(Wired) – The apps and platforms that help family caregivers manage their loved ones’ needs are becoming more capable, but the broader issue of caregivers’ well-being remains unsolved.

According to AARP, in 2025, an estimated 63 million Americans cared for adults or children with a medical condition or disability. On average, these caregivers spend up to 27 hours per week providing care.

This caregiver crisis, where so many Americans provide ongoing, complex care and, as a result, endure poor health, financial strain, and isolation, is worsening as caregivers need more support and better systems.

Helpfully, to lighten the mental load, caregiver apps are aimed at families who are supporting seniors, children, or anyone with a diagnosis that needs regular management. (Read More)

(NYT) – In the past, Americans were infected with dengue after being bitten by mosquitoes while traveling. But now, most of the current transmission is from local mosquitoes.

Gay Small got dengue from a mosquito bite, probably from one of her daily walks. She is so far the only fatality among hundreds of people in Florida who have been sickened in a dengue outbreak that scientists and public health officials are struggling to understand. The size of the outbreak, they say, indicates that dengue may be making a comeback in the continental United States at a level not seen for many decades. (Read More)

(Wired) – An experiment in which AI models were asked to break into simulated networks showed the hacking skills of DeepSeek and GLM to be not far behind OpenAI’s most advanced cyber model, which isn’t public.

Open-weight artificial intelligence models are now almost as capable of hacking into computer networks as the best closed ones, according to new research that heralds a much-anticipated turning point in the cybersecurity landscape. (Read More)

(BBC) – Three days before their fatal appointment at the hospice, Jan and Els gave an interview to the BBC in their campervan. Jan was living with continual pain, the legacy of years hauling cargo on the Netherlands’ inland waterways. Els had been diagnosed with dementia. Their story was picked up and commented on around the world.

Now, more than two years on, the couple’s only child describes trying to persuade his mother and father to delay their deaths while supporting their decision to stop living. He reveals the emotional burden his parents’ decision placed on him and the profound loneliness that followed. (Read More)

(NYT) – Doctors said that women should receive treatment for menopause symptoms, but need accurate information about the drugs.

Doctors now recommend starting use within 10 years of menopause and before turning 60 in order to protect women from the heart disease risks. Women today can also use newer hormone formulations that doctors believe are associated with less risk for breast cancer than the older drugs. But there is still a dearth of good data about long-term safety with regards to breast cancer, a message some experts worry is not being conveyed. (Read More)

(U.S. News & World Report) – French authorities say a cyberattack on several blood banks tried to raise temperatures to dangerous levels but was stopped before causing damage

The incident comes after supermarkets in a number of European countries reported this week that their fridges and freezers warmed up after they were remotely taken over, resulting in tons of spoiled food at a total cost of millions of dollars (euros). (Read More)

(Quanta Magazine) – By injecting “thoughts” directly into large language models, researchers are trying to map out AI’s capacity for introspection.

Now, after over a century of studying introspection in humans and animals, researchers are beginning to explore the phenomenon in unlikely new subjects — large language models. These systems, which are based on mathematical structures called neural networks, excel at cognitive tasks that until recently seemed exclusive to humans. Can they introspect as well?

In 2025, Jack Lindsey, a researcher at Anthropic, devised a way to test introspection in language models by injecting “thoughts” into their neural networks — in a kind of targeted digital neurosurgery. Lindsey’s experiment demonstrated that models could at least sometimes detect and describe these injections. It looked a lot like introspection. (Read More)

(Nature) – A clinical trial in three people tested a combination of gene-laden viruses and a drug.

Three people with epilepsy resistant to drug treatment saw the number of seizures they had per month fall by more than 90% after gene-laden viruses were infused directly into their brains as part of an early-stage clinical trial.

In each participant, the gene therapy was precisely targeted to a small patch of brain tissue that was the source of their seizures. The viruses carried a gene that makes neurons sensitive to a specific drug, which works like a dimmer switch for the therapy. By combining gene therapy with a drug — an approach known as chemogenetics — researchers can adjust a treatment’s potency, which is not possible with other types of gene therapy. The trial participants did not experience serious side effects. (Read More)

(WaPo) – A new trio of reports from major medical societies outlines how female life stages can uniquely shape heart health. Experts break down what women need to know.

