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Apple Stock Falls Nearly 2% Before Earnings as Upgrade Program Launches
Investors are weighing expected double-digit revenue growth against margins, component costs and Apple's new device-leasing strategy.
Samsung Electronics posted a record profit on AI chip demand — but its mobile business swung to a loss
The South Korean tech giant's memory chip division hit all-time highs on AI server demand, while elevated component costs pushed its mobile unit into the red
Samsung Stock Jumps Over 6% In Seoul as AI Memory Business Delivers Record Profit: 'Supply Constraints' Expected to Continue
Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.‘s (OTC:SSNLF) shares rose on Thursday after the chipmaker posted a record second-quarter operating profit as surging artificial intelligence memory demand boosted its semiconductor business, though higher component costs weighed on earnings in its mobile division. Operating Profit Beat Estimates Operating profit climbed to a record 89.5 trillion KRW ($61.93 billion) for the second-quarter, beating the 88.13 trillion KRW ($60.98 billion) analysts’ forecast compiled by
'Not alike any we've ever seen before': Three of the 12 galaxies in this cosmic string are missing a crucial component of the universe
Astronomers have discovered a third galaxy without dark matter in a strange string of a dozen dwarf galaxies. A violent collision is likely to blame.
Four pharmacy trends every business leader should be watching
Commentary: For business leaders trying to manage healthcare costs, the pharmacy component has become a strategic priority.
RAMageddon Is Hammering Retro Handheld Makers Like Evercade
The makers of Evercade are buying up every component they can way in advance
"Honestly, it’s still getting worse" - Valve Steam Machine engineer says component prices are still rising, potentially paving the way for a price increase
The memory crisis is not showing signs of abating, according to people whose job it is to price-out every component that goes into Valve's hardware.
Union County business moving back to Monroe with 350,000-square-foot facility
The company manufactures canopy systems, structural steel components and design engineering services.
Valve warns memory crisis is getting worse, retail prices lag bulk supply by up to six months
Valve says manufacturers are seeing component conditions that have not yet reached store shelves. The retail impact may arrive within three to six months.
5 Micro Center Finds With Deep Discounts In July 2026
Micro Center is holding a back-to-school sale along with regular monthly discounts that let you get laptops, computer monitors, and components on the cheap.
Swatch’s New Gold MoonSwatch Solves the Problem of the Nightmare Royal Pop Launch
Swatch's latest MoonSwatch is the Mission to the Moon 1969, a limited-edition model with components crafted from Omega’s 18K Moonshine Gold. To get one, you'll have to join a lottery.
iPhone 18 Pro Max Component Costs Could Rise Nearly $300
The bill of materials for the iPhone 18 Pro Max is expected to rise by nearly $300 compared to the iPhone 17 Pro Max, according to a new Counterpoint Research analysis. The estimate covers the 1TB storage model. NAND flash costs for the device are said to exceed $250 on their own, a figure that would cover roughly half of the iPhone 17 Pro Max's entire estimated component cost.
iPhone 18 Pro Max component costs could jump by nearly $300
A new estimate of the iPhone 18 Pro Max’s bill of materials suggests that Apple’s next flagship could cost significantly more to build than the current model.
SKF eyes role in humanoid robotics business
SKF is looking to work its way into the expanding Chinese robotics market with a recently announced agreement with Leaderdrive (LD), a global manufacturer specializing in precision robotic components. The companies are working together on a venture in China focused on high-precision transmission components for robot joints. SKF officials said the investment is a step […]
AI helped scientists discover two new superconductors, bringing them closer to a room-temperature breakthrough that could change electronics
Artificial intelligence is now fast becoming an important component in scientific investigations, and its recent achievement may have very significant effects on the advancement of technology. Scientists devised a way to utilise artificial intelligence in scientific research, which has not only resulted in the discovery of two new superconductors, but has also expedited the process of discovering even more superconductors.
NASA and Small Business Administration partner on funding key space technologies
NASA is partnering with the U.S. Small Business Administration on an effort to attract capital to invest in companies producing critical space components.
The MacRumors Show: Latest iPhone 18 Pro Leaks and Rumors
On this week's episode of The MacRumors Show, we discuss the latest leaks and rumors surrounding the iPhone 18 Pro. Subscribe to The MacRumors Show YouTube channel for more videos Tata Electronics, one of Apple's manufacturing partners in India, was hit by a ransomware attack that resulted in more than 200,000 internal files being posted online, including component lists, supplier data, and images of iPhone 18 Pro test units.
Carpinteria’s Performing Arts Center Offers a Wealth of Entertainment and Community Components
From films and plays to classes and camps, The Alcazar Theatre has been serving the Central Coast since 1928.
Bayer Group to consolidate U.S. glyphosate business into distinct entity operating as Ruveon
Advances key component of Crop Science division’s Five-Year Framework strategy / Reinforces commitment to delivering trusted Roundup® brands and glyphosate products and services to U.S. customers
China's Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo cut 2026 smartphone targets again: sources
Rising costs and component shortages lead some brands to slash outlook by up to 30%
Xbox Expects The 'Component Crisis' To Get Worse For Consoles In 2027
Specifically for console storage and memory prices
A $1000 PlayStation 6 No Longer Sounds Crazy, As Sony Doesn’t Intend To Sell Hardware At Significant Losses
The PlayStation 6 is set to launch at one of the most challenging times for consumer tech, if not the most challenging. With the rising prices of components, RAM and SSDs above all, manufacturers are having an extremely hard time keeping costs down, and with a bill of materials that is now close to $1000, there's a very high chance the system will cost way more than most anticipated. Adding fuel to the fires of speculation is Sony itself, as the company heavily suggested in a recent investor Q&A session that it won't heavily subsidize the system. "We regard hardware as the base […]
Cowboys Weekend Headlines: History's brink, Quinnen, Parker dilemmas
The Cowboys are looking to avoid an inglorious feat in 2026, while there are close eyes on two key components in the fight.
