September 19, 2025
New Articles from BMC Medical Ethics Are Now Available
BMC Medical Ethics has new articles available online. Articles include:
September 18, 2025
AI Psychosis Is Rarely Psychosis at All
(Wired) – A wave of AI users presenting in states of psychological distress gave birth to an unofficial diagnostic label. Experts say it’s neither accurate nor needed, but concede that it’s likely to stay. With the focus so squarely on … Read More
September 18, 2025
Organ Transplant Group Faces Shutdown After Safety Problems
(New York Times) – Federal officials will for the first time fire one of the organizations responsible for coordinating organ donations in the United States, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Thursday. It is an escalation in the … Read More
September 18, 2025
Texas governor signs bill cracking down on mail-order abortion pills
(Reuters via MSN) – Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law a bill to crack down on mail-order distribution of abortion medications, already banned in his state, by empowering private citizens to sue individuals and companies for shipping the pills … Read More
September 18, 2025
Nagging Pain
(Slate) – They had a mysterious, sometimes debilitating condition. At special “boot camps,” they were promised a cure. They experienced something much different. Sherry began using the term AMPS in the early 2000s while working at a children’s hospital in … Read More
September 17, 2025
US parents to urge Senate to prevent AI chatbot harms to kids
(Reuters) – Three parents whose children died or were hospitalized after interacting with artificial intelligence chatbots called on Congress to regulate AI chatbots on Tuesday, at a U.S. Senate hearing on harms to children using the technology. Chatbots “need some … Read More
September 17, 2025
AI-Designed Viruses Are Here and Already Killing Bacteria
(MIT Technology Review) – Artificial intelligence can draw cat pictures and write emails. Now the same technology can compose a working genome. A research team in California says it used AI to propose new genetic codes for viruses—and managed to … Read More
September 17, 2025
Dueling approaches to infertility vie for Congress’ attention
(NBC News) – Two professional organizations with different approaches to treating infertility, one backed by supporters of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement and anti-abortion groups, and the other representing in vitro fertilization providers, held separate, dueling events on … Read More
September 17, 2025
Eli Lilly to build $5 billion Virginia facility to boost production of targeted cancer drugs, other treatments
(NBC News) – Eli Lilly on Tuesday said it will spend $5 billion to build a manufacturing facility in Goochland County, Virginia, to boost production capacity for targeted cancer drugs and other treatments — the first in a string of … Read More
September 17, 2025
A New Edition of The Linacre Quarterly Is Now Available
The Linacre Quarterly (vol. 92, no. 3, 2025) is available online by subscription only. Articles include:
September 16, 2025
OpenAI’s Teen Safety Features Will Walk a Thin Line
(Wired) – OpenAI announced new teen safety features for ChatGPT on Tuesday as part of an ongoing effort to respond to concerns about how minors engage with chatbots. The company is building an age-prediction system that identifies if a user … Read More
September 16, 2025
Pig Organ Transplants May Pose a Dilemma for Some Jews and Muslims
(New York Times) – The taboo against pork is deeply entrenched in both religious traditions. But the prohibition is not absolute. It has not always been entirely clear whether the religious prohibitions on pigs apply strictly to consumption, and neither … Read More
September 16, 2025
Research finds half of Ozempic patients quit within a year
(UPI) – Half of people who start taking the GLP-1 weight-loss drug Ozempic drop it within a year, a new study says. About 52% of people in Denmark prescribed semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) for weight loss stopped taking it after one … Read More
September 16, 2025
New HHS campaign tackles youth vaping, nicotine addiction
(UPI) – U.S. health officials have targeted youth vaping in a new campaign amid the high popularity of e-cigarettes used by young people. On Tuesday, the Surgeon General’s office in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services unveiled its … Read More
September 16, 2025
Reality Is Ruining the Humanoid Robot Hype
(IEEE Spectrum) – Bank of America Global Research, for example, predicts that global humanoid robot shipments will reach 18,000 units in 2025. And Morgan Stanley Research estimates that by 2050 there could be over 1 billion humanoid robots, part of … Read More
September 16, 2025
1 in 6 parents reject vaccine recommendations: Poll
(USA Today) – About 1 in 6 parents have skipped or delayed vaccinating their children against diseases other than COVID-19 or the flu, according to a new poll from The Washington Post and health care policy nonprofit KFF. The … Read More
September 16, 2025
Finding God in the App Store
(New York Times) – Millions are turning to chatbots for guidance from on high. God works in mysterious ways — including through chatbots. At least, that’s what many people seem to think. On religious apps, tens of millions of people … Read More
September 16, 2025
‘I love you too!’ My family’s creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy
(The Guardian) – The cuddly chatbot Grem is designed to ‘learn’ your child’s personality, while every conversation they have is recorded, then transcribed by a third party. It wasn’t long before I wanted this experiment to be over … ‘I’m … Read More
September 16, 2025
Ready or not, the digital afterlife is here
(Nature) – Developers of griefbots say that they help people by allowing them to commune with recreations of the dead, but others say that the technology is fraught with danger. “Saying goodbye to Dadbot was surprisingly hard,” she says. “When … Read More
September 16, 2025
A New Edition of The New England Journal of Medicine Is Now Available
The New England Journal of Medicine (vol. 393, no. 7, 2025) is available online by subscription only. Articles include:
September 15, 2025
The Next Era of Gene Editing Will Be Disease Agnostic
(Wired) – At the WIRED Health summit, biochemist David Liu said his lab is on the verge of revealing a new gene-editing technique that could target multiple unrelated diseases. At the WIRED Health summit last week, Harvard biochemist and gene-editing … Read More
September 15, 2025
What do people actually use ChatGPT for? OpenAI provides some numbers.
(Ars Technica) – Today, OpenAI’s Economic Research Team went a long way toward answering that question, on a population level, releasing a first-of-its-kind National Bureau of Economic Research working paper (in association with Harvard economist David Denning) detailing how people … Read More
September 15, 2025
Toxic Fumes Are Leaking Into Airplanes, Sickening Crews and Passengers
(Wall Street Journal) – Doctors compare brain effects to concussions in NFL players. A Wall Street Journal investigation shows the problem is getting worse and not much is being done about it After months of worsening symptoms, Chesson was diagnosed … Read More
September 15, 2025
Man, 34, has tooth implanted in eye to restore his vision
(NBC Boston) – Tooth-in-eye surgery sounds like science fiction, but it can help people with severely damaged corneas see again. A patient and his doctors describe what it’s like. Brent Chapman can see again after doctors pulled out one of … Read More
September 15, 2025
Dive deep into an egg cell to see how ageing reboots when a new life begins
(Aeon) – The biomedical animator Drew Barry is known for his dazzling visualisations of biological processes that unfold on microscopic scales. As enlightening as it is arresting, his imagery straddles the line between science and art, as seen in his … Read More
