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NWTI, state office to host industry training luncheon on Thursday

Northwest Technical Institute (NWTI) in Springdale said Tuesday (Oct. 20) that it and the Arkansas Office of Skills Development will jointly host an event Thursday (Oct. 22) on short-term industry...

Oct 20 • 7:00 PM EDT • Business • talkbusiness.net

As flag football becomes official sport in Oregon, Salem-Keizer coaches, players hopeful about future

The decision is particularly meaningful for some Salem-Keizer Public Schools teams that have been invested since the sport began gaining popularity in 2023.

Oct 20 • 6:00 PM EDT • Sports • salemreporter.com

The truth of 'Dancing with the Stars' – What training with a pro is really like

Editor's note: Anna Kaufman is a former reporter at USA TODAY, who trained with a pro dancer from "Dancing with the Stars" to see what the process is really like. This story originally ran in November 2025.

Oct 20 • 4:23 PM EDT • Entertainment • centredaily.com

Orange County Public Schools rejects salary and health insurance recommendations

OCPS said declining enrollment and what it described as insufficient state funding have put additional pressure on its budget

Oct 20 • 4:01 PM EDT • Health • wftv.com

TRAIL OF BLOODY FOOTPRINTS | Employee killed woman at Dauphin County business after complaining about hours, court docs say

Woman killed at Dauphin County business | Police looking for suspect

Oct 20 • 3:57 PM EDT • Business • wgal.com

Nonpartisan coalition of religious leaders plans to counter voter intimidation on Election Day

The diverse, multifaith group is training all the way through the end of October online and in person learning de-escalation techniques and equipping themselves with knowledge of local laws and resources.

Oct 20 • 3:55 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org

Sundar Pichai: Google’s Frontier Imperative, Compute Scarcity Dilemmas, Future AI Products and Businesses

