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  • The Apprentice Producer Daniel Bekerman Trump’s Movie Legal Threat

    The Apprentice Producer Daniel Bekerman Trump’s Movie Legal Threat

    Any indie film producer can find themselves in the eye of a culture-war storm — but Daniel Bekerman got blown off course by the most powerful man on Earth.

    The founder of Scythia Films, a Canadian indie studio, recalls a valuable lesson learned when lawyers for Donald Trump began sending cease-and-desist letters in an effort to block the U.S. release of The Apprentice, the Oscar-nominated Trump origin story.

    “The current president is primarily in the entertainment business more than the politics business. Those letters were for entertainment purposes. You could tell by their lack of seriousness,” Bekerman tells THR ahead of leading a conference panel on indie film at the Toronto Film Festival.

    Scythia Films — with offices in Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Los Angeles — is one of Canada’s largest indie studios. The company develops original features while also offering production services, assisting U.S. studios filming in Canada in a way that allows them to retain full ownership rights.

    In addition to The Apprentice, which stars Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong (both Oscar-nominated for their performances), Bekerman’s recent producing credits include Guy Nattiv’s Love and Light (working title), starring Lily James; Viggo Mortensen’s directorial debut, Falling; Endless Cookie, which premiered at this year’s Sundance; I Object, directed by Oscar nominee Andrew Niccol and starring Anna Faris and Karl Urban; and Close to You, directed by Dominic Savage and starring Elliot Page.

    Bekerman sat down with THR to discuss the potential — and perils — of independent filmmaking in a disrupted industry.

    You do original movies and are a key service production company in Canada. How have each of those businesses been impacted by increased industry disruption, including from Hollywood?

    We have these two sides of the business. One side is effectively the service productions, where we do the physical nuts and bolts of facilitating production. And the other is developing our own films. So we do both, and, especially for the creative side, it was important for us to have a presence in L.A.

    And you’re based in Vancouver, where you can drive both sides of the business, original and service work?

    There’s enough work for me to just stay in Canada, where I don’t need to think about relocating and [designing] all my stories to being just from the Hollywood machine. It’s always case by case. But what I do want to advocate for in general is having that diversity of storytelling and storytellers. If it’s all being made by one source, whether it’s a company or a government or anybody else, it’s going to become thin after a while.

    You also in a sense have a third leg of the stool — international co-productions — some of which involve American partners. How is that impacted by our disrupted times?

    You’re right to point out that third component, which usually falls under the original, creative producing side of things. Sometimes it’s more like service production and a minority co-production scenario. But what’s going on is very complex, but you can break it down to the simple principles of stability and instability of business. You can have instability in the business, or you can look for stability. And there’s a lot of instability in the market. That’s where international co-productions can come in and potentially offer stability with legislated agreements between nations that have consistent and fulfilled parameters for getting projects made. But these are not separate from the market entirely. They do augment other forces in the market. So having the ability to access the international treaty co-production system can be something of a remedy for the instability in the rest of the market.

    Making movies has never been easy. But do you find conversations to structure indie films just take longer these days, given all the industry disruption?

    I would say there’s increased curiosity and interest in the these other systems, these international co-production systems, and the Canadian system. I’m paying attention to where the energy is. That’s in the market and in the public consciousness because we’re in the storytelling business. Sometimes we forget the source of our stories is the world.  Right now, I find the institutional entertainment companies becoming increasingly conservative, increasingly homogenized. Their parameters for stories they’re telling and how they’re telling them are narrower, and increasingly they’re trying to color within the lines of what will be deemed acceptable by certain power structures that prevail in today’s world. In light of that, where I see this vacuum, where I see energy and opportunity, is in actually going in the other direction and telling stories that are as bold as possible, that are as honest and unvarnished as possible in the subject matter they tackle. And that has the capacity to excite audiences in a way that they’re not getting from the kind of overly sanitized storytelling by committee that is increasingly the case in institutional entertainment companies.

    Are you speaking more about companies in the U.S., while in Canada and Europe and elsewhere producers are still able to tell the stories you covet?