Healthcare AI Leaders Are Rapidly Trying To Outmaneuver Skyrocketing Memory And GPU Costs
Compute power has become one of the most crucial components of the healthcare delivery cycle.
Xbox Sales Are Its Lowest Ever This Month, PlayStation Its Lowest Since 2000
Xbox and PS5 sales have cratered due to skyrocketing prices based on skyrocketing component costs they have to pay.
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.
Microsoft lifts price of Xbox consoles due to soaring component costs
Microsoft said it's increasing the price of Xbox game consoles after Apple announced price hikes for MacBooks and iPads.
This simple twist could bring quantum computers closer to reality
Researchers found that twisting layered sheets of hexagonal boron nitride can dramatically change the light produced by quantum emitters embedded within the material. The technique offers an unexpected new level of control over components that could power future quantum computers, communications systems, and sensors.
Nothing CMF Phone is a RAMageddon casualty, memory now the most expensive component
Nothing’s CMF Phone series has released two models thus far and, at least for now, won’t be getting a third,...
New legislation to open Allentown NIZ’s tax records adds small-business program
Unlike previous bills, this one will have a component to enhance small businesses in the NIZ with an assistance program.
Tata's iPhone parts factory faces India health probe after farmer contamination complaints
An Indian state health authority is investigating how liquid discharged from Apple supplier Tata's iPhone components factory has affected farmers, some of whom complained about skin issues from contamination in their farmlands, according to three officials and a document reviewed by Reuters.
AI is turning Nintendo and Sony products into accidental luxury goods
With component-makers busy supplying data centres, console prices are rising as demand outstrips production capacity
SanDisk announces $3000 PS5 SSD as component pricing surge continues
$2960 plus tax, to be exact.
Community Market a super summer kickoff in Fulton
FULTON — It was a super market in Fulton on Saturday.The Fulton Community Market joined forces with the Greater Oswego-Fulton Chamber of Commerce’s Fulton Farmers Market and the CNY Arts Center Arts Market to bring a variety of goods and activities to downtown Fulton. × This page requires Javascript. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings. kAmuF=E@? $2G:?8D q2?< AC@G:565 DA@?D@CD9:A[ 2?5 E96 6G6?E H2D AC6D6?E65 3J E96 uF=E@? $A64:2= tG6?ED r@>>:EE66]k^AmkAm$F?D9:?6 8C66E65 E9@D6 2EE6?5:?8 E96 DF>>6C 2>F?:EJ @C82?:K2E:@?D]k^Am #placement_726068_0_i{width:100%;margin:0 auto;}var rnd = window.rnd || Math.floor(Math.random()*10e6);var pid726068 = window.pid726068 || rnd;var plc726068 = window.plc726068 || 0;var abkw = window.abkw || '';var absrc = 'https://ads.empowerlocal.co/adserve/;ID=181918;size=0x0;setID=726068;type=js;sw='+screen.width+';sh='+screen.height+';spr='+window.devicePixelRatio+';kw='+abkw+';pid='+pid726068+';place='+(plc726068++)+';rnd='+rnd+';click=CLICK_MACRO_PLACEHOLDER';var _absrc = absrc.split("type=js"); absrc = _absrc[0] + 'type=js;referrer=' + encodeURIComponent(document.location.href) + _absrc[1];document.write('');kAmu@@5 G6?5@CD :?4=F565 |C] |:>F?:EJ |2C>F?:EJ |2C2;@C 6G6?ED 4C62E65 2?5 >2?2865 3J E96 ?@?AC@7:E[ 2==\G@=F?E66C $A64:2= tG6?ED r@>>:EE66 @7 uF=E@?] %96 6G6?ED 2=D@ :?4=F56 E96 2??F2= u2== u6DE:G2=[ E96 r9C:DE>2D %C66 {:89E:?8 6G6?E[ 2?5 E96 C646?E q:8 %CF4< s2J] %96 $A64:2= tG6?ED r@>>:EE66 :D ?@E 277:=:2E65 H:E9 2?J 8@G6C?>6?E2= @C82?:K2E:@?]k^Am googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('ad-2978731'); });
Health under the Global Gateway: achievements and future prospects
The EU has increasingly positioned global health as a strategic component of its external action through the EU Global Health Strategy and the Global Gateway in
Oxford physicists just made Schrödinger’s cat even stranger
Oxford physicists have created an entirely new type of Schrödinger’s cat-like quantum state using components that are themselves highly quantum in nature. The advance could open new possibilities for more resilient quantum computers and deeper insights into the strange rules that govern the quantum universe.
iPhone Ultra Price: Apple’s Foldable Must Protect The iPhone 18 Pro
Apple's rumored $1,999 foldable iPhone could help absorb rising component costs and reduce pressure to raise prices on mainstream models.
UVA Health program looks to reverse children drinking too many sugary drinks
The trial has six education components to bring mindfulness and reduction to sugary drink consumption
Exclusive: US military rushed to prepare ground mission to capture Iran’s uranium, but Trump paused it, sources say
The US’ top general made a secret, rushed visit to US Central Command headquarters in Florida late last month to be briefed in person on plans for the US military to send ground troops into Iran to forcibly seize its highly enriched uranium, the key component necessary to produce a nuclear weapon, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
Xbox Memo Predicts over 5x Increase in Storage and Memory Costs by Holiday 2027
"While the entire industry is facing a components crisis, we believe we have been impacted more greatly than many of our peers".
Combining the general and the specific for urban science and policy
As the world's population becomes more and more urban, cities are emerging as key components of the Anthropocene—both as major contributors to climate change and as potential trendsetters for innovation ...
