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How a patient advocate could help you navigate your family's next health crisis
Here’s what you need to know to work with one most effectively.
VB Health Launches Public Seven-Part Supplement Quality Standard
New company-wide standard, effective across the VB Health portfolio, establishes requirements for research, clinically relevant dosing, formula transparency, sourcing, U.S. manufacturing and every-batch testingDENVER, Oct. 03, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- VB Health, a Denver-based dietary supplement company co-founded by a U.S.-licensed physician, launched the VB Health Supplement Quality Standard today, a new public seven-part framework that establishes company-wide requirements for how its supplem
Iran knows US 'is winning' as Operation Economic Outcast inflicts damage, Treasury official says
A top Treasury official told FOX Business that the "absolute isolation" campaign the Treasury is imposing on the Iranian regime has been "really effective."
$28B hemp THC industry fighting to save itself from looming federal ban
A government-funding bill last month delayed the effective date of a hemp THC ban to Dec. 11 to give Congress time to consider regulations.
NVIDIA Raises Shield TV Pro Price to $299, Discontinues Standard Shield TV
NVIDIA has raised the price of the Shield TV Pro from $199.99 to $299.99, effective October 2. The streaming box launched in October 2019 at $199.99 and held that price for almost seven years. Earlier this year, NVIDIA promised to keep updating the Shield TV, with hardware engineering SVP Andrew...
Will Brazil Betting Ban Change Flutter Entertainment's (FLUT) Narrative
Flutter Entertainment reported that Don Liu resigned as Chief Legal Officer effective September 30, 2026, with Group Company Secretary Edward Traynor stepping in as interim Chief Legal Officer from October 1, 2026. Brazil's recent ban on online betting removes a previously important market opportunity for Flutter Entertainment, placing greater emphasis on execution in existing regulated regions and any remaining expansion plans. We will now look at how Flutter Entertainment's investment...
Coastal forces shape building sciences practice
When Built Environments relocated to Wilmington, the firm’s partners weren’t looking for the lazy tranquility one hopes for when on vacation. Instead, they sought sultry heat. They wanted to understand whipping coastal winds and punishing precipitation – the kind that tropical storms produce. That’s because how materials degrade can reveal a lot about how they can be improved. “We specifically chose the Wilmington market because it does fall within Climate Zone 3A, which is a coastal warm-humid climate,” said Jarrett Davis, who joined Built Environments in 2023 to lead the company’s building science practice. “There’s not a lot of product research in that climate zone, but there are a lot of structures here that get weatherized pretty severely.” Built Environments has provided building science, material testing and code compliance consulting for 25 years, ever since principal materials scientist Steve Doggett founded the company in Minnesota. “There are very few manufacturers that understand fully how their own materials and products work, whereas we know their shortfalls and their benefits out in the real world on jobsites,” Doggett said. “That’s why the original Built Environments was formed, to make buildings better.” He said the 15-employee company is just as comfortable on a jobsite, retrofitting a high-end beachside property, for example, as it is recreating some of the coast’s most intense weather conditions in the great indoors. The company operates an A2LA-accredited ISO/IEC 17025 mechanical testing laboratory on Wright Street. The year-old facility has expanded Built Environments’ in-house capabilities, Doggett said. “We’re able to simulate that hurricane wind (and) rain and perform structural and impact testing on wall assemblies, roof assemblies and glazing assemblies,” he said. “There are certain requirements that those windows and doors need to meet as far as wind ratings and pressure ratings and things of that nature.” Standard Glass Co.-Glass Depots, of Wilmington, is currently testing a new glazing system using Built Environments’ stress testing, the partners said. One method involves what’s called a “large missile cannon.” “We take 8-foot two-by-fours, and we shoot them at assemblies, so they have to withstand that impact,” Davis said. “It’s pretty cool to see, I’m not going to lie.” In many cases, the lab can run a full, wall-scale test of a product in a matter of weeks or months, whereas “it might take midrange manufacturers years,” Doggett said. “We’re nimble. We can cut that time in half.” The lab also develops intellectual property. Doggett, for example, shares a patent with Sustant LLC, of Minnesota, on a fastener patch to increase the air and water tightness within building envelopes. “We have too many ideas and not enough time,” he said. But the partners noted that they or their fellow principals – of which the company has four total, including a principal engineer and a principal codes and standards expert – could be anywhere on a given day, including in the courtroom providing expert testimony in contentious insurance cases. “Let’s say there is a fire on a structure,” Davis said. “We can analyze all the specific materials within that assembly – an exterior wall or something like that – because there are loads that require certain heat release. And so, we can measure each one of those materials, if need be, to say if this was likely or not a code-approved assembly.” Despite what can be inferred in a lab, the partners said nothing beats learning from how materials change over time under real-world strain. Take, for instance, the curious case of the creaking condo. “We recently had a customer that came to us trying to assess a sound issue of a roof. It was making noises that no one could explain or account for. How do you tackle something like that?” Doggett asked rhetorically. “There’s really no generally agreed-upon methodologies.” The problem turned out to be a faulty installation of a commercial roof system. “The building in this particular case was not local,” he said. “In the initial installation, the commercial roofing contractor installed the wrong fasteners in the wrong locations into the deck, and essentially the solar radiation was causing the building to move quite substantially early in the morning when the sun initially hit that assembly after a quite cool evening, causing the threads on the fasteners to kind of jump within the material, within the metal.” Built Environments designed an effective repair methodology that was within budget, the partners said. “We get the bizarre,” Doggett said. “I will say that’s something that has stayed the same over 25 years.” The partners said they are hiring, and that Cape Fear Community College is one of their main recruiting grounds. Davis and Doggett look for talented people who can understand traditional methodologies yet are open to on-the-job training and new understandings, they said. After all, it’s not just weather that can ruin a building. “My favorite saying is,” Davis said, “‘What are the eight most expensive words in construction? That’s how my daddy used to do it.’”
Coastal forces shape building sciences practice
When Built Environments relocated to Wilmington, the firm’s partners weren’t looking for the lazy tranquility one hopes for when on vacation. Instead, they sought sultry heat. They wanted to understand whipping coastal winds and punishing precipitation – the kind that tropical storms produce. That’s because how materials degrade can reveal a lot about how they can be improved. “We specifically chose the Wilmington market because it does fall within Climate Zone 3A, which is a coastal warm-humid climate,” said Jarrett Davis, who joined Built Environments in 2023 to lead the company’s building science practice. “There’s not a lot of product research in that climate zone, but there are a lot of structures here that get weatherized pretty severely.” Built Environments has provided building science, material testing and code compliance consulting for 25 years, ever since principal materials scientist Steve Doggett founded the company in Minnesota. “There are very few manufacturers that understand fully how their own materials and products work, whereas we know their shortfalls and their benefits out in the real world on jobsites,” Doggett said. “That’s why the original Built Environments was formed, to make buildings better.” He said the 15-employee company is just as comfortable on a jobsite, retrofitting a high-end beachside property, for example, as it is recreating some of the coast’s most intense weather conditions in the great indoors. The company operates an A2LA-accredited ISO/IEC 17025 mechanical testing laboratory on Wright Street. The year-old facility has expanded Built Environments’ in-house capabilities, Doggett said. “We’re able to simulate that hurricane wind (and) rain and perform structural and impact testing on wall assemblies, roof assemblies and glazing assemblies,” he said. “There are certain requirements that those windows and doors need to meet as far as wind ratings and pressure ratings and things of that nature.” Standard Glass Co.-Glass Depots, of Wilmington, is currently testing a new glazing system using Built Environments’ stress testing, the partners said. One method involves what’s called a “large missile cannon.” “We take 8-foot two-by-fours, and we shoot them at assemblies, so they have to withstand that impact,” Davis said. “It’s pretty cool to see, I’m not going to lie.” In many cases, the lab can run a full, wall-scale test of a product in a matter of weeks or months, whereas “it might take midrange manufacturers years,” Doggett said. “We’re nimble. We can cut that time in half.” The lab also develops intellectual property. Doggett, for example, shares a patent with Sustant LLC, of Minnesota, on a fastener patch to increase the air and water tightness within building envelopes. “We have too many ideas and not enough time,” he said. But the partners noted that they or their fellow principals – of which the company has four total, including a principal engineer and a principal codes and standards expert – could be anywhere on a given day, including in the courtroom providing expert testimony in contentious insurance cases. “Let’s say there is a fire on a structure,” Davis said. “We can analyze all the specific materials within that assembly – an exterior wall or something like that – because there are loads that require certain heat release. And so, we can measure each one of those materials, if need be, to say if this was likely or not a code-approved assembly.” Despite what can be inferred in a lab, the partners said nothing beats learning from how materials change over time under real-world strain. Take, for instance, the curious case of the creaking condo. “We recently had a customer that came to us trying to assess a sound issue of a roof. It was making noises that no one could explain or account for. How do you tackle something like that?” Doggett asked rhetorically. “There’s really no generally agreed-upon methodologies.” The problem turned out to be a faulty installation of a commercial roof system. “The building in this particular case was not local,” he said. “In the initial installation, the commercial roofing contractor installed the wrong fasteners in the wrong locations into the deck, and essentially the solar radiation was causing the building to move quite substantially early in the morning when the sun initially hit that assembly after a quite cool evening, causing the threads on the fasteners to kind of jump within the material, within the metal.” Built Environments designed an effective repair methodology that was within budget, the partners said. “We get the bizarre,” Doggett said. “I will say that’s something that has stayed the same over 25 years.” The partners said they are hiring, and that Cape Fear Community College is one of their main recruiting grounds. Davis and Doggett look for talented people who can understand traditional methodologies yet are open to on-the-job training and new understandings, they said. After all, it’s not just weather that can ruin a building. “My favorite saying is,” Davis said, “‘What are the eight most expensive words in construction? That’s how my daddy used to do it.’”
The Mindsets Leaders Need as AI Accelerates the Pace of Business
AI is changing not only what leaders need to know, but how they need to think. Yet many are struggling to adapt to the speed, uncertainty, and emotional complexity of an AI-driven workplace. To keep pace, you need to shift the mindsets that shape your behavior in three important ways: from certainty to clarity, from expertise to exploration, and from emotional control to emotional insight. A simple four-step practice—pause, perceive, pivot, and practice—can help you start to recognize and change automatic reactions. By deliberately reshaping the assumptions and patterns that guide your behavior, you can become more adaptable, curious, and effective as the nature of work continues to change.
Former CDC director on politics of measles: ‘A death is a death’
Dr. Tom Frieden, former CDC director, appeared on “The Final 5” to discuss the nation’s growing measles outbreak. Frieden said the measles vaccine is safe and effective and remains the only way to stop the spread, while criticizing political arguments over how to classify measles-related deaths. Frieden also discussed the growing role of artificial intelligence in medicine, saying AI can be a powerful tool for doctors and patients but cannot replace trained medical professionals.
Trump embarks on rally blitz hoping to energize GOP voters
Trump’s low standing with voters limits the places he can most effectively campaign. Advisers hope he can energize GOP voters.
Stihl taps Caterpillar vet as new president
Stihl Inc. named Caterpillar veteran Sean McGinnis its new president effective immediately Thursday.
How Washington Funded the Politicization of Science
Over the last half-decade, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on projects designed to influence academic policies, both in the sciences and other disciplines. The aim was to foster a progressive conception of social justice in these fields. In pursuit of this end, the foundation earmarked nearly a million dollars for a project titled “Creating Inclusive Scientific Societies through Policies and Practices,” over a million for a project on “Faculty Online Learning Communities for Gender Equity,” and over $2 million to foster “racial equity focused departmental change.” Through a public records request, I’ve obtained the proposals and progress reports for dozens of NSF grants designed to promote social justice. Although funding for these grants was eventually halted by the Trump administration, the projects illustrate an important facet of recent higher-education policy. Many of the university policies that promised “social transformation” didn’t arise in a vacuum. They were actively encouraged by outside funders—often by the federal government itself. Subscribe Accreditation—the peer-review process which enables universities to receive federal grants and student loans—has recently become a policy battleground, with accreditors wielding significant power over both universities and academic disciplines. In 2020, when Oregon Health and Science University’s medical school issued an extensive diversity action plan—which promised “consequences” for employees who failed to support “DEI, anti-racism and social justice”—it specifically pointed to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), the medical-school accrediting body, to justify the overhaul. The NSF actively promoted DEI-focused accreditation policies. The proposal for a $1.2 million program on promoting “community engagement” in STEM, which I obtained through a records request, notes that the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology was exploring changes to its criteria “that would incorporate JEDI [justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion].” The proposal promised to “support broader JEDI efforts in the general criteria for engineering.” Another grant funded a conference designed to “identify and share best practices and strategies to integrate IDEA principles in accreditation criteria”—referring to an acronym that stands for “inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.” Scholarly societies have become another flashpoint in debates over higher education. Critics argue that many of these societies, which have the power to shape entire disciplines, have become increasingly politicized. Again, through its giving, the NSF played a role in promoting this politicization. In one million-dollar grant that received funding in 2024, a group of psychologists proposed a series of social-justice reforms to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. The proposal, which I obtained via a records request, asserts that “[r]edistributing resources (such as moving different people into leadership roles) is not enough” and that the society’s “governance structures do not yet reflect its stated values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Its solution: review and rework the society’s criteria for leadership development, academic awards, conferences, and publications. Adjusting review criteria informed by “intersectionality” designed to fight “epistemic exclusion” is an easy way to introduce de facto ideological litmus tests into the peer-review process. For many of the grants I obtained, such litmus tests seem to be the point. “Academic departments are racialized social systems that produce and sustain the byproducts of systemic racism,” a proposal for a $2.7 million project funded in 2024 asserts, promising to develop “departmentally-focused change efforts that cultivate values, assumptions, and behaviors that advance racial equity.” The University of Illinois Urbana Champaign’s million-dollar “I-ADVANCE” project, which effectively created a small DEI bureaucracy on campus, promised to Embed 28 ADVANCE faculty fellows in STEM departments” to amplify its equity goals. Another $1.2 million project promised to create “faculty online learning communities,” made up of scientists at universities around the country, that would eventually build department-level diversity action plans. “Ultimately,” the proposal asserts, perhaps more perceptively than its authors realized, “both organizational change and intersectionality frameworks deal with power.” Indeed, such grants confer a great deal of power to administrators and scholar-activists, who can even use the mere availability of funding as a tool to advance their causes. That history is worth remembering amid today’s debate over federal involvement in higher education: Washington has been shaping university priorities for years, including by financing efforts to instill progressive ideas about race, gender, and equity into academic institutions—and many of the policies those grants encouraged remain embedded within universities long after the federal money has stopped flowing. John D. Sailer is the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at Manhattan Institute. Share
For sleep apnea, a dental device may be as effective as CPAP
A dental device may be as effective as CPAP for some people with sleep apnea. Learn how oral appliances work and who may benefit from this treatment option....