    Absolutely.  We faced this very specific kind of pressure with our movie, The Apprentice. The movie surprised a lot of people in that it was not just a movie about Donald Trump. It had a lot to say and was not just an easy set of political talking points. It was a good piece of art. And the pressure we faced was not a unique occurrence. There is a new wave of pressure, like what’s happened with Stephen Colbert. There’s other examples of that. But also, the industry spent several years telling filmmakers who had been historically shut out of telling their stories — in many cases, these are Black filmmakers, Indigenous filmmakers, queer filmmakers and women filmmakers — that their stories should be told and will be told. And then as soon as the political winds start blowing another direction, there’s corporate amnesia. Perhaps we were naive to take some of that corporate speak at face value in the first place. But frankly, it’s not acceptable because there’s a reason why it was a good idea to start telling stories that hadn’t been told and to give voice to storytellers who had struggled to have their voices heard. 

    Do you sense big media companies have kind of scrubbed their websites of anything mentioning DEI but are still looking for fresh stories from diverse storytellers?

    I know there are incredibly talented individuals working at those companies. So I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush because many people at those companies are great at their jobs. But I think because of the top-down structural movement away from certain kinds of stories that is clearly happening, I look at it more as an opportunity that they’re vacating a space in the spectrum of stories that are being told, a very large space that has a lot of energy in it. And people willing to just have a smidgen of boldness can go straight into that space and tell amazing stories.

    With The Apprentice, you famously were served with a cease-and-desist letter from Donald Trump. What did you learn from that experience?

    I would say that was the beginning of a learning process about the degree to which the current president is primarily in the entertainment business more than the politics business. Those letters were for entertainment purposes. You could tell by their lack of seriousness. There’s just silly claims, silly anecdotes that are designed clearly to play to an audience on Fox News. They might get someone’s blood boiling because they’re the greatest hits of things that get those audiences angry. But they lack legal substance, they lacked logical substance.

    As a storyteller, you recognized in that legal threat from Trump an appeal to his base?

    This sounds like I’m being dismissive. I’m not, because when I say he’s in the entertainment business, people underestimate the entertainment business and its potency. Most people think of entertainment as a bag of popcorn. It may be. But it’s also these stories. And this is what Trump understands very well, the power of storytelling. Because people live their lives along the lines of the stories they integrate into their lives. That can be all forms of stories. It can be any kind of story. And this is something the president is an expert in, in how to utilize that power of storytelling.

    And The Apprentice was a harbinger for a Trump administration wanting to control the narrative?

    It was a canary in a coal mine moment. Some of the things we’re seeing now, including Stephen Colbert, what was happening with our film, this was an early indicator that there was an intense interest on the part of the administration to control what stories could be told and who could tell them.

    He understands the power of framing how people see the world through storytelling.

    Absolutely, that’s what stories are. From the time when people first started scratching into the cave walls. Their stories were about how to survive in the world and how to prioritize your life in the world and give order to our lives. By calling them stories, I’m not diminishing them. This is what I’m passionate about in doing this work. It can be incredibly positive, and you can gain incredible insights into yourself and into humanity in general through great storytelling.

    So you see your movies opposing presidential propaganda and its capacity to influence people’s lives?

    I believe we’re in a contest between two fundamental kinds of storytelling. One is determinative, and the architects of that story already know the morality contained in the story, with the objective to lay out a moral system. The other kind of storytelling is more about curiosity, more about exploring the human condition. That’s the kind of storytelling I aspire to. It’s the kind of storytelling in The Apprentice. We took a subject that happened to be named Donald Trump, but what we were interested in wasn’t telling everybody what we already knew about Donald Trump. We were exploring the human being and what it says about all of us that there’s this person who devolved into the person we call Donald Trump. What does that mean for all of us on a human level? That was an exploration. It was going into a deep, dark cave and trying to shine a light on something that lives down there — that’s the objective of this kind of storytelling.

    You just completed a movie in southern British Columbia, Love and Light, directed by Guy Nattiv. What brought you to that project and others like it? 

    So a movie like Guy Nattiv’s project, in certain ways, it’s very personal to Guy in ways that I actually really relate to. It’s that kind of storytelling where you are exploring characters. And you’re finding surprises. You’re really, really finding things that are surprising and sometimes uncomfortable. But they have a lot of energy in them. And this is so much more interesting to me as a person. And that difference between that kind of storytelling and what is essentially propagandistic storytelling has never been so clear to me. 

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  • Image Recognition On 0.35 Watts

    Image Recognition On 0.35 Watts

    Much of the expense of developing AI models, and much of the recent backlash to said models, stems from the massive amount of power they tend to consume. If you’re willing to sacrifice some ability and accuracy, however, you can get ever-more-decent results from minimal hardware – a tradeoff taken by the Grove Vision AI board, which runs image recognition in near-real time on only 0.35 Watts.

