SCROLL NEWS / DISCOVERY
Search headlines
Find the stories shaping the conversation.
Results for " Cause " 100 found 🔀 AI-powered Shuffle
Sign in to save shuffle history.
JD Vance Says He Only Dressed Up in an “Ugly Wig” for Halloween Because He “Lost a Bet”
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before.
Earth’s geological record is missing hundreds of millions of years. UOW scientists think they know why
Research led by a University of Wollongong (UOW) PhD candidate may have solved one of Earth’s most perplexing geological mysteries – what caused the Great Unconformity?
Evacuation at Blaisdell Hall shopping event after apparent chemical incident
A local shopping experience at the Blaisdell Exhibition Hall on Sunday, was evacuated following an apparent chemical incident that caused multiple people to cough.
David Alan Grier on Ron’s Health Scare in St. Denis Medical Season 3: “I’m Right Back. No, You’re Not, Brother”
David Alan Grier knows exactly who Ron is. He knows how to relate to men like him because he grew up around them. In a private conversation with Where Is… The post David Alan Grier on Ron’s Health Sca...
Lung Cancer Awareness Month: UCI Health Medical, Surgical, Radiation Oncologists Available for Comment About Lung Cancer, Screening and Increasing Nonsmoker Diagnoses
Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center based in Orange County Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the nation, according to the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association. More people die of lung cancer each year compared to those with colon, breast and prostate cancers combined. According to the Cancer Research Institute, about 10% to 20% of lung cancers now occur in never-smokers, with two-t
Apple warns rogue AI agents could ‘conceal’ and ‘manipulate,’ causing unintended consequences for its business
The iPhone maker said AI agents could access systems without authorization and cause damage.
Zelda Remake Link's Tunic Looks Like That Because He Made It Himself
He's very proud of it and you should be nice to him
7,300 Years Ago, One of Earth's Worst Eruptions Hit Japan. What Humans Did Next Surprised Scientists.
"The disaster caused major loss of life."
The US is likely to lose its edge in scientific research because of political priorities
As is the tradition, the first full week of October marked the announcements of Nobel Prizes, with a new one each day: Physiology and medicine Oct....
Scientists discovered an unknown baby right whale off Canada. They say it's a cause for joy
Scientists who study whales are heartened by an unexpected discovery of a baby right whale off Canada. Researchers in Canada captured images of an unidentified baby North Atlantic right whale, one of the rarest sea mammals in the world, off Anticosti Island in Quebec in September. Scientists with...
The Token Trap: Why AI Costs Spiral at Scale
Most enterprise AI teams discover the token cost problem somewhere between the demo and production, when the first real invoice arrives, and nobody can quite explain it. The query was straightforward, the prompt was short, but the bill reflects something much larger. That’s because the prompt is only a fraction of what gets billed. A […]
Five Plays: Stanford Third Quarter
It took until the second half, but Louisville started to get more aggressive with their linebackers. On this play, Stanquan Clark times up the snap before shooting the gap to make a play in the backfield. He’s just unlucky because the play goes to the other side, which leaves him grasping for air. Stanford uses […]
Dead by Daylight Devs Apologize After TheBurntPeanut Stream Stirs Controversy in Its Community
Behaviour Interactive has responded after what appeared to be a Dead by Daylight collaboration with controversial streamer TheBurntPeanut caused backlash in its community.
Hamstring issue for Kyler Murray
Vikings QB Kyler Murray being evaluated because of a sore hamstring
Research: When Workers Adapt Their Resumes to Fit the Political Moment
Job seekers are rewriting their resumes to match the political moment. A new study, which analyzed 2.9 million U.S. workers, found that employees added ESG and DEI language around Biden’s 2020 election and deleted it after Trump’s 2024 victory, mirroring corporate behavior. The research also found that this strategy can be an effective way to earn a new role; those who added such language were more likely to switch employers or be promoted, even though their qualifications tended to be slightly lower. This is because employers tend to sacrifice candidate quality for political alignment. To hire for the long haul, leaders should limit reliance on resume-screening algorithms, prioritize skills and experience, and discount political signals that may soon fade.
This gen’s top 10 PlayStation Studios games
As we near the six-year anniversary of the PS5, we thought we’d dive into our estimates for the top-grossing PlayStation Studios games since the start of the gen. Together, the 10 games we’re covering today have generated over $6.5 billion across PlayStation (84.7%), Steam (14.1%), and Xbox (1.2% via just Helldivers 2). Let’s have a look at the top 10. Spidey and Kratos sequels take the top two spots God of War Ragnarok takes the top spot with $1.4B in revenue via 21.6M copies – 20.1M on PlayStation (75.2% via PS5) and the rest on Steam. Around 27.5% of the copies sold on PlayStation were physical. It’s another PlayStation evergreen seller, too. This year, Ragnarok has already sold 1.1M copies, generating $60M (68% on PlayStation), outperforming new 2026 titles like Gears of War E-Day and Saros. Overall, our estimates show that Ragnarok has been accessed by 6.7M PlayStation Plus players (it was added to the Extra tier about two years ago). So it’s performed that well this year despite subscription cannibalisation. That’s the pull of God of War IP. And that Bautista series on Amazon is going to be massive - bigger than Fallout, I reckon. Next up is Spider-Man 2 with $1.3B across PS5 (over $1.2B) and Steam (nearly $70M). Spider-Man 2 has sold over 19.1M copies overall, so it should pass 20M early next year. Spider-Man 2 is an evergreen title that always spikes around the holidays (mostly concentrated around Christmas week): In December 2023, it sold 2.1M copies, up 20% from November 2023 (the month after release) In December 2024, Spider-Man 2 sold 460K copies (natural decay), up 60% from November 2024. Despite the Steam version launching in January 2025, it still sold more copies – and made more revenue – the month before. In December 2025, it sold 328K copies, up 30% from November 2025. This year’s December and Christmas will be somewhat limited by Spidey’s February 2026 addition to PS+ Extra, where 6.3M people accessed it for the first time. While subscription inclusions always cannibalise premium revenues to some extent, Spider-Man 2 did manage to sell 578K copies in August 2026 – the most its sold since Q1 2024, following hype from the Spider-Man Brand New Day movie. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe God of War Ragnarok and Spider-Man 2 continue to be huge evergreen tentpoles for Sony. Together, both titles have sold 3.4M this year (2.3M for Spidey and 1.1M for Ragnarok), generating a combined $172.9M ($115.8M for Spidey and $57.1M for Ragnarok). Again, some premium games would take a leaf out of Kratos’ book (not Spidey’s!) and would kill for these numbers in year 1. And we can see why Sony wants to take a leaf from Steam’s book, killing physical to get higher margins from catalogue sales, ensuring they get their cut, and having more control over supply and demand (and pricing for their first-party titles). Hot rods, hellpods, and horizons Gran Turismo 7 takes #3 this generation with $841.9M in revenue via 12.7M copies sold. For more info on GT7, you can check out our write-up from earlier this week. Around 1.1M people have already played GT7 this month, less than six days in. Next up – at #4 – is the first second-party game on this list. Helldivers 2 has generated $786.3M via 23M copies sold across Steam (66.1% of the copies), PS5 (25.7%), and the 1.5-year-later Xbox port (8.3%). And there are plenty of players very dedicated to the Super Earth cause, as over 4M folks have played Helldivers 2 for over 100 hours, while 462K played for over 500 hours. That dedication to democracy is pretty topical… Anyway, Helldivers 2 still attracts about 700K players per day (more if there’s a significant update), and its August addition to PlayStation Plus Extra has led to 1.6M new players overall. This year, Helldivers 2 has sold over 2.5M copies, generating $81.1M in revenue. It’s another evergreen hit for Sony, and draws in engagement numbers similar to Arc Raiders. The Helldivers 2 model, in my opinion, should be the way PlayStation approaches its live-service and second-party releases. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Horizon Forbidden West rounds off the first half of the top 10, generating $485.8M. That said, PlayStation completely stifled Horizon Forbidden West’s revenue by adding it to PlayStation Plus way too early (one year after launch). You can see the revenue drop-off clearly in our platform: As you can see: Forbidden West was still a healthy catalogue earner right before it was added to PS+ Extra, making about $1.23M a week on PlayStation across late 2022 and into January 2023. After it was added to Extra_, Forbidden West_’s weekly revenue halved to around $610K, basically overnight. Excluding launch month, Horizon Forbidden West generated about $67.2M on PlayStation in the period before the PS Plus addition. In the same period after it joined the service, that fell to $28.1M, a 58% drop. So, PlayStation didn’t trade a little bit of premium revenue for subscriber value here. It gave up well over half of it, and it cut momentum instantly for one of its premier franchises. Could you imagine the kind of cannibalisation if it launched day in date on Extra? Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe And the cannibalisation wasn’t a temporary blip that bounced back once the game left the service in September 2024. By then, 19 months on PS Plus had already hoovered up most of the install base that would have bought it, so there was barely a premium audience left to monetise. PlayStation even added it back to PS Plus on October 21 this year, and sure enough, weekly revenue dropped again (by around a third); though, the numbers are small now that Forbidden West is nearly four years old. Worth the trade-off. The usual suspects, platformers, and an Asia-driven second-party hit As for the rest of the list: Ghost of Yotei has now generated $410.1M via 5.5M copies on PS5. Yotei popped off a bit a few weeks ago due to a content update, which we covered here. The Last of Part Us I, a remake that we covered here, has generated $341.3M in revenue (67.2% via PlayStation) via 6.4M copies. It was also added to PS+ Extra about two years after launch, where 7.8M people accessed it for the first time. Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart has made $334.9M (93.6% via PlayStation 5). It’s now passed 5M copies sold overall. It’s sold 250K copies this year, generating $13.5M in revenue. Time for another Ratchet? Stellar Blade has generated $316.9M via PS5 (59.7%) and Steam (40.3%). However, the share of Stellar Blade’s 5.4M copies sold is far closer (50.4% on PlayStation, 49.6% on Steam) – despite the Steam version releasing a year later. China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong account for 48% of Steam copies and 35% of PlayStation copies (about 41% overall). These markets are regionally priced lower than others, hence the difference. Astro Bot rounds out the top 10 with $292.6M in revenue via over 4.7M copies sold. We covered Astro’s recent performance here, covering how Astro Bot is another evergreen seller and has been a hit with families. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Even these bottom five games have generated a combined $281.7M this year in catalogue sales. PlayStation wants those numbers to be bigger in the coming years, which is one of the reasons it’s killing the disc (alongside the better margins it and publishers get through digital). No more used discs means more D2C revenue for PlayStation. On that note, we recently chatted to the New York Times again about PlayStation’s digital future, so keep your eyes peeled for that! The last word Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover. Want to see why these companies (and many others) are subscribed to Alinea? Get a free platform trial! [Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]
The Maya used so much red paint that they poisoned their water with mercury, mud sediments reveal
Researchers found extreme levels of mercury in sediment cores in Mexico — and it’s all because the Maya loved red paint.
