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Lamborghini's most extreme car just sold out its future

Scarcity is the oldest pricing trick in luxury, and it only works when the scarcity is real. Anyone can print “limited edition” on a box. Very few companies can cap production at a hard number, refuse to move it, and still watch buyers pay a premium for the privilege of waiting a year to take ...

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Aug 17 • 4:23 PM EDT • Technology • sg.finance.yahoo.com
‘Unprecedented’ number of Apple users received recent spyware alert, say investigators

Cybersecurity experts who investigate spyware attacks say the number of people who received a recent threat notification from Apple is unusually high.

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Aug 17 • 4:18 PM EDT • Technology • techcrunch.com
YouTube is changing how it counts views to give the numbers a boost

Watching one frame of a video will count as a view.

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Aug 17 • 1:13 PM EDT • Technology • theverge.com
Trump dwarfs predecessors in the number of ultra-rich in his second White House

The number of people worth at least $100 million is more than four times the combined total under the three previous presidents

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Aug 17 • 11:42 AM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com
Trump dwarfs predecessors in the number of ultra-rich in his second White House

The number of people worth at least $100 million is more than four times the combined total under the three previous presidents

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Aug 17 • 11:42 AM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com
Netflix’s New #1 Movie Has Viewers in Their Feelings (And It Has a Nearly Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score)

Netflix’s number one movie is winning over viewers with a nearly perfect Rotten Tomatoes score and plenty of emotional reactions. Find out more here.

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Aug 17 • 11:09 AM EDT • Entertainment • purewow.com
Everyday Injustice Podcast Episode 337: Marc Bookman Examines the Death Penalty’s Politics, Failures and Enduring Appeal

Marc Bookman, legal director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, recently discussed capital punishment on Episode 337 of 'Everyday Injustice.' Bookman challenged the perception of a national death penalty resurgence, asserting its continued application is increasingly confined to a limited number of states. He also critiqued public opinion polling on capital punishment, specifically a Pew poll, for failing to present alternatives such as life without parole. Additionally, Bookman previewed his forthcoming novel, 'Albert's Time,' which explores the ethical dimensions of capital punishment by confronting the execution of an undeniably guilty individual.

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Aug 17 • 7:10 AM EDT • Politics • davisvanguard.org
North Africa's 'Youth Bulge' Will Remain a Significant Factor in the Region's Politics

Large numbers of young people in North Africa are not inherently destabilizing, but weak job creation and deteriorating public services will deepen social polarization, and make young people an increasingly important driver of economic pressure, protest, violence and migration. In 2025, approximatel

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Aug 17 • 5:48 AM EDT • Politics • worldview.ranenetwork.com
AMC Entertainment Holdings (AMC) Proposes Governance Changes, Is The Rebound Already Priced In?

Governance changes put AMC Entertainment Holdings (AMC) in focus AMC Entertainment Holdings (AMC) has put corporate governance firmly on the agenda, asking shareholders to vote on declassifying its board, expanding stockholder rights, and loosening limits on director numbers at the September 24, 2026 annual meeting. See our latest analysis for AMC Entertainment Holdings. The governance proposals arrive after a sharp rebound in AMC Entertainment Holdings’ share price, with a 30 day share price...

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Aug 17 • 5:22 AM EDT • Entertainment • simplywall.st
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Cooley’s Business Czar Navigates AI Deals ‘Unmoored’ to Numbers

Fast-moving artificial intelligence deals are changing the equation for buyers and their lawyers, according to veteran tech attorney Peter Werner.

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Aug 17 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • news.bloomberglaw.com
Elite science high schools boost enrollment as AI, chip demand grows

South Korea's elite science high schools will admit a record number of students next year, expanding opportunities for young science talent at a time when unive

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Aug 17 • 1:04 AM EDT • Science • koreaherald.com
Republicans won the redistricting competition. Don't tell that to this California congressman

President Donald Trump last year told GOP-controlled states to redraw their maps before this year's midterm elections to increase the number of winnable seats for Republicans in order to help the party hold onto the U.S. House.

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Aug 16 • 1:37 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org
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Column: Solo diners are the face of ‘me-conomics’

A former colleague — terribly self-important because of winning a number of journalism prizes — once took a protege out to a fancy lunch spot in New York City. When

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Aug 16 • 9:30 AM EDT • Entertainment • thederrick.com
Physicists discover a hidden gluon structure inside protons that could rewrite textbooks

Physicists may have uncovered a hidden feature inside protons that helps preserve one of matter’s most fundamental properties. RHIC collision data suggest baryon number is carried not simply by three quarks, but by a Y-shaped junction of the gluons connecting them. The finding challenges a decades-old textbook picture and could deepen our understanding of why protons—and ultimately matter itself—remain stable.

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Aug 15 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com
Huron (NASDAQ:HURN) Q2 Earnings: Leading The Business Process Outsourcing & Consulting Pack

Wrapping up Q2 earnings, we look at the numbers and key takeaways for the business process outsourcing & consulting stocks, including Huron (NASDAQ:HURN) and its peers.

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Aug 15 • 2:21 PM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com
There’s a Vast Network Beneath Your Feet—And It Could Be Conscious, Some Theories Claim

It’s so large that it could stretch from the sun to Pluto an unfathomable number of times.

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Aug 15 • 9:00 AM EDT • Science • popularmechanics.com
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I Can't Tell if I Hate or Love-Hate the #1 Movie on Netflix

It's not often that I watch a film and think 'what the hell am I watching,' especially if it stars powerhouse actors like Greta Lee and Wagner Moura. But 'The Last House' on Netflix was bonkers and confusing, even if it is the number one movie on Netflix. Here, my review.

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Aug 15 • 9:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • purewow.com
Roughly 23 million Americans trapped in jobs they want to leave over one costly fear

A growing number of Americans are staying in unwanted jobs to keep their health coverage as medical debt and rising costs squeeze household finances.

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Aug 15 • 7:00 AM EDT • Health • foxbusiness.com
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Moss Point CTE Center ranks number 1 in state for business, marketing and finance

The Moss Point Career and Technical Education Center is celebrating a major accomplishment.

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Aug 14 • 7:00 PM EDT • Business • wlox.com
Erie County receives small number of responses to biometric law disclosure

The law prohibits businesses from collecting, using or selling people's data.

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Aug 14 • 6:17 PM EDT • Business • spectrumlocalnews.com
Grand Theft Auto 2 Legacy Review – Revisiting the Retro-Futuristic Sequel in 2026

Grand Theft Auto 2 boasts a number of noticeable technical improvements over the original and feels far better to play, but I'm glad its odd and unrecognisable setting was a one-time experiment.

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Aug 14 • 10:00 AM EDT • Technology • ign.com
Joshua Dobbs by the numbers for Lions at Cincinnati

NFL preseason Week 1: Joshua Dobbs debuts for Detroit at Cincinnati

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Aug 14 • 9:50 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
New Business Poised To Replace Omega Restaurant

Greek diner's days appear to be numbered, with demolition planned.

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Aug 14 • 9:47 AM EDT • Business • urbanmilwaukee.com
5 Core Principles To Master Before You Sell Your Business

Learn the five core principles that determine whether your business is truly sellable, from owner independence to knowing your real valuation number.

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Aug 14 • 8:03 AM EDT • Business • forbes.com
'The lance head was still inside the pelvis:' Mass grave found in Austria may hold casualties of unknown ancient Roman battle

A new analysis of skeletons recovered from an ancient mass burial has revealed a surprising number of groin injuries.

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Aug 14 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • livescience.com
World’s first superconducting quantum heat engine could help unlock massive quantum computers

A tiny superconducting engine has successfully converted heat near absolute zero into useful work, demonstrating the first cyclic quantum heat engine of its kind. Future versions could operate autonomously inside quantum computers, potentially eliminating huge numbers of costly, noise-producing microwave cables.

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Aug 14 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com
Immune cells flood into the aging brain, Stanford scientists discover

Scientists have discovered that the aging human brain may be far less isolated from the rest of the body than once believed. Stanford researchers found that large numbers of immune cells from the blood begin entering the brain as early as middle age, where they can transform into microglia, the brain’s specialized immune cells. The finding overturns a long-standing assumption that these cells remain largely separate from the body’s immune system throughout life.

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Aug 14 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com
Be prepared for the preseason with our Denver Broncos roster

All of the players on the team are sorted by their jersey numbers and by their last names to help you find your favorites during the preseason.

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Aug 14 • 8:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
VAR, timewasting and subs - new rules for the new season

The 2026-27 season will feature an unprecedented number of new laws, mostly designed to tackle tempo disruption and make the game quicker.

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Aug 14 • 7:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Kentucky health officials report confirmed measles case, suspect outbreak after additional unconfirmed case reports

The Kentucky Department of Public Health announced Thursday that a case of measles with a high number of community exposers was confirmed in Christian County.

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Aug 13 • 6:23 PM EDT • Health • wsmv.com
Fort Smith water leak repairs up almost 57% in July

The number of water leaks the city of Fort Smith repaired in July rose 56.6% compared with June leak repairs, but the number of active leaks rose to 45 at...

