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Scientists reversed liver aging with young gut bacteria in stunning study

Rebooting the gut microbiome with bacteria from youth may help stop aging-related liver damage and even prevent liver cancer, according to new research in mice. Older mice that received their own preserved youthful microbiome showed less inflammation, reduced DNA damage, and no signs of liver cancer. Researchers also found that the treatment suppressed a cancer-linked gene called MDM2, making older mice biologically resemble younger ones.

May 9 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Desert school, ocean science: How an ASU student found her calling beneath the waves

Makena Krause came to ASU with dreams to change the world — but with no clear plan on how she was going to do so.This spring, she graduates with a clear answer, found through coral reef ecology, collaboration, and the next generation of scientists and practitioners she hopes to inspire.Coming from a family of Sun Devils, Krause has always had an affinity for Arizona State University. However, what ultimately solidified her decision to attend was ASU's focus on real-world application and impact.

May 8 • 2:09 PM EDT • Science • news.asu.edu

PlayStation sees AI as a ‘powerful tool’ to help make games

However, AI is meant to “augment” its teams’ capabilities, not replace them.

May 8 • 12:30 PM EDT • Technology • theverge.com

Caesars Entertainment (CZR) Valuation Check After Improved Results And New Venue Openings

Caesars Entertainment (CZR) just released first quarter results, with revenue and sales both higher than a year ago and the net loss narrowing, while new entertainment openings aim to keep its properties front of mind for visitors. See our latest analysis for Caesars Entertainment. The latest results and property openings come after a strong 90-day share price return of 35.38% and a 17.91% year to date share price return. However, the 1-year total shareholder return is slightly negative and...

May 8 • 12:18 PM EDT • Entertainment • finance.yahoo.com

Sony forecasts lower gaming business sales amid memory price surge

By Sam Nussey TOKYO, May 8 (Reuters) - Sony forecast on Friday annual sales at its gaming business would fall 6% to 4.42 trillion yen ($28 billion) due to lower hardware sales as its PlayStation 5 ages and as the industry grapples with a surge in memory chip prices. The Japanese company, however, said it expects gaming profit to rise 30% due to higher first-party software sales and the absence

May 8 • 9:08 AM EDT • Business • msn.com

Trends in Female First Authorship in Anatomical Science International: A 24-Year Analysis (2002-2025)

In recent years, the promotion of gender equity and diversity in academic research has attracted increasing international attention. However, studies examining gender differences in authorship w...

May 7 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • cureus.com

Exclusive: Inmates describe being punished for speaking out about Ghislaine Maxwell

Julie Howell did not know what she was getting into last year when she was asked about a new inmate who had arrived at her prison – or that she was about to become an unwitting supporting character in the ongoing drama around convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

May 7 • 7:01 PM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Commission requests more info on proposal to paint Eisenhower building white

More than 2,000 comments were sent in from the public about the proposal with messages appearing to be heavily skewed in opposition

May 7 • 5:00 PM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com

Nature’s giant vacuum cleaner: Scientists reveal how the Sun is secretly cleaning Earth’s space junk

Science News: As Earth’s orbit becomes increasingly crowded with decommissioned satellites and fragments from the 1960s, however, researchers have identified a natu.

May 7 • 2:00 PM EDT • Science • timesofindia.indiatimes.com

WATCH LIVE: Trump's push to paint Eisenhower building white reviewed by Capital planning commission

May 7 • 12:41 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org

Rare Pink Katydid Slowly Transforms Green and Upends Camouflage Science

Camouflage is a widely studied antipredator technique that we thought we understood. A rainforest insect, however, is rewriting the textbooks on the subject as it reveals previously unseen behavior. O...

May 7 • 8:02 AM EDT • Science • yahoo.com

Science diplomacy lessons from a North Korean volcano

Mount Paektu, a mythic, active volcano on the border between North Korea and China, is almost the epitome of a scientific challenge that crosses political lines. In 946 CE, it erupted in one of the five biggest volcanic events of the past 10,000 years, kicking up huge quantities of ash and sending destructive mud flows down river channels for hundreds of kilometres. Should this happen again, the entire region, including easternmost Russia, South Korea and even Japan could be hit. “It’s definitely got the potential to be big,” said James Hammond, a professor of geophysics at Birkbeck, University of London. An eruption on the scale of 946 would have “huge regional impact.” For the past 15 years, Hammond has helped lead a groundbreaking collaboration with North Korean scientists to study the volcano, navigating scientific sanctions, tough export controls on scientific equipment and a long, pandemic-enforced exodus from the country. Although he seems more at home on far-flung research expeditions – before speaking to Science|Business, Hammond was camping out on a Greenland ice sheet – he has also advised the European Commission on its changing science diplomacy strategy. His long experience with North Korea has made Hammond sceptical of blanket bans on science collaboration, no matter the country.This is a live question in Europe, where in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, institutional ties with Russian universities were almost entirely severed, although some scientists fear this could undermine our understanding of climate change’s impact on the Arctic. Here, Hammond tells the story of the Mount Paektu mission and the policy lessons he takes from it. Ominous rumblingsThe genesis of Hammond’s collaboration came in 2002, when Mount Paektu began to rumble ominously. Earthquake activity picked up and the volcano began to emit unusual gases. North Korean scientists took notice. “People felt we need to know more about this volcano,” said Hammond. In 2011, North Korean vulcanologists put out a request for international expertise to help them learn more. At the time, Hammond and his collaborator, Clive Oppenheimer, were working on a vulcanology project in another sanctioned country, Eritrea, and so decided to answer the call. Within a month, they had flown into Pyongyang. “It was pretty incredible,” recalls Hammond (left). “We were made to feel like honoured guests, and invited to official celebrations.” The scientific opportunity was huge. Paektu is unusually positioned, a thousand kilometres from where tectonic plates rub against each other in the Pacific. “It was an incredibly interesting volcano, but not much research had been done, at least not in the international community,” he said. “There was so much we felt we could do. And we had these partners that were super keen to engage.”The mission received an unusual visitor in the form of volcano-obsessed filmmaker Werner Herzog, who accompanied Hammond and Oppenheimer while directing his 2016 film Into the Inferno about volcanos across the world. Four days into the trip, the German director delivered a long speech about reunification to his North Korean hosts, recalls Hammond. “He got to the heart of the Koreans and how they felt, and how they thought, in a way that I'm not sure I ever will,” he said. UN sanctionsHowever, Hammond realised he’d been “naïve” about how difficult it would be to collaborate with North Korea, which was sanctioned far more heavily than Eritrea. “We didn’t fully appreciate the all-encompassing nature of restrictions,” he said. In 2016, as tensions escalated over Pyongyang’s nuclear tests, a United Nations resolution banned all joint scientific work with North Korea. However, the UN sanctions did allow countries to request carve outs, and the UK successfully requested an exemption for Hammond’s work. Related articlesEU pushes for joint science diplomacy, but care needed to avoid gridlock, experts sayRussia severs its last ties with German scienceAnchor Greenlanders in Arctic climate research, experts tell EU ahead of policy updateExport controls have also delayed Hammond’s work. In one case, it took 18 months to get approval from the UK government to take seismometers, which measure earthquakes, to North Korea. “It was frustrating,” he said. “But they didn’t just say no.” However, one instrument, called an induction coil, used to measure how the earth conducts electricity, was blocked entirely because it can in theory be used to detect submarines. Karaoke bondingSince the collaboration started in 2011, Hammond has visited the country around 15 times, although the pandemic closed off North Korea for more than five years. A trip last November was Hammond’s first since the outbreak. Despite this lengthy interlude, Hammond has deep bonds in the country. The North Korean scientists Hammond works with are somewhat isolated, as they struggle to access the latest research papers and travel to international conferences. That said, they are “excellent geophysicists” and are “very well trained in the field,” he said. Over karaoke and chats about their families, “we’ve made friendships, for sure,” he said. The authorities have to sign-off things like the placement of seismometers, for example, but Hammond said these requests have been approved. “Everything that we've asked for within a scientific context has been delivered.”Scientific backchannels? These kind of personal links between scientists across political lines are one purported benefit of science diplomacy. During the Cold War, some historians argue, scientific contact between the US and Soviet Union laid a groundwork of trust for other cooperation, such as on arms control. Hammond agrees that backchannel contacts to North Korean geophysicists are hardly likely to defuse a military crisis on the Korean peninsula, but the simple fact of the scientific collaboration makes contacts between diplomats that little bit easier. “It creates opportunities to understand each other a little bit better,” he said. “When maybe you have those more difficult discussions as diplomats, it's coming from a slightly better place.” Cutting tiesDrawing lessons from the Mount Paektu mission for today’s links with Russian science isn’t simple. The analogy is far from exact, Hammond said, “because one is essentially a Cold War, versus a pretty hot war in the case of Russia.” But Hammond’s broader argument is that the challenges we face, such as climate change, pandemics, biodiversity loss, pollution and so on, have globalised in an unprecedented way, making blanket shutdowns in collaboration with any country unwise.He’s somewhat critical of the UN scientific sanctions imposed on North Korea in 2016, even though they did allow for exceptions. “I think a blanket halt to some of these things, when we face big global challenges [. . .] that’s quite a risky thing to do,” he said.Institutional endorsement?European academics are still by and large free to work individually with Russian counterparts. However, official, institutional partnerships have largely ended. Shortly following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian university rectors wrote a public letter endorsing the war, meaning European universities fear official collaboration could also be seen as a kind of endorsement. Hammond acknowledges there is a risk of legitimising regimes, and state-controlled universities, through scientific cooperation. “That’s the trade off you have to make,” he said. Strategic projectsWith Russia, instead of giving a green light to restart all Arctic science, a middle ground might be firing up a few carefully selected “strategic” projects, said Hammond. After all, European countries are still collaborating with Russia on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, an experimental nuclear fusion plant in the south of France. However, even if Europe did try to revive Arctic science with Russia, there’s no guarantee Russian scientists would play ball. A series of high-profile arrests of physicists in Russia accused of sharing their findings with the outside world has made collaboration fraught. Even before the invasion of 2022, “the Russian regime made it increasingly difficult, and this sort of discouraged people,” Dag Rune Olsen, rector of the Arctic University of Norway, told Science|Business last year.

