The Download: online safety's future and climate tech's big pivot Plus: SpaceX has filed for an IPO expected to be the largest ever. For months, the Trump administration has been going after researchers who study and try to counter hate speech, harassment, propaganda, and disinformation online. Now, some of those researchers are fighting back. In a new lawsuit, they're seeking to strike down a visa restriction policy against "foreign officials and other persons" announced last year by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. They say the policy violates the speech and due process rights of foreign-born workers whose "work supports greater moderation of content on the [tech] platforms. Find out how the case could impact online safety and free speech .

Who is James Murray, the new health secretary replacing Wes Streeting? From a high-profile, media-friendly Secretary of State to a relatively unknown MP, the departure of Wes Streeting and arrival of James Murray has raised eyebrows in the health and political worlds. It is one of the biggest Cabinet jobs with the largest public service departmental budgets. There will be a steep learning curve with no time for preparation away from the front line. Murray says he's deeply honoured to be appointed to the brief and continue Wes Streeting's brilliant work on such a critical mission, but who is he, and what issues will he face in his in tray?

'Thank God they're still alive': Kaiser therapists claim its new screening system puts patients at higher risk by delaying their care Kaiser pushed back on striking workers' claims and AI fears, saying it delivers'timely, high-quality care to meet members' needs' I lana Marcucci-Morris is worried about the patients she treats and how long it took for them to arrive in her office. At Kaiser Permanente's psychiatry outpatient clinic in Oakland, California, she says she increasingly finds herself assessing people experiencing severe mental health issues whom she believes should have been sent to the emergency room weeks earlier. For those who do make it to their appointments, she thinks: "Thank God they're still alive." It wasn't always this way, according to Marcucci-Morris, a licensed clinical social worker. Licensed professionals used to almost always be the first point of contact for patients with behavioral health issues at Kaiser, she said. She has noticed a change since January 2024, after the healthcare giant introduced a new screening process for first-time patients.

Among those Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently named to a federal autism committee are people who tout dangerous treatments and say vaccine manufacturers are "poisoning children." US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has filled an autism committee with friends, associates, and former colleagues who believe that autism is caused by vaccines. Autism advocates are now worried the group could pave the way for dangerous pseudoscientific treatments going mainstream. Last week, Kennedy announced an entirely new lineup for the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), a group that recommends what types of autism research the government should fund and provides guidance on the services the autism community requires. The group is typically composed of experts in the area of autism research, along with policy experts and autistic people advocating for their own community.

Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch, who has entertained a connection between Covid vaccines and "turbo cancer" and promoted ivermectin, says he'll chair the President's Cancer Panel. An epidemiologist who has speculated about whether there is a connection between Covid-19 vaccines and "turbo cancer" in young people, and works as chief epidemiologist at a company that sells ivermectin alongside reviews that claim it has efficacy as a cancer treatment, has been appointed by president Donald Trump to a key position overseeing the National Cancer Program. Harvey Risch, a professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, announced his appointment as chair of the President's Cancer Panel on X earlier this month. Risch's profile page on the Yale website has also been updated to read "In November 2025, President Trump appointed Dr. Risch to Chair the President's Cancer panel." No formal announcement was made by the president or the White House, and the Cancer Panel website's list of current members does not include Risch.

Here's What You Should Know About Launching an AI Startup AI startups say the promise of turning dazzling models into useful products is harder than anyone expected. Three founders discuss what it takes. Julie Bornstein thought it would be a cinch to implement her idea for an AI startup . Her résumé in digital commerce is impeccable: VP of ecommerce at Nordstrom, COO of the startup Stitch Fix, and founder of a personalized shopping platform acquired by Pinterest . Fashion has been her obsession since she was a Syracuse high schooler inhaling spreads in Seventeen and hanging out in local malls.

