(Ars Technica) – OpenAI is facing calls for “serious sanctions” after fighting to keep news organizations from snooping through millions of logs to find evidence of users skirting their paywalls by prompting ChatGPT to regurgitate their articles.

This evidence is considered among the most important to both sides, potentially either dooming OpenAI as an infringer or exonerating its chatbot technology as a transformative fair use of news sites’ content.

In a sanctions motion Thursday, news organizations suing OpenAI—led by The New York Times—accused the AI firm of repeatedly lying for years to conceal evidence of infringement that could hobble OpenAI’s defense. (Read More)

(MedPage Today) – Two Chinese studies related to liver transplantation published more than a decade ago in the Journal of Hepatology were retracted by the journal’s editors.

The editors said concerns were raised that the transplants described in both studies may have involved organs “procured unethically.” (Read More)

(BBC) – A law to allow terminally ill adults the right to choose to end their own lives in Jersey has been granted Royal Assent, meaning the island’s government can bring it into force.

The government said this was a “critical step” in making sure the assisted dying service could begin on schedule later next year, after the bill was approved by the States in February.

When it comes into law, which is expected in a few days’ time, Jersey will be the first part of the British Isles where assisted dying is legalised. (Read More)

(WSJ) – Some Latin American and Caribbean countries are cutting ties to Havana’s medical program under pressure from Washington

The Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Cuba’s Communist government is zeroing in on the island’s most valuable export and one of its few remaining sources of hard currency: the doctors and nurses it deploys abroad.

The U.S. has blocked fuel shipments, sanctioned and indicted its top officials and curbed money Cubans abroad send to relatives back home. Now, the effort to throttle Cuba’s decades-old medical missions—through which Havana gets payments to export doctors and nurses to more than 50 countries—threatens billions of dollars in revenue for a country already in economic free fall. (Read More)

(NYT) – The human microbiome is essential to our health, but scientists still know very little about it. Two researchers set out to map this largely uncharted terrain.

Poyet and Groussin suspected that the answers to those questions lurked not in the 10 percent of the canvas that scientists were looking at but in the remaining 90 percent. They had long, digressive conversations — in the lab and at home, over hasty meals and occasionally long walks — about how to uncover that bigger picture. So far they had been gathering data and samples piecemeal, from colleagues and collaborators. What they needed instead was a comprehensive approach: to collect as many microbiome samples from as many different communities in as many parts of the world as possible, and then to interview the people who contributed those samples about anything that might be affecting their internal microbial ecosystems, including their diets and lifestyles. (Read More)

(The Guardian) – Remarkable scientific progress against cancer has changed very little for millions of patients globally, who face devastating physical, emotional and financial consequences after diagnosis, a new World Health Organization report has warned.

One person in five will develop cancer, according to WHO estimates, and the disease will touch 92% of people, either through their own diagnosis or that of a close family member.

Dr Andre Ilbawi, team lead for cancer control at the WHO, said: “For years, the story told about cancer has been about scientific progress, new technologies, new treatment, new hope. That story is true, and it deserves to be told, but it’s not the whole story.” (Read More)

(NYT) – Behind closed doors, millions of Americans are stepping into one of the hardest roles they’ll ever take on: caring for their aging parents.

Times Opinion interviewed dozens of family caregivers across the country to paint a portrait of the American elder care crisis. In the video above, these caregivers describe the heavy emotional toll and personal sacrifices required to keep their loved ones safe and comfortable.

The United States currently relies on unpaid caregivers to provide $870 billion worth of labor each year, often at an extreme cost to the caregivers’ own well-being, finances and futures. (Read More)

(Psyche) – Americans are secretive about their intense emotional relationships with AI companions like Replika, Nomi and Character.AI because they fear they’ll seem delusional if they talk about them publicly. But many are also secretive because they feel pressure to appear self-reliant and don’t want to admit that they long for sociability. Chatbots hidden away on their phones allow them to maintain the illusion that they are happily independent and aren’t afflicted by loneliness.

This trend reflects the unique emotional culture of the contemporary United States which, on the one hand, treats loneliness as shameful, and on the other hand, ceaselessly extolls self-reliance. The emotional dilemma that Americans confront as they try to live up to these conflicting ideals is challenging to navigate – and it is new, for earlier generations of Americans thought differently about both loneliness and self-reliance. (Read More)

(Wired) – A regulatory loophole has let in thousands of new fossil-fuel-burning power sources across the state. The AI business is booming—but residents feel blindsided.