May 7 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencebusiness.net

Google Pixel May 2026 update fails to fix battery drain issues

Google has started rolling out a new update for Pixel smartphones. However, while the update brings various fixes and improvements, it fails to fix a major issue that users have been facing since the March update.

May 7 • 1:13 AM EDT • Technology • notebookcheck.net

Lankas turns multi-disciplinary drive at Nebraska Into Hudl career

“I’ve always been super passionate about dance, sports, academics, entrepreneurship and keeping my social life interesting. When searching for colleges, it can sometimes feel like you’re having to settle for less in one area to get more in another. However, as an overly ambitious person, those weren’t really tradeoffs I wanted to make, and I’ve been able to do so much at such a high level all at Nebraska.” — Lena Lankas, May 2026 graduate

May 6 • 8:00 PM EDT • Business • news.unl.edu

North Hollywood Senior High School Wins 5th Place at National Science Bowl

Washington, D.C. (May 4, 2026) – North Hollywood Senior High School tied for 5th place at the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science National Science Bowl® academic competition in Washington, D.C., delivering a standout performance on the national stage on Monday, May 4, 2026. The team proudly represented Los Angeles and showed their teamwork […]

May 6 • 3:40 PM EDT • Science • ladwpnews.com

BioShock, game prices, GTA, the disappearing NFL deal and more: An interview with Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick

In 20 years of covering the video game beat, I’d probably not spoken more than 20 words with Take Two chairman Strauss Zelnick, who’s been running the company behind NBA 2K, Grand Theft Auto, BioShock and Red Dead Redemption for, you guessed it, nearly 20 years. Last week, though, ahead of a panel I was hosting at the iicon event in Las Vegas, I had about 20 minutes to interview Zelnick. I could ask one question for each year, I joked, as we settled into our seats on opposite sides of a conference table. Take Two’s longtime head of corporate communications, Alan Lewis, was seated at Zelnick’s side. I didn’t quite conduct our chat that way, but we wound up going through a lot, including… The state of BioShock The ramifications of the rising costs of game development The fate of Take Two’s recent multi-game deal with the NFL Some hints about Take Two’s mobile plans Whether Zelnick’s answer to me about Civ VII was a good one The do’s and don’t’s of NBA 2K microtransactions Take Two’s take on the Switch 2 Oh, and GTA VI (Spoiler: if Zelnick had spilled the beans on the price of the game or a release date for a PC version or whether there will be a polka radio station, that would have been this article’s headline). Before all of that, I would learn what it’s like to interview Strauss Zelnick, who is confident, calm and focused on delivering precise answers. To wit, I thought I’d start our chat with something fun, a bit insidery but maybe safe for him to share. The team at Take Two’s Rockstar label delays their games a lot, I noted. Of course, those delays, however painful, tend to be worth it. So, I was wondering how Zelnick finds out about them. Take the most recent postponement back in November 2025, when Rockstar said that GTA VI would not hit its May 26, 2026 release date (just 20 days from now!) and would instead come out on November 19, 2026. Was that news delivered via a call? An email? How does it work? “I work super closely with my team,” Zelnick said. “It's a very thin team at Take Two. The entire senior management team is six executives who sit in one hallway and share two assistants. And then, basically, there are two people who head up each of our labels.” They meet weekly to discuss their business, he said. So no one emails him about a delay? Nothing like that? Zelnick craned his neck to look at my left hand. He asked if I was married. I am, I said. “Does your partner email you to give you information?” he asked. Fair enough. I didn’t get the sense Zelnick was going to read me the minutes of the management meeting where the GTA VI delay was discussed. Slight pivot, maybe I could get some personality insights about one of the most successful gaming execs of the last 20 years, before getting to my big list of questions about specific Take Two games, franchises and policies. I asked: How do you deal with delay news like that? Go for a run? Meditate? “I tend to default to being very calm,” he said. “I’m not a person who freaks out easily.” He noted that he has a daughter with special needs due to an illness, and he shared that that situation had gotten him worked up. It was a personal, family emergency. “But, you know, business is not that,” he said. “I have no trouble distinguishing between, like, a business challenge and an emergency.” He turned to his left to ask Lewis, his colleague of 17 years, a question. “Have you ever seen me freak out?” “Never,” Lewis replied. “You’ve seen me upset,” Zelnick told Lewis. “Have you seen me raise my voice? Maybe how many times? Be honest, because we might as well be.”

May 6 • 1:58 PM EDT • Technology • gamefile.news

James Loehr, Who Showed Athletes the Power of the Mind, Dies at 83

He began practicing sports psychology before it was a profession, teaching athletes the importance of mental resilience and how to cultivate it.

May 6 • 1:53 PM EDT • Sports • nytimes.com

CEA Retail + Hospitality Winner: Biggers blends produce, entertainment

Biggers Market’s roots run deep, tracing back to the 1940s when founder and partner Sven Wallin’s grandfather, alongside his brothers, opened Biggers Brothers, a family-run produce business in Charlotte. Decades later, the family’s reputation for farm-fresh fruits and vegetables lives on. In 2010, Wallin opened Biggers Market, building on a reputation that endured for the past 16 years. “I learned a lot about my grandfather, who passed away when my mother was young, through my uncle. The one thing that is ingrained in me is my grandfather’s willingness to go the extra mile for a better product, not settling for what’s easy, but finding what is better,” said Wallin. “He taught me the importance of name and reputation. If your name was on it, it had better be right. Word-of-mouth was always very important to gain a good reputation.” So was hard work. Entrepreneurialism has always been central to Biggers Market’s identity, Wallin said. In high school, Wallin worked at a produce stand in Charlotte, an experience that shaped how he thought about food. “I realized all produce was not created equal, and we could focus on freshness, seasonality and flavor. Grocery stores were convenient, but the produce often didn’t have the same taste or quality,” he said. As a college graduate without a paying job, Wallin took a leap and opened a 20-by-30-foot roadside stand with just three employees. “It was so small we had to put tables with umbrellas out in the yard to accommodate everything. We didn’t have pallet jacks or forklifts to unload the trucks. We would form a line and toss watermelons to get them to where they needed to go,” he recalled. In year two, Wallin opened a market on Carolina Beach Road, still in operation today but larger, and later on Market Street, setting up tents for extra space. In 2019, the sale of the land forced a hunt for a new property, and Wallin landed on his current location at 6250 Market St. “We had ambitions beyond produce,” he said. “We wanted this market to be a place that felt different from a typical grocery store.” In 2024, Wallin added his kitchen to the Biggers brand. “I’ve blurred the lines of a market and a grocery store,” Wallin said. “It’s a place where you can shop, eat, have a drink and listen to live music with friends and family. It’s a mix of retail and social experiences cultivated over time.” What hasn’t changed, however, is Wallin’s Southern hospitality, a strong sense of pride, purpose and responsibility and a commitment to seasonality. Spring brings the garden center to life with herbs, veggie plants and jumbo ferns. Summer leans heavily into produce. Fall brings the pumpkin patch, and winter hosts a Christmas market. “It means a lot to have what we’ve built recognized, especially in Wilmington. There’s a lot that goes into the business from our team. And that’s something we’re genuinely grateful for,” Wallin said. With plans underway for a new larger Carolina Beach Road location, Wallin continues to look ahead. “It’s an opportunity to build another market from the ground up and continue growing what we’ve been doing,” he said. “We’ve been through development before, so we understand what it takes.”

