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County Supervisors Approve Three‑Year Integrated Plan, Funding Behavioral Health Care, Housing and Crisis Services

County Supervisors today approved the region’s first Behavioral Health Services Act (BHSA) Integrated Plan, a three-year roadmap for how the County will use funding to support mental health care, substance use treatment and housing for people with serious behavioral health needs.

Jun 9 • 8:12 PM EDT • Health • countynewscenter.com

A classic brain test exposed AI's biggest weakness

Researchers gave top AI models a classic attention test used in psychology and found a major flaw. While the models could correctly name colors in short lists, their performance deteriorated sharply as the task became longer and more complex. Some leading systems fell from over 90% accuracy to nearly complete failure.

Jun 9 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Earth's first animals barely evolved until sex changed everything

Earth’s earliest animals may have held evolution back because they reproduced asexually, creating low-competition communities that changed very little over time. When environmental pressures pushed them toward sexual reproduction, biodiversity exploded and evolution accelerated dramatically.

Jun 9 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Statue unveiled in Boston for late business magnate, philanthropist Jack Connors

A large crowd gathered at John Hancock Tower Tuesday morning to unveil a statue honoring revered and celebrated philanthropist and business magnate Jack Connors.

Jun 9 • 7:29 PM EDT • Business • bostonherald.com

Apple Updates App Store Guidelines With Stricter Rules for Low-Quality Apps

Apple updated its App Store Review Guidelines this week, adding stricter language around low-quality apps. The 4.3 Spam rule already barred overly simple apps in saturated categories, but Apple now includes language saying low-effort apps could be pulled from the App Store. Apps in oversaturated categories that are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers may be removed, according to Apple.

Jun 9 • 6:52 PM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

Ahead of Apple MacBook Ultra: macOS 27 gets touchscreen support

With the MacBook Ultra, Apple will soon be launching its first laptop with an OLED touchscreen. The first beta version of macOS 27 already shows that macOS is being prepared for this laptop, as the system can be officially operated via touchscreen for the first time.

Jun 9 • 2:58 PM EDT • Technology • notebookcheck.net

Bleecker Street, LD Entertainment acquire Anton Corbijn’s ‘A ...

Oscar winner portrays celebrated novelist Patricia Highsmith in new thriller.

Jun 9 • 2:54 PM EDT • Entertainment • screendaily.com

K-Pop Powerhouse SM Entertainment Elevates Global Hitmaking with Solid State Logic ORACLE

Seoul, South Korea, June 9, 2026 — SM Entertainment, the multinational record label, talent agency, production company and music publisher that pioneered the introduction of Korean music artists to a wider global audience, has integrated a new Solid State Logic Oracle into BigShot Studio at its facility in Seoul, South Korea. Oracle, which introduces SSL’s […]

Jun 9 • 2:43 PM EDT • Entertainment • mixonline.com

From Classroom to Racetrack: How Charlie Baur is Building a Motorsports Career in a Business Discipline