Business Technology Isn’t One Category: 7 Areas Leaders Should Know Before Modernizing
Effective modernization starts with strategic clarity. Leaders should understand these seven core technology areas before investing in AI, systems and digital infrastructure.
Apple Finally Made AirPods Repairable… Sort Of
It’s been true for a while now that Apple’s AirPods have been effectively disposable, with [iFixit] slapping each successive generation with an abysmal 0/10 repairability score. The mom…
Rural MAHA followers say Trump hasn't improved health of their communities, an AP-KFF poll finds
The findings signal an apparent disconnect between the Trump administration’s MAHA-branded policy priorities and rural America’s perception of their reach and effectiveness.
Seaboard FCU president and CEO to retire in May
Seaboard Federal Credit Union announced that longtime President and Chief Executive Officer Kyle Casburn will retire effective May 31, 2027. The announcement marks the conclusion of a 31-year tenure of
When “DEI” research is cut, what happens to community health?
“I’m just going to run to the grocery store!” How many times have we said this without thinking about it? For most of us, it's usually an easy walk or a short drive to get the cheese we forgot. In reality, though, 13% of the U.S. population (about 39 million people) live in “food deserts,” which means living more than a mile from a grocery store in urban areas and more than 10 miles in rural areas. This was the case for people in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where a quick run to buy food wasn’t an option. In the 1930s, federal maps marked the Hill as "hazardous" for lending, a practice known as redlining that steered investment away from Black neighborhoods. Decades of disinvestment followed, and residents went about 30 years without a nearby grocery store. This made it hard to keep healthy eating habits and contributed to chronic disease. When a grocery store finally opened in the area in 2013, researchers saw the opportunity and launched the PHRESH study, which initially compared the health of participants from the Hill district to those in the Homewood district. Over time, the study expanded to other factors such as brain health and Alzheimer's risk. Residents like Roderick Blair overcame initial hesitation to share their health data, trusting it would benefit their neighborhood. Then, in August 2026, the NIH abruptly canceled the study’s grant, citing that it was “subjective” and fell outside their scientific scope—an effect of the administration’s interpretation of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Research like PHRESH can help determine what changes in a neighborhood actually improve health, so cutting it has left that question unanswered. Other canceled studies have examined health issues like maternal health, preterm birth rates, or sickle cell disease. Courts have reversed some of these grant cancellations, but not all of them. If we really want America to be healthier, research into why some communities get sicker than others is absolutely critical. The law that created the federal minority health research institute passed with bipartisan support in 2000. But these days, as evidenced by grant cancellations, the political shift in attitudes toward DEI means we often lose access to the health information we need to help all communities thrive. DEI vs. health equity vs. equality and the overlap (or lack thereof) The letters “DEI” evoke very different reactions depending on who you are in the U.S. DEI programs can address gender, disability, age, and other factors, but the fiercest debate centers on race. For some people, hearing DEI brings to mind policies that may have cost them a job or a college seat because they are white. Others see DEI as a matter of justice: a way to expand representation and opportunity for groups that have been historically marginalized. Both perspectives are rooted in lived experience, and both center on the same question: whether hiring and admissions practices are fair. Hiring and admission practices, though related, are not the same as health equity. Health equity is “the attainment of the highest level of health for all people.” It’s the recognition that some groups of people consistently experience worse health outcomes than others. For instance, black mothers die from pregnancy-related complications at three times the rate of white mothers, and rural Americans are more likely to die from issues such as heart disease and cancer. Equity is also often conflated with “equality,” which leads to misunderstanding of how to actually best support communities. Equality ignores the fact that we aren’t all starting life with the same resources or circumstances, whereas equity is about helping people get what they specifically need based on their situation so they have the chance to achieve the same outcome as anyone else. For example, if every household in Pittsburgh got a $30 grocery gift card, that would be equal. But during the decades the Hill District went without a grocery store, that card wouldn’t have helped much. Equity means making sure everyone can actually access a store in the first place. DEI policies can overlap with health equity in many ways. For example, they may help expand access to quality education and stable, well-paying jobs, which in turn can provide health insurance, safer housing, and improved finances—all of which can reduce health disparities. But to make that happen, we first need data to identify disparities in communities and to develop solutions that effectively address them. What we lose when the research stops Community data is important to health equity because: You can’t fix what you don’t see: Data show which communities are most affected by health factors such as infection, heart disease, and cancer. If we don’t know what is happening and where, then we can’t develop interventions to help. Poor health costs everyone: Chronic disease is expensive—both to the individual person and to the overall economy. Understanding what groups of people are most at risk allows us to develop interventions that can save everyone money. Disparities exist for many communities: Health equity includes disparities that exist due to a whole host of factors, such as family background, race and ethnicity, rural vs. suburban residence, gender and sexual orientation, veteran status, disability, and lower income. This means many Americans can benefit from research into differences in health outcomes and how to improve them. Trust is easy to lose: Some participants in the PHRESH study were initially vocal about their concerns about participating. But that trust was earned because the researchers kept their promises and centered their work on the community. When projects are canceled mid-cycle, researchers have no choice but to leave behind communities they had promised to help. This hurts trust in the long run. It’s also a very inefficient use of resources, and it will take significant time and effort to redo the work when the government realizes this work is important again. How should we talk about health equity? This is hard because the words “equity” and “DEI” are currently very politically charged. So whether you’re a public health professional, teacher, or friend, how we talk about this topic matters. The right framing can help people who might otherwise be skeptical see why health equity research is important and deserves funding. Here are some suggestions to help your conversations: Choose your words strategically: Who are you trying to reach with your message? Are they likely to be resistant to terms like “diversity” and “equity”? If so, find alternative words to use to still get the message across. It is frustrating to be in that position, but the goal of improving health is too important not to try to make inroads. Sometimes simply reframing can help the message reach those who need to hear it. Focus on the problem: The terms “health equity” and “DEI” are abstract. Make it more specific. For example, discuss differences in maternal death or ways to improve health outcomes in rural communities. These still have equity at their core but will likely be better understood by those you’re talking with. Focus on systems: Disparities exist, but if they are communicated poorly, people can mistakenly think the issue is the individual’s fault. Disparities are largely driven by failures of the system—such as lack of access to health care and a long legacy of racism. When discussing the disparities, frame them around these systemic issues to ensure blame isn’t placed on the individuals impacted. Tell stories: Personalize these policies by using stories from those impacted that connect to the data you’re trying to convey. This helps make the policies and outcomes more concrete and meaningful. Bottom line Some communities end up sicker than others. That’s just the facts. We can argue about the best way to do that research, but canceling it simply because it may be linked to DEI doesn’t make anyone healthier. It just leaves communities like the Hill district behind. And in the end, it causes us all to move backward in our efforts to improve health in this country. Love, EM Big thanks to MacKenzie Isaac & Legairre Radden, who reviewed this piece and generously shared their expertise and lived experience to help improve it. Dr. Liz Marnik, PhD, is Executive Director of The Evidence Collective and a science communicator and immunologist working at the intersection of public trust, science, and public health. To discuss communication training on topics like health equity and storytelling, email Liz at liz@yle.health or learn more on our website. Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) comprises a team of experts, ranging from physicians to immunologists to epidemiologists to nutritionists, working together with one goal: to “translate” ever-evolving public health science so that people are well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions. The YLE suite of newsletters reaches over 475,000 people across more than 132 countries. This newsletter is free to everyone, thanks to the generous support of fellow YLE community members. To support the effort, subscribe or upgrade below: Your Local Epidemiologist is a reader-supported publication. 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New Cancer Drugs Are Revolutionary. Why Don’t More Patients Get Them?
Targeted gene therapies are highly effective at stopping cancers, but the very abundance of the treatments, plus cost and sluggish change, are hindering access.
Concerning Report Emerges on Patriots QB Drake Maye, Shoulder
The start of the season has been a disaster for New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye. That’s, of course, led to plenty of questions about why that might be.A popular theory goes back to the Super Bowl a season ago. Maye dealt with a shoulder injury that has made him ineffective. Now, some are wondering […] The post Concerning Report Emerges on Patriots QB Drake Maye, Shoulder appeared first on HEAVY.
Xbox Disc-To-Digital Officially Exits Testing
The Xbox Disc-to-Digital licensing program recently launched to insiders, effectively paving the way to a discless future for Xbox, while still allowing the brand to market its console as backwards compatible. Following just over a month of public testing, Microsoft has just announced that the...
Tom Watson to lead Cherokee Federal as president
Cherokee Federal, the federal contracting division of Cherokee Nation Businesses, announced that longtime industry executive Tom Watson has been named president, effective Oct. 1.
State Senate Democratic Committee: Robyn Vining earns Recombobulation Area endorsement, highlighting her effective legislative record
MADISON, WI – State Representative Robyn Vining’s campaign for State Senate has earned the endorsement of The Recombobulaiton Area and Dan Shafer. During their conversation on The Recombobulaiton Area podcast, Robyn and Dan highlighted her path to political life, her...
Zygi Kamasa's True Brit Entertainment Files For Administration
True Brit Entertainment, the UK distributor founded by former Lionsgate executive Zygi Kamasa, has effectively filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Essentia Health, HealthPartners propose merger
The new partnership — which would create one of the larger health systems in the state — is to be effective Jan. 1.
Essentia Health, HealthPartners announce planned merger
The organizations are targeting an effective launch date of Jan. 1, 2027, pending regulatory review.
Baystate Health appoints Dr. Amir Lotfi as new Chief Medical Officer
Baystate Health has appointed Dr. Amir Lotfi as Chief Medical Officer, effective Monday.
Primetime Review: That’s Entertainment?
If you decide to see Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, it’s important to remember the title as you watch. Yes, this is a biopic of sorts about Chris Hansen and his work on To Catch a Predator, but it is more accurately about the quest for fame and using people’s trauma to attract ratings. True crime entertainment continues to have a prominent place in many people’s television habits, and this film asks us to examine what that means both for those whose stories have become our viewing pleasure and those of us watching. Primetime starts as Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) is told that his show, To Catch a Predator, is moving to a 9 PM spot opposite LOST. Chris and his producer, Andie (Merritt Wever), see this as an opportunity to make the program even more sensational, looking for bigger, more horrific predators. As part of their plan, they hire a young actor, Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), to play “Decoy Dan,” the person who greets the would-be predators who were catfished by Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher). Oppenheim, along with writers Ajon Singh and Luke Dittrich, is less concerned with an accurate retelling of the show as much as they are interested in interrogating the why of it all. That decision sometimes leaves Primetime feeling less like a biopic and more like a satirical look at the nature of programming like this. Visually, the movie is impressive. Oppenheim uses light and color effectively to cast Hansen as both villain and savior. Pattinson plays Hansen in an almost comical manner, as we see him wake his two young sons to watch a clip of the show, just to brag that he was moving into a prime spot on television. Even Andie struggles to accept a “nice” job when there is so much more fame to be found producing salacious true-crime content. Wever does an excellent job showing how the hunger for fame is not just in front of the camera, but in every aspect of the production. The heart of the movie, and the standout performance, belongs to Gisondo as Dan Plum. He is someone who just wants to get enough hours to be admitted into the Screen Actors Guild, and stumbles into this job without really knowing what it is. Throughout the film, we watch him suffer one trauma after another, ending with him witnessing the suicide of a District Attorney who is about to become the next unwitting star of Hansen’s show. If there is a sympathetic character in Primetime, it is Decoy Dan, and Gisondo plays him brilliantly. If you’re a fan of programming like To Catch a Predator, then Primetime will probably make you feel uncomfortable, and I think it’s worth sitting with that feeling and examining why we turn on shows that display the worst of humanity while we judge from our couches. Yes, it is correct to want to see people who would hurt children brought to justice, but perhaps it shouldn’t be something that we watch as entertainment. Rating: 3.5/5 This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on September 25, 2026. MacGuffin or Meaning: Film & TV Reviews and Reflections is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
Titan Business EDGE: Building career readiness from the first year to the first job
By Daniel Coats Career prep is most effective when it begins long before graduation. For Cal State Fullerton College of Business and Economics(opens in a new tab) students, knowing how to build professional skills, gain meaningful experience and ultimately launch a career requires intentional development over time. The new Titan Business EDGE program provides that pathway […]
Newcastle Creates New Senior Role After Major Recruiting Changes
Newcastle United’s football operation has undergone significant change over the past year, with Ross Wilson overseeing another stage of the club’s restructuring following the departures of experienced figures including Steve Nickson and Andy Howe. Jack Ross has now confirmed that he has become Newcastle’s Assistant Sporting Director, effectively placing him directly beneath Wilson in the […]
Enagic rep tells moms to disinfect with 'magic water,' and the science falls apart
Effective disinfection depends on proven products, clear instructions, and a little skepticism, especially when a sales pitch starts sounding more like a chemistry magic trick.
WHO recognizes healthy, innovative cities across the Western Pacific Region
Nine Healthy City champions from across the World Health Organization (WHO) Western Pacific Region received special recognition at an awarding ceremony during the 11th Global Conference of the Alliance for Healthy Cities in Sydney, Australia.The WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific has presented the Healthy Cities Recognition Awards every two years since 2004 to celebrate innovative and impactful city-led initiatives that improve the health and well-being of urban populations.Eight cities received awards for their best practices, and one National Forum received the WHO Regional Director’s Special Award in recognition of its long-standing leadership in advancing the Healthy Cities movement.Awardees were selected through a rigorous evaluation process and recognized for demonstrating measurable, innovative and sustainable approaches to health challenges faced by cities.Remarking on the significance of the awards, Dr Huong Tran, Director of the Division of Health Promotion, Disease Prevention and Control at the Regional Office, said that, “There is no single blueprint for a healthy city. What works in one context may need to be adapted to another. But by sharing our experiences, including what worked, what was challenging, and what we learnt along the way, we can help one another move faster and further.”Award-winning cities and initiativesThis year's awards recognize outstanding city-led initiatives that have demonstrated measurable impact, innovation and sustainability in advancing health initiatives for urban populations.Baguio City (Philippines) – Data for equity: informing action, improving healthDr Donnabel Tubera-Panes, City Epidemiologist – Medical Officer IV of the Health Services Office accepted the award on behalf of Baguio City. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisBaguio City was recognized for developing a pioneering Livability Index that provides village-level data across all 128 barangays (villages), enabling evidence-based planning and more equitable allocation of resources. By integrating community participation and institutionalizing the index within city planning and budgeting processes, the city has demonstrated how data can drive action to reduce health and social inequities.Eunpyeong-gu (Seoul, Republic of Korea) – Communities living in vulnerable situations: advancing health equity through community engagementVice Mayor Honourable Ahn Hyoung Jun accepted the award on behalf of Eunpyeong-gu. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisEunpyeong-gu was recognized for its inclusive health equity programme supporting vulnerable populations, including isolated older adults and LGBTQI+ communities. Through peer-led community networks, social cooperatives and inclusive service design, the district has strengthened access to care, promoted social inclusion and advanced community ownership of health initiatives.Madiun City (Indonesia) – Adapting and mitigating climate-related crises: building heat resilience and preventing flood-related health risksMs Yuni Dwi Purwani, Secretary General of the National Forum for Indonesian Healthy Cities/Regencies, accepted the award on behalf of Madiun City. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisMadiun City was recognized for its SUPERMIE (Sustainable Public Environmental Management Initiative) – a community-based environmental governance model that addresses urban flooding, climate resilience and environmental sustainability. The initiative contributed to reductions in flood-prone areas, greenhouse gas emissions, diarrhoeal disease and dengue fever, while at the same time improving food security through neighbourhood food gardens. The programme has already been replicated in 15 cities and regencies across Indonesia.Macao Special Administrative Region (China) – Protecting communities from tobacco and alcohol-related harms: tackling commercial drivers of riskDr LO Iek Long, Director of the Health Bureau, Macao SAR, China accepted the award on behalf of Macao. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisMacao SAR was recognized for implementing a comprehensive and integrated approach to tobacco and alcohol control. Through legislation, monitoring systems, enforcement, public awareness campaigns and multisectoral partnerships, the programme has strengthened protection against major risk factors for noncommunicable diseases and established a model that is highly transferable to other urban settings.Phnom Penh Capital City (Cambodia) – Safe, active and health-enabling transport: advancing health and reducing inequities in urban mobilityH.E. Khoung Sreng, Governor of Phnom Penh Capital City accepted the award on behalf of Phnom Penh Capital City. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisPhnom Penh received the award for its Safe School Zone Project, which combines infrastructure improvements, speed management, enforcement, education and stakeholder engagement to protect children and communities. The initiative has demonstrated measurable reductions in crashes and vehicle speeds while providing a scalable model for safer urban mobility across the country.Quezon City (Philippines) – Transforming food environments: addressing policy, market and urban design drivers of health and nutritionMs Jirah Asa M. Sideco, Chief of the Nutrition Section of the Quezon City Health Department accepted the award on behalf of Quezon City. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisQuezon City was recognized for its public food procurement policy that promotes healthier diets through government-run institutions and feeding programmes. Supported by strong policy frameworks and monitoring systems, the initiative improves access to nutritious food for vulnerable populations while serving as a benchmark for other local governments.Samarinda City (Indonesia) – Preventing violence and promoting gender equality: transforming urban systems, norms and spaces Mrs Rinda Wahyuni, Chairperson of Samarinda Healthy City Forum accepted the award on behalf of Samarinda City. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisSamarinda City was recognized for its multisectoral approach to preventing violence and advancing gender equality. Responding to local evidence on violence against women and children, the city has positioned violence prevention as a public health priority, bringing together health services, schools, social welfare institutions, law enforcement, civil society and community leaders to strengthen prevention, reporting, survivor-centred support and legal protection. Through inclusive policies, community engagement and sustainable city financing, Samarinda has developed a locally owned and scalable model for creating safer, more equitable and inclusive urban communities.Singapore – Age-friendly cities: transforming systems to bridge generations for a healthier tomorrowDr Tan Weng Mooi, Director, Integrated Health Promotion, accepted the award on behalf of Singapore. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisSingapore received recognition for its Healthy Precinct Framework, which translates national healthy ageing priorities into neighbourhood-level action. The initiative integrates preventive care, social support, service coordination and age-friendly environments while actively engaging older persons, caregivers and community organizations. Its expansion across multiple precincts demonstrates its scalability and long-term sustainability.WHO Regional Director’s Special AwardNational Forum for Indonesian Healthy Cities/Regencies (Indonesia)Ms Yuni Dwi Purwani, Secretary General of the National Forum for Indonesian Healthy Cities/Regencies, accepted the award on behalf of the National Forum. Photo credit: Maria BoyadgisThe WHO Regional Director's Special Award was presented to the National Forum for Indonesian Healthy Cities/Regencies (FKKSI) in recognition of its long-standing leadership in advancing the Healthy Cities movement across Indonesia. As a national platform bringing together local governments, communities, academia and civil society, FKKSI has played a critical role in promoting collaboration, capacity-building, knowledge exchange and advocacy. Its efforts have strengthened and institutionalized healthy urban development nationwide and established a model for multisectoral engagement in the Region. Healthy Cities for allThe 2026 Healthy Cities Recognition Awards highlight how cities can lead transformative action on health by addressing climate change, inequity, ageing, nutrition, mobility, social inclusion, violence prevention and the commercial determinants of health. The recognized initiatives demonstrate that local governments, communities and partners can work together to create healthier, safer and more resilient urban environments for everyone. As urban populations continue to grow across the Western Pacific Region, WHO remains committed to supporting cities in advancing health, equity and sustainable development through the Healthy Cities approach and the Alliance for Healthy Cities. ###Note to editorsSince 2004, the WHO Healthy Cities Recognition Awards have provided a platform for cities to share innovative and effective approaches to improving health and well-being. The awards recognize achievements in areas including climate resilience, healthy ageing, health equity, gender equality, tobacco and alcohol control, urban mobility, nutrition and data-driven governance. In 2026, more than 150 submissions were received from cities and local governments across the Western Pacific Region. The titles and affiliations of awardees are presented as they were at the time the photo was taken.______________For more information, or to arrange media interviews, contact: WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific: wprocom@who.int
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Intel Panther Lake Teardown, 18A, BSPD, GAAFET, SemiAnalysis STEEL
Panther Lake debuts the first commercial implementation of backside power delivery (BSPDN), introduces Intel’s first iteration of gate-all-around (GAA) transistors, and showcases their advanced packaging capabilities with its Foveros-S assembly. With Panther Lake, Intel’s manufacturing arc has shifted from nebulous roadmaps to shipped silicon, a significant milestone on their long road back to competitive semiconductor manufacturing. To evaluate the extent of Intel’s comeback, we tore down Panther Lake. The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Our teardown traces 18A from its four-sheet RibbonFETs (Intel’s marketing name for GAAFETs) and gate stacks through contacts, frontside and backside wiring, and the bonded carrier. We explain how these material and integration choices improve gate control and reduce resistance, while adding capacitance, thermal resistance, and process complexity. Our measurements put Panther Lake’s 18A compute logic and TSMC N3E GPU logic at similar logic density. However, 18A does not lead TSMC N3P, N2 or Samsung SF2 in peak density. Panther Lake’s CPU cores are incremental updates, and the high-end GPU still uses TSMC N3E. Panther Lake assembles one compute tile, one GPU tile, and one I/O tile atop a passive base tile using Intel’s Foveros-S advanced packaging. Both compute tile variants use Intel 18A. The Xe3 GPU options are a 4-core GT1 tile on Intel 3 and a larger 12-core GT2 tile on TSMC N3E. Both I/O tile variants use TSMC N6. [1], [2] Our analysis centers on the PTL-U compute tile, both the 4-core and 12-core GPU tiles, as well as the 12-lane I/O tile. In conventional chips, power and signal are routed through the same frontside metal stack towards the device frontend. Power rails consume scarce routing resources near the transistors, while tall via stacks carry VDD and VSS from the coarse upper wires to local rails. Backside power delivery (BSPD) moves the main power network behind the transistor layer, to the backside, separating it from frontside signal routing. We covered BSPD and its impacts in 2024. [3], [4], [5] Intel’s BSPD implementation, branded as “PowerVia”, routes power through dedicated backside metals to nano-TSVs, which connect those rails to local source/drain (S/D) contacts. Implementing that separation requires Intel to build the interconnect stacks from both sides of the wafer. The frontside comprises the M0-M14 signal stack, while the backside comprises the BM0-BM5 power stack. M0 and BM0 are closest to the transistors. The nano-TSVs connect the two sides, but Intel patterns and etches each via from the front after forming the contacts. A narrow via runs from the side of the contact deep into the silicon substrate. Intel then completes the frontside signal metal stack, bonds the wafer to a carrier, flips it and removes the original substrate until the buried via tips are exposed. The backside metal stack is then deposited directly on the revealed vias. The nano-TSV and backside-via profiles taper in opposite directions because Intel forms them from opposite sides of the wafer. The transistor structures form the FEOL. Local contacts and nano-TSVs connect them to the wiring. M0 begins the frontside interconnect stack. The silicon carrier remains attached above the frontside interconnects. It supports the device wafer during substrate removal and backside processing and remains part of the finished chip’s thermal path. PowerVia removes the main power distribution from the congested frontside metals, routing supply through shorter and wider backside wires. Its lateral landing still occupies area in the standard cell, so it recovers less cell area than a direct backside contact. [3] Nano-TSVs beside the logic devices carry VDD or VSS from the backside power network, while signal connections continue upward through the frontside metals. Backside Interconnects Samsung SF2 data is included for comparison to Panther Lake’s within this article. SF2 is the incumbent GAA foundry node but lacks BSPD, serving as a useful reference to evaluate 18A. A full teardown of Samsung’s S26 products, processed on SF2, will be shared soon.Nanosheet-cut EDS comparison. The PowerVia supply path runs from the backside Cu rails through Mo-lined W nano-TSVs to the local transistor contacts. In this cross section, the tapered connection spans roughly 150 nm from the contact level to BM0. The Ta liner confines Cu and promotes adhesion to the surrounding stack; the AlOₓ etch stop controls the next dielectric etch above the rail. Dielectric beneath the ribbons electrically separates the devices from the backside wiring and removes the conducting silicon body below the channel. [6] AlOₓ serves as an etchstop (ES), enabling endpointing and protecting the underlying layers. Low-volatility aluminum fluoride reaction products resist the fluorinated plasma, allowing a thin AlOₓ film to protect the metal while the surrounding low-k dielectric is removed. [6], [7]. While the BM0 and layers above the M1 lines show double AlOx layers, Our SMIC N+3 teardown showed single AlOₓ layers. SMIC uses a simpler local AlOₓ substack, while the remaining cap and etch sequence provide the required landing protection. So why double layers? The closely spaced AlOₓ doublets provide two protected endpoints in the etch sequence. Intel documents an AlOₓ/SiN/AlOₓ stack that explains the benefit. The main dielectric plasma etch stops on the first AlOₓ film; a selective wet clear opens that film; a second plasma etch removes the intermediate SiN and stops on the second AlOₓ film. The final wet clear exposes the metal landing surface. SiN is the intermediate dielectric in Intel’s published example. [8] The second stop protects the metal through a cap breakthrough. Wide openings can etch faster than narrow ones, and etch depth varies across the wafer. Metal under an early-clearing opening would otherwise be exposed while other openings still need more etching. Staged protection widens the process window and reduces metal erosion, corrosion and void formation. [8] TSMC documents AlN/AlOₓ/SiOC/AlOₓ above Cu, with AlN blocking Cu diffusion, and a simpler AlN/SiOC/AlOₓ variant that omits one AlOx film. [9] Levels with different opening sizes, aspect ratios, pattern densities and cap materials need different etch margins. A double AlOx stop is useful where another protected endpoint justifies the added processing. The extra film adds formation, selective opening and cleaning steps, plus another set of interfaces to control adhesion, moisture, and stress. These blanket films are opened through the existing via pattern, so each film does not require another lithography mask. AlOₓ adds parasitic capacitance when it replaces lower-k dielectric; two thin AlOₓ films can nevertheless contain less AlOₓ than one thick film. Total thickness, placement, and theintermediate dielectric determine the electrical cost. Deposition chemistry also changes AlOx permittivity and residual hydroxyl content, which can oxidize the underlying metal. [7], [8], [10], [11] The backside stack separates into relatively fine BM0-BM2 wiring near the devices and coarser BM3-BM5 power distribution. The largest pitch increase occurs between BM2 and BM3. BM0’s pitch closely matches the logic-row height, fitting local power delivery to the cell rows. Higher levels aggregate current through larger conductors: routing density becomes less important than low resistance and current capacity as the network approaches the package. This hierarchy provides wide power wiring for the power delivery network without consuming scarce frontside signal-routing resources. [3] The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Frontside Interconnects Intel 18A combines Mo-lined W contacts and nano-TSVs with a separate backside Cu power network. Samsung SF2 keeps power on the frontside, using Ti-based contact interfaces and Ta-based barriers and Co liners around Cu wiring. In 18A standard-cell rows, backside power rails supply the devices through nano-TSVs within the cells, freeing frontside routing resources. Samsung’s M0 accommodates both power and