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Halfpricesoft.com Expands Business Tools With Launch of New Operational Software
Halfpricesoft.com today showcases the powerful integration of its flagship payroll tools: ezPaycheck and ezACH direct deposit software. Designed specifically for small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) and accounting professionals, this software duo provides a complete, in-house payroll processing and electronic payment delivery system without recurring subscription fees.
Building a stronger workforce through inclusive hiring
ARC Ontario promotes inclusive hiring in New York to strengthen workforce by employing people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Flex Partners with Mesh to Power Crypto and Stablecoin Deposits for Business Owners
/PRNewswire/ -- Mesh, the leading crypto payments network, today announced a partnership with Flex, the finance platform that brings business owners' accounts...
Beneath a field of loose rubble on Utah’s Mount Timpanogos, scientists mapped a hidden mass of ice up to 150 feet thick — enough frozen water to fill 600 Olympic swimming pools
Massive ice deposits hidden beneath Utah mountain rubble could reshape understanding of water resources and climate patterns in the American West.
Inhaled Microplastics Linked To Lung Cancer, Study Finds
By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterTUESDAY, Sept. 8, 2026 (HealthDay News) — People with lung cancer are more likely to have hidden deposits of microplastics in their lungs, a new study says. About 66% of lung cancer patients had detectable microplastics found in fluid samples taken from their ...
Polymarket Promo Code SBWIRE Get $50 Bonus for NFL Week 1, Politics & More
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Polymarket Promo Code SBWIRE Get $50 Bonus for NFL Week 1, Politics & More
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ADHD UK Cannot Hide the Flawed Science Behind the Diagnosis and Its Treatment
The extensive critique of the biomedical account of ADHD and its treatment with stimulant medication has persisted for decades.
FDIC Deposit Rule Gives Banks More Room for Business Cash
For banks seeking a larger share of their commercial customers’ operating cash, new federal deposit rules may help those efforts. The Federal Deposit
Fairfax County’s Xpect Solutions acquires Reston security company
Fairfax County-based Xpect Solutions announced Thursday that it has acquired Reston-based security company Amivero.
The future of AI in healthcare: Moving from hype to business value
Commentary: Artificial intelligence in healthcare is not one story. It is three different stories moving at three different speeds, and that nuance often gets lost in the headlines.
LZ Sees Surprising Result in Search for Dark Matter
Key Takeaways Dark matter is the mysterious substance that accounts for the vast majority of matter in our universe. LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is a world-leading dark matter detector and specializes in searching for WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. A new LZ study found one particle interaction that is difficult to explain with known background processes and could potentially have been caused by a WIMP. LZ continues to run to see if additional data strengthens or weakens the hint of a dark matter interaction. For the better part of a century, people have been trying to understand dark matter. This invisible substance makes up roughly 85% of the mass in the universe but has never been directly detected. Determining exactly what it is remains one of the biggest questions about our world. Now, a new analysis from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment has recorded a single particle interaction that researchers have great difficulty explaining with known background signals from normal matter. The result does not yet meet the statistical threshold required to claim a discovery, but is the most compelling hint of dark matter reported by the experiment to date. LZ is an international collaboration of 250 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions. The detector is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and operates nearly one mile below ground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota. The experiment uses 10 tonnes of ultrapure liquid xenon to search for dark matter and is optimized to look for WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. The results were presented in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan. The paper will be released on the online repository arXiv and submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters. “We’re very intrigued to see this event in the data, in the region where we expect dark matter to show up and the competing backgrounds are very low,” said Rick Gaitskell, a professor at Brown University and the spokesperson for LZ. “With only one event, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input.” The LZ collaboration studies experimental data in batches. In the new result, researchers analyzed 220 live days of data collected between March 2023 and April 2024. The collaboration had previously searched this dataset for faint signals from the simplest kinds of WIMP interactions. The new analysis searched for a broader range of possible WIMP interactions that could deposit more energy in the detector. LZ is particularly sensitive to such signals while also minimizing false positives. “This was a detailed study in a region we hadn’t explored within this dataset, and we spent months of additional effort to understand all the possible causes of background events,” said Sam Eriksen, a senior research associate at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and lead author of the study. “We understand our detector and the backgrounds so well that even a single outstanding event, like the one we found, is important. We expect dark matter events to be extremely rare, so only a handful could mark the first detection of WIMP dark matter.” If the anomalous event was caused by dark matter, the WIMP that generated it would likely have a mass of at least 200 GeV/c2 (gigaelectronvolts), or more than 200 times the mass of a proton. It would also suggest a specific type of interaction between WIMPs and ordinary matter beyond the simplest model. The LZ results have not reached “5-sigma” significance, the statistical threshold considered a discovery in physics. The new analysis is 2.6 sigma, meaning there is approximately a 0.5% chance that the event could be explained by known backgrounds. With additional data, researchers can test whether the finding continues to grow in significance or fades away. LZ has already accumulated the world’s largest dark matter dataset and will continue to accrue WIMP search data at SURF, substantially improving their search statistics. LZ searches for dark matter by looking for signature flashes of light from energy deposited in the detector. The collaboration leverages multiple methods to prevent or account for particle interactions caused by normal matter. This includes the mile of rock that shields the detector from cosmic rays from space, a water tank and outer detectors that protect the central detector from background neutrons, and a suite of computational tools that disentangle particle interactions and reject dark matter mimics. “Outlier events in the data are not unexpected, but they usually stand out as a background of some kind when you look at them deeper,” said Aaron Manalaysay, a physicist at Berkeley Lab and the chair of LZ’s Institutional Board. “This is the first example in any experiment I’ve worked on of an outlier that appears valid in every way. Of course, we’re still twisting our brains trying to think if there’s a rare background mechanism we could’ve missed, but it’s thrilling to wonder if this could be the first hint of a dark-matter observation.” LZ is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy and Nuclear Physics, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility. LZ is also supported by the Science & Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology; the Swiss National Science Foundation; the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics; and the Institute for Basic Science, Korea. Thirty-nine institutions of higher education and advanced research provided support to LZ. The LZ collaboration acknowledges the assistance of the Sanford Underground Research Facility. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Colorado Sues EarnIn For “Immoral, Unethical, Oppressive and Unscrupulous” Business Practices
