How JPMorgan Chase made its latest Billions
Data is Beautiful – How JPMorgan Chase made its latest Billions
FBI executes search warrant at Washington Post reporter’s home
“The FBI executed a search warrant Wednesday morning at a Washington Post reporter’s home as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials. The reporter, Hannah Natanson, was at her home in Virginia at the time of the search. Federal agents searched her home and her devices. The …
From sea slugs to sunflowers, California Academy of Sciences described 72 new species in 2025
Mongabay California Academy of Sciences researchers and collaborators described 72 new-to-science species in 2025, including a bird, fish, plants, sea slugs, and insects found across six continents, from ocean depths to national parks. The discoveries include the first new plant genus found in a U.S. national park in nearly 50 years — a fuzzy wildflower …
EPA to Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution
The New York Times Gift Article [no paywall] – “In a reversal, the agency plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits, and not the monetary value of saving human lives, documents show. For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency has calculated the health benefits of reducing air pollution, using the cost …
The Looming Data Loss That Threatens Public Safety and Prosperity
EOS – Cuts to funding and staff needed to maintain trusted datasets of reference Earth system observations could limit their availability and quality, undermining hazard predictions and risk assessments. From farming and engineering to emergency management and insurance, many industries critical to daily life rely on Earth system and related socioeconomic datasets. NOAA has linked …
I analyzed 750,000 academic citations to find out what “recent” actually means in different fields
Data is Beautiful – JoonSimJoon: “When researchers write “recent studies show…” – how recent is recent, really? I scraped 749,853 references from 19,108 papers across 200 academic fields using OpenAlex data to find out. TL;DR: Average “recent” = about 5 years Virology/Pandemic research: 2 years (half their citations are from the last 2 years!) Philosophy/History: …
Trump is trying to change how the midterm elections are conducted
Washington Post [no paywall]: “Five years ago, President Donald Trump pressured Republican county election officials, state lawmakers and members of Congress to find him votes after he lost his reelection bid. Now, he’s seeking to change the rules before ballots are cast. Trump, openly fearful that a Congress controlled by Democrats could investigate him, They …
Homelessness and Housing Program Trends by State Display Date
Urban Institute, December 31, 2025: “On any given night, hundreds of thousands of people across the country do not have a safe and stable place to sleep. Though this homelessness crisis affects every state, each person and community experiences homelessness differently. As a result, local data about the number of people unhoused and the resources …
AI’s Memorization Crisis Large language models don’t “learn”—they copy.
The Atlantic – And that could change everything for the tech industry. Alex Reisner: “On Tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden. Four popular large language models—OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok—have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained …
When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?
The Pragmatic Engineer: “No longer a hypothetical question, this is a mega-trend set to hit the tech industry, Gergely Orosz, Jan 06, 2026. “This winter break was an opportunity for devs to step back from day-to-day work and play around with side projects – including using AI agents to juice up those half-baked or incomplete …
Google pulls AI overviews for some medical searches & ChatGPT Health lets you connect medical records to AI that makes things up
The Verge – no paywall: “Earlier this month, The Guardian published an investigation that showed Google was serving up misleading and outright false information via its AI overviews in response to certain medical inquiries. Now those results appear to have been removed. According to the original report: In one case that experts described as “really …
Can AI do your job? See the results from hundreds of tests.
Washington Post via MSN no paywall: “Imagine you are redesigning your living space. You could hire an interior designer for a few thousand dollars. Or you could ask an artificial intelligence tool such as ChatGPT to do it instead. But can AI actually do the work? See what happened in a study that compared how well …