SCROLL NEWS / DISCOVERY
Search headlines
Find the stories shaping the conversation.
Results for " much " 3,275 found 🔀 AI-powered Shuffle
A judge ruled Brendan Sorsby can play for Texas Tech after gambling on his own teams. It’s the latest college sports stunner
This is how sports betting and athletes have intersected for much of the past six months.
Apple Announces macOS Golden Gate
Apple today announced that macOS 27 is named macOS Golden Gate. macOS Golden Gate has some Liquid Glass design changes. For example, apps now have a unified toolbar at the top, and the sidebar now expands to the edge of the window. Much like Mac OS X Snow Leopard in 2009, Apple said it focused on improving macOS's performance and dozens of underlying technologies.
Should personal scandals matter at the ballot box?
How much do democrats really care about questions of character for potential political leaders? And in an era of hyper-polarization… has the calculus changed?
Israel, Ireland, and the uneasy politics of international soccer
“Some people believe football [soccer] is a matter of life and death… I can assure you it is much more important than that.”
FIFA World Cup 2026 bold predictions
The 2026 FIFA World Cup starts on Thursday. Running from June 11th to July 19th, the much-anticipated tournament will bring exciting matches in the world’s sport. 48 teams, through 104 fixtures, will give their all to achieve world glory. Argentina…
Planet nine mystery deepens as new discovery challenges hidden planet theory
Astronomers have spent years searching for a possible hidden giant planet far beyond Neptune. Unusual orbits among distant Kuiper Belt objects have fueled the Planet Nine theory, but recent discoveries are challenging the idea by showing more stable motion than expected. If Planet Nine exists, it may be much farther away than originally thought.
An incredible sports week ahead, plus RIP Stacey King
The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox. Good morning! What a week ahead. Coming up: 🫨 MSG frenzy 🎾 Zverev’s breakthrough 🙏 Beloved broadcaster dies To prepare for this week, I kept looking at the calendar and vacillating between stressed and pumped. Wow, there are so many big games. Amazing, right? But also … so much to care about. Yay? So this might be more of a personal exercise, but I think it can benefit us all. A guidebook to the week ahead, which is one of the most...
What North Texas health leaders do isn’t changing for FIFA World Cup, but how they do it is
Soccer fans from around the world will be coming to North Texas this month for the FIFA World Cup. Local health leaders have been preparing for the influx of people for about a year and a half. Hospital and public health officials say what they’re doing hasn’t changed much, but how they do it has.
Seven ways to trick yourself into eating better
We might believe we are in control of what we choose to eat, but our senses are constantly manipulating what we buy and how much we consume. Here's how to turn them to your advantage.
The Guy Who May Have Finally Fixed Siri Is Reportedly Not Getting Much Credit
Despite all his hard work, Mike Rockwell is reportedly not getting a moment in the spotlight.
New Mayo–Microsoft collaboration may mean much for AI in healthcare
When Mayo Clinic and Microsoft announced last week that they’re partnering to develop a frontier AI model for healthcare, observers could see where Mayo’s expertise in advanced digital medicine would interest Microsoft. The Big Tech behemoth has not been coy about its healthcare ambitions.
‘Strength doesn’t mean silence’: Men talk mental health at Jacksonville field day
On the surface, it looked like a day of friendly competition, laughter, and games. But organizers say a Men’s Mental Health Awareness Field Day held in Jacksonville was built around a much deeper mission: breaking the silence surrounding men’s mental health.
5 health risks from consuming too much protein
Most Americans eat more protein than they need. We asked experts what can happen if people have too much of a good thing.
How PE Guy became a million-dollar business in just a year
Johnny Hilbrant's joke parodying annoying finance bros has become a hit. They would be shocked by how much he makes off of "silly little skits."
Bumblebees have tiny brains but they can solve problems like chimps and elephants
New research suggests the fuzzy insects may be capable of spontaneously solving problems the way animals with much larger brains do.
World Ocean Day Celebration at Seacoast Science Center
For Seacoast Science Center, this year marks a remarkable 35 years of providing outstanding coastal and ocean education at Odiorne Point State Park along the New Hampshire seacoast! World Ocean Day, a global celebration that honors our one shared ocean, presents the perfect opportunity for us to invite our community to come together and celebrate the ocean that connects us all.On June 20th, the Center will host its flagship World Ocean Day celebration from 10 AM to 2 PM. Enjoy hands-on games, educational activities, naturalist-led tide pooling sessions, music, and much more! You’ll also have the opportunity to meet local scientists, divers, artists, and conservationists who are dedicated to safeguarding our one world ocean. See the schedule and the organizations joining us on our event web page: https://www.seacoastsciencecenter.org/world-ocean-dayWe can’t wait to see you by the coast for learning, discovery, and plenty of fun, all aimed at inspiring the conservation of our Blue Planet!
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation Tweaks Mini-Games But Square Enix Says It Would Never Reduce Them
Square Enix has confirmed it tweaked its approach to mini-games for Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, but there are some things it won't change "no matter how much feedback we receive."
Was this the season that got away for Glasgow Warriors?
Surrendering a 21-3 lead to the Bulls, when a United Rugby Championship final spot was seemingly within their grasp, was indicative of a season that promised so much and failed to deliver for Glasgow Warriors. When referee Andrew Brace headed to the Bulls posts to award Glasgow a penalty try after the South Africans had illegally halted a maul headed for their line, it looked like the Scots were about to make a statement of intent. At that stage, with 25 minutes on the clock and an 18-point lead, it looked like the Warriors were going to win at a canter.
