Trump's mass firing just dealt another blow to American science Ambitious research is on the chopping block following yet more cuts at the National Science Foundation. This past week delivered another gut punch for science in the US. This time, the target was the National Science Foundation--a federal agency that funds major research projects to the tune of around $9 billion. The foundation's efforts were overseen by a board of 22 prominent scientists. On Friday last week, they were all fired . The NSF has been without a director since April 2025, when former director Sethuraman Panchanathan stepped down in the wake of DOGE-led funding cuts and mass firings.

The Download: an exclusive chat with Jim O'Neill, and the surprising truth about heists Over the past year, Jim O'Neill has become one of the most powerful people in public health. As the US deputy health secretary, he holds two roles at the top of the country's federal health and science agencies. He oversees a department with a budget of over a trillion dollars. And he signed the decision memorandum on the US's deeply controversial new vaccine schedule. In an exclusive interview with earlier this month, O'Neill described his plans to increase human healthspan through longevity-focused research supported by ARPA-H, a federal agency dedicated to biomedical breakthroughs. Fellow longevity enthusiasts said they hope he will bring attention and funding to their cause.

June Squibb sparkles opposite Cynthia Nixon in a futuristic drama, and Michelle Williams loses her way in Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer Prize winner. Appropriately enough, Jordan Harrison's déjà-vu-inducing "Marjorie Prime" has been here before. The Off Broadway theatre Playwrights Horizons produced the poignant sci-fi play about hyperrealistic re-creations of the dead--so-called Primes, which are used as a supportive technology for the bereaved--in Anne Kauffman's spirited, delicately comic production, back in 2015. Lois Smith, then eighty-five years old, played Marjorie, a woman struggling with dementia. It's the early twenty-sixties, and so Marjorie is attended by a holographic Prime of her husband, Walter, who tells her stories from her own life.

When Jim O'Neill was nominated to be the second in command at the US Department of Health and Human Services, longevity enthusiasts were excited. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s new right-hand man, O'Neill is expected to wield authority at health agencies that fund biomedical research and oversee the regulation of new drugs. And while O'Neill doesn't subscribe to Kennedy's most contentious beliefs--and supports existing vaccine schedules--he may still steer the agencies in controversial new directions. O'Neill is well-known in the increasingly well-funded and tight-knit longevity community. In speaking with more than 20 people who work in the longevity field and are familiar with O'Neill, it's clear that they share a genuine optimism about his leadership.

Seven people, including three children, were killed in a Russian drone attack on a gas station in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Saturday. Russia has lost more than 3,000 tanks in Ukraine - the equivalent of its entire pre-war active inventory - but has enough lower-quality armored vehicles in storage for years of replacements, a leading research center said on Tuesday. Ukraine has also suffered heavy losses since Russia invaded in February 2022, but Western military replenishments have allowed it to maintain inventories while upgrading quality, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said. Even after the loss of so many tanks - including an estimated 1,120 in the past year - Russia still has about twice as many available for combat as Ukraine, according to the IISS's annual Military Balance, a key research tool for defense analysts. Henry Boyd, the institute's senior fellow for military capability, said Russia had been roughly "breaking even" in terms of replacements.

An international team of researchers is applying artificial intelligence techniques to design energy-efficient district heat pump systems that better serve human needs and behaviors while reducing the carbon footprint of buildings. The $1.5-million project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) program and led by Zheng O'Neill of the J. Mike Walker '66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University. The PIRE program funds only an estimated 10-15 projects nationwide at a time, according to NSF. The research is also supported by the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station's Energy Systems Laboratory, of which O'Neill is an associate director. The project focuses on the technology of district heat pump systems, which distribute energy to buildings through a system of heat pumps and insulated networked pipes.

Penn State has launched its first degree program in artificial intelligence, a master's degree that is offered online and designed to provide a professional, technical education in developing and deploying AI and machine learning. Penn State is now accepting applications for the Master of Professional Studies in Artificial Intelligence program, which is being offered by the engineering division of the Penn State Great Valley School of Graduate Professional Studies online through Penn State World Campus. The first courses will start in January 2022. Penn State's first academic offering in AI comes at a time of soaring growth in the job market and of increasing presence of AI in everyday products and services, said Colin Neill, a professor of software and systems engineering who is the director of the new program. The World Economic Forum estimates that AI will lead to the creation of 97 million new jobs by 2025.

Deep generative models, such as Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), have been employed widely in computational creativity research. However, such models discourage out-of-distribution generation to avoid spurious sample generation, limiting their creativity. Thus, incorporating research on human creativity into generative deep learning techniques presents an opportunity to make their outputs more compelling and human-like. As we see the emergence of generative models directed to creativity research, a need for machine learning-based surrogate metrics to characterize creative output from these models is imperative. We propose group-based subset scanning to quantify, detect, and characterize creative processes by detecting a subset of anomalous node-activations in the hidden layers of generative models. Our experiments on original, typically decoded, and "creatively decoded" (Das et al 2020) image datasets reveal that the proposed subset scores distribution is more useful for detecting creative processes in the activation space rather than the pixel space. Further, we found that creative samples generate larger subsets of anomalies than normal or non-creative samples across datasets. The node activations highlighted during the creative decoding process are different from those responsible for normal sample generation.

I don't think we've ever really covered much about L. Frank Baum's famous stories about the land Oz here before, mostly because the stories (and the famous movie) are pretty thin on cars. But that's not to say there aren't any things like cars. In fact, in one of the later Oz books, there's something that sure as hell seems a lot like some of the autonomous cars being developed today. Only, you know, much more weird and magical. This browser does not support the video element.

On a recent episode of How To!, Brittany O'Neill, the woman who inspired the hit film Brittany Runs a Marathon, revealed what happened to her after the movie came out. A quirky, motivational dramedy, Brittany Runs a Marathon first premiered at Sundance last year. It tells the story of an unhappy, overweight woman who trains for the New York City Marathon and, in the process, revamps her whole life. In this episode of How To!, Brittany opens up about her struggles with weight loss after the movie's happy ending, and how she finally learned to accept herself--one run at a time. This transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity.