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The Politics of Falling in Love
Heteropessimism holds that men and women are incapable of understanding one another, foreclosing the possibility of more equal, fulfilling relations between the genders. But romantic love may offer us a way out of a social order in which everyone loses.
WHO RUNS MARYLAND POLITICS NOW?
ByThe Maryland Wire The Machine Didn’t Die — It Broke Apart Mike Miller is gone. Steny Hoyer is retiring. The two men who helped define Maryland political power for generations are disappearing from the map. Nobody has inherited all of what they controlled. Instead, Maryland power has fractured among Wes Moore, legislative leaders, county organizations, federal figures and a new generation fighting to connect the pieces. By The Maryland Wire For decades, there were two names in Maryland politics that required almost no explanation. Mike Miller. Steny Hoyer. You didn’t necessarily have to agree with them. You didn’t even have to like them. But everyone understood something: Not social-media power. Not cable-news power. Not the temporary power that comes from one big election. They possessed political infrastructure. Relationships. Institutional memory. Donors. Staff. Allies. County leaders. Lobbyists. Legislators. Operatives. And the ability to connect people who needed something with people capable of delivering it. Today one is gone. The other is preparing to leave Congress after more than four decades. And Maryland faces a question it hasn’t had to answer in generations: The answer may be: Nobody. At least not the way Miller once did. Maryland’s old machine wasn’t inherited by one person. It fragmented. And now several ambitious political networks are competing to assemble the pieces. Miller presided over the Maryland Senate for 33 years, becoming one of the longest-serving legislative leaders in American history. He stepped down as Senate president in 2019 and died in January 2021. (Behavioral and Social Sciences) But Miller’s real power wasn’t the title printed on his door. It was the accumulation of relationships behind it. Miller came from Maryland’s old Democratic organization and developed into an extraordinarily adaptable political operator, retaining authority even as the Senate around him became younger and more liberal. (The Washington Post) He understood something fundamental: politics is information. Who wants what? Who owes whom? Which senator needs help? Which county executive wants something in the budget? Which committee chairman can move a bill? Which lobbyist represents which client? Which candidate should receive support today because that candidate could be a senator ten years from now? Miller knew the answers because he’d spent decades collecting them. Miller’s influence wasn’t confined to elected officials. Former Miller aides became prominent Annapolis lobbyists. Maryland Matters noted figures such as Joseph Bryce and Timothy Perry among the high-profile lobbyists who had once served as top Miller aides. (Maryland Matters) That was one of Miller’s greatest political achievements. He didn’t merely accumulate power around himself. He produced alumni. Staffers became lobbyists. Legislators became committee chairs. Allies became power brokers. And decades of relationships reinforced one another. By the end, Mike Miller wasn’t simply a person. He was an ecosystem. Hoyer’s network was different. Miller’s power was rooted in Annapolis. Hoyer connected Maryland to Washington. He served in the Maryland Senate before winning election to Congress in 1981 and ultimately became one of the longest-serving members of the U.S. House and a longtime No. 2 in House Democratic leadership. In January 2026, Hoyer announced that he would retire rather than seek another term. (The Washington Post) His influence stretched through: Prince George’s County, Southern Maryland, Congress, federal agencies, donors, campaign organizations, and generations of Democratic candidates. And Hoyer had something machine builders value enormously: a succession network. That became obvious almost immediately. When Hoyer announced his retirement, Maryland’s 5th Congressional District exploded with candidates. Twenty-four Democrats entered the race. But when the votes were counted, the winner was Adrian Boafo, Hoyer’s former campaign manager. Boafo wasn’t running without establishment help. He was endorsed by Hoyer. He was endorsed by Governor Wes Moore. And he ultimately won the Democratic nomination. (AP News) In his victory speech, Boafo described the result as voters deciding it was time to “pass the torch to a new generation of leaders.” (AP News) That phrase captures the transition perfectly. Hoyer’s seat isn’t simply being vacated. Parts of his network are being transferred. But they aren’t being transferred to another Steny Hoyer. They’re being absorbed into a newer political constellation. And standing prominently inside that constellation is Wes Moore. If someone forces you to name the single person sitting nearest the center of Maryland Democratic politics today, the answer is Governor Wes Moore. The 2026 Democratic gubernatorial primary underscored the scale of his position. Moore won renomination overwhelmingly, receiving roughly 88% of the Democratic primary vote. (WBAL-TV) But raw votes tell only part of the story. Look at the party infrastructure. The Maryland Democratic Party says Steuart Pittman ran for state party chairman in 2025 “at the suggestion of Governor Wes Moore.” Pittman took office that July. (The Maryland Democratic Party) That’s important. Governors traditionally influence their state parties. But party leadership plus fundraising, endorsements, executive appointments and national relationships creates the beginning of something bigger: a political network that could survive the governor’s term. Moore also played a role in the Hoyer succession by backing Boafo. That’s how political organizations reproduce themselves. You support tomorrow’s politician today. And that’s the distinction that matters. Moore has enormous statewide visibility. Miller had decades of accumulated legislative control. Moore can endorse candidates. Miller could influence the environment in which legislators lived every day. Committee assignments. Leadership positions. Legislative priorities. Relationships that had been accumulating since before many current lawmakers entered politics. Moore may have a larger national profile than Miller ever possessed. But he doesn’t possess Miller’s half-century of Annapolis memory. Nobody does. Which is why the modern Maryland political structure looks less like a pyramid and more like several power centers connected by overlapping relationships. One of those centers belongs to Senate President Bill Ferguson. Ferguson controls an institution no governor can simply command. The Senate. Maryland’s official 2026 legislative records identify Ferguson as Senate President. (Maryland General Assembly) That means influence over: committee structure, Senate leadership, legislative priorities, confirmations, and negotiations with the House and governor. But Ferguson is not Mike Miller 2.0. Miller’s extraordinary longevity allowed him to become almost inseparable from the institution. Ferguson possesses the office. Miller possessed the office plus decades of political mythology and accumulated relationships. Those aren’t the same thing. The House now has its own new center of gravity. Official 2026 legislative records identify Joseline Peña-Melnyk as Speaker of the House of Delegates, alongside Ferguson as Senate President. (Maryland General Assembly) That makes the current Maryland governing triangle: Executive power. Senate power. House power. None fully controls the others. And that fact alone demonstrates how different modern Maryland is from the Miller era. The governor proposes. The legislature disposes. Committee leaders negotiate. County interests intervene. And political coalitions shift issue by issue. That’s not one machine. That’s a networked power structure. Then there’s U.S. Senator Angela Alsobrooks. Her significance isn’t that she is the new Hoyer. She isn’t. Hoyer spent decades constructing his network. Alsobrooks brings something different: Prince George’s County roots, a statewide electoral organization, a United States Senate platform, and relationships with national Democratic leaders. That makes her a critical bridge between Maryland and Washington at precisely the moment Hoyer leaves. Hoyer’s retirement therefore doesn’t necessarily weaken Prince George’s influence. It changes who carries it. Prince George’s itself is undergoing a dramatic generational transition. Official 2026 results show Aisha Braveboy winning the Democratic County Executive primary with 87,944 votes and 73.31% of the vote. (Maryland State Board of Elections) That’s political infrastructure. Prince George’s is one of Maryland’s central Democratic vote engines. A county executive with that level of primary support gains: appointments, budget influence, organizational relationships, donor access, and a platform for cultivating the next generation of political leadership. Braveboy therefore isn’t merely another person on the Maryland power map. She controls a place from which a political organization can be built. Boafo is particularly interesting because he sits almost perfectly at the intersection