From Governing.com: a study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety finds that Waymo’s autonomous driving record is better than the average human driver in multiple urban areas. “These results provide further evidence that Waymo’s deployments of L4 vehicles in driverless operation have lower crash rates than human drivers in comparable areas—68% lower in Waymo’s current state of technology and current locations.”  From the Governing story:

• That rate varied by city: In Phoenix, Waymo had a 76 percent lower crash rate than human drivers; 71 percent lower in Los Angeles; 35 percent lower in San Francisco; and 3 percent higher in Austin. (Researchers caution that they had a small sample size for both Waymo and human drivers in Austin, which could have affected results).
• Waymo cars operating in driverless mode also got into fewer collisions severe enough to merit reporting to the police. From 2021-2024, Waymo driverless cars were involved in an average of 1.28 such crashes per million vehicle miles traveled, while human-driven cars were involved in 4.06.
• Compared to human-driven cars, Waymo cars were involved in 85 percent fewer single-vehicle crashes per vehicle miles traveled.
• Waymo cars were also involved in 81 percent fewer injury- or fatality-causing crashes per vehicle miles traveled, compared to human-driven cars.

It’s important to note that this data does not include interstate highway or freeway driving, so the results can’t necessarily be extrapolated to those venues.

No surprise here: news outlets are reporting that federal prosecutors today acknowledged that contractors hired by the Trump administration had “botched” the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and sought to drop charges against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was one of several people accused of vandalizing the landmark. The NY Times said that in a court filing the prosecution said it had received documents showing that the damage to the pool “was the result of a flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration.”   And Jeanine Pirro said “Given all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the reflecting pool to vandalism.”  Earlier this month she had claimed there was abundant evidence of vandalism.

What a sad administration we live under.

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 S, Gong Q, Ai 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.”

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.

• Schweitzer K. Inside the Push for a Fentanyl Vaccine. JAMA. Published online June 12, 2026. doi:10.1001/jama.2026.6392

• Eric Topol’s Agentic AI Comes to Medicine here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2850522

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:

On Good Friday, Sam Sifton writes in his NYT The Morning newsletter on a story by C.J. Chivers on how Russia weaponized the cold this past winter in their attacks against Ukraine:

“His reporting comes from a residential neighborhood at the northeastern edge of Kyiv called Troieshchyna. Most of the buildings you’ll see there are classic late-Soviet apartment blocks — giant stacks of prefabricated reinforced concrete panels, some rising 15 stories or more above the street. Few have boilers to provide heat. Instead, the Soviet government built centralized thermal plants to supply hot water and heat to dozens, even hundreds, of buildings at a time.

This winter, one of the coldest in Ukraine in close to 20 years, Russian forces used long-range strikes to target those plants, rendering huge swaths of Troieshchyna virtually uninhabitable.

Here’s Chivers:

The attacks of early January severed more than 400,000 households from electricity, city officials said, and left 6,000 buildings without heat. Problems compounded from there. Once buildings become cold enough, pipes freeze and residents lose running water. In this way, a measure of cruelty from long-range attacks can be distributed to an entire population in their homes without hitting the homes at all. Call it sanctuary denial on the cheap or, in the words of Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Center in Kyiv, a premeditated assault “on the life-support system of a modern city.”

Ukrainians called what followed the “kholodomor,” a sort of portmanteau of the Ukrainian words for “cold” and “plague.” More than 600,000 residents fled the city in search of warmth and safety as Russian drones continued to strike.”

Chivers’s story is here.  Don’t be like Russia; stand with Ukraine.