Hey all, Jason here. When this hits your inbox, I should be en route to the airport — not to go anywhere myself, just to pick up my better half. I must admit, it’s been strange to be home alone (well, with two dogs) for two weeks! Really lets me “optimize” to spending more time on reading/writing/working, whether that’s healthy or not! Looking forward to getting back into a (somewhat) more balance routine. Subscribe or Support by Upgrading Compare Notes With the People Who Built Modern Fintech Partner content: Remitly CEO Sebastian Gunningham. Increase founder Darragh Buckley. Linda Du, Co-founder & President at Valon. They’ll unpack the decisions behind building and scaling major financial products: what they got right, what broke, what they would do differently, and how AI and new infrastructure are changing the operator playbook. Most events tell you where fintech is going. NerdCon puts the people who built the present in the room and asks them what comes next. Expect an operator-led conversation grounded in real products, real trade-offs and lessons earned the hard way. Fintech Business Weekly readers save 20% on Regular tickets with code FBW20 before standard pricing ends September 11. Meet the Builders Things To Know & Other Good Reads Advent and Stripe Abandon $50 Billion Pursuit of PayPal (Bloomberg) Trump Family’s New Crypto Bank Is Backed by Abu Dhabi Sheikh (Wall Street Journal) The multiplying risks of financing data centres (FT) Let the Bond Market Speak (Wall Street Journal) Did we waste a crisis? Modest proposals to reform deposit insurance. (Fintech Takes Banking) Untangling Guggenheim: How Private Credit Built Its Own Universe (Net Interest) The Hater’s Guide To Circular Financing — Part One (Ed Zitron) Fiat Ventures Rebrands to FGV Capital, Announces $35M Oversubscribed Fund II (BusinessWire) Socure Announces Strategic Growth Investment at $5.2B Valuation and Acquires Agentic Operations Platform Fravity (Socure) Listen: When Consumer Protection Disclosures Work Too Well (Consumer Finance Monitor Podcast) Colorado Sues EarnIn For “Immoral, Unethical, Oppressive and Unscrupulous” Business Practices When Andreessen Horowitz led EarnIn’s $39 million Series B in 2017, Alex Rampell, a partner at the storied venture capital firm, described EarnIn’s small-dollar advance product as “free,” relying on “entirely on voluntary contributions instead of fees.” Rampell favorably compared EarnIn’s approach to typical payday loans, writing, “Payday loans historically have had the potential to be a slippery slope for consumers into financial distress: opaque systems and steep fees that are hard to repay and set individuals back further than where they started. For many Americans living paycheck to paycheck, that kind of slide into debt can be extremely difficult to recover from.” But EarnIn’s product — which, the company says, isn’t a “loan,” legally speaking — ends up being anything but free for most users. While it is technically possible to take a no-fee advance from the company, most users incur “Lightning Speed” (instant funding) fees and/or ostensibly optional tips that combined can equate to annualized percent rates that can reach over 1,000%. With an average term of 9.77 days, even fees and tips that are small on an absolute dollar basis are equivalent to high APRs on an annualized basis. A lawsuit filed last week by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser against EarnIn describes the company and its product and business practices quite differently than Andreessen’s Rampell; “EarnIn’s business practices are unfair because they are immoral, unethical, oppressive and unscrupulous,” the complaint, filed in District Court in Denver, Colorado, says. EarnIn’s marquee product, Cash Out, isn’t a loan, the company says, as Cash Out is not “[f]orward [l]ooking” because “[t]he money is transferred based on earnings to date,” does not carry a mandatory fee to access funds, and is “non-recourse,” meaning EarnIn cannot pursue recovery from users who don’t repay advanced funds. EarnIn is sometimes referred to as an “Earned Wage Advance” service. Though, unlike some others in the broader category, EarnIn does not integrate with employers’ payroll or time and attendance systems. Rather, EarnIn attempts to verify a user’s income and employment, by examining direct deposit transaction data in their linked external bank account, by using GPS location and Bluetooth data to estimate a user’s time spent at work, if they work in a fixed location, and/or by having a user provided a work email address. While repayment is theoretically optional, as EarnIn would have no recourse, such as reporting non-payment to the credit bureaus or a collections agency, this is anything but clear to users of the EarnIn app, Colorado’s complaint argues. During the process of taking a Cash Out, users must agree to a preauthorized debit of the amount advanced, plus any expedited funding fee and/or tips. Though users technically can revoke this ACH authorization, the fact that they have this right isn’t presented to users during the Cash Out process, but rather is included in linked terms and conditions few users are likely to actually read. And users who do wish to revoke their ACH authorization must do so three or more days before the scheduled transaction date by emailing EarnIn’s customer support. Similarly, EarnIn’s marketing claims that it carries “no interest” and “no mandatory fees” is technically true, but is not the reality for many of the app’s users, the Colorado complaint argues. Further, EarnIn has extensively marketed to users the ability to “access your pay today,” to get “instant” funds, and to get funds “the same day you work” — when, in reality, this speed of access was only possible by paying the additional, undisclosed Lightning Speed fee. The Colorado complaint highlights this contradiction specifically, noting: EarnIn tells consumers that they can ‘Make any day payday with EarnIn’ and that there no ‘hidden’ or ‘mandatory fees.’ For a consumer to access their pay on the same day requested, they would have to pay the Lightning Speed fee. In the fine print of the advertisement EarnIn discloses that ‘[f]ees apply to use Lightning Speed,’ a direct contradiction to the larger text of the advertisement, and a fact that would not be immediately understood by a consumer as ‘Lightning Speed’ is not defined nor explained. Like other small-dollar lending services, rather than explicitly charge interest, EarnIn collects a markup on the optional Lighting Speed fee, which, given the nature of the transactions, many users opt for, as well as offering users the option to leave “tips.” EarnIn leverages either Real-Time Payments (RTP) rails or push-to-card via debit rails if a user opts for the optional Lightning Speed. But while these capabilities cost EarnIn, on average, $0.075 or $0.20 per transaction, respectively, EarnIn charges users significantly more. Initially, EarnIn charged as little as $1.99 for Cash Outs up to $24. But EarnIn has hiked these fees multiple times, and now charges $4.99 for Cash Outs up to $75 and $6.99 for those over $75. According to the Colorado complaint, EarnIn leverages “dark patterns” to manipulate users and to make it more difficult to avoid tipping. Examples of these “road blocks” highlighted in the complaint include: As of 2023, in the EarnIn app, a consumer attempting to get a loan under the default settings had to make at least eighteen separate taps to complete the transaction and reduce the tip to $0. There is an alternative method to leave a $0 tip, via the “Custom