Business group: German MPs should cancel summer recess to pass reforms
The Family Business Association believes the Bundestag, Germany's lower house of parliament, should cancel this year’s summer recess in order to discuss and adopt much-needed reforms. “Under no circum...
I love luxury hotels, but my sister took me to an adult summer camp
I went to an adult summer camp with my sister. I didn't miss the amenities I'm used to in luxury travel, and was surprised by how much I loved it.
This Week in Science: Iceman Microbes, Bawdy Birds, And Much More!
Our weekly science news roundup.
How the Amish think about vaccines, health care costs, and much more
There may be nearly 2 million Amish Americans by 2075. That has large public health implications.
How The Mixed Analyst Calls Are Reframing The Cardinal Health (CAH) Investment Story
Cardinal Health is back in focus as fresh Street research reshapes the price target conversation, with several firms trimming their targets while one raises its view and another starts coverage on a bullish footing. Those mixed calls reflect a split between analysts who see room for upside if execution holds and others who are more cautious about how much to pay for the stock right now. As you read on, you will see how to track these shifting views and what they might mean for your own...
Stellar Blade Follow-Up Blood Rain Announced, Trailer Has Some Eye-Opening Moments
This year’s Summer Games Fest brought a surprise in the form of a reveal of the next game from Stellar Blade developer Shift Up much sooner than. The game is Stellar Blade: Blood Rain and looks to continue on the high octane action delivered by the highly popular 2024 game. The game revealed in a...
TVLine Asks: Which Not Suitable For Work 'Ship Is Best? Did Criminal Minds Escape Confuse? Was Pop Culture Jeopardy! Semi Too Hard? And More
We tackle the biggest questions from the week in TV: Not Suitable For Work, Pop Culture Jeopardy!, Criminal Minds: Evolution, and much more.
Brand new direct-feed Elden Ring Nintendo Switch 2 footage released
After much anticipation, Elden Ring Tarnished Edition received its release date on Nintendo Switch 2 yesterday, and now we have some direct-feed footage to follow up on that. What’s interesting is how little we’ve seen of the port so far. We got the announcement trailer for the reveal of Nintendo Switch 2 exactly one year ago, but that was it....
Xbox boss Asha Sharma still can't seem to decide on a stance regarding console exclusivity
The Xbox exclusivity conversation continues, and it doesn't look like much is actually changing.
Mamdani harnesses New York Knicks run, seeking to power progressive politics
NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) is riding a wave of Knicks mania as the city’s storied basketball team makes its strongest run at an NBA championship in a generation. Much of the …
What’s new in EA Sports’ College Football 27: A new level of NIL in Dynasty Mode and more
In Dynasty Mode, players will need to manage differing school budgets and how much to pay both players and coaches.
Opinion: UFC is cutting corners
The Ultimate Fighting Championship's releases of Ketlen Vieira and Daniel Marcos show how much the UFC is struggling with finding a balance between entertainment and competition, writes Dayne Fox.
Sophie Cunningham reveals the truth about Fever’s Commissioner’s Cup payday
Indiana Fever veteran Sophie Cunningham set the record straight on how much players actually took home after winning the WNBA Commissioner's Cup.
Fmr Defense Secretary Panetta: the war in Iran ‘is very much turning into Trump’s Vietnam’
James Webb telescope detects most distant dormant black hole, invisible in all wavelengths and weighing as much as 6 billion suns
JWST found a black hole hiding in a galaxy more than 10 billion light-years away from Earth, and used a cosmic magnifying glass to determine its mass.
Christian Watson's new $110.5 million deal shows how much Packers believe in his ceiling
The Packers just gave Christian Watson a huge contract, and here's why.
A study of 8,300 older adults revealed a surprising salt habit
A large study of older adults in Brazil found that adding extra salt at the table is still a common habit, especially among men. While too much salt is linked to serious health problems and faster cognitive decline, researchers discovered that women’s salt-shaking habits were tied more closely to lifestyle and diet.
