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Democratic candidate challenging Rep. Lawler on her bid to ‘tear down political silos’
New York U.S. House candidate and combat veteran Cait Conley (D) joins Meet the Press NOW following her primary win. She faces incumbent Republican Rep. Mike Lawler in one of November’s most closely watched races as Democrats try to flip the House.
Pilots react to a Boeing 777 freighter's 'reckless' stunt over Texas
A Boeing 777 nearly clipped the ground during an unusually low flyover in Texas, a stunt veteran pilots called "reckless" and "stupid."
MAI-Code-1-Flash for Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise
MAI-Code-1-Flash, Microsoft AI’s in-house coding model, is now generally available for GitHub Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise, building on its recent expansion across Copilot surfaces. Purpose-built for coding and optimized…
Survey: Most Life Science Labs Piloting AI, Few in Production
A survey finds only 5% of labs use AI in production, with most still piloting the tech and citing integration, data quality as barriers.
Nevada takes step toward becoming corporate litigation hub with business court pilot program
The Clark County District Court this week announced it has restructured its departments to include a dedicated business court. The restructuring is expected to bring down case adjudication times, and it could help an ongoing effort to transform Nevada into a premier destination for corporate litigation. Judges Maria Gall and Joe Hardy–Departments 9 and 15, […]
What we learned as Bryce Harper caps Phillies' shocking comeback trilogy
The Phillies erased another five-run deficit, rallied late again and reached the season’s halfway point with another reminder of how much has changed.
It's Xbox's turn (again), as console prices keep going up
Microsoft announced a price hike for the Xbox Series consoles today, the third in little over a year. Effective August 1, the Xbox Series S, which launched in 2020 for $300, will cost $500 in the U.S. The Xbox Series X, which launched in 2020 at $500, will go for $800. This follows a round of PlayStation 5 price increases from Sony this spring, and a slow-motion increase for Nintendo’s Switch 2, which will kick in in the U.S. in September. (Mind you, there were also eight video game industry price hikes in six months of 2025). The chart up top shows the sudden ascent of console prices over the past year, a sudden surge in an already unusual hardware generation. Prices had been flat for years, now “up” is the new “flat.” Game console prices used to go down across the length of a console generation, but not this time around. Microsoft’s explanation for the new price hike today: We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and we have spent the last several months working with suppliers on options. Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027. The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles. Unlike phones, computers, speakers, and other consumer devices, consoles are typically not sold at a profit, but instead for less than they cost to make. This is an issue well beyond game consoles. Apple announced price hikes on its computers and tablets today as well. Game File is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe Item 2: Brutal Bungie cuts Bungie laid off “most” of its Destiny development team and some developers who worked on Marathon, the newest game from the struggling Sony-owned studio. A WARN notice issued by Sony to Washington State, where Bungie is based, tallied cuts impacting 292 workers, effective next month. That’s strictly for Bungie/Sony jobs in Washington and wouldn’t account for any elsewhere. The video I clipped below shows the redacted list of Bungie cuts filed to Washington State officials. As you’ll see, I had to scroll for a while… In a note emailed to PlayStation workers and published online, PlayStation game studios chief Hermen Hulst offered the following explanation for these latest cuts at Bungie: This is painful news, especially for talented colleagues whose roles have been eliminated. This decision was made only after extensive discussion and careful consideration, and I want to provide some context on how we arrived here. Over the past several months, together with Bungie leadership, we reviewed the studio’s long-term direction, development priorities, resource needs, and role within our broader portfolio strategy. We explored multiple alternatives before concluding that a reduction was necessary to align the studio’s resources with its current priorities and long-term goals. In 2022, Sony bought Bungie for $3.7 billion. The studio’s marquee game, the multiplayer live service shooter Destiny 2 was losing popularity at the time. Its next game Marathon, released earlier this year, has been well-reviewed but had a slow start. Bungie is renowned for making great shooter games, and Destiny fans have mourned the wind-down of Destiny 2. They’ve also expressed bewilderment over reports that Destiny 3 is not, per Bloomberg, immediately in the cards.
New Enhanced Services Pilot Brings Home Health Aides to New Yorkers in Their New Homes
New York, NY – NYC Health + Hospitals’ Housing for Health initiative today announced Bridge to Care, a pilot program funded by The Leona M. and Harry B.
Three in five young gun violence survivors do not receive mental healthcare – this California bill can fix that
The Thrive Act will create a pilot program that offers mental health resources for shooting survivors and witnesses under 25
Former MLB GM Shares Answer To Yankees' Bullpen Woes
The New York Yankees have a clear need in the bullpen, but the team may not have to acquire one through a trade. New York addressed its bullpen at last year's trade deadline, acquiring the likes of David Bednar and Camilo Doval among other relievers. However, Doval has struggled this season, so the ...
REV Entertainment Expands College Baseball Series to Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 2027
REV Entertainment today announced the addition of Spartanburg, South Carolina, to its growing College Baseball Series schedule, with Fifth Third Park set to host the inaugural Spartanburg College Baseball Series, Feb. 26-28, 2027. The four-team...
What Does Success Look Like in 2026 for Dolphins?
The meaning of the word success can be subjective. But for the Miami Dolphins in 2026, the number of wins shouldn't be the measure of success. After moving on from veterans such as Tua Tagovailoa and Tyreek Hill, the upcoming season is about developing the Dolphins' roster, resetting the culture, ...
