like in 2024, we might eventually find ourselves with no time to find a viable alternative unless we start now. DSA, with its abundant deliberative processes, moves slowly. The approach you’re suggesting seems risky. If a DSA candidate runs but doesn’t receive a lot of votes, it’ll undercut our current national momentum. This is a reasonable worry. All big initiatives always carry risks, and the path I’m advocating is certainly not free of these. That said, if a Healthcare Not Warfare campaign doesn’t catch on like we envisioned, it’s a pretty simple pivot in March 2028 to explain that in the future we really need our standard-bearers like AOC, or our growing bench of national electeds, to step up in presidential primaries. Moreover, it’s worth noting that the risk of my Plan B proposal is on the whole significantly less than the risk entailed by an AOC run. We should all back her if she runs, since she’d fire up the base, provide huge openings for organizing, have a real shot at defeating a Republican (especially given MAGA’s unpopularity), be a great standard-bearer for our issues, particularly M4A and ending aid to Israel, and be less willing than mainstream candidates to capitulate to any anti-democratic machinations from Trump and co. But it’s also true that AOC could lose, which would be a devastating setback to the country and the Left. Or she could win and find herself unable to pass much, if any, of her (and our) program, a demoralizing prospect. So if we’re willing to take these risks with AOC (and we should), it follows that we should be able to take lower-level risks if she doesn’t throw her hat in the ring. What’s Your Plan B? The US Left is facing its biggest opening for growth and influence since the 1930s. Initiatives that would have been impossible a few months ago are now potentially feasible. A President AOC is now easier to imagine, but if she ultimately assesses that the risks aren’t worth the potential reward in 2028, we can’t be left flat-footed. So even if you’re not convinced by the specifics of my Plan B, I hope you can at least agree that it’d be a disaster for us not to have one — and not to start getting a Plan B into motion. Hopefully other organizers and political currents will put forward their responses and alternative ideas ASAP. The stakes are too high to just wait and see. More As always, please share this article widely. This newsletter depends on all you lovely people to get the word out. Thank you! I uploaded the full text of my Catalyst article on Milwaukee sewer socialism here (it’s updated and 3x as long as the version published earlier on this substack). If you haven’t yet, please make sure to subscribe to Catalyst here; I read every issue front to back, highly recommend. 🌹🎵 Ivan Lins (arranged by Arthur Verocai) — “General da Banda” 🌹🎵

Aug 3 • 12:50 PM EDT • Politics • laborpolitics.com

Aaron Rodgers: "Zero debate" about this being my final season

Jul 28 • 1:21 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Jackery FridgeGuard review: Keep your refrigerator cooling during an outage

Rest easy the fridge will keep cooling during the next power outage with zero effort on your part.

Jul 26 • 5:00 AM EDT • Technology • mashable.com

This week in politics: How Schuylkill County’s legislators voted

The PA House of Representatives was in session last week. The House passed zero bills during their one day in session July 23. They’re now on a summer break until Sept. 9. The PA Senate was last in session July 11 and 12, and they passed t…

Jul 25 • 10:45 AM EDT • Politics • republicanherald.com

When It Comes to Fusion, Materials Matter

Fusion at high temperatures powers the sun and, if harnessed, could provide a potential source of energy here on Earth. But controlling fusion reactions has other benefits. The process also generates subatomic particles called neutrons that are used in a range of applications spanning medicine, research, and national security. Now, scientists at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have found that the materials surrounding a fusion reaction can dramatically increase how often it occurs, particularly at low energies where fusion is rare. The study was published July 18 in Nature Communications. Their approach sets up a way to study and engineer nuclear reactions within solid materials, opening a new field of “materials-driven fusion.” Instead of designing materials just to survive the harsh conditions of fusion, researchers might be able to design materials that boost the reaction in specific conditions, similar to the way catalysts speed up chemical processes. “It gives you a new knob to turn that you didn’t have before,” said Arun Persaud, head of the Fusion Science & Ion Beam Technology group in Berkeley Lab’s Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics (ATAP) Division. “If we understand this effect better, it opens the door to engineering new materials that would affect the fusion rate under certain conditions. Someday future progress might enable more compact and efficient neutron generators, which have all kinds of applications, like cargo screening, planetary science, and medical therapy and imaging.” In the experiment, researchers used two different methods to pack deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen atoms that is often used in fusion, into thin foils of palladium and titanium. They then fired a beam of deuterium ions at the foils at different energies and measured how often fusion happened. Then they compared the rates from the different materials and methods with the “bare” fusion reaction (not in a material). The team found that fusion rates depended on how the deuterium was loaded into the metal foils. The biggest effect was at the lowest energies, below 2.5 kiloelectronvolts (keV), where theory predicts fusion rates drop off sharply. Instead, researchers found a surprising plateau: Some samples showed elevated fusion rates roughly a quintillion times higher than bare fusion reactions. (A quintillion is a 1 followed by 18 zeroes.) Researchers are not exactly sure why that’s happening, though they have some ideas and ways to test them. The electrons and defects within the material might partially shield repulsive electrostatic forces between deuterium nuclei, making it easier for them to get close together and fuse. Tuning the electronic structure, defects, and composition of materials could help make nuclear reactions happen more readily. “It comes down to better understanding the mechanism so that we can try to enhance it,” said corresponding author Jeremy Munday, a professor at UC Davis. “We’ve seen that we can increase fusion rates, but what is the limit? Can we bring it to lower temperatures or energies? There’s obviously a lot of interest and excitement about fusion, so if there’s something we can learn about the physics at these lower energy scales, maybe there’s something we can translate to other areas of nuclear science.” The team plans to explore a wider range of materials and continue probing the unexpected fusion plateau at lower energies. Their work establishes a reproducible experimental platform to study how solid materials influence nuclear reactions, creating a new area of research that links fusion science with materials science and chemistry. “The work shows conclusively that the material environment where fusion occurs at low temperatures is an active participant rather than a passive container,” said Cameron Geddes, director of ATAP. “That adds a new dimension to fusion research.” This work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.

