SCROLL NEWS / DISCOVERY
Search headlines
Find the stories shaping the conversation.
Results for " asked " 1,133 found 🔀 AI-powered Shuffle
‘Heartbreaking’: Arts District business owners hoping for help after devastating fire
The owners of Raw Remedies and Analog Dope have asked for the community’s help after a blaze crippled their Las Vegas businesses.
How Angine de Poitrine, KEXP BBQ performer, went viral this year
The masked art rockers went from obscurity to indie stardom when their must-see KEXP performance hit 18 million views.
Mel Brooks picks 20 favorite movies for Cinematheque series
To mark Mel Brooks’ 100th birthday, the American Cinematheque asked the comedy icon to program a series of his favorite films. His 20 picks range from Chaplin and Hitchcock to “Dolemite Is My Name.”
AMC Entertainment (AMC) Is Down 6.1% After Proposing Major Board and Shareholder Rights Changes
In August 2026, AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. announced that shareholders had been asked to approve amendments to its Certificate of Incorporation to declassify the board, shorten existing director terms to the next annual meeting, and remove limits on board size. The company also proposed expanding shareholder rights by allowing action by written consent and removing restrictions on investors’ ability to call special meetings, marking a meaningful shift in AMC’s governance...
Can You Be an Adventist Science Student in a Secular University Environment?
“How many of you have felt, in your studies, that you had to choose between faith and science?” asked Noemí Durán, a Seventh-day Adventist scientist, at her workshop at the 2026 European Adventist Youth Congress in Valencia, Spain, August 5. “It’s a common belief that science and religion are opposites.”
AEW reportedly took $30 million loss on Fight Forever video game, more details
Tony Khan has been asked frequently about the future of the AEW Fight Forever video game and whether he will do another one. Based on a new report out
Nebraska GOP, Dems appeal to state Supreme Court to stop other political parties
Nebraska’s two major political parties have asked the state Supreme Court to overrule a decision allowing two new political parties to form.
NJ panel deadlocks on vote to raise health premiums for teachers
The NJ-run health plan for teachers may see a 34% premium hike next year. The panel tasked with approving rates punted on a vote Wednesday.
Patriots news: Is Christian Gonzalez playing in Eagles joint practice?
All eyes have been on New England Patriots cornerback Christian Gonzalez as he’s been sidelined for the past week with an injury. The team is set to start joint practice with the Philadelphia Eagles, and head coach Mike Vrabel was asked if Gonzalez would be participating . “Vrabel says no Christian Gonzalez again today for the Patriots’ joint […] The post Patriots news: Is Christian Gonzalez playing in Eagles joint practice? appeared first on ClutchPoints.
The four unsolved problems threatening to derail Liverpool’s season
SEASON PREVIEW : Taking over an unfinished squad and an injury prone defence while tasked with fitting in last year’s expensive signings and replacing Mohamed Salah means Andoni Iraola inherits many of the issues that plagued Arne Slot’s second season, writes Richard Jolly
WNBA: Security wrong to ask fans to cover shirts' transgender messaging
At least three fans were asked by WNBA security personnel to cover shirts that had messages about transgender women participating in women's sports during Sunday's Fever-Dream game. The league said Monday the fans should have been free to wear the shirts.
Supreme Court asked to review law requiring Ten Commandments in public schools
The case could set a new national standard for the limits of state-sponsored religious expression in classrooms
Supreme Court asked to review law requiring Ten Commandments in public schools
The case could set a new national standard for the limits of state-sponsored religious expression in classrooms
Supreme Court asked to review law requiring Ten Commandments in public schools
The case could set a new national standard for the limits of state-sponsored religious expression in classrooms
Trump administration pauses border construction project in Big Bend National Park
The Trump administration says it is temporarily pausing construction of a controversial border construction project in the Big Bend National Park while the head of the agency tasked with building the wall visits Texas to do an “on-the-ground evaluation.”
A CyberPowerPC Pre-Built With An RTX 5060, 32GB RAM, And More, Became A Dream Purchase For a Console Gamer; Total Was Only $750 After He “Asked” For A $100 Discount
A console gamer snagged a CyberPowerPC pre-built with an RTX 5060 and 32GB RAM for just $750 after scoring an extra $100 discount simply by asking
'Electric up top and suspect at the back'
Hearts fans, we asked for your views after Sunday's 6-2 win over Inverness CT in the Premier Sports Cup. The entertainment value is 10 out of 10 but our defensive errors will cost us against good teams. Can't quite believe that we have such good wingers in Josh McPake, Calvin Miller (both of whom really should be getting Scotland call-ups from Pocognoli) and Sabah Kerjota.
What will TV look like in three years? Media insiders share their predictions
CNBC asked media insiders what they think the TV market — from pay TV subscribers to sports ratings — will look like in three years.
‘New weather’ changing the nation, defying politics
OPINION — I have never done political consulting. So, it was novel to me when a candidate in the midterms asked me what he should be worried about in 2027. I repeated what Harold Macmillan, British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, is believed to have said, “Events, dear boy, events.”
Elvis Presley asked Barbara Eden for marriage advice
Elvis Presley asked Barbara Eden for marriage advice, the ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ star recalled in an exclusive interview.
Blanche Refuses to Say He’ll Always Be Independent of Trump as Attorney General
The new head of the Justice Department said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the president had never asked him to prosecute specific people — and never would.
A disputed phone call sheds light on political maneuvering over Minneapolis public safety
Toddrick Barnette claims Council member Jamal Osman asked him for a political favor to earn his support. Osman calls it “a frickin’ lie.”
A mom asked for a free business-class upgrade for her son — and the flight attendant had the perfect response
Reddit users cringed, but it took a true professional to nail the response.
New Mexico behavioral health committee approves $40M in funding for rural behavioral health plans
The New Mexico committee tasked with rebuilding the state's behavioral health infrastructure approved $40 million in funding requests Friday.
Who Is Cami Clark? Anthropic CEO’s Wife Asked Epstein To Invest In Porn Business
Clark approached Epstein after he had already been convicted for soliciting prostitution.
Trump Dismisses Reports About Dire Conditions Aboard U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln
Asked whether the deployment of the Abraham Lincoln had gone on too long, the president said its deployment had lasted “not nearly long enough.”
Volunteer Develops Machine-Learning Tool to Identify Rare Clouds
Certain kinds of clouds are misbehaving – appearing more often and lower in the sky than they used to. To help identify the factors influencing these changes, scientists have asked people around the world with cameras to submit fresh images of these clouds as a part of the NASA-supported Space Cloud Watch project.
Trump asks Supreme Court to let White House resume ballroom construction during appeal
President Donald Trump's administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the White House to resume construction on its $400 million ballroom project while it appeals a lower court's order to halt the work.
9 AI Tools Founders Say They Could Not Run A Business Without
Founders were asked to pick one AI tool each, and 3 names took most of the votes. Here are the 9 tools they say they could not run a business without today.
Regional business leaders share their advice for new team members
This month, we asked: What’s the best advice you can give a new employee at your organization?
Llewellyn King: 'New weather' will define life, politics (Opinion)
I have never done political consulting. So it was novel to me when a candidate in the midterms asked me what he should be worried about in 2027. I repeated
Bengals news: Joe Burrow reacts to Jayden Daniels-LSU fiasco
Bengals star Joe Burrow, who also hails from LSU, was asked about his thoughts on Jayden Daniels' legal battle with their alma mater.
A mom asked for a free business-class upgrade for her son — and the Delta flight attendant had the perfect response
Reddit users cringed, but it took a true professional to nail the response.
Hutchins Forum Continues to Put Politics of Race Center Stage
It was 1995, and Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. was four years into his tenure at Harvard University, when he was tasked with building the “greatest center of African and African American studies in
Senate Democrat demands answers to reports of Navy warship's mental health breakdown
Senator Richard Blumenthal asked the Trump administration in a Wednesday letter to provide information about conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.
