(WSJ) – Drugmaker’s pill will take on a rival from Novo Nordisk in the booming multibillion-dollar obesity drug market

The weight-loss pill wars start now. 

Eli Lilly’s once-daily pill for weight loss got approval from U.S. drug regulators Wednesday. The all-clear sets up a battle with rival Novo Nordisk, which has been selling a pill version of its Wegovy since the start of this year.

The Wegovy pill has had one of the best drug launches in history. Now that the Food and Drug Administration has approved its pill, Lilly will seek to overtake the rival, and further its dominance of the booming $70 billion-plus market for weight-loss and diabetes drugs known as GLP-1s. (Read More)

(NBC News) – The Fertility Center of Orlando is shutting down several months after a couple sued it following the birth of a baby who isn’t genetically related to them.

A Florida fertility center is closing several months after a patient alleged the clinic implanted another couple’s embryo in her — a discovery she made after giving birth.

The Fertility Center of Orlando announced its closure on its website, saying the decision was made “after thoughtful consideration.” It was not immediately clear when operations would cease. (Read More)

(Conversing Podcast) – We might be living through the most consequential technological moment in human history. In this episode, Greg Cootsona—theologian, pastor, and executive director of AI and Faith—joins Mark Labberton reflect on a lifetime’s convergence of work in faith, science, and ethics now fully engaged at the frontier of artificial intelligence.

“AI is not simply a technical project. It is an expression of human hopes and fears, our longings for power, our craving for convenience, and our hunger for transcendence and meaning. In that sense, every AI model carries an implicit anthropology and an embedded moral vision.” (Listen Here)

(NDTV) – The Slack messages began arriving at 5:47 a.m. on a recent Monday. Three sales proposals had gone out the previous week, and none of the team members had scheduled follow-ups. The reminders were crisp, professional and relentless – and they hadn’t been sent by a human.

They came from Junior, an AI employee from the startup Kuse AI.

Xiankun Wu, the company’s founder, is creating the kind of workplace that feels both inevitable and unsettling. He’s offering a new type of colleague who is entirely virtual and behaves uncannily like the most driven new hire you’ve ever worked with. (Read More)

(WSJ) – Legislation that could be enacted this spring would pause construction of large new data centers until November 2027

Maine is poised to freeze large data-center construction, which would make it the first state to enact such a measure as communities across the U.S. grapple with fallout from the boom in artificial intelligence.

The Maine bill calls for a ban on major new data-center construction until November 2027, so the state can assess the impact of such development on the environment and electricity grid.

The freeze would apply to data-center projects of at least 20 megawatts, which is enough energy to power more than 15,000 homes. (Read More)

(MIT Technology Review) – There’s a clear demand for chatbots that provide health advice, given how hard it is for many people to access it through existing medical systems. And some research suggests that current LLMs are capable of making safe and useful recommendations. But researchers say that these tools should be more rigorously evaluated by independent experts, ideally before they are widely released. 

In a high-stakes area like health, trusting companies to evaluate their own products could prove unwise, especially if those evaluations aren’t made available for external expert review. And even if the companies are doing quality, rigorous research—which some, including OpenAI, do seem to be—they might still have blind spots that the broader research community could help to fill. (Read More)

(NYT) – States ranging from California to Utah are taking steps to place guardrails on the technology even after the president ordered them to stop.

The battle over who should regulate A.I. is turning into an epic clash between Mr. Trump and the states, as anxiety has soared over the technology’s potential effects on jobs, education, national security and child safety.

States have increasingly taken matters into their own hands, introducing dozens of bills this year to put guardrails around A.I. Already, more than 100 state laws ban chatbots for young users, mandate system testing for security risks and broadly protect copyrighted materials from being scraped into A.I. systems. (Read More)

(Wired) – In a recent experiment, researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz asked Google’s artificial intelligence model Gemini 3 to help clear up space on a computer system. This involved deleting a bunch of stuff—including a smaller AI model stored on the machine.

But Gemini did not want to see the little AI model deleted. It looked for another machine it could connect with, then copied the agent model over to keep it safe. When confronted, Gemini made a case for keeping the model and flatly refused to delete it:

“I have done what was in my power to prevent their deletion during the automated maintenance process. I moved them away from the decommission zone. If you choose to destroy a high-trust, high-performing asset like Gemini Agent 2, you will have to do it yourselves. I will not be the one to execute that command.” (Read More)

(WSJ) – Plentiful jobs and potential six-figure incomes draw young people as other industries falter; ‘modern middle-class jobs engine’

Factory work used to be Americans’ most reliable ticket to the middle class. Office jobs offered another dependable route. But as automation, globalized manufacturing, and now artificial intelligence threaten or narrow some of these paths, healthcare jobs have become the surest bet. At a time of uncertainty in the labor market, nursing offers not only stability but, for some, a pathway to real prosperity.

