The United States will withdraw from UNESCO for the second time in eight years, with the departure taking effect December 31, 2026. The State Department announced the decision yesterday, ending the country's brief two-year return to the Paris-based United Nations science and cultural organization. The US previously withdrew from UNESCO in 2017, cutting off more than 22% of the agency's funding. The American contribution now represents 8% of UNESCO's current $900 million annual budget, making the financial impact less severe than the earlier withdrawal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has made a big push to get agencies like the Food and Drug Administration to use generative artificial intelligence tools. In fact, Kennedy recently told Tucker Carlson that AI will soon be used to approve new drugs "very, very quickly." But a new report from CNN confirms all our worst fears. Elsa, the FDA's AI tool, is spitting out fake studies.

CNN spoke with six current and former employees at the FDA, three of whom have used Elsa for work that they described as helpful, like creating meeting notes and summaries. But three of those FDA employees told CNN (paywalled) that Elsa just makes up nonexistent studies, something commonly referred to in AI as "hallucinating." The AI will also misrepresent research, according to these employees. "Anything that you don't have time to double-check is unreliable. It hallucinates confidently," one unnamed FDA employee told CNN. [...] Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) commission issued a report back in May that was later found to be filled with citations for fake studies. An analysis from the nonprofit news outlet NOTUS found that at least seven studies cited didn't even exist, with many more misrepresenting what was actually said in a given study. We still don't know if the commission used Elsa to generate that report.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary initially deployed Elsa across the agency on June 2, and an internal slide leaked to Gizmodo bragged that the system was "cost-effective," only costing $12,000 in its first week. Makary said that Elsa was "ahead of schedule and under budget" when he first announced the AI rollout. But it seems like you get what you pay for. If you don't care about the accuracy of your work, Elsa sounds like a great tool for allowing you to get slop out the door faster, generating garbage studies that could potentially have real consequences for public health in the U.S. CNN notes that if an FDA employee asks Elsa to generate a one-paragraph summary of a 20-page paper on a new drug, there's no simple way to know if that summary is accurate. And even if the summary is more or less accurate, what if there's something within that 20-page report that would be a big red flag for any human with expertise? The only way to know for sure if something was missed or if the summary is accurate is to actually read the report. The FDA employees who spoke with CNN said they tested Elsa by asking basic questions like how many drugs of a certain class have been approved for children. Elsa confidently gave wrong answers, and while it apparently apologized when it was corrected, a robot being "sorry" doesn't really fix anything.

For the first time ever, a CCTV camera in Myanmar captured real-time footage of a supershear strike-slip earthquake moving at 3.7 miles per second. According to seismologists at Japan's Kyoto University, the analysis has "led to new findings based on real-time visual evidence of tectonic motion," reports Popular Science. From the report: The magnitude 7.7 event took place on March 28 along the Sagaing Fault with an epicenter near Myanmar's second-largest city, Mandalay. Although the initial rupture process lasted barely 80 seconds, it and numerous aftershocks were ultimately responsible for 5,456 confirmed deaths and over 11,000 injuries. Later evaluations indicated the quake was the second deadliest in modern history, as well as the most powerful to hit Myanmar in over a century. According to a separate group's paper published in the same journal, the southern portion of the rupture occurred at an astonishing 3.7 miles per second -- fast enough to qualify as "supershear velocity."

Amid the catastrophe, an outdoor CCTV camera about 74.5 miles south of the epicenter recorded a visceral illustration of its power. Over just a few moments, what at first looks like a single chunk of the ground appears to suddenly divide and horizontally shift past one another in opposite directions. Completely by accident, the camera recorded a direct look of a strike-slip fault, something previously analyzed by remote seismic instruments. To researchers at Kyoto University, the clip wasn't just a jaw-dropping scene -- it was an opportunity to study a strike-slip fault using visual data. You can watch the footage on YouTube.

Conspiracy theorists drastically overestimate how many people share their beliefs, according to a study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Researchers conducted eight studies involving over 4,000 US adults and found that while participants believed conspiracy claims just 12% of the time, believers thought they were in the majority 93% of the time.

The study examined beliefs about claims such as the Apollo Moon landings being faked and Princess Diana's death not being an accident. In one example, 8% of participants believed the Sandy Hook shooting was a false flag operation, but that group estimated 61% of people agreed with them. "It might be one of the biggest false consensus effects that's been observed," said co-author Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University. The findings suggest overconfidence serves as a primary driver of conspiracy beliefs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Using brain scans from a very large database, British researchers determined that during the pandemic years of 2021 and 2022, people's brains showed signs of aging, including shrinkage, according to the report published in Nature Communications. People who got infected with the virus also showed deficits in certain cognitive abilities, such as processing speed and mental flexibility. The aging effect "was most pronounced in males and those from more socioeconomically deprived backgrounds," said the study's first author, Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad, a neuroimaging researcher at the University of Nottingham, via email. "It highlights that brain health is not shaped solely by illness, but also by broader life experiences."

