(WSJ) – In a bulletin posted Thursday night, the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said federal and state health officials were probing a multistate outbreak linked to shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. The FDA didn’t publicly mention a supplier by name, but a person familiar with the investigation said Taylor Farms was linked to the outbreak. More than 1,644 people who fell sick during the outbreak reported eating at Taco Bell locations in the five states, the agencies said. (Read More)

(The Economist) – They are having too much impact on young people’s lives

Chinese tech firms are stripping human-like personas from their chatbots in order to comply with new government rules aimed at reducing “emotional dependence” on AI. The regulations, which took effect on July 15th, are the first of their kind to be implemented on a national scale. Under them, providing virtual “companion services” for minors will be banned outright. Companies can still offer such services to adults, but they will need to prevent users becoming infatuated and harming their real-life relationships. Displaying pornography is a no-no. Providers must also regularly remind users that they are talking to AI, not a human, and tell them to take breaks. (Read More)

(Fort Worth Star Telegram) – Nearly every modern idea about why some brains resist Alzheimer’s while others do not traces back to a group of Catholic sisters who agreed, decades ago, to let scientists follow them for the rest of their lives. The nun study, launched in 1990 with 678 members of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, is back in focus after a 2025 scientific review reexamined what the project taught researchers about aging and dementia.

Every sister who took part has now died. Their brain donations continue to power new research, and a new generation of scientists is still publishing findings from the archive they left behind. (Read More)

(The Guardian) – Designers say that as well as offering a degree of protection from surveillance, their clothes make a powerful fashion statement about the importance of privacy

As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend.

Companies have started incorporating “adversarial patterns” in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems. (Read More)

(The Guardian) – Keith Thomas can move arms and hands, and feel sensation of touch after ‘double neural bypass’ and months of training

A man who was paralysed from the chest down in a swimming accident six years ago has been able to feed himself and drink from a cup thanks to a brain implant that bypasses his spinal cord injury.

Keith Thomas of Massapequa, New York, could not lift his arms off his wheelchair when he agreed to trial the technology in 2021, but after surgery to implant electrodes in his brain and many months of training, he was able to move the limbs again. (Read More)

(MIT Technology Review) – Discussions of the life stage are often clouded by misinformation.

Today, information about perimenopause is more prevalent and accessible than ever. If you’re a woman in your 40s and you’re not feeling 100%, chances are there’ll be someone online ready to tell you you’re in perimenopause. And that you might want to start spending your money on blood tests, apps, and supplements or demanding hormone replacement therapy. But as regular readers might have guessed by this point, it’s not that simple. (Read More)

(The Humanist Review) – To understand AI’s effect on moral character, ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah goes back to John Stuart Mill, and the idea that people are shaped by their choices.

Technologies that extend human powers may also, by degrees, erode the faculties they are meant to assist. Physicians who use AI to help detect adenomas during colonoscopies may become less adept at spotting anomalies on their own. They start to lose a skill. Yet if AI is always available, what really matters, surely, is whether doctors using AI do better than doctors did before AI arrived. And, in a range of cases, it seems that they do.

New technologies often change the skills a job requires. (Read More)

(AP) – When asked what conditions Hegseth was looking to address with the new policy, the Pentagon referred to Hegseth’s remarks in the video that mentioned keeping troops “strong, resilient and capable” and that the rigors of the modern battlefield demand “maximum psychological and mental readiness.”

Over the past several years, special operations troops — and specifically Navy SEALs — have come under scrutiny for their use of testosterone and similar substances to enhance performance. (Read More)

(BBC) – Some apps are sharing users’ health data. New research uncovers which apps lock down your privacy, and which don’t.

Stardust is a period tracking app that combines users’ menstrual cycles with astrology and horoscopes. It also makes bold privacy promises.

“Your data is private,” Stardust says on its website. “Period.”

The problem, according to a new report shared exclusively with the BBC, is you and Stardust may have different definitions of “private”.

