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Fed's Waller says forward guidance 'more art than science'
Federal Reserve Board Gov. Christopher Waller says he is OK with dialing down the amount of communication issued by the central bank's monetary policy committee, but doesn't want the central bank to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
How this Olympic snowboarder is building a business career
Inside the budding business mind of a young Olympic medalist.
‘They had hyped us up so much’: Seattle businesses near World Cup stadium report declining sales
The city’s tourism board estimated 750,000 visitors would visit over the course of the World Cup
Union County Announces Return of Sensory-Friendly Summer Camp at Trailside Nature & Science Center
The Union County Board of County Commissioners is pleased to open registration for the 2026 Sensory Friendly Summer Camp at Trailside Nature and Science Center – 452 New Providence Road in Mountain…
This extreme ski competition could be coming to Utah’s 2034 Olympics
An extreme skiing and snowboarding event is vying to become the newest Winter Olympic sport. If Utah 2034 brings in freeride, will it have to be held in the Cottonwood Canyons?
Oscar Health's Mark Bertolini on making 'healthcare work for all'
A former CEO of Aetna and Bridgewater (and current chairman of the board of Verizon) brings his leadership philosophy to a challenger brand.
Scotty James & Nigel Sylvester: the big business of extreme sports
Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi chats with professional snowboarder and Olympic silver medalist Scotty James and professional BMX athlete Nigel Sylvester about the evolution of their extreme sports and how it's driving big business for their brands.
Prison health care lacks oversight, despite dedicated DE review board
A report analyzing the work of a state board tasked with monitoring the quality of health care in state prisons concluded the board isn't working.
Trump posts a doctored photo of the Obamas and Air Force One with graffiti spray-painted on plane
President Donald Trump has posted a falsified image of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama boarding Air Force One covered with graffiti | News-Talk 1380 WAOK
Trump posts a doctored photo of the Obamas and Air Force One with graffiti spray-painted on plane
President Donald Trump has posted a falsified image of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama boarding Air Force One covered with graffiti | WWJ Newsradio 950
Crimson Desert Update 1.13.00 is live
There are also dozens of new pieces of equipment for Kilff and Oongka obtainable through quests, achievements, shops, and "other sources".
Overnight News Digest: Star Spangled Science Saturday, 7/4/26
Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, JeremyBloom…
Patrick Ewing reportedly joining Wizards' staff as assistant, with Steve Clifford coming aboard as coaching adviser
Patrick Ewing reportedly joining Wizards' staff as assistant, with Steve Clifford coming aboard as coaching advisor
Flatbush Zombies’ Erick the Architect misses his BlackBerry keyboard
Fresh off a surprise appearance rapping about apps at WWDC.
Aroldis Chapman breaks MLall-time strikeout record among relievers
The Red Sox closer broke a tie with Hoyt Wilhelm for the top of the career leaderboard.
Aroldis Chapman breaks MLB all-time strikeout record among relievers
The Red Sox closer broke a tie with Hoyt Wilhelm for the top of the career leaderboard.
East Texas business leader discusses key success factors on local, national levels
Tonight, we’re joined by an East Texas leader whose work has taken him from local business circles to guiding executives, boards, and organizations across the country.
Providing Outdoor Science Education
Science Kids was one of 15 nonprofits that received funding from the Sheridan-Johnson Counties Local Board of the Wyoming Community Foundation as part of their spring competitive grant cycle. Sheridan Media’s Ron Richter has more. Science Kids in Sheridan started in 2009. The nonprofit provides outdoor, hands-on science education and summertime classes for youth ages […]
NYC Board of Elections to certify primary results
During a manual recount, each campaign will make its case for votes cast in its favor.
VivoPower Reinforces Focus on AI Data Center Business and Provides Update on Non-Core Businesses
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, July 02, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- VivoPower PLC (NASDAQ: VIVO) (“VivoPower” or the “Company”), a B Corp-certified global developer and owner of powered land and data center infrastructure for AI compute applications, today provides the following update in respect of its strategic direction and the previously announced separation initiatives relating to its subsidiaries Tembo e-LV B.V. (“Tembo”) and Caret Digital (“Caret Digital”). Following a strategic review, the Board o
Coleman: Walz pardon of child rapist puts politics over public safety
Senate Republican Assistant Leader Julia Coleman (Waconia) denounced the actions of the Minnesota Pardon Board, including Governor Tim Walz and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, for pardoning illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes to help them avoid deportation. The pardons were made to men convicted of criminal sexual assault of a child, aggravated robbery, and...
Blake Duncan & Scott Hendricks Launch TAYCAN Entertainment
Blake Duncan and Scott Hendricks launch TAYCAN Entertainment, ROAM's new hire brings his roster which includes Angine de Poitrine and more music hires.
Colorado governor fires board members who criticized release of election denier
Gov. Jared Polis (D) said clemency deliberations should be confidential.
