New Trump slogan: Make America Sick Again!

In previous government shutdowns, federal employees were furloughed and not paid during it but when the shutdown ended, they were brought back and given their back pay. This time Trump first said that they may not get any back pay and then upped the ante by saying that he will begin firing them. He and the Republicans seem to think that this will put pressure on the Democrats to acquiesce to their demand to approve a short-term spending bill that will result in cutting health care subsidies under Obamacare that made health insurance premiums more affordable.

Over the weekend, people started getting fired. It seems like the first firings are targeting health care workers and had been planned even before the shutdown.
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“Are observers fundamental to physics, or simply byproducts of it?”

I like this discussion because it does not try to hide the fact that the interplay of the observer and the wave function in quantum mechanics is a fundamental unresolved question in physics.

Are observers central to physics, or are they more accurately framed as bystanders to and byproducts of phenomena that exist independently of consciousness? In this interview from the long-running series Closer to Truth, Bernard Carr, an emeritus professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University of London, traverses the double-slit experiment, the fine-tuning argument and more to explore what significance, if any, first-person observation holds in the realm of fundamental physics. In his conversation with the US presenter Robert Lawrence Kuhn, he doesn’t adopt a personal stance. Instead, he considers these persistent questions through a contemporary frame, assessing how discussions around them have evolved and where they stand among physicists today.

Meet Tilly Norwood, who may be the next big star

She is introduced in this clip.

As you would have read in the first frame, she and everyone else in that clip are entirely the creation of AI.

Meet Tilly Norwood, an up-and-coming on-screen talent who might just be the next big thing.

Norwood, as can be seen in the exclusive clip above, appears to be a talking, waving, bona fide person – she can even cry.

Except she’s not a real-life person: she doesn’t exist off a screen (yet), having instead been birthed via the increasingly sophisticated capabilities of AI software.

But then again, so has the entire sketch above, including all the other actors you see.

Norwood and the sketch are both the work of Particle 6, the UK production company created and led by Eline van de Velden, a former actor-turned-producer who also happens to have a Master’s degree in physics from London’s Imperial College.

“We want Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman, that’s the aim of what we’re doing,” van der Velden tells Broadcast International.
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The sketch is also acting as the first on-screen appearance for Norwood, and discussions are now in the works to see if talent agencies want to sign up the AI creation.

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The damage done to autism research

I wrote before how the actions of the Trump administration are eerily reminiscent of the Lysenko era in the former Soviet Union when Trofim Lysenko used the power of the government to suppress genetics research that did not agree with his prejudices, setting back agriculture in the country for decades. It is clear that the ghost of Lysenko now haunts the White House and the office of RFK Jr, as they have both decided that they only want to see research that supports what they already believe

The extraordinary press conference where Trump and RFK Jr. inveighed against the over-the-counter pain-killer Tylenol (the brand name for the drug acetaminophen) took people by surprise, even though we should be used be used by now to this duo pushing crackpot theories that have little or no factual basis.

For years, scientists have studied a possible link between pregnant mothers’ use of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, and neurological conditions like autism and A.D.H.D. The findings are complex. Some studies suggest a link; others do not. None have found proof of a causal relationship.

Yet Trump spoke as if the connection were definitive. He instructed pregnant women to avoid the drug. “Don’t take Tylenol. Don’t take it. Fight like hell not to take it,” he said.

It s easy for him to say. But what are pregnant women supposed to do when they need an analgesic?
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Back to the days of half-baked medical advice

We all recall the days during the Covid pandemic in 2020 when Trump would hold press conferences where he would promote whatever the latest crackpot idea that he heard about to treat Covid, such as injecting disinfectant or hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine or ultraviolet light or the animal dewormer Ivormectin. And since as president he commanded much media attention, a lot of people listened to him.

It looks like we are back to those days, only much worse since Trump is now backed by another crank in RFK Jr. whom he has appointed to the post of secretary of the department of health and human services and who has long espoused anti-vaccine views as well as promoting false theories as to the causes of major ailments.

They seem to think that they have found the cause of autism and that it is the over-the-counter analgesic Tylenol, long a staple of home remedies for fevers and minor pain. He and RFK Jr have launched a major attack on it, claiming that it can cause autism.
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What makes a disease incurable?

