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New map estimates health impacts from oil refineries across the Mountain West

People living near oil refineries can often see or smell signs of industrial pollution. Now, a new interactive map aims to help them better understand the potential health impacts associated with those facilities.

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Jun 10 • 6:31 PM EDT • Health • kunr.org
Cell Therapy Clinical Trials: Breaking Down the Science

Breakthrough T1D is here to answer all of your questions about islet cell therapies, from the research lab to real-world treatments.

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Jun 10 • 8:15 AM EDT • Science • breakthrought1d.org
New OMB rule could break science in the United States

The drug that saved your mother. The treatment your doctor recommended. The clinical trial that bought someone you love more time. None of it was inevitable. It required a system built to operate outside politics and sustained over decades, because science doesn’t operate on the timeline of a politician. That system is now under direct threat. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has proposed a new rule to regulate all federal grants, not just science, but housing, education, defense, NASA and everything in between, that would fundamentally change how research is conducted in the United States. There have been a lot of fires in the past 16 months, and if everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. But this is a very big deal. These rules would strip away the independence that has kept science from becoming a political tool. The good news is there’s still something we can all do. How the grant system was designed to work When I was a new faculty member, I was full of millions of ideas, so I sat down and wrote an NIH proposal. I worked on it for months and thought it was so good. Then I sent it to my mentor. It came back covered in comments. Places where my reasoning wasn’t as airtight as I’d thought, methods that could be stronger, gaps in my thinking that I had been too close to the work to see. It stung, as honest feedback always does, but peer review almost always makes the work better. In fact, it’s the backbone of how American science has functioned for generations. At NIH, submitted proposals go to a panel of scientists who have experience in the field. These are the people who can read research methods and spot their weaknesses, who understand when an experiment is designed well and when it isn’t. Applications are scored rigorously, and often only the top 3-20% of proposals receive funding. The people making funding decisions are required to justify them based on these reviews. To be clear: this is not a perfect system, and good science still goes unfunded more often than any of us would like due to limited resources. There is also criticism that peer review may undervalue bold ideas that are risky but could have high payoffs. But the peer review system is nonetheless a meaningful part of the grant selection process. While thoughtful and careful changes could improve the system, the changes being proposed by OMB will not make things better. The rule that could change everything Through this OMB proposal, the system that helps decide what gets funded is being dismantled. There are many troubling elements buried in this proposal, but three provisions stand out in particular. Each would be damaging alone. Together, they would change what kind of science gets done in America, and who it serves. 1. Political appointees would decide which science gets funded, and peer review would be explicitly sidelined or ignored. The guidelines your doctor follows, the standards that determine what’s in your air and water, the drugs that get approved for your family: all of it starts with a funding decision. Right now, that decision is made by scientists who can evaluate whether the work is actually sound and whether it could move the needle forward. Under this proposal, funding decisions could be made by political appointees. The careful, expertise-driven review process that shapes grant funding would be effectively sidelined. That means that a poorly designed study could get funded simply because someone in a political office liked the sound of it, while rigorous, important work doesn’t get funded because it no longer aligns with the administration’s priorities. In other words, critical work that benefits all of us could now be missed just because it has become politically inconvenient. 2. Grants could be canceled at any point, without warning, in the middle of ongoing work. Say your tax dollars have been paying for a cancer study for two years. The grant was awarded for five years, so the team is mid-experiment. There are three additional years’ worth of answers that could change how the disease is treated for hundreds of thousands of people. With this new rule, the federal government could cancel the remaining funding tomorrow, walk away from the commitment it made with your money, and have no legal obligation to finish what it started. This is a huge waste of money. There are rarely other sources of funding for this work, which means the team, the graduate students, postdocs, and research staff who have dedicated years of their careers to this project could lose their jobs. Patients who have contributed their time to studies may not see it turn into useful learnings for others. Every hour of work already completed could result in nothing useful. Science can take decades to get to tangible outcomes. It needs a stable funding system to flourish. 3. Researchers would have a harder time communicating their findings without pre-approval from the federal government. There is a saying from Sir Mark Walport: “Science isn’t finished until it’s communicated.” Science is no use to anyone if it is kept locked away in the labs that produced the data. The proposed rule could make communicating research findings harder in a number of ways: Make it harder for scientists to widely share their findings in scientific journals. Publication costs, including journal fees that allow for broad public access, could not be paid for by federal funds which is often how scientists pay these costs. Restrict researchers from engaging publicly about how their findings should inform policy or public health guidelines. This would restrict scientists from doing the work that transforms years of lab work into decisions that actually affect people’s lives. Make it harder for scientists to attend conferences. Conferences would now need to be approved by the federal agency at the time of grant award. This disadvantages conferences or publications that are not politically aligned. Conferences are a key way in which scientists learn about work happening in their field so they can collaborate and build on each other’s findings. What good is science with a muzzle? The long-term impact These changes could (and hopefully would) be reversed under the next administration. But by then, damage has been done. Once projects are halted or denied funding by political appointees, people leave their science careers for other paths or even leave the country to do their amazing science elsewhere. You cannot pause a scientific study the way you pause a subscription you decided isn’t useful anymore. You cannot freeze a research team that depends on salaries to feed their families, causing a scramble for replacement funding that, in most cases, simply does not exist. When the money stops, everything stops, and all the work in progress and its potential are lost. Despite all of the language about reducing waste, fraud, and abuse, this new proposed rule increases the administrative burden tremendously. Every researcher watching this unfold will make a rational decision: don’t start anything that will take a decade to finish. This includes not building a team around funding that could vanish, or asking the big questions that need patience and stability to answer. The most consequential science, the kind that produces the treatments and the breakthroughs that reach your doctor’s office twenty years from now, is exactly the science that would be abandoned first. This is still a proposal, so we can all do something Some worry this rule is already a done deal. But by law, OMB is required to open a public comment period. Those comments matter because they inform members of Congress, they can be used in litigation, and they create a public record. So here’s what you can do: Submit a public comment. The public comment period on this proposed change is open until July 13. Anyone can submit a comment, and OMB is required to respond to substantial ones. Each comment must be different to count as distinct; identical comments will be counted only once. Comment as an individual, not on behalf of your organization. Here’s a full resource to help you, with useful examples, but in general: Share a story about how science or federal funding has benefitted you or is involved in your work. Are you or someone you loved a cancer survivor? Do you know someone with Alzheimer’s? Have you received NIH/NSF or other federal funding? All of these can be stories you use to highlight why you care. Explain why you’re worried about these proposed changes. You can use the wording found here or in other resources to help you. Ask them to withdraw this proposed rule. Contact your elected representatives. Congress allocates money to federal agencies to spend, and it has oversight of how that process works. You can let your representatives know this proposed change concerns you and ask them to intervene. There are levers they can push that can help at this moment. Let others know why federal funding matters. This isn’t just about science, but ALL federal grants, including for education systems, defense projects, and more. The process, including the importance of federal funding, is invisible to many. We can all make it more visible by sharing how science benefits us and why we value it. You can also share this article, or any of the resources linked here, to help spread awareness! Bottom line We are quickly losing ground in scientific research in the U.S. More changes, like the proposed rule by OMB, would decimate our ability to conduct research here, leaving us all worse off: fewer treatments for pancreatic cancer, less research on pollution impacts, fewer answers for patients with rare disease, and more unaddressed health needs. The impact will be very real for all of us, regardless of where we stand politically. Using our voices for science is more important than ever. Love, LM Big thanks to Dr. Megan Ranney for reading this over and providing brilliant insights, as always. Dr. Liz Marnik, PhD, is Executive Director of The Evidence Collective at YLE and a science communicator and immunologist working at the intersection of public trust, science, and public health. You can find her on Substack, LinkedIn, Instagram and Threads. Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) comprises a team of experts, ranging from physicians to immunologists to epidemiologists to nutritionists, working together with one goal: to “Translate” ever-evolving public health science so that people are well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions. The YLE suite of newsletters reaches over 475,000 people across more than 132 countries. This newsletter is free to everyone, thanks to the generous support of fellow YLE community members. To support the effort, subscribe or upgrade below: Subscribe

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Jun 10 • 6:04 AM EDT • Science • yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com
Steven Spielberg doesn't want to be the first human to meet aliens: 'I would not be the right person'

Steven Spielberg says that he doesn't want to be the first human to meet alien visitors: 'I would not be the right person.'