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Aug 13 • 6:17 PM EDT • Business • talkbusiness.net
BREAKING: Netflix to shut down two more game studios

Netflix is sticking with video games but once again reducing the number of studios it owns making games. The streaming giant is closing Los Angeles-based Night School studio, which it acquired in 2021 and plans to close Helsinki-based Moonloot, which was founded in 2022. Just six weeks ago, Night School had released Unhinged, a novel 30-minute first-person horror game, streamable on TVs to Netflix users. The game was hailed by Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters in a call with investors. Six weeks later, Night School is closing. Prior to its Netflix tenure, Night School had developed the award-winning supernatural thriller Oxenfree. A second Oxenfree game followed after the purchase, as well as a mobile game designed to tie in to an episode of the Netflix show Black Mirror. Netflix attributed the studio closures to a prioritization around kids gaming, party games, story-driven fare and games with mainstream hooks, such as a recently released FIFA game. “We see an opportunity to be more focused in our execution, so we are making organizational changes to the business to match those priorities,” a Netflix spokesperson told Game File. Netflix is also cutting jobs from its internal games team. A rep declined to say how many jobs were being lost by these cutbacks. “We are incredibly grateful to the talented colleagues we’re saying goodbye to today. We thank them for all their contributions to Netflix, and wish them the best,” the rep said. Netflix started releasing video games, initially on mobile as a free bonus to subscribers, in 2021. By 2023, Mike Verdu, then the head of Netflix’s game operations, was telling me that the company was committed to growing carefully, as it offered more games and built up internal game studios. At the time, it hadn’t made any gaming job cuts. Since then, Netflix has altered its approach. In 2024, it shut down Team Blue, a start-up studio led by ex-Call of Duty and Halo developers that was exploring making a high-end first-person game for the service. Last October, Netflix shut down another studio, Boss Fight, shortly after Peters praised the team’s Squid Game game to investors. (One of Boss Fight’s main developers now works on the Netflix FIFA game for outside studio Delphi.) And in December, Netflix sold cozy game studio Spry Fox back to its founders. Amid all of this, Netflix has shifted from emphasizing mobile games to offering games through TVs and PCs, via streamed connections, with phones used as controllers. That’s how Night School’s Unhinged worked, along with games such as Boggle and Party Crashers that have collectively helped the Netflix game controller app chart well on mobile app stores. The studio cuts leave Netflix with a central gaming team that works with external developers, and a dedicated first party studio in, Helsinki-based Next Games, which produced many of the company’s couch-centric party games. The move away from having a roster of internal game studios aligns with Netflix’s own approach to shows and movies, which are largely produced externally. The company owns few TV/film production studios of its own. The gaming industry overall is seeing large holders of multiple studios cut back, with Sony, Ubisoft, Embracer, Microsoft and other giants closing or selling off studios. Cuts in California-based studios, where costs often run relatively high, have been particularly acute. Netflix has faced skepticism about its gaming plans for years. The moves today are likely to fuel them, and the company has few upcoming projects to counter the narrative. Among the few hinted, acclaimed independent studio Don’t Nod said last year it was working on a game tied to a major Netflix franchise.

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Aug 13 • 2:47 PM EDT • Technology • gamefile.news
The glue that binds a proton may be key to its identity

Gluons do more than hold protons together. They may also help define the proton’s identity through a quantum property called baryon number.

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Aug 13 • 2:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencenews.org
3 Entrepreneurs Want to Be Chicago’s Next Mayor. Each Has a Different Plan for the City

With the next mayoral election less than a year away, a number of well-known founders and business leaders have entered the race to lead the Windy City.

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Aug 13 • 1:04 PM EDT • Business • inc.com
Scientists uncover new clue to how protons maintain their identity

New results from the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) suggest that gluons, the gluelike particles that hold quarks together inside protons, play a central role in the conservation of baryon number, an essential part of a particle’s quantum identity.

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Aug 13 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • news.rice.edu
Single Powerball ticket sold in Illinois wins $1.04 billion jackpot, eighth-largest in US history

Wednesday's Powerball drawing produced a single Illinois winner who matched all six numbers to claim the $1.040 billion jackpot, eighth-largest ever.

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Aug 13 • 1:14 AM EDT • Business • foxbusiness.com
Hospitals chipping away at maternal mortality one birth at a time

If you could help break the silence around the nation’s maternal mortality crisis for something like 1 cent per message, wouldn’t you make the spend? If so, know that a growing number of hospitals has already laid the groundwork.

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Aug 12 • 11:29 PM EDT • Health • healthexec.com
How Nevada made big strides to keep kids with behavioral health issues out of institutions

Four years ago, the federal government found the state was sending too many kids out of state for treatment. That number has been cut by more than half.

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Aug 12 • 10:00 PM EDT • Health • thenevadaindependent.com
Ex-Dolphins Quarterback Receives Crushing News Before Preseason Game

Over the past few seasons, the Miami Dolphins have had to rely on a large number of quarterbacks. That has been primarily due to the health situation of former quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, who was only able to play the entire regular season once with the Dolphins.For both Tagovailoa and the Dolphins, it was unfortunate, as […] The post Ex-Dolphins Quarterback Receives Crushing News Before Preseason Game appeared first on HEAVY.

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Aug 12 • 5:59 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
The Tyrone Taylor trade by the numbers

The Cubs added a right-handed platoon bat at the trade deadline

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Aug 12 • 2:00 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
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In Good Health: Why Measles Numbers Are On The Rise

Nationwide, students, teachers, and parents are gearing up for the school year.And measles is spreading. The U.S. has already logged more cases this year than in all of 2025. It’s the highest count in 35 years. That’s in large part because measles vaccination rates have slipped below 95 percent – the threshold public health experts say is needed to stop community spread. Last week on CNN, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said children should be vaccinated for measles after being pressed on-camera, even as he used the same interview to push a debunked claim about respiratory syncytial virus. And on Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at upending the childhood vaccine schedule, including changes to the measles vaccine and others. But what will actually change at the doctor’s office?Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.

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Aug 12 • 1:21 PM EDT • Health • npr.org
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Fans Try To Decipher The Elder Scrolls VI’s Censored Subtitle

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma just played 'The Elder Scrols VI' and both she and Bethesda are censoring its subtitle with a specific number of letters.

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Aug 12 • 12:34 PM EDT • Technology • forbes.com
Pixel Watch 5 gets Gemini Intelligence, At a Glance, and more

Gemini Intelligence comes to Wear OS with the Pixel Watch 5, and there are a number of interesting AI and on-device features.

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Aug 12 • 10:20 AM EDT • Technology • 9to5google.com
US Employers Abandon Group Health Insurance as Price Hikes Bite

As US employers brace for the largest price hikes on employee health plans in 15 years, a growing number are opting out of group insurance altogether.

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Aug 12 • 9:28 AM EDT • Health • bloomberg.com
Madison Square Garden Entertainment (MSGE) Reports Q4 Loss, Tops Revenue Estimates

MSG Entertainment (MSGE) delivered earnings and revenue surprises of +69.05% and +17.68%, respectively, for the quarter ended June 2026. Do the numbers hold clues to what lies ahead for the stock?

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Aug 12 • 8:40 AM EDT • Entertainment • finance.yahoo.com
Arizona's wild horses deserve science, not assumptions

Arizona is reducing its wild horse herds toward targets set without real science. Officials should prove the numbers before removing more.

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Aug 12 • 8:01 AM EDT • Science • azcentral.com
This week in Santa Cruz County business: Workbench files pre-application for new housing on site of Seabright business plaza; Joby makes moves in Texas

In her weekly look at local business, Jessica M. Pasko reports on a proposed six-story mixed-use development in Santa Cruz, Joby Aviation's latest maneuvers and names, numbers and dates to know.

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Aug 12 • 6:45 AM EDT • Business • lookout.co
The Weekly Bobbins: Will This Season Be The One?

For Bobbins, a number of factors mean this probably won’t be Reading’s year for promotion.

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Aug 12 • 3:14 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
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Sharp HealthCare announces restructuring that will impact about 260 workers

Number includes 120 behavioral health workers who will be offered jobs on different shifts to comply with new state law

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Aug 11 • 8:34 PM EDT • Health • sandiegouniontribune.com
As Candida auris spreads, UT Health San Antonio scientist highlights growing threat of antifungal resistance

Life-threatening fungus now in 27 states; Texas with second-most clinical cases Contact: Steven Lee, (210) 450-3823, lees22@uthscsa.edu Content provided by Claire Kowalick SAN ANTONIO, Aug. 11, 2026 – As cases of the potentially deadly drug-resistant fungal infection Candida auris have spread to 27 states, including Texas with the second-highest number, a scientist at UT Health […]

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Aug 11 • 2:34 PM EDT • Health • news.uthscsa.edu
Oklahoma Health Department reports 506 cyclosporiasis cases statewide

The Oklahoma State Department of Health has updated the cyclosporiasis numbers in Oklahoma, with 496 confirmed cases and 10 probable cases as of Tuesday, Aug. 1

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Aug 11 • 1:01 PM EDT • Health • okcfox.com
Dem governor booed at Virginia Old Fiddlers' Convention

Video shows Virginia Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger greeted by loud boos at the Old Fiddlers' Convention in Galax amid sagging poll numbers.

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Aug 11 • 11:58 AM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com
Health Facts vs. Myths: Detoxing, Water Intake, Steps, More

NBC’s medical contributor Dr. John Torres joins TODAY to sort out fact from common medical myths. He also shares his advice for navigating produce shopping amid the rising numbers of recalls, which include buying locally and staying up to date with CDC and FDA guidelines.

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Aug 11 • 9:34 AM EDT • Health • today.com
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The U.S. Healthcare System is Already Mostly Socialized