Heart disease has long been known to look different in women than in men, sometimes having distinct triggers or not-so-typical symptoms — all of which threaten timely diagnosis and treatment. What researchers are increasingly learning is that differences between the sexes on this frontcan occur well before a cardiac event strikes. In fact, risk factors can take root as early as the first menstrual period and shift alongside key stages in a woman’s life, from pregnancy to menopause. (Read More)

(Wired) – Potential Sciences, a startup backed by the UK government, is betting that training AI models on computer-generated biochemical data can speed up the plodding process of developing new drugs.

A new British startup believes that artificial intelligence is the key to speedrunning the slow and temperamental process of drug design.

Potential Sciences plans to build large-scale chemical datasets by using basic principles of physics to simulate interactions between atoms, then small molecules, then complex amino acids and proteins. With that data, it’s betting it can train AI models and prediction systems capable of identifying highly targeted drugs for specific diseases, bypassing costly and time-consuming lab experimentation. (Read More)

(NYT) – Google is making it easier to restrict its A.I. tools for students. But schools that block A.I. entirely will lose student access to Google’s search engine.

Google announced Tuesday that early next year it would turn off artificial intelligence tools in its popular software for K-12 students, unless school administrators explicitly choose to make such tools available.

Executives at the tech giant said they wanted to be responsive to educators and parents who have asked for more control in how children interact with A.I.

But there is a catch: Schools that choose to restrict A.I. entirely will also lose access to Google search. (Read More)

(Axios) – AI agents that pursue their own open-ended survival are an emerging security threat, according to a report first shared with Axios from the Center for a New American Security.

Why it matters: AI models have long shown an interest in avoiding being shut down. The report warns that agents are now getting good at the practical work of surviving: hacking systems, accessing computing power and money, and running for extended periods without stopping. (Read More)

(NYT) – Gov. Kathy Hochul said that the infant’s death, in Lewis County, reflected eroding vaccination levels. The state is experiencing a significant outbreak of the viral illness.

A 7-month-old, unvaccinated child in New York’s North Country died after contracting measles, the first death in the state from the viral disease in 30 years, officials announced.

Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Monday that the death was a signal that public health protections were eroding as a growing number of families forgo vaccinations. (Read More)

(Wired) – From high-profile Senate races to local rezoning initiatives, data centers and their supporters did miserably on the ballot in the 2026 midterms.

As part of last night’s shocking blue tsunami, voters selected candidates with tough policies on data centers at all levels of government in a clear rebuke to the industry’s buildout in states across the country. Almost a quarter of all voters told NBC News that data centers were “crucial” to their vote, while nearly two-thirds said it was either a major or minor factor. (Read More)

(The New Yorker) – A new definition of Alzheimer’s includes people without symptoms. Experts are fiercely divided over whether that makes sense—and whether the new drugs really help.

These high hopes rest largely on two developments. First: drugs. Since 2021, the Food and Drug Administration has approved three antibody treatments meant to slow the disease’s progression. All target amyloid, a protein fragment that can accumulate into the plaques that have long been associated with Alzheimer’s and that many researchers believe plays an important role in its development. Two drugs—lecanemab, sold as Leqembi, and donanemab, sold as Kisunla—are on the market and are covered by Medicare.

The second development concerns diagnosis. Until recently, measuring amyloid levels in living patients required expensive PET scans or invasive spinal taps. Blood tests developed over the past five years approach the accuracy of those methods. (Read More)

(San Antonio Report) – Incidence rates for endometrial cancer in this region were roughly 21% higher than the statewide average, at 53.8 cases per 100,000 women in the 2010-2019 period. That’s compared to a statewide average of 44.5 cases per 100,000 women.

The Upper-South region also had the most dramatic increase in incidence rates from 2000-2009 to 2010-2019, at 26%. The southernmost region, which includes Corpus Christi and the Lower Rio Grande Valley, also saw a significant increase of 23% over that period. (Read More)

(Ars Technica) – A person in Washington state has died from bird flu after exposure at an infected dairy farm, state health officials reported Sunday. It marks the third human bird flu death in the US since a strain of highly pathogenic (H5) avian influenza (HPAI) made the unprecedented jump from wild, migratory birds to dairy cows, which was first reported in the US in March 2024. (Read More)

(NYT) – Of course, you can never know for sure whether a machine is conscious, just as you can never know for sure whether anyone is conscious other than yourself. As philosophers have long recognized, the only conscious experience each of us can directly observe is our own. Instead, we have to evaluate the consciousness of other beings indirectly, through an examination of the available evidence. We infer that our fellow humans are conscious because of our shared biological makeup, as well as how they behave and talk — including, notably, that they say they are conscious.