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Jun 9 • 8:52 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com
Here’s what’s impacting the Ascension land market

Industrial expansion and retail demand are the main drivers in Ascension Parish’s land market as residential developers become more selective, according to Peter Laville with Elifin. Laville says Ascension’s strongest momentum is currently tied to industrial growth in Geismar and along the west bank, where major projects such as Hyundai Steel are creating demand for […]

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Jun 9 • 1:01 PM EDT • Business • businessreport.com
Movie Review: ‘Disclosure Day’ is classic Spielberg

Steven Spielberg's “Disclosure Day” takes the filmmaker back to familiar territory. The film follows Daniel Kellner, played by Josh O’Connor, who’s caught in a conspiracy involving extraterrestrial life. Emily Blunt

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Jun 9 • 12:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • yakimaherald.com
Steven Spielberg exposes the truth about his latest extra-terrestrial thriller 'Disclosure Day'

Steven Spielberg is still looking to the stars. The 'E.T.' filmmaker and actors Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colman Domingo, and Colin Firth declassify their mysterious thriller 'Disclosure Day.'

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Jun 9 • 12:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com
Scientists Unethically Experiment On the Unborn to Improve Gene Editing Techniques, Bioethicist Says

Genetic researchers are experimenting on unborn children in trials that could have been done on animal embryos, according to one bioethicist.

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Jun 9 • 10:15 AM EDT • Science • ncregister.com
Dexcom RCT suggests CGM benefits for broad diabetes population

In this edition of STAT Health Tech: Dexcom's CGM trial, udpates from Apple's annual developers' conference, and wearables.

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Jun 9 • 9:34 AM EDT • Health • statnews.com
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The First AI-Designed Vaccine Was Just Tested on Humans. It Could Change How We Fight Pandemics

An early human trial suggests a new vaccine strategy is safe, but still not proven effective.

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Jun 8 • 7:19 PM EDT • Science • zmescience.com
Ken Paxton's attorney in his impeachment trial endorses Democrat James Talarico in U.S. Senate race

Dan Cogdell criticized Paxton for prioritizing loyalty to President Donald Trump over Texas families.

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Jun 8 • 5:29 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org
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We can create the future of science right now

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

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Jun 8 • 4:44 PM EDT • Science • goodscience.substack.com
Who's building and who's buying in Greater Baton Rouge

A look at the latest property transactions and issued permits in East Baton Rouge Parish. Los Angeles investor Andrew Fay purchased an industrial property at the corner of South Choctaw Road and … Already an INSIDER? Sign in. Already an INSIDER? Sign in

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Jun 8 • 2:58 PM EDT • Business • businessreport.com
Ken Paxton's attorney in his impeachment trial endorses James Talarico in US Senate race

An attorney who defended Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in his impeachment trial has endorsed Paxton’s Democratic opponent in the U.S. Senate race

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Jun 8 • 1:30 PM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com
What It Takes To Be A Top Tier Entertainment Lawyer in 2026

Share I’ve recently run several popular posts breaking down data related to sought after legal jobs. General Counsel Big Law Appellate Attorney Here is another in this series. Two Lawyers, One Elite Market Entertainment law can sound like a single professional category. In practice, the lawyers who reach the top of the Hollywood market often look quite different from one another. Consider two attorneys from the 2025 top-entertainment-law universe. Lesley Freeman represents one route: the company-side entertainment lawyer. She is chief legal officer of AGBO, where she oversees company-wide business and legal affairs across film, television, video game and interactive experiences, and technological innovation, after senior legal roles at MGM, Amazon MGM Studios, HBO, and O’Melveny. Daniel Petrocelli represents another route: the outside-counsel trial lawyer. He is chair of O’Melveny’s trial practice and a vice chair of the firm, with a national litigation practice that includes entertainment, sports, and media disputes. Their careers differ by platform, role, practice area, and professional identity. One sits inside an entertainment company; the other practices from a major law firm. One is associated with corporate and governance work; the other with litigation. Yet both fall within the same publicly recognized top tier of Hollywood lawyers. That contrast points to the article’s central question. If there is no single mold for a top entertainment lawyer, are the paths simply idiosyncratic, or do they follow recurring patterns? The data suggest the latter. The attorneys recognized on The Hollywood Reporter and Variety’s 2025 top-attorney lists do not follow one career template, but their paths are not random. They cluster around several defined routes: entertainment-focused private practice, company-side or operator experience, corporate and finance conversion, litigation conversion, public-service-to-litigation pathways, and smaller specialized lanes in labor, employment, and celebrity family law. Across those routes, the recurring ingredients are platform strength, educational capital or Los Angeles market proximity, long career tenure, specialized practice identity, and entertainment-industry fluency. The article examines five dimensions of the top-attorney sample: route into entertainment law, firm or organizational platform, education pipeline, seniority, and practice specialization. Data and Methodology The dataset includes 103 attorneys drawn from The Hollywood Reporter and Variety’s 2025 lists of top entertainment or Hollywood attorneys. For each attorney, the dataset tracks current organization, law school, J.D. year where available, first-known bar admission year, practice area, prior roles, platform type, and route into entertainment law. The sample is best understood as a recognized-attorney dataset, not a census of all entertainment lawyers. It captures lawyers who reached public top-tier recognition in 2025, rather than every lawyer practicing in the entertainment sector. Multiple but Defined Routes Into Entertainment Law The first question is how these lawyers entered the entertainment-law market. Because every attorney in the dataset is entertainment-related by definition, the key distinction is not whether they practice entertainment law. It is how they got there. The largest group followed what might be called the entertainment private-practice route. These attorneys appear to have built their practices around entertainment, media, talent, music, rights, production, intellectual property, or adjacent industry work relatively early. That route accounts for 40 of the 103 attorneys in the sample, or 38.8%.

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Jun 8 • 12:46 PM EDT • Entertainment • legalytics.substack.com
Testing AI against public health's existing tools shows mixed results

A new Penn-led randomized controlled trial has found that AI-powered chatbots can make vaccine-hesitant parents more likely to say they will immunize their children against human papillomavirus (HPV), ...

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Jun 8 • 11:00 AM EDT • Health • medicalxpress.com
A drug may help people on GLP-1 meds preserve muscle

In a clinical trial, an experimental antibody reduced lean-mass loss in people on a GLP-1 drug. Whether that improves health is unclear.

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Jun 8 • 11:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencenews.org
Households outshine business in Australia’s rooftop solar revolution, report finds

Australia leads world in residential solar per capita with 22GW installed but commercial and industrial sector has deployed only a quarter of that

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Jun 8 • 10:01 AM EDT • Business • theguardian.com
How To Watch The 79th Annual Tony Awards

Watch 79th Annual Tony Awards live with TV channel, start time and streaming info. Stream on Fubo — no cable required, free trial available.

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Jun 7 • 2:07 PM EDT • Entertainment • fubo.tv
Williams Toyota Lift celebrates 80 years

In the latest business roundup, we share news on Williams Toyota Lift, Liberty HealthShare, Timken, Advanced Industrial Roofing and other companies.

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Jun 7 • 6:25 AM EDT • Business • cantonrep.com
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Police wanted to release statement during trial of Henry Nowak’s killer

The local police force wanted to address what it described as online ‘disinformation’ during active court proceedings against Vickrum Digwa, a report said

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Jun 7 • 4:11 AM EDT • Politics • theguardian.com
Shooting trials for Asian Games, Indian athletes at Taiwan Open, wrestlers in Ulaanbaatar Open: Indian Sports LIVE, June 7

Here are all the updates from Indian sports on June 7, 2026.

