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Google agrees to curb power use for AI data centers to ease strain on US grid when demand surges – Reuters
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Chappell Roan Reveals Her Second Album ‘Doesn’t Exist Yet’
Chappell Roan may have released three new singles since her debut album, but she is now revealing that fans likely won’t get to hear her second full album for “at least five” years.
She spoke to Vogue while on set of the music video for her latest single, “The Subway,” where she said that her “second project doesn’t exist yet.”
Roan’s debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, was released in September 2023. The album was critically acclaimed and earned six Grammy nominations. She also took home the Grammy for best new artist at the 2025 ceremony.
Despite releasing “The Subway,” “The Giver” and “Good Luck, Babe” after her debut album’s release, Roan said “there is no album” and “no collection of songs.”
“It took me five years to write the first one, and it’s probably going to take at least five to write the next,” she said of her sophomore album. “I’m not that type of writer that can pump it out.”
Roan added that she doesn’t think she makes “good music whenever I force myself to do anything.”
“I see some comments sometimes, like, ‘She’s everywhere except that damn studio,’” she continued. “Even if I was in the studio 12 hours a day, every single day, that does not mean that you would get an album any faster.”
Roan went on to reveal that “The Subway” also “took an annoying amount of time to get just right.” While reflecting on why the writing and producing process took so long, she said, “I just wasn’t ready to put it out yet. It was just too painful. I was just too angry and scared — just about my life — to put it out.”
She’s now she’s in a better place, which she partially credits to staying off of social media. “Socials harm the fuck out of me and my art. I’m not doing that to myself anymore,” she said. “I’ve never written an album where I don’t have Instagram or anything. The album process is purely, only mine. No one on TikTok gets to see it.”
Roan first debuted “The Subway” during her performance at Governors Ball in New York City in June of 2024. However, she didn’t release the song on streaming platforms until July 31.
“I’m very proud of this song & what a journey she has been on,” she wrote on Instagram when she first dropped the track. “I first played it at gov ball when I was painted green as lady liberty and in the past have played new songs live to feel them out.”
She released the Amber Grace Johnson-directed music video on Aug. 1, which showed her making her way through New York City as she looked back on a broken heart on the subway.
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Scarlett Johansson & Adam Driver’s ‘Marriage Story Scenes’ Are Being Used By USDA To Scare Wolves From Killing Cattle: “Humans Are Bad”
Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver‘s scenes from Marriage Story are reportedly being repurposed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in their quest to save cattle from wolves.
According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, the scene being used is the most dramatic moment of the 2019 Noah Baumbach film.
“Riding to the rescue are drone cowhands, whose quadcopters have thermal cameras that can reveal any wolf lurking in the darkness and bathe it in a spotlight. A loudspeaker broadcasts alarming sounds like fireworks, gunshots and people arguing. One recording is of the fight between Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver in the movie Marriage Story,” reads the report from WSJ.
A USDA district supervisor in Oregon added, “I need wolves to respond and know that, hey, humans are bad.”
RELATED: Noah Baumbach On His Personal Approach To Filmmaking And How Hitchcock Influenced ‘Marriage Story’ – Behind The Lens
WSJ notes that “wolf hazing” was practiced in Oregon after wolves killed 11 cows during a 20-day period. After drones were deployed to patrol the area using this practice, only two cows were killed in 85 days.
Marriage Story was written and directed by Baumbach and released by Netflix in 2019. The film stars Johansson and Driver as a couple going through a bi-coastal divorce, which is complicated even more with custody issues of their son.
The film earned various Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture and acting for both lead stars.
RELATED: Laura Dern On That ‘Marriage Story’ Monologue And The Line She Added – The Contenders NY Video
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Laval University OCT enhances accuracy of deep brain stimulation
04 Aug 2025
Polarized light method provides more detailed and accurate structural information than MRI.
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) involves implanting electrodes into specific brain areas to regulate abnormal activity, as a surgical treatment for neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.
Placing these electrodes with high positional accuracy is a vital aspect of the procedure, but imaging tools such as MRI often fail to reveal small deep-brain structures, making precise targeting difficult.
A project group from Quebec’s Laval University and Harvard Medical School has now developed a better method, using catheter-based polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT).
The results, published in Neurophotonics, show that PS-OCT could be an effective intraoperative imaging tool for guiding DBS neurosurgery, complementing MRI methods.
By detecting the polarization properties of light PS-OCT can yield additional contrast data over standard OCT, and in the case of the brain it can capture the intrinsic birefringence characteristics of the brain’s white-matter tissues.
“In birefringent materials such as brain white matter, light encounters two slightly different refractive indices depending on whether the light is polarized parallel or perpendicular to the tissue fiber direction,” noted the project in its paper. “The amount of birefringence detected in tissue is directly related to the alignment and density of the fibrous structures within it.”
