This story by Matthew Shaer in the NYT is a very good read, one that describes the very sad state of EV manufacturing in the United States. One more example (OMB’s proposed rule that would politicize NIH grant awards is another) of how we in America are currently moving backwards rather than embracing the future.
A large and nicely done (matched sibling to reduce confounding) study from Hong Kong by Luo SGong QAi Y, et al. adds more reassurance to the safety of acetaminophen in pregnancy. From the study’s key points:
“Question Does prenatal exposure to paracetamol (acetaminophen) increase the risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in offspring after accounting for unmeasured familial confounding?
Findings From an initial cohort of 708 020 mother-child pairs in Hong Kong (approximately 43.3% with prenatal paracetamol exposure), a sibling-matched cohort was constructed of 124 333 children who were assessed for ASD and 97 285 for ADHD. Prenatal paracetamol exposure was not associated with an increased risk of either ASD or ADHD and these findings were consistent across paracetamol exposure timing, pattern, and dose.”
Ryan Moulton has a slightly technical, but a thoroughly entertaining review of how nature produces colors, how we perceive them, and how our screens don’t quite manage to exactly reproduce the real world on his WordPress Blog. If you are interested in color , it’s highly recommended!
• Alan Taylor has a wonderful photo essay in the Atlantic on the construction of what will be the world’s largest fusion reactor – ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, France. It’s a fantastically complicated construction challenge.
ITER collaboration Members China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States will share in the cost of project construction, operation and decommissioning, and also share in the experimental results and any intellectual property generated by the project. Europe is responsible for the largest portion of construction costs (45.6 percent); the remainder is shared equally by China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States (9.1 percent each).
The target date for completion with plasma generation is 2033.
Here are two medicine-relevant papers that I found very interesting. The first discusses the work being done on the development of a fentanyl vaccine in the hope of decreasing the tragic death toll from its non-medical use. The second is from Eric Topol’s terrific Ground Truths Substack where he talks about two recent papers, one from Germany and the other from Google in Cal, both looking at the performance of agentic AIs compared against clinicians. Both were text based (not verbal) interactions, one with an agent presenting real world HPIs and the other with patient actors — and so decidedly not real world scenarios. Nevertheless, in both cases the AI agents outperformed real world physicians. Read Topol’s post for his excellent summary, cautions, and analysis.
• Eric Topol’s Agentic AI Comes to Medicine here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2850522
• This was a fun read from the NYT on how some farmers are integrating machine learning – From Cow-Milking Robots to Weed-Zapping Lasers, Farmers Are Embracing A.I.
From “There Has Never Been an Example of Presidential Corruption Like This” — a May 20, 2026 NY Times editorial:
“Congress and the executive branch built rules and traditions to ensure that federal agencies, especially the Justice Department, operated in the public interest, rather than that of the president. Mr. Trump has tried to break this system. Once he is gone, it will need to be rebuilt, and better than before. He has exposed and exploited its flaws and gaps. Unless they are filled, Mr. Trump’s corruption and perversion of justice risk becoming the norm.
In the meantime, Americans should be cleareyed about what the president is doing. He is taking their money and showering it on criminals.”
Yup.
This is a pretty interesting paper published in the April 30 edition of Science ( Peter G. Brodeur et al., Performance of a large language model on the reasoning tasks of a physician. Science 392,524-527 (2026). DOI:10.1126/science.adz4433 ).
Excerpts from the article:
• Caveat emptor. From Matt Levine’s excellent Money Stuff, on Polymarket bots:
“Anyway Bloomberg’s Carolyn Silverman, Nathaniel Popper and Marie Patino report:
Over 100,000 accounts lost at least $1,000 on Polymarket, one of the largest prediction markets, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of every wallet active since the beginning of 2025. That is almost twice the number that made at least that much.
Among the winners, a majority of the profits were raked in by a tiny slice of what look to be automated bots, based on the Polymarket trade records compiled by the data firm Dune. Everyone else, in aggregate, lost $131 million. …
While prediction markets have been described as peer-to-peer, the Polymarket records suggest the role of the sportsbook is now largely being played by the sort of automated, high-frequency traders that have long dominated other financial markets. The most active accounts on the site were a small proportion of wallets, but accounted for most of the trading volume.“