What Does Success Look Like in 2026 for Dolphins?
After moving on from veterans such as Tua Tagovailoa and Tyreek Hill, the upcoming season is about developing the Dolphins' roster, resetting the culture, and gaining salary cap flexibility for the future. The goal for any NFL team is not just to succeed in the immediate future but to establish a solid foundation for long-term success. After releasing Tagovailoa, Willis became the Dolphins' most significant free agent acquisition after he signed a three-year, $67.5 million contract with $45 million guaranteed.
Bangor council rejects proposed rules limiting ICE cooperation
One councilor left abruptly in protest during a heated discussion over ICE.
A preventable tragedy: What my sister’s death taught me about public health
Rabies is 100% preventable when institutions work together. We must engage trusted community leaders and break down siloes between animal and human health.
The universe may be hiding conscious minds stranger than we can imagine
What if consciousness isn’t limited to brains like ours? Philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel and Jeremy Pober argue that consciousness could arise in many different forms of life, even in beings built from radically different materials than those found on Earth. Drawing on the vastness of the universe and the likely existence of countless alien civilizations, they suggest it would be surprisingly Earth-centric to assume that only Earth-like biology can support conscious experience.
Sixers add offensive firepower, draft guard Labaron Philon Jr. with 22nd pick
The Sixers selected Alabama product Labaron Philon Jr. with the 22nd pick in Tuesday night’s NBA draft.
Project ASCENT at ILL selected for EU funding under "Choose Europe for Science"
The Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) will lead the ASCENT project, funded at 1.4 M€ by the European Commission as part of the initiative "Choose Europe for Science 2025". The goal is to train the next generation of researchers and sustain Europe’s leadership in neutron science. ASCENT is one of 16 projects (three of them in France) funded under the pilot call of a programme that aims to enhance the attractiveness of research careers in Europe and address the challenge of scientific talent retention. It is also the only project led by a large-scale infrastructure.
Meta announces new range of smart glasses starting at $299
Meta Platforms on Tuesday announced a new range of AI smart glasses in partnership with EssilorLuxottica , starting at $299.
Does the War on ‘Ultra-Processed Foods’ Make Any Sense?
The latest dietary evil is an old story in a new package.
Exclusive: Downed US pilot reported seeing Iranian drones swarm in ‘jellyfish’ formation
A US fighter jet pilot rescued by special forces after being shot down over Iran in April described a shocking sight before ejecting from his aircraft: multiple Iranian drones hovering in the air, moving as one, in a formation that resembled a jellyfish, according to four sources familiar with the matter.
FF7 Revelation Director Says Queer Romances Help The World Feel Real
Naoki Hamaguchi said that the presence of queer people and relationships in the remake trilogy 'enhances the world’s realism'
FDA to launch pilot program to speed up early-stage clinical trials
Federal health officials aim to speed up drug development and better compete with China.
Breaking Business News: AbbVie To Acquire Apogee Therapeutics
AbbVie is set to acquire Apogee Therapeutics and its pipeline of multiple clinical-stage candidates in development across inflammatory and immunological diseases, including its lead asset, zumilokibart (APG777), a subcutaneous half-life extended monoclonal antibody targeting interleukin (IL)-13 in atopic dermatitis (AD). Under the terms of the transaction, AbbVie will acquire all outstanding shares of Apogee for $135.11 per share in cash. […]
Clive Davis, music titan behind Whitney Houston, dies at 94
Clive Davis, one of the most influential record moguls in music history and the mastermind behind the careers of Whitney Houston, Barry Manilow, Earth, Wind & Fire, Alicia Keys and
NAIRR Science Program Reshapes Scientific Research, Powered by NVIDIA AI Infrastructure
The U.S. National Science Foundation’s NAIRR pilot program has driven innovative research across the U.S. for over 700 projects — spanning protein prediction and infectious disease outbreak management.
Here’s what comes next for MacArthur Center businesses, days before mall’s closure
Just days before closure, MacArthur Center tenants are moving out and looking for new locations.
Business Notes: Virginia Beach’s Tarnished Truth expands distribution; new city clerk in Newport News
See which businesses are expanding and which professionals are getting hired in Hampton Roads.
Microsoft says it'll force install Microsoft 365 Copilot on Windows 11 with MS 365 Business in the next 30 days
Microsoft quietly confirmed that the Microsoft 365 Copilot app will auto-install on eligible Windows PCs with Microsoft 365 desktop apps.
2026 NBA draft profiles: Philadelphia 76ers prospect Labaron Philon
Here is a look at Philadelphia 76ers prospect Labaron Philon ahead of the 2026 NBA draft on Tuesday.
Don’t wear these items to Barry Manilow’s Las Vegas show
An impressionist tried to wear a Barry Manilow wig and jacket to meet Barry Manilow. Bad idea.
Jennifer Aniston joins “Friends ”in remembering James Burrows: 'He was a father figure to me'
Burrows, who directed the pilot of 'Friends' among other episodes, died on Friday at age 85.
Jennifer Aniston joins 'Friends' in remembering James Burrows: 'He was a father figure to me'
Jennifer Aniston joined fellow 'Friends' stars in paying tribute to James Burrows, who directed the pilot episode of the hit sitcom. Burrows died on Friday at 85.
How Michael Landon's “Little House on the Prairie” philosophy influenced “Malcolm in the Middle”
"Malcolm" creator Linwood Boomer cites Landon's approach to working with child actors as an inspiration for how he ran the sitcom.