Jimmy Rolder will not return in 2026
Lions LB Jimmy Rolder will not play again this season because of hamstring injury
Why 2026 Is a Health Care Election
_Ypsilanti, Michigan_THE MIDTERM ELECTION IS ABOUT a lot of things: gas prices and groceries, the spread of corruption, and the future of democracy. And yet, as much as any single issue, it’s about health care. You can tell by listening to all the Democrats talking about high deductibles, drug costs, and insurance companies as they campaign around the country. Or you can tell by reading all the public-opinion surveys in which voters consistently rank health care as one of their top concerns. But if you really want to know why this is a health care election, your best source isn’t the politicians or the pollsters. It’s the people on the front lines. One of them is Raymond Rion, a family medicine physician and executive director of Packard Health, a small network of clinics spanning Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti on the western outskirts of the Detroit metro area. Packard is what’s known as a Federally Qualified Health Center, where anybody can get care regardless of income or insurance status. And like similar safety-net providers all over America, for the past decade it has benefited directly from the Affordable Care Act. “We almost went bankrupt in 2011,” Rion told me in a conversation last week, recalling how in the old days staff at Packard would work the phones furiously to get supplies and find specialists who would take referrals. Now many more patients have either Medicaid or private coverage they’ve purchased through HealthCare.gov, the online marketplace that the law created, so that the proportion of uninsured patients has fallen from around one in three to one in ten. It’s a lot easier to find referrals for these insured patients, though thanks to the infusion of paying customers Packard can do much more on its own. In particular, Rion said, the organization has opened two new branches, started a pharmacy, begun offering prenatal services, and vastly expanded behavioral health care by bringing on a half-dozen new doctors, nurses, and case workers. Now a retrenchment is underway. Coverage options on the HealthCare.gov marketplace got more expensive because Donald Trump and the Republicans refused to renew temporary subsidies that had been reducing the price of insurance. On top of that, the first cuts to Medicaid as part of last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” are starting to take effect. Rion told me Packard has already laid off a provider in anticipation of less revenue next year.1 Patient volume is down, he went on to explain, in part because uninsured patients sometimes avoid care altogether out of fear a single visit will lead to more treatments with more bills. And postponing care in that way can have serious medical consequences, as his colleague Ron Romero told me. “So you have somebody with diabetes, their chronic condition isn’t getting cared for,” said Romero, who like Rion is a family physician. “Their sugars rise, and they end up having other medical problems. Their kidneys start to get damaged. They start to have eye damage. They increase risk for heart attacks and strokes. . . . They end up in the emergency room.” And things are likely to get worse. Partly that’s because next year most of the remaining Medicaid cuts will take full effect, throwing more people off coverage. And partly it’s because forces that have nothing to do with Trump or Republican actions are making medical care more expensive for everyone, including those with employer insurance and Medicare. That will lead to still more people delaying or skipping care, ending up in the emergency rooms, and putting yet more cost pressure on providers. Rion wasn’t taking a position on the election or political parties, he made clear. He was just describing the reality he sees around him: “The whole system is being pressured. Nobody is immune to this stuff.” He’s right. And here’s the thing: This has all happened before. We know happens next.
‘Star Trek’ actor Walter Koenig’s cause of death revealed
LOS ANGELES — Walter Koenig’s official cause of death has been revealed. The actor, who portrayed Pavel Chekov in the original “Star Trek” series, died at age 90 on Oct.
St. Paul business hub meant to aid Latino startups needed help itself to open
After delays caused by COVID, inflation and the ICE crackdown, the $11 million Plaza del Sol Latino center has finally opened in the Payne-Phalen neighborhood.
Retailers face uninsured losses from supermarket cyberattacks
Estonian retailers must cover their own losses from this week’s Europe-wide cyberattacks on supermarket refrigeration systems because some companies hadn’t updated their systems’ software from older…
TreVeyon Henderson Health Update: Patriots RB Recovering After 'Unusual Medical Emergency'
Henderson is "working with specialists and physical therapists" because his symptoms have impacted his strength and coordination.
Tectonic forces near Japan helped fuel the formation of the Grand Canyon
A double subduction zone off the coast of Japan caused rifting halfway around the world to accelerate, fueling the formation of some of North America's most iconic features.
“Instead, He Never Gets To Play”: Nick Wright Takes Shot at Shedeur Sanders for Ditching Ravens in 2025 As Lamar Jackson’s Injury Opens Room for QB2
According to the Baltimore Ravens’ website, they planned to draft Shedeur Sanders in the fifth round of the 2025 NFL Draft. However, the former Colorado quarterback refused because he didn’t want to be Lamar Jackson’s backup.
Vote-scanning machine malfunction expected to delay counting in New York's Westchester County
A judge has granted permission for elections officials in a major New York county to move thousands of paper ballots to a secure warehouse after a technical problem caused vote-scanning machines to malfunction.
Israeli politicians who grew up poor see poverty as a challenge to overcome, not a systemic problem
The study raises a fundamental question for modern democracies: When legislators claim to represent a community because they come from it, how do they actually interpret that shared past?
Traditional Korean paper becomes breathable patch for future wearable health care
Wearable health-monitoring devices are becoming increasingly important for personalized health care, but conventional patches often rely on substrates that restrict airflow, trap sweat and cause skin ...
Scientists Say Marijuana Use Could Increase Heart Disease Risk by Up to 23%
And it’s not just smoking it that can cause issues.
These midterms could effectively end the Trump era – but neither side is yet ready for what comes next
Despite the US president’s ratings being at rock bottom, undoing his legacy will be difficult, not least because the Democrats are in disarray, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik
Exclusive | Cause of death revealed for 22-year-old who died on LA-bound Southwest flight
Upcoming ‘Turkey Trot’ event causes concern for local business
Thanksgiving is just a few weeks away, and while many may be picking out their best running shoes while looking forward to the annual Turkey Trot.
Hunter Henry not on practice field
Patriots TE Hunter Henry misses first practice of week because of foot injury
VITAS Healthcare reports strong Q3 growth despite cost concerns
Growth in admissions and patient revenue contributed to strong third quarter earnings for VITAS Healthcare, the nation’s largest provider of hospice and palliative care services. But rising labor and fuel costs and challenges with the acuity mix caused a drag on the company’s overall financial performance.
Scientists discovered an unknown baby right whale off Canada. They say it's a cause for joy
It would seem difficult to miss a 15,000-pound (6,804-kilogram) baby, but for months scientists who study rare whales did just that, and now they couldn't be happier.
Snacks sold in California may contain metal, prompting recall. See health risks
High exposure to the metal can potentially cause nerve damage and hair loss, the FDA says.
Anti-Transgender Political Rhetoric Played an Outsized Role in the 2026 U.S. Midterm Elections
Your Support Saves LGBTQ+Youth's Lives Every DayDonate94% of transgender and nonbinary youth said recent anti-LGBTQ+ politics caused stress or anxiety, […]
Cryosphere faces permanent damage when world overshoots 1.5C, scientists warn
UN-backed report finds even temporary rises above Paris agreement target could cause harm to glaciers and polar ice sheets
Sony MDR-3R Review: Walkman Nostalgia Wins Again
Sony recreated the original Walkman headphones, because why not?
Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month: UCI Health Medical, Surgical, Radiation Clinicians Available to Comment About Pancreatic Cancer, New Treatment Options
Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center based in Orange County, can offer hope for patients and families Pancreatic cancer accounts for about 3% of all cancers in the nation and about 8% of all cancer deaths, according to the American Cancer Society. Yet, pancreatic cancer is expected to become the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths by 2040, according to the National Foundation for Cancer Research. The Foo
What James Talarico can teach Democrats about revenge politics
One of the world’s most powerful and addictive drugs cannot be consumed or ingested. On the individual level, this drug perpetuates feelings of anger and hatred and makes our most violent thoughts feel pleasurable. On the global scale, this drug causes war and exacerbates political, social, religious and ideological divides. This is the drug of […]
Artist pulls popular screensaver from Roku OS because of Fox acquisition
Developer: “I can’t be part of the Fox world.”...
