Talk about homework: a large class of undergraduates at an unnamed university in Utah became the unfortunate subject of a severe public health response after an extraordinary bungle in a science lab.
In September of last year, the group of lab students were tasked with identifying a bacterium known as P. shigelloides, a relatively harmless pathogen known to cause diarrhea when ingested. But as lab results came in, students were alarmed to find the specimens handed out in class were actually the bacteria Neisseria meningitidis, a potentially deadly pathogen that causes meningitis.
Unlike P. shigelloides, the bacterium N. meningitidis calls for high-security practices, like double gloves, disposable clothes, and fit-tested N95 masks, as the bare minimum. (In one unfortunate case from 2012, a 25-year old microbiologist whose lab was ill equipped to handle N. meningitidis died mere hours after exposure to the aerosolized microbe.)
According to People, Utah public health authorities soon raided the Utah stockroom, finding samples labeled “N. meningitidis.” That discovery prompted a recommendation that all 33 of the exposed students begin a cautionary antibiotic regimen, especially given that the lab participants were only wearing gloves and lab coats at the time of exposure.
On top of the antibiotics dose, at least two people sought medical attention due to possible exposure symptoms, which included a painful and invasive spinal tap.
It was only after the frenzy that further professional lab tests identified the offending pathogen as Neisseria sicca, a bacterium “commonly found in the upper respiratory tract” that is “nonpathogenic in immunocompetent persons,” according to a recently-filed Center for Disease Control study of the Utah lab incident.
Student misidentification notwithstanding, the event underscores the importance of accurately labeling microbial cultures — lest aspiring biologists become victims of their own studies.
As of last week, the US had recorded 2,465 confirmed infections so far this year, already more than the 2,289 total cases in 2025. The last two years saw more total infections than the rest of the 21st century combined, as The Guardian reports, with 2026’s tally beating a 35-year record.
Now, in the midst of all that crisis crisis, a character has stumbled into the narrative who perfectly illustrates how it’s gotten so bad. As the LA Times reports, a measles-infected individual spent a whopping 11 hours at the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park last month, potentially exposing countless other visitors.
The Los Angeles County Public Health Department was forced to issue a stark warning: anybody who visited the amusement park on July 26 during teh hours between 10am and 9pm may have been exposed and should monitor for symptoms including fever, cough, or rash — and stay vigilant until August 16.
The virus is contagious up to four days before the characteristic rash appears on the skin, and up to four days after that.
Measles can easily spread through the air through just via talking or breathing, and can persist on surfaces for hours at a time.
The vaccine against it, available as part of the measles, mumps, and rubella combination (MMR) shot, is extremely worthwhile. Two doses are 97 percent effective in preventing a measles infection.
The department also urged “everyone to confirm their immunity and get the vaccine if needed, especially before traveling and attending crowded events.”
California has been hit particularly hard, recording at least three localized measles outbreaks this year so far. However, according to the state’s health department, all three outbreaks have ended.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been 38 new outbreaks in 2026 across the country so far this year, with several thousand cases spanning 47 states.
The danger to one’s health is substantial — especially to the unvaccinated. According to the CDC, roughly one in five unvaccinated people in the US who get measles are hospitalized. One out of 20 children with measles develop pneumonia. and one to three of every 1,000 children who become infected die from respiratory and neurologic complications.
In case you weren’t already feeling paranoid about how AI is shaping our future, scientists for the first time have used an AI model to create new and viable viruses that have never been seen in nature.
Before you panic, the work, detailed in a study published in the journal Science, involved creating viruses that only target bacteria and are harmless to humans. Bacteriophages, as they’re called, are an important medical intervention for targeting drug-resistant pathogens.
“This is an important milestone,” Patrick Cai, a synthetic biologist at the University of Manchester who was not involved in the study, told The New York Times.
Still, it’s an alarming testament to AI’s power and trajectory. The researchers at Stanford University and the Arc Institute trained an AI model to recognize patterns of genetic structure in nature to create new DNA molecules. These molecules were inserted into bacteria that, over time, turned into wholly new viruses, at the expense of killing their hosts.
In their research, which first gained attention last year but has now been peer-reviewed, the scientists used an AI model called Evo. Unlike a general purpose large language model, Evo is trained on billions of lines of genetic sequences, and for this work in particular, millions of bacteriophage genomes. But it still functions like an LLM, predicting what DNA building blocks — nucleotides — should follow each other like a chatbot predicts what words to spit out to finish a sentence.
