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ProPublica: “Researchers at Stanford University modeled how many people could die or be disabled in 25 years if vaccines for polio, measles, rubella or diphtheria were no longer available. Before vaccines, death and disability stalked children. Then shots turned once-common infections into something doctors only read about in textbooks. When immunization rates drop, however, plagues …
FBI investigating deaths and disappearances of staff at secretive government laboratories. Here’s what we know. “At least 10 scientists and researchers connected to U.S. nuclear and aerospace programs have died or gone missing since 2023, prompting concern in Congress and a House Oversight Committee investigation. Lawmakers, including James Comer, are seeking answers from federal agencies …
The Atlantic – Gift Article: “The best thing I watched in the past year was an epically long movie about retired militants, but it wasn’t One Battle After Another, the Oscar winner for Best Picture. It was The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-hour documentary from 1969 about life in Nazi-occupied France. Reviewing the film …
CounterSpin interview with Lia Holland on the Internet Archive. “Janine Jackson: A recent report by Wired‘s Kate Knibbs leads with the contradiction: USA Today published a story recently on how ICE is misinforming about its detainment policies, a case that the paper built on data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a nonprofit digital library …
The “State of the Air” 2026 report “finds that even after decades of successful efforts to reduce sources of air pollution, 44% of Americans—152.3 million people—are living in places that get failing grades for unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution. We found that nearly half of American children (46%, or 33.5 million people under …
Literary Hub: “Lately there has been a lot of hand-wringing, and rightly so, about if and how the publishing industry will deal with AI in the wake of the cancelation of the first major book deal due to suspected AI usage. There is no easy solution to AI detection for many reasons, partly because large …
Wired: “The cyber capabilities of AI models have experts rattled. AI’s social skills may be just as dangerous.”
Wes Siler’s Newsletter – “Testifying in front of the House of Representatives on Monday, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum revealed that the maintenance backlog in national parks now totals over $35 billion. This is the first time we’ve gotten an estimate on the increase to the backlog caused by the Trump administration’s first year …
Ars Technica: “Newly unsealed emails reveal the sneaky ways that Amazon colludes with rivals to raise prices across the Internet on “everything from diapers to clothing to furniture,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta alleged in a press release Monday. “Amazon and a competitor will knowingly stop price matching each other, so that one retailer can increase …
Bloomberg (Gift Article): “A small group of unauthorized users have accessed Anthropic PBC’s new Mythos AI model, a technology that the company says is so powerful it can enable dangerous cyberattacks, according to a person familiar with the matter and documentation viewed by Bloomberg News. A handful of users in a private online forum gained …
PHYS.org: “The next time you find yourself lulled by the patter of rain outside your window, think how that same sprinkle might sound if you were a tiny seed planted directly below a free-falling droplet. Would you still be similarly soothed? In fact, MIT engineers have found the opposite to be the case: Some seeds …
The Verge: “Nothing has launched Essential Voice, a dictation tool that tidies speech in more than 100 languages and sounds similar to a product Google launched earlier this month. It supports shortcuts for repeated words and phrases and speech-to-text translation. It’s currently only available for Phone (3) and Phone (4a) Pro, but Nothing hopes it’s …