With some 300 data centers already in operation and 200 more in development, Texas could surpass Virginia as the nation’s leading data center market by 2030. Amidst the frenzy to capitalize on the AI boom, a regulatory loophole has allowed dozens of data centers like Stargate to quietly construct massive power sources that emit harmful pollutants with little to no public notice, a Floodlight investigation has found. (Read More)

(Gizmodo) – Health officials are reporting record numbers of the unpleasant gastrointestinal infection in southeastern Michigan.

More than half of U.S. states—29 and counting—have now reported cases of a parasitic illness that can induce weeks of watery, explosive diarrhea since the wave first emerged in May. But this mysterious outbreak, a poop tsunami, as some might say, appears to have a new epicenter. (Read More)

(Wired) – As part of Meta’s Muse Image model rollout, Instagram users with public accounts need to opt out to block AI generations of their content.

Meta launched its inaugural AI image model from the Meta Superintelligence Labs on Tuesday, its effort to compete with the likes of OpenAI’s GPT Images 2.0 and Google’s Nano Banana 2 in the AI image generation race.

The new model, called Muse Image, rolled out with deep integrations woven into the Instagram app. As part of this update, public Instagram profiles are now automatically opted into being fodder for generative AI remixes. All someone has to do is tag your account’s profile in a prompt—if it’s public—and they can use Meta AI to generate an image using your likeness. (Read More)

(The Guardian) – Couple ‘devastated’ after DNA tests for children’s British citizenship showed no biological connection to them

The Sri Lankan surrogacy agency used by the couple initially confirmed the embryos had been created using the intended father’s sperm, but later claimed the couple had signed a consent form allowing them to use donor sperm. The couple deny this.

The children’s mother said the DNA result had “struck us like a thunderbolt” but they wanted to protect the children and bring them home, saying they were “meant for us”. (Read More)

(City Journal) – If Americans are to revive our sagging national birthrate, we must rebuild the ordinary social structures that made children thinkable and natural.

If the trend continues, Stone and Brookes project that the American population will peak around 351 million in the 2050s and then decline.

Why? Here the authors have uncovered something genuinely novel: evidence that the fertility collapse is not only economic, but social. Americans are not having fewer children because they want fewer children. They are having fewer children, in part, because friendship has thinned and social support for family life has weakened. (Read More)

(WSJ) – Research into how drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound could help people with eating disorders is limited, but emerging

While blockbuster GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound are known for helping people lose weight, Gordon is part of a new wave of people using them to treat their eating disorders instead. Success, for them, might actually involve gaining weight.

Some doctors say they see remarkable success in conditions like bulimia and binge-eating disorder, which have been notoriously difficult to treat. By quieting food noise, these drugs might be able to address some of the hallmarks of disordered eating. But experts say widespread adoption is unlikely to occur soon, because of limited scientific data—and because the drugs might have as much potential to hurt patients with eating disorders as to help them. (Read More)

(The Guardian) – One hundred years after Virginia Woolf explored the limitations of language in On Being Ill, the Piranesi author reflects on the power of storytelling to shape our experience of sickness

In her essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf says, “let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry”.

At least I was in good company.

I remember very well what I wanted to say to the doctor: “I feel like I am about to fall off the world.” I had the sense to realise that he would probably not be able to do much with this. What doctors need is a clear description of something physical, but what the sufferer experiences may be as much emotional as it is physical – it may even have a spiritual component. It is very difficult in my experience to separate the different strands. (Read More)

(Vox) – New analysis suggests other factors may explain the harms blamed on “ultra-processing.”

In little more than a decade, the term “ultra-processed foods” (UPFs) has risen from an obscure academic coinage to one of the most potent ideas in the American food imagination. It has saturated media coverage of diet and disease, spawned a profusion of guides teaching shoppers how to spot UPFs at the supermarket, and animated Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade to remake American food policy.

It might also be kind of fake.

The trouble starts with the definition. (Read More)

(Wired) – In a world regulated by devices, humanity has become disconnected from the physical world—from stick-shift cars to postcards.

If gratification is so easy, why don’t you feel more gratified already? Because it’s gotten harder. It’s still easy to experience individual feats of gratification when you find them (or they find you). But the ordinary circumstances that once produced so much gratification have gradually receded. Unseen choices in design, business, and social life have made it harder for you to engage directly with the sensory world.

This problem snuck up on me, and probably on you as well. Slowly, over time, the world started withdrawing from us. Automation took over ordinary tasks. Things that used to have buttons suddenly did not. Basic activities got taken over by computers. I was slow to notice it happening, too. But once I did, I saw it everywhere and every day. I can’t tell you when the realization formed fully in my brain. But a turning point came on an unassuming day as I piloted my car home from work. (Read More)

(Nature) – Tool directs text-generation systems to remove constructions associated with artificial intelligence in research papers and grant proposals.