    The heart of the board is a WiseEye processor, which combines two ARM Cortex M55 CPUs and an Ethos U55 NPU, which handles AI acceleration. The board connects to a camera module and a host device, such as another microcontroller or a more powerful computer. When the host device sends the signal, the Grove board takes a picture, runs image recognition on it, and sends the results back to the host computer. A library makes signaling over I2C convenient, but in this example [Jaryd] used a UART.

    To let it run on such low-power hardware, the image recognition model needs some limits; it can run YOLO8, but it can only recognize one object, runs at a reduced resolution of 192×192, and has to be quantized down to INT8. Within those limits, though, the performance is impressive: 20-30 fps, good accuracy, and as [Jaryd] points out, less power consumption than a single key on a typical RGB-backlit keyboard. If you want another model, there are quite a few available, though apparently of varying quality. If all else fails, you can always train your own.

    Such edge AI projects as these are all about achieving better performance with limited resources; if your requirements aren’t too demanding, you can run speech recognition on much more limited devices. Of course, there are also some people who try to make image recognition less effective.

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  • Stock Funds Continue to Score – The Wall Street Journal

    1. Stock Funds Continue to Score  The Wall Street Journal
    2. Index Insights: August  Cboe Global Markets
    3. S&P 500’s Ascent to New Heights: A Broadening Rally or a Precarious Peak?  FinancialContent
    4. Stock Market Sizzles In The Summer And Heats Up Funds, Too  Investor’s Business Daily
    5. In September, The S&P 500 Index Hits A Fresh All-Time High  FinanceFeeds

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  • He crossed 26 miles in a kayak made from mushrooms – and lived to tell the tale | US news

    He crossed 26 miles in a kayak made from mushrooms – and lived to tell the tale | US news

    On a clear, still morning in early August, Sam Shoemaker launched his kayak into the waters off Catalina Island and began paddling. His goal: to traverse the open ocean to San Pedro, just south of Los Angeles, some 26.4 miles away.

    But upon a closer look, Shoemaker’s kayak was no ordinary kayak. Brown-ish yellow and bumpy in texture, it had been made – or rather, grown – entirely from mushrooms. His journey, if successful, would mark the world’s longest open-water journey in a kayak built from this unique material.

    ‘Shoemaker’s kayak was no ordinary kayak. Brown-ish yellow and bumpy in texture, it had been made – or rather, grown – entirely from mushrooms.’ Photograph: Jordan Freeman/Courtesy of Sam Shoemaker

    With his phone, GoPro camera, walkie talkie, and a compass affixed to his life vest, Shoemaker left shortly before 6am in order to avoid the worst of the swells in the forecast. But three hours in and powering through his ninth mile, the coastline still out of sight, Shoemaker began feeling seasick.

    Suddenly, he heard the sound of a large animal breaching the waters. To his left, a fin whale flashed its glistening tail, then trailed slowly behind him. As the 50-ft creature followed him for three more miles, Shoemaker found the strength to finish out the maiden voyage.

    “It was just like a psychedelic experience,” he says of the crossing, which took him 12 hours.

    As he stumbled onto shore with his mushroom kayak still intact, the artist and mycologist embraced his friends and family. All of them hoped this voyage would usher in a new wave of curiosity about the unconventional fungus material, which Shoemaker and others argue is a more environmentally-friendly option than the plastics that are used extensively in boats and other aquatic recreation.

    Shoemaker began his career as an artist creating sculptures with propagated mushrooms. Upon returning to Los Angeles after graduating from Yale with an MFA in 2020, he began exhibiting artwork that captured the unique behavior of mushrooms as they grew out of hand-built ceramic vessels and blown glass.

    Eventually, his interests grew beyond the gallery walls. Shoemaker now belongs to a small community of scientists and artists exploring the potentiality of fungal innovation as an alternative material that could be used in everything from kayaks and buoys to surfboards.

    Their focus is on mycelium – the network of threads that support the growth of fungi and mushrooms. Though it tends to do the brunt of its work underground or in a substrate, it is a pivotal connective tissue in the animal kingdom. Mycelium-based materials in an aquatic context are known as AquaFung, a term coined by Shoemaker’s mentor Phil Ross, an artist and the co-founder of a biotechnology company called MycoWorks that engineers mycelium-based materials including a mushroom “leather” that can be used in furniture, handbags and biomedical equipment. After cofounding MyCoWorks, Ross also opened an open source mycology research lab at Stanford University called Open Fung.