between the old and new worlds. He worked for Hoyer. Hoyer endorsed him. Moore endorsed him. Then Boafo beat an enormous Democratic field for Hoyer’s seat. (AP News) That doesn’t make him powerful on Hoyer’s scale. He’s just beginning. But it illustrates how power actually transfers: not through a ceremonial handoff, but through endorsements, donors, staff, relationships, and voter confidence. Boafo may become Hoyer’s congressional successor. He will not automatically inherit Hoyer’s 40-plus years of political capital. That part has to be rebuilt. This is the part that often gets overlooked. When a machine breaks apart, power doesn’t only move upward. Some people’s relationships become less valuable. Former Miller aides still know Annapolis. Former Miller allies still possess institutional memory. Veteran lobbyists don’t forget how legislation works. But something fundamental disappeared when Miller did: the common center. The person capable of connecting all of them instantly was gone. That changes the value of a political network. Imagine knowing everybody in Annapolis. Useful. Now imagine the person who introduced many of those people, appointed committee chairs, influenced Senate priorities and understood decades of relationships is simultaneously Senate President. Much more useful. Remove that person and the individual relationships remain. But the system becomes decentralized. First: Bill Ferguson. The Senate’s institutional relationships now run through his leadership rather than Miller’s. Second: the House leadership. With the Miller-Busch generation gone, today’s House leaders are building their own committee chairs, alliances and relationships. Third: Wes Moore. Moore became governor after Miller was gone. That distinction matters. Earlier governors had to operate with Miller sitting across State Circle. Moore entered office during a generational reset. Instead of negotiating with the old machine, he has the opportunity to help build the next network. Fourth: Angela Alsobrooks and the emerging Prince George’s generation. Hoyer is leaving. Miller is gone. The county’s political leadership now belongs to another generation. Fifth: politicians who were outside the old Miller organization. When someone dominates an institution for 33 years, inevitably some politicians develop within that organization and others outside it. Miller’s departure created room for people who may never have risen as quickly under the old structure. That’s the biggest point. If Mike Miller’s power had simply transferred to Bill Ferguson, Maryland would still have a machine. If Hoyer’s influence simply transferred to Boafo, Maryland would still have a machine. If every county leader simply took orders from Moore, Maryland would have a machine. None of those things happened. Instead: Moore controls the statewide executive platform. Ferguson controls the Senate. Peña-Melnyk controls the House. Alsobrooks has statewide and federal reach. Braveboy has Prince George’s executive power. Pittman leads the state Democratic Party after Moore encouraged him to seek the role. (The Maryland Democratic Party) Boafo represents the beginning of the post-Hoyer congressional generation. And Baltimore, Montgomery County, organized labor, donors and other county organizations maintain their own centers of influence. That’s not one machine. If you want to understand where Maryland power is moving, don’t simply watch office titles. Watch endorsements. Who does Moore support? Who does Alsobrooks support? Who gets Ferguson’s allies? Who gets House leadership? Who gets Hoyer’s blessing? Who gets labor? Who gets major donors? And most importantly: That is where the new Maryland network becomes visible. The Boafo race was a textbook example. Hoyer’s successor didn’t emerge randomly from 24 candidates. He had ties to the outgoing incumbent and support from the governor. The old network and the emerging one overlapped. And voters chose him. (AP News) Moore may ultimately become the most important person in determining whether Maryland develops another durable statewide political organization. But the test isn’t whether Moore himself remains popular. The test is what happens to the people he supports. Which delegates become senators? Which senators become committee chairs? Which county officials become executives? Which staffers become candidates? Which appointees become statewide leaders? Who gets his donor network? Who gets his political advisers? Who eventually gets his endorsement when Maryland faces a post-Moore gubernatorial succession fight? That’s how we’ll know whether Moore was merely a successful governor— or the founder of another generation of Maryland power. There’s another category worth watching: politicians who came from Miller’s Maryland but remain active in the new one. Dereck Davis is one. Anthony Brown is another. Veteran legislators and former officials throughout the state still possess old relationships that newer politicians don’t. These people can function as bridges. That’s important because political systems rarely reset completely. The new machine usually grows partly from pieces of the old one. Donors don’t disappear. Lobbyists don’t disappear. Operatives don’t disappear. Institutional memory doesn’t disappear. They find new centers of gravity. If you want one name: His overwhelming 2026 Democratic renomination, executive authority, national profile and influence within the Maryland Democratic Party make that difficult to dispute. (WBAL-TV) But saying Moore “runs Maryland” the way Miller once ran the Senate would oversimplify the reality. Maryland power today looks more like this: WES MOORE Statewide organization.Appointments.Fundraising.Executive government.National Democratic relationships. BILL FERGUSON The Senate.Committees.Confirmations.Legislative leverage. JOSELINE PEÑA-MELNYK The House.Committee leadership.Budget and legislative leverage. ANGELA ALSOBROOKS Statewide electoral organization.Federal platform.Prince George’s relationships.National Democratic connections. AISHA BRAVEBOY Prince George’s executive organization.County government.A major Democratic vote base. THE POST-HOYER GENERATION Boafo and the emerging political class that will have to rebuild Hoyer’s Washington-Maryland network rather than simply inherit it. It did something more interesting. Mike Miller’s influence was too personal, too old and too deeply rooted in his own relationships to be inherited whole. Hoyer’s network is too extensive and too intertwined with decades of congressional politics to fit neatly inside one successor. So the pieces are moving. Toward Moore. Toward Ferguson. Toward Peña-Melnyk. Toward Alsobrooks. Toward Braveboy. Toward younger candidates and new county organizations. And toward veteran political survivors who understand both eras. That’s the next chapter of Maryland politics. The person who eventually connects: Annapolis, Prince George’s, Montgomery County, Baltimore, labor, business, donors, the Maryland Democratic Party, and the congressional delegation will possess something Maryland hasn’t truly seen since Miller’s heyday. Not merely another elected official. And maybe that’s why searching for “the next Mike Miller” is the wrong exercise. There may never be another one. The more important question is: Miller spent half a century becoming that person. Hoyer spent decades becoming another version of it. Maryland’s current political leaders are still competing for the privilege. And until somebody actually connects all those pieces, the most accurate answer to the question “Who runs Maryland?” may be the most fascinating one of all: No one does. Not anymore. But there are plenty of people trying. Sources University of Maryland and Maryland Matters — Miller’s 33-year Senate presidency and political legacy. (Behavioral and Social Sciences) Washington Post historical reporting — Miller’s rise from Maryland machine politics and ability to retain power as the Senate evolved. (The Washington Post) Maryland Matters — former top Miller aides who moved into Annapolis lobbying and the changing Senate power structure. (Maryland Matters) Washington Post and Reuters — Hoyer’s January 2026 retirement announcement after more than four decades in Congress and his long Democratic leadership career. (The Washington Post) Associated Press — Adrian Boafo’s 2026 victory in the Democratic primary to succeed Hoyer, including Hoyer and Moore’s support and Boafo’s “pass the torch” remarks. (AP News) Maryland Democratic Party — Steuart Pittman’s official biography stating that he sought the state chairmanship at Moore’s suggestion. (The Maryland Democratic Party) Maryland General Assembly — official 2026 records identifying Bill Ferguson as Senate President and Joseline Peña-Melnyk as Speaker. (Maryland General Assembly) Maryland State Board of Elections — official 2026 Prince George’s County results showing Aisha Braveboy’s dominant County Executive primary victory. (Maryland State Board of Elections) 2026 election reporting — Moore’s overwhelming Democratic gubernatorial primary victory. (WBAL-TV)
Scientists map hair follicle formation in spacetime, advancing understanding of how organs develop
In a new research report, scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have developed a technology that allows them to capture a 3D molecular "snapshot" of hundreds of hair follicles as they develop ...