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Jun 6 • 11:30 PM EDT • Sports • espn.com
Ozempic and similar weight-loss drugs linked to 30% lower breast cancer risk

A large study found that women taking GLP-1 drugs, the medication class behind Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound, were about 30% less likely to develop breast cancer. Researchers say the findings are promising but not yet proof, and clinical trials are now being planned to test whether these drugs could help prevent breast cancer.

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Jun 6 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com
IND vs AFG: Gautam Gambhir backs ICC’s pink-ball initiative

India's head coach Gautam Gambhir has backed the ICC's plan to trial pink balls in day-night Tests. He believes this initiative will help minimise truncated matches caused by bad light or adverse weather, ensuring a better chance for a decisive result in crucial encounters.

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Jun 6 • 3:50 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Scientists unveil 'living bandage' that could dramatically speed wound healing

Rice University researchers developed a "living bandage" that uses engineered cells to deliver healing proteins directly to wounds in animal trials.

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Jun 5 • 2:41 PM EDT • Health • foxnews.com
A Critical UV Legacy: A Hubble Roadmap for HWO Science Readiness

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will provide the first opportunity to directly image and spectrally characterize terrestrial exoplanets

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Jun 5 • 12:50 PM EDT • Science • astrobiology.com
Ex-CIA employee accused of stealing from agency is ordered to remain in jail ahead of trial

A former CIA officer in Virginia who is accused of taking tens of millions of dollars in gold bars and foreign currency from the agency was ordered Friday to remain in jail until his trial.

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Jun 5 • 11:42 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com
E-bike safety; lung cancer treatment and prevention; keeping CMA Festival attendees safe; plus other stories with Vanderbilt Health sources

WKRN News 2 interviewed Jeffrey Upperman, MD, FACS, Professor and Chair of the Department of Pediatric Surgery and Surgeon-in-Chief of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, about e-bike related injuries following the recent death of a Brentwood High student and a proposal to require safety training before students could ride a bike on a school campus in Williamson County. Fabien Maldonado, MD, MSc,Professor of Medicine and Thoracic Surgery, was on WTVF News Channel 5‘s live studio show, “Openline,” with host Ben Hall, to discuss lung cancer, treatment and prevention. WSMV’s “Today In Nashville” program hosted Vanderbilt LifeFlight paramedic/flight nurse practitioner Tony Smith to talk about safety for the CMA Festival. The New York Times reporter Carl Zimmer interviewed James Crowe, MD, Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Antibody Therapeutics, for a story about the race to find vaccines and treatments as Ebola spreads. The Vanderbilt Health News release about the pilot clinical trial conducted by Vanderbilt Health and Cumberland Pharmaceuticals Inc., that confirms the safety of ifetroban and supports the further development of the drug to prevent cancer metastasis, was picked up by Reuters, Stock Titan,and others. Women We Admire has named Lee Ann Liska, President and Chief Operating Officer, to its list of top women leaders of Nashville for 2026. Radiology Business, Aunt Minnie, Bioengineer, and Imaging Technology News covered the study from Consuelo Wilkins, MD, MSCI, the Mildred Thornton Stahlman Professor in Rural Health and professor of Medicine in the Division of Geriatric Medicine, that found Black and Hispanic people, while known to be far more apt to have dementia, are significantly less apt than other racial and ethnic groups to show Alzheimer’s pathology on brain scans. STAT News interviewed Deva Sharma, MD, Transfusion Medicine & Hematology-Oncology, for a story about more patients requesting unvaccinated blood and what it means for the medical system at large. Yahoo! Health reporter Korin Miller interviewed Gitanjali Srivastava, MD, Director of Obesity Medicine, for a story about how semaglutide and tirzepatide compare. William Schaffner, MD, Professor of Preventive Medicine, was quoted by several news outlets about public health issues, including: NBC News (new COVID vaccinations); Medscape (pneumonia and sepsis); and CNN (protection from contagious viruses). Shelbyville Times-Gazette is repurposing Jessica Pasley’s July 2025 Vanderbilt Health News story on tick-borne illnesses as a front-page story.

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Jun 5 • 10:54 AM EDT • Health • news.vumc.org
AI-designed universal coronavirus vaccine passes first human trial

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

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Jun 5 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com
Scientists discover why ozempic may not work for some people

Scientists have identified genetic variants that may make some people less responsive to GLP-1 drugs used to treat Type 2 diabetes. Roughly 10% of the population carries these variants, which appear to cause a mysterious form of "GLP-1 resistance." In several clinical trials, carriers were significantly less likely to reach healthy blood sugar targets while taking GLP-1 medications.

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Jun 5 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com
Court blocks mental health diversion for suspect in Santa Monica hate-fueled pipe attacks

A man accused of carrying out a series of racially motivated attacks in Santa Monica, including an attempted murder, will face trial after the California Supreme Court declined to review a ruling o…

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Jun 4 • 5:24 PM EDT • Health • ktla.com
What will it take to get a vaccine for the Ebola strain driving the current outbreak?

There is an effective vaccine for Ebola — but not for the variety spreading rapidly in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Trials are going on for several candidates. How long will it take?

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Jun 4 • 10:12 AM EDT • Health • npr.org
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Scientists finally crack an “undruggable” pancreatic cancer target and nearly double survival

For decades, pancreatic cancer has been one of the most lethal cancers, with few effective treatment options. A new drug, daraxonrasib, targets the KRAS mutation that fuels most pancreatic tumors—something many scientists once thought couldn't be done. In a major clinical trial, the treatment nearly doubled survival for patients with advanced disease and reduced the risk of death by 60%.

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Jun 4 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com
How Rachel Carson's Silent Spring changed the world in 1962

Rachel Carson’s look at the dire effects of industrial and agricultural pollution birthed the modern environmental movement when it was first published – and remains as crucial a read today, finds Rowan Hooper

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Jun 4 • 7:00 AM EDT • Science • newscientist.com
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May's top PlayStation games by copies sold

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

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Jun 3 • 10:49 AM EDT • Technology • alineaanalytics.substack.com
Germany’s Rheinmetall to Sell Auto Business to Focus Entirely On Defense

The arms maker agreed to sell its automotive unit to industrial group Aequita for a provisional price of €350 million.

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Jun 3 • 9:37 AM EDT • Business • wsj.com
Keto diet shows real promise for anorexia recovery

Restricting carbohydrates may sound like an unlikely approach to treating anorexia, but following a ketogenic diet was linked to recovery in 3 in 4 people with the eating disorder in a small trial

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Jun 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • newscientist.com
The most explosive revelations from Netflix's new Michael Jackson doc

From allegations of child pornography and lewd nicknames, here is what we learned about the pop star's 2005 trial in "Michael Jackson: The Verdict."

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Jun 3 • 6:47 AM EDT • Entertainment • usatoday.com
Supervisors approve Valley Commerce rezoning application

Plans to build a nearly 1 million square foot flex industrial park outside Purcellville can move forward after the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors approved a rezoning application June 2.

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Jun 2 • 9:43 PM EDT • Business • loudountimes.com
Straight Talk with Ascension Chamber President and CEO Donnie Miller

Ascension Parish is in the midst of a significant growth period, fueled by billions of dollars in industrial investment, rapid population gains and a diverse business landscape. As businesses navigate workforce shortages, infrastructure demands, rising operating costs and new opportunities tied to major projects, the Ascension Chamber of Commerce is working to help employers stay […]

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Jun 2 • 5:08 PM EDT • Business • businessreport.com
Hawthorne Race Course property marketed as industrial redevelopment play

While the racecourse is also seeking a buyer to revive the gambling operation, the sprawling property may have more eager suitors from the commercial property sector.

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Jun 2 • 6:50 AM EDT • Business • chicagobusiness.com
Yan Diomande interview: On the World Cup with Cote d'Ivoire, his gratitude to RB Leipzig and trials with Crystal Palace
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Jun 2 • 6:00 AM EDT • Sports • skysports.com
How The World Searches for Extraterrestrial Life May Be Holding Back Discoveries

Could scientists be overlooking life in space?