Charlie Baur can trace his racing story back to a Christmas morning in Michigan — the kind that starts with snow on the ground and ends with a throttle in a kid’s hands. “I remember being 3 years old and then for Christmas that year, my parents had gotten me a 120 cc snowmobile,” Baur said. Long before sprint cars, he was a Michigan kid on snowmobiles, dirt bikes, four-wheelers and jet skis — and a regular at car shows and races with his family. Photo courtesy of Charlie Baur That early exposure became a calling. At 12, he sat in a sprint car for the first time and knew he’d found the next chapter. He started in quarter midgets, moved to go-karts, and the day before he turned 16 — one day shy of the minimum age required by track insurance — he made his first sprint car start after convincing officials to let him race. Five years later, Baur is still pushing forward, now racing sprint cars on both pavement and dirt while pursuing an automotive business education at Northwood University — with a clear-eyed understanding that motorsports encompasses more than what happens under the lights on Saturday night. “It’s a business,” said Charlie, a 20-year-old who calls Fenton, Michigan, home when he’s not at a racetrack or at Northwood’s residential campus in Midland, Michigan. Photo courtesy of Charlie Baur Racing is the product — but preparation is the job To the average fan, race day begins around dinner time. For a team, race day can be a 12-hour shift — plus the work that came before it. And Baur’s racing operation is a family affair. “The team is my parents and myself,” he said, explaining they own the cars, maintain equipment and manage the business side — from sponsor relations to budgeting. On race weekends, the core group includes Baur and his parents (Eric and Stefanie), plus a couple of additional hands (Alex Photiou and Robert Flannigan) who help with the intensity and pace of trackside work. That structure has shaped how he thinks about efficiency and professionalism. “We’ve always kind of had the mentality of we’re never working on the car for maintenance at the track,” he said. “Our goal is to do as little work as possible to the car because it should be ready when that car rolls out of the trailer to go racing.” That mindset shows up in routines: bolt checks, tire procedures, safety equipment and a repeatable process designed to limit errors. “Once I fire the car up and put my helmet on, that’s when it’s go time,” he said. “You can plan as much as possible for how the race is going to play out, but until you take the green flag … you don’t know how it’s going to go.” Photo courtesy of Charlie Baur First-generation driver, student of the game In racing, “first-generation” matters — and Baur wears that label with pride. “A lot of the drivers are third or fourth generation,” he said. “My family has never been in motorsports. So for me, we’ve always looked at it as we’re new to it and we want to be as different as possible. From a marketing standpoint, it helps us stand out.” It also pushes him to seek out mentors — especially veteran drivers who have seen every scenario, solved every problem and won in multiple eras. Baur credits accomplished driver Jason Blonde, a 10-time champion, for becoming his driver coach and helping him develop as a competitor. “To me, learning from Jason helps me because he has had lots of success and knows what to do,” Baur said. “You have to humble yourself and say, ‘I don’t know what to do; can you help me out?’” That willingness to learn extends off the track, too. Baur says one of his biggest challenges is not a mechanical limitation, but credibility. “It’s my age,” he said. “Some people won’t take me seriously because I’m so young. Even though … I do know what we’re talking about and have a general idea.” His answer has been to out-prepare, out-communicate and treat the operation like a real enterprise — because it is. Photo courtesy of Charlie Baur Northwood’s role: Turning passion into a plan Baur is majoring in automotive aftermarket management and pursuing an accelerated path that pairs undergraduate study with graduate work. He’s also exploring how to align his studies with motorsports-focused coursework as Northwood advances related programs and pathways. He sees the value clearly: motorsports needs business-literate professionals who understand budgets, sponsorship, marketing, operations and long-term strategy — and who can translate between the language of the shop and the language of the boardroom. That’s why his Northwood experience isn’t limited to the classroom. He has been involved with the Northwood University International Auto Show and serves as motorsports chair — a leadership role that demands outreach, contracts, coordination and a steady professional demeanor. “There’s so much outside work that makes the auto show successful that people don’t realize,” he said. “And it is truly student led.” He’s also participated in industry experiences through Northwood at major events such as AAPEX, SEMA and PRI, along with other automotive networking events — opportunities he describes as a fast track to understanding how business really gets done. “You learn a lot in the classroom,” he said. “But if you learn it and you can’t apply it to the real world, it loses its value. Or if you learn it and can apply it, but you don’t know anyone, it is still of no value.” In his words, Northwood helps him win because it “gives me the tools to succeed” — including flexibility and faculty support as he balances travel and racing commitments with academics. Photo courtesy of Charlie Baur Racing as an ecosystem — and a talent gap waiting to be filled Baur is blunt about what he sees across the motorsports world: a deep bench of experienced professionals, and not enough young talent entering the pipeline. “I go to car shows, I go to these different events, and typically … the average age is between 45 to 55,” he said. “There’s not a lot of young people going into the motorsports world.” That reality reinforces Northwood’s communications focus: positioning motorsports not as a narrow lane, but as a wide ecosystem of business careers — sponsorship, logistics, data, media, leadership, hospitality and innovation — with real demand for prepared graduates. It also shapes how Baur talks to younger students who love racing but aren’t sure what their future looks like. “If you have a passion for motorsports, there’s gonna be a spot for you somewhere,” he said, emphasizing that driving is only one of many career paths — and that local tracks and hands-on experience are often the best first step. But if someone is interested in driving as a career path, it will take a team to make that happen. Baur’s team includes Stahl’s Motors and Music Experience, Rhino Racing, Randy Wise Buick GMC Chevrolet, Western Michigan Fleet Parts, Mother’s Polish, Schaeffer’s Oil, Hepfner Racing Products, Ameriguard Storage Centers, Justice Brothers, Race 1 Wraps, TBM Brakes, Behind Your Design, CharlieBaur.com and Northwood University. “There are so many people who invest not only in myself but in my race team and who believe in us to succeed,” he added. Pictured: Charlie Bauer’s sprint race car. Looking ahead: A headline worth chasing Ask Baur to imagine 2035, and he’ll give you two answers — one dream, one blueprint. “In a perfect world,” he said, “winning the Indy 500.” Realistically, he wants to build a life where business ownership and racing reinforce each other and where he can pay forward the help he has received by mentoring younger drivers, especially those trying to break into motorsports without a family legacy. “When I retire from full-time racing, I want to be able to provide the same opportunities that were presented to myself to the next generation of drivers,” Baur said. “I know how difficult it is to get your foot in the door.” For now, the focus is simple: keep building the operation, keep learning the business, and keep showing up prepared — because in sprint car racing, as in life, process matters. And once the helmet goes on? “It’s go time,” Baur said. Photo courtesy of Charlie Baur Learn more Students interested in motorsports careers — whether in competition, team operations, marketing, finance, sponsorship, data, or management — can explore opportunities through Northwood University’s Center for Automotive and Mobility Studies. For Charlie Baur’s latest motorsports adventures, follow Charlie_Baur and Charlie Baur Racing on social media. To learn more about Northwood’s Bachelor of Business Administration in Automotive and Mobility Studies and motorsports management concentration, visit www.northwood.edu/programs/automotive-mobility-studies/. Photo courtesy of Charlie Baur Pictured: Charlie Baur at Butler Motor Speedway on May 31, 2026. Share this page

Jun 9 • 8:30 AM EDT • Business • northwood.edu

The Wallflowers celebrate 30th anniversary of breakthrough album at the Englert

While touring to mark The Wallflowers' 30th anniversary of “Bringing Down the Horse,” Jakob Dylan also spotlights Tom Petty’s underrated 1982 album “Long After Dark,” bridging the connection between two influential catalogs.

Jun 9 • 7:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • thegazette.com

Oklahoma Ethics Commission, political leaders weigh future of AI-generated ads

In response to concerns from candidates, elected officials and the public, Oklahoma’s Ethics Commission began exploring the regulation of AI-generated campaign ads at a special meeting Friday.

Jun 9 • 5:08 AM EDT • Politics • kosu.org

The radiologist shortage is real but smaller and more local than believed: Report

Approximately 1,470 of active radiologist openings have been sitting unfilled for over two months or more, concentrated in certain states.

