U.S. Food and Drug Administration employees told CNN that Elsa — the AI model that’s supposed to help speed up approvals of pharmaceuticals and medical devices — isn’t working great. Instead, it cites nonexistent studies, misrepresents research, fails to access crucial documents, and wastes a bunch of their time. Not quite the “AI revolution” RFK Jr. promised.
What do a filmmaker in Wisconsin, billionaire investor Bill Ackman, The Guardian, and a doctor who posted on TikTok all have in common? UnitedHealth has targeted them in an effort to clamp down on criticism. The company’s legal tactics have only intensified after the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, The New York Times reports.
[nytimes.com]
Gemini’s on the wrist, there’s a new Antioxidant Index, and a slightly updated Ultra, too.
House Democrats are holding a science fair of canceled grants in Washington, DC today to call attention to research projects that the Trump administration has defunded.
Publishing giant Springer Nature is losing millions as a result, Axios reports.
President Trump is also working to slash funding for research institutions in the US, while hundreds of scientists and engineers have accused his administration of censorship.
The Trump administration is thinking about scrapping a ban on white asbestos, a material used in roofing, chlorine manufacturing, and more. White asbestos is banned in many countries; exposure to it has been linked to lung cancer and other serious health risks.
“By siding with corporate polluters and willfully ignoring decades of public health evidence, they are dismantling life-saving protections,” Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, said in a press release today.
You may remember, he funded a literal version of a Saturday Night Live sketch. Well, first of all, it turns out shattering world records in sports like swimming is a little more complicated than just adding steroids. But second: The Enhanced Games are a fancy way to sell supplements.
‘This is going to cost lives. Children are going to suffer.’
It’s been brought to my attention that the Trump Mobile Telehealth Information site seemingly claims contactless blood pressure are things you can get through its third-party Doctegrity services. This is a health tech red flag. While the other metrics mentioned are generally possible through a camera, contactless blood pressure is an emerging technology that hasn’t been widely adopted. Most blood pressure tech still requires calibration with a cuff. I’m more inclined to think this is a marketing copy snafu.
[trumpmobile.com]
Were you feeling left out by the terrible economics of Musk’s Twitter buyout? Great news! xAI, which now owns Twit — I mean, X — is selling shares. Also, Neuralink, newly freed from those pesky FDA staffers overseeing its applications, raised more money. has raised $650 million. Plus, there will be a public demo in two weeks! You know, if I were a cynical person, I might think Musk was trying to publicly distance himself from his time at DOGE.
The worst wildfires in decades are tearing through Saskatchewan, Canada, and at least two people have been killed in blazes in the neighboring province of Manitoba.
Smoke from those fires has triggered air quality warnings in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. It’s the kind of climate change-driven disaster that led young people from Minnesota to file suit against the Trump administration last week. Wildfire smoke can be 10 times as toxic as other air pollutants.
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” which would ban gender-affirming care for Medicaid recipients as well as those insured under the Affordable Care Act. House Republican leadership struck the phrase “for minors” with an amendment last night. Some Democrats are pushing back. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) told The Independent, “It’s horrible, and obviously the fight doesn’t end here.”
The bill now heads to Senate.
No, not those sorts of drugs, the kinds that could save your life.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s recent embrace of the infamously transactional US president has already secured a Huawei AI chip clampdown and a reversal of limits placed on Nvidia’s AI chip exports. Now, according to Reuters, The UAE could be allowed to import 500,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips per year starting in 2025. It’s all part of a US deal to build a massive artificial intelligence campus in the UAE — measuring 10 square miles with 5 gigawatts of power for AI data centers — something that wouldn’t have been allowed previously over concerns that China would gain access to the tech.
The president announced on Truth Social that he’s nominating Dr. Casey Means, who The New York Times says “frequently casts doubt on the American medical system,” for the position.
Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, who had been the previous nominee, will work in “another capacity” at the Department of Health and Human Services, Trump said.
More than 90 percent of Americans rely on federal science information, from weather forecasts to food safety warnings, according to a recent poll by the Association of Science and Technology Centers. Many of those resources are in jeopardy now as the Trump administration slashes the federal workforce and funding for health and science research.
Under RFK Jr., ‘Make America Healthy Again’ means junk science like ‘survival of the fittest.’
“The report reads less like a medical analysis and more like an anti-trans screed—politicized, inflammatory, and devoid of scholarly grounding,” writes journalist Erin Reed in comprehensively fact-checking the 400-page document.
The HHS report has also been repudiated by the medical community. “This report misrepresents the current medical consensus and fails to reflect the realities of pediatric care,” Susan Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in a statement yesterday.
The Trump administration has cut off access to data used globally for warnings about disasters and shortages.
RAW Ring founder Marina Anderson claims this emotional surveillance could help deepen relationships.
Russian-born Kseniia Petrova has been detained since she was arrested at a Boston airport in February for allegedly not declaring samples of frog embryos for Harvard, which recruited her to work on cutting-edge research into aging and cancer detection.
The US faces a potential brain drain of scientists avoiding Trump’s crackdown on immigration and science. A poll of 1,600 scientists by the journal Nature found that 75 percent were thinking of relocating outside the US.