Intel Expected To Restart Supply Of 10th, 12th, 13th, And 14th Gen Processors In Mainland China
Intel will reportedly focus more on the previous-gen processors to fulfill the current demand in the PC market. Intel is Reportedly Restarting Supply of Last Four Generation of Processors as Motherboard Vendors Ramp Up DDR4 Platform Production Roughly a month ago, we reported that some vendors are now restarting the production of DDR4 platforms, i.e., DDR4-compatible motherboards. This is to ensure the market gets DDR4 motherboards in sufficient quantity, as expensive DDR5 memory has made it unfeasible to build DDR5 systems on a budget. More reports are surfacing confirming the same report, and Intel appears to have prepared accordingly. Related […]
Silicon Valley-Themed 'Breaking The Code' Boarded By Two Sales Reps.
The Silicon Valley-themed 'Breaking the Code,' about pioneering Indian entrepreneur Kanwal Rekhi, has been boarded by two international sales agents.
Colorado governor fires two clemency board members who spoke out about Tina Peters’ commutation
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Wednesday fired two members of the state’s clemency board after they spoke out against his controversial decision to grant clemency to Tina Peters – an election denier whose sentence was cut in half by the outgoing Democratic governor in May.
Politics in the Park: Natrona County commissioner candidates talk taxes, energy, responsibilities
CASPER, Wyo. — Nine Republican candidates for the Natrona County Board of County Commissioners outlined their visions Wednesday for property taxes, energy
ESPN hates the Rams’ offseason
Sean McVay’s bullet board material for Rams players starts with a “C+”
British Business Bank bolsters board with four new directors
The British Business Bank has appointed four new non-executive directors across its boards, effective July 1, as chair Stephen Welton CBE is confirmed for a second three-year term
Sony will cease production of discs for new PlayStation games in 2028
New games sold for PlayStation consoles will only be available digitally and won’t be sold on discs effective January 2028, Sony has announced. The move applies to all PlayStation games released from that point on, including those made by Sony and those released by third parties. The PlayStation group calls the change “a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” according to a PlayStation blog post reviewed by Game File in advance of its publication. As movies, TV and music have shifted from physical media to an age of downloads and streaming, Sony’s move could speed the demise of physical media in a gaming. The industry has offered consumers games via cartridges, cassettes, floppy discs, CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays across a 50-year stretch. Sony has been reporting to investors in recent years that PlayStation games have been increasingly purchased as downloads, not as discs. The most recent figures show nearly four in five purchases of full games for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 were purchased digitally in the past year. Stats like that may cause today’s news to carry an air of the inevitable. But Sony’s declaration for 2028 is still likely to produce a shock, as the biggest gaming platform on the planet that uses game discs leaves them behind. Discs going away, but the fate of game boxes is unknown Sony is committing to still selling games in physical retailers even after they drop discs in 2028. Just how those games will be sold—in boxes with codes inside, as cards marked with digital redemption codes—is unclear. Digital games will also continue to be sold in the online PlayStation Store. New games released for PlayStation consoles prior to January 2028 will be unaffected by the policy change, Sony says. That means the PS5 games of 2027, be they a new Madden, a new God of War, a new Call of Duty, a new Sly Cooper (one can dream?), would still potentially be offered on disc. PlayStation 6 implications Sony’s timeline for a transition to a no-disc era will also spin up more speculation about the timing and configuration of Sony’s next-generation console, the probable PlayStation 6. “This pretty much guarantees that PS6 won’t arrive until 2028 at the earliest,” Piers Harding-Rolls, senior games research analyst at Ampere Analysis tells Game File. Harding-Rolls also concludes from today’s news that “the base version of a PS6 will not include a physical media drive,” as Sony looks to keep costs down on the device. Sony itself is saying nothing about the PS6 today: not its timing, nor how it might or might not support internal or external disc drives in order to run disc-based PS4 and PS5 games, should the console be backwards compatible. The many signs this was coming Industry support for games being released on physical media has been waning. As has consumer interest in them. PC games effectively went all-digital years ago, thanks to the popularity of playing games through Steam and other digital storefronts. The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that kept much of the global population home helped shift shopping patterns toward downloads. Sony’s own data shows PlayStation game downloads being an uncommon consumer choice a decade ago and now becoming the norm. On consoles, physical media has been in such decline that Sony and Microsoft both launched their current gen Xbox Series and PS5 consoles in 2020 with cheaper versions that lacked disc drives. In early 2024, Phil Spencer, then head of Xbox, told me that ““[w]e ship games physically and digitally, and we’re really just following what the customers are doing.” He added that the game industry had become an outlier in still supporting disc-based entertainment, even as movies and TV have bailed on discs in favor of downloads and steaming: “Gaming consoles themselves have kind of become the last consumer electronic device that has a drive. And this is a real issue, just in