May 6 • 9:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • wilmingtonbiz.com

Hawaiʻi Balks At Funding Maui Fire Victim Health Study

Lawmakers did not pass a bill that would have funded the continuation of the most comprehensive study of the long-term health effects of the wildfires.

May 6 • 6:01 AM EDT • Health • civilbeat.org

Opinion: Speaking the truth about the Pope and politics

In 1938, Monsignor Fulton Sheen wrote, “There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the […]

May 5 • 4:59 PM EDT • Politics • catholicworldreport.com

The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero, Trails to Azure coming to Nintendo Switch 2

The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure are both to Nintendo Switch 2, NIS America and Falcom just revealed. These two titles are planned for Fall 2026. The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure previously came to Nintendo Switch. For these new releases, however,...

May 5 • 9:07 AM EDT • Technology • nintendoeverything.com

Scientists connect “time crystal” to real device in quantum breakthrough

A strange kind of matter that “ticks” forever without energy input has just taken a major leap toward real-world use. Known as a time crystal, this quantum system repeats its motion endlessly—like a clock that never winds down—and scientists have now managed to connect it to an external device for the first time. By linking the time crystal to a tiny mechanical oscillator, researchers showed they can actually control its behavior, opening the door to powerful new technologies.

May 5 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

German firms abroad grow more pessimistic as Iran war disrupts supply chains

German firms operating abroad have become more pessimistic about their prospects, with nearly one in three expecting ​economic conditions to worsen as the Iran war exposes ‌vulnerabilities in global supply chains, a survey showed on Tuesday.

May 5 • 3:38 AM EDT • Business • reuters.com

Christian Parker already getting his hands dirty as Cowboys coordinator

When Christian Parker took the field at rookie minicamp, he showed you exactly why players are drawn to him.

May 4 • 5:30 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Caleb Downs Is the Cowboys’ Best Pick in Years

Caleb Downs very clearly has “it.” It’s extremely premature to make a claim as bold as “best in a decade” before a draft pick touches the field in training camp, let alone at game speed. However, some people have “it”—an aura people can see on film and in real game time. Every draft has a […] The post Caleb Downs Is the Cowboys’ Best Pick in Years appeared first on The Lead.

May 4 • 3:52 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Canadian forward/real estate agent flashes business card in goal celebration

Tomasz Skublak scored in the Canadian Premier League, then showed his business card to advertise his other job as a real estate agent.

May 4 • 1:04 PM EDT • Business • usatoday.com

How To Start To Unlock Diablo 4: Lord Of Hatred’s Secret Cow Level

The Secret Cow Level is back in Diablo 4 and it almost unlocked. There's a lot of prep work you need to do to get to the current point, however.

May 4 • 9:25 AM EDT • Technology • forbes.com

Trophies or entertainment? Jose Mourinho conundrum facing Newcastle as Chris Waddle explains winning versus ‘boring’ balancing act

Jose Mourinho rumours refuse to go away at Newcastle, as questions are asked of Eddie Howe’s future, and Chris Waddle has told GOAL why any club considering a move for the ‘Special One’ must mull over the “win trophies or entertain” conundrum. Mourinho boasts several major honours on his glittering CV, but the ex-Chelsea and Real Madrid boss has faced accusations of being “boring” at times.

May 4 • 3:59 AM EDT • Entertainment • ca.sports.yahoo.com

I tried this $5 laundry hack for a spotless shower — and the results have totally surprised me

It's transformed the way I clean my bathroom

May 4 • 12:30 AM EDT • Technology • tomsguide.com

Browns' other two options before selecting Spencer Fano revealed

The Cleveland Browns selected Utah offensive tackle Spencer Fano with the 8th overall pick. However, we now know what their other options were

May 3 • 8:05 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Marotta: ‘Inter showed courage choosing Chivu’

Inter President Beppe Marotta admits he didn’t expect Cristian Chivu to win the Scudetto in his first season, and potentially the Coppa Italia too. ‘We didn’t go in blind, but showed courage.’...

May 3 • 2:45 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

TST Best Bets: May 3, 2026

After the Philadelphia 76ers became the 14th team to ever come back from a 3-1 lead to win the series, the Detroit Pistons enter Sunday on the brink of history themselves. Detroit looked to be in dire straits against the Orlando Magic, as their physical defense made for a very poor matchup with the Pistons’ lack of secondary offensive creators behind Cade Cunningham. However, aided by an untimely injury to Franz Wagner for the Magic, the Pistons have started to look like the 60-win team they wer

May 3 • 12:53 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

'Devil Wears Prada 2' director explains returning star's surprise death scene

'The Devil Wears Prada 2' director David Frankel explains why one returning actor 'had to die' in a shocking death scene twist — and later showed up to watch his peers film his character's funeral.

May 3 • 9:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

The creepy feeling in old buildings might have a surprising cause

A hidden force may be quietly shaping how you feel—and you’d never even know it. Infrasound, an ultra-low-frequency vibration below the range of human hearing, is everywhere from traffic to old buildings. In a small experiment, people exposed to it became more irritable, less engaged, and even showed higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol—despite having no idea it was present. The findings suggest our bodies can “sense” these vibrations without conscious awareness, potentially explaining eerie sensations in places like basements or supposedly haunted buildings.

May 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

The Eta Aquariid meteor shower peaks this week: How to see 'shooting stars' dropped by Halley's Comet

The Eta Aquariids will peak May 5-6, with debris from Halley's Comet creating swift meteors, though bright moonlight will make them harder to see.

May 3 • 7:00 AM EDT • Science • livescience.com

Curing U.S. Health Care, Part II

On March 23, 2010 President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — usually referred to either as the Affordable Care Act or as Obamacare — into law. Joe Biden, then the vice president, could be overheard whispering “This is a big fucking deal.” And it was. The ACA, which went into full effect in 2014, created a system of subsidies and regulations designed to make health insurance available to many Americans who had previously been left out. It worked: In 2010 there were 47 million uninsured people in America, but by 2016 this number had dropped to 27 million. This still fell short of the universal health insurance that every other advanced nation has, but it was real progress. In 2017, during his first term, Donald Trump tried to destroy the ACA, replacing it with the American Health Care Act — legislation that would have eliminated most of the provisions that expanded health insurance under Obama. At the time the Congressional Budget Office projected that the G.O.P.’s replacement bill would nearly double the number of Americans without health insurance, increasing the total uninsured population by 23 million and undoing all of the progress achieved under the ACA. However, the attack on Obamacare failed by one vote in the Senate, and the ensuing public backlash against the G.O.P. delivered a large victory in the 2018 midterms to the Democrats. After these developments many observers assumed that the ACA had become a more or less permanent feature of American life. Such assessments, however, failed to take into account the deep hostility of the U.S. right toward policies that expand access to healthcare. As we’ll see, this hostility goes back generations. And the second Trump administration has taken actions that the CBO projects will add 16 million people to the rolls of the uninsured by 2034. How did we get here? And now what? Today’s primer will analyze the political economy of U.S. healthcare since the 1940s and the combination of danger and opportunity created by the current crisis. Beyond the paywall I will discuss the following: US health care on the eve of Trump II 80 years of US health politics The Obamacare story The new assault on healthcare

May 3 • 6:31 AM EDT • Health • paulkrugman.substack.com

Real Madrid contacted former legendary manager to replace Xabi Alonso

Alvaro Arbeloa was the selected candidate to replace Xabi Alonso as the head coach of Real Madrid after the Spanish Super Cup in January.However, the former youth team manager has not enjoyed the best...