Marked Tree man accused of assaulting health care workers, spitting on them
A 61-year-old Marked Tree man allegedly struck a nurse, bent another nurse’s hand backward, and spit on hospital employees during an Oct. 20 incident, according to a probable cause affidavit.
Green Bay Packers guard reveals how he’s adjusting to new role in the offensive line
The Green Bay Packers made an unexpected lineup decision in Week 8, assigning Laken Tomlinson to right guard despite the veteran having started at that position just once during his 12-year NFL career. Tomlinson said he is adjusting well to the new position, although the switch proved more challenging last week because of the condensed [...]
Mercury in retrograde: Bar owner who fought for businesses hurt by streetcar work to close up shop
The owner of Mercury in downtown Omaha led the fight for businesses suffering because of streetcar construction. Now, he’s closing. Photo by Lily Smith/Flatwater Free Press
Jimmy Stewart stopped acting because he couldn’t hear
The legendary Oscar winner’s last role was in the animated feature, “An American Tail: Fievel Goes West.”
The brain’s hidden fear mechanism may explain anxiety and PTSD
A surprising new discovery suggests that fear may cause the brain to blur the line between danger and safety rather than distinguish them more clearly. By observing brain activity in mice using augmented reality, scientists found that memories of threatening and harmless environments began to overlap, potentially allowing faster responses to danger. This "better safe than sorry" survival mechanism could help explain why people with anxiety or PTSD sometimes experience intense fear in completely safe situations.
No practice for A.J. Brown again
Patriots WR A.J. Brown unable to practice for second straight day because of injuries
Meta President on Data Center Politics
Dina Powell McCormick of Meta tells WSJ editor-in-chief Emma Tucker that a newly elected Governor who ran on a data center platform said "as soon as we get past the inauguration, let's meet, because we don't want to lose this investment."
Curling Cares, Just Because
“We all know that Curling Cares, and together we can make a difference for Canadian families”
Starz Entertainment Corp. (NASDAQ:STRZ) Just Released Its Third-Quarter Earnings: Here's What Analysts Think
It's been a good week for Starz Entertainment Corp. ( NASDAQ:STRZ ) shareholders, because the company has just released...
The Bulletin welcomes 2026 editorial fellows
The Bulletin proudly welcomes its largest editorial fellow class yet. Fellows work closely with Bulletin editors to produce cutting-edge journalism focused on nuclear risk, climate change, disruptive technologies, or biosecurity. As part of a Bulletin initiative focused on uplifting the next generation of experts, our Editorial Fellows Program is possible because of readers and supporters alike.
Los Angeles Lakers Provide Clarity on Ziaire Williams Injury
On Sunday, the Los Angeles Lakers ruled Ziaire Williams out against the Toronto Raptors because of a left foot injury.Lakers insider and analyst Jovan Buha was among the first to report that Williams’ status was downgraded from questionable to out.“The Lakers have downgraded Ziaire Williams (left foot injury management) to out for tonight’s game against […] The post Los Angeles Lakers Provide Clarity on Ziaire Williams Injury appeared first on HEAVY.
Can Laser Hair Removal Cause Cancer? What Science Says
Can Laser Hair Removal Cause Cancer? What Science Says / cancer, Cancer Prevention, cancer risk, 𝐃𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲, Laser Hair Removal, Laser Safety, OncoDaily,
Takeaways from the midterms: Americans broadly rejected Trump — and Democrats stand to make huge gains because of it
The Democratic wave is here — and now, as votes are counted in key states, the question is how many Republicans it will wipe out.
Snap settles US social media mental health lawsuit on eve of trial
Plaintiffs are among more than 2,000 people alleging social media platforms caused them to become addicted to their phones, contributing to mental health issues | Anadolu
Why it could take a while to know who will control Congress
Control of the House depends on which party reaches the 218 seats necessary, while the Senate requires 51 for Democrats or 50 for Republicans because of Vice President JD Vance’s tiebreaking vote.
Gov. Newsom will commute all death sentences in state to life without parole
Newsom said the decision was among the most difficult choices of his career because it will surface painful memories for crime victims’ families.
Farmer Music Center announces country star as first concert at new venue
Dust off your boots and grab your cowboy hat because it's official: The first show at Farmer Music Center has been announced.
Highly anticipated cholesterol drug fails to prevent heart attacks, strokes
The drug, Novartis’ pelacarsen, should have worked against lipoprotein(a), a genetic type of cholesterol that causes plaque to build up in arteries, researchers said. Why didn’t it?
The best high-stakes entertainment to watch this November – from hidden identity action to revenge-driven love stories
Because we could all do with some added drama in our lives.
'Star Trek' actor Walter Koenig's cause of death released
Original "Star Trek" cast member Walter Koenig's cause of death has been released.
‘Star Trek’ actor Walter Koenig’s cause of death revealed
LOS ANGELES — Walter Koenig’s official cause of death has been revealed. The actor, who portrayed Pavel Chekov in the original “Star Trek” series, died at age 90 on Oct.
OpenAI: ChatGPT Search Is About 20% of Google’s, 250 Million People Speak With ChatGPT, and Chat Is Merging With Work
OpenAI says ChatGPT growth is accelerating. The company added 200 million users over just the past two months, jumping from 1 billion to 1.2 billion weekly active users in 60 days. Its search volume, it says, is approximately 20% of Google’s. Its users create 1.5 billion images with it per week. And its voice mode, between dictation and speaking with ChatGPT, now has 250 million combined weekly active users. ChatGPT consumer product lead Adam Fry told me this during a brief fireside chat at an OpenAI-hosted dinner in New York City on Monday night. “The growth is just going big,” he said. During our conversation, Fry also revealed plans to merge ChatGPT’s Chat and Work modes (so that confusing toggle up top will soon go away), agreed with feedback that ChatGPT-created restaurant signage looks too uniform, and addressed the cost to serve its personal assistant Dots. Here’s a look at our full conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length. We also cover image generation, interactive interfaces, advertising, education, and public unease about AI: Alex Kantrowitz: OpenAI has analyzed ChatGPT’s search volume and compared it with Google’s. What did you find? Adam Fry: ChatGPT has been growing quite quickly. ChatGPT’s volume of search-like queries is now roughly one-fifth the volume of queries of Google. It’s a pretty amazing statistic when you think about it, mainly because we started just about a year and a half ago. It’s hard to remember this, but ChatGPT at a time didn’t have any up-to-date information. You’d ask a question, it would say something like, “It’s past my training date,” and nobody had any idea what that meant. You’re saying ChatGPT’s search volume is one-fifth of Google’s. Bing’s share of the search market is around 5%. Does that make you multiple times larger than Bing? To say that more directly, ChatGPT has gone from one billion to 1.2 in just the last two months. That’s roughly 100 million users in 30 days, and another 100 million in another 30 days. The growth is just going big, and we’re staying very focused on how fast ChatGPT is growing. What counts as a search? I might have 20 prompts back and forth in a ChatGPT conversation. Does each one count as a query? Story continues below… A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR Move upmarket without a rebuild Moving upmarket means saying yes to what enterprise buyers ask for first: SSO, directory sync, and audit logs. WorkOS gives you all three, so your team keeps building the product instead of the checklist. Get enterprise-ready. Continued from above…. Adam Fry: What people came to ChatGPT for to start, if you go back about two years, is really writing help and coding help. Those wouldn’t be things that you really search for. What we’ve seen over the last year is people have grown into all these other topics. Things like you’re looking up a person or people or a place or a thing, and it requires up-to-date information. That’s a key element. Another big part is finance questions or health questions, where you really want to make sure it’s up-to-date information that’s quite factual, and we’ll do a web search for those questions. It’s basically anything that a user would have traditionally gone to a traditional search engine for, but is now deciding to go to ChatGPT for. Does each conversation with a search embedded count as one search, or does every question that requires a web search count? Every time you ask a question and go search the web, that’s a search. You used to work at Google. How would you say the nature of search is changing? One of the things that people really love about ChatGPT is this personalization and this understanding of the broader journey. If you look in the past, people would go for a Q&A box, and you’d ask a one-off question, like how tall is the Eiffel Tower. But there’s so much context in our lives around, “Maybe I’m taking a trip to Paris.” It’s actually helpful for ChatGPT to respond, “Here’s how tall the Eiffel Tower is, but I know you’re going on a trip to Paris.” It’s that ability for people to actually maintain context over time that has led them to start using ChatGPT in this way. You’ve also announced 250 million weekly active users of voice input, including dictation and conversations with voice mode. We are at 250 million weekly active users. What’s amazing about this is, if you look at those 250 million, what we’re seeing is it’s actually also incremental to the product. It’s no longer just a novelty. People aren’t just trying out voice. We’re seeing them use voice input day to day in their daily life, and it’s grown so quickly. Those 250 million users are using voice input, and that could just be a quick question or a long conversation. We’re seeing both behaviors. We’re seeing people just not want to type. You just hold it and start talking to it, or it turns into a longer conversation where people just sit with it. The big reason for this is the frontier capabilities of our models that we’ve shipped. We shipped what we call GPT Live 1, and then we shipped GPT Live 1.1. The big change with this is that it’s much more natural to speak with. It’s something we call backchanneling and interruptibility. Mhhhm… What you just did there is what the model does, because it’s really good at having a bidirectional conversation. That push to the frontier—we were the first to really release this at scale—has made it so much more natural for people to chat. That’s still only about 20% of the user base. From the outside, that looks small. Why is it exciting from the inside? It’s very exciting for a few reasons. We see from the data that when people start using voice, they stay around using voice. One of the things, transparently, we can do a better job of is