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Jun 1 • 4:09 PM EDT • Science • time.com
Howard Stern's longtime cohost Robin Quivers is cancer-free after 14 years: 'I never gave up hope'

Robin Quivers, Howard Stern's longtime cohost, announced on Monday that she is cancer-free after struggling with endometrial cancer since 2012.

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Jun 1 • 1:53 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com
Veolia Completes Clean Earth Deal, Doubling Its U.S. Hazardous Waste Business and Expanding Its Growth Platform

BOSTON, June 01, 2026--Veolia, a leader in environmental services, has completed the financial close of its acquisition of Clean Earth, a hazardous waste management firm operating in a sector that has become increasingly critical for industrial competitiveness, public health and environmental security in the United States and worldwide.

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Jun 1 • 9:01 AM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com
Paradigm Health Implements New Clinical Trial Solution to Support Observational Study Presented at ASCO

/PRNewswire/ -- Paradigm Health today announced its role in the execution of a multicenter, hybrid, observational post-marketing commitment study in the United...

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Jun 1 • 9:00 AM EDT • Health • prnewswire.com
Explore the engine accelerating new cancer treatments at UT San Antonio

See how the university is spurring the path from discovery to care, expanding access to advanced cancer treatments and clinical trials.

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Jun 1 • 4:00 AM EDT • Science • news.utsa.edu
Study reveals unexpected health benefits after 5 minutes of prayer

Adult patients experienced significant relief from pain and anxiety after just five minutes of in-person prayer, as found in a randomized controlled trial.

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May 31 • 5:51 PM EDT • Health • foxnews.com
Bob on Business: Barnes & Noble in Fort Worth, the sequel

Also, light industrial for AllianceTexas and U-Haul gets a Texas-sized assist.

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May 31 • 5:09 PM EDT • Business • fortworthreport.org
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'We were being bullied in our own home': How 'authoritarian' HOAs are contributing to the insect apocalypse

In the book "Bitter Honey," writer and researcher Jennie Durant explores how industrial agriculture is destroying bees — and what can be done to stop them.

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May 31 • 12:00 PM EDT • Science • livescience.com
Longview, a town built on mill industry, caught between loss and fear

After what Gov. Bob Ferguson called the most fatal industrial disaster in the state’s modern history, the community is stuck in limbo.

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May 31 • 9:00 AM EDT • Business • seattletimes.com
‘Landmark’ pancreatic cancer drug keeps patients alive for twice as long

The highly anticipated results of a clinical trial for the pill, daraxonrasib, have been released, giving doctors hope for treating the stubbornly lethal disease.

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May 31 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • washingtonpost.com
Science & Medicine: A pill that slows aging? San Antonio researchers are putting it to the test

Rapamycin may be able to help older adults live longer, healthier lives. Studies of mice suggest the drug may even reverse hardening of the arteries. Researchers at UT Health San Antonio have launched a clinical trial to see if the drug can restore the biological activity of older adults to levels more typical of younger people, and, if so, how much does it take to do it?

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May 31 • 7:00 AM EDT • Science • tpr.org
Rafa Jodar’s ball girl shove incident leaves tennis fans divided

Rafael Jodar’s biggest French Open win turned into a messy social-media trial after a clip appeared to show a ball girl stumbling near him. The Spanish teenager had just beaten Alex Michelsen in five sets at Roland Garros, a serious breakthrough on a major stage.

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May 30 • 1:00 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
MRIPC Complex Selected for Grow Site Ready Program

The Vicksburg Warren Economic Development Partnership (VWEDP) recently announced that the Mississippi River Inland Port Complex (MRIPC), a 1,238-acre industrial site currently under development, has been selected for inclusion in Canadian Pacific Kansas City’s (CPKC) Room to Grow Site Ready Program—further reinforcing its position as a premier destination for industrial investment. As part of the […]

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May 30 • 12:56 PM EDT • Business • deltabusinessjournal.com
Satwik-Chirag, Kapila-Crasto in Singapore Open semifinal action; Vinesh in action at Asian Games trials: Indian Sports LIVE, May 30

Here are all the updates from Indian sports on May 30, 2026.

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May 29 • 10:41 PM EDT • Sports • espn.com
Beware the risks of ‘wellness’ peptides

The peptide craze is replacing rigorous clinical trials with unfettered self-experimentation.

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May 28 • 4:30 PM EDT • Health • washingtonpost.com
Florida Clerks of Courts relieved by measure allowing them to retain more funding

The legislation allows Clerks of Courts to keep more funding from fines and fees.

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May 28 • 2:00 PM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com
Argonne to lead $2.8M project to accelerate catalyst discovery

Argonne National Laboratory has been awarded $2.77 million by ARPA-E to speed the discovery of industrial catalysts using AI, automation and rapid testing through the CATALCHEM-E program.

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May 28 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • anl.gov
Control Without Ownership: How China's Party-Business Networks Dominate Indonesia's Mineral Supply Chains

In 2024, when Jiangsu Delong, the world’s second-largest stainless-steel producer, filed for bankruptcy, several Chinese firms and state-owned enterprises

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May 28 • 4:00 AM EDT • Business • warontherocks.com
California advances $12 billion bond for science research in rebuke to Trump cuts

UCSF researchers say the bond could help protect studies, jobs and clinical trials from delays in federal NIH funding

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May 27 • 8:30 PM EDT • Science • missionlocal.org
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New depression treatment targets the immune system instead of the brain

A surprising new approach to depression treatment is showing early promise — not by targeting brain chemicals, but by calming the immune system. In a small clinical trial, researchers found that an anti-inflammatory drug normally used for rheumatoid arthritis appeared to ease symptoms in people with hard-to-treat depression, while also reducing fatigue and anxiety and improving quality of life.

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May 27 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com
Defense Billionaire’s Father Builds New Business on CSG Model

The founder of CSG NV, which completed the biggest ever initial public offering for a pure defense company four months ago, is seeking to raise as much as €200 million ($233 million) this year to expand his industrial group.

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May 27 • 12:30 AM EDT • Business • bloomberg.com
China’s industrial maturity and supply chain control open exciting opportunities for Kuehne+Nagel

Michael Aldwell from Kuehne+Nagel Group discusses growing business opportunities in China.

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May 26 • 10:33 PM EDT • Business • cnbc.com
What could alien life look like? These Earthlings offer clues.

Scientists are listening in on sperm whale conversations and studying Earth's strangest microbes to prepare humanity for first contact with extraterrestrial life.

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May 26 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • nationalgeographic.com
Santana: Industrial Business Regulations Get Fresh Look in Wake of Garden Grove Evacuation

State leaders are debating how to regulate industrial businesses amid a chemical plant emergency in Garden Grove.

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May 26 • 5:20 PM EDT • Business • voiceofoc.org
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New Ebola Vaccine Reportedly Nearing Clinical Trials (Live Updates)

The vaccine, which hasn’t been tested on humans, would be the first capable of treating the deadly Bundibugyo strain of Ebola.

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May 26 • 8:53 AM EDT • Health • forbes.com
From smart agriculture to mental health: These are the New U.S.-Israel projects set to receive $7.5 million from the BIRD Foundation

On May 5, 2026, the Board of Governors of the Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation approved grants totaling $7.5 million for seven new projects between U.S. and Israeli companies. In addition to BIRD funding, the projects will leverage private-sector investment, resulting in a combined investment of $20 million across all projects.

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May 26 • 8:30 AM EDT • Health • finance.yahoo.com
Clinical trials underway for sleep apnea pill
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May 25 • 11:51 PM EDT • Health • cbsnews.com
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One-and-Done Heart Disease Prevention? Scientists Show It May Be Possible.

A single infusion of an experimental gene-editing drug seemed to reduce LDL long-term in a small trial. The results may point to something “curative,” one expert said.

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May 25 • 8:45 AM EDT • Science • nytimes.com
One-and-Done Heart Disease Prevention? Scientists Show It May Be Possible.

A single infusion of an experimental gene-editing drug seemed to reduce LDL long-term in a small trial. The results may point to something “curative,” one expert said.