WHO urges targeted action to strengthen emergency workforce capacities for shared health risks across the Asia-Pacific region
At a time when the world is more interconnected than ever, the World Health Organization (WHO) is disseminating a comprehensive regional analysis of shared health risks across Asia and the Pacific, urging Member States to invest in enhancing workforce capacities regionwide to mitigate these risks and ensure health systems are better prepared to anticipate, tackle and withstand a range of crises and shocks. Over 100 delegates from 49 countries and areas in the Asia-Pacific region reviewed results from the regional risk analysis during the WHO-led Asia Pacific Health Security Action Framework (APHSAF) Stakeholders Meeting in Malaysia. Synthesizing insights from 21 strategic risk assessments and more than 800 multisectoral experts, the regional analysis highlighted an urgent imperative: countries must proactively invest in emergency workforce preparedness to navigate a landscape where climate hazards, disease outbreaks and geophysical events increasingly overlap. These complex converging crises create devastating, compounding impacts on health systems and communities – reiterating the need for investing in a fit-for-purpose regional health workforce and multisectoral action.Key findings: an evolving risk landscape More than half of the participating countries ranked flooding, cyclones, dengue and pandemic-potential respiratory pathogens as being of high or very high risk, while antimicrobial resistance, landslides and gastroenteritis remain widespread concerns as well. “Given that 51% – over half – of these assessed hazards are deeply interconnected, isolated health interventions are no longer sufficient,” said Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific. “Extreme weather events like cyclones and floods directly trigger subsequent disease outbreaks, while environmental degradation – driven by sea-level rise, coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion – fuels health risks across the Pacific. Mitigating these cascading risks requires unified, cross-sectoral action linking environmental, agricultural and public health policies to build true regional resilience.” Priority recommendations for action To address critical vulnerabilities, WHO calls on Member States in the Asia-Pacific region to urgently prioritize the following strategic actions: Bridge workforce capacity gaps. Embed and standardize emergency preparedness within academia to promote regional workforce interoperability. Foster multisectoral coordination. Address ad-hoc taskforce responses and fragmented surge support through formalized contingency plans and standard operating procedures that are frequently updated and tested. Secure sustainable financing for emergencies. Overcome systemic barriers to access dedicated funding for both immediate anticipatory actions and long-term emergency preparedness initiatives. Enable emergency-ready primary health care. Embed emergency management into public health workforce readiness planning. Ensure that emergency planning is inclusive. Establish clear pathways for inclusive emergency planning that actively involves communities most at risk and other vulnerable groups. Optimize communication. Update risk communication and community engagement strategies, aligning them with seasonal risk calendars. Elevating workforce readiness to meet regional health risks While the gaps identified are significant, the Asia-Pacific region possesses solid foundational pillars, including dedicated clinicians, laboratory staff, rapid response teams, emergency medical teams and extensive community networks. However, to adequately address the compounding nature of modern crises, the various components of the emergency workforce must collaborate cohesively. True resilience depends entirely on transforming this currently fragmented workforce into a highly trained, interconnected and rapidly deployable asset. To achieve this, WHO is actively advancing regional workforce capacities through the Global Health Emergency Corps initiative. This initiative – supported by the Gates Foundation and the Institute of Philanthropy – seeks to build a seamless network of emergency workforce across borders and sectors, ensuring that when a crisis strikes, a standardized, well-coordinated and trained workforce is immediately ready to respond. “Scaling up emergency workforce readiness is no longer optional,” said Dr Gina Samaan, Regional Emergency Director for WHO in the Western Pacific. “It is the definitive factor that will determine how effectively the Asia-Pacific region safeguards health and protects lives in an increasingly unpredictable future.” ____________________For more information, or to arrange media interviews, contact: Ara Johannes, WHO Western Pacific Health Emergencies Division: johannesa@who.int WHO Western Pacific Communications: wprocom@who.int
Low-cost laptops with smartphone RAM in metal chassis: Intel reveals details of Project Firefly
The DRAM crisis is making entry-level laptops more and more expensive – or forcing manufacturers to use very old components. Intel Wildcat Lake and Project Firefly are set to change this and provide serious competition for the Apple MacBook Neo. Intel now reveals more details about Project Firefly.
Holding Space for Science: 100K Hours of Microgravity Science Glovebox
On June 9, 2026, the Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG) aboard the International Space Station reached 100,000 hours of operation since its installation in the Destiny Module in 2002! This crucial laboratory facility consists of an enclosed area with the capability of accommodating experiments of many different disciplines, including those with hazardous components like bacteria and reactive chemicals. Equipped with arm inserts, this facility allows safe hands-on execution of experiments while keeping astronauts and the surrounding area free from contamination. In recognition of the facility’s milestone, check out this MSG image gallery highlighting science and scientists throughout its 100,000 hours of holding space for science.
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.