bringing more people into discovering it. We see that the number of people who discover it could be a lot higher. But once they do, it’s a really new way for people to interact with AI. We’ve made a lot of improvements to it too, where we’re just going to see the number go up. You have background mode, so now by default, if you close the app, it’ll show, “Hey, the conversation’s still going.” If you want to walk around the house or you’re putting away the groceries, you can still have a chat. That kind of continuity has also changed how much people use it. Dots launched on September 29 and is about a month old. How’s it doing? It’s doing great. We talk to people about their Dot, and the first thing that everyone says is, “I love my Dot.” One of the reasons we’re seeing this is the proactivity, its ability to reach out to you and figure out things. The biggest use case I see all the time is, “Did I forget something today that I was supposed to do?” You can just say to your Dot, “Remind me of things at the end of the day that I may have forgotten. Somebody emailed me or messaged me,” and it’ll do that. This Dot changes the paradigm of the relationship with AI, where it’s actually helping you and giving you time back. You’re more conservative with permissions than some competitors. I tried to give my Dot my credit card, and it wouldn’t take it. With the creator of OpenClaw in-house, why are Dots’ permissions more limited? This is a space where we want to be very thoughtful and conservative because it’s a new space where you’re entrusting your Dot to take care of things on behalf of you that matter and are meaningful. We’ve just talked about how you go to this 1.2 billion user growth and asking questions. Now we’re asking people, “Can you ask ChatGPT or your Dot to help get things done?” But when you ask it to help get things done, it’s a whole new level of trust. We’ve built up a tremendous amount of trust in giving the right answers to your questions, and we want to make sure that when we build this new product, it has a high degree of trust. It’s a long game. We think this is going to be a new market for a very long time, and we want to make sure that we’re being this trusted player in the market to start. I initially thought Dots would be available on my $20 plan, then realized I had to spend $100 a month to get it. I upgraded, but I’d like to downgrade at some point…. We hope to keep earning your business and make the value good enough. It’s a really good point. ChatGPT’s goal more broadly, which I think is unique for us in the market, is we are focused on bringing intelligence to everyone safely across the entire world. For Dots in particular, there’s no difference. We don’t have anything to share tonight about the date of when Dots will go to a broader set of users. But you can rest assured we’re working very hard, and there are a couple things we have to get right. Over time we’re going to work on more efficient, agentic models that are able and capable of doing things for you. The first one is, right now we wanted to make sure that your Dot is actually really helpful. We started with some of our best models, but over time we’re going to work on more efficient, agentic models that are able and capable of doing things for you. The second thing is around proactivity. We’re still dialing in: How much do I message you to help you get things done? We can always play around with that to understand how much usage should a user use to have a successful Dot. We’re going to work on both, and our goal and ambition is to bring it out to all users. How much background computing does a Dot require? I’ve read estimates that serving a $100 subscriber might cost OpenAI $3,000 in compute, and mine seems to read every email that arrives. How often is it checking connected data sources? Right now, Dots are on the compute-heavier side, and this is one of the things we want to make sure that we can dial back over time. But the goal is to give you the best product. This is our premium, always-on personal assistant. Once we nail that, we’ll figure out how to dial back the compute needs. The thing we’re seeing also from our models, as we train frontier models, is just how—I can’t even keep up with how quickly we have a new model, and each new model is more efficient. If you looked at 6.1 Sol when it came out relative to Astra, much more efficient. I’m very excited about the next set of models we have coming too that’ll be even more efficient that we can use. Elon Musk said the cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue. Is efficiency the key to winning against competitors, or is there more to it? There are a couple of factors that go into it. One is the cost side, but the other is the revenue side. On ChatGPT and on our consumer business, we’ve been extremely proud of our ability to diversify different revenue streams in a way that’s growing really fast. To give you another stat, we announced several months back that we had passed 50 million subscriptions, and the number has grown considerably since then. On ads, within 200 days, we reached more than a billion in ARR, and that business is growing extremely quickly. We also have credits. Rather than paying for subscriptions, users can buy more credits. Between credits, subscriptions, and ads, I’m confident that the value of a Dot is going to be able to pay for itself. Elon has subscriptions too. This is clearly an expensive product to serve. One thing we continue to bet on at OpenAI and ChatGPT more broadly is that the models will continue to get much better and much cheaper, way faster than any of us think. If you look back at the historicals on it, it continues to be true. From what I’ve seen, I see no slowing down of that. What is Meta doing right with Muse? It has spent a lot of time atop the App Store charts. There are a couple of things they’ve done well. The first is people have been craving simplicity in their products. One of the things we have stated publicly as well is, at times AI products can be too complex. We’ve announced we’re merging ChatGPT’s Chat and Work. We’re making it much more simple in the products. You don’t have as many toggles or sliders between efforts and different model pickers. One of the things they’ve done well is this simplicity. You just go in and you can ask a question. You don’t have to think too much about what you’re doing. That’s one thing that seems to have resonated with users, which we also believe in. Second, there’s something really nice about being able to access your agent across many different channels. We just announced and launched Dots on iMessage. Whether you talk to your Dot on email or iMessage or within the ChatGPT app, the ubiquity in getting your assistant out there is going to be key. Those are two things that, if I had to be nice to our competitors, I would say were two big ones. So Alexandr Wang’s meme-tweeting strategy isn’t something you’re going to emulate? I have a different tweeting style. ChatGPT still asks me to choose between Chat and Work, even though some people call this technology AGI. Will that distinction go away? Couldn’t agree more. We have to solve this. Asking users to choose — we’ve heard repeatedly from all of our users it’s too much to understand. When should you go to Chat? When should you go to Work? It’s solvable. There’s real research to solve to make sure the models can understand what your intent is. Are you asking for a fast, quick reply? Are you asking me to go do a long agentic task? We’re going to solve it, and the plan is to bring Chat and Work together. So one interface will work out whether I’m asking for a conversation or a task. When? Coming soon. You told me the majority of ChatGPT’s 1.2 billion users are using image functionality. What are they doing? Today, 1.5 billion images are created per week. It’s hard to even wrap my head around that number. They’re doing a wide range of things. One of the most interesting things they’ve started to do is really use it for productivity use cases. The first thing it started with—I don’t know if you saw the ’80s trend, but it was quite fun. You could take a photo of yourself and say, “Put me and my family in ’80s outfits.” I did this for my family, and it was a really fun poster. But what we’re also seeing is businesses for their menus, or posters for birthdays. People are using it almost in a productivity-like fashion to create visual diagrams of what they would like to see. We’ve actually brought the latency down on images as well, so it’s gotten a lot faster. It went from a very high number of seconds to getting much faster. As it comes down even further, the number of images people are creating and the number of use cases is going to grow a lot. My feature request: When a restaurant makes a menu or sign, prompt it for more specificity so it doesn’t look like every other AI-generated restaurant sign. Or offer a shuffle button for a different style. I agree with the feedback, and we’ll take it to the team. I’m seeing ChatGPT generate little interactive interfaces within its answers. What’s the direction for Intelligent UI, and how are people using it? I am extremely excited about Intelligent UI. If you go back a couple years, these chat apps were all text, and now that’s changing. They’re going to be visuals. Intelligent UI and our first attempt at this with GPT-6 Intelligent UI is really just the beginning. As you go to the extreme, what you can imagine is, let’s say you’re using voice mode, and you just say, “Show me how offside works.” Immediately it should show you a visual diagram, and you say, “No, I don’t quite understand it.” It should just repopulate. That’s where the future of this technology goes. It’s almost like you’re talking to a canvas that will update and change. People are finding it helpful for a lot of things. My favorite one is—it’s hard to admit that I had no idea how hearts work. The last biology course I took was in high school. I just asked it, “How does the heart work?” and it instantly gave me a beautiful interactive diagram of where blood flows and how it goes through. I’m really, really bullish on this for learning in particular. You’ve described useful applications in finance, health, and learning, and ChatGPT has 1.2 billion users. If people are getting so much value, why is public polling on AI so negative? The reality with AI is it is going to change the nature of how work gets done. For a lot of people, that is something that can feel scary at times, and we’ve all felt that. But I remain confident that when people actually use the product and they use AI, it very quickly changes how they perceive it. We’re at 1.2 billion, but there are still a lot of people who haven’t used it. The more people use it, get familiar with it, how it can actually help you in your life, it’s going to feel a lot less scary. Big Technology is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thanks!! Subscribe
The dangerous myth of the well-meaning health guru
In healthcare, a warm heart is no substitute for a trained mind. Banned Australian naturopath Barbara O’Neill built a global empire on the defense that she "just wants to help," but good intentions mean nothing when uncredentialed health advice causes real-world harm.
Inside the Abdul El-Sayed-Haley Stevens Meltdown in Michigan
The relationship shattered in part because of Israel, but also because of their sensitive egos and hurt feelings. The split had been months in the making.