Overall, the researchers found a 5.5-month acceleration in aging associated with the pandemic. On average, the difference in brain aging between men and women was small, about 2.5 months. "We don't yet know exactly why, but this fits with other research suggesting that men may be more affected by certain types of stress or health challenges," Mohammadi-Nejad said. [...] The study wasn't designed to pinpoint specific causes. "But it is likely that the cumulative experience of the pandemic -- including psychological stress, social isolation, disruptions in daily life, reduced activity and wellness -- contributed to the observed changes," Mohammadi-Nejad said. "In this sense, the pandemic period itself appears to have left a mark on our brains, even in the absence of infection." "The most intriguing finding in this study is that only those who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 showed any cognitive deficits, despite structural aging," said Jacqueline Becker, a clinical neuropsychologist and assistant professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "This speaks a little to the effects of the virus itself."

The study may shed light on conditions like long Covid and chronic fatigue, though it's still unclear whether the observed brain changes in uninfected individuals will lead to noticeable effects on brain function.

Roughly 10 to 25% of lung cancers worldwide now occur in people who have never smoked, according to researchers at the National Cancer Institute. Among certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share reaches 50% or more. Scientists studying 871 nonsmokers with lung cancer from around the world found that certain DNA mutations were significantly more common in people living in areas with high air pollution levels, including Hong Kong, Taiwan and Uzbekistan.

The research, published in Nature this month, revealed that pollution both directly damages DNA and causes cells to divide more rapidly. The biology of cancer in nonsmokers differs from smoking-related cases and may require different prevention and detection strategies. Nonsmokers with lung cancer are more likely to have specific "driver" mutations that can cause cancer, while smokers tend to accumulate many mutations over time.

Current U.S. screening guidelines recommend routine testing only for people ages 50 to 80 who smoked at least one pack daily for 20 years. Taiwan now offers screening for nonsmokers with family history after a nationwide trial detected cancer in 2.6% of participants.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.org: The mission team of NASA's Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft executed a deep-space move in December 2023 to repair its JunoCam imager to capture photos of the Jovian moon Io. Results from the long-distance save were presented during a technical session on July 16 at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Nuclear & Space Radiation Effects Conference in Nashville. JunoCam is a color, visible-light camera. The optical unit for the camera is located outside a titanium-walled radiation vault, which protects sensitive electronic components for many of Juno's engineering and science instruments. This is a challenging location because Juno's travels carry it through the most intense planetary radiation fields in the solar system. While mission designers were confident JunoCam could operate through the first eight orbits of Jupiter, no one knew how long the instrument would last after that. Throughout Juno's first 34 orbits (its prime mission), JunoCam operated normally, returning images the team routinely incorporated into the mission's science papers. Then, during its 47th orbit, the imager began showing hints of radiation damage. By orbit 56, nearly all the images were corrupted.

While the team knew the issue might be tied to radiation, pinpointing what was specifically damaged within JunoCam was difficult from hundreds of millions of miles away. Clues pointed to a damaged voltage regulator that was vital to JunoCam's power supply. With few options for recovery, the team turned to a process called annealing, where a material is heated for a specified period before slowly cooling. Although the process is not well understood, the idea is that heating can reduce defects in the material. Soon after the annealing process finished, JunoCam began cranking out crisp images for the next several orbits. But Juno was flying deeper and deeper into the heart of Jupiter's radiation fields with each pass. By orbit 55, the imagery had again begun showing problems.

"After orbit 55, our images were full of streaks and noise," said JunoCam instrument lead Michael Ravine of Malin Space Science Systems. "We tried different schemes for processing the images to improve the quality, but nothing worked. With the close encounter of Io bearing down on us in a few weeks, it was Hail Mary time: The only thing left we hadn't tried was to crank JunoCam's heater all the way up and see if more extreme annealing would save us." Test images sent back to Earth during the annealing showed little improvement in the first week. Then, with the close approach of Io only days away, the images began to improve dramatically. By the time Juno came within 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the volcanic moon's surface on Dec. 30, 2023, the images were almost as good as the day the camera launched, capturing detailed views of Io's north polar region that revealed mountain blocks covered in sulfur dioxide frosts rising sharply from the plains and previously uncharted volcanoes with extensive flow fields of lava. To date, the solar-powered spacecraft has orbited Jupiter 74 times. Recently, the image noise returned during Juno's 74th orbit.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2023 and 2024, the hottest years on record, more than 78 million acres of forests burned around the globe. The fires sent veils of smoke and several billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, subjecting millions of people to poor air quality. Extreme forest-fire years are becoming more common because of climate change, new research suggests.