Daveigh Chase's mother says late 'The Ring' star struggled with addiction after back injury: 'She was completely gone'
Daveigh Chase's mother said that 'drugs took hold of' the late 'Lilo & Stitch' actress after she was prescribed painkillers for a back injury she sustained in a motorcycle accident around 2016.
A center with ‘fantastic' hockey sense could give Flyers option to trade down
Egor Shilov is a Russian center who’s highly skilled with the puck on his stick. Could the Flyers grab him in the first round of the 2026 NHL draft?
Herring Gut Coastal Science Center welcomes two new members to Advisory Council
PORT CLYDE — Two distinguished leaders in environmental science and communications have been appointed to Herring Gut Coastal Science Center's Advisory Council: Claire Parsons and Melissa Waterman. The Advisory Council provides strategic guidance and expertise to support Herring Gut's mission of educating students and communities about the connections between Maine's waters, environment, and economy.
The spirit of Juneteenth can lead us out of this perilous political moment
Nicholas Mitchell: Juneteenth is a reminder not to despair
Sony drops “PC”, adds “AI” to official PlayStation business strategy summary
Sony had made some conspicuous edits and updates to its description of PlayStation’s “business environment and strategy,” in a new annual report filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today. These changes are part of a 379-word overview of Sony’s strategy for its Game & Network Services (G&NS) division, which is another name for PlayStation. The chunk about PlayStation strategy is part of a voluminous financial report filed by Sony each June. This year’s is 229 pages long. Differences to any part of the filing—word changes made from year to year, as Sony provides a breakdown of its business for investors—can be illuminating. For example: A line from 2025 about how the PlayStation team “aims to achieve sustainable and profitable business growth” has been changed in the 2026 version to “aims to achieve sustainable business growth.” Notice which word they cut? That’s a pretty clear tell about how Sony expects its profit margins to be squeezed this year, due to rising chip costs for its hardware, among other things. A line from 2025 that stated “Sony plans to continue its efforts to deploy its first-party titles to multiple platforms such as PC” had been cut from the 2026 version. That appears to be Sony’s admission by omission that it has backed off releasing its biggest games on PC. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported in March and again in May that Sony’s big single-player marquee games are no longer planned for time-delayed release on PC.1 A whole new chunk has also been added about how “Sony is utilizing AI to unleash the creativity of studios and further enhance the PlayStation experience.” A full breakdown of the changes made from the 2025 version to the 2026 version is below. I’ve redlined them for you…
Texas State, Sky Safety Flight Academy partner to offer Aviation Science degree across San Antonio
Texas State University and Sky Safety Flight Academy are expanding the Aviation Science degree to San Antonio, creating new pathways for pilot training and aviation careers starting Fall 2026.
'Lilo & Stitch' and 'The Ring' star Daveigh Chase dies at 35: report
Daveigh Chase, the former child actress who voiced Lilo in 'Lilo & Stitch' and portrayed the central young ghost in 'The Ring,' has reportedly died at 35.
WHO issues comprehensive guidelines on filovirus disease, including Ebola and Marburg disease
As the Democratic Republic of the Congo is battling an Ebola disease outbreak caused by the Bundibugyo virus, the World Health Organization (WHO) has released its first comprehensive guidelines for the clinical management of filovirus disease which include all types of Ebola and Marburg viruses.
Latvia pilots citizen engagement in research grant evaluations
Latvia has introduced an element of citizen engagement to the evaluation of nationally funded research grants. The aim is to both create more connections between science and society, and to improve the quality of its evaluations. The move comes as research funders across Europe are experimenting with ways to improve evaluation processes in the face of a sharpened focus on science’s impact on society. Evaluators of grant applications submitted to Latvia’s Fundamental and Applied Research Programme (FLPP), the country’s main research funder, will this year have the option of consulting citizen feedback on challenges the public thinks science should focus on to inform their decisions. “In recent years, both public discussions and policy-level debates in Latvia have highlighted the importance of demonstrating how publicly funded research contributes to society, the economy and the resolution of real-world challenges,” said a source at the Latvian Council of Science (LCS), which manages the FLPP. “At the same time, research institutions themselves expressed interest in improving the project evaluation framework while continuing to ensure that funding is awarded to the highest-quality projects,” the source added. The citizen input comes from a survey that was conducted between 25 February and 16 March 2025, to which 1,737 people responded. It gathered information on what the public views as problem areas for Latvia, and the role of science and technology in providing solutions to these problems. A summary of these responses has been included as an annex to the FLPP 2026 call for proposals that evaluators can refer to, purely in an advisory manner, when judging proposals. Results from the survey show that the main problem areas identified by the public were in healthcare and public health, followed by the development of new treatment methods and medicines, and then digital technology, data security and cyber security. At the bottom of the list was research aimed at acquiring new knowledge about the universe, matter and the laws of nature. Further analysis looked at the public view of the possible role of science in solving these problems. The survey charted 4,167 individual responses based on open-ended questions that were derived from the participants’ answers. The analysis again found that medical and health sciences topped the scoring, with 788 responses referring to the field. Humanities and the arts were bottom of the list, with 625. Digging further into the details, the survey suggests citizens are aware of and concerned about a number of research areas. This includes technologies and innovation to improve the environment or reduce pollution, the development of modern military technologies and cybersecurity tools, and the development and application of artificial intelligence, among others. “We hope this initiative will help strengthen public trust in science and create a more meaningful dialogue between researchers and society,” the LCS source said, adding that it offers benefits to researchers, evaluators and to the general public. More space for citizen engagement in evaluationsThere is a gradual but increasing use of citizen engagement in research evaluation processes around Europe, especially in healthcare, but it remains relatively rare, said Henry Sauermann, a professor at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin and an expert in citizen science.