May 3 • 6:15 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Kunimitsu trailer for Tekken 8, character releases for early access on May 28th

At the Tekken World Tour 2025 Finals back in January, Bandai Namco unveiled their Season 3 trailer which showed us that the game's third season will consist of Kunimitsu, Bob, Roger Jr. and a brand new character.As promised ...

May 3 • 1:30 AM EDT • Technology • eventhubs.com

‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia comp sci students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field

‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia comp sci students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field ‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia comp sci students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field A field that once seemed like a direct path to stable, lucrative work is becoming less certain under AI, students and faculty told Spectator. By Ria Vasishtha and Arjun Menon May 3, 2026 Shanying Liu / Deputy Illustrations Editor Asia Genawi, SEAS ’29, first encountered artificial intelligence during her sophomore year at her high school in Indiana. Back in 2023, policies on AI varied widely—even within the same district—and some schools had no guidance at all. As Genawi began to see the effects of AI trickle into her classroom, she turned to guidance from her home state’s Department of Education, which she said she found “outdated and inaccessible.” Genawi spent the rest of her high school career dedicated to the issue, including writing a 15-page memo exploring varying AI policies across Indiana schools, which she sent to every Indiana state senator and representative whose contact information she was able to find. She later helped draft a bill that would have required public high schools to establish and share their own AI policies with students in an accessible format. But with so many other bills already awaiting referral, hers never made it to committee. When Genawi arrived at Columbia to study computer science, she found that the gaps she had spent years trying to address in Indiana had followed her there. Many students and professors were also grappling with what AI meant for the field. Across Columbia’s undergraduate schools, computer science has become the most popular major—accounting for around 11 percent of degrees awarded in Columbia College, 32 percent in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and 12 percent in the School of General Studies in 2024. While the number of computer science majors in SEAS grew from 166 to 173 during the 2024-25 academic year, the total number across the three schools fell around 4.5 percent from 393 to 375, driven by declines at Columbia College and General Studies. At Barnard, it has grown to become the second most popular major as of 2025, up from third the year prior. The number of degrees awarded have grown fivefold since 2016. Faculty members and students in the department told Spectator that the surge in the major’s popularity has been driven in large part by its apparent promise of a secure, well-paid career path. However, they noted that the recent rise of generative AI has compromised the sense of stability that once defined the field, even as interest in technical skills among students persists. According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2024, out of 74 majors tracked, computer science had the fifth highest unemployment rate among majors at 7 percent, while computer engineering had the second highest at 7.8 percent. “Anecdotally, people are moving away from CS as a major,” Daniel Bauer, a senior lecturer in the computer science department, said. “They’re still taking some of our classes, right, because they think they need that, but they’re instead majoring in other things.” Bauer described a field that had shifted from what he called a “nerdy outlier discipline” to one that “everyone needs,” a sign that technical skills have become a baseline expectation across industries with the emergence of AI. “A lot of people thought, ‘Oh, it’s a guaranteed path to a stable income. You get a six-figure job right out of your undergrad,’” Bauer said. Now, companies may see AI as a way to reduce demand for entry-level programmers, especially in what he calls “code monkey jobs,” roles where a large number of employees are “just writing out code nine-to-five.” Chris Murphy, a senior lecturer in the computer science department, described the current moment as the convergence of two forces: the downturn of the job market and generative AI coming onto the scene. “Things kind of started to really pick up in 2014, 16,” he said, recalling the years after the weaker 2010 market. Murphy added that this was also a period where “students were getting more experience outside of class than they were inside of class” through internships, jobs, and side projects. Murphy suggested that the earlier momentum helped make computer science feel like both an academic program and a reliable pathway into work. That feeling is harder to sustain now as the industry reconfigures, which is a shift that students are seeing firsthand. Rebecca Yu, SEAS ’27, said that during a recent internship in Big Tech, she saw that “every single tech company was racing to integrate” large language models. She added that her manager said her intern class was the first to complete their assigned projects, which she attributed to the increased efficiency that comes with AI. Frank Liu, SEAS ’29, said that with AI lowering the barrier to coding, companies now expect everyone to write code. “A lot of companies outright say if you’re not using coding in your job, you might get fired for not being productive enough,” Liu said. Yu similarly expressed that students increasingly have to accept AI being a part of industry workflow, adding that many also “make use of it to maximize their productivity.” Richard Li, CC ’28, described a “franticness” among his peers as the pace of change accelerates. He explained how “some new tool” is released regularly, noting that tools rise and fall in prominence within weeks. He has come to believe that he doesn’t need to “match that speed all the time” and keep up with every development. Li has learned that AI tools allow him to “take a breath” and “get back into the loop much easier than before” when he needs to. While some companies specifically target Columbia when hiring, sending representatives to campus career fairs and recruiting large numbers from Columbia, a computer science degree cannot be treated as a static credential, Yu described. “You can’t just get your degree and stop learning after that. You have to always be learning,” Yu said. “That is something you basically have to expect for your job.” AI has not only affected students’ decisions to major in computer science, but also reshaped how the subject is taught. Across departments, faculty members no longer treat work done outside the classroom as a reliable measure of understanding, shifting instead toward in-person exams, quizzes, and attendance checks. While homework once made up as much as 60 to 70 percent of a student’s grade in computer science classes, Murphy said that breakdown has since flipped, with exams and quizzes now accounting for the majority. “The assumption—especially among pessimists—is that they’re using it to do their homework,” Murphy said. “They take the homework assignment. They put it into generative AI. Out comes the solution. Submit solution. The end.” Murphy said that faculty members ranged in their responses from fully prohibiting AI use to actively teaching students how to effectively work with AI. He said he shifted his approach this year after his teaching assistants called his belief that students weren’t using the technology “naïve,” and now permits students to use AI on assignments. His surveys of students in his introductory classes have told a more complicated story than the one so-called pessimists offer: Around 60 to 70 percent of students who reported using AI said they used it to have concepts explained to them, to clarify assignment instructions, to generate test cases, or to create practice questions. “Those are all ways that you might have had a tutor in the past to do that, and now you have this AI essentially as your tutor,” he said. Bauer has taken a different approach, teaching students how to use AI productively without sacrificing the core principles of the discipline. “People who are trained to actually use AI tools productively, while being in charge of designing the overall project, will be very much in demand in the next couple of years,” he said. Over the past year, a working group of computer science faculty has been redesigning the introductory and intermediate programming sequence to integrate generative AI as both a subject and a tool, representatives from SEAS wrote in a statement to Spectator. The effort is “coordinated” across the department, “not course-by-course,” with a systematic assessment of how AI integration is affecting student outcomes underway to shape the next round of changes. The goal, the department explained, is for students to be able to “read, verify, and reason about code, whether they or a model wrote it.” Tony Dear, senior lecturer in the computer science department, is piloting individualized AI feedback in a discrete mathematics course, while a machine learning course is also testing a Socratic AI dialogue system designed to “guide inquiry rather than supply answers,” the statement reads. Beyond individual courses, SEAS funded seven cross-departmental faculty projects in generative AI this past academic year, spanning biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, industrial engineering, and computer science, according to the statement. This phenomenon extends beyond the computer science department. SEAS’ new AI minor, which it announced in November 2025, reflects the University’s attempt to adapt. The minor is specifically designed for noncomputer science majors and aims to provide “essential AI knowledge” while emphasizing practical and responsible use across disciplines, according to the SEAS website. At the center of the minor is AI in Context, a course taught by a team of faculty from the departments of computer science, applied mathematics, philosophy, music, literature, and the Writing Center, the representatives told Spectator. Bauer described it as targeted at students who want to bring AI into fields like economics or biology, rather than as a path into software engineering itself. At the graduate level, SEAS announced a new Master of Science in artificial intelligence in February, with the inaugural cohort starting in the fall. While recognizing how AI has helped them navigate coursework, students also described its rise as isolating, even among members of the Application Development Initiative, one of Columbia’s largest computer science clubs. “As people start to ask AI for questions that they would normally ask students and members, it starts to isolate people” Li said. Alexa Kafka, BC ’27, echoed Li’s sentiment, pointing out that computer science has always been a collaborative discipline with code reviews and pull requests, even as AI makes independent work easier. Despite this, Kafka noted that she hasn’t been to office hours “in at least a year.” Bauer added that faculty are exploring long-term solutions to the assessment problem. “One of the things that we’re trying to do at the department or school level is to maybe move towards computerized testing facilities,” Bauer said, referring to ideas in the department to revitalize computer labs as an alternative to pen-and-paper exams. “We have to accept that this is the reality, for better or worse.” But more exams, students say, does not mean better learning, nor does it reflect how computer science is actually done. “Code is so variable and can be approached in so many directions, there’s never just going to be one correct answer. There can be multiple optimal solutions,” Kafka said. Students also expressed concern that the shift toward exam-heavy grading pulls focus away from the applied, project-based work that better reflects both discipline and industry expectations. ADI has tried to respond more quickly than the curriculum can. Through a vibe coding workshop this past semester, club members said they wanted to help students understand not just that AI exists, but how to use it deliberately. “Vibe coding” refers to the practice of prompting AI to write code for a task or project, and has become widespread enough that ADI felt the gap in formal instruction was worth addressing, according to Sophia Huang, BC ’29. The workshop introduced students to the concept of context engineering, which Shaina Sahu, SEAS ’27, described as not just writing a prompt, but optimizing “the rest of the relevant information that you would feed into the model.” Without that, students said that AI-generated code can fail at scale or introduce difficult-to-detect bugs. Genawi said the shift toward AI has changed what it means to be good at computer science. “I think the shift has kind of gone towards what can you create and what can you do, instead of, what do you know,” she said. Indeed, during ADI DevFest, its annual hackathon, Li said more teams are trying to complete their projects than in years past. While sign-ups have historically outpaced submissions, Li said this is beginning to change because teams “have a tool that completes the vision for them.” While many students see AI as an equalizer that lowers the barrier to entry for coding and technical work, Murphy said it also creates new equity concerns inside the classroom around who can afford stronger tools and who already knows how to use them. “The equity issues I worry about are students who have access to paid versions of things versus free versions of things,” he said. Although popular AI models like ChatGPT and Claude have free versions available, both have paid models that can reach over $100 per month, which output different qualities of code. Murphy also pointed to differences in prior exposure to AI literacy itself. “Students who go to high schools or K-12 education, where they’re taught AI literacy, prompt engineering, context engineering, they understand how to do this, as opposed to students who go to schools who don’t teach that,” he said. “Then they come in, and then they’re somehow expected to know how to use these tools.” For Genawi, those disparities begin long before students arrive on campus. “It’s very interesting to consider how lucky you were geographically,” she said. “To be born where you were is influencing your ability to get access to these spaces.” Students like Yu, though broadly apprehensive about the future of computer science, are not without hope. “I’m optimistic, because I think if you’re truly passionate about CS, there will definitely be a place in the field to do something you want to do,” she said. Senior Staff Writer Ria Vasishtha can be contacted at ria.vasishtha@columbiaspectator.com. Follow Spectator on X @ColumbiaSpec. Staff Writer Arjun Menon can be contacted at arjun.menon@columbiaspectator.com. Follow Spectator on X @ColumbiaSpec. Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter and like Spectator on Facebook. Produced with Spectate by Emily Ta