tip” feature, but EarnIn made this option difficult to access by visually deemphasizing it and positioning it near devices’ “home” button. Using language and imagery such as “Tip to pay it forward,” “Your generosity supports the service + helps,” “Your tips make a difference,” and “[t]he APR for this cash out is 0%. Your tips help support us.” While Lightning Speed and tipping are, in theory, both optional, in practice, users nearly always ended up paying something. According to the Colorado suit, users were charged either a tip or an expedite fee for more than 92% of transactions, with an average APR of nearly 388%. And, although the advances are “non-recourse,” EarnIn successfully collects on nearly all transactions — 99.18%, according to the complaint, which, Colorado argues, “demonstrat[es] that EarnIn’s advances function as high cost loans, not voluntary payments.” The share of EarnIn users incurring fees — despite the product being marketed as 0% APR — is hard to reconcile with Andreessen investor Rampell’s favorable description of EarnIn vs. “opaque systems and steep fees” associated with payday loans, which, Rampell says, can be “extremely difficult” for borrowers to extricate themselves from. According to Colorado’s suit, EarnIn’s Cash Out product “trapped many consumers in extreme cycles of high-cost reborrowing.” The suit gives an example of one consumer in the state, who took out a whopping 1,151 loans, paying a total of $4,038.50 in Lightning Speed expedited funding fees on loans that averaged the equivalent of 1,421% APR. Another Colorado user, the suit says, took out 1,033 loans, paying $8,561.22 in tips and fees at an average APR of 1,539% . These types of usage patterns demonstrate “the severe and repeated financial harm caused by EarnIn’s illegal lending model,” the Colorado complaint argues. In aggregate, from January 2023 through July 2025, EarnIn extended 3.1 million loans to 56,778 users in Colorado — an average of nearly 55 transactions per person during the time period. EarnIn lent more than $300 million and collected more than $16 million from Colorado users in Lightning Speed fees and in tips. Ultimately, the Colorado complaint argues that “EarnIn’s Cash Outs are loans under Colorado law, and EarnIn’s contention that its product is not a loan based on its disclaimer of any legal repayment obligation lacks any real-world significance given how the Cash Out transactions actually operate in practice.” Colorado further argues that “EarnIn was not working with companies here in providing consumers with funds but acted as a third-party lender and charged illegally high rates, used deceptive design strategies to extract some charges, and trapped consumers in repeat borrowing. Colorado will continue to stand up for consumers and hold companies accountable when they violate our credit laws or attempt to evade them through misleading practices.” Colorado’s suit alleges EarnIn assesses finance charge in excess of that permitted by Colorado law, that EarnIn failed to make legally required disclosures to Colorado borrowers, that EarnIn made supervised loans to consumers without obtaining the requisite license, that EarnIn violated the state’s Deferred Deposit Loan Act, that EarnIn engage in unfair and deceptive trade practices, and that EarnIn made false or misleading statements concerning price. The suit seeks a court order enjoining EarnIn from violating relevant Colorado laws, for EarnIn to refund amounts charged in excess of state law, fees, costs, and penalties, and other relief the court deems to be just. Fintech Business Weekly is made possible by the generous support of paying subscribers — bringing you independent analysis of banking, fintech, and crypto without fear or favor. You can support my work by becoming a paying subscriber if you aren’t already. Paying subscribers enjoy: access to the entire archive of nearly six years of newsletters extended versions of the weekly newsletter, with additional content and analysis and (for founding member tier) quarterly personal 1:1 fintech Q&A / strategy calls with me, tapping into my unparalleled knowledge of the intersection of banking and fintech and experience working in the sector, including helping to launch Goldman Sachs’ retail bank Marcus Support Fintech Business Weekly You can also support Fintech Business Weekly by sponsoring a newsletter or podcast, putting you in front of 93,000+ of the most influential decision makers in banking, fintech, and crypto. Learn more about sponsor opportunities or request a media kit by dropping me an email. Q2 Quarterly Banking Profile: Five Quick Takeaways The FDIC released its quarterly banking profile, which is always worth a read, for the second quarter. The profile provides an aggregate snapshot about the overall health of the 4,238 institutions whose deposits are insured by the FDIC, who, collectively, hold more than $26 trillion in assets and saw a total net income of more than $90 billion in the second quarter. Net income was up 12% vs. Q1 2026, with lower provisions and realized gains on securities helping to drive the improvement, somewhat offset by increases in non-interest expense and applicable income taxes. Overall net interest margin was basically flat quarter over quarter (up 1 basis point vs. Q1 2026), though community banks saw NIM grow by 10 basis points, to 3.81%. Unsurprisingly, given that interest rates haven’t changed, unrealized losses on securities changed little, edging up slightly to $326.7 billion vs. $325.1 billion in Q1 2026. Aggregate credit quality has remained benign, with asset quality actually improving slightly in Q2. Overall, institutions reported a 9 basis point decline in their past-due and non-accrual rate, to 1.44%. Net charge off rate also declined by 2 basis points, to 0.57%. And finally, the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund stands at $161.1 billion, making the DIF reserve ratio 1.48% — above the statutory minimum of 1.35%, but still below the designated target reserve ratio of 2%. [Paid Subscriber Exclusive] Nissan Withdraws ILC App, State Associations Plan BankChain Alliance, FDIC Defines “Unsafe or Unsound Practice” For First Time Automaker Nissan withdrew its application to charter a Utah industrial loan company and its corresponding application to the FDIC for deposit insurance last week, on August 19th. Nissan’s application had been outstanding for more than a year, as it originally applied in June 2025. Recent applications to the OCC to form national banks have been decisioned, one way or the other, substantially more quickly than has historically been the case.
When Medical Science Refuses to Correct Itself
Science is supposed to be self-correcting. But what happens when the journals entrusted to uphold this principle become its gatekeepers?
Talarico wants to unearth Paxton's depositions to keep focus on his past in Senate race
Talarico is trying to keep attention on Paxton’s past by pushing to make depositions public. The case involved Unity Resources and was settled.
In Texas Senate race, Talarico seeks depositions that could damage Paxton
Democrat James Talarico has leaned into Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s past legal scandals to try to win over moderate Republicans.
Buffalo Sabres open waitlist after season ticket packages sell out
To join the waitlist, it'll cost $100, but with that deposit you get pre-sale access to playoff tickets.
Maryland Zoo's remaining male cheetah euthanized following health complications
WBFF Fox45 provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, notices of events and items of interest in the community, sports and entertainment programming for Baltimore and nearby towns and communities in Maryland, including Annapolis, Crofton, Glen Burnie, Linthicum, Pasadena, Severn, Cockeysville, Dundalk, Essex, Parkville, Owings Mills, Towson, White Marsh, Woodlawn, Hampstead, Sykesville, Taneytown, Westminster, Elkton, Perryville, Pt. Deposit, Rising Sun, Aberdeen, Abingdon, Bel Air, Edgewood, Fallston, Havre De Grace, Columbia, Elkridge, Ellicott City, Fulton, and Ocean City.