“Given that we are at a point where citizen involvement is extremely limited, there is presumably space for more, but it's not that we should do it just because we want to do it,” he told Science|Business. He said some research lends itself better to having citizen input, and this usually tends to be on the applied end of the science spectrum where the public can offer useful feedback based on their experiences. He added that advising scientists on certain topics to study is also a useful approach, in the way that Latvia is doing. “The public does fund a lot of science, there's a lot of tax money going into this. We of course do want to preserve academic freedom, but it's also not unreasonable to incorporate more feedback or input from citizens where possible,” he said. Related articlesCitizen science: where, when, and how to let the public contribute to researchHow can Europe cope with a flood of AI-assisted research grant proposals?Data Corner: Horizon Europe’s AI, digital and data call success rate is 5.2%There are several ways of involving citizens in science funding. The most minimal way is having a few representatives on a panel, such as members of a patient group or union. The most direct way is crowdsourcing funding for specific projects. There is an increasing number of online platforms that allow the public to chip in to support scientific proposals.Sauermann studied this in a recent paper and found that it can have its uses, but it still is not clear if there are benefits to it. There are various assumptions linked to citizen engagement, for example that it increases public trust in science, or that it provides a representative view of what the public thinks about science. These are not necessarily true, Sauermann found. People who participate in engagement activities tend to already be very trusting of science, and, on the whole, it is generally the well-off and well educated who contribute, giving a narrow view of public opinion. On whether citizen input can help manage the increasing number of proposals that are being submitted due to assistance from AI, Sauermann is more sceptical. “The obvious answer to the flood of AI-written proposals is AI-driven evaluation,” he said, adding that it doesn’t mean citizen engagement shouldn’t be a part of evaluations in a well thought-out manner. Southern Denmark’s successful approachOne successful example of citizen engagement in science evaluations was implemented in southern Denmark. Between 2019 and 2025, citizens in the region were invited to vote to fund one of five pre-selected projects in the field of healthcare. The project, called A Healthier Southern Denmark, was a collaboration between regional authorities, the University of Southern Denmark, and two media partners. Over the seven years, there were 75,000 votes and significant public engagement online and on social media. “It was a bit of a wild project, we’d never done something like that before and we were a bit nervous about what would be said in the media about it. But actually, people were very positive,” said Anne Kathrine Overgaard, one of the main organisers of the project from the University of Southern Denmark. The university and its researchers have learned a lot from the experience, particularly about engaging with society and shaping their research to match real-world needs. This is important with Europe’s increasing focus on competitiveness and bringing innovations to market faster, Overgaard said. She hopes to see more citizen engagement in evaluation processes and in science more broadly. “For many years, citizen engagement has been a bit of an add-on to proposals, just to check a box. But I think things are changing,” she said. It’s less about citizens just gathering data and more “about the dialogue between the public and the scientists,” she said. The initiative ended last year as the team wanted to regroup to find fresh momentum. The development of AI and AI-written proposals has made Overgaard reflect on how the project could be reworked to help evaluators. She hopes to bring it back in the future. “It could be a good idea to try this initiative again in a slightly re-worked format,” she said.
World Cup results, schedule, scores, live updates: France vs. Senegal kicks off star-studded day; Norway-Iraq up next
Health Outcomes Data For Wearables Key To Medicare Coverage Expansion
Insurance coverage of wearables is spotty. This could soon change as Medicare begins a pilot to facilitate access to wearables while gathering data on health outcomes.
Your letters: Writer uses novel character to make point about life, politics
Dear editor, In Louise Penny’s novels, her protagonist, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, gives his subordinates a bit of advice: “Don't believe everything
“The Five Star Weekend” cast on how women are 'siloed' away from each other in Hollywood — but not on their show
Jennifer Garner, Gemma Chan, Regina Hall, D'Arcy Carden, and Chloë Sevigny star in the upcoming Peacock series based on Elin Hilderbrand's best-selling novel.
Dragon Undocks to Return Science Experiments to Earth
At 12:25 p.m. EDT, the unpiloted SpaceX Dragon spacecraft undocked from the forward‑facing port of the International Space Station’s Harmony module after a command from SpaceX ground controllers. Flight controllers delayed the undocking slightly to power‑cycle a navigation sensor and restore full redundancy before departure.
Microsoft weighs DeepSeek for Copilot Cowork
Microsoft will also shift to usage-based pricing for the enterprise agent.
Researchers receive funding to launch USC’s first clinical study of psilocybin for mental health
Related News NIH investment totaling 30.7M will expand USC-led AI effort to decode Alzheimer’s disease April 2, 2026 USC study maps brain network changes linked to bipolar disorder severity and […]
By Letting You Fly the Highwind and Drop Into Its Open World Wherever You Want, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation Is Doing JRPG Airships Right
By putting you back in the pilot seat and letting you command the Highwind, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is finally bringing back the airship dream.