In my previous post on Canada’s system known as MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying), there was an issue that I did not properly address and thought worth exploring in more depth, and that is the question of when a patient’s request for assistance in dying should be honored. The criteria have been getting steadily looser over time, which is not surprising. Once the threshold has been crossed that it is acceptable for medical professionals to end the life of a patient, the line as how much it should be limited becomes difficult to draw.

In 2014, when the question of medically assisted death had come before Canada’s supreme court, Etienne Montero, a civil-law professor and at the time the president of the European Institute of Bioethics, warned in testimony that the practice of euthanasia, once legal, was impossible to control. Montero had been retained by the attorney general of Canada to discuss the experience of assisted death in Belgium—how a regime that had begun with “extremely strict” criteria had steadily evolved, through loose interpretations and lax enforcement, to accommodate many of the very patients it had once pledged to protect. When a patient’s autonomy is paramount, Montero argued, expansion is inevitable: “Sooner or later, a patient’s repeated wish will take precedence over strict statutory conditions.”

As the size of the aging population gets larger and we see many cases of painful and protracted end of life, and as more and more people become comfortable with the idea of assisted dying and know of people who have taken the route and died peacefully, they are likely to want greater access, and that has happened in Canada with the expansion occurring at a faster rate than in Belgium
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Canada grapples with medically assisted dying

That people should be able to request medical assistance in dying peacefully if they face a long and painful death due to illness or chronic pain is something that many people can sympathize with it. But implementing such a program in practice can create problems for the family and the medical professionals involved. Canada legalized the practice following a supreme court decision in 2015 and has seen a rapid rise in what are called MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) deaths. The August 11, 2025 issue of The Atlantic magazine has an article by Elaina Plott Calabro titled Canada is Killing Itself that takes a very deep dive into this ethically challenging area.

When Canada’s Parliament in 2016 legalized the practice of euthanasia—Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, as it’s formally called—it launched an open-ended medical experiment. One day, administering a lethal injection to a patient was against the law; the next, it was as legitimate as a tonsillectomy, but often with less of a wait. MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.
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The new law approved medical assistance in dying for adults who had a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” causing them “intolerable suffering,” and who faced a “reasonably foreseeable” natural death. To qualify, patients needed two clinicians to sign off on their application, and the law required a 10-day “reflection period” before the procedure could take place.

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Here we go again – another cutely-named voting group

In every election, political consultants love to come up with a new demographic group with some cute identifier that they signal will be THE swing group whose votes will determine the outcome, and the media promptly latches on it it. Sometimes these groups consist of women. Remember the ‘soccer moms’ phase?

Well, we have a new entry for this election cycle: the ‘weighted vest moms’, which consists of (I kid you not) women wearing weighted vests as they walk around or jog or otherwise exercise. This is apparently the latest fitness fad promoted by TikTok influencers and others such as Gwyneth Paltrow. (That last piece of information alone should give you pause.)
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Eddie Izzard on the Daleks

Based on my personal experience, there seems to a correlation between skeptical thinking and science fiction. I attend functions of a group of skeptics, sometimes physically at local venues, and at other times online with people around the world and I find that a large number of them are aficionados of science fiction and are knowledgeable about the minutiae of those stories.

Recently I created some mild astonishment within this group by saying that I had never actually watched any complete episodes of favorites like Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, or Dr. Who. I knew about them of course and had read about them and seen the odd clip of something from them. It is not that I avoid them. I do read the occasional science fiction but had never had any great interest in seeing science fiction on TV or the big screen. This surprised others who seemed to expect that with my science background, I would find them appealing.

One thing that had always puzzled me were the Daleks, the evildoers in the Dr. Who stories. They seemed to me to be laughably comical and totally not frightening. Eddie Izzard shares my puzzlement as to what the creators were thinking when they created them as conical objects with flat bottoms, like pepper and salt shakers, who moved on wheels and had weird appendages where arms would be.

Living in an alternate reality

Joseph Ladapo is the surgeon general for the state of Florida and is a vaccine skeptic who recently announced plans to abolish all mandates that requires parents to vaccinate their children against preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio, and hepatitis, comparing such mandates to slavery. He also opposes gender-affirming care and counseling for transgender and nonbinary minors. He is a good example of how an education obtained at elite institutions (he obtained his undergraduate degree from Wake Forest and his MD and PhD from Harvard) does not mean that one cannot hold unscientific views. He has been publicly rebuked by the CDC and FDA for spreading scientific misinformation.

But extreme as his views are, they are nowhere close to those of his wife Brianna who is described as an “intuitive spiritual healer, movement therapist, and teacher”.
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