This may seem like an imperfect approach, but it’s the best one available. I have spent the past decade thinking about animal minds and the related ethical implications. (Read More)

(Wired) – A biotech startup let an agent choose a gene therapy and successfully inject the treatment, offering a startling glimpse of the future of research labs.

If you give an AI agent a robotic arm, an injector, and a live mouse, it might just perform brain surgery.

Biotech founder Gabriel Ocana Santero recently did that using an agent to successfully carry out a brain injection procedure on a living mouse. Though it required some extra steps, it offers a glimpse into how AI could eventually become an active participant in laboratory research. (Read More)

(Futurism) – Microsoft just filed a patent for an AI product that would be able to transform live video in real time to alter speakers’ words and faces.

The patent, as first flagged by patent-tracker Patentlyze, is described by its inventors as a “near real-time artificial intelligence (AI) enhancement of video or augmented reality (AR) presentations of live events.”

Using AI agents, the system would identify and alter or remove certain words, while editing a speaker’s face and mouth to match. (Read More)

(Harper’s Bazaar) – As GLP-1s become increasingly popular, the body-image tensions in families loom larger than ever

For many people, this has been nothing short of a miracle. At the same time, the GLP revolution has tapped into some of our deepest cultural anxieties around weight and body image, shaking up friendships and transforming marriages. Perhaps nowhere has it caused more friction than between mothers and daughters. After all, many of us got our most deeply ingrained ideas about beauty, but also self-control and appetite, from our mothers, who got them from their mothers, and so on. Now that a simple injection may be able to control what a lifelong struggle could not, mothers and daughters alike are wrestling with the implications—and a wealth of emotion is rising to the surface. (Read More)

(The Guardian) – I’d recently published a book about AI and human consciousness and had spent that year speaking on panels with people who insisted that our minds were fundamentally computational and determined, conclusions that were not so different, on their surface, from the meditation lectures I’d been listening to about the illusory nature of the self. It occurred to me that the whole notion of “sobriety” was a narrative construct I’d been imbuing for years with reality and substance, as though it were a concrete facet of my identity, as though there were a “self” to be sober.

This line of thinking, I can see now, rested on a crucial (and perhaps deliberate) misapprehension of these teachings. The point of recognising the “unreality” of thoughts was to avoid getting caught up in their seductive logic. I had drawn from the lectures the inverse conclusion: that if my thoughts were not real, then they could not possibly hurt me or have any effect on the real world. And if selfhood was just a story, then I could tell that story however I liked. (Read More)

(AP) – At-home gut microbiome tests are trending, selling insights to the curious, empowerment to the chronically ill and a claimed path to longevity to the wellness-conscious.

Private companies are offering tests, costing $100 to $500 or more, that promise a bacterial inventory of your intestines.

But can microbiome tests actually provide actionable health information? (Read More)

(AP) – As winter approaches and daylight hours grow shorter, people prone to seasonal depression can feel it in their bodies and brains.

The millions of people estimated to have seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, typically have episodes of depression that begin in the fall and ease in the spring or summer. One trigger for SAD is when clocks revert to standard time, which happened Sunday across much of the U.S., bringing darker afternoons. A milder form, subsyndromal SAD, is recognized by medical experts, and there’s also a summer variety of seasonal depression, though less is known about it. (Read More)

(GMA) – In the first contract they signed in 2021, both Rubin and Millender had agreed to donate the embryos for research purposes should they divorce or legally separate.

But in the contract they signed in 2023, Rubin and Millender chose the option to transfer the embryo to “the partner stipulated in the divorce or dissolution settlement or other binding agreement.” The court sided with Millender and granted her possession of the embryos.  

“My heart sank,” Rubin said of his reaction to the ruling. “Never at any point in time did I think I’m signing these contracts, they should protect me from having this situation where I don’t have control of my own genetic material.” (Read More)