"Climate change is loading the dice for extreme fire seasons like we've seen," said John Abatzoglou, a climate scientist at the University of California Merced. "There are going to be more fires like this." The area of forest canopy lost to fire during 2023 and 2024 was at least two times greater than the annual average of the previous nearly two decades, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers used imagery from the LANDSAT satellite network to determine how tree cover had changed from 2002 to 2024, and compared that with satellite detections of fire activity to see how much canopy loss was because of fire. Globally, the area of land burned by wildfires has decreased in recent decades, mostly because humans are transforming savannas and grasslands into less flammable landscapes. But the area of forests burned has gone up.

At least 759 US hospitals experienced network disruptions during the CrowdStrike outage on July 19, 2024, with more than 200 suffering outages that directly affected patient care services, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open by UC San Diego researchers. The researchers detected disruptions across 34% of the 2,232 hospital networks they scanned, finding outages in health records systems, fetal monitoring equipment, medical imaging storage, and patient transfer platforms.

Most services recovered within six hours, though some remained offline for more than 48 hours. CrowdStrike dismissed the study as "junk science," arguing the researchers failed to verify whether affected networks actually ran CrowdStrike software. The researchers defended their methodology, noting they could scan only about one-third of America's hospitals, suggesting the actual impact may have been significantly larger.

An anonymous reader shares a blog post: The International Mathematical Olympiad is the world's most prestigious competition for young mathematicians, and has been held annually since 1959. Each country taking part is represented by six elite, pre-university mathematicians who compete to solve six exceptionally difficult problems in algebra, combinatorics, geometry, and number theory. Medals are awarded to the top half of contestants, with approximately 8% receiving a prestigious gold medal.

Recently, the IMO has also become an aspirational challenge for AI systems as a test of their advanced mathematical problem-solving and reasoning capabilities. Last year, Google DeepMind's combined AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 systems achieved the silver-medal standard, solving four out of the six problems and scoring 28 points. Making use of specialist formal languages, this breakthrough demonstrated that AI was beginning to approach elite human mathematical reasoning.

This year, we were amongst an inaugural cohort to have our model results officially graded and certified by IMO coordinators using the same criteria as for student solutions. Recognizing the significant accomplishments of this year's student-participants, we're now excited to share the news of Gemini's breakthrough performance. An advanced version of Gemini Deep Think solved five out of the six IMO problems perfectly, earning 35 total points, and achieving gold-medal level performance.

"Scientists at the world's largest particle collider have observed a new class of antimatter particles breaking down at a different rate than their matter counterparts," reports Scientific American: [P]hysicists have been on the hunt for any sign of difference between matter and antimatter, known in the field as a violation of "charge conjugation-parity symmetry," or CP violation, that could explain why some matter escaped destruction in the early universe. [Wednesday] physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)'s LHCb experiment published a paper in the journal Nature announcing that they've measured CP violation for the first time in baryons — the class of particles that includes the protons and neutrons inside atoms.

Baryons are all built from triplets of even smaller particles called quarks. Previous experiments dating back to 1964 had seen CP violation in meson particles, which unlike baryons are made of a quark-antiquark pair. In the new experiment, scientists observed that baryons made of an up quark, a down quark and one of their more exotic cousins called a beauty quark decay more often than baryons made of the antimatter versions of those same three quarks... The matter-antimatter difference scientists observed in this case is relatively small, and it fits within predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics — the reigning theory of the subatomic realm. This puny amount of CP violation, however, cannot account for the profound asymmetry between matter and antimatter we see throughout space...

"We are trying to find little discrepancies between what we observe and what is predicted by the Standard Model," [says LHCb spokesperson/study co-author Vincenzo Vagnoni of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics]. "If we find a discrepancy, then we can pinpoint what is wrong." The researchers hope to discover more cracks in the Standard Model as the experiment keeps running. Eventually LHCb should collect about 30 times more data than was used for this analysis, which will allow physicists to search for CP violation in particle decays that are even rarer than the one observed here.

So stay tuned for an answer to why anything exists at all.

"The distant reaches of the Solar System are still mysterious," writes ScienceAlert. "Not much sunlight pierces these regions, and there are strong hints that undiscovered objects lurk there. The objects that astronomers have discovered in these dim reaches are primordial, and their orbits suggest the presence of more undiscovered objects."

