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These Are The 8 Shows Canceled By NBC In 2026 So Far
"Law & Order: Organized Crime" and more shows are not returning.
Why Anna Faris thought she'd never do another 'Scary Movie': 'A concession of my soul'
Anna Faris never thought she'd return to the 'Scary Movie' franchise, fearing 'a concession of my soul.' Now, she tells EW that coming back as Cindy Campbell after 20 years has been a 'huge gift.'
Habits form far faster than science previously thought, research shows
Hopkins team studies whether a region of the brain plays a key role in developing habitual behavior, a discovery that could point to ways to alter entrenched habits
I Wore a Smart Fart Wearable for Three Days. Here's What I Learned
Researchers at the University of Maryland are trying to get to the bottom of our farts.
Popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs linked to lower risks of addiction and overdose
A massive study of more than 600,000 U.S. veterans suggests that popular GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide may do far more than help with diabetes and weight loss—they could also fight addiction itself. Researchers found that people taking these medications were less likely to develop substance use disorders involving alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, cocaine, opioids, and other drugs, while those already struggling with addiction experienced fewer overdoses, hospitalizations, emergency visits, and drug-related deaths.
Elections to top science bodies test Croatia’s gender equality in research
Croatia’s track-record on gender equality in science has been both questioned and lauded in recent months, following both bad and good news on the topic. On the one hand, a senior awards committee was announced without a single woman researcher included. On the other, the national science academy welcomed its first cohort of fellows with more women than men.Members of the committee, which gives national awards recognising scientific achievement, are proposed by the ministry of science and endorsed by the parliament. The current line-up does include a woman, but she is culture minister Nina Obuljen Koržinek rather than a researcher. Even then, she didn’t make it into the photograph released to announce the appointments on April 16. “The image speaks a thousand words,” says Tanja Rudež, a science journalist for Jutarnji List newspaper. “I am surprised that none of these men, all well-known scientists, saw a problem with the fact that there was not a single successful female scientist on the committee,” she told Science|Business.Ivan Đikić, a prominent Croatian biochemist based at Goethe University Medical School, commented on LinkedIn that the news illustrated a “sad truth” about the state of science in Croatia.“It [. . .] reveals a system where women, despite contributing a substantial share of high-quality, internationally competitive science, are systematically excluded from the very processes that determine recognition and influence,” he wrote. Some 60% of researchers in Croatia are women, according to the Croatian Bureau of Statistics, and they perform well in international competitions. For example, of the 12 European Research Council (ERC) grants awarded to Croatian researchers, seven went to women.“So how is it possible that decision-making bodies are still dominated by men over 60, while not a single female ERC laureate is involved in the selection process?” asked Đikić. “This is not a marginal oversight; it is a structural failure.” The ministry of science did not reply to a request for comment. The awards committee is not unusual. For example, a scientific advisory body announced by the ministry of demographics in April comprises 35 men and five women. The board of the Croatian Science Foundation, newly appointed by the parliament, is a little better, with five men and two women, but still unequal. “This is especially significant because such bodies do not merely distribute prestige. They shape research priorities, funding allocation and long-term scientific development,” Marija Lugarić, chair of the parliament’s committee on gender equality, told Science|Business. “Representation here matters not only symbolically, but materially.”Referring to the awards committee and the board of the science foundation, Lugarić says that while both bodies were appointed by parliament, neither met the minimum 40% gender balance threshold that Croatian law and EU guidelines expressly recommend for public bodies.Đikić wants to see EU institutions put pressure on the government to ensure basic standards of fairness, transparency and democratic governance in science policy are met. “Meaningful change will not come without pressure,” he wrote. “It must intensify both within Croatia and at the level of European institutions. Anything less undermines the credibility of Europe’s commitment to excellence and inclusion in science.”Rudež also underlined the importance of talking and writing about this topic, “because public opinion in Croatia does influence changes in the status and visibility of women in science.”The European Commission has not yet responded to a request for comment.Good news from the academyA more positive story came from the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts on 21 May, with the announcement of seven new women fellows and five men. This is the first time in the academy’s 165-year history that women have outnumbered men in a new intake.One of the new fellows, two-time ERC grantee Iva Tolić, credits the academy leadership with trying to be more modern and inclusive, representing the whole community