The researchers chose to focus on a E. coli-killing virus called Phi X-174, a variant that’s so well studied that it serves as the equivalent of a lab rat in virology. Viruses in general are simple compared to complex cellular life, making them an ideal platform to test AI’s capabilities.
They used Evo to create new viruses based on Phi X-174, and it generated 700,000 candidates. They then narrowed it down to just 300 that they would recreate in the lab. Of those 300, 16 proved to be viable, infecting and killing their bacterial hosts.
There’s clear medical merit to using AI to create bacteria-slaying viruses, but there’s already fears that the technology could be abused to crank out pathogens that are deadly to humans.
“Although this is promising for life sciences applications, it also raises urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions. The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not,” warned Tom Inglesby and Moritz Hanke at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in a perspective article.
Tom Ellis, a professor of synthetic genome engineering at Imperial College London who was not involved in the research, acknowledged this threat, but told The Guardian that it would be much harder to create more complex genomes and that controlling access to genetic data could stymy the threat.
And if someone were to deliberately engineer deadly viruses, he added, doing it by hand would probably be more practical.
“But honestly, the threat from full AI design and writing of a genome of a virus or bacteria is very overblown when we consider that just taking existing pathogens and making gain-of-function changes to their genomes is so much easier and much more likely to be a real pathogenic threat,” he said.
A Massachusetts man is feeling some buyer’s remorse after securing a $5.5 million mortgage on a mansion poised to fall into the Cape Cod Bay.
The man, John Bonomi Jr, first made headlines five years ago when he purchased the sprawling 5,817-square-foot estate against warnings from area conservationists, who advised that the beach was eroding at a rate of six feet per year as rising sea levels take their toll.
Bonomi’s house, meanwhile, sat just 12 to 14 feet away from the rapidly-disappearing escarpment — and that was 2021.
Fast forward half a decade, and the situation — not to mention the mansion’s foundation — has only deteriorated as the continual lashing of ocean waves takes its toll. According to the Boston Globe, Bonomi is now trying to recoup his costs by filing suit against JP Morgan Chase, the bank that originally serviced his ill-fated mortgage.
As for his legal strategy, the property owner is essentially pleading insanity, saying that he was “acting under an uncontrollable manic psychosis at the time” he agreed to the terms of the mortgage. It’s a fascinating argument, especially because Bonomi has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
“No rational person… would have considered purchasing the Property, and certainly not at the full asking price,” the suit argues. “It is a recognized diagnostic fact that a symptom of bipolar disorder is irrational risk-taking and impulsive behavior, including reckless spending.”
While Bonomi may have a point — it’s astonishing that JP Morgan Chase gave him the green light, mental health episode or not — it remains to be seen whether the courts agree.
According to the Globe, the bank originally lobbied to get the case dismissed. It answered Bonomi’s filings in May, however, saying that, “to the extent a response is required, Chase denies the allegations contained therein and leaves Plaintiff to his proofs.”
Compared with standard flu shots, Moderna’s mFlusiva generates stronger, longer-lasting immunity and is more effective at preventing infection, data show.
On July 27, a billboard went up in San Francisco advertising an AI service called ChatTJB. But the “AI” powering the service, as noted in a small disclaimer on the billboard, isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s a self-avowed “average individual” named Tucker Bryant, who manually answers user queries by way of a chatbot-like interface.
An “About” page for the service defines the process as “artisanal intelligence, handcrafted by a single human being.” Or, in other words: just talking to a guy.
Bryant, a Stanford graduate and former Google employee who now works as an artist and speaker, is clear that the project isn’t designed to be anti-AI. But in an interview with Futurism, he explained that he was inspired to create ChatTJB after his romantic partner introduced him to the phrase “cognitive surrender” — a term introduced in a University of Pennsylvania study which found that AI users are overwhelmingly likely to blindly trust the advice of chatbots, even when AI-generated responses are incorrect. It resonated: Bryant felt he’d personally experienced the phenomenon during his own interactions with chatbots, so he cooked up ChatTJB as a satirical way to infuse inconvenience and unpredictability back into a chatbot-like experience.