WHO urges targeted action to strengthen emergency workforce capacities for shared health risks across the Asia-Pacific region
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 11 June 2026 – At a time when the world is more interconnected than ever, the World Health Organization (WHO) is disseminating a comprehensive regional analysis of shared health risks across Asia and the Pacific, urging Member States to invest in enhancing workforce capacities regionwide to mitigate these risks and ensure health systems are better prepared to anticipate, tackle and withstand a range of crises and shocks. Over 100 delegates from 49 countries and areas in the Asia-Pacific region reviewed results from the regional risk analysis during the WHO-led Asia Pacific Health Security Action Framework (APSHAF) Stakeholders Meeting in Malaysia. Synthesizing insights from 21 strategic risk assessments and more than 800 multisectoral experts, the regional analysis highlighted an urgent imperative: countries must proactively invest in emergency workforce preparedness to navigate a landscape where climate hazards, disease outbreaks and geophysical events increasingly overlap. These complex converging crises create devastating, compounding impacts on health systems and communities - reiterating the need for investing in a fit-for-purpose regional health workforce and multisectoral action. Key findings: an evolving risk landscape More than half of the participating countries ranked flooding, cyclones, dengue and pandemic-potential respiratory pathogens as being of high or very high risk, while antimicrobial resistance, landslides and gastroenteritis remain widespread concerns as well. “Given that 51% - over half - of these assessed hazards are deeply interconnected, isolated health interventions are no longer sufficient,” said Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific. “Extreme weather events like cyclones and floods directly trigger subsequent disease outbreaks, while environmental degradation - driven by sea-level rise, coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion - fuels health risks across the Pacific. Mitigating these cascading risks requires unified, cross-sectoral action linking environmental, agricultural and public health policies to build true regional resilience.” Priority recommendations for action To address critical vulnerabilities, WHO calls on Member States in the Asia-Pacific region to urgently prioritize the following strategic actions: Bridge workforce capacity gaps. Embed and standardize emergency preparedness within academia to promote regional workforce interoperability. Foster multisectoral coordination. Address ad-hoc taskforce responses and fragmented surge support through formalized contingency plans and standard operating procedures that are frequently updated and tested. Secure sustainable financing for emergencies. Overcome systemic barriers to access dedicated funding for both immediate anticipatory actions and long-term emergency preparedness initiatives. Enable emergency-ready primary health care. Embed emergency management into public health workforce readiness planning. Ensure that emergency planning is inclusive. Establish clear pathways for inclusive emergency planning that actively involves communities most at risk and other vulnerable groups. Optimize communication. Update risk communication and community engagement strategies, aligning them with seasonal risk calendars. Elevating workforce readiness to meet regional health risks While the gaps identified are significant, the Asia-Pacific region possesses solid foundational pillars, including dedicated clinicians, laboratory staff, rapid response teams, emergency medical teams and extensive community networks. However, to adequately address the compounding nature of modern crises, the various components of the emergency workforce must collaborate cohesively. True resilience depends entirely on transforming this currently fragmented workforce into a highly trained, interconnected and rapidly deployable asset. To achieve this, WHO is actively advancing regional workforce capacities through the Global Health Emergency Corps initiative. This initiative - supported by the Gates Foundation and Institute of Philanthropy - seeks to build a seamless network of emergency workforce across borders and sectors, ensuring that when a crisis strikes, a standardized, well-coordinated and trained workforce is immediately ready to respond. “Scaling up emergency workforce readiness is no longer optional,” said Dr Gina Samaan, Regional Emergency Director for WHO in the Western Pacific. “It is the definitive factor that will determine how effectively the Asia-Pacific region safeguards health and protects lives in an increasingly unpredictable future.” For more information, or to arrange media interviews, contact: Ara Johannes, WHO Western Pacific Health Emergencies Division: johannesa@who.int WHO Western Pacific Communications: wprocom@who.int
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From writing emails to generating computer code, much of the artificial intelligence prevalent in our daily lives has succeeded by mastering one domain: text. However, this leaves a major blind spot in the physical sciences, where models depend on the high-resolution, three-dimensional data of the physical world, like the intricate lattice of atoms in a crystal. Delivering on the promise of using AI for science requires teaching these data-driven text models to seamlessly “talk to” physics-based models. Now, a new AI framework from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), called MatterChat, solves this problem by creating a specialized “bridge.” It connects the conversational power of a Large Language Model (LLM) with a physics-based AI that models “interatomic potentials”: the complex physical forces between atoms. The resulting system already significantly outperforms general-purpose AI tools like GPT-4 at predicting material properties, and the team hopes it can accelerate scientific discovery by serving as a robust research partner that provides grounded insights and generates step-by-step instructions for synthesizing novel materials. A paper describing this work was recently published in Nature Machine Intelligence. “Traditional simulations can provide the physical rigor required for materials science, yet their computational cost remains prohibitive for high-throughput screening. Conversely, while LLMs excel at rapid knowledge synthesis, they inherently lack the ‘structural vision’ to interpret materials directly from their underlying atomic coordinates,” said Yingheng Tang, a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Applied Math and Computational Research Division (AMCR) and lead author on the paper. “MatterChat was built to solve this dilemma, empowering LLMs with a structural ‘vision’ that allows researchers to leverage their full potential for solving complex, real-world materials challenges.” Empowering language models to solve complex challenges in materials science To build MatterChat, the Berkeley Lab team drew inspiration from technologies like Vision Question Answering (VQA) and Text-to-Image (T2I) generation. In these tasks, AI must translate high-level text concepts into visual images, or vice versa. Doing so requires developers to build tools that “bridge” two fundamentally different forms of data. The researchers adapted this concept to the physical sciences. With MatterChat, they created a “bridge model” that successfully connects an LLM’s general knowledge with the deep understanding of the atomic-scale world encoded in scientific interatomic potentials. Until now, researchers using LLMs to solve materials problems usually had to feed them raw data files as if they were just strings of text. It’s like asking an AI to understand a complex 3D engine based only on a parts list: the LLM can read the names, but it can’t “see” how the atoms fit together in space. MatterChat solves this by training a specialized AI bridge model, pre-trained on millions of crystal structures and an LLM, to align the LLM’s representation of the world with the interatomic potential’s representation of the world. The bridge model can translate physical insights into a format the LLM can actually