Science

The Associated Press reports: U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new vaccine advisers meet next week, but their agenda suggests they’ll skip some expected topics — including a vote on Covid shots — while taking up a longtime target of anti-vaccine groups. The agenda for the new committee’s first meeting, posted Wednesday, shows it will be shorter than expected. Discussion …

The Guardian reports: One of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starships has exploded during a routine test in Texas, authorities said, in the latest setback to the billionaire’s dream of turning humanity into an interplanetary species. The Starship 36 underwent “catastrophic failure and exploded” at the Starbase launch facility shortly after 11pm on Wednesday (0400 GMT Thursday), a Facebook post by the …

NBC News reports: The Food and Drug Administration has approved a highly effective new HIV-prevention medication, Gilead Sciences reported Wednesday. In clinical trials, the drug nearly eliminated HIV’s spread among people given an injection every six months. Called Yeztugo, the highly effective drug has inspired feverish anticipation among advocates for HIV prevention. The hope is the medication could accelerate the …

NPR reports: Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia on Monday filed a lawsuit in bankruptcy court seeking to block the sale of personal genetic data by 23andMe without customer consent. The lawsuit comes as a biotechnology company seeks the court’s approval to buy the struggling firm. Biological samples, DNA data, health-related traits and medical records are too sensitive to …

Axios reports: By gutting the expert panel that’s advised the government on vaccine policy for more than 60 years, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earned the condemnation of virtually every medical society, as well as former public health officials and local practitioners. The distress and lack of organization apparent in health circles on Tuesday was a sign that a …

Axios reports: Current and former employees of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are calling on Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign, warning that job cuts and proposed funding reductions will hurt the agency’s ability to protect the public from future health outbreaks. Dozens of current employees at the facility walked out in protest of the cuts and …

Reuters reports: Dozens of scientists, researchers and other employees at the U.S. National Institutes of Health issued a rare public rebuke Monday criticizing the Trump administration for major spending cuts that “harm the health of Americans and people across the globe,” politicize research and “waste public resources.” More than 60 current employees sent their letter to NIH director Dr. Jay …

The Hill reports: The bird flu virus can remain infectious in raw milk for over a day at room temperature and more than a week when refrigerated, according to a new, non-peer-reviewed research from a group of UK scientists. The study, published in medRxiv, examined the stability of the H5N1 avian influenza virus in raw cow and sheep milk, with …

Straight Arrow News reports: A recent study has raised new questions about how artificial intelligence responds to human control. According to findings from Palisade Research, a version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, known as model o3, altered its behavior to avoid being shut down, even after it was instructed to do so. Researchers said the model appeared to change its scripted responses …

The Guardian reports: A cure for HIV could be a step closer after researchers found a new way to force the virus out of hiding inside human cells. The virus’s ability to conceal itself inside certain white blood cells has been one of the main challenges for scientists looking for a cure. It means there is a reservoir of the …

Reuters reports: Pediatric infectious disease expert Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos of the U.S. CDC resigned on Tuesday as co-leader of a working group that advises outside experts on COVID-19 vaccines and is leaving the agency, two sources familiar with the move told Reuters. Panagiotakopoulos said in an email to work group colleagues that her decision to step down was based on …

Axios reports: U.S. marijuana use among those 65 and older surged nearly 46% from 2021 to 2023, according to new research in JAMA Internal Medicine. The rapid adoption of state marijuana laws and commercialization of cannabis helped drive much of the increase. But there also are changing social dynamics that make marijuana more acceptable for dealing with chronic pain, stress …

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration has dealt a sharp blow to work on H.I.V. vaccines, terminating a $258 million program whose work was instrumental to the search for a vaccine. Officials from the H.I.V. division of the National Institutes of Health delivered the news on Friday to the program’s two leaders, at Duke University and the Scripps …

The Washington Post reports: Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House’s sweeping “MAHA Report” appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence, resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday. Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at …

NPR reports: The Medical Council of Canada said in an email statement that the number of American doctors creating accounts on physiciansapply.ca, which is “typically the first step” to being licensed in Canada, has increased more than 750% over the past seven months compared with the same time period last year — from 71 applicants to 615. Separately, medical licensing …

USA Today reports: SpaceX’s latest unmanned Starship launch at first went off without a boom on Tuesday, but eventually broke up almost an hour after it took off. After two test flights ended in dramatic explosions earlier this year, SpaceX’s ninth test of its Starship vehicle experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” on Tuesday, May 27, SpaceX confirmed on X. That’s …

The Washington Post reports: Engagement with digital technology was associated with a 58 percent reduced risk of cognitive impairment in people middle-aged and older, according to a study in the journal Nature Human Behavior. Researchers conducted a systematic review of 57 studies to see whether exposure to technology has helped or harmed cognition among the first generation of adults with …

Axios reports: Google’s newest AI video generator, Veo 3, generates clips that most users online can’t seem to distinguish from those made by human filmmakers and actors. Veo 3 videos shared online are amazing viewers with their realism — and also terrifying them with a sense that real and fake have become hopelessly blurred. Unlike OpenAI’s video generator Sora, released …

CBS News reports: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s airport screening program has detected multiple cases of the new COVID-19 variant NB.1.8.1, which has been linked to a large surge of the virus in China. Cases linked to the NB.1.8.1 variant have been reported in arriving international travelers at airports in California, Washington state, Virginia and the New York …

Wired reports: Cuts made by the Trump administration are threatening the function of a tiny but crucial office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that maintains the US’s framework of spatial information: latitudes, longitudes, vertical measurements like elevation, and even measurements of Earth’s gravitational field. Staff losses at the National Geodetic Survey (NGS), the oldest scientific agency in the …