There has been a development in a year-old murder case in Potter Township, Pa. The victim: Samuel S. Boob, 29. The alleged getaway driver has been arrested, Kermit Butts, 26.
One-shot gene therapy is helping the deaf hear. The OTOF gene makes otoferlin, a protein the inner ear needs to send sound to the brain. Those born without this gene are deaf… but maybe only temporarily. Researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute injected ten OTOF-deaf people with a working copy of the otoferlin-making gene, delivered straight into the cochlea via synthetic virus.
The hearing of all ten improved drastically: on average, the quietest sound they could hear dropped from 106 decibels to 52, roughly the difference between a chainsaw and normal conversation. Children responded fastest; one seven-year-old was chatting with her mother four months after therapy. The treatment has shown no adverse side effects, so the Karolinska team is now looking to try the same setup on different deafness genes. ScienceDaily
Here is our highly subjective list of Trump’s top 25 lies of 2025. We chose some because the president repeated them particularly often, some because they were about notably consequential topics, and some because they were especially egregious in their distance from reality….
Here are the headlines. Each one has a short explanatory paragraph:
Inflation, tariffs and the economy
Lie: Trump secured $17 trillion or $18 trillion in investment in 2025 Lie: ‘Every price is down’ Lie: Trump was reducing prescription drug prices by ‘2,000%, 3,000%’ Lie: Foreign countries pay the US government’s tariffs
Public safety
Lie: Portland was ‘burning down’ Lie: Washington, DC had no murders for six months ((Full explanation:)) The president continued his long-established pattern of choosing dramatic untruths over facts that would have been useful to him if he had just stated them accurately. Instead of correctly noting that crime in Washington, DC, declined after his federal takeover of law enforcement there in August, he falsely claimed three times in a November speech that the capital hadn’t had a single murder “in six months.” Washington actually had more than 50 homicides over the six months prior to the speech, police statistics and Washington Post tracking show. Lie: ‘I invaded Los Angeles and we opened up the water’ Lie: The Democratic governor of Maryland called Trump ‘the greatest president of my lifetime’
Foreign affairs
Lie: Ukraine ‘started’ Russia’s war on Ukraine Lie: Trump was speaking ‘in jest’ when he promised to immediately end the Ukraine war Lie: The US government had planned to spend $50 million on ‘condoms for Hamas’ Lie: Every drug boat in the Caribbean ‘kills 25,000 Americans’ Lie: Trump ‘didn’t say’ he had no problem releasing full footage of a September boat strike Lie: Numerous foreign leaders emptied prisons and mental institutions to send their most undesirable people into the US Lie: Trump ended seven or eight wars Lie: ‘The people of Canada like’ the idea of becoming the 51st US state
Justice and elections
Lie: Capitol rioters ‘didn’t assault’ Lie: Critical media coverage of Trump is ‘illegal’ Lie: Trump didn’t pressure the Justice Department to go after his opponents Lie: Obama, Biden and Comey made up the Epstein files Lie: The 2020 election was ‘rigged and stolen’ Lie: The US is ‘the only country in the world’ with mail-in voting
Health care, legislation and Democrats
Lie: Babies get 80-plus vaccines at once Lie: Trump’s big domestic policy bill didn’t change Medicaid Lie: The domestic policy bill was ‘the single most popular bill ever signed’
Mozambique has wiped its IMF debt to zero. The country cleared its $701 million IMF debt by late March, making Mozambique one of a growing number of African countries with no IMF debt at all (Nigeria and Namibia cleared theirs last year). The move doesn’t end the country’s wider debt problems, but it does remove an important external liability. Business Insider Africa
xkcd.com posts a new item three times a week. I always read them. (Remember to hold your mouse over the item for an extra comment.) Some people try to say “Rabbit rabbit” or “Rabbit rabbit day” as the very first thing they say on the first of each month (https://xkcd.com/3191/):
(And the mouseover comment is: “It’s important to teach yourself to feel responsible for random events, because with great responsibility comes great power. That’s what my wise Uncle Ben told me right before he died; he might still be alive today if only I’d said rabbit rabbit that year!”)
Good news from Fix the News: Big progress in 25 years!
The UN Special Programme on Human Reproduction’s 2025 annual report reveals women today are 40% less likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth than in 2000. That’s astonishing progress, and there are powerful reasons to believe it will continue: in 2025 the WHO issued new guidance on standardising postpartum haemorrhage treatment, the single leading cause of maternal mortality globally, responsible for around a quarter of all deaths.