Since PS-OCT can visualize brain structures at the micron level rather than the millimeter resolution provided by MRI, it can detect fine details in white matter fiber tracts, the bundles of nerve fibers that are crucial landmarks for DBS targeting.
Visualizing tissue structures during neurosurgery
In trials using a postmortem animal model, researchers inserted a PS-OCT probe into the brain along planned trajectories, and then captured high-resolution images of the brain’s internal structure as the probe was withdrawn back through the tissue. These images were then matched with MRI scans to assess accuracy.
Results showed that PS-OCT could distinguish between white and gray matter more clearly than MRI and reveal fine fiber structures that MRI missed, such as the internal capsule – a dense bundle of fibers important for DBS planning. In one case, PS-OCT identified highly organized fiber tracts that were invisible in MRI scans.
While PS-OCT offers clear advantages, noted the project, it currently measures fiber orientation only in two dimensions; future improvements enabling full 3D mapping would further enhance its usefulness. The ultimate goal would be a catheter-based system suitable for use by surgeons during implantation of DBS electrodes, able to offer real-time guidance.
“Surgeons would be able to receive feedback on the structural details of brain tissues during DBS procedures, facilitating precise targeting and localization of brain structures,” wrote the project in its paper.
“The ability to visualize fine tissue structures during neurosurgery could significantly improve surgical accuracy and reduce the risk of errors due to misalignment or incomplete targeting.”
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There’s Only One Black Moon In 2025 And It’s Happening This Month
We like the August sky because there are usually lots of beautiful things to see. We have had amazing solar eclipses, like the Great American Eclipse in 2017, and we will have two brilliant ones next year and the year after. The best meteor shower of the year, too, is in August: the Perseids. But today we are telling you what you are not going to see this month: the Black Moon of August 23.
The Moon goes through phases, with the whole progression lasting around a month. When it is completely illuminated, it’s a full Moon, while its opposite is the new Moon. In the former case, the Moon is on the side of the Earth away from the Sun. In the latter case, it is closer to the Sun, so it’s in the sky during the day and invisible to us.
The Moon goes around the Earth 12.37 times every year, so some years will have 12 new Moons (or 12 full Moons) and some years will have 13. In a more accurate approximation, there are 235 new Moons within 19 years, so seven years in every 19 will have an extra new Moon.
The extra full Moon has been historically called a Blue Moon. Given its relative rarity, we get the expression “once in a Blue Moon”. The concept of the Black Moon originated in astrological circles centuries ago to refer to an actual real Earth satellite that was hiding in orbit around the Earth. The term has been more recently co-opted to mark a similar concept to that of the Blue Moon, but for the new Moon.
A Blue Moon can be defined as a monthly one (the second full Moon in a calendar month) or a seasonal one (the third full Moon in a season). Similarly, you can have a monthly Black Moon, happening roughly every 29 months, and a seasonal one, happening every 33 months. The last Black Moon we had was only 8 months ago, and it was a monthly one.
The one this month will be a seasonal one. There won’t be another Black Moon, monthly or seasonal, until 2027 – another seasonal one, following the new Moon that will cause the incredible eclipse happening on August 2, 2027.
If we can’t see it and there is not even an eclipse this time, what is the point of knowing there’s a Black Moon? Well, the Moon is beautiful, but its brightness is also pretty annoying when you want to see the night sky – especially when you want to see stuff like meteor showers.
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Simple Algorithm Paired with Standard Imaging Tool Could Predict Failure in Lithium Metal Batteries
Newswise — Researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed a simple yet powerful method to characterize lithium metal battery performance with the help of a widely used imaging tool: scanning electron microscopy. The advance could accelerate the development of safer, longer-lasting and more energy-dense batteries for electric vehicles and grid-scale energy storage.
The work was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Lithium metal batteries have the potential to store twice as much energy as today’s lithium-ion batteries. That could double the range of electric cars and extend the runtime of laptops and phones. But to realize this potential, researchers must tackle a longstanding challenge: controlling lithium morphology, or how lithium deposits on the electrodes during charging and discharging.
When lithium deposits more uniformly, the battery can achieve longer cycle lifetimes. By contrast, when lithium deposits unevenly, it forms needle-like structures known as dendrites that can pierce a battery’s separator and cause the battery to short-circuit and fail.
Historically, researchers have largely determined the uniformity of lithium deposits by visually assessing microscope images. This practice has led to inconsistent analyses between labs, which has made it difficult to compare results across studies.