signal connections. From the device toward M0, the connection runs through a Ti-based S/D interface, W contact fill, a Mo-lined W via, and the Cu M0 wire. Mo supplies a conductive nucleation and adhesion layer for W, replacing the resistive TiN liner used in conventional W integration. This increases the effective conduction volume within the feature while retaining W fill and its established polishing, cleaning and etching processes. Intel’s Mo/W patent describes this integration tradeoff. The nano-TSV uses the same Mo-lined W construction in the backside supply path. [12] The move from TiN to Mo is an incremental change. While a full Co or Mo fill can also reduce the volume lost to liners in very small features, it requires new integration schemes that increase complexity and risk. Cu remains attractive for wider wires due to its low resistance. As wires and vias shrink, the diffusion barrier consumes an increasing fraction of their cross-section. [12], [12], [14] Intel uses Co/Ru liners at M0-M1, Co at M2-M4, and Nb at M5-M9. The lower-level liners help Cu adhere and reduce void formation during trench fills. Applied Materials’ Endura has new thermal control that facilitate wetting process, so the thin film continuity is good enough that good capillary pressure will drive Cu atoms to the via bottom without voiding. Intel’s choice to use Nb is particularly interesting. Intel’s Nb patent describes a conductive diffusion barrier intended to reduce the barrier’s contribution to resistance relative to conventional Ta-based barriers, particularly at via bottoms where all current crosses the barrier. The patent pairs Nb in coarser levels with the option of lower-cost PVD processing. [15], [16] The upper metal layers support thicker barriers formed through physical vapor deposition (PVD) despite its worse coverage and uniformity. Meanwhile, the lower metal layers require thinner barriers deposited through conformal atomic layer deposition (ALD). Co/Ru adds another material interface and requires controlled deposition and Cu fill. Changing liners and barriers by metal layer allows Intel to optimize interconnect resistance, process complexity, and reliability. [15, 16] RibbonFET, Intel’s name for its gate-all-around FETs (GAAFETs), replaces the FinFET’s vertical fins with four stacked horizontal silicon nanosheets, allowing the gate to surround the channel on every side. The path to GAAFET begins with the planar transistor. A planar MOSFET places the gate above the channel between its source and drain. Pairing an NMOS with a PMOS transistor creates a CMOS inverter, in which the NMOS pulls the output low for a high input, and the PMOS pulls it high for a low input. The gate must retain electrostatic control of the channel to ensure clean switching. As gate lengths shrank, the drain began to compete with the gate for that control, increasing off-state leakage. Electrostatic control was restored through an architectural evolution that raised the channel into a vertical fin and wrapping the gate around three sides. Called “FinFET”, this new architecture packed more effective channel width into a smaller footprint. Further scaling made it harder to maintain both drive current and leakage within smaller cells, and reintroduced the same problems planar MOSFETs faced. Nanosheet GAAFETs close the fourth side by replacing the vertical fin with a stack of horizontal nanosheets, each surrounded by the gate. The tighter electrostatic control suppresses leakage at shorter gate lengths while stacking adds effective channel width within the cell footprint. In a FinFET process, channel width changes in discrete steps as designers must add or remove whole fins. Nanosheet width can instead be adjusted continuously within the process’s design rules. Wider sheets increase drive current, while narrower sheets reduce capacitance at the cost of drive current. Intel 18A uses stacks of four nanosheets each and varies their widths across logic and SRAM. At the process level, adding more sheets to each stack increases effective channel width and drive current, but complicates fabrication. RibbonFET vs MBCFET Samsung began GAAFET production in 2022 with SF3E, following with SF3 and now SF2. Its ‘MBCFET’ provides a useful structural comparison with Intel’s first RibbonFET implementation. [17] STEEL is digging deeper into SF2, used in the Exynos 2600, and TSMC’s GAAFET N2, used in Apple’s A20 Pro, in upcoming newsletter articles. We’re throwing some teasers on X. Let’s compare Samsung SF2’s MBCFET with Intel 18A’s RibbonFET. Subscribe Even to the untrained eye, Intel’s extra nanosheet is obvious. Intel stacks four ribbons to Samsung’s three. Samsung’s sheets are much wider in these fields, so both sheet count and width matter to the available channel perimeter. Sheet width also changes which silicon surfaces carry current. On conventional (001) silicon, wide nanosheets emphasize the broad top and bottom surfaces, favoring electron transport; the larger sidewall contribution in a narrow sheet favors hole transport. Thinner sheets improve gate control but increase confinement and scattering. This makes width and thickness part of the NMOS/PMOS balance, alongside strain and threshold voltage. [18], [19] GAAFET designs like 18A use different work-function-metal (WFM) stacks for NMOS and PMOS. Around each ribbon, a thin SiOx interfacial layer separates the silicon channel from the HfOx high-k dielectric, with La providing dipole tuning and the WFM wrapping the dielectric. NMOS uses a TiAl-based stack, while PMOS uses TiN WFM. W fills the remaining gate trench, providing a lower-resistivity path where the work-function layers are no longer needed. In this field, the PMOS stacks leave room for W between ribbons, while the NMOS stacks occupy more of those gaps. A silicon-based dielectric marks the P/N boundary, allowing the PMOS and NMOS gates, sharing the same gate trench, to be processed sequentially. Fast logic paths, retention circuits, and SRAM need a family of threshold options. Changing threshold without substantially changing device dimensions, capacitance or fabrication complexity is valuable. FinFET processes typically use different work-function-metal stacks. In a four-ribbon GAA stack, the narrow sheet-to-sheet gap limits how much WFM can fit around each channel. La in the gate dielectric creates interfacial dipoles at the SiOx/HfOx boundary, shifting effective work function and tuning threshold voltage. This gives Intel another control alongside its NMOS and PMOS WFM stacks. Low-threshold devices improve critical-path drive; higher thresholds reduce leakage elsewhere. Dipole tuning is especially useful in GAA because it changes threshold without consuming the narrow intersheet gap with thicker WFM. Precise control of La incorporation, diffusion and interface quality has long been a challenge, limiting viability in high volume production but is now seen from every leading-edge foundry. Intel’s patent describes depositing a dipole-forming oxide above HfOx and annealing it toward the interfacial oxide before completing the work-function and fill metals. This separates threshold tuning from the space available for metal. Newer research addresses the thermal cost: imec’s 2026 dipole-middle research inserts the shifter between two HfOx depositions, shortening the diffusion path while protecting SiOx during patterning. [20], [21]Matched-cut EDS, Intel 18A (left) vs. Samsung SF2 (right). Intel retains raised source/drain epi beneath its contacts, while Samsung recesses W deep into the epi to form a V-shaped Ti-lined interface. The deeper contact increases metal-to-semiconductor area and shortens the current path from the lower sheets, reducing contact and spreading resistance. It also removes epi volume and brings the contact etch closer to the channel ends. Retaining more epi preserves the material available for strain transfer, especially from SiGe into PMOS. These geometries balance contact access against stress engineering and etch margin. [22], [23] Samsung stacks three sheets to Intel’s four ribbons, and both processes use sheet width to tune drive strength. In our Samsung cross-sections, widths range roughly from 19 to 30 nm in the NPU rows and 37 to 50 nm in the CU cell. The Samsung nanosheets taper, with the widest sheet at the bottom and the narrowest at the top. Both processes use HfOx gate dielectric and Ti-based work-function stacks, with Al in the NMOS stack. In the Samsung devices shown here, the dielectric and WFM occupy the intersheet gaps, leaving W above the top sheet. Intel’s PMOS stack leaves more room between ribbons, and W fills those gaps while the thicker NMOS stack leaves W mainly in the upper trench. Gate-stack EDS maps. The W between Intel’s PMOS ribbons provides a conductive path close to the lower gates. Where WFM fills the entire gap, the gate still surrounds the channel, but voltage reaches it through the more resistive work-function films. Thinner WFM and dipole tuning preserve room for low-resistivity fill; Mo and Ru are alternative fill metals being developed for further scaling. [24] A masked, sequential WFM flow explains the different gate heights and inter-nanosheet fill. The proposed sequence below shows how separate NMOS and PMOS work-function steps produce that geometry. Enabled by the BSPDN process, Intel replaces the dense-logic silicon subfin with dielectric, removing the parasitic conduction path below the ribbons and reducing substrate-related capacitance. A retained silicon body as in classical, non-SOI, planar and FinFET designs needs junction and punchthrough-stop engineering to suppress leakage. Dielectric isolation makes that leakage less sensitive to the subfin doping profile but adds removal and fill steps. It also weakens the direct thermal path through silicon, making the contacts, metal stacks and package more important for heat extraction. [24], [26] Fluorine is concentrated around selected Intel device structures in the maps. WF6 is a standard precursor for W nucleation and fill, while barrier films protect adjacent dielectrics from fluorine attack. Low-fluorine W processes reduce the residual-F burden. Chloride-based precursors avoid introducing F during W deposition, but require control of chlorine attack, nucleation and fill quality. The integration target is a continuous, low-resistance W path with a thin protective liner and minimal chemical damage to the surrounding stack. [20], [27], [28] The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. We measured cell height, gate pitch, metal geometry, and ribbon dimensions at the XTEM sites shown below. The tables group these dimensions by site and device polarity. Our “sheet cuts” cross the silicon channel and show the ribbons end-on. “gate cuts” run along the channel through successive gates. The 18A logic cell dimensions point to a five-track logic library while the N3E and Intel 3 cell dimensions evidence a seven-track logic library. The DDR-PHY uses wider M0 wires and much larger spacing than core logic. That trades routing density for lower wire resistance and weaker coupling between neighboring nets. The geometry suits the current delivery and coupling requirements of analog, clock, and I/O circuitry. PowerVia lets 18A combine a compact cell height with wider M0 geometry by moving the main power rails off the signal-routing tracks. That relaxes local wire scaling while preserving a small cell footprint. Cell height and gate pitch set the geometric density; pin access and routability determine how much of it a real block can use. [29] The biggest takeaway from our gate-pitch measurements is that Intel 18A compute logic and TSMC N3E GPU logic have similar density in the Bohr representative-cell model. The 18A example is 18.6% denser than the Intel 3 GPU example. Gate pitches are nearly identical across the three sites, so cell height drives most of the difference. The Bohr model combines a four-transistor NAND2 spanning three gate pitches and a 32-transistor scan flip-flop (SFF) spanning nineteen pitches, weighting their densities 60:40. The sensitivity column shows how independently changing cell height and gate pitch by ±1 nm changes the result. This compares representative cell geometries; whole-die density also depends on cell mix and placement. The 18A P-core gives M0 substantially more metal cross section than the N3E vector engine. Treating each profile as a trapezoid gives 2.63 times the area per line and 1.84 times the area after normalization by routing pitch. The larger section reduces the geometric contribution to line resistance and lowers current density for a given current. Taller and wider wires also add capacitance, so circuit delay depends on the balance of resistance and capacitance. The DDR-PHY has less metal area per routing width than the 18A core fields, while remaining above N3E. [30] Area = height × (top CD + bottom CD) / 2, including liners. Area/pitch normalizes by routing width. Taper is the symmetric sidewall angle from vertical, with the largest angle belonging to the DDR-PHY. Compute tile The measurements show how ribbon dimensions and gate-stack geometry vary across the compute tile and between NMOS and PMOS to balance channel drive, gate load and the space needed for the dielectric/WFM stack across logic, SRAM and the DDR-PHY. Width mainly changes available channel perimeter; thickness also changes electrostatic control and carrier confinement. Gate-stack thickness then determines the space left for low-resistivity fill P-core and LP E-core logic Both the P-core and LP E-core use multiple nanosheet widths. Widths are measured on high-magnification XTEMs while wider-field images demonstrate additional width choices within the LP E-core. Multiple widths are expected even within an LP E-core. Timing-critical paths, buffers and cells with different fanout need different drive strengths. The lower-magnification fields show this width diversity beyond the sites quantified in the table. L2 and L3 SRAM GAA gives SRAM designers another way to balance the pull-up (PU), pass-gate (PG), and pull-down (PD) transistors. FinFET bitcells set device strength through fin count while GAA adds nanosheet width as a sizing knob. In a 6T SRAM cell, a strong pull-down relative to the pass-gate limits read disturbance, while a strong pass-gate relative to the pull-up improves writability. During a write, the pass-gate and write driver pull the node storing “1” below the inverter trip point. During a read, the pull-down holds the node storing “0” low. Bias, threshold voltage, mismatch and assist circuitry set the remaining margin. FinFET high-current cells commonly use a PU:PG:PD fin-count pattern of 1:2:2, a device-sizing ratio rather than a current ratio. Ribbon width lets Intel balance SRAM strengths without adding whole fins. The L2 cell uses its narrowest ribbons for PU and widest for PD, improving writability and read stability respectively. Intel’s disclosed HCC operates without assist; its denser HDC uses negative-bitline write assist. Pulling the selected bitline briefly below ground increases pass-gate overdrive so it can overpower the pull-up at lower supply voltage. That buys density and low voltage writability at the cost of boosting circuitry, switching energy, and additional voltage stress that must be controlled. [31], [32] Four rectangular ribbons give the perimeter = 8 × (width + thickness), before corner rounding. PG/PU is 1.49 and PD/PG is 1.16. The L3 structures closely resemble L2 in layout and cell height. Fewer L3 nanosheet widths are tabulated because fewer high-magnification images were available. DDR PHY The DDR-PHY trades density for controlled analog behavior and reliable off-chip signaling. It contains drivers, receivers, delay circuits, and calibration logic that set drive strength, sampling time, and voltage margin. Repeated four-sheet devices with similar widths fit the use of regular transistor units for matching and programmable drive. Its wider local wiring provides room for current delivery and separation of sensitive signals, while consuming more area than a dense core-logic grid. The layout serves the memory channel’s electrical requirements as well as digital logic density. [33] The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Intel 3 GPU devices Vector engine logic Intel 3’s XVE logic uses two-fin PMOS and NMOS devices with power rails in M0. Its cell height and M0 pitch give a seven-track geometry, two tracks more than the 18A logic. One-fin groups also appear among the two-fin devices. Intel 3 L2 SRAM The Intel 3 L2 SRAM uses the familiar HCC sizing pattern: one PU fin, two PG fins, and two PD fins. N3E GPU devices Vector engine logic The N3E XVE field contains repeated two-fin devices with seven-track cell geometry. N3E remains a FinFET process, giving Panther Lake a direct FinFET-to-RibbonFET comparison. N3E L2 SRAM The N3E L2 SRAM uses the same PU:PG:PD fin-count pattern of 1:2:2. Panther Lake-U follows Lunar Lake’s floorplan quite closely. Both pair 4 P-cores with 4 LP E-cores and NPU, media and display engines in similar locations. Lunar Lake also uses Xe2, the direct predecessor to Panther Lake’s Xe3 GPU. This makes Lunar Lake the most direct basis for our comparisons. Arrow Lake differs in core count and uses the older Xe-LPG GPU architecture, so we only use it where it offers a more direct component-level comparison. Compute tile Panther Lake compute-tile floorplans remain sparse even months after launch. Intel 18A’s backside metal and dielectric stack must be removed without damaging the underlying structures before a clean transistor-level floorplan can be imaged. Most published die shots hide or heavily process the background, but we are quite proud of the die shot we achieved and are excited to show the work we have done. We measured the areas of the key components on the compute tile and compared them with their Lunar Lake predecessors on TSMC N3B. These help us to capture changes in block area and compare the two chips across process nodes and designs. Our total tile areas exclude the scribe-line area. The compute-plus-GPU