May 2 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • columbiaspectator.com

Osula project pays off to help ease pressure on Howe

Newcastle United head coach Eddie Howe keeps faith with William Osula and the forward repays his faith in a crucial win against Brighton.

May 2 • 3:35 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Analysis: Howe's calls pay off

This was an afternoon when Eddie Howe's big calls paid off when he needed them most. The head coach justifiably kept faith with the bulk of players who put in an improved performance in a 1-0 defeat against Arsenal last week. Having again decided to name £124m worth of forwards on the bench, in Nick Woltemade and Yoane Wissa, Osula repaid the faith of his manager once more with the opener.

May 2 • 12:36 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Sports Illustrated Revel at the Races party draws athletes, influencers

NFL athletes, dramatic actresses and rising influencers all showed up to the black carpet May 1 at Sports Illustrated's Revel at the Races party.

May 2 • 10:52 AM EDT • Sports • courier-journal.com

Boosting one protein helps the brain fight Alzheimer’s

Scientists have discovered a way to help the brain clean itself of harmful Alzheimer’s plaques by activating its own support cells. By increasing a protein called Sox9, researchers were able to boost the activity of astrocytes, star shaped cells that help maintain brain health. In mice that already showed memory problems, this approach reduced plaque buildup and preserved cognitive function over time.

May 2 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Business owner and band members speak out following First Friday cancellation

NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) – For years, First Fridays has been a popular block party series in downtown Norfolk. However, following April’s event, the long-running party has been put on hold. The Do…

May 1 • 7:26 PM EDT • Business • wavy.com

Everyone loves Ella Langley. Everything else about country music is up for debate.

Ella Langley's breakout Stagecoach set showed her rare cross-generational appeal even as fans across the festival disagreed on what country music is becoming.

May 1 • 5:24 PM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.com

Second Chances In The Workforce

People certainly make mistakes — a lot of them through the course of a lifetime, and some that are serious enough to warrant jail time. However, for those mistakes — or crimes — that are less serious, it has been difficult for released and rehabilitated felons to re-enter a workforce that has already labeled and […]

May 1 • 7:37 AM EDT • Business • deltabusinessjournal.com

Summer move already done? VfB boss raves about Bundesliga star!

It has not yet been officially confirmed that Grischa Prömel will move from TSG Hoffenheim to VfB Stuttgart this summer. However, as numerous media outlets are reporting in unison, the transfer is al...

May 1 • 1:42 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Mitchell Robinson and Dyson Daniels ejected as Knicks break record for largest NBA playoff halftime lead in Game 6 beatdown of Hawks

Dyson Daniels showed more fight than the rest of the Hawks. Which isn't saying much.

Apr 30 • 8:33 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

'Playing a waiting game:' Triangle small business owners hope to receive refunds from illegal tariffs

Last week, businesses began applying online for refunds to tariffs the U.S. Supreme Court deemed illegal earlier this year. However, small business owners in the Triangle who worked with brokers to import their goods say that they'll have to wait for their brokers to pass those refunds to them.

Apr 30 • 4:54 PM EDT • Business • wunc.org

Mills Exit Is a Blow to Schumer as Democrats Question His Strategy

Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and minority leader, considered the Maine governor his top recruit for winning the majority. Critics said her collapse showed he is out of touch with the party’s voters.

Apr 30 • 2:32 PM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

Fed's favored inflation gauge remained elevated in March

The latest PCE inflation data was released by the Commerce Department which showed that inflation rose and remained elevated in March due in part to the Iran war's impact.

Apr 30 • 8:32 AM EDT • Business • foxbusiness.com

Teachers’ knowledge of science of reading improves, Fordham reports

However, at least a quarter of K-3 teachers say they are not fully committed to the literacy model, according to new research.