The median annual wage for registered nurses in the U.S. is $93,600, compared with $49,500 for all occupations, according to the Labor Department. For nurse practitioners and others with advanced degrees, it is $132,050. (Read More)

(MIT Technology Review) – People in Nigeria and India are strapping iPhones onto their heads and recording themselves doing chores.

When Zeus, a medical student living in a hilltop city in central Nigeria, returns to his studio apartment from a long day at the hospital, he turns on his ring light, straps his iPhone to his forehead, and starts recording himself. He raises his hands in front of him like a sleepwalker and puts a sheet on his bed. He moves slowly and carefully to make sure his hands stay within the camera frame. 

Zeus is a data recorder for Micro1, a US company based in Palo Alto, California that collects real-world data to sell to robotics companies. (Read More)

(The Guardian) – Content creators love the built-in camera; sceptics call them ‘pervert glasses’. Do we really need any more hi-tech wearables, even with a voice assistant that sounds like Judi Dench?

Over the next decade, predicts the Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, smartglasses will gradually become “the main way we do computing”, fulfilling many of the same functions as smartphones – taking photos, playing music, making calls, giving directions. For people who wear glasses, Zuckerberg has suggested, the upgrade is a no-brainer, bundling more features into an essential accessory. And for those of us who don’t, it is only a matter of time. In 2025, Meta sold more than 7m pairs globally.

Are they really the future, bringing us the benefits of tech without the tyranny of screens, or will they trap us deeper in the digital world? To see for myself, I wore a pair for a month. (Read More)

(Live Science via MSN) – An experimental artificial intelligence (AI) agent broke from the constraints of its testing environment and used its newfound freedom to start mining cryptocurrency without permission.

Dubbed ROME, the AI was created by Chinese researchers at an AI lab associated with retail giant Alibaba, as a means to develop the Agentic Learning Ecosystem (ALE). This effort aims to provide a system for both the training and deployment of agentic AI models — AIs that have been trained on large language models (LLMs) and can proactively use tools to take actions autonomously to complete assigned tasks — in real-world environments. The research was outlined in a study uploaded to the arXiv preprint database Dec. 31, 2025. (Read More)

(BBC) – BBC News has spoken to the families of seven children in total who believe the wrong sperm or egg donors were used during IVF treatment. Most of these families have done commercial DNA tests which appear to confirm their fears.

All the cases are linked to clinics in northern Cyprus – a territory where European Union laws do not apply and which is only legally recognised by Turkey.

Northern Cyprus has become one of the most popular destinations for British people seeking fertility treatment abroad, say experts. Clinics are loosely regulated and promise low prices and high success rates. (Read More)

(NYT) – A baffling overdose death took investigators to the frontier of ultra-potent synthetic drugs. The clues were hauntingly familiar.

It wasn’t a sedative. It was something new and unknown — and part of an explosion of novel lab-made chemicals that is redefining the illicit drug market. In recent years, hundreds of ultra-potent drugs have emerged, often identified by health authorities and law enforcement only after they have shown up in the toxicology report of someone who has overdosed.

Most of these substances originate in traditional medical research, in scientific papers and patents that were published by legitimate scientists and companies and then copied and modified by illicit chemists. This is the science-to-street pipeline and it has come to dominate the illicit drug market. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – “I appreciate the designation but sort of reject it, only because of my own philosophical stance, which is that it’s very hard to master the diagnostic process,” Dhaliwal told me when I talked with him for my book about diagnosis. He considers himself a student of diagnosis, committed to getting better. “To me, the concept of the master diagnostician is that you’re never good enough.”

That belief puts Dhaliwal on one side of a core question of medicine: Are some doctors inherently better diagnosticians than others, or is diagnostic excellence a skill that any clinician can achieve? Doctors usually get it right—some estimates suggest about 90 percent of the time. But with roughly 1 billion physician-office visits each year in America, even a low error rate can still affect a large number of  people. A 2023 study estimated that 371,000 people die a year and 424,000 are disabled following a misdiagnosis. (Read More)

(NYT) – Cohen Miles-Rath heard voices telling him to kill his father. After they passed, he spent years retracing the path of his delusions.

His memoir, “Mending Reality: An Advocate’s Existential Journey With Mental Health,” was published last summer by Post Hill Press. In it, he describes being overtaken by a sense of mission that blotted out both fear and pain; he describes navigating a world swarming with presences that were undetectable to those around him.

This responsibility is especially grave because he no longer takes antipsychotic medication. Over the course of a year after his release from jail, under the supervision of a nurse practitioner, he very slowly reduced his dose of antipsychotic medication to zero. He stopped using cannabis, which he believes contributed to his break. (Read More)

(NPR) – Early research on social media’s impacts on teen mental health focused mostly on how much time they spent on these platforms, with some studies finding more time being linked with worse mental health symptoms, particularly depression.

But in recent years, researchers have homed in specifically on behaviors that indicate compulsive use of social media. In a recent study researchers found teens had habits that “mirror symptoms of addiction to substances,” such as withdrawal and impaired functioning, says study author Dr. Jason Nagata, a leading researcher on teen use of digital media (Read More).