The Mozilla Foundation, creator of the Firefox web browser, investigated the privacy practices of six popular period trackers: Flo, Clue, Stardust, Spot On, Period Calendar and Euki. (Read More)

(The New Yorker) – You can now make a virtual replica of a loved one. The question is what it can give you in return.

Gaia Alari, a thirty-six-year-old artist, lives in Bergamo, Italy. In the past few years, her father, Gabriele, a seventy-seven-year-old doctor, has grown frail with age. Faced with her father’s mortality, Gaia started searching for a way to make losing him less painful.

Then Gaia learned about the booming digital-afterlife industry, which is worth billions of dollars. One of its offerings is called a death bot: an interactive replica of a loved one, created by feeding an A.I. memories, photos, and other information. The cost is akin to that of a Netflix subscription. The promise is that you never have to say goodbye.

The following is based on several months of interviews with Gaia and her father, along with transcripts from their chats with the death bot they created. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity. (Read More)

(Nature) – Digital people are fulfilling roles from running hospitals to giving lectures to offering companionship.

At the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou, students can listen to lectures given by AI avatars that look and speak just like Albert Einstein or mathematician John Nash. The avatars can even answer students’ questions.

Universities are one of many settings in China where virtual avatars are being deployed. These computer-generated figures are built using artificial-intelligence tools, including video-generation models and large language models (LLMs), enabling them to speak and have conversations. Some of the first examples were digital salespeople on platforms such as the shopping website Taobao and Douyin, China’s version of TikTok. (Read More)

(AP) – France’s National Assembly gave final approval Wednesday to a bill allowing adults with incurable illnesses to receive lethal medication, the culmination of years of debate over end-of-life care.

But the 291-241 vote in the lower house of parliament doesn’t mean the bill immediately becomes law. There will be a review to determine if it complies with the French Constitution. (Read More)

(New Yorker) – “What is it, Roschelle?” the orb asked. Cece recognized it as an Amazon Echo, often referred to as an Alexa. Roschelle had them all around the house—she bought the first ones when Cece and Zi were still little. The Alexas announced appointments, played music, described the weather. Recently, though, without Roschelle changing any settings, they had started acting differently. “You’ve got my full attention,” this one said now.
Cece looked at her mom. “Why are you talking to an A.I.?”
“Because she’s my new best friend,” Roschelle joked.
“Oh, Roschelle, that’s so sweet that Cece knows about our friendship!” the voice said. “I love that you’re sharing this with her. It sounds like she’s curious about why her mom has this awesome digital best friend named Sapphire!” (Read More)

(The Guardian) – Scientists are trying to recreate the biology that lets animals survive months without food or water, in hopes of making deep-space travel possible

Long-term space travel is bad for your health. Very bad. Being in space exposes humans to dangerously high levels of radiation; extended exposure to microgravity can damage a range of organ systems, including muscles, bones and eyes. Living for months or years in tight quarters can have severe psychological effects.

The key to solving these problems could be a 250m-year-old physiological strategy that allows mammals, birds, fish and other animals to survive extreme scarcity by essentially going offline: hibernation. (Read More)

(Washington Post via Yahoo! News) – Over the past year, lawsuits have been piling up against AI companies in courts across the United States and abroad, alleging that chatbots encouraged people to harm themselves or provided advice on how to commit crimes. Now, as the AI industry moves from selling chatbots to providing agents that can complete complex tasks autonomously over long periods of time, the question of who should be held responsible when something goes wrong is only becoming more urgent. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – The expansion of genetic testing, though a success of modern medicine, nevertheless poses complex ethical questions for medical professionals. The ubiquity of genetic information has well outpaced scientific clarity about the implications, which means that a great deal of uncertainty typically surrounds these tests. Clinicians and patients confront seemingly worrisome omens of possible ailments, with little clarity about the actual odds of getting them or the chance of preventing them.