On March 28, 2026, over eight million people attended more than 3,300 “No Kings” protests across the country, making it the largest single-day demonstration in US history, according to organizers. Buzzfeed seems to really like these: here are three links to pics of signs:
Good news from Fix the News: Our President has (totally by accident) greatly advanced interest in switching from foreign oil as an energy source to locally-produced green energy:
Iran shock speeds the shift from fossil fuels to electrification. The data is starting to come in: the Iran war is acting as an accelerant for clean energy. As oil and gas volatility pushes up costs, households from Britain to India and Pakistan are turning to EVs, solar, heat pumps and induction stoves as a hedge. These shifts will not stay local: when major economies accelerate the transition, others follow, creating spillover effects that outlast the crisis. Bloomberg / PV Magazine / CleanTechnica
And an image from my collection:
(xkcd.com/3199. The mouse-hover text is “Ugh, I’m never going to be like spiders. My descendants will all just be normal arthropods who mind their own business and don’t do anything weird.” –The ancestor of a bunch of eusocial insects.)
My takeaway from this article was the importance of taking charge of your own (or your husband’s) medical treatment.
Joel elected to have a hip replacement. He counted on it to improve his quality of life.
Instead, a nick from the retractor caused a life-threatening bleed that set off a cascade of catastrophes. Within a few hours, he went from a healthy, active, 63-year-old to an unconscious, life-support-dependent ICU patient. Kidney failure followed, plus an obstructed colon and compartment syndrome — all complications of what should have been a routine procedure.
To make matters worse, the doctor who fucked up his hip replacement was in charge of fixing the mistake. Joel instead embarked on a months-long hospitalization with no guaranteed survival….
Just minutes before, a nurse had told me one doctor advocated amputating Joel’s leg; the other disagreed. The argument continued.
Why only two doctors instead of a larger team? I wondered. Why did they not ask my opinion? Who would make the ultimate decision?
That’s when a rabbi came to see me. “You can request a different hospital,” she told me calmly. “You could have your husband transferred.”
Those six words seemed so obvious…
Now, before every doctor appointment, I compose a list of questions, complaints and possible treatments. When a doctor pooh-poohs a test, I challenge their opinion. When a nurse minimizes a symptom, I repeat my concern. When a result goes unnoticed, I call attention to it. And my advocacy goes beyond medicine. When I appeared in court on a probate issue, I wrote a script for my lawyer with points to make to the judge.
Child mortality down 60% in two generations, as low-cost tools save millions. Since 1990, global under-five deaths have fallen from 13 million to 4.9 million a year, one of the largest public health gains in human history. Vaccines, oral rehydration, bed nets and safer births have been at the heart of this, with deaths from diarrhoea down 75% and malaria by 63%. Although progress has slowed in the last decade, the tools to prevent most remaining deaths exist. The gap is now political will rather than innovation. UNICEF
One thing I ask of you (Okay) Time to learn your homophones is past due (Woo) Learn to diagram a sentence, too Always say “to whom”, don’t ever say “to who” (Woo) And listen up when I tell you this I hope you never use quotation marks for emphasis (Woo)
Adult smoking in the United States has dropped below 10% for the first time. New analysis of national survey data found that cigarette use fell from 10.8% of adults in 2023 to 9.9% in 2024 (about 25 million people) down from 42% in 1964. The shift has helped drive a long fall in cancer mortality, with the American Cancer Society estimating reduced smoking prevented nearly four million lung cancer deaths between 1970 and 2022. Gizmodo
Plus an image from my collection, in honor of (recently) St. Patrick’s Day:
Here’s the story of how the Big Bang’s fifth and final great prediction was confirmed.
…As time went forward ((from the instant of the Big Bang)), the Universe would cool, expand, and gravitate all together. First atomic nuclei would form from protons and neutrons, then neutral atoms would form, and then gravitation would lead to stars, galaxies, and the grand structures of the cosmic web. These leftover relics — the light elements formed in the Big Bang, the relic photons from the primordial plasma, and the large-scale structure of the Universe — would, along with the cosmic expansion of the Universe, form the four modern cornerstones of the Big Bang.
But remaining from an even earlier epoch, a fifth cornerstone should exist as well. There would be an early signal left over from when the Universe was just one second old: a bath of neutrinos and antineutrinos. Known as the cosmic neutrino background (CNB), it was theorized generations ago but was dismissed throughout the 20th century as being fundamentally undetectable.