    Gymnopilus ventricosus, commonly known as “jumbo gym”, were used to stain the paddle for Shoemaker’s kayak. Photograph: Courtesy of Sam Shoemaker

    Ross argues that AquaFung has many of the appealing properties as plastic – such as being lightweight and buoyant – but without the harmful footprint. “People hate Styrofoam plastics in the water washing onto shore,” says Ross. “[AquaFung] is biodegradable. It acts a lot like the material that everyone seems to hate.”

    Shoemaker began working on his first mycelium boat in 2024 with harvested wild Ganoderma polychromum mycelium outside his Los Angeles studio. He modified a used fishing kayak to serve as his fiberglass mold, then grew the mycelium network inside the mold, which held over 300lbs of inoculated hemp substrate to support the cultivation. After propagating the mycelium for almost four weeks, Shoemaker meticulously dried the resulting kayak composite structure using fans over the course of several months.

    After incubation, the dried mycelium exhibits a strong, hydrophobic material. To the touch, it feels rough and durable, like cork. And it doesn’t keep the same consistency in color and texture throughout – a testament to the mushroom’s wildness.

    Confident in his prototype, Shoemaker began searching for appropriate support.

    Shoemaker met Patrick Reed, the lead curator of the Pasadena-based arts organization Fulcrum Arts, in December 2023 through mutual friends. After a studio visit, Reed was blown away by everything that the artist had to show him, fondly remembering their conversation to be “incredibly exciting and stimulating”. It aligned with Fulcrum Arts’ mission to support artists pursuing social change at the intersection of art and science, and the pair entered into an official collaboration in early 2024.

    Shoemaker completed his second mushroom boat in June; grown from the same wild Ganoderma polychromum mycelium, the kayak was propagated on over 520lbs of a hemp hard substrate packed inside a new fiberglass mold. Shoemaker allowed the boat to grow over six weeks, then took another three months to dry it. At 107lbs, the new kayak is three feet shorter, but 50% larger by volume for more buoyancy and stability. It also featured a keel to improve tracking and rigidity.

    Sam Shoemaker works on a mushroom kayak in his studio. Photograph: Jordan Freeman/Courtesy of Sam Shoemaker

    The community of AquaFung enthusiasts, spanning mycologists, artists, fisherman, farmers and hobbyists alike, is vigorous but nascent. The completion of Shoemaker’s boat marks the second ever water-tested mushroom boat to be made after Katy Ayers, who holds the Guinness World Record for growing, then testing, what was then the world’s longest fungal mycelium boat on a Nebraska lake in 2019.

    “A lot of people really didn’t think it was possible,” says Ayers, who grew her boat after being inspired by a documentary called Super Fungi. “I had reached out to companies who actually make the biomaterials, and their spokespeople weren’t confident in it working, but I was confident and naive enough to give it a shot and figure out what the shortcomings were.”

    The future is … mushroom?

    Ayers and Shoemaker credits mycology pioneers like Ross for making the technology more accessible. And mushroom-based materials are slowly beginning to pop up in the mainstream: In 2021, Stella McCartney made headlines with its launch of the world’s first-ever garments made from lab-grown mushroom leather, in consultation with Ross.

    Ross calls Sam’s voyage “remarkable”, and hopes it inspires other scientific institutions to take this work more seriously. “[Sam] did it before Stanford and Caltech, and it happened in his backyard. This whole field is led by designers and artists, and it’s not because they’re the best scientists, but they are aware of the future before everybody else.”

    But Shoemaker is wary of promising that mushrooms will revolutionise the industry just yet. He points out that it required a year’s worth of time and resources to produce just one kayak, one that still remains slower and heavier than a store-bought ocean kayak.

    “People talk about mushrooms being this utopian future where plastic problems go away, [but] this is not the silver bullet where boats are easier to make,” he says. “I’m pleased with how far this project has gone, but there’s a long way to go.”

    Sam Shoemaker in the waters off Catalina Island. Photograph: Jordan Freeman/Courtesy of Sam Shoemaker

    For now, he plans to continue the dialogue with other artists, mycologists and hobbyists, and make his open-source compendium, with over 70 pages of research, methodology and diagrams, available to the public. A full exhibition of his materials and kayak will take place at the Fulcrum Arts’ space in Pasadena in October.

    “There’s probably some 19-year-old kid out there who thinks ‘I could do that,’ and they can,” says Shoemaker. “The biggest compliment that they could pay me is to go and build a better boat and attempt a crossing even more ambitious than mine.”

