(NYT) – Pope Leo XIV’s spiritual message on artificial intelligence arrived as Silicon Valley’s A.I. enthusiasts pursue their own spirituality through technology.

Many of the founders and important researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI joined the earliest gatherings at A.G.I. House. Mr. Nixon is now founder and chief executive of a start-up called the Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, which is trying to automate the creation of A.I.

Mr. Nixon said he has met a generation of scientists who shunned traditional religion in favor of technology. After growing up with books like “The God Delusion” — in which the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins painted God as a false belief contradicted by empirical evidence — he and his peers saw A.I. as an alternative that was more real and far more powerful.

A.I. has started to crack math problems that humans struggled with for decades, he said, and it will soon cure diseases in the same way. “Practically speaking, it will achieve the outcomes that many religions claim their deities would be able to achieve,” he said.(Read More)

(Washington Post via MSN) – As a deadly outbreak of Ebola spreads through the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, one conspiracy theory is that nonprofit workers brought the disease to get more money. Another is that the outbreak has been fabricated to frighten the population and gain access to minerals, including gold.

There are people who refuse to accept that preventing the spread of Ebola, which is transmitted through contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, requires forgoing some traditional funeral rites. And there are others who do not believe Ebola exists at all — it is a fiction, they say, to steal aid money. (Read More)

(Plough) – It is not a question of when “artificial intelligence” will develop consciousness, because there is no such thing as artificial intelligence. What we call AI is the extremely fast simulation of decision-making processes, generating results from the multitude of data available on the network that can be deceptively similar to the achievement of intelligent activity. But it is not intelligence. Intellegere is Latin and means “to understand, to recognize.” When an algorithm selects what is probably the right answer from millions of text modules, who is doing the understanding? There is no understanding and recognition without someone who understands and recognizes something. “Artificial intelligence” is no more intelligent than a pocket calculator or a library: just because both can be used to quickly find something out, it does not mean that there is an intelligence there that understands something. (Read More)

(NYT) – I am a physician who runs her state’s health agency. I had good insurance, paid leave and a fluency with institutions most new mothers should never need. What I did not have was a single provider who could serve as a quarterback for my care.

The dominant obstetric care model treats postpartum recovery as a brief coda to pregnancy: a short follow-up interval, punctuated by a three- to six-week clinic visit. Our reimbursement system reinforces that assumption, bundling prenatal care, delivery and immediate postpartum care into a single global fee, even as recovery extends months longer. (Read More)

(NYT) – The types of Ebola and hantavirus worrying officials are very different from the species identified decades ago, raising new questions about how to respond.

In both cases, the news has been not only frightening but also confusing, even to scientists. The hantaviruses didn’t seem to be acting like hantaviruses, and the Ebola viruses weren’t behaving like Ebola viruses.

Hantaviruses are carried by rodents and other animals, and typically infect people who inhale dried animal urine and saliva. But aboard the cruise ship M.V. Hondius, hantaviruses were moving from person to person.

As for the African outbreak, scientists have made huge strides in fighting Ebola in recent years. They’ve created vaccines that can slow the spread of the disease and antiviral drugs that can cure infections.

But these treatments are probably going to be weak or useless. This is a very different Ebola virus. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – My generation—which is to say, the pillbox generation—came of age during the 1990s. The number of adults who were taking five or more prescription drugs doubled in that decade; the use of medications for depression and cholesterol more than tripled. If pills had once been used from time to time to curb a headache or stifle an infection, now they were a daily ritual for tens of millions of Americans. Popping meds, whether by catapult or tweezers, became the norm.

In the 2020s, we’re living through a second such transition: the dawning of the needle age.

For the past five years, the nation’s shots have multiplied to levels never seen before. Injected medications were once unusual, and mostly limited to diabetics who needed insulin. (Read More)

(The Free Press) – ‘I don’t want my little girl to die,’ Cissy Dekker said about her 19-year-old daughter, Iris. ‘But out of love, I also don’t want this life for her.’

The symptoms began early in Iris’s adolescence. In 2019, at the age of 13, she began complaining of constant pain in her back, head, and stomach. At first, she pushed through it at school, during shifts at a bakery, while babysitting, and playing tennis, relying on a combination of painkillers and antidepressants, counseling at school, and cognitive behavioral therapy.

Then the pandemic hit. As lockdowns stretched on, Iris retreated—into her room, away from friends, away from everything. At 15, she tried to kill herself twice. The first time, she attempted to hang herself, but the hook in the ceiling broke. The second time, she slit her wrists. Both times, Omar, a former psychiatric nurse who now teaches nursing, came home to find her.