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May 25 • 8:45 AM EDT • Health • nytimes.com
Semiconductor decoupling. Powell's politics. Industrializing Ogaden. Free trade and the Magna Carta.

Thank you for opening your Chartbook email. Feliks Topolski, 1907-1989 8th Army’s Front, Italy 1944 Semiconductor decoupling Source: FT One thing that Jerome Powell deeply understood is that chairing the Fed under current conditions is a deeply political job. “Powell has successes and mistakes to his name. But he stands out as having thought more carefully about the Fed’s democratic legitimacy than any chair since Paul Volcker,” said Paul Tucker, a former deputy governor at the Bank of England, referring to the Fed chair who successfully fought the great inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s. … While Powell was at the Treasury in the early 1990s, he watched Alan Greenspan build relationships within the government. That convinced Powell he needed to follow the former Fed chair’s lead and spend more time in Congress than his predecessors Yellen and Bernanke. “The accountability for the Fed runs through Congress,” said Claudia Sahm, a former Fed official who is now chief economist at New Century Advisors. “That’s not just about having people on speed dial — it’s answering questions, explaining policy and getting feedback.” Source: FT Ethiopia’s PM Abiy and Nigerian business tycoon, with Chinese engineering, are driving industrialization in Ogaden/Somali region of Ethiopia. - Michael Masri’s reporting for Africa Report if fascinating. Ethiopia has launched a cluster of large industrial schemes in the Somali region, laying foundation stones for a urea plant and an oil refinery in Gode while opening the first two phases of the Ogaden LNG project. Abiy Ahmed framed the push as part of a broader strategy to link energy, agriculture and industry. “These projects embody more than industrial growth,” he said. “They represent our shared responsibility to harness opportunities, strengthen co-operation and promote peace.” The Gode urea plant, backed by Dangote Group and Ethiopian Investment Holdings (EIH), is designed for 3m tonnes a year. Dangote owns 60%, while EIH holds 40%. Officials say Dangote’s equity totals about $2.5bn, while the state provides land and implementation oversight. Gas from the Calub fields will be piped 108km to the site. Construction is slated for 40 months, with operations targeted for 2028. Ethiopia imports most of its fertiliser, spending more than $1.2bn a year for 1.5m–2m tonnes. Usage was roughly 1.7m tonnes in 2023, almost half of it urea, and demand for 2024–25 is put above 2.4m tonnes. If delivered on time, the Gode plant could cover domestic needs and allow exports to neighbours. Brook Taye, chief executive of EIH, called the venture “a significant milestone in the journey toward industrial self-sufficiency”. Dangote told the groundbreaking crowd that the complex would be integrated with gas supply and a polypropylene unit to support local inputs. He pointed to Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), with a capacity of more than 5,000MW, and noted his group’s cement operations and expansion plans. The Gode refinery is being developed by Golden Concord Group of China. It is designed to process 3.5m tonnes a year of crude and condensate from the Hilala field, with associated storage. Backers say it will ease foreign-exchange pressure from fuel imports and anchor further industrial activity, including a proposed steel smelting site in Dire Dawa. GCL’s chair, Zhu Gongshan, cast the project as “a key step in Ethiopia’s path to energy sovereignty”, underscoring the Beijing–Addis ties. Financing details are still being finalised, but the refinery is central to the government’s energy-security narrative. Source: The Africa Report Dangote’s Ethiopian vision: Dangote began with cement. His crown jewel, Dangote Cement, dominates Nigeria’s market and has 10 operations in other nations in Africa. The formula has been consistent: identify sectors with chronic shortages – cement, fertiliser, sugar – commit massive local investments, and scale up to serve regional demand. Ethiopia was a natural extension of that model. In 2015, Dangote launched the Mugher Cement Plant outside Addis Ababa at a cost of $600m, with an annual capacity of 2.5 million tonnes. The investment gave him a firm foothold in one of Africa’s fastest-growing construction markets. But success came with risks. In May 2018, violent unrest led to the killing of Dangote’s country manager and temporary shutdowns at Mugher. While other investors might have retreated, Dangote doubled down. Today, he is preparing to spend $400m to expand Mugher’s capacity to 5 million tonnes, alongside a new grinding unit near Addis Ababa. Cement is just one market Dangote is targeting. Ethiopia’s enormous state-controlled sugar industry, long plagued by inefficiency and debt, has struggled for years to reform. Its Omo Kuraz Sugar Development Project, touted as one of the continent’s largest initiatives, continues to face delays and mismanagement. … The most ambitious venture of all is the planned fertiliser production complex in Gode, Somali region. Publicised on 28 August 2025, the Dangote Group and Ethiopian Investment Holdings (EIH) deal plans one of the world’s largest single-site urea manufacturing plants. The project costs an estimated $2.5bn and has an estimated capacity of 3 million metric tonnes annually, a rate that would not only render Ethiopia independent, but even a net exporter of fertiliser. EIH, the state wealth fund of Ethiopia, will hold 40%, while 60% is held by Dangote Group. … For Dangote, Ethiopia is a trifecta: Cement demand is projected to grow by 10% annually, its sugar consumption is growing with rapid urbanisation, and fertiliser demand is all but insatiable, given that farming supports the livelihood of 70% of Ethiopians. Source: The Africa Report The stakes for Abiy are high: For Addis Ababa, the $4bn fertiliser project in Ethiopia’s Somali region is no longer simply a manufacturing investment. It is increasingly being framed as a strategic state project tied to food sovereignty, import substitution and the government’s broader attempt to build economic resilience under mounting fiscal pressure. “Becoming self-sufficient in food is our main agenda,” Abiy says during the visit. “Land is needed; we have it. Water is needed; we have it. Human resources are needed; we have it.” The scale is enormous even by African industrial standards. Once operational, the plant is expected to produce three million metric tonnes of urea annually, potentially making it one of the continent’s largest fertiliser complexes. Ethiopian officials say the project now includes a 110km gas pipeline, a 120MW power plant, a polypropylene packaging facility and a two-million-tonne NPK blending plant. For a government grappling with chronic foreign exchange shortages, ballooning import bills and pressure on agricultural productivity, the numbers matter politically as much as they do economically. The decision to anchor the project in Gode is deliberate. Long viewed as peripheral to Ethiopia’s industrial economy, the Somali region is now being repositioned by the federal government as a future irrigation and agro-industrial corridor. Officials argue that the area’s vast land reserves and access to water could eventually support large-scale commercial farming capable of reshaping Ethiopia’s food economy. The government is simultaneously building housing infrastructure for about 5,000 residents near the plant, while officials project broader industrial expansion along the corridor. Abiy goes further, comparing the long-term revenue potential of the Gode development zone with Ethiopia’s flagship state enterprise. “The investments we are making in this Gode area, combined, will generate high revenue for Ethiopia, at par with Ethiopian Airlines,” he says. Source: The Africa Report Feliks Topolski 1907-1982 Topolski’s Chronicle, ‘Nazi Revival’, Vol. 8, Is. 1-2, 1960 HEY READERS, THANK YOU for opening the Chartbook email. I hope it brightens your day. I enjoy putting out the newsletter, but tbh, what keeps this flow going is the generosity of those readers who clicked the subscription button. Photo by Jakub Dziubak on Unsplash If you are persuaded to click, please consider the annual subscription of $50. It is both better value for you and a much better deal for me, as it involves only one credit card charge. Why feed the payments companies if we don’t have to. Subscribe Grim vision of drone warfare by Sylvie Kaufmann For contributing subscribers only. Subscribe The state of the art in Colbert-studies. Jean-Baptiste Colbert was Louis XIV chief minister from 1661 to 1683 and traditionally seen as an architect of absolutism and mercantilism. Alexander Hamilton later cited him as an inspiration in 1782. Now his legacy is disputed. Daniel Dessert, the chief critic, sees Colbert as the orchestrator not so much of an absolutist state as of an elite cabal. Would be great to have a good English-language review of this important debate. Source: lhistoire Didn’t know that the Magna Carta included free trade provisions Fighting for the right to the beach in Oregon in 1967: Source: Research Gate RAF Station – British and Polish Flags, c. 1940-45, The Ingram Collection Feliks Topolski, 1907-1989 ink and wash If you’ve scrolled this far, you know you want to click: Subscribe

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Top Links 1112 Semiconductor decoupling. Powell's politics. Industrializing Ogaden. Free trade and the Magna Carta.