It’s “this idea that we often, or increasingly, trust LLM outputs so easily that we stop bringing our own creativity or critical thinking into the responses we receive, and over time that weakens our ability to be fully-functioning, sovereign human beings in the world,” Bryant mused. “I thought it would be fun or interesting to create an experience that looks like the LLMs we trust a lot — that I, at least, have fallen prey to the trap of over-trusting at times — but where the experience, rather than being this super futuristic thing I think we all felt the first time we saw those cool tokens streaming on ChatGPT, would be just a really average or bad experience.”
Indeed, chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude are simultaneously authoritative-sounding and eager-to-please, a combination that can lead to terrible-yet-seductive advice that many users accept with little to no critical pushback. In contrast, ChatTJB’s responses are unwieldy and unpredictable. Bryant’s responses might be good; they may also be terrible, or equivocal, or otherwise bizarre and helpful. (In a social media video, Bryant says that he wants ChatTJB users “to have such an inconvenient experience with something that aesthetically looks like artificial intelligence that the next time an LLM gives you what sounds like a reasonable answer, you remember the time ChatTJB responded to your tax question with a haiku about crows.”)
Like a chatbot, he can also generate images upon request— in the form of graphics that he hastily sketches, of course.
At first, Bryant said, ChatTJB attracted a “slow trickle” of incoming queries. Which wasn’t all that surprising, given that the billboard itself isn’t exactly in a prime spot.
“It’s not a very good location — it’s obscured by trees, there’s basically no oncoming traffic that can see it, and the only way you’d get a clear look at the full billboard is if you’re parking a car in the lot right underneath it,” Bryant said. “But I was fine with that, and I also didn’t want to pay much more.” The billboard’s cost, he conceded, was “less than most used cars under 150,000 miles, but still a very irresponsible amount… $6,000 for the month, not including fees.”
But when a picture of the billboard started to make the rounds online, Bryant quickly found himself drowning in requests.
“The first couple of days I would get maybe several dozen over the course of the day. There’d be a couple hours of silence, then I’d get one inquiry, respond to that, then get a couple of other prompts from different users,” he recounted. “A few days later it started taking off into the hundreds to thousands range.” By the time Bryant made an Instagram video promoting ChatTJB, he says he was receiving about a thousand prompts a day.
“I was answering all of those,” he added. “After that is when it blew up beyond my control.”
Though many of ChatTJB’s patrons have been trolls — which Bryant says is “reasonable,” given that ChatTJB “is in some ways a troll” itself — many of the inquiries have been surprisingly tender, and at times even moving.
“Some people are just looking to chat, asking about what to make for dinner, etc. And some people are coming with their personal life stuff, and it’s been really sweet to engage with them,” said Bryant. “The one I keep coming back to — this is when I realized this isn’t just a joke to some people — was somebody a couple of days in said, ‘I’m on the first night of my honeymoon and I don’t feel relaxed, is that okay?'”
“I switched out of super-casual-mode into supportive-friend-model,” the artist continued, adding that he “acknowledged their wedding had just happened, they’d probably been anticipating it with a lot of excitement but also a lot of stress, that it was a peak moment, and now the celebration is still happening but that peak moment has passed and they’re starting what might be the rest of their life — I imagined that might feel like a strange dissonance, so I could imagine their nervous system not being settled yet, and I wondered if they were going to talk to their spouse about it.”
Often, Bryant said, users of ChatTJB have sent him reminders to take breaks and drink water as he’s worked to respond to the thousands of inputs waiting for him in ChatTJB. The reminders have been welcome.
“There were a number of days I wasn’t taking the best care of myself,” Bryant admitted. “That was also very humanizing, getting responses from people on that basis.”
It’s not just users who have been reaching out to ChatTJB. According to Bryant, he’s received over a thousand messages from aspirational “average individuals” who want to help moderate the platform and respond to inbound user inquiries. Bryant is now — carefully, he says — testing the idea of turning ChatTJB into a community project. Which, for ChatTJB users, means they’ll have to wait a while for answers.
“I’m going to move slowly,” Bryant told us. “This was just intended to be an art project. I think it’s beautiful that people want to do something less ridiculous with it than what I had planned. I also don’t want people to get hurt, so I’d rather people wait a long time for their prompts than open the floodgates to anyone and everyone. So, a long preamble to saying: I’m starting to let some approved volunteers try answering questions while testing out some moderation tools.