AI needs science’s search history
“Actually, that’s where the gold is,” said Alasdair Russell, my graduate school friend who leads a pre-clinical genome editing group at Cambridge. He was talking about the winding road of science that is omitted from published papers. “When you’re discussing how to do the experiment, and why this way is better than another way, and what does the data really mean? I know what it shows, but what does it mean?” At RAAIS 2026, he described how his group has begun logging the twisting path of discovery as it happens, recording the verbal and written exchanges that normally disappear. Ideas become nodes in a living graph: they branch when a meeting produces two plausible experiments, merge when separate lines of evidence converge, and go dark when someone quietly stops pursuing them. In his implementation, one agent scores novelty, while another tries to learn “how scientists think and how they navigate through a complex world of data,” so that high-potential nodes can trigger deeper investigation. As frontier AI labs deploy agents toward scientific discovery, giving AI authentic scientific taste remains a trillion-dollar dilemma. The bottleneck is that the record we have kept for centuries of science might be insufficient to get us there. The experiments that never make the paper Peter Medawar, 1960 Nobel laureate and “father of transplantation,” asked in 1963 whether the scientific paper was a fraud, and answered yes: the form of the paper misrepresents the thinking that produced it. Sixty years on, the diagnosis is unchanged. A paper presents a clean progression from hypothesis to result to conclusion. Lost along the way are the unconventional theories, the abandoned or unaffordable methods, and the underwhelming and inconclusive data. It reads like a browser history with every dead end deleted: the ten open tabs, the four rephrased queries, the wrong turn down a subforum. All scrubbed, leaving one clean path from question to answer as the canonical path. What has changed since then is that the discarded material is now worth something. No high-impact journal wants these artifacts, but raw trial and error is the most likely source of the training data required to develop scientific intuition, or what researchers call taste. Earlier attempts to capture the discards were motivated by scientific integrity. The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine launched in 2002 to publish rigorous studies that disputed established models or exposed ineffective treatments. Its archive preserved negative conclusions after they had become papers, rather than the live alternatives and arguments that produced them. BioMed Central closed it in 2017, saying the mission had been served now that other journals publish null results. A less generous reading is that in fifteen years it published around 200 papers because almost nobody wants to read a negative result, let alone write one up when it will not count toward academic tenure. AI models are different. Even an uninteresting negative result can be useful, provided it is labeled. Earlier this year, Anthropic put a version of this to the test. The company pulled 129 decision points from real Claude Code sessions between January and March 2026, showed models the work up to a human detour, and asked what should happen next. Claude Mythos Preview beat the human choice 64% of the time, while Opus 4.5 managed 51%. The comparison was tilted toward the models because Anthropic deliberately chose moments where the human decision had room for improvement. On 127 further scenarios where the human action was already strong, the models improved on it only about 20% of the time. The study was possible because Anthropic’s researchers work inside a tool that logs by default. The reasoning, detours and outcome are produced in the same working environment. Biology has no equivalent. Its reasoning happens in hallways, at benches, in Slack threads and on whiteboards, while the outcome arrives weeks later somewhere else. The record has to emerge from the work itself. Ask scientists to reconstruct it afterwards and we’ll create another polished account. Subscribe A log is not a label Before any of this becomes training data, a negative result has to say what failed. The first paper published in the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine examined 234 negative studies across five leading medical journals. Only 30% discussed statistical power, and half clearly defined a primary outcome. Tell a model an experiment failed, without telling it whether the assay was underpowered, a reagent had degraded, or the hypothesis was simply wrong, and it will learn noise with confidence. Decision histories have a second missing label too. When a lab considers five experiments and runs one, only the chosen branch returns an outcome. The other four are experimental counterfactuals. Researchers call this the selective labels problem: the data reveal results only for the actions someone chose to take. Such a record can teach a model to imitate a lab’s taste, but it cannot establish that the taste was good. It also smuggles local constraints into general lessons. A lab that never ran cryo-EM because it did not own a microscope teaches a model that cryo-EM is rarely the right call. Alasdair’s nodes preserve the candidate set, which is the necessary first step. To be useful, each decision record needs six fields: The evidence available at that moment, and nothing that arrived later. The candidates considered, including the ones dismissed in a sentence. For each candidate: the expected result, the confidence attached to it, and the cost in time and money. The route chosen, and the reason. What happened next. How the evidence changed the scientist’s view. These must be timestamped before the outcome, because hindsight turns uncertainty into inevitability. Disagreement also has to survive. Averaging three scientists into one clean rationale reproduces exactly the information loss we are trying to fix. But there is an obvious failure mode here. Once decisions are logged and scored, people log for the record post-facto. Anyone who has watched an electronic lab notebook fill up with retrospective tidying knows how quickly a research tool becomes a compliance exercise. A record that costs a scientist ten minutes of honest reflection per decision is worth far more than one that costs an hour of performance. A publication initiative called Registered Reports offers a useful starting point. Here, researchers submit their rationale, methods and analysis plan for peer review before the data exist, and the journal commits in principle to publish if they follow the approved plan. Nature has now expanded the format across every field it covers. This approach to paper writing timestamps intent before the outcome, but it freezes one plan. A useful search history must also preserve how the plan changed, which alternatives were rejected, when, and on what evidence. Subscribe Run the runner-up Autonomous labs show what happens when decisions and outcomes are connected in a loop. Liverpool’s mobile robotic chemist ran 688 experiments over eight days in a ten-variable formulation space. A batched Bayesian search used each result to choose the next experiments and found photocatalyst mixtures six times more active than the starting formulations. Every completed experiment changed what the system did next. The robot optimized within a goal and search space that humans had already chosen. It did not decide which scientific question mattered. So what this work demonstrates is narrower, but still useful: a search history pays off when the options return standardized outcomes quickly. Open-ended biology is harder because branches can take weeks and the discarded alternatives may never be run. Some exploration therefore has to be bought. Where two branches are plausible and the stakes justify the cost, a lab should sometimes run the runner-up. Otherwise the record captures what today’s scientists usually chose and stays silent on what they systematically overlooked. A funder could ring-fence a small fraction of a grant for the branch not taken, provided that the decision record and the outcome are both deposited. That costs money, but so does having every lab rediscover the same abandoned path. Test whether taste transfers When it comes time to evaluate if our new AI system exhibits taste, the comparison should run across laboratories and fields. At selected decision points in a live research campaign, we should freeze the six fields: the evidence, the candidates, expected results, confidence, costs and the choice made. Experts then rank the options before the outcomes are known, and those outcomes are checked independently later. We could give models one of two diets - papers alone, or papers plus decision histories - and ask them to rank the next experiment on unfamiliar projects. Then, we score information gained per dollar and week, calibration, and how quickly weak branches are abandoned. If histories improve choices only inside the lab that produced them, they amount to useful organizational memory. If they improve choices on unfamiliar problems elsewhere, Alasdair’s group will have captured something science has never managed to write down: a transferable record of taste. Until that happens, a scientific search history is a promising record, not yet a training set.
We asked Madison: How much money do you make?
Over a dozen states have pay transparency laws, including Illinois, Minnesota, New York and Washington. While no such laws exist in Wisconsin, money is still at the top of mind
Siena poll: Hochul's lead over Blakeman narrows as voters weigh issues
Likely voters were also asked about statewide races for attorney general and state comptroller.
Hunting is a privilege, not a constitutional right
By Roland Halpern Colorado voters may soon be asked to place hunting and fishing in the state constitution. Proposition 302 would establish the right to hunt, fish and take wildlife using “traditional methods,” while declaring hunting and fishing are the state’s preferred means of managing wildlife. But though hunting and fishing are an important management […]
Hunting is a privilege, not a constitutional right
By Roland Halpern Colorado voters may soon be asked to place hunting and fishing in the state constitution. Proposition 302 would establish the right to hunt, fish and take wildlife using “traditional methods,” while declaring hunting and fishing are the state’s preferred means of managing wildlife. But though hunting and fishing are an important management […]
CBS announces Week 1 changes to 2026 NFL broadcast booths
The biggest question CBS Sports had to answer at its media days on Tuesday was asked and answered in under three minutes. After acknowledging the Tony Romo-sized elephant in the room, the network was forced to explain the down-ballot impact on the rest of its broadcast booths, with J.J. Watt being promoted to the lead…
Wingers and defenders needed with tough season ahead
After Saturday's EFL Cup win over Swindon, we asked Cardiff City fans what manager Brian Barry-Murphy's promoted side still needs for the Championship season which kicks off against Wrexham on Monday. Mark: Unless Cardiff bring in at least another three or four players we will be in a dog fight at the wrong end of the table. Dafydd: The Championship looks really tough this year.
Saber's newest game trailer takes a shot at Gearbox's CEO, if you look closely
The first hint that something might be up with the recent debut trailer for Saber Interactive’s Rideshare Stimulator is an unusual choice of words—aside from that second one in the game’s title. “Don’t take your passengers too seriously,” the trailer’s narrator says, as he describes this upcoming game. It a car game about the gig work of driving eccentric people to their destinations, a riff on Crazy Taxi. And then, he says: “When I think I’ve met the randiest of passengers, someone even stranger gets in.” “Randiest”? That suggests “randy,” which usually means having strong sexual desire. Yet none of the oddball backseat occupants featured in the trailer seem particularly lustful. One is an old man who considers his grandson a failure, another shares the theory that birds might control traffic lights, another says he’s banned from an aquarium. A little later, there’s a license plate, shown 63 seconds into the trailer, on the front of an SUV: USB DRV It’s a Texas plate. The symbol between those letters is a cog wheel. If you know, you know. That’s a reference to Texas-based Borderlands game development studio Gearbox Software (their logo features a cog wheel). More specifically, it’s a reference to Gearbox’s CEO Randy Pitchford, who in 2018 found himself explaining the nature of video he’d saved on a USB drive that was found at a Medieval Times restaurant before being returned to the studio: “It was ‘barely legal’ porn. This girl’s handle was ‘Only 18.’” The “girl” in the video had committed a solo sex act that Pitchford, an avid practitioner of magic, found remarkable. “I realized, this is not a sex worker…This is a fucking magician.” Back then, the USB drive was central to competing lawsuits against Gearbox by the studio’s former lawyer and by Gearbox against him. A settlement in late 2019 “exonerated” Pitchford, per the Hollywood Reporter. The USB story has resurfaced at times, now in a trailer from a company that not long ago was corporate brethren with Gearbox. Saber vs. Gearbox The head of Saber told Game File that the reference is payback. “The dig is because Randy took shots at Embracer in Borderlands 4,” Saber CEO Matt Karch told me when I asked him about the license plate. “Without Embracer, Randy is performing magic tricks at birthday parties for a living.” Having interviewed Karch during a cross-country flight in late 2024, I can confirm that Karch was unimpressed with Pitchford during their time both working in the Embracer group. I’d approached him not out of surprise that there was animosity but that it was manifesting publicly now. Gearbox was founded in 1999, worked on a port of Halo early on, and developed hit series such as the loot-based sci-fi shooter Borderlands before it was purchased by The Embracer Group in early 2021 for $363 million (with a possible earn-out of over $1 billion, if certain targets were hit by 2027). Saber was founded in 2001, worked on a remaster of Halo early on, had a big hit with zombie shooter World War Z and was purchased by Embracer in early 2020 for $150 million, with a potential earn-out of up to $375 million. For a few years, the Embracer group was a voracious acquirer of game studios. Then, as investment dried up, it choked. In March 2024, Embracer sold Saber to an investment company controlled by Saber CEO Matt Karch, and it sold Gearbox in an all-stock deal to long-time Borderlands publisher Take Two Interactive. Other studios were shut down. Hundreds of developers were laid off. Gearbox didn’t say much about their Embracer experience, nothing too direct, at least. In the summer 2024, Pitchford told reporter and occasional Game File contributor Nicole Carpenter that Borderlands 4’s story was in some way thematically connected to Gearbox’s experience at Embracer: “There’s this cultural and emotional shift in me, personally, and at the studio. What does it mean to trade some autonomy for organization?” When Borderlands 4 came out, there was something stranger: the matter of “Embracer’s Bluff,” a location in the game featuring an AI-powered toilet and a large trash dump, according to a detailed Kotaku account of the place. Gearbox never commented on it; Take Two never got back to me about it when I asked them last year. By contrast, since Saber exited Embracer, Karch has been one of Embracer’s biggest defenders, casting their management as well-meaning and supportive despite the layoffs and studio closures that resulted from their excessive expansion. Like others, Saber’s Karch saw Embracer’s as a shot. With Rideshare Stimulator’s trailer, he’s returned fire. “It’s amazing to me how fast people forget those who went above and beyond for them,” Karch told Game File. A rep for Gearbox did not comment by press time. Game File is a reader-supported publication. Your backing makes my reporting—including any coverage of trailer-based beefs—possible. Good news! I’m currently running Game File’s first big sale of 2026. You can get a one-year subscription for 23% off. Click here to take advantage of the limited-time offer. And thank you for your support! Item 2: In brief… 🚫 Wal-Mart has laid off the staff of Restart, a games media outlet launched in 2024, Aftermath reports. 🟥 A GTA VI preview is on the way, at last, via an “extended look” that will premiere, unusually, on Netflix at 3pm ET on August 27, then officially go live elsewhere six hours later. Last week, Game File noted that Take Two label Rockstar Games is overdue for showing off GTA VI, based on the timing of the initial hands-off previews of GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2. During a call with investors, Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said pre-orders for GTA VI were “unprecedented and astonishing,” but added the company can’t predict how many of those pre-orders represent bonus sales vs. sales that otherwise would have been made at launch. During the same call, Zelnick was noticeably bullish on the future of playing games over streaming cloud connections (predicting wider adoption in three or so years). He sounded unbothered by Sony’s plans to stop making discs for new games (he said the business is 90% digital already and predicted that there could still be limited edition physical editions of games “in the same way there’s still vinyl in the recorded music business.”) 👀 Take Two wrote off $43 million in their spring quarter after deciding “not to proceed with further development of an unannounced title in its pipeline from a third-party developer.” 🤔 Some rare age-demographics from a big publisher: Capcom recently told investors that “users in their 20s account for approximately half of the users of both Pragamata and Resident Evil Requiem.” Item 3: The week ahead Tuesday, August 11 Game releases: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (Switch 2; already out for PC, PS5, Xbox) continues the Bethesda strategy of putting Elder Scrolls games on everything; Royalty Free-For-All is a Smash Bros.-style fighting game featuring public domain characters such as Mother Goose brawling with Oliver Twist in a stage based on the original Little Shop of Horrors movie. Wednesday, August 12 Game release: Pro Jank Footy (PC, console) is an arcade-style Australian Rules Football game with increasingly ridiculous rules, the more you play (I enjoyed the Steam demo) Thursday, August 13 Game release: Super Mario Sunshine (Switch 2, originally released in 2002 on the GameCube) is released for Switch 2’s Nintendo Switch Online service. This game is the black sheep of 3D Mario games. It’s the successor to the breakthrough Super Mario 64 and the rare Mario game built around a single (vacation resort) theme. Mario’s got a water-spraying backpack, a Yoshi pal and a lot of blue coins to collect.