This $60 Retro Gaming Device Saved My Childhood Final Fantasy III Endgame Save From The Slow Demise of Cartridge Battery Death
Preserve your physical Super Nintendo library and save files forever. We tested the Epilogue SN Operator to see if this $60 device is a must-have for SNES collectors.
Mind, Body, Soul: Self-Care Is Health care Community Health Day
Ethan Temple Seventh-day Adventist Church invites residents throughout the Miami Valley and surrounding communities to attend its “Mind, Body, Soul: Self-Care Is Healthcare: Community Health Day” on Saturday, July 25, 2026, at Ethan Temple SDA Church, 4000 Shiloh Springs Road, Clayton, Ohio 45315.The free community event is designed to promote holistic wellness by addressing physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health while connecting individuals and families with valuable healthcare and community resources.The day opens with Morning Worship at 11:00 a.m., featuring guest speaker Alberta Scruggs, a licensed registered dietitian and nutritionist, who will share practical guidance on nutrition, self-care, and healthy living. Following the service, attendees will enjoy refreshments and a light lunch before taking part in the afternoon's health screenings, community resource fair, and wellness-focused activities.From 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., attendees will have access to free health screenings provided through a partnership with Premier Health, along with information and resources from local health and human service organizations.A Community Health Fair from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. will feature representatives from several organizations such as Black Women’s Health Initiative, CareSource, and many more.Recognizing the growing importance of emotional wellness, the event will also feature a Mental Health Panel Discussion from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. led by respected professionals in behavioral health and counseling. The panel will provide an opportunity for open conversation, education, and community engagement around mental health awareness, treatment, and support.In addition to health services and educational opportunities, attendees will receive complimentary lunch bags while supplies last, and school supplies will be distributed to students and families while supplies last.The Community Health Day is open to the public and free of charge. No registration is required.
Beneath our feet lies a fungal superhighway stretching 68 quadrillion miles
Beneath our feet lies a vast hidden fungal superhighway that helps sustain much of life on Earth—and scientists have now mapped it for the first time. Researchers estimate that these underground networks stretch an astonishing 110 quadrillion kilometers, move about 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide into soils each year, and play a major role in supporting plants and regulating the climate.
Business Notes: Stores open at Norfolk Premium Outlets; 3 women receive Farm Bureau awards
See which businesses are giving back and which ones are celebrating milestones in Hampton Roads.
America’s public health programs must cover medically tailored meals
When you prescribe the nourishing meals that people require, they get healthier — and the system spends less.
"I Don't Do Anything I Don't Enjoy" - The Business Philosophy That Made Terry Bradshaw a Winner Off the Field
"I Don't Do Anything I Don't Enjoy" - The Business Philosophy That Made Terry Bradshaw a Winner Off the Field
Terry Bradshaw, Hall of Fame Quarterback, 4-Time Super Bowl champion with the Pittsburgh Steelers, Emmy-Award winning studio analyst with the NFL on Fox and Founder of Bradshaw Bourbon and Bradshaw Quarter horses joins Sports Business Radio for a wide-ranging conversation. Bradshaw discusses his Hall of Fame career with the Steelers (where he went 4-0 in the Super Bowl). Bradshaw returned to Pittsburgh earlier this year for the NFL Draft and he shares his feelings about his relationship now with
Science facility in Newport News breaks ground on new center
The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility broke ground Friday for a new center that will expand its mission into high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and the data-driven research to meet the demands of modern science.
Wolfgang Puck's rules for building a lasting restaurant empire
From morning walks to tasting dishes late into the night, Chef Wolfgang Puck shares the routines and philosophy behind his global restaurant empire.
In Retrospect: Poland, Russia, Europe
In April I spent a few days with Zryw, a Polish non-profit organization that recruits young people to enter politics and public life. Their aim is to build a new generation of civic leaders in Poland. I’ve followed their evolution from the beginning; my son is one of the founders. (“Zryw” means “impulse” or “burst of speed” in Polish). Julie Chmielewska, one of Zryw’s leaders, interviewed me at the event. Here is the conversation, lightly edited for grammar and context: Julia Chmielewska: Assuming that culture shapes institutions, could we conclude that some cultures are more prone to authoritarianism? Anne Applebaum: I don’t think so. Every culture, every nation, and every country has the potential for change. When we look at history, we can see that nations do change. Poland has changed, for example, from the 1980s to today. There’s a completely different mentality here than the one I encountered when I first visited, in 1988. The current generation sees the world through a different frame. So no, I don’t believe that certain nations are doomed to authoritarianism, or to anything. Of course, there are political and cultural traditions, but they can always be challenged. JC: So do you think there’s something intrinsic in human nature that pushes people to democracy, freedom? AA: I think there is something in human nature, a deep instinct, that pushes people towards freedom, yes. People who live in authoritarian countries – and I’ve heard this from them over and over again – sooner or later find themselves angered by a feeling of helplessness. They can see the unfairness of crooked courts, irrational political decisions. They naturally dislike the fact that somebody has all the power while they have none. In those circumstances, people who have no political background at all sometimes are politicized just by that frustration. I’m thinking of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, for example, who was a Belarusian housewife, until the circumstances of her husband’s arrest forced her to become a politician. I met a woman who is a Uyghur from China, and who had come to live in Turkey. After several of her family members were arrested, she too was propelled into a political role. These kinds of experiences make people interested in democracy or political reform, even if they thought they didn’t care. I also think that the opposite is true: some people instinctively prefer homogeneity, order, hierarchy. They don’t like the confrontation of opinions or the noise of debate, and they lean towards a single leader or a unified regime. I think