Democrat who dropped out of race over health wins anyway; GOP opponent says, ‘We deserve to know more’
A Democratic candidate who suspended his campaign for a western Iowa legislative district in September because of health reasons still won his race as part of the sweeping success story against Republicans, leading to new questions from his rival.
LA Rams vs Washington Commanders: Three Matchups to Watch
The Washington Commanders face the Los Angeles Rams with a depleted D-line, an ascending receiver group, and Puka Nacua lurking to cause issues for the secondary.
Scientists discovered an unknown baby right whale off Canada. They say it's a cause for joy
Scientists who study whales are heartened by an unexpected discovery of a baby right whale off Canada
Yaya Diaby expected to miss some time
Buccaneers LB Yaya Diaby on track to miss a few weeks because of sprained MCL
Scientists discovered an unknown baby right whale off Canada. They say it's a cause for joy
Scientists who study whales are heartened by an unexpected discovery of a baby right whale off Canada
Brandon McGinley: There's more to life than politics
Today is Election Day and you should vote if you haven’t already. But you should also do something in the real world not related to politics. Because...
Chris Rock says he was ‘not a great husband’ because he ‘watched a lot of porn’
He divorced from ex-wife Malaak Compton-Rock in 2016.
When papers become currency: a Chinese debate about trust in science
Last Saturday, 31 October, I went to the University of Hong Kong’s Beijing Centre for its Talent Forum. It was the fourth stop in the series this year, following events in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang, Shenzhen’s Qianhai, and on HKU’s main campus. The programme covered a remarkable distance in one afternoon. HKU’s Xiao-Jing Wang discussed computational neuroscience, intelligence, and the prefrontal cortex—before even delivering his inaugural public lecture to students back in Hong Kong. His colleague Bing Zhang took us from the Big Bang to artificial intelligence. Tsinghua’s Xue Lan asked how AI might reshape the institutional infrastructure underpinning higher education. There were lively panels featuring industry leaders from JD.com, Xiaomi, Haier—and Kaiser Y Kuo on the closing panel discussing innovation and international connections. I cannot pretend to have followed every detail of the brain models or the astrophysics. The talk that stayed with me was closer to something we have covered before: Zhou Zhonghe 周忠和 on papers, evaluation, and scientific trust. Zhou is a palaeontologist, an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and an international member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is also editor-in-chief of The Intellectual (知识分子), China’s leading science commentary platform. His subject was uncomfortable enough for a room full of successful academics: what happens when the system for recognising good science starts rewarding something else? Part of my interest came from our sister newsletter, The East is Read, which covered the controversy around “Geng Tongxue” in May. A PhD dropout from Beihang University, Geng has publicly challenged papers by prominent researchers through detailed online allegations of manipulated images and fabricated data. At Tongji University, an investigation into a challenged Nature paper found academic misconduct, and the dean of its life sciences school was removed. The affair brought doubts about academic integrity well beyond laboratories and university committees. How could someone outside the established hierarchy spot problems in papers that had passed through prestigious journals and institutions? And what, exactly, had all that prestige guaranteed? Zhou approached these questions through two essays published in July by The Intellectual: one by Wang Xiaodong, director of the National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing, and a response by Wang Liming, of Shanghai’s Shangsi Institute of Natural Sciences. Both began with the controversy over Geng. Their arguments deserve a wider audience, so I want to put parts of them alongside what Zhou said on Saturday. Wang Xiaodong’s starting point is evolution. A research system selects for the behaviour it rewards. Grants, jobs, journals, talent programmes, and prizes collectively determine which scientists prosper and which practices get passed down from advisors to students. “Whatever the system rewards is what it will evolve to produce,” he writes, citing the ancient Chinese saying: The King of Chu loved slender waists, and many in the palace starved to death. That is a more demanding diagnosis than saying there are dishonest people in science. Punishing a fraudster does not change the selective environment that made a particular kind of research profitable. His account also gives scientific success an awkward role in the story. As Zhou put it on Saturday, science became a victim of its own success. Once research became central to industry, national power, and economic growth, universities and laboratories expanded, and public money followed. That created an administrative need for rapid decisions: who should get the next grant, the next laboratory, the next appointment? The difficulty is that the true value of a discovery may take years or decades of testing and building to become clear. Resource allocation cannot wait that long. Publication counts, journal prestige, impact factors, and citations therefore become convenient ways to make an instant judgement. “The real problem is not that these indicators have no value,” Wang Xiaodong writes, “but that they are trying to answer a question that only time can answer.” Telling administrators simply to stop counting papers will never be enough. They still have budgets to distribute and appointments to make. Something has to replace the shortcut. Zhou described the consequences inside publishing. Papers acquire ever more requirements: a complete story, polished presentation, extensive datasets, and accessibility to readers beyond the immediate field. Individually, those demands sound reasonable. Together, he warned, they produce formulaic “eight-legged” papers 八股文 and rigid reviewing, while genuinely original or non-consensus work struggles to get past journal editors—some of whom wield immense gatekeeping power despite having limited laboratory experience themselves. Meanwhile, the demands for sprawling, “complete” narratives have fuelled a wider replication crisis. Wang Xiaodong uses a mahjong metaphor to describe the result: put the complex papers published by the exact same lab over several years side by side, and they often look like “Thirteen Orphans” (十三不靠)—every tile completely unrelated to the next, and none of them reproducible by outsiders. Zhou also spoke frankly as an editor who has trouble finding reviewers. Everyone wants someone else to review their work; qualified senior researchers have little time to return the favour. The labour is anonymous, unpaid, and brings almost no institutional recognition, so it increasingly gets passed down to postdocs and graduate students. And while anonymity protects reviewers from rank and personal favours, hyper-specialisation means an author’s most qualified reviewer is often a direct competitor, shielded from accountability. The protection and the problem coexist. Wang Liming takes the argument a step further. The decisive change, in his essay, is the instant conversion of academic honour into material resources. Once a paper can be cashed in for funding, a job, students, commercial investment, or even a company valuation, scientists are alienated from their work: they must keep minting this “research currency” to keep their teams alive. He is careful not to romanticise the past. The old world of gentleman scientists—financially independent figures like Boyle and Darwin who needed nothing from external funders—was also a closed club that excluded people without inherited wealth, women, and much of humanity outside the West. Professional science allowed ordinary people, himself included, to become researchers. Nobody should want to undo that. The problem, in his account, is an exchange system that becomes too uniform and too difficult to correct. His most pointed Chinese example is the “hat” (帽子): the prestigious talent designation that brings continuing access to money, laboratory space, students, and institutional influence. “If papers are the circulating currency of the research system, then a ‘hat’ is a bond that pays interest over the long term,” he writes. A paper at least requires another round of peer review. A title in the Chinese context can lock in a judgement made years ago and turn it into permanent status rent, regardless of whether its holder is still doing good science. Here, official institutions hire, organise, and evaluate scientists. Unlike honours awarded by autonomous academic communities in the West, a Chinese “hat” blends non-scientist administrative power with state authority. Once granted, it turns a past judgement into permanent status rent that is nearly impossible to revoke—because taking a hat off would imply that official authority erred in putting it on. Both Wangs see China as experiencing, at compressed speed, pressures present across global science. Research expansion, rising investment, publication growth, and elaborate evaluation metrics arrived in China within two or three decades rather than two or three centuries. Zhou agreed with that international framing—noting that recent US White House science policy documents and the new president of the US National Academy of Sciences, a fellow palaeontologist who recently visited Zhou’s institute in Beijing, have raised strikingly similar warnings about consensus-bound peer review, short-term project grants, and the replication crisis. Still, Zhou emphasised that China’s traditional hierarchy, personal networks (guanxi), and the ethos that “a good scholar becomes an official” (学而优则仕) amplify those pressures at home. So what would change things? Here Zhou’s tone differed from the call for a revolution in scientific trust in Wang Xiaodong’s essay. As an evolutionary biologist, Zhou favoured patchwork repair (修修补补). Living systems survive through accumulated adjustments; dramatic mutations are usually fatal. Science cannot return to a small, slow-moving pastoral era, especially after the successive accelerations of professionalisation after the Second World War, the internet, and now artificial intelligence. But it can alter the local environment in which researchers work. He pointed to domestic experiments designed to support unconventional research and diversify funding, including Tencent’s New Cornerstone Investigator Program, the Xplorer Prize, and the Future Science Prize. He also mentioned participating in reviews for “major non-consensus projects” under the National Natural Science Foundation of China. One guiding principle he recalled was wonderfully direct: “Failure is allowed; corruption is not” (允许失败，不允许腐败). That distinction would mean quite a lot if taken seriously. An honest attempt that fails should not have to disguise itself as a success to survive an assessment. Wang Liming’s essay adds a sharp caveat to the optimism about new domestic funders. Multiple organisations do not automatically produce multiple ways of judging science. If the same pool of senior domestic scientists makes the decisions through the same two-round review procedures, it is still “fake diversity.” He argues for three distinct kinds of money: broad baseline funding governed by fair procedures; patient funding for questions that take ten years; and non-consensus funding based on individual taste, deliberately empowering a few genuine experts to make biased, contrarian bets on eccentric ideas that would inevitably be averaged out by a committee. Replacing one monopoly with another achieves little; a healthy ecosystem needs variance. Zhou’s proposals for publishing were similarly concrete: strip papers