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45th annual Health Fair and Expo brings free screenings to Mountain Home on Oct. 7
Twin Lakes area residents can get free health screenings, lab test vouchers and time with local providers on Wednesday, Oct. 7, when the Health Fair and Expo returns for its 45th year. Baxter Health and KTLO, Classic Hits and The Boot present the fair, which runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the gymnasium
Russia-Ukraine war creates new voting bloc in Israel as immigrants find their political voice
More than 102,000 immigrants from Russia and Ukraine since the 2022 invasion are eligible to vote in the October 27 election; several tell ynet that democratic institutions, minority rights, regional investment and immigrant integration are shaping their priorities
‘Enormous potential’: UK envoy seeks deeper Israel ties in science, technology and trade
Ambassador Simon Walters tours the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor, meeting researchers, investors and industry leaders as Britain seeks new partnerships with Israel in genomics, life sciences, agri-tech, AI and clean tech despite political differences
Duke football report card: Grading Blue Devils after Stanford victory
How did Duke football perform against Stanford? We hand out grades for the Blue Devils in their beatdown win over the Cardinal.
What is Dave Doeren’s buyout as NC State football coach
Following N.C. State football's stunning loss at Vanderbilt, here's contract info on coach Dave Doeren, including his buyout.
Russian election observer loses consciousness during arrest by police, opposition party says
The three-day election, which began Friday and ends Sunday, features virtually no opposition and is all but certain to secure the Kremlin’s political dominance.
100 years ago, NC rate dispute was over cost of a telegraph
In this look at The N&O’s archives, a dispute over telegraph prices, and the Raleigh police union wants to oust the chief.
Live updates, scores from Week 5 of high school football
High school football season in NC rolls into the final week of nonconference play with a full slate of matchups. Follow here for scores, highlights.
The Politics of Religion
Good afternoon. We're some 45 days away from the 2026 midterms. Most media observers - recalling with well-earned humility how they felt after the "red wave" of 2022 turned into a mild reddish ripple ...
Virginia tightens data center restrictions amid political backlash
The U.S. state of Virginia is tightening controls on data centers, with plans that include banning non-disclosure agreements for the projects, requiring stricter permitting and imposing clean energy mandates on the server warehouses, Governor Abigail Spanberger said on Friday.
Virginia Tightens Data Center Restrictions Amid Political Backlash
NEW YORK, Sept 18 (Reuters) - The U.S. state of Virginia is tightening controls on data centers, with plans that include banning non-disclosure agreements for the projects, requiring stricter permitting and imposing clean energy mandates on the server warehouses, Governor ...
Engrams Embedding Entendre: Codesign for Efficient DRAM/SSD Offloading
Engram extends standard token embeddings with learned multi-token lookups. Recurring local patterns retrieve vectors directly, reducing the need to reconstruct them through attention and feed-forward layers. With Engram model architecture optimization, it allows for lower HBM capacity to be needed for models at the same quality. This does not mean there won’t be an insane demand for HBM but it just means that model architecture will continue to innovate around constraints. This model architecture design is naturally codesigned for parameter offloading: each token accesses a few embedding rows whose addresses depend on token IDs, not hidden states. The runtime can prefetch those rows from host DRAM while earlier layers compute, keeping the table outside HBM without transferring entire weight matrices. Our Memory model contains our latest estimates of quarter by quarter HBM, DRAM, & NAND supply and demand. Offloading frees HBM for model weights and KV cache, potentially supporting larger batches or more concurrent sessions. When DRAM becomes the next constraint, NVMe offers another tier. Recommendation systems already cache frequently or recently accessed embedding rows in faster memory while backing colder rows with SSDs. After NVIDIA roadmap had to change due to massively despec’ing Rubin Ultra from 1024GB to now ~200GB of HBM per chip, model architecture optimizations like emgram maybe helpful. Our DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash configuration uses roughly 189 GiB of memory for Engram. We replace it with a memory-mapped (mmap) file and measure serving performance with offload to SSD. Later on in our report, we will show our Engram offloading experiments along with the official InferenceX agentic inference serving results on Engram models like DeepSeekv4.1 Flash across all 6 NVIDIA GPU SKUs along with MI355X. Unsurprisingly, the CUDA Moat is still mogging MI355X on the ultra popular DeepSeekV4.1 Flash model. We also show how even on high capacity HBM SKUs, offloading emgrams to DRAM could result in even better performance for most of the pareto than keeping the emgram in HBM. Our benchmark has been widely reproduced, validated and/or supported by almost every major buyer of compute from Google Cloud to Microsoft Azure to Oracle, to Meta and many more. Furthermore, it has the support of the ML community including from vLLM, LMCache, SGLang, PyTorch, Huggingface and the support of major labs like OpenAI, MiniMax, ZAI, Qwen, Moonshot Kimi, etc. Star the InferenceX GitHub repository if you find the open-source benchmark and data useful!. InferenceX is the only inference benchmark in the world to have TPUv7, Jalapeño, Nvidia Rubin NVL72, AMD, and soon, SambaNova and Trainium. Due to how realistic AgentX scenario is to real world agentic inference workloads, AMD has committed to collaborating on MI455X UALoE72 too. DeepSeek did not release the original paper’s two trained Engram models. We replicated its setup on fineweb-edu using the released code and training hyperparameters, at an estimated 6E18 FLOPs per run. We observed the same U-shape scaling: Engram improved performance over pure MoE baselines. We also reproduced DeepSeek’s results, where earlier-layer representations with Engram resembled those of later layers. Like the original Engram paper, it is possible to probe Engram’s gate scores to see what n-grams DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash makes the most use of. Our gate scan finds names, code fragments, relational phrasing, and boilerplate. These examples prioritize interesting-ness over gate strength. One unexpected result was Wright : Ace Attorney. These examples suggest learned memory optimizes the training objective, not a judgment of which facts deserve storage. Licenses, bibliography fragments, API scaffolding, and website furniture can provide prediction shortcuts, so the value of additional Engram capacity may depend on what survives data preparation. This does not show that table capacity is “wasted”: the evaluation-corpus scan establishes neither training exposure nor the capacity occupied by each category. For offloading, strong gates do not identify cache-hot rows. Low gates do not automatically save reads either: computing the gate requires the retrieved key and undoes the performance gain of a fused kernel. Skipping reads would require a separate usefulness predictor before retrieval. In the original paper’s inference-time ablation, factual-knowledge benchmarks retained just 29–44% of their original performance, while reading comprehension retained 81–93%. This is due to the training–inference mismatch. The resulting degradation therefore measures this trained model’s dependence on Engram, not the performance difference between models trained with and without it. In our ablations, suppressing Engram worsens token likelihood across all evaluated domains, especially encyclopedia text and several code corpora. Surprisingly, GSM8K accuracy stays within measured run-to-run variation and removing Engram has no effect. Engram is not a detachable dictionary beside an unchanged MoE. Removing it changes downstream features and expert selection. We tested whether rerouting hurts or compensates by holding tokens fixed in a teacher-forced experiment on CRUXEval, a code-reasoning benchmark of small Python functions where the model predicts a function’s output from its code and an input, and scoring the reference answer. Removing Engram raised answer loss from 0.2848 to 0.3093 bits/token. Forcing the ablated model to use the original Engram-on expert choices made it worse still, at 0.3375 bits/token. Rerouting partially compensates for the missing memory. Memory features and expert selection work together, rather than following a clean “memory stores facts; experts reason” division. On the same CRUXeval, removing Engram during either phase reduced accuracy and increased generated tokens; removing it throughout produced the largest changes. Keeping Engram for prefill leads to more correct answers than keeping for decode likely due to semantically richer KV cache transferred to decode workers, allowing it to mitigate some of the performance loss. Engram’s table is large, but each lookup is small. DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash requests 24 rows at each of two Engram layers, about 12.4 KiB per processed token position across the model, or 3.1 KiB per GPU when split across four GPUs. Currently as of Day 7 since Model Release, MI355X is still 2-4x worse performance per dollar compared to B200 even when normalized by Mi355X’s lower TCO. Our full total cost of ownership breakdown comes from our AI Cloud TCO Model along with monthly market surveys of over 100+ gpu clouds & gpu cloud customers. On the Day 0 release of DeepSeekv4.1 Flash, NVIDIA vLLM works out of the box with zero issues across all 6 SKUs: H100, H200, B200, B300, GB200, GB300! This was thanks to the amazing work by the NVIDIA & Interact teams! In comparison, AMD vLLM did not work on day 0 for DeepSeekv4.1 Flash.Source: SemiAnalysis InferenceX AMD’s vLLM documentation points to using vllm/vllm-openai-rocm:deepseekv41-flash-0909, but from hour 0 of the model release to hour 23, AMD has not publicly released the image. AMD claims, “SPEED IS THE MOAT,” yet it has still not released it by the 23rd hour. We wish that, going forward, the AMD team has a better process for hour 0 model releases. Eventually when they did publicly release for “day 0” image support, performance-wise, it is currently up to 14.8x worse perf per dollar than H200 and up to 42x worse perf per dollar than B200/B300. The power of the CUDA MOAT is NVIDIA’s collaboration with its massive 6 million-developer community ecosystem including most of the vLLM & SGLang & Tokenspeed maintainers which means that CUDA is optimized on day 0. Overall, AMD did make significant improvements but the performance per dollar is still currently 2-4x worse than B200. AgentX Engram DRAM Offloading Improving Performance The HBM and DRAM offload use the same GPU kernel to select and dequantize rows. With HBM, it reads GPU memory; with Unified Virtual Addressing (UVA), it reads pinned host memory directly. Both support full decode graphs. Moving the table into HBM accelerates only the sparse lookup, leaving decoder computation and communication unchanged, resulting in little overall benefit while consuming memory otherwise available to KV cache. Another benefit of Engram offloaded to DRAM which means you can reduce the communication overhead by using less HBM GPUs per replica. For example, when enabling Engram offloading on B300, we are able to switch from TP4 to now TP2 which improves the pareto curve by up to 1.6x. When iso-model quality, less HBM is required as the engrams could be offloaded to host DRAM. Thus HBM bandwidth matters way more than HBM capacity. For inference workloads where memory bandwidth matters the most, 4-hi HBM provides the best $/bandwidth and therefore lowest cost per token. If China continues to make more and more revolutionary model architecture innovations, soon it could potentially 0Hi HBM stacks. [ ](https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/long-live-the-short-king-why-4-hi) [ Long Live the Short King: Why 4-hi HBM Wins ](https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/long-live-the-short-king-why-4-hi) Myron Xie, Bryan Shan, and 3 others · Sep 13 [ Read full story ](https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/long-live-the-short-king-why-4-hi) Moreover, on B300 and week-0 stack, moving the Engram table back to HBM did not improve results and stay within run-to-run variance. This is a result of the work optimizing DRAM offload, such as async, and overlap. SSD Offloading On B200, we created a unoptimized vLLM fork and stored the Engram tables in memory-mapped files on local SSDs. File backing lets the OS reclaim table pages when other applications need RAM. Pages already cached in memory can be served without reading the SSD again. Furthermore, note that we were unable to turn on GDS The unoptimized SSD implementation changes how rows reach the GPU. It copies row IDs to the CPU, deduplicates them, gathers the requested rows into pinned buffers, copies those rows back to the GPU and dequantizes them. This work runs between segments of the GPU execution graph. Native UVA performs row selection and dequantization directly on the GPU, avoiding the CPU round trip. A warm