    After Shoemaker’s success, Ayers also sees hope for a more fungal future.

    “I’ve been waiting for somebody else to do this for years now. The first thing I thought when my boat went out was, ‘Please somebody try and beat this record because that gives me a reason to try again,’” she says. “If we can continue to inspire each other and make better things, who knows, maybe we’ll see a floating colony of mushroom houses.”

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  • Paris Saint-Germain legend Presnel Kimpembe joins Qatar Sports Club

    Paris Saint-Germain legend Presnel Kimpembe joins Qatar Sports Club

    Born in Beaumont-sur-Oise in the Paris region, Presnel Kimpembe started playing football at AS Éragny (Val-d’Oise) before joining the capital club in 2005, at the age of just 10. He progressed through all the youth categories before joining the U19 squad, where he made his Youth League debut in September 2013, at just 17 years of age, and helped his side reach the quarter-finals of the competition.

    A true star of the Parisian youth system, Presnel Kimpembe made his first appearance in Laurent Blanc’s professional squad in the Trophée des Champions against Guingamp, where he won his first title in the Rouge & Bleu jersey.

    A few weeks later, he made his debut with the first team on 17 October 2014, replacing Thiago Motta fifteen minutes before the end of the match against RC Lens. This moment marked the beginning of a long and successful relationship between the young defender and the capital club.

    On 17 March 2015, Presnel Kimpembe signed his first professional contract with Paris Saint-Germain and, a few months later, won his first French league title – the first of many. A leader who always proved combative and powerful in one-on-one situations, he gradually established himself in the Parisian squad during the 2015-2016 season and confirmed his status in the following campaign.

    The 2016-2017 season saw him sign his second contract extension with his beloved club, but also marked his breakthrough, with 28 appearances and a remarkable Champions League debut in the victorious first leg of the round of 16 against FC Barcelona, where he impressed with his commitment and natural leadership.

    At the end of a successful 2017-2018 season, marked by a treble (French Championship, Coupe de France and Coupe de la Ligue), Presnel Kimpembe flew to Russia to compete in the 2018 World Cup, which he won with the French national team, becoming a world champion as a representative of Paris Saint-Germain. In the wake of this victorious summer, he extended his contract with the capital club through to 2023 and, on 12 February 2019, scored his first professional goal in the Champions League round of 16 first leg against Manchester United – six years after making his debut with the Parisian club.

    Two months later, on 17 April 2019, Presnel Kimpembe wore the Paris Saint-Germain captain’s armband for the first time on the pitch at La Beaujoire. Having become a key member of the team, he then alternated the captaincy with Marquinhos and, alongside the Brazilian defender, formed a solid and successful partnership, guiding Paris Saint-Germain to numerous successes.

    The Parisian youngster was also recognised on an individual level, featuring in the Champions League Team of the Season in 2020, then in the Ligue 1 Team of the Season at the 2021 UNFP Awards.

    On 26 February 2023, during an away game in Marseille, Presnel Kimpembe suffered a ruptured Achilles tendon that kept him out of action for many months. True to his warrior mentality, however, he remained focused on coming back stronger to help his beloved club.

    On 4 February, almost two years after his serious injury at the Stade Vélodrome, Presnel Kimpembe made his big return to competition in the Coupe de France round of 16 against Le Mans. 

    This return allowed him to fully experience Paris Saint-Germain’s historic season, punctuated by an unprecedented quadruple: the Trophée des Champions, the French Championship, the Coupe de France and, above all, the Champions League. By finally lifting the Champions League trophy, Presnel Kimpembe achieved the ultimate goal of his career and fulfilled a lifelong dream.

     The embodiment of club spirit and a real guide for the Parisian youth players during his time at the club, Presnel Kimpembe has taken on this role for many years with successive generations. In recent seasons, he has played a key role in the development of young talents such as Warren Zaïre-Emery, Senny Mayulu, Ibrahim Mbaye and Noham Kamara.

    Presnel Kimpembe has also had a remarkable adventure with the French national team. He was called up to Les Bleus for the first time in October 2016, before playing his first minutes in a friendly match against Russia in March 2018. The Parisian defender was one of 23 players selected by Didier Deschamps for the 2018 World Cup, he was named to the starting line-up for the the third group-stage match, against Denmark (0-0). On 15 July 2018, at just 22 years of age, he became a World Champion. In October 2021, he started in the Nations League final victory over Spain, helping Les Bleus win the trophy for the first time. On 6 June 2022, during a match between France and Croatia, he wore the captain’s armband for Les Bleus, the first time this has happened for a Paris Saint-Germain youth academy graduate.

