¶The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the U.S.’ first flu shot that uses mRNA technology: mFlusiva, from drugmaker Moderna.

¶In a late-stage trial, mFlusiva was found to be about 27% more effective than a standard flu shot.

¶One promise of mRNA vaccine technology has always been the speed with which a vaccine can move from initial design to production, which is of particular importance for pathogens that change on a regular cycle, like flu. Moderna, thankfully, has been pressing on with its work despite the current environment surrounding vaccine policy. And now those efforts are producing results. The company can have its newly approved mRNA vaccine “available for this fall’s flu season.”

¶That’s the good news.

¶Here’s the great news:

¶Moderna said it takes two to three months from picking the strain to rolling out its flu shot, compared with about six months for traditional flu shots.

¶The speed advantage provided by mRNA vaccines is being realized, providing more time each year to observe developing strains before committing to a particular design. This will make these vaccines more effective year after year, and we will all benefit from that.

¶But, there is some not-so-great news:

¶Vaccines, however, are typically formally recommended by the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee — called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) — before they are used. But a federal judge has blocked the committee from convening.

¶Levy said mFlusiva could still be legally prescribed in the U.S. without ACIP’s sign-off.

¶However, he said, patients most likely would not be able to get insurance coverage, as private insurers generally cover only ACIP-recommended shots, and the public distribution of the vaccine would be severely limited with no official federal guidance on whom the shots should go to. Federal programs, such as Vaccines for Children and Medicaid, also rely on ACIP’s guidance.

¶So, we’ve got a new, more effective flu vaccine that will provide valuable time when designing the vaccine each year. The benefits of this new vaccine will compound over time. But, we either won’t have access to it or we’ll have to pay for it out of pocket, which, of course, will limit its uptake.

¶This is where we’re at.

¶But, there’s good and great news, and that’s a positive development.

¶Earlier population studies found that exposure to polluted air was associated with a greater likelihood of developing RA. Researchers in South Korea wanted to determine whether air pollution could also affect disease activity and trigger flares in people who already had the condition. They also investigated the biological processes that might explain such a connection.

¶“Our study found that higher PM2.5 concentration was associated with increased disease activity and flare risk, notably prolonged exposure to elevated PM2.5 over more than two weeks,” explains lead investigator Eun Bong Lee, MD, PhD, Division of Rheumatology, Department of Internal Medicine, Seoul National University College of Medicine, and Department of Molecular Medicine and Biopharmaceutical Sciences, Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.

¶Research is starting to show that prolonged exposure to air containing elevated levels of certain microparticles is associated with both development of rheumatoid arthritis and flare-ups in people who already have it. Add this to the medical-related issues to think about as periods of wildfire smoke become more common.

¶This paper includes some truly beautiful images of our star, the sun. The images were made through observations using the world’s first 4-m class solar telescope, the US National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii. This Yahoo! News article reporting on the paper has some incredible detail on the resolution of the telescope and an interesting analogy that really puts the optical feat into perspective:

¶In some of these new images, the cresting vortices that dot the sun are barely 12 miles wide. To put the achievement into perspective, the feat is like trying to discern George Washington’s face on a quarter from roughly 74 miles away. The details of the milestone achievement are detailed in a study published today in the journal Nature.

¶Impressive, and beautiful!

¶According to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the monitors’ mandate this year was to root out “problems with the integrity of elections.” If they found any, it wasn’t immediately clear Tuesday.

¶[E]lection officials said monitors were polite and unobtrusive as they moved from one polling place to the next, asking a few questions about assistance technology designs for voters with disabilities and provisional ballots. Importantly, officials Votebeat spoke with on Tuesday said monitors did not interfere with election proceedings.

¶I hate that this brings a minor feeling of relief, but it does.

¶Speaking of technology and progress, Smell-O-Vision is one of those rare examples of a flop that has cemented a place in the collective consciousness. This Popular Science article provides a great overview of the technology, its rollout, and a competitor that also flopped but was quickly forgotten (AromaRama).