filesystem cache removes physical SSD reads, but leaves the coordination, row gathering and transfers. This is why a file already cached in RAM can still perform worse than a pinned DRAM table. The comparison measures the whole serving path; it does not separate the time spent on each of these operations. B200 DRAM dominates both measured SSD serving curves in total tokens per dollar and P90 interactivity. Near 125 tokens/s/user, DRAM delivers 121 million total tokens per dollar versus 52 million for SSD. For production serving, SSD offloading is likely not worth the tradeoff. On the B200 configurations we measured, SSD offloading loses on both measures: every observed SSD point has a DRAM alternative that delivers higher P90 interactivity and more total tokens per dollar. The only points where Cheaper storage does not automatically produce a cheaper inference service. Moving Engram to SSD leaves the same four expensive GPUs and the rest of the server in place. Reclaiming RAM only creates an economic benefit if it enables a cheaper server configuration or additional useful capacity. The current unoptimized path provides neither benefit, and the filesystem cache still consumes RAM when table pages are resident. Next we will look at the mechanisms and specific implementation of ngrams from DeepSeekv4.1 Flash, LongCat, Qwen3.8 Flash Next.
Candidates Balkcom and Buckhout campaign with Trump in moment on national stage
Plus, polls show widespread support for the constitutional amendments on the ballot.
To err is human, to forgive takes work: what science and therapy reveal about truly letting go
Family gatherings can reopen old wounds, but research shows resentment can affect both mind and body; psychotherapist Edna Arbel explains why forgiveness cannot be forced and how processing pain, setting boundaries and therapy can help us truly let go
Sitrin Health Care Center cuts ribbon on 75 years serving the Mohawk Valley
Sitrin Health Care Center celebrated 75 years with ribbon-cutting ceremony Sept. 9 sponsored by Greater Utica Chamber of Commerce.
Sponsored: From Belfast to Lakewood Ranch
Darren Shore turned a passion for the bar business into a growing restaurant career built on hard work, resilience and relationships.
See where Durham’s red wolf pups and parents are heading in conservation swap
The Museum of Life and Science says they will get a new breeding pair in the exchange for seven.
CASCADES: A Journey Along Greenland’s Coast Where Ocean Meets Ice
CASCADES is an international, multidisciplinary expedition bringing together glaciologists, marine-mammal observers, microbiologists, geologists, and biogeochemists.
Microsoft patch gives domain-joined Windows PCs trust issues
Machine Identity Isolation policies can reject valid credentials unless controllers meet the Server 2025 functional level
Can researchers trust that AI models won’t leak their ideas?
Research funders are asking how they can stop confidential scientific ideas in grant proposals from leaking out through large language models (LLMs), for example if reviewers use AI to help them judge applications. Last week, a row erupted in mathematics after OpenAI announced it had solved a notoriously difficult problem, only for another mathematician to demand answers over whether the company had used ideas he had fed into its models. The spat, and the broader issue of idea leakage through AI models, was discussed by funders at an R&D policy conference held in Paris on September 14. At worst, it threatens to undermine the correct attribution of breakthroughs, one of the foundations of modern science. The mathematics dispute around OpenAI is “certainly something we're looking at” Jason Gallo, head of the newly established Office of Metascience at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), told the Blue Sky Forum, hosted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The controversy started on September 8, when OpenAI announced it had cracked a mathematical problem that had gone unsolved for 90 years. Using a swarm of AI agents, millions of dollars’ worth of computing power and a new internal model, the company said it had finally proved that a long-used formula for modelling fluid dynamics breaks down under certain conditions. However, Tristan Buckmaster, a New York University mathematician who had been independently working with collaborators on the same problem using OpenAI’s Codex tool, hit back with a statement questioning whether the company had snooped on his Codex sessions to gain an advantage. OpenAI has always denied it looked up the “specific user data” of Buckmaster and colleagues. However, the company initially admitted that “while unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models,” although its proofs “differ significantly” from Buckmaster’s. The firm later said that, following an investigation, it concluded that Buckmaster’s Codex prompts “could not have influenced the [OpenAI] system in any way, including through training.”Funder concernYet OpenAI’s initial admission that its model might have ingested Buckmaster’s ideas, then spat them out to its own mathematicians, has scientistsworriedthat their work could leak out if shared with AI. Some AI tools give users an opt-out option to stop their sessions from training the model. If such guarantees can be trusted, this gives scientists some confidence they can use an LLM to develop an idea without the risk of it leaking out.But there’s a bigger potential vulnerability. To win money to investigate ideas, scientists have to share them with funding bodies. These grant proposals are normally kept strictly confidential, to prevent other scientists from scooping them, or to protect commercially valuable intellectual property. To preserve this confidentiality, when the NSF uses AI models, “we have to be sure that it's not making server calls out to an external party, leaking that data,” said Gallo to delegates in Paris. Leaks through reviewersHowever, funders normally use external academic reviewers to assess proposals. And there are growing worries that these reviewers are feeding grant ideas into AI models to help them make a judgement. Research funders have noticed that peer review reports and funding recommendations have “suddenly become much longer, more detailed and complex,” said Diogo Machado, head of the data science unit at Technopolis, a science and technology-focused consultancy. “The sense is that reviewers are increasingly using generative AI in their review work, even where guidelines sometimes forbid it,” he told Science|Business. “This is very difficult for funders to control or prove.” Happening at scaleThis sharing of confidential proposals with AI models is “happening at scale already,” said James Wilson, executive director of the Research on Research Institute, based at University