Reimagining how scientists study the chemistry of the air
Professor Victoria Barber and doctoral student Cooper Crabtree are spearheading Keck Foundation-funded project charting a path toward better understanding atmospheric oxidation. by Álvaro Castillo, UCLA College of Letters and Science From the vantage point of Victoria Barber, a UCLA assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, understanding the chemical reactions that shape air quality and climate are among the most pressing scientific challenges of our time. And thanks to a recent grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, she and doctoral student Cooper Crabtree will spearhead a new research project exploring exactly how pollutants form in the atmosphere. Specifically, the project will examine how volatile organic compounds transform through atmospheric oxidation and explore how pollutants, like smog, form in the atmosphere. VOCs are released by sources ranging from trees and wildfires to vehicle exhaust pipes and consumer products such as cologne and perfume. As they undergo atmospheric oxidation, they can transform into a wide range of other compounds. Anyone in Southern California can attest to the urgency of this area of research — for example, in late July of this year, Los Angeles County was under an active ozone pollution advisory for almost a full week. While many people associate ozone with the protective ozone layer high in the stratosphere, ground-level or tropospheric ozone is a harmful secondary pollutant formed through atmospheric oxidation. Understanding how VOCs transform into pollutants like ozone is therefore critical to improving air-quality forecasts and informing strategies to reduce exposure. “My group is focused on trying accelerate our understanding of these networks of reactions so that we can do a better job of predicting how those pollutants form,” Barber said. “When we make decisions about how we might alter emissions, we can understand how that’s going to influence the production of these downstream pollutants.” With support from the W. M. Keck Foundation, Barber and Crabtree are developing new experimental approaches that will combine — and improve — techniques to study hundreds of chemical systems more efficiently than traditional methods allow. Instead of spending years decoding a single VOC, the project seeks to dramatically expand the pace and scale of discovery. The grant comes at a particularly important moment for environmental research. Barber, who joined UCLA in 2023, says funding for climate and air-quality research, especially for early career scientists, has become increasingly difficult to secure, a challenge compounded for ambitious projects that require building entirely new research infrastructure. The Keck Foundation’s support, Barber said, provides the flexibility to pursue bold early-stage, high-risk ideas that may be more difficult to fund using conventional federal funding sources. “It’s really, really hard to do environmental research under the current federal paradigm,” Barber said. “By stepping in and providing stable and flexible funding to explore this new idea, the Keck Foundation is making a huge difference to my research program.” In addition to funding early-career faculty, the Keck Foundation’s support is also focused on empowering graduate students like Crabtree in their scientific growth. The project gives Crabtree the opportunity to help develop an entirely new experimental approach to studying atmospheric chemistry — an experience that will provide him with valuable technical skills, scientific training and preparation for the next stage of his career. Stable funding also allows doctoral students like Crabtree to devote themselves more fully to research rather than balancing their scientific work with additional teaching responsibilities needed to cover funding gaps. “Getting to devote more of my time to research this past school year has greatly improved the pace and quality of our experiments, data analysis and planning for our future work,” said Crabtree, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry. “I feel very lucky — especially amid the current uncertainty surrounding scientific funding — to be able to continue exploring exciting knowledge gaps in our field and growing as a scientific researcher.” For Barber, mentorship is among the most rewarding and important aspects of her role as a faculty member. “Our jobs as faculty are to do good science and make good scientists,” she said. “I believe the Keck Foundation shares this belief and sees the potential positive impact this project can have.”
A Mother’s Age Can Affect Her Offspring in Ways Scientists Are Only Starting to Understand
The effects of maternal age may travel through generations without being written into DNA.
Spacetime May Be Just One Layer of the Universe—Embedded in a Deeper Reality We Don’t Understand, Physicist Suggests
This means there could be much more to the universe than we ever expected.
LePage supports data centers with guardrails
Sen. Susan Collins said she understands concerns about new data centers “gobbling up too much energy and putting stress on the cost of energy.”
Wood’s research advances fertility understanding
Wood's team studies embryo development, nutrition impacts and lab techniques to help producers achieve better reproductive outcomes.
The Apophis encounter in 2029: A rare opportunity for planetary science and defense
The near-Earth asteroid Apophis will make an extremely close flyby of Earth on April 13, 2029, at a distance of approximately 38,000 km—an event that occurs on average only once every 7,500 years, offering an unprecedented opportunity for planetary science and planetary defense. However, significant uncertainties remain regarding the physical parameters of Apophis, such as its shape, spin state, internal structure, and material composition, and predictions of tidal effects—including potential orbital changes, spin acceleration, surface material displacement, and dust ejection during the flyby—are highly dependent on model assumptions. Although multiple nations have planned exploration missions, how to coordinate global observational resources within the limited time window, optimize rapid-response mission architectures, and translate scientific understanding into effective planetary defense strategies remain critical challenges to be addressed.
