(Nature) – Study of almost 28,000 people also identifies genetic variants that raise the risk of gastrointestinal side effects from GLP-1 medications.

Scientists have identified a set of genetic variants that could help to explain why responses to obesity drugs vary markedly from person to person.

One variant is associated with greater weight loss from the powerful GLP-1 medications. Others are linked to an increased risk of side effects such as nausea. The findings, published today in Nature, come from a study of almost 28,000 users of the DNA-testing service 23AndMe who reported taking weight-loss drugs. (Read More)

(Wired) – The trial focused on tumor types where HER3 signaling is implicated. HER3 is a membrane-bound protein that mediates cell-to-cell communication on growth and division. But when cancer is present, HER3 signaling can act as a pro-cancer driver, contributing to cell proliferation, tumor growth, and resistance to therapy.

The HER3 protein was discovered more than 30 years ago, but HER3 has been a challenging target, and translating HER3 biology into real clinical treatments that benefit patients has proven difficult. That’s because cancer is tricky, and “HER3 biology isn’t a single switch—tumors have multiple ways to activate and adapt,” Ingram says. So to develop a molecule that could block cancer growth by stopping HER3’s signals, the Singapore team asked a more specific question: “Can we engineer an antibody that more effectively suppresses HER3 function and signaling—not just bind the target?”

As those first drops of the infusion trickled down the IV line, HMBD-001 became the first clinical test of that hypothesis. (Read More)

(NYT) – Anthropic said it found critical exposures in every major operating system and Web browser, many of which run power grids, waterworks, airline reservation systems, retailing networks, military systems and hospitals all over the world.

If this A.I. tool were, indeed, to become widely available, it would mean the ability to hack any major infrastructure system — a hard and expensive effort that was once essentially the province only of private-sector experts and intelligence organizations — will be available to every criminal actor, terrorist organization and country, no matter how small. (Read More)

(Washington Post via MSN) – The data remains sparse: An analysis published last year found that just a tiny fraction of the more than 40,000 autism papers published between 1980 and 2021 included people over 50. But the number of studies about aging with autism is growing rapidly. Advances in brain imaging, DNA sequencing and molecular biology are revealing remarkable overlaps between autism and Alzheimer’s, scientists say — in genes, in neural circuitry, even in patterns of disease. (Read More)

(NYT) – An analysis of hundreds of images from several studies shows how hallucinogenic drugs drive activity in various regions of the brain.

Their findings, published on Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, suggest that psychedelics prompt a welter of activity between regions of the brain that normally operate somewhat independently: the areas that process sensory information like vision, hearing and touch, and those involved with abstract thinking and self-reflection.

The research suggests that psychedelic compounds temporarily reduce the separation between how we think and how we perceive, which could explain the neurological mechanics behind the sensory distortions, mystical experiences and ego dissolution that patients report during sessions. (Read More)

(NPR) – “There is a lot of fear and anxiety about AI,” says psychologist Vaile Wright, senior director of health care innovation at the American Psychological Association (APA). “And in particular fear around AI replacing jobs.”

Those concerns were a key issue last month, when 2,400 mental health care providers for Kaiser Permanente in Northern California and the Central Valley went on a 24-hour strike. (Read More)

(NYT) – Eliminating outreach to people with severe mental illness set off such a cascade of bad outcomes that Idaho has scrambled to reverse the cuts.

His was the first death, but not the last, among the Idahoans who lost access to the home visits and medical care the program provides.

In January, a 49-year-old man was found in his trailer in the city of Nampa. The same month, a 36-year-old man was found in the closet where he slept in the desert town of Arco. In February, a man in his 40s died at his home in Boise; providers said he was too paranoid to take medication to treat a chronic health condition.

The deaths so alarmed Idaho legislators that last week they took the unusual step of voting to restore funding for the program, known as assertive community treatment, or ACT. (Read More)

(NPR) – For this study, researchers surveyed 168 patients waiting to see a clinician to receive medication abortion. “If they were interested and eligible to participate in the study, they looked at a box that is kind of like a prototype packaging for what an over-the-counter medication abortion package might look like,” explains Grossman. The box took them a long time to develop, he adds, explaining that they named the prototype “MiMi” for the two medications, mifepristone and misoprostol.

Based on the information on the box, patients assessed whether they would be good candidates for the medication. Then, researchers compared the patient’s self-assessment to the assessment of the clinician they went on to see. (Read More)

(WSJ) – A big reason is the high prices Americans pay for surgeries and drugs

Americans spend more on healthcare than anyone else in the world. Just insuring a family here costs nearly $27,000 a year, enough to buy a car.

The main cause: Prices are far higher in the U.S. for the same medical products and services, from surgeries to drugs. 

American patients have also been using more care recently, including costly hospital treatment and expensive new drugs for weight loss. That has pushed up spending as well. (Read More)

(Compact Magazine) – Last April, 600 people gathered for a technology policy conference in downtown Washington, DC. The main speaker, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, laid out what he called the “San Francisco consensus”: the view that “within three to five years, we’ll have what is called artificial general intelligence,” which will be able to extend its own capabilities without needing input from human beings. This development, according to the consensus, could bring considerable benefits, but also risks bringing about human extinction. The challenge of getting to one by avoiding the other, Schmidt explained, “is called the ‘eye of the needle’ problem. You need to get through this eye of the needle without killing yourself and killing everybody else, to get to this promised land of AI.” 