College London, during the debate in Paris. In response, Gallo said the NSF had “strict guidance” around the uploading of proposals to AI models. But he added the NSF was mulling new types of assessment to make sure applicants were truly the originators of their ideas, such as following a short-form proposal with an oral presentation, which would allow the foundation to “really interrogate the investigator on their intellectual contribution.” Related articlesHow can Europe cope with a flood of AI-assisted research grant proposals?The risks and benefits of AI in screening research grant proposals Viewpoint: AI could make scientific overload worse“For us as funders, a lot of the ways to ensure that the application remains the applicant's own intellectual contribution, those ways are quite regressive,” Peter Clifford, head of strategy at Research Ireland, told delegates. “They're maybe ten or 15 or 20 years old, and they don't scale particularly well.” Disputes over the origin of ideas are as old as modern science. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent more than a decade arguing over who invented calculus, for example. And long before LLMs emerged, academics would agonise over how much of their early work to reveal at conferences, in case their colleagues scooped them, Jack Leahy, a senior metascience advisor to the UK government, told delegates. But AI was “accelerating” the “problems of the system,” he said.
Whatley campaign event featured sex offender + Ruling allows weaker NC governor
A panel of the Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against Stein.
OpenAI brings ChatGPT advertising business to Israel
Israeli companies can now create and manage advertising campaigns through OpenAI’s Ads Manager as the company expands its $1 billion advertising business globally.
What Does the Science of Climate Change Really Look Like?
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a three-part series on how the Right should think about environmental and climate policy. Read Chris Barnard on Reclaiming Environmental Policy from the Left. More than a decade ago, the world’s governments negotiated and signed the Paris Climate Agreement, committing to hold global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius. In the following years, climate had immense cultural power. Greta Thunberg emerged. Fortune 500 companies established net-zero plans. The U.S. got the Inflation Reduction Act. Then the pendulum swung back. President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, speaking of green energy as a “scam” and carbon footprints as a “hoax” and on all matters of international policy emphasizing bilateral engagement and power over globalism and cooperation. The technology companies that had been at the forefront of net-zero pledges and green leadership discovered the importance of all-of-the-above power to their visions for artificial intelligence and began quietly postponing or removing their targets. On the left side of the political spectrum, rising concerns about inflation and cost pushed climate lower down in the stated priorities of voters and stump speeches of politicians. The moment is ripe for a reset on the politics of climate change and for conservatives especially to chart a course that acknowledges and addresses the real challenges in plausible ways. So what should we think about climate change as we enter a post-peak climate era? If it is neither an apocalypse nor a hoax, what will hold up as a durable view of climate change? And how does it project onto the concerns and priorities of the right-of-center’s emerging coalition? New to Commonplace_? Subscribe below to get the magazine in your inbox._ Subscribe A Solid Foundation As the politics and economics of climate careened over the past ten years, the physics carried on regardless. In 2015, the year the Paris Climate Agreement was adopted, the world emitted 41.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. By 2025, emissions had risen only 2.4%, to 42.2 gigatonnes, because falling emissions from land use offset increasing emissions from fossil fuels. But slow growth in annual emissions is not rapid decline, let alone net-zero, so carbon dioxide kept accumulating in the atmosphere, going from 399 to 426 parts per million. Global temperature kept rising too, from about 1.1 degrees Celsius above the 1850–1900 average in 2015, to 1.4 degrees above it in 2025. None of this should surprise anyone. Even most prominent skeptics, like the authors of the 2025 report commissioned by the Trump administration’s Department of Energy, accept the basic physics. Carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere at industrial volumes accumulates and traps heat that would otherwise escape to space. That heat warms the upper ocean and increases temperatures at the surface. Increased ocean heat and melting of land ice cause sea levels to rise. Changes in the climate become noticeable to us as subtle shifts in temperature and precipitation, seasons arriving early or late, changes in the surrounding ecosystem, and weather extremes. The much more meaningful debate is not about whether these things are happening, but about what it all means for human societies. (While it is a proxy measure of overall risk, no one experiences global surface temperature.) This debate invokes at least three interesting questions: how much today’s warming is showing up in regional climate trends, how much more warming we should anticipate, and how extreme weather events can be understood in the context of climate change. Recent scientific advances give us new insights into each of these, but there is still much to learn. This is the context in which the next generation of conservative leaders will be the first to deal with significant climate change as a fact, not a forecast. It will be with them for their entire careers. Our evolving scientific picture of climate change will come from weather and climate records stretching further into the past, new kinds of observations in the present, better modeling tools for the future, and simply more time to observe the emergence of climate signals and their tangible effects on ecosystems and communities in the United States and around the world. The policy landscape will be shaped by not only the impacts of changes in the climate, but also by the ways in which societies respond and by the emergence of new technologies for both altering the trajectory of emissions and adapting to new climate realities. Global climate records now show the fingerprints of warming in different phenomena around much of the world. The IPCC, in its most recent assessment report, documents warming trends over all land regions, even as natural variability adds substantial variance to local trends. And the highest temperature extremes have