“We’re testing this out — so far it seems to be going fine, and it’s been tender seeing folks helping the stranger on the other end,” Bryant added. “But if it doesn’t work out, I’ll either revert or we’ll take a break from ChatTJB overall, because short term, I want to help people do what they want with it, but I don’t want anyone at risk of danger.”
Asked why he would pay thousands of dollars for a billboard — after all, he could’ve just made a website and posted about it on social media — Bryant pointed to the ubiquity of often-confusing AI billboards blanketing his city and the “cultural omniscience” of AI.
“Here in San Francisco, a lot of us have had this experience of AI billboards everywhere,” said Bryant. “There’s this cognitive dissonance I felt… in a lot of ways there are meaningful and positive changes these technologies are bringing. But at the same time, they’re associated with such anxiety about the future, and the world, and the economy, and the environment. It can feel really strange walking around and seeing all these billboards with those two sides of the conversation happening at once. So it felt like a natural extension to prod at what I’ve been referring to as the cultural omniscience that AI has — why not satirize the billboards too, because they’re part of this ecosystem.”
“That’s the highbrow answer,” Bryant added. “But the lowbrow answer is just as authentic, which is that I also thought it would be funny. I tend to overcommit to bits.”
For those who want to help Bryant pay off his billboard, there is a ChatJTB “Pro” tier. Be warned, though, that you won’t get your answers any faster if you pay up.
In case you need any more evidence that the Trump administration is run and advised by cranks, here’s the cabinet’s meat-mainlining doctor’s unvarnished thoughts on the incredible skill he displays while defecating, which he says is down to his diet.
The doctor, Sean O’Mara, is reportedly the reason why the likes of JD Vance, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and Sean Duffy have all adopted a diet based almost entirely on eating steak and fermented foods like kimchi.
When New York Times reporter Willy Staley tried out the diet and spoke to O’Mara, the 63-year-old physician — who describes himself as the only one “in the world specializing in Health and Performance Optimization” — suddenly steered the topic to his bowel movements. As one does during casual conversation, he pulled up the Bristol Stool Chart, which categorizes different kinds of poop, and said his was Type 4 (“smooth, soft, like a snake.”)
“When you start eating healthy, you don’t need toilet paper,” he claimed, per the NYT. “Animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus.”
A proper number two, he explained to Staley, would be odorless, wipe-free, take just a few seconds, and be “nearly orgasmic.”
That’s when Staley boasted about his stealthy rectal ability.
“I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room and nobody would know,” O’Mara declared.
Whether or not it endows its followers with fantastic defecation powers, doctors are generally pretty skeptical about O’Mara’s diet, which, as a reminder, asks you to only eat beef — preferably steak — and fermented foods like kimchi, sauerkraut, and cheese.
Marion Nestle of New York University told Staley that the diet would be effective for temporary weight loss, because of how lean and satiating the meat is. But one of O’Mara key claims is that the bacteria of fermented foods help repopulate your gut bacteria and drive up your metabolism — something that the science is more iffy on. There’s also the clear cancer risk of consuming so much red meat.
Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have long garnered a reputation for allowing users to make all kinds of ethically dubious bets, from the outcomes of deadly conflicts to mass famine.
As the New York Times reports, Kalshi will now even allow users to bet on whether clinical trials for potentially lifesaving drugs will succeed.
To critics, the move will effectively allow betting on the lives of patients trying a final intervention in the face of a lethal diagnosis. There’s even risk that those enrolled in these trials could choose to drop out if the market were to bet against a positive outcome.
“Turning loose a betting market in an ongoing randomized clinical trial really is a breach of scientific conduct,” Robert Califf, who served as FDA commissioner in the Biden administration, told the NYT.
Kalshi first announced its “biotech prediction markets pilot program” last month, the same day president Donald Trump’s teleprompter guy was busted for winning more than $100,000 on Kalshi by betting on what he would say.
The company argued in the announcement that a “publicly listed contract on a trial or regulatory outcome produces a continuously updated, public probability that reflects the weight of the evidence rather than the preferred messaging of the trial sponsor.”
In a statement to the NYT, spokesperson Jack Such argued that these bets wouldn’t undermine research integrity, but instead cut through the hype surrounding biotech companies and the drugs they’re working on.