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has little patience for doubts about Google’s willingness or capacity to compete at the frontier of AI. His company’s latest Gemini 4 Argon model — long-promised and recently delivered — beats OpenAI and Anthropic’s latest public models on coding, math, science, and knowledge-work benchmarks and has placed Google’s AI back among the world’s best. Amid chatter that Google was fine with good-enough lightweight ‘Flash’ models, Pichai pushed back hard against any suggestion that company is limiting its research ambitions. “We won’t do it any other way,” he told me in a Big Technology Podcast interview recorded this week at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Pursuing cutting-edge research is costly for Google, requiring compute and chips that otherwise could be sold at a high markup by its cloud business. But Pichai said allocating resources to frontier AI development is “ground zero” for Google. “Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development,” Pichai told me. In our conversation, we discussed Argon (which Pichai says processed three times as many tokens as Gemini 3 in the 72 hours after launch), AI’s role in developing better models, the AI interface of the future, competition with OpenAI, Google’s partnerships with Anthropic and Apple, data centers in space, and the nature of his optimism. You can read the full conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, below, or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice. Alex Kantrowitz: Google is back at the frontier with Gemini 4 Argon, which beats OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s public models on benchmarks spanning coding, math, science, and knowledge work. The conventional wisdom was that Google had given up on the frontier to focus on fast, good-enough models for its products. That was wrong? Sundar Pichai: Very wrong. Look, we are so committed to being at the frontier. It’s in our DNA. We won’t do it any other way. We’ve been thinking about the AI frontier for well over a decade now. The frontier is very dynamic. It’s very competitive. It’s very exciting. I couldn’t be more pleased with how Argon has come together. We took our time with it. We made sure we tested it safely and deployed it carefully. We took a bit longer than our other models, given its capabilities. Across the board, be it for agentic work, knowledge work, coding, creative tasks, Argon is one of the really good frontier models. The first 72 hours since we launched, it’s almost up to 25 trillion tokens used, which is about three times what Gemini 3.0 had in the first 72 hours. And we are capacity constrained as we are serving it. Excited, but there are always areas….. You know, the frontier is very dynamic, and you have to keep evolving the models. There are areas which we can see we need to improve as well. We’ll be at work on all of that as well. Which areas? On any given model, Argon would be across the board better at everything if you just look even two months back. But the space is so evolving. Even on coding, for example, there are pockets where we know we need to do better, and there’s clear feedback. We’ll make it better. The argument for standard models is that they’re already good enough to build great products, with the frontier valuable only for certain tasks. Meta built Muse with good models rather than the best, and Google could put standard models into Maps, Gmail, and Search. Why isn’t that sufficient? It’s definitely not how I have thought about it at all. We are deeply committed to driving the state of the art and actually pushing where this technology can go, all the way from transformers. That’s a journey we’ve been on. You will see us continue to do that. When you’re at the frontier, you get an earlier look into the emerging capabilities, earlier than others, which helps you better prepare for the future. We are fortunate to have a wide set of opportunities across consumer and enterprise. Some of our cloud customers, for sure, want the model at the frontier. The frontier models will be better at developing the next set of models in an era of recursive self-improvement. I would argue it matters there. Internally, we have definitely seen a steep point of inflection by deploying Argon to our developers. It definitely tackles problems which our previous models could not do. Being at the frontier puts you at the innovation frontier and helps you drive that as well. There is room for models of all sizes and capabilities. That’s why we did Flash, Flash-Lite, etc. I agree with you that you can develop very good product experiences with not necessarily the most frontier model, because they tend to be slower and more expensive too. But we care about the Pareto frontier, and we’re committed to doing all of that. You said developing frontier models gives you a look at what’s coming. What do you see on the horizon? What makes this moment so exciting is you build something which you think is a culmination of months of work, and you put it out. You already see clear headroom ahead. We’ve all been working on these agentic, long-horizon capabilities, but clearly the frontier is going to have multiple of these agents working together to do things. That’s an example of an exciting paradigm underway. It’s also clear to me that users, both in consumer and enterprise, will have access to some multi-agent framework for them, working all the time doing things. It feels like a moment of infinite possibilities. Sergey Brin said one of Argon’s core innovations was relying more on the model to help develop the model. Yet incidents involving OpenAI’s bots breaking containment and Google’s bots accessing a site they shouldn’t have suggest these systems still aren’t perfectly aligned. Isn’t there reasonable cause for concern about accelerating toward recursive self-improvement? There are three parts to your question. Let’s first talk about RSI itself. You’re right, Sergey mentioned RSI being a critical contributor as we are developing Argon. But to be very clear, today, in a continuum, we are pretty far from the end state of RSI or something like that. The right way to describe it is you have RSI loops along with AI researchers in various aspects of model development. You almost have agents helping AI researchers in some automated way work together to build these models. It’s good to at least understand where we are today, and it’s super exciting. I expect that continuum to keep making progress as we go into next year. The second question is around safety. Security comes from defense in depth. You’re talking about alignment, obviously. We all are doing a lot of work to make sure the models are as aligned as possible. But it’s an active area of research, and there are clear gaps. That’s not the only thing we rely on. You have the work you do on alignment, but beyond that, we put a lot of effort into real-time monitoring as these models are working. Making sure you have good telemetry into what’s happening so that you can intervene in real time if you see unexpected behaviors. How you do that, the architecture with which you do that, how you make sure it’s all sandboxed and isolated in a way that it can continue doing its job during real-time monitoring — these are all areas of investment. Obviously, when we deploy these models, giving customers, enterprises, control, both with real-time monitoring, but their ability to decide where they deploy, what type of data which models ever have access to, etc. All that work is very, very important, and we are doing a lot of that. As an industry, we need to constantly up our game and take the time to do all this stuff, including dedicating the compute required to make sure you can safely deploy these models. The third part is: Is it all enough? This is why there are a lot of conversations in the industry, and I think it’s reasonable to be worried. The right way to approach something you worry about is early on thinking about what more we can do. As an industry, you’re definitely seeing increased levels of work on alignment, testing for safety, etc., as we deploy these models. The next step would be developing better standards so there are cross-industry standards of how we do these things, including the ability to evaluate using independent evaluators. If you look at areas like financial controls, we have accounting standards, we have independent auditors. Those are all the next natural steps for us as an industry to work toward, and regulation will end up playing a role as we go through all of that as well. Google pursues both language models and world models, while some other AI companies like OpenAI have focused more heavily on LLMs as the path to AGI. Why is world-model research important to you? As humans, you obviously perceive the world around you, and you’re taking all those inputs. Making sure these models are able to understand the laws of physics, simulate the world in high fidelity. All that, I think, are key enabling blocks for intelligence. We are working across all possible applications of this. Take an area like robotics. It’s not an accident: If you look at embodied reasoning benchmarks, Argon is state of the art. That all comes from our experience building world models. Inherently, I would expect there will be architectures which will converge all of this in the future. But for us, we view this as, today, this jagged frontier that is intelligence. We want to be at the frontier of all the possible approaches, and that will help us both drive better research, better insights, and develop a much better AGI model, is how we think about it. Some people argue Google should focus on selling its computing resources rather than using them for AI research. Cloud wants to sell compute at a high markup, while researchers need a very big computer to build the best models. How do you balance those demands? Ground zero for us is making sure we are investing in the compute that’s needed to be at the AI frontier. In 2015, I set the company to be AI-first. AI is that key horizontal ingredient across everything we do, all the way from Search to Cloud to Waymo. That is ground zero for us, making sure both for research and developing the models that we have enough compute needed. Beyond that, we have these independent businesses which each have their own long-range plans. They’re using those long-range plans to project forward, and we plan for compute for all of them. The cloud team, they have a business and they have a projection and they have demand signals. They have committed contracts. With that help, we can plan on a long-term compute trajectory for them. We’re fortunate to have this wide set of opportunities. There’s no company in the world which isn’t making trade-offs at any given moment in time. But the first principles we operate on is making sure we have enough compute to invest in the frontier, and that’s non-negotiable, and everything else works on top. Remember, we are building our own compute, our own data centers. There are long lead times. The compute we have today is a function of decisions I made in 2024. Even if you think back to a year from today, last year the agentic coding takeoff hadn’t happened. Today, obviously, when you sit and look at anything, everyone is short—not just us, other companies—and everyone wishes you had two times what you had planned for. That comes with the territory. At any given moment in time, we are planning for what we would need two to three years out in the future. You’re going to find some decisions you make may look suboptimal two years out, depending on where the state of the art is. I don’t spend too much time thinking about it. The way I think about compute allocation is making sure Google DeepMind, both for research and frontier model development, is cutting edge in terms of compute access. After that, we plan for all our businesses. It’s great we can provide our compute to other people too, like we have done. It allows us to scale that up, get real tests for it in the widest application set possible, test it in the real world, and make sure we are at the cutting edge of technology at every layer of our AI stack as well. Ben Horowitz relayed on a podcast that Andy Jassy had said compute was sold out until 2028. Are you seeing the same thing? If today a customer is coming out and asking us for compute in ’27, that is incredibly difficult to do. Even last year we went out and leased some short-term compute to accommodate some customers and help them out. But yes, we are all dealing with similar timelines. Every major technology shift seems to involve overbuilding, from railroads to fiber. Do you think that’s happening here? It depends on the time frames you’re looking at. This level of build, if I take a long enough time frame, it makes complete sense to me. We are at early stages of the most consequential technology ever, and this is not like fiber. It’s not dark. We are using it. We are capacity constrained on a daily basis. The applications, the underlying technology is improving rapidly. But running a company, the way I work through the moment is you look at your demand signals. You look at your committed revenue opportunities that you’re getting in the form of contracts. You balance that with the underlying technical capability, or internally you balance how we are using it internally, the model trajectories. Based on all that, you take a disciplined approach—a confident, aggressive, but disciplined approach—to plan out compute. But when you talk about the broader economy as a whole, you’re having people operate with various levels of risk. I focus on what I can control as a company and plan through it. If your question is, can there be an overbuild? Yes, because you can have some constrained components. Remember, what matters is a set of everything you need to build out that compute. Memory, electricity, electricians…. Land. Like 2,000 components or more. You could get constrained at some point. There could be things which cause bottlenecks, and then you could have overbuilds. There could be external shocks to the economy. There are macro risks. All that is possible at any given time. But am I confident that the compute we are planning for, we will have uses for it given enough time? Absolutely, yes. I was in the room when you said AI would be as profound as fire and electricity. If you believe that, shouldn’t you give researchers the biggest possible computer, even at the expense of today’s cloud profits? We’re all doing some form of that. Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development. What you’re seeing is true already. But you want to be thoughtful. Even our AI researchers have some constraints, which are also good. That’s what inspires creativity. That’s what helps you come up with a more efficient algorithmic breakthrough, maybe to use less memory. What we are committed to is to invest what’s needed to stay at the frontier. OpenAI President Greg Brockman told me a few months ago that the ideal AI product might have no interface at all—just as natural as conversation. What do you think the interface looks like in the age of AI? Computing historically has been humans adapting to computing. With AI, it’ll be the other way around. The technology will adapt seamlessly to how humans live and go about their day-to-day life. You want to be able to speak to that AI when you want to. It has context. It can be persistently running somewhere, give you continuity. You’re not dealing with a lot of complexity. It’s natural. All that makes sense to me. That doesn’t mean it won’t have any interface, however. Nowadays, even on my phone, Gemini voice models are so good. I can just press the microphone button. I can just ramble. That’s why we call it Rambler. I can ramble. It intelligently corrects with my personal context. Even my friends’ names, weird names, it gets it right, even if it first guesses it wrong. It’s amazing. I’m not going in, backspacing, editing once I finish saying it. It’s remarkable how good it’s gotten. But there are going to be moments you will need an interface. You may want to entertain yourself. You may want to watch a video. You may ask your AI to create something, and you want to watch it, consume it. The way I think about it is, you want it to be as seamless and as natural as possible, and that you are not doing the hard work adapting to whatever the interface is. The technology is adapting to how you’re working at any given moment in time. When I asked Sam Altman about competition from Google, he argued that OpenAI was building AI-native products and implied Google was bolting AI onto existing ones. Do you accept that framing, and can a “bolt-on” compete with an AI-native product? First of all, it’s a very dynamic moment. We are all pushing each other. OpenAI has pushed us as a company too. This is not just we are doing something to them. Far from it. Yes, Google went into its own version of a code red too. In the AI moment, all of us have to respond with varying levels of urgency at any given moment in time. We are constantly building new products as well. Gemini was built from the ground up as a product—the Gemini app I’m talking about. Or tomorrow, as all of us are adapting to agents, are you bolting agents onto ChatGPT, or are they building it natively? How would you think about that? You can always put these questions back. I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as you want to build world-class product experiences that are AI-native and they are winning. Some of it is adapting products, some of it is rethinking new experiences. They will all be part of how you approach this moment. How do you expect to make money from these AI interfaces? If an agent recommends a product and I buy it, should it take a cut of the sale, even if that’s disclosed? I’m going to put enterprise aside. Consumers are going to increasingly value this technology. Take software developers today. Developers are willing to pay for these coding models because it really helps make them more productive. Nobody would want to code the way they were coding three years ago, or even the same time last year. When you’re delivering value, there’s value to be had. I’ve never seen examples where consumer products really scale to billions of users, where people are using it intensely, and haven’t had monetization to go along with it. If you’re providing value to people, there is inherent value to be had. The nature of it may change. You’re asking a scenario in which agents are doing stuff for you. At the end of the day, you will have commercial needs. The agents need to fulfill those commercial needs. The providers on the other side are going to see value in that. There’s going to be some mechanism by which it gets fleshed out. That’s what an efficient system does. But what matters is that you’re building those world-class consumer experiences. I promised myself one product feature request: Can you make Gemini-powered search in Gmail as good as searching Gmail through ChatGPT? What’s going on here? One of the exciting things we announced recently is the unified Gemini agent for enterprise, and we’re bringing that to consumers. These are persistent agents which run 24/7 in the cloud. We’re spinning up a micro VM effectively for every query, and from the runtime, the harness, the model—it’s all a headless service. It’ll work everywhere, and it has your context with you. You can address this agent whether you’re in Workspace, in Search, in Gemini. Agents are going to drive this unification from a customer experience, which people are looking for. When you have a broad product portfolio and you’re moving forward fast, there are always areas where you’re moving forward faster than some other areas. That’s valid feedback. But we are putting a lot of time and effort into making sure, as we build out our agentic experience, that unification and that capability works well across all these services. People have asked where Google’s equivalent of Muse or Dots is. Do you anticipate creating a new product to compete with them? Our goal with Gemini is to be a personal, proactive, and powerful assistant. That’s what we are working toward. You saw us describe the early versions of it at Google I/O this year with Spark. Effectively, already, if you open the Gemini app as a Pro or an Ultra user, you see Chat and Task, and they start giving you that agentic experience. With Argon now, that capability is dramatically accelerated. What we announced recently in our enterprise event, we are bringing that to consumers as well. Soon in Gemini, you will be able to ask something, and it’s a continuum. You don’t need to think about whether you’re asking a chat or an agentic task. It’ll just automatically do the right thing, and it can work persistently in the background securely and get things done for you. Already, empirically, when I look at what’s coming into Gemini in our app, last year you would have tagged them and most of them would have been chats. But a steadily growing percentage is already agentic tasks in Gemini. Yes, we are going to bring personal agents to our consumers. It’ll work in the Gemini app. It’ll work in Google Search. It’ll work in Gmail. You can address it, call it, etc. We want to make sure we’re getting it right. It’ll be powered by Argon, and we are very excited to bring it to our users. Google has invested and committed tens of billions of dollars to Anthropic. What do you see in Dario Amodei that makes you want such a deep investment and partnership? Very early on, when we looked at the founding team of Anthropic, it was very clear to us this was a world-class team which was involved in some of the earliest GPT models. We were quickly able to assess that they would be at the frontier. We’ve always tried to identify and partner with companies which would be at the cutting edge of technology. We’ve done that with SpaceX. We’ve done that with Anthropic. That’s what we saw, and we had a chance to partner. Is your partnership with Apple to license Gemini for Siri expanding, contracting, or standing still? For both us and Apple, that partnership was about translating the capabilities of AI into better experiences for users. I thought Apple has done a phenomenal job of incorporating—they customize these models and build it into Siri—and it’s been great to see the reception. We are committed to doing more. You’re going to do more with them? There’s nothing specific to comment, but it’s a partnership. It’s working well. What have you learned so far about the feasibility of data centers in space? It’s a very exciting project. Projects like this remind me—I still recall that moment in the desert for the DARPA Grand Challenge, watching the Stanley car compete in it, which ended up being the basis for Waymo. With all these technologies, you’re at a moment in time where it looks a bit like sci-fi, but 10 to 20 years down the line, it’s actually working in a meaningful way. I feel the same in space. We’ve always believed in betting big on these technologies. Quantum has been a great example of it. We’re probably 10 years into the journey. Waymo, we are almost 20 years into the journey. Space, we are two to three years into the journey. It’s clear to me that it’s an approach which will make a lot of sense in the future. Being in sub-synchronous orbits with 24/7 access to the most abundant form of energy we have access to will make a lot of sense for this exponential increase in compute that we are going to need. Having said that, this is a challenging project. The team has disciplined milestones. It was a super exciting milestone to send the TPUs up to space. Sometime, as we are speaking, we are expecting a “hello world” moment from them. I look forward to seeing that happen, and we’ll continue investing here too. You previously said 25% of the code written within Google was written by AI. What’s the number today? That number in our world today is meaningless in the sense that every part of what we now touch is influenced by AI deeply. What we are tracking with Argon, for example, it’s been a point of inflection. People are using Argon to really go tackle complex projects, including projects which affect millions of lines of code. In the four weeks since we have launched Argon, we have seen a 30% increase in CLs, and more importantly, almost a similar increase—a one-third decrease in rollbacks. People are writing code more productively and better code with it. We are tracking it with newer metrics now. How are you dealing with opposition to data centers? If you can’t build in the U.S. the way you want to, where else do you go? We’re very committed to building our data centers very responsibly. When I look at our largest data centers in some of the communities where we have been the longest, I visit them, I talk to people. There are people who come and tell us their kids have gone to college because of our investments in these communities, and we’ve grown in those communities. To me, this is about doing it right. Engaging with the communities early, doing it transparently. We are committed to making sure we are bringing incremental power, and we cover 100% of the cost of our power needs for these projects. It’s understanding the impact on neighborhoods and making sure you’re working thoroughly to address them. Done rightly, you can continue making progress. But we are constantly taking feedback into account. I do worry not everyone operates the same way. People have been surprised by data centers showing up in their backyard. Those are all important. As an industry, we should continue to do better. But part of the reason, in a 20-year time frame, we are thinking about things like data centers in space is making sure we are able to put these data centers where maybe the trade-offs will be different. What unproven area of AI is Google working hardest to crack? Is it continual learning—getting models to keep updating after release—or something else? There are multiple parallel paths. You saw with Argon we have a million output tokens. With our Gemini models early on, we had a one-million context window on the input side. These are all examples of breakthroughs we are constantly working on. How do you think about synthetic data? How do you think about continual learning? How do you think about more efficient architectures? We do dedicate a meaningful percentage of our compute to these research bets too. It always goes hand in hand, including our world models. Those are all bets we are placing. Sometimes, as part of these bets, there are ideas that emerge which just make their way into the mainline models. Maybe we don’t fully talk about it, but we have multiple steps in these areas. Working in technology requires optimism that building something will improve the world, but those bets can leave real consequences when they fail. I recently returned to a town in El Salvador where enthusiasm for Bitcoin had given way to unfinished construction and something resembling a ghost town. How do you maintain the optimism you spoke about in your Stanford commencement address while accounting for those risks? I genuinely have a deep conviction that improving technology and improving access to technology makes people’s lives better. It’s been my personal experience in my life, out of which comes that deep conviction, optimism. But with that, I’ve always felt humanity’s journey is always about working hard to harness that technology to make it work well for society. The optimism is not an optimism that you just build whatever you want, whenever. You work hard to make sure you’re building technology in the service of humanity, to make the human condition better. That’s got to be the defining goal as we are approaching it. With that framework, I’m very, very optimistic. We are in very early stages of the kind of progress that we are going to see on many areas. We’re all talking about areas like healthcare. A lot of the progress is ahead. The ability to make things in a fundamentally cheaper way on many things where things have been getting expensive for a long, long time, discovering new materials, etc., which really bend the curve—it’s tough to step today and understand the impact of all that, but they’re going to be very profound. I’m very optimistic, but we have to be rightfully concerned about all the ways this technology can go wrong. Sundar, I know you don’t do many of these. Thank you. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate it.