Your backyard could hold a rare earth fortune and this orange lichen is the clue
Chinese scientists discover link between lichen growth and potentially untapped rare-earth-bearing carbonates and mineral deposits.
ActBlue co-founder pleads Fifth Amendment in closed-door House GOP grilling
Matt DeBergalis pleaded the Fifth Amendment during his deposition before three House committees investigating ActBlue's fraud prevention standards.
Alessi-Miceli: Workforce development is everybody’s business
HIA-LI and partners launched LongIslandJobs.org to connect businesses, educators, and job seekers, addressing workforce development challenges on Long Island.
It’s time to measure what matters in higher education
Commentary: Dr. Ian Mortimer of Golisano Institute highlights the importance of measuring graduate employment and financial independence immediately after college in Rochester.
Why Manufacturers Are Paying Closer Attention to Building Envelopes
Site selection teams have to be meticulous. They model tax incentive schedules years into the future, track labor availability across competing markets, and negotiate access to highway interchanges and rail spurs.
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Richmond science company to lay off 68 employees
Eurofins Professional Scientific Services South plans to lay off 68 Richmond employees Oct. 9, according to a state notice.
AI needs science’s search history
“Actually, that’s where the gold is,” said Alasdair Russell, my graduate school friend who leads a pre-clinical genome editing group at Cambridge. He was talking about the winding road of science that is omitted from published papers. “When you’re discussing how to do the experiment, and why this way is better than another way, and what does the data really mean? I know what it shows, but what does it mean?” At RAAIS 2026, he described how his group has begun logging the twisting path of discovery as it happens, recording the verbal and written exchanges that normally disappear. Ideas become nodes in a living graph: they branch when a meeting produces two plausible experiments, merge when separate lines of evidence converge, and go dark when someone quietly stops pursuing them. In his implementation, one agent scores novelty, while another tries to learn “how scientists think and how they navigate through a complex world of data,” so that high-potential nodes can trigger deeper investigation. As frontier AI labs deploy agents toward scientific discovery, giving AI authentic scientific taste remains a trillion-dollar dilemma. The bottleneck is that the record we have kept for centuries of science might be insufficient to get us there. The experiments that never make the paper Peter Medawar, 1960 Nobel laureate and “father of transplantation,” asked in 1963 whether the scientific paper was a fraud, and answered yes: the form of the paper misrepresents the thinking that produced it. Sixty years on, the diagnosis is unchanged. A paper presents a clean progression from hypothesis to result to conclusion. Lost along the way are the unconventional theories, the abandoned or unaffordable methods, and the underwhelming and inconclusive data. It reads like a browser history with every dead end deleted: the ten open tabs, the four rephrased queries, the wrong turn down a subforum. All scrubbed, leaving one clean path from question to answer as the canonical path. What has changed since then is that the discarded material is now worth something. No high-impact journal wants these artifacts, but raw trial and error is the most likely source of the training data required to develop scientific intuition, or what researchers call taste. Earlier attempts to capture the discards were motivated by scientific integrity. The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine launched in 2002 to publish rigorous studies that disputed established models or exposed ineffective treatments. Its archive preserved negative conclusions after they had become papers, rather than the live alternatives and arguments that produced them. BioMed Central closed it in 2017, saying the mission had been served now that other journals publish null results. A less generous reading is that in fifteen years it published around 200 papers because almost nobody wants to read a negative result, let alone write one up when it will not count toward academic tenure. AI models are different. Even an uninteresting negative result can be useful, provided it is labeled. Earlier this year, Anthropic put a version of this to the test. The company pulled 129 decision points from real Claude Code sessions between January and March 2026, showed models the work up to a human detour, and asked what should happen next. Claude Mythos Preview beat the human choice 64% of the time, while Opus 4.5 managed 51%. The comparison was tilted toward the models because Anthropic deliberately chose moments where the human decision had room for improvement. On 127 further scenarios where the human action was already strong, the models improved on it only about 20% of the time. The study was possible because Anthropic’s researchers work inside a tool that logs by default. The reasoning, detours and outcome are produced in the same working environment. Biology has no equivalent. Its reasoning happens in hallways, at benches, in Slack threads and on whiteboards, while the outcome arrives weeks later somewhere else. The record has to emerge from the work itself. Ask scientists to reconstruct it afterwards and we’ll create another polished account. Subscribe A log is not a label Before any of this becomes training data, a negative result has to say what failed. The first paper published in the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine examined 234 negative studies across five leading medical journals. Only 30% discussed statistical power, and half clearly defined a primary outcome. Tell a model an experiment failed, without telling it whether the assay was underpowered, a reagent had degraded, or the hypothesis was simply wrong, and it will learn noise with confidence. Decision histories have a second missing label too. When a lab considers five experiments and runs one, only the chosen branch returns an outcome. The other four are experimental counterfactuals. Researchers call this the selective labels problem: the data reveal results only for the actions someone chose to take. Such a record can teach a model to imitate a lab’s taste, but it cannot establish that the taste was good. It also smuggles local constraints into general lessons. A lab that never ran cryo-EM because it did not own a microscope teaches a model that cryo-EM is rarely the right call. Alasdair’s nodes preserve the candidate set, which is the necessary first step. To be useful, each decision record needs six fields: The evidence available at that moment, and nothing that arrived later. The candidates considered, including the ones dismissed in a sentence. For each candidate: the expected result, the confidence attached to it, and the cost in time and money. The route chosen, and the reason. What happened next. How the evidence changed the scientist’s view. These must be timestamped before the outcome, because hindsight turns uncertainty into inevitability. Disagreement also has to survive. Averaging three scientists into one clean rationale reproduces exactly the information loss we are trying to fix. But there is an obvious failure mode here. Once decisions are logged and scored, people log for the record post-facto. Anyone who has watched an electronic lab notebook fill up with retrospective tidying knows how quickly a research tool becomes a compliance exercise. A record that costs a scientist ten minutes of honest reflection per decision is worth far more than one that costs an hour of performance. A publication initiative called Registered Reports offers a useful starting point. Here, researchers submit their rationale, methods and analysis plan for peer review before the data exist, and the journal commits in principle to publish if they follow the approved plan. Nature has now expanded the format across every field it covers. This approach to paper writing timestamps intent before the outcome, but it freezes one plan. A useful search history must also preserve how the plan changed, which alternatives were rejected, when, and on what evidence. Subscribe Run the runner-up Autonomous labs show what happens when decisions and outcomes are connected in a loop. Liverpool’s mobile robotic chemist ran 688 experiments over eight days in a ten-variable formulation space. A batched Bayesian search used each result to choose the next experiments and found photocatalyst mixtures six times more active than the starting formulations. Every completed experiment changed what the system did next. The robot optimized within a goal and search space that humans had already chosen. It did not decide which scientific question mattered. So what this work demonstrates is narrower, but still useful: a search history pays off when the options return standardized outcomes quickly. Open-ended biology is harder because branches can take weeks and the discarded alternatives may never be run. Some exploration therefore has to be bought. Where two branches are plausible and the stakes justify the cost, a lab should sometimes run the runner-up. Otherwise the record captures what today’s scientists usually chose and stays silent on what they systematically overlooked. A funder could ring-fence a small fraction of a grant for the branch not taken, provided that the decision record and the outcome are both deposited. That costs money, but so does having every lab rediscover the same abandoned path. Test whether taste transfers When it comes time to evaluate if our new AI system exhibits taste, the comparison should run across laboratories and fields. At selected decision points in a live research campaign, we should freeze the six fields: the evidence, the candidates, expected results, confidence, costs and the choice made. Experts then rank the options before the outcomes are known, and those outcomes are checked independently later. We could give models one of two diets - papers alone, or papers plus decision histories - and ask them to rank the next experiment on unfamiliar projects. Then, we score information gained per dollar and week, calibration, and how quickly weak branches are abandoned. If histories improve choices only inside the lab that produced them, they amount to useful organizational memory. If they improve choices on unfamiliar problems elsewhere, Alasdair’s group will have captured something science has never managed to write down: a transferable record of taste. Until that happens, a scientific search history is a promising record, not yet a training set.