that most of modern history is shaped by the clash between those two different sides of human nature. JC: Which force do you find more powerful today? AA: I think they both have a lot of power and there’s no way of predicting who wins. Even in countries that seem very shut off or stuck in an authoritarian system can change. We’ve seen that happen. And vice versa, I think democracies can also begin to fail and slide into authoritarianism. So it’s very important not to be complacent in either direction. JC: I want to go into your history and your experiences. You’ve lived in Russia during a time of incredible change in the late 80s, and then you came back to do research in post-Soviet Russia. AA: I was a student in Russia just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. I then traveled and worked there extensively in the 1990s, and I met people who really were full of hope. They hoped that Russia could become a democracy, or at least a place that guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of the press. These weren’t ideas that came from Washington. Although now the narrative in the Kremlin is different, I met many people who were working towards exactly that kind of transformation. A friend of mine ran a series of seminars – once a year, and then later several times a year, in cities all over Russia – designed to get people to discuss politics in new ways. She invited young politicians and journalists, as well as foreigners. I went to many of them, in Moscow as well as Volgograd and Novosibirsk. Over two decades, hundreds of people came to these seminars, and all of them wanted Russia to be different. I remain convinced that many Russians still want Russia to be different. It’s just that the old system, in the form of Putin, a representative of that system, returned. The KGB reimposed their power. And this wasn’t because of something to do with culture, this was to do with money and politics, and who was in charge. JC: You’ve partially answered my question... I wanted to ask whether that excitement of the 1990s was an exception from the Russian historical norm which has been rather authoritarian? AA: Of course, if you look at the history of Russia since the 18th century, there have always been liberal groups, reformers and revolutionaries. There were the Decembrists, in the early 19th century, and the rural populists later on, who tried to organize the peasantry. A significant group of liberal Russians appeared at the turn of the 20th century, people like the father of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who was a Russian politician before the revolution. These groups were small in number, but sometimes had a broader significance. The Russian dissident movement in the 1950s and 1960s actually invented the modern human rights movement. It was their idea to hold the leaders of the Soviet Union accountable for the language they used, to remind them of the treaties they had signed and the promised they had made. They created the Helsinki group, for example, that held Soviet leadership to the language of the Helsinki Treaty, which formally ended the Second World War and which contained guarantees of human rights, at least on paper. That idea spread to Eastern Europe, and similar tactics were used here in Poland. (Benjamin Nathans recently wrote a great book about the Soviet dissidents, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause) JC: But seemingly, even if they do ever get power, they could never hold on to it. AA: We don’t know, because they have never really had power. But in any case, we also don’t know what will happen in the future. There is no reason to assume that Russia will forever be condemned to totalitarianism. Even during the first fifteen years of Putin’s regime there was some form of democratic politics. Only when the full-scale war began did he bring everything to an end: he shut down all remaining independent organizations and killed his most important opponent, Alexi Navalny. But does that mean he is popular, that he enjoys legitimacy? Even now, we don’t really know what Russians think about him, or about the war. There is no way of doing real polling in Russia because nobody will answer an independent pollster over the phone. JC: Do you think that the flock of young people, especially young men, who fled Russia after the start of the war represent a continuation of liberal movements that refuse to partake in the authoritarian state, or do you think they are moving for the sake of self-preservation – “I don’t want to go to the army, so I leave”? AA: I’m sure it’s both. I actually know many people who left Russia for political reasons either in the very last years before the war, or else just after the war began. JC: And do you see a change in the young generation versus the old one that have fled? AA: It’s hard for me to say because the people who I know were mostly already politicized. I do know some younger people who left, but most of them were already either active in the opposition, or working as journalists. Many of them very self-consciously think of themselves as maintaining Russian culture abroad, just as in the 20th century the Soviet dissidents or the anti-communist White Russians once thought of themselves as people who maintained the true Russian culture, outside of Bolshevik Russia. JC: Let’s move on to Poland. One of your first experiences with Poland was reporting on Margaret Thatcher’s first state visit, in the autumn of 1988. You followed her around the farmers’ market. AA: She was making a symbolic gesture. She wanted to welcome free markets, but the only one she could really visit was the farmers’ market at Hala Mirowska. JC: And I want to talk about this area because today you can look out of any window in that district, Mirów, and see rows and rows of skyscrapers. How does it feel to see a country built from the ground in such a short time, both politically and economically? AA: You know, when you’re living in a period of dramatic change, it’s always hard to know whether the change is positive or negative. The transformation in Poland created winners and losers, as well as new classes of people, new political movements of different kinds. At the time, it sometimes just felt like turbulence. Now, we can look back at the 1990s and early 2000s in Poland and see in retrospect that the country was headed in towards prosperity and European integration. In around 2009 or 2010, I remember speaking to a woman who worked cleaning government offices, and who asked me if her daughter should study in Amsterdam or in London. This seemed to me to be a real transformation, and it happened very fast: within a few years, Poles stopped feeling like second-class Europeans, and a generation of younger Poles appeared who had no qualms about crossing borders. JC: We again live in turbulent times. Do you think we’re heading towards positive outcomes? AA: I can’t make predictions, because everything that happens tomorrow depends on what people do today. Also, history doesn’t have a trajectory. It doesn’t move in a particular direction. You only think it does afterwards. As I said, you can look afterwards at Poland