Science Literacy Project Daily Digest
Viewpoint: 4 very real AI doomsday scenarios
An engineered pandemic, a nuclear war, a planet paved over with paper clip factories: AI researchers have floated plenty of ...
After Idaho criminalized abortion providers in 2022, one-third of obstetricians fled. Health care advocates are making rural health the case for repealing the ban
Idaho's campaign to overturn one of the nation's toughest abortion bans is centering on doctors rather than abortion itself, as ...
Anti-GMO activists in Pakistan rev up their campaign of dire warnings
Pakistan is weighing whether to commercialize genetically modified maize, and critics of the technology are sounding the alarm, warning of ...
How can we know if social media bans actually help teens?
Australia’s first-in-the-world social media ban for kids under 16 has so far produced more workarounds than results. That’s exactly why ...
There has been a slew of recent reports of food recalls and foodborne outbreaks. Do we face an escalating problem?
Egg recalls, salmonella-linked jalapeños and a spike in cyclospora cases have dominated headlines this year, but the U.S. food-safety system ...
Facing pressure from Trump administration, fewer hospitals offer medical treatment for transgender minors
At least six major U.S. hospitals have signed deals with the Department of Justice agreeing to stop providing gender-affirming hormones ...
Microsoft exec: AI is a ‘doom loop’ scraping the ‘largest theft of labor in human history’
Newly unsealed court filings show that Microsoft and OpenAI executives privately described their AI models as trained on stolen work ...
Viewpoint: Does IQ really measure intelligence? BBC gets it wrong.
A blistering rebuttal to the BBC's recent case against IQ testing argues the corporation got nearly every point wrong, as ...
AI sparks a bioweapons race
Artificial intelligence chatbots can’t yet hand a bad actor a ready-made plague, but the queries Anthropic flagged this month suggest ...
22-year frozen embryo: In one of the longest delayed births ever, middle-aged Greek couple gives birth to a daughter
A 54-year-old Greek woman has given birth to a healthy baby girl conceived from an embryo that spent 22 years ...
Viewpoint: America’s food-safety system is being methodically dismantled by the Trump administration.
America's food-safety infrastructure is being quietly hollowed out even as outbreaks grow more complex and harder to trace, journalist Eric ...
Is the Defense Department gobbling up research dollars originally targeted for medical research?
The Trump administration wants to gut a core research unit of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), ...
Viewpoint: Is corporate embrace of regenerative agriculture greenwashing?
Major food companies are racing to tout “regenerative agriculture,” but the term has no legal definition — and that vagueness ...
Trump says he’ll require drugmakers to end multiple vaccine doses, reviving discredited autism claims
President Trump said that he'll “demand” drugmakers break vaccines into five smaller doses spaced six months apart, claiming the change ...
Slowdown AI development? China acknowledges serious risks but sees warnings as U.S. ploy to control the technology
For years, Silicon Valley's most powerful voices insisted the US was locked in an unwinnable AI arms race with China ...
RFK Jr.’s latest crank obsession: Protecting Americans from perfectly safe electromagnetic radiation
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken a first formal step toward possible new rules—or at ...
Should doctors engage in social media to counter misinformation?
Doctors shouldn't retreat from social media just because their words carry extra weight there — they should use that weight ...
‘Symptom borrowing’: Young people are copying health problems they see on TikTok
Young people are increasingly copying health symptoms they see in TikTok videos, a phenomenon one mental health app founder has ...
White House drafting executive order to control what OMB Director Vought claims are “woke” NIH science grants
The White House is drafting an executive order that would create an external committee with power to veto National Institutes ...
What’s Trump’s ‘AI Force’? Administration rushes to announce ill-defined watchdog agency and czar amid criticism of its resistance to curb AI acceleration
Donald Trump says he's creating an "AI Force" and will soon name an AI "czar," though as the Guardian reports, ...
Vitamin D, omega-3 fish oil and glucosamine supplements could cause brain damage
Vitamin D, omega-3 fish oil and glucosamine — three of the most popular supplements among older Americans — may do ...
Child-monitoring apps: When the cure is worse than the harm—and how the technology could be tweaked
Millions of American parents have turned to apps like Bark that scan their kids' texts, photos and chats for signs ...
Viewpoint: Why are the less intelligent more likely to be conservative—and smarter people more socially liberal?
Smarter people tend to be more socially liberal — less racist, less homophobic, less nationalistic, more supportive of free speech ...
The heated debate over trans athletes in the WNBA
Three-time Olympic gold medalist Nancy Hogshead-Makar has created a petition demanding that the WNBA spell out that its players must ...
Viewpoint: Women, depression and empathy: Explaining the gender gap in views about child-murderer Lindsay Clancy
Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy's trial — which ended in a deadlocked jury over the deaths of her three children while ...
Outing students: California court says schools need not notify parents of their child’s gender identity—unless they ask
California schools don't have to tell parents when a student comes out as transgender — but if a parent asks, ...
Doomsday cult? Why we should be suspicious of end-of-the-world claims
Marc Andreessen is done listening to AI's doomsayers, and he wants everyone else to stop too. The venture capitalist behind ...