Apple to Launch New Siri in September With Help of Google, Nvidia
Apple is currently on track to launch its overhauled Siri in September, to run in part on Google’s cloud computing servers using Nvidia chips, according to people familiar with the matter. While Apple will try to run as much as possible of the new Siri on devices such as iPhones, certain parts will require more compute power and will run on Google Cloud, as The Information has previously
Senators urge quick action to halt college sports decay
Senators and college officials on Wednesday urged swift action on a bipartisan measure that aims to overhaul college athletics system they say hemorrhages money and hinders student-athletes — even as two powerful conferences said they would seek changes. During a much-anticipated Senate Commerce Committee hearing, both the bill’s authors — Chair Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and […]
How good can they be? Projecting the best- and worst-case outcomes for rookie QBs in 2026
From Fernando Mendoza's uphill climb to Drew Allar's ideal situation, the environment around each rookie QB may matter as much as the talent itself
May's top PlayStation games by copies sold
Yesterday’s State of Play gave us an idea of where PlayStation’s heading next. But we’ve had our May estimates for a couple of days now (we always update our data daily for clients), so it’s time to look at what performed best on PlayStation last month. We’ve got a new IP at the top, two evergreens doing their evergreen thing, FC26 smashing it ahead of the World Cup Plus pivot, and a quiet but promising result for Lego Batman. Let’s have a look at the state of Play…Station’s top games for May. 007 takes #001 007 First Light sold 1M copies on PS5 in May, easily making it the month’s top PS5 game by copies sold. Over 80% of those May copies were digital, which is broadly in line with where PlayStation’s digital share has settled for new releases this year. To date, 007 First Light has sold through 2.2M copies across platforms (so no unsold retail copies in that figure). The platform split is 55.1% PS5, 33.1% Steam, and 11.8% Xbox (console, Windows, and cloud combined). In gross revenue terms, 007 First Light has generated $150M. Owing to regional pricing and audience composition differences, the consoles make up a higher share of revenue than they do copies. Of the $150M, 60.5% came via PlayStation, 27.6% via Steam, and 12.9% via Xbox. Part of this is because over two-thirds of 007 First Light‘s PlayStation audience is in North America (43.4%) or Western Europe (23.2%), where local currency means the game generates more revenue per player. On Steam, under half of First Light‘s audience is from those same regions (31.8% North America, 15.1% Western Europe). As we covered in last week’s 007 Steam piece, the Steam version is pulling in higher-than-expected numbers in China, which now accounts for 17.3% of First Light‘s Steam audience. 007 is the equivalent of $44 USD in China, which is roughly 37% cheaper than the US price and about 44% cheaper than Western Europe. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe The crossover data backs up what we’ve seen all year about launch-window cohorts. 11% of PS5 players who played 007 First Light in May also played Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, which launched just a few days before. Last month was a great month for Denmark! IO Interactive is Copenhagen-based, and Lego Group is headquartered in Billund (TT Games is UK-based but produces work under Lego Group licence and direction). Speaking of which… A very blocky #2 and #3 Minecraft sold another 788K copies on PlayStation consoles last month. Business as usual, since Minecraft hasn’t sold fewer than 760K copies in a single month all year. With over 350M copies sold across all platforms, Minecraft is the best-selling game in history and one of the strongest brands in the world. Every month, a new cohort of children reaches Minecraft age, which guarantees a constant volume of new sales regardless of what the broader market is up to. The demographic refresh rate is truly impressive, with the audience renewing itself faster than it’s churning. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight shifted 757K copies on PS5 last month, bringing its lifetime total on the platform to over 800K. Across all platforms, Legacy of the Dark Knight has now passed 1.5M sold through, so PlayStation accounts for over half of the game’s players. The May crossover data for Legacy of the Dark Knight on PS5 is also useful. 27% of those players also played Fortnite, 16% Roblox, 16% FC 26, and 14% NBA 2K. That’s the household-and-family cohort showing up, plus the launch-window cohort of core gamers who buy practically everything. FC 26 gets players through the door ahead of the World Cup FC 26 sold 411K copies on PlayStation last month (90% via PS5), the fewest copies FC 26 has sold all year and down heavily from April’s 700K. Part of this dropoff is because FC 26 has been available as a PlayStation Plus monthly game since 6 May, cannibalising premium sales. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe The strategic logic is straightforward for EA, which is sacrificing premium unit sales in May to build up the player base ahead of the FIFA World Cup, which kicks off on 11 June. Obviously, a bigger player pool going into the tournament means a bigger pool of potential Ultimate Team spenders during the period when football attention is at its peak. The early returns are around what you’d expect, with 4.4M new players accessing FC 26 via PS Plus last month – a substantial new spender pool. Anecdotally, a few of my mates who were ‘’skipping FIFA and Ultimate Team this year’’, were drawn back in via PS Plus. Lo and behold, one of them is buying packs like it’s going out of fashion. Whether this is all a smart trade for EA depends entirely on the Ultimate Team conversion rate over the next six weeks. Either way, the short-term engagement impact on the game as a whole is evident. FC 26‘s MAUs hit a record 24M on PlayStation in May, up 30% from the previous record set in April. GTA V does what GTA V always does Rounding out the top five is another evergreen title. Grand Theft Auto V shifted another 387K copies on PlayStation last month. No matter what else is happening in the industry, GTA V keeps pulling players in. It’s sold another 1.8M copies on PS5 in the first half of this year alone, helping the franchise pass the 230M-sold milestone across all platforms. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe I have a theory that Minecraft and GTA V are doing the same thing at different demographic levels. Both are functioning as generational gateway games that the audience ages into faster than it ages out of. Minecraft captures kids around age 6-10, GTA V captures much of the same audience around age 12-15 (unofficially, of course). The crossover data suggests this: 40% of GTA V‘s monthly PlayStation players typically play Fortnite in any given month, while 30% play Roblox. Household accounts aside, that’s not the original GTA V audience from 2013. Of course, the under-12 audience would love to get their hands on GTA, too. It’s always been the way of things, and some parents are happy to oblige. Mine did too back in the day, and I turned out just fine. Right? Right!? Want to get your hands on our data for yourself – for free? We’re offering a free trial of our platform for games companies. Send us a message here, or reply to this email, and we’ll set you up. The last word Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover. [Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]
The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science
With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!
Wake schools hire a company to make sports sponsorship deals. Can it get much?
The Wake County school system will be guaranteed at least $100,000 a year from the agreement with National Amateur Sports.
Top 6 worries about healthcare AI among clinicians and patients in 2026
AI is now as much a part of U.S. healthcare as any other technology category in wide use across the sector. However, like no other technology, its role is “being actively shaped, not passively adopted” by clinicians and patients alike.
Why Trump’s payout fund was too much for Republicans
Of all the president’s moves, the fund is the first to prompt real GOP resistance, signaling a sharply shifting political environment.
L.A. Rep. Jimmy Gomez reportedly faces House investigation over sexual misconduct allegations
The investigation came after the New York Post reported that the five-term congressman had been spotted kissing a much younger congressional staffer from a different office in 2023.
Seahawks agree to three-year extension with pass rusher
Rush end Derick Hall has agreed to a three-year contract extension with the Seahawks that is reported to be worth as much as $46.9 million.