of their resource-allocation burden and return them to recording discoveries and establishing priority; separate dissemination from evaluation, as eLife and Peer Community In do; adopt more modular “micro-publications” and real-name endorsements; recognize the labour of editors and reviewers; and give replication work proper credit rather than treating it as an unpublishable dead end. AI makes every part of this debate more urgent—and Zhou wove it throughout his talk. In his own preparation, he used AI to survey the declining influence of academic monographs, noting how tools are already changing how scholars gather information. More fundamentally, he placed AI as the latest great acceleration in scientific history: just as the internet sped up the pace of research and tightened external resource pressures, AI is compressing the cycle again. In the essays Zhou cited, AI cuts both ways. Wang Xiaodong expects large language models to erase much of the English-writing disadvantage long faced by Chinese scientists, further swelling the flood of papers coming out of Chinese labs. Wang Liming sees AI accelerating both ends of the trust crisis: it lowers the cost of paper mills and fabricated images just as quickly as it lowers the cost of automated image forensics, data auditing, and code reproduction. “Whoever builds the verification layer wins,” Wang Liming writes. His proposed alternative to the static, packaged “story paper” is a continuously versioned “unit of discovery” containing a falsifiable claim, raw data, analysis code, experimental parameters, and an ongoing log of independent checks—where negative results and failed replications are recorded rather than buried. Zhou ended his keynote by bringing AI back to the question of scientific honour and credit. Citing a recent Intellectual discussion on “What AI Means for Mathematics” featuring Fields Medalist Deng Yu 邓煜—at a moment when AI is already batch-solving mathematical conjectures, as HKU Vice-President Lin Chen noted in his opening remarks—Zhou agreed that human researchers must remain the principal agents: AI is a tool that frees scientists from tedious calculation to think about deeper, messier real-world problems. Yet that partnership creates a thorny new evaluation problem. When a breakthrough is made with AI, what is the human contribution and what is the machine’s? And since AI models distil centuries of accumulated human scholarship, is it right that the credit and value flow so heavily to the private AI companies building the tools? The old struggle over how to assign scientific honour is acquiring a whole new layer. What I took away was a serious discussion of how science can remain trustworthy as its scale, incentives, and tools change. These were scientists with real standing inside China’s system questioning how that standing is produced, and proposing changes that would affect their own institutions and peers. That made the afternoon at HKU’s Beijing Centre worthwhile. At the close, Wang Feng, Director of Communications and Public Affairs at HKU, said the value of the forum series—which heads to Hangzhou in December and cities like Chengdu early next year—would lie in the real cooperation it helped bring about. The university has plenty to celebrate: this week it topped the QS Asia rankings for a second consecutive year, alongside its 11th-place position in the QS World University Rankings 2027. For me, bringing this debate to an audience beyond the people who review papers and allocate grants was a useful contribution. Share [ The East is Read PhD dropout’s exposé forces an academic fraud reckoning in China A former doctoral student turned blogger has shaken China’s academic establishment by publicly accusing prominent university scholars of fabricating data and manipulating papers, triggering investigations at several leading institutions and drawing rare attention from state media… Read more 5 months ago · 43 likes · 8 comments · Yuxuan JIA ](https://www.eastisread.com/p/phd-dropouts-expose-forces-an-academic?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embedding_publication_id=47580)
The percentage of people without health insurance is growing
The percentage of working-age adults without health insurance has increased in the past two years, largely because many people can no longer afford Obamacare coverage after Congress allowed federal subsidies
Jake Ferguson will not return to Week 8 game
Cowboys TE Jake Ferguson leaves Week 8 game because of injury and is unable to return
‘I’m really apolitical’: Jerry Jones claims he stays out of politics despite donating more than $1 million to Republicans
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones wants everyone to know that he doesn’t take sides in politics. His recent donations tell a slightly different story. Speaking on 105.3 The Fan on Friday, Jones described himself as “apolitical,” saying that he can’t afford to pick a party because the Cowboys have fans on both sides. That’s an…
Riccardo Orsolini’s comments
Riccardo Orsolini spoke after the game: “I really wanted to get back out on the pitch and put in a good performance, because I’ve had a bit of bad luck recently. I’ve worked hard over the past f...
AFGHS co-signatory countries ask health care users to help fill the financing gap
Hundreds of thousands of Ugandans living with HIV on antiretrovirals could be targeted for user fees or community health insurance schemes requiring modest premium payments, according to the April 2026 version of the country’s America First Global Health Strategy implementation narrative.1 As part of the “sustainable financing for the private not for profit sector” strategy, 491 facilities will be targeted for a phased introduction of user fees and scale up of community health insurance programs.2 In the Ugandan context, PNFP facilities include faith-based hospitals and other health facilities, US missionary organizations and centers of excellence—services that are often co-located at government facilities but run with additional financial and technical resources. 402,000 people—or about 28 percent of the total Ugandan adult PLHIV population on treatment—get ART from the private not for profit sector. The selected facilities provide the majority of ART and prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT) services. The plan doesn’t give the total number of clients served by the 491 facilities, so it is not possible to give a precise number. But the majority of 402,000 is a figure in the hundreds of thousands—hence the estimate I’m using.3 The April draft of the Ugandan implementation plan narrative is the only one I’ve been able to review. But the government of Uganda is not alone in turning to health care users to help fill the financing gaps caused by the abrupt withdrawal of US funds. In July 2025, the Government of Liberia introduced user fees for previously free services including “registration, accommodation, patient feeding, hospitalization, and a wide range of surgical and diagnostic procedures.”4 Earlier that year, Liberia rolled out a revolving drug fund designed to stabilize drug supplies by “allowing patients to pay a small fee for standardized, quality medications,” according to a Ministry of Health press release.5 (Both of these approaches had been proposed in the National Health Policy 2022-2031; media coverage explicitly connects the launch with the US foreign aid cuts.) The health financing strategies proposed by Uganda and established in Liberia are qualitatively different from user fees officially adopted by specific health facilities to cover funding shortfalls caused by the new US approach.6 The latter is a stopgap, adhoc change. The former is a national governmental adoption of policies that pass costs on to health care users, despite evidence that such approaches can exacerbate inequities and leave deficits unfilled. Two countries does not make a pattern, but they do point to urgent questions: Have other countries, including Liberia, included user fees or community health insurance schemes in their implementation plans? If so, do any of these narratives have what Uganda’s lacks: a fall-back plan in place in case these strategies for sustainable health systems fail to deliver—as they have before? I wonder if you think about it Subscribe Predictable pitfalls Both community-based health insurance and user fees are as old as the hills. And after decades of people climbing up these hills, duking it out, climbing back down—neither strategy has shown the results the Ugandan implementation plan is counting on. This is, in fact, a hill some folks are willing to die on. (You knew I’d get there, right?) In November 2025, an African-led team of health system experts published a paper directed at low- and middle income country governments trying to figure out how to create self-sustaining health systems. The money wasn’t coming back. It had been more than nine months since the season of freezing, waivering and wood-chippering; two months since AFGHS tumbled into the world touting co-financing requirements and reductions in future US government health aid. Governments were looking for strategies for sustainable, self-financed health systems, the authors wrote. For countries considering user fees and community health insurance to fill the financing gaps, they had a simple message: Don’t. On user fees, the paper states: “Reliance on user fees is ultimately a regressive and inequitable approach. It places a disproportionate burden on the poor and undermines health system goals of equity and financial protection. […] There is overwhelming evidence that user fees mobilise very limited resources for the public health sector, making it an inefficient mechanism for revenue mobilisation.” On community health insurance: “Attempting to shift the burden of funding previously donor-funded services, such as HIV care and management, and TB treatment, onto contributory schemes would exacerbate their fragility and fail to protect the population.”7 The WHO says that community-based health insurance “cannot be expected to provide a major source of funding or coverage,” and noted that most schemes offer only moderate benefit to individuals paying into them, and exclude the poorest segment of the population.8 And yet, the US-Ugandan implementation plan says that community health insurance is “the central pillar of this [PNFP] sustainability strategy” and that this approach that will generate “pre-paid pooled funding at facility and community level [that] improves financial risk protection for households, reduces catastrophic out-of-pocket expenditure, and generates structured, transparent revenue streams that can progressively absorb recurrent costs including health worker salaries.” Unfortunately, Uganda’s own history suggests the pillar might not be able to bear this weight. Ugandans Have Been to this Rodeo Before—and Some Want Their Money Back Uganda introduced its first community health insurance scheme in 1996 with support from international donors.9 Thirty years later, somewhere between 0.2 and 0.3 percent of the population is covered by CHI; just over 1 percent has any kind of health insurance.10 User fees were universally introduced in 1993 as a condition of a World Bank loan.11 They were abandoned in 2001, and in 2004—the year I moved to Uganda to watch the free HIV program get underway—a definitive study found that the fees did not improve health systems and outcomes.12 In 2004, most clinics and hospitals had ‘free’ and ‘fee for service’ options for getting care.13 The fee for service, or “cash and carry” programs had often been established in the years prior to PEPFAR and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. People who could afford to paid for the drugs, often at facilities in the private-not-for-profit (PNFP) sector. When free drugs arrived, some people who’d been paying kept on doing so, perhaps because of shorter wait times, greater confidentiality, convenience or other factors. But in the year that I spent visiting the same clinics around the country week after week—including a “center of excellence” that maintained separate days for cash and carry clients and those accessing free ARVs—lots of people who had been paying tried to switch to the free option. They’d paid because they had no other choice. They’d sold pieces of family land, begged family members for loans, bought pills by the week, and sometimes by the day. Or they were just cash-strapped, like most of us, and wanted the funds for other things. 