better. “The academy is really aware that so far, before this election, there were very few women,” she told Science|Business. “So, they are actively trying to make this more equal.”Related articlesExplained: How the MSCA is close to achieving gender balanceCall for EU to leverage academic freedom in global talent raceRudež is more cautious, noting that despite the academy’s “breakthrough this year [. . .] it is still a predominantly male institution, with only 18% women.”This reflects a wider imbalance in Croatia’s research landscape. “The key levers of power in science are still in the hands of men,” she went on. “For example, all 14 rectors of private and public universities are men.”Similarly, Lugarić says a structural glass ceiling still exists in Croatian science, which is “most visible precisely where power is exercised.”She cites data from the Commission’s She Figures 2024 report, which shows that Croatia ranks second in the EU for gender equality in research and innovation overall, with an equality index of 79.6 out of 100. It is in the top five for women’s career advancement, participation in research; representation across all research sectors and for scientific publications.In stark contrast, it ranks second to last when it comes to women in decision-making positions in science. “This is not a coincidence,” Lugarić says. “It is a structural pattern.”Informal barriersThe persistent under-representation of women in the highest structures of Croatia’s academies, boards, award committees and leadership positions is not down to formal barriers, Lugarić says, but arises from more subtle obstacles such as “informal networks, persistent expectations regarding traditional gender roles and the unequal distribution of care responsibilities.”Tolić would like to see more support for young women in terms of affordable housing and child support, and higher salaries. Currently, she says, salaries in science stay low for the first 10-15 years, while housing and spaces in kindergarten are limited and expensive. “You have to work a lot, you get very little money, so it’s not great to have a family in this situation,” she says.But despite the challenges, Tolić is optimistic, saying that gender equality in research in Croatia is “definitely improving and going in the right direction.” The situation is particularly promising in biology, she adds, where most full professors, heads of department and deans of faculties are women. Lugarić, too, see the glass ceiling “very slowly, cracking,” and cites the academy election as an example that structural change is possible. Yet the situation in the national awards committee is a “stark reminder that without a conscious, systemic commitment to gender balance, progress will remain slow and uneven.”
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!
STAR Seminar
This Stress, Trauma, and Resilience (STAR) Seminar is about transitional age youth — young people between the ages of 16 and 25 navigating child welfare, mental health systems, and schools in a world that has already formed opinions about them before they walk through the door — and specifically about Black and brown youth, who are overrepresented in every one of these systems.
Mud Hens crush Cubs as Justin Verlander rehabs
Scores, news, and notes from around the Detroit Tigers’ farm system for Tuesday, June 2, 2026.
This week in Santa Cruz County business: Planning commission weighs next steps for Front & Laurel project; apple farmers face shift as Martinelli’s cancels contracts
This week in local business, Jessica M. Pasko has the latest on a proposed mixed-use development in downtown Santa Cruz, a seismic development for South County apple growers and names, numbers and dates to know.
Tom Steyer spent over half a billion trying to get into politics. So far, not so good
Steyer is trailing Democrat Xavier Becerra for the No. 2 slot for the November general election by about 250,000 votes.
Dennis Cirkin Deserves a Fond Farewell from Sunderland
It's certainly a bittersweet exit, but it's important that we thank Dennis Cirkin for his time at the club and wish him the very best as everyone moves forward.
Trump’s pick for Iowa governor concedes GOP primary in upset
Rep. Randy Feenstra’s apparent loss to farmer Zach Lahn is a blow to Trump’s dominance in Republican nominating contests.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra and Wide just leaked side by side again in new images
This time you can see exactly how far apart the two shapes really are.
RRH marks one year of free genetic screening program that identifies health risks
13WHAM ABC Rochester provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, health reports, notices of events and items of interest in the community, local sports and entertainment programming for Rochester and nearby towns and communities including Greece, Victor, Pittsford, Penfield, Henrietta, Webster, Irondequoit, Fairport, Chili, Gates, Rush, Wheatland, Canandaigua, Farmington, Spencerport and Hilton.
N.Y. sues over the Trump administration's deal to end an offshore wind project
State attorneys general from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont joined New York in challenging the cancellation of the lease off of New York.
Indie Video Game ‘Mina the Hollower’ Sells 300,000 Copies in Three Days
The new action-platformer is the best-reviewed video game of 2026 so far
New Jersey Democrats pick opponent in district where U.S. Rep. Tom Kean Jr. has been absent
New Jersey’s 7th District, nestled amid suburban towns and rolling farmland — and including one of President Donald Trump’s golf clubs — is the highest-profile race in the state on Tuesday.