Thank you for your support of Chartbook. Your generosity keeps this show on the road. Feliks Topolski, 1907-1989 8th Army’s Front, Italy 1944 Semiconductor decoupling

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Yoga and meditation show promise for gut health

This systematic review found that yoga and Buddhist meditation were associated with favorable gut microbiota and metabolite profiles in four human studies involving healthy adults. However, because participants largely followed vegetarian or vegan diets and no randomized controlled trials were included, the findings cannot prove that meditation alone reshapes the gut microbiome.

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How integrating tradition and self-care has strengthened public health in the Americas

On 13 May 2026, a regional dialogue for the Americas titled, Innovative Experiences to Strengthen Health and Self-Care through Traditional, Complementary, and Integrative Medicine, was hosted by EsSalud, the government agency responsible for social security and health care in Peru.The event brought together representatives from the World Health Organization (WHO), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), WHO collaborating centres, the health sector and academia. It presented regional perspectives from BrBolivia, Brazil, Mexico and Peru to explore how self-care and traditional medicine can strengthen public health, empower communities and support more inclusive models of care. Across all four countries, a clear message emerged: traditional medicine is not being positioned as an alternative to formal systems, but as a way to strengthen them. In the Americas region, the challenge is to consolidate intercultural and holistic care, with the aim of strengthening the healthcare system – making care more preventive, culturally relevant and community-based.Peru: institutionalizing complementary care over 28 years Dr Martha Villar López from EsSalud Peru demonstrated how integration can be institutionalized over time. With nearly three decades of investment, including a research programme dating back to 1998, traditional medicine is now embedded within public health infrastructure. EsSalud’s flagship programme, Reforma de Vida, operating as Prevenir, takes multidisciplinary teams into workplaces to reduce and detect risk factors for chronic noncommunicable diseases. Education cycles are structured around three pillars: celestial nourishment, focused on life purpose and movement; terrestrial nourishment, centred on regional food and healthy diets; and human nourishment, addressing identity, relationships, stress and spirituality. Grounded in Andean cosmovision and the principle of the ayllu, the programme aligns with local cultural values. Since 2007, it has trained over 6600 health leaders, certified more than 3100 health-friendly organizations and built alliances with nearly 11 000 employers.Bolivia: legal recognition and medical pluralism Adelino Pau Carpacheco, an 82-year-old Callawaya healer, described working with more than 220 medicinal plants, supported by deep generational knowledge. Traditional healers and plant medicine are highly respected in the country. Bolivia’s contribution also highlighted the role of policy in enabling integration. Through Law 459, traditional medicine has been formally recognized within a legal framework and led the country to medical pluralism where traditional medicine coexists with biomedicine, and both are now offered free of charge through the public health system. Mexico: preserving Indigenous knowledge and reinventing food culture Mexico presented two complementary approaches focused on knowledge preservation and food systems. In Veracruz, communities partnered with a university to safeguard Totonac traditional medicine through a diploma programme launched in 2019. This collaboration has already produced practical outputs, including manuals and a dictionary, helping to sustain knowledge at risk due to migration and generational change. Alongside this, Dr Hernán García, Directorate of Traditional Medicine and Intercultural Development – Mexico, explained how the Dieta de la Milpa programme addresses Mexico’s dual burden of malnutrition and rising noncommunicable diseases. Rooted in traditional Mayan cultivation systems and ingredients, it promotes healthier diets through community-led, intercultural approaches involving local authorities, Indigenous leaders and cooks. By reconnecting food, culture and health, it offers a practical pathway to prevention. Brazil: community therapy as a public health tool Brazil’s experience centred on Integrative Community Therapy, a methodology developed over 40 years ago by Dr Adalberto Barreto and now used in more than 47 countries. Therapy circles create spaces where participants share experiences and coping strategies, building social support networks at very low cost. Within Brazil’s Unified Health System, the approach has expanded rapidly since its inclusion in national policy in 2017. By 2025, more than five million integrative practice procedures were delivered annually in primary care, with registrations for this therapy increasing by over 500% in eight years. The main challenge now is equity, with access still concentrated in urban areas such as São Paulo. A shared regional direction against a global backdrop Drawing these experiences together, Dr Natalia Aldana of the TCIM Network of the Americas highlighted the shared outcomes of the interventions discussed. Such approaches strengthen healthy behaviours, social networks and community resilience; they are low-cost, adaptable and enable active participation in care, while showing potential to reduce the burden of noncommunicable diseases.The regional momentum mirrors a broader global shift. Dr João Paulo Souz, Director of BIREME (Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information), the specialized center of PAHO/WHO, emphasized that the Global Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025–2034 promotes a vision centred on people, evidence and integrated use. He noted that health should be understood through the relationships between people, community, nature and spirituality. Self-care interventions as a critical pathway towards universal health coverage Dr Manjulaa Narasimhan, Unit Head for Sexual Health and Well-being across the Life-course at WHO, delivered a presentation titled Advancing Self-Care in Traditional Medicine: Aligning the WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025–2034 with the WHO Self-Care Framework, co-authored by Dr Geetha Krishnan Gopalakrishna Pillai, Unit Head for Research, Data and Innovation at the WHO Global Traditional Medicine Centre. WHO recommends self-care interventions for every country and economic setting as a critical path to reach universal health coverage – and traditional medicine acts as a bridge for self-care. Dr Narasimhan explained that traditional medicine contributes most effectively to self-care when embedded directly into primary health care, not operating in parallel, siloed systems. This, she stated, “is possibly the only sustainable way to deliver continuity of care that meets the needs, rights and priorities of communities and individuals”. The Global Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025–2034 is a move towards a more people-centred approach to health care that champions holistic approaches to health equity and patient autonomy.The integration of traditional medicine and self-care requires collaboration across disciplines, clear referral pathways, trained health and care workers, and strong leadership that supports integration. The WHO self-care competency framework defines 10 key competencies for health and care workers to support self-care in their clinical practice, supported by the WHO guideline on self-care interventions for health and well-being. These documents help health-care workers safeguard their own well-being and ensure that care is consistent, safe and grounded in shared standards and values.Together, the discussion through this dialogue points to a fundamental shift in how health systems are designed in the region, and globally, towards models that are more inclusive, culturally-grounded and responsive to the needs of the communities they serve. It is a move towards a system where traditional medicine is respected and responsibly integrated, where self-care provides empowerment and evidence-based care, and where health systems are supportive rather than being distant from these systems.Traditional medicine perspectives from Bolivia, Mexico and Peru - WHO's "Restoring Balance" seriesInnovative Experiences to Strengthen Health and Self-Care through Traditional, Complementary, and Integrative Medicine was streamed in Spanish, with Spanish and Portuguese subtitles. Recordings are available through the CABSIN YouTube channel with Portuguese subtitles and on the BVS MTCI Americas YouTube channel with Spanish subtitles. Dr Narasimhan’s session can be watched in English on both channels.

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May 24 • 8:00 PM EDT • Health • who.int
How to Watch Tracker Season 3 Finale

Watch Tracker live with TV channel, start time and streaming info. Stream Season 3 Finale on Fubo — no cable required, free trial available.

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May 24 • 3:15 PM EDT • Entertainment • fubo.tv
How to Watch Marshals Season 1 Finale

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AI scans 400,000 Reddit posts and finds hidden Ozempic side effects

By analyzing over 400,000 Reddit posts, researchers discovered that users of popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs frequently discussed unexpected symptoms like menstrual irregularities, chills, and hot flashes. The findings suggest AI could turn social media into a powerful early-warning system for spotting side effects that clinical trials may miss.

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May 23 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com
Bond breakout? Big effects of bad data. Immigration and thermostatic politics & dad-chat is coming for dad-books.