Scientists discovered four snakes curled together in a burrow for 38 million years as the volcanic ash preserved their remarkable fossils
A snake fossil discovery in Wyoming has given palaeontologists an unusually close look at the lives of these ancient reptiles. Four complete skeletons belonging to a newly recognised species, have helped researchers understand an early member of the ‘boa family’ and the history of small, burrowing snakes in North America.
Scientists discover learning and memory formation in model membranes
A decades-long collaboration between two scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory is reshaping how we understand learning.
Sean Mannion’s play-calling philosophy starts with the quarterback
Sean Mannion explains how finding the right play is only part of the job and understanding who's taking the snap may actually matter more.
CHI Health: Understanding the Perinatal Mood Spectrum
Following the tragic death of actress Hayden Panettiere, CHI Health and medical experts are shedding light on the complexities of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders.
Rock-solid evidence for the origins of birds
Stones in dinosaur stomachs may help understanding of avian evolution
Understanding Athlete Support Needs and Advancing Disability Health Equity
A new study from Special Olympics was published in the American Journal on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities titled, Functional Limitations Reported Among U.S. Adults With Intellectual Disability Participating in Special Olympics: A Comparative Analysis to the General Population.
Sea Aggie Researchers Make Evening Fun with Science on the Beach
“The environment is where we all meet; where we all have a mutual interest; it’s the one thing all of us share.” – Lady Bird JohnsonOn Galveston Island, beaches rank among the favorite environments to share and study, and, as Texas A&M University at Galveston faculty emphasized last week, are “More Than Just Sand.”A program subtitled “The Secret Life & Value of Sandy Beaches” drew more than 40 people to the Aug. 13 meeting of Surfrider Foundation Galveston, a local chapter of a nonprofit focused on the protection and enjoyment of oceans and beaches.The evening began barefoot with ecology lessons on the sand before moving across Seawall Boulevard for beverages, bites, and more beach talk at an area establishment. Drs. Guilherme Corte and Yasmina Shah Esmaeili show how a mesh bag is used as a sieve to separate organisms from samples of the sand. Credit: TAMUG Divisions of Marketing and CommunicationsNot far from where others were enjoying the attractions at Pleasure Pier, Drs. Guilherme Corte and Yasmina Shah Esmaeili introduced the ecologically curious to species living within the sediments.“When people hear ‘coral reefs,’ they immediately think of fish, live ecosystems, but when they think of sandy beaches, they think party, recreation, vacations – not coastal ecosystems,” said Corte, an assistant professor of marine biology in the College of Marine Sciences and Maritime Studies at TAMUG.Shah Esmaeili co-founded the Gulf eDNA Network and works with Corte in TAMUG’s Benthic Ecology Lab.“Sandy beaches are indeed great places for leisure and recreation,” Corte said. “Let’s keep enjoying them, because they are awesome. But they are also full of life that we most of the time don’t realize is there.”The married couple soon had the beachcombers measuring the slope with PVC poles, searching for ghost shrimp with a stainless-steel pump, sifting for marine worms and sand fleas, and guessing which species would burrow fastest back into the sand once released.Away from the sand, the focus turned to research from Drs. Ashley Ross ’03, ’10, and Virgie Greb, ’25 and those words from Lady Bird Johnson reminding people that the environment isn’t separate from their daily lives.“It’s about things that we value, mostly our communities, strong local economies, outdoor recreation, cultural connections, and our overall quality of life,” said Greb, a proud BOI – born on the island – Galvestonian, who now works in Austin as a project manager for the Texas General Land Office. “Along our coast, these benefits are deeply interconnected.”Greb and Ross, an associate professor in marine and coastal environmental science with the College of Marine Sciences & Maritime Studies, have studied a variety of ways beaches and the sea are important to Galveston and those who live there. Drs. Ashley Ross (left) and Virgie Greb (standing at right) field questions after their presentation. Credit: TAMUG Division of Marketing and CommunicationsIn 2023, using three survey methods – online for Galveston County residents, in-person at beaches, and paper distributed via city water bills – they collected 732 complete responses, 53 percent from residents and 47 percent from visitors.Most were frequent beachgoers who gave the recreation value of Galveston beaches a “B” and rated amenities such as restaurants, lodging, shopping, and beach access highly. Lower rated were water clarity and restroom facilities.“It’s noticeable that primary residents actually rate water quality higher; they’re more tolerant of hard, turbid water,” Ross said, crediting them with better understanding the natural conditions with the Trinity and San Jacinto Rivers bringing sediments and rich nutrients to the area around Galveston.Island residents also were more likely to understand that “clear” isn’t the same as clean beach water and to know that water quality is regularly tested. Clean means absent of disease-causing pathogens.“We need more education and outreach focused on water quality and the benefits of Galveston beaches and shores and water,” Greb said. “And it’s not just for tourism. There are a lot of people who are very lucky to live on an island with beaches and the bay.”
Microscopic contaminants found on Ryugu asteroid samples - Futura-Sciences
The high stakes of asteroid analysis Finding genuine traces of life or organic compounds on an asteroid would transform our understanding of how life began in the universe. But before claiming a discovery of that scale, researchers must be entirely certain they are not looking at Earthly hitchhikers. Mistaking a...
New research explores the earliest stages of coronary plaque inflammation
"If we want to prevent plaque from forming, we need to understand those earliest changes—not just what happens after inflammation has already taken hold," one researcher explained.
Business understanding drives small commercial satisfaction gap, JD Power finds
New data shows a 203-point satisfaction gap between small business clients whose brokers know their industry and those whose don't
ICYMI: Sen. Banks Joins All Indiana Politics
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Yesterday, Senator Jim Banks (R-Ind.) joined All Indiana Politics to discuss AI oversight, Food-is-Medicine initiatives, the ongoing conflict in Iran, and the Protect College Sports Act. Click the image above for the full discussion. Key Excerpts on AI: Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.): “We need to better understand the security threats that are occurring in some of these labs, and that’s the […]
Next Generation of Planetary Scientists Learn Public Engagement Skills
FORCE is a world-class laboratory that uses high-pressure experimental equipment to recreate the extreme conditions found deep within Earth and other planetary bodies, enabling researchers to better understand how planets form, evolve, and behave under immense pressures.
Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 – We Played This PvE Bug Hunt One Last Time Before Review and Found the Specialist Class to Be Where It's At
Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 seems like one of those lazy Sunday games, where you kill part of an afternoon playing a couple hours with friends. It gets Aliens and understands that forty miles of bad road Cameron envisioned. As a co-op game, it’s not going to change the world. Aliens already did that. But it’s a great excuse to play around in that world again, and I’m eager to see what else LV-558 has in store.
Mind hacking: Stanford neuroscientist seeks to decode the brain’s toughest riddles
Stanford neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth is decoding the human brain to understand how our emotions are formed.
A school for political education in Argentina – Offering hope for the future of democracy
Amid an increasingly polarized and divided world, Argentinian Jesuits envisioned an institute dedicated to training politicians inspired by Gospel values, intercultural understanding, and democracy.