¶Why do we associate the brand “Smell-O-Vision” with any attempt to incorporate scents with movie theaters? The article presents a theory:

¶Smell-O-Vision’s abrupt turn from hype to nothingburger, and its silly name, helps explain how it lingers in pop culture. It would take a radical leap forward for scented media to outgrow its hokey origin story. So far, nobody’s done it.

¶I’m not sure many people remember the “abrupt turn from hype to nothingburger”, these days. For me, the “silly name” likely explains it. What a great brand.

¶ESPN is much more than a TV network these days, with younger consumers increasingly engaging with the brand on the social platforms where the creators operate every day.

¶“We have such a loaded roster of what I’ll call traditional football talent. We really looked at putting this group together as an opportunity to find talent that speaks to different fan communities or speaks to those audiences in a way that’s more unique and social first,” says Kaitee Daley, ESPN senior VP of digital, social & streaming content.

¶I think all sports have been dealing with the reality of having multiple audiences and the challenge of using multiple channels effectively to reach those audiences over the past several years. I think that’s true for ‘broadcasting’ actual games (network television broadcasts v. streaming broadcasts v. social posts during the game) as well as pre- and post-game analysis and commentary (talking heads in studio v. long-form write ups on The Athletic and other web publications v. “stories” on Instagram and other platforms).

¶With its “layoffs” of “traditional talent” last week and now this announcement of the new “class of digital creators for its Creator Network”, ESPN has shown its hand a bit: individual content producers, who tend to be “social first”, are viewed as a source of growth.

¶“The post-2013 ESPN era steamrolls ahead.” In that era of ESPN, the individual is valued over the company because, maybe, “in 2026 [that] is the only way to break through in the crowded media environment.” (Id.)

¶Sports media is changing rapidly, and the 2026-2027 NFL season, I think, is going to tell us a lot about where it’s at and where it’s headed. Stay tuned…to something.

¶The $2.4 billion cash exit marks a sharp step-up. It reflects both the growing cost of AI-driven fraud and the premium placed on proven behavioral technology already embedded in major banks.

¶This will make you pause for a moment the next time you’re using your bank’s app on your phone. Turns out, AI has been watching your “digital banking sessions.” BioCatch, the company being acquired by Visa, analyzes “thousands of real-time signals during digital banking sessions….[including] keystrokes, touch gestures, device handling and signs of coercion.”

¶Don’t worry, though. BioCatch is watching your every move for your own protection. The company’s “AI models distinguish legitimate users from fraudsters in milliseconds.”

¶That’s probably a good thing, but be careful as you pause during your next “digital banking session” to reflect on the many ways in which AI has entered our lives. Thinking about it for too long may have consequences.

¶The hacks also raise new questions about what liability and consequences other AI makers might face if their own models are misused to hack into other companies.

¶One attorney called this “uncharted territory,” while others found little legal precedent to work from, suggesting it will likely be up to the courts to sort it out. Victim companies would likely have to develop novel legal arguments based on laws that were written decades before the arrival of large language models (LLMs).

¶In an interview with CNN, Hugging Face’s chief executive Clem Delangue said he doesn’t want to sue OpenAI. But he argued that companies should be held responsible....”We have to make sure that the legal frameworks keep these events really illegal,” and to hold companies accountable when they do make mistakes. “Otherwise we’re going to end up in a very different world.”

¶(emphasis added).

¶“Really illegal”. I like that that, but I’m not counting on it.

¶From Google’s announcement of the rollback:

¶We’ve seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we’ve also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we’re rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails.

¶It’s hard to imagine how Google didn’t anticipate people using this new feature to deepfake earth. And the apparent ease with which people created the fake crises listed in the linked article makes you wonder if Google had any guardrails on the feature at all. I do like the examples shown in Google’s announcement, and see tremendous value in a Google Earth that enables creation of enhanced content, but, apparently, it will be awhile before we can enjoy such things.