Jun 9 • 2:59 AM EDT • Business • radiologybusiness.com

We can create the future of science right now

Paul Litvak is the founder and Executive Director of the Robyn Dawes Institute and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. He has a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon where he studied emotions and the sunk cost bias. Over 15 years in industry, he solved a wide range of challenging technical problems. At Meta he created models optimizing the ad review process. At Google he ran experiments to measure social influence. At Airbnb, he was a product manager leading machine learning teams optimizing search ranking and price suggestions. He also co-founded and led product at Rhythmic Health, a venture-backed biosensing startup, creating an accurate low cost system using a color changing strip and a smart phone to measure salivary lactate. The bottleneck At this point, it is uncontroversial to say that science needs to stop using the PDF article as the unit of knowledge and currency. The unbearable slowness of scientific publishing, the profit motive and margins: I’m not saying anything new. The PDF also sucks because it’s hard to extract structured information, which makes it hard to do evidence synthesis. As a result, we do much less evidence synthesis than is needed. And evidence synthesis ultimately undergirds most policy and medical decision-making. I can see second-by-second real-time odds for any sporting or newsworthy event, but a school board can’t see the best evidence on whether their 8th graders should be taught algebra. As a society, we don’t treat this as an important problem. Again, not controversial. Not only is the problem well understood, but the solution has already been laid out. What we need is AI-assisted living evidence synthesis - (1) an open knowledge graph of atomic claims, (2) claims linked to evidence, (3) assessment and synthesis of each piece of evidence, and (4) continuous updating with new data. What few realize (yet) is that the technical capacity to build this vision for a significant portion of science already exists. Not only that, scientists and startup teams are already building many of these components. I know this because I’ve been surveying the space and talking to many of the builders. There are some missing pieces: for example, evaluations of how well some of the components work. But at this point, most of what’s missing is a fully end-to-end working integration of all of these parts. In the rest of this essay, I’m going to lay out all the parts of a working living evidence layer for science and who is working on them, and propose concrete next steps for building this system. What’s now possible The diagram above outlines the components of a living evidence synthesis platform, including some of the teams working on each component1. Scientific PDFs are processed into claims with associated evidence. The evidence is subjected to a forensic audit, methodological evaluation and robustness and reproducibility checks. Finally it’s given a weight in a continuously updating synthesis. What follows is a description and status of each component and a few of the teams working on them. Document understanding The first thing you need to be able to do is turn an article into structured data. Mostly that means parsing PDFs. There are often multicolumn layouts that confuse non-specialized PDF to text processing libraries. For scientific papers, there is the added complexity of parsing formulas and tables and figures. This is a really hot area - there are startups offering APIs, and it seems like a new open source package gets posted to Github every few weeks. What follows isn’t exhaustive. A package called GROBID was the state of the art for a while, they didn’t update their package for nearly two years until very recently. In the meantime reducto.ai released an AI powered PDF extraction API, PaddleOCR became popular, IBM released a model called Docling, and both Mistral and Gemini created models and libraries. I also know of at least one other well-funded psychology research group working on a paper parser. By contrast, there are few open evals in this space, with no extensive evals for complex table comprehension in particular. Nonetheless, I’m confident this will be a solved problem soon, given the combination of LLM advances and developer interest. Hypothesis level extraction There has been increasing interest in comprehending the extracted text of papers and linking information to evidence for each hypothesis. A lot of work has already been done. Trialstreamer (Marshall et al. 2020) and RobotReviewer LIVE (Marshall et al. 2023) demonstrated automated extraction of trial population, intervention, and outcome at scale on clinical RCTs. PaperQA2 (Skarlinski et al. 2024) and Ai2 ScholarQA (2024) extended this to retrieval-augmented question answering with citation grounding. Elicit, Consensus, and SciSpace operationalized claim-level extraction for end users. OpenEval (Booeshaghi et al. 2026) is the most recent and most ambitious: 1.96 million atomic claims extracted from 16,087 eLife manuscripts using Claude Sonnet 4.5, grouped into ~299,000 results, with LLM evaluations showing 81% agreement with human peer review on a 2,487-paper subset. None of these solutions link claims to test-statistics, as you would need to evaluate randomized controlled trials. This is why I built the evidence.guide API - to extract hypotheses and associated test statistics from behavioral science papers. The best public eval of this kind of extraction I’m aware of comes from the recent SCORE project - they had humans code thousands of psychology papers to extract their claims by hand. It would be extremely helpful to the world if all scientific PDFs were available as structured open data. I’ve been working to make this happen, both directly at Berkeley and through coordination with large entities I can’t yet speak of; as hard as it is to do, I think it’s possible2. Forensic audit A lot of work has been done on forensic audit, but some gaps remain. Of course, for biology papers that rely on images for evidence, there are a variety of tools (notably Proofig and ImageTwin) to spot anomalies. These are still well short of what sleuths like Elizabeth Bik can do on her own, but these tools are constant companions among fraud analysts. There’s someone working on auditing Excel files for anomalies, and a number of teams are automating numerical checks like GRIM and SPRITE, including Scrutiny project, the INSPECT-SR team as well as statcheck. The regcheck team is building a way to use AI to compare preregistrations to analyses in papers, to ensure there aren’t significant deviations. Nonetheless, there are many other kinds of anomalies to screen for, both public and less publicly known. And there are no formal evals for anomaly detection that I’m aware of. Still, there’s a lot to draw from in this space and I’m pretty certain we will be able to scan papers for most kinds of obvious anomalies in the near future. Methodological review This area has been white hot, though I fear for many of the startups in this space, because this capability may become commoditized. There are at least six different AI peer review companies, including Refine.ink, Reviewer3, ReviewerZero.ai, Q.E.D. Science, Paper Wizard, and Isitcredible. Coarse (a pun on refine) was also recently created as an open source alternative. These systems provide qualitative feedback on the content of papers, spotting methodological weaknesses and mathematical errors. They seem to work pretty well, and many academics report bitterly that they exceed the average quality of typical peer reviewers. But there are few evals here either. What evals exist so far involve using LLM-as-judge (circularity problems abound) or comparing against human reviews of questionable quality. What you’d ideally want is an eval that measures capturing known errors in papers3. Reproducibility and robustness Another active area has been using AI agents to automate computational reproducibility4 and robustness5 checks in papers that report numerical results. For more recent papers where data and code are available, AI agents can see whether they can re-run the analyses and produce the numbers reported in the published paper. In addition to a handful of individual academics who have been experimenting using Claude Code for this, the Institute for Replication is a leading group working on building an end to end system. The evals related to this problem are the most mature, with CORE-Bench (Siegel, Kapoor, Narayanan 2024) and PaperBench (OpenAI 2025) available to benchmark agents on this task. There is also work on getting AI agents to test alternative ways of analyzing the data to ensure the results are robust to small analytic design choices. Synthesis This is the most underdeveloped area where significant investment is required. Although