Discovering science through art exhibition
An innovative exhibition that aims to present complicated science in a simple-to-understand and artistic way hosted by UWA as part of National Science Week.
Designing a Persistent Knowledge Layer That Refuses to Guess
RAG Retrieves, It Never Remembers. A vendor-neutral blueprint for applications that accumulate understanding. Includes a complete Azure-native implementation (Microsoft Foundry, Azure AI Search, Cosmos DB, FastAPI) mapped to a property-insurance corpus.
'Very weird': 236-million-year-old fossil proves mammals stopped laying eggs earlier than we thought
Our understanding of mammalian reproduction is being reborn.
Doctors and women who've had it call for more attention on postpartum psychosis
The high-profile murder trial of Lindsay Clancy's has put the condition in the spotlight. Women who have had it call for more research and understanding of a difficult mental illness.
Sooo ... About Last Night
Last night (Sat., Aug. 15, 2026), Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) ventured forth to Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for UFC 330. Though the pair of title fights atop the card understandably garnered most of the attention ahead of time, the rest of the card proved a little underrated. Some of the veterans exceeded expectations, […]
Mark Cuban tells Ro Khanna 'you don't understand business,' threatens investment shift over billionaire tax
Mark Cuban warned Rep. Ro Khanna that California's proposed billionaire tax could drive startup founders out of the state, vowing to avoid investing there.
Dritwood Outdoors: Wildlife science demands effective communication
Wildlife management has come a long way from the days of Aldo Leopold traversing the New Mexico mountains on horseback and the Wisconsin River Valley by canoe. Back then, most decisions were based primarily on observation and experience. Today, highly trained wildlife biologists use sophisticated research, technology and mountains of data to understand everything from population dynamics and habitat needs to disease transmission and predator-prey relationships.
Wildlife science demands effective communication
Wildlife management has come a long way from the days of Aldo Leopold traversing the New Mexico mountains on horseback and the Wisconsin River Valley by canoe. Back then, most decisions were based primarily on observation and experience. Today, highly trained wildlife biologists use sophisticated research, technology and mountains of data to understand everything from population dynamics and habitat needs to disease transmission and predator-prey relationships.
Physicists discover a hidden gluon structure inside protons that could rewrite textbooks
Physicists may have uncovered a hidden feature inside protons that helps preserve one of matter’s most fundamental properties. RHIC collision data suggest baryon number is carried not simply by three quarks, but by a Y-shaped junction of the gluons connecting them. The finding challenges a decades-old textbook picture and could deepen our understanding of why protons—and ultimately matter itself—remain stable.
‘The Cardinal Countdown: 22 Days Until Kickoff’
LEKHY THOMPKINS #22 Height: 6’2” Weight: 235lb Position: RB Class: Freshman Hometown: Alamo, TN Summary: Some guys walk into the program looking for help, they build a good work ethic, build a strong foundation of understanding in the schemes, develop a relationship with the coaches, and work their way into a nice role on the […]
Why do cats yowl?
Understanding a cat’s yowl requires looking beyond the noise to the behavior and emotions behind it.
Wildlife science demands effective communication
Wildlife management has come a long way from the days of Aldo Leopold traversing the New Mexico mountains on horseback and the Wisconsin River Valley by canoe. Back then, most decisions were based primarily on observation and experience. Today, highly trained wildlife biologists use sophisticated research, technology and mountains of data to understand everything from population dynamics and habitat needs to disease transmission and predator-prey relationships.
Brandon Butler column: Wildlife science demands effective communication
Wildlife management has come a long way from the days of Aldo Leopold traversing the New Mexico mountains on horseback and the Wisconsin River Valley by canoe. Back then, most decisions were based primarily on observation and experience. Today, highly trained wildlife biologists use sophisticated research, technology and mountains of data to understand everything from population dynamics and habitat needs to disease transmission and predator-prey relationships.
AI tools now widely available in Oracle Health's patient portal
New artificial intelligence capabilities can help patients understand care plans and medications, offer automated reminders of upcoming visits and prompt them to complete labs or schedule follow-up screenings.
The Lindsay Clancy case shows the limits of postpartum psychiatry
“Our understanding and treatment of postpartum psychiatric illnesses remain profoundly inadequate,” experts write.
The Lindsay Clancy case shows the limits of postpartum psychiatry
“Our understanding and treatment of postpartum psychiatric illnesses remain profoundly inadequate,” experts write.
UT Health San Antonio study reveals how the liver’s internal clock may influence metabolism
Contact: Eileen Teves, 210-450-7239, tevese@uthscsa.edu Content provided by Claire Kowalick SAN ANTONIO, Aug. 12, 2026 — What if one of the keys to a healthier metabolism is understanding how and when the liver communicates with the rest of the body? Researchers at UT Health San Antonio, the academic health center of The University of Texas at […]
AHA resource: Economic Impact of Disparities in Health Outcomes
The AHA Aug. 11 released a new resource guide designed to address a critical gap by helping leaders understand and quantify the economic burden of disparities of health outcomes. The guide provides practical methods to identify and assess the financial impact of health disparities, along with data-driven approaches to implement interventions that both improve outcomes and reduce costs. READ MORE
Scientists are closer than ever to understanding the power of the vagus nerve
The vagus nerve is the autonomic nervous system’s highway, connecting every major organ
The U.S. Healthcare System is Already Mostly Socialized
Now that Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the outcome of this crucial race will depend mainly on two things: Whether Republicans succeed in demonizing El-Sayed because he’s brown and a Muslim, and whether they succeed in demonizing him as a left-wing radical. I will defer for the now the question of whether bigotry will be effective this year, although I will address it another day. What I want to address instead is El-Sayed’s signature issue — healthcare. Yes, El-Sayed advocates Medicare for All, a position the usual suspects denounce as “socialism.” I will get to the politics of his stance soon. Today, however, I want to talk about the substance. We should be clear that El-Sayed doesn’t even call himself a socialist. On the contrary, he explicitly disavows the label, saying “I’m a capitalist who just knows about capitalism”. In fact, as I explained in a previous post, the policies that El-Sayed advocates qualify him as a social democrat, not a socialist. Still, El-Sayed advocates a system under which the government would pay almost all medical expenses. Isn’t that socialism? Well, if that is the criterion then much of U.S. healthcare is already socialist. In fact, the government’s