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USPTO Expands Category A Patent Bar Admission Criteria to Include Biomedical Science Degree
The USPTO published a Federal Register Notice Tuesday announcing administrative updates to the General Requirements Bulletin (GRB).
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These 'five pillars' for living healthier longer are easy and affordable
Longevity has become a bit of a buzz word, and has become increasingly aligned with the tech industry. But while it remains unclear whether the billions of US dollars being invested in life-extending bioscience is something any of us can access, a timely report from Harvard Medical School reminds us what we can do on our own – and it's backed by a huge body of evidence.
Colorado’s new limits on sports betting deposits — and credit card ban
The new rules are part of the bipartisan Senate Bill 26-131 passed in May by the Colorado General Assembly amid growing concerns over rising addiction.
Scientists studied animal bones in South Australia’s underwater caves; those near light carried algae marks while bones in total darkness remained remarkably pristine
Animal bones resting on the floors of South Australia's underwater caves are revealing far more than the identity of the creatures they once belonged to. According to a new study published in PLOS One, the cave environment itself leaves distinct "fingerprints" on bones, helping scientists reconstruct how they were deposited, the environmental conditions they experienced after deposition, and the processes that affected their preservation over time.
Butterfly lilies wing their way to Science
Many animals and plants show left-right differences in how their bodies or organs are arranged, but we still know little about how such asymmetries evolve or how genes control them in natural populations. Mirror-image flowers, in which female and male sex organs are deflected to opposite sides in left- and right-handed forms, provide a notable example of such asymmetry. Here, we studied South African butterfly lilies, where individual plants produce only left- or right-handed flowers. Their mirror-image flowers promote outcrossing by depositing pollen from each floral form onto a specific region of a pollinator’s body that matches the stigma position of the opposite form. This suggests that selection for efficient pollen transfer between forms maintains this natural polymorphism. Our work uncovers a hemizygous supergene that coordinates the left-right orientation of female and male sex organs in mirror-image flowers by linking two independently acting genes for style and stamen handedness in a single, nonrecombining genomic segment. This architecture ensures the coinheritance of a matched pair of organ orientations that is essential for efficient cross-pollination between floral forms. At the developmental level, we show that floral handedness emerges from the interaction between an intrinsic tissue chirality and a gravitropic response that orients the style and median stamen relative to gravity. Together, these findings reveal how a supergene, hormone and microRNA signaling, tissue chirality, and an external physical cue combine to produce and maintain a stable left-right polymorphism in natural plant populations.
Paychex reports steady small business hiring with more worker hours
Small businesses across the nation continued to maintain a stable hiring environment in July, with employers increasingly relying on existing workers to meet demand
Veritas to acquire McLean tech company
Veritas Capital announced that it had entered an agreement to acquire McLean-based government technology consulting company Steampunk.
Rochester-area executive education adapts to AI and leadership demands
Rochester-area executive education programs evolve to emphasize ai, critical thinking, and leadership skills for a rapidly changing business environment.
The Beauty Of Settled Science
Commenters convinced me I made a subtle mis-step in my framing of Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine. My framing emphasized that social priming studies had failed to replicate, but that many other subfields of psychology hadn’t. This naturally led commenters to point to failed replications in other subfields. Although none of these were as bad as social priming, few or none were entirely problem-free. Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have emphasized the difference between settled science and novel research. Here are some of my favorite psychology findings: The brain is sculpted by reinforcement learning, and a key driver of this learning is a prediction-error-based algorithm located in the nucleus accumbens and implemented through dopamine. Psychedelic drugs exert their effects through 5-HT2A receptors, pointing to a role for these receptors in some sort of construct like the balance between priors and new evidence. Certain cognitive functions are localized to certain brain areas (for example, impulse control to the frontal lobes; linguistic structure to Broca’s area, linguistic meaning to Wernicke’s area. But injure one of these areas, or render a certain function useless (eg a blind person having no more use for their visual cortex), and these mappings can gradually shift - suggesting that neurons are general-purpose compute whose specialization is a contingent fact about convenience and efficiency rather than a necessity. Most personality traits and general capabilities are about 50% genetic and 50% random, with little role for family environment or childhood history, with a few notable exceptions like partisan preference. Recent research complicates this story, but the further you go from this basic picture, the gnarlier the chains of indirect causation you require. Neurons fire together in “brain waves”, whose exact frequency corresponds with the character of consciousness; These divide neurons into natural subpopulations and linked graphs. The gamma rhythm corresponds surprisingly well to items in conscious awareness. GABA receptors seem to be involved in something like relaxation. By hitting different GABA receptors in different ways, you can modulate the exact type of relaxation you produce. Hitting GABA-A directly is too powerful and can cause dangerous levels of sedation, but allosteric modulation of GABA is an incredibly fruitful strategy that underlies drugs from benzos to barbituates to alcohol. If you know your GABA-A subunits, you can target specific subtypes of relaxation; for example, Ambien hits GABA-A1 and induces sleep. Memory divides somewhat fuzzily into bins of immediate-sensory, short-term, and long-term, with separate retrieval and storage functions, and separate systems for declarative vs. procedural learning. These can be harmed selectively, usually by hippocampal injury, so that some patients can remember their life stories but not form new long-term memories, or learn new skills like bike-riding but not new facts. The exact substrate of memory is unclear but seems to involve new synaptic connections between neurons in at least some way. The ability of modern psychology and psychiatry to treat mental illness is real but limited. SSRIs work for half or slightly fewer than half of patients; antipsychotics work with extreme side effects; benzodiazpines work but produce addiction and tolerance in many (not all) people. Most supplements are stuck in Poor Quality Study Replication Crisis Hell, but melatonin and l-theanine stand out as especially promising. Psychotherapy works with moderate effect size, but (with a few exceptions) seems to be more about the relationship with the provider than the details of the therapy itself. Mental hospitalization can sometimes defuse immediate crises but work less well than mental hospitals would like, with some studies showing overall negative effects. Schizophrenia is mostly genetic, but risk also increases with prenatal infection (especially