Thank you for opening your Chartbook email. Anna Airy, A Shell Forge at a National Projectile Factory, Hackney Marshes, London, 1918 Bond breakout - John Authers Across the developed markets, bond markets are staging a slow-motion car wreck. Looking at the drastic moves in the US, Japan, the UK and France, Barclays’ Ajay Rajadhyaksha commented: “Last week, long bonds broke. Not in one country. In all of them. Simultaneously. Four countries. Four different political systems. Four different central banks. But the same trade — “get me out of duration!”” Each country has its own contributing political problems, but the uniformity of the shift out of long-term bonds with high duration makes clear that something broader is afoot. For Rajadhyaksha, it is “simple and uncomfortable.” The developed​ world “has too much debt, too little fiscal discipline, and no political appetite for fixing either.” If there’s a trigger, it has been the Iran war and the resulting shock to oil supply. Source: Bloomberg G7 countries are now borrowing at rates that were enjoyed by EM in the early 2020s For contributing subscribers only. Subscribe Trade between China and Russia has grown in recent years For contributing subscribers only. Subscribe Big effects of bad data A decade ago nearly nine in ten Americans, when approached, agreed to fill out the Current Population Survey, which is administered to about 60,000 households each month and asks about, among other things, employment. Fewer than seven in ten do so now (see chart 1). For the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which tries to capture 3,700 households monthly, the response rate is down from 68% to 40%. … When the information becomes less reliable, investment decisions get more difficult to make. Some may be delayed, creating a potential drag on the economy. A new working paper by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University, Erica Groshen, former head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) now at Cornell University, and Duncan Hobbs and Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, hazards an estimate. Preserving trust in “the integrity and quality of official statistics”, the authors claim, generates economic benefits of about $25 for every $1 spent on the BLS, the agency with an annual budget of $700m that is responsible for many of these data. To arrive at their conclusion the quartet analysed an ignoble episode in the BLS’s recent history. On August 1st 2025 Donald Trump sacked Erika McEntarfer, appointed as the agency’s commissioner by his predecessor, Joe Biden. The president alleged, without evidence, that the BLS’s steep downward revision to recent jobs numbers had been “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad”. In fact, it was the wanton dismissal that looked bad in the eyes of many observers. In the following seven days there was a 50% leap, relative to the week before, in the average value of the index of Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU), which tracks the number of articles mentioning such uncertainty that are published daily in American newspapers. This was a discernible jump even when compared to the chaos caused by Mr Trump’s trade war in April 2025 and his real one in Iran in the past two months (see chart 2). Based on Mr Bloom’s earlier study with other colleagues of the EPU’s impact on business investment, industrial production and employment, the authors estimate that the jump reduced American GDP by over $100bn (0.3%) and non-farm payrolls by 168,000 (0.1%). Source: The Economist Immigration and thermostatic politics (Sarah O’Connor in the FT) A strange thing happened a year and a half ago. No sooner had Americans elected Donald Trump as president on an explicitly anti-immigration platform than US public opinion began to swing much more favourably towards immigration. … to political scientists who study “thermostatic” politics, this development is no surprise at all. Public opinion often moves against the prevailing party, especially if they are perceived to have gone “too far” in one direction. The phenomenon was first explored in the 1990s with reference to fiscal policy, but in recent years it has been particularly evident in the realm of immigration policy. While these swings in opinion polls can make it seem as if people don’t know their own minds, they can be a useful democratic check on governments by sending bright flashing warning lights when policies stray too far from the public’s comfort zone. The problem comes when politicians misinterpret those signals. When people tell pollsters they want less immigration, or think it is bad for the country overall (or the converse), they are often expressing an opinion about how things appear to be going in that moment relative to their preferences, rather than a deep shift in their underlying views. According to Alexander Kustov, a political scientist, most Americans’ views are quite stable and moderate: they support immigration that is controlled and in the national interest, and oppose flows that are disorderly or under-enforced. In the US, he argues the Trump administration over-interpreted dissatisfaction with high immigration under Joe Biden, and implemented policies that went too far for many voters. “People don’t necessarily change their idea about their ideal immigration policy, but they can react to what the government is currently doing,” he told me. “A lot of people are not happy with what the Trump administration are doing — right now we’re not talking about border enforcement, we’re talking about people not just getting harassed, but killed.” But similarly, he added, pro-immigration advocates would be making a mistake to interpret the recent, more favourable swing towards immigration as a deep-seated ideological shift in attitudes. The recent history of UK immigration policy offers another cautionary tale. After the 2016 Brexit referendum, public concern about immigration fell. This was partly because net migration statistics declined, but also because people felt a sense of catharsis and control, says Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a think-tank. By 2019, the public ranked immigration as only the ninth biggest issue of concern, according to Ipsos polling. But when the Conservative government liberalised visa routes for students and care workers between 2019 and 2022, that helped net migration to surge. And so, too, did public concern. Today’s Labour government has implemented another sharply restrictive turn in immigration policy. As Kustov and researcher Caitlyn Yates argue, thermostatic public opinion should be a useful check on politicians. Instead it seems to have helped to magnify the pendulum swing in the UK. The government over-interprets and overreacts to a change in public opinion, which reacts in turn, prompting a sudden swing the other way. Source: Financial Times HEY READERS, THANK YOU for opening the Chartbook email. I hope it brightens your day. I enjoy putting out the newsletter, but tbh, what keeps this flow going is the generosity of those readers who clicked the subscription button. If you are persuaded to click, please consider the annual subscription of $50. It is both better value for you and a much better deal for me, as it involves only one credit card charge. Why feed the payments companies if we don’t have to. Subscribe Anna Airy, Shop for Machining 15-Inch Shells: Singer Manufacturing Company, Clydebank, Glasgow, 1918 Racing for a vaccine … we have been here before! The deadly Ebola outbreak in two African countries driven by a virus species with no vaccine has triggered an urgent search for a potential jab, in a test of troubled global efforts to avert threats posed by emerging diseases. A World Health Organization advisory group is due to would meet on Tuesday to recommend candidate jabs to prioritise for clinical trials, the global health body said. It will assess data including an analysis by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi), which was set up after failures in the international response to a previous Ebola crisis. The latest Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda has infected hundreds of people and killed more than 80, health authorities say. Cepi’s reaction will be a crucial indicator of its progress towards its wider goal of producing vaccines for pandemic threats in just 100 days, despite steep cuts to international health funding. “If there was ever a time that we could show the world why Cepi is needed and show the world why the 100-day mission is needed, it’s now,” Nicole Lurie, the organisation’s executive director for preparedness and response, told the FT. “We’re happy to accept that responsibility, but obviously we need help from partners — particularly financial help in the long run.” DR Congo and Uganda would make the final decision on whether to press ahead with any vaccine candidates endorsed for clinical trials by the WHO experts, the global health body said. “Other ethical and community acceptability issues will be considered,” said the WHO, which declared the latest outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on Sunday. “This will be important to make sure that the trial, if it happens, will be adequately communicated to the population.” Lurie said Cepi had provided information from a survey of research teams and companies working on drugs that might be effective against the Bundibugyo virus behind the outbreak. The organisation hoped soon to announce partners in the quest for a jab, she added, although she declined to give a timescale for when one might be developed. Cepi’s Nicole Laurie said global health bodies were ‘getting some live-fire drills’ with hantavirus and the latest Ebola outbreak. The hunt for a vaccine should be helped by scientific advances including the use of artificial intelligence to find drugs active against viruses, Lurie said. Existing jabs against the Zaire Ebola virus responsible for many previous outbreaks might provide a basis for tackling the Bundibugyo species, she added. “We’ll see how far and how fast we can get,” Lurie said, adding that Cepi had done preliminary work recently on a possible jab for the rat-borne hantavirus responsible for a recent fatal outbreak on a cruise ship. “Both with hantavirus and now with Ebola, [we] are getting some live-fire drills.” Source: Michael Peel in the Financial Times Dad-chat is coming for dad-books. (By Pamela Paul and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in the WSJ) They were the go-to gifts for Father’s Day: a book about some little-known chapter of World War II, the sweeping narrative of a shipwreck, perhaps the latest presidential biography. These days, dad books are a dying breed. Nonfiction book sales have been in decline for the past four years, and are now the most challenged segment of the print book market. Publishers say certain types of books still fare well—including celebrity memoirs and religious titles. But in recent years, print sales in such categories as biography, current affairs and business and economics—what publishers refer to as “serious nonfiction” and which tend to resonate especially with men—have fallen considerably. Sales of nonfiction print titles were down nearly 8% through May 9 this year, and sales of books about politics and current affairs were down 19%, according to book tracker Circana BookScan. Publishing has long been subject to cyclical changes, with trends in format and genre taking over bookshelves in grand sweeps. (Remember the adult coloring-book craze? Or the stratospheric rise of romantasy?) But many in publishing believe the decline in serious nonfiction is more existential. “The trend couldn’t be clearer,” said Jonathan Karp, the former chief executive of Simon & Schuster and publisher of the new Simon Six imprint. “This is a sea change and people should wake up and realize we’re living in a new world.” One culprit for the shift: a new media diet for fans of more serious nonfiction. … Sixty-two percent of men and 54% of women consumed a podcast in the prior month, according to a recent survey by Edison Research at SSRS, up from 46% and 39%, respectively, in 2023. “When we have internal meetings to talk about this problem, it always comes around to podcasts,” said Jonathan Burnham, president and publisher of the Harper Group at HarperCollins Publishers. “The man who wants to read American history is now tuning into one of the many good podcasts about history that lends the quiet attention to a serious subject he’s looking for. It makes the idea of sitting down with a 700-page Ron Chernow book less appealing. You’ve scratched that itch.” Source: Wall Street Journal Remarkable report by Novara from the nationalist rally in London in mid May. Anna Airy, Leopard Moth and Plums, 1915 If you’ve scrolled this far, you know you want to click: Subscribe