Inside the 'Scary Movie' family reunion for an 'edgy as f---' new era
Marlon and Shawn Wayans, Regina Hall, and Anna Faris are giving EW an exclusive sneak peek at their rowdy return to the 'Scary Movie' franchise, which they call 'bare-knuckle boxing with kids' gloves on.'
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.
Mets Player Meter: Position players, May 18-31
A quick review of how the Mets’ position players fared in the past couple of weeks.
French Open: Elina Svitolina upset in quarterfinals as favorites continue to fall at Roland-Garros
Top seeds aren't faring very well at the 2026
'Leeds want to become that established Premier League team'
Leeds' Daniel James says it has been "really big" for him to play the minutes he has in what was a "brilliant season" for the Whites. Despite missing two months with a hamstring problem, the 28-year-old made 19 appearances in the Premier League as Daniel Farke's side finished 14th in their top-flight return. "It's been a brilliant season," said James before Wales' summer friendlies against Ghana and Romania.
Uganda health ministry confirms six new cases of Ebola
Uganda has confirmed six more new cases of Ebola, bringing the total confirmed in the country so far to 15, the health ministry said on Tuesday.
iPhone 18 Pro battery capacity could offer far more modest gains this year
It’s long been rumored that the iPhone 18 Pro Max battery capacity would be the largest ever seen in an...
PHOTO ESSAY: Where tango never sleeps: Inside Istanbul’s vibrant dance community
ISTANBUL (AP) — Far from tango's birthplace in working-class districts and port areas of Buenos Aires and Montevideo in Argentina and Uruguay, dance enthusiasts in Istanbul have built a close-knit
Gravitational wave astronomy is now a fully mature science
In 2016, humanity announced our first successful gravitational wave detection. 10 years and 389 events later, here's how far we've come.
Whistleblower hunt
Also, in Tuesday’s edition: return hubs, Frederiksen returns, Moldova, and what’s a farmer?
Divorced mom managed graduation and other end-of-year events from afar
As a divorced mom, I always prepare for my kids' biggest moments even when they happen on a week when they're with my ex.
USACE FED earns esteemed Army Safety and Occupational Health Star
CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea—The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – Far East District (USACE FED) successfully earned the Army Safety and Occupational Health...
President Trump to visit Wisconsin on Friday to support farmers
As Dairy Month kicks off, he’ll visit Chippewa County.
Business News June 2026
• The Cornell School celebrates 10th anniversary! • “School’s Out for Summer “ market at Bethany Village • Cedar Mill Farmers Market • End of School Block Party • Speech & Debate summer camp • BodElite Introduces Emsella for pelvic health • Buying a Home? What to Know Before You Remodel • How CWS sets rates for your community • Sunset Credit Union news • New Bottle Drop at Target store
The Next Step in Trump’s War on Science - Center for Progressive Reform
A proposed new rule would replace merit-based funding of science with a heavily politicized process. It would also deprive scientists of the ability to rely on finding for long-term projects. This proposal has no real legal basis. It is likely to undermine American science, giving a boost to China's efforts to take over global scientific leadership.
The Next Step in Trump's War on Science
OMB's new rule attempts to politicize funding for scientific research. It goes far beyond OMB's legal authority.
Infinity Ward sneakily offers first look at Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer gameplay, and apparently it's all about movement now
Modern Warfare 4 has shown off multiplayer for the first time, and there's a major emphasis on movement that even Infinity Ward's harshest critics didn't expect
Happy Harry's RibFest brings heat to summer entertainment lineup
“It’s probably our strongest four nights of entertainment," said Fargodome Director of Marketing & Sales Sarah Dykema.
Every concert announced for the 2026 Oregon State Fair so far
Who's playing the Oregon State Fair this summer? Here's the list of everyone announced so far.
Your kitchen sponge is releasing microplastics every time you wash dishes
Kitchen sponges release microplastics as they wear down during everyday use, with some sponge types shedding far more than others. Researchers estimated that millions of households could collectively release hundreds of tons of microplastics annually.
What are realistic expectations for Isaac TeSlaa in 2026?
How will Isaac TeSlaa fare in his second season with the Detroit Lions?