    Presnel Kimpembe has played 241 matches for Les Rouge & Bleu, scoring three goals, providing two assists and wearing the captain’s armband 31 times. He is also the third-most decorated player in Paris Saint-Germain’s history, with eight French league titles, seven Coupes de France, six Trophée des Champions, five Coupes de la Ligue and one UEFA Champions League.

    Deeply committed to and sensitive to social issues, Presnel Kimpembe has been the patron of the Paris Saint-Germain Foundation since October 2022.

    He will remain a player who is close to and loved by the supporters, who have never ceased to admire and respect his commitment to the Rouge & Bleu jersey over the past 20 years.

     

    A child of the Paris region, an academy graduate and a true captain and leader, Presnel Kimpembe will forever remain a major player in the history of Paris Saint-Germain. The club and its supporters thank him for all these years and wish him all the best for the rest of his career.

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  • Trump Family Adds $1.3 Billion of Crypto Wealth in Span of Weeks

    Trump Family Adds $1.3 Billion of Crypto Wealth in Span of Weeks

    It took just a few eventful weeks for President Donald Trump’s family to rack up about $1.3 billion from two crypto ventures, each less than a year old.

    The haul from crypto firm World Liberty Financial and separate mining operation American Bitcoin Corp. shows how still-nascent projects are already translating into tangible wealth for the first family. The sums rival the values of long-held golf and resort properties that had been synonymous with the Trumps, whose fortune now stands at $7.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

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  • WINUX provides the Windows 11 experience in a Linux distro

    WINUX provides the Windows 11 experience in a Linux distro

    We’ve talked a lot about the impending end-of-life of Windows 10, and what folks can do if they can’t, or choose not to upgrade to Windows 11. One of the options is to pay up for extended support, one of the options is to buy a new PC — which Microsoft would surely love — and one continually floated is to make a switch to Linux.

    Linux is known for many things, one of which is legendary support for older hardware. But Linux can be a very different experience from Windows, and quite jarring for many who make the switch. I’ve already looked at one Linux distro that aims to be friendly to Windows refugees. AnduinOS was created by a Microsoft engineer, so it has the credentials.

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  • What To Know About The New Updated Covid Vaccines For 2025-2026

    What To Know About The New Updated Covid Vaccines For 2025-2026

    The FDA recently approved new Covid vaccines for Americans, but due to certain restrictions, there has been mounting confusion on what they are, how much protection they will offer, and if various insurance companies will cover them. Below are answers to some common questions the general public may have on the new updated Covid vaccines.

    How Many Updated Covid Vaccines Are There?

    To date, there will be three new updated Covid vaccines. A Moderna vaccine has been approved for those six months of age and older, a Pfizer vaccine for those five years of age and older, and a Novavax vaccine for those 12 years of age and older.

    What Strain(s) Will The Vaccines Protect Against?

    The updated vaccines will target the JN.1 lineage of Covid-19, using the LP.8.1 strain. This lineage is a descendant of the Omicron variant of the virus. Currently, the dominant strain in the United States that is causing most infections is the XFG, or “stratus” variant, according to data from WastewaterSCAN.

    As the XFG is a descendant of the Omicron variant and is closely related to the LP.8.1 strain of the virus, the newly updated Covid vaccines should offer protection against this dominant variant and will be effective at preventing severe illness, hospitalization and death, per the World Health Organization.

    Who Can Get The Vaccine?

    Traditionally, anyone six months of age and older were eligible to receive Covid shots. That changed recently when the FDA restricted the vaccine for those 65 years of age and older, or for younger individuals six months of age and older with an underlying condition that would put them at high risk for severe Covid infection. These individuals will likely be able to get the vaccine at various healthcare clinics and pharmacies with insurance covering the cost of the shot.

    What Qualifies As High Risk For Severe Covid Infection?

    Those under 65 years of age will need to have at least one medical condition that would put that at high risk for severe Covid in order to get the new updated Covid vaccine. Although it remains unclear exactly how many and what conditions qualify for putting one at severe risk for Covid infection, the CDC back in February identified 22 qualifying conditions that include obesity, depression, diabetes, asthma and cancer.