Kalshi says it will prohibit betting by patients enrolled in a trial, as well as by employees of the company conducting it or its competitors, per the NYT. It will also ban betting on trials that “exclusively enroll minors,” at least at first.
But those enrolled in drug trials were left appalled by the news.
“We’re literally trying to stay alive,” metastatic pancreatic cancer patient Walter Ingaharro Jr told the NYT. “It’s not a game. The introduction of gambling into the process really creates an ethical mess.”
In an opinion piece for The Guardian, Boston University humanities professor Joshua Pederson talked about how his 12-year-old son has a “very aggressive tumor growing inches below his heart.”
“If Kalshi has its way, you could soon be able to bet on health treatments that could be essential to his survival,” Pederson argued.
While choosing a trial for his son’s cancer was a “terrifying experiment for which we feel ill-prepared,” turning to a prediction market instead of “our extremely qualified team of oncologists” feels “preposterous,” Pederson argued.
In short, it’s yet another example of prediction markets crossing a moral boundary by gamifying things with real-world consequences.
“The possibility that somebody out there might be wagering against my son, hoping that the treatment fails so they can make money, is enraging,” Pederson wrote. “How is this not just another type of ‘death market’ — like markets for war or assassination — that even Kalshi says it won’t abide?”
The headline of this story was updated to specify that the program would bet on the outcomes of clinical trials, and the piece was updated to more specifically refer to controversies around prediction markets like Kalshi, writ large, and to add details about Kalshi’s response.
Authorities are struggling to get the outbreak of an explosive diarrhea-causing parasite under control. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are more than 18,000 cases that have been confirmed or are being investigated across 45 states.
There had been 423 reported hospitalizations, but at least no deaths — until this week. On Monday, Michigan health officials confirmed that there are now two fatalities linked to the outbreak, an intestinal illness called cyclosporiasis which is caused by the microscopic parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis.
However, it’s important to note that both individuals had “significant underlying health conditions that may have been impacted by cyclosporiasis and dehydration,” according to an update by Michigan Health and Human Services. In other words, both people didn’t die purely because they were infected by the parasite.
Cyclosporiasis is a gastrointestinal illness that causes watery and frequent diarrhea. There are specific treatments available for the infection, including sulfonamides, which are synthetic antimicrobial agents.
The vast majority of people recover after a few days, weeks, or even a month in severe cases. But in combination with a slew of pre-existing conditions, the illness can prove fatal, as the latest news highlights.
Michigan has been hit particularly hard, representing the majority of cases being tracked, with 11,234 reports and almost 200 hospitalizations. Fortunately, the numbers are starting to wane — though it’s far too early to tell if the state is out of the woods just yet.
“We have growing confidence that the outbreak is declining,” Michigan health department spokeswoman Michigan’s health department told the New York Times.
Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, White House officials declared the outbreak “under control” on July 21. Cases of the illness have risen more than tenfold since then.
For a president who upholds “Make America Healthy Again” as a load-bearing narrative pillar, Donald Trump has gone to remarkable lengths to make the US a breeding ground for a widening range of viruses, bacterium, and parasites — and no, we’re not talking about his cabinet.
Early into his second tenure as commander-in-chief, Trump and his cronies set to rapidly dismantling offices doing critical work on public health. His appointments were a one-two punch on longstanding institutions safeguarding the US from the ravages of disease: Elon Musk’s DOGE cut the government’s capacity to identify and track public health problems, while Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Department of Health and Human Services limited what the government was willing to do about them.
Case in point: the Centre for Disease Control has lost nearly a quarter of its workforce since January 2025, while those who remain have watched in horror as the CDC’s acting director cut the number of universally recommended childhood vaccines from 17 down to 11.
Examples of those kinds of policy faceplants abound, and the cumulative consequences will surely be felt for decades to come. And nowhere are the consequences of the Trump administration’s war on public health more obvious than in the diseases we’d previously had under control, but which are now surging back after a year and a half of MAHA.
There’s the cyclospora outbreak, of course, spreading from tainted lettuce to over 18,000 victims across 45 states. And those are just the ones we know about — the true extent may be far worse, as reporting delays create a major lag in fresh data. And while cyclospora flare ups come and go, it’s hard to overlook the fact that Trump officials made reporting of the parasite optional for the CDC in 2025, right before the largest known outbreak in modern history.