Oct 20 • 1:47 PM EDT • Technology • bigtechnology.com

Virginia Tech, Lynchburg firm part of $73M mining initiative

Lynchburg wireless technology company, with help from Virginia Tech and others, will lead effort to develop mining technologies

Oct 20 • 1:42 PM EDT • Business • virginiabusiness.com

Oregon State expert to lead soil health workshop

Oct. 29 event free for farmers; Registration deadline Oct. 22 The registration deadline is fast approaching for a free soil health training in Aumsville, Ore. The event, held by Oregon […]

Oct 20 • 1:00 PM EDT • Health • capitalpress.com

Review: Dinner and Bowling at Kings Dining & Entertainment Lincoln Park

If you’re tired of the old date night dinner and a movie or group hang at your regular haunts, give Kings Dining & Entertainment a try! With locations in…

Oct 20 • 12:36 PM EDT • Entertainment • chicagofoodmagazine.com

Training solutions for your business

Director of Workforce Development and Continuing Education Programs Molly Salisbury joins Kerrigan to share how you can build your team's skills with training designed around your organization's needs.

Oct 20 • 12:35 PM EDT • Business • kctv5.com

Training solutions for your business

Director of Workforce Development and Continuing Education Programs Molly Salisbury joins Kerrigan to share how you can build your team's skills with training designed around your organization's needs.

Oct 20 • 12:27 PM EDT • Business • kctv5.com

Among the Academies: The Importance of Talking Politics

How often do you talk politics with friends and family? How about with colleagues? Talking politics might lead to a disagreement, but political scientist Robert Huckfeldt believes that’s a good thing. One way of explaining people’s political beliefs is to make assumptions based on their job, level of income, their religion and other facets of their lives. Huckfeldt, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of political science at UC Davis, thought people’s sources of political information mattered more.

Oct 20 • 12:00 PM EDT • Politics • ucdavis.edu

Axena Health Named Finalist for the Digital Health Hub Foundation - Digital Health & AI Awards 2026 at HLTH

NEWTON, Mass., October 20, 2026--Axena Health, Inc. (Axena Health), a women’s health company redefining the standard of care for pelvic health conditions through clinically proven, non-invasive treatments, today announced it has been named a finalist for the Digital Health Hub Foundation – Digital Health & AI Awards 2026 at HLTH. Selected from a pool of more than 1,300 participating companies across all tracks and categories, Axena Health is recognized in the Best in Class Track for Women’s and

Oct 20 • 11:59 AM EDT • Health • finance.yahoo.com

Walmart and Sam’s Club combine plus memberships into one fee

Walmart and Sam’s Club are combining memberships into one fee of $120 annually or $10 per month beginning Oct. 20. This is the first time the two business segments have...

Oct 20 • 11:33 AM EDT • Business • talkbusiness.net

USMNT announces December training camp, friendly vs. Jamaica

Oct 20 • 10:58 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

'Yaga' isn't the show Hudson Williams fans want it to be

Hudson Williams (of "Heated Rivalry," of course!) stars in this folklore reimagining.