terms of the number of manufacturers that are actually building drives and the cost associated with those. And when you think about cogs that we’re going to go put in a console—and as you have fewer suppliers and fewer buyers—the cost of the drive does have an impact.” Last year, the Nintendo’s Switch 2, which uses cartridges rather than discs, introduced the concept of game-key cards, which are physical media that contain no game, just a prompt for a download. Even disc-based games aren’t what they once were, now frequently containing just stubs of games rather than the whole thing. The website Does It Play has tested over 3000 games and found that, for example, that the disc version of this year’s hit 007: First Light, only contained the game’s first mission, with the rest needing to be downloaded. Beyond all that, last week brought the news that Grand Theft Auto VI, likely the biggest game launch this decade, will debut for PS5 and Xbox Series without a disc-based version. Today’s big news comes to you for free. Game File is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and ensure more of my work is possible, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe Discs helped define PlayStation However the trends in entertainment may be going, it is still remarkable to see PlayStation ditch discs given their importance in PlayStation history: In the late 1990s, the first PlayStation’s support for games on relatively cheap CD-ROMs instead of traditional game cartridges allowed the upstart console to outmaneuver cartridge-based systems from Nintendo and Sega, as it drove down game prices down in the process. (The cheaper disc format even prompted Final Fantasy VII maker Square to taunt Nintendo in a magazine ad, saying that if the game was “available on cartridge, it’d retail for around $1200.”) PlayStation devices often doubled as machines for watching movies and TV on the latest disc-based formats. In the late 2000s, for example, Sony’s pricy PS3 gained traction as a go-to device for playing then-novel Blu-Ray discs. In 2013, Sony effectively roasted the digital game-sharing restrictions proposed by rival Microsoft for its upcoming Xbox One console by showing how games could be shared for the then-upcoming PS4. In a 21-second clip that has over 20 million views on YouTube, one PlayStation executive simply handed a game box—presumably with disc inside—to another, who said “thanks.” Sony’s possible motivations The PlayStation announcement today cites “consumer preferences” and a shift away from discs among “the broader entertainment industry,” but does not delve into the decision-making process that brought Sony to this point. Sony is not discussing the economics of this move (I asked!), but there are a number of potential factors: Abandoning discs will spare Sony the cost of manufacturing and shipping them, which analysts and industry veterans I spoke to said could account for $1 or so of a game’s retail price. For first-party games, that’s direct savings for Sony, though the amount is limited by the winnowing percentage of people who were even buying the disc-based versions. For third-party games, Sony could pass the savings on to partners or just retain the better profit margin for themselves. As the 2024 comments from Phil Spencer alluded to, leaving discs behind could mean leaving disc-drives behind, allowing Sony to produce consoles more cheaply. Switching to digital-only for games could diminish the risks of copies of new games leaking. It would also seemingly make second-hand sales of used games impossible, pushing more people to buy their own copies of games. These economic benefits for Sony could be boons for the games industry overall, Ampere analyst Piers Harding-Rolls tells Game File. Among other things, it could free publishers and retailers from having to worry about securing an inventory of game discs when trying to sell games, he noted. “If there is a way to streamline the business of games retail, I generally think it’s a good thing for the industry as it removes unnecessary costs,” Harding-Rolls said. “This will help offset pressure on margins from other directions – development and staffing costs for example.” Should the industry shift from game boxes that contain discs to smaller, cheaper game cards, Harding-Rolls said, that reduces pressure on publishers and retailers. “The advantage of everything going digital for the industry is that sales can be tracked much more easily and there is less commercial risk for publishers wanting to continue selling via retail,” he said. The shift to no discs will also likely impact game development timelines, as developers will no longer face the same urgency to have a build ready to submit to PlayStation for the production of a disc, as industry experts noted around GTA VI’s no-disc news last week. Instead, projects may gain weeks of development time, in the event delivery deadlines for platform approval move closer to release date. Preservationists’ likely worries While millions of gamers have shifted to digital, there are still people who associate game discs—and only game discs—with actual ownership of PlayStation games. That portion of the gaming community spoke up last week about wanting to buy a version of GTA VI that they could hold in their hands, could lend to a friend and could potentially pop into a well-preserved PS5 console three decades from now and still see it run. Such gamers didn’t want to worry that they’d merely purchased a digital copy that could lose access to the game if, say, the company behind the game someday turns of the servers that transmit downloadable copies. Digital copies of games are inherently less long-lasting, because consumers aren’t actually buying a game (on a disc), just buying access to the game. The fine print in online gaming shops notes this, as does a recent law that went on the books in California in 2025. That lasw requires game publishers doing business in the state to refrain from words