    This risk could be modified this month by the CDC since the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is set to meet September 18th to make formal recommendations on the Covid vaccine. In addition, although pregnancy was included back in February as a qualifying condition for getting the Covid vaccine, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has since stated that healthy pregnant individuals would not qualify to get the shots. Further clarification will likely come later this month.

    Can You Still Get The Covid Vaccine If You Want To And Do Not Qualify Under The FDA Restrictions?

    If you are a healthy young adult or child that does not have an underlying condition that would put you at risk for severe Covid, in theory you could still potentially get a Covid shot, but there could be significant barriers. Most adults would need to get a prescription from their doctor and then present it at a pharmacy or health clinic to get the vaccine. For children, Secretary Kennedy is now requiring shared decision making between parents and physicians, which requires a conversation in order to possibly get a prescription for the Covid vaccine.

    However, there may be significant barriers for each of the above situations to play out. For example, some Americans may not have a primary care doctor, thus precluding them from getting a prescription for the Covid shot. Even if they were to get a prescription, they may not be willing to pay the $150 for the Covid vaccine, particularly if they are uninsured and have to pay the cost out of pocket. More than 27 million Americans lack health insurance, according to the CDC. Finally, some physicians may be reluctant to write a prescription for the Covid vaccine “off-label” since it has not been officially recommended or approved by the FDA for a certain subset of the population.

    The ACIP is set to meet September 18th, and the outcome of that meeting and subsequent CDC approval could provide further clarification on Covid vaccine approvals and whether or not insurance companies will cover the shots, since insurance coverage for many plans is intimately tied with the recommendations from the ACIP and CDC.

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  • AMD Ryzen 5 9500F To Launch On 16th September Officially; Up To 27% Faster In Competitive Gaming According To AMD

    AMD Ryzen 5 9500F To Launch On 16th September Officially; Up To 27% Faster In Competitive Gaming According To AMD

    The budget Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 CPU will officially launch for retail on 16th September. AMD has shared a few slides, hinting at the CPU’s performance and the generational uplifts it delivers over its predecessor.

    Zen 5-Based Ryzen 5 9500F (iGPU-less) 6-Core/12-Thread CPU to Hit the Shelves on 16th This Month; Brings an Average of 9% and 11% Uplifts in AAA and Competitive Gaming

    Yesterday, AMD silently unveiled the Ryzen 5 9500F processor, which is currently the slowest and the cheapest in the Ryzen 9000 lineup. This Zen 5-based CPU will feature no integrated graphics, but boasts specifications similar to the Ryzen 5 9600/9600X except for the boost clock. Today, AMD has announced that the CPU will hit the shelves officially on 16th September, which is around a week from now.

    Image Credit: benchlife.com

    AMD shared a couple of slides detailing its specifications and the expected performance versus its direct predecessor. Specs-wise, it will feature a 6-core/12-thread configuration, a base clock of 3.8 GHz and a boost clock of up to 5.0 GHz. So, it’s 400 MHz slower than the 9600X, but most specs are identical, including the L2+L3 cache size and the TDP of 65W. Being a successor to the Ryzen 5 7500F, it offers superior Zen 5 architecture, which, according to AMD, delivers noticeable performance improvements in gaming.

    AMD Ryzen 5 9500F vs. AMD Ryzen 5 7500F gaming performance comparison chart.
    Image Credit: benchlife.com

    As per the slides, the Ryzen 5 9500F is up to 24% faster in AAA games like Baldur’s Gate 3, but the average performance uplift across 10 different Triple-A titles is 9%. In games like F1 2023 and Black Myth: Wukong, AMD reports a slight performance regression but takes the performance uplifts in double digits in games like Elden Ring, Watch Dogs: Legion, and Far Cry 6. Similarly, in competitive games, the 9500F can offer an average of 11% higher performance across 10 different games.

    The tests were conducted at 1080p resolution with high settings, but please note that these are AMD’s own tests, and the actual results may vary. The results are drastically different when compared to the third-party benchmark comparison uploaded on Bilibili (via @9550pro). The Ryzen 5 9500F is 3.5% faster than the 7500F when paired with a GeForce RTX 5080. Unfortunately, these weren’t tested at native, but most had DLSS enabled.

    Chart comparing AMD锐龙 and 英特尔酷睿 CPUs in gaming performance at 1920x1080 resolution.
    Ryzen 5 9500F vs 7500F vs 9600X vs 14600K vs 265K; Image Credit: @9550pro

    Surprisingly, the higher performance is mostly due to two games: DOTA 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Almost every game saw a similar performance, and there won’t likely be a noticeable difference between the two in gaming in reality. The Ryzen 5 9500F is launched at 1,299 Yuan or US$181 (excluding taxes), which is just $20 cheaper than the MSRP of Ryzen 5 9600X in China. So, it may not be exactly a good replacement for the 9600X, which is slightly faster and also has an iGPU.