After the second attempt, Iris’s psychologist raised the possibility that there was a more humane way to die under Dutch law: euthanasia, which is allowed in cases of “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement.” (Read More)

(STAT News) – Let’s stop mourning the end of the ivory tower and start celebrating what comes next

A few years ago, my lab published a study comparing memory complaints across racial groups. We matched participants on age, IQ, socioeconomic status, depression, genetics — everything we’d been trained to match on. We ran them through the most sophisticated statistical machinery I knew. And we got a finding that felt righteous: proof that the assessments were biased. I was proud of it. My name was first author.

It took me two more years to realize what we’d actually done. We’d stripped our participants of every variable that made them human beings in order to make them statistically comparable — and in doing so, we’d erased exactly the context we needed to understand what was happening. The paper told a clean story. The world it claimed to describe was not clean. And that just ain’t science. (Read More)

(TechCrunch) – CEOs “play with AI,” develop a prototype, or generate a contract, to use Levie’s examples, and then make the leap to believing agents can do the work.

But these top-level executives aren’t the people who have to review code, discover bugs, and identify calls to hallucinated libraries before software is deployed. They aren’t responsible for training AI models on a company’s idiosyncratic contract terms, nor do they have to spend days combing through contracts to find sneaky terms, as Levie indicates. (Read More)

(Gizmodo) – Human reproduction beyond Earth is no longer reserved for science fiction.

China launched embryo-like structures made from living human stem cells to its Tiangong space station for a first-of-its-kind experiment. The artificial embryos flew on board the Tianzhou-10 cargo craft on May 10 and spent around five days in low-Earth orbit to replicate the early development phase that comes after fertilization. (Read More)

(WSJ) – The Trump administration is expected to deploy U.S. public-health officers to Kenya to staff a potential quarantine facility there amid the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to people familiar with the matter.

The people said the facility, which Tuesday was pending signoff from the Kenyan government, is primarily intended for Americans who are exposed to or at high risk of testing positive for the virus in the region, as well as Americans who test positive. (Read More)

(WSJ) – The job for some can be unpredictable and lonely. But for others, it offers travel, friendship, and a whiff of glamour.

Nursing is hardly known as a glamorous profession. Long shifts, late nights and demanding patients take their toll. But traveling nurses, an increasingly popular segment of the profession, are giving the field a surprising allure. 

Thousands of these nurses pack suitcases and catch flights each year to work monthslong stints in places with high demand. The job typically offers better weekly pay than a staff nursing role does, though with less job stability. It can also offer a taste of the jet-setting life, which some young nurses have started chronicling widely on social media—at times in posts sponsored by staffing agencies. (Read More)

(ABC News) – In place of the quest to create artificial intelligences that can surpass human cognition and drive a technological revolution, Leo has written a hymn to the grandeur of human limitation. His dire assessment of the dehumanising “technocratic paradigm”, which he characterises as a “new Tower of Babel”, will likely come across as excessively negative, given the dramatic achievements of large language models and other machine learning tools. (Read More)

(Wired) – In Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope decries the concentration of technological power in a few global players.

An algorithm decides what we see, another filters what we read, and still others enter into the processes that govern work, information, and collective choices. In the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. the first signed by Pope Leo XIV and published on May 25, artificial intelligence is not viewed as just another technology; it is part of the invisible infrastructure of our contemporary daily lives.

But the text is not conceived as an exclusively technological reflection. Pope Leo XIV places the issue of AI within the tradition of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and directly invokes—while updating it—the Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII (published on May 15, 1891) in the year of its 135th anniversary. That encyclical addressed the question of labor at the height of the industrial revolution in the late 19th century. (Read More)

(WSJ) – Employers are clamoring for workers who can do doctor-like work but who are trained faster and can cost them less

These days, heading to the doctor’s office often doesn’t involve a doctor. At least not directly. Instead, nurse practitioners have become major gap fillers, growing their ranks by 60% to 461,000 between 2019 and 2025, data from the American Association of Nurse Practitioners show. 