like “sell” when offering digital copies of games, unless they explicitly tell consumers that what’s being sold isn’t the game itself but a potentially revocable license to access it. A Sony spokesperson noted to Game File that “[w]ith all digital content, including games, movies, and music, players are purchasing a personal license for non-commercial use.” Regarding the fears of PlayStation games being lost to time in an all-digital era, the rep also noted that Sony remains “committed to delivering experiences from past generations to the new platforms our players are using.” They noted that PlayStation has used emulation and remasters to keep offering its classic games to modern gamers. It’s true that many consumers have become accustomed to not having physical copies of new music albums or movies, but the relative precariousness of digital copies of games is in fact being highlighted today by…. Sony’s other big announcement: the upcoming closure of the PS3 and PS Vita online stores Sony said today that it will be closing the online marketplaces for its PlayStation 3 console and PS Vita handheld in most countries in July 2027 (sooner elsewhere: August 2026 for the PS3 store Mexico, Honduras and Nicaragua; late 2026 for PS3 in other Latin American countries and the Middle East). “We know this news may be disappointing to PS3 and PS Vita players who hold a special place in their hearts for this generation of gaming,” Sony said in its announcement, saying the move “was not an easy decision for us to make.” Sony said that PS3 and Vita marketplaces “are no longer able” to support modern commerce systems, prompting a “need” to close the shops and focus on more modern PlayStation platform stores. The news may spark some deja vu. Sony announced back in March 2021 that it planned to take the PS3, Vita and PlayStation Portable marketplaces offline that summer. The move would have caused some 2,000 digital-only games to become unavailable for new purchasers, according to a VGC analysis at the time. Fans complained loudly. By April 2021, Sony walked back the PS3 and Vita shop closures, with then PlayStation boss Jim Ryan saying “it’s clear that we made the wrong decision here.” This time around, Sony is giving a longer notice period in most regions. The closure of those stores is still likely to cut off access to new purchases of digital-only PS3 and Vita games. The current PlayStation 5 marketplace sells PS5 and PS4 games, as well as a selection of PS1 and PS2 games. It does not sell PS3 games, because games for that platform can’t run on the system (some are offered via a PlayStation Plus streaming option). Vita games also aren’t sold via PS5. Sony says digitally purchased PS3 and Vita games will be downloadable after the stores’ shutdowns “for the foreseeable future.” Sony’s move contrasts with Microsoft’s Xbox platform, which continues to sell and support games from all four Xbox console generations. But it puts it in line with Nintendo, which disabled purchases in the marketplace for its Wii console (a contemporary of the PS3) in 2019. Nintendo discontinued purchases in the online shop for its 3DS portable (a contemporary of the Vita) in 2023. The big questions about Sony’s 2028 post-disc era Will Microsoft follow suit, ending support for new disc-based games on Xbox platforms and therefore all game consoles, too? Whether Microsoft does or not, will third-parties that can no longer release games on discs for PlayStation, simply ditch the disc options across the board? Given the GTA VI no-disc experiment launching this November, will more game publishers decide to forgo disc-based offerings even in 2027? How will no-disc PS5/6 games be packaged and sold in brick-and-mortar retail stores? What becomes of game sharing in an all-digital era? Will Sony modify its current set-up, which currently allows some sharing of digital games across a pair of consoles, to allow more casual lending? (See for example, Nintendo’s year-old system of letting players lend a digital game to another player in a “family group” for up to 14 days.) Will there be a version of a PS6 with a disc drive? Or will a drive be offered as an add-on? And how will gamers who want to retain access to PS4/PS5 disc-based games react to whichever configurations Sony chooses to offer? What will the final disc-based PlayStation game be?
Just in: Ex-Science minister Uche Nnaji arrested at Abuja Airport
Former Minister of Science and Technology, Uche Nnaji, was on Wednesday arrested at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, shortly after arriving from Enugu aboard a chartered flight.
Sewerage and Water Board meet with Decatur businesses to answer questions about project completion
The floor was open for questions at Turtle Bay, where owners and employees pressed SWBNO about when the barricades will come down.
Leaders of powerful S.F. Chinatown business group threaten to quit
Some leaders of San Francisco’s Chinese Chamber of Commerce are demanding that former president Donald Luu be permanently removed from the organization’s board.
St. Peter’s Health Partners Medical Associates Welcomes Nattamon Thapa
Nattamon Thapa, FNP-BC, has joined St. Peter’s Vascular Associates in Albany. A board-certified family nurse practitioner, Thapa specializes in vascular surgery care.
Acti puts AI agents directly into your smartphone keyboard
Startup Acti is betting the smartphone keyboard is the next home for AI assistants. Its new keyboard for iOS and Android works across apps and lets users create custom AI-powered shortcuts using natural language.
Oklahoma Health Care Authority board approves balanced budget despite funding gaps
Budget cuts and modifications are leaving the state Medicaid agency with "razor-thin margins" as it enters the 2027 fiscal year.
Supreme Court lets states ban trans girls from girls sports
The decision caps a yearslong, Republican-led push through statehouses and school boards to define girls' sports by sex assigned at birth.