some automated evidence synthesis systems exist — for example, otto-sr is building an AI agent to write systematic reviews — none of these incorporate the full range of paper level signals to weight evidence appropriately. Nor is there anything like an eval or a gold standard for a good systematic review. Arguably Cochrane reviews are the closest we have to gold standard human systematic reviews, though I’ve heard academics in the know complain about their uneven quality. A key question for a synthesis platform is how to weight anomalies and methodological issues in assessing the quality of a piece of evidence. This is an unsolved problem and one I’m very keen to work on. Continuous updating There are many pieces of basic infrastructure available for monitoring for new research and initiating updates. OpenAlex is the current open citation graph. Retraction Watch integrated into Crossref in October 2023. Scite tracks how citations support, contrast, or mention prior claims. The Living Evidence Network demonstrated continuous-update workflows in clinical guidelines. Engineering this is a relatively straightforward task. When you look over this technical architecture and all the progress being made, it’s hard not to be optimistic that a living guide to scientific evidence will be built. The stakeholders are ready The social infrastructure for this is starting to coalesce — it’s not just a pie in the sky academic exercise to imagine this coming into existence. Institutions like the Center for Open Science, the Institute for Replication, the INSPECT-SR, the Living Evidence Network and more are all working on scaling work to improve research quality. Funders are also aligned. The Sloan Foundation has funded living evidence work through COS. Coefficient Giving supports the Institute for Replication and COS. The Astera Institute and the Institute for Progress have shown interest in this space. NIH has established an Office for Replication and Reproducibility. Although there are (very unfortunately) serious headwinds in science funding generally, there is an active group of funders interested in metascience. A brief word about what I’ve been doing at RDI. First, as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley I’ve been actively figuring out how a non-profit and a public university can conduct and make public the results of large-scale academic article data mining. With some of the money I raised from donors, I commissioned a legal analysis of recent case law and publisher text data mining (TDM) agreements in order to understand whether a massive open data mining of academic articles is possible (with caveats, it is). I’ve also been working to bring together stakeholders in this space, and identify gaps. I’ve also been doing some software development in this space, with more to come. A pilot proposal The assumption undergirding all of this is that an AI, given all this information, would make the right judgment about a scientific claim with lots of conflicting evidence, weighing all the factors appropriately. That’s the hypothesis we need to test. Randomized control trial research is the best place to focus on first. RCTs are used to make many of the important decisions in society - from medical trials to public policy changes. And they use a relatively uniform set of inferential statistics with lots of known and available diagnostics. Behavioral science experiments, within the broader realm of RCTs, should be first used as a testbed whose results can be generalized. Because behavioral science is at the vanguard of open science practices, replications abound (there are thousands of them) to serve as ground truth training data. Key Hypothesis Therefore the pilot would test, in behavioral RCTs that have been replicated, whether the quality of evidence for a claim can be used to accurately predict whether that claim will replicate. Secondary Hypotheses Compared to claims that replicated, non-replicated claims demonstrate a greater share of forensic anomalies in their source literatures. Hypothesis level claim and statistic extraction is accurate enough to scale living evidence without onerous human review costs. Replication prediction is more accurate than prediction markets6 or journal prestige. If all the different quality signals we gather do accurately predict which studies will replicate, then we can use that model to score evidence to power the living evidence layer. Why this is informative regardless of outcome If the pilot succeeds, the architecture extends to medical RCTs (where Living Evidence already operates and integration is mostly about claim representation), then to slices of basic biology with stable replication structure. If it fails, the field learns which quality signals are load-bearing and which ones metascience has oversold. Either result is a contribution to knowing what the literature supports. Implications for funders Because this burgeoning ecosystem of builders already exists, a well-informed philanthropic or government funder could play a crucial catalyzing role in bringing this future about. They could play at least three roles: creating open structured datasets, publishing open benchmarks and incentivizing the solving of key technical challenges. First, open archives of papers that the government maintains, like PubMed, could be turned into structured data amenable to large scale metascience and claim aggregation. I know the US government already has an interest in doing this, though some key open questions remain unanswered. How do you determine the best models and systems for accurately extracting information from papers? How can you establish a robust way to allow researchers to flag errors and correct them? And finally, how do you create a legal regime in working with publishers to maximize the scope of available papers? For the latter, a university or a private philanthropy may be better positioned to make structured data publicly available under journal subscription terms or fair use. Philanthropists or government funders could also coordinate to create or commission benchmarks that evaluate whether important problems have been solved. For example, an open benchmark for claim extraction from a range of different scientific article types would be extremely helpful. Ensuring the underlying data are accurate is vital for creating these evaluations. I’ve discussed opportunistically using various human-created datasets for this purpose, but a consistent problem is that errors in human data make it difficult for them to serve as a gold standard. Finally, with structured data and benchmarks available, the government or private philanthropy could use them to incentivize groups to develop machine learning systems that meet these benchmarks. Prizes are one potentially valuable tool for this. For example, you could establish a prize for a system that accurately updates a living meta-analysis for a small set of claims. Prizes are particularly useful as signals of problem importance, and can help create vibrant ecosystems of public and private research—see, for example the role the government played in kickstarting the current work on nuclear fusion. Conclusion The drawbacks of the current scientific publishing system are known. Scientists agree, metascientists agree, philanthropists agree: the published PDF plus citation graph isn’t the right substrate for maintaining a representation of the evidence base in science. The pieces needed to build the alternative either already exist or are rapidly taking shape. The community is forming around exactly this problem, with concrete partnerships and shared infrastructure. A pilot should start on behavioral science RCTs because that’s the slice of empirical science most amenable to legibility, where replication ground truth is richest, and where the failure modes are best documented. What’s been missing is the galvanizing mission to assemble these pieces into something that works. That’s what I’m proposing to build. *** 1 I have a broader field map that I’ll release publicly soon. This is me, building in public! 2 If this is something that you are excited about, please reach out and talk to me. 3 More on this very soon too! 4 This tests whether, given the code and the data, you can get the same statistics as reported in the published paper. 5 This tests whether the results are the same as a paper’s given alternative analytical decisions in conducting the analysis (like outlier omission). Closely related is the idea of a “multiverse” where you come up with many different ways of answering the same underlying research question with the same data, and test whether the results hold in all those alternative methods. There’s been work on the latter as well. 6 Some of the replications, e.g. those from the SCORE project, had paired the experiments with forecasts from prediction markets. So we get to look at this for free.