understand. By giving the LLM these “scientific eyes”— a scientific “inductive bias” in the terminology of AI — the Berkeley Lab team has transformed it into a robust research tool capable of providing grounded scientific insights into complex materials challenges, such as predicting thermal stability or analyzing electronic band gaps. “We think of atoms as living in a physical space, but from a machine learning perspective, they are just vectors living in some very non-trivially structured manifold in a high-dimensional Euclidean space; and, of course, the same is true for the sentences and paragraphs that we use to express our ideas about those atoms,” said co-author Michael Mahoney, Berkeley Lab’s Scientific Data Division (SDD) AI Initiative Research Lead. “The bridge model basically gets those two structures to ‘talk with’ each other.” As a proof-of-concept of this general approach, the team trained their bridge model on a dataset curated by pairing nearly 143,000 stable atomic structures from the Materials Project with their corresponding physical properties. This training data was automatically assembled using the Materials Project’s API and deliberately enriched with properties fundamental to microelectronics design — like formation energy and bandgap — allowing MatterChat to learn the complex patterns connecting a material’s atomic blueprint to its functional performance. To validate their model, the researchers benchmarked MatterChat against a suite of other AI systems, from general-purpose LLMs to other specialized scientific AI methods. The results show that MatterChat consistently outperformed its competitors across a range of tasks. The model was more accurate in classifying material types and demonstrated superior precision in predicting numerical properties. For example, it excelled at predicting a material’s bandgap, a property critical for designing new electronics from high-capacity energy storage to next-generation computer chips. “Our design is significantly more efficient because we don’t have to build a massive AI model from the ground up,” said co-author Zhi (Jackie) Yao, a research scientist in Berkeley Lab’s AMCR. “Instead, we take two powerful, pre-trained models — a structural encoder for materials physics and an open-source LLM — and use them off-the-shelf. The only component we actually train is the lightweight ‘bridge model’ that translates between them. It’s the difference between building an entire car factory and simply designing a smart adapter that connects a world-class engine to a world-class navigation system. This approach is not only computationally efficient, but also makes the system modular, so we can easily upgrade components or adapt the bridge for other scientific domains in the future.” Crucially, this modular design highlights exactly how institutions like Berkeley Lab and the Department of Energy are carving out a highly valuable niche in the booming AI landscape. Rather than competing with Silicon Valley tech giants to build ever-larger language models from scratch, the lab is focusing on the specialized connective tissue that makes commercial AI useful for hardcore science. Because the bridge model approach underlying MatterChat is forward-compatible, it is perfectly positioned to leverage these parallel tracks of innovation. As Mahoney pointed out, “We expect that industry will continue to develop improved LLMs, and we expect domain scientists and facilities will continue to generate new data. An important part of scientific machine learning is not simply to solve problems on today’s data, but instead to develop general methods that will be forward-compatible with orders of magnitude more data, whether from scientific domains or from LLMs.” According to Yao, the MatterChat project, which was initially developed and enhanced with funding from a Berkeley Lab Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) Program, will now expand its capabilities. In a collaboration with Fermilab, MatterChat is already contributing to a U.S. Department of Energy Genesis Mission project — called Accelerating eXtreme Environment Specs-to-Silicon (AXESS) — that aims to speed up the development of next-generation, high-speed, radiation-hardened detectors for challenging particle physics experiments by using advanced 3D integrated circuits (chiplets) and AI-driven data analysis. In addition to the LDRD support, the team also credits supercomputing resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), located at Berkeley Lab, with MatterChat’s success. “We are incredibly grateful to NERSC; this research simply would not have happened without access to the Perlmutter supercomputer through their AI for Science program,” said Tang. Wenbin Xu, a NERSC postdoctoral fellow at the time, was also a major co-author of the work, as was Benjamin Erichson, a research scientist in Berkeley Lab’s SDD, highlighting the benefits of AMCR-SDD collaboration on AI for science. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
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Howard Community College Featured in 'State of Business' Address
In his Business Outlook Luncheon remarks at Turf Valley Resort last week, Howard County Executive Calvin Ball outlined how Howard County “stands on business” through five pillars: managing crises, investing in people, backing businesses, making strategic investments, and preparing for the future. Howard Community College appears by name in the pillar that anchors the others: investing in people. Dr. Ball highlighted the $11 million county investment in HCC’s Cathy and Danny Bell Workforce and Trades Center, which will open this fall. He described the facility as a world-class center with state-of-the-art training in key industries, championed by HCC President Dr. Daria J. Willis, and positioned to help Howard County compete with institutions worldwide. He also recognized HCC’s Complete4Success program, supported by a $3.5 million county investment in 2022, as a continuing driver of certifications and degrees that prepare students to enter Howard County’s workforce ready to contribute on day one. Dr. Ball connected HCC’s work to the broader economic moment in the county, including more than 1,580 apprentices now training across Howard County businesses, up from roughly 1,100 in 2018, and the SPARK program that bridges classroom learning to high-demand industries. Each of these efforts depends on the kind of workforce pipeline HCC is built to deliver. Educational Services is one of the top three employment sectors for county residents, alongside Professional, Scientific, & Technical Services and Health Care & Social Assistance. HCC will award 1,263 degrees next week at its annual commencement ceremony, and every year, that output feeds directly into the industries the County Executive named as drivers of Howard County’s growth. The full picture also includes the families who are not yet there. The 2024 ALICE update from United Way of Central Maryland found that 35,346 households in Howard County, 29% of the total, fell below the ALICE Threshold in 2022, meaning they earned more than the Federal Poverty Level but less than the basic cost of living in the county. The Household Survival Budget for a Howard County family of two adults, an infant, and a preschooler reached $118,608 annually, requiring an hourly wage of $59.30 to cover housing, child care, food, transportation, and other essentials. Affluence and economic strain coexist within the same county lines. That gap is the reason higher education and economic development are inseparable. Every certification, associate degree, and apprenticeship credential issued at HCC represents a household closer to crossing the ALICE Threshold and into long-term financial stability. The Bell Center, Complete4Success, Howard P.R.I.D.E., Parent Scholars, and the institution’s transfer-rate gains are significant components of Howard County’s economic mobility infrastructure. HCC is grateful to Dr. Ball for his sustained partnership over nearly eight years of service and for recognizing that this college plays a central role in the economic story Howard County is telling. Standing on business in Howard County means standing alongside the flagship institution that prepares its workforce.