New College Football Playoff schedule is latest NCAA mishap
One of the hottest topics of the college football offseason continues to be the future of the College Football Playoff. Expansion has dominated much of the conversation, but scheduling has emerged as an equally important issue. On Tuesday, a new…
How Science Works
The 2nd Weather and Climate Livestream is now underway. It is organized by a group of early-career researchers concerned about declining funding for the field and eager to demonstrate how weather and climate research makes a difference in our lives. Last year’s event was a great success, drawing terrific press coverage including a piece in the NY Times. This year features a strong lineup of talks aimed at a general audience — I highly recommend tuning in. Share I gave a talk yesterday about How Science Works in Three Steps. You can see the short presentation here (I’ve appended a transcript below): And please tune into the livestream here. It runs through tomorrow at 6 pm ET. Thanks for reading The Climate Brink! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Subscribe Cleaned up transcript: Thank you, and thanks to everyone tuning in. I want to talk about something I think a lot of people don’t really understand: how science actually works. Arguments over any scientific topic — climate change, vaccines, you name it — revolve around competing claims. For climate change, the claims are: Is the Earth warming? Are humans to blame? What will the impacts be? Over the last 150 years, the scientific community has developed a remarkably robust method for sorting out which claims are true and which aren’t. That method is what I want to walk through. So how does science generate knowledge? If you ask a high schooler, they’ll give you the version they learned in ninth grade: an individual scientist forms a hypothesis, runs an experiment, and draws a conclusion. That’s more or less what happens at the individual level, though in practice it’s more iterative — you design, test, and refine all at once, landing on a slightly different idea each time until you reach a conclusion about whatever hypothesis you’ve ended up with. But this isn’t science. It’s only step one. Any individual scientist can make mistakes — scientists are human. Maybe there’s a bug in the code, maybe there’s an error in the experiment. Just because someone ran an experiment and reached a conclusion doesn’t mean it’s right, and scientists don’t treat a single result as settled truth. Step two is peer review, the first layer of quality control. The scientist writes up what they did and submits it to a journal, which sends the paper to other experts in the field. Those experts judge whether the methods are sound, whether it properly references prior work, and whether the conclusions actually follow from the data. Ask any scientist and they’ll tell you peer review is miserable — the comments come back brutal, often harsh, and you have to revise and resubmit, sometimes multiple times, before an editor finally accepts the paper. Peer review catches an immense amount of bad science, but it can’t catch all of it. Reviewers get sloppy or overworked, they miss obvious mistakes, and they can’t catch hidden errors — a bug in the code, a misread instrument. So a peer-reviewed paper making it into a journal doesn’t mean the paper is right. Nobody treats a single paper as the final word. That’s where step three comes in: the crucible of science. Important results get retested by the broader community. If you publish something interesting, it gets dissected. Sometimes people try to reproduce your work directly but more often they test its implications. If someone claims X is true, and that implies that Y is also true, then scientists will go check Y. If a claim survives this gauntlet long enough, it becomes accepted. That’s how we generate knowledge. Let me give an example: the ozone hole. In 1985 — and I doubt many people watching were around then, but I remember it well — Joe Farman and his colleagues published observations from Antarctica showing that a huge chunk of ozone was disappearing every year. This was shocking because most atmospheric chemists had expected ozone loss to occur at mid-latitudes and high altitudes, not over the South Pole. When scientists see something they don’t understand, they rush to explain it, and several competing hypotheses quickly appeared in the peer-reviewed literature. One pointed to chlorine chemistry from chlorofluorocarbons. A second blamed nitrogen chemistry, possibly driven by solar proton events — meaning the sun was responsible. A third argued it wasn’t chemistry at all but dynamics: winds were carrying naturally low-ozone air from the lower atmosphere up into the stratosphere. Then the community went to work testing which theory could survive the crucible. Aircraft flew into the ozone hole and found no nitrogen, ruling out the nitrogen theory. Measurements showed the air in the polar vortex was descending, not rising — which would bring high-ozone air down, eliminating the dynamics theory. Meanwhile, those same flights measured enormous amounts of chlorine, strongly correlated with exactly the regions where ozone was being destroyed. That became known as the “smoking gun” paper, and it established that chlorine chemistry was the cause. Through this process, a consensus emerged. And it’s worth being clear that this consensus is organic. There’s no vote, no poll, no meeting where it gets decided. Scientists go to conferences, talk to one another, and independently arrived at the same answer. It’s the ultimate free market of ideas. After the consensus was established, the peer-reviewed literature doesn’t even mention the rival theories — it simply takes chlorine chemistry as given. That’s what a consensus looks like. It doesn’t mean every single scientist agrees, but it does mean there’s no longer any legitimate debate. So where can you see what scientists actually think? It’s all in the peer-reviewed literature, which contains the entire historical record of the argument: the discovery, the competing theories, the debate, the testing, and finally the community coalescing around one answer. But there’s a lot of room for misrepresentation. You can dig up an old paper claiming the ozone hole was caused by dynamics and wave it around as if there still was a debate about the cause of the ozone hole — without mentioning that the idea was disproven long ago and that even its own authors no longer believe it. There’s a bigger problem, though: the peer-reviewed literature is written in a language I call “nerd.” It’s extremely hard to read — honestly, some of it is hard for me to follow. It takes graduate students years to work through the literature in a single field, so we can’t expect policymakers or ordinary people to do it. This is where scientific assessments come in. The most famous is the IPCC — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The job of an assessment is to read and summarize the peer-reviewed literature, synthesizing what’s settled, what’s been disproven, and what remains genuinely debated. To ensure the assessments accurately summarize the peer-reviewed literature, assessments are written by large teams, which are far less prone to bias than individuals and which dilute the influence of any one scientist with an axe to grind. The teams are deliberately assembled to avoid stacking the deck, and the reports themselves go through multiple rounds of peer review. That rigorous process is exactly why you can trust them and why people consider the IPCC to be the gold standard of what we know about the climate system. An assessment produced through a different process may well not be credible. You can even watch the consensus evolve across assessments. Take the attribution of warming. The 1990 IPCC report said the observed warming was broadly consistent with model predictions but also comparable to natural variability — in other words, we don’t know whether humans are responsible. By 1995, it concluded that the balance of evidence suggested a discernible human influence — a sentence only a committee could write, and one that barely commits to anything. By 2001, most of the warming over the previous 50 years was judged “likely” due to greenhouse gases; by 2007, “very likely”; by 2013, “extremely likely.” The 2023 report says essentially the same as 2013 — there’s not much stronger language available. So, to wrap up: science is our ultimate tool for deciphering the universe — the most successful method we’ve ever developed for determining what’s true and what isn’t. Our understanding is written into the peer-reviewed literature, so if you want to know what scientists think, that’s where to look. And for those of us who don’t speak nerd, scientific assessments are the Rosetta Stone — they translate nerd into English. Let me open the floor to questions. Thank you.