A Blog, If We Could Keep It
In 1797, a Philadelphia socialite asked Benjamin Franklin, of the new American nation, “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Reader, Off Tackle Empire makes no claim to be important; rather, it is a silly place on the internet. But I hope you’ll indulge me at least that introduction in the hopes of […]
Is Goodwin's time up at United?
United fans, we asked for your views after Sunday's Scottish Premiership defeat to Hearts. Gary: I listened to Jim Goodwin's post-match assessment, he's either lying or delusional because he says he saw and what actually took place on that Tynecastle pitch are worlds apart. Dave: Jim Goodwin said the people who weren't at the match may have thought that Hearts gave us a good hiding, well I was there and can confirm that they did give us a good hiding.
Cowboys Legend Troy Aikman Announces Honest CTE Health Update After Admitting Concussion Concerns Still Linger
Once considered one of the toughest quarterbacks in Dallas Cowboys history, Troy Aikman has long been questioned about whether his health has taken setbacks because of the sport. With more cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) coming to light, Aikman was asked about his concerns.
GungHo Online Entertainment (TSE:3765) P/E Premium Clashes With Shrinking Margins
GungHo Online Entertainment stock came into this earnings release with a muted setup, slightly weaker over the past week but modestly higher over the past month. The headline today is not a revenue story. It is the squeeze between a rich P/E of 52.1x and a thin 2.5% trailing net margin that keeps slipping from the 5.8% level a year earlier. The market is being asked to pay up for future growth while living with weaker profitability and a dividend yield of 3.77% that is not well covered. That...
2 men charged after robbing Davie County business at gunpoint, deputies say
Investigators obtained surveillance video that authorities said showed two masked suspects armed with pistols entering the business and forcing people back inside.
Burcum: Putting Flanagan and Craig to the test on health care
Columnist Jill Burcum asked the DFL candidates for their positions on several pressing Minnesota health care issues to provide a more detailed look at how they’d approach the job in the U.S. Senate.
A mom asked for a free business-class upgrade for her son — and the Delta flight attendant nailed the reply
Reddit users cringed, but it took a true professional to nail the response.
Michigan Supreme Court is asked to block money-out-of-politics question
A business-backed group is asking the Michigan Supreme Court to invalidate a campaign finance petition over a dispute about signature certification.
This A.I. Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature
Scientists trained artificial intelligence on libraries of DNA and then asked the model to create recipes for viral genomes. Sixteen of them were viable, yielding new viruses.
Coco Gauff addresses transgender athlete debate with powerful statement
Coco Gauff, the No. 4-ranked women’s singles player in the world, is also universally regarded as one of the most authentic, outspoken athletes in the world. She just showed why yet again. Fewer than three minutes into her post-match press conference at the National Bank Open in Toronto, Gauff was asked about the WTA’s newly…
US Stand Up for Science movement expands to Europe
A grassroots movement by scientists in the US pushing back against threats to academic freedom is setting up a Swiss outpost to take the movement global. Stand Up for Science started in February 2025 to protest against politically-motivated grant cancellations by the Trump administration. Since then, it has organised numerous rallies by scientists and turned into a broader campaigning organisation, supporting “pro-science” political candidates and attempting to impeach Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary the group accuses of advancing “quack” science. Now, Stand Up for Science is establishing a Swiss office to take some of its campaigning beyond the US, and its leader is urging European academics to organise similar pro-science groups in case they face similar threats in Europe. There will likely be “spillover” to Europe from what the Trump administration is attempting in the US, said Colette Delawalla, chief executive of Stand Up for Science, who last month returned from a tour of Europe. “Are we going to see a Trump-style scientific [. . .] take over in the same way?” she asked.Delawalla, who is doing a PhD in clinical psychology, said she was driven to help found the organisation after the Trump administration started cancelling health research grants in politically taboo topics, such as transgender people, diversity and HIV, in early 2025. Since then, the administration has introduced several other measures that infringe academic and institutional autonomy.It threatened to cut Harvard University’s federal funding unless the university accepted a “critical mass” of new faculty and students to create “viewpoint diversity.” And this year, it proposed explosive new rules that would allow political appointees at research funders to screen grants to make sure they “advance the president's policy priorities.”US scientists have been at times stunned by the volume of announcements, and the country’s researchers were relatively unprepared. “We sit in front of the fire hose every day,” said Delawalla. For this reason, European scientists need to prepare now for similar assaults. “If you've got a little bit of extra time to start thinking through, and making those preparations and building community and solidarity,” then European researchers will “start five steps ahead of where we were.” She plans to return to Paris in September to share experiences with concerned French academics. Is Le Pen the same?During her European tour, Delawalla said that French academics were beginning to worry about a National Rally (RN) victory in presidential elections next year. She said there were “chilling similarities” between Trump and Marine Le Pen, the RN’s likely candidate. However, so far, the RN hasn’t proposed anything nearly as radical as the Trump administration has carried out. Its current manifesto is all but silent on university and research policy. Le Pen’s 2022 manifesto bemoaned a lack of French R&D spending, including in fundamental research, and promised to modernise labs and strip away grant bureaucracy. The party’s 2024 European election manifesto explicitly supported the Erasmus+ student exchange programme, scientific exchange and joint European technology projects. However, a Le Pen victory next year could see France drastically cut its contribution to the EU, which would hit the budget for science and innovation. Meanwhile, more restrictive immigration policies could hit university recruitment of faculty and students. Climate science denial?As heatwaves and wildfires have ravaged France, the RN has sought to distance itself from previous comments casting doubt on climate science.In the UK, the radical-right party Reform UK, now second in the polls, denied climate research in a draft of its 2024 election manifesto, but its leader, Nigel Farage, then appeared to quietly U-turn and said he was “not arguing the science.” By contrast, Trump has repeatedly and explicitly denied climate change science, in 2025 calling it “the greatest con job.” Like the RN, Reform UK has been light on research and university policy. However, it did say in its 2024 manifesto that universities should suffer “heavy financial penalties” for allowing “political bias or cancel culture” on campus, building on laws brought in by a previous Conservative government. Ahead of September state elections in Saxony-Anhalt in Germany, the poll-leading Alternative for Germany has proposed abolishing gender studies and postcolonial studies, and promised money for “critical” climate research and studies of Islam. Starts with rhetoricEven if European radical right parties aren’t currently planning the draconian policy measures of the Trump administration, Delawalla said that academics should not be complacent, and fight even small funding restrictions or anti-science talk from the start. “It starts off with sowing distrust about institutions,” she said. “It starts off with these small things, and then all of a sudden it's there.” There are other, more established science and university advocacy groups in the US aside from Stand Up for Science. But the group stands out because of Delawalla’s refusal to attempt to appear politically bipartisan or conciliatory. “I firmly believe that the US is experiencing fascism,” she said. “We’re not trying to win over the super Maga people,” she said, “and we never have been.” The lesson of the US is that even if universities or other institutions capitulate to government demands, this doesn’t save them from cuts and restrictions. “It doesn’t matter what people do,” she said. Global “pseudoscience”Another aim of Stand Up for Science’s push into Europe is to better coordinate a campaign to protect people in poorer countries from what the group describes as “pseudoscientific exploitation,” trials outside the US used to build a case against things like vaccines. Earlier this year, the group sent an investigator to Guinea-Bissau to investigate a controversial, Danish-run Hepatitis B vaccine project funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The study would have withheld a proven vaccine from newborns, Stand Up for Science argued in a briefing it presented to Congress, risking their health. Significantly, the research group based in Guinea-Bissau, known as Bandim, focuses on the “non-specific effects” of vaccines: impacts on health beyond preventing the target disease. Related articlesEuropean researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationData corner: which fields of health science is the US curbing? The US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to know The suspicion is that the study was funded as part of an attempt to shop around for results that could help build a case against vaccines in the US, said Delawalla. “This is just code for vaccines cause autism,” she said.Bandim has put out a rebuttal of Stand Up for Science’s criticisms, arguing its work has uncovered a number of vaccine side effects, both positive and negative, which need to be taken into account in public health. However, Congressional Democrats took up the Stand Up for Science cause, and in February, Guinea-Bissau said it had permanently halted the study. WatchdogBut for Delawalla, this is not the end of the fight. Kennedy has made a number of health claims that scientists think lack evidence, such as the idea that seed oils cause inflammation, for example. Delawalla worries that more studies could be launched in poorer countries to fish around for evidence to support this agenda. Stand Up for Science is talking to African science organisations to create a kind of “watchdog” to scrutinise any further trials. “Outsourcing the investigation to some of the most vulnerable children in the world who are desperate [. . .] is fundamentally wrong,” she said.
What’s working in the sports collectibles world: Industry leaders share what they’re seeing
Sports collectibles records are being shattered on a near daily basis. We asked industry leaders what's driving that success.
Coco Gauff says she supports trans community and fairness in women’s sports amid new WTA policy
Gauff was asked about a new eligibility policy in professional women's tennis, which is based on a one-off gene test.
With nothing to run on, Republicans return to low road ‘gutter’ politics
Donald Trump's disastrous time in office has left campaigning Republicans with very little to boast about to constituents back home. What they are left with instead is their familiar playbook of culture war scare tactics and divisive distortions to try to scare voters into supporting them. Senator Ted Cruz wasted no time to resort to absurd smears when asked about Democratic Senate candidate from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed.
Perez Hilton's family offers health update after disturbing TikTok
Perez Hilton's family has asked for privacy and confirmed he is receiving medical care after a TikTok livestream frightened fans and triggered a law enforcement response.