become more intense and frequent, almost everywhere, since the 1950s. Scientists are highly confident that these changes are attributable to human influence. But confidence in detecting trends and attributing them to human influence degrades across heavy precipitation events; drought trends are heterogeneous and not attributable to human activity with great confidence. For hurricanes, tornadoes, and other severe storms there is even less confidence in trends or their relationship to climate change. In general, a fair summary of the evidence is that for well-observed phenomena, like surface temperature or heavy rainfall, with a clear relationship to warming, our multidecadal observations are consistent with human influence overcoming natural variability over long time periods and extremes increasing. For regions that are sampled more sparsely, or phenomena with a higher noise-to-signal ratio, we will need to observe them longer to understand the magnitude of the climate signal or improve dynamical understanding using models and observations together. But for Climate For those who can’t wait, we also have new techniques that attempt to understand the role climate change has in influencing particular extreme events. When the climate is changing and disaster strikes, it is natural to ask whether that disaster was somehow “caused” by climate change. For scientists and policymakers acting in good faith, answering that question helps develop a more accurate picture of the problem, how it may be getting worse, and what preparations we should be making to respond to it. It may, at some point, give some weight to how liability is assigned by courts or adaptation funding is distributed by society. But how we ask this question is extremely important. It is easy to get the analysis wrong by discounting the role that meteorology plays. As meteorologist Theodore Shepherd explained in a clear 2016 review of climate attribution methods, “if a weather or climate event is truly extreme in the present climate, then perforce it requires unusual meteorological conditions, which means that climate change is at most a contributing factor.” Share Scientists have two ways to probe climate as a contributing factor, both of which have entered media coverage of extreme weather events. One asks a probabilistic question: How much more likely is a particular event (e.g., a temperature record over a particular area) amid global warming? The answer involves using historical records and computer simulations to estimate the likelihood of such an event in both a changed and a preindustrial climate. The findings are less about the specific event, and more about events of that nature. The other question is: How has the changed climate affected the specific event in question? Here, scientists try to understand what a similar event would have looked like in the preindustrial climate. This is sometimes called the storyline approach, where the story is the specific meteorological details of the event. These methods offer ways to test the intuition of scientists about real weather extremes. In late June and early July of 2021, a persistent high-pressure ridge, or heat dome, set up over the Pacific Northwest and an extraordinary heat wave affected the area from Oregon to British Columbia. For six days, it shattered temperature records across the region and hundreds died from heat-related causes, in an area where such high, and persistently high, temperatures were well outside of experience and many live without air conditioning. Scientists have studied its connection to climate change using multiple approaches. This specific event was created by a rare combination of meteorological factors, a strong high-pressure ridge created the conditions for extreme heat, which occurred on top of higher average temperatures in the region from global warming. Probabilistic analyses showed that climate change increased the likelihood of such an event by at least 8-fold to more than 100-fold. One standout example found that such an event had effectively zero probability of occurring in the preindustrial climate. The enormous range in these assessments reflects how hard it is to estimate probabilities of events at the tail of the historical record. Estimates of the effect on the temperature of the event are more clustered. A recent review paper documents how multiple methodologies have found a positive influence, roughly 1-2 degrees Celsius of an anomaly that exceeded 15 degrees, of climate change on the temperature magnitude of the event. Multiple studies have investigated and found some positive influence of climate change in other extreme events. Attribution studies found climate likely increased the heavy rainfall that accompanied Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and surrounding regions in 2024. The extensive fires that struck Los Angeles in 2025 illustrate how the causal chain can become messy, though. Studies do detect a positive influence of climate on the event’s likelihood, but while climate change likely contributed to underlying aridity, it would not have played a role in the heavy winds or land practices that preceded disaster. These event attribution studies will become more common for extreme, or damaging, weather events. They can be produced quickly, and often are reported before peer review. As the Pacific Northwest heatwave example shows, when multiple methods converge on a positive attribution, the finding should probably carry some weight even if you have to be careful about accepting the results from a single study. I expect that as climate change proceeds and the climate thus departs further from a preindustrial counterfactual, the influence will become more detectable across a variety of extreme events and more easily identified. This will be used to cast blame, but can also be used to inform how communities and society adapt to ongoing change. We May Still Be Surprised One positive development, insofar as less climate change is better, has been that our central estimates for future climate change should probably be revised downward. Mostly, that is because the high-end warmings that scientists regularly analyzed about ten to 20 years ago, driven by high emissions throughout the twenty-first century, now appear to be somewhere between unlikely and impossible. At one time, the upper end of mainstream climate projections extended well into 4 to 6 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of this century, which, models suggest, would have wrought enormous real-world damage. Current energy and policy trends now point toward 2.5 or 3 degrees. Damages and risks are commonly modeled as increasing steeply with more warming, so this is already a better-than-previously-expected outcome for the climate (which is independent of the physical response