¶When exploring different sides of an issue, a devil’s advocate can play-act an opposing perspective, but the exercise has limits. It’s better to talk to someone who genuinely disagrees with you.

¶When faculty members discuss intellectual diversity on college campuses, it’s not enough, she said, to “theoretically entertain what political conservatives might think.”

¶“Simply the fact that the Harvard Radcliffe Institute invited a significant number of political conservatives to discuss this question was astonishing to many people on the political right,” she said. “It just signals right off the bat: We’re going to take your opinion seriously; we’re inviting you to be equal partners in drafting this statement.”

¶I find this encouraging.

¶Universities, and their researchers and work product, are under the microscope and losing credibility. To maintain the value of higher education and the university as an institution, collective academia has to recognize the importance of the current moment and respond to it. And responding to it cannot be a sneer or dismissal. That’s what got us here in the first place. No, universities have to authentically engage the problem and show honest work and progress on it. They have to show that they are the inclusive spaces they’ve touted lo these many years. They have to be in the business of instructing students “how to think, not what to think, by engaging in all the real-world complexity of divergent ideas and messy discourse.” In short, universities should strive to be the true marketplace of ideas.

¶Harvard, it seems, is authentically working on it, which is encouraging.

¶The Blue Jackets announced plans on Wednesday to simulcast their TV broadcasts, with play-by-play voice Steve Mears and color analyst Jody Shelley, across their radio network and affiliates.

¶I hate to see this but I suspect radio audiences for live sports have shrunk considerably in recent years. I wonder if the Blue Jackets are a canary in the coal mine as far as home town broadcasts go.

¶Over the next decade, Rubin will illuminate a treasure trove of discoveries: pulsating stars, supernova explosions, the fossil record of galaxies, clues to the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter, and entirely new phenomena we’ve never seen before. Some cosmic processes unfold slowly, unpredictably or incredibly rarely, which is why a 10-year survey is essential. By returning to each point in the sky about 800 times over a decade, Rubin data will provide the scientific community with deep, time-rich views needed to uncover subtle events, capture moving objects and study the accelerating expansion of the universe.

¶What a time to be alive. The Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is officially underway, collecting “approximately 10 terabytes of data and produc[ing] as many as seven million alerts of changes in the night sky” each night. And the data is open to “both scientists and the public”. Kudos on that.

¶This is going to be fascinating to watch.

¶They include drive-offs, when there is no attempt to pay, and no-means-of-payment incidents, when a customer fills up and claims they have no way to pay.

¶I wasn’t familiar with the term “forecourt” before reading this article. Now I know and can’t wait to use it in a sentence.

¶It must be a British thing. Sadly, though, I suspect drive-offs and “no-means-of-payment incidents” are something America and Britain share in common.

¶Starting [today], citizens of the European Union must be informed when they are interacting with an AI system or viewing content generated or altered by the technology.

¶This sounds like a big deal, but apparently it’s not…yet:

¶The EU has allowed for a transitional period, until December, for AI model providers to label synthetic audio, image, video, or text in a machine-readable format so that this material can be detected as AI-generated, clearly recognizing the technical challenge of implementing this. Other compliance deadlines within the act have been delayed, as the European AI Office has taken longer than expected to produce key compliance guidelines.

¶Will December’s end of the “transitional period” bring anything? Is any “transition” actually happening right now? Will any future deadline associated with these new rules carry any weight? We’ll see.

¶With a day to go, the MLB trade deadline has failed to disappoint…and to surprise. Despite the Dodger’s feigned disinterest in Tarik Skubal, which nobody believed, the team completed a trade with the Tigers overnight to land their man:

¶The Dodgers acquired Skubal, the reigning back-to-back American League Cy Young Award winner, from the Detroit Tigers for a package of three prospects: outfielder Zyhir Hope and right-handers River Ryan and Brady Smith, sources told ESPN’s Jeff Passan.