Jul 23 • 11:00 AM EDT • Science • newscenter.lbl.gov

Democrats zero in on Nevada and South Carolina to kick off 2028 presidential primary calendar

Nevada and South Carolina are the leading contenders to be recommended to head Democrats’ 2028 presidential primary calendar, according to conversations with members of a powerful panel within the Democratic National Committee.

Jul 22 • 7:13 PM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Why has Labour briefed against Ed Miliband – is it his success and popularity?

Tories, Reform, fossil fuel industry and some in his party lined up against net zero agenda as energy secretary

Jul 21 • 3:00 AM EDT • Politics • theguardian.com

Some Xbox studio leads reportedly "detest" Game Pass — so why did Xbox push ahead with it? "It felt like a race to zero."

In a new podcast, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier shared thoughts from Xbox Game Studios leaders, who reportedly "detest" Game Pass and its impact on perception of value.

Jul 19 • 7:23 AM EDT • Technology • windowscentral.com

Disco Elysium Dev ZA/UM Announces Layoffs Affecting Up to 32 Staff

Disco Elysium developer ZA/UM has announced layoffs affecting up to 32 staff just two months after launching Zero Parades: For Dead Spies.

Jul 18 • 12:52 PM EDT • Technology • ign.com

Disco Elysium Studio Says Game About People Forced Into Impossible Situations Didn't Sell Well Enough To Prevent Layoffs

In a post on social media, ZA/UM wrote that it would lay off 32 developers two months after releasing Zero Parades: For Dead Spies

Jul 17 • 5:38 PM EDT • Technology • kotaku.com

Disco Elysium developer ZA/UM announces layoffs after Zero Parades flounders

ZA/UM says that Zero Parades: For Dead Spies failed to perform commercially

Jul 17 • 1:53 PM EDT • Technology • polygon.com

U.S. health officials zero in on source of Cyclospora outbreak

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is zeroing in on the source of a parasitic outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce that has sickened hundreds of people across five states.

Jul 17 • 9:13 AM EDT • Health • wlwt.com

Chico City Council approves entertainment zones for downtown and Meriam Park

CHICO, Calif. - Chico City Council voted 6 to 0 to approve an ordinance creating entertainment zones in downtown Chico and Meriam Park.The ordinance, taking effect September 18, 2026, will allow customers to carry approved alcoholic beverages and walk around outside within those designated areas."I feel like the downtown could use all the help it could get right now," said Celeste Cramer, general manager of Downtown Chico Business Association. "In the other areas where they have been doing the entertainment zones and throughout California, it has increased their sales. They haven't seen an increase in violence, or tickets, or anything like that. It's a good thing to try out."Numerous other cities around California such as Redding, Sacramento and San Francisco have put their own entertainment zones into effect and have had success.Action News Now stopped by both designated locations and spoke with organizers and bar owners."I'm super excited, I think this is an opportunity for us," said Scott Baldwin, owner of Argus. "We can get a booth at the farmers market. You can order a cocktail from that booth and then we'll have it ready for you at the door as you walk through. Think of it as a picnic situation. You can grab some tacos, you can get a Kentucky Buck. You can sit down anywhere in the entertainment zone and enjoy Argus outside of Argus."Chico's Chamber of Commerce hosted community stakeholder meetings and community engagement sessions to tailor the ordinance to the city's needs as a university town and rural area.The ordinance will allow people 21 and older to walk around with open containers of alcohol within the entertainment zones as long as they have a wristband, stamp or another visible marker showing they're allowed to do so."To us it's more than an ordinance," said Jen Rothenwander, marketing manager at Meriam Park. "It's an opportunity to invest back into the community, and to continue to do what Chico does well – which is to create the spaces for people to stick around and gather, and shop and spend."The Meriam Park entertainment zone will be enclosed by Springfield Drive, Alcott Avenue, Notre Dame Boulevard and E. 20th Street.The Downtown Chico entertainment zone will span mostly from Highway 32 to Lost Park.Chico Chief of Police Billy Aldridge spoke with Redding Police and was informed they had zero problems with their entertainment zone.Chief Aldridge endorses the ordinance in Chico. freestar.config.enabled_slots.push({ placementName: "actionnewsnow-com_blox_yup-rectangle-one", slotId: "actionnewsnow-com_blox_yup-rectangle-one", targeting: { "pos": "yup-rectangle-one" } });

Jul 15 • 7:37 PM EDT • Entertainment • actionnewsnow.com

The ’Gay’ Attacks on Lindsey Graham Are All About Politics

Was Lindsey Graham gay? As the author of a book about the history of gay Washington, D.C., it’s a question I’ve been asked frequently for years, and even more so since his sudden death last weekend. The South Carolina Republican’s lifelong confirmed bachelorhood, vocal intonation, and Southern dandy demeanor (if not sartorial choices) prompted many to conclude that he was, as they say in that part of the country, “light in his loafers.” Graham’s repeated attestations to the contrary had zero effect on those invested in the narrative that he was. Only about the matter of J. Edgar Hoover’s rumored cross-dressing (for which there is much circumstantial but no direct evidence) am I questioned more. Whenever I’ve been asked to speculate upon Graham’s sexuality—and speculate was all that I or anyone else could do—I always answered the question honestly. While my personal sense is that Graham was probably gay, as a journalist and a historian I cannot rely on my intuition to make factual assertions. (Gaydar hasn’t yet been scientifically perfected.) Given the absence of any known female or male romantic interests, Graham may very well have been a heterosexual unlucky in love. He might also have been asexual. Barring the highly unlikely postmortem emergence of a personal diary or some other unassailable evidence attesting to Graham’s innermost yearnings, we will never know the answer. As is depressingly the case these days when a public figure dies, a chorus of voices reveled in Graham’s passing, many of them making light of his presumed homosexuality.

Jul 15 • 7:30 PM EDT • Politics • thefp.com

Microsoft patches record number of security vulnerabilities, citing its use of AI

Microsoft's monthly release of security fixes, dubbed Patch Tuesday, resolved a record 570 security vulnerabilities across the company's product line, thanks to discoveries with AI.