Now that Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the outcome of this crucial race will depend mainly on two things: Whether Republicans succeed in demonizing El-Sayed because he’s brown and a Muslim, and whether they succeed in demonizing him as a left-wing radical. I will defer for the now the question of whether bigotry will be effective this year, although I will address it another day. What I want to address instead is El-Sayed’s signature issue — healthcare. Yes, El-Sayed advocates Medicare for All, a position the usual suspects denounce as “socialism.” I will get to the politics of his stance soon. Today, however, I want to talk about the substance. We should be clear that El-Sayed doesn’t even call himself a socialist. On the contrary, he explicitly disavows the label, saying “I’m a capitalist who just knows about capitalism”. In fact, as I explained in a previous post, the policies that El-Sayed advocates qualify him as a social democrat, not a socialist. Still, El-Sayed advocates a system under which the government would pay almost all medical expenses. Isn’t that socialism? Well, if that is the criterion then much of U.S. healthcare is already socialist. In fact, the government’s role is so large that U.S. healthcare is better described as partially privatized socialism than as anything resembling a free market. Let’s start with the raw numbers on health insurance, which pays the bulk of Americans’ medical expenses. Americans receive health insurance either from private companies or from public programs, overwhelmingly Medicare and Medicaid. Here’s what the breakdown of coverage and spending between private and public looked like in 2024: While a majority of Americans with health insurance get it from private companies, well over 100 million of us are covered by government programs instead. And these government programs pay more total dollars for medical bills than the private insurers do. Why do government programs that cover a minority of the population account for a majority of health insurers’ outlays? Mainly because Medicare covers seniors, and we’re expensive. Also, while Medicaid covers many younger Americans, disabled and elderly beneficiaries account for most of its spending. Even by the raw numbers, then, U.S. health insurance looks as much public as private. But that understates the government’s role: Private health insurance in the U.S. is both highly regulated and heavily subsidized. This is obviously true for the insurance coverage purchased by tens of millions of Americans through the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. But employment-based health insurance, which covers 161 million Americans, is far more of a government creation than most people realize. For employment-based insurance exists largely because of huge implicit government subsidies that come with major strings attached. Here’s how that works. If your employer pays you $10,000, that’s taxable income. But if your employer pays $10,000 toward a company health insurance plan that meets certain criteria, it isn’t taxable. That’s a huge effective subsidy, running at more than $300 billion a year. Take that subsidy into account, along with the more than $100 billion per year spent subsidizing policies purchased under the ACA, as well as the outlays on Medicare and Medicaid, and net effect is that the government pays for more than two-thirds of Americans’ health insurance. Granted, there are strings attached. Roughly speaking, employment-based health plans can’t discriminate based on medical history — that is, they can’t deny coverage to employees with pre-existing conditions — and they also can’t offer the plans only to highly compensated employees — a health plan that is only for the C-suite is considered taxable income. So given the restrictions of the federal tax code, employer-based health insurance is a lot like Obamacare, which also prohibits discrimination based on medical history and provides subsidies to make insurance affordable to lower-paid workers. The fact is that virtually all of private healthcare insurance is already well under some form of government control through regulation and tax subsidies. How should we think about this system? First of all, is Medicare socialist? Don’t tell anyone, but the way Medicare operates — it covers every senior’s medical expenses, whatever they turn out to be, while being funded by taxes that depend on one’s income — could be summarized by the old Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And back in 1961, when Ronald Reagan was the face of a last-ditch effort by the American Medical Association to block the creation of Medicare, he denounced Medicare as “socialized medicine” and warned that it would destroy our freedom. In reality, American freedom survived until Jan. 20, 2025, while Medicare is immensely popular, with an 82 percent favorable rating in the most recent KFF survey. Medicaid, government health insurance for lower-income Americans, comes in at 73 percent. This is in sharp contrast to public views about private insurers, who are widely disliked if not hated and accused of denying essential care. Furthermore, if Medicare is socialism, then the whole U.S. health insurance system, with the government paying most of the bills and placing conditions on private insurers, is almost equally socialist. If you insist on calling any program the government pays for and regulates socialist, then U.S. healthcare would best be described as a partially privatized form of socialism. And one must ask, what is the point of the part that is privatized? Do private insurers add anything positive? Or are they simply parasites, skimming off money that could have been paying for care? The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare. Assessing the waste from employer-based insurance is harder, but most evidence suggests that private insurers have substantially higher administrative costs than Medicare does. Furthermore, the complexity of private insurance, with multiple payers all trying to deny care when they can, is a huge burden both on providers — doctors, nurses, and hospitals — and on patients. What do private insurers offer to compensate for these costs? One must go through intellectual contortions to avoid the conclusion that they are, in fact, parasites. Which brings me back to El-Sayed. In supporting Medicare for All, he’s basically calling for an end to the partial, parasitic privatization of a healthcare system that is already hugely dependent on public funding. When one looks at it that way, it’s not at all a radical proposal. Admittedly, the political lift requires overcoming the opposition to higher taxes to pay for Medicare for All. Political realism rather than economics was the reason I and many other progressives supported Obamacare, with all its complexities, rather than demanding an immediate move to Medicare for All. But the political calculus may very well have shifted since the 2000s, as Americans are fed up with a system of unaffordable premiums, rampant claim denials, and byzantine claim administration. Moreover, funding healthcare insurance through taxation would allow for a much more progressive distribution of the cost. That is, compared to the present system, middle-income households would pay less as high-income households would pay more. And the U.S. would stop wasting large sums on pointless administrative costs. So let’s be clear: El-Sayed’s healthcare platform is perfectly reasonable on the merits of cost, fairness and health efficacy. And with private insurers never more hated, while millions of Americans are losing their health insurance, 2026 may be its time. MUSICAL CODA

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Aug 11 • 6:33 AM EDT • Health • paulkrugman.substack.com
49ers Injuries Continue to Mount as Training Camp Rolls On

The San Francisco 49ers are hoping their growing list of training camp injuries is nothing more than a temporary setback, but the number of players missing practice continues to be a concern as the regular season gets closer. The latest names to miss practice are two of the biggest stars on the roster. Running back…

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Aug 10 • 10:30 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
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Trump order aims to cut number of diseases all children should be vaccinated against from 18 to 11

The order reaffirms the dramatic overhaul to the vaccine schedule that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced earlier this year. Those changes have been blocked in court.

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Aug 10 • 3:44 PM EDT • Health • nbcnews.com
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Bluesky now lets you hide reposts from that annoying person you follow

You can also turn on post numbers for threads.

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Aug 10 • 3:26 PM EDT • Technology • theverge.com
AbCellera women’s health data top ‘most aggressive upside scenario,’ putting Astellas and Bayer on notice

AbCellera has reported phase 2 results “beyond even the most aggressive upside scenario” that its CEO dared to consider, boosting the biotech’s chances of challenging Astellas and Bayer for a women’s health market. The phase 2 clinical trial compared ABCL635, an antibody targeting NK3R, to placebo in patients with hot flashes caused by menopause. Investigators enrolled 92 postmenopausal women experiencing a mean of about 10 moderate or severe hot flashes per day. By Week 4, the number of moderate or severe hot flashes had fallen by a mean of 8.8 on ABCL635 and by 3.5 on placebo. That statistically significant, placebo-adjusted reduction of 5.3 hit the trial’s primary endpoint. The level of efficacy also cleared the bar set by existing drugs. While cross-trial comparisons can be misleading, AbCellera CEO Carl Hansen, Ph.D., had seen enough to start hyping the program. “We now view ABCL635 as a potential best-in-class non-hormonal therapy with strong differentiation against approved NK3R competitors across all important dimensions, including efficacy, safety, dosing and convenience,” Hansen said on a Monday morning conference call with investors to discuss the data. “We believe ABCL635 is now a highly de-risked program.” Last week, Hansen used AbCellera’s earnings call to set expectations for readout, with the CEO defining success as a clean safety profile and efficacy comparable to the two approved small molecules. The data vaulted over that bar. Astellas linked (PDF) one of the small molecules, Veozah, to placebo-adjusted reductions in hot flash frequency of 2.1 and 2.6 at Week 4 of its two phase 3 trials. Bayer reported (PDF) placebo-adjusted reductions of 3.04 and 3.29 at Week 4 of pivotal studies for its small molecule, Lynkuet. At 5.3, the placebo-adjusted reduction in AbCellera’s trial comfortably cleared the standard set by the incumbents. Veozah and Lynkuet came to market based on evidence of their ability to reduce the frequency and severity of hot flashes. AbCellera’s phase 2 study covered both endpoints, with the Canadian biotech reporting a mean reduction in severity of 1.4 points at Week 4 on ABCL635, compared to 0.3 points for placebo. Again, the placebo-adjusted result compares favorably to data on Veozah and Lynkuet. Analysts shared Hansen’s enthusiasm for the data. The phase 2 results “firmly validate ABCL635 as a potentially best-in-class treatment,” BMO Capital Markets analysts said in a note to investors Monday. ABCL635’s apparent efficacy edge “is likely attributable to the higher dosing/target engagement the asset is able to reach vs. the oral agents due to its wider therapeutic index,” the analysts added. The analysts, who model $2.3 billion in unadjusted peak sales for ABCL635, flagged the safety profile as another positive of the phase 2 readout. While Veozah carries a boxed warning for liver damage, nobody on ABCL635 in the phase 2 trial had elevated liver enzymes or bilirubin values. If replicated in phase 3, the lack of a liver signal could allow approval without the monitoring requirements imposed on Veozah. Investors appeared equally enthused, sending AbCellera's stock up 32% to $9.21 in premarket trading Monday from a Friday closing price of $6.93. Next, AbCellera will collect the Week 12 data and talk to its advisors about further development. The results open up “a wide variety of possibilities of how we might take this forward into phase 3 studies to truly maximize the value of the asset and make sure that ABCL635 is able to demonstrate its differentiation potential,” Sarah Noonberg, M.D., Ph.D., AbCellera’s chief medical officer, told investors.

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Aug 10 • 8:24 AM EDT • Health • fiercebiotech.com
The AI Slop Backlash Is Actually Having an Impact

Platforms are finally recognizing that people don’t want to consume AI slop. A growing number of sites and apps now have tools and policies to flag, label, and ban AI-generated content.

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Aug 10 • 7:30 AM EDT • Technology • wired.com
Wisconsin health providers worry new Medicaid work requirement hurts doctor-patient relationship

The new rule, which was included in Republicans' "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" last year, provides exemptions for a number of groups, including people who are pregnant, have children under age 19 who live with them and people with a recognized disability.

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Aug 10 • 6:00 AM EDT • Health • wpr.org
Private Equity Is Stuck With 33,575 Unsold Businesses

Even amid a booming deal-making environment, private equity firms are unable to exit a growing number of investments at values their investors require.

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Aug 10 • 5:01 AM EDT • Business • nytimes.com
Public health alert for various meat and poultry products containing recalled jalapeños

Products distributed across a number of states, including one product in Florida, could be contaminated with salmonella.

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Aug 9 • 9:07 AM EDT • Health • wgcu.org
Steelers rookie Riley Nowakowski ‘trying to earn trust’ in expected special teams role

Riley Nowakowski has heard this one before. Number 37? Was that your choice? Is there a special meaning? Yes, the Steelers rookie fullback knows it’s...

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Aug 9 • 4:00 AM EDT • Sports • post-gazette.com
Sabalenka and Norrie exit Canadian Open in last 16

World number one Aryna Sabalenka suffers a surprise defeat at the Canadian Open, while Britain's Cameron Norrie also bows out in the last 16 in Toronto.

