Conversations around birth control usually focus on women, but Kevin Eisenfrats, one of the MIT Technology Review 2025 Innovators Under 35, is working to change that. His company, Contraline, is working toward testing new birth control options for men . Exclusive: A record-breaking baby has been born from an embryo that's over 30 years old Jessica Hamzelou Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT. Exclusive: A record-breaking baby has been born from an embryo that's over 30 years old The embryos were created in 1994, while the expectant father was still a toddler, and donated via a Christian "embryo adoption" agency. Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT. Some therapists are using AI during therapy sessions.

A key task in certain democratic processes is to produce a concise slate of statements that proportionally represents the full spectrum of user opinions. This task is similar to committee elections, but unlike traditional settings, the candidate set comprises all possible statements of varying lengths, and so it can only be accessed through specific queries. Combining social choice and large language models, prior work has approached this challenge through a framework of generative social choice. We extend the framework in two fundamental ways, providing theoretical guarantees even in the face of approximately optimal queries and a budget limit on the overall length of the slate. Using GPT-4o to implement queries, we showcase our approach on datasets related to city improvement measures and drug reviews, demonstrating its effectiveness in generating representative slates from unstructured user opinions.

One of my many guilty pleasures is lurking on my former home's Facebook group. The New York apartment complex, which houses the population of a small town, is classified as a naturally occurring retirement community, which means there are a lot of people in the group with time and energy to devote to petty feuds. The gossip is unrivalled and often a little unhinged. At one point there was a heated debate about birth control for pigeons that resulted in at least one person getting banned. Recently, a mania of sorts has swept the group.

Selecting a birth control method is a complex healthcare decision. While birth control methods provide important benefits, they can also cause unpredictable side effects and be stigmatized, leading many people to seek additional information online, where they can find reviews, advice, hypotheses, and experiences of other birth control users. However, the relationships between their healthcare concerns, sensemaking activities, and online settings are not well understood. We gather texts about birth control shared on Twitter, Reddit, and WebMD -- platforms with different affordances, moderation, and audiences -- to study where and how birth control is discussed online. Using a combination of topic modeling and hand annotation, we identify and characterize the dominant sensemaking practices across these platforms, and we create lexicons to draw comparisons across birth control methods and side effects. We use these to measure variations from survey reports of side effect experiences and method usage. Our findings characterize how online platforms are used to make sense of difficult healthcare choices and highlight unmet needs of birth control users.

Care and Feeding is Slate's parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? I'm currently attending college, and to help pay for various expenses I got a summer job at a daycare. A few weeks ago, a parent accused me of making an inappropriate hand gesture at them during pick up. I didn't do it; I've never had so much as a conversation with this woman.

A few months before COVID shut the world down in 2020, I published a book called The Future of Another Timeline. Set in 2022, it's about a group of time travelers who live in an alternate United States where abortion was never legalized. Working in secret, they travel 130 years back to the 19th century to foment protests against the anti-abortion crusader Anthony Comstock. Their goal is to change the course of history. When they return to 2022, abortion is legal in a few states, though it remains illegal in the majority of them.

The pill may blur a woman's judgement and even impact her relationships, research suggests. A study found taking the oral contraceptive causes subtle emotional changes to a woman's brain. This makes her 10 per cent less likely to be able to read other people's facial expressions and feelings. Although unclear why this occurs, the pill's impact on a woman's oestrogen and progesterone levels is thought to influence her empathy. The pill may blur a woman's judgement and even impact her relationships (stock) The research was carried out by the University of Greifswald in Germany and led by Dr Alexander Lischke, from the department of biological and clinical psychology.

Sex robots could one day help failing marriages. According to an economics professor at the University of British Columbia, the futuristic droids could improve marriages by making husbands and wives focus more on love and parenting, instead of sexual compatibility. In a book called'Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications,' professor Marina Adshade claims the advent of sex robots will change our societal norms around marriage, particularly when it comes to monogamy. Adshade refers to this phenomenon as'sex-bot induced social change' and compares it to the societal impacts of birth control when it was first commercialized. 'I predict their availability will give couples greater opportunity to define their own types of marriages,' Adshade explained. 'One example might be that more couples could choose "companionship marriages" that do not involve sex, but focus solely on the creation of a family.'

The Trump administration's new birth control rule is raising questions among some doctors and researchers. WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration's new birth control rule is raising questions among some doctors and researchers, who say it overlooks known benefits of contraception while selectively citing data that raise doubts about effectiveness and safety. "This rule is listing things that are not scientifically validated, and in some cases things that are wrong, to try to justify a decision that is not in the best interests of women and society," said Dr. Hal Lawrence, CEO of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a professional society representing women's health specialists. Two recently issued rules -- one addressing religious objections and the other, moral objections -- allow more employers to opt out of covering birth control as a preventive benefit for women under the Obama health care law. Although the regulations ultimately address matters of individual conscience and religious teaching, they also dive into medical research and scholarly studies on birth control. It's on the science that researchers are questioning the Trump administration.

The Supreme Court is leaving in place the conspiracy conviction of Osama bin Laden's former personal assistant by a military tribunal. The justices' order Tuesday was issued without comment and could be the final legal appeal by Guantanamo detainee Ali Hamza al-Bahlul. A military commission convicted Bahlul of conspiracy and other crimes in 2008. An appellate panel at one point ruled the military tribunal lacked the authority to convict defendants of conspiracy and other crimes that are not international war crimes. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit later upheld the conviction.