Jul 15 • 12:20 PM EDT • Technology • techcrunch.com

Researcher Drops New Windows Zero-Day PoC Hours After Microsoft Patch Tuesday

LegacyHive is a PoC for a Windows ProfSvc privilege escalation flaw that works after the July 2026 update, but the public build needs extra credential

Jul 15 • 7:02 AM EDT • Technology • thehackernews.com

Independent Testing Shows Which Business Security Products Actually Hold Up When It Matters

When Iranian-linked hackers breached medical device maker Stryker in March 2026, they did not need a sophisticated zero-day exploit to cause chaos. Once inside, they triggered simultaneous factory resets on more than 200,000 corporate devices across 79 countries, grinding order processing, production and shipping to a halt for days. Two months later, Foxconn confirmed that the Nitrogen ransomware group had stolen an alleged 8 terabytes of data from its North American factories, including project

Jul 15 • 4:00 AM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com

Independent Testing Shows Which Business Security Products Actually Hold Up When It Matters

When Iranian-linked hackers breached medical device maker Stryker in March 2026, they did not need a sophisticated zero-day exploit to cause chaos. Once inside, they triggered simultaneous factory resets on more than 200,000 corporate devices across 79 countries, grinding order processing, production and shipping to a halt for days. Two months later, Foxconn confirmed that the Nitrogen ransomware group had stolen an alleged 8 terabytes of data from its North American factories, including project

Jul 15 • 4:00 AM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com

SonicWall warns of SMA1000 flaws exploited in zero-day attacks, patch now

SonicWall warns that threat actors have been exploiting two SMA1000 vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-15409 and CVE-2026-15410, in zero-day attacks and urges customers to install the newly released security updates.

Jul 14 • 5:23 PM EDT • Technology • bleepingcomputer.com

Microsoft Patches Record 622 Flaws, Including Two Zero-Days Under Active Attack

Microsoft fixes a record 622 CVEs, including two exploited SharePoint and AD FS zero-days, while a Kerberos RC4 change could break service account log

Jul 14 • 4:25 PM EDT • Technology • thehackernews.com

Microsoft July 2026 Patch Tuesday fixes massive 570 flaws, 3 zero-days

Today is Microsoft's July 2026 Patch Tuesday, and with it comes security updates for a record-breaking 570 flaws, including two zero-day vulnerabilities exploited in attacks and one publicly disclosed.

Jul 14 • 2:01 PM EDT • Technology • bleepingcomputer.com

Health Officials Zero In on Lettuce in Explosive-Diarrhea Outbreak Probe

The state health department in Michigan, where there are thousands of cases, pointed to prewashed salad kits as a possible culprit

Jul 14 • 1:28 PM EDT • Health • wsj.com

Michigan cyclospora outbreak investigation zeroes in on lettuce, salad greens

Michigan health leaders say the picture is getting clearer on what could be causing the state's massive cyclosporiasis outbreak.

Jul 13 • 6:29 PM EDT • Health • freep.com

From Brooklyn to the Biggest Names in Sports and Entertainment: Mitch Gould's Quintessential American Success Story

The creator of the Evolution of Distribution® who built Amazon's sports nutrition category from ground zero and placed brands with America's largest retailers, including Walmart, Costco, CVS, and Walgreens. BOCA RATON, FL / ACCESS Newswire / July ...

Jul 13 • 9:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • finance.yahoo.com

Disney+ could soon add a free plan

After years of unrelenting subscription price hikes that have pushed viewers toward zero-cost platforms, Disney+ may be preparing its biggest strategy shift yet. Internal reports reveal that Disney le...

Jul 13 • 7:01 AM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.com

Handover of Health Commodities

Joint Handover of Health Commodities Speech of Chargé d’Affaires Steve Bremner (…) Thank you for joining us. I am here today to demonstrate how U.S. foreign assistance under President Trump’s America First Global Health Strategy and our bilateral health MOU makes America safer and stronger while helping Madagascar build a more self-reliant health system. Through our bilateral Global Health Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed in December 2025 with the Ministry of Public Health, our two governments outlined shared priorities and responsibilities, including a strong focus on infectious disease threats and Madagascar’s increasing ownership and co-investment in its own health system. The MOU outlines the structure and terms of U.S. support to Madagascar’s health sector from 2026 through 2030, with a total commitment of $134,305,000 from the U.S. government and $41,216,252 from the Government of Madagascar to work jointly to address malaria, maternal and child health, polio and global health security issues. Stronger health systems help prevent instability and reduce the risk that infectious diseases reach the United States, making both our countries safer. America First foreign assistance is clear and disciplined: It is a tool of strategic engagement, not global charity. Every U.S. taxpayer dollar must show measurable results, reduce long-term dependence on U.S. taxpayer resources, and support greater self-reliance in recipient countries. Support must be efficient and targeted, with zero tolerance for fraud, waste, or abuse. This year, through the U.S.-funded Global Health Supply Chain Program – Procurement and Supply Management project, we are distributing: 989,250 long-lasting insecticide-treated nets, worth $2,000,000 to 63 districts and 1,661 Community Health Centers across Madagascar, with the third and final delivery of these nets having arrived in late June. Through the U.S.-funded Momentum Country and Global Leadership (MCGL) project, we are funding: The full cost of Starlink internet connectivity equipment procurement, installation, and one-year subscription for 31 priority District and Regional Health Offices. Through the U.S.-funded Strengthening Infectious Disease Detection Systems project, we are supplying: 908,523 pieces of critical medical equipment and a modernized digital surveillance system to the Ministry of Public Health. These materials will strengthen health systems, improve response capabilities, and help those most in need of protection from mosquito-borne diseases — particularly malaria, which continues to claim the lives of children and women at an unacceptable rate. Deployed effectively, they will contribute to reducing maternal and newborn mortality in rural and hard-to-reach communities where the need is greatest. In these same underserved areas, Starlink connectivity will play a critical role in enabling the rapid transmission of health data and information to central levels, ensuring that decision-makers receive timely, actionable intelligence and can mount swift, coordinated responses to protect populations. For Americans, this support delivers concrete benefits. Stronger health systems in Madagascar help detect and contain infectious diseases before they spread across borders, protecting American and Malagasy families. More stable, healthier countries can expand trade and economic cooperation with the United States. Our goal is not permanent support; it is temporary, targeted assistance that helps Madagascar save lives while achieving greater self-reliance and independence from foreign assistance. To the health workers and community health agents here that will use the products we’re delivering today: your dedication and skills save lives. Your work exemplifies the kind of local ownership that will enable Madagascar to reduce dependence on foreign assistance and manage the country’s health challenges. This targeted support delivers results today while helping Madagascar build toward a future where it can sustain and expand those health gains independently, ensuring that today’s U.S. support leads to Madagascar’s self-sufficiency. Thank you, Misaotra.