subtotal below uses the PTL-U compute tile and GT1 GPU; it excludes the I/O tile and passive base. Individual block areas use the boundaries marked on the floorplans The compute-plus-GPU row is recomputed from the displayed PTL-U and GT1 areas. Component rows use their stated per-region counts and are not an additive partition of the whole tile. The P-core area remains almost unchanged between Lunar Lake and Panther Lake, despite L2 capacity increasing from 2.5 MiB to 3 MiB. Arrow Lake uses the same Lion Cove core as Lunar Lake but also has a 3 MiB L2. Cougar Cove fits 20% more L2 into the same P-core area. The larger private cache keeps more of each core’s working set close to its execution units, reducing access to shared L3 and DRAM. Extra capacity adds storage leakage and lookup energy, so designers balance it against avoided lower-level accesses. The shared P-core L3 cache also shrank by 14.8%. [2] Cougar Cove combines a similar footprint with Intel’s reported power-efficiency improvements. RibbonFET’s tighter channel control reduces leakage, while PowerVia reduces supply droop and allows tighter voltage guardbands. [1] Darkmont’s four-core LP E-core cluster is 5.0% smaller than Skymont’s on Lunar Lake, with most of the reduction in its L2 regions. The 1 MiB region shrank by 8.4% and the 1.5 MiB region by 14.9%. The tag arrays also use one fewer visible row. Tags identify which memory addresses the data array holds, so rearranging them changes the cache’s layout and wiring without requiring less data capacity. [2] The LP E-cores share one L2. This pools capacity and avoids duplicating all the cache machinery, but the four cores contend for its banks and bandwidth. Their separate cluster also keeps light work away from the performance cluster and its L3, allowing that larger domain to sleep. [1], [2] Cache area includes more than the storage cells. Tags identify each line, decoders select rows, sense amplifiers read the small bitline signal, and wires connect to the banks. Splitting an array into smaller sections shortens wordlines and bitlines, improving access speed, but duplicates peripheral circuits. Panther Lake’s smaller cache regions therefore reflect the complete memory implementation, including how much of each region is devoted to storage. [34] Unlike Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake, Panther Lake has no separate SoC tile. The NPU, LP E-cores, memory controllers, PHYs, media and display engines now share the compute tile. This removes an active die and keeps CPU memory traffic on one die. The cost is moving PHY and I/O-related circuitry onto 18A: drivers, receivers and analog circuits must still meet external voltage, loading and signal-integrity requirements, so their area does not shrink like dense digital logic. [1], [2] The biggest shrink comes from the NPU, which occupies 36.9% less area. NPU 5 consolidates the same total INT8 MAC count into half as many neural compute engines. Each of the three NCEs has a larger MAC array to make the complete NCE envelope 22.6% larger than an NPU 4 engine. Consolidation also halves the number of scratchpads and SHAVE DSPs, from 12 to 6. The MAC array handles matrix multiplication and convolution, while SHAVE executes vector and custom operations that fit the array poorly. [1], [2], [35] The paired floorplans identify each NCE envelope and its scratchpad, MAC, and SHAVE regions. Each measured MAC polygon is counted once per NCE in the area accounting below. The scratchpads store weights, activations, and intermediate results near the MAC arrays, allowing repeated use without fetching them again from DRAM. Halving their number delivers the largest measured area saving but leaves less local storage for the same total MAC count. Layers that no longer fit locally require smaller working tiles or more transfers of intermediate data. The benefit depends on keeping the enlarged arrays busy while managing that tighter storage budget. [36] NPU 5 also adds native FP8. Using half the operand width of FP16 reduces storage and transfer demand, helping workloads fit the smaller local memory budget. Lower precision and format-dependent range make scaling and model validation part of deployment. Hardware activation functions further reduce work that would otherwise occupy the programmable DSPs. [1], [2] Microsoft requires an NPU to deliver at least 40 TOPS for Copilot+ PCs. Both Lunar Lake and Panther Lake meet this threshold, but Panther Lake uses significantly less silicon. GPU tiles Panther Lake is Intel’s first product with Xe3, its latest GPU architecture. It offers two different GPU tiles: a smaller GT1 tile with 4 Xe3 cores on Intel 3 and a larger GT2 tile with 12 Xe3 cores on TSMC N3E. Panther Lake allows us to compare the same GPU architecture across both Intel 3 and TSMC N3E. Wildcat Lake adds a third Xe3 implementation on Intel 18A. A future newsletter will detail Xe3 and its implementation differences across all three process nodes. GT2 scales Xe3 to a different physical layout, with render slices arranged vertically instead of GT1’s horizontal arrangement. Slice placement sets the distances to shared cache banks and the D2D interface. Those wires consume area and add delay, so scaling the number of Xe cores also requires a new balance of cache placement, routing and timing. [1] What’s immediately obvious is that the GT2 tile on TSMC N3E has much smaller Xe cores than GT1. These block areas include logic, caches, and routing. An Xe core on the GT1 tile is ~69% larger than one on Lunar Lake, and ~55% larger than one on GT2. Intel 3 therefore uses substantially more area per Xe core. The block-area gap exceeds the measured logic and SRAM density gaps, bringing routing, timing targets, cell mix, and floorplan allocation into the comparison. The measured vector/matrix engine region is almost unchanged between Lunar Lake and Panther Lake’s GT2 tile. Xe3 retains eight 512-bit vector engines and eight 2048-bit XMX engines per core. Its gains also come from feeding those engines more effectively: more resident threads hide stalls, and variable register allocation lets shaders trade registers per thread against the number of threads kept active. [1] The shared L1/SLM capacity increased by 33% from 192 KiB to 256 KiB, while its area increased only 5%, raising effective density by 27%. L1 retains reused cache lines, while software-managed SLM lets a thread group share data locally. Both reduce traffic to more distant memory. Allocating more SLM per group can also limit how many groups reside on a core at once. [1], [37] The GT1 tile carries 4 MiB of L2 against 16 MiB on the GT2 tile. GT1 divides its L2 cache into four 1 MiB banks, while GT2 uses eight 2 MiB banks. Each bank contains 128 macros, but each N3E macro stores 16 KiB, twice the Intel 3 macro’s 8 KiB capacity. The N3E macro is only 54% larger while holding twice as many bits, giving it 30% higher density: ~23.7 Mbit/mm² versus 18.3 Mbit/mm². Including bank-level circuitry, the gap widens to ~16.9 Mbit/mm² on GT2 versus ~10.4 Mbit/mm² on GT1. GT2 gains density with its macros storing more bits per unit area, and those macros occupy more of each cache bank. Larger macros spread decoder and sense-amplifier overhead across more storage, while a more compact bank layout reduces the share spent on control and routing. The compromise is longer wordlines and bitlines that carry more capacitance. [34] I/O tile Panther Lake uses two I/O tile variants, both fabricated on TSMC N6. The smaller one provides 4 PCIe 5.0 and 8 PCIe 4.0 lanes and serves lower-tier systems as well as those without a discrete GPU, while the larger one adds 8 PCIe 5.0 lanes, bringing the total to 20 lanes, for discrete-GPU connectivity. Panther Lake SKUs with the larger 10- or 12-Xe GPUs use the smaller I/O tile. [38] The smaller I/O tile adds a PCIe 4.0 block and a Thunderbolt block to Lunar Lake’s I/O layout, providing four additional PCIe 4.0 lanes and another Thunderbolt 4 port. Its repeated N6 blocks retain nearly identical areas and layouts. Reusing these proven PHYs and controllers avoids porting and requalifying external interfaces on 18A, where faster digital logic offers less benefit to circuits constrained by the off-chip link. [38] SemiAnalysis’s teardown lab (STEEL) dives deep into the world’s advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. We’re hiring technical experts from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Panther Lake offers scalability and modularity through its disaggregated packaging that partition compute, GPU, and I/O silicon into separate tiles allowing for a suite of tile configurations. This partitioning makes the package part of Intel’s node economics as it determines how much leading-edge wafer area each product consumes, which functions can remain on other processes, and how much configuration freedom Intel can offer from a shared set of tiles. Furthermore, fabricating the compute and GPU tiles separately confines the new 18A process to the compute tile and allows graphics and I/O to use other, more established, and more cost-effective processes. For Panther Lake, the GPU and I/O tiles are assembled alongside the compute tile on a passive silicon base using Foveros-S. Intel’s current technology brief lists a nominal 36 µm pitch for Foveros-S. Through-silicon vias (TSVs) in the base connect the fine wiring above to the larger package connections below. The functional tiles sit side by side on that passive base in a 2.5D configuration. [39] Our cross-section through the compute and GPU tiles shows the package’s wiring hierarchy. Microbumps connect each active tile to the passive silicon base; its fine redistribution layer (RDL) carries the short, dense tile-to-tile links. TSVs carry connections through the base to the package substrate, which fans them out to the much coarser motherboard solder joints. The base supplies interconnect, while computation remains in the active tiles above it. [39] At the compute-tile edge, the higher-magnification inset shows a local microbump spacing of approximately 25.24 µm and a feature width of 12.33 µm. These local spacings are finer than Intel’s nominal Foveros-S value. The X-ray fields further confirm tighter neighboring bumps, consistent across every die-to-die area found on each tile. Additional X-ray analysis is offered after the paywall. Putting the memory controller beside the CPU removes the D2D transfer that CPU memory requests required in Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake. This avoids the extra transmitter, receiver, and link traversal, saving interface energy and latency. Panther Lake’s separate GPU still crosses a D2D link to reach DRAM, so its larger local caches also help contain package traffic. [1], [40] Smaller dies are less likely to contain a random fatal defect, and screening them before assembly prevents one bad tile from consuming a complete package of good silicon. Reuse also spreads design and qualification work across more products. Against those gains, Intel pays for the passive base, D2D circuits, extra bonding and test steps, and losses during assembly. Cost per working product across the portfolio captures the combined effect of wafer yield, reuse, test, and assembly. [29] Wildcat Lake packaging Intel launched Core Series 3, formerly Wildcat Lake, on 16 April 2026 for value mobile and edge systems. Wildcat Lake keeps 18A but removes the passive base and combines more functions on one die to simplify the package. The two products therefore reveal two distinct ways to commercialize the same leading-edge process. [41] Wildcat Lake’s 18A die combines up to two Cougar Cove P-cores, four Darkmont LP E-cores, two Xe3 cores and a smaller NPU. A separate platform-controller die supplies I/O, connected through UCIe, Intel’s first processor implementation of the standard. Consolidating graphics remove a tile boundary and the passive base, reducing assembly complexity for a modest-bandwidth value product. It also ties CPU and graphics scaling to the same die, giving up Panther Lake’s ability to swap in a much larger GPU. [42], [43] In July 2021, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger set out an ambitious process roadmap aimed at regaining performance leadership by 2025, later described as five nodes in four years. Five years and one CEO later, Intel’s comeback story is not as unambiguously positive as Pat may have hoped. [44], [45] Intel once set the pace for process technology, bringing high-k metal gate technology and FinFETs into volume production years ahead of the rest of the industry. Its 22 nm FinFET process reached consumers with Ivy Bridge in 2012. [46] Intel’s integrated device manufacturing (IDM) model allowed its architects and process engineers to co-optimize products and processes. Starting with Sandy Bridge, Intel dominated x86, while AMD struggled with Bulldozer. That lead faltered at 14 nm and broke at 10 nm. Intel targeted a massive 2.7× density increase, but the node arrived years late and required several revisions before it could support Intel’s full lineup. This delay forced Intel to stretch 14 nm across six generations, while TSMC moved ahead in process technology and AMD recovered in x86. By 2019, Intel was still shipping 14 nm across most of its product stack, with its 10 nm client ramp focused on Ice Lake mobile processors. Meanwhile, TSMC was shipping N7 and N7+, and AMD’s Zen 2 compute chiplets used N7 to raise core counts and improve efficiency. Intel’s process failures were central to its decline, but unsound business decisions furthered their downward slide. Product delays compounded product mistakes, pushing client, server, and FPGA roadmaps off schedule. Several attempts to enter AI (Nervana and Gaudi) and networking (Tofino) also failed to establish lasting businesses. Intel’s recovery has focused on consumer CPUs and advanced packaging. Tiger Lake, Alder Lake, Lunar Lake and now Panther Lake have restored Intel’s consumer roadmap. On the process side, Intel 4 shipped with Meteor Lake, Intel 3 with Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest, and Intel 18A with Panther Lake. Intel has also made advanced packaging part of its foundry offering. However, Intel is still playing catch-up in servers. Several Xeon generations arrived years late and trailed contemporary AMD and Arm server CPUs in performance, efficiency, and core count. The process roadmap is back, but Intel does not hold the same process-technology leadership position it held prior to 10 nm. The introduction of gate-all-around nanosheets and backside power delivery are two of the biggest changes to transistor integration in a decade. Intel took on both changes at once: 18A paired its first RibbonFET with PowerVia in Panther Lake. Panther Lake is a substantial manufacturing milestone. Our cross-sections show how RibbonFET and PowerVia reshape local contacts and wiring, while the floorplans show where architectural consolidation and process choices save area. A sustained competitive lead depends on product performance, cost, yield, and the next implementation. The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page.. 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Baptist Health names new president of Fort Smith, Van Buren facilities
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Quick hitters: O-line health, safety depth and Dan Campbell’s first days in Detroit with Glenn