    News Source: Benchlife

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  • Mitton and McRae prepare for Tokyo with wins in Beijing | REPORT

    Mitton and McRae prepare for Tokyo with wins in Beijing | REPORT

    Sarah Mitton and Khaleb McRae are among the athletes who will head to the World Athletics Championships Tokyo 25 on a winning note after clinching victory at the final World Athletics Continental Tour Gold meeting of the season in Beijing on Sunday (7).

    Canada’s Mitton achieved the two best marks in the shot put contest – 19.81m and 19.72m – and that saw the two-time world champion win ahead of Sweden’s Fanny Roos and China’s Zhang Linru, who will also compete in Tokyo.

    The field featured a total of five Tokyo-bound athletes and both Roos and Zhang joined Mitton in surpassing 19 metres, respectively throwing 19.35m and 19.05m, as New Zealand’s Olympic silver medallist Maddison-Lee Wesche finished fourth on 18.79m.

    USA’s McRae also clinched a confidence-boosting win, holding off his compatriot Bryce Deadmon in the 400m – 44.64 to 44.78. Dylan Borlee was third in 45.15.

    Japan’s Tatsuki Abe will not be racing at his home World Championships but he closed his Continental Tour Gold campaign in style, dipping to victory by just 0.01 in the 110m hurdles. The World University Games champion clocked 13.22 (1.0m/s) to beat China’s Xu Zhuoyi (13.23) in a photo finish.

    Irish record-holder Mark English was among the meeting record-breakers as he won the 800m in 1:44.67 as he prepares for Tokyo. He will be joined there by Spain’s Pablo Sanchez-Valladares, who finished second this time in 1:44.79, just ahead of Kenya’s two-time Commonwealth champion Wyclife Kinyamal in 1:44.86.

    Hungary’s Anna Toth finished strongly to take the 100m hurdles in 12.83 (0.6m/s) – a victory in her final race before the World Championships. USA’s Rayniah Jones was second in 13.00.

    Oman’s Ali Al Balushi ran a PB of 10.09 (0.5m/s) to deny USA’s Brandon Hicklin (10.12) and Canada’s Andre De Grasse in the men’s 100m – the latter clocking 10.16 in his first race since June. The women’s race was won by USA’s Maia McCoy as she clocked 11.20 (0.1m/s) and held off Liberia’s Destiny Smith-Barnett (11.28).

    Finland’s Kristiina Halonen ran a well-judged race to overtake China’s Kong Yingying down the home straight and win the 400m hurdles in 55.46. Kong responded with a late surge and although it wasn’t quite enough to beat the Tokyo-bound Halonen, she did achieve a PB of 55.54 for the runner-up spot.

    China’s Asian indoor champion Zhong Tao won the pole vault on countback in front of a home crowd, equalling his PB with 5.75m – his best ever outdoor clearance – to clinch top spot ahead of USA’s Cole Walsh. World silver medallist Ernest John Obiena and Huang Bokai shared third place after they both cleared a best of 5.65m.

    China’s world U20 record-holder Yan Ziyi topped the javelin with her first throw of the competition – 64.46m – to win by more than two metres ahead of her compatriot Su Lingdan, the Tokyo-bound Asian champion who threw 62.39m in the final round.

    USA’s Helen Schlachtenhaufen was in control as she won the 1500m in 4:06.95. The bigger battle was for the runner-up spot and that was won by Christina Aragon as she dipped for second place in 4:07.20 ahead of the French duo of Adele Gay (4:07.21) and Berenice Cleyet-Merle (4:07.24).

    China’s long-time leader Liang Tiantian held off a late charge by Great Britain’s Eloise Walker in the 3000m, responding to Walker’s attack down the home straight and kicking to victory in a big PB of 8:57.65 in her first outdoor race over the distance. Walker was second in 8:58.02 and her compatriot Cari Hughes was third in 9:00.49.

    A close long jump contest closed the meeting – Croatia’s Filip Pravdica and Norway’s Henrik Flatnes both jumping 7.88m but Pravdica taking the victory thanks to his superior second-best leap.

    China’s Li Jialu won the high jump on countback with a 2.20m clearance.

    Results

     

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