Jul 13 • 4:49 AM EDT • Health • mg.usembassy.gov

NASA is creating a fifth state of matter on the ISS, thanks to an upgrade to a mini-fridge-sized quantum lab

A new set of upgrades to the International Space Station’s Cold Atom Laboratory is allowing NASA to probe quantum mechanics at the coldest possible temperatures while in zero gravity.

Jul 10 • 12:37 PM EDT • Science • livescience.com

Xbox Exclusive Game Delisted and Now Gone Forever

An Xbox exclusive game from the Xbox 360 era has been delisted, which means it is now gone forever with zero purchasing options.

Jul 5 • 10:39 PM EDT • Technology • comicbook.com

Flipper Zero firmware development continues with community help

Flipper Devices says development of the Flipper Zero firmware will continue, albeit with a smaller internal team and greater reliance on community contributions.

Jul 5 • 10:14 AM EDT • Technology • bleepingcomputer.com

Claude Fable 5 Helped Port A Native Version Of Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour To iPhone & iPad, Complete With Touch Controls And More

A step-by-step guide reveals how Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour was natively ported to iPhone and iPad, with the help of Claude Fable 5

Jul 5 • 8:21 AM EDT • Technology • wccftech.com

‘Changing the space’: New St. Clair business hopes to become a community hub

If you’ve noticed a change in energy while passing through St. Clair, you’re not imagining things. A mystical, explorative new shop has hit the zero block of South Second Street, and welcomes folks to mingle with the esoteric…

Jul 5 • 8:15 AM EDT • Business • republicanherald.com

This week in politics: How Schuylkill County legislators voted

Both the PA House of Representatives and Senate were in session early this week — the House passed 19 bills and the Senate passed five. The U.S. House and Senate were also in session — the House passed 10 bills and the Senate passed zero. L…

Jul 4 • 10:20 AM EDT • Politics • republicanherald.com

In Mojave Desert, startup JetZero builds novel plane to take on Airbus and Boeing

Inside a cavernous aircraft hangar in the Mojave Desert, JetZero is building a full-size demonstrator of what ​could be a 200-plus-seat jet, a lucrative market segment expected to be at the center of future plane strategies for Airbus and Boeing .

Jul 2 • 6:06 AM EDT • Business • reuters.com

Cruis'n Blast has been delisted from the Nintendo Switch eShop

Out of nowhere, Cruis’n Blast has been delisted from the Nintendo eShop. As far as we’re aware, the arcade racer has been available since launching on Nintendo Switch almost five years ago. Unfortunately, that’s no longer the case as of today. Looking the game up on the Nintendo eShop now provides zero results. We checked both the North American store...

Jun 30 • 3:16 PM EDT • Technology • nintendoeverything.com

South Coast youth basketball team wins national title

The Leaders In Training seventh grade boys basketball team capped its season by winning the Zero Gravity National Championship.

Jun 30 • 4:02 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

The Folks Behind Beloved Hacker Tool Flipper Zero Have a New Device for Focus

More of a life hack this time.

Jun 29 • 2:40 PM EDT • Technology • gizmodo.com

The Flipper Zero creators’ Busy Bar productivity display will go on sale next month

The Busy Bar will let others know when you don’t have time to chat.

Jun 29 • 9:00 AM EDT • Technology • theverge.com

UK software sales chart for the week ending June 27, 2026 - Star Fox tops the charts, outperforms Star Fox Zero and Star Fox 64 3D

The latest UK software sales chart for the week ending June 27, 2026 is now available. Star Fox was the major release of the week, and it seems to have done pretty well. For one thing, it took the top spot. We’re also hearing that the Nintendo Switch 2 game sold almost double what Star Fox Zero did during its...

Jun 29 • 7:13 AM EDT • Technology • nintendoeverything.com

Commitment season looming as Ohio State staff awaits

The month of June has been a grind for Ohio State’s coaching staff. Position camps, recruiting visits, and still prioritizing their current roster, the Buckeyes have had zero time off… and that will soon change. Ryan Day and company set to be on vacation in the coming days for a well deserved break, that doesn’t […]

Jun 26 • 5:01 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Scientists discover ancient brain cells that help block distractions

Scientists have discovered a tiny group of neurons in an ancient brain region that acts like a built-in focus filter, helping the brain ignore distractions and zero in on what matters most. When researchers temporarily switched off these neurons in mice, the animals became unusually distractible—similar to what is seen in ADHD—but regained normal focus as soon as the neurons were reactivated.

Jun 24 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

New York Giants' Newest Suggested Target Makes Zero Sense

The New York Giants should absolutely not pursue this player.

Jun 24 • 7:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Superhuman acquires GPTZero to enhance AI authenticity tools

Superhuman is acquiring GPTZero, the AI detection startup founded by 26-year-old Princeton grad Edward Tian.

Jun 23 • 9:30 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Warhammer 40,000 Devs Announce And Roll Back Launcher In 24 Hours

Owlcat Games’ original announcement has nearly 2000 comments and zero likes

Jun 23 • 9:15 AM EDT • Technology • kotaku.com

NFL offseason power rankings: No. 32 Miami Dolphins start over in Year Zero, but at least with Malik Willis aboard

Jun 23 • 9:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

MASTER CLASS: Tap in to the power within to make healthy choices

Intention is a very powerful psychological attribute contributing toward any behavior change. Without an intent to change, there's almost zero chance it will occur – especially with respect to health behaviors. This week, I'll present some tips for maximizing intention in an effort to make good behaviors "stick." Plus, I'll introduce an exercise that fits perfectly into physical activity program.