The computer interrupted while Pamela was still speaking. I had accompanied her - my dear friend - to a recent doctor's appointment. She is in her 70s, lives alone while navigating multiple chronic health issues, and has been getting short of breath climbing the front stairs to her apartment. In the exam room, she spoke slowly and self-consciously, the way people often do when they are trying to describe their bodies and anxieties to strangers. Midway through her description of how she had been feeling, the doctor clicked his mouse and a block of text began to bloom across the computer monitor. The clinic had adopted an artificial-intelligence scribe, and it was transcribing and summarizing the conversation in real time.

Robby Starbuck speaks in an interview in New York in March. Robby Starbuck speaks in an interview in New York in March. Critics condemn Robby Starbuck, appointed in lawsuit settlement, for'peddling lies and pushing extremism' A prominent anti-DEI campaigner appointed by Meta in August as an adviser on AI bias has spent the weeks since his appointment spreading disinformation about shootings, transgender people, vaccines, crime, and protests. Robby Starbuck, 36, of Nashville, was appointed in August as an adviser by Meta - owner of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other tech platforms - in an August lawsuit settlement. Since his appointment, Starbuck has baselessly claimed that individual shooters in the US were motivated by leftist ideology, described faith-based protest groups as communists, and without evidence tied Democratic lawmakers to murders.

The promise of AI in medicine depends on learning from data that reflect what matters to patients and clinicians. Most existing models are trained on electronic health records (EHRs), which capture biological measures but rarely patient-clinician interactions. These relationships, central to care, unfold across voice, text, and video, yet remain absent from datasets. As a result, AI systems trained solely on EHRs risk perpetuating a narrow biomedical view of medicine and overlooking the lived exchanges that define clinical encounters. Our objective is to design, implement, and evaluate the feasibility of a longitudinal, multimodal system for capturing patient-clinician encounters, linking 360 degree video/audio recordings with surveys and EHR data to create a dataset for AI research. This single site study is in an academic outpatient endocrinology clinic at Mayo Clinic. Adult patients with in-person visits to participating clinicians are invited to enroll. Encounters are recorded with a 360 degree video camera. After each visit, patients complete a survey on empathy, satisfaction, pace, and treatment burden. Demographic and clinical data are extracted from the EHR. Feasibility is assessed using five endpoints: clinician consent, patient consent, recording success, survey completion, and data linkage across modalities. Recruitment began in January 2025. By August 2025, 35 of 36 eligible clinicians (97%) and 212 of 281 approached patients (75%) had consented. Of consented encounters, 162 (76%) had complete recordings and 204 (96%) completed the survey. This study aims to demonstrate the feasibility of a replicable framework for capturing the multimodal dynamics of patient-clinician encounters. By detailing workflows, endpoints, and ethical safeguards, it provides a template for longitudinal datasets and lays the foundation for AI models that incorporate the complexity of care.

Large Language Model-based agents(LLM-based agents) are increasingly deployed in customer service, yet they often forget across sessions, repeat errors, and lack mechanisms for continual self-improvement. This makes them unreliable in dynamic settings where stability and consistency are critical. To address the limitations of existing approaches, we propose MemOrb, a lightweight and plug-and-play verbal reinforcement memory layer that distills multi-turn interactions into compact strategy reflections. These reflections are stored in a shared memory bank and retrieved to guide decision-making, without requiring any fine-tuning. Experiments show that MemOrb significantly improves both success rate and stability, achieving up to a 63 percentage-point gain in multi-turn success rate and delivering more consistent performance across repeated trials. Our results demonstrate that structured reflection is a powerful mechanism for enhancing long-term reliability of frozen LLM agents in customer service scenarios. Large Language Model-based agents (LLM-based agents) are increasingly adopted in large-scale customer service systems, where they act as interactive assistants for diverse users (Brown et al., 2020). Despite their rapid deployment, these agents face persistent challenges: they often lose critical information across sessions, repeat errors without systematic correction, and struggle to adapt to rapidly changing product catalogs. Such limitations undermine their reliability in dynamic environments such as e-commerce. Existing memory solutions typically rely on short-term caching or user-specific profiles (Chhikara et al., 2025; Zhong et al., 2023). Consequently, purely per-user or short-horizon memories are insufficient for robust long-term improvement.