New York Jets Flight Connections 06/01/26
It’s Monday, Jets fans, and your daily links are below. Michael Nania – Jets’ Geno Smith named ‘unluckiest’ QB of 2025 season Michael Nania – Adonai Mitchell reveals the ‘Bad MF’ of the NY Jets Paul Esden Jr. – 6-Foot-7 Jets Pass Catcher Is Getting ‘Real Chance’ to Make Team: Insider Nick Faria – Garrett […]
Trump flips script on left, maneuvers to use foreign influence law against the them
Trump aims to use FARA and other legal tools against alleged foreign influence on the left after years of probes targeting his allies, experts say.
Kona-low storm fallout continues to hit North Shore business
Visitor traffic to Waimea Valley has fallen sharply this spring, forcing staff to stretch resources and scale back hiring as fewer travelers make the trip past ongoing traffic restrictions triggered by March’s Kona-low storms.
Flannery O’Connor book probes how mother grew author’s legacy on family farm
Flannery O'Connor is a central figure in Southern fiction whose work has been oft dissected. But “Flannery and Regina” focuses on a novel angle: her Andalusia domestic life.
Virtual farms created from real-world tomato farm images
The virtual environment (left) is created using real-world tomato farm images (right) manually obtained from camera data collected by agricultural robots.
The Boston Red Sox Have A Problem Nobody Expected
The Boston Red Sox have had an odd season so far, to say the least.
How Will FIFA Impact Local Business & Tourism? Join the Conversation June 9!
The FIFA World Cup is coming to the Seattle region—and the economic impact will extend far beyond the stadium
Beaten Kentucky Derby Favorite Further Ado Returns In Matt Winn
Spendthrift Farm’s Blue Grass Stakes (G1) winner Further Ado headlines a talented field of eight 3-year-olds entered in next Sunday’s 29th running of the $500,000 Matt Winn Stakes (G3) at Churchill Downs. Contested at 1 1/16 miles for 3-year-olds, the Matt Winn shares the Sunday ...
iOS 28 Will Reportedly Be 'Far More Significant' Than iOS 27
While we are still a week away from Apple unveiling iOS 27, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has just shared the first rumor regarding iOS 28. In his Power On newsletter today, he said that iOS 28 will be "far more significant" than iOS 27, but he did not provide any specific details. "Next year's '28' releases are already shaping up to be far more significant than the '27' updates," wrote Gurman, without elaborating.
News 13 bids farewell to weekend sports anchor Marvin Parker Jr.
It's a bittersweet day at News 13 as the station says goodbye to weekend sports anchor and reporter Marvin Parker Jr.
The Missing Variable In Every AI Business Case: Your Customer
Leaders are running incomplete math on AI automation. Efficiency gains are real—but the erosion of customer trust may cost far more than the savings.
Sheinbaum accuses U.S. of interfering in Mexico’s politics
"Or are we perhaps seeing sectors of the US far right positioning themselves ahead of their 2026 elections?”
Transactional politics or far-left planning? Either way, California’s next governor will be terrible.
Whoever wins, we can only hope they clean up the mess left by Gov. Gavin Newsom and can at least not make things worse.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 invites you to "keep the receipts" as it fights to be a more "authentic", "grounded, and transparent" shooter experience
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's community team insists players can "keep the receipts" as it fights to remain "authentic to what Modern Warfare is".
Frankie Valli, 92, abruptly cancels remainder of Four Seasons farewell tour to focus on his health
Frankie Valli cancels remaining Four Seasons farewell tour dates, saying he needs to take the rest of the year off to focus on his health at age 92.
Stephon Castle joins Kobe, Westbrook and Shai in rare Western Conference Finals company
Stephon Castle gave San Antonio far more than debutant support during the Western Conference Finals, averaging 18 points, five rebounds and 7. 6 assists against Oklahoma City.
'Stop Killing Games’ Bill Passes California Assembly
Bill AB 1921 adds new stipulations to games being taken offline, giving Accursed Farms’ Scott Ross one of his biggest stateside wins yet
Music icon cancels the rest of his tour to focus on health
Frankie Valli canceled the remaining dates on his farewell tour to focus on his health.
More than profit: Baltimore entrepreneurs blend business with community service
Black entrepreneurs in Baltimore are using their businesses as vehicles for community impact, offering resources that extend far beyond their products and services. From literacy initiatives and youth programs to mutual aid and criminal justice advocacy, local business owners are investing directly in the people and neighborhoods around them.