Jun 21 • 9:00 AM EDT • Health • arkansasonline.com

Glaive Rush Mega Baxcalibur: Greatest Community Day for Raids?

Community Day has always been a redemption arc for several Pokémon, with the popular event propelling them to the top levels of relevance in the PvP and/or PvE meta. In fact, Pseudo Legendaries like Metagross (Meteor Mash) and Hydreigon (Brutal Swing) have literally gone from zero to hero in Pokémon GO via their exclusive moves. […]

Jun 19 • 6:10 AM EDT • Technology • pokemongohub.net

Zero sugar, more problems? Study reveals surprising gut health effects

A study presented at ENDO 2026 suggests that completely eliminating sugar from a low-fat diet may harm gut health and increase inflammation.

Jun 17 • 10:25 PM EDT • Health • foxnews.com

Metro Atlanta Chamber host Spanish officials for international business summit

While Spain’s national team finished with a zero-to-zero draw in its first match of the World Cup, economic leaders are looking to score off the pitch.

Jun 16 • 5:56 PM EDT • Business • wabe.org

Robert De Niro's message for Donald Trump on his 80th birthday: 'Shut the f--- up'

As the president was hanging with UFC fighters at the White House on his 80th birthday, Robert De Niro delivered a fiery anti-Trump speech, declaring that he wants to "love my country again."

Jun 15 • 9:01 AM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

Arlington Mayor talks World Cup and Inter-city competition

Arlington is ground zero for the FIFA World Cup in North Texas. Mayor Jim Ross just won reelection and speaks with Lone Star Politics about the international event and city vs. city competition in North Texas which just led Plano to steal the Dallas Stars away from downtown Dallas.

Jun 14 • 4:17 PM EDT • Politics • nbcdfw.com

11 New Pocket Knives, Multi-Tools and EDC Items You Might Have Missed

One of Blade Show’s biggest winners headlines the week, but it’s hardly the only standout in the latest crop of cutting-edge releases.

Jun 13 • 10:00 AM EDT • Technology • gearpatrol.com

Ahead of October 1 court hearing, Nintendo has zero chance of prevailing over current Palworld versions: it may get $30K chump change

Nintendo and Pocketpair appear to have completed their written pleadings and submissions of evidence. The Tokyo District Court will hear the case on October 1.

Jun 11 • 10:00 AM EDT • Technology • gamesfray.com

The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure for PS5, Switch 2 launch September 10

The PlayStation 5 and Switch 2 versions of Falcom-developed story RPGs The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure will launch on September 10, publisher NIS Am…

Jun 11 • 9:18 AM EDT • Technology • gematsu.com

Chaotic Eclipse Strikes Again: New Zero-Day Unlocks BitLocker in Four Hours of Research

GreatXML bypasses BitLocker via Defender offline scan artifacts, giving SYSTEM shell in Recovery Mode. No patch exists.

Jun 11 • 6:58 AM EDT • Technology • securityaffairs.com

Microsoft Patches Record 206 Flaws, Including Three Zero-Days and Critical RCE Bugs

Microsoft released fixes for 206 vulnerabilities across its software portfolio, including 39 Critical flaws and three publicly disclosed zero-days.

Jun 10 • 5:38 AM EDT • Technology • thehackernews.com

Microsoft June 2026 Patch Tuesday fixes 3 zero-day, 200 flaws

Today is Microsoft's June 2026 Patch Tuesday, with security updates for 200 flaws and three publicly disclosed zero-day vulnerabilities.

Jun 9 • 1:57 PM EDT • Technology • bleepingcomputer.com

Chrome V8 Zero-Day CVE-2026-11645 Exploited in the Wild

Google released security updates for 74 Chrome vulnerabilities, including CVE-2026-11645, a high-severity V8 out-of-bounds memory access flaw.

Jun 9 • 7:58 AM EDT • Technology • thehackernews.com

Google patches new Chrome zero-day flaw exploited in the wild

Google has released emergency updates to patch another Chrome zero-day vulnerability that has been exploited in the wild, the fifth such flaw patched since the start of the year.