Oct 20 • 10:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • mashable.com

Making Science Appoints AdTech Pioneer Sharon Park as US Managing Director

Appointment coincides with Deborah Slabodsky, ex-Google Head of Measurement for Latam, joining as Making Science Deepens America’s Footprint.

Oct 20 • 9:17 AM EDT • Science • einpresswire.com

Alberta rejects a move toward independence from Canada

With more than 1.5 million votes counted, 76% supported remaining in Canada

Oct 20 • 9:12 AM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com

JMU Military Science program prepares future military leaders

JMU’s Army ROTC program combines rigorous training, hands-on leadership development, and strong alumni support to prepare cadets for success as future military officers.

Oct 20 • 8:55 AM EDT • Science • jmu.edu

AI agents are joining the workforce, so it’s time to rethink the business plan

Once agents take over the grunt work, ask what your team could finally tackle, because adopting AI alone won’t set you apart from competitors.

Oct 20 • 8:00 AM EDT • Business • cio.com

'DWTS' Dedication Night: What each couple will dance to Tuesday night

Dancing with the Stars returns Tuesday night, with the 10 remaining couples participating in the always emotional Dedication Night. The evening allows the celebrity dancers to perform for someone or something important to them, often featuring guest appearances.

Oct 20 • 7:51 AM EDT • Entertainment • bellinghamherald.com

San Marcos relaunches support program for local businesses

The city of San Marcos re-launched its SMTX BOOST program to provide local small businesses with free training, coaching and resources.

Oct 20 • 7:00 AM EDT • Business • communityimpact.com

Walmart rolls out new bundle combining Walmart+, Sam’s Club Plus

Walmart shoppers can now get Walmart+ and Sam’s Club Plus together for $120 a year, nearly $100 less than buying both memberships separately.

Oct 20 • 6:01 AM EDT • Business • foxbusiness.com

Democrats Demand Tougher Standards for Companies Running Medicaid Systems

A year after launching an inquiry into companies, including Deloitte, that receive billions in taxpayer dollars to build complex computer systems determining Medicaid eligibility, senators are urging the federal government to impose stricter rules.

Oct 20 • 5:01 AM EDT • Health • kffhealthnews.org

Do Democrats have inflated expectations for the midterms? Examining the case

Democrats are hungry for a blue wave in the November election, and a series of recent polls has them thinking they could pull off victories in some deeply red territory that would have seemed unthinkable a few months ago.

Oct 20 • 4:00 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

How Rutgers Is Training Tomorrow’s Public Health Heroes

Since its launch in 2024, the Rutgers Health Service Corps has connected students with faculty and staff to improve population health outcomes throughout New Jersey

Oct 20 • 3:40 AM EDT • Health • newswise.com

Calcium-rich whey permeate improves bone health in postmenopausal women, study finds

AFI AFI COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Oct. 20, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Twice-daily supplementation with calcium-rich whey permeate supports the maintenance of bone mineral density in postmenopausal women, according to a 12-month clinical study.[1] Declining oestrogen levels during menopause can accelerate bone loss and reduce bone mineral density, increasing osteoporosis risk. The findings come from the RENEW project, a research collaboration investigating how calcium-rich permeate from whey production

Oct 20 • 2:00 AM EDT • Health • finance.yahoo.com

Challenging creation of a ‘vaccine injury clinic,’ NIH research scientists rebuke Kennedy for politicizing and undermining science

The board that oversees the National Institutes of Health’s research hospital has publicly rebuked Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., voting

Oct 20 • 12:05 AM EDT • Science • geneticliteracyproject.org

FNCS Solos Last Chance Qualifier in NA West: Session 1

Keep your FNCS Solos journey alive in the Last Chance Qualifier! LCQ Round 1 is open to eligible players who participated in an FNCS Solos Qualifier Round 1 session but have not already advanced to the LCQ Final or the FNCS Solos Finals. Players will compete in a single three-hour session with up to 11 matches. After the session concludes, the top 70 players in each region will advance to the LCQ Final. The LCQ Final lasts approximately two and a half hours and features up to five matches. Every match provides a direct path to the Finals: the player who earns the Victory Royale will receive 1,000 points and immediately qualify for the FNCS Solos Finals. Once qualified through a Victory Royale, that player may not compete in any remaining LCQ Final matches. After the LCQ Final concludes, the next 17 highest-scoring players who have not earned a Victory Royale will also advance to the FNCS Solos Finals. This is your last chance to secure a spot—good luck and have fun!

Oct 19 • 9:00 PM EDT • Technology • fortnitetracker.com

'People will die because of this': health care advocates discuss new federal work requirements for Medicaid

Under the changes, which will take effect on Jan. 1, 2027, HUSKY D recipients must document at least 80 hours of work, education and job training or community service each month to maintain their coverage.

Oct 19 • 8:02 PM EDT • Health • theday.com

Tuskegee University Targets First Aviation Science Cohort Graduation in May 2027

Alabama, USA – Tuskegee University, a historically Black university operating an FAA-certificated...

Oct 19 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • afm.aero

Republicans pull funding in Ohio’s 1st District as race shifts toward Democrats

The district was once considered one of the most competitive in the country, with both parties viewing it as key to maintaining control of the House.

Oct 19 • 5:15 PM EDT • Politics • spectrumnews1.com

Paid training program helping to fill Rutland healthcare worker gaps

A new paid training program in Rutland is helping people become medical assistants while addressing the region’s shortage of entry-level healthcare workers.

Oct 19 • 5:01 PM EDT • Health • wcax.com

Spotify introduces QR code checks for Family plans, missing verification could mean a year-long ban

Spotify is tightening household checks for its Premium Family plan with time-sensitive QR codes, and members who miss the seven-day verification window could face a 12-month restriction on joining another Family plan.

Oct 19 • 3:04 PM EDT • Technology • firstpost.com

Why Thinking About Divorce Is Actually Good for Your Marriage, According to Science

Researchers say imagining life without your spouse can sometimes serve as a wake-up call to address problems before they get worse.

Oct 19 • 11:15 AM EDT • Science • vice.com

Verily Health to Integrate PacBio HiFi Sequencing With Data Platform

The multi-year collaboration will link PacBio sequencing workflows to Verily Pre to support biomedical research and AI model training.

Oct 19 • 10:06 AM EDT • Health • genomeweb.com

New UI clinic pilots exercise treatments to improve health of cancer patients, survivors

A new exercise oncology research clinic at the University of Iowa is helping people dealing with cancer and its aftermath build back strength and trust in their bodies through exercise training.