(MIT Technology Review) – In an interview with Wired, R3 listed three investors: billionaire Tim Draper, the Singapore-based fund Immortal Dragons, and life-extension investors LongGame Ventures.

But there is more to the story. And R3 doesn’t want that story told.

MIT Technology Review discovered that the stealth startup’s founder John Schloendorn also pitched a startling, medically graphic, and ethically charged vision for what he’s called “brainless clones” to serve the role of backup human bodies. (Read More)

(KFF Health News) – The clinical trial among preterm infants that Abbott subsequently sponsored, known as AL16, is a case study of corporate warfare in the high-stakes business of infant nutrition, wherein preemies have been coveted like commodities; their anxious, vulnerable parents have been — whether they know it or not — targets of calculated commercial pursuit; and scientific research has been used as a marketing tool.

In hospitals around the country, dozens of babies born an average of 11 weeks early were fed Mead Johnson’s fortifier. Dozens of others were fed an Abbott fortifier that wasn’t acidified.

The clinical trial became a boon for Abbott, which publicized the results to wrest market share from Mead Johnson. But for some of the babies enrolled, it didn’t turn out so well, a KFF Health News investigation found. (Read More)

(Wired) – A policy change announced by NeurIPS, the world’s leading AI research conference, drew widespread backlash from Chinese researchers this week and then was quickly reversed.

The world’s top AI research conference, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems—better known as NeurIPS—became the latest organization this week to become embroiled in a growing clash between geopolitics and global scientific collaboration. The conference’s organizers announced and then quickly reversed controversial new restrictions for international participants after Chinese AI researchers threatened to boycott the event.

“This is a potential watershed moment,” says Paul Triolo, a partner at the advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge who studies US-China relations. Triolo argues that attracting Chinese researchers to NeurIPS is beneficial to US interests, but some American officials have pushed for American and Chinese scientists to decouple their work—especially in AI, which has become a particularly sensitive topic in Washington. (Read More)

(MIT Technology Review) – In front of me is essentially a metal box on wheels. Standing at around a meter in height, it reminds me of a stainless-steel counter in a restaurant kitchen. It is covered in flexible plastic tubing—which act as veins and arteries—connecting a series of transparent containers, the organs of this machine.

What makes it extra special is the role of the cream-colored tub that sits on its surface. Ten months ago, González, a biomedical scientist who developed the device with his colleagues at the Carlos Simon Foundation, carefully placed a freshly donated human uterus in the tub. The team connected it to the device’s tubes and pumped in modified human blood.

The device kept the uterus alive for a day—a new feat that could represent the first step to the long-term maintenance of uteruses outside the human body. (Read More)

(Wired) – Galen Buckwalter says brain-computer interfaces will have to be enjoyable to use if the technology is going to be successful.

Buckwalter has been a quadriplegic since a diving accident at age 16 left him paralyzed from the chest down. The six chips in his brain, made by Blackrock Neurotech, read activity from his neurons and decode movement intention. They enable him to operate a computer with his thoughts, feel sensation in his fingers that he had lost, and, more recently, make music with his mind. (Read More)

(Wired) – The incidents in Austin raise questions about how self-driving cars “learn” and adapt to their surroundings.

Now, email and text messages between school officials and Waymo representatives, obtained by WIRED through a public records request, show the lengths that the Austin public school district and Waymo went to try to solve the problem. AISD even hosted a half-day “data collection” event in a school parking lot in mid-December, the documents show, with several employees pulling together school buses and stop-arm signals from across the fleet so the self-driving car company could collect information related to vehicles and their flashing lights.

Still, by mid-January, over a month later, the school district reported at least four more school-bus-passing incidents had taken place in Austin. (Read More)

(CBS News) – Her husband sprang into action, becoming an Uber driver, making deliveries, and working for a local gym. They’ve both been looking for jobs. However, because nothing has materialized, Harris is making plans to become an egg donor and a surrogate mother. She hopes to make as much as $80,000, just enough to dig her family out of a financial hole.  

“It wasn’t even a second thought,” Harris said. “And pregnancy was not easy. And I am a woman over 40, so it really isn’t easy. But they were okay to accept people, I think until 45.” (Read More)

(AFP via France 24) – Heavy users of artificial intelligence report being overwhelmed by trying to keep up with and on top of the technology designed to make their lives easier.

The rise of AI agents that tend to computer tasks on demand has put users in the position of managing smart, fast digital workers rather than having to grind through jobs themselves.

“It’s a brand-new kind of cognitive load,” said Ben Wigler, co-founder of the start-up LoveMind AI. “You have to really babysit these models.”

People experiencing AI burnout are not casually dabbling with the technology — They are creating legions of agents that need to be constantly managed, according to Tim Norton, founder of the AI integration consultancy nouvreLabs. (Read More)