Queen Camilla Says It Was ‘Difficult’ to Keep Charles’s Cancer a Secret
“I was just longing to let it out,” Camilla said in rare public comments about the king’s 2024 diagnosis, which was not immediately revealed. “But obviously I couldn’t.”
Babies Born Under Sugar Rationing Grew Into Adults With Lower Cancer Risk
A study of more than 64,000 people born around the end of Britain's postwar sugar rationing found that those exposed to less sugar during their first 1,000 days had lower rates of five cancers decades later, including roughly 69% lower liver cancer risk and 36% lower breast cancer risk. They also "showed signs of slower biological aging" and "continued to consume less sugar and had healthier diets overall," according to the authors of a new study published in The Conversation. From the report: After the second world war, sugar remained rationed in Britain for several years. But in September 1953, rationing ended and people started eating a lot more sugar. Consumption nearly doubled. This meant that children born just a few months apart had very different levels of sugar exposure both in the womb and during early childhood. For our study, we used data from over 64,000 people born in Britain between 1951 and 1956. Those born earlier spent a larger share of their first 1,000 days under sugar rationing, while those born later experienced progressively less of it.
[...] What is most surprising, however, is not the cancer results or the biological markers of ageing. It's how early-life sugar exposure continued to affect people's diets even 50 years later. We found that people who experienced sugar rationing early in life still consumed less sugar in adulthood, around age 50. They also ate less overall, and their diets were healthier and more diverse. This suggests that the level of sweetness people are exposed to very early in life may shape their taste preferences for a long time.
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Everyone’s Using This A.I. Dictation App That I Want to Murder With a Hammer
Wispr Flow is supposed to make writing effortless and magical. So I “wrote” this column with it.
Physicists Entangle Quantum Memories Across a Record-Breaking 420 Kilometers
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Optical fibers are already the backbone of global communication systems. Recently, however, physicists have started to explore how their functionality could be boosted further by conveying information via entangled quantum particles -- potentially enabling instantaneous exchanges of information across vast distances. Such a system could eventually be the basis of a future 'quantum internet,' offering a level of security and computing power beyond anything possible today. In new research published in Physical Review Letters, a team led by Xi-Yu Luo at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei has pushed that vision further than ever, entangling two quantum memories across 420 kilometers (261 miles) of optical fiber -- more than four times the previous record.
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Rosie O’Donnell Rags on Trump’s Strait of Hormuz Claims
“I’ll put it this way: If the U.S. is in charge of the strait, then I’m also straight — and let’s face it, I’m not,” the guest host said on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
A Stunning Win for the Left in Florida: 6 Takeaways From Tuesday’s Primaries
State Representative Angie Nixon, a progressive firebrand, defeated a moderate who dramatically out-raised her with grass-roots enthusiasm. Can it carry her to victory in November?
The ‘Crack Spread’ Is Going to Make Your Life Unpleasant
Gas prices are going to remain high. Don’t blame the price of crude oil.
Mary Peltola and Dan Sullivan Advance in Key Alaska Senate Contest
The Democratic former congresswoman and the incumbent Republican senator will face off in November. Whether a potential spoiler candidate with the same name as the senator qualifies alongside them has not been determined.
Pentagon Scales Back Major Training Exercises With South Korea
The move to end the military training a week earlier than scheduled comes after President Trump ordered the Defense Department to reduce joint military exercises with the key U.S. ally.
Trump’s Tariffs on Hold as President Claims Deal With Canada Is Near
Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada was less definitive about what the intense talks produced, saying ‘important work’ remained.
ZZ Top Drummer Frank Beard Dies at 77
The only member of the Texas power trio without a beard, he propelled the band’s blend of boogie, Southern rock and blues for more than a half-century.
Top Album Releases Linked To Rise In Fatal Crashes
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The release of a new album by Taylor Swift might be a cause for celebration among her fans, but such events have also been linked to a more sombre phenomenon: an increase in fatal car crashes. The team behind a new study say it sheds light on the impact of distracted driving. Writing in the journal Jama Network Open, [Vishal Patel, first author of the study based at Harvard Medical School] and colleagues report how they focused on the release of 10 major albums, launched between 2017 and 2022, selected for having the highest number of Spotify streams over a single day. [...] The team found streaming volume for the top 200 songs in the US was 43% higher on the date of major album releases compared with the days surrounding the releases -- although such data does not reveal whether the music was being streamed in a car.