rubella) and obstetric complications; there is suggestive evidence for roles of social stress and drug use (with psychedelics and marijuana making things worse, and nicotine if anything making things better). Bipolar and schizophrenia are so closely linked on a pathophysiological level that it seems like they might be the same disease; on the clinical level, they do seem to follow two separate courses/prognoses but can sometimes surprise clinicians by eg someone who seemed condemned to permanent schizophrenia unexpectedly recovering. The brain’s native reinforcement learning algorithms cash out in the phenomena of classical and operant conditioning; different reinforcement schedules reinforce at different levels, which can be exploited by bad actors to make especially compelling products (eg slot machines). None of these are immune to doubt. A few are speculative; one or two are genuinely unorthodox. But they’re all a step above one p = 0.049 paper that might not replicate. If they get overturned, they’ll be overturned by the same sort of genuine scientific shift that replaced Ptolemy with Copernicus or Lamarck with Darwin, not some sort of sordid discovery about someone entering random numbers into a spreadsheet. In 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about The Beauty Of Settled Science: If you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage. The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news. Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention. Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun. Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty [...] A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid. Psychology isn’t centrally the new paper in Annals Of Recently-Breaking News saying that an n=5 study showing that large portion sizes increase support for terrorism. Psychology is centrally ideas like brain waves, GABA receptors, reinforcement learning, twin studies, and connectionism. People who think differently are worrying too much about BREAKING NEWS!!!, and should stop. The key distinction isn’t “recent research in social psychology” vs. “recent research in cognitive/bio/behavioral psychology”, as my essay last week unfortunately implied. It’s recent research in general vs. the deposit of settled science, battle-tested hypotheses, and carefully-earmarked speculation. And part of the reason social priming in particular was such a disaster was that it defied that heuristic, building itself up over hundreds of studies until it approached or even entered the pantheon of settled science - before collapsing (5-HTTLPR was also sort of like this). This isn’t a claim that settled science is always right - Freud was “settled science” for a long time - just that there’s an intuitive distinction between the level of credence you should have in the existence of power posing vs. the existence of Broca’s Area. (I compounded this error by calling the last post “Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine”, which suggested I was talking about the new research rather than the settled science. I actually meant to distinguish between research-psychology-the-field vs. clinical-psychology-aka-therapy, but this framing unintentionally pushed against the point I wanted to make) Some commenters on the previous article understood this point, but challenged its weight. It’s very cool, they said, to know how many neurons are in which brain lobe, but the main way that Psychology affected their lives was through bad clickbait studies used to buttress dumb policies; some p = 0.049 study says that exposure to microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel into raisins, and now their company has to implement punitive DEI or be sued for hazardous work conditions. I won’t dispute this as an accurate description of how the sausage gets made, but it’s worth examining the trains of thought that connect this observation to a campaign against psychology in general: The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad, and I don’t have good heuristics for distinguishing dumb woke psychology from other psychology, so I’m going to assume it’s all wrong and bad. The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad; it seems useful to punish/discredit psychology as a whole to assist my campaign against it, so for propaganda purposes I will try to discredit psychology as a whole. To people in the first camp, my response is: come on, your heuristics aren’t that bad. “Microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel up like raisins” is in the woke category; “the hippocampal theta rhythm seems to be associated with both memory and pathfinding, suggesting an unexpected yet surprisingly compelling relationship between the two” is in the not-woke category, don’t play dumb here. To people in the second camp, my response is: deliberately exaggerated propaganda campaigns are bad and this is a confession, not an excuse. Inability to view science through anything but a political lens was what got us into this problem; doubling down on it is a temporary solution but a recipe for permanent disaster. If you pronounce entire fields of science to be acceptable collateral damage in your campaign against bad political actors, you will alienate not just scientists but patients, clinicians, and general lovers of truth. Instead, you can say the thing you mean - that woke partisans shouldn’t try to occupy and exploit the otherwise-noble science of psychology for their own political gain - and wage the same campaign with a halo rather than a comic-book-villain goatee. From the font of oracular wisdom that is Weird Sun Twitter: [ Vessel Of Spirit@VesselOfSpirit i love you all conditionally but i love the good part of you unconditionally. even if it becomes a very small part 2:11 AM · Jan 22, 2015 1 Reply · 5 Reposts · 29 Likes ](https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/558084551772471298) This is how I feel about psychology1, too, but with a touch more optimism. The good part of psychology is enormous, a hoard of endless treasures. You just have to look past the headlines! 1 To play devil’s advocate - should one always be so magnamious? Astrology? Phrenology? These seem different in that their entire orientation was flawed from the start; they didn’t simply fail to find the correct constellation-personality connections, the whole project of searching for connections between constellations and personality was doomed from the start. More difficult might be asking the same question about education research, which is notoriously bad. I don’t know enough about education research to know if there’s some settled science of correct and enlightening results lurking in the background beyond the day-to-day froth of poorly-conducted and politically-motivated studies. I think if it’s 90% bad, 10% good, it’s correct to call it bad as a compact way of communicating a useful truth; I think psychology is better than that, but admit it’s a tough judgment call.
Risky Business: Patent Term Adjustment in the Post- Forest Era
What value is a patent that expires before it issues? Until recently, that question seemed wholly academic. In In re Forest, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit answered it directly.
Rochester panel highlights early planning for successful business transitions
Rochester experts emphasize starting succession planning three to five years ahead with clear owner goals and strategic preparation for business transitions.
Successful AI integration should start with identifying business needs
John Loury and Amanda Orson emphasize identifying business needs and data quality as keys to successful AI integration in operations.
Why This Business First Insider Sale Matters Less Than Second-Half Loan Growth And Deposits
Keith Mansfield's transaction reduced his direct equity stake by 5%, though he retains 77,139 shares and 13,374 restricted stock units vesting through 2029.