in the 1990s and you could say this was a period of great progress. But not everybody at the time saw that. Sometimes people are very wrong about a given country’s trajectory. I remember people writing about Ukraine in the 1990s, about how dangerous it was that Ukraine was independent, that this was going to be an anti-semitic state, that Ukrainian nationalism was going to come back... and although you can say many bad things about Ukraine, the country made many bad choices, actually it became a pretty tolerant state which now has a Jewish president and until recently a Muslim defense minister. JC: In the 1990s Poland’s and Ukraine’s GDP were roughly similar. Ukraine was even a bit richer. So the starting point was similar for both of these countries, but they’ve turned out very, very differently. Even if we stop in 2014. Why do you think Ukraine “chose East”? Was it external influence? AA: No, I think Ukraine was in a different position. First of all, central and eastern Ukraine had been part of the Soviet Union since the 1920s, and had therefore experienced a longer period of occupation, repression, Sovietization and even Russification. Ukraine did not have, as Poland did, an alternative elite: a large cadre of economists and politicians, who already had some experience in opposition politics and in independent thinking. In Poland, the transformative finance minister, Leszek Balcerowicz, had already thought about how an economy might be decentralized before he took office. We can argue about how successful he was, but at least he was prepared to try something new. In Ukraine, people weren’t prepared. For one, there hadn’t been much space even for an illegal opposition in the previous couple of decades. Ukraine was also in many ways still emerging from colonial occupation. For the previous couple of centuries, many of the most capable Ukrainians had moved to Russia, and the first generation of leaders in independent Ukraine tended to be former Soviet apparatchiks. They didn’t immediately seek to become closer to western Europe. Instead, they looked for some kind of economic and political “third way” and an accomodation with Russia. Ukraine became stuck in this position, half-in, half-out and became pretty profoundly corrupt. JC: The Polish alternative elite had a vision of where they wanted the country to go. I think the general perception now is that this vision ends with the next election, right? Is this a natural process of gaining power? AA: Their vision, and it was shared by the time by politicians who now call themselves both left and right, was that Poland should join the EU and NATO, as fast as possible. My husband (Radek Sikorski) was in the very first government that said it wanted to join NATO. At the time this was taken very badly in Washington: the demand for NATO membership absolutely came from Poland, not from the US. But even then, in the early 1990s, many Poles already understood that the Russian sphere of influence would grow once again, that it was important to become part of the transatlantic alliance and an integrated Europe as fast as possible: NATO, the EU, the Council of Europe, all of the trading and security alliances. That consensus lasted through several different governments and over many years, even governments containing former communists. For twenty years, right, left and center disagreed about many things, but they all agreed on the direction that the country should go. In retrospect, that consensus created the basis for prosperity in Poland. JC: And regarding the Polish-Ukrainian relations. We know that antagonisms, e.g. the myth of Wołyń [a massacre of Poles that took place in what is now Western Ukraine, in 1943] are increasingly used in Polish political discourse today. In Ukraine, nationalist historians make heroes out of UPA, the Ukrainian revolutionary army, which is held responsible for this tragedy. Where do you see a start for burying the hatchet? Is the reconciliation of our nations possible? AA: So here’s a strange thing: For more than a decade after they both gained independence, Poland and Ukraine participated in a number of projects that were designed to solve exactly these kinds of Polish-Ukrainian differences. Books were published that were jointly written by Polish and Ukrainian historians, monuments were built. These projects were successful: If you’d asked me this question in 2010, I would have said that there are no real historical issues between Poland and Ukraine, that the two countries had mostly reconciled. For a number of reasons, this began to shift. In Poland, children and grandchildren of victims of the Wołyń massacre felt their tragedy hadn’t been fully recognized. In Ukraine, nationalist groups wanted the UPA partisans who had fought against the Soviet Union recognized for their heroism, despite the fact that some in this broad and not well-defined group were also linked to Wołyń. In both eastern Poland and western Ukraine, the memory of the ethnic cleansing that took place there in the late 1940s - Poles were moved West, Ukrainians East - to accomodate new borders has left feelings of displacement and bitterness. The wave of Ukrainian immigration, which started before the war, may have provoked some of this. But don’t underestimate the role played by Russia, which has always wanted to create discord between Poland and Ukraine, and pumps out propaganda to that effect in both countries. Vandalism on both sides of the border, damage done to cemeteries and monuments, is sometimes carried out by provacateurs working for Russia, just to create bad feelings. The Polish-Ukrainian conflict also hides a different reality: although there are real grievances and bad memories, the truth is that the biggest tragedies both nations experienced in the twentieth century were inflicted by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. That should unite these two countries, not divide them. JC: This week (19.04.2026 – Ed.) in Hungary we saw that using historical narratives to create grievance has no longer worked. Are you optimistic about the direction after Orban’s loss? AA: The Hungarian election was really important because it shows that people can actually resist powerful, dominant propaganda. The ruling party Fidesz controlled all of the TV, 90% of the newspapers, the constitutional court, the bureaucracy... and yet people had the nerve to vote against it and resist it. It’s also an important election because Hungary created a huge network of well-funded think tanks and foundations that were funding other far right groups and projects. So that loss is going to have a knock-on effect in other places too, maybe even in Poland. JC: What you’ve said about resisting propaganda reminds me of one of the interviews you did about talking to Russians in the post-Soviet era who claimed that people knew that the system was lying. Why do people choose to believe in these regimes anyway? AA: Because it’s useful. Stephen Kotkin, an American historian, once described how people would learn how to “speak Bolshevik”: It was just a language that you needed to use in order to get by in society. If you didn’t talk the way the regime