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Aug 9 • 2:54 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Top-ranked Sabalenka, Pegula stunned in Toronto fourth round

World number one Aryna Sabalenka and Jessica Pegula were both upset in fourth-round matches on Saturday at the Toronto Masters.Russian 15th seed Shnaider upset world number three Pegula 6-3, 6-3 to book a last-eight date with Poland's Iga Swiatek.

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Aug 8 • 11:49 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
World number one Sabalenka ousted in Toronto by Alexandrova

World number one Aryna Sabalenka was eliminated by Russian 16th seed Ekaterina Alexandrova on Saturday in a fourth-round match at the WTA Toronto Masters tournament.Sabalenka, who will seek her third consecutive US Open title next month, fell to 5-5 in her career WTA rivalry with Alexandrova, who will face either American eighth seed Amanda Anisimova or Ukraine's ninth-seeded Elina Svitolina in the quarter-finals.

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Aug 8 • 10:09 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Md. health officials report record-breaking 50 heat-related deaths this summer

The number of heat-related deaths soared in July, with 43 deaths reported just last month, according to a Wednesday update to the state’s weather-related illness dashboard.

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Aug 8 • 7:26 PM EDT • Health • wtop.com
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How do Alaska animals sleep in the summer?

The way an animal sleeps during the Arctic summer depends on a number of factors.

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Aug 8 • 4:24 PM EDT • Science • adn.com
Indiana Fever have a Lexie Hull problem to deal with

Lexie Hull’s 2026 numbers have raised an interesting question for the Indiana Fever.

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Aug 8 • 2:55 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Cruisin’ the Coast turns 30 with new events, expanded entertainment

Cruisin’ the Coast marks its 30th anniversary this October with new events, expanded entertainment and a projected record number of vehicles along the South Mississippi coast.

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Aug 7 • 7:36 PM EDT • Entertainment • wlbt.com
Liverpool Signs FC Barcelona Defender Ronald Araujo In Shock Transfer

Liverpool has signed FC Barcelona defender Ronald Araujo according to a number of leading transfer market experts.

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Aug 7 • 5:39 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
iOS 26 Gets First Jailbreak Thanks to Dopamine

After 326 days, iOS 26 has received its first jailbreak, thanks to the developers behind the popular Dopamine jailbreak. Lars Fröder, better known as opa334, today released Dopamine 3.0, which adds support for a number of newer firmware versions, including iOS 26.0 and iOS 26.0.1 on devices with A12 or A13 chips.

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Aug 7 • 4:56 PM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com
Why Take-Two Won’t Share ‘Unprecedented’ ‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ Pre-Order Numbers

CEO Strauss Zelnick says he doesn’t want to mislead shareholders

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Aug 7 • 1:00 PM EDT • Technology • bloomberg.com
Take-Two Boss Explains Why GTA 6 Is $80 And NBA 2K27 Is $70

'Given the hype around this title, I think we could have made any number of other pricing choices,' said Strauss Zelnick

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Aug 7 • 9:34 AM EDT • Technology • kotaku.com
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Release Date, T-Mobile Free Phone Deals, Price

Fresh off its silver screen debut and record-breaking pre-order numbers, the buzzy new device is coming to T-Mobile customers at no cost. Here's how to claim the carrier's best phone deal to date.

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Aug 6 • 11:00 PM EDT • Technology • hollywoodreporter.com
Ranking every position group on the Ravens’ 2026 roster

The Baltimore Ravens filled out their roster this offseason with a number of notable additions in the draft and free agency. Now, with the 2026 season fast approaching next month, position groups will be finalized across training camp and preseason action over the next few weeks. Which of the team’s position groups are the strongest? […]

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Aug 6 • 8:37 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
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California's cyclosporiasis cases are 'higher than expected,' but officials aren't sure why

There are no known cyclosporiasis outbreaks in California, but officials say case numbers are higher than they expected for this point in the season.

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Aug 6 • 5:50 PM EDT • Health • latimes.com
WATCH: Trump signs executive orders imposing new limits on birthright citizenship

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he is once more trying to limit the number of people who are born in the country who can become American citizens, in a sign that even after his first attempt at limiting birthright citizenship was rejected by the Supreme Court, he's ready to try again.

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Aug 6 • 5:41 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org
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OpenAI and four rivals just agreed on one standard for AI agents

OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft, Cursor and Vercel launched Agent Plugins, an open standard letting an agent extension run across ChatGPT, Copilot and more.

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Aug 6 • 2:00 PM EDT • Technology • thenextweb.com
Safe to eat lettuce like normal as statewide cyclosporiasis numbers dwindle, health officials say

Health officials on Thursday said it’s safe for residents to return to typical food safety guidance as statewide cyclosporiasis numbers continue to decline.

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Aug 6 • 1:29 PM EDT • Health • wlns.com
PENN Entertainment (PENN) Tops Q2 Earnings and Revenue Estimates

PENN Entertainment (PENN) delivered earnings and revenue surprises of +25.71% and +0.06%, respectively, for the quarter ended June 2026. Do the numbers hold clues to what lies ahead for the stock?

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Aug 6 • 9:50 AM EDT • Entertainment • finance.yahoo.com
PENN Entertainment (PENN) Reports Q2 Earnings: What Key Metrics Have to Say

The headline numbers for PENN Entertainment (PENN) give insight into how the company performed in the quarter ended June 2026, but it may be worthwhile to compare some of its key metrics to Wall Street estimates and the year-ago actuals.

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Aug 6 • 9:30 AM EDT • Entertainment • finance.yahoo.com
Ask Maps in Google Maps rolling out Personal Intelligence, real-time transit, global launch

The Gemini-powered Ask Maps chat in Google Maps is getting a number of big updates today, including a global launch.

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Aug 6 • 8:30 AM EDT • Technology • 9to5google.com
US Stand Up for Science movement expands to Europe

A grassroots movement by scientists in the US pushing back against threats to academic freedom is setting up a Swiss outpost to take the movement global. Stand Up for Science started in February 2025 to protest against politically-motivated grant cancellations by the Trump administration. Since then, it has organised numerous rallies by scientists and turned into a broader campaigning organisation, supporting “pro-science” political candidates and attempting to impeach Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary the group accuses of advancing “quack” science. Now, Stand Up for Science is establishing a Swiss office to take some of its campaigning beyond the US, and its leader is urging European academics to organise similar pro-science groups in case they face similar threats in Europe. There will likely be “spillover” to Europe from what the Trump administration is attempting in the US, said Colette Delawalla, chief executive of Stand Up for Science, who last month returned from a tour of Europe. “Are we going to see a Trump-style scientific [. . .] take over in the same way?” she asked.Delawalla, who is doing a PhD in clinical psychology, said she was driven to help found the organisation after the Trump administration started cancelling health research grants in politically taboo topics, such as transgender people, diversity and HIV, in early 2025. Since then, the administration has introduced several other measures that infringe academic and institutional autonomy.It threatened to cut Harvard University’s federal funding unless the university accepted a “critical mass” of new faculty and students to create “viewpoint diversity.” And this year, it proposed explosive new rules that would allow political appointees at research funders to screen grants to make sure they “advance the president's policy priorities.”US scientists have been at times stunned by the volume of announcements, and the country’s researchers were relatively unprepared. “We sit in front of the fire hose every day,” said Delawalla. For this reason, European scientists need to prepare now for similar assaults. “If you've got a little bit of extra time to start thinking through, and making those preparations and building community and solidarity,” then European researchers will “start five steps ahead of where we were.” She plans to return to Paris in September to share experiences with concerned French academics. Is Le Pen the same?During her European tour, Delawalla said that French academics were beginning to worry about a National Rally (RN) victory in presidential elections next year. She said there were “chilling similarities” between Trump and Marine Le Pen, the RN’s likely candidate. However, so far, the RN hasn’t proposed anything nearly as radical as the Trump administration has carried out. Its current manifesto is all but silent on university and research policy. Le Pen’s 2022 manifesto bemoaned a lack of French R&D spending, including in fundamental research, and promised to modernise labs and strip away grant bureaucracy. The party’s 2024 European election manifesto explicitly supported the Erasmus+ student exchange programme, scientific exchange and joint European technology projects. However, a Le Pen victory next year could see France drastically cut its contribution to the EU, which would hit the budget for science and innovation. Meanwhile, more restrictive immigration policies could hit university recruitment of faculty and students. Climate science denial?As heatwaves and wildfires have ravaged France, the RN has sought to distance itself from previous comments casting doubt on climate science.In the UK, the radical-right party Reform UK, now second in the polls, denied climate research in a draft of its 2024 election manifesto, but its leader, Nigel Farage, then appeared to quietly U-turn and said he was “not arguing the science.” By contrast, Trump has repeatedly and explicitly denied climate change science, in 2025 calling it “the greatest con job.” Like the RN, Reform UK has been light on research and university policy. However, it did say in its 2024 manifesto that universities should suffer “heavy financial penalties” for allowing “political bias or cancel culture” on campus, building on laws brought in by a previous Conservative government. Ahead of September state elections in Saxony-Anhalt in Germany, the poll-leading Alternative for Germany has proposed abolishing gender studies and postcolonial studies, and promised money for “critical” climate research and studies of Islam. Starts with rhetoricEven if European radical right parties aren’t currently planning the draconian policy measures of the Trump administration, Delawalla said that academics should not be complacent, and fight even small funding restrictions or anti-science talk from the start. “It starts off with sowing distrust about institutions,” she said. “It starts off with these small things, and then all of a sudden it's there.” There are other, more established science and university advocacy groups in the US aside from Stand Up for Science. But the group stands out because of Delawalla’s refusal to attempt to appear politically bipartisan or conciliatory. “I firmly believe that the US is experiencing fascism,” she said. “We’re not trying to win over the super Maga people,” she said, “and we never have been.” The lesson of the US is that even if universities or other institutions capitulate to government demands, this doesn’t save them from cuts and restrictions. “It doesn’t matter what people do,” she said. Global “pseudoscience”Another aim of Stand Up for Science’s push into Europe is to better coordinate a campaign to protect people in poorer countries from what the group describes as “pseudoscientific exploitation,” trials outside the US used to build a case against things like vaccines. Earlier this year, the group sent an investigator to Guinea-Bissau to investigate a controversial, Danish-run Hepatitis B vaccine project funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The study would have withheld a proven vaccine from newborns, Stand Up for Science argued in a briefing it presented to Congress, risking their health. Significantly, the research group based in Guinea-Bissau, known as Bandim, focuses on the “non-specific effects” of vaccines: impacts on health beyond preventing the target disease. Related articlesEuropean researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationData corner: which fields of health science is the US curbing? The US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to know The suspicion is that the study was funded as part of an attempt to shop around for results that could help build a case against vaccines in the US, said Delawalla. “This is just code for vaccines cause autism,” she said.Bandim has put out a rebuttal of Stand Up for Science’s criticisms, arguing its work has uncovered a number of vaccine side effects, both positive and negative, which need to be taken into account in public health. However, Congressional Democrats took up the Stand Up for Science cause, and in February, Guinea-Bissau said it had permanently halted the study. WatchdogBut for Delawalla, this is not the end of the fight. Kennedy has made a number of health claims that scientists think lack evidence, such as the idea that seed oils cause inflammation, for example. Delawalla worries that more studies could be launched in poorer countries to fish around for evidence to support this agenda. Stand Up for Science is talking to African science organisations to create a kind of “watchdog” to scrutinise any further trials. “Outsourcing the investigation to some of the most vulnerable children in the world who are desperate [. . .] is fundamentally wrong,” she said.