Apr 30 • 1:00 AM EDT • Science • k12dive.com

Viewpoint: A career in science is possible, and worth it

Starting a career in science is exciting, but also demanding, with researchers often faced with intense competition, long working hours and high levels of stress. A pioneer in the field of mass spectrometry, Carol Robinson has been there. She speaks with Science|Business on the importance of creating a supportive environment, particularly for women.Robinson did not wake up one day thinking that she would become a scientist. It was only late in school that she developed an interest in chemistry. “The more you work at something, the more you think, actually, this is fascinating. So, I went much further and deeper than I ever needed to pass the exam. And then I loved it,” she says. “I thought, I’m going to give it my all. I’m going to enjoy it while I’m here. But I didn’t think this would be my career for 50 odd years.”She left school at 16 to become a lab technician with the drug company Pfizer, which is where she first worked with mass spectrometry. Fascinated, she was encouraged to take a part-time degree and then a PhD. She went on to do pioneering work in native mass spectrometry, a technique that is used to study protein structures in their natural state, paving the way for breakthroughs in drug discovery. She also broke new ground by becoming the first female professor of chemistry at the University of Cambridge, and then the first female professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford, her current home.She now wants to show young researchers that a career in science is worth it. “Sometimes, I believe the culture isn’t very encouraging, and that’s something I have worked on,” Robinson says.In 2021, she launched the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery at Oxford, whose acronym gives a sense of what she hopes it will achieve. “Maybe it is corny,” she says. “It’s just a reminder that I would like it if we could all be kind to each other and supportive, especially for early-career researchers of either gender, because there’s quite a big attrition rate in science, and maybe it just doesn’t feel like a very friendly place to work.”And yet, a career in science comes with a lot of flexibility. “There are few careers where you have that amount of freedom, to go to conferences, to the library. Just because you didn’t see me didn’t mean I wasn’t working,” she says. “And I’m excited to come in every day. So, I don’t want people to think it’s a terrible place.”Gender equality is also important when it comes to the quality of science as a career. “The more women we have, the better it becomes,” Robinson adds.Imposter syndromeAccording to EU data, women outnumber men in university education but account for just about a third of graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem). And while the number of women working as scientists and engineers in the 27-member bloc is on the rise, their representation remains below that of men, at 41%. This discrepancy is even more pronounced in top-tier functions across these fields, where women fill just 20% of positions.Having supervised many young scientists, Robinson sees that women continue to have a greater propensity than men to doubt their abilities, a feeling she once shared. “When I was doing my PhD at the University at Cambridge, I really felt like an imposter,” she says. “I don’t think I ever felt I deserved to be there or owned it and was proud. I just thought I was lucky.” Later on, she adds, “I was always that person who said, I can’t apply yet because my CV is not strong enough.”She has now made it her job to encourage women to break with this imposter syndrome. For example, rather than calling for volunteers to give a lecture in the groups that she mentors or teaches, which nearly always results in men stepping forward, she goes straight to the women, “because I know they won’t push themselves forward.”But the gender gap in science is not just down to imposter syndrome. The “obvious” reason, Robinson says, and the reason that is on everybody’s mind when discussing workplace gender equality, is the balance between work and raising a family. Her own path was to choose between the two, taking an eight-year break after completing a postdoctoral training fellowship to bring up three children. And she continues to advise women not to work part-time while they raise a family. “You’ll just get half the pay and continue to work full-time because you are not able to fit everything in,” she says. “You should be able to have a family and come back to have the career that you want.”The solution is for men to also take career breaks. “That kind of evens it up, so that it’s not such a big thing for women,” Robinson says. “I always encourage men in my groups to do that. I think it’s important to take your share of the duties.”Support produces resultsAccording to the Women in Stem Network, a UK advocacy group, countries with strong childcare systems and equal pay policies retain more women in technical careers. In Europe, these are primarily found in the Nordic region and parts of central Europe.At the EU level, the European Commission asks all Horizon Europe applicant organisations to have a gender action plan in place. Since this criterion was introduced in 2021, the share of women leading consortia has increased to 31%, against 23% in Horizon 2020. Their overall participation, however, has risen just 1%, to 38%. After trying to weaken the requirement for gender action plans in 2025, the Commission now intends to adopt a plan for supporting women in research and innovation.Related articlesCommission scraps plan to water down gender requirements in HorizonHow gender balance can swing who wins Horizon Europe fundingRobinson herself has benefited from three Advanced Grants from the European Research Council. “I was extremely honoured and privileged to get those, because they really allowed me to fuel my passion,” she says. “Without that, it would have been a much harder slog.”Beyond applying gender rules, she says that more work is needed on translational enterprise, where women are, once again, largely underrepresented. The European Patent Office found that only 13.8% of applications were filed by women in 2022. “We have so many more women doing amazing science; why do they feel it’s not a thing to have a company?” she asks.She founded her own spin-out company, OMass Technologies, in 2016, and remains chair of its scientific advisory board now that it trades as OMass Therapeutics. As for research, Robinson is now studying how changes in the brain may be linked to depression, using port-mortem tissue. “We’re hoping to publish soon,” she says. “We had to consult with a lot of people who knew a lot more about the brain than we did. So, we’ve learnt a lot, and that’s always a lot of fun to learn a new thing. That’s what keeps you going.”

Apr 29 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencebusiness.net

UBS Sees Recovery Signs in US Wealth Business as Inflows Return

UBS Group AG’s wealth-management business in the Americas showed tentative signs of revival after a period of client fund outflows and departures by key staff.

Apr 29 • 5:28 AM EDT • Business • bloomberg.com

Racial health gaps persist in Pa., N.J. and Del. as Medicaid cuts loom, report finds

The Commonwealth Fund’s 2026 State Health Disparities Report showed health care gaps were the greatest among Hispanic residents.

Apr 29 • 5:00 AM EDT • Health • whyy.org

Senate Republicans reject attempt to end Trump's blockade of Cuba

The vote on the war powers resolution showed how Republicans continue to stand behind Trump as he acts unilaterally to exert American force in a range of global conflicts, including Venezuela, Iran and Cuba.

Apr 28 • 8:13 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org

How to implement AI-powered coronary plaque analysis software—and ensure you get paid

The use of AI to evaluate plaque buildup in CCTA images has been one of cardiology’s biggest ongoing trends. Implementing this software into existing workflows, however, can be a challenge. An upcoming webinar is focused on providing guidance to hospitals and cardiology practices hoping to learn more about this topic.

Apr 28 • 5:25 PM EDT • Business • cardiovascularbusiness.com

Health Canada approves first generic version of Novo Nordisk's Ozempic

Health Canada ​has approved ‌the first ​generic ​version of Danish ⁠drugmaker ​Novo ​Nordisk's blockbuster diabetes drug ​Ozempic ​made by Indian ‌drugmaker ⁠Dr Reddy's Laboratories , ​its ​website ⁠showed on ​Tuesday.

Apr 28 • 5:06 PM EDT • Health • reuters.com

Grading the New York Giants’ 2026 NFL Draft Picks

Ahead of the 2026 NFL Draft, many questions arose about what the New York Giants would do, especially after trading former All-Pro Dexter Lawrence for the 10th overall pick. With their two top 10 selections, as well as trading into the third round, the Giants showed great aggression for their needs. But, with these premier […] The post Grading the New York Giants’ 2026 NFL Draft Picks appeared first on The Lead.

Apr 28 • 11:31 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

PS5 30-Day DRM “Confirmed” by PlayStation Support – But Sony Denies It

PlayStation Support appears to confirm PS5 DRM on digital games is real. However, Sony is also seemingly denying it's a new policy change.

Apr 28 • 9:31 AM EDT • Technology • vice.com

Spanberger marks first 100 days with focus on healthcare, housing and energy affordability

Gov. Abigail Spanberger celebrated her first 100 days in office Monday in Richmond by touting her administration’s progress on healthcare, housing, and energy affordability measures. She had less to say, however, about the delayed state budget, which lawmakers haven’t finalized but must send to her desk for signature in the coming weeks.

Apr 28 • 5:25 AM EDT • Health • virginiamercury.com

WNY Invention Convention at Buffalo Science Museum

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) — Students had the chance to showcase their creativity at the Buffalo Museum of Science on Sunday at the Western New York Invention Convention. Around 350 students showed…

Apr 26 • 9:10 PM EDT • Science • wivb.com

Meryl Streep tears up after receiving message from actress who played her daughter in 'Sophie's Choice'

Meryl Streep's eyes welled with tears when watching a current-day video of Jennifer Lawn Lejeune, the actress who played her daughter over four decades ago in 'Sophie's Choice,' showering her with praise.

Apr 26 • 7:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

Hurricanes use postseason experience to advance again in NHL playoffs sweep

Carolina showed its scoring depth with a dominating performance from its second line.

Apr 26 • 2:34 PM EDT • Sports • spectrumlocalnews.com

Bennett, Lapid, and the bromance that could decide Israel's next election

On paper, Bennett and Lapid had no business being allied. However, the personal trust between them is the central campaign promise.

Apr 26 • 2:24 PM EDT • Politics • jpost.com

Buying an apartment seemed my best option. Visiting a tiny home village showed me another way to live.

A zillennial who spent 30% of his income on his mortgage felt lucky. Minitopia's tiny home village gave him a new perspective on homeownership.

Apr 26 • 5:27 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Business owner worried as Hwy. 1 closure in San Francisco continues

Caltrans says they finished up one lane overnight and are moving on to the next. However, In the neighborhood there is mixed reaction, from relief to some concern, with three weekends of work.

Apr 25 • 10:08 PM EDT • Business • nbcbayarea.com

‘But I’m lasting like 40 seconds or something’: Nikhil Kamath shares health hacks he swears by to stay in shape

From sleep to cold showers, expert decodes whether these popular wellness habits actually work.