to emissions). But we should maintain a wide range for plausible outcomes and prepare for the possibility of being surprised. Emissions trajectories are subject to deep uncertainty, the physical climate response is still developing, and whatever change occurs in the climate will then be mediated through unpredictable economic, social, and political institutions. Over the past decade, the pace of warming surprised some keen observers and appeared to accelerate, though not yet outside the range of expectation provided by climate models. The reasons for that apparent acceleration are being actively studied (as was the apparent pause in warming from 1998 to 2012), but no single driver has emerged. Some blame it on the El Niño, variability which would have no bearing on climate. Some think it is a result of factories in East Asia and global shipping fleets cutting aerosol emissions, which in the strongest version of the argument would indicate higher climate sensitivity to carbon-dioxide emissions. Others are more measured, not yet ready to draw solid conclusions as to whether climate projections require revision. We will have to see. Long-Term Thinking Climate change asks us to think over long time scales. But the pace of human-driven warming is compressing a large global change into a century. Changing weather patterns and extreme events are already causing adjustment costs and damages and will do more. Adaptation will help, but it is not free. For some communities, these costs will erode livelihoods and well-being, and may force migration. Are we prepared for large-scale managed retreats in the United States? Thankfully, American wealth, geographical diversity, and moderate climates may leave us better prepared than many around the world. But wealthy countries can still suffer serious disruption from narrowly concentrated costs, even if they appear entirely manageable in aggregate. Readers of Commonplace are familiar with the challenges of rapidly adapting to economic forces. The displacement that came from the China Shock is barely perceptible in aggregate GDP and employment data, but it affected millions of people and those people were far less mobile than economic models tended to assume. Deindustrialization rippled through the nation with enormous effects for not only our economic vitality, but also our national security. The forces surrounding climate change may not be so different; the world gets richer and must accept some diffuse costs. Those may be modest overall, but cause all manner of unpredictable effects with which policymakers must cope. In the case of the China Shock, our faith in a growing pie served us poorly. We’ll need to do better on climate. Leave a comment
Your AI agents can now control your Google Home devices
Google is launching early access to a new MCP server for Google Home, allowing AI agents like Claude, ChatGPT and others to control connected devices, review camera summaries and access smart home activity using natural language.
Seoul National University of Science and Technology Researchers Develop a Reliable AI System for SSD Failure Prediction
/PRNewswire/ -- Solid-state drives (SSDs), which store data in computers and servers, are critical to data center reliability. SSD failures can cause service...
Small businesses unleash big dreams on Longboat Key
Three of the newest additions to the Longboat Key small business community are up for a new award from the Longboat Key Chamber of Commerce.
New York launches measles dashboard as cases rise statewide
The New York State Department of Health launched a new measles dashboard that tracks cases by county and date
Meta now lets AI agents handle the boring parts of WhatsApp Business setup
A new WhatsApp Business MCP server lets developers use AI coding agents like Claude, Cursor, Codex, and ChatGPT to handle setup, messaging templates, testing, and troubleshooting.
Raleigh is putting up signs marking the ‘4th Ward Entertainment District.’ What is it?
Find out more about Raleigh’s newest district.
Ocean Science Consulting Release Second Edition of Marine Mammal Observer Handbook
Ocean Science Consulting Ltd. (OSC) has announced the official launch of OSC Publishing House, a dedicated publishing division established…
Lakewood Ranch Business Alliance promotes nonprofits
The first Community Impact Showcase was hosted by the alliance to bring the nonprofit and business communities together.
Lakewood Ranch Business Alliance promotes nonprofits
The first Community Impact Showcase was hosted by the alliance to bring the nonprofit and business communities together.
Dallas senator, Democratic AG candidate Nathan Johnson wants to break from the past
Johnson is facing Mayes Middleton, a Republican who has pledged to continue pushing conservative priorities if elected.
OpenAI acquires Israeli-founded camera startup Glass Imaging for over $300 million
Founded by Israeli former Apple engineer Ziv Attar and his former colleague Tom Bishop, Glass Imaging uses AI to overcome limitations in compact cameras and has developed technology for smartphones, drones and wearables.
In a reversal, NC Health Plan moves some Atrium hospitals to mid-tier for 2027
A dozen Atrium hospitals will no longer be designated as “non-preferred” under the plan’s new tiered network, taking effect Jan. 1, 2027.
Nine athletes highlight the 910Preps Athlete of the Week poll
Another week of high school sports has concluded. Here are nine Fayetteville-area nominees for 910Preps Athlete of the Week for Sept. 7-13.
UNC vs Clemson | Odds, injuries, predictions and key matchups
Everything you need to know for UNC vs. Clemson, including kickoff time, TV channel, injury updates, betting odds, predictions and storylines.
Baxter Health honors nurse Sara Phelps with Heroes with Halos award
Sara Phelps, a licensed practical nurse on Baxter Health's 5 South unit, has received the health system's Heroes with Halos Award. The recognition honors Baxter Health providers, employees, volunteers and departments nominated by grateful patients and families. Phelps was nominated by a patient she cared for after back surgery in mid-July. "She showed genuine kindness and
‘We hit the floor running’ Winfield Grill server on Bills football spiking business
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC)- Bills football is back. The team is 1-0 after beating the Houston Texans in a nail-biting victory. Fans and businesses across western New York are thrilled, including the st…
Europe built its medical science around male bodies – and women are paying the price
Just consider this - after almost four decades of EU-funded research, just 10 projects out of 145,983 have focused specifically on endometriosis, a condition affecting an estimated 10-15 percent of women of reproductive age, writes Renew Europe MEP Billy Kelleher.