14 Twenty-two years later, this hasn’t changed. Ugandans pay out of pocket for 30-40 percent of their health care costs, leading one paper to declare that “falling ill is more than a health crisis. It is a financial emergency.”15 One recent study found that up to 48.5 percent of households dealing with tuberculosis sold something, took out a loan or dug into savings to defray the costs of TB care—which is supposed to be universally free.16 The Ugandan implementation plan does anticipate challenges. It proposes a phased approach, with 187 facilities introducing user contribution systems in Year 1, 152 in Year 2, and 153 in Year 3. Willingness to pay and feasibility studies will precede roll out; fees will be tiered by region, and a waiver system is proposed to ensure that no one has to pay who is unable to. Moreover, the plan provides for quarterly reviews of epidemiological data to “ensure that user contributions do not compromise epidemic control gains, ART continuity for the client cohort, TB case management, or PMTCT services.” Alt text: A screenshot of a table included in the implementation plan narrative that is the subject of this stack. It’s got a fetching pink bar at the top. It uses the abbreviation “CHI” which is Community Health Insurance, and FBO which is Faith Based Organizations, and it details the number of facilities that will implement user fees with waivers and community health insurance schemes over the five years of the agreement. As I said in the footnote, this is a super interesting document with a lot of other rich material. Tell me what you see—and what you would have focused on. And if you’ve seen something like this, or anything else that strikes you, in another implementation plan, tell me that too. You can use the Substack message platform or try me on Signal at @endaplague_again.25 (because @mercoonfan was, weirdly, taken). But the plan doesn’t fully explain what will happen if this approach doesn’t work out. Yes, progress will be monitored, and corrective action triggered. However, there is no specified funding replacement if premium and fee revenue prove inadequate. Instead, the authors write, “Currently, COEs serve a total client cohort of over 180,000 across 28 facilities. In the initial years, the U.S. Government (USG) will provide financial support for clients; over time, user fees generated by COEs will become the primary source of funding for sustaining their services.” Failure does not really seem to be an option. Health insurance schemes are more acceptable to the Ugandan population than user fees. Members of Parliament and civil society traveled to Ethiopia to see how that country’s scheme worked. In a follow up report, a veteran civil society group recommended allowing the “health insurance ecosystem to grow organically and [to] keep reviewing the law and regulations as this growth takes root.”17 One study found that more than three-quarters of Ugandans were willing to join a health insurance program.18 However, coverage of community-based health insurance is minimal, as is coverage of any kind of insurance—including private plans.19 A national health insurance scheme bill has been stalled for several years and presently sits with President Yoweri Museveni.20 Community-based health insurance scheme that do exist are expanding in number, but losing enrollees. Between 2022 and 2026, the number of community-based health financing schemes across the country increased by 42 percent, while the number of people enrolled decreased by nearly 11 percent.21 None of this means that community-based health insurance should not happen in Uganda—or that people do not want insurance. It doesn’t even mean that user fees and waivers won’t ever work. But there is highly relevant evidence from Uganda and the surrounding region that it is quite optimistic to describe community health insurance and user fees as central supports for sustainable financing in any sector of the health system. And now for the best-case scenario In the best-case scenario22, the Ugandan approach does exactly what it sets out to do, and so does the Liberian fee structure and revolving pharmacy fund—though I’ve not confirmed that these are in the MoU. In one best-case scenario, Uganda is an outlier, and user fees and community health insurance are not recurrent pillars of self-sustaining financing in other countries’ implementation plans. In another best-case scenario, all countries that include these strategies enjoy success beyond anyone’s evidence-informed wildest dreams: reliable funding generated by health care users fees, great health care outcomes for everyone, no exacerbation of inequities, no crippling household debt. No sold land, repurposed school tuition or high-interest loans. In the best-case scenario, not one of the hundreds of thousands of Ugandans living with HIV receiving antiretrovirals from 491 PNFP facilities misses a refill or leaves care because of user fees or community health insurance premiums. This is the best-case scenario for these people for their own health, and for their families. It is also the best-case scenario if Uganda wants to stay on the path to eliminating HIV as a public health threat. According to the country’s most recent data, 96.5 percent of people living with HIV on antiretrovirals are virologically suppressed. Epidemic control depends ensuring that 95% of people living with HIV know their status, 95 percent of those individuals are on ART, and 95% of those individuals are virologically suppressed. Uganda is still struggling with the first “95"—a frankly abysmal 85.3 percent. If HIV epidemic control and the attendant prevention of new infections, avoidable suffering and premature death matter, the country cannot afford to lose any clients who are currently in care.23 As I write this a couple hours before the polls close for the US elections in the city I live in, I say with soul-deep sincerity: I am rooting for the best-case scenario. I think it’s safe to say that we all are.24 I think it’s also safe to say that if the US and co-signatory governments have inked plans that lead to successful expansion of community health insurance and strategic use of user fees, we all would like to know, now, so that we don’t miss the opportunity to celebrate when success happens. The implementation plan narratives have to enter the public domain. They are the fullest expression of a strategy co-created by two governments. There are assumptions and details that people living in the US and co-signatory countries need to understand that are not available in the MoUs or, to date, in the Congressional Notifications. Some of these details can help other countries that are, as I write this, still working on implementation plans. Others, like a solid count of how many other countries have plans for expanding user fees or health insurance, are important for regional and global health architecture reform initiatives. No matter how this election night turns out, there will be a slew of new Congressional member orientations, briefings and talking points papers in the next few months. Release of implementation narratives should be a bullet point in every context that AFGHS is discussed. These documents can be redacted so that procurement sensitive information isn’t disclosed. There is much more historical precedent for sharing such documents than there is for relying on user fees to fill health financing gaps. Let’s look at the information together so we can hope for the best and prepare for, you know, the other thing. Alt text: A substack first: a bicep selfie! It’s my arm - peachy-white skin, black shirt (flannel, notch neck, too hot for this appallingly balmy November weather, if you’re wondering) and a sticker that says I VOTED 2026. Beige letters on red for I voted. Beige on blue for 2026. You bet I did.25 In your wildest dreams. Subscribe 1 This is a really, really rich 95 page document. There are fascinating ideas and detailed plans in it. It is all worth reading AND I have, in this post, highlighted an instance of content that could pose challenges and certainly posits success of strategies that haven’t worked before. I would love to hear what readers’ see that’s interesting and should be lifted up as something to check for in other implementation plans. I will also shortly be adding a static page to the substack site where implementation plan documents will live. I will put the url into this footnote and it will also be there on emilybass.substack.com by the end of the week. Uganda Implementation Narrative Section 4 April 22 2026 Draft 1.51MB ∙ PDF file Download Download 2 User fees are costs charged for visits, labs, medicines or other health services, usually at the time they are provided. Community health insurance, or community-based health insurance, is what the World Health Organization calls “micro insurance,” which is health insurance targeted at low-income people. 3 As usual (by which I mean always), please prove me wrong. 4 https://smartnewsliberia.com/liberias-ministry-of-health-announces-2025-hospital-service-fees-for-public-facilities/?utm 5 https://moh.gov.lr/news/2025/grand-cape-mount-leaders-residents-embrace-new-community-pharmacy-program/?utm 6 https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/09/hiv-usaid-pepfar-africa-foreign-aid-cuts-mission-hospitals/?utm 7 https://gh.bmj.com/content/10/11/e021270 8 https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/community-based-health-insurance-CBHI 9 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2827475/ 10 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10861328/#b3-jpmph-23-110 11 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC527704/ 12 Same citation as the footnote 2 - the article is called “Learning from failed health care reform in Uganda.” To which I say: If only. If. Only. 13 There is a whole taxonomy of user fees to be aware of, if not commit to memory. Out of pocket costs are everything that someone pays for themselves. In this Stack, user fees are planned and policy-supported out of pocket costs. There are also out of pocket costs that people pay to buy drugs or receive tests or health care assessments that would be free if the drugs were on the shelves, or the machines or kits were available, or the staff were on site. A user fee is usually designed to be modest, pegged to willingness to pay, and may be waiveable at the point of care for anyone who is unable to do so. The costs for things that would otherwise be free are whatever the market will bear and people either have to pay them or go without. Out of pocket costs for services and stuff that aren’t available in public facilities are different again from bribes or unofficial fees that some health workers may impose, even though most are indefatigable, tireless and tired, and devoted to their clients. 14 For the record—which really is these footnotes—I would give a whole stack of fridge magnets for a systematic analysis of the economic and social impact of the Mass Unemployment Event in AFGHS countries among the very people who used to be able to afford and cover user fees, both for themselves and vast family networks. Locally employed USAID technical staff, house cleaners, caregivers, drivers and technicians were financial anchors for cousins, friends, friends’ children, friends’ childrens’ cousins, teachers, pastors, neighbors and so many other kinds of kin. Aid recipients lost direct funding; many other people who had not been aid recipients, but parts of the elaborate care webs that function as safety nets for so many people, lost crucial support too. And that’s even before we get to the people who worked at the hotels and restaurants and bars where people employed by the US and its implementing partners used to spend disposable income. Those businesses have lost revenue; those folks have lost jobs. It will be some time coming—and someone will have to fund this work—but I do hope it happens. And I hope, as usual, to be proven wrong. 