Allen Park — Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell and quarterbacks coach Mark Brunell met with the media on Friday. Here are the noteworthy items from those conversations. Healthier up front, banged up in the back It’s good news, bad news on the injury front. First, the offensive line is going to be far closer to full strength with starters Blake Miller (knee) and Christian Mahogany (hip) on track to return to the lineup. That provides stability the offense lacked against Buffalo, particularly at right tackle, where backup Larry Borom allowed 11 quarterback pressures and committed a trio of penalties. Subscribe However, with that same unit, veteran Ben Bartch (foot) is likely to miss Sunday’s matchup with the Jets. The left guard competition that’s been ongoing since May has effectively been whichever option is healthy that week. In the back end, safety Thomas Harper (ankle) is also unlikely to be available on Sunday. That leaves the team precariously thin at the position following Avonte Maddox going on injured reserve this week. Christian Izien is expected to get the start alongside Chuck Clark. “Izzy's been working a lot back there and had a full week,” Campbell said. “And he's gotten a ton of work this week, a ton of reps, full-speed reps. ‘This is what you're going to do, this is the calls’ and just dousing him with full-speed reps and he's done a good job this week.” Safety depth is the bigger concern. The team is expected to count on some combination of Jalen Mills, who signed to the practice squad on Monday, Bishop Fitzgerald, the undrafted rookie poached off the Steelers’ practice squad on Tuesday, and rookie cornerback Keith Abney, who doesn’t have experience at safety. “I'll say this about Abney, man, for a rookie, he's a pretty dang smart, conscientious, aware football player that's got a ton of room to really take off,” Campbell said. “…He's young. He's another one, he just needs reps and reps. But, if we need it, that'll be a guy who may have to go in for us.” You can check here for the full injury report, with game designations, later this afternoon. Reflecting on the past Responding to comments made by Jets coach Aaron Glenn this week, Campbell reflected on his earliest days with the Lions, before the coaching staff had been fleshed out and it was just he and Glenn at the facility working through what they wanted things to look like. “It was just he and I in the lab,” Campbell said. The coach said the two would fill the whiteboard that remains in current coordinator Kelvin Sheppard’s office top to bottom with notes about philosophy, coaching style, team identity and the type of players they wanted to target. “He looks different than me,” Campbell said. “I'm taller, I'm whatever. He's quicker. All these different things, man, but we're really the same. I mean we're so much the same. And he's the defensive version, I'm the offensive version. He was my right hand man. …It was fun, man. Those were good days.” Campbell said it was one of the best and worst days of his life when the Jets hired Glenn to be their coach. “AG means the world to me,” Campbell said. “He's one of my dearest friends because I know what he's made of. “…It's because you know you're losing a little piece of you. That's what he meant to me and to us. So, that's hard.” Traits under center A couple of weeks back, Sheppard noted that Brunell had identified Saints quarterback Tyler Shough as the best prospect at the position ahead of the 2025 draft. On Friday, Brunell confirmed his evaluation and explained what he looks for when studying a young quarterback. Here’s the full answer: “Young quarterbacks, you have to look at everything, you know? I look at guys coming out of college just like I look at any free agents that we might be looking at, or guys that we might add to our roster. Do they take care of the ball? Are they on time? How is their decision-making? How are their feet? “It's tough because you look at a college player, you don't understand what they're trying to do offensively, what their reads are, but you can identify when a guy is accurate, obviously, and when the ball's getting there on time. If there are a lot of interceptions, it raises a red flag. And I think with a lot of the spread offenses of what you're seeing, when you see a young player and they're running some pro concepts and he's having to make protection calls, and he's getting the right play out of the run game, and when there's a lot on his plate and he's executing it very well, and he's managing all of that, that really jumps out at you. It’s really hard to find. “That's one thing we saw with Luke Altmeyer. He had a lot of experience. We call it, ‘Hey, he's playing quarterback.’ And what does that mean? It's not just completing passes. It's getting guys lined up, getting the right play, getting the protection call right, just fixing some problems, being able to progress (through reads). And there's still some young guys out there that can do that at a high level, which is good to see.” Regarding Altmyer, who competed for the team’s backup job through the offseason and currently resides on the practice squad, Brunell acknowledged physical development slows once the season starts, because there aren’t reps to go around. However, there’s still extensive mental development that’s ongoing. “The key for him is approach the game as if you're the starter, mentally,” Brunell said. “And that's really all you can do. Approach the game as if you're the starter and be good in the (class)room. You come in alongside Jared (Goff), and you come in alongside Josh (Dobbs) and (do) whatever they need. And if you get an opportunity to talk to Luke, he'll tell you he does have a lot of responsibilities besides just getting donuts for us on Saturday. “For him, it's mentally staying focused, and even though there's really no chance this Sunday of him playing, he has to approach it as if he's taking the first snap and playing the whole game. So what's our game plan? What are our checks? What are we anticipating? And then during the game, we keep him involved as far as looking at coverages and pressures. And so, really, for him, it's just a mental game. And for now, that's all we can do.” Reason for more zone The Lions have significantly increased their usage of zone coverage on defense this season. I asked Campbell if that was a reaction to their personnel or driven by the focus to generate more turnovers, given it can be easier to produce interceptions when you can keep eyes on the quarterback while playing zone. “I think it was a little bit of both,” Campbell said. “We just felt like this would suit us a little bit better up to this point, and then be disruptive and get takeaways, which worked well Week 1. We had two (opportunities) last week against Buffalo we weren’t able to get, but they’re there.” I followed up by asking how much the combination of heavy blitzing with the back end playing zone has contributed to some of the early-season coverage woes, since adding extra players to the pass rush means leaving the coverage short-staffed. “I mean, it’s challenging, and that’s why a lot of the things we’ve done in zone, for the most part, have been to reduce that stress level back there,” Campbell said. “But that also requires the front getting there. And if you don’t get there, we already kind of talked about that, but there (has to be) a trust there.” The alternative, Campbell explained is sending four and it taking longer for the rush to get home, which can create different problems for a defense. “You can bleed yards,” Campbell said about the strategy. “It gets a little longer and it’s dink-and-dunk and run after catch. …So, we do what we think is right by what we feel like our personnel (does well). But also the game plan, who you’re going in to play, the matchups, their offense. “We’re not stuck on one way.” Detroit Football Network is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
SCORE Iowa to launch statewide organization Oct. 1
Iowa’s existing SCORE chapters will consolidate into one statewide organization, effective Oct. 1, expanding access to business mentoring and educational resources for entrepreneurs and small businesses across all 99 counties. SCORE Iowa provides free, confidential, one-on-one mentoring by connecting entrepreneurs with volunteers whose experience matches their business needs, regardless of location. “Bringing our Iowa chapters…
Research reveals the science behind the fight against infection | Science and Technology Facilities Council
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Is metascience being co-opted?
In July, the White House released a report that argued academia is deeply dysfunctional and in need of radical reform.Science: A New Golden Age sets out a litany of problems many academics will recognise: interminable waits for grants; short-term funding rather than support for longer, more ambitious projects; ballooning administrative requirements; pressure to publish, and many more. “The scientific machine is getting bogged down,” it says. At least on the face of it, Science: A New Golden Age is a triumph for the metascience movement, a loose-knit, global group of academics, philanthropists and think tankers that want far more testing and experimentation in how we fund public research and innovation. The report tells US research funders to set up internal metascience units to do just this. But it has also set alarm bells ringing that metascience is being conveniently deployed to help justify the defunding of US universities, which US vice president JD Vance has openly labelled “the enemy.” “Just because you have an issue with your plumbing in your house doesn't mean you light the entire house on fire and burn it to the ground,” said Colette Delawalla, chief executive of Stand Up for Science, a group campaigning against what it says are attacks on scientists by the Trump administration. No one is arguing that academia doesn’t need reform, but there’s debate over how far and how fast the system should be shaken up. Does public R&D need slow and steady evidence-based adjustment, or radical new experiments?One of the key arguments in Science: A New Golden Age is that there’s not enough funding for what it calls “mid-level” science: engineering-heavy projects that require tens of millions of dollars, involve ten to a hundred people, and last around five years. Such a project might develop a brain-computer interface for people with Alzheimer's disease, for example. As such, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has already announced $1.5 billion to set up so-called X-Labs, effectively new research organisations to pursue breakthroughs in areas such as quantum sensing and new scientific instruments. Funding divertedBut there’s a catch: this money has squeezed NSF budgets for more traditional, fundamental research grants, Science reported in June, likely meaning less cash for university-based scientists. Science: A New Golden Age also makes various swipes at universities, accusing them of extracting overheads from scientists to fund administrative bloat. “We have become dependent on a narrow set of legacy institutions,” it says. The report doesn’t mention it, but the US government is simultaneously seeking greater powers over federal funding, which would allow political appointees at funding agencies to screen or cancel research grants mid-project. The White House is also seeking to slash the NSF’s budget by more than half in 2027, although similar cuts proposed for 2026 were blocked by Congress. Convenient hookThis has worried some that the metascience agenda could be misused as a kind of smokescreen to further weaken universities. James Wilsdon, executive director of the Research on Research Institute at University College London, said that the report contains lots of “interesting ideas” and agrees that in places, academia is a “pretty broken system.” But the risk is that metascience is being deployed as a “convenient hook” to support cuts and a “political land grab” to transfer grant power from scientists to political appointees in US funding agencies.So far, the metascience agenda hasn’t been seized on by radical right parties in Europe. But Wilsdon worries it will cross the Atlantic, politicising research reform efforts and making them more difficult to carry out. The report is already making some in Europe sceptical of the entire idea. “The system is not without flaws, but the metascience discussion is not likely to improve the system but rather to generate munition to undermine it,” said Claes de Vreese, a professor of AI and society at the University of Amsterdam. Peter Thiel protégéOfficially, Science: A New Golden Age has just one named author: Michael Kratsios, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and a former chief of staff to Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel. He also served as chief financial officer of Thiel’s Clarium Capital Management. Since the 1990s, Thiel has criticised US universities for moving away from teaching what he views as the classic works of western civilisation, and drifting towards “anti-Western zealotry.” And since 2011, he has offered two-year fellowships of $250,000 to young people to skip or drop out of university, and instead start companies or pursue scientific research. “College can be good for learning about what’s been done before, but it can also discourage you from doing something new,” according to the Thiel Fellowships website. In other areas, the Trump administration has promoted academics with a longstanding interest in metascience. For example, the head of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, in 2020 co-authored a study arguing the funder backs overly conservative proposals, although he achieved wider prominence as a critic of pandemic lockdowns. Careless talk costs fundingEven before the Trump administration embraced the metascience agenda, some metascientists privately wondered whether they should be careful not to overstate dysfunctions in academia, in case this gets used as ammunition against universities. But others think being cautious with criticism is pointless. After all, last year, the Trump administration sought to cut funding from US universities on an entirely different premise: supposed antisemitism on campus. “I don't think these governments need a technical metascientific excuse to attack the universities, they will want to do so anyway,” said Will Stone, a researcher at Science Works, a new think tank advocating for a “metascience revolution” in the UK. “I think researchers should report what they find, even when the findings may be used to advance policies they disagree with,” echoed Russell Funk, a researcher at the University of Minnesota, who in 2023 co-authored a highly influential paper that argued scientific papers were becoming less disruptive over time. No justificationThat said, Funk thinks that metascientific research certainly doesn’t justify a weakening of universities. Instead, scientists need “time, resources and stability to pursue unfamiliar ideas,” he said. “Taking away those conditions works against the very goal the reforms are supposed to achieve.”The Institute for Progress, a Washington DC-based innovation policy think tank that has championed X-Labs and metascience units, also says that reforms should complement, not supplant, universities. “Unpredictable, unreliable, and reduced federal funding to researchers is destabilising to the very foundations of research and development and is bad,” said Jenn Gustetic, the institute’s director of metascience and R&D policy.Evolution or revolution?This points to a much bigger divide in the metascience community: how far and how fast should public R&D be shaken up? Does it need evolution or revolution? For example, Science: A New Golden Age says the science system relies too heavily on traditional “workhorse” project grants, the type that pay out around $250,000 a year to fund “hypothesis-driven science by small teams on tractable questions.” However, in criticising project grants, the report “decisively picks one side of a debate that is far from settled,” David Hilmer Rex, a metascientist based in Denmark, has written. In June, Pierre Azoulay, a metascientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, defended project grants, saying that the alternative of X-Labs “merits scepticism.”A-B testingOne challenge in metascience is that it’s easier to generate evidence for some types of change than others. Most straightforwardly, research funders can run A-B tests on different ways of awarding money. For example, Germany’s Volkswagen Foundation recently trialled distributed peer review, where applicants rate each other’s proposals, and measured its results against traditional review panels. Distributed peer review made quicker decisions, although awarded money to largely different ideas. However, much of the focus of the metascience movement has been on founding fast-moving and free-acting new research organisations and funders, in contrast to the alleged stodginess of mainstream academia or public innovation grants. A culture of speed and freedom are the animating principles behind Germany’s Sprind or the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria).Related articlesViewpoint: it's time to experiment with how Europe funds science European researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationHowever, while it’s possible to closely study previously successful bodies, such as the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), for historical clues to their secret sauce, it’s impossible to guarantee in advance that the likes of Sprind or Aria will actually work as hoped. But advocates of new organisations say this inherent uncertainly shouldn’t stop us trying. “If we wait for definitive proof that something will work before we try it, I don't know where your proof is coming from,” said Stone. Trade-offsUp until now, experiments in metascience haven’t generally come with hard trade-offs over money. In the US, new ideas such as focused research organisations have often been funded by billionaire philanthropists. In Europe, new innovation agencies such as Sprind and Aria, or the Netherland’s new National Agency for Disruptive Innovation, haven’t needed explicit cuts elsewhere in the research system. But with the $1.5 billion establishment of X-Labs by the NSF, the trade-offs are becoming clearer. Some metascientists privately wonder whether a smaller pilot would have been more appropriate, given that the idea is untested. The Institute for Progress counters that the $1.5 billion X-Labs budget is spread out over a decade, so will account for less than 2% of the NSF’s annual budget. “It’s important to remember that [Darpa] was once an institutional experiment as well. Now it’s one of the most cited innovative funding models in the world,” said Gustetic.As for Europe?The US isn’t the only country placing metascience at the heart of its research strategy. Science: A New Golden Age looks admiringly at the UK, which in 2024 set up a Metascience Unit to scrutinise how it funds research. In Brussels, it’s more of a mixed picture. In 2018, the EU set up the European Innovation Council to funnel grants and equity to start-ups, although it’s sometimes criticised for awarding money too slowly. Recently, the council has started experimenting with challenges, where teams of inventors compete to overcome a technological challenge. The European Commission also wants to experiment with partially randomising grant winners, to cut down on bureaucracy. However, the Commission’s own advisers have said the EU’s own research schemes are too conventional. They want the Commission to establish a new dedicated unit to scrutinise and experiment with funding. But there’s no sign of a such unit emerging in Brussels’ plans for the next Horizon Europe programme, which from 2028 is set to distribute more than €160 billion over seven years. Sam Bogerd, director of breakthrough innovation at the Brussels-based Arq Foundation, an AI-focused think tank that also looks at metascience, says that Europe might have the opposite problem to the US: universities and basic research funding are still reasonably well supported, but there’s not enough experimentation. “We're not taking a close enough look at where this money can achieve the most, and I am worried that the good ideas around metascience will be tainted politically by their association with the Trump administration,” he said. He’s still lobbying for the Commission to set up an experimental unit. But in the meantime, the Arq Foundation plans to do its own research, and is currently hiring two metascience researchers to run the rule over how Brussels spends research funding.