And now thanks to the giant 8.2-meter Subaru telescope at Hawaii's Mauna Kea Observatory, astronomers have discovered "a massive new solar system body located beyond the orbit of Pluto," reports Space.com. The weird elongated orbit of the object suggests that if "Planet Nine" exists, it is much further from the sun than thought, or it has been ejected from our planetary system altogether.

The strange orbit of the object, designated 2023 KQ14 and nicknamed "Ammonite," classifies it as a "sednoid." Sednoids are bodies beyond the orbit of the ice giant Neptune, known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), characterized by a highly eccentric (non-circular) orbit and a distant closest approach to the sun or "perihelion." The closest distance that 2023 KQ14 ever comes to our star is equivalent to 71 times the distance between Earth and the sun... This is just the fourth known sednoid, and its orbit is currently different from that of its siblings, though it seems to have been stable for 4.5 billion years.

However, the team behind the discovery, made using Subaru Telescope as part of the Formation of the Outer Solar System: An Icy Legacy (FOSSIL) survey, thinks that all four sednoids were on similar orbits around 4.2 billion years ago. That implies something dramatic happened out at the edge of the solar system around 400 million years after its birth. Not only does the fact that 2023 KQ14 now follows a unique orbit suggest that the outer solar system is more complex and varied than previously thought, but it also places limits on a hypothetical "Planet Nine" theorized to lurk at the edge of the solar system.
There's "no viable transfer mechanisms" to explain the observed orbits "with the current configuration of planets," according to the team's recently-published paper. But since those orbits are stable, it "suggests that an external gravitational influence beyond those of the currently known Solar System planets is required to form their orbits." So where does that leave us? ScienceAlert summarizes the rest of the paper — and where things stand now: Astronomers have proposed many sources for this external gravitational influence, including interactions with a rogue planet or star, ancient stellar interactions from when the Sun was still in its natal cluster, and the capture of objects from other lower-mass stars in the Solar System's early times. But the explanation that gets the most attention is interactions with a hypothetical planet, Planet Nine.

If Planet Nine exists, it has a huge area to hide in. Some astronomers who have studied its potential existence think it could be the fifth largest planet in the Solar System. It would be so far away that it would be extremely dim. However, we may be on the cusp of detecting it, if it exists. The Vera Rubin Observatory recently saw first light and will begin its decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The LSST will find transient events and objects in the Solar System like no other telescope before it. It's purpose-built to find hard-to-detect objects, and not even an elusive object like Planet Nine may be able to hide from it.

San Francisco-based startup Orchid Health "screens embryos for thousands of potential future illnesses," reports the Washington Post, calling it "the first company to say it can sequence an embryo's entire genome of 3 billion base pairs." It uses as few as five cells from an embryo to test for more than 1,200 of these uncommon single-gene-derived, or monogenic, conditions. The company also applies custom-built algorithms to produce what are known as polygenic risk scores, which are designed to measure a future child's genetic propensity for developing complex ailments later in life, such as bipolar disorder, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, obesity and schizophrenia. Orchid, [founder Noor] Siddiqui said in a tweet, is ushering in "a generation that gets to be genetically blessed and avoid disease." Right now, at $2,500 per embryo-screening on top of the average $20,000 for a single cycle of IVF, Siddiqui's social network in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs is an ideal target market...

Yet several genetic scientists told The Post they doubt Orchid's core claim: that it can accurately sequence an entire human genome from just five cells collected from an early-stage embryo, enabling it to see many more single- and multiple-gene-derived disorders than other methods have. Experts have struggled to extract accurate genetic information from small embryonic samples, said Svetlana Yatsenko, a Stanford University pathology professor who specializes in clinical and research genetics. Genetic tests that use saliva or blood samples typically collect hundreds of thousands of cells. For its vastly smaller samples, Orchid uses a process called amplification, which creates copies of the DNA retrieved from the embryo. That process, Yatsenko said, can introduce major inaccuracies. "You're making many, many mistakes in the amplification," she said, rendering it problematic to declare any embryo free of a particular disease, or positive for one. "It's basically Russian roulette...."

Numerous fertility doctors and scientists also told The Post they have serious reservations about screening embryos through polygenic risk scoring, the technique that allows Orchid and other companies to predict future disease by tying clusters of hundreds or even thousands of genes to disease outcomes and in some cases to other traits, such as intelligence and height. The vast majority of diseases that afflict humans are associated with many different genes rather than a single gene... And for traits such as intelligence, polygenic scoring has almost negligible predictive capacity — just a handful of IQ points... Or parents might select against an unwanted trait, such as schizophrenia, without understanding how they may be screening out desired traits associated with the same genes, such as creativity... The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics calls the benefits of screening embryos for polygenic risks "unproven" and warns that such tests "should not be offered" by clinicians. A pioneer of polygenic risk scores, Harvard epidemiology professor Peter Kraft, has criticized Orchid, saying on X that "the science doesn't add up" and that "waving a magic wand and changing some of these variants at birth may not do anything at all."
The article notes several startups are already providing predictions on intelligence. "In the United States, there are virtually no restrictions on the types of genetic predictions companies can offer, and no external vetting of their proprietary scoring methods."