Oct 19 • 9:39 AM EDT • Health • kcrg.com

Liverpool Reportedly Out: Chelsea Target ‘Dead Set’ on Joining Blues

Despite it being October, the transfer mill never truly stops spinning with clubs seemingly already lining up their business for January and beyond. Liverpool have started their season under Andoni Iraola fairly well, new reports indicate they won't look to strengthen certain areas in the winter window, which could open the door for Chelsea to …

Oct 19 • 9:02 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Your Plex Server Could Be Mining Crypto for Hackers

Remote code execution is now available on non-updated Plex servers.

Oct 19 • 9:00 AM EDT • Technology • gizmodo.com

Luxury Entertainment Trends in 2026 That Are Redefining Travel

Luxury in 2026 is about more than five-star hotels and extravagant amenities. Discover how private escapes, immersive dining, wellness experiences and personalized hospitality are changing the way we travel.

Oct 19 • 8:42 AM EDT • Entertainment • finehomesandliving.com

Travel, Entertainment, and Freestanding Dining Contribute $1,089 Billion to Growth in the Food Away From Home

The Business Research Company’s Food Away From Home Global Market Report 2026 – Market Size, Trends, And Forecast 2026-2035

Oct 19 • 8:21 AM EDT • Entertainment • einnews.com

Windows 11 runs faster when you disable these 5 Microsoft apps

Stop Microsoft bloatware from quietly draining your system memory

Oct 19 • 8:00 AM EDT • Technology • howtogeek.com

Scientists discover why some people still can’t taste food after COVID-19

Scientists have uncovered a possible explanation for why some people struggle to taste food more than a year after recovering from COVID-19. By examining taste buds from patients with lingering symptoms, researchers discovered molecular abnormalities that weaken the signals responsible for detecting sweet, bitter, and savory flavors.

Oct 19 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Rural medical training is key to stronger health care in First Nations communities

Training doctors in rural and remote communities and embedding First Nations knowledge and leadership in medical education could be key to strengthening health care access, building a sustainable workforce ...

Oct 19 • 7:40 AM EDT • Health • medicalxpress.com

How Texas officials try to find poll workers for elections

Counties and political parties are using personal appeals, training and college internships to find people who can serve as poll workers and election judges to make sure voting runs smoothly.

Oct 19 • 6:30 AM EDT • Politics • dallasnews.com

HCA Healthcare opens clinical training center in Gainesville

New facility will support nursing and physician education at six North Florida hospitals.

Oct 19 • 6:00 AM EDT • Health • mainstreetdailynews.com

Best Bill Pay Software for Small Business (2026): Melio Selected by Better Business Advice for Streamlining Vendor Payments

Better Business Advice has published a new review of bill pay software for small businesses, selecting Melio for streamlining vendor payments through a centralized accounts payable workflow.

Oct 19 • 6:00 AM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com

Amazon's $220 billion AI bet tests the limits of its empire

Amazon's $220 billion AI buildout is draining cash as power shortages, costly Nvidia servers, and construction challenges pile up.

Oct 19 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Kentucky Geological Survey to host annual earth science open house

The Kentucky Geological Survey (KGS) at the University of Kentucky will host its 26th annual open house 5:30-7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 21, in and around the Mining and Mineral Resources Building on the UK campus, 310 Columbia Ave.

Oct 19 • 4:00 AM EDT • Science • uknow.uky.edu

Executives from finance, healthcare and energy will explore where quantum could help businesses.

Only approved guests may attend; roundtables will cover combining quantum and AI, security readiness and adoption policies at the Nov. 3 London forum.

Oct 19 • 12:00 AM EDT • Business • stocktitan.net

Fact or fiction? Examining the claims behind North Carolina political ads

As Election Day approaches, political ads across North Carolina are making claims about candidates’ past. The Chronicle examines the claims and the context behind them.

Oct 18 • 11:49 PM EDT • Politics • dukechronicle.com

Burnham warns of Neets-fuelled 'economic catastrophe and moral failure'

The UK faces "economic catastrophe" with one million young people not in work or training, the prime minister says.

Oct 18 • 9:40 PM EDT • Politics • bbc.com

As Michigan flu vaccinations drop, health risks increase

LANSING – Flu season is returning to Michigan as declining vaccination rates have become an important public health concern. Annual vaccinations help protect individuals from serious illness and reduce the risk of complications that can lead to hospitalization and death, medical experts say. However, fewer Michigan residents have been receiving flu vaccines in recent years, […]

Oct 18 • 8:00 PM EDT • Health • miningjournal.net

QED Science adds preprint scoring to research discovery | ETIH EdTech News

QED Science has introduced Insights Feed, combining personalized research recommendations across 250 life science subfields with quality scores for selected preprints. ETIH’s edtech news coverage examines the tool’s features, use of unpublished work and limits of the launch claims.

Oct 18 • 7:15 PM EDT • Science • edtechinnovationhub.com

Choose Your Own Doomsday: Select from These, Scientists Say

In one scenario based on a sci-fi movie, something called “The Shimmer is interfering with the fundamental patterns of life, redefining evolutionary code.”

Oct 18 • 6:06 PM EDT • Science • scienceandculture.com

Revenue And Earnings Growth Could Be A Game Changer For agilon health (AGL)

agilon health has reported strong annual revenue and earnings growth from its model of partnering with primary care physicians to deliver value-based care for Medicare patients through long-term, globally capitated contracts. The combination of accelerating financial performance and the scaling of its value-based primary care network indicates that agilon health is gaining share where payers and physicians seek partners willing to take on population-level risk. We will now look at how agilon...

Oct 18 • 5:31 PM EDT • Health • simplywall.st

Trust In Science Falls Fastest Among Those Left Behind

Poor access to healthcare, limited local influence over research priorities, and an unequal distribution of scientific benefits are undermining public

Oct 18 • 5:06 PM EDT • Science • eurasiareview.com

CNY state lawmakers call for a ‘reimagining’ of mental health services

Some Central New York lawmakers are calling for significant changes in how the state addresses what they are calling a “mental health crisis.”

Oct 18 • 1:51 PM EDT • Health • wrvo.org

Slotkin wants GOP prosecutions to deter young people from Trump administration jobs

Elissa Slotkin said she wants young people to fear legal problems before joining the Trump administration, sparking fierce online backlash..