A new academic ‘humanizer’ tool aims to personalize the tone of research papers written with an artificial-intelligence program, in part by erasing apparent signs of AI usage. Some researchers praise the tool — but others are voicing concerns.

The tool, released on 20 June, is tailored for “papers and grant proposals”, according to its developer, Jie Ding, a machine-learning researcher at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. It can be used to “match the author’s own voice”, according to the GitHub site for the tool, which lists under “core principles” the need to “strip the AI tells without casualizing”. (Read More)

(MedPage Today) – The bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, commonly used against tuberculosis, changed how immune cells behaved and altered markers linked to Alzheimer’s disease in a pilot study involving two open-label trials.

In a year-long study, BCG vaccination induced persistent, trained immunity-like changes in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), including enhanced innate immune responsiveness, reported Steven Arnold, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and co-authors in Communications Medicine. (Read More)

(Wired) – The lab will beam back data to train AI models to predict how proteins behind age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s and certain cancers behave.

Space is becoming the next frontier in longevity research.

A British startup just launched self-run chemical experiments into orbit, in the hopes zero-gravity data might shine a light on a group of disease-causing proteins too difficult to study on Earth. But first they need to check whether their autonomous laboratory will work in space. (Read More)

(NYT) – A lawsuit filed by Children’s Health Defense, an organization founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., claims that vaccines caused the twins’ deaths. But a grand jury in Idaho has indicted her on charges of suffocating them.

Three days later, she sat for an interview with Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit co-founded by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., claiming that vaccines caused their deaths. The story was sensational, billed on the group’s website as “breaking news” of toddlers who were born together and died together, “FOLLOWING VACCINATIONS.”

The organization quickly embraced the woman, Andrea Renee Shaw, naming her the lead plaintiff in two legal actions against the nation’s top society of pediatricians claiming that the organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics, lied about the safety of childhood vaccines.

Then, last week, after a nearly 14-month investigation by the Payette Police Department, a grand jury indicted Ms. Shaw, 23, on charges of murder, claiming that she suffocated the children in an act that was either premeditated or taken in the course of aggravated battery. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – Now the reckoning they want appears to have arrived. An expert on the flu got hauled off by the FBI. A coronavirus researcher was indicted in Detroit. Two prominent virologists stepped down or were removed from senior roles. And a fifth infectious-disease researcher—Anthony Fauci, the central figure in an alleged “lab-leak” cover-up—was recently subpoenaed to appear before the U.S. Senate.

The precise timing of these cases, which have all come to light since April, may be a coincidence. Yet all five are centered on a small community of scientists affiliated with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci ran for nearly 40 years. (Read More)

(Nature) – Dolly’s brush with celebrity could hold lessons for current discussions about reproductive technologies.

Reproductive cloning is now being used in agriculture to generate gene-edited cattle with no horns and pigs with organs that might be suitable for transplantation into humans. Moreover, an industry has sprung up to create copies of cherished pets, show animals and sport horses.

But in one important respect, Dolly’s legacy is not that anticipated in the frantic weeks after news of her birth became public in 1997. From the start, much of the world’s media portrayed Dolly as a step towards the imminent creation of cloned humans. No such development has materialized. (Read More)

(NYT) – Proponents of assisted spelling say it has improved the lives of thousands of nonspeakers, some of whom have used it to write memoirs or obtain graduate degrees. Yet despite the potentially profound implications of these communication methods, there has been remarkably little scientific research evaluating them. Citing the risk that the person holding the letter board may influence the messages, and a history of such abuses with prior assisted communication methods, many medical groups have cautioned against them.

All of this has led to a growing debate dividing autistic people, families and the scientific community. The central question is less about whether breakthroughs like Tito’s are possible, but whether they are as widespread as many proponents claim. Do assisted spelling methods reliably reveal a person’s own thoughts, or do they give families a false sense of their loved ones’ inner world and capacities? (Read More)

(Straight Arrow News) – Pregnant women in the U.S. are routinely exposed to dozens of chemicals found in everyday products. Some of these chemicals are linked to poorer birth outcomes, a new study reported.

Researchers from across the country followed more than 5,000 pregnancies over 21 years and found that the typical pregnant woman was exposed to over 40 different chemicals. More than a dozen of the chemicals tested were associated with poorer birth outcomes, including slightly shorter pregnancies, lower birth weight or a higher risk of preterm birth. (Read More)