Business is good at the Camillus Costco. It asks town for OK to make a move
The proposal is being reviewed by the town of Camillus planning board.
The origin story of college football’s most unhinged corner of the internet: Message boards
Message boards are ubiquitous with college sports, and have been since the late 1990s. Here's how it all began.
Google Play Store is getting faster everywhere, from your Android phone to your car's dashboard
Google Play Store is becoming faster across phones, tablets, TV, Wear OS, and Android Auto, and receiving a bunch of new Store features.
Simon Says... Buy This OpenAI Mechanical Keyboard Thingy
It's a collaboration between OpenAI and Work Louder. It does something or other with Codex.
Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment Wins ‘Alien Superstar’ Sample Lawsuit
Beyoncé’s company Parkwood Entertainment beat a copyright lawsuit over the EDM sample that opens her hit 2022 "Renaissance" track “Alien Superstar.”
BlueCross BlueShield of VT pulls its proposed lower-cost, higher-deductible health plans
The insurer said the Green Mountain Care Board’s delayed approval of the plans left them with little time to prepare.
The Most Important Business Lesson From Cannes Had Nothing to Do With Advertising
The world's biggest advertising festival just made the case that creative thinking belongs in the boardroom, not just the campaign brief.
RWJBarnabas Health Board Chair, Susan Reinhard, Designated a Living Legend by the American Academy of Nursing
Susan C. Reinhard, PhD, RN, FAAN, Chair of the Board of Trustees for RWJBarnabas Health, the largest, most comprehensive academic health care system in New Jersey, has been designated by The American Academy of Nursing as a Living Legend.
Arena, the AI leaderboard everyone uses, is now a $100M business
The startup, which runs a popular free AI leaderboard, launched its commercial service just last September.
Faculty in Politics, Chemistry, Biology and English Appointed to Endowed Professorships | Pomona College in Claremont, California
Four faculty members have been awarded endowed professorship positions. The Pomona College Board of Trustees voted to support these appointments during their meeting in May.
The Entertainment Community Fund Reveals New Board of Trustees Appointments and Leadership Additions
The Entertainment Community Fund, formerly The Actors Fund, has revealed four new Board members, including one returning member, as well as new appointments to its Western Council and the Actors Fund Home Board of Trustees.
Annette Bening Reelected Chair of Entertainment Community Fund; Kenny Leon Rejoins Board of Trustees
The Fund provides support and resources tailored to the needs of performing arts and entertainment professionals.
Leaked A20 Pro Image Hints at iPhone 18 Pro Performance Gains
An alleged image of the iPhone 18 Pro motherboard has leaked online, showing the A20 Pro chip will use a new packaging technology that should offer notable performance gains over the previous model. The leaked image, which has been shared by the accounts "WHYLAB" and "Ice Universe" on Weibo, appears to show the A20 Pro chip integrated into TSMC's new packaging architecture, known as Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WMCM) technology.
Cognition's CEO says token leaderboards are 'directionally correct'
Cognition CEO Scott Wu said there are better ways to incentivize employees to use AI.
France, Argentina top World Cup odds; U.S. puts sportsbooks at risk
Star-powered France and Argentina top the odds board to win the World Cup as the tournament moves into the knockout stage, while the United States' positive momentum will have sportsbooks sweating more with each game it wins.
Business People
Northwest Arkansas-based CS Bank has recognized its Chairman of the Board, John Fuller Cross, for reaching 70 years in the banking industry.
Business People
Northwest Arkansas-based CS Bank has recognized its Chairman of the Board, John Fuller Cross, for reaching 70 years in the banking industry.
Business People
Northwest Arkansas-based CS Bank has recognized its Chairman of the Board, John Fuller Cross, for reaching 70 years in the banking industry.
Community Market Series creates space to support small business
A new market in Boardman is hoping to bring the community together to help support small, local businesses.
Nigel Farage’s anti-WHO campaign moves to US with allies added to board
Relocation of Action on World Health raises questions over why Reform UK leader is involved in a US pressure group
Nigel Farage’s anti-WHO campaign moves to US with allies added to board
Relocation of Action on World Health raises questions over why Reform UK leader is involved in a US pressure group
Apple A20 Pro motherboard leak hints at notable memory and packaging upgrades
A leaked package layout of Apple's A20 Pro hints at several notable upgrades for the iPhone 18 Pro series. The next-gen SoC is said to feature a wider 96-bit memory interface, a redesigned packaging approach for improved thermals, and a larger Neural Processing Unit (NPU).
City of Covington awards final round of fiscal year 2026 Small Business Incentive program funding
The City of Covington continues its commitment to supporting entrepreneurs, revitalizing commercial corridors, and strengthening neighborhood business districts through the Covington Small Business Incentive Program. The Covington Board of Commissioners has approved the fourth and final round of Fiscal Year 2026 Small Business Incentive Program funding, awarding $28,000 to support four projects across the city....