Fall sports Senior Media Day
Seniors, mark your calendars for our fall sports Senior Media Day photo shoot, which will take place on Monday, Sept. 14, at 3:30 p.m.! All seniors playing a fall sport should report to the third-floor balcony area at Albany High promptly at 3:30 p.m. to get their photograph taken by John Wong Photography. Photographs taken on our fall sports Senior Media Day will be utilized for the creation of large, weatherproof senior banners. Each senior will be featured in their own individual banner. We extend our heartfelt thanks to the Albany Booster Club for funding our senior banners, which will be proudly displayed at our senior night events. Thanks to our booster club's support, each senior will get to keep their banner as a memento of their hard work and dedication as a Falcon student-athlete. There is no sitting fee for the Senior Media Day photo shoot. Students and families will be given the opportunity to purchase photos separately if they so choose. Senior Media Day photo shoots for winter and spring sports will be publicized leading up to each season. In addition to our Senior Media Day photo shoots, seniors will also be asked to participate in our sports photo sessions each season for all student-athletes in grades 9-12, facilitated by Upstate Images. Upstate Images provides our sports photography for our Albany High yearbook and students and families will be given the opportunity to purchase individual and/or team photos if they so choose. More details will be available at the start of the fall sports season.
Apple's iCloud Private Relay is Leaking Users' Real IP Addresses
Apple's paid Safari protection feature that promises to keep your IP masked doesn't always work, according to security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry. It turns out iCloud Private Relay can expose your real IP to websites that use or pretend to use passkeys. iCloud Private Relay is a service included with paid iCloud+ plans. It is supposed to hide your IP and DNS information when you browse the web using Safari, but it is not a VPN that masks all traffic from a device.
Michigan Supreme Court asked to block 'money out of politics' proposal
A group fighting a petition initiative that would bar state-regulated corporations from political spending has asked the high court to block it
Chartbook 464 The"China squeeze" - the politics of development counterfactuals.
There are three types of China shock discourse. Each has a distinct temporal register. China shock 1.0 was a phrase coined by US academics in the 2010s to retrospectively summarize the impact on particular US labour markets, which they identified through painstaking empirical investigation. China shock 2.0 on everyone’s lips in Europe in the mid 2020s is an alarm raised by trans-Atlantic policy thinkers warning of a coming disaster which they project onto Europe’s ailing car industry. The third type of China shock discourse - commonly known as the “China squeeze” launched most recently by Indian economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in the pages of Foreign Affairs - mobilizes a different, more speculative temporal register: the counterfactual realm of alternate history. The China squeeze argument asks not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what might have been. Specifically, what options for economic development might have been open to Global South economies like India or the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, had it not been for China’s spectacular industrialization since the late 1990s and the persistent competitiveness of China’s manufacture in low-skilled segments. Chatterjee and Subramanian’s argument is that whilst China has built a powerful position in electrical machinery and other high-skill manufacturing, which is now delivering China Shock 2.0, it also continues to run a trade surplus in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing. This surplus is large and has remained largely unchanged in fifteen years. Indeed, in the 2010s, in trade with low-income countries, China’s surplus rapidly increased. On their reading, this squeezes low-income producers in low-skill sectors in which they “should” be able to compete. Source: “China’s Mercantilist Squeeze on Developing Countries” Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. Peterson Institute for International Economics 26-7 May 2026 Chatterjee and Subramanian’s wording is telling: (emphasis mine) The canonical trajectory of economic development in the post-World War II period is for countries to transition from agriculture to manufacturing, first in low-skilled manufacturing and then later on to high-skill manufacturing (Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2013). At the global level, this implies that high-income countries (HICs) that once specialized in low-skilled activities cede manufacturing export space to poorer countries that come along to occupy that space. In 1965, advanced economies accounted for about 60 percent of global value-added exports in four key low-skilled manufacturing sectors, i.e., apparel, leather, textiles, and footwear. Over time this share declined and began to be occupied first by the East Asian tigers and, beginning in the late 1990s, by China. Today China accounts for about 50 percent of the global market. The question is whether China, with its rising prosperity, is continuing to behave like its richer counterparts and ceding export space to poorer followers or to behave unlike them and continuing to occupy space. In terms of the conceptual maneuvers it performs, of the three China shock discourses, the “China squeeze” argument is by far the most ambitious. After all, it bases its critique of China on a counterfactual imagining of the world. Like any counterfactual argument, to construct this alternative reality it must rely on a heuristic model. To make their argument Chatterjee and Subramanian mobilize two key claims. The first reference point is the actual history of rich-country industrialization, what they refer to as the “canonical path”. The idea is that countries transition from agriculture to light industry and low-skilled manufacturing and from there up the value chain. To make this useful as a standard of comparison and a means to construct a normative standard, they adjust sectoral export shares for two factors: 1. the underlying level of economic development of the exporting country, as measured by national income and 2. the degree to which the sector in question is internationalized. The idea being that for a high income country to have a high export share in low-skill sectors is anomalous and even more so if that particular product is highly internationalized and thus suitable for being “conceded” to lower-income competitors. Where should this process end? Here Chatterjee and Subramanian introduce their second benchmark. Their normative idea of a global development path is one in which, in due course, low-skill manufacturing exports are distributed in proportion to a country’s share in the global labour force. They imagine, in other words, a world of proportional, polycentric global development without much national specialization in low-skill manufacturing. A useful benchmark is that, in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, a country’s share of world exports should be broadly commensurate with its share of the world’s low-skilled labor endowment. … In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, this would be true if value added per worker and export propensities, i.e., fraction of output that is exported, are the same across countries. It is this pleasant liberal vista of orderly global development, progressing towards a general distribution of low-skilled manufacturing against which they judge reality and conclude that the low-income countries are suffering a “China squeeze”. China is not exiting low-skill sectors fast enough Allowing for its gdp level and the degree of globalization, China’s share of low-skill manufacturing exports is far higher than it “should” be. Relative to population, its low-skill share of exports is far too high. That in turn yields the conclusion that huge numbers of jobs - the authors suggest tens of millions - are being hoarded by China. For the four sectors captured in figure 4, this excess in value-added exports is $110 billion in 2022. For all low-skilled sectors overall captured in appendix figure D.1, excess value-added exports amount to $365 billion. The crowding out of LMIC exports by China is therefore substantial. Both these claims have in common that they are strong structuralisms. The first is that development paths ought to resemble each other. The second is that broadly speaking as far as low-skilled manufacturing is concerned, all countries are alike. If the world currently diverges from the distribution of trade implied by these assumptions, if China is not following the advanced economy path and has huge exports, this must be the result of “policy”, which the authors then put in question as illegitimate or unfair. Thus the naturalistic construction of a canonical path leading to a “level” distribution of low-skilled manufacturing reveals itself to be a polemical tool. From the point of view of China shock polemics, this discourse is no doubt welcome. But as an account of economic history, it must surely be regarded as nothing short of bamboozling. Development paths do not follow a regular, natural sequence. As David Fishman put it aptly, “development is not a queue”. They are always and everywhere, through and through political. Development is not so much a process, as a project. Each such project is more or less well adjusted to its context. As Gerschenkron taught uneven and combined development implies differentiation rather than simple imitation on a single parth. It may be true that Europe and the US exited relatively early from low-skill work. But clearly technology has changed. As C&S themselves point out, China no longer enjoys a low wage environment. Do they really believe that such huge differences can be accounted for either by industrial policy, which as they admit does not operate powerfully in low-skill sectors, or by exchange rate manipulation? What is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining the persistence of “low-skill” manufacturing in China are surely the network effects of complex supply chains. Indeed the label of “low-skill” may miss the point. The degree of globalization which Chatterjee and Subramanian decide to conjure away in their model of the development path - to allow for the fact that Europe and American textiles exporters did not enjoy just-in-time logistics in the 1950s - obscures the point that the networks through which Chinese factories supply the world are themselves key parts of the low-skill industrialization project. China isn’t knocking out 1970s style “cheap”. It has redefined the entire product cycle. C&S’s casual reference to “T-shirts” is telling. In today’s “fast fashion”, there is weight on both terms. Fashion and fast. China’s success in delivering on both at unprecedentedly high speed and at unprecedentedly low cost, isn’t a low-skill operation at all. If we see development trajectories not as the serial repetition of the same, but as distinctive, crafted projects that cumulate in complex agglomerations of skill, technology and labor, then this explains why the assumption that low-skilled manufacturing should follow the distribution of population flies in the face of all experience. As countless cases attest, low-wage, low-income developed economies are not by themselves the makings of a competitive production base. As Leon Liao puts it quite fairly: “International trade has never been allocated according to population. A country’s population gives it no natural claim to an equivalent share of global exports." And the remarkable fact is that Subramanian alone and with co-authors has long been making this point, not to pillory China, as is the case of the tendentious _Foreign Affair_s and Peterson pieces, but to highlight the great counterpart to China’s industrial success, namely India’s relative failure. The much-quoted Foreign Affairs piece showed low-skill export shares only for China, not for India. If you put both countries in the picture as Chaterjee and Subramanian have done on other occasions, the picture looks like this. China is far above the line, but India, almost as large in terms of population, is no less anomalous, just in the opposite direction. As far as global populations are concerned, and the imagining of tens of millions of “squeezed” jobs, it is this Sino-Indian pair that account for a huge share of the action. What this graph reveals is not China’s cheating, but India’s “greatest development failure”, at least this is the argument made Arvind Subramanian, this time in co-authorship with Devesh Kapur, in their major book, A Sixth of Humanity. Independent India’s Development Odyssey which appeared with Oxford University Press earlier this year. In this highly critical work on India’s development, China is repeatedly evoked, not to criticize but as a benchmark against which to illuminate what India’s political economy has not delivered i.e. large-scale formal employment for hundreds of millions of citizens. Kapur and Subramanian leave no doubt, if you want to understand why China, not India was the main driver of manufacturing globalization from the 1980s, don’t look to slots opening up in the division of labour thanks to the liberal mindedness of advanced economies, look to the contrasting political economy of the Maoist PRC and India’s post-independence political economy. As Kapur and Subramian note: The great divergence between China and India did not begin in 1978 with the Deng reforms—it was well underway by then. In one of the great ironies of modern history, the conditions created by Maoism turned out to be a great launching pad for industrial globalization. As the comparison of India and China in 1980 makes clear, to imagine manufacturing would be equally distributed when populations are so differently endowed in terms of educational and nutritional is fanciful. Here is the data from Kapur and Subramanian, data which I explored back at the very beginning of Chartbook. As Kapur and Subramanian insist, the striking fact is that even as India’s growth accelerated from the 1980s, structural change has not. Formal employment in India lags woefully behind. Why? As Kapur and Subramanian note, the path-dependent impact of India’s poor early start was devastating. The list of factors they mention is long and weighty: We argue for a new five-fold