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Advancing epidemic and pandemic preparedness through research readiness: SEAR Unity Studies Network Sites chart the way forward in 2026
On 25 March 2026, WHO Regional Office for the South‑East Asia Region (SEARO) convened the first meeting of the SEAR Chapter of the Unity Studies Network Meeting in 2026 to take stock of progress and plan next steps for strengthening epidemic and pandemic preparedness across the Region. The meeting focused on reviewing the ongoing adaptation of selected, standard Unity Study methodologies, sharing field implementation experiences from 2025, and identifying key priorities to guide collaborative work in 2026.Held virtually, the meeting brought together representatives from six Unity Studies network sites across five countries (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand) as well as participants from all three levels of WHO.The meeting took place against the backdrop of ongoing regional efforts in South‑East Asia to strengthen early investigations and studies for epidemic and pandemic preparedness, with a focus on pandemic influenza and other emerging respiratory pathogens with epidemic and pandemic potential. In this context, and as part of preparedness for the rapid generation of evidence, the WHO Health Emergencies Programme in SEAR (WHE/SEAR) encourages Unity Studies sites to adapt prioritized, standardized Unity Study protocols to their national contexts. This approach supports the generation of timely and reliable evidence to inform public health decision‑making during epidemics and pandemics.These efforts are supported through a combination of experience sharing, participation in the global Unity Studies network webinars, capacity‑building of the national public health workforce, and regional collaboration that promotes inter‑country, inter‑agency, and inter‑ministerial action. In parallel, sites are encouraged to explore diversified funding sources to help sustain research preparedness over the long term.Discussions highlighted the importance of WHO’s catalytic financial support through the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (PIP) Partnership Contributions (PIP‑PC). When combined with national and institutional resources, this support enables countries and sites to maintain continuity of activities at a core level and remain prepared to respond rapidly and effectively to future epidemics and pandemics.Regional and Global Updates: Opening the session, Dr Pushpa Ranjan Wijesinghe, Programme Area Manager, Pandemic and Epidemic Management (PEM) Unit, WHO Health Emergencies Programme, highlighted the progress made in operationalizing the Unity Studies Network across the Region and acknowledged the collaborative efforts of WHO at all three levels, together with country unity studies sites. He emphasized the availability of limited but catalytic funding through the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (PIP) Partnership Contribution (PIP‑PC) workplan at SEARO to sustain network activities in 2026, while encouraging sites to leverage additional funding sources to expand implementation.Representing SEARO, Dr Ashok Basnet, consultant, Pandemic Influenza Preparedness reported that, at the regional level, the Unity Studies Network currently includes six sites across five countries: Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. He noted that in 2025, catalytic funding supported protocol adaptation, training, and pilot implementation. In addition, a regional Unity Studies symposium held during the Global Public Health Summit in Sri Lanka strengthened and advocated collaboration between the Unity Studies site, national decision‑making forum, relevant technical units of the ministry of health, WHO and other partners.The symposium also highlighted the role of early investigations and studies as a key component of a multi‑source surveillance system needed at country level to generate a broad range of evidence. It underscored the critical role of country Unity Studies sites and similar research entities in generating evidence to support public health decision‑making during epidemics and pandemics.Participants of the WHO GISRS Unity Studies Sites Network- SEAR Chapter Meeting 2026 (Photo credit- PEM/WHE/SEARO). SEARO also updated participants on ongoing efforts to develop a regional Unity Studies webpage and to promote participation in global knowledge‑sharing platforms, including webinars and the WHO Community of Practice. Priorities for 2026 include supporting the implementation of Unity protocols, strengthening collaboration and experience sharing across sites, documenting and publishing findings, integrating Unity Studies activities as a component of multi-source national surveillance systems, and building workforce capacity.Dr Nickle Boddington of the Global Influenza Programme (GIP) at WHO Headquarters, which coordinates the Unity Studies Network globally, provided updates on global Unity Studies activities, noting that the network has expanded to 16 sites worldwide. New and updated protocols, including rapid clinical severity assessment tools and standardized data platforms, are being developed to support implementation. The global Community of Practice has also been launched to facilitate technical exchange, and continued support will be provided to sites for protocol adaptation, ethical approvals, and readiness for early investigation during outbreaks. Updates from Unity Studies sites in SEAR in 2025Unity Studies sites shared progress and experiences in implementing protocols across diverse country contexts. Sites initiated activities in 2025 using catalytic funding from SEARO, complemented by the mobilization of internal national resources. The Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR), Bangladesh, reported the adoption and piloting of investigation protocols on non‑seasonal influenza and emerging respiratory diseases during recent avian influenza outbreaks, demonstrating a multi‑source funding approach involving government, WHO and One Health partners.The Hamdard Institute of Medical Sciences and Research (HIMSR), New Delhi, India, highlighted the piloting of household transmission investigation studies, the expansion of the national Unity Studies network, and the contribution of study findings to global evidence through published outputs. The All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, India, shared experiences from large‑scale seroprevalence studies conducted during the COVID‑19 pandemic, recent efforts to strengthen national Unity network sites through training activities, and plans to initiate multi‑centre studies on respiratory viruses.Similarly, Prince of Songkla University, Thailand, highlighted its experience in developing integrated surveillance and diagnostic protocols for multiple respiratory pathogens, enhancing readiness for targeted investigations of emerging threats. The University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka, reported ongoing engagement with the Ministry of Health and exploration of additional funding sources to initiate studies. Meanwhile, the National Public Health Laboratory, Nepal, provided updates on continued coordination with national stakeholders to initiate implementation, despite delays related to the country context.Across sites, shared experiences underscored the importance of protocol adaptation, multisectoral collaboration, and sustainable funding