HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revealed a record-breaking number for America’s obesity rate. It has dropped by 2.5 percent in a little over one year, which is the first drop in that measurement in over 50 years.
05 Sci-Tech
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What just happened? The UK’s long-expected social media ban for under-16s has finally been confirmed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, though it’s not expected to be introduced until spring 2027. The PM also revealed that livestreaming will be prohibited, while restrictions will be enabled by default for 17-year-olds.
The UK was one of several countries examining potential under-16 social media bans, following the lead of nations such as Australia.
On Monday, Starmer announced a full, rather than partial, ban as he is not “prepared to compromise on the safety and happiness of our children.”
“Social media is making children unhappy, it’s making it easier for bullies to harass and abuse them, and it could even be harming their mental health,” the Prime Minister added.
The ban also includes restrictions on online products such as gaming apps, including removing the option to message with strangers.
Pro-Life States Want to Protect People From Water Contaminated With Abortion Drugs– www.lifenews.com
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Republicans are calling on federal authorities to impose stringent regulations on the abortion drug mifepristone, citing the dangers posed by the drug’s largely unregulated use to Americans’ drinking water. A coalition of 15 red state attorneys general is urging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to add mifepristone to the agency’s Contaminant Candidate List, which would likely trigger safety studies and potentially stricter regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The latest state to join the effort was Indiana.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita (R) said in a press release this week that the use of the abortion drug is “causing pain and suffering to women. … Obviously, this starts with the individuals persuaded by Planned Parenthood and Big Pharma to use mifepristone to abort their pregnancies, but increasingly it extends to other women who might ingest the drug from their local water supplies.” Rokita noted that when a woman ingests mifepristone, whether via the drug in pill form or via mifepristone contaminating drinking water, the chemicals block the natural production of the hormone progesterone and erodes an unborn baby’s uterine environment. “The baby, in effect, is starved to death in the womb,” the Hoosier State A.G.’s office said.
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A cargo ship crossing the North Pacific encountered a powerful storm that swept several shipping containers into the ocean. One of those containers carried 28,800 plastic bath toys consisting of yellow ducks, blue turtles, red beavers, and green frogs. What appeared to be a routine shipping accident soon turned into one of the most unusual scientific experiments in history. As the toys drifted across oceans for years, researchers tracked their movements and used the information to gain a deeper understanding of how ocean currents move around the planet. The accidental spill provided scientists with valuable data that would have been extremely difficult and expensive to collect through traditional methods.
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The U.S. government’s decision to stop Anthropic from offering its Mythos and Fable 5 models to non-U.S. nationals may end up providing a big boost to the adoption of open-source models, including those from Chinese AI labs like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI.
Users can download open-source models and run them on their own computers or cloud networks, effectively sidestepping the ability of both AI developers and governments to control access. These models can also be more easily fine-tuned by developers to tailor them for specific needs.
Chinese labs are already claiming a public relations win from the Anthropic controversy.
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Trump administration officials began weighing sanctions on Anthropic weeks before they demanded the company take its latest and most advanced artificial intelligence model offline, after a dispute shattered the White House’s already-fragile trust in the company, according to two White House officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations.
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“Living with a disease like ALS, you are supposed to have diminished dreams. I do not,” Harrell tells MIT Technology Review. “Any one of these things would be an absolute godsend of improvement. To have all of them, and many, many more, is truly revolutionary.”
Within the first 22.6 months after the device was implanted, Harrell had used it for more than 3,800 hours at home without any researchers present, the team reported today in the journal Nature Medicine. “He’s the first power user of a speech BCI,” says team member Sergey Stavisky, a neuroengineer at the University of California, Davis.
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New UK government AI planning prototype built with Gemini aims to halve the time it takes to process homeowner applications
Around the world, Governments are exploring how AI can deliver better public services, faster. The UK is working to build 1.5 million new homes by 2029, but local planning authorities are often slowed down by dense paperwork and administrative backlogs. To help get Britain building, we’re partnering with the UK government to help radically shorten the time it takes to process householder planning applications. Our goal is to help officers cut application decision times by 50%, freeing up time for planners so that more homes can be built. We’re excited to see how our National Partnerships for AI, which seek to support reimagining of public services to create more resilient societies, can help Britain build faster.
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Late last week, Anthropic took its new Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models offline following a United States government export-control directive barring “any foreign national” from using the services. The company has been in talks with the White House since Friday but has yet to secure an agreement that would allow it to reinstate the offerings.
Since Mythos debuted in April, Anthropic has claimed—and warned—that the model has advanced capabilities for not only finding software vulnerabilities to help defenders patch them, but also figuring out ways to exploit them that could be used by bad actors. Anthropic itself noted this double edged sword in its launch of Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. “A great deal of advanced usage of AI models is dual use: the same queries that are beneficial in the hands of cybersecurity professionals and biology researchers could be dangerous if available to malicious actors,” the company wrote in a blog post last week.