explanation applicable at different stages of Indian history: in the initial stages, the legacy of two key pre-1980s policies, the neglect of agriculture and the strangling of the domestic private sector, were critical. The failure of broad-based agricultural growth militated against rural industrialization, which would have been devoted to satisfying local needs that would have necessarily been labour intensive. Then, when the boom came after 1980, the thicket of regulation and broader labour protections that were legislated prematurely in a nascent democracy, underpinned by a deep ideological aversion to private capital in general and big capital specifically, became a barrier to attaining the size that would be necessary to compete globally. Similarly, the reforms after 1991, while wide-ranging, did not quite encompass non-tradeable inputs critical to manufacturing, namely, land, logistics infrastructure and power. A combination of low investment (logistics infrastructure), regulation (land) and the continued monopoly supply by state governments (power), combined with residual socialism, kept costs at 75–100 per cent above efficient supply. These factors were compounded on the supply side by the government, which dominated the formal labour market and established exorbitantly high wages at the lower end of the skill spectrum. This made their employment in the labour-intensive sector by the private sector less attractive. Finally, when the services sector and its exports boomed, wages soared even further via a Dutch Disease effect: one successful tradeable sector killed and cannibalized another less-skilled tradable sector, namely, manufacturing. Thus, scarcity-inducing policies of the planning era, precocious democracy and a Gandhian aversion to size; inefficient, monopolistic supply of critical non-tradable inputs; the behemoth of government; and super-successful skill-intensive services successively undermined India’s unskilled labour employment opportunities. The employment failure seems to have been over-determined. … Less quantifiable but no less important are some of the sociological factors that have undermined manufacturing and factory jobs. Take the impact of the success of the IT sector—located in urban areas with better working conditions, such as air-conditioned offices, good schools for children and attractive entertainment options. It became a more attractive place for engineering and management graduates to flock to. … Consider manufacturing and female employment. Indian society makes it difficult for women to work, reflected in India’s unusually low female labour force participation (elaborated in Chapter XIII). Indian society, in particular the routine harassment of women in public spaces, makes it even more difficult for them to travel long distances to take up work.37 Combined with onerous regulations on creating hostels and dormitories for women—which, in turn, prevents multiple shifts of operation—factories need to be located in areas with a large female labour pool. While firms can take apparel plants to female labour or bring them to the plants by building large-scale dormitories, this raises costs. If there was a case for subsidies to encourage labour-intensive manufacturing, housing subsidies to build dormitories for women workers would be a good place to start. All of this meant, that when opportunities did open up, in part thanks to adjustments in China, India was in no position to take advantage. Here is the account of the 2020s from Kapur and Subramanian. It stands in dizzying contrast to the one-sided, “China squeeze” argument delivered in the Peterson and Foreign Affairs pieces: In 2022, for example, India’s share of global exports in clothing (the canonical labour-intensive sector) was 3.1 per cent compared to 32 per cent for China. This is extremely disappointing because China started vacating export space in this sector after the Global Financial Crisis as its wages started rising; it then vacated further space in the aftermath of geopolitical developments that led investors to seek alternative investment locations. Between its peak and today, China lost about 7.5 percentage points of global export share (worth about $43 billion in 2022); over this period, India’s export share remained stagnant at 3 per cent, while that of Vietnam and Bangladesh rose by 3.5 to 4 percentage points. China’s loss did not translate into any gain for India in terms of low-skill exports and employment. Put differently, when the conditions for dynamism and prosperity were established after 1991, and even more tantalizingly when the global export opportunities opened up, it was as if India was a high-wage economy and only skilled labour could benefit from the dynamism. It had converted its physically abundant unskilled workforce into an economically expensive resource, penalizing its use. It is not my mission here to argue for or against Kapur and Subramanian’s interpretation of India’s development trajectory. The point in this context is simply that the “China squeeze” such as it is can only be understood, in relation to the heavy burden of domestic constraints that Kapur and Subramanian so unsparingly enumerate. I am concentrating here on India because it is the great counterpart to China and the unspoken reference point of the “China squeeze” discourse. But the point is more general. Can anyone with a straight face suggest that the main problems afflicting the development of South Africa or Nigeria, the great centers of mass underemployment in sub-saharan Africa, are cheap competition from China driven by Beijing’s industrial policy and an undervalued RMB? Likewise, is the main problem of the American working-class the threat of Chinese competition or the manifest crisis of social reproduction in the United States itself? The point here, as in the discourse around China shock 2.0 in Europe, is to insist that we should not normalize the world and pathologize China, without actually investigating what is going on in America’s industrial wastelands, the German car industry, or India’s lopsided labour market. One-sided pathologization should be understood for what it is, a polemical gesture. Concepts like China shock and China squeeze are, what Reinhart Koselleck, following Carl Schmitt, would have described as “asymmetrische Kampfbegriffe”, or “asymmetrical counter-concepts” or “asymmetrical combat concepts”. If the function of arguments like the “China squeeze” is to alert elites in the rest of the world of the need to rejuvenate and energize their development projects, so be it. But let us see the resulting discourses as the mobilizing interventions that they are. Interestingly, a significant slice of China’s public sphere - the so-called industrial party - have been obsessed for the last twenty years with precisely these questions of counterfactual economic history. Since the mid 2000s, a massive online discourse developed around an alternative history in which Chinese techno-patriots were asked to imagine how they would proceed if they had the possibility of traveling back in time to transport modern technology into the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) thus averting the “great divergence” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a fantasy of course, but also a goad. The point was not directed at Westerners. The alternate history is dramatically nationalist, but few n the West had even heard of it until recently. The adherents of the industrial party are not liberal moralists. They don’t project natural ladders of international development and ask why others don’t cede space. They take the Realpolitik of global economic development for granted. Their pointe was directed against fellow Chinese. The rallying cry of the alternative narrative was this: Now that we are beginning to gain steam and push forward on our national development path, now that we are breaking out of the inferior position assigned to us even in the early years following WTO accession, do not lose yourself in humanistic imaginings about better futures. In the spirit of Deng, they called on China to embrace the hard truth of development. Perhaps one might of the Industrial Party as a cultural trend born out of desire for symbolic revenge against those who had inflicted the century of humiliation. In terms of the various temporalities of the “China shock” - retrospective, prospective and counterfactual - one might think of the Industrial Policy discourse as truly speculative, conjuring up the China shock that never was. Or perhaps one might better think of it as imagining a world in which a powerful China was no shock at all, but simply a defining fact of modern history. I love putting out Chartbook. I am particularly pleased that it goes out for free to thousands of subscribers around the world. But, writing this newsletter takes a lot of work. If you are enjoying it and would like to support the project, sign up for one of the subscription options here. It is the equivalent of a fancy cup of coffee per month! Subscribe
I’d Been Wondering What The Odyssey Was Trying To Do With Athena. Someone Asked Christopher Nolan
A mom asked for a free business-class upgrade for her son on Delta — and the flight attendant had the perfect reply
Reddit users cringed, but it took a true professional to nail the response.
Elizabeth Siders files request for mental health evaluation
The attorney for Elizabeth Siders has asked for her mental health to be evaluated, citing concerns she may not be able to assist in her own defense.
A mom asked for a free business-class upgrade for her son — and the Delta flight attendant had the perfect reply
Reddit users cringed, but it took a true professional to nail the response.
Judge allows N.Y. bans of local agreements with ICE, blocks mask ban for agents
The laws at hand were part of legislation signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul in May in response to the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
Apple Plans iPhone-to-Windows Copy and Paste in EU After Microsoft Request
Apple is working on a new feature that will support cross-device copy and paste between iOS devices and Windows PCs. Microsoft asked for the feature using Apple's EU interoperability request system for developers, which Apple implemented to comply with the Digital Markets Act. Apple began evaluating the request in March, and on June 26, proposed a project plan.
Snap CEO sidesteps Specs pre-order questions on Q2 earnings call
When asked about product-market fit, Spiegel said he believes mass-market consumer adoption won't occur until the end of the decade.
After contract dispute with East Idaho hospital, Legislature’s task force to study health insurers
Idaho Republican legislative leaders founded a new working group of lawmakers tasked with studying health insurance companies.
Science Inquiry Comes Alive for Jacket Middle Schoolers
Snails, sidewalks and Double Stuff Oreos... At Partnership Middle School, instructors are finding innovative ways to help students connect the classroom to what they see in the real world every day. By integrating hands-on experiences and scientific investigations into weekly lessons, 6th and 7th grade science teachers push their classes to explore the curriculum standards through the lens of critical thinking, communication with their peers, experimentation, and scientific inquiry. Last week, two different approaches for two different grade levels saw Jacket teachers ignite the same spark for learning. On Tuesday, 6th graders in Lydia Jones' science class took their lessons outside as they explored the school grounds to identify living and non-living things. Despite the warm temperatures, they engaged in discovering unexpected objects on the campus and connecting that to what they learned in class about the criteria for what qualifies a thing as "living". Ms. Jones tasked students with walking the grounds and listing as many living and non-living things they could find in just a few minutes. Students spotted a fire hydrant, construction vehicles, grass, trees, soccer equipment, rocks, sidewalks, and even a snail hidden in the plants. After they finished the exploration, students returned to the regular classroom to discuss their results and whether their objects were classified correctly. On Thursday, 7th graders in Omini Parks' science class participated in their first lab of the semester as they explored and identified the physical properties of a favorite snack -- Oreos. Ms. Parks identified the class objective before the lab activity began by writing the academic standard on the dry erase board in a declarative statement: "I can collect and evaluate qualitative data to describe substances using physical properties." Students watched a video about how Oreo sandwich cookies are made, and then engaged in a question and answer discussion to give observations on the manufacturing process, review various types of physical properties and their scientific terminology, and talk generally about how the lab inquiry would work. The Q&A ended with a predictable question from students... "Will we be able to eat the Oreos?" The hands-on lab exercise required the 7th grade scientists to observe and record the differences between regular Oreos and the Double Stuff variety based on their physical properties. They followed the instructions in their lab brief to chart a comparison between the two types of cookies by observing properties with their magnifying lenses, measuring the height and diameter of both, and weighing the cookies with and without their filling. The activity let students put their lessons about physical properties into practice with real objects while also practicing vocabulary and writing skills to record their observations and using math skills from the last school year like taking measurements and calculating averages. Of course, they ended the lab by charting the taste of the cookies as well! These types of activities allow students to see the science standards they are learning come to life in the real world and engage with the content in new ways. Beyond that, they serve as a foundation for encouraging and growing scientific inquiry. Later in the school year, students will use the scientific method they are learning to complete science projects that require real research and the ability to explain and answer questions about their process and results. At the school-level competitive Science Fair last year, 41 Partnership students earned a place in the 2026 regional Science Fair held at MSU. From there, 14 advanced to the State Science Fair conducted at Northeast Mississippi Community College in April.