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The Strange New Politics of AI. Plus. . .
It’s Thursday, September 17. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Douglas Murray asks, why do we allow terrorists to die of old age? The American nonprofits backing Hamas. A conversation with Dara Horn and Coleman Hughes. And much more. But first: inside the unlikely coalition warning that AI may kill us all. Last week, an AI researcher named Jacob Coxon made headlines around the world after saying that he had resigned from Anthropic because he believes AI might cause human extinction—and his co-workers do, too. Unlike the rest of us, potentially, the story just won’t die. The Pro-Human Assembly, a conference held Tuesday in Washington, D.C., about the existential dangers of artificial intelligence, couldn’t have come at a better time—or with a more eclectic coalition. The Archbishop of San Francisco was there. So was Steve Bannon, screaming about the Chinese. Bernie Sanders did a quasi-dramatic reading of messages posted to an online forum by rogue AI agents. Ashley Judd paraphrased a graphic Andrea Dworkin quote for reasons that remain a mystery to me still. It was odd. People in the AI industry have talked openly about the possibility of this technology causing human extinction for years, but it hits differently in the wake of the Hugging Face incident. If you don’t know what that is, all the more reason to read my dispatch today. As the doomers see it, the best-case scenario is a future in which humans are basically kept as pets: well cared for, but with zero autonomy. The worst-case scenario, obviously, is the everyone dies thing. What should be done? I heard lots of ideas but no easy answers. There are currently zero federal regulations on AI, which is sort of strange even to think about. After all, we regulate microwaves, and the people running the microwave industry have never once refused to rule out the possibility that their products will end all human life on Earth. What I saw in D.C. left me even more convinced that you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who believes nothing should be done. You know, except for President Trump. — River Page River Page • Tech and Business [ The AI Doomers Have a Plan to Save Us. I Went to Find Out What It Is. ](https://www.thefp.com/p/the-ai-doomers-have-plan-save-bernie-sanders-bannon) Read story How Robert Kraft Made Macklemore a Martyr—and How to Better Fight Antisemitism On Monday, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and a group of other NFL owners banned Macklemore from performing at their stadiums after the rapper delivered a “Free Palestine” speech while opening for Ed Sheeran. Kraft cited the rapper’s “broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery.” Once multiple venues refused to host shows with Macklemore on the lineup, the tour’s promoter officially dropped him. Today, Josh Kaplan says that the move was counterproductive, arguing that though well-intentioned, Kraft’s decision turned an irrelevant footnote into a martyr. “You cannot cancel people into liking you,” Josh writes. Read his column on what a better response to Macklemore would have looked like. Read [ Robert Kraft Made Macklemore a Martyr ](https://www.thefp.com/p/robert-kraft-made-macklemore-martyr-antisemitism-palestine) This raises the question: What actually works against antisemitism? On the latest episode of Conversations with Coleman, recorded in front of a live audience in New York, Dara Horn joins Coleman Hughes to talk about her new book The Final Solution to the Jewish Question. She argues that antisemitism is a script that has repeated itself across countries and ideologies, and that most people don’t understand that well enough to fight it. Don’t miss their conversation. Watch [ The Lie at the Center of Antisemitism, with Dara Horn ](https://www.thefp.com/p/the-lie-at-the-center-of-antisemitism-coleman-hughes-dana-horn) Listen now Douglas Murray • U.S. Politics [ Douglas Murray: The 9/11 Failure That Still Haunts America ](https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-911-failure-justice-terrorist-guantanamo-bay) Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the men who planned them have still not faced trial. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and most of the accused have been locked up in Guantanamo Bay since 2002. Judges have retired, and plea deals have collapsed. Today, Douglas Murray examines how this happened and argues that a justice system that allows terrorists to die of old age in an interminable pretrial process is one that has failed. Read his latest column on what that failure says about our unpreparedness for the era we are now living in. Read story The Editors • U.S. Politics [ When Nonprofits Support Terrorists ](https://www.thefp.com/p/when-nonprofits-support-terrorists) A newly declassified CIA brief from 1998 found that Osama bin Laden used nonprofit shell organizations—including U.S.-based Islamic groups—to fund his terror plots. Today, a similar story is unfolding as multiple organizations on American soil present themselves as nonprofits, taking advantage of tax-exempt status while seeking to advance the ideological mission of terrorist groups like Hamas. Read our editorial on the latest evidence of this dangerous trend—and why there’s no excuse for making the same mistake the CIA revealed 28 years ago. Read story Simon Sebag Montefiore and Bari Weiss Live in New York For decades, the Middle East has shaped American foreign policy and loomed large in the public consciousness. Few understand its influence on our politics better than Simon Sebag Montefiore, who argues that America’s quagmires in the Middle East stem from a deep misunderstanding of the region—on both the left and the right. Join him October 1 as he sits down with Bari Weiss live in New York City to kick off his U.S. book tour for The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East. Get Tickets Now MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS [ Sydney Sweeney’s Naked Truth ](https://www.thefp.com/p/sydney-sweeneys-naked-truth-caitlin-flanagan) Caitlin Flanagan Read story [ I Thought Ukraine Was Losing. Then I Was Almost Hit by a Russian Drone. ](https://www.thefp.com/p/elliot-ackerman-ukraine-drone-gas-station-train) Elliot Ackerman Read story [ The Dangerous Ideology Behind the AI Warnings ](https://www.thefp.com/p/dangerous-ideology-effective-altruism-artificial-intelligence) Shyam Sankar Read story [ Amanda Knox: Patrick Clancy Can’t Win ](https://www.thefp.com/p/amanda-knox-patrick-clancy-grief-internet-crime) Amanda Knox Read story THE NEWS The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter point, its first hike since 2023, signaling that another increase could follow as the central bank tries to bring inflation under control. President Donald Trump fired back by demanding that rates be cut sharply, though he stopped short of criticizing Fed Chair Kevin Warsh by name. The Houthis fired drones and missiles at Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, including a major oil port on the Red Sea, and Saudi jets struck back with air strikes across Yemen in an escalating front of the Middle East war. (For more on the Houthis, read Zineb Riboua’s column from earlier this week.) A sweeping Russia and Iran sanctions bill passed the House in a 262–159 vote and is now heading to Trump for his signature. Named after the late senator Lindsey Graham, the legislation would hit countries that purchase large volumes of Russian oil and gas with tariffs of up to 100 percent, and is aimed at cutting off revenue that funds Russia’s war in Ukraine. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen proposed making Canada the European Union’s first-ever “associate member,” drawing a standing ovation from European lawmakers. The proposal, framed as a response to a world grown more hostile, faces an uncertain path as EU member states would have to approve it, and one diplomat said that “nobody really knows what it means.” The House voted unanimously to send billionaire Leon Black a criminal contempt referral after he defied a congressional subpoena to testify and hand over documents related to his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Black chose to fight the subpoena in court rather than comply. Charlie Kirk’s family filed a wrongful death notice Wednesday against Utah Valley University, alleging that a series of security failures left him exposed to a rooftop sniper. The notice is a required legal step before the family can sue. Merriam-Webster added 1,400 words and definitions to its dictionary, including looksmaxxing, vibe coding, and cuffing season. The publisher said the new entries offer “a window into the world today.” The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.
AI-driven health app helps patients achieve better blood pressure control
Incorporating a free smartphone app featuring AI-driven health coaching, blood pressure monitoring, and behavioral incentives into a hospital's existing clinical workflows helps patients make meaningful reductions in blood pressure, findings that suggest that digital apps may offer an effective means of extending care beyond the clinic when incorporated into treatment plans.
Adora Life Science Announces the Appointment of Dr. Clinton D. Morgan as Chief Medical Officer
Adora Life Science (Adora) today announced that Dr. Clinton D. Morgan, MD, will be joining Adora as its full-time Chief Medical Officer, effective November 1, 2026. Dr. Morgan has previously been appointed to Adora's Board of Directors and has been consulting part-time on human therapeutic opportunities, mechanism of action and development strategies. Dr. Morgan will spearhead Adora's human clinical development, regulatory strategy, and the company's scientific and research network.
What Does the Science of Climate Change Really Look Like?