Jun 8 • 4:44 PM EDT • Science • goodscience.substack.com

Apple Brings AI Tab Organization and AI-Generated Extensions to Safari

Apple today unveiled a raft of Safari upgrades powered by Apple Intelligence, including automatic tab organization, AI-generated custom extensions, and new privacy-first browsing tools. The centerpiece feature is automatic tab organization, which uses Apple Intelligence to group a user's open tabs into relevant topics without any manual intervention. If someone is planning a weekend trip, for example, Safari can pull all of their travel-related tabs into a single topic.

Jun 8 • 4:18 PM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

Baton Rouge brick company rebrands through Ascension acquisition

Cocreham Brick has rebranded as The Brick Company and acquired Gonzales-based Economy Brick, a move that expands the Baton Rouge company’s footprint into Ascension Parish and strengthens its position in Louisiana’s building materials market. The company, which has operated in Louisiana under the Cocreham Brick name for more than 75 years, announced the rebrand and […]

Jun 8 • 2:54 PM EDT • Business • businessreport.com

SGMC Health Celebrates Graduation of Resident Physicians, Retaining Talent in South Georgia

SGMC Health celebrated a major milestone in its medical education program on Friday, June 5, with the graduation of 18 resident physicians

Jun 8 • 2:29 PM EDT • Health • sgmc.org

Discover the Gears of War: E-Day Collector’s Edition

The Gears of War: E-Day Collector’s Edition is available to pre-order now, including the Premium Edition of the game alongside a curated set of physical items. Find out more inside.

Jun 8 • 10:00 AM EDT • Technology • news.xbox.com

GBTA: U.S. business travel spending hits record $538.5B in 2024

Business travel spending in the U.S. | The report—based on 2024 data—found that business travel accounted for 2.1 percent of total U.S. GDP and generated $148.6 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue.

Jun 8 • 8:00 AM EDT • Business • hotelmanagement.net

'City is shooting us down': Stuart business owner speaks out on costly permit delays

A business owner says a permit for a storage building has turned into a nearly 2-year battle with the city, costing her thousands of dollars and leaving her frustrated with the permitting process.

Jun 8 • 5:53 AM EDT • Business • wflx.com

PrideFest celebrated in downtown Athens with parade, more

Pridefest was held in downtown Athens on Saturday, June 6, 2026. The annual event included a parade, live entertainment and local vendors.

Jun 8 • 4:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • onlineathens.com

Accelerated PTSD care offers faster relief for veterans

Rush University System for Health’s Road Home Program helps veterans recover with intensive, evidence-based treatment, while preserving their dignity.

Jun 8 • 3:00 AM EDT • Health • ama-assn.org

Business briefs: New Cold Spring location for Gold Star, United Way tax prep, Knochelmann state of county update

Gold Star’s new Cold Spring location Gold Star Chili’s will open its newest location in Cold Spring. Construction is officially underway at 3801 Alexandria Pike, following the location’s recent groundbreaking. Gold Star President and CEO Roger David, Cold Spring Mayor D. Angleo Penque as well as other local officials celebrated breaking ground on the new...

Jun 8 • 12:36 AM EDT • Business • nkytribune.com

BUSINESS MONDAY: Spotlight on Torrico Electric and Grenergy Solar—vertically integrated for holistic design, install, and service

Founded in 1985, the family business combines decades of electrical expertise with a growing focus on renewable energy and backup power systems.

Jun 8 • 12:08 AM EDT • Business • theberkshireedge.com

Men’s Health Month shines spotlight on mental health and suicide prevention

As Men’s Health Awareness Month begins, the death of one of the NHL’s most decorated players is renewing attention on men’s mental health and suicide.

Jun 7 • 11:55 PM EDT • Health • news3lv.com

South Korea's Lee says success of business should be shared, plans surplus tax revenue use

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said on ​Monday the gains of business ‌success should be shared throughout society and the government will devise ​a plan to effectively use ​the surplus tax revenues generated ⁠from the country's semiconductor sector.

Jun 7 • 9:23 PM EDT • Business • reuters.com

Photos of the Tony Awards celebrating Broadway’s best

NEW YORK (AP) — The Tony Awards celebrate Broadway’s best, with Grammy winner Pink hosting Sunday’s telecast. This is a photo gallery curated by AP photo editors.

Jun 7 • 9:04 PM EDT • Entertainment • seattletimes.com

Veganfest highlights plant-based living, sustainability and local businesses

Pack Square Park celebrated all things green at Veganfest.

Jun 7 • 6:05 PM EDT • Business • wlos.com

Three Seahawks defenders named No. 5 defensive trio by Sports Illustrated

Seahawks All-Pro honorees Leonard Williams, Ernest Jones IV and Devon Witherspoon were named the fifth-best defensive trio in the NFL for next season.