Android 17 QPR1 Beta 8 just landed with all of Google's latest fixes
Just what you asked for: a new Android 17 QPR1 Beta release to play around with on your Pixel all weekend long.
The new "science golden age" looks suspiciously like a grift
This edition of PN is made possible by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️ 🚀 Subscribe to PN 🚀 The Trump regime is trying to usher in a “Golden Age in Science” where scientific research is run like a Trump family business, artificial intelligence is all that matters, profit is everything, and expertise is for chumps. Or at least that’s the vision emerging from a new 123-page “Report to the President” from Michael Kratsios, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In a normal administration, you could probably skip over learning about a science policy document — but this is no normal administration, and this is no normal science policy document. Instead, it’s Trump’s attempt to end the actual golden age of science that was kicked off in 1945 with the publication of '“The Endless Frontier” by Vannevar Bush. [ ](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/harmeet-dhillon-portland) [ Harmeet Dhillon demonstrates danger of posting through it ](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/harmeet-dhillon-portland) Liz Dye · Jul 29 [ Read full story ](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/harmeet-dhillon-portland) Bush, at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s request, laid out a vision of federal support for science that centered on funding universities to do basic research, saying that as long as those institutions were “vigorous and healthy and their scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems in Government, in industry, or elsewhere.” Kratsios’s report is supposed to be the successor to Bush’s, and even apes the format, but this isn’t really a document about science policy. It’s one about ending science research as we know it in favor of shoveling cash at big tech companies. While it might be temping to wave this away as an aspirational policy document, Trump has already begun to shift billions in research funds to AI projects and has taken a hatchet to science funding across the board. He’s teed up the shift Kratsios proposes here, and since neither Congress nor the Supreme Court seem inclined to stop him from doing whatever he wants with taxpayer money, it isn’t doomering or hyperbole to say we are staring down the barrel of a world where the only “science” the government intends to support is for-profit tech and defense advancements. Science for dummies Part of how you can tell this isn’t a document about science is that you are immediately faced with an absolute wall of business-speak of the worst sort. Did you know we must “tightly couple our science and technology enterprises to ensure that groundbreaking ideas invented in the United States are rapidly prototyped, tested, manufactured, and scaled domestically”? You do now! That tone isn’t surprising, because Kratsios has no background in science or research. He has a bachelor’s in political science and spent most of his career working for Peter Thiel at Thiel Capital. After a stint in the first Trump administration as Chief Technology Officer, where he also did not do any science, Kratsios was tasked in 2020 with overseeing the Pentagon’s research budget for a brief time, a position that, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “carries a great deal of power in terms of dictating investment allocations.” He spent the Biden years at Scale AI as “head of strategy,” which you will also note is neither a science nor a research job. But Scale AI has contracts with the Department of Defense and, as the Washington Post wrote in 2023, “has been aggressively pitching itself as the company that will help the US military in its existential battle with China.” And now you have the necessary background for our new golden age, which is going to be a golden age of taking money away from scientists and universities and giving it to companies like Scale AI. A note from Aaron: Working with brilliant contributors like Lisa takes resources. If you aren’t already a paid subscriber, please become one to support our work. 👇 Subscribe In a genuinely galling move, Katsios spends a lot of time slamming universities because of “administrative burdens on researchers” and the “well-documented inefficiencies” in academia, the message being that those damn universities waste the time of amazing researchers with paperwork. Except it’s the administration that is attempting to impose inefficient, unnecessary burdens on those researchers with a proposed Office of Management and Budget rule that would require senior political appointees to approve every science grant and ensure it aligns with Trump’s personal priorities. Researchers would also have to seek prior government approval to attend conferences or publicize their research. And political appointees could terminate any grant at any time if they feel like it. [ ](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/omb-rule-science-funding) [ The murder of expertise ](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/omb-rule-science-funding) Lisa Needham · Jun 11 [ Read full story ](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/omb-rule-science-funding) But when it comes to AI, we’re going to “restore permissionless innovation.” The report proposes to give lucky ducky innovators a pile of cash up front for grants lasting five years or longer, saying “awards should be fully-funded in year one, with all resources earmarked upfront, to minimize administrative burdens and reduce pressure for researchers to generate intermediate results to secure continued funding.” Yeah, wouldn’t want to have to make the Very Special Tech Bros show results or get money parceled out year by year like the plebes at universities. The report also proposes that we should have “fast grants” with “simplified applications requiring just a few pages of writing” because that is definitely how science works, just writing a bit off the dome and getting some cash. [ ](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-ai-action-plan-altman-llms) [ Tech elites are turning AI into ChatGPTrump ](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-ai-action-plan-altman-llms) Paul Waldman · July 29, 2025 [ Read full story ](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-ai-action-plan-altman-llms) Oh, and we should have prizes and challenges, where multiple teams compete. The proposed prizes include incentives like “advance procurement commitments,” which means the federal government agrees to buy whatever is being developed. There’s also “regulatory fast-tracking,” making sure all those great AI thingies don’t have to wait too long to be unleashed on a market. These aren’t incentives to do science. These are incentives to develop things with tax dollars that you can then sell to the government for more tax dollars. In the suggestion that might be the most unhinged, the most very opposite of how both government and research work, our new age will include “golden tickets.” That’s where an individual reviewer in an agency — yes, just one person — can “recommend unconventional proposals that may not pass consensus-driven review panels” because somehow this will “surface valuable ideas too divisive for committees and attract higher quality reviewers by empowering them to exercise independent scientific judgment.” Yes, that’s saying that a random person in an agency should be able to shovel money at some idea even if it can’t pass a review panel, and that the opportunity to do so will attract better employees because apparently all the best minds in science are chomping at the bit to be allowed to unilaterally fund AI research based on their personal vibes. But that isn’t at all how actual science works, and actual scientists aren’t unhappy about review panels. They work collaboratively, not siloed in some secret race to create the next AI chatbot. A 2020 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research examined whether peer review panels succeed in helping agencies predict which research ideas will best advance science. Peer review was better at finding “diamond in the rough” applicants than a single government program official. How about that. Trump always wants a taste It’s painfully clear that what Katsios is trying to do here is turn the whole of government science research and funding into the sort of “move fast and break things” paradigm that is the hallmark of big tech. That method works to line the pockets of tech executives, but it isn’t science. There’s a reason the government funds different kinds of research than private tech companies do. What Katsios either fails to understand or deliberately ignores is that the federal government is the main funder of basic research precisely because it can take a long time for it to bear fruit and is not intended to be profitable as such. “Basic” here does not mean rudimentary or simple, but rather research that is designed to advance scientific knowledge instead of achieving a specific outcome or product. Big tech companies don’t widely fund that sort of research, because it doesn’t make them money. Industry dollars account for only about 20 percent of basic research funding, while the government contributes around 60 percent. Big tech companies and startups do, however, rely on and benefit from that basic research. A 2019 study found that 35 percent of all patents obtained by venture-backed startups from 1976 to 2016 cited federally supported research. Basic research funded by the NIH contributed to every single drug the FDA approved from 2010 to 2016. [ ](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-saudi-nuclear-deal) [ The Saudi nuclear farce and governance by whim and meme ](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-saudi-nuclear-deal) Noah Berlatsky · Jul 27 [ Read full story ](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-saudi-nuclear-deal) Unlike inventing the next ChatGPT, actual science is slow and iterative. Government funding of research that, on its face, would not appear to lead to any big new invention is actually what underpins those big new inventions. If the government hadn’t funded research into desert lizard venom, we wouldn’t know about semaglutide, and we wouldn’t have Ozempic. If research scientists hadn’t studied how bees optimize nectar foraging within a colony, we wouldn’t have the algorithm that assigns internet traffic across computer servers. The report assiduously ignores that a symbiotic, profitable relationship between the federal government, universities, and private companies already exists. Each federal research dollar generates about $1.50 to $3.00 in long-term economic benefits. The $36 billion the government awarded in NIH research funding in fiscal year 2025 generated $94 billion in new economic activity. Trump’s proposed new golden age is intended to strip those billions from universities, resulting in the dismantling of departments and the shuttering of labs. But Katsios has a plan for that: Universities should just become trade schools to churn out no-show STEM degrees! “Require universities and community colleges to embed practical technical training and externships into STEM curricula. Let hands-on experience and industry credentials count toward degrees.” It’s quite the feat to, on the one hand, strip schools of funding for scientific research while simultaneously demanding to control what is taught and, oh, also, colleges need to give degrees to employees at big tech companies just for being employees at big tech companies. The new golden age would also exacerbate the brain drain Trump’s policies have already caused. Nature found that in the first quarter of 2025, US scientists submitted 32 percent more job applications abroad than in 2024. A March 2025 poll by Nature of roughly 1,600 scientists found that over 1,200 said they were considering leaving the country. Europe is investing $565 million to make it a “magnet for researchers” and provide funding for scientists who relocate. The new golden age is also about embedding Trump’s xenophobia into the fabric of American science. The report complains of an “over-reliance on foreign students” that “creates a security challenge our institutions are ill-equipped to address” and that a “reliance on foreign talent sidelines American students.” This is, to put it mildly, nonsense. International students pay far higher tuition and often receive no financial aid. Their tuition dollars are what make it possible for American students to get financial aid. In the 2023-2024 school year alone, international students contributed $43.8 billion to the US economy and supported over 378,000 jobs. Those 1.1 million international students accounted for only six percent of the total number of students in higher education that year, but were such an economic engine that for every three international students, one job was created or supported. It’s impossible not to wonder whether part of Trump’s loathing for universities and their leading role in scientific research is that there is no way for him to corrupt the process and make money off it in the same way he can by giving millions and billions to Silicon Valley types who, in turn, give him millions in cash. There’s no way for his children to invest in universities that the government then gives no-bid contracts to, fattening the family’s bottom line, which is pretty much the Trump sons’ current venture capital practice. Trump and Katsios’s view of science is narrow, cramped, and wrong. We’re not in a crisis, we’re not a failed state. We’ve been a science superpower for decades, and the only thing that threatens that is Donald Trump. Tech bros are already living high off the hog in this administration. They don’t need any more of our tax dollars. Hopefully this new golden age never comes to pass. Thanks for reading Public Notice. This post is public so feel free to share it. Share We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription. 🚀 Subscribe to PN 🚀 Thanks for reading, and for your support.
Science & PINS Prize recognizes work that could prevent blood pressure crises after spinal cord injury | American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Jan Elaine Soriano asked a question that researchers had struggled to answer for decades: What if the nervous system could be retrained to stop these dangerous blood pressure surges before they begin?