This Week's 10 Must-Read Stories on Women in Politics: Title IX Anniversary, AI's Anti-Women Bias and Ranked-Choice Voting Victories
Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation is a weekly compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, on boards, in sports and entertainment, in judicial offices and in the private sector in the U.S. and around the world—with a little gardening and goodwill mixed in for refreshment! Published every Friday. —This week marked the 54th anniversary of Title IX. —As the Taliban approaches the five-year mark of its return to power this August, a rare protest in western Afghanistan last week laid bare both the brutality of its rule and the resilience of those living under it. —A woman will replace Eric Swalwell in California … but for not two more months. —A study of 133 AI systems found that 44 percent demonstrated gender bias, and more than a quarter showed both gender and racial bias. ... and more.
Health Care Plan Premiums Approved for 2027
The State Teachers Retirement Board set premiums for the STRS Ohio Health Care Program for calendar year 2027.
Trustees hear Glencoe neighbors who blast possibility of street parking near business district
Facing opposition from residents living adjacent to the Village’s business district, the Glencoe Village Board has adopted the findings of a long-in-development parking study without three areas that multiple residents spoke against during a recent Village Board meeting. In a 5-0 vote, with Trustee Dudley Onderdonk abstaining, the Glencoe Village Board on Thursday, June 18, […]
Your Social Security benefits could be cut by a quarter in 2032. Here’s what to know
Americans’ Social Security benefits will have to be cut by roughly a quarter in six years due to depleted funds, according to a June 9 report from the Social Security Board of Trustees. That’s months sooner than the group had estimated in 2025.
ECU Health announces 2026 Board Quality Leadership Award winners
ECU Health Board Quality Leadership Award winners were recognized for delivering exceptional experiences and advancing patient outcomes.
How to Keep Your Skin Healthy and Hydrated in Summer Months
From sunburns to heat rashes, board-certified Dr. Angela Lamb joins TODAY with solutions for common summer skin problems.
Texas school board to vote on required Bible readings in public education
If approved by the Texas State Board of Education, which is controlled by Republicans, the reading list would take effect in 2030.
Past participants are now the leaders of MIT’s dynaMIT Club
The MIT student club dynaMIT teaches STEM principles to local middle school students for free every summer. They use fun, innovative experiments to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.
2026 NHL Mock Draft
Ahead of tonight’s NHL draft, let’s take a stab at how the first round could play out tonight. First, a moment of silence for our near miss last year – when we tried to predict that Kyle Dubas would go ‘off the board’ with a high pick on a WHL center that no one saw […]
Cabo Verde Is a Breakout Star of the World Cup. So Is the Family-Owned Business That Designed Its Jerseys
After more than three decades manufacturing apparel, Capelli Sport co-founder and CEO George Altirs found his company’s biggest billboard yet—3,500 miles away from his midtown Manhattan office.
Making Our Own Luck
We are cross-posting a piece that former NIH official Kris Willis wrote for Macroscience. Kris is now the President and Founder of the Woodley Park Institute, for which I’m a board member. Picking winners or hedging bets? Federal science agencies have long wrestled with the question of how to ensure their billions of dollars of grants and contracts result in maximum benefits for Americans. On the surface, it might seem that a goal-oriented, interventionist style of management would be the best policy: prioritize our most pressing problems and distribute funding accordingly.This top-down strategy creates a unique hazard, though: bad choices can send resources in the wrong direction, resulting in slow progress that impedes the delivery of tangible benefits to citizens. Moreover, if decision makers pursue an applied advance when the underlying scientific principles remain poorly understood, they risk costly failures and a loss of support for the research enterprise at large. Examples include Nixon’s 1971 War on Cancer, undertaken on the premise that a cure could be achieved in less than a decade, the drive to build an operational commercial fusion plant by the mid-1990s, and the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease, which failed to produce the effective treatments and prevention strategies promised by 2025. The contrasting laissez-faire approach is to hedge your bets. If the path to an advance is impossible to predict, then the wisest choice might be to distribute funding to as widely as possible. The main risk of this strategy is that spreading funding thinly may limit the resources available to the most promising research, resulting in the same negative outcomes as the interventionist approach: limited support for the most promising topics, slow progress, and delayed returns. In reality, at science agencies like the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, program managers navigate between these two extremes, setting some funds aside to target high-priority areas and using the rest to cover the widest possible range of meritorious proposals. This middle path seems like the most rational way to proceed, but it still requires making choices. How much should be set aside for high priority topics? What should those topics be? How should we define merit? Expert opinion can provide a helpful guide, but leading experts can have remarkably different opinions about what matters and what should be prioritized. Moreover, experts and administrators alike can be risk averse, giving an edge to high-profile, well-established concepts. What’s really needed is a data-driven framework to help guide decision-making, one that doesn’t simply repackage prestige or incumbency. Recognizing breakthroughs years in advance Many breakthroughs fail to attract funding or recognition at the earliest stages of development. Katalin Karikó, for example, spent years struggling to win grants for work on mRNA that would eventually