role is so large that U.S. healthcare is better described as partially privatized socialism than as anything resembling a free market. Let’s start with the raw numbers on health insurance, which pays the bulk of Americans’ medical expenses. Americans receive health insurance either from private companies or from public programs, overwhelmingly Medicare and Medicaid. Here’s what the breakdown of coverage and spending between private and public looked like in 2024: While a majority of Americans with health insurance get it from private companies, well over 100 million of us are covered by government programs instead. And these government programs pay more total dollars for medical bills than the private insurers do. Why do government programs that cover a minority of the population account for a majority of health insurers’ outlays? Mainly because Medicare covers seniors, and we’re expensive. Also, while Medicaid covers many younger Americans, disabled and elderly beneficiaries account for most of its spending. Even by the raw numbers, then, U.S. health insurance looks as much public as private. But that understates the government’s role: Private health insurance in the U.S. is both highly regulated and heavily subsidized. This is obviously true for the insurance coverage purchased by tens of millions of Americans through the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. But employment-based health insurance, which covers 161 million Americans, is far more of a government creation than most people realize. For employment-based insurance exists largely because of huge implicit government subsidies that come with major strings attached. Here’s how that works. If your employer pays you $10,000, that’s taxable income. But if your employer pays $10,000 toward a company health insurance plan that meets certain criteria, it isn’t taxable. That’s a huge effective subsidy, running at more than $300 billion a year. Take that subsidy into account, along with the more than $100 billion per year spent subsidizing policies purchased under the ACA, as well as the outlays on Medicare and Medicaid, and net effect is that the government pays for more than two-thirds of Americans’ health insurance. Granted, there are strings attached. Roughly speaking, employment-based health plans can’t discriminate based on medical history — that is, they can’t deny coverage to employees with pre-existing conditions — and they also can’t offer the plans only to highly compensated employees — a health plan that is only for the C-suite is considered taxable income. So given the restrictions of the federal tax code, employer-based health insurance is a lot like Obamacare, which also prohibits discrimination based on medical history and provides subsidies to make insurance affordable to lower-paid workers. The fact is that virtually all of private healthcare insurance is already well under some form of government control through regulation and tax subsidies. How should we think about this system? First of all, is Medicare socialist? Don’t tell anyone, but the way Medicare operates — it covers every senior’s medical expenses, whatever they turn out to be, while being funded by taxes that depend on one’s income — could be summarized by the old Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And back in 1961, when Ronald Reagan was the face of a last-ditch effort by the American Medical Association to block the creation of Medicare, he denounced Medicare as “socialized medicine” and warned that it would destroy our freedom. In reality, American freedom survived until Jan. 20, 2025, while Medicare is immensely popular, with an 82 percent favorable rating in the most recent KFF survey. Medicaid, government health insurance for lower-income Americans, comes in at 73 percent. This is in sharp contrast to public views about private insurers, who are widely disliked if not hated and accused of denying essential care. Furthermore, if Medicare is socialism, then the whole U.S. health insurance system, with the government paying most of the bills and placing conditions on private insurers, is almost equally socialist. If you insist on calling any program the government pays for and regulates socialist, then U.S. healthcare would best be described as a partially privatized form of socialism. And one must ask, what is the point of the part that is privatized? Do private insurers add anything positive? Or are they simply parasites, skimming off money that could have been paying for care? The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare. Assessing the waste from employer-based insurance is harder, but most evidence suggests that private insurers have substantially higher administrative costs than Medicare does. Furthermore, the complexity of private insurance, with multiple payers all trying to deny care when they can, is a huge burden both on providers — doctors, nurses, and hospitals — and on patients. What do private insurers offer to compensate for these costs? One must go through intellectual contortions to avoid the conclusion that they are, in fact, parasites. Which brings me back to El-Sayed. In supporting Medicare for All, he’s basically calling for an end to the partial, parasitic privatization of a healthcare system that is already hugely dependent on public funding. When one looks at it that way, it’s not at all a radical proposal. Admittedly, the political lift requires overcoming the opposition to higher taxes to pay for Medicare for All. Political realism rather than economics was the reason I and many other progressives supported Obamacare, with all its complexities, rather than demanding an immediate move to Medicare for All. But the political calculus may very well have shifted since the 2000s, as Americans are fed up with a system of unaffordable premiums, rampant claim denials, and byzantine claim administration. Moreover, funding healthcare insurance through taxation would allow for a much more progressive distribution of the cost. That is, compared to the present system, middle-income households would pay less as high-income households would pay more. And the U.S. would stop wasting large sums on pointless administrative costs. So let’s be clear: El-Sayed’s healthcare platform is perfectly reasonable on the merits of cost, fairness and health efficacy. And with private insurers never more hated, while millions of Americans are losing their health insurance, 2026 may be its time. MUSICAL CODA
Montana State students to help NASA science soar during 2026 total solar eclipse
BOZEMAN — Each total solar eclipse — when daytime skies darken and the sun briefly reveals its outer atmosphere, or corona — presents new opportunities to better understand our star,
$100 GTA VI Ultimate Edition Surpasses Standard Edition in Pre-Orders
Grand Theft Auto VI is leading the charge in the $80 AAA race, which has understandably upset many gamers, but the $100 Ultimate Edition has been another point of contention in online discussions. However, despite the online discussions potentially suggesting otherwise, Take-Two CEO, Strauss...
Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand how to live
An AI future of sleek, streamlined, and totally empty relationships.
Ant Colonies Pulse Like a Physical System, And Scientists Are Beginning to Understand What Triggers Them
It starts by activating a lazy co-worker.
"They don't understand art" - id Software lead slams Xbox, says it's "impossible" to make games like 2016's Doom now
id's lead services provider Chris Hayes spoke to the Well Played podcast about the studio, and the problems he has with the company post-layoffs.