¶Trump Media & Technology Group is now shopping to traders and investors a premium version of Truth Social delivering early access to the feeds of high-profile users, including the president.

¶Starting Saturday, for a fee of up to $100,000 a month, trading firms can access “Truth API” to get a glimpse of the president’s often market-moving announcements about economic policy and global affairs before the rest of the world.

¶Just a few days ago, I thought the now-failed Kushner family FIFA investment fund best illustrated the boundless nature of Trump’s grift.

¶What a difference a few days can make!

¶The Kushner FIFA fund seems to pale in comparison to the blatant nature of this cash grab. Starting today, you can apparently pay Trump’s company to get early access to his social posts, which means you could have been one of the first to see today’s rant about Janine Pirro dropping charges against David Hearn for lack of evidence.

¶Big deal?

¶It’s a huge deal because the fee will also provide early access to the market moving content frequently posted by Trump.

¶This is embarrassingly insane.

¶Infantino said it had become clear the project had “created divisions” that are “no longer in the interest” of its original objective.

¶The Swiss official added: “As a result, this proposal will not proceed.”

¶I didn’t need another reason to pay more attention to soccer after the fantastic World Cup, but now I’ve got one. The drama of this week has seemingly come to a sudden end as Infantino killed his proposal to sell off a portion of FIFA. Ostensibly, the reason for opposing the proposal is that investment isn’t needed. FIFA, it seems, has plenty of cash. I have to believe, though, that an underlying reason is a collective raising of the fist against the Trump connection to the investment fund.

¶European soccer governing body UEFA appears to have been the force behind the sacking of the proposal, saying “no UEFA national teams will participate in any FIFA competition for so long as these proposals remain alive, unless this proposal has been abandoned in its entirety and binding assurances have been given that FIFA will never again open its governance or competitions to private ownership.”

¶I’m definitely loving soccer right now.

¶This giant salamander lived in the broad freshwater lakes and marshes that covered parts of Kyushu several million years ago. As an adult, it may have reached approximately 1.1 meters in length.

¶This length seemed impressive for a salamander, prehistoric or not, until I realized the Japanese giant salamander(Andrias japonicus) is alive and well in Japan and can grow up to to 1.5 meters in length. These modern day giants are fully aquatic and endemic to present-day Japan. Five feet long!

¶What lead to the extinction of the newly identified prehistoric giant salamander? The linked article headlines a climate change theory (“Climate Change and Extinction”), noting that “[c]ooling temperatures, along with major changes in local habitats, may have contributed to [its] disappearance.” (emphasis added). The underlying paper cautions that the cause is still unclear, explaining:

¶[I]t remains unclear whether such sea-level changes directly affected the Ajimu region. Regardless, the loss of freshwater habitats—whether due to climate cooling, local tectonic uplift, or any marine incursion—could have been a key factor in the disappearance of the new genus.

¶The resigning Carlos Cordeiro is an ex-vice president of the U.S. Soccer Federation and represented FIFA on the White House Task Force for the 2026 World Cup. He’s got an MBA from Harvard Business School and was a vice chairman at Goldman Sachs before joining U.S. Soccer.

¶Cordeiro is no slouch, and his view on FIFA’s proposal to sell an interest in its future through a Kushner family-led fund should carry real weight, particularly considering his willingness to openly link his resignation directly to the proposal:

¶“Let me be clear: I had no involvement in this proposal ⁠and I oppose ⁠it unequivocally,” Cordeiro said in a statement.

¶“It is ⁠a bad deal for ⁠FIFA’s Member Associations, ⁠a bad deal for football and a bad deal ‌for the long-term future of the game.”

¶If that’s not enough, consider the comments by FIFA President Gianni Infantino, the public showman for the investment proposal, on Cordeiro’s appointment to the role from which he is now resigning:

¶Announcing the 2021 appointment of Cordeiro, Infantino had said: “Carlos is the right person to advise us as we modernise our regulatory framework and grow the sport in ways that advance football for men, women and youth ‌across the globe.”