Jun 9 • 2:56 AM EDT • Technology • bleepingcomputer.com

We can create the future of science right now

Paul Litvak is the founder and Executive Director of the Robyn Dawes Institute and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. He has a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon where he studied emotions and the sunk cost bias. Over 15 years in industry, he solved a wide range of challenging technical problems. At Meta he created models optimizing the ad review process. At Google he ran experiments to measure social influence. At Airbnb, he was a product manager leading machine learning teams optimizing search ranking and price suggestions. He also co-founded and led product at Rhythmic Health, a venture-backed biosensing startup, creating an accurate low cost system using a color changing strip and a smart phone to measure salivary lactate. The bottleneck At this point, it is uncontroversial to say that science needs to stop using the PDF article as the unit of knowledge and currency. The unbearable slowness of scientific publishing, the profit motive and margins: I’m not saying anything new. The PDF also sucks because it’s hard to extract structured information, which makes it hard to do evidence synthesis. As a result, we do much less evidence synthesis than is needed. And evidence synthesis ultimately undergirds most policy and medical decision-making. I can see second-by-second real-time odds for any sporting or newsworthy event, but a school board can’t see the best evidence on whether their 8th graders should be taught algebra. As a society, we don’t treat this as an important problem. Again, not controversial. Not only is the problem well understood, but the solution has already been laid out. What we need is AI-assisted living evidence synthesis - (1) an open knowledge graph of atomic claims, (2) claims linked to evidence, (3) assessment and synthesis of each piece of evidence, and (4) continuous updating with new data. What few realize (yet) is that the technical capacity to build this vision for a significant portion of science already exists. Not only that, scientists and startup teams are already building many of these components. I know this because I’ve been surveying the space and talking to many of the builders. There are some missing pieces: for example, evaluations of how well some of the components work. But at this point, most of what’s missing is a fully end-to-end working integration of all of these parts. In the rest of this essay, I’m going to lay out all the parts of a working living evidence layer for science and who is working on them, and propose concrete next steps for building this system. What’s now possible The diagram above outlines the components of a living evidence synthesis platform, including some of the teams working on each component1. Scientific PDFs are processed into claims with associated evidence. The evidence is subjected to a forensic audit, methodological evaluation and robustness and reproducibility checks. Finally it’s given a weight in a continuously updating synthesis. What follows is a description and status of each component and a few of the teams working on them. Document understanding The first thing you need to be able to do is turn an article into structured data. Mostly that means parsing PDFs. There are often multicolumn layouts that confuse non-specialized PDF to text processing libraries. For scientific papers, there is the added complexity of parsing formulas and tables and figures. This is a really hot area - there are startups offering APIs, and it seems like a new open source package gets posted to Github every few weeks. What follows isn’t exhaustive. A package called GROBID was the state of the art for a while, they didn’t update their package for nearly two years until very recently. In the meantime reducto.ai released an AI powered PDF extraction API, PaddleOCR became popular, IBM released a model called Docling, and both Mistral and Gemini created models and libraries. I also know of at least one other well-funded psychology research group working on a paper parser. By contrast, there are few open evals in this space, with no extensive evals for complex table comprehension in particular. Nonetheless, I’m confident this will be a solved problem soon, given the combination of LLM advances and developer interest. Hypothesis level extraction There has been increasing interest in comprehending the extracted text of papers and linking information to evidence for each hypothesis. A lot of work has already been done. Trialstreamer (Marshall et al. 2020) and RobotReviewer LIVE (Marshall et al. 2023) demonstrated automated extraction of trial population, intervention, and outcome at scale on clinical RCTs. PaperQA2 (Skarlinski et al. 2024) and Ai2 ScholarQA (2024) extended this to retrieval-augmented question answering with citation grounding. Elicit, Consensus, and SciSpace operationalized claim-level extraction for end users. OpenEval (Booeshaghi et al. 2026) is the most recent and most ambitious: 1.96 million atomic claims extracted from 16,087 eLife manuscripts using Claude Sonnet 4.5, grouped into ~299,000 results, with LLM evaluations showing 81% agreement with human peer review on a 2,487-paper subset. None of these solutions link claims to test-statistics, as you would need to evaluate randomized controlled trials. This is why I built the evidence.guide API - to extract hypotheses and associated test statistics from behavioral science papers. The best public eval of this kind of extraction I’m aware of comes from the recent SCORE project - they had humans code thousands of psychology papers to extract their claims by hand. It would be extremely helpful to the world if all scientific PDFs were available as structured open data. I’ve been working to make this happen, both directly at Berkeley and through coordination with large entities I can’t yet speak of; as hard as it is to do, I think it’s possible2. Forensic audit A lot of work has been done on forensic audit, but some gaps remain. Of course, for biology papers that rely on images for evidence, there are a variety of tools (notably Proofig and ImageTwin) to spot anomalies. These are still well short of what sleuths like Elizabeth Bik can do on her own, but these tools are constant companions among fraud analysts. There’s someone working on auditing Excel files for anomalies, and a number of teams are automating numerical checks like GRIM and SPRITE, including Scrutiny project, the INSPECT-SR team as well as statcheck. The regcheck team is building a way to use AI to compare preregistrations to analyses in papers, to ensure there aren’t significant deviations. Nonetheless, there are many other kinds of anomalies to screen for, both public and less publicly known. And there are no formal evals for anomaly detection that I’m aware of. Still, there’s a lot to draw from in this space and I’m pretty certain we will be able to scan papers for most kinds of obvious anomalies in the near future. Methodological review This area has been white hot, though I fear for many of the startups in this space, because this capability may become commoditized. There are at least six different AI peer review companies, including Refine.ink, Reviewer3, ReviewerZero.ai, Q.E.D. Science, Paper Wizard, and Isitcredible. Coarse (a pun on refine) was also recently created as an open source alternative. These systems provide qualitative feedback on the content of papers, spotting methodological weaknesses and mathematical errors. They seem to work pretty well, and many academics report bitterly that they exceed the average quality of typical peer reviewers. But there are few evals here either. What evals exist so far involve using LLM-as-judge (circularity problems abound) or comparing against human reviews of questionable quality. What you’d ideally want is an eval that measures capturing known errors in papers3. Reproducibility and robustness Another active area has been using AI agents to automate computational reproducibility4 and robustness5 checks in papers that report numerical results. For more recent papers where data and code are available, AI agents can see whether they can re-run the analyses and produce the numbers reported in the published paper. In addition to a handful of individual academics who have been experimenting using Claude Code for this, the Institute for Replication is a leading group working on building an end to end system. The evals related to this problem are the most mature, with CORE-Bench (Siegel, Kapoor, Narayanan 2024) and PaperBench (OpenAI 2025) available to benchmark agents on this task. There is also work on getting AI agents to test alternative ways of analyzing the data to ensure the results are robust to small analytic design choices. Synthesis This is the most underdeveloped area where significant investment is required. Although