Category: BLOG

(Wired) – The trial starts soon in New Mexico’s case against Meta—and the company is pulling out all the stops to protect its reputation.

Meta has emphasized in pretrial motions that the only questions the jury should be asked are whether Meta violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act because of how it has allegedly handled child safety and youth mental health, and that other information—such as Meta’s alleged election interference and misinformation, or privacy violations—shouldn’t be factored in.

But some of the requests seem unusually aggressive, two legal scholars tell WIRED, including requests that the court not mention the company’s AI chatbots, and the extensive reputation protection Meta is seeking. WIRED was able to review Meta’s in limine requests through a public records request from the New Mexico courts. (Read More)

(New York Times) – We definitely have an attention problem, but it’s not just a function of the digital technology that pings and beeps and flashes and nudges us ever closer to despair. It starts with the way we think about attention in the first place. An industry estimated to be worth $7 trillion views attention in the narrowest possible way: as something that can be measured in terms of device-engaged, task-oriented productivity, then optimized and operationalized and profitably controlled. That narrow view of attention has become so dominant that it even pervades efforts at resistance, including the countless well-meaning calls to “improve focus” or “avoid distraction.” In our efforts to liberate ourselves, we have become anxious accountants of our own attention. (Read More)

(New York Times) – People, and men in particular, have long mixed solid science and serious quackery in the pursuit of longevity.

Whatever the maximum human life span may be, people appear increasingly determined to find it — in particular men, who are more inclined to favor radically extending life, maybe even indefinitely. Last year, nearly 6,000 studies of longevity made their way onto PubMed, a database of biomedical and life sciences papers; that’s almost five times as many as two decades ago.

Along with the creation of dozens of popular podcasts and a sizable supplement industry, that zeal has led to efforts to preserve organs, search out life-extending diets and even try to reverse aging itself. It’s the same mix of solid science, quixotic experimentation and questionable advice that has, for much of recorded history, defined the pursuit. (Read More)

(Wired) – A new EPIC report says data brokers, ad-tech surveillance, and ICE enforcement are among the factors leading to a “health privacy crisis” that is eroding trust and deterring people from seeking care.

When immigration agents enter hospitals, and private companies are allowed to buy and sell data that reveals who seeks medical care, patients retreat, treatment is delayed, and health outcomes worsen, according to a new report that describes a growing “health privacy crisis” in the United States driven by surveillance and weak law enforcement limits.

The report, published by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), attributes the problem to outdated privacy laws and rapidly expanding digital systems that allow health-related information to be tracked, analyzed, breached, and accessed by both private companies and government agencies. (Read More)

(New York Times) – He Jiankui spent three years in prison after creating gene-edited babies. Now back at work, he sees a greater opening for researchers who push boundaries.

For creating the world’s first genetically edited babies, He Jiankui has been reviled as the Chinese Dr. Frankenstein. He was sent to prison for three years, convicted in China on charges of deceiving medical authorities.

But as China ramps up ambitions to become a biotechnology superpower, the disgraced researcher, 41, has not been muzzled or pushed into obscurity. Instead, he is living and speaking openly at his home in a government-backed research hub north of Beijing, boasting about his work and insisting his country is ready to embrace him.

He can’t travel abroad because his passport has been seized, but he has become a small, but outspoken figure in China’s biotech landscape, neither silenced nor fully rehabilitated. The question is why. (Read More)

(Washington Post via MSN) – Epic’s disclosures offer a rare glimpse into the unseen workings of how your personal medical records move from one network to another, who has access to them, and where there may be gaps that allow medical privacy to be breached and sensitive information exploited for commercial gain.

If bad actors’ access isn’t curtailed, Epic argues in a lawsuit it filed last week, the viability of the U.S. system for sharing health records is threatened. Some of the firms targeted by Epic contend they were performing legitimate services for patients that complied with federal privacy requirements, and they accuse Epic of acting in bad faith.

The networks for sharing identifiable patient records operate similarly to those for cellphones. (Read More)

(Wired) – Explosive acceleration, limited dexterity, eyes in the back of its head. What could possibly go wrong?

Perhaps no humanoid maker has a bigger lead than a Hangzhou-based company called Unitree. While Elon Musk’s Optimus staggers through its demos, Unitree’s robots are doing sprints, kung-fu kicks, and acrobatic backflips. (The conference’s dancing door greeter was a Unitree.) Unitree’s legged robots are also incredibly cheap, costing tens of thousands of dollars or less, a tenth of what a typical humanoid in the US costs. Unitree is China’s most prominent robotics startup, a national champion for its tech industry, and is reportedly targeting a $7 billion IPO listing in Shanghai. And if Unitree fails? A staggering 200-plus other Chinese companies are also developing humanoids, which recently prompted the Chinese government to warn of overcapacity and unnecessary replication. The US has about 16 prominent firms building humanoids. (Read More)

(Axios) – This chart shows what it looks like to hit a 30-year high in measles cases — and why the U.S. is on track to lose its measles “elimination status.”

Why it matters: We’ve all heard that cases are on the rise, but the reality is that they’re skyrocketing. (Read More)

(New York Times) – More than 300 Times Opinion readers responded to a January invitation to share their experience of rising health care costs. They included a cancer patient who shifted care mid-recovery to a new insurance plan that doesn’t cover all her doctors. A mother who began skipping birthday parties to avoid the cost of a gift. A small-business owner who closed his doors. Many readers shared accounts of relying on retirement funds to pay for insurance. More than one Republican voter said they now regretted voting for that party. I am sharing a selection of these stories below, which have been edited for length and clarity. (Read More)

(ProPublica) – Each year, hundreds of thousands of women enter pregnancy with chronic conditions that put them at an elevated risk of long-term complications and, in some cases, death.For those who live in states that have banned abortion, their options are now severely limited.  

Our reporting has found that abortion bans generally don’t include exceptions that cover these kinds of health concerns — or if they do, doctors aren’t using them. 

Instead, the exceptions are for the “life of the mother.” In practice, this often means doctors won’t act without strong evidence that their patients are very likely to die. Where there have been efforts to create broader health exceptions to cover a range of medical risks women can face in pregnancy, anti-abortion activists have fought against them. They argue that such exceptions are too permissive and could allow nearly anyone to get an abortion. (Read More)

(ProPublica) – A ProPublica investigation found that Averhealth’s lab practices have not only been faulted by its own accreditor but also targeted in lawsuits, and prompted Michigan’s child welfare agency to order its employees not to use Averhealth’s tests as evidence in court and to withdraw any petitions based solely on the lab’s results.

Six former employees told ProPublica that the company’s central lab facility in St. Louis was mismanaged. The former employees, who include two chemists and two lab managers, complained variously of understaffing, broken and poorly maintained instruments, and pressure from management to speed up the delivery of test results, even when some feared they were compromising accuracy. (Read More)