wanted you to talk, then you might have problems, or lose your job, or your kids would not get into university. It was a way of getting along. Communist Poland was similar, at least in the early years. When I was writing a book about the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after World War II, I met a lot of people who wanted to talk a lot about the war, when many of them had done really heroic things. But almost nobody wanted to talk about the decade afterwards, between 1945 and 1956. This was when you had the short period of terror, violence and Polish Stalinism. To stay safe, people felt the need to just go along with what others were saying, or stay out of politics, or use communist jargon without necessarily believing it. I don’t judge them for it, and I wouldn’t describe all of those people as collaborators. It’s easy to feel moral certainty in retrospect, because we know that communism ended. But if you were living in 1949, it might not have been clear to you that communism was going to end. In very repressive societies, maybe about 10% of people who are really evil – collaborators, torturers. Maybe 10% of people are really brave and who find ways to resist. And then around 80% of people have kids, they have parents, they have to have jobs and they’ve had to get through it somehow. Strange though it may sound, I’ve found that the work I did on that book is now very useful in explaining some of what’s going on in the United States today. There are plenty of members of the Republican Party in Congress who know perfectly well that Donald Trump says many things that aren’t true. But they avoid criticizing him because it’s inconvenient, because they would get in trouble, because someone would attack them on the internet. So actually you don’t even need mass terror to get people to conform. JC: Is Gen Z reinventing agency? AA: We’ll see. In any generation you can find groups of people who want agency. If you live in a society that’s unfair, for example where a tiny number of people have captured most of the wealth, then at a certain point people rebel. This is always easier for younger people, who have you have less to lose. The question now is how the internet will affect the relationships between citizens and the state, and how it will change organizations. The “Twitter revolutions” people spoke about as early as 2008-9, mass protests organized online, have often proved to be very superficial. Although you can easily join something just by clicking, the work of creating a real movement requires physical participation. Successful mass movements of the past, for example the Civil Rights movement in the United States, were built by people who had spent many years together. They had participated in non-violent workshops together. They practiced and prepared. Just using the you can get everybody to show up at a certain moment, but then when the protest is broken up, nothing happens. It’s also true that the repressive regimes have more recently learned how to use the internet to undermine leaders and movements. Most of all, they now understand how to make people cynical. The form of propaganda that most modern authoritarians use - and I think the Russians really pioneered this - deploys sneering cynicism. Instead of praising the rulers, the regime propagandists mock the opposition movement leadership for being supposedly corrupt or sexually degenerate, with the goal of undermining any kind of idealism. JC: MAGA grew on the internet? AA: MAGA is a real grassroots movement. They had symbols, red hats, they showed up at rallies. But you’re right that the cynicism, the sarcasm and the distrust that the movement embodies came originally from the internet, and this is different. Fifty years ago, most European political parties had a social base in real organizations, in trade unions for Social Democrats, in church groups for Christian Democrats. As people stopped going to church and as the trade unions became smaller, the social base of these parties disappeared. Now people who wouldn’t have known one another in the past meet on the internet and create new movements, many of which don’t last. JC: Is history ending? Going in stale circles? AA: History never ends. In truth, human beings want contradictory things at the same time: order and freedom, stability and change. These things are never resolved, and when a society swings too far in one direction, people always push it the other way. But each time that happens, the result is different. Certainly it is true that we are now in a period when old philosophers and ideas from the 1930s are undergoing a revival. Carl Schmitt, who was a philosopher who was very influential on the Nazis, is back as an influence on both the far left and the far right, once again inspiring people to think that all politics has to be existential, that all politics is about defining and defeating enemies. In the US, some are also bringing back dominionism, the idea that we need a Christian and not a secular state. It’s also true that we are living through a more fundamental shift. The old left-right divide, which was mostly about the size of the state, is much less important now. Instead, we are arguing about more fundamental things: what are our rights, what protects our freedom. Or how much power do we want to give small elites, versus how much power to give ordinary people. In America a small group of very wealthy people now control information, because they control the social media platforms and AI, which means they determine what people will read and learn. Finding a way to preserve preserve zones of autonomy and independent thinking, this is going to be the main task for the next generation. JC: What is the one book that a person interested in Central Europe should read? AA: You could read my book “Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe” which tells the story of how the Soviet Union imposed its culture on the region. Or read Tim Snyder’s history of the region, “The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569-1999.” And everyone should read “The Captive Mind” by Czesław Miłosz, which describes exactly the phenomenon we were talking about: why do people collaborate? I joined Scott Galloway and the brilliant Fiona Hill in a discussion about the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the future of global power, and what these conflicts reveal about America's role in the world. Scott told us that this was the 400th edition of his podcast, which is quite a number: My friend Francesco Chiamulera runs a brilliant series of literary events, Una Colline di Libri, A Hill of Books, in the Prosecco Hills, a region of vineyards and elegant hill towns in the Veneto, north of Venice. We did an event in Vittorio Veneto and also drove and biked around the countryside. Buy Autocracy Inc Buy Iron Curtain Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
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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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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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