Science Blogs

American filmmaker George Lucas is one of the latest to indicate he’s open to AI in the movie industry. In a recent interview, the director said resistance to the technology was “very much like sitting here saying: ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people.

The Trump administration announced on July 21, 2026, that it’s withholding US$867 million in federal healthcare funding for California and $200 million for Minnesota – a total of more than $1 billion. Federal officials said the two states had failed to provide sufficient evidence that a number of disputed medical claims were legitimate. These include bills for in-home care and other services covered by the two states’ Medicaid programs for low-income residents.

The cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to fresh produce in the United States is raising concerns in Canada about the safety of imported food. While Canada has seen some recent cases of cyclosporiasis, officials say there is no link with the U.S. outbreak. The outbreak has drawn attention to public health advice encouraging Canadians to consume fresh produce grown in Canada.

Most Americans don’t read the rules that govern the federal grants funding science. Those rules, called the Uniform Guidance, shape how cancer research is funded, graduate students are trained, clinical trials are sustained, universities stock their labs and discoveries from those labs move into broader society. When the Trump administration announced on May 29, 2026, its intentions to revise these rules, many researchers were alarmed.

Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated adaptation of The Odyssey officially opened in theatres this week. It retells Homer’s ancient epic of Odysseus’ journey home from the Trojan war. The Trojan war of Homer’s epics is heavily mythologized. But it is set in a world of seafaring and sea passages that the ancient Greeks knew intimately well. Interestingly, Nolan’s film has reframed the Trojan war as a trade war over a shipping route. This economic motive is absent from Homer’s original.

July 15, 2026 Child malnutrition in South Africa casts a long shadow across the life course. For example, stunting or being short for their age compromises children’s physical growth and their brain development in ways that limit their education and employment prospects.

In times past, when we wanted to know which team would win the World Cup, we had to turn to seers with crystal balls, use divination via tea leaves, or hope for Paul the Octopus to tell us what would happen. But modern data science can provide a better alternative. As part of a team of statisticians, I helped train a machine learning algorithm to predict the most likely course of the tournament. Probabilistic forecasts and loaded dice The algorithm we built proceeds in two steps.

Both liberals and conservatives can detect logical flaws in opposing arguments, but when it comes to their own side many fall short of being critical thinkers. Ignoring, denial, or dismissal become the norm for both liberals and conservatives. Even scientists put politics first.

We are now approaching six years since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, yet talk of vaccines and our immune systems persists in our cultural conversations — from political arenas to the dinner table. The vaccination conversation has extended beyond the scientific community, resulting in controversial changes to the recommended vaccination schedule for children amid other changes to public health policy and funding cuts to vaccine development.

Every five years, the U.S. government releases an updated set of recommendations on healthy eating. This document, called the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, has served as the cornerstone of nutrition policy for almost half a century. On Jan. 7, 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture released the 2025-2030 edition of the guidelines. The updated guidelines recommend that people consume more protein and fat, and less ultraprocessed foods.