183228365
submission
fjo3 writes:
One of the most common criticisms Republicans have of Democratic presidents is that they damage military readiness. During the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush accused Bill Clinton of such neglect. “The next president will inherit a military in decline,” he said. Donald Trump claimed in 2016 that President Barack Obama left the military “depleted,” and recently said that President Joe Biden left it “gutted.”
Well, Trump had a strategy. Find the most serious Alpha Male Warfighter among Fox News’s weekend hosts, put him in charge of the Pentagon, and take the proverbial gloves off. No more of this woke nonsense like “nonwhite male generals” or “following duly enacted treaties.”
The results are coming in: The military is falling to bits.
183202687
submission
fjo3 writes:
Ever felt like mosquitoes bite you while ignoring everyone else? Scientists are now making progress in deciphering the complex chemical cocktail that makes particular people more enticing to these disease-spreading bloodsuckers.
"It's not a misconception—mosquitoes are attracted to some people more than others," Frederic Simard of France's Institute of Research for Development told AFP.
"But we are not all magnets all the time," the medical entomologist added.
183200663
submission
fjo3 writes:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the plight of Americans finding it harder and harder to make ends meet and rising gas and consumer prices simply aren’t on his mind as the months-long Iran war and impasse over the Strait of Hormuz continue to fuel surging inflation in the United States.
Trump made the stunning brush-off statement as he departed the White House for Beijing, where he will be feted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a state visit, including a lavish Thursday night banquet at the Great Hall of the People.
183150646
submission
fjo3 writes:
It’s the stuff of science fiction cinema, or particularly breathless AI company blogposts: new research finds recent AI systems can independently copy themselves on to other computers.
In the doom scenario, this means that when the superintelligent AI goes rogue, it will escape shutdown by seeding itself across the world wide web, lurking outside the reach of frantic IT professionals and continuing to plot world domination or paving over the world with solar panels.
183147272
submission
fjo3 writes:
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised to crack down on ultra-processed foods, a key policy priority of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda. The biggest obstacle standing in his way? Figuring out what an ultra-processed food is.
"By April, we will have a federal definition of ultra-processed foods," RFK Jr. promised on The Joe Rogan Experience in February. "Every food in your grocery store will have a label on it—it'll have maybe a green light, red light, or yellow light, telling you whether or not it's going to be good for you."
The agency is now weeks behind this deadline, and appears to be no closer to landing on a definition. As The New York Times recently reported, "behind the scenesthe process of defining ultraprocessed foods is still very much in the air. Agencies are struggling to agree, and it is unclear when a definition will be released."
183124028
submission
fjo3 writes:
An AI model developed at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, detected abnormalities on patients’ CT scans up to three years before they were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, according to research published this week in the journal Gut.
The scientists behind the model, which is now being evaluated in a clinical trial, trained it by feeding it CT scans from patients who had been screened for other medical conditions then were later diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The team then had radiologists review the scans and compared their ability to find early signs of cancer to that of the AI model. The model was found to be three times better at identifying the early signs.
183080744
submission
fjo3 writes:
The invisible culprit behind this damaging phenomenon? Carbon dioxide pollution.
Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow — from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc. Experts fear the degradation of Earth’s food supply will cause an epidemic of hidden hunger, in which even people who consume enough calories won’t get the nutrients they need to thrive.
183077822
submission
fjo3 writes:
The scaling down of the May 9 Victory Day parade in Red Square is extraordinary, so much so that it demands serious attention. What was once a massive display of military power now appears reduced to something closer to a token event.
This, remember, is meant to honour the sacrifice of some 26 million Russians during what they call the Great Patriotic War, known elsewhere as the Second World War. To cut it back so dramatically – reportedly due to an inability to defend Moscow from Ukrainian attack – is not just embarrassing; it is strategically revealing. For Vladimir Putin, it raises uncomfortable questions.
This is, in part, because when Putin reintroduced military hardware to the parade in 2008, he framed it as a clear signal of strength: a warning to adversaries that Russia could defend itself. He was explicit: this was not sabre-rattling, but proof of growing capability. That claim now rings hollow.
183066080
submission
fjo3 writes:
This week, several House Republicans reignited a yearslong debate over a law that federally mandates cars to have impaired driving technology, raising concerns about the expanding surveillance state.
The controversy over "kill switch" technology began in 2021, when Congress passed the HALT Drunk Driving Act as part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The provision requires that "advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology"—which the bill defined as a system that can "passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired" and "prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected"—be installed in new cars. Such systems could involve driver eye tracking, a feature already built into some cars.
183046758
submission
fjo3 writes:
More than two-thirds of babies under two use screens, a report has found, and some are exposed for up to eight hours a day.
Nearly a third of newborns were found to be watching screens for more than three hours a day, while almost 20 per cent of infants of four to 11 months used screens for more than an hour a day.
The report comes after the government issued guidance that children under two do not use screens at all, apart from communal activities such as video-calling relatives.
183028524
submission
fjo3 writes:
The United Arab Emirates announced Tuesday that it would exit the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, along with the wider group of partners known as OPEC+, effective May 1, in what could be a blow to control over prices by the group, long led in practice by Saudi Arabia.
The move “reflects the UAE’s long-term strategic and economic vision and evolving energy profile” read an official statement carried by a UAE state news agency, as disruptions “in the Strait of Hormuz continues to affect supply dynamics.”
182863936
submission
fjo3 writes:
No sex, no alcohol, no daylight, no fruit or vegetables, and no eye contact with your captors for 100 days.
It might sound like a hellish prison sentence, but these are the conditions for the European Space Agency’s (ESA) latest experiment to learn how humans cope in social isolation, before a mission to Mars.
On Thursday, six participants entered a sealed, simulated space station in Cologne, Germany, and will not be allowed out until August – unless something goes seriously wrong.
The trial – named Solis100 – is hoping to answer the question: What happens to a small team of humans who spend months isolated in a confined environment, without friends or family, under strict rules, cut off from the outside world?
182860700
submission
fjo3 writes:
For every 10% increase in the share of calories coming from ultra-processed sources, attention scores dropped by a small but measurable amount (about 0.05 points on the study’s scale), and a score used to estimate future dementia risk ticked upward. Both associations held up even after accounting for how closely participants followed a Mediterranean-style diet, widely considered the gold standard for brain-healthy eating. That detail matters because it suggests something about the processing itself may be driving the effect, not simply the absence of better food choices.
Published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring, the study doesn’t prove that ultra-processed foods directly cause cognitive problems. It captured a single snapshot in time rather than tracking people over years.
182859016
submission
fjo3 writes:
In most of the English-speaking world, a vehicle’s front glass panel is called a windscreen. Americans call it a windshield. What we refer to as a rear window is more widely known as a “backlight.” This archaism, from the era of horse-drawn carriages, gives you some idea of how long rear windows have been around.
But our test car—the fresh-faced, frighteningly fast 2026 Polestar 4—doesn’t have one. Foiling the visual expectations of a lifetime, the four-door’s glass roof joins the car’s sloping rear deck just over the rear axle, omitting a transparent panel of any kind.
181960678
submission
fjo3 writes:
“The rate of rectal cancer seems to be increasing more than two to three times compared to colon cancer,” said Mythili Menon Pathiyil, lead author of a new study and a gastroenterology fellow at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York.
If the trend continues, rectal cancer deaths will exceed the number of colon cancer deaths — already the nation’s No. 1 cause of cancer death in people under age 50 — by 2035.