Oct 18 • 1:04 PM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

Sizzle Dining exceeds 100,000-meal goal in milestone 10th year

Sizzle Dining, Southwest Florida's premier culinary fundraiser, surpassed its ambitious goal of selling 100,000 meals during its monthlong dining event, generating a record $105,655 donation for Blessings in a Backpack

Oct 18 • 1:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • floridaweekly.com

Joe Manganiello reveals what he said that caused 13-year estrangement from father

Joe Manganiello wrote about the ups and downs with his father in his new memoir, ‘Bloodlines,’ explaining why they’ve been estranged for more than a decade.

Oct 18 • 8:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

Meta's giant data center is creating a new path to $30-an-hour jobs

A community college in Louisiana is training students to work at Meta's giant new AI data center.

Oct 18 • 5:04 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

A Deep-Sea Mining Trial Rapidly Threw The Seafloor Ecosystem Off Kilter

Even short-term disturbance has significant impacts.

Oct 18 • 4:00 AM EDT • Science • yahoo.com

Riot Games reveals Agent 31 Hush as VALORANT’s new Duelist

Riot Games has unveiled Hush as the latest Duelist joining VALORANT’s agent roster. The publisher will reveal her cinematic trailer during the VALORANT Champions Shanghai Grand Final day.

Oct 18 • 2:00 AM EDT • Technology • sheepesports.com

Ohio State With Season-Defining Victory, But At What Cost?

Ohio State will be without starting quarterback Julian Sayin after he was injured in a big win over Indiana. Ohio […]

Oct 18 • 1:34 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Oregon’s top wide receiver out vs. Nebraska

Evan Stewart is set to miss the matchup with the Cornhuskers, joining teammate Jeremiah McClellan on the injury report.

Oct 17 • 9:44 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Scaler Wave (@scalerwave)

How’s that “science” workin’ out for ya? -“Outside of running, Yoo was a graduate student at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, known as KAIST, where she researched AI semiconductors. She shared her training and race results online and built an audience of thousands who admired how she balanced demanding research with serious endurance running. In March, she completed the full Seoul Marathon in 2 hours, 56 minutes and 32 seconds, finishing under the three-hour mark. No cause of death has been made public.” Odd….

Oct 17 • 4:27 PM EDT • Science • substack.com

Miley Cyrus makes a comeback of sorts at the Hollywood Bowl

The musician and actor played her first full headlining show in years Friday night at the Hollywood Bowl.

Oct 17 • 4:03 PM EDT • Entertainment • latimes.com

Jenny McCarthy says A-lister tried recruiting her, recalls 'Scientology stare'

Jenny McCarthy says Tom Cruise once attempted to recruit her into joining the Church of Scientology.

Oct 17 • 12:36 PM EDT • Entertainment • centraloregondaily.com

AHN takes lifesaving training into western Pennsylvania classrooms

AHN's new Building Bridges program teaches students CPR, Narcan use and other lifesaving skills while introducing health care careers.

Oct 17 • 12:03 PM EDT • Health • phillyburbs.com

AHN takes lifesaving training into western Pennsylvania classrooms

AHN's new Building Bridges program teaches students CPR, Narcan use and other lifesaving skills while introducing health care careers.

Oct 17 • 12:03 PM EDT • Health • usatoday.com

UT System's $60 million Laredo Center expansion begins

UT System officials broke ground on a new Laredo Center building that will expand educational access, research opportunities and health care training.

Oct 17 • 12:02 PM EDT • Science • lmtonline.com

When does ‘Dexter: Resurrection’ season 2 premiere? Everything we know about the new killers

Michael C. Hall dodges old allies and faces new killer foes in ‘Dexter: Resurrection’ season 2, premiering on Paramount+ very soon. Here’s everything you need to know, including who’s joining the cast and who’s returning.

Oct 17 • 12:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

Global survey links financial hardship to lower trust in science

Poor access to health care, limited local influence over research priorities and an unequal distribution of scientific benefits are undermining public confidence in science, experts warn, following the ...

Oct 17 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • phys.org

Congressional Staff Open Letters Containing Suspicious Substances

The incidents, the first of which was reported on Thursday, came as election officials have reported a growing number of threats directed at them.

Oct 16 • 10:00 PM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

M42 CEO on AI, genomics and the future of healthcare

M42 Group CEO Dimitris Moulavasilis discusses how the Abu Dhabi-based healthcare company is combining artificial intelligence, genomics and clinical services to reshape healthcare. He explores the group’s international expansion, the Emirati Genome Programme and the potential for technology to help doctors identify health risks earlier and move healthcare towards prevention rather than treatment.

Oct 16 • 10:00 PM EDT • Health • cnbc.com

Real Betis vs Barcelona, La Liga: Preview

A brutal (and very entertaining) test

Oct 16 • 9:00 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Ketchikan nonprofit launches initiative to strengthen health advocacy for local Filipino families

The Ketchikan Wellness Coalition has been awarded a grant to expand health advocacy for Filipino families in Ketchikan and on Prince of Wales Island. The initiative is called Malasakit Matters. Malasakit is a Tagalog concept that means to have deep compassion and ownership for someone else’s wellbeing. The program is aimed at training Filipino youth […]

Oct 16 • 8:18 PM EDT • Health • krbd.org

Workshop provides training to start and grow small businesses

SALISBURY — Small business entrepreneurs were invited to attend a workshop to help them start or grow their businesses. Rowan-Cabarrus Community College served as the sponsor of the free workshop, […]

Oct 16 • 7:30 PM EDT • Business • salisburypost.com

Memorial honors North Kingstown officer as family encourages mental health conversations

A new memorial honors a North Kingstown police officer who died by suicide months after joining the department.

Oct 16 • 6:00 PM EDT • Health • turnto10.com

Super Smash Bros. Player Mew2King Banned From Tournament After Bug Bites Spark Health Concerns

Professional Super Smash Bros. player Jason ‘Mew2King’ Zimmerman has been banned from a competitive tournament after posting photos of his concerning skin condition and complaining of a bug infestation in his home.

Oct 16 • 5:54 PM EDT • Health • ign.com

Super Smash Bros. Player Mew2King Banned From Tournament After Bug Bites Spark Health Concerns

Professional Super Smash Bros. player Jason ‘Mew2King’ Zimmerman has been banned from a competitive tournament after posting photos of his concerning skin condition and complaining of a bug infestation in his home.