In this statement, Schmidt summed up a common way of understanding AI progress. We are developing more and more powerful AI systems that pose extreme risks, but also promise great benefits. (Read More)

(Florida Today) – A Florida doctor entangled in an embryo mixup lawsuit is being sued by another patient claiming he used a “severely mentally ill” woman as a surrogate.

Dr. Milton McNichol, along with Fertility Center of Orlando, IVF Life, IVF Orlando, are named in the new lawsuit filed in March in Seminole County. It alleges a woman in her early 20s was used as surrogate for her cousin and her cousin’s partner, despite the woman’s long-documented history of severe psychiatric illnesses, including Baker Act admissions and experiencing psychiatric instability at the time of the IVF procedure.

The unnamed woman’s attorney, Andrew Rader, said his client was in no condition to be a surrogate and could not meaningfully consent to it. (Read More)

(Science) – The ERROR project tried enticing reviewers with payments. Now, it’s launching a journal—and promising papers as rewards

A project that offers researchers a cash bounty for finding mistakes in published scientific papers has run into trouble: It can’t find enough reviewers to do the work. Now, organizers of the Estimating the Reliability and Robustness of Research (ERROR) project are planning to throw in an additional incentive, by publishing the reviews in a new peer-reviewed journal.

ERROR, launched in 2024 at the University of Bern (UBern), aims to investigate the scientific rigor of important papers in the social sciences, which have been plagued by questionable results. The organizers recruit independent experts to recheck the studies’ data, statistics, methodology, and code.

Because few scientists voluntarily spend time combing through colleagues’ work, ERROR offers reviewers a base fee of 250 to 1000 Swiss francs (roughly $300 to $1200), and bonuses of up to 2500 francs if they spot errors, depending on their severity. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – Online communities focused on health anxiety—an umbrella term for excessive worrying about illness or bodily sensations—are filling up with conversations about ChatGPT and other AI tools. Some say it makes them spiral more than ever, while others who feel like it helps in the moment admit it’s morphed into a compulsion they struggle to resist. I spoke with four therapists who treat the condition (including my own); they all said that they’re seeing clients use chatbots in this way, and that they’re concerned about how AI can lead people to constantly seek reassurance, perpetuating the condition. “Because the answers are so immediate and so personalized, it’s even more reinforcing than Googling. This kind of takes it to the next level,” Lisa Levine, a psychologist specializing in anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and who treats patients with health anxiety specifically, told me. (Read More)

(Washington Post via MSN) – You can hire a death doula anytime after a terminal diagnosis, but it’s more common during hospice care, which is end-of-life care for people with a life expectancy of six months or less that focuses on providing comfort and quality of life rather than a treatment or cure. “People don’t always realize hospice isn’t 24/7,” said Patterson. “A death doula can be there as much as you want them to.”

Given their close work with dying people and their families, death doulas have a unique perspective. Below, they share insights into what they’ve learned about the end of life. (Read More)

(The Walrus) – There’s chaos in the waiting room.

A glance at FirstNet, the app we use to track patients, shows that forty-three people have been triaged by nurses and are waiting to be seen. Nine have minor issues, such as ankle sprains and sore eyes. Eight have intermediate problems, such as abdominal pain and first-trimester bleeding. The other twenty-six have illnesses and injuries deemed major and in need of a full workup and a stretcher. It’s far too many patients for my colleague Tawny to see. She started her shift at 6 p.m. That’s why I’ve been called in early. (Read More)

(Law & Liberty) – Glenn Hughes’s posthumous book is a reminder of the philosophical sources for the conception of human dignity that ought to define our political tradition.

Glenn “Chip” Hughes, longtime professor of philosophy at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, passed away in 2024. His final work, Inherent Human Dignity: A Philosophical Meditation, published posthumously, is a résumé and summa of a lifelong intellectual and spiritual concern, which he pursued across philosophy, politics, literature, music, anthropology, and more, guided by the pathbreaking work of two twentieth-century giants, political theorist Eric Voegelin and theologian Bernard Lonergan. (Read More)

(Axios) – Without a federal law, surrogacy in the U.S. is governed by a patchwork of state regulations/

Why it matters: Confusing, varied local rules can determine everything from whether agreements are legally binding to who is recognized as a parent at birth.

By the numbers: As of 2026, surrogacy agreements are enforceable in 31 states (with some limitations), void in one, and unregulated in 17, Surrogacy360 tells Axios. (Read More)

(Axios) – For the first time, Medicare is covering some cannabis products under a pilot program that opens up more of the nearly $30 billion hemp industry to seniors.

Why it matters: The effort is part of a White House push to reschedule marijuana and tracks with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s interest in non-pharmaceutical, alternative treatments. Policy experts say it also taps into public dissatisfaction with how the health system treats chronic pain and other health problems. (Read More)

(Axios) – OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is doing something no tech titan has ever done: He’s publishing a detailed blueprint for how government should tax, regulate and redistribute the wealth from the very technology he’s racing to build and spread.

Why it matters: Altman told us in a half-hour interview that AI superintelligence is so close, so mind-bending, so disruptive that America needs a new social contract — on the scale of the Progressive Era in the early 1900s, and the New Deal during the Great Depression. (Read More)

(WSJ) – As the AI-generated imagery and video colloquially called slop spreads across social media and video feeds, marketers are going out of their way to tell consumers they’re not to blame.

For some, it’s part of a message about authenticity that they want to send to their customers.

“We commit: No AI generated bodies or people,” promised a campaign last month from Aerie, the intimate apparel brand owned by American Eagle Outfitters. The ads depict actress Pamela Anderson prompting a chatbot to create models before revealing that they were real people the whole time. (Read More)

(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)