Crow Wing SWCD to host free soil health events
The events will include soil health demonstrations led by soil health educators and field tours led by local farmers who are implementing soil health practices on their farms.
NC lawmakers return from break with budget pending. Catch up on what they’re doing
The NC legislature is about to return from a break. Here’s what you need to know about their activity so far.
Milan Superstar Bids Farewell: “I’ve Given Everything”
Rafael Leao is on the verge of leaving Milan after seven years, with the Portuguese winger bidding farewell to San Siro in his latest interview. Speaking to Gazzetta dello Sport, Leao confirmed his am...
Can solar sails really send humans out into interstellar space?
"I think these are not far-out type of ideas; they are not really futuristic ideas that we are talking about."
The surprising business class travel hack I learned as a parent
Older business-class cabins make flying with a baby far easier for my family of three in a way that newer suite-style pods can't. Here's why.
HCA Healthcare’s Far West Division hires Rodriguez
HCA Healthcare’s Far West Division has hired Onel Rodriguez as division chief financial officer.
Western Conference Finals winners and losers: De'Aaron Fox steps up for Spurs, two Thunder starters disappear
The best series of these playoffs so far is in the books, and the WCF ramifications will be felt for a long time
Frankie Valli calls off Four Seasons' farewell tour for health concerns
Frankie Valli, 92, has canceled the remainder of the Four Seasons 2026 farewell tour dates, citing health reasons.
New coin business opens in W’bago
Winnebago Coins celebrated its grand opening with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Wednesday, May 28, and owner Ryan Hatlen has already had a few eager customers come through his doors. “The neat thing about being in the coin business is that almost everybody knows somebody who collects,” Hatlen notes. “Either they have a family member who […]
Francis Tiafoe Slammed For Behavior During French Open
The match between Frances Tiafoe and Jaime Faria went so long that Tiafoe had a little bit of a blow-up at Faria at one point.
Frankie Valli cancels the remainder of the Four Seasons’ farewell tour, citing health concerns
Frankie Valli, whose legendary falsetto defines the sound of the 1960s rock group the Four Seasons, has cancelled the remainder of the band’s 2026 tour dates.
Delaney Hall protests intensify as far-left activists, ICE supporters converge in New Jersey
Communist activists, far-right group clash outside Delaney Hall in Newark, transforming the protest into a broader political spectacle.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will fix something players hated years ago
Movement should feel a whole lot better in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4
Delta Communities Must Plan for the Future They Want
Everyone has a plan. The farmer decides months before the first warm day of spring which crops will go in the ground, how many acres each will take, and what inputs will be needed to give each row its best chance. The retailer studies last year’s numbers and plans which products to stock before the […]
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 […]
Infinity Ward Vows Modern Warfare 4 Stays Grounded, Slams Door on Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj and Omni-Man Skins
Infinity Ward dumped a lot of information on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 all at once on Thursday, May 28. Among the reveals, the studio also shared that cosmetics and collaborations won't betray the game's grounded atmosphere, unlike in other recent installments. On the studio's X account, they tweeted: Every aspect of Modern Warfare 4 is anchored in the game's narrative. Every feature, every decision needs to feel authentic to what Modern Warfare is, and that includes cosmetics and collabs. We're committed to keeping it grounded and transparent, and we want to hear from you on what you'd like […]
Power of Two: Health plans becoming fiduciary litigation target
A new wave of litigation is targeting health and welfare plans, particularly voluntary benefits, pharmacy benefit managers, and fee structures embedded in vendor arrangements.
Meta has struggled at selling anything other than ads. Will AI be different?
Meta is making a major push to expand its business beyond online advertising, but past efforts show that success is far from guaranteed.
Atlanta airport parking is getting a big boost
The seven-level, $441 million Domestic Terminal South Parking Deck is a far cry from its over-40-years-old predecessor.
Blue Moon 2026: An extremely rare micromoon rises tonight
A rare Blue Moon, the second full moon in May, will also be a "micromoon" near its farthest point from Earth.
Trump’s $1.8bn slush fund: has the Don gone too far?
Such ‘brazen corruption’ makes the Watergate scandal look ‘almost quaint’
Chinese scientists create ‘kill-them-all’ algorithm for drone warfare
Smart web identifies objects as friend, foe or terrain, meaning drone swarms can hunt even when communication is jammed and vision blocked.