Jun 7 • 4:08 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Simone Biles recovering from health scare she described as ‘scariest experience’ of her life

While she didn’t divulge many details, decorated U.S. gymnast Simone Biles shared that she was resting in bed following a terrifying health scare.

Jun 7 • 1:45 PM EDT • Health • fox8.com

Rep. Mace: If price of an endorsement was ‘to not vote to release the Epstein files, that is a price I am unwilling to pay.’

Jun 7 • 11:21 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Rep. Mace: Democrats voted to release the Epstein files but are defending Platner

Jun 7 • 11:01 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

GOP Congressman on President’s ‘anti-weaponization’ fund: ‘The votes are not there… to give a dime to this fund’

Jun 7 • 10:51 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Senator Warner: Trump threw ‘live hand grenade’ into FISA negotiations with Pulte appointment

Jun 7 • 10:39 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Sen. Warner pays tribute to his daughter who passed away

Jun 7 • 10:35 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

A raucous Copenhagen crowd cheers Denmark’s 2026 Mullet Championship

A packed Danish crowd celebrated the enduring mullet hairstyle on Saturday.

Jun 7 • 7:58 AM EDT • Entertainment • seattletimes.com

Rumour: Gears of War: E-Day Was Coming to PS5, Xbox Only Just Cancelled Port

Update: PS5 retail SKU exists, game was rated for Sony console

Jun 7 • 7:00 AM EDT • Technology • pushsquare.com

RFK Jr. Appears Disengaged on Many Health Department Matters Beyond Vaccines

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has demonstrated little interest in managing his sprawling department as he focuses on food and vaccine policies, according to colleagues.

Jun 7 • 5:00 AM EDT • Health • nytimes.com

Memphis Pride Festival celebrates 50 years of LGBTQ advocacy

The city of Memphis celebrated Pride Month this weekend with thousands attending the 51st annual Memphis Pride Festival.

Jun 6 • 11:33 PM EDT • Entertainment • actionnews5.com

Hideo Kojima Says He's No Longer Interested In AI

The Death Stranding 2 directly recently appeared in an AI-generated promo for a new art exhibit

Jun 6 • 10:41 PM EDT • Technology • kotaku.com

Belmont Stakes Day Generates More Than $116 Million In Handle

Saturday's blockbuster Belmont Stakes Day program, highlighted by Golden Tempo’s victory in the 158th running of the $2-million Belmont Stakes (G1) presented by NYRA Bets, generated all-sources handle of $116,077,378 and paid attendance of 46,128. On-track handle for the 14-race Belmont Stakes Day ...

Jun 6 • 9:34 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Dodgers' Japanese-born starting trio establishes unique MLB mark

With Roki Sasaki establishing himself in his past four starts, Los Angeles' pitching staff remains internationally celebrated.

Jun 6 • 2:38 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

St. Peter’s Health Partners celebrates 400-plus survivors for Cancer Survivor Day

St. Peter's Health Partners honored cancer survivors at their annual Cancer Survivors Day Celebration on Friday.The event celebrated more than 400 cancer surviv

Jun 6 • 10:49 AM EDT • Health • cbs6albany.com

Vulnerable Republicans increasingly willing to defy Trump’s agenda as midterms approach

President Donald Trump remains the clear leader of the Republican party. Yet his grip is weakening among Republicans on Capitol Hill who’ve grown frustrated by what they view as increasingly brazen decisions in his second term.

Jun 6 • 6:30 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Jill Biden’s book tour reopens wounds, sparks Biden-world infighting

The former first lady’s memoir has made some Democrats frustrated at relitigating the 2024 presidential election and her treatment of a once loyal White House aide.

Jun 6 • 5:00 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

Washington Avenue businesses frustrated by repeated water shutoffs

Jun 5 • 7:25 PM EDT • Business • click2houston.com

Kyren Williams is still too underrated

Surprisingly, the answer is a resounding yes!

Jun 5 • 6:29 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

How The 2026 World Cup Favourites Are Rated

International football has become harder to separate from the betting markets surrounding it. Predictions for the 2026 World Cup have been shifting long before the tournament itself, with qualificatio...

Jun 5 • 5:20 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Looking back: O’Donnell School of Public Health commencement: Center Times Plus, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX

The Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health (OSPH) celebrated its second commencement ceremony on May 13 in the Tom and Lula Gooch Auditorium, marking an exciting milestone for the school and its newest graduates from the Master of Public Health (M.P.H.), Master of Science in Health Informatics (M.S.H.I.), and Master of Science in Clinical Investigation (M.S.C.I.) programs.

Jun 5 • 4:48 PM EDT • Health • utsouthwestern.edu

Liverpool is pushing to beat Arsenal to sign two attackers

Liverpool and Arsenal have both been linked with moves for several of the same attacking targets, and The Times reports that the duo are now competing for two highly rated forwards in the current tran...

Jun 5 • 1:00 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Democrats are increasingly frustrated with Graham Platner in Maine Senate race

The Maine race is considered crucial to Democrats’ hopes of flipping the Senate, but Platner’s web of controversies is overshadowing other issues.

Jun 5 • 11:21 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

Research digs deeper into how paternal drinking shapes offspring health

New $2.9 million NIH grant will lead to a better understanding of how alcohol use before conception influences the child’s risk for developmental disorders, chronic disease and accelerated aging.

Jun 5 • 9:15 AM EDT • Health • stories.tamu.edu

AI-designed universal coronavirus vaccine passes first human trial

Scientists have successfully tested an AI-designed universal coronavirus vaccine in humans for the first time, finding it to be safe and well tolerated. The vaccine generated immune responses against multiple coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, SARS, and related bat viruses with pandemic potential. By targeting features shared across an entire virus family, it aims to provide protection even as viruses evolve.