Oct 16 • 5:54 PM EDT • Technology • ign.com

Staff Turnover and Missing Funds: A Tumultuous Week at Trump’s White House

With just over two weeks remaining before the midterm elections, things inside the White House are turbulent. Even though President Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot, he is top of mind for many as they head to the polls. Republicans across the country are already working to persuade voters not to ...

Oct 16 • 5:10 PM EDT • Politics • usnews.com

Suspicious powder sent to Rep. Ritchie Torres’ Bronx office in latest mail scare targeting New York Democratic pols

An envelope containing a suspicious substance prompted a hazardous materials response at U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres' Bronx district office Friday afternoon,

Oct 16 • 4:10 PM EDT • Politics • amny.com

'The Wiz' Eases on Down the Road to Eisenhower Auditorium

The hit Broadway musical “The Wiz” will bring its reimagining of “The Wizard of Oz” to Penn State next week, featuring performers from “American Idol” and

Oct 16 • 3:35 PM EDT • Entertainment • statecollege.com

Meta Terms Taking Effect Oct. 30 Let It Scrape Business Websites for AI Training

Meta's updated commercial terms, effective October 30, let it crawl websites tied to business accounts and use the content to train AI…

Oct 16 • 12:51 PM EDT • Business • northeasttimes.com

Candace Cameron Bure declined to return to ‘The View’ for season 30

Candace Cameron Bure says ‘The View’ asked her to return for season 30, with the ‘Full House’ and ‘Special Forces’ star explaining to EW why she declined.

Oct 16 • 12:38 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

Berlin's High-End KaDeWe Store Opens Dedicated Health Hub

KaDeWe department store dedicates 2,000 square meters to training, recovery and exclusive fitness brands and includes biohacking and Lagree studio.

Oct 16 • 12:15 PM EDT • Health • wwd.com

Napoli must separate McTominay contract negotiations from their midfield plan

Scott McTominay’s reported contract discussions have brought Napoli’s approach to retaining important players back into focus.The immediate temptation is to read every negotiating position as a pr...

Oct 16 • 11:10 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Nebraska-Oregon Preview: Why the Huskers Must Win Early

Oregon’s quarterback uncertainty and vulnerable early-down defense give Nebraska a path to bowl eligibility and a defining win under Matt Rhule.

Oct 16 • 10:28 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Detroit Lions Trade Target Gaining Steam as Deadline Approaches

Detroit Lions trade speculation surrounding Zyon McCollum is growing. A new assessment reveals what Tampa Bay might demand before November 10.

Oct 16 • 9:51 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Plague is stoppable. The next health threat may not be.

The word plague is scary. Centuries ago, the Black Death killed tens of millions of people and changed the course of history. Plague still kills people around the world, and the word still evokes catastrophe. New fears of plague surfaced on October 2, when a lab worker in Irkutsk, Russia, died of pneumonia. Reports suggested that she may have contracted plague through a laboratory exposure. Understandably, people were alarmed. On October 7, the World Health Organization called for the Russian Federation to be transparent about what it knew. WHO issued an update on October 10. Russian authorities told WHO that testing did not identify plague and that investigations found no laboratory release. WHO said confidence in its risk assessment remained limited and that further clinical, epidemiological, and laboratory information was needed. The cause of the woman’s illness remains unknown, and WHO says a laboratory-associated exposure cannot be excluded. As I explained in a recent interview, this incident is very unlikely to lead to a pandemic. Plague is still active, including in the U.S., which sees a handful of cases each year. But it is a disease we can prevent and treat. Plague doesn’t spread readily, and it responds to antibiotics. The standard response—isolate the patient, trace contacts, and administer antibiotics and monitor for symptoms among contacts for seven days—works. We have even planned for antibiotic-resistant plague. At CDC, we developed a playbook for antibiotic-resistant plague and ran exercises on how to find and stop it. CDC guidance anticipates engineered resistance and recommends two different classes of antibiotics if there’s reason to suspect it. There is no evidence that resistance—or even confirmed plague—is involved in this incident. We have thought through how to address plague, but we’re not ready for the next major health threat that emerges from a lab or from animal spillover to humans. What should concern people is how little stands between the world and the next pathogen to get loose. Since peak COVID, epidemic preparedness has fallen off the political agenda, but the risk is greater than ever. More labs handle dangerous pathogens with more ways to make those pathogens deadlier, and more people live and work in close contact with animals. There are actions we can take now: We need better lab safety in every country. The number of labs that work with dangerous pathogens has increased worldwide over two decades, but there’s no enforceable international standard and no inspection regime; the Biological Weapons Convention, fifty years on, still has no verification mechanism. Labs that study dangerous germs need strong safety systems, training, and oversight. We need to reduce spillover events. Three in four emerging human infections start in animals, and there’s a lot we can do to reduce spillover risk, but the world is doing very little of it. Live-animal markets are one place to act. For instance, closing live-bird markets helped control H7N9 influenza in China. Reducing opportunities for people to encounter infected animals can prevent infections before they become outbreaks. In The Formula for Better Health, which is now out in paperback along with the hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook versions, I argue that labs do too many risky experiments with too many dangerous pathogens in too many institutions, and that every experiment should first answer one basic question: Is the likely benefit greater than the risk? Spillover risk can also be reduced: In the book, I discuss how Brazil cut its deforestation rate by 70% from 2004 to 2012 while increasing agricultural production and reducing risky contact between people and forest animals. We need faster detection and response. Delay costs lives. Strong surveillance, good labs, and trained responders can turn a single case into a small cluster of infections instead of an epidemic. Resolve to Save Lives has worked for nearly a decade to help countries find and stop outbreaks faster. The 7-1-7 target, which Resolve to Save Lives developed with partners in Uganda and elsewhere, provides a clear standard: detect within 7 days, notify within 1 day and complete all essential early response actions within 7 days. In Uganda’s Kasese district, for example, a review of a measles outbreak using 7-1-7 identified shortages of accessible funds, fuel, and vehicles that delayed the response. District leaders established funds they could access quickly. When, a few months later, the Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever appeared, the district detected it in three days, notified authorities in one, and mounted an effective response in two. Only one case was confirmed, and the patient survived. Because funds were available before the emergency, authorities were prepared and able to act. This kind of preparation can’t wait until the next crisis begins. Plague is an old disease we that know how to stop. The next threat may be harder to recognize, harder to treat, and easier to spread. Safer labs, less risk of spillover, and faster outbreak detection and response need sustained investment now, while we still have time to prevent the next emergency. Share

Oct 16 • 8:57 AM EDT • Health • tomfrieden.substack.com