15 https://eprcug.org/blog/how-out-of-pocket-healthcare-costs-keep-driving-ugandans-into-poverty/ 16 Another straight-to-the-point journal article title. Households experiencing catastrophic costs due to tuberculosis in Uganda: magnitude and cost drivers. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32938411 17 https://www.cehurd.org/download/technical-policy-brief-on-community-health-insurance-scheme/?wpdmdl=13661&refresh=6ae9122f5d4ed1793659439 18 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10125197/ 19 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10861328/#b3-jpmph-23-110 20 https://ugandapost.news/uganda-to-make-health-insurance-mandatory-by-2026/ 21 https://shu.org.ug/download/235 22 With a nod, tip of the stack hat, and wag of the Mercoon tail to a deeply valued reader who told me that I have a tendency to speculate about the worst-case scenarios a little too much of the time. 23 https://news.mak.ac.ug/2026/10/uphia-2025-shows-ugandas-hiv-status-awareness-gap-despite-strong-treatment-outcomes/ As you’ll see in the next footnote, I’ve already written a subSubstack on another topic, so I will be brief with regard to the study referenced in this article. The Uganda Population-Based HIV Impact Assessment, or UPHIA, will never happen in this way again. For more than a decade, PHIAs have been supported by the US government as a way to generate accurate estimates of country progress on key HIV indicators. They are a holdover from the PEPFAR program that was laser focused on ensuring US taxpayer dollars subsidized progress in pandemic control. There may be other population-level surveys and the data may even be publicly released, as the entire set of FY2026 MER data have not. But PHIAs will never happen again. If you’re wondering whether the estimates of HIV progress at country level might get less reliable….you’re not alone. 24 Ooh baby, I hate “we” in almost all forms. But sometimes I go there, when I am looking for company, which I am. Because this Stack moves into the somewhat-uncharted territory of assessing what the implementation plan narratives may suggest about co-signatory countries’ roles and responsibilities to the people living within their borders. The MoUs, specimen and data sharing agreements were templates. Countries’ answers fit into pre-specified questions that did not include, “how are you going to fill financing gaps and stabilize your health system as this plan unfolds?” In contrast, the implementation narratives are open form—the product of co-creation between the two governments. Co-creation can mean lots of things, but nothing leads me to believe that implementation plans are ghost-written by the US government, or that contents were imposed by the US counterparts. Instead, I think the parts of the plans that read like country government initiatives are endorsed, if not initiated by, those governments. For instance, the Ugandan implementation plan narrative describes plans for revenue-generation through fees charged for equipment calibration, repair and maintenance provided through Uganda’s National Equipment Calibration Laboratory, and laboratory accreditation through the Uganda National Accreditation Service (UGANAS), targeting private sector, PNFP, research and academic clients. That’s super specific and also quite ambitious. It doesn’t read like an American idea. There’s also a provision for solar panels, and other stuff that feels country owned and driven. This is where it gets interesting. If co-creation is the case, then both the US and co-signatory governments are accountable for the contents and the outcomes. Most discourse about AFGHS to date has focused on the decisions that America has made, or demanded that other countries make. The AFGHS architects have monopolized the hot seat. As they should, in so many ways. America absolutely created the conditions under which countries needed to come up with health financing strategies to fill unanticipated, catastrophic funding gaps. And with not-too-long a lens, we can look back and see that America is also on the hook for its role in the Bretton Woods institutions that made user fees and health system fiscal austerity conditions of loans during the era of structural adjustment. But in the here and now, it is not at all clear to me that the US is requiring Uganda or any other country to implement specific approaches to sustainable financing. Instead, it is as the authors of that paper up in footnote 6 suggest: African governments have agency. As implementation plans roll out—whether or not the narratives are shared—it will be important to understand what this agency looks like and what it means for people, including the poorest of the poor. And it will be important to figure out how to talk about it safely, respectfully and critically in places other than the literal and metaphorical footnotes. 25 This week’s song is “Once upon a time” by the Moody Blues. (I know, this is gonna be a weird, largely banger-free end of 2026 playlist. HMU with requests.) AND please do watch the video and appreciate the truly amazing opening sequence—a drum kit wasteland, a coupla plastic bags, a bit of sand. Sort of like the hill where fiscal austerity policies that put costs on health care users might go to perish. But then there’s a lady with amazing hair. It’s worth it.
Modern fitness enthusiasts turn toward advanced metabolic science to reach new heights
Men’s health optimization is evolving as fitness enthusiasts trade quick-fix trends for documented metabolic research and cellular physiological data. You have likely spent years tracking sets, logging miles, and testing diets that promised effortless gains but delivered mixed outcomes. Generic fitness rules often leave active men frustrated because standard gym routines fail to address individual […]
'No Amount of Competition Will Ever Unseat Steam' – Former Epic Games Engineer Rails Against Valve
Epic's rivalry with Valve isn't anything new, but while it's usually CEO Tim Sweeney taking shots at Valve, an ex-engineer posted a long list of problems Steam has caused in the industry.
Indie games are missing launch dates because Steam is backed up
Games are taking longer than expected to get approved.
Familiarity vs. formality: Why do we call female politicians by first names?
Just because the U.S. is willing to elect women doesn’t mean it sees them in the same light as men. When the next wave of congressional and presidential hopefuls make themselves known ahead of 2028, make sure to see the women on the ballot as more than a hot commodity, an anti-candidate or a first name.
Artemis II launch tore a hole in Earth's atmosphere, say scientists | BBC Sky at Night Magazine
The launch of Artemis II caused three distinct disturbances in Earth's ionosphere. Scientists say future launches could cause more disruption.
Scientists recover 22,000-year-old human DNA from cave dirt
If you think archaeologists need actual bones or teeth to uncover the secrets of ancient humans, you may have to check that thought because DNA testing has evolved more than you know. Scientists are g...
The science behind why ginger ale tastes better on airplanes
Ginger ale tastes crisper and less sweet on airplanes because dry cabin air and lower air pressure at 30,000 feet change how your nose and taste buds work.
Measles, mumps and misinformation: how Crunchy Moms became ‘the most dangerous’ group on Facebook
Meta says it removes content that could cause imminent physical harm – but nearly half a million members have joined a group that regularly promotes misinformation
TreVeyon Henderson Health Update: Patriots RB Recovering After 'Unusual Medical Emergency'
Henderson is "working with specialists and physical therapists" because his symptoms have impacted his strength and coordination.
Health violations closed dozens of L.A. County restaurants in October
October was a busy month for Los Angeles County health inspectors, who cited and closed nearly six dozen restaurants and markets because of health code violations. The list includes upscale eaterie…
De Roon: “I never had any doubts about joining Roma.”
Marten De Roon gave an interview to Idealista.it in which he discussed his arrival in Rome.“When the coach called me, I already knew it would be a difficult move, partly because of the history of Ro...
In brief: Putting the squeeze on gene-editing techniques
Xiaojun “Lance” Lian, associate professor of biomedical engineering and of biology at Penn State, alongside biomedical engineering doctoral candidate Tahir Haideri contributed to a paper recently published in Matter. The research, led by scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), introduced a physical system that squeezes cells, temporarily loosening the DNA inside and making space for gene-editing tools to reach the target genes. The team said this is an improvement upon previous approaches because it enables a better yield of cell reprogramming, when researchers can coax one cell type to turn into another cell type. Lian and Haideri supported the research by guiding the molecular engineering of reprogramming cells from one type to another, building on their prior work improving how gene-editing tools are delivered to the cell’s genetic material. Editor’s note: The full article describing this work can be found on the UCLA news site.
Lamar Jackson placed on Injured Reserve
Ravens QB Lamar Jackson to be sidelined for at least a month because of his thumb injury
Traditional mulberry paper used to develop breathable health patch
Wearable health-monitoring devices are becoming increasingly important for personalized health care, but conventional patches often rely on substrates that restrict airflow, trap sweat, and cause skin discomfort during prolonged use.
Kendrick Bourne suffers ankle injury
Cardinals WR Kendrick Bourne unable to finish Week 8 game because of an ankle injury
Alaska science time capsule: A record cold snap, haunted garage doors and Murphy’s Law
Disruptions to the ionosphere caused can impact radio waves on Earth.
Carle Health billing system problems disrupt patient payment options - CU-CitizenAccess.org
Technical snags in Carle Health‘s billing system conversion have disrupted online payment options for patients across one of central Illinois’ largest healthcare systems, prompting the provider to extend billing deadlines. The health system is temporarily unable to process payments online that are made directly from checking or savings accounts because of the software conversion, Carle […]
Report: Japan's Tashima to stand against Infantino for FIFA presidency
Kozo Tashima, the honorary president of the Japanese Football Association (JFA), will challenge Gianni Infantino for the FIFA presidency, according to reports. Infantino’s position appeared under threat after a dropped plan for private investment in the World Cup caused consternation, but he has rallied and now looks to be in a strong position to win a fourth term at FIFA Congress in Morocco next year.
Supporters resubmit signatures for 2027 ‘Protect Girls’ Sports’ referendum
Campaign organizers said the effort fell 532 signatures short of this year’s ballot because of paperwork tied up in federal court. They said volunteers gathered new signatures on a measure to designate interscholastic sports and school facilities, such as restrooms and locker rooms, by the sex listed on an original birth certificate.
After the deluge. Making sense of the altered political landscape in NC.
Massive wins across North Carolina for Democrats and losses for Republicans in 2026 election have multiple causes, complex implications.