some automated evidence synthesis systems exist — for example, otto-sr is building an AI agent to write systematic reviews — none of these incorporate the full range of paper level signals to weight evidence appropriately. Nor is there anything like an eval or a gold standard for a good systematic review. Arguably Cochrane reviews are the closest we have to gold standard human systematic reviews, though I’ve heard academics in the know complain about their uneven quality. A key question for a synthesis platform is how to weight anomalies and methodological issues in assessing the quality of a piece of evidence. This is an unsolved problem and one I’m very keen to work on. Continuous updating There are many pieces of basic infrastructure available for monitoring for new research and initiating updates. OpenAlex is the current open citation graph. Retraction Watch integrated into Crossref in October 2023. Scite tracks how citations support, contrast, or mention prior claims. The Living Evidence Network demonstrated continuous-update workflows in clinical guidelines. Engineering this is a relatively straightforward task. When you look over this technical architecture and all the progress being made, it’s hard not to be optimistic that a living guide to scientific evidence will be built. The stakeholders are ready The social infrastructure for this is starting to coalesce — it’s not just a pie in the sky academic exercise to imagine this coming into existence. Institutions like the Center for Open Science, the Institute for Replication, the INSPECT-SR, the Living Evidence Network and more are all working on scaling work to improve research quality. Funders are also aligned. The Sloan Foundation has funded living evidence work through COS. Coefficient Giving supports the Institute for Replication and COS. The Astera Institute and the Institute for Progress have shown interest in this space. NIH has established an Office for Replication and Reproducibility. Although there are (very unfortunately) serious headwinds in science funding generally, there is an active group of funders interested in metascience. A brief word about what I’ve been doing at RDI. First, as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley I’ve been actively figuring out how a non-profit and a public university can conduct and make public the results of large-scale academic article data mining. With some of the money I raised from donors, I commissioned a legal analysis of recent case law and publisher text data mining (TDM) agreements in order to understand whether a massive open data mining of academic articles is possible (with caveats, it is). I’ve also been working to bring together stakeholders in this space, and identify gaps. I’ve also been doing some software development in this space, with more to come. A pilot proposal The assumption undergirding all of this is that an AI, given all this information, would make the right judgment about a scientific claim with lots of conflicting evidence, weighing all the factors appropriately. That’s the hypothesis we need to test. Randomized control trial research is the best place to focus on first. RCTs are used to make many of the important decisions in society - from medical trials to public policy changes. And they use a relatively uniform set of inferential statistics with lots of known and available diagnostics. Behavioral science experiments, within the broader realm of RCTs, should be first used as a testbed whose results can be generalized. Because behavioral science is at the vanguard of open science practices, replications abound (there are thousands of them) to serve as ground truth training data. Key Hypothesis Therefore the pilot would test, in behavioral RCTs that have been replicated, whether the quality of evidence for a claim can be used to accurately predict whether that claim will replicate. Secondary Hypotheses Compared to claims that replicated, non-replicated claims demonstrate a greater share of forensic anomalies in their source literatures. Hypothesis level claim and statistic extraction is accurate enough to scale living evidence without onerous human review costs. Replication prediction is more accurate than prediction markets6 or journal prestige. If all the different quality signals we gather do accurately predict which studies will replicate, then we can use that model to score evidence to power the living evidence layer. Why this is informative regardless of outcome If the pilot succeeds, the architecture extends to medical RCTs (where Living Evidence already operates and integration is mostly about claim representation), then to slices of basic biology with stable replication structure. If it fails, the field learns which quality signals are load-bearing and which ones metascience has oversold. Either result is a contribution to knowing what the literature supports. Implications for funders Because this burgeoning ecosystem of builders already exists, a well-informed philanthropic or government funder could play a crucial catalyzing role in bringing this future about. They could play at least three roles: creating open structured datasets, publishing open benchmarks and incentivizing the solving of key technical challenges. First, open archives of papers that the government maintains, like PubMed, could be turned into structured data amenable to large scale metascience and claim aggregation. I know the US government already has an interest in doing this, though some key open questions remain unanswered. How do you determine the best models and systems for accurately extracting information from papers? How can you establish a robust way to allow researchers to flag errors and correct them? And finally, how do you create a legal regime in working with publishers to maximize the scope of available papers? For the latter, a university or a private philanthropy may be better positioned to make structured data publicly available under journal subscription terms or fair use. Philanthropists or government funders could also coordinate to create or commission benchmarks that evaluate whether important problems have been solved. For example, an open benchmark for claim extraction from a range of different scientific article types would be extremely helpful. Ensuring the underlying data are accurate is vital for creating these evaluations. I’ve discussed opportunistically using various human-created datasets for this purpose, but a consistent problem is that errors in human data make it difficult for them to serve as a gold standard. Finally, with structured data and benchmarks available, the government or private philanthropy could use them to incentivize groups to develop machine learning systems that meet these benchmarks. Prizes are one potentially valuable tool for this. For example, you could establish a prize for a system that accurately updates a living meta-analysis for a small set of claims. Prizes are particularly useful as signals of problem importance, and can help create vibrant ecosystems of public and private research—see, for example the role the government played in kickstarting the current work on nuclear fusion. Conclusion The drawbacks of the current scientific publishing system are known. Scientists agree, metascientists agree, philanthropists agree: the published PDF plus citation graph isn’t the right substrate for maintaining a representation of the evidence base in science. The pieces needed to build the alternative either already exist or are rapidly taking shape. The community is forming around exactly this problem, with concrete partnerships and shared infrastructure. A pilot should start on behavioral science RCTs because that’s the slice of empirical science most amenable to legibility, where replication ground truth is richest, and where the failure modes are best documented. What’s been missing is the galvanizing mission to assemble these pieces into something that works. That’s what I’m proposing to build. *** 1 I have a broader field map that I’ll release publicly soon. This is me, building in public! 2 If this is something that you are excited about, please reach out and talk to me. 3 More on this very soon too! 4 This tests whether, given the code and the data, you can get the same statistics as reported in the published paper. 5 This tests whether the results are the same as a paper’s given alternative analytical decisions in conducting the analysis (like outlier omission). Closely related is the idea of a “multiverse” where you come up with many different ways of answering the same underlying research question with the same data, and test whether the results hold in all those alternative methods. There’s been work on the latter as well. 6 Some of the replications, e.g. those from the SCORE project, had paired the experiments with forecasts from prediction markets. So we get to look at this for free.