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Aug 6 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencebusiness.net
Global business travel spending to hit record $1.71T in 2026: GBTA

Although business travel spending is increasing, the number of trips is growing at a slower rate, indicating corporate travel is becoming more selective.

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Aug 6 • 5:22 AM EDT • Business • hoteldive.com
Halo Studios hit by layoffs after release of Halo: Campaign Evolved

An unconfirmed number of developers have been let go from Halo Studios just over a week since Campaign Evolved's release.

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Aug 6 • 5:08 AM EDT • Technology • eurogamer.net
Halo Studios is the latest Xbox Games Studio to be hit by layoffs just days after Campaign Evolved launch, as reports reveal "troubled" development

A number of developers previously employed at Halo Studios have posted on LinkedIn confirming layoffs at the studio.

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Aug 5 • 6:49 PM EDT • Technology • windowscentral.com
Mass. health officials see uptick in cyclospora cases

The number of cyclospora cases in the state so far this year has increased to 147, the highest level of reports of the parasitic infection since 2019.

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Aug 5 • 1:33 PM EDT • Health • wgbh.org
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The Ocarina of Time and Star Fox Remakes Feel Like Overly Safe Bets From a Typically Bold Company – Has Nintendo Lost Its Creative Spark?

The Switch 2 is an iterative update console. The Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Star Fox remakes are safe bets with generic art styles. The Mario movies are by-the-numbers. Is Nintendo losing its soul?

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Aug 5 • 11:30 AM EDT • Technology • ign.com
Summit League unveils 2025-26 Commissioner's List of Academic Excellence

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – The Summit League released a list of more than 1,000 student-athletes named to the 2025-26 Commissioner’s List of Academic Excellence Thursday as that number grew by more than 50 from a season ago. The list includes student-athletes from the League’s 17 different sports.

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Aug 5 • 8:00 AM EDT • Sports • thesummitleague.org
Chartbook 464 The"China squeeze" - the politics of development counterfactuals.