Physician assistants who can fill similar roles are also in high demand, as are other non-MD health providers. They are all part of a broader trend to push basic care beyond the doctor’s office. In many states, for example, pharmacists now prescribe medications such as contraceptives and flu treatments. (Read More)

(Wired) – Over the past year or so, more and more people have looked at me with great pity. Surely a fact-checker at a magazine isn’t long for this AI-upgraded world. Call me foolish, but I’m not that worried. Very little of humanity’s collective knowledge, I’ve concluded, lives on the internet. And according to my research, AI is even more wrong than people might think. (Read More)

(National Post) – In a second case, the same doctor failed to administer one of three drugs used in assisted deaths and the patient resumed spontaneously breathing after being pronounced dead

As first reported Monday by the The Globe and Mail, the doctor’s case is raising new concerns about MAID’s oversight and accountability.

“What is striking is not only the seriousness of the concerns identified in these cases, but the limited regulatory response,” said Dr. Ramona Coelho, a family physician and former member of the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario’s MAID death review committee. (Read More)

(Vatican News) – Marking the 135th anniversary of Rerum novarum, Pope Leo XIV releases his first encyclical, entitled ‘Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.’ He appeals for the safeguarding of humanity, promotion of truth, dignity of work, social justice, and peace.

“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

The opening words of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, summarize its underlying reasons and purpose. (Read More)

(The New Atlantis) – Since the beginning of his papacy a year ago, Pope Leo XIV has held out the promise of offering the world some much-needed wisdom on living well with technology. His very choice of name hearkened back to Leo XIII’s unmatched moral and intellectual leadership in framing the case for human flourishing in the face of the indignities of the industrial age. And his ambition has seemed directed to offering similar guidance, rooted in the same enduring conception of the nature of the human person, to a world coming to terms with artificial intelligence.

His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, released to the world this past Monday, certainly reflects that ambition. But it also reflects the difficulties posed by the sheer magnitude of the moment. (Read More)

(AP) – Fred Kerley ran 100 meters in a pedestrian 9.97 seconds Sunday night to win the Enhanced Games in a race where the sprinters had to be placed in the starting blocks four times because of false starts and untied shoes.

Kerley, who predicted Usain Bolt’s world record of 9.58 seconds would get “destroyed,” ran a time that would have placed him last at the Paris Olympics two years ago, where he ran 9.81 and won bronze.

The only athlete to win the $1 million bonus for going faster than the world record over the four hours of swimming, weightlifting and track in the specially built stadium on the Las Vegas Strip was Kristian Gkolomeev, who closed the night by swimming the 50-meter free in 20.81 seconds. (Read More)

(NYT) – I’ve seen Ebola up close. I got it while treating patients in West Africa in 2014. I know how destructive the disease can be — and how unprepared we are for its return.

After the 2014 outbreak, which killed over 11,000 people, the world strengthened systems to catch and contain Ebola outbreaks early. Much of that infrastructure — surveillance networks, rapid response teams and diplomatic partnerships — has been dismantled over the past year, as the United States abdicated its longstanding role as a leader in global health and humanitarian response. (Read More)

(BBC) – Scientists at Oxford University are developing a new vaccine that could be ready for clinical trials within two to three months to help tackle the Ebola emergency.

The outbreak, centred on the Democratic Republic of Congo, has resulted in 750 suspected cases and 177 deaths.

The rare species of Ebola, known as Bundibugyo, for which there is no proven vaccine, kills around a third of those infected. (Read More)

(MIT Technology Review) – As you might expect, the event is generating a mix of curiosity, excitement, and condemnation from various quarters. To me, it feels like very much a reflection of where we are today—an era of peptide-crazed looksmaxxing in which consumers are being encouraged to get thinner than ever, optimize for longevity, and have their “best baby.” It’s 2026, and if you’re not enhancing, what are you even doing?

So, these games. (Read More)

(STAT News) – Advisory offers ways to reduce exposure, including bell-to-bell school bans, tech design changes

Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is issuing a U.S. surgeon general’s advisory urging families, schools, and providers to reduce children’s screen time, according to a draft of the report reviewed by STAT.

The report, which comes from the surgeon general’s office even though there is no Senate-confirmed nominee, calls on parents, schools, and all levels of government to work together to shift the use of devices with screens, saying some patterns of use “can pose real harm to children.” (Read More)

(WSJ) – New studies suggest drugs like Ozempic, Zepbound might slow tumor progression and improve survival; more research needed to confirm finding

A suite of four new studies suggest that people taking so-called GLP-1 drugs like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro saw reductions in tumor progression, lower overall chance of death and less risk of developing breast cancer.

“It’s really provocative that they showed, in several cancers, that people who took these drugs seem to have a lower risk of their cancer returning,” said Dr. Jennifer Ligibel, a breast oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who wasn’t involved in any of the studies. (Read More)