Separately, a nation-wide salmonella outbreak prompted officials to recall millions of cartons of eggs as at least 100 cases were reported throughout the country. Though salmonella reporting is still mandatory for the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration under Trump has delayed the implementation of a food traceability rule, designed to speed up the tracking of food borne illnesses back to their source.
Beyond foodborne illnesses, there are even more nasty bugs spreading around the country under Trump’s watch.
The formerly-eradicated measles is back, with over 2,300 American infected in 2026 alone, the highest number since 1992, Vox reported. Flesh-eating screwworms are ravaging livestock, as staffing cuts and mandatory budget reviews at the US Department of Agriculture slowed government containment efforts. Even the nightmarish botulism toxin has made it into the headlines, entering the food supply via contaminated infant formula after the Trump administration disbanded the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods — coincidentally right as the group was about to release a report on infant formula.
We could go on. While some will surely shoot back that these diseases are always hanging over us regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, that’s exactly the point.
Public health isn’t a game of checkers, where enemy pieces leave the board once they’re conquered. It’s more like a game of whack-a-mole, demanding quick reflexes, a mallet, and someone to wield them with unending focus. Under Trump, the mallet has been sold off to the highest bidder, while the player has wandered off, convinced the moles are a hoax.
A protein that is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease may also ID a brain condition associated with head trauma in contact sports, early findings suggest.
Just over a week ago, Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr declared that the ongoing outbreak of the explosive diarrhea-causing parasite was “under control.”
But the reality is that cases are climbing into the thousands across 45 states, as USA Today reports, meaning his reassurances appear to have been a gross overstatement. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of cases increased by an additional 2,500 cases between July 21 and July 28 alone.
As of this week, the CDC has confirmed over 6,700 cases since May 1 and is “aware of more than 11,500 additional cases that are not laboratory confirmed or require further investigation and analysis.”
There is a bright side: while the symptoms are gross, there have been no known fatalities. There have been 423 hospitalizations so far, but no deaths have been recorded, according to the agency.
Health officials are still racing to nail down the source of the outbreak of the microscopic parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis, which is known to cause frequent — and often explosive — watery diarrhea. The top suspect so far has been Taylor Farms, one of Taco Bell’s lead suppliers, whose bagged shredded lettuce was initially found by the Food and Drug Administration to contain the parasite.
While the FDA has since gone back on that claim, saying the results were a “false positive,” Taylor Farms has nonetheless agreed to lead a “voluntary” recall of the allegedly tainted lettuce.
The true count of cyclosporiasis cases in the US remains extremely difficult to tally. As the CDC notes, “surveillance updates do not include probable cases.” Many people who fall ill “recover without medical care and are not tested for Cyclospora.”
According to a map issued by the agency, the two hotspots are Michigan and Ohio. Michigan alone passed the 10,000 cases mark today, according to the state’s Department of Health and Human Services.
The only states that have yet to report or confirm a single case, per the CDC’s map, are Montana, New Mexico, Maine, South Carolina, and Hawaii.
Fortunately, it’s easy to protect oneself from the parasite. Public health experts recommend thoroughly washing fruits and vegetables or simply cooking them, which kills the tiny critters.
Glowy oils, tinted creams, misty sprays, chalky sticks, lightweight gels. Like many people, my pool bag is filled with many types of sunscreen. But all use the same sun-shielding chemicals. In fact, the allowed ingredient list for U.S. sunscreens hasn’t changed in 20 years — until now.
“I think we should all be super excited,” says Tanya Hathaway. She’s a dermatologist who specializes in treating high-risk skin-cancer patients. Hathaway works at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Wash.
Bemotrizinol has many benefits. It lasts longer than other sunscreen ingredients. It won’t get quickly absorbed into the bloodstream. And it’s very good at blocking those rays of the sun that age skin.
Sunscreens in Europe have used the chemical for more than 25 years, Hathaway notes. More recently, it’s been approved in Japan, Canada, Australia and many other places.
There are some sunscreen ingredients used elsewhere that still are not allowed in U.S. products. Bemotrizinol’s approval could open U.S. doors for some of these. It’s “a great first step,” Hathaway says.