$50M technical school opens in Lee County
The institute will offer career and technical education to about 500 students from across the region.
UNC vs East Tennessee State live updates: Score, highlights, analysis
UNC plays East Tennessee State in the Tar Heels' home opener. Follow live score updates, highlights, injury news, key plays and instant analysis.
Modified GeForce RTX 5090 with 96 GB Memory Shows Up on Alibaba for Nearly $4,000
A Chinese manufacturer is now selling a modified GeForce RTX 5090 with 96 GB of memory, three times the 32 GB on the retail card. Shenzhen Suqiao Intelligent Technology, an OEM/ODM with over a decade of experience building graphics cards, motherboards, and servers, listed the card on Alibaba for...
Pinecrest at South View football kickoff delayed due to lightning
With lightning seen from Randy Ledford Field at South View, the Tigers' football game against Pinecrest is under delay.
Group says Floridians are owed $48 billion in unclaimed funds
The national organization Reclaim.org says despite state's efforts to connect people with their money, 13 million accounts are unclaimed.
Apple’s foldable iPhone poses a $1,999 question: Who is it for?
Apple's new foldable iPhone launched on Wednesday with impressive features and a premium price tag, starting at $1,999 in the U.S. market. But some observers in the packed room at the launch event in Cupertino, California, were left questioning its appeal beyond wealthy tech enthusiasts.
Apple’s foldable iPhone poses a $1,999 question: Who is it for?
Apple's new foldable iPhone launched on Wednesday with impressive features and a premium price tag, starting at $1,999 in the U.S. market. But some observers in the packed room at the launch event in Cupertino, California, were left questioning its appeal beyond wealthy tech enthusiasts.
Legal troubles mount as REIT founders indicted for stealing from employees
Already facing an SEC lawsuit and state investigation, the founders of RAD Diversified REIT have been charged with raiding employee benefit programs.
Live updates, scores from Week 4 of high school football
Follow along here for scores and highlights from Week 4 as Terry Sanford takes on Jack Britt, Seventy-First faces former coach at Hoke, and more.
Attorney opposing Republican-backed Missouri congressional map reacts to Supreme Court cases
What public records of local elections meeting texts show + tax limits opposition
Read our Under the Dome politics newsletter to stay up to date, including what public records of elections meeting texts show.
Elbit restructures its U.S. business as American defense demand accelerates
The Israeli defense group is placing its 3,300-worker American operation under Twenty-Six Defense as its U.S. business expands. The move follows more than $370 million in recent contracts from Customs and Border Protection and comes as Elbit seeks to expand manufacturing capacity to meet a record $32 billion backlog.
From Lumen Field: Sam Darnold injury update, why Seahawks rallied past Patriots in NFL opener
Gov. Andy Beshear says arrest of former Gov. Matt Bevin shows 'the rule of law still applies'
Gracenote Expands AI Product Roadmap with Sports MCP Server, Entertainment SLM and Agents
/PRNewswire/ -- Gracenote, Nielsen's content intelligence business, today unveiled the next phase of its AI product roadmap. Anchored by its Video Model...
New Anita Earls campaign ad + protest outside NC Supreme Court
Read our Under the Dome newsletter to stay up to date on North Carolina politics, delivered to your inbox.
Company that pledged 200 jobs in Charlotte leaves town for SC, loses NC incentives
The company, known for brands like Dirt Devil, announced a $5 million investment in 2015.
Southern Union names Pike dean of health sciences
CONTRIBUTED BY SUSCC OPELIKA — Southern Union State Community College has named Dr. Richard Pike as dean of health sciences. Pike assumed the position Sept. 1 following the retirement of Dean Rhonda Davis. A graduate of Southern Union, Pike earned an associate in science degree and his emergency medical technician certification from the college. He […]
Joint Observations with Swift removed from IXPE GO Cycle 4
The IXPE Guest Observer (GO) Program solicits proposals for investigations in any area of astrophysics (not constrained to IXPE’s prime science areas).
In 12 years, Triangle man missed only 1 health insurance payment. He lost coverage
A mistake setting up autopay proved costly for this Morrisville family. Here’s what happened — and how you can avoid it.
‘Texas is the center of political conversation,’ according to MS NOW host Jen Psaki
Ahead of the RNC's Dallas midterm convention, the former White House spokesperson explains why Texas leads 2026 midterm politics.
72nd Annual Decatur BBQ Fest promises flavor, fun, and free family entertainment on Sept. 12
DECATUR -- A cherished Northwest Arkansas tradition returns Saturday, Sept. 12, as the Decatur Chamber of Commerce hosts the 72nd annual Decatur BBQ Fest at Veterans Park (1105 W. Main St.).
Four Lake Norman hospitals seek approval for 3D body scanner. Only one will get it
Atrium, Duke Health, Novant and Southern Oncology compete to set up a 3D body scanner outside Charlotte.
NC Senate race sparks AI deepfake debate after mistake on Cabarrus County mailers
“The use of AI deepfake imagery and content deceives voters and violates their trust,” one candidate said.