The US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to know
The US has unveiled what officials claim is the most radical overhaul of the public R&D system in a generation, which if implemented could have significant implications for transatlantic research collaboration. Science: A New Golden Age derides universities as “legacy institutions” and instead wants to prioritise funding on technological challenges, new research labs and funding that follows individual scientists, rather than being linked to their institutions. “Too much of our research enterprise has come to serve itself rather than the scientists within it,” writes Michael Kratsios, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the only named author of the report. “Federal funding agencies should support a broader range of performers.” But some critics argue that the strategy is a smokescreen, using genuine problems in academia as an excuse to further weaken US universities, which US vice-president JD Vance has labelled “the enemy..”Even as it talks of a “golden age” for science, the White House has proposed halving the 2027 budget of the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and has put forward double-digit cuts for other funding bodies, such as the National Institutes for Health. It asked for similarly steep savings in 2026, but Congress stopped them going through. Science: A New Golden Age says success will be measured by the extent to which scientists are “free” to pursue the most “vital questions,,” painting academia as currently hidebound by bureaucracy, sluggishness and consensual conservatism. And yet the Trump administration is simultaneously planning new rules that will hand political appointees unprecedented powers to screen and cancel grants. The report has pretentions to be the successor to Science: The Endless Frontier, the seminal 1945 document in which presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush set out the case for post-war government funding of basic research, helping to spur the creation of funders such as the NSF. Even the title page font is the same. But it remains unclear if the latest report will leave anything like as lasting a legacy.Here, Science|Business explains some of the biggest proposed changes in Science: A New Golden Age, and how Europeans think it might change the landscape of their biggest science partner.Universities under fireA key target of the report are US universities, which it repeatedly suggests are outmoded as research institutions. It criticises the NSF for channelling resources “overwhelmingly to a single type of performer, the university-based, principal investigator-led research group..” Universities “extract” money from researchers’ grants to support “growing administrative bloat,” alongside legitimate uses. The Trump administration has been trying to cut the overhead costs in federal research grants that flow to universities. Instead, new institutions are being built. In May, the NSF announced it would spend $1.5 billion on two new so-called X-Labs, focused on scientific instrumentation and quantum systems. The idea is that they fill a niche in the landscape, tackling problems that are too big for a university lab, but too early stage for private start-up funding. Parallel with Europe?This shift to new research organisations parallels moves in Europe to set up new innovation agencies, such as Germany’s Sprind, the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, and the EU’s European Innovation Council. The Dutch and French governments are looking to set up their own entities too. There’s now an emerging consensus, evident in a number of new strategies, that public R&D needs to be shaken up, Charles McIvor, an economist at the OECD, has written in response to Kratsios’s plans. “What stands out for me across these strategies [in the US, Germany, South Korea and Japan] is that governments are realising that the old ways of delivering STI [science, technology and innovation] programming no longer works,” he said in a LinkedIn post. Metascience wins?The document is, at least on the face of it, also a big win for some policy thinkers in the US who want far more experimentation with new forms of research grant and institution.It name-checks a litany of new public R&D ideas, from focused research organisations and advance market commitments to “golden tickets,” which allow grant reviewers the power to hand applicants money without requiring the consensus of other review panellists.Related articlesEuropean researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationFocused research organisations: what are they, and how do you set them up? NIH turmoil risks reciprocal EU-US access to health research funding In addition, every federal research funding agency should set up a metascience unit, the strategy says, “with authority to run controlled experiments on review and funding mechanisms.” The UK has already set one up, the strategy points out. This mirrors recommendations to the European Commission. In 2024, a report led by former Portuguese science minister Manuel Heitor also advised the EU to set up an “experimental unit” to test out new methods of funding research. So far, however, Brussels hasn’t put forward any plans to do so. Bypass universitiesBut there’s a worry that the Trump administration is using the metascience movement to justify an overhaul of public R&D that punishes universities, which it sees as centres of political resistance. Last year, it threatened to cut Harvard University’s federal funding unless it hired and admitted a “critical mass” of new faculty and students to create “viewpoint diversity” across campus. It’s also attempted to strip academics of funding for working on politically forbidden areas, like LGBTIQ people’s health.The new strategy appears to be a “move to bypass the power of universities full stop and allow funders and political bureaucracies to handpick the projects and people who will execute them,” said Jean-Claude Burgelman, a former senior official in the Commission’s research directorate, on LinkedIn.The EU’s science counsellor in Washington, Florent Bernard, wrote that the plans risk diverting public research funding so that it “solely serves private interests.” “Who, if not independent universities, will do research that demonstrates the impact of tobacco on lung cancer or the role of human activities in our current climate crisis?” he wrote.Should we take it seriously?“I would view the overall document as a bad faith argument,” said Cole Donovan, director of science policy at the campaigning group Stand Up for Science, and a former OSTP official. “I don’t see the project itself as something that can be isolated from the broader attack on the system.” He thinks the argument that academia has become dysfunctional and in need of radical reform is being deployed as part of a “PR argument” to legitimate moves against US scientists. The strategy presents ideas like metascience units as new, whereas there were moves to set them up at the NSF during the previous administration of Joe Biden, Donovan said. The other caveat here is that the OSTP has limited power to carry out any of these recommendations. While Kratsios has issued a memo to research agencies telling them to implement the recommendations in the report, he doesn’t have direct budgetary control. “As a former OSTPer myself, this does not seem like a document that is realistic,” said Donovan.
Bickley: Can Kenny Dillingham keep Arizona State's momentum going?
Kenny Dillingham is tasked with the hardest ask in the Valley: Create a program that wins consistently.
‘Practical Magic’ Star Speaks Out After Not Being Asked Back For The Sequel
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman return as witch sisters in “Practical Magic 2,” but one of their best-known co-stars will be noticeably absent.
How 97 Copies of an Unreleased Version of Super Mario Bros. Duck Hunt Were Discovered in a Wisconsin Warehouse
When Jason Ganos was asked to help sell an old box full of NES cartridges, he figured they would be pre-owned copies of games that had already been circulated in the market. He had no idea that he was about to make a historic discovery that would change his life forever.
US lawmakers press Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on vaccine settlement
A group of U.S. senators has asked Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to disclose whether his family stands to profit from a recent legal settlement involving Merck's Gardasil vaccine, according to a letter reviewed by Reuters.
Where governor candidates stand on incentives, data centers and other business issues
Crain’s asked each contender to respond to seven questions ahead of the Aug. 4 primary, when voters will decide which Democrat and Republican will face off in November.
The Science Behind the AI Panic Is Shakier Than You Think
A column by Sascha Lobo Is AI making us dumb? So asked DER SPIEGEL on its cover a while ago. After a few weeks of recovery and a therapeutic intervention with the help of my AI, I feel able to respond. That’s a bit unfair, of course; the article itself is more nuanced than the loud cover, the image of a schoolkid with dull prompt questions, or the subtitle: “AI is conquering the schools, and educators fear a disaster.” The short answer to “Is AI making us dumb?” is: no. The long answer is more interesting, and even carries a preliminary glimmer of the spectacular. Unfortunately, it requires a detour into the sphere of artificial intelligence, into the mogul-field terrain of technology assessment, the attention economy, and the destructive virus of cultural pessimism. Along with narrowing the scope to AI’s effects on education and work rather than on intelligence. Because the honest version of the question would be: Does AI help us learn and work, or not? Generative AI, which set off the still-ongoing hype with ChatGPT, has only existed in relevant distribution since late 2022, early 2023. For a technology-driven transformation of people and society, that is extremely short. For that reason alone, research is still in its infancy. And technology assessment is not a fast discipline anyway. Prominent voices from Elizabeth Eisenstein to RAND to Tom Wheeler say we still cannot conclusively judge the consequences of the printing press. Its invention is a mere 580 years back, and some scholars would rather not circulate assessments that might have to be retracted in two or three hundred years. We’re Going Through Growing Pains A phenomenon that already caused upheaval in social media research makes serious assessment of AI’s consequences even harder: the “moving target” problem of LLM-ology, as the linguist Sean Trott called it in 2025. AI develops so quickly and so unpredictably that researchers often end up studying snapshots of the past. There are concepts, from morphological analysis to anticipatory governance, for keeping research, planning, and regulation halfway meaningful anyway. But even with those, universally valid statements are rare. DER SPIEGEL - The German View is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe We should therefore treat findings about the interplay between humans and AI as far more procedural and situational. Unfortunately, this challenge comes at the worst possible time. We are going through growing pains: AI’s everyday impact has grown very large very fast, and with it the longing for guidance. Annoyingly, the body of solid knowledge has not exploded along with it. Experts cannot be moved to broad consensus on even banal statements about AI. Sascha Lobo, born in 1975, is an author and strategy consultant focusing on the internet and digital technologies. Together with Jule Lobo, he explores the debates of the day in the podcast “Feel the News – Was Deutschland bewegt” (”What Moves Germany”). Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says software developers are dying out. Bill Gates considers coders one of only three professions that will survive the AI tsunami. Top tech economists find virtually irrefutable arguments both for and against an AI bubble. The same naturally applies to the structurally youth-hostile debate over whether AI is good or bad for young people. The gap between the demand for insight and the supply of solid knowledge creates an orientation vacuum. This vacuum of AI cluelessness is filled, as the attention economy described by Georg Franck in 1998 would have it, with half-knowledge (funnily enough, often AI-generated), marketing, and self-marketing. After all, infinite money is at stake, along with academia’s best current shot at global fame. But this iridescent froth of interpretation operates more by the algorithmic principles of the digital public sphere than by seriously earned insight. That is why dramatized, fear-feeding claims about AI are so promising. It tempts parts of academia into distorted drivel, and parts of the media then sensationalize the published drivel once more. Was the Research Aimed at a Desired Result? How badly this can influence academia and public perception is demonstrated by one of the most-discussed studies on AI’s effects: “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” The MIT study by Nataliya Kosmyna also gets plenty of space in the SPIEGEL cover story. What was measured and interpreted: lower brain activity in people who write with AI assistance, compared to people who only google or write without any tools. As is common with preprints, the study has not yet been peer-reviewed, and it contains substantial weaknesses that experts have sharply criticized. The first round had 54 participants in three groups, the second only 18, who reportedly also came from MIT’s own orbit. There was no preregistration (committing in advance to what you want to find out with which data). In their analysis, Stanković et al. even discovered an opposite effect that the study does not further explain. Some measurement data has not (yet) been published. And the EEG analysis method used is considered too imprecise to support such far-reaching conclusions. The biggest criticism, though, is the suspicion of an activism-driven study. In an interview with Time, lead author Kosmyna said she published the study immediately, rather than after full peer review, because she feared politicians might otherwise decide to put ChatGPT in kindergartens. She considers that absolutely harmful. It is legitimate to hold such a view. It just seems