A new chemical sunscreen
Sunscreens use a few tricks to protect our skin from the sun’s rays. Physical sunscreens rely on minerals such as titanium dioxide and zinc oxide. These create a coating that reflects sunlight, like a mirror. But they can leave a white sheen on the skin. Just think of a lifeguard’s nose, says Jennifer Stein. She’s a dermatologist at NYU Langone Health in New York City.
Those zinc and titanium products also “don’t rub in so well,” she notes. “And if people don’t like the way their sunscreen smells or feels, they’re not going to use it.”
Non-mineral sunscreens often rub in a bit better. They often use chemicals such as avobenzone (Ay-vah-BEN-zoan) and oxybenzone to absorb the sun’s rays. But these molecules are not very stable. They start to break down when hit by sunlight, Stein says. That’s not ideal for something that’s designed for use in the sun.
Because bemotrizinol is more stable, people may not need to apply sunscreens with it as often. This new ingredient also is good at blocking ultraviolet A1 (UVA1) radiation. That’s a type that gets deep into the skin. Over time, UVA1 can make skin wrinkly, loose and spotted, Hathaway says.
Current U.S. sunscreens do a good job of blocking UVB, which causes sunburns. But U.S. sunscreens had fewer options for blocking UVA, she says. Bemotrizinol “really expands that UVA spectrum of coverage.”
You might have seen influencers on TikTok or Instagram making DIY sunscreens. Often, they will call the ingredients in commercial brands “toxic.” Sunscreen skepticism on social media is nothing new, Stein says. Patients who avoid sunscreen often worry about chemicals passing through the skin.
That can happen with things like avobenzone and oxybenzone. They may even get into your blood, Stein says — but only if “you apply them to large areas of the body repeatedly throughout the day.” Even so, people shouldn’t fear them. Hathaway says no studies have shown that U.S. sunscreen ingredients are unsafe when used at current levels.
Bemotrizinol, which is a big molecule, is less likely to pass through skin than these other chemicals. It’s “too big to squeeze through the skin cells to get down into your bloodstream,” Stein says.
FDA classifies bemotrizinol as GRASE (short for generally recognized as safe and effective). Titanium dioxide and zinc oxide are the only other U.S. sunscreen ingredients with this rating.
Bemotrizinol’s U.S. approval goes into effect on August 9. So sunscreens using it could hit shelves later this summer. But a new sunscreen is not the only way to stay safe from the sun. There are plenty of low-tech options, too: long sleeves, hats, sunglasses and staying in the shade. “The more clothing you’re wearing,” Stein emphasizes, “the less you have to depend on sunscreen.”
For only the second time in its history, the American Red Cross has declared a “national blood supply crisis,” after donations fell to a four-year summer low.
The hotter summer months conventionally trigger blood shortages because people are more likely to injure themselves while spending time outdoors.
And this summer has been particularly extreme. According to the Red Cross, extreme heat, poor air quality, and widespread foodborne illnesses have compounded into blood donations dropping precipitously, causing supply levels to plummet to a historic low.
The news comes amidst record-breaking temperatures this summer, devastating heatwaves that have killed at least 25 people in the US. Public health officials are also battling an outbreak of an explosive diarrhea-causing parasite that’s has spread to 45 states.
As a result of plummeting donations, the Red Cross, which is the largest single provider of blood products, has “less than a one-day national supply of type O positive blood.” Type O positive is the most commonly transfused blood type, and highly valued because can safely be used to treat over 80 percent of the population.
The Red Cross declared its first-ever national blood crisis in January 2022, triggered by a previous low in donor turnout due to ongoing COVID-19 surge disruptions.
“Every donation has the potential to help save lives, and we urgently need everyone who is eligible to make an appointment to give blood as soon as possible,” said Red Cross Biomedical Services president Chris Hrouda in a statement.
The risks of an extremely limited blood supply are considerable.
“There’s always the possibility, when the blood supply dips like it has, that patients won’t be able to get the blood products they need, when they need,” Red Cross spokesperson Matt Trotter told NPR affiliate KOSU.
To get back on track doesn’t require drastic action, either. The organization says that just “three more donors at each blood drive this summer can end this crisis and stabilize the blood supply.”
“One donation can help save multiple lives, so if you’ve got an hour you can spare, you can do a lot of good with it,” Trotter told KOSU. “Many people who think they are ineligible actually can donate blood.”
The tech overlords pushing the AI boom are quickly wearing out what little welcome they had.