Jun 5 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Memphis business frustrated by stolen AC in summer heat

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — We’re feeling a summer-like heat across the Mid-South. There’s no doubt residents and businesses are turning up the AC to stay cool, but what happens when you go …

Jun 5 • 6:20 AM EDT • Business • wreg.com

Was Sunderland’s 2025/2026 Campaign Underrated Or Unappreciated?

Despite securing European football, the Lads and Régis Le Bris in particular have largely flown under the radar!

Jun 5 • 1:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Slower, but steady US job growth anticipated in May

U.S. employment growth likely moderated in May after two straight months of strong gains, but the pace would probably remain consistent with stable labor market conditions.

Jun 5 • 12:02 AM EDT • Business • reuters.com

Are Germany Overrated Heading In? World Cup Group E Preview

Germany always seems like a favorite at the World Cup, but does this 2026 squad have the talent to challenge for the trophy?

Jun 4 • 8:27 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Scientists identify the origin of noise in spin qubit quantum processors

Charge noise arising from two-level fluctuators is considered to play a key role in causing qubit frequency shifts in silicon spin qubits, resulting in deteriorated gate fidelity. Higher temperatures can improve gate fidelity, but the microscopic origins of this effect and of qubit frequency shift have not yet been established. Now, using statistical simulations, researchers have clarified the parameter regimes under which gate fidelity can be improved and the potential origin of qubit frequency shifts.

Jun 4 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • eurekalert.org

Big Ten, SEC release new statement on Protect College Sports Act after Sen. Ted Cruz meeting

After Thursday’s meeting with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) about the Protect College Sports Act, the Big Ten and SEC said they had a “positive conversation” in a new joint statement. The two conferences reiterated do not support the bill as is currently written. The meeting came two days after the Big Ten and SEC released […]

Jun 4 • 7:06 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Circus Circus Las Vegas Offers Iconic Family Fun, Entertainment and Unforgettable Summer Memories

Circus Circus Las Vegas, the iconic Las Vegas Strip resort and the city's premier family-friendly destination, is welcoming in guests this summer to experience the Las Vegas that started it all: coin-operated slots, paper bingo cards, mesquite-grilled steaks, circus acts, carnival midway, and a five-acre indoor theme park all under one roof.

Jun 4 • 6:26 PM EDT • Entertainment • finance.yahoo.com

Why business owners have few options to fix continued flooding near KC

Property owners in Blue Summit, unincorporated land outside Kansas City, are desperate to find a fix for persistent flooding at their intersection.

Jun 4 • 6:24 PM EDT • Business • kansascity.com

Best of Santa Cruz County entertainment, arts & food events this weekend, June 4-7

With the weekend nearly here, check out things to do around Santa Cruz County with a recommendation from Lily Belli and a specially curated list from Lookout's BOLO events calendar.

Jun 4 • 3:06 PM EDT • Entertainment • lookout.co

Ferrari unveils supercar-informed laptop that "transcends traditional boundaries of PC design"

Car brand Ferrari and technology brand HP have collaborated to design a laptop informed by the aesthetics and engineering of supercars.

Jun 4 • 11:01 AM EDT • Technology • dezeen.com

Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks

Google’s CEO says 75% of the company’s code is AI-generated. The people who write that code say the AI they’re using is overhyped.

Jun 4 • 9:30 AM EDT • Technology • 404media.co

Detroit Lions QB Teddy Bridgewater Disrespected by Sports Illustrated

Sports Illustrated ranked Detroit Lions backup Teddy Bridgewater No. 21 among NFL backup quarterbacks entering the 2026 season.

Jun 4 • 8:38 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

'One of the Best Showcases I've Seen': 70% of PS5 Fans Loved State of Play

The second best-rated State of Play ever

Jun 4 • 8:00 AM EDT • Technology • pushsquare.com

Wellin5 Moves Toward Its Next Phase of Behavioral Health Acquisitions

Wellin5 is arguing for the harder version. The company is a hybrid behavioral health platform that has operated in the category for more than a decade and has served tens of thousands of patients through virtual therapy services.

Jun 3 • 3:32 PM EDT • Health • usatoday.com

Google's Dreambeans, its weirdest-named AI tool to date, will turn your life into a cartoon

Dreambeans is a curated list of AI-illustrated "stories" culled from the personal data in your Google account.

Jun 3 • 3:07 PM EDT • Technology • techcrunch.com

Why Needham Still Sees Upside in Flutter Entertainment plc (FLUT)

Flutter Entertainment plc (NYSE:FLUT) is one of the best sin stocks to buy now. On May 7, Needham reiterated its Buy rating on Flutter Entertainment plc (NYSE:FLUT) but lowered its price target to $135 from $150. The research firm also lowered its adjusted EBITDA estimates of the company by 7%. The price target cut is […]

Jun 3 • 1:48 PM EDT • Entertainment • finance.yahoo.com

Amazon’s search bar will invent AI-generated products you can’t buy

You can search for products that look like the fake images.

Jun 3 • 12:07 PM EDT • Technology • theverge.com

Amazon will show AI product images when you search for some reason

Amazon will use visual search and AI to show AI generated product images that match your search queries. The retailer says it will help guide users to products.

Jun 3 • 11:50 AM EDT • Technology • techcrunch.com

Michael Ferguson reports $100K raised, 4K doors knocked in HD 100 bid

‘The message we're hearing is clear: people are frustrated.’