Jun 8 • 4:44 PM EDT • Science • goodscience.substack.com

California, and the dangerous sudden resurgence of GOP voter fraud fever

Even Republicans who previously kept such voter-fraud claims at arm’s length are embracing theories that something is off in California, despite zero evidence.

Jun 8 • 1:59 PM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Jets' consistent inconsistency prompts zero primetime games in 2026

Even the worst teams get a primetime slot or two throughout the season, at least that's how it used to be.

Jun 8 • 11:28 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Confusion, worry cloud Baton Rouge auto service businesses after state axes inspection stickers

Businesses said they've received “zero communication” from the state on when to stop providing the safety portion of the inspection.

Jun 6 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • theadvocate.com

AI Agent Uncovers 21 Zero-Days in FFmpeg; Chrome Patches Record 429 Bugs

AI found 21 FFmpeg zero-days, some 20 years old; Chrome 149 patched 429 bugs, including 100+ critical/high flaws.

Jun 6 • 3:28 AM EDT • Technology • thehackernews.com

How a simple mix-up fueled false conspiracies about L.A. vote count

An update of votes for Los Angeles mayor, reported by media outlets, led some observers to believe there was a large batch of votes counted that included zero votes for candidate Spencer Pratt. There was no such batch, but there was a misleading update.

Jun 5 • 9:47 PM EDT • Politics • latimes.com

Joe Burrow backs BODYARMOR FIT launch as sparkling sports drink targets everyday active hydration

BODYARMOR FIT launched as a sparkling sports drink with electrolytes, caffeine, and zero sugar for everyday active hydration beyond workouts, championed by Bengals QB Joe Burrow.

Jun 3 • 11:29 AM EDT • Sports • foxbusiness.com

11 Job Requirements Bill Pulte Met to Be Trump’s New DNI

From zero intelligence experience to knowing where to find AI Trump Jesus pics, this guy checks all the boxes.

Jun 2 • 4:28 PM EDT • Politics • nymag.com

Google fixes one actively exploited Android zero-day, 124 flaws

Google has released the June 2026 Android security patches to address 124 vulnerabilities, including one zero-day flaw exploited in targeted attacks.

Jun 2 • 7:10 AM EDT • Technology • bleepingcomputer.com

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will 'give zero input' toward Thunder's offseason decisions

May 31 • 11:32 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

16 Netflix shows ending in 2026

"The Abandons" and "Terminator Zero" got the axe, while "The Night Agent" and "The Lincoln Lawyer" are ending on their own terms.

May 31 • 8:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • aol.com

Scientists shatter 30-year superconductivity record with zero-resistance material that works at normal pressure

"Our method shows that it is possible to retain that state without maintaining pressure."

May 31 • 1:00 AM EDT • Science • yahoo.com

"They will ruin my life": Microsoft threatens to wield 'Digital Crimes Unit' over zero-day exploit disclosures — causing uproar in the cybersec community

Microsoft's approach to working with security researchers has long been controversial, but some of its recent language has alarmed some commentators.

May 30 • 6:06 PM EDT • Technology • windowscentral.com

Sony Is Wrong To Take ‘Destiny 2’ Support Down To Absolute Zero

When Sony says Destiny 2 is getting no more updates, they truly mean zero, and that is a big mistake for a franchsie this storied.

May 30 • 9:51 AM EDT • Technology • forbes.com

Twisted graphene reveals a hidden superconductivity switch

Scientists have uncovered a surprising new way to control superconductivity — the mysterious phenomenon where electricity flows with zero energy loss. By pairing twisted layers of graphene with a synthetic diamond material, researchers were able to effectively switch superconductivity on and off by tweaking how electrons interact with their surroundings. Even more intriguing, the material behaved in ways that defied the rules of conventional superconductors, hinting at an entirely new kind of physics.

May 28 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Google's CEO Was Asked If Companies Should Plan for 'Zero' Search Traffic — His Answer Was Alarming

The Google CEO sat down with The Verge and got pressed on whether websties should plan for the death of search traffic.

May 28 • 10:36 AM EDT • Business • entrepreneur.com

Scientists break 30-year superconductivity record at normal pressure

Scientists at the University of Houston have shattered a long-standing superconductivity record, creating a material that can conduct electricity with zero resistance at the highest temperature ever achieved under normal pressure conditions. Their breakthrough pushes superconductivity to 151 Kelvin (minus 122°C), beating a record that stood for more than 30 years.

May 27 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Kiva Oregon Raises Funds to Keep Zero-Interest Rural Business Loans Flowing

Rural-focused lending hub has deployed more than $600,000 in zero-interest, zero-fee loans to Oregon small business owners.

May 26 • 6:17 PM EDT • Business • oregonbusiness.com

Tony Blair says Labour must abandon net zero, support Trump and move firmly to the right

In highly unusual intervention, ex-PM says his party’s ‘almost infinite capacity for self-delusion’ makes it likely to lose next election

May 26 • 5:00 PM EDT • Politics • theguardian.com

Roaches, rodent droppings found during Fort Worth health inspections

One restaurant was temporarily closed by the city due to no hot water. Seven facilities received a perfect score of zero.

May 23 • 10:09 AM EDT • Health • star-telegram.com

The Team Behind The Flipper One Needs Your Help

You’ve probably heard of the Flipper Zero, a pocket-sized device that packs in lots of great hacking potential. The team behind it has now turned their efforts towards developing the Flipper …

May 23 • 1:00 AM EDT • Technology • hackaday.com

New Flipper One Multi-Tool Computer Is Official, Built for Tinkerers

This doesn't replace the popular Flipper Zero. The One sits alongside it with advanced connectivity options.

May 21 • 7:07 AM EDT • Technology • pcmag.com

The Company Behind the Flipper Zero Hacking Tool Is Making a Cyberdeck

Flipper co-founder Pavel Zhovner told Gizmodo he hopes to make PCs personal again.

May 21 • 7:00 AM EDT • Technology • gizmodo.com

Microsoft Confirms Active 0-Day Exploit—Check Emergency Mitigation Now

Microsoft Exchange users are urged to mitigate a zero-day vulnerability that CISA has confirmed is under active exploitation.

May 18 • 9:21 AM EDT • Technology • forbes.com

Lawmakers zero in on sports gambling regulation as scandals boom

Congress appears poised to intensify its scrutiny of major sports leagues and their gambling partners in response to a growing number of scandals involving illicit&nbs…

May 18 • 9:14 AM EDT • Sports • thehill.com

Disco Elysium’s spiritual successor can’t escape its phantoms

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies carries the ZA/UM name, but the studio has changed a lot since its previous hit.

May 18 • 6:00 AM EDT • Technology • theverge.com