¶Turns out, Infantino was right. Cordero is the “right person to advise [FIFA] as [it] modernise[s]…the sport.” He should take Cordero’s parting advice and kill the proposal before the Kushner-Trump fingerprints on the World Cup trophy become permanent. The coming vote may be more than a vote on the proposal if he doesn’t.

¶What a time to become a soccer fan!

¶Uefa’s initial condemnation of Fifa’s plan to “sell the soul” of ­football has received strong backing from Concacaf – the North, Central ­American and Caribbean ­confederation – and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC). If their members follow their leads there should be sufficient votes to block the proposal.

¶Well, it looks like I picked a fine time to become a soccer fan. The proposed FIFA “bundle and sell” plan is developing faster than any World Cup match I watched (other than the England v. France third place match, which moved more like an American football game).

¶“We’ve served two and a half million children and their families around the world, and the fact that our programs have expanded into so many different kinds of outreach, I think he would be amazed,” the younger Newman tells THR. “[But] he had a saying within our family. He’d pat you on the back and be like, ‘Honey, that’s so great! That’s a great start,’” she laughs again. “So I think he would feel the same way that I do: that there are so many children and families who still need us.”

¶Two and a half million kids and their families? That’s a great start.

¶Paul Newman is one of my favorite actors; The Hustler is, without question, my favorite movie of all time (it’s not a pool movie, btw). If you needed a reason to think more highly of Newman, this article will certainly provide it. I didn’t, but found several nevertheless. I naively believed his charity was limited to his Newman’s Own line of food products. Looks like he did so much more than that, and his daughter is ensuring those efforts will continue to grow. Great story.

¶“Coffee contains not just caffeine, but numerous bioactive compounds like polyphenols, which may have health benefits,” Hu said. “Studies have shown that the metabolism of the polyphenols by the gut bacteria leads to production of beneficial metabolites, the small-molecule chemical compounds produced by the bacteria, which can reduce oxidative stress and reduce chronic inflammation, and may even have beneficial effects on insulin sensitivity.”

¶The pick-me-up provided by caffeine may be just a side benefit of drinking coffee. Its chemistry is complex. Up to five cups a day, you say? Looks like I’ve got some room for improvement.

¶To get started with Hint, users enter their home address, and the app builds a profile of the home from public data, like property records, weather and soil information, utilities, and more. Users can then upload documents, like inspection reports, home warranties, mortgage documents, contracts, insurance policies, invoices, and more.

¶Then, homeowners upload photos of the home’s major appliances, which allows the app to guide you through any “how to” questions or other maintenance tasks.

¶The iOS app is currently available for free without subscriptions or ads. “We want it to be in the hands of every homeowner in the country,” says Rush.

¶(emphasis added)

¶So, the model for Martha Stewart’s new app seems to be “Give us all your home-related documents and photos of your appliances and we’ll remind you when it’s time to change your furnace filter. For free!”

¶Got it.

¶Remember, “if we don’t pay for the product, dear colleagues—we are the product.” For another early use of “the internet-age dictum” regarding free products, see the essay, “You are the Product”, by the British journalist and novelist John Lanchester in the London Review of Books.

¶He said that Americans need to “assume the person with whom you disagree loves this country every bit as much as you do,” adding that he will never convince his more liberal colleague Justice Sonia Sotomayor to become an originalist or a textualist, nor will she convince him to abandon those analytical approaches.

¶“I know she loves this country,” Gorsuch said. “She knows I love this country. We know we’re coming at it from the right place internally. And then we sit down” and talk.

¶I agree. Completely, actually. But this won’t happen, and likely can’t, until we find common American ground on which to stand. Justices Gorsuch and Sotomayor have that in the law and the legal system. The American People need something that provides common ground. Right now, it feels like we’re still searching for it.