Scientists Release Biggest 2D Map of the Universe
Key Takeaways The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys combined more than 263,000 telescope exposures to make the largest 2D map of the universe in visible and near-infrared light. Astronomers can pair the Legacy Surveys map with their own observations to explore our universe and search for rare phenomena. The 2D map serves as the foundation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument survey to measure the universe in 3D and investigate dark energy. Hold on to your telescopes: the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team has released the largest-ever 2D color map of the universe. The 5.6-trillion-pixel map contains nearly 4 billion celestial objects, primarily stars and galaxies. The data is available for all to use and publicly viewable through the Legacy Survey Sky Viewer. Astronomers and citizen scientists can explore the map or combine it with their own observations to better understand our universe. Researchers can search for rare phenomena like gravitational lenses, observe fleeting events like supernovae, and investigate two of physics’ biggest mysteries: dark matter, the invisible substance that accounts for most of the mass in our universe, and dark energy, the force driving our universe’s accelerating expansion. The new map builds on earlier versions from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys that have already proved invaluable. To date, more than 1,800 science papers that reference the Legacy Surveys data have been published. “It’s part of the fabric of astronomy research now,” said David Schlegel, a co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). “When you’re working with astronomical objects today, you often start by pulling up the Legacy Imaging Viewer to see what you’re looking at.” Covering roughly 75% of the sky in visible and near-infrared light, the updated map provides a deep view of the extragalactic universe not blocked by the dust and stars of our own Milky Way. Researchers expect it will remain the most comprehensive 2D map of our universe for years to come. More than 160 scientists contributed to data collection for the project, and a team of 20 produced the final dataset released today. It was built by combining 263,407 telescope exposures from three ground-based sky surveys: the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS) at NSF Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS) at NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory, and the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS) at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. That was supplemented by years of data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite mission and additional public data. “For our team, these data are fundamental to our investigation of the expansion history of the universe and the formation of our galaxy,” said Arjun Dey, co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and an astronomer at NSF NOIRLab. “But the skies belong to everyone, and this survey gives everyone the chance to explore the sky and marvel at its wonders.” Here be galaxies The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys were originally conducted to prepare for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. The Legacy Surveys’ 2D map is essentially a deep photograph of the sky; it records where galaxies and stars appear and how bright they appear. This crucial step enables DESI to select objects and measure their light in different wavelengths to determine their distances, building the largest high-resolution 3D map ever made. Scientists study the way galaxies have clustered at different ages of the universe to track dark energy over time. In April 2026, DESI completed its original five-year survey ahead of schedule and with vastly more objects than expected. The early results have shown surprising hints that dark energy’s impact may be weakening over time — a paradigm shift that could potentially shape the predicted fate of our universe. DESI expects to publish improved results using their first five years of data in 2027 and is continuing observations into 2028. DESI was so efficient at observing galaxies, the Legacy Surveys map needed to expand. Early on, “it became clear we might run out of galaxies to look at and run out of sky, and we better start doing something about that,” said Schlegel, who also works on DESI. The new Legacy Surveys map has been used to select DESI targets since June 2026 and will guide the telescope’s operations over the coming years. Computing the cosmos Merging hundreds of thousands of images taken on 2,285 nights, each with unique atmospheric and telescope conditions, was a massive computational effort. It took about a year to develop the computer code and eight weeks to process all the images at the Perlmutter supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab. Beyond supporting DESI, the Legacy Surveys will be a foundational reference for the next generation of telescopes. As new observatories like the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory (jointly funded by NSF and DOE’s Office of Science) and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope come online, researchers can compare their observations with one of the deepest and most comprehensive views of the sky ever assembled. The Legacy Surveys data will also help scientists train artificial intelligence tools to analyze petabytes of astronomical data and accelerate new discoveries. It will be among the datasets used in an astrophysics pilot project within the American Science Cloud, part of the DOE’s Genesis Mission. The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of High Energy Physics; the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility; the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Astronomical Sciences; and the partner institutions. DESI is supported by the DOE Office of Science and NERSC. Additional support for DESI is provided by the NSF; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (SECIHTI) of Mexico; the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain; and by the DESI member institutions. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Why businesses may need to rethink how they plan
According to Axios, we have entered a new era of “post-processable velocity,” where the pace of technological and AI-driven change is faster than individuals, companies, markets and governments can fully absorb, understand or respond to in real time. The major shift is from information moving faster than humans can process to capabilities changing faster than […]
Designing Direct-to-Government Assistance: Three Case Studies in Global Health Financing
In September 2025, the US State Department released the America First Global Health Strategy, announcing a major shift in how the United States programs foreign assistance in one of its largest sectors, representing over $13 billion in FY 2024. Global health dollars, the strategy states, will now flow primarily to foreign governments, not to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as has been the case in recent decades. The Department has sought to advance this strategy by signing non-binding, multi-year memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with dozens of its largest aid recipients. While officials acknowledge that there will be real challenges to providing direct assistance in the near term, the explicit goal of these MOUs is to transition from donor-driven systems to partner government-led implementation.
UNCW Business School Students Travel to Prague for Real-Life Consulting Experience by David Glew
This article was contributed by Kestrel Smoot, International Programs Coordinator for UNCW’s Cameron School of Business. During the most recent spring semester, 33 upper-level finance and marketing students from the UNCW’s Cameron School of Business traveled to Prague, Czechia, to participate in an intensive international consulting project. Unlike traditional study-abroad programs, the Prague consultancy project focuses on real client engagement. Each year’s project is entirely new, designed through collaboration between faculty and industry partners to identify a current business challenge that students will address. This year, students worked with MAMS-Champi, a Czech non-alcoholic beverage company that is seeking to expand into other global markets. Throughout the first half of the semester, students attend class at UNCW and prepare for their time abroad by conducting preliminary research, developing analytical frameworks, and organizing themselves into specialized teams responsible for tasks such as marketing strategy, industry analysis, consumer segmentation, and competitive evaluation. The course emphasizes independence and teamwork, requiring students to take ownership of their work, manage deadlines, and collaborate across functional groups. Additionally, faculty serve as advisors, allowing students to navigate the complexities of the project much as they would in a professional consulting environment. Once in Prague, students met with company leadership, toured facilities, and refined their recommendations based on real-time feedback. The in-person component is widely regarded as the most transformative aspect of the program because students must synthesize weeks of work into a cohesive presentation and deliver it to the client, demonstrating professionalism, strategic thinking, and adaptability. Beyond the consulting work, students participated in cultural and educational activities that broadened their understanding of global business environments. They explored Prague’s historic districts, learned about Czech culture, and engaged with local professionals. These experiences helped students understand how economic, regulatory, and social factors shape market opportunities. The Prague consultancy project stands as a defining example of the Cameron School of Business’s commitment to experiential learning, consistently strengthening students’ confidence, enhancing their resumes, and serving as a focal point in job interviews. Employers recognize the value of the hands-on experience and transferable skills students gain, underscoring the program’s role in preparing industry-ready graduates for today’s fast-moving business landscape.
Politics needs less messaging and more meaning
Trust that voters are smart enough to understand
New Penn Vet research moves science closer to a solution to male infertility
By converting human skin or blood cells into stem cells and coaxing them into early-stage human sperm cells, researchers are furthering the understanding of how sperm cells are formed.
How savvy is the Iranian regime about U.S. politics?
NPR's A Martinez speaks to Holly Dagres, senior fellow at the Washington Institute, about how the Iranian regime's understanding of U.S. politics informs its war strategy.
How savvy is the Iranian regime about U.S. politics?
NPR's A Martinez speaks to Holly Dagres, senior fellow at the Washington Institute, about how the Iranian regime's understanding of U.S. politics informs its war strategy.
Beyond Flashpoints: Understanding the Politics Behind Taiwan’s Strategic Choices
Written by Lucy Best. This article argues that issues of everyday governance, such as budgets, industrial development, and energy availability, that underpin Taiwan’s strategic success have b…
Slow spin could explain why planets become hellish
Hundreds of Venus-like planets could soon help determine why some worlds become sweltering greenhouse hellscapes, but to fully understand that, scientists first need to know how fast those planets are spinning.