There are three types of China shock discourse. Each has a distinct temporal register. China shock 1.0 was a phrase coined by US academics in the 2010s to retrospectively summarize the impact on particular US labour markets, which they identified through painstaking empirical investigation. China shock 2.0 on everyone’s lips in Europe in the mid 2020s is an alarm raised by trans-Atlantic policy thinkers warning of a coming disaster which they project onto Europe’s ailing car industry. The third type of China shock discourse - commonly known as the “China squeeze” launched most recently by Indian economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in the pages of Foreign Affairs - mobilizes a different, more speculative temporal register: the counterfactual realm of alternate history. The China squeeze argument asks not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what might have been. Specifically, what options for economic development might have been open to Global South economies like India or the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, had it not been for China’s spectacular industrialization since the late 1990s and the persistent competitiveness of China’s manufacture in low-skilled segments. Chatterjee and Subramanian’s argument is that whilst China has built a powerful position in electrical machinery and other high-skill manufacturing, which is now delivering China Shock 2.0, it also continues to run a trade surplus in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing. This surplus is large and has remained largely unchanged in fifteen years. Indeed, in the 2010s, in trade with low-income countries, China’s surplus rapidly increased. On their reading, this squeezes low-income producers in low-skill sectors in which they “should” be able to compete. Source: “China’s Mercantilist Squeeze on Developing Countries” Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. Peterson Institute for International Economics 26-7 May 2026 Chatterjee and Subramanian’s wording is telling: (emphasis mine) The canonical trajectory of economic development in the post-World War II period is for countries to transition from agriculture to manufacturing, first in low-skilled manufacturing and then later on to high-skill manufacturing (Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2013). At the global level, this implies that high-income countries (HICs) that once specialized in low-skilled activities cede manufacturing export space to poorer countries that come along to occupy that space. In 1965, advanced economies accounted for about 60 percent of global value-added exports in four key low-skilled manufacturing sectors, i.e., apparel, leather, textiles, and footwear. Over time this share declined and began to be occupied first by the East Asian tigers and, beginning in the late 1990s, by China. Today China accounts for about 50 percent of the global market. The question is whether China, with its rising prosperity, is continuing to behave like its richer counterparts and ceding export space to poorer followers or to behave unlike them and continuing to occupy space. In terms of the conceptual maneuvers it performs, of the three China shock discourses, the “China squeeze” argument is by far the most ambitious. After all, it bases its critique of China on a counterfactual imagining of the world. Like any counterfactual argument, to construct this alternative reality it must rely on a heuristic model. To make their argument Chatterjee and Subramanian mobilize two key claims. The first reference point is the actual history of rich-country industrialization, what they refer to as the “canonical path”. The idea is that countries transition from agriculture to light industry and low-skilled manufacturing and from there up the value chain. To make this useful as a standard of comparison and a means to construct a normative standard, they adjust sectoral export shares for two factors: 1. the underlying level of economic development of the exporting country, as measured by national income and 2. the degree to which the sector in question is internationalized. The idea being that for a high income country to have a high export share in low-skill sectors is anomalous and even more so if that particular product is highly internationalized and thus suitable for being “conceded” to lower-income competitors. Where should this process end? Here Chatterjee and Subramanian introduce their second benchmark. Their normative idea of a global development path is one in which, in due course, low-skill manufacturing exports are distributed in proportion to a country’s share in the global labour force. They imagine, in other words, a world of proportional, polycentric global development without much national specialization in low-skill manufacturing. A useful benchmark is that, in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, a country’s share of world exports should be broadly commensurate with its share of the world’s low-skilled labor endowment. … In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, this would be true if value added per worker and export propensities, i.e., fraction of output that is exported, are the same across countries. It is this pleasant liberal vista of orderly global development, progressing towards a general distribution of low-skilled manufacturing against which they judge reality and conclude that the low-income countries are suffering a “China squeeze”. China is not exiting low-skill sectors fast enough Allowing for its gdp level and the degree of globalization, China’s share of low-skill manufacturing exports is far higher than it “should” be. Relative to population, its low-skill share of exports is far too high. That in turn yields the conclusion that huge numbers of jobs - the authors suggest tens of millions - are being hoarded by China. For the four sectors captured in figure 4, this excess in value-added exports is $110 billion in 2022. For all low-skilled sectors overall captured in appendix figure D.1, excess value-added exports amount to $365 billion. The crowding out of LMIC exports by China is therefore substantial. Both these claims have in common that they are strong structuralisms. The first is that development paths ought to resemble each other. The second is that broadly speaking as far as low-skilled manufacturing is concerned, all countries are alike. If the world currently diverges from the distribution of trade implied by these assumptions, if China is not following the advanced economy path and has huge exports, this must be the result of “policy”, which the authors then put in question as illegitimate or unfair. Thus the naturalistic construction of a canonical path leading to a “level” distribution of low-skilled manufacturing reveals itself to be a polemical tool. From the point of view of China shock polemics, this discourse is no doubt welcome. But as an account of economic history, it must surely be regarded as nothing short of bamboozling. Development paths do not follow a regular, natural sequence. As David Fishman put it aptly, “development is not a queue”. They are always and everywhere, through and through political. Development is not so much a process, as a project. Each such project is more or less well adjusted to its context. As Gerschenkron taught uneven and combined development implies differentiation rather than simple imitation on a single parth. It may be true that Europe and the US exited relatively early from low-skill work. But clearly technology has changed. As C&S themselves point out, China no longer enjoys a low wage environment. Do they really believe that such huge differences can be accounted for either by industrial policy, which as they admit does not operate powerfully in low-skill sectors, or by exchange rate manipulation? What is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining the persistence of “low-skill” manufacturing in China are surely the network effects of complex supply chains. Indeed the label of “low-skill” may miss the point. The degree of globalization which Chatterjee and Subramanian decide to conjure away in their model of the development path - to allow for the fact that Europe and American textiles exporters did not enjoy just-in-time logistics in the 1950s - obscures the point that the networks through which Chinese factories supply the world are themselves key parts of the low-skill industrialization project. China isn’t knocking out 1970s style “cheap”. It has redefined the entire product cycle. C&S’s casual reference to “T-shirts” is telling. In today’s “fast fashion”, there is weight on both terms. Fashion and fast. China’s success in delivering on both at unprecedentedly high speed and at unprecedentedly low cost, isn’t a low-skill operation at all. If we see development trajectories not as the serial repetition of the same, but as distinctive, crafted projects that cumulate in complex agglomerations of skill, technology and labor, then this explains why the assumption that low-skilled manufacturing should follow the distribution of population flies in the face of all experience. As countless cases attest, low-wage, low-income developed economies are not by themselves the makings of a competitive production base. As Leon Liao puts it quite fairly: “International trade has never been allocated according to population. A country’s population gives it no natural claim to an equivalent share of global exports." And the remarkable fact is that Subramanian alone and with co-authors has long been making this point, not to pillory China, as is the case of the tendentious _Foreign Affair_s and Peterson pieces, but to highlight the great counterpart to China’s industrial success, namely India’s relative failure. The much-quoted Foreign Affairs piece showed low-skill export shares only for China, not for India. If you put both countries in the picture as Chaterjee and Subramanian have done on other occasions, the picture looks like this. China is far above the line, but India, almost as large in terms of population, is no less anomalous, just in the opposite direction. As far as global populations are concerned, and the imagining of tens of millions of “squeezed” jobs, it is this Sino-Indian pair that account for a huge share of the action. What this graph reveals is not China’s cheating, but India’s “greatest development failure”, at least this is the argument made Arvind Subramanian, this time in co-authorship with Devesh Kapur, in their major book, A Sixth of Humanity. Independent India’s Development Odyssey which appeared with Oxford University Press earlier this year. In this highly critical work on India’s development, China is repeatedly evoked, not to criticize but as a benchmark against which to illuminate what India’s political economy has not delivered i.e. large-scale formal employment for hundreds of millions of citizens. Kapur and Subramanian leave no doubt, if you want to understand why China, not India was the main driver of manufacturing globalization from the 1980s, don’t look to slots opening up in the division of labour thanks to the liberal mindedness of advanced economies, look to the contrasting political economy of the Maoist PRC and India’s post-independence political economy. As Kapur and Subramian note: The great divergence between China and India did not begin in 1978 with the Deng reforms—it was well underway by then. In one of the great ironies of modern history, the conditions created by Maoism turned out to be a great launching pad for industrial globalization. As the comparison of India and China in 1980 makes clear, to imagine manufacturing would be equally distributed when populations are so differently endowed in terms of educational and nutritional is fanciful. Here is the data from Kapur and Subramanian, data which I explored back at the very beginning of Chartbook. As Kapur and Subramanian insist, the striking fact is that even as India’s growth accelerated from the 1980s, structural change has not. Formal employment in India lags woefully behind. Why? As Kapur and Subramanian note, the path-dependent impact of India’s poor early start was devastating. The list of factors they mention is long and weighty: We argue for a new five-fold explanation applicable at different stages of Indian history: in the initial stages, the legacy of two key pre-1980s policies, the neglect of agriculture and the strangling of the domestic private sector, were critical. The failure of broad-based agricultural growth militated against rural industrialization, which would have been devoted to satisfying local needs that would have necessarily been labour intensive. Then, when the boom came after 1980, the thicket of regulation and broader labour protections that were legislated prematurely in a nascent democracy, underpinned by a deep ideological aversion to private capital in general and big capital specifically, became a barrier to attaining the size that would be necessary to compete globally. Similarly, the reforms after 1991, while wide-ranging, did not quite encompass non-tradeable inputs critical to manufacturing, namely, land, logistics infrastructure and power. A combination of low investment (logistics infrastructure), regulation (land) and the continued monopoly supply by state governments (power), combined with residual socialism, kept costs at 75–100 per cent above efficient supply. These factors were compounded on the supply side by the government, which dominated the formal labour market and established exorbitantly high wages at the lower end of the skill spectrum. This made their employment in the labour-intensive sector by the private sector less attractive. Finally, when the services sector and its exports boomed, wages soared even further via a Dutch Disease effect: one successful tradeable sector killed and cannibalized another less-skilled tradable sector, namely, manufacturing. Thus, scarcity-inducing policies of the planning era, precocious democracy and a Gandhian aversion to size; inefficient, monopolistic supply of critical non-tradable inputs; the behemoth of government; and super-successful skill-intensive services successively undermined India’s unskilled labour employment opportunities. The employment failure seems to have been over-determined. … Less quantifiable but no less important are some of the sociological factors that have undermined manufacturing and factory jobs. Take the impact of the success of the IT sector—located in urban areas with better working conditions, such as air-conditioned offices, good schools for children and attractive entertainment options. It became a more attractive place for engineering and management graduates to flock to. … Consider manufacturing and female employment. Indian society makes it difficult for women to work, reflected in India’s unusually low female labour force participation (elaborated in Chapter XIII). Indian society, in particular the routine harassment of women in public spaces, makes it even more difficult for them to travel long distances to take up work.37 Combined with onerous regulations on creating hostels and dormitories for women—which, in turn, prevents multiple shifts of operation—factories need to be located in areas with a large female labour pool. While firms can take apparel plants to female labour or bring them to the plants by building large-scale dormitories, this raises costs. If there was a case for subsidies to encourage labour-intensive manufacturing, housing subsidies to build dormitories for women workers would be a good place to start. All of this meant, that when opportunities did open up, in part thanks to adjustments in China, India was in no position to take advantage. Here is the account of the 2020s from Kapur and Subramanian. It stands in dizzying contrast to the one-sided, “China squeeze” argument delivered in the Peterson and Foreign Affairs pieces: In 2022, for example, India’s share of global exports in clothing (the canonical labour-intensive sector) was 3.1 per cent compared to 32 per cent for China. This is extremely disappointing because China started vacating export space in this sector after the Global Financial Crisis as its wages started rising; it then vacated further space in the aftermath of geopolitical developments that led investors to seek alternative investment locations. Between its peak and today, China lost about 7.5 percentage points of global export share (worth about $43 billion in 2022); over this period, India’s export share remained stagnant at 3 per cent, while that of Vietnam and Bangladesh rose by 3.5 to 4 percentage points. China’s loss did not translate into any gain for India in terms of low-skill exports and employment. Put differently, when the conditions for dynamism and prosperity were established after 1991, and even more tantalizingly when the global export opportunities opened up, it was as if India was a high-wage economy and only skilled labour could benefit from the dynamism. It had converted its physically abundant unskilled workforce into an economically expensive resource, penalizing its use. It is not my mission here to argue for or against Kapur and Subramanian’s interpretation of India’s development trajectory. The point in this context is simply that the “China squeeze” such as it is can only be understood, in relation to the heavy burden of domestic constraints that Kapur and Subramanian so unsparingly enumerate. I am concentrating here on India because it is the great counterpart to China and the unspoken reference point of the “China squeeze” discourse. But the point is more general. Can anyone with a straight face suggest that the main problems afflicting the development of South Africa or Nigeria, the great centers of mass underemployment in sub-saharan Africa, are cheap competition from China driven by Beijing’s industrial policy and an undervalued RMB? Likewise, is the main problem of the American working-class the threat of Chinese competition or the manifest crisis of social reproduction in the United States itself? The point here, as in the discourse around China shock 2.0 in Europe, is to insist that we should not normalize the world and pathologize China, without actually investigating what is going on in America’s industrial wastelands, the German car industry, or India’s lopsided labour market. One-sided pathologization should be understood for what it is, a polemical gesture. Concepts like China shock and China squeeze are, what Reinhart Koselleck, following Carl Schmitt, would have described as “asymmetrische Kampfbegriffe”, or “asymmetrical counter-concepts” or “asymmetrical combat concepts”. If the function of arguments like the “China squeeze” is to alert elites in the rest of the world of the need to rejuvenate and energize their development projects, so be it. But let us see the resulting discourses as the mobilizing interventions that they are. Interestingly, a significant slice of China’s public sphere - the so-called industrial party - have been obsessed for the last twenty years with precisely these questions of counterfactual economic history. Since the mid 2000s, a massive online discourse developed around an alternative history in which Chinese techno-patriots were asked to imagine how they would proceed if they had the possibility of traveling back in time to transport modern technology into the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) thus averting the “great divergence” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a fantasy of course, but also a goad. The point was not directed at Westerners. The alternate history is dramatically nationalist, but few n the West had even heard of it until recently. The adherents of the industrial party are not liberal moralists. They don’t project natural ladders of international development and ask why others don’t cede space. They take the Realpolitik of global economic development for granted. Their pointe was directed against fellow Chinese. The rallying cry of the alternative narrative was this: Now that we are beginning to gain steam and push forward on our national development path, now that we are breaking out of the inferior position assigned to us even in the early years following WTO accession, do not lose yourself in humanistic imaginings about better futures. In the spirit of Deng, they called on China to embrace the hard truth of development. Perhaps one might of the Industrial Party as a cultural trend born out of desire for symbolic revenge against those who had inflicted the century of humiliation. In terms of the various temporalities of the “China shock” - retrospective, prospective and counterfactual - one might think of the Industrial Policy discourse as truly speculative, conjuring up the China shock that never was. Or perhaps one might better think of it as imagining a world in which a powerful China was no shock at all, but simply a defining fact of modern history. I love putting out Chartbook. I am particularly pleased that it goes out for free to thousands of subscribers around the world. But, writing this newsletter takes a lot of work. If you are enjoying it and would like to support the project, sign up for one of the subscription options here. It is the equivalent of a fancy cup of coffee per month! Subscribe

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Aug 5 • 7:18 AM EDT • Politics • adamtooze.substack.com
This week in Santa Cruz County business: Volunteer Center names new director as longtime exec retires; new life ahead for Casalegno’s market

Shawn Peterson takes over for Karen Delaney at a powerhouse local nonprofit, a revival for a Soquel institution and names, numbers and dates to know – Jessica M. Pasko runs it all down in her weekly survey of Santa Cruz County business.

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Aug 5 • 6:00 AM EDT • Business • lookout.co
‘Your days are numbered’: DOJ, federal agencies target health care fraud, Medicaid schemers in Pennsylvania

Federal agencies and state partners announced criminal charges against 19 people who allegedly defrauded Medicaid with home health schemes.

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Aug 4 • 7:13 PM EDT • Health • whyy.org
Swiatek fends off Bejlek to reach Toronto third round

Former world number one Iga Swiatek survived some nervy moments to launch her US Open build-up with a 6-0, 6-3 victory over Sara Bejlek in her second-round opener at the Toronto WTA 1000 on Tuesday.World number one Aryna Sabalenka was due to open her campaign on Tuesday night with a second-round clash against Japanese qualifier Moyuka Uchijima.