You may have noticed big-name AI labs pushing new commercials lately. Meta’s new 60-second ad spot insists that the “future is for everyone,” even as CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal net worth eclipses the GDP of Hungary. Anthropic’s new commercial for Claude assures viewers that there’s “hope in hard questions,” seemingly embracing the discomfort that comes when your software is used to bomb elementary schools in Iran.
For as magnanimous as these new PR stunts appear on the surface, a vast swathe of the public they’re meant to sway are rejecting the industry’s faux-populism messaging out of hand, as the cost of AI — born out in inflation, data center pollution, fears of job loss and mental health concerns — becomes too much to bear.
According to data compiled by Pew Research, 40 percent of US adults predict AI will have a negative impact on society writ large, compared to just 16 percent who say it’ll have a positive effect. A whole 31 percent of those surveyed think AI will have negative consequences for themselves, personally, over the next 20 years.
As disgust with AI itself grows, so too does resistance to the hardware embodying its rise.
Per a separate poll by Gallup, flagged by Business Insider, an astonishing three-quarters of US adults are now resolutely opposed to hyperscale data centers popping up near their home. City councils are increasingly forced to reconcile with landowners hostile to any AI data center appearing in their district, putting significant strain on developers hoping to gorge themselves on the fruits of the AI boom. Protests against AI companies are flaring up across the country, with Time reporting 142 protests across 42 states in one day alone.
Beyond data centers, a decentralized but highly-motivated movement is growing around the chopping, hacking, and outright sabotage of AI-integrated surveillance cameras. A parallel struggle is being waged around AI-integrated surveillance drones, with organizers in cities like Minneapolis beating back ambitious police dragnets.
So if you’re a tech executive trying to win back the masses to the AI revolution, take note: it’s gonna take a lot more than a few smarmy commercials to solve your PR problem.
Over the past year or so, a puzzling idea has taken hold among billionaires ranging from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos: that instead of trying to force data centers on communities that don’t want them down on Earth, it would be much easier just to launch them into space.
The economics and logistics of the scheme, many experts have pointed out, are absolutely absurd. And even beyond those practical concerns, if corporations actually did somehow manage to fill the planet’s orbit with the facilities, scientists are now warning that the environmental cost would be devastating.
A new petition organized by the group EarthJustice, first reported by the Guardian, is warning of “catastrophic” consequences for the planet if the billionaire-backed dream ever came to pass. The 29-page petition calls on the US Federal Communications Commission to investigate current orbital data center licensing requests as potentially in violation of “federal law,” joining the chorus of experts warning that it’s a horrible idea for just about everybody.
“The FCC is currently considering multiple requests for licensing extraordinary numbers of satellite-based data centers to be placed into low-earth orbit over the next decade,” the petition begins. “The proponents of these proposals describe their plans in grandiose, civilization-changing terms. But these same proponents have refused to embrace any inquiry into the impacts of their self claimed epochal technology on the environment, science, economy, or other values. This is not just poor planning and a missed opportunity: it violates federal law.”
The filing does double duty. On top of formally petitioning the FCC to prepare an environmental assessment, it’s also a “petition to deny,” which is a legal mechanism that requires the petitioner to back up their claims with verified facts. That requirement turns the document into a de factoreview article — with 113 footnote citations, it’s easily one of the most detailed public accounts yet of what orbital data centers could actually cost the planet.
“The operation of more than a million data center satellites threatens potentially catastrophic forms and quantities of atmospheric pollution, risking damage to the climate, to the ozone layer, to human health, and to the chemistry of the stratosphere itself,” the petition reads.
In particular, the petition warns that giving free rein to tech billionaires to clutter our skies with experimental data centers would accelerate our contamination of the stratosphere, which is currently facing an unprecedented rise in heavy metals, noxious gasses, and carbon particles thanks to record satellite launches.
Satellite companies run by tech and aerospace tycoons are already facing scrutiny for their lack of transparency around this type of pollution, a situation the petition warns would make significantly worse. As the petition authors write, they are “concerned that no [company] has yet provided more than a token acknowledgment of environmental risks.”
“Moreover,” the authors continue, “no [company] has provided satisfactory detail to explain how it will mitigate the cumulative environmental harms flowing from the foreseeable operation of more than a million satellites [emphasis in original], orbiting our planet, colliding and disintegrating and plummeting back to Earth.”
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