to operationalize Unity Studies and generate evidence for public health action.Discussions and Way ForwardThe meeting reinforced key priorities for 2026, including strengthening unity studies protocol implementation, enhancing collaboration, knowledge sharing, integrating research as a component of national multi-source surveillance systems, and ensuring that generated evidence informs public health decision‑making. Participants also emphasized the importance of documentation, visibility, and leveraging multiple funding sources, and agreed on the following action points.Unity Studies Sites and WHO Country Offices:Advance adoption and implementation of at least one Unity protocol, continuing activities initiated in 2025 with catalytic funding, supplemented with other sources of funding where feasible.Document site-specific experiences, outcomes, and lessons learned; participate in regional and global knowledge-sharing platforms including WHO webinars and the Community of Practice.Work closely with ministries of health to establish unified national platforms for translating generated evidence into national public health decision-making. WHO Country Offices may facilitate technical support and complementary, synergistic funding opportunities where feasible. WHO Regional OfficeCoordinate with WHO Country Offices to support implementation of core unity studies activities by network sites through catalytic funding and provide technical guidance and virtual engagement opportunities throughout 2026.Facilitate the participation of all Unity Studies sites in the regional meeting on Unity Studies implementation in October 2026, to be held back‑to‑back with the Annual SEAR Regional PIP‑PC Meeting; develop and host a SEAR Unity Studies website; and mobilize support from academic institutions within the SEAR Unity Studies Network to support the development of regional manuscripts that showcase Unity Studies activities to scientific audiences and promote knowledge‑sharing.Explore complementary funding opportunities and partnerships to sustain and expand network activities across the Region.WHO HeadquartersProvide global technical guidance, updated protocols, and toolkits to support the implementation of Unity Studies in SEAR.Facilitate engagement of SEAR sites in global webinars, the Community of Practice, and opportunities to showcase their work.Support joint publications, inclusion of SEAR experiences in global outputs, and identification of additional funding and collaborative opportunities to strengthen Unity Studies activities.
Galaxy Z TriFold 2 will outshine the OG with rumored improvements
Samsung is working on a critical Galaxy Z TriFold 2 component.
UNC Hussman offers new sports play-by-play class | UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media
This story, written by UNC Hussman alumna Caroline Daly ’24, was originally published on unc.edu. The UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media has a new, hands-on class available for students interested in sports careers. Students in “MEJO 390: Sports Commentary and Play-By-Play” can call live radio broadcasts for Carolina sporting events, streamed live on the Go Heels website. This spring, 11 students are calling mostly softball games to gain experience and learn the preparation needed for a successful broadcast. The class is capped at a small number to provide consistent, individual feedback. Matt Krause, the radio voice of Carolina women’s basketball, teaches the class to help students sharpen their skills, using his experience with the Tar Heels and calling games for ACC Network and ACC Network Extra. “There is no substitute for live reps, and that is the only way you get better. The classroom component teaches you how to get better, but going about that requires sitting in that chair, making mistakes and being able to know your broadcast is going somewhere,” Krause said. “These students are doing real live games, and they will have tape where if they want to pursue this. They will have ready-made demos to send for jobs. Being able to utilize all the resources of UNC, GoHeels Productions and the Carolina Athletics brand and create these opportunities for students is really impactful.” In the class, students learn fundamentals like how to announce starting lineups for different sports and how to conduct research before games. Krause has led the class in mock preparation exercises, looking at game charts with information about the different teams and players that they can refer to at pivotal moments during the game. Krause and the students then critique each other, listening to clips from the past week to find ways to improve. It’s a rare class without a slew of quizzes or assignments. Their main tasks are calling games and making a portfolio or demo reel of their best calls at the end of the semester, all with the goal of being ready to step into similar roles after graduation. Laible live streams her coverage on the GoHeels website. Calling a live game while broadcasting her coverage allows her to get hands on experience. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill) Junior Anna Laible ’27 wished for a class just like this. Her first year at Carolina, she interned with the Coastal Plain League, where she was introduced to play-by-play for baseball. “I enjoy the challenge and uncertainty of each game being different because each sport looks a little different,” said Laible. “Each game is different — not just with teams but what could happen with certain records being broken or random trends. That’s what I enjoy most.” She wanted more opportunities for reps during college to prepare for a career after Carolina, so she pitched an idea for the class to Livis Freeman ’99, distinguished associate professor of sports communication. Laible and Freeman reached out to GoHeels Productions for a partnership and then connected with Krause. “This is how at UNC Hussman we separate ourselves: Our students go into the field ready,” said Freeman. “The biggest compliment we get it is when our students start their careers, they don’t need any hand-holding.” Laible calls a Carolina softball game at Kessing Stadium – after pitching the idea to Hussman faculty. Her interest in sports commentary allowed her to apply her interest as she attends Carolina. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill) Laible is now a student in the class, which has helped her strengthen her skills and deepen her passion for the field. The goal is to expand to other sports like soccer, lacrosse and field hockey. “The hands-on experience I’ve gotten here is invaluable. I’ve loved the classes and professors because they’ve taught me a lot, but it’s also the things outside of class, too, that have helped me grow,” said Laible. “Since being at UNC, I’ve grown a lot in the versatility, from doing writing to production and commentating. UNC Hussman and Carolina have given me the ability to be strong and well rounded.”
Microsoft Raises Prices for All Surface PCs, Making Them More Expensive Than Equivalent Macs
Microsoft increased prices for all of its Surface PCs this week, with most models priced hundreds of dollars higher than they were when launching. Windows Central highlighted the increases, which now see Microsoft's mid-range models priced above $1,000 and flagship models priced starting at $1,500. A Microsoft spokesperson said the price increase was due to "recent increases in memory and component costs".