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Aug 4 • 5:43 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Are automated CT exams on the way? Cardiologist shares concerns about radiation, regulation

Former SCCT president Ed Nicol, MD, knows there has been interest in the potential of automated CT exams. However, he isn't so sure they are possible at this point in time for a number of reasons.

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Aug 4 • 5:39 PM EDT • Business • cardiovascularbusiness.com
The Beauty Of Settled Science

Commenters convinced me I made a subtle mis-step in my framing of Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine. My framing emphasized that social priming studies had failed to replicate, but that many other subfields of psychology hadn’t. This naturally led commenters to point to failed replications in other subfields. Although none of these were as bad as social priming, few or none were entirely problem-free. Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have emphasized the difference between settled science and novel research. Here are some of my favorite psychology findings: The brain is sculpted by reinforcement learning, and a key driver of this learning is a prediction-error-based algorithm located in the nucleus accumbens and implemented through dopamine. Psychedelic drugs exert their effects through 5-HT2A receptors, pointing to a role for these receptors in some sort of construct like the balance between priors and new evidence. Certain cognitive functions are localized to certain brain areas (for example, impulse control to the frontal lobes; linguistic structure to Broca’s area, linguistic meaning to Wernicke’s area. But injure one of these areas, or render a certain function useless (eg a blind person having no more use for their visual cortex), and these mappings can gradually shift - suggesting that neurons are general-purpose compute whose specialization is a contingent fact about convenience and efficiency rather than a necessity. Most personality traits and general capabilities are about 50% genetic and 50% random, with little role for family environment or childhood history, with a few notable exceptions like partisan preference. Recent research complicates this story, but the further you go from this basic picture, the gnarlier the chains of indirect causation you require. Neurons fire together in “brain waves”, whose exact frequency corresponds with the character of consciousness; These divide neurons into natural subpopulations and linked graphs. The gamma rhythm corresponds surprisingly well to items in conscious awareness. GABA receptors seem to be involved in something like relaxation. By hitting different GABA receptors in different ways, you can modulate the exact type of relaxation you produce. Hitting GABA-A directly is too powerful and can cause dangerous levels of sedation, but allosteric modulation of GABA is an incredibly fruitful strategy that underlies drugs from benzos to barbituates to alcohol. If you know your GABA-A subunits, you can target specific subtypes of relaxation; for example, Ambien hits GABA-A1 and induces sleep. Memory divides somewhat fuzzily into bins of immediate-sensory, short-term, and long-term, with separate retrieval and storage functions, and separate systems for declarative vs. procedural learning. These can be harmed selectively, usually by hippocampal injury, so that some patients can remember their life stories but not form new long-term memories, or learn new skills like bike-riding but not new facts. The exact substrate of memory is unclear but seems to involve new synaptic connections between neurons in at least some way. The ability of modern psychology and psychiatry to treat mental illness is real but limited. SSRIs work for half or slightly fewer than half of patients; antipsychotics work with extreme side effects; benzodiazpines work but produce addiction and tolerance in many (not all) people. Most supplements are stuck in Poor Quality Study Replication Crisis Hell, but melatonin and l-theanine stand out as especially promising. Psychotherapy works with moderate effect size, but (with a few exceptions) seems to be more about the relationship with the provider than the details of the therapy itself. Mental hospitalization can sometimes defuse immediate crises but work less well than mental hospitals would like, with some studies showing overall negative effects. Schizophrenia is mostly genetic, but risk also increases with prenatal infection (especially rubella) and obstetric complications; there is suggestive evidence for roles of social stress and drug use (with psychedelics and marijuana making things worse, and nicotine if anything making things better). Bipolar and schizophrenia are so closely linked on a pathophysiological level that it seems like they might be the same disease; on the clinical level, they do seem to follow two separate courses/prognoses but can sometimes surprise clinicians by eg someone who seemed condemned to permanent schizophrenia unexpectedly recovering. The brain’s native reinforcement learning algorithms cash out in the phenomena of classical and operant conditioning; different reinforcement schedules reinforce at different levels, which can be exploited by bad actors to make especially compelling products (eg slot machines). None of these are immune to doubt. A few are speculative; one or two are genuinely unorthodox. But they’re all a step above one p = 0.049 paper that might not replicate. If they get overturned, they’ll be overturned by the same sort of genuine scientific shift that replaced Ptolemy with Copernicus or Lamarck with Darwin, not some sort of sordid discovery about someone entering random numbers into a spreadsheet. In 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about The Beauty Of Settled Science: If you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage. The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news. Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention. Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun. Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty [...] A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid. Psychology isn’t centrally the new paper in Annals Of Recently-Breaking News saying that an n=5 study showing that large portion sizes increase support for terrorism. Psychology is centrally ideas like brain waves, GABA receptors, reinforcement learning, twin studies, and connectionism. People who think differently are worrying too much about BREAKING NEWS!!!, and should stop. The key distinction isn’t “recent research in social psychology” vs. “recent research in cognitive/bio/behavioral psychology”, as my essay last week unfortunately implied. It’s recent research in general vs. the deposit of settled science, battle-tested hypotheses, and carefully-earmarked speculation. And part of the reason social priming in particular was such a disaster was that it defied that heuristic, building itself up over hundreds of studies until it approached or even entered the pantheon of settled science - before collapsing (5-HTTLPR was also sort of like this). This isn’t a claim that settled science is always right - Freud was “settled science” for a long time - just that there’s an intuitive distinction between the level of credence you should have in the existence of power posing vs. the existence of Broca’s Area. (I compounded this error by calling the last post “Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine”, which suggested I was talking about the new research rather than the settled science. I actually meant to distinguish between research-psychology-the-field vs. clinical-psychology-aka-therapy, but this framing unintentionally pushed against the point I wanted to make) Some commenters on the previous article understood this point, but challenged its weight. It’s very cool, they said, to know how many neurons are in which brain lobe, but the main way that Psychology affected their lives was through bad clickbait studies used to buttress dumb policies; some p = 0.049 study says that exposure to microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel into raisins, and now their company has to implement punitive DEI or be sued for hazardous work conditions. I won’t dispute this as an accurate description of how the sausage gets made, but it’s worth examining the trains of thought that connect this observation to a campaign against psychology in general: The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad, and I don’t have good heuristics for distinguishing dumb woke psychology from other psychology, so I’m going to assume it’s all wrong and bad. The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad; it seems useful to punish/discredit psychology as a whole to assist my campaign against it, so for propaganda purposes I will try to discredit psychology as a whole. To people in the first camp, my response is: come on, your heuristics aren’t that bad. “Microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel up like raisins” is in the woke category; “the hippocampal theta rhythm seems to be associated with both memory and pathfinding, suggesting an unexpected yet surprisingly compelling relationship between the two” is in the not-woke category, don’t play dumb here. To people in the second camp, my response is: deliberately exaggerated propaganda campaigns are bad and this is a confession, not an excuse. Inability to view science through anything but a political lens was what got us into this problem; doubling down on it is a temporary solution but a recipe for permanent disaster. If you pronounce entire fields of science to be acceptable collateral damage in your campaign against bad political actors, you will alienate not just scientists but patients, clinicians, and general lovers of truth. Instead, you can say the thing you mean - that woke partisans shouldn’t try to occupy and exploit the otherwise-noble science of psychology for their own political gain - and wage the same campaign with a halo rather than a comic-book-villain goatee. From the font of oracular wisdom that is Weird Sun Twitter: [ Vessel Of Spirit@VesselOfSpirit i love you all conditionally but i love the good part of you unconditionally. even if it becomes a very small part 2:11 AM · Jan 22, 2015 1 Reply · 5 Reposts · 29 Likes ](https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/558084551772471298) This is how I feel about psychology1, too, but with a touch more optimism. The good part of psychology is enormous, a hoard of endless treasures. You just have to look past the headlines! 1 To play devil’s advocate - should one always be so magnamious? Astrology? Phrenology? These seem different in that their entire orientation was flawed from the start; they didn’t simply fail to find the correct constellation-personality connections, the whole project of searching for connections between constellations and personality was doomed from the start. More difficult might be asking the same question about education research, which is notoriously bad. I don’t know enough about education research to know if there’s some settled science of correct and enlightening results lurking in the background beyond the day-to-day froth of poorly-conducted and politically-motivated studies. I think if it’s 90% bad, 10% good, it’s correct to call it bad as a compact way of communicating a useful truth; I think psychology is better than that, but admit it’s a tough judgment call.

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Aug 4 • 5:33 PM EDT • Science • astralcodexten.com
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Steam meme game made in days almost turns teen into a millionaire

Even after refunds, a surprising number of people kept the expensive game on Valve's platform

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Aug 4 • 4:10 PM EDT • Technology • polygon.com
Small business work hours grew in July

Growth in the number of weekly hours worked at small businesses hit its highest level in over five years last month, according to Paychex.

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Aug 4 • 1:49 PM EDT • Business • accountingtoday.com
MrBeast Sales Slow, Angel Stock Falls, MUBI and Neon Look for Hits, and Will an NBA Franchise Set a Sales Record?