The work you can't always see: Beer is political, part 2
Recently I published a piece about beer, politics, and the question of who speaks up and who doesn’t. I meant every word of it. I still do. And then my inbox opened up. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe I’ve been writing about beer since 2014. For most of that time, I kept things deliberately light — taproom profiles, new releases, the people behind the pints. Gradually, over years of building this thing, you gave me something I didn’t expect: permission. Permission to go deeper. To say what I actually saw in this industry and what I actually believed about it. That trust isn’t something I take lightly. It’s why that piece existed at all, and it’s why this one does too. I’m not walking anything back. But I want to go further. In that piece, I wrote that beer has never existed outside the system. That immigration policy affects who staffs breweries and harvests ingredients. That labor policy affects taproom workers. That civil rights policy affects who feels safe walking into a taproom. That “beer does not exist in a vacuum. The idea that it does is comforting. It is also false.” I believe that as much now as I did when I wrote it. But one idea came back at me, in different forms, over and over (from reader emails, comments, and conversations): that beer itself isn’t political — that it only becomes political when someone decides to make it that way. That what we’re really seeing is a choice by individuals to inject division into something that doesn’t inherently require it. It’s a comforting idea. It’s also wrong — and I think it’s worth being precise about why. That framing assumes that breweries operate outside the conditions shaping everything else. That politics is something you choose to bring into a room that was, until then, clean and neutral. That if you stay quiet, you stay clear of it. But the room was never neutral. It was never clean. Politics is already in the room. It’s in who walks through the door comfortably and who hesitates. It’s in whether a space can be used for organizing without fear. It’s in whether helping someone quietly might carry consequences you have to think carefully about in advance. It’s in who staffed the brewery, who harvested the grain, who can afford to be a regular. The idea that you opt out of all that by staying quiet is an illusion. You only change how visible your response to it is. This is, I realize, a hard thing to hear if you came to a beer newsletter for something lighter. I wrote recently that “beer, for me, has always felt like a refuge — a third place in an increasingly fractured world.” I meant that. I still do. But a refuge is not an escape from reality. It’s a place to gather strength to face it. Here’s what I actually missed — and what I want to correct. Multiple people in the industry reached out to me. I’m not naming them and I’m not identifying their businesses, because that’s not my call. If and when they want to be loud about what they’re doing, that agency belongs to them. What I can share is the substance of what they said, because it complicated something I presented too cleanly. The overall message: *You don’t know what we all are doing.* And they’re right. I don’t. One example involved a collaboration brewed quietly to support another business facing serious challenges in a whole different region, with proceeds directed toward solidarity, community, and keeping operations afloat. No announcement. It could have been broadcast widely. The point was never publicity. Another example involved logistical support for community efforts: organizing safe transportation, providing space for meetings on otherwise closed days, facilitating gatherings under difficult conditions. All of it happening while balancing real financial pressure and genuine concern for personal safety. None of what they described is a brewer “deciding to make beer political.” It’s people responding to the conditions around them — conditions that are already shaping who feels safe, who has access, who can gather, who needs help, and who has the capacity to offer it. Politics, again, already in the room. Already shaping choices. Whether anyone announced it or not. I’ve spent decades in taprooms, at barrel releases, at festivals, in back offices and brewing floors, talking to the people who built this industry from nothing. I know how much happens that never makes it onto social media. I know the owner who quietly comp’d a tab for someone having a crisis. The brewer who drove an hour to pick up a stranger who needed a safe ride. The taproom that stayed dark on a Tuesday so a community group could use the space without it becoming A Whole Thing. None of that gets a post. Most of it never will. So when I wrote recently about silence — when I said that “silence right now doesn’t feel neutral, it feels like complicity” — I was writing about what I could see. And I was right about what I saw. The public silence of breweries that have the platform, the stability, and frankly the safety to say something and choose not to? That still troubles me. I’m not softening that. But some of what I read as silence is actually something else entirely. It’s people doing the work with their hands instead of their phones. It’s people who are genuinely afraid — not of being canceled, but of real consequences for their families, their employees, their ability to keep the doors open at all. That deserves more than a footnote. It deserves to be named clearly. Here’s the tension I want to sit with honestly: public statements matter. They matter because people can’t rally around something they can’t see. Visibility creates awareness and solidarity. It helps people find each other. It tells someone standing outside your taproom door, uncertain whether they’ll be welcomed inside, something they need to know — or whether it’s even safe for them to be in public at all. That’s not performative. I wrote recently that the craft beer movement “was built on collective defiance. It was built on rejecting consolidation. On pushing back against homogeneity.” I believe that too. And I’ll extend it: breweries should be at least as loud about their values as they are when they drop a new seasonal. Your hazy IPA gets a full rollout — the label art, the tap handle photo, the countdown post. Human dignity deserves the same energy. Be as loud about human rights as you are about your beer. There is no reason those two things should require different levels of courage from you. But visibility isn’t the only form of courage. And not everyone can be visible