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a three-part series on how the Right should think about environmental and climate policy. Read Chris Barnard on Reclaiming Environmental Policy from the Left. More than a decade ago, the world’s governments negotiated and signed the Paris Climate Agreement, committing to hold global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius. In the following years, climate had immense cultural power. Greta Thunberg emerged. Fortune 500 companies established net-zero plans. The U.S. got the Inflation Reduction Act. Then the pendulum swung back. President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, speaking of green energy as a “scam” and carbon footprints as a “hoax” and on all matters of international policy emphasizing bilateral engagement and power over globalism and cooperation. The technology companies that had been at the forefront of net-zero pledges and green leadership discovered the importance of all-of-the-above power to their visions for artificial intelligence and began quietly postponing or removing their targets. On the left side of the political spectrum, rising concerns about inflation and cost pushed climate lower down in the stated priorities of voters and stump speeches of politicians. The moment is ripe for a reset on the politics of climate change and for conservatives especially to chart a course that acknowledges and addresses the real challenges in plausible ways. So what should we think about climate change as we enter a post-peak climate era? If it is neither an apocalypse nor a hoax, what will hold up as a durable view of climate change? And how does it project onto the concerns and priorities of the right-of-center’s emerging coalition? New to Commonplace_? Subscribe below to get the magazine in your inbox._ Subscribe A Solid Foundation As the politics and economics of climate careened over the past ten years, the physics carried on regardless. In 2015, the year the Paris Climate Agreement was adopted, the world emitted 41.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. By 2025, emissions had risen only 2.4%, to 42.2 gigatonnes, because falling emissions from land use offset increasing emissions from fossil fuels. But slow growth in annual emissions is not rapid decline, let alone net-zero, so carbon dioxide kept accumulating in the atmosphere, going from 399 to 426 parts per million. Global temperature kept rising too, from about 1.1 degrees Celsius above the 1850–1900 average in 2015, to 1.4 degrees above it in 2025. None of this should surprise anyone. Even most prominent skeptics, like the authors of the 2025 report commissioned by the Trump administration’s Department of Energy, accept the basic physics. Carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere at industrial volumes accumulates and traps heat that would otherwise escape to space. That heat warms the upper ocean and increases temperatures at the surface. Increased ocean heat and melting of land ice cause sea levels to rise. Changes in the climate become noticeable to us as subtle shifts in temperature and precipitation, seasons arriving early or late, changes in the surrounding ecosystem, and weather extremes. The much more meaningful debate is not about whether these things are happening, but about what it all means for human societies. (While it is a proxy measure of overall risk, no one experiences global surface temperature.) This debate invokes at least three interesting questions: how much today’s warming is showing up in regional climate trends, how much more warming we should anticipate, and how extreme weather events can be understood in the context of climate change. Recent scientific advances give us new insights into each of these, but there is still much to learn. This is the context in which the next generation of conservative leaders will be the first to deal with significant climate change as a fact, not a forecast. It will be with them for their entire careers. Our evolving scientific picture of climate change will come from weather and climate records stretching further into the past, new kinds of observations in the present, better modeling tools for the future, and simply more time to observe the emergence of climate signals and their tangible effects on ecosystems and communities in the United States and around the world. The policy landscape will be shaped by not only the impacts of changes in the climate, but also by the ways in which societies respond and by the emergence of new technologies for both altering the trajectory of emissions and adapting to new climate realities. Global climate records now show the fingerprints of warming in different phenomena around much of the world. The IPCC, in its most recent assessment report, documents warming trends over all land regions, even as natural variability adds substantial variance to local trends. And the highest temperature extremes have become more intense and frequent, almost everywhere, since the 1950s. Scientists are highly confident that these changes are attributable to human influence. But confidence in detecting trends and attributing them to human influence degrades across heavy precipitation events; drought trends are heterogeneous and not attributable to human activity with great confidence. For hurricanes, tornadoes, and other severe storms there is even less confidence in trends or their relationship to climate change. In general, a fair summary of the evidence is that for well-observed phenomena, like surface temperature or heavy rainfall, with a clear relationship to warming, our multidecadal observations are consistent with human influence overcoming natural variability over long time periods and extremes increasing. For regions that are sampled more sparsely, or phenomena with a higher noise-to-signal ratio, we will need to observe them longer to understand the magnitude of the climate signal or improve dynamical understanding using models and observations together. But for Climate For those who can’t wait, we also have new techniques that attempt to understand the role climate change has in influencing particular extreme events. When the climate is changing and disaster strikes, it is natural to ask whether that disaster was somehow “caused” by climate change. For scientists and policymakers acting in good faith, answering that question helps develop a more accurate picture of the problem, how it may be getting worse, and what preparations we should be making to respond to it. It may, at some point, give some weight to how liability is assigned by courts or adaptation funding is distributed by society. But how we ask this question is extremely important. It is easy to get the analysis wrong by discounting the role that meteorology plays. As meteorologist Theodore Shepherd explained in a clear 2016 review of climate attribution methods, “if a weather or climate event is truly extreme in the present climate, then perforce it requires unusual meteorological conditions, which means that climate change is at most a contributing factor.” Share Scientists have two ways to probe climate as a contributing factor, both of which have entered media coverage of extreme weather events. One asks a probabilistic question: How much more likely is a particular event (e.g., a temperature record over a particular area) amid global warming? The answer involves using historical records and computer simulations to estimate the likelihood of such an event in both a changed and a preindustrial climate. The findings are less about the specific event, and more about events of that nature. The other question is: How has the changed climate affected the specific event in question? Here, scientists try to understand what a similar event would have looked like in the preindustrial climate. This is sometimes called the storyline approach, where the story is the specific meteorological details of the event. These methods offer ways to test the intuition of scientists about real weather extremes. In late June and early July of 2021, a persistent high-pressure ridge, or heat dome, set up over the Pacific Northwest and an extraordinary heat wave affected the area from Oregon to British Columbia. For six days, it shattered temperature records across the region and hundreds died from heat-related causes, in an area where such high, and persistently high, temperatures were well outside of experience and many live without air conditioning. Scientists have studied its connection to climate change using multiple approaches. This specific event was created by a rare combination of meteorological factors, a strong high-pressure ridge created the conditions for extreme heat, which occurred on top of higher average temperatures in the region from global warming. Probabilistic analyses showed that climate change increased the likelihood of such an event by at least 8-fold to more than 100-fold. One standout example found that such an event had effectively zero probability of occurring in the preindustrial climate. The enormous range in these assessments reflects how hard it is to estimate probabilities of events at the tail of the historical record. Estimates of the effect on the temperature of the event are more clustered. A recent review paper documents how multiple methodologies have found a positive influence, roughly 1-2 degrees Celsius of an anomaly that exceeded 15 degrees, of climate change on the temperature magnitude of the event. Multiple studies have investigated and found some positive influence of climate change in other extreme events. Attribution studies found climate likely increased the heavy rainfall that accompanied Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and surrounding regions in 2024. The extensive fires that struck Los Angeles in 2025 illustrate how the causal chain can become messy, though. Studies do detect a positive influence of climate on the event’s likelihood, but while climate change likely contributed to underlying aridity, it would not have played a role in the heavy winds or land practices that preceded disaster. These event attribution studies will become more common for extreme, or damaging, weather events. They can be produced quickly, and often are reported before peer review. As the Pacific Northwest heatwave example shows, when multiple methods converge on a positive attribution, the finding should probably carry some weight even if you have to be careful about accepting the results from a single study. I expect that as climate change proceeds and the climate thus departs further from a preindustrial counterfactual, the influence will become more detectable across a variety of extreme events and more easily identified. This will be used to cast blame, but can also be used to inform how communities and society adapt to ongoing change. We May Still Be Surprised One positive development, insofar as less climate change is better, has been that our central estimates for future climate change should probably be revised downward. Mostly, that is because the high-end warmings that scientists regularly analyzed about ten to 20 years ago, driven by high emissions throughout the twenty-first century, now appear to be somewhere between unlikely and impossible. At one time, the upper end of mainstream climate projections extended well into 4 to 6 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of this century, which, models suggest, would have wrought enormous real-world damage. Current energy and policy trends now point toward 2.5 or 3 degrees. Damages and risks are commonly modeled as increasing steeply with more warming, so this is already a better-than-previously-expected outcome for the climate (which is independent of the physical response to emissions). But we should maintain a wide range for plausible outcomes and prepare for the possibility of being surprised. Emissions trajectories are subject to deep uncertainty, the physical climate response is still developing, and whatever change occurs in the climate will then be mediated through unpredictable economic, social, and political institutions. Over the past decade, the pace of warming surprised some keen observers and appeared to accelerate, though not yet outside the range of expectation provided by climate models. The reasons for that apparent acceleration are being actively studied (as was the apparent pause in warming from 1998 to 2012), but no single driver has emerged. Some blame it on the El Niño, variability which would have no bearing on climate. Some think it is a result of factories in East Asia and global shipping fleets cutting aerosol emissions, which in the strongest version of the argument would indicate higher climate sensitivity to carbon-dioxide emissions. Others are more measured, not yet ready to draw solid conclusions as to whether climate projections require revision. We will have to see. Long-Term Thinking Climate change asks us to think over long time scales. But the pace of human-driven warming is compressing a large global change into a century. Changing weather patterns and extreme events are already causing adjustment costs and damages and will do more. Adaptation will help, but it is not free. For some communities, these costs will erode livelihoods and well-being, and may force migration. Are we prepared for large-scale managed retreats in the United States? Thankfully, American wealth, geographical diversity, and moderate climates may leave us better prepared than many around the world. But wealthy countries can still suffer serious disruption from narrowly concentrated costs, even if they appear entirely manageable in aggregate. Readers of Commonplace are familiar with the challenges of rapidly adapting to economic forces. The displacement that came from the China Shock is barely perceptible in aggregate GDP and employment data, but it affected millions of people and those people were far less mobile than economic models tended to assume. Deindustrialization rippled through the nation with enormous effects for not only our economic vitality, but also our national security. The forces surrounding climate change may not be so different; the world gets richer and must accept some diffuse costs. Those may be modest overall, but cause all manner of unpredictable effects with which policymakers must cope. In the case of the China Shock, our faith in a growing pie served us poorly. We’ll need to do better on climate. Leave a comment
Earth Science Tech, Inc. Uplists to OTCQB Venture Market
MIAMI, FL, Sept. 16, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Earth Science Tech, Inc. (OTC: ETST) ("Earth Science Tech" or the "Company"), operating as a holding company with a diversified highly accountable portfolio of distinct entities, today announced its successful uplisting to the OTCQB Venture Market (the "OTCQB") effective for trading September 17, 2026. The OTCQB is a premier, established public market for entrepreneurial and growth-stage companies. To qualify for quotation, companies must meet rigoro
John Deere dealer Murphy Tractor names new president
Murphy Tractor and Equipment Co., one of the largest John Deere construction and forestry equipment dealerships in North America, has appointed Jeff Oldham as president, effective Sept. 10. Oldham succeeds Bill Buckles, who retired after 33 years with the company based in Park City, Kan. As president, Oldham will oversee operations across Murphy Tractor’s 29…
College of Ag Sciences Names Head of the Department of Plant Science
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Joe Louis has been named head of the Department of Plant Science in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, effective Oct. 7. Louis joins...
NCQA Unveils 2026 Health Plan Ratings
18 health plans earn top 5-star rating. / ACCESS Newswire / September 16, 2026 / The National Committee for Quality Assurance () announced its 2026 Health Plan Ratings \- an annual report that helps healthcare consumers and regulators assess the quality and effectiveness of health plans.
Cumberland County Schools Business Operations earns Meritorious Budget Award for third consecutive year
Cumberland County Schools continues to demonstrate strong fiscal leadership as the district’s Business Operations Department has earned the 2026–2027 Meritorious Budget Award from the Association of School Business Officials International for the third consecutive year.The national recognition honors excellence in budget preparation and presentation, highlighting the department’s commitment to transparency, accountability and sound financial practices. The award is presented following a rigorous peer review by experienced school finance professionals who evaluate district budgets against nationally recognized standards.“This recognition reflects the leadership of the Cumberland County Board of Education and Superintendent Dr. Eric C. Bracy, along with the hard work of our Business Operations team,” said Jay Toland, associate superintendent of Business Operations, in a press release. “We take pride in using public funds wisely and making our budget clear and accessible so our community can see how those resources support student success.”ASBO International’s award program promotes budget documents that are comprehensive, accessible and informative for families, staff and community members.“An effective school budget is more than just numbers—it’s a vital tool for building trust and engaging the community,” said Executive Director of ASBO International Jim Rowan in a press release. “The Meritorious Budget Award recognizes districts like Cumberland County Board of Education that prioritize financial clarity and accountability.”
After curriculum scrutiny, Springfield will keep an eye on fifth grade science proficiency
The district’s choice to put its fifth-grade science scores under the microscope is meant to measure the effectiveness of its new elementary science curriculum after the state ruled the district’s previous science curriculum did not meet state requirements.
College of Ag Sciences names head of the Department of Plant Science
Joe Louis has been named head of the Department of Plant Science in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, effective Oct. 7.
BYU–Hawaii Names New Deans for Faculty of Culture, Language & Performing Arts and Faculty of Business & Government
Brigham Young University–Hawaii Academic Vice President Kelly Haws announced two new academic leadership appointments, effective immediately.
Karma TMS Marks 20,000 TMS Treatments, Transforming Mental Health Care Across the Coachella Valley and Riverside County
Palm Springs, California--(Newsfile Corp. - September 15, 2026) - Karma TMS PC, a leading provider of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) therapy in Southern California, today announced it has delivered more than 20,000 TMS treatments to patients across the Coachella Valley and Riverside County. The milestone reflects nearly a decade of growth for the practice. It underscores the rising demand for effective, non-invasive, medication-free options for treatment-resistant depression, anxiety,..
Senator Jonathan Dismang to resign, accepting role with Electric Coops
State Senator Jonathan Dismang, R-Searcy, announced Tuesday (Sept. 15) that he will resign from the Arkansas State Senate effective today and accept a new position in the private sector with...
Lightbeam Health Appoints Thomas McCarrick, MD, MBI, as Chief Medical Officer
Lightbeam Health Solutions, a proven AI-enabled solutions and services leader helping healthcare organizations succeed in value-based care, today announced the appointment of Thomas P. McCarrick, MD, MBI, as Chief Medical Officer effective August 31, 2026.
Scientists Reveal Malaria’s Method of Attack
A major new discovery by Columbia scientists is raising hopes that more-effective drugs could be developed.
Business solutions company Conduent names Sundaresan chief information and technology officer
Conduent Inc. announced Sept. 14 the appointment of Narayanan Sundaresan as chief information and technology officer, effective immediately.
Effectiveness of NC certificate-of-need law meant as healthcare guardrail in doubt
NC certificate-of-need law governs building healthcare facilities. Research and recent outcomes suggest it may do more harm than good.
De Beers Group Science & Technology Showcases SynthDetect 2: The World’s Most Versatile Automated Diamond Screening Instrument
SynthDetect™ 2 builds on the leading-edge technical capabilities of its forerunners, adding greater automation, more effective reporting and faster throughput
Middleburg appoints Will Moore as interim town manager
The Middleburg Town Council has appointed Deputy Town Manager William M. “Will” Moore as interim town manager effective Sept. 11, according to a news release.
Newsom says he won't run for president if Harris does
Newsom's effective yield to Harris diminishes the possibility of a 2028 showdown between two of California’s most powerful political figures.
Jays/Tigers Series Preview
The Jays start a three-game series with the Tigers tonight. The Jays are one game back of the Guardians for the last Wild Card spot. The Tigers are eight games back, not officially eliminated, but effectively eliminated. Starting pitchers: I try not to be an ‘old man’, but I’m tired of bullpen days. I know […]
BioMarin appoints Robert Plenge to its Board and Science & Technology Committee
BioMarin appointed Robert Plenge, M.D., Ph.D., to its Board of Directors and to the Science and Technology Committee, effective September 10, 2026.Original SEC Filing: BIOMARIN PHARMACEUTICAL INC [ BMRN ] - 8-K - Sep. 14, 2026This is an AI-powered summary. It may contain inaccuracies. Consider veri…