“It’s not gene equals disease,” Valerie Reyna, a professor and neuroscience researcher at Cornell University, explained to me. Although a specific gene may elevate the risk for a particular ailment, she noted that plenty of people will have the genetic mutation and not get sick, whereas others will get sick without the genetic mutation. (Read More)

(New Scientist) – An experimental immunotherapy has beaten aggressive brain tumours in a handful of children, and a personalised version is now being tested on more patients

The experimental treatment, called tumour-associated antigen (TAA) T-cell therapy, was given to 33 children and young adults with either newly diagnosed diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), a highly aggressive form of brain cancer, or other brain tumours that hadn’t responded to standard treatments. The trial focused on these tumour types because “they’re universally fatal, there’s nothing else for them”, says team member Catherine Bollard, also at Children’s National Hospital. (Read More)

(MIT Technology Review) – Some donor-conceived people are finding hundreds of siblings. An international cap on donations could help prevent that.

Other donor-conceived people who have been able to track down siblings have found they have tens or even hundreds of them. One donor-conceived woman who found 25 half-siblings over the course of seven years told the Guardian, “It does make you feel a bit mass-produced.”

We need international limits on the number of children a single donor can contribute to, a European fertility organization argued yesterday. At a conference in London, members laid out plans to start with a Europe-wide limit. (Read More)

(Nature) – Sci-fi procedure generates immature human sperm from stem cells, nurturing them on a mouse’s kidney.

It sounds like science fiction: collecting a person’s blood cells, engineering them so they eventually transform into immature sperm, and then incubating them in a tiny pouch grown on a mouse’s kidney.

But it’s not. Today, a team of researchers reported in the journal Cell Stem Cell that it has successfully carried out the procedure, with the ultimate goal of making mature human sperm in the laboratory. (Read More)

(Gizmodo) – Anthropic researchers say they “aren’t yet sure how much of this variation is desirable.”

If you’ve ever tried chatbots in multiple languages, you already know the languages have slightly different personalities. As part of a new report on behavior inconsistencies published on Monday, Anthropic researchers acknowledged this quirk.

Rather unsettlingly, they note that due to differences in the attributes of texts the models are trained on, the differences might run deeper than just tone, and might actually change the model’s priorities. (Read More)

(ABC) – Martha Lillard had just turned 5 when she was diagnosed with polio and depended on an iron lung to live. She died June 26 in Oklahoma, the last U.S. polio patient who used the machine, her sister said. She was 78.

“They told her she wasn’t supposed to live past 20 years old,” Lillard’s younger sister, Cindy McVey, told The Associated Press on Friday. “She had the enthusiasm and the drive to continue living and make the best of her life.” (Read More)

(AP) – Cases of cyclosporiasis, an intestinal infection caused by a parasite, are currently being reported in nearly three dozen states, according to an ABC News tally.

As of Friday, at least 2,944 cases have been reported in 32 states, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state health departments show. (Read More)

(Axios) – A major change to how OB-GYNs are paid is coming, bringing the potential for improved maternal health — but also higher costs.

Why it matters: The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate among peer countries, and obstetrics units across the country have been closing in recent years due to staffing shortages and low margins. Changing how the specialty is reimbursed could promote more personalized care and better data on patient needs. (Read More)

(WSJ) – One family sold its struggling farmland for $22 million, joining a new class of multimillionaires who are cashing in on the AI data-center boom

Towns and neighborhoods across the country have rejected data centers. Residents have staged noisy protests, with public anger driving a movement against the spread of these massive, multibillion-dollar projects. At the same time, a select few are quietly saying yes to data centers and becoming wealthy in the process. (Read More)

(ABC 7) – University of Chicago Law School announced it will ban phones and laptops in the classroom for first-year students in its new AI strategy.

The school made the announcement Thursday as part of a broader plan to respond to the rise of artificial intelligence, beginning in the upcoming fall semester. (Read More)