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SCI/TECH

MAHA Wins One: Common Sense Returns to Childhood Vaccines

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order restructuring federal childhood vaccine recommendations around three fairly revolutionary concepts: actual risk, individual circumstances and parental choice. In other words, America is moving away from “CDC says every child gets this” toward “here are the core vaccines, here are vaccines appropriate for particular risks, here are decisions for parents and physicians, and now go produce better evidence.”

POLITICS

US Cowboys, Middle Eastern Airspace and Reliable Partners

Y’all remember that awkward Ankara summit where everybody was promised everything, nobody got much of anything, Turkey was once again declared a reliable partner without getting its F-35s, and Trump supposedly flew home on the older Air Force One because the new Qatari jet wasn’t quite sophisticated enough yet? Turns out there weren’t two planes involved. There were three.

POLITICS

EU Taxpayers Happy to Finance CIRCULANDIA Packaging Solution

Brussels has solved the small-producer problem. European taxpayers are contributing almost €9 million to CIRCULANDIA, a new Horizon Europe project involving 35 organisations across 12 countries to research circular food systems, local production and reusable packaging. Tax money put to good use.

POLITICS

The EU Single Market Now Requires 27 Single Markets

Say goodbye to high-quality local produce from small companies. Europe spent decades removing borders so a small producer in one country could sell to a customer in another as easily as next door. Then it discovered packaging.

SCI/TECH

Moderna’s mRNA Flu Vaccine Enters Through the Retirement Home

Moderna has finally done for seasonal influenza what it previously did for COVID-19: placed a strand of laboratory-produced messenger RNA inside lipid nanoparticles and persuaded the FDA that this was a perfectly reasonable thing to make an annual appointment.

SCI/TECH

Pfizer’s New Invention: The Schrödinger’s Control Group and Other Tales

The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine was a triumph of modern science. A genuinely extraordinary piece of biotechnology. Within months of SARS-CoV-2 appearing, researchers had designed a nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccine capable of instructing human cells to produce the viral spike protein, wrapped that message inside lipid nanoparticles, tested it in tens of thousands of people and prepared the technology for production on a scale previously reserved for Coca-Cola.

SCI/TECH

Unemployed? Lose Weight or Die. Either Way, You’re Off the Statistics.

Britain floated weight-loss injections as a way to get people back into work. The MHRA has now received more than 158,000 suspected adverse reactions involving the drugs and reports of hundreds of fatal outcomes. Apparently there are several ways to improve the employment figures.

SCI/TECH

Scientists Want 4 Billion People by 2200. They Never Said Which Ones.

A new paper in Sustainable Development has the polite solution to the planet’s problems: gently reduce the human population from over eight billion to around four billion by the year 2200. The good news is the White man has already volunteered.

SCI/TECH

Ukraine Now Monitoring Russian Troop Movements on Lunar Front

Ukrainian astronomers at the Main Astronomical Observatory have detected more than twenty large unidentified objects near the Moon, some allegedly the size of Manhattan. According to the researchers, the Moon may serve as a base for these craft, which could reach Earth in approximately twenty minutes, which would make them considerably faster than a Ukrainian trans-European cash transport.

SCI/TECH

EU Swings the Ban Hammer on AI

The European Union has finally begun applying its Artificial Intelligence Act, bringing the continent one step closer to making AI safe, transparent and pleasant. Officially it is the world’s first comprehensive legal framework for AI. Citizens are now protected from manipulation, social scoring and imaginary nudes, while border-control AI has been placed on a back-burner.