right now without real consequences — financial, personal, sometimes physical. There are people in this industry doing hard, unglamorous, sometimes risky work in the background, and announcing it would compromise it or paint a target on someone who’s already stretched thin. That’s not silence as complicity. That’s operational discipline under pressure. What I want to push back on — clearly, not gently — is the idea that behind-the-scenes action and public visibility are in competition with each other. The person organizing quietly in the back room and the person posting a statement of solidarity on a Tuesday morning are both doing something real. We need both. We need the quiet infrastructure and we need the visible signal. We need people to know that this industry — at its best, at its most independent, and human — gives a fuck. I closed that piece with a question: “Reactive and fearful? Or clear and values-driven?” That question still stands. But having heard from you, I’d add a corollary: the values-driven path isn’t always the loudest one. Sometimes it’s a phone call and a recipe. Sometimes it’s a room made available on a closed Tuesday. Sometimes it’s a drive across town for someone who needed a safe ride home. All of it is political. All of it was always political. You don’t get to opt out of that — you only get to decide what you do with it. I’ve spent more than a decade writing about this industry because I believe it can be exactly that. I’ve been lucky enough to build an audience that lets me say so plainly. That’s a privilege I intend to use. The work is happening. Some of it you’ll see. Some of it you won’t. Support it either way. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication covering beer and brewing across New York state. To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
Democrats Must Learn to Talk Sports
Politicians need as much attention as possible, as frequently as possible, while seeming as relatable as possible. A cheat code exists to hit all three objectives.
OpenAI and Anthropic have a new rivalry: who rings the bell first
Conventional wisdom holds that going public first is better because there is only so much capital to go around. But what if it's better to go second?
British politics is fractured and chaotic – but at last it’s brimming with ideas for the future
Finally, Labour is talking policy, thanks to the leadership contest and Tony Blair’s intervention – and the centre-right is making a much-needed fightback too, says Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee
A.J. Brown Gives Patriots Deserved Validity, Brings Swagger To Foxboro
A.J. Brown coming to New England is much bigger than it seems.
Construction halted on massive Glendale entertainment hub; Colorado city, developer trade accusations
Construction on a much-anticipated 10-acre entertainment district in Glendale has come to a halt, with the developer and the city accusing each other of being responsible for the project going off the rails.
One fat helped pancreatic cancer grow while another cut disease in half
A surprising new study suggests that when it comes to pancreatic cancer, the kind of fat you eat may matter more than how much. Researchers found that oleic acid—the main fat in olive oil and several other common foods—sped up tumor growth in mice predisposed to pancreatic cancer, while omega-3-rich fats from fish oil dramatically slowed disease development.
Towards a responsive health system and equitable access to quality RMNCAH services
Indonesia’s vast geography and sociocultural diversity shape the delivery of reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health (RMNCAH) services in ways that are both enabling and challenging. Across provinces, significant variation has been observed in how services are planned, resourced, and delivered. These variations in service standards and quality are felt daily in the lives of women, newborns and adolescents. Despite these challenges, progress is visible. National estimates show a drop in maternal mortality ratio, from 331 to 140 per 100 000 live births since 2000, signaling improvements in care quality and access. Fertility has stabilised and contraceptive use has grown, yet unmet reproductive health needs persist, and adolescent pregnancies continue to reflect early marriage and limited access to youth-friendly services.To better understand how Indonesia’s health system has evolved under decentralisation, the Ministry of Health, supported by World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), IPAS and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), conducted a joint external review of RMNCAH programmes. This review draws on multiple sources of evidence, including existing literature, policy documents, national health system data, as well as field visits to six selected provinces to represent Indonesia’s geographic and administrative diversity. During the field visits, review teams observed service delivery in health facilities, spoke with health workers and local leaders and met mothers and families to understand how RMNCAH policies are operationalised. One of the challenges identified was the management of low birthweight (LBW) infants, a major contributor to neonatal deaths, under resource constraints. One midwife described a severe case of extremely LBW twins, one stillborn and the other died after three days of care. She recalled how the surviving infant struggled to swallow and may not have received breast milk, while simultaneous emergencies required the team’s attention, affecting the care provided to the infant.A subsequent review of the case by the district health office revealed insufficient antenatal care, fragmented maternal medical history due to population mobility, referral delays, limited provider capacity in neonatal intravenous access and a heavy workload that constrained proper newborn monitoring. These insights informed recommendations to strengthen both system-wide and service-level responses. Since the early 2000s, Indonesia’s decentralisation initiative has given much of the responsibility for funding, staffing and managing health services to regional governments. While the Ministry of Health sets national clinical standards, daily management of public health facilities falls under regional authorities through the Ministry of Internal Affairs. While this arrangement allows services to be tailored to local needs, it also depends heavily on local capacity for planning, budgeting and management. Health facilities and district health offices are better positioned to translate national priorities into local action when they have access to consistent technical support, helping health workers manage resource constraints and infrastructure gaps.The complexity of Indonesia’s health system governance is no easy feat to navigate. Understanding these dynamics is essential to strengthening policy, improving coordination and ensuring more equitable access to services across Indonesia. Under the leadership of Ministry of Health, recommendations from this exercise will be key in guiding the nation’s roadmap to an equitable and quality health system for RMNCAH.Written by Edit Oktavia Manuama, National Professional Officer (Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health), and Jessie Yunus, National Professional Officer (Gender, Rights, Equity, and Disability Inclusion)