Israel records one of OECD’s steepest declines in reading, math and science scores
Israeli 15-year-olds lost 38 points in reading, 25 in math and 23 in science since 2022, leaving the country below the OECD average in every field; nearly 3 in 10 now lack basic proficiency across all three
Longtime Baxter Health nurse joins gastroenterology clinic as nurse practitioner
Kirsten Cotter, a registered nurse at Baxter Health since 2001, will begin seeing patients Tuesday, Sept. 8, as an advanced practice registered nurse at the Baxter Health Gastroenterology Clinic. Cotter joins Dr. Abodunrin S. Badejo, Dr. William S. Dyer Sr., and nurse practitioners Patricia Acklin, Kimber Jensen and Amanda Stricklin at the clinic, according to
Anthropic drops plans to acquire Israeli AI startup Decart
The companies had discussed a transaction worth roughly $6 billion, but the Claude maker ultimately decided against buying the company after reviewing its business and technology.
Mental health services being offered at two schools
Riverside Counseling LLC will begin providing on‑site mental health services at both Eisenhower and Youngsville Schools starting in the 2026 school year. The initiative aims to make emotional and behavioral health support more accessible for students by offering therapy directly within the school buildings. “We are here to support the Youngsville and Eisenhower Schools by […]
Letters to the Editor: Constitutional amendment, state and local races
One reader discussed the constitutional amendment on the ballot this November. Another wrote in response to a student regarding local elections. And another discussed gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany, who serves as U.S. Rep. for the 7th Congressional District.
Burnham’s UK‑first politics meet a more protectionist EU and its ‘Made in Europe’ plan
The new UK prime minister has focused on domestic policy so far, but wants a close relationship with EU. How can that be reconciled with the EU's new protectionist 'Made in Europe' agenda?
Pokémon Go is Milking Mewtwo Too Hard, Fans Say, After a Lackluster Weekend Event Marred by More Server Issues
Mewtwo is being milked too hard, fans say, as Pokémon Go continues to capitalize on the creature's popularity and monetization potential.
Nvidia’s Israeli networking business is booming, and so is its economic footprint
The company’s networking revenue reached $32.3 billion in just the first half of fiscal 2027, already surpassing the previous full-year total. Much of the technology behind the business traces back to Mellanox and Nvidia’s Israeli development centers.
Gascoine transforms a pottery hobby into thriving Monson business
MONSON — More than a quarter century ago Jemma Gascoine noticed an ad for an evening pottery class when she flipped through a copy of “Time Out London” magazine someone had left on a seat of the London train back in her native United Kingdom. Gascoine soon stopped by a class offered by Barry Guppy and attended his workshop classes for two years.
It seems impossible not to mention Gaza if you meet Israelis on holiday in Europe
I made friends with two Israeli couples while on holiday in Greece this summer and when the conversation inevitably turned to Palestine, I was struck by how misinformed, scared, and ashamed they were.
Ocean Beach Health Foundation launches $500,000 campaign for MRI in south Pacific County
ILWACO — The Ocean Beach Health Foundation has launched a community-wide campaign to raise $500,000 toward the purchase of a permanent Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) system for Ocean Beach Health, […]
Wonderful is growing like Wiz, but its business is very different
The Israeli AI startup has reached a $5 billion valuation and a $70 million revenue run rate in less than two years, but its economics look far less like those of a traditional software company.
The Casual Observer: Georgia's musical talent
Georgia has a rich history of popular musical talent.
North Hills, Hillsborough Street and Pittsboro restaurants go out of business
A burger spot near NC State is among the restaurants closing.
Maine healthcare leaders celebrate Gov. Mills as ‘Health Care Hero’
Photo courtesy of the Office of Gov. Janet MillsHEALTH CARE HERO — Healthcare leaders from across Maine celebrated Gov.
Exchange Online outage causes email delays, 'Server busy' errors
Microsoft is working to resolve an ongoing Exchange Online outage that is delaying email sent to and received from external domains.
Analysis | Ken Paxton and the politics of timepieces
Ken Paxton campaigned while wearing a very expensive watch, some political observers believe. Will it hurt his race?
Cumberland County school board moves to end minority business program
Cumberland County Schools plans to repeal minority- and women-owned business contracting policies after changes included in North Carolina's budget.
Feld Entertainment CEO on prioritizing innovation, challenging assumptions
To foster innovation, Feld Entertainment, under CEO Juliette Feld Grossman, prioritizes creating an environment that allows people to take risks and challenge assumptions.
Feld Entertainment CEO on prioritizing innovation, challenging assumptions
To foster innovation, Feld Entertainment, under CEO Juliette Feld Grossman, prioritizes creating an environment that allows people to take risks and challenge assumptions.
St. Pete tech entrepreneur uses AI to help save family farms
AgWise is bringing a bushel of AI technology to an industry — farming — sorely in need of it.
Fast-food franchisee chooses Tampa to debut healthy eating drive-thru
Tampa-based drive-thru concept Greenlane is redefining convenience with fresh, made-to-order meals — and bringing innovation to an industry sorely lacking it.
SWFL nonprofit donor consulting firm surpasses $120M in revenue
VeraData, founded by Michael Peterman, has tapped into machine learning and AI to innovate — and influence — the way nonprofits find and connect with donors.
Founding high school principal launches AI-fueled education business
Onetime teacher Marlee Strawn, who her students say had "eyes in the back of her head," has turned her innovative approach to special education, aided by AI.