Four ways the High Seas Protection Portal is helping turn science into stronger marine protection.
Understanding the high seas is the first step toward protecting them.
Sleep Health: Melatonin Myths Most People Still Believe
Despite its popularity, many people misunderstand what melatonin does—and what it does not do. Sleep medicine specialists say these misconceptions can lead to unrealistic expectations and unnecessary use of high doses.
'His urine goes on tour around Europe, showing the kings and queens this glowing pee': The weird world of alchemy before chemistry
Editor Hannah Osborne spoke with science writer Kit Chapman about his book "The Age of Alchemy." In it, he explores how, long before modern science existed, people were finding extraordinary ways to solve problems and understand the world around them.
Anthony Scaramucci, Podcast Star, Explains U.S. Politics to the World
He spent 11 days in the Trump White House nine years ago. Now he has a hit podcast, helping the British public, among others, understand what’s going on.
'They Fundamentally Don't Understand Art' — Doom Dev Blasts Xbox After Microsoft 'Gutted' id Software With Layoffs
After layoffs ripped through Doom developer id Software in July, id Software lead services programmer Chris Hays has taken aim at Xbox: "They fundamentally don't understand art."
Google's top hacker hunter explains why hacking groups get codenames
Google recently changed how it refers and assigns names to hacking groups. TechCrunch spoke with one of the world’s foremost experts on tracking hackers to understand why companies give hackers codenames.
The Business of Immigration: Ethics, Economics, and the Future of Our Region
About this Program: Immigration has long shaped the identity, economy, and culture of the San Diego–Baja California region. Today, it remains one of the most significant—and often most debated—public policy issues facing our communities. As employers grapple with workforce shortages, governments respond to evolving immigration policies, and families pursue opportunity and security, important questions arise about the economic, ethical, and practical implications of immigration for our region's future. As part of the Engage San Diego: Tough Topics, Real Discussion series, moderator Andrew Blum will lead a thoughtful conversation with community leaders to examine these issues from multiple perspectives. Together, the panel will explore how immigration and immigration policy influence regional economic growth, workforce development, cross-border commerce, public services, and community well-being. The discussion will consider both the opportunities and the challenges immigration presents for employers, policymakers, and the broader San Diego economy, while also examining the ethical considerations that inform business and public policy decisions. Rather than advocating for a single viewpoint, this program is designed to foster informed, respectful dialogue and deepen public understanding of one of the defining issues of our time. Through a balanced exchange of ideas, panelists will explore practical approaches to strengthening our region while recognizing the diverse perspectives that shape this complex conversation. Join us for an engaging discussion that reflects the spirit of the Engage San Diego series—bringing together diverse voices to tackle difficult topics through civil discourse, informed analysis, and constructive community engagement. What We’ll Explore Immigration and the Regional Economy How does immigration influence San Diego's workforce, economic growth, business competitiveness, and cross-border prosperity? Ethics, Policy, and Public Responsibility How can communities balance economic needs, humanitarian values, public safety, and the rule of law in shaping immigration policy? The Business and Government Perspective What roles do employers, local government, and community leaders play in addressing workforce challenges and creating opportunities for shared prosperity? The Future of Our Region As immigration policy continues to evolve, what practical solutions can help strengthen our economy, support our communities, and ensure the long-term success of the San Diego–Baja California region?
Scientists turn to sharks to improve hurricane predictions
From the killer shark of Jaws to the tornado-tossed predators of the Sharknado movies, films long have portrayed sharks as objects of summer fear. But when a shark cuts through the waters off the U.S. East Coast, it now may be doing more than hunting. It may also be gathering data that helps scientists understand the potential intensity of a hurricane before it makes landfall.
David Sinclair Launches Lifespan Media Platform for Longevity Science
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Id Software Vet Claims Xbox Doesn't Understand Art Or Games
id Software vet Chris Hays says entire departments have been 'gutted'
Cleaning products used to kill germs may come with hidden risks
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Scientists Are Starting To Understand The 'Largest Biomechanical Event on Earth': Whales Hunting For Food on a Single Breath
If your heart slowed that much, you'd probably pass out.
Building Business Success On A Solid Foundation
Grady Wold, owner of Trend Stone Surfaces, understands the importance of building a business on a solid foundation. When he needed a financial partner to help expand his granite and quartz countertop business, he turned to Security Financial Bank (SFB), where he works with Scott Erickson, Bloomer
Veteran Financier Nimi Natan Advises That You Should Never Fund a Business You Don’t Understand
After spending years operating businesses as well as financing them, the President & CEO of Gulf Coast Small Business Lending has learned that some of the most important signs whether a business will be successful in the long term are found in people, operations, customer relationships, and the day
Movies to help understand the politics of immigration
Explore powerful films that illuminate the challenges of immigration, examining policy impacts and sociopolitical drivers for migration.
Louisiana Tech and LSU Health Shreveport create historic research part
Two prominent research enterprises in North Louisiana are officially partnering, after signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), establishing a new framework for collaborative research, student tra
Atlanta’s entertainment scene gives rise to lawyer John Rose
Atlanta-based entertainment attorney John Rose helps recording artists land deals, film studios relocate productions and creatives understand their value.
'Shark' De Zerbi has a love for transfer business
Tottenham have undergone radical change over the past 12 months amid understandable fan anger, with new chief executive Vinai Venkatesham leading the organisation on behalf of the Lewis Family Trust. Venkatesham, alongside technical director Johan Lange, is leading negotiations. Lange is the only senior figure from the previous regime to remain in post.
Scientists discover the brain cells that keep you motivated
A group of brain cells called orexin neurons appears to help us keep working when reaching a reward becomes increasingly difficult. Blocking their activity weakened motivation in rats, pointing to a possible new target for understanding why people sometimes struggle to sustain goal-directed behavior.
Where the Trump Administration's Global Health Agreements Stand
The State Department has now signed more than 30 bilateral global health cooperation agreements, adding dozens of new deals with partner governments since our initial update and rundown of outstanding questions in December. And as the administration works to reorient the geographic focus of US assistance, the sweeping new agreements have reached the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific. Beyond signing additional agreements, the State Department published the official texts of five memoranda of understanding (MOUs) in response to a FOIA request, only to quietly disappear from the government's website. (Public Citizen maintains separate copies—along with other MOU-related documents from unofficial sources.)
Where AI meets ethics: new interdisciplinary minor blends computer science and philosophy
This story originally appeared on the website of the College of Arts & Sciences – Ed. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly woven into everyday life, William & Mary is expanding opportunities for students to understand not only how AI works, but how it should be used. Guided by the university’s spirit of the ampersand — […]
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
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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.
Generation Z wants significant change in government
Good morning, and welcome to the first edition of The Feed. We are three Generation Z editors at The Hill working to understand the ins and outs of our generation’s politics. Each week, we’ll…