The new question business owners should be asking their CPA’s
Commentary: After more than a century of relatively steady ownership models, the last few years have brought a wave of mergers, acquisitions, and private equity investments unlike anything most CPAs have experienced.
Get in the game: Delta, DraftKings bring sports fandom to new heights
Delta and DraftKings are bringing a new kind of sports experience onboard: SkyPicks, a free-to-play sports knowledge contest built for fans who want to do more than just watch. SkyMiles Members (ages 21 and up) can make sports prediction picks and play to win Delta gift cards – no betting, deposit functionality, buy-in, miles or financial risk involved. It’s one more way Delta is becoming the home for sports fandom in the sky.
Felony Theft Charges Filed Against Landscaping Business Owner, Investigators Seek Additional Information - Colorado First Judicial District Attorney's Office
GOLDEN, Colo. (July 27, 2026) --The First Judicial District Attorney's Office has filed two felony theft charges against Ulises Tajonar Diaz, 32, alleging he received more than $32,000 in deposits from two Jefferson County homeowners for landscaping projects that were never started. Diaz advertised and operated landscaping businesses across the metro area under the names My Son’s Landscape and My Son’s Landscape Group LLC.
India's HDFC Bank finds employees' conduct in deposit pricing matter was business overreach, not misconduct
India's HDFC Bank said on Monday its board concluded employees involved in the deposit pricing of an Indian state agency had engaged in business overreach, rather than acting for personal gains or with any improper motive.
Attorney general’s office secures landmark settlement with discriminatory landlord
Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones secured a $2.25 million settlement from landlord David Merryman for discriminatory housing practices in Hampton Roads.
Fake Spa Listings Take Deposits, Then Send Customers to Real Businesses
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New Jersey aims to turn science into startups
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National Science Foundation selects URochester to lead new laser tech program
The National Science Foundation has chosen the University of Rochester to lead a $15 million laser technology program, boosting Rochester's optics innovation cluster.
Polymarket Promo Code SBWIRE Get $50 Bonus for World Cup, Politics & More For July 13
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Commentary: What we’ve learned from the fight to save SNAP
Coalition organized by the Greater Chicago Food Depository helped preserve an essential benefit for thousands around Illinois.
PSP Mercer investigating stolen checks from business, nearly $40k taken
The person deposited the amount of $37,800 into an unknown PNC Bank Account.
The 5 stock funds Americans can invest in through Trump Accounts
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Polymarket Promo Code SBWIRE | $50 Bonus for Today's World Cup, Politics & More (July 3)
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Video shows masked thieves smashing glass, grabbing items during Bowie business break-in
WBFF Fox45 provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, notices of events and items of interest in the community, sports and entertainment programming for Baltimore and nearby towns and communities in Maryland, including Annapolis, Crofton, Glen Burnie, Linthicum, Pasadena, Severn, Cockeysville, Dundalk, Essex, Parkville, Owings Mills, Towson, White Marsh, Woodlawn, Hampstead, Sykesville, Taneytown, Westminster, Elkton, Perryville, Pt. Deposit, Rising Sun, Aberdeen, Abingdon, Bel Air, Edgewood, Fallston, Havre De Grace, Columbia, Elkridge, Ellicott City, Fulton, and Ocean City.
Meet the 2026 NJBIZ Leading Women in Business
NJBIZ names more than 60 Leading Women in Business across industries, plus three Rising Stars, honoring New Jersey professionals.
General manager arrested for stealing over $40,000 from Black Canyon City business
An investigation found that financial records had been deleted, documentation was incomplete and deposits were missing.
Trump Mobile Takes The T1 Phone Reservation Holders For A Ride, Opens Sales To The Public Without Clearing The Backlog
Those who paid Trump Mobile a $100 deposit to gain early access to the T1 Phone suddenly find themselves at the back of the proverbial queue.
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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.
The Long Arm of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Far more than just a research institution, the Chinese Academy of Sciences is a key investor behind many of China’s leading technology companies.
Maryland Science Center marks 50th anniversary; Harbor plaza groundbreaking
WBFF Fox45 provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, notices of events and items of interest in the community, sports and entertainment programming for Baltimore and nearby towns and communities in Maryland, including Annapolis, Crofton, Glen Burnie, Linthicum, Pasadena, Severn, Cockeysville, Dundalk, Essex, Parkville, Owings Mills, Towson, White Marsh, Woodlawn, Hampstead, Sykesville, Taneytown, Westminster, Elkton, Perryville, Pt. Deposit, Rising Sun, Aberdeen, Abingdon, Bel Air, Edgewood, Fallston, Havre De Grace, Columbia, Elkridge, Ellicott City, Fulton, and Ocean City.
AMD Stiffs Researcher $10,000 Bug Bounty After Critical Security Flaw, Takes 124 Days to Fix
AMD's auto-updater downloaded software over insecure HTTP, letting attackers inject malware during updates before a 124-day delayed fix.
Scientists Tracked These Strange Arctic Icebergs and Found Something Unexpected on the Seafloor
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Local business warns others to be wary of check fraud
Local residents and business owners are urged to be vigilant of check fraud, following one recent example which was preempted, thanks to the work of keen bankers. Attorney Caryn Brzykcy, of Harbinson Brzykcy Attorneys At Law in Taylorsville, explained that a $32,000 fraud was attempted against their firm’s checking account recently. “We had no problem…
Scientists discover ‘graveyard’ of whale skeletons in an ocean abyss off Australia
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New sports betting law protects against addiction, exposure to kids in Colorado, according to lawmakers
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New solar desalination breakthrough makes fresh water without toxic brine
Scientists have developed a solar desalination system that turns seawater into drinking water without creating environmentally damaging brine. Special laser-textured metal panels use sunlight to evaporate water while automatically moving salt deposits away from the working surface, preventing clogging. The process was successfully tested with water from three oceans and can recover nearly all salts as solids. Those leftover materials could even become a source of valuable lithium for batteries.
Artists drop out of DC Freedom 250 festival over reported political ties
WBFF Fox45 provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, notices of events and items of interest in the community, sports and entertainment programming for Baltimore and nearby towns and communities in Maryland, including Annapolis, Crofton, Glen Burnie, Linthicum, Pasadena, Severn, Cockeysville, Dundalk, Essex, Parkville, Owings Mills, Towson, White Marsh, Woodlawn, Hampstead, Sykesville, Taneytown, Westminster, Elkton, Perryville, Pt. Deposit, Rising Sun, Aberdeen, Abingdon, Bel Air, Edgewood, Fallston, Havre De Grace, Columbia, Elkridge, Ellicott City, Fulton, and Ocean City.