(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) You probably remember egg prices spiking a few years ago. This led to a lot of debate between the pro-market/pro-competition/antitrust/Neo-Brandesian crowd and the center/center-right/center-left/abundance/libertarian crowd over the cause, whether it was the avian flu outbreak or whether industry consolidation led to price fixing, using avian flu as a convenient cover. Basel Musharbash wrote a whole investigation at BIG looking at it. Well, two years later, we have our answer: it was price fixing. The Justice Department found proof, via emails, of price fixing. Indeed, just the threat of an investigation brought prices down two years ago: I bring this up because at least half a dozen of my favorite political writers and pundits, who were skeptical about price fixing at the time, haven’t written any mea culpas on this issue. It’s really dispiriting and makes it much, much harder to trust their work on other issues. If you take a hard stand on an issue, then you get it wrong, you need to explain how and why you got it wrong. Or update your priors. This is how epistemological bubbles are formed! All of which is to say, it’s time for another installment of “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong”. Last issue, I mostly focused on the “wrong” side of the equation, so today’s is a bit more balanced, but with one big mea culpa (though I still stand by my original concerns). Let’s dive right in! Subscribe CORRECTION: UFC Didn’t Release Subscriber Data (But Seems to Have Bragged About It Internally) In my analysis of the viewership of UFC Freedom 250, I wrote... “Paramount has also released datecdotes bragging about their subscriber numbers. Earlier this year, they claimed that the first UFC fight on Paramount+ brought in 1 million subscribers.” Well, that datecdote did not come from a PR rep, but from great reporting from James Faris at Business Insider. The actual quote was this: “Paramount’s flagship streaming service generated about a million new subscribers on the day of its first-ever UFC event, Paramount product chief Dane Glasgow told employees in a town hall on Tuesday morning, three staffers who attended the meeting told Business Insider.“ This wasn’t the biggest goof in the world; even Faris emphasized to me that this is more a “clarification” than a correction. Still, it sounds like, internally, the folks at Paramount were very happy about this result—and I’m guessing they were happy with this news getting out—even though the gains didn’t last through the quarter, dropping to 700K adds. RIGHT: MrBeast’s Struggles Continue... I’m very skeptical about MrBeast’s burgeoning media “empire” and, in particular, its $5 billion valuation, as I wrote earlier this year and last year. Sure enough, according to Business Insider, regarding its “booming” consumer products division_:_ “US sales volume grew 13% year-over-year in 2025, following a 33% leap the previous year, according to a presentation deck dated May 2026....A February 2025 investor deck viewed by Business Insider showed Feastables’ net revenue more than doubled in 2024 from 2023, to $215 million, and was forecast to grow 74% in 2025, to $375 million.” [Emphasis mine.] If you told investors that you projected 74% growth but delivered 13%,1 that’s not ideal. But it’s not just MrBeast. Logan Paul and KSI’s Prime had sales drop in half for their energy drinks. It’s one thing to build a successful entertainment company and an entirely different thing to succeed in the heavily-consolidated-but-also-very-competitive consumer packaged goods space! CPGs are dominated by a few firms with very wide moats compared to YouTube, which has few barriers to entry. These businesses require different skill sets and have completely different business environments. WRONG: Does the NBA Have an $8 Billion Bidder? Almost as soon as I published my article about the NBA’s finances, casting skepticism on NBA expansion, I saw this Front Office Sports headline: One group “claims to have already raised $8 billion” for the Vegas expansion team. I mean, wow. That’s just $2 billion less than what the Los Angeles Lakers were valued at when they were sold just last year. And they’re arguably the most popular team in the NBA. (Side note: the new owner is now under an investigation for fraud in how he went about financing the Lakers and the Dodgers purchases.) So much for the “dried up” language I used in that article. (This is why I usually stick to my “Entertainment Nuance Guy” tone in articles...) I went off old information—from April, when I read/heard about the NBA downplaying expansion efforts—instead of doing a quick double-check for new news. That said...if you read the article, the market for Seattle is “slow”, with just one reported bidder. So I wasn’t entirely off. This goof has annoyed me since I first published it, mainly because it undercut that article’s real point, which I stand by: NBA franchises are really overvalued right now. Now, I get why NBA teams are overvalued. When it comes to owning sports teams, it’s basically never wrong to assume that some rich person somewhere will care more about owning a team (or just being part of a group since they’re so expensive) than the actual financials. There are only so many teams to own, and opportunities to buy in preferred markets don’t come along very often. This explains why the teams sell for such high multiples (usually above a 10 to 12.5 revenue multiple, which is very high). You only need one person to overpay! Beyond the ultra-wealthy luxury good explanation, I worry NBA teams are becoming speculative assets. More and more private equity investors are buying into NBA teams. But the value, in owning a team, comes from selling it later, not any meaningful relationship to revenue or profit growth. In other words, the newer NBA owners are increasingly expecting someone later to buy their inflated asset. That’s not sound economics; that’s the “greater fool” theory at work.2 At some point, actually making money has to matter. Especially since revenue growth is now below the growth of the stock market. (And this matters because the NBA doesn’t have easy levers to pull to drastically lower their costs—half of their revenue has to go to players and then you actually have to run a team, including coaching, training, travel, media expenses, and more—or raise revenues aside from one-off expansions in America and overseas.) I just don’t see how investors make their money back buying NBA teams, except for selling at a higher price later on down the line. But if revenue/profit growth continues to slow, at some point, someone will be left holding the bag. RIGHT: Baseball and Basketball are about equally popular. Related to the above, I wanted to cite two quick pieces of evidence for one of my other theories: that the NBA and MLB are about as popular as each other, but the NBA gets much, much better media coverage. One YouGov survey has that fans prefer basketball to baseball by 52% to 48%, which I’m guessing is within the margin of error for that poll. That’s virtually even, meaning they’re about the same popularity. Over on NBC, a recent Red Sox-Yankees game averaged 4 million viewers, higher than Sunday Night Basketball’s average of 3.4 million on the same network. A Yankees-Dodgers game averaged 3.9 million two weeks ago. Not every game averages this much, but it shows you that baseball isn’t far off from basketball, depending on the matchup. Altogether, the NBA is just slightly more popular than baseball, but NBC is paying MLB a fraction of what they pay the NBA, a point I’ve made before. RIGHT: Angel, MUBI and Neon Updates... I’ve long been skeptical about many of Hollywood’s buzziest startups/smaller indie studios. It’s not that they don’t make great movies—films like Anora and Everything Everywhere All at Once are amazing—or that they’re not (rightfully) pushing the majors to make better films, but...they get a ton of hype, and that hype often doesn’t live up to the reality or difficulty in scaling up. Starting with MUBI, well, The Wall Street Journal wrote a feature on MUBI’s struggles last April, best summarized by the subheader “After Sequoia valued Mubi at $1 billion, a left-wing revolt sent the indie film company into a tailspin”. MUBI lost $7.3 million on $200 million in revenue in Q4 2025, but reportedly hit a record 1.7 million subscribers at the end of Q1. As for Neon, Department M purchased a “significant stake” in the company earlier this year. How much is that “stake” worth? According to Deadline, “No financial figures for the Neon-Department M deal were disclosed.” So...that’s not great! If it was a big valuation, we’d hear about. Also, I found this curious: “Both Neon and Department M already have separate partnerships with Qatar. The Qatar Film Committee has a slate deal in place with the former, and a biopic production pact with the latter.” Color me skeptical about much Middle Eastern investment dollars. See: LIV Golf. Finally, as for Angel (formerly Angel Studios), their stock very, very slightly popped last month after Young Washington ($20 million budget) which made $45 million in the US, but their stock is still way down from its opening. Smaller Updates RIGHT: The WGA should focus on antitrust concerns! I’ve been on this for years. Post-WGA/AMTPT deal in 2023, I wrote an article for the Ankler calling on the WGA to focus and organize against industry consolidation. Sure enough, the WGA filed a lawsuit against the Paramount-WBD merger, and people are organizing around this issue now. I wish this energy had coalesced earlier (specifically to lobby Washington much earlier), but better late than never! WRONG: Actually, the chip shortage might be due to market manipulation. In my last “Long Reads for the Long Summer” article, I shared an article about how LLMs are causing memory chip prices to spike, which will make all electronics more expensive. Well, turns out, three RAM manufacturers control 90% of the market, and now a private lawsuit accuses them of price-fixing. So yeah. WRONG/UPDATE: The Odyssey will hold! Two weeks ago, I wrote, “As of this moment, we haven’t had a super-blockbuster, though The Odyssey, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday could all cross the $500 million mark. (At this point, The Odyssey would need a very strong hold to get there.)” Well, it’s safe to say it’s going to have that hold! It only dropped 30% in weekend two and IMAX screenings are sold out all month. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is also off to a great start. RIGHT: People are rushing to get shows out yearly. I’ve long been bullish on yearly, weekly-released shows, and Leslie Goldberg at The Ankler wrote about how many people in town are now listening. WRONG: Mark Carney reverses Canada’s stance on homegrown production. After writing about Canada installing domestic production quotas, Canada has backed off. WRONG: I don’t trust Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s online “views”. When I originally wrote about the latest Spider-Man film’s record-breaking trailer, I thought this was just YouTube views, but after watching this Corridor Crew video and doing more research, well, it’s all social views of the trailer globally. Really? That stat includes TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts views. Basically, I don’t trust it anymore. (This film will probably set record, but I trust the pre-sales data more.) RIGHT: Celebrity Production companies are still struggling. I’ve written about this for years, but the company that I didn’t track was Kevin Hart’s HartBeat, which was valued at $650 million but is struggling now and might just end soon, especially after Kevin Hart pulled his endorsement deals. And Bad Robot is moving to NYC. CORRECTION: SpongeBob is a “second run” title. In my 2025 recap article, I had _SpongeBob SquarePants_labelled as a “library” title, when it is still a “second run” show, with new episodes still coming out on Nickelodeon. CORRECTION: In my last “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong” update, I offered a correction from Doug Creutz and misspelled TD Cowen. Thanks, Grammarly! 1 Though he could have increased prices to make up for the gap, he couldn’t have increased them that much. 2 There’s a theory, which I think that Daryl Morey created and Bill Simmons popularized, that, to be successful building your team, you only need a handful of bad GMs in the league to take advantage of. To be clear, Daryl Morey’s theory was also for signing bad contracts, that you could always get out of bad contracts. Basically, there’s always someone who will make a bad trade. It’s not the same exact thing, but similar enough to the Greater Fool Theory that I really like it.

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Aug 4 • 11:55 AM EDT • Entertainment • entertainment.substack.com
Michelle Centofanti Honored as Louisville Business First Best in Finance Winner

For Michelle Centofanti, finance has never been just about numbers. It is about helping people make better decisions, solving complex challenges, and building stronger partnerships across the business. That approach has earned Michelle recognition as one of Louisville Business First’s 2026 Best in Finance honorees. During her first year at Heaven Hill, Michelle has become […]

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Aug 4 • 9:42 AM EDT • Business • heavenhill.com