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Your water may be contaminated by abortion pills, officials warn.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told the Daily Caller News Foundation that it is reviewing comments from 14 attorneys general urging the agency to classify mifepristone as a water contaminant.
“Pharmaceuticals, like Mifepristone, encompass a diverse group of chemicals, including prescription and over the counter drugs,” an EPA spokesperson told the DCNF. “EPA is currently reviewing comments submitted on its draft contaminant candidate list 6 (CCL 6), which lists pharmaceuticals as a group, and human health benchmarks for 374 individual pharmaceuticals that are approved by the FDA and may occur in surface and groundwaters and/or treated drinking water.”
Keir Starmer’s government has announced plans to pass a new online safety act that will ban children under 13 from using social media. To assure that children cannot gain access, adults will be required to confirm their identification every time they access the internet. The plan is seen as a scheme to track adult online users, not to protect children from the dangers of the internet.
At one point in America, people were losing their careers for declaring Covid-19 was man-made in a Chinese biolab funded by U.S. dollars. Now, a report has come out that exposes U.S. efforts to fund biolabs worldwide. These labs were working on “gain of function” virus research.
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Bottom line: The math behind AI subscriptions is starting to look uncomfortable. Flat monthly pricing helped fuel the rapid adoption of tools like ChatGPT and Claude, but new analysis suggests those fees may not come close to covering the actual cost of heavy use. As users push these systems harder and more demanding AI workflows take hold, the gap between revenue and compute costs is becoming difficult to ignore.
SemiAnalysis has calculated how big that gap really is. After testing subscription tiers from both OpenAI and Anthropic – running long-horizon coding and agentic tasks until weekly limits were exhausted – the firm found that the cost of theoretical maximum usage of these plans if priced at standard API rates far exceeds what users actually pay.
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Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t. Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption – software engineering.
In this essay, we argue that there is enough evidence to reject the narrative that once AI capabilities reach a certain threshold, it will cause mass layoffs. Given that this is true even in a sector with very few regulatory barriers, most other professions are likely to be even more cushioned.
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While Hollywood has fake cities for filming movies, the FBI apparently has one for getting hacked. The agency has pulled back the curtain on its Kinetic Cyber Range, a 22,000-square-foot replica small town hidden inside its Huntsville, Alabama campus. But instead of training officers for shootouts or hostage rescues, the facility is designed to simulate realistic cyberattacks on homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure so investigators can practice responding to them in a controlled environment.
The indoor complex includes buildings such as homes, a hotel, a gas station, a courthouse, and even a fully functional data center packed with around 200 servers. Each location is wired with operating systems, connected devices, and live networks to mirror the kinds of digital environments agents encounter during real investigations.
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Massive stars produce light and heat through nuclear fusion, a process that releases enormous amounts of energy from their cores. Eventually, however, the largest stars run out of fuel. Once that happens, the outward pressure generated by radiation is no longer strong enough to resist gravity. The star begins collapsing under its own weight, theoretically continuing until all of its mass is compressed into a single point known as a singularity.
Although black holes are widely accepted by physicists, they still raise profound questions. How can a mass equal to billions of Suns be squeezed into an infinitely small point? How can spacetime become infinitely curved at a singularity?
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Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that died in the deep, let nature call, tossed a galactic salad, and became interstellar voyeurs.
First, there’s a whale necropolis under the sea that is packed with ancient carcasses and teeming with new species. Then: a bygone world preserved in poop, the fruits of the universe’s labor, and a zoom lens for distant planets.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
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The administrative state orchestrated a calculation during the global pandemic, utilizing specific diagnostic infrastructure to drive a nationwide enforcement regime. Anthony Fauci, acting as the primary architect of the federal response via the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), deployed hyper-amplified diagnostic parameters to mandate unprecedented economic and societal lockouts. This strategic mobilization substituted clinical confirmation with automated data collection, forcing compliance and establishing a blueprint for institutional control.
Anthony Fauci directed a command-and-control apparatus that dismantled localized medical autonomy and enforced absolute policy adherence across federal and corporate sectors. By shifting the state response from optional guidance to rigid containment directives, the public health leadership created an operational environment where alternate medical strategies faced immediate institutional suppression. Federal executive powers restricted public assembly, disrupted small commerce, and penalized individual resistance, utilizing public health agencies as an enforcement arm.
The administrative architecture penalized non-compliance by design. State governors and municipal authorities received direct allocations of emergency funding tied explicitly to the execution of federal mitigation protocols. This structural mechanism transformed local health networks into branches of a centralized command structure, ensuring that internal dissent from independent medical practitioners encountered professional decertification and systemic exclusion.
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Senior Anthropic technical staff are in Washington to meet with White House officials to try resolving a dispute that has taken the company’s most advanced AI models offline, Axios reported on Sunday, citing a source close to the company.
Reuters could not immediately verify the report. Anthropic and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Anthropic’s technical staff have held virtual meetings with White House officials since the Trump administration’s initial outreach on Friday, the report said.