Opinion: Science is recognizing the protective effects of religion
A new study suggests that religion and spirituality could be a component in preventing and recovering from addiction
Framework CEO warns AI boom may lead to a scenario where "personal computing as we know it is dead”
Framework CEO Nirav Patel warns that the AI boom and a “winner-takes-all” scramble for chips and storage could drive up component costs and push consumers toward cloud-leased, closed devices, effectively ending personal computing as traditionally understood. While acknowledging progress in repairability across the industry, he positions Framework’s upcoming Next Gen Event as part of a renewed pledge to defend user ownership through upgradable, repairable hardware and local control over data and computation.
Preserving access for vulnerable communities should be a top priority in Congress
By Tony Henderson As both a minister and as president of the NAACP Denver, I believe access to high-quality, accessible health care is a right that should be afforded to each and every one of us. To that end, Medicare Advantage has become a critical component of our health system, helping secure access to care […]
CIM Group and Partners in Miami Worldcenter Sell Development’s Retail and Entertainment District to Falcone Group, ROK Acquisitions, Andrew Mirmelli, The Davis Companies and Jamestown
CIM Group and its partners in Miami Worldcenter have sold retail and entertainment district component of the 27-acre development in downtown Miami.
iPhone 18 Pro Launching Later This Year With These 12 New Features
While the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are not expected to launch for more than five more months, there are already plenty of rumors about the devices. It was initially reported that the iPhone 18 Pro models would have fully under-screen Face ID, with only a front camera visible in the top-left corner of the screen. However, the latest rumors indicate that only one Face ID component will be moved under the screen on the devices, which will result in merely a smaller Dynamic Island.
MSU Plans to Expand Business Offerings on Campus. Will it Have an Impact on Downtown East Lansing?
While MSU scrapped major components of its initial Spartan Gateway project proposal, the university still plans to add retail businesses, restaurants and more to campus.
Sharing her passion for science
By Danielle Rush Communications Specialist, Indiana University Kokomo Hisako Masuda, Indiana University Kokomo professor of biochemistry, was honored by the Indiana Academy of Science (IAS) as its 2026 Distinguished Scholar. The award is given to an individual who is recognized by the IAS as having an exceptional record of scholarship. Recipients are selected from nominations submitted to its awards committee. “I was surprised,” said Masuda, who joined IU Kokomo’s faculty in 2013. “I feel there are many good scientists in the Academy, so I wasn’t expecting it at all.” Patrick Motl, dean of the School of Sciences, said the Academy recognizes up to one member per year, and that Masuda is the second or third IU Kokomo faculty member to receive the commendation. “Clearly this speaks to the strength of Dr. Masuda’s accomplishments in research and scholarship and that her work stands out amongst her peers in Indiana,” said Motl, who received the award in 2019. “Many of the institutions that participate in the IAS are undergraduate institutions or primarily undergraduate institutions, but even having that caveat, Dr. Masuda has built and maintains a very active research program in her lab, working exclusively with undergraduates. She is passionate about science and can share that passion with her students. To carry on a quality research program with so many students involved in so many projects is truly remarkable and I am glad that the IAS acknowledged that for Dr. Masuda.” The IAS specifically commended her for involving more than 50 undergraduates in her research in bacterial metabolism, genomics, and their phenotypic plasticity at IU Kokomo, and publishing 23 articles with many student co-authors. Masuda’s current work primarily focuses on biodegradation and chemical repurposing of nylon. Using soil bacteria, her lab studies bacterial biodegradation of nylon and other environmental pollutants. She applies principles of green chemistry while developing a method to convert nylon waste into other nontoxic polymers. In collaborative work with health scientists, her lab investigates gut microbiomes of Indiana native birds as well as human subjects in a clinical study. She became interested in converting plastic waste while earning her Ph.D. at Rutgers University, working on methods to remove environmental waste not using chemicals or other intrusive methods. She learned about Nylon 11, which is used in pipes for transferring oil, interior components for cars, catheters, and in other industrial hard plastics. Nylon 11 is nontoxic, she added, so it is safe to include students in the research. “Those are considered to be nonbiodegradable, and have to go to a landfill,” she said. “I thought if we could come up with a way to biodegrade it, that would make some kind of impact.” Eventually, she wants to develop a product that would convert nylon waste to something useful, and to reduce waste and microplastics in the environment. “That would be my goal at some point, that we can make that change, and also make people more aware of their use of plastics,” she said. “I hope students stop to think about what we can do as scientists to address issues currently impacting us.” She appreciates the IAS for its support of scientific research at Indiana institutions, and IU Kokomo and the School of Sciences for providing funding for students to attend the Academy’s annual meeting. She added that IU Kokomo has also supported her research with funding from the School of Sciences and Academic Affairs. “Without that, I couldn’t do my research,” she said. Masuda has also earned a Senior Research Grant from the IAS, IU Kokomo’s Distinguished Research Award, and the IU Kokomo Junior Faculty Annual Research Award. She is a Fellow of the Indiana Academy of Science. Education is KEY at Indiana University Kokomo.
A 200-year-old light trick just transformed quantum encryption
Scientists have unveiled a new approach to ultra-secure communication that could make quantum encryption simpler and more efficient than ever before. By harnessing a 19th-century optics phenomenon called the Talbot effect, researchers developed a system that sends information using multiple states of single photons instead of just two, dramatically boosting data capacity. Even more impressive, the setup works with standard components and requires only a single detector, reducing cost and complexity.
iOS 27 Siri Update Will Let Users Make Multiple Requests at Once
The updated version of Siri that Apple plans to release in iOS 27 may be able to handle multiple commands in a single query, reports Bloomberg. With the feature, users would be able to make multi-step requests that Siri would carry out, such as getting directions to a location and then sending those directions to someone in a message. Siri has long been limited to a single command for most requests, and the personal assistant is not able to parse queries with multiple components.