Apr 25 • 8:30 PM EDT • Health • indianexpress.com

Trump’s political headwinds pile up after gerrymandering, Iran setbacks

New polls showed voters prefer Democrats on the economy for the first time since 2010 and Republicans disapprove of Trump’s handling of inflation.

Apr 25 • 5:00 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

Mamdani vetoes bill for 'buffer zones' around protests near schools

However, he allowed a similar bill for houses of worship to become law.

Apr 24 • 8:30 PM EDT • Politics • ny1.com

Teen of the Week: DeAngelo builds relationships through sports and family

PARKERSBURG – For Leonardo “Leo” DeAngelo, it is about building relationships whether it is through playing sports or working at his family’s restaurant as he prepares for a future in sales. However, it is the connection to his family that remains the strongest. The 18-year-old senior at Parkersburg Catholic High School has been on Catholic’s […]

Apr 24 • 8:00 PM EDT • Sports • newsandsentinel.com

Final Fantasy 14 coming to Nintendo Switch 2

Square Enix is bringing Final Fantasy 14 to Nintendo Switch 2, Square Enix just announced. The game will be available this August. A short early access period of about a month is planned. The cost during this time will be entirely free. The Switch 2 version will require a separate subscription from other versions, following discussions with Nintendo. However, a...

Apr 24 • 3:16 PM EDT • Technology • nintendoeverything.com

Mina the Hollower has gone gold

Mina the Hollower has now gone gold, Yacht Club Games just announced. Typically we don’t post about games going gold. If a title hasn’t been announced and wasn’t cancelled, it’s eventually going to release. However, this is a bit of a special case. For one thing, we’ve been waiting a long time for Mina the Hollower at this point. Originally,...

Apr 24 • 2:25 PM EDT • Technology • nintendoeverything.com

Birdbrained Science: My God, it’s full of stars

I’ve been a casual stargazer ever since high school when I first watched a meteor shower with some of my friends. The stars often (and rightfully, in my opinion) get romanticized; countless people …

Apr 24 • 6:00 AM EDT • Science • dailycampus.com

Close, but still not good enough: Cubs 8, Phillies 7

The Phillies finally showed some signs of life, but nevertheless they still couldn’t manage to finally break their losing streak, which has now extended to nine games. They erased a 6-2 deficit and tied it at 7-7 in the ninth, but ultimately, they couldn’t find a way to win in extras while Dansby Swanson walked it off for the Cubs to win 8-7. Brandon Marsh went 4-5 with two home runs and three RBIs in a losing effort.

Apr 23 • 5:57 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Most Americans Worried About Brain Health, But Few Know How To Protect It

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterTHURSDAY, April 23, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Nearly all Americans are worried about their brain health as they age, ranking as important or more so than their physical health, a new Alzheimer’s Association report says. However, they don’t know what steps they can ...

Apr 23 • 6:45 AM EDT • Health • usnews.com

Euro zone business activity contracted in April as costs rocketed, PMI shows

Business activity in the euro zone suffered a surprise contraction in April with the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran sapping demand as prices soared, a closely ​watched survey showed on Thursday.

Apr 23 • 4:03 AM EDT • Business • reuters.com

New issue: Mirrorlife | BBC Science Focus Magazine

Mirror life could end all life on Earth. That sounds dramatic, but senior biologists have raised the alarm about experiments happening all around the world. It sounds like something in a Doctor Who plot, but no – mirror life is a real possibility. So why do scientists want to create something that’s potentially apocalyptic? Well, it could also have huge benefits (think back to splitting the atom). The first thing to say, however, is that mirror organisms are still a little way away yet – but only decades, not centuries. So far, scientists have only made mirror molecules, one of life’s building blocks. What for? Life works because its building blocks fit together. Imagine drilling a screw into a piece of wood. The screw cuts a hole with a thread that snugly matches its own. If, for some reason, the Doctor showed up and handed you a mirror version of the screw, its thread would be in reverse. It wouldn’t twist into the hole you’d just made as the threads wouldn’t match. That said, the mirror screw would still work; you’d just have to create a mirror hole for it. Mirror molecules, including DNA, work a bit like that. They follow the same principles as the biology around us, but they’re entirely incompatible with traditional biological functions. In medical terms, this means they’re effectively invisible to your body’s systems. Our biology doesn’t have the tools to recognise these molecules and break them apart. And if someone took these mirror molecules and put them together to make a cell and then an organism… you’d have mirror life. But we don't have any way of breaking it down. If it escaped the lab, we’d just have to hope it didn’t have an appetite.

Apr 23 • 3:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencefocus.com

Pete Davidson debuts new tattoo, after spending $200K to have others removed

Pete Davidson has spent years — and a lot of money — removing his many tattoos. But he just showed off a new one.

Apr 22 • 11:33 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

This “quantum” material fooled scientists and revealed something new

A mysterious magnetic material once thought to host an exotic “quantum spin liquid” has turned out to be something entirely different—and possibly just as intriguing. Scientists studying cerium magnesium hexalluminate found it showed the hallmark signs of this elusive quantum state, like a lack of magnetic order and a spread of energy states. But after closer inspection using neutron experiments, they discovered the behavior came from a delicate tug-of-war between two opposing magnetic forces.

Apr 21 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Shaky political science: using "simulated" elections over real-world elections