unscientific to approach a study with it, and then to design the setup so that the chance of a fitting desired result remains as high as possible. Ideologies Collide It is not easy to separate genuine AI insights from studies that trivialize and weaken well-founded AI criticism. The same goes for the opposing, AI-enthusiastic narratives, because the pro-AI side works against it with billions in resources. Ideologies collide, fed by egos, PR strategies, moral posturing, and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Doomsday marketing makes the search even harder: AI companies can profit from warnings about the dangers of AI, whether through the notoriety of apocalypse narratives or because, in some target groups, danger translates into power. Some seemingly negative findings are therefore quite welcome in the AI industry. If you try to get at the findings presumably less influenced by interest groups, the picture in education seems relatively clear: AI can improve educational outcomes when the right AI is used the right way, namely pedagogically. Simply dumping an AI chatbot into a classroom, by contrast, accomplishes little. Huge surprise. But something else is also obvious: whether they are allowed to or not, kids use AI for school, which is why the controlled integration of AI tools into education is, in the medium term, entirely without alternative. In the world of work, the landscape of findings is more complex and requires more differentiation. A series of serious studies points to an AI effect that suits neither the alarmists, regulation fetishists, and AI opponents, nor the trillion-dollar corporations with their armada of paid scientists, PR professionals, and ecosystems: working with AI helps the inexperienced (at least for now) considerably more than it helps the pros, in certain fields of work, and provided they know how to use it correctly. Missing Domain Knowledge Among the experienced, the professionals, and the high flyers, by contrast, despite frequent time savings, partially negative effects and new problems are emerging. Take the jagged frontier problem: AI solves task A brilliantly and fails completely at task B, even though both look similar even to professionals. Or the verification-cost problem, in which AI’s greater productivity gets eaten up by the enormous effort of checking its output. Or the illusion of competence, because AI makes new domains seem easily penetrable, until you painfully discover that deep domain knowledge is missing. Taken as a whole, the effects of working with AI do lean positive. But the promise that AI works as a turbocharger for everyone and boosts practically everything simply refuses to materialize. The AI magic the world has been feeling since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022 has so far barely shown up in most companies’ numbers. The consulting firm McKinsey has coined a term for this, the “gen AI paradox,” and believes that work processes and corporate structures would have to be rebuilt quite fundamentally to realize AI’s benefits at scale. Reuters just reported that only 3.3 percent of Microsoft’s customers have subscribed to the AI package Copilot. That may be down to the product; in other areas we continue to see soaring successes and new AI triumphs. But after the first quarter of 2026, disillusionment is the word for all too many AI projects at traditional companies: because the promised revolution of AI agents has so far failed to arrive or been postponed, and because of the leveling effect that many of the studies cited here suggest. Against Inequality The societal effects, on the other hand, appear rather encouraging. Many previous technologies operated on the Matthew principle, named for the Gospel verse about giving to those who already have: they tended to reward the more competent and more privileged. AI, however, seems more often to have an equalizing effect once a threshold of access and education is crossed. Some anecdotal insights point in this direction, for example, how an unemployed man in Leipzig successfully defended himself in court in 2025 against fraud accusations from Germany’s federal employment agency — without a lawyer, armed only with ChatGPT. The AI made mistakes and cited invented court rulings, but in the end the man walked away unpunished. And a key capability of artificial intelligence is its capacity to learn: set up correctly and fed with data, it can keep getting better. It is a question of time, or more precisely of AI innovations and training data, until even free AI chatbots write better legal briefs than law graduates with perfect exam scores. Whether that will make anyone dumb is something the world’s press will surely inform us of in due time. Subscribe Leave a comment
Area surrounding north suburban hospital evacuated amid police activity involving drones
People were asked to avoid the area surrounding a north suburban hospital amid police activity involving drones on Tuesday, authorities said.
Jonathan Grennard's Exit Leaves Vikings Dangerously Thin at Edge Rusher
The Vikings fully report to training camp this week, and there are a lot of storylines that could converge in Eagan as the team has had a lot of questions and not a lot of answers this offseason. One such example of uncertain elements of the team that could become more and more urgent as the season gets closer is the Vikings' edge defenders and the depth at that position in particular. To the untrained eye, the Vikings had a plethora of edge rushers last year, but in reality it was actually a facade masked by the star power of their two starters, Andrew Van Ginkel and Jonathan Greenard, who were coming off a season in which they combined for 23.5 sacks and 36 tackles for loss.
Evan Rachel Wood is ‘sad’ about being left out of ‘Practical Magic’ sequel: ‘They’re not following the book’
Evan Rachel Wood opens up about her disappointment in not being asked to reprise her role as an Owens daughter for the upcoming sequel to ‘Practical Magic.’
A Traveler Paid $7,000 for a Business-class Seat—Then Another Passenger Asked Her to Move to Economy
Influencer Ishika Yadavalli paid $7,000 for a business-class flight on Qatar Airways, and went viral when a mom asked her to switch with her daughter in economy.
Catherine Ryan Howard on Murder Houses, Strange Science, and Finding Inspiration for Her New Novel
“Could you live in a house that had been the scene of a murder?” asked the headline of the article my agent had sent me, presumably in a bid to inspire a future book idea. As a single woman who mak…
Galveston businesses ask for I-45 construction delay
Concerned about the effect on businesses during the final weeks of Galveston’s peak tourism season, the Galveston Restaurant Group has asked the Texas Department of Transportation to delay Phase 2,
Trump asks Supreme Court to let him curtail mail voting
President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to allow the administration to move forward with implementing a sweeping executive order aimed at mail voting — setting up a major elections dispute at the high court months before the midterms.
Trump administration urges Supreme Court to allow order targeting mail-in voting before midterms
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to clear the way for an executive order from President Donald Trump that could dramatically change mail-in voting.
Family homes, vehicles and business damaged in linked attacks
Masked men smash windows of family homes, burn vehicles and set a sofa on fire during three attacks.
Trump administration demands hospitals share emergency room records
A tiny federal agency tasked with protecting the public from injuries caused by lawn mowers and coffeemakers is demanding that some of the nation’s biggest health systems turn over detailed, personally identifiable medical records of all patients who seek help at their emergency rooms.
Maeda 'nothing short of a legend' at Celtic
Celtic fans, we asked for your views after Daizen Maeda's move to promoted Premier League side Ipswich Town was confirmed. Ian: Daizen Maeda was appallingly let down by Celtic at the last minute and he struggled initially last season.
What England's local councils tell us about fragmenting politics
Even the most ardent advocate for local democracy would concede that council chambers are not always the most exciting places. Subscribe Whether it’s planning meetings, motions or resolutions, you’d be forgiven for switching off. Unless it’s lockdown and we’re talking about standing orders, of course. Remember Jackie Weaver, who infamously “had no authority here” at a chaotic parish council Zoom call in 2021? Yet, as a general rule since then, council meetings rarely make the headlines beyond local papers and news websites. Reform’s success After Reform’s stunning success at the local elections in May though, the leader of the party’s group on Kirklees Council suddenly found she’d gone viral online for admitting that she didn’t actually understand council procedures. “I don’t understand the constitution”, Councillor Sarah Wood, pictured above, told the council chamber. “I have not had sufficient time to read that as yet. I don’t understand what standing orders are, what they’re made up of, nor do I understand what an amendment is.” Share Channel 4 News Councillor Wood later defended her comments to the BBC, and said that “new councillors and not just us, are coming from jobs”. She claimed that the sharing of the clip mocking her online was an example of “Reform-bashing”. She added: “Yes, we need to know procedures. Yes we need to do the homework. And we have addressed that now and we have put that right.” So, with standing orders getting another moment in the spotlight, not to mention the fracturing and fragmentation from May’s results, we set out to find out how new councillors are doing across England in this new political landscape. New political landscape Where better to start then than Kirklees, in West Yorkshire. Reform is the largest party, the council is under no overall control and has chosen a new leader - Sarah Wood - after two failed attempts to elect one. It is difficult to secure interviews with new Reform councillors, but John Hardie, pictured below, told us it’s been a “whirlwind” since being elected in May. He represents the Dalton ward and told us the party’s lack of political experience hasn’t been a hindrance. “We’ve come with lots of experience, lots of business experience and life experience, and it’s been good, actually, too. And to mix with other councillors who have been in the political world, and we can learn from each other.” Indeed, more parties are now having a say than ever before. In Manchester, the Green Party followed up their victory in the parliamentary by-election in Gorton and Denton by gaining 17 seats on the city council. That makes them the official opposition to Labour, who have long dominated Manchester City Council. [ ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/how-landmark-green-by-election-win) [ How landmark Green by-election win could change British politics ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/how-landmark-green-by-election-win) Krishnan Guru-Murthy · Feb 27 [ Read full story ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/how-landmark-green-by-election-win) Thirza Amina Asanga-Rae, pictured below, is one of those new councillors, representing Moss Side. We asked her how being the official opposition can make a difference. She said: “I think even the fact that we’ve made history in what we’ve done, it’s been a 50-year stronghold of Labour in Manchester, and now that we’ve broken that and chipped in that, there’s real hope that we can not only run the council in the future, but currently hold them to account. So, I think that’s powerful. It’s just going to help shape and build what I call the green wave.” The reality, though, is that several newly elected councillors across the country have already left their roles through resignations, suspensions or defections. ‘It’s a slog’ Asanga-Rae adds: “It’s a job, it’s a slog. Obviously, we’re going through hard times. Austerity is real. We’re talking about food, child poverty, furniture poverty. The list is endless, and I think people who come into a councillor role need to be willing to help, really roll the sleeves up and get involved and help, and I think a lot of the career politicians, who think it’s the ‘la-di-da’ position, get in and realise I’m not going to do this work and bounce.” Share Although Manchester still has a clear majority, many councils, including Kirklees, are now under no overall control. That is perhaps the strongest sign of the political fragmentation we are seeing. Burnley is another example of this. Reform is now the largest party, yet they’re not part of the power-sharing coalition on this council - the Liberal Democrats and a local group of independents. Zulkernehn Hayat, pictured below, is part of The Independent Group. He represents Queensgate ward and told us all councils can benefit from having more independent councillors. ‘This is where I was brought up’ He said: “This is my home. This is Burnley. This is where I was brought up. Why do I need to get approval from somebody in a head office down south somewhere, you know? “This is my biggest argument. If okay, my neighbour comes to me with an issue, I can then take that straight to the council, because I don’t need to get approval from anywhere else. And this is the benefit of being independent.” So, while voters will always inevitably want quick results, perhaps spare a thought for the newly-elected councillors who are still navigating local government - one standing order at a time. Subscribe Share Channel 4 News Leave a comment
I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity what they really think of each other — and their responses revealed their biggest strengths (and weaknesses)
Each chatbot proved to be as honest as possible
Senator Makes Puzzling New Claim About McConnell’s Health
McConnell’s GOP colleague appeared nervous when asked about his condition.
Does a surrogate change the baby? Here's what science says
A curious reader asked us: Does a surrogate actually contribute something to the baby she's carrying? The answer is yes—but probably not in the way you're thinking.
Assassin's Creed Maker Says PlayStation Killing Discs Has Pluses
The Assassin's Creed maker was asked about physical games on its latest earnings call