Jun 3 • 10:59 AM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com

May's top PlayStation games by copies sold

Yesterday’s State of Play gave us an idea of where PlayStation’s heading next. But we’ve had our May estimates for a couple of days now (we always update our data daily for clients), so it’s time to look at what performed best on PlayStation last month. We’ve got a new IP at the top, two evergreens doing their evergreen thing, FC26 smashing it ahead of the World Cup Plus pivot, and a quiet but promising result for Lego Batman. Let’s have a look at the state of Play…Station’s top games for May. 007 takes #001 007 First Light sold 1M copies on PS5 in May, easily making it the month’s top PS5 game by copies sold. Over 80% of those May copies were digital, which is broadly in line with where PlayStation’s digital share has settled for new releases this year. To date, 007 First Light has sold through 2.2M copies across platforms (so no unsold retail copies in that figure). The platform split is 55.1% PS5, 33.1% Steam, and 11.8% Xbox (console, Windows, and cloud combined). In gross revenue terms, 007 First Light has generated $150M. Owing to regional pricing and audience composition differences, the consoles make up a higher share of revenue than they do copies. Of the $150M, 60.5% came via PlayStation, 27.6% via Steam, and 12.9% via Xbox. Part of this is because over two-thirds of 007 First Light‘s PlayStation audience is in North America (43.4%) or Western Europe (23.2%), where local currency means the game generates more revenue per player. On Steam, under half of First Light‘s audience is from those same regions (31.8% North America, 15.1% Western Europe). As we covered in last week’s 007 Steam piece, the Steam version is pulling in higher-than-expected numbers in China, which now accounts for 17.3% of First Light‘s Steam audience. 007 is the equivalent of $44 USD in China, which is roughly 37% cheaper than the US price and about 44% cheaper than Western Europe. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe The crossover data backs up what we’ve seen all year about launch-window cohorts. 11% of PS5 players who played 007 First Light in May also played Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, which launched just a few days before. Last month was a great month for Denmark! IO Interactive is Copenhagen-based, and Lego Group is headquartered in Billund (TT Games is UK-based but produces work under Lego Group licence and direction). Speaking of which… A very blocky #2 and #3 Minecraft sold another 788K copies on PlayStation consoles last month. Business as usual, since Minecraft hasn’t sold fewer than 760K copies in a single month all year. With over 350M copies sold across all platforms, Minecraft is the best-selling game in history and one of the strongest brands in the world. Every month, a new cohort of children reaches Minecraft age, which guarantees a constant volume of new sales regardless of what the broader market is up to. The demographic refresh rate is truly impressive, with the audience renewing itself faster than it’s churning. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight shifted 757K copies on PS5 last month, bringing its lifetime total on the platform to over 800K. Across all platforms, Legacy of the Dark Knight has now passed 1.5M sold through, so PlayStation accounts for over half of the game’s players. The May crossover data for Legacy of the Dark Knight on PS5 is also useful. 27% of those players also played Fortnite, 16% Roblox, 16% FC 26, and 14% NBA 2K. That’s the household-and-family cohort showing up, plus the launch-window cohort of core gamers who buy practically everything. FC 26 gets players through the door ahead of the World Cup FC 26 sold 411K copies on PlayStation last month (90% via PS5), the fewest copies FC 26 has sold all year and down heavily from April’s 700K. Part of this dropoff is because FC 26 has been available as a PlayStation Plus monthly game since 6 May, cannibalising premium sales. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe The strategic logic is straightforward for EA, which is sacrificing premium unit sales in May to build up the player base ahead of the FIFA World Cup, which kicks off on 11 June. Obviously, a bigger player pool going into the tournament means a bigger pool of potential Ultimate Team spenders during the period when football attention is at its peak. The early returns are around what you’d expect, with 4.4M new players accessing FC 26 via PS Plus last month – a substantial new spender pool. Anecdotally, a few of my mates who were ‘’skipping FIFA and Ultimate Team this year’’, were drawn back in via PS Plus. Lo and behold, one of them is buying packs like it’s going out of fashion. Whether this is all a smart trade for EA depends entirely on the Ultimate Team conversion rate over the next six weeks. Either way, the short-term engagement impact on the game as a whole is evident. FC 26‘s MAUs hit a record 24M on PlayStation in May, up 30% from the previous record set in April. GTA V does what GTA V always does Rounding out the top five is another evergreen title. Grand Theft Auto V shifted another 387K copies on PlayStation last month. No matter what else is happening in the industry, GTA V keeps pulling players in. It’s sold another 1.8M copies on PS5 in the first half of this year alone, helping the franchise pass the 230M-sold milestone across all platforms. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe I have a theory that Minecraft and GTA V are doing the same thing at different demographic levels. Both are functioning as generational gateway games that the audience ages into faster than it ages out of. Minecraft captures kids around age 6-10, GTA V captures much of the same audience around age 12-15 (unofficially, of course). The crossover data suggests this: 40% of GTA V‘s monthly PlayStation players typically play Fortnite in any given month, while 30% play Roblox. Household accounts aside, that’s not the original GTA V audience from 2013. Of course, the under-12 audience would love to get their hands on GTA, too. It’s always been the way of things, and some parents are happy to oblige. Mine did too back in the day, and I turned out just fine. Right? Right!? Want to get your hands on our data for yourself – for free? We’re offering a free trial of our platform for games companies. Send us a message here, or reply to this email, and we’ll set you up. The last word Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover. [Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

Jun 3 • 10:49 AM EDT • Technology • alineaanalytics.substack.com

Rewriting the Narrative: Jewish Voices in the Entertainment Industry | AJC Global Forum 2026

At AJC Global Forum 2026, writer, producer, actor, and comedian Jamie Denbo joins Grammy-nominated songwriter, music publisher, and entrepreneur Billy Mann; Deborah Marcus; and Lori York for a conversation moderated by Dov Wilker, AJC Vice President, Advocacy and Innovation; Regional Director, AJC Atlanta.

Jun 3 • 9:56 AM EDT • Entertainment • ajc.org

This new diabetes pill burns fat without the downsides of Ozempic

Scientists have developed an experimental diabetes and obesity pill that works in a completely different way from drugs like Ozempic. Rather than reducing hunger, it activates metabolism in skeletal muscle, helping lower blood sugar and increase fat burning while preserving muscle mass. Early clinical results suggest the treatment is safe and well tolerated.

Jun 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

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.”

Jun 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencebusiness.net

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. 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Jun 2 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • eurekalert.org

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