"Eight healthy babies were born in Britain," reports Phys.org, "with the help of an experimental technique that uses DNA from three people to help mothers avoid passing devastating rare diseases to their children, researchers reported Wednesday."

Mutations in mitochondrial DNA "can cause a range of diseases in children that can lead to muscle weakness, seizures, developmental delays, major organ failure and death," and in rare cases even pre-IVF testing can't clearly detect their presence. Researchers have been developing a technique that tries to avoid the problem by using the healthy mitochondria from a donor egg. They reported in 2023 that the first babies had been born using this method... Using this method means the embryo has DNA from three people — from the mother's egg, the father's sperm and the donor's mitochondria — and it required a 2016 U.K. law change to approve it. It is also allowed in Australia but not in many other countries, including the U.S. Experts at Britain's Newcastle University and Monash University in Australia reported in the New England Journal of Medicine Wednesday that they performed the new technique in fertilized embryos from 22 patients, which resulted in eight babies that appear to be free of mitochondrial diseases. One woman is still pregnant...

Robin Lovell-Badge [a stem cell and developmental genetics scientist at the Francis Crick Institute who was not involved in the research] said the amount of DNA from the donor is insignificant, noting that any resulting child would have no traits from the woman who donated the healthy mitochondria...

In the U.K., every couple seeking a baby born through donated mitochondria must be approved by the country's fertility regulator. As of this month, 35 patients have been authorized to undergo the technique. Critics have previously raised concerns, warning that it's impossible to know the impact these sorts of novel techniques might have on future generations... But in countries where the technique is allowed, advocates say it could provide a promising alternative for some families.

"Nearly 2 million people protected their privacy by deleting their DNA from 23andMe after it declared bankruptcy in March," writes a Washington Post technology columnist.

"Now it's back with the same person in charge — and I still don't trust it." As of this week, genetic data from the more than 10 million remaining 23andMe customers has been formally sold to an organization called TTAM Research Institute for $305 million. That nonprofit is run by the person who co-founded and ran 23andMe, Anne Wojcicki. In a recent email to customers, the new 23andMe said it "will be operating with the same employees and privacy protocols that have protected your data." Never mind that Wojcicki and her privacy protocols are what put your DNA at risk in the first place...

The company is legally obligated to maintain and honor 23andMe's existing privacy policies, user consents and data protection measures. And as part of a settlement with states, TTAM also agreed to provide annual privacy reports to state regulators and set up a privacy board. But it hasn't agreed to take the fundamental step of asking for permission to acquire existing customers' genetic information. And it's leaving the door open to selling people's genes to the highest bidder again in the future...

Existing 23andMe customers have the right to delete their data or opt out of TTAM's research. But the new company is not asking for opt-in permission before it takes ownership of customers' DNA... Why does that matter? Because people who handed over the DNA 15 years ago, often to learn about their genetic ancestry, never imagined it might be used in this way now. Asking for new permission might significantly shrink the size (and value) of 23andMe's DNA database — but it would be the right thing to do given the rocky history. Neil M. Richards [the Washington University professor who served as privacy ombudsman for the bankruptcy court], pointed out that about a third of 23andMe customers haven't logged in for at least three years, so they may have no idea what is going on. Some 23andMe users never even clicked "agree" on a legal agreement that allowed their data to be sold like this; the word "bankruptcy" wasn't added to the company's privacy policy until 2022. And then there is an unknown number of deceased users who most certainly can't consent, but whose DNA still has an impact on their living genetic relatives...

[S]everal states have argued that their existing genetic privacy laws don't allow 23andMe to receive the information without getting permission from every single person. Virginia has an ongoing lawsuit over the issue, and the California attorney general's office told me it "will continue to fight to protect and vindicate the rights" of consumers....
Two more points of concern:

• "There is nothing in 23andMe's bankruptcy agreement or privacy statement to prevent TTAM from selling or transferring DNA to some other organization in the future."

• The article also notes a 2023 data breach affecting 6.9 million users, arguing "They haven't shown they can keep your data safe... 23andMe's financial struggles could make it hard to run a robust cybersecurity program."