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May 23 • 6:45 AM EDT • Politics • adamtooze.substack.com
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Inflammation may help explain how GLP-1 drugs prevent AFib

Kenneth Bilchick, MD, spoke to Cardiovascular Business about new data he presented at Heart Rhythm 2026.

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May 22 • 4:44 PM EDT • Business • cardiovascularbusiness.com
How the Clinical & Translational Science Institute at UCLA Health advances medicine from bench to bedside

Clinical trials are at the heart of UCLA Health’s Clinical & Translational Science Institute

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May 22 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • uclahealth.org
Surprising study finds beef doesn’t worsen blood sugar or diabetes risk

A new clinical trial suggests that eating beef every day may not be as risky for people with prediabetes as many assume. Researchers found that adults who ate 6–7 ounces of beef daily for a month showed no worsening in blood sugar control, insulin function, inflammation, or other key markers linked to type 2 diabetes when compared to people eating poultry instead.

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May 22 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com
EU’s Carbon Border Levy Is Growing Source of Tension for Ukraine

In the fourth year since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine’s industrial heartland, Kyiv faces another challenge—this time from a partner: the European Union’s carbon border adjustment mechanism.

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May 22 • 5:30 AM EDT • Business • wsj.com
Meta settles first US case over school costs tied to youth mental health, court filing shows

May 21 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms on Thursday reached a settlement in the first case set for trial seeking to make social media companies cover the costs that school districts say they have incurred

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May 21 • 1:44 PM EDT • Health • finance.yahoo.com
New obesity drug helped patients lose up to 85 pounds in trial

A new experimental obesity drug from Eli Lilly helped patients lose an average of about 85 pounds in a late-stage clinical trial. Duke Health expert Dr. Susan Spratt says the results are reaching levels typically only seen with gastric bypass surgery.

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May 21 • 1:41 PM EDT • Health • wral.com
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Meta settles first US case over school costs tied to youth mental health, court filing shows

Meta Platforms on ​Thursday reached a ‌settlement in the first ​case set ​for trial in ⁠litigation seeking ​to make ​social media companies cover the costs ​school districts ​across the country ‌say ⁠they have incurred to combat a youth ​mental ​health ⁠crisis allegedly fueled ​by their ​platforms.

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May 21 • 1:34 PM EDT • Health • reuters.com
Both sides say 'politics' being injected into Alex Murdaugh's retrial

Death penalty debate sparks political debate, as both sides are accusing the opponent of \

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May 21 • 5:05 AM EDT • Politics • greenvilleonline.com
Iran rebuilding military industrial base faster than expected, already producing drones, according to US intel

Iran has already restarted some of its drone production during the six-week ceasefire that began in early April, one sign it is rapidly rebuilding certain military capabilities degraded by US-Israeli strikes, according to two sources familiar with US intelligence assessments. Four sources told CNN that US intelligence indicates Iran’s military is reconstituting much faster than initially estimated.

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May 21 • 3:09 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com
Chris Fleming's Cameo On 'Widow's Bay' Is The Best TV Moment Of 2026

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms had the Trial of Seven. The Pitt had Robby and Baby Jane Doe. Widow’s Bay has a shaman.We are now five episodes into the first season of the Apple TV+ horror/comedy seri...

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Lawmakers, health leaders make bipartisan push to expand clinical trials access

A House Democrat and Republican on Wednesday highlighted their push to expand access to clinical trials, saying artificial intelligence could be one tool used to reach more underrepresented communi…

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SMART update: Self-expanding TAVR valves still linked to superior durability after 3 years

These three-year data represent a major update to one of the more noteworthy TAVR trials in recent memory.

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Judge orders mental health evaluation for woman accused of attempting to murder Rihanna

A judge paused the prosecution of a woman charged with the attempted murder of Rihanna and sent the case to a mental health court that will determine whether she is competent to stand trial.

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May 20 • 9:41 AM EDT • Health • abc7.com
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Advancing care through clinical trials

May 20 is Clinical Trials Day, a time to recognize the importance of clinical research.

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May 20 • 8:46 AM EDT • Health • valleyhealth.com
New drug approach offers hope for patients with recurrent aggressive cancers

Merck announces that sac-TMT, a new cancer drug, demonstrated strong results in phase 3 trials for advanced or recurrent endometrial cancer patients.

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May 19 • 11:52 PM EDT • Health • foxnews.com
Judge orders mental health evaluation for the woman charged with the attempted murder of Rihanna

A judge has paused the prosecution of a woman charged with the attempted murder of Rihanna while it is determined whether she is mentally competent to stand trial

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May 19 • 10:07 PM EDT • Health • wbaltv.com
Judge orders mental health evaluation for the woman accused of attempting to murder Rihanna

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A judge on Tuesday paused the prosecution of a woman charged with the attempted murder of Rihanna and more than a dozen other felonies and sent the case to a mental health court that will determine whether she is competent to stand trial.

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May 19 • 9:18 PM EDT • Health • wral.com
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Judge orders mental health evaluation for woman accused of trying to murder Rihanna

A judge has paused the prosecution of a woman charged with the attempted murder of Rihanna while it is determined whether she is mentally competent to stand trial

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May 19 • 7:37 PM EDT • Health • abcnews.com
FDA approves first-in-class hypertension drug from AstraZeneca

The pivotal trial for baxdrostat showed nearly double-digit placebo-adjusted systolic blood pressure reduction.

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May 19 • 11:56 AM EDT • Business • cardiovascularbusiness.com
Powell: Courtroom chaos in Murdaugh case could spill into South Carolina politics

News that the South Carolina Supreme Court had overturned the murder convictions of Alex Murdaugh in the state’s “Trial of the Century” made headlines nationwide.

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May 19 • 1:30 AM EDT • Politics • telegraphherald.com
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Murdaugh attorney SLAMMED after retrial ruling: ‘Bald-faced allegations of politics’

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson discusses the state Supreme Court’s ruling in the Alex Murdaugh retrial case and criticism of defense attorney Dick Harpootlian’s past Democratic political leanings.

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May 18 • 2:40 PM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com
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