Scientists map the ocean’s invisible workforce of microbes
USC Dornsife research reveals how tiny sea-faring organisms compete for nutrients, recycle carbon and help regulate the planet’s climate
A recap of UNC's spring sports
From record-breaking performances to deep postseason runs, UNC once again showcased its strength across collegiate athletics during the spring season. Here’s a look back at how UNC’s spring sports teams fared this season.
Farley Reardon
Juniper Advisory is pleased to announce the promotion of Farley Reardon to Partner.
Romania's political crisis deepens
After Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan’s government fell in early May, Romania's moderate parties have struggled to chart a new course — opening the door for the far right to gain ground.
Who's tired? Bukayo Saka warns PSG: 'It's moments, not minutes, that will decide Champions League final'
Despite playing far more minutes than their French opponents this season, Mikel Arteta's side say they're rested and ready for a shot at European glory
Global Health Watch: CDC Directors Warn About PEPFAR, Ebola & Aid Cuts, Policy Developments Threaten Open Science
A commentary by eight former US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) directors urges the US Department of State to reform PEPFAR, not dismantle it; the growing Ebola outbreak in Central Africa and ongoing hantavirus concerns underscore the risks abrupt changes pose to global health security; and a proposed new US federal grant regulation […]
SOCOM chief says military must 'creatively destroy' old training
The top special operations leader says the military must cut outdated training to prepare troops for drones, electronic warfare, and future conflicts.
Azmoun: Iran's absent talisman unafraid of controversy
Sardar Azmoun is Iran's third top scorer in history with a successful club career behind him but is set to miss out on the 2026 World Cup in an exclusion shadowed by political controversy."At a historical turning point, Sardar Azmoun stood on the wrong side," said the pro-government Fars news agency, accusing the player, a racehorse breeder in his spare time, of "betting on the losing horse" in a "gamble that meant missing the World Cup".
49ers News: So far so good
Your daily San Francisco 49ers news for Friday, May 28th, 2026
SRAM vs the UCI: How a dispute over gear ratios could change global sport forever
Why the outcome of a relatively obscure legal battle could have far-reaching consequences
SRAM vs the UCI: How a dispute over gear ratios could change global sport forever
Why the outcome of a relatively obscure legal battle could have far-reaching consequences
Tesla has far fewer autonomous vehicles on Texas roads than Waymo
In January, Tesla said that some of its robotaxis in Austin have begun operating without a human chaperone.
Hidden driving danger when edible cannabis and alcohol mix
Using cannabis edibles and alcohol together may make drivers far more impaired than either substance alone, according to new research from Johns Hopkins. Even more concerning, common field sobriety tests often failed to detect the cannabis-related impairment.
What will the deal to acquire Caesars Entertainment mean for Las Vegas? Gaming expert weighs in
Abel Garcia talks to Nevada Independent senior reporter Howard Stutz about the far-reaching impacts of Fertitta Entertainment's deal to acquire Caesars Entertainment.
Blistering report exposes how national K-12 group's DEI agenda is trickling down to local chapters
The National PTA faces scrutiny over DEI initiatives and left-wing political priorities allegedly trickling down to state and local school chapters and ultimately reaching students.
The acquisition of Caesars Entertainment includes other Strip resorts
The sale of Caesars Entertainment is set to bring a wide swath of Las Vegas Strip properties under new ownership, extending far beyond the Caesars Palace name.C
A silent kidney crisis is spreading far faster than experts expected
A sweeping global study found that chronic kidney disease now affects nearly 800 million people and has become one of the world's leading causes of death. Often silent in its early stages, the condition is also a major contributor to heart disease and may be even more common than current estimates suggest.
Scientists say evolution may work differently than we thought
A major research study is challenging one of evolution’s most influential ideas: that most genetic changes that become permanent are essentially neutral. Researchers at the University of Michigan found that beneficial mutations are actually far more common than scientists have long assumed. The puzzle is that these advantageous mutations rarely spread through entire populations. Their answer? Nature keeps changing the rules.
Antarctica’s ice sheet hit a climate tipping point 1 million years ago
A new study suggests Antarctica’s ice sheet hit a climate tipping point about one million years ago, making it far more reactive to temperature and CO2 changes. Researchers warn this surprising sensitivity could offer clues about how the continent may respond to today’s warming world.
Who's in? Who's out? See the lineup so far for Freedom 250 State Fair
The 16-day Great American State Fair in Washington, DC, scheduled to take place in June and July, is already facing hiccups as entertainers pull out.