Roundup: US retail industry / Anthropic / Business opportunity
Facing challenges: The retail industry emerged from a choppy first quarter relatively unscathed, but higher-than-usual tax refunds likely helped to buoy spending. The second quarter could offer a clearer view on consumer health and just how much gas price increases and persistent inflation have disrupted the economy and put more pressure on household budgets. The […]
Astros News: Hader’s Return, Imai’s Turnaround, Abreu Struggles, Ullola
The latest news on your Houston Astros! Josh Hader’s return appears to be imminent: After 6 no-hit innings in his best start in MLB, Tatsuya Imai gave the Astros another strong start this weekend against division-leading Milwaukee: Bryan Abreu’s struggles continue, so much so that the Astros have, at least for now, changed the trajectory […]
Cities are making it rain more—but not as much as scientists thought
After another spell of wet weather along Australia's east coast, with storms, heavy rain and flash flooding across Sydney and parts of New South Wales, it is natural to ask whether our cities are shaping ...
Off-Day OpenThread
The Jays and we get a day off. As much as I enjoy baseball, I don’t mind days off. We are using the evening to see a National Geographic lecture. Yes, I’m that old. So we have time for an OpenThread. Use it to chat about anything you like, within site rules. It doesn’t have […]
Carolina’s Cap Comparison: Linebackers
How much money are the Panthers spending on their linebackers compared to the rest of the NFL?
Juneteenth celebrations in Pensacola about family, food and freedom
Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom and liberty, much as Independence Day is. In Pensacola, there are a few ways to celebrate the holiday.
Playbook 2026: How Chattanooga’s business leaders are preparing for what comes next
Chattanooga is changing -- much of it happening right in front of us, while other parts are harder to see.
2026 Charles Schwab Challenge: Here's how much every player made
Check out our list of how much money each player in the field came away with at the 2026 Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial CC.
Alienware’s New 5K Curved Gaming Monitor Has Almost Too Much Going on
It’s curved, supports 5K, uses "RGB Stripe Tandem OLED," and, and, and...
Baby blues or postpartum depression? How new moms can protect their mental health
For many women, it can be hard to differentiate postpartum depression from the much milder and more common "baby blues" brought on by plummeting hormone levels.
Baby blues or postpartum depression? How new moms can protect their mental health
For many women, it can be hard to differentiate postpartum depression from the much milder and more common "baby blues" brought on by plummeting hormone levels.
Just A Terrible Game, Jays Lose To Orioles
Orioles 9 Blue Jays 5 That was bad in so many ways. Worst of which, Jesús Sánchez was hit in the wrist by a ball thrown from the stands. They are saying he has a contusion, which is pretty much the best possible news. It was weird. Apparently, a kid(?) or young person, thought that […]
Leak Tips Potential New ASUS ROG Xbox Ally Gaming Handheld
It was previously revealed that ASUS may be launching an update to the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld at Computex 2026, but not much was known about the new handheld at the time. Now, thanks to licensing documentation from the Korean National Radio Research Agency, shared by Huang514613 on X, a littl...
Nicola’s only crime was to love too much. And to not notice the Jaguar on the drive
Rather than being one of the shrewdest operators in British politics for a decade, it turns out Sturgeon was just too trusting
Summer Game Fest Schedule: Your Guide To All 15+ Xbox-Related Events In June 2026
Xbox Showcase, SGF and so much more!
Chimpanzees and bonobos have human-like friend circles, study finds
Great apes appear to build friendships much like humans do. By studying grooming behavior, researchers discovered that chimpanzees and bonobos form close inner circles along with wider networks of weaker social connections. Chimpanzees focus on a few trusted partners and become more selective with age, while bonobos maintain a more egalitarian social style.
A quantum metasurface breakthrough could finally close the terahertz gap
Researchers have developed a compact quantum detector that makes terahertz radiation much easier to detect. A specially designed metasurface funnels incoming energy into tiny active regions, greatly strengthening the electrical signal produced. The approach boosted efficiency by roughly 20 times compared to earlier designs and could pave the way for more practical THz devices in healthcare, communications, and scientific research.
What Florida football's defense will look like under Brad White
New DC Brad White was brought in by Jon Sumrall to fortify the Gators defense, so how much different will the unit look this year?
Science & Medicine: A pill that slows aging? San Antonio researchers are putting it to the test
Rapamycin may be able to help older adults live longer, healthier lives. Studies of mice suggest the drug may even reverse hardening of the arteries. Researchers at UT Health San Antonio have launched a clinical trial to see if the drug can restore the biological activity of older adults to levels more typical of younger people, and, if so, how much does it take to do it?
Retail CEOs who make more in a day than workers earn in a year
The median annual pay for retail salespersons is about $34,750 per year. Several top-paid retail CEOs make that much every single day of the year.
How Jayden Daniels was involved in Commanders promoting David Blough
How much influence did Jayden Daniels have on the Commanders promoting David Blough to OC?