Scientists create global treasure map pointing to hidden rare earth deposits
Scientists have created a global “treasure map” for rare earth elements by uncovering where the strange volcanic rocks that contain them are most likely to form. By combining thousands of rock samples with seismic images of Earth’s deep interior, the team discovered that these metal-rich rocks tend to appear along the ancient, thick roots of continents. These unusual rocks, once seen as geological oddities, are now incredibly important because they hold many of the materials used in smartphones, electric vehicles, and wind turbines.
The Future as Politics: East Asia and World Order
Temporality in IR posits imagined futures not as a neutral horizon but as a means through which international relations is conducted as states act on future claims.
Innovation Developed by UT Health Sciences Research Program Passes Landmark Trial for Cardiac Amyloidosis
A new diagnostic tool developed at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences may soon make it significantly easier for physicians to detect cardiac amyloidosis, a progressive and frequently underdiagnosed disease caused by abnormal protein deposits in the heart.
Rare earth breakthrough in China’s icy northeast
A new type of deposit in Heilongjiang and Jilin promises easier, cheaper mining than in southern clay-rich areas, say scientists.
Stunning fossil discovery in Ethiopia rewrites human origins
A stunning fossil discovery in Ethiopia shows that early Homo and a previously unknown Australopithecus species lived together around 2.6 to 2.8 million years ago. The find overturns the classic “ape-to-human” progression and paints human evolution as a crowded, branching tree with multiple species coexisting. Scientists dated the fossils using volcanic ash deposits and are now investigating what these ancient relatives ate and whether they competed for resources.
Rocket Science Health validates targeted olfactory-cleft deposition in non-human primates ahead of the 4th Nasal Formulation & Delivery Summit
As the pace of modern drug discovery accelerates, the industry is increasingly recognizing that a breakthrough molecule is only as effective as its ability to reach the target site.
Evaluating the Business Case for AI in Patent Practice
Legal organizations that treat AI as a capital allocation, workflow design, and practice-management discipline will be positioned to generate real advantage.
Science spotlight: AI 'transformative' for cosmetic dermatology
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers significant promise in cosmetic dermatology, but technologies must be used in synergy with human expertise to overcome risks associated with scaled integration. According to a review published in Actas Dermo-Sifiliográficas [1], AI tools have revolutionised skin assessment and the development of personalised treatments in cosmetic dermatology already. And, looking ahead, the researchers said advances are set to further transform the category. “AI has...
Where Did The Myth That Oil Is Made Of Dinosaurs Come From? Probably Chicago In 1933
When we first encountered oil we thought it might be a mineral deposit, which was incorrect, but absolutely nobody was suggesting it was dinosaur juice.
This simple amino acid supplement greatly reduces Alzheimer’s damage
A new study suggests a surprisingly simple compound could help fight Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers found that arginine—an inexpensive amino acid already considered safe—can reduce the buildup of toxic amyloid proteins in the brain, a hallmark of the disease. In animal models, oral arginine not only lowered harmful protein deposits but also improved behavior and reduced brain inflammation.
Today’s Papers: Forza Calcio, Malagò progress, Gervasoni deposition
La Gazzetta dello SportOnly Milan Modric has decidedDoesn’t want to finish on an injury, another year in Rossonero to play in the Champions League with Allegri, or it’s goodbye to footballThe Scu...
US Regional and Mid-Sized Banks Are Dramatically Reinventing Their Business Models
Regional and mid-sized banks have traditionally held stable positions within the US banking sector. But fluctuating interest rates, shifting depositor preferences, stringent regulatory requirements and technological advancements are driving many institutions to undertake significant transformations to maintain their competitive positions.
World IP Day 2026 Spotlights IP Issues in Sports
WIPO established World IP Day to commemorate April 26, 1970, the date the WIPO Convention officially took effect.
Fredericksburg region business figures weigh in on state minimum wage bill
Bill could improve regional economy, put strain on small businesses.
Five tips for managing small business employee recruitment and hiring
Commentary: Small businesses are feeling the squeeze, as big corporations often have deeper pockets and endless resources to attract top talent. But competing isn't about money, it's about strategy.
What Rochester's small business owners miss by separating strategy, wealth
Commentary: Nicole Newman highlights how small business owners in Rochester often separate business strategy from wealth planning, limiting long-term financial flexibility.
New disclosures reveal how DOGE actually worked
Depositions offer insight into what Elon Musk’s group was up to. Members describe a club-like atmosphere in which they slashed agencies with little oversight.
Bondi won't appear for House deposition next week in the Epstein investigation
A spokeswoman for the House Oversight Committee says that the department has signaled that Bondi won’t appear on April 14 “since she is no longer attorney general and was subpoenaed in her capacity as attorney general.”
Mental Health Safety Net Coalition to Meet April 14
The Mental Health Safety Net Coalition will meet on Tuesday, April 14, 2026, at 1:00 pm. The Coalition provides an advocacy platform
SoFi Launches Banking Service for Businesses. Can It Boost the Struggling Stock?
SoFi Big Business Banking will allow enterprise customers to hold deposits, transfer funds, and settle transactions within SoFi’s nationally chartered bank.
Scoop: In 2024, Disney considered building hotels inside the Magic Kingdom, records show
The revelation came via a court deposition from a Disney Imagineer.
New bill could shield small business payroll cash, curb bank runs and aid community banks
A bipartisan group of lawmakers has reintroduced legislation that would expand federal deposit insurance coverage for certain bank accounts.
Wagoner Community Hospital delays March 13 paychecks, cites soft business deposits
Employees at Wagoner Community Hospital were expecting their March 13th paycheck but instead were notified via email their payroll would be delayed.News Channel
Scientists may have discovered a brand-new mineral on Mars
Scientists studying Mars may have uncovered a brand-new mineral hidden in the planet’s ancient sulfate deposits. By combining laboratory experiments with orbital data, researchers identified an unusual iron sulfate—ferric hydroxysulfate—forming in layered deposits near the massive Valles Marineris canyon system. The mineral likely formed when sulfate-rich deposits left behind by ancient water were later heated by volcanic or geothermal activity, transforming their chemistry.
Highlights from the first few hours of Bill Clinton’s deposition on Epstein files
Hillary Clinton erupts after Boebert leaks photo from her deposition
WATCH: Hillary Clinton's full deposition on Jeffrey Epstein ties before House Oversight panel
Videos of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton answering questions about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were released Monday by a House committee investigating the late financier.
House panel releases videos of Clinton depositions in Epstein investigation
Former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton appeared last week before the Republican-led House Oversight Committee.
House Oversight Committee releases video of Clinton depositions on Epstein
The House Oversight Committee has released video footage of the closed-door depositions of Bill and Hillary Clinton that occurred last week in Chappaqua, New York, as part of the panel’s investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.