win her and Drew Weissman a Nobel Prize. Similar stories can be told about Jim Allison’s groundbreaking studies leading to the development of cancer immunotherapy, Stan Pruisner’s demonstration that prions can self-replicate without DNA, or Robin Warren and Barry Marshall’s proof that Helicobacter pylori, not stress, causes ulcers. Yet at some point, the scientific community recognizes and responds to transformative breakthroughs like these. How does that change happen? And what if science funders could identify the areas that are on the cusp of a breakthrough? Those questions led my collaborators and me to study how scientists responded to past breakthroughs. Based on patterns in that data, we developed a means of predicting future breakthroughs, using biomedicine as a proof of concept. It’s worth taking a moment to describe how our approach works. Briefly, our prediction process begins by grouping the 18 million or so peer-reviewed papers in PubMed, the authoritative database of biomedical research, into roughly 50,000 unique topics. A small subset of these topics are so widely acclaimed as breakthroughs that they have been recognized with a major prize like a Nobel or a Lasker Award. We theorized that studying the development of these outliers over time, especially before they gained acclaim, was the key to identifying future instances of them. After defining topics, we chose 21 representative breakthroughs and asked what they looked like before they won prestigious prizes. To answer that question, we re-ran our topic-mapping algorithm repeatedly, winding back the clock one year each time, stringing together the years to follow the progress of each field as it grew and advanced. We found that in each case, the years leading up to a discovery followed a pattern: a burst of papers on a new, rapidly evolving topic, many of which quickly became influential. These characteristics—the percent of papers that are new, the percentage of papers that are brought in from other topics, and the influence of each individual paper—can all be measured separately for any given topic. Together, they act as a predictive signal that is detectable an average of five years before a transformative discovery is made, and up to thirty years before the discovery receives a major prize. Scanning the current research landscape for topics that display this signal allows us to predict what work will likely produce a future breakthrough. Each year we analyzed includes four or five signals, a number that appears to have remained constant across a twenty year time frame. In their classic work on the sociology of science, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar established that the desire to participate in a major discovery is an important motivator for scientists as they consider whether they should take up (or abandon) a research problem. Although further work is needed, the simplest explanation for our results is that this behavior is widespread enough to detect at scale. A foundational advance, or something like it, draws the attention of scientists and causes them to change the direction of their research. They vote with their feet, staking their own reputation and careers by publishing on and citing the new idea. That upswell of interest is the foundation of our breakthrough signal. What kind of research does our model identify as a breakthrough? After building a model based on the patterns in our 21 preselected breakthroughs, we tested it by identifying all early signals of discovery from 1994 through 1997. Of the 18 signals we found in that time period, 17 can be traced forward in time to a breakthrough. Examples include super-resolution fluorescence microscopy (see the image above), the directed evolution of proteins and enzymes (Chemistry Nobel, 2018), and sequencing the human genome (National Medal of Science, 2008). The discovery of the role of leptin signaling in obesity is a particularly interesting case study. Around 1950, scientists noticed the existence of a type of lab mouse that suffered from a unique inherited form of obesity. When given the freedom to choose their own diet, these mice ate more than normal and preferred food that was high in fat. Researchers had few clues as to why the animals overate; early experiments pointed to the existence of a soluble ob factor found circulating in the bloodstream that regulated appetite, but its identity was unknown. In 1994, Jeffrey Friedman and colleagues identified and sequenced the ob gene, noting that the protein it encoded appeared to fit the profile of a circulating factor. A year later, a trio of high-profile publications demonstrated that ob was a hormone that regulated body weight and fat deposition by regulating appetite. One of these was co-authored by Friedman, who christened it leptin from the ancient Greek word for thin. Using our model, the data from 1996 make it clear this advance would become a breakthrough. Scientists had flocked to study the biology of the new hormone, generating the flurry of new papers and citations required to produce a signal. One of these demonstrated that serum leptin concentrations reflected the amount of adipose tissue in the human body, providing clinical validation of the earlier mouse studies. Before the identification of leptin, scientists were unable to point to a specific molecule that controlled appetite and adiposity, so that it was impossible to rule out non-physiological causes of obesity; its characterization fundamentally changed our concept of weight gain. In 2010, Friedman and fellow pioneer Douglas Coleman were awarded a Lasker for the discovery. Our work also identifies breakthroughs in clinical practice and behavioral and social sciences, even though these areas are less likely to draw the attention of major prize committees. One example that falls into this category is the introduction of endovascular aneurysm repair, a minimally invasive surgical procedure for the treatment of abdominal aortic aneurysm, a leading cause of death among Americans over the age of 65. Relative to the previous standard of care, it reduces in-hospital mortality by almost four-fold. In 2017, Timothy Chuter received the American College of Surgeons’ prestigious Jacobsen Innovation award for his multiple refinements to the technique. Another under-recognized breakthrough