China’s Factory Activity Slows in May, Raising Questions Over Its Economy
BEIJING (AP) — China’s factory activity was flat in May, according to an official survey released Sunday, raising questions about how much further the country’s economy can shield itself from the fallout of the ongoing Iran war and pressure on demand. The official manufacturing purchasing managers ...
John Rodgers Brashier
Ready to lead Delta Council as President Recently named as the new and 92nd President of Delta Council, John Rodgers Brashier believes that his 40 years of being an independent farmer not only will help him in the role—it also humbles him to work for an organization that has done so much for the agricultural […]
Restaurants brace for impact as I-65 closure looms
Taquero Mucho 3 manager Luis Ramirez said he worries business could drastically slow down with the highway closure.
Restaurants brace for impact as I-65 closure looms
Taquero Mucho 3 manager Luis Ramirez said he worries business could drastically slow down with the highway closure.
Medical or a PR exercise? Why presidents get annual check-ups
Every president in modern history - including Donald Trump this week - has taken an annual physical exam that is as much about messaging as it is about health.
Too much money in politics
Reader commentary: Texas U.S. Senate race demonstrates the peril of big money in elections.
Microsoft and NVIDIA Jointly Tease Possible N1X Debut as a "New Era of PC"
Microsoft and NVIDIA, through their X handles, each teased "A new era of PC," along with the map coordinates "25.0528, 121.5990," which correspond to the Nangang Exhibition Centre, the seat of Computex 2026. If it wasn't obvious already, NVIDIA is announcing its much awaited N1X client PC processor,...
Kraken co-CEO on the business amid the company's upcoming IPO
Arjun Sethi, Kraken co-CEO, joins 'Power Lunch' to discuss the state of the crypto sector, how AI impacts the blockchain and much more.
Dell's business strength separate from AI servers was very impressive, says BofA's Wamsi Mohan
Wamsi Mohan, BofA Securities senior IT hardware analyst, joins 'The Exchange' to discuss Dell's quarterly earnings results, the company's position in the AI race and much more.
Questions surround shellfish workforce appropriation tucked into budget
The small appropriation would direct as much as $75K to the FSAA's Executive Director.
Palidye Holdings Initiates PENN Entertainment Position, According to Recent SEC Filing
PENN Entertainment pairs regional casinos with a digital wagering business now centered on iCasino and theScore Bet. The stock becomes much more interesting if digital keeps improving without weighing on the casino's cash-flow base.
Palidye Holdings Initiates PENN Entertainment Position, According to Recent SEC Filing
PENN Entertainment pairs regional casinos with a digital wagering business now centered on iCasino and theScore Bet. The stock becomes much more interesting if digital keeps improving without weighing on the casino's cash-flow base.
Exynos 2600’s Heat Pass Block Performs Better Than A Liquid-Nitrogen-Cooled Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, Enabling Practical Uses For Future SoCs
A test shows that Samsung’s Heat Pass Block technology is a much more practical way of cooling an Exynos 2600
This newly discovered raptor may have hunted like a giant heron
A newly discovered raptor-like dinosaur from Patagonia is changing how scientists think about ancient predators. Named Kank australis, the 70-million-year-old dinosaur appears to have hunted fish much like modern herons, using a long, flexible neck and specialized vertebrae adapted for swift, precise movements.
Everton quickfire end of season review
Everton's season feels like a mixed bag in all honesty and I was tempted to go with the 3-0 home win over Chelsea, as it was an emphatic performance and a real moment that Hill Dickinson Stadium felt like it was encapsulating the Goodison atmosphere. Trailing 1-0 at the break, James Garner was then booked quickly followed by a yellow for David Moyes. It started a feisty reaction much like those at Goodison Park when fans felt a sense of injustice.
An experimental GLP-1 pushes the limits of weight loss. There are risks.
Eli Lilly is developing the the most powerful GLP-1 drug yet. But how much weight loss is too much?
Sky Sports: Liverpool star set to leave this summer after contract U-turn
Konate Exit Looms as Liverpool Face a Summer of UncertaintyLiverpool supporters have spent much of the past few weeks looking ahead, eager to see how the club responds after a frustrating 2025/26 camp...
Valve Steam Deck Sells Out in 24 Hours Despite Price Hike
The internet has recently been rife with complaints and discussions about the recent price increases to the Valve Steam Deck OLED, which saw prices of the gaming handheld spike by as much as $300. However, that same price increase coincided with the first restock of the Valve Steam Deck in anywhere ...
What’s next for Microsoft’s Surface PCs?
The future of Surface looks like a much smaller lineup of devices.
Ebola at the World Cup? Here’s what we should actually worry about
“Infectious disease threats during the World Cup will almost certainly look much more familiar than frightening headlines suggest,” writes Krutika Kuppalli.
Thinner Oura Ring 5 finally tracks live activity, $50 price increase
Leaks gave a quick preview of the Oura Ring 5, but it wasn’t clear just how much thinner the new...
Mark Zuckerberg’s $145 Billion AI Gamble Could Spawn Meta’s Next Monster Business
The artificial intelligence arms race has turned Silicon Valley into a spending contest. Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG), and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into chips, servers, networking gear, and data centers in a scramble to dominate AI infrastructure. The question investors are wrestling with is simple: how much ... Mark Zuckerberg’s $145 Billion AI Gamble Could Spawn Meta’s Next Monster Business
5 Health Risks From Consuming Too Much Protein
Most Americans eat more protein than they need. We asked experts what can happen if people have too much of a good thing.