River otters have staged a remarkable comeback across North America’s Great Lakes after disappearing from many waterways by the 1970s. Reintroductions beginning in the 1980s, combined with wetland restoration and pollution controls under the 1972 US–Canada Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, have allowed breeding populations to recover across Ohio, New York, Ontario and beyond. As apex predators, their return signals cleaner water and healthier ecosystems. Rewilding Magazine
Sweden cuts shootings by 63% after policing overhaul. Gun violence in Sweden has dropped sharply since peaking in 2022, with shooting incidents falling to 147 in 2025, down from the 390 recorded three years earlier. Authorities attribute the shift to expanded surveillance powers, tougher sentencing and new police tactics targeting criminal networks, which have also improved asset seizures and disruption of gang operations. Reuters
If it’s possible in Sweden (in just three years), maybe it’s possible here…
And an image from my collection. People’s profile pictures on dating sites often include other people; for privacy, many people will “scratch out” the faces of the others:
Tips on safely using your Constitutional rights to free speech in the face of authoritarian tactics. Summarized:
After Alex Pretti was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis, eyewitness cellphone videos became a powerful tool to contradict the Trump administration’s version of what had happened.
The Trump administration called Pretti “an assassin,” but videos show Pretti helping a protester who got pepper sprayed before he is pinned to the ground and shot. The Department of Homeland Security initially alleged in a statement that Pretti approached officers with a handgun, which is not supported by publicly available videos that show him clearly holding a cellphone when officers approached him.
People have the right to record law enforcement in public spaces under the First Amendment, but federal government officials have denounced people who do so. Last year, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that videotaping agents when they are out on operations is “violence.”
“There’s no guaranteed safe way to record ICE right now,” explained David Huerta, senior digital security trainer at Freedom of the Press Foundation. “There are ways to at least do so with as many safety measures as one could put in place.”
1. Before Filming, Prepare Yourself And Your Phone.
Burner phone, strong password, updated OS, and “Do this kind of activity with neighbors on your block or in pairs.”
2. While Filming, Narrate What You See For Verification Later.
“Make sure to mention the time, the date and an approximate location…” ((many details under the acronym “SALUTE”))
3. While Filming, Remember You’re There To Document.
Nathan-Pineau said she doesn’t encourage people to follow ICE officers back to their house.
4. While Filming, Ask The Person Being Arrested If They Want To Share Contact Info.
5. Focus Camera On Agents, Not People Being Detained.
If you do capture a person’s face, Nathan-Pineau advises against immediately sharing that video without obscuring the detained person’s face in some way.
6. Preserve Footage If Your Phone Gets Taken.
If you believe your phone is about to be seized by an officer, hit the stop button on the recording and turn the phone completely off. This “is probably the best protection, because then it’s in a fully encrypted state at that point,” Huerta said.
7. After Filming, Don’t Edit Your File.
(…)
After a federal agent fatally shot Renee Good in her car in Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz asked residents to “carry your phone with you at all times” and “hit record” when they see ICE agents in neighborhoods.
“Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution,” he said.
Good news from Fix the News (info on dengue, AKA “breakbone disease” because of the great pain that some victims suffer):
Singapore demonstrates that specially-bred mosquitos can keep dengue suppressed at city-scale. Wolbachia is a bacterium that lives in many insects; when scientists breed male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes with it, those males don’t bite, and when they mate with wild females the eggs don’t hatch.In a 24 month trial across 15 residential areas in Singapore, this approach slashed wild female mosquitoes by around three‑quarters and reduced symptomatic dengue risk by roughly 70%.Medical Xpress
Many economists insist that this will all be fine. Capitalism is resilient. The arrival of the ATM famously led to the employment of more bank tellers, just as the introduction of Excel swelled the ranks of accountants and Photoshop spiked demand for graphic designers. In each case, new tech automated old tasks, increased productivity, and created jobs with higher wages than anyone could have conceived of before. The BLS projects that employment will grow 3.1 percent over the next 10 years. That’s down from 13 percent in the previous decade, but 5 million new jobs in a country with a stable population is hardly catastrophic.
And yet: There are things that economists struggle to measure. Americans tend to derive meaning and identity from what they do. Most don’t want to do something else, even if they had any confidence—which they don’t—that they could find something else to do. Seventy-one percent of respondents to an August Reuters/Ipsos poll said they’re worried that artificial intelligence will “put too many people out of work permanently.”
A detailed account of what’s happened in the past, whether it will apply to this very different new technology, and what the numbers show (briefly, it’s too soon to tell)…
Acemoglu, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024, studies inequality; Autor focuses on labor. But both insist that the story of AI and its consequences will depend mostly on speed—not because they assume lost jobs will automatically be replaced, but because a slower rate of change leaves societies time to adapt, even if some of those jobs never come back.
AI reads brain MRIs in seconds and flags emergencies. Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed an AI system that can analyse scans in seconds, identifying neurological conditions with up to 97.5% accuracy while also triaging urgency. Tested on over 30,000 MRI scans, the model flags strokes and haemorrhages for immediate attention, offering a potential fix for radiology backlogs and delayed diagnoses as MRI demand outpaces specialist capacity. Science Daily
Laugh / learn links log 