identified by our model is the development of standardized survey instruments to assess the quality of life for HIV+ patients. The antiretroviral cocktails introduced in the mid-1990s reduced AIDS mortality, but treatment came with serious side effects. The new evaluations showed that patients whose disease progressed had worse physical functioning than Americans with other chronic diseases, while those who were asymptomatic maintained a health-related quality of life on par with the overall US population. This evidence made it possible for patients and activists to argue that even in the absence of a total cure, and in spite of the side effects, alleviation of symptoms was a worthwhile priority for clinicians. My colleagues and I have failed to identify any significant recognition for the physicians and health policy experts who pioneered this advance, although in 2016, researchers called for the World Health Organization to set targets for good health-related quality of life as part of its framework to end the AIDS pandemic. From forecasting to funding How should science funders use our predictions? Any serious discussion of what we should do with this new capability needs to begin with an understanding of its limitations. We can’t (and shouldn’t) invest all of our resources in the small number of topics predicted to produce breakthroughs. Innovative new fields are born from existing ones; they rarely arise de novo. If funders don’t maintain a diverse portfolio, the breakthroughs of tomorrow will have no antecedents. Think of this as eating the seed corn, or killing the goose that lays the golden egg. There are also multiple goals of funding beyond basic scientific discovery, including translating discoveries into clinical practice, developing new technologies, supporting economic development, and training new scientists. The investments needed to accomplish these goals are likely different from those required to support emerging breakthroughs. Finally, we must be aware that we may not capture every instance of a breakthrough. The concept is fuzzy, and not every significant discovery is recognized with a major award. Further, breakthroughs are rare, meaning that our dataset is, by necessity, small. This makes formal estimates of accuracy challenging. Although our overall success rate appears to be high, any one signal may turn out to be a false positive. We found one apparent example: the development of the third generation COX-2 inhibitors, Vioxx and Celebrex, which were much celebrated in the early 2000s as effective but non-addictive pain relievers, meets all the algorithmic criteria of a breakthrough. Five years after it received FDA approval, researchers demonstrated that Vioxx was associated with serious cardiovascular complications, and the manufacturer voluntarily pulled the drug from the market. Celebrex remains available, although like other NSAIDs, it carries an FDA warning for increased cardiovascular risk. Decision makers who were overly focused on the breakthrough potential of this research might have wasted substantial resources nurturing an area that ultimately proved to be a failure—but so would those who relied on expert opinion at the time. That said, the potential benefits of funding the next mRNA vaccine or cancer immunotherapy years earlier than we might have are large. When we can’t assume the outcome of an action, it’s worth conducting an experiment. Can targeted support for areas that are poised to produce a breakthrough increase the return on scientific investment without cannibalizing future advances? With the necessary administrative infrastructure in place, conducting this experiment would be straightforward. First, identify all the breakthrough signals between 2018 and 2023, select half at random, and commit to a decade of investment. For biomedicine, a six year window should yield about 30 topics with the potential to produce a breakthrough. Providing strong support to half of these might be accomplished for $300 million a year. That’s roughly half of the recent annual budget of the NIH Common Fund or around 20% of the fiscal year 2025 budget for ARPA-H. After five years, then again at ten, compare to see which group — the one that was actively managed, or the control — produced more breakthroughs, and on what timescale. Although we used biomedicine as an example, the same experiment could just as well be run for physics, materials science, or any other discipline. Any attempt to undertake such an experiment should keep three points top of mind. First, we can predict the topic of future breakthroughs, but the people and vision for how to move the work forward are still important. In practice, this means success requires active program managers with the expertise to develop the science and the authority to do so, including by recruiting investigators. Second, we would be wise to learn from the failures of past attempts to fund transformative research. High among these are funding modestly repackaged work, confusing the genuinely novel with the merely unfamiliar, and relying too much on incumbent investigators. All of these risks can be mitigated by thoroughly and intelligently integrating high quality data into portfolio management. Finally, we need to have patience. Even with strong funding support, producing a breakthrough takes time. If supporting breakthroughs is the best way to nurture the birth of new fields, we also need to accurately describe and properly manage the other two stages, so that we invest wisely throughout the productive lifetime of ideas and divest once they reach the point of diminishing returns. We would benefit from more study of all of these phases, especially the transition from one to another. More research could answer questions like: When does a breakthrough become an established field? How do the availability of funding, the size and characteristics of the available workforce, and the accumulation of evidence that disagrees with prevailing models affect a field’s decline? Exactly how do old ideas give birth to new ones, and can we speed up the process? The more we understand about the dynamics of scientific progress, the better we can maximize the odds that our curiosity leads to results. I’d call that finding a way to make our own luck.
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