[Dear DSOS readers – this article is the latest in our “Shaky Political Science” series. In our 38 page report, “Shaky political ‘science’ misses mark on ranked choice voting,” released in early December, we examined over 40 studies focused on ranked choice voting. We found that many of these studies suffered from puzzling research methodologies, poorly constructed surveys, unrealistic simulated elections, cherry picked data, and faulty analyses that often were contradicted by results from real-world elections (a link to our full paper is here). Here are links to the first three articles in our series: the first one summarizing the overall results of our report, the second one analyzing a study co-authored by University of Minnesota academic Larry Jacobs, which was one of the most error-prone of all the research we reviewed in our report, and a third article showing an admirable example of two political scientists holding two other political scientists accountable for their flawed, sloppy research]. In this fourth article in our “Shaky Political Science” series, we shine a spotlight on seven studies that were web-hosted and funded by New America’s Political Reform Program and its Electoral Reform Research Group (the ERRG is an ad hoc committee headed by New America’s Political Reform Program and joined by the American Enterprise Institute, the Unite America Institute and Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law). This research consortium has been led by Lee Drutman, senior fellow with New America’s Political Reform Program. These seven studies are simply not credible from any objective standard about how political “science” is supposed to illuminate our understanding of either ranked choice voting or politics in general. The feature that six of these seven studies have in common is that they all used surveys – artificial, simulated elections -- to attempt to say something cogent or interesting about ranked choice voting (RCV) elections. None of them used real world data from actual RCV elections – either the 1000+ elections in the US or the many thousands of elections from places like Australia, Ireland and elsewhere where RCV has been used for 100 years. While a few of these studies conclude with some mixed positives about RCV, our analysis here is content neutral. The idea that, with a political reform like RCV, you can ask respondents in a mock, artificial election to vote with that method, with only the barest of explanation about how RCV works or its likely impacts (i.e. no spoiler candidates, majority winners, voters liberated to pick their favorite candidates, coalition-building), and then ask them their thoughts/reactions about voting in that system, with fake candidates and no real campaigning, no real exposure to an actual election or actual candidates, rests on some very puzzling assumptions. The findings of these seven studies actually are contradicted by the findings from many other studies based on real-world RCV elections. These New America studies also failed to list the real-world RCV studies in their own citations, instead including those studies that reinforced their conclusions. The seven studies featured in this article were chosen because they form a cohesive cohort which precisely illustrates one of the main points of our research paper, namely that using surveys, i.e. artificial elections, or mathematical/theoretical models, instead of real-world data, is in fact “shaky political science.” Below are summaries of our analysis of five of the seven New America studies. You can read our complete analysis of all seven studies at our paper, “Shaky political ‘science’ misses mark on ranked choice voting.” Choosing to “Vote As Usual” by Andre Blais, Carolina Plescia, and Semra Sevi. New America. (Blais et al., 2021). This study, web-hosted and funded by New America’s Political Reform Program and its Electoral Reform Research Group, used two surveys in which respondents completed ballots for simulated elections using plurality, approval, RCV and point (Score) voting. In both cases the authors provided the respondents with only minimal explanation of each method. For example, the entire explanation for RCV was “For this vote, rank the candidates from your first to your last choice (you do not need to rank them all). This is called the ranked vote.” That’s it. The study did not provide any context or explanation to survey respondents about why she/he might want to rank multiple candidates. Participants were not even told that ballots would be tabulated using an “instant” runoff, not to mention any description of RCVs ability to eliminate the spoiler effect or liberate voters to rank their favorite candidates without fear of helping the “greater evil” candidate to win. That’s like taking an iPhone back in time to 1970 and asking someone if they like it better than their rotary phone without explaining how it works. Their first survey targeted states that held 2020 Super Tuesday Democratic primaries and used the real candidates’ names in the survey; the second survey used fictitious candidates. In other words, they surveyed respondents who had only ever participated in plurality elections, had no history or background with using RCV or any of the other methods, had no clue about its likely impacts, and did not communicate how the alternative methods would be counted, and then asked them: “How satisfied are you with using each system?” Predictably, the winner was plurality elections, the system used for president, Congress, gubernatorial and state legislative elections – in other words, the method they have been using, year after year, all their voting lives. With so little explanation of RCV and its impacts, this study is simply not credible in discovering anything useful about real-world RCV elections. It merely shows that a basic voter education campaign is needed when adopting a new election system. Additionally, the result contradicts many other post-election surveys following real RCV elections, asking opinions from voters who had just participated in a RCV election, that showed a great deal of satisfaction with RCV (see details on that in Studies 22-25 in our paper, as well as the four studies cited in the review for Study 28). Share Other studies on “satisfaction” and “understanding” make similar mistakes, in terms of basing their surveys on inadequate explanation to respondents and lack of education about context. How could any survey ever hope to measure accurately, in essence simulate a real-world election, without actual campaigning candidates, the media writing about those candidates, organizations endorsing candidates and voters being inundated with crucial information? More than anything, what these “studies” based on surveys show is that if you ask voters about something they don’t know very much about, and fail to adequately educate them, their responses will unsurprisingly reflect their confusion. Equally puzzling is that New America’s Electoral Reform Research Group, headed by political scientist Lee Drutman, found this to be a credible enough study that they not only published it but highlighted it in Drutman’s own discussion of research related to ranked choice voting. This pattern was repeated in study after study featured by New America’s Electoral Reform Research Group. For example in Ranked-Choice Voting and Political Expression: Voter Guides Narrow the Gap between Informed and Uninformed Citizens by Cheryl Boudreau, Jonathan Colner, and Scott MacKenzie, the researchers based their analysis on a survey which found that respondents who were asked to vote in a simulated RCV election, with minimal explanation of RCV or how it works, displayed less evidence of being informed about how to use RCV effectively, with the least informed voters ranking fewer candidates. As pointed out under the study above, in a real election voters are informed by a wide variety of methods, including public education by the election administration, by interested political groups, the media, and the candidates themselves who benefit from voters being aware of how to vote in the new system. In Support for Ranked-Choice Voting across Race and Partisanship by Joseph Anthony, David C. Kimball, Jack Santucci and Jamil Scott, the researchers used respondents from different parties and races voting in simulated plurality and RCV elections, who indicated their satisfaction with each voting method. Instead of using real world election results, the authors fell back on the easy, armchair and less reliable academic research methodology of making up mock elections. As with the other studies, little explanation was given of how RCV works or what its implications might be (electing majority winners or eliminating spoilers, for example). Unsurprisingly, this study found that respondents were not very satisfied with RCV. However, when the authors added an explanation that RCV has a tendency to elect more women and people of color, they found that this greater explanation increased the preference for RCV. The more voters were familiar with it, and the more they understood potential positive impacts – surprise! -- the more they were open to switching away from the status quo. Of note, the results from this study are thoroughly contradicted by a number of other studies whose data was obtained from real RCV elections with real voters. Those studies show a great deal of satisfaction with RCV. More “fake election” research An interesting wrinkle on this “research by fake elections” approach, which only served to illustrate how unreliable such “research” can become, was taken in Ranked-Choice Voting, Runoff, and Democracy: Insights from Maine and Other U.S. States by Joseph Cerrone and Cynthia McClintock_,_ also web-hosted and funded by New America’s ERRG. It gets high marks for creativity, but an eye-roll for thinking this could possibly add anything meaningful to our understanding of real world RCV elections. This study tried to determine whether RCV, plurality or two-round runoff elections provided greater voter satisfaction and acceptance of election results. To determine that, the authors conducted a survey asking if voters were satisfied with a fictional newspaper report of an election, with three different versions given to respondents – plurality, runoff and RCV, with variations of Republican/Democrat winners and variations of “come-from-behind” winners,” i.e. candidates not initially in first place but who win the “runoff.” Again, a minimal explanation of RCV or how it works was given, and the survey showed that respondents had the greatest unfamiliarity with RCV than the other methods. The unsurprising result? Respondents were much more satisfied with “come-from-behind” victories in a traditional two-round runoff election than in RCV, even though RCV is also a runoff system but with a single round of counting. Interestingly, the dissatisfaction with RCV disappeared for those who were more familiar with RCV. In fact, among those respondents who were “very familiar” with RCV, they were equally satisfied with RCV, runoff and plurality. Surprise, surprise. Again, what this study revealed, more than anything, is not only the inadequacy of the explanation for RCV given by the authors of this study, but the failure of the research format itself, thinking that such an artificial mock election could somehow simulate what actually happens in the real world in a real RCV election. Those four studies reviewed above are fitting examples of inadequate and shaky political “science.” Other studies reviewed in our paper from the New America/Electoral Reform Research Group cohort which also used mock elections included: Ranked-Choice Voting is an Acquired Taste by Joseph Anthony and David C. Kimball. New America. (Anthony et al., 2021). Ranked-Choice Voting is No Refuge for Extreme Candidates by Melissa Baker. New America. (Baker, 2021). Also included in this New America cohort is Does Ranked-Choice Voting Reduce Racial Polarization? by Yuki Atsusaka and Theodore Landsman, which actually did use real-world election results data but applied an odd and unconventional methodology to the data which relied on shaky assumptions and non-real-world scenarios that were too divorced from reality. To determine levels of “racially polarized voting,” the researchers imagined “ethnic parties,” by which they mean political parties for each ethnic group, which was especially odd since the election data they were using came from nonpartisan RCV races. But then they made an even odder assumption, namely that since race and ethnic characteristics of studied voters were not available, the authors tried to infer that information based on who voters selected and the racial make-up of voters in each district. This amounted to little more than vague and ambiguous guesswork dressed up with a bunch of mathematical equations used to give it a veneer of scientific appearance. Indeed, it seemed to assume racial polarization in order to prove racial polarization. Based on this questionable methodology, the authors concluded that RCV doesn’t reduce racial polarization. But the premise of this study missed an obvious reality: since RCV incentivizes more candidates to run and can result in more diverse fields of candidates, one would expect more racially-polarized voting in voters’ top rankings, not less, because more voters would have someone on that ballot who represents their racial or ethnic identity and more freedom to vote for their real first choice. By encouraging more diverse candidates and eliminating the spoiler effect, RCV facilitates voting for a favorite candidate of your own race and then selecting a second choice with the best likelihood of winning. The real measure is what voters do with their additional rankings – do they consider other candidates and vote “for the best of the rest”? This study didn’t tell us anything useful about that. But readily available data shows this is common in real RCV elections, and candidates act on this knowledge by engaging with voters outside their racial group. So the authors of this study failed to consider or account for what actually happens in real-world elections, and their conclusions are tainted by this failure. New America has contributed a great deal over the past 2.5 decades to our understanding of many policy areas, including politics and political reform (full disclosure: Steven Hill, one of the authors of this article and of the “Shaky Political Science” research paper and series, is a former senior fellow and former director of New America’s political reform program, 2005-2010). So it was especially disappointing that New America funded and published such a large batch of dubious studies about ranked choice voting. The stated praiseworthy goal of its Electoral Reform Research Group was to inspire new academic research about ranked choice voting that would shed light and help the public better understand the impacts of RCV. Instead, the ERRG research did just the opposite. It produced dubious research that created more confusion and misinformation. In so doing, New America’s political reform program contributed to “shaky political science.” Steven Hill and Paul Haughey Share Upgrade to $5 subscription Thanks for reading DemocracySOS, a reader-supported digital portal for the pro-democracy movement. Subscribe for only $5 per month to receive full benefits and to support our work. Subscribe

Apr 21 • 9:31 AM EDT • Science • democracysos.substack.com

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