It's not business as usual

Turns out we’ve been undercounting what blackouts actually cost us, by a lot, because we only count immediate damage and not the economic ripple effects (Bloomberg)

🌎 Over 12,500 extreme climate events hit the Amazon between 2013 and 2023, but many more disasters went unrecorded due to a lack of data, especially for events like droughts and heat waves (Mongabay)

The National Emergency Child Care Network provides free emergency child care to families displaced by disasters, filling a critical gap as storms and wildfires damage child care centers (The 19th)

Four offshore wind projects have won court injunctions against Trump’s construction freeze, ruling that a project already 95% complete and already powering homes can continue to build (HEATMAP)

Even if all of the world’s liquid biofuels were redirected exclusively for aviation, they would only meet about one-third of current flight demand (Our World in Data)

Terms used in vaccine discussions like “"shared clinical decision making” and “informed consent” sound empowering, but actually signals in medical terms that there is no clear recommendation (Your Local Epidemiologist)

The new healthcare package extends telehealth flexibilities and hospital-at-home programs through 2027, reforms pharmacy benefit managers, and delays Medicaid DSH cuts, but does not renew the enhanced ACA premium tax credits (MedCity News)

California is the first state to join the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, one day after the US officially withdrew from the WHO (The Hill)

While MAHA’s attacks on science are harmful, they’ve also exposed real flaws in scientific practices, that scientists have privately complained about for years and now must confront and fix (Undark)

People with serious mental illness face discrimination in NYC’s housing system, with only 20% of eligible individuals receiving supportive housing placements (American Inequality)

Federal water regulations have driven up the cost of water and sewer services in US cities to about $1300 per household annually, more than double the inflation-adjusted cost since the 1980s (The Works In Progress)

🌏 Small-scale farms produce about one third of food consumed in wealthy nations, with farms typically under 20 hectares and concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia playing an outsized role in exporting fruits & veggies to the West (The Conversation)

🌎 Olive groves across the Mediterranean are being abandoned due to rural depopulation, disease, and climate change, but solutions like tree adoption programs, agroforestry, and rural tourism offer hope (Mongabay)

🌏 Microsoft expects its annual data center water use to increase 150% by 2030 from 2020 levels, with particularly heavy consumption projected in water-stressed areas like Phoenix and Jakarta, despite “water positive” pledges (The New York Times)

Sexual deepfakes are becoming dramatically more sophisticated and dangerous, with “nudify” websites and bots now offering not just image manipulation but realistic explicit video generation from a single photo (WIRED)

AI chatbots with memory features are creating new privacy risks by storing personal details in unstructured repositories where info can cross contexts inappropriately, potentially allowing casual conversations about diet to influence health insurance offers, for example (MIT Technology Review)

Previous pod guest Emma Pierson has developed a new method to detect racial discrimination in policing by analyzing traffic stop data where officers recorded the same individuals as different races (UC Berkeley News)

OpenAI has launched a dedicated team called “OpenAI for Science” to make its LLMs more useful for scientists, though it still is best for brainstorming rather than delivering definitive answers (MIT Technology Review)

🌏 An AI health chatbot in China has attracted 30 million monthly users to offer personalized health care the country’s overburdened hospital system can’t provide (of course there are concerns about patient safety and data privacy) (Rest of World)