[...] The researchers used data from a population-based registry of fatal US motor vehicle crashes to look at the number of traffic fatalities on the dates these albums were released, as well as for the 10 days either side. After taking into account the day of the week upon which the album was released, as well as federal holidays, and time of year, the researchers found the number of US traffic fatalities showed a relative increase of 15.1% on the date of major album releases, compared with similar days either side. "This is equivalent to approximately 182 fatalities in the US attributable to the release days of the 10 included albums," the team writes.
Patel said the release of a new album could distract drivers because accessing music is a search task, not a single button press. "You unlock the phone, open the app, find the release, read down a tracklist, tap the right song. That's several seconds of looking at a screen," he said, adding unfamiliar music also demands more attention, while research has suggested listening to new, high-energy music measurably degrades driving performance. The researchers add the rise in traffic fatalities was greater among certain groups -- such as younger drivers, male drivers, people who were driving alone, and people driving cars with a built-in infotainment platform. The authors say the results suggest that "online music streaming through smartphones may significantly contribute to distracted driving and traffic fatalities."
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Threatening Friends and Courting Enemies in Trump’s ‘Upside-Down World’
The president’s hostility to allies like Oman, Canada and South Korea, and his affection for adversaries like North Korea, may still shock some. But it comes as little surprise after a decade of upheaval.
Trump to Nominate Heidi Overton, a Top Domestic Policy Aide, for F.D.A. Commissioner
Dr. Overton is a fierce opponent of abortion rights and a supporter of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.
Natalie Harp, Trump’s Most Devoted Aide, Is Always by His Side. What Exactly Does She Do?
President Trump’s White House aide Natalie Harp is always by his side. What, exactly, does she do?
Haitians in Springfield Hunker Down as ICE Begins Detentions
Federal agents have begun detaining Haitians in the Ohio city, signaling an increase in ICE activity that has panicked the community and kept many from leaving home.
California Passes New Rule Regulating Replacement Car Tires
The rule to require efficient replacement tires was praised by environmentalists. But manufacturers warned that the change would hurt American companies and increase tire prices.
Judge Orders New Oversight of Immigrant Children’s Detention
After reviewing claims of persistent safety and sanitary failures, the court named two experts to monitor detention conditions across several facilities.
Boyfriend Who Abused Hayden Panettiere Had Returned to Her Life
Despite the actress’s efforts to move on from a turbulent relationship with Brian Hickerson, they were together when she went into cardiac arrest and died.
Cursor Launches 'Origin' Code Hosting Platform As GitHub Alternative
Cursor has launched Origin, a GitHub-style code hosting platform built directly into its AI coding environment. The company is initially positioning Origin as a low-risk layer on top of GitHub, keeping GitHub as the "source of truth," but the launch landed just as a major GitHub outage highlighted growing concerns about reliability in the age of AI-generated code. VentureBeat reports: Cursor began rolling out Origin, its own code hosting platform, to paid users on Monday morning. Roughly three and a half hours later, GitHub's status page lit up with what became a six-hour-and-forty-two-minute global degradation -- error rates near 20% across pull requests, issues and the API, and near 50% on archive and raw file downloads, according to GitHub's incident log. Enterprise single sign-on went down with it: SAML, OIDC, SCIM provisioning and Team Sync all failed. So did Copilot.
The developer internet did what the developer internet does. "You can now host your repos in Cursor Origin and deploy to Vercel via Cursor Origin which is itself hosted on Vercel," Vercel chief executive Guillermo Rauch posted on X. "And unlike GitHub, it's online [smile emoji]" Asked why he was smiling, Rauch replied: "trying to make light of the situation. We ourselves are stuck because of github rn!" Matt Palmer, who works at Cursor, quote-tweeted his own company's launch with the day's best line: "We were going to ship this earlier, but GitHub was down." A GitHub outage, in other words, delayed the launch of a GitHub competitor.
Product launches get locked weeks in advance, and no evidence suggests Cursor timed this one. But the coincidence did the company an enormous favor, because it dramatized the argument Origin exists to make. For eighteen years, choosing where to host your team's source code has been the least interesting decision an engineering organization makes. Cursor is betting that AI agents have made it interesting again -- and for technical decision makers, that is the real news here. Not a new product, but a new procurement question with a governance problem attached.
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