“What one battery group may define as uniform might be different from another group’s definition,” said study first author Jenny Nicolas, a materials science and engineering Ph.D. candidate at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “The battery literature also uses so many different qualitative words to describe lithium morphology — words like chunky, mossy, whisker-like and globular, for example. We saw a need to create a common language to define and measure lithium uniformity.”
To do so, Nicolas and colleagues — led by Ping Liu, professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering — developed a simple algorithm that analyzes how evenly lithium is spread across scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images. The researchers used SEM because it offers detailed images of battery electrodes by capturing 3D surface features as 2D grayscale images — it is also a widely used technique in battery research.
To use their method, the team first takes SEM images of battery electrodes and converts them to black and white pixels. The white pixels represent the topmost lithium deposits in the sample and black pixels represent either the substrate or inactive lithium. The images are divided into multiple regions, and the algorithm counts the number of white pixels in each, then calculates a metric called the index of dispersion (ID).
“The index of dispersion is a measure of lithium uniformity,” Nicolas explained. “The closer it is to zero, the more uniform the lithium deposits. A higher value means less uniformity and more clustering of lithium particles in certain areas.”
The team first validated the method on 2,048 synthetic SEM images with known particle size distributions. The ID measurements aligned with the ground-truth distributions, which confirmed the method’s accuracy. The team then applied the method to real electrode images to analyze how lithium morphology changes over time under different cycling conditions. They found that as batteries cycled, the ID increased — indicating more uneven lithium deposits. Meanwhile, the energy required for lithium to deposit increased — a sign of degradation. In addition, the researchers found that local peaks and dips in the ID consistently appeared just before cells failed. Such peaks and dips could serve as an early warning sign of short circuits.
A big advantage of this method is that it is accessible. Battery researchers already use SEM imaging as part of their studies, Nicolas noted, and they can use the simple algorithm presented here to calculate the ID from the data they already collect.
“Our tool can be employed as a low-hanging fruit for researchers to take their analysis to the next level by utilizing image analysis to its fullest potential,” she said.
Full study: “A quantitative imaging framework for lithium morphology: Linking deposition uniformity to cycle stability in lithium metal batteries”
This work was supported by the Office of Vehicle Technologies of the U.S. Department of Energy through the Advanced Battery Materials Research Program (Battery500 Consortium) under Contract No. PNNL-595241. Part of the work used the UC San Diego-MTI Corporation Battery Fabrication Facility.
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Ultraprocessed Food Consumption Linked to Increased Lung Cancer Risk
Greater consumption of ultraprocessed food is associated with an increased risk of developing either small cell or non–small cell lung cancer, according to findings published in Thorax.
“Over the past 2 decades, the consumption of ultraprocessed food has significantly increased worldwide, regardless of development or economic status. The rise in ultraprocessed food consumption may have driven global increases in obesity, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, cancer, and mortality, as these foods are confirmed risk factors for such conditions,” wrote study authors.
Study Methods and Rationale
High consumption of ultraprocessed food, which contains many additives and preservatives, has been associated with heightened risk for several health conditions, and researchers wanted to know if this could include lung cancer.
“Industrial processing alters the food matrix, affecting nutrient availability and absorption, while also generating harmful contaminants,” the study authors noted. Among the contaminants of interest, the researchers highlighted acrolein, which is a toxic component of cigarette smoke and is used in many ultraprocessed foods’ packaging materials.
The study authors collected data from patients in the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trials. The screening trials included 155,000 participants between the ages of 55 and 74 between November 1993 and July 2001.
The study focused on 101,732 participants with completed dietary history questionnaires. Foods were categorized using the NOVA classification by degree of processing: unprocessed or minimally processed, containing processed culinary ingredients, processed, and ultraprocessed. They focused their study on the ultraprocessed category, which included foods such as sour cream, cream cheese, ice cream, frozen yogurt, fried foods, bread, baked goods, salted snacks, breakfast cereals, instant noodles, shop-bought soups and sauces, margarine, confectionery, soft drinks, sweetened fruit drinks, restaurant/shop-bought hamburgers, hot dogs, and pizza.
Key Study Findings
The average energy-adjusted ultraprocessed food consumption was almost 3 servings per day among the participants (range, 0.5–6). The ultraprocessed foods that came up most often were lunch meat, diet or caffeinated soft drinks, and decaffeinated soft drinks.
Among the participants in the analysis, there were 1,706 cases of lung cancer within 12.2 follow-up years, including 1,473 non–small cell lung cancers (NSCLCs) and 233 small cell lung cancers (SCLCs). After multivariable adjustments, individuals who had the highest levels of ultraprocessed food consumption had a higher risk for lung cancer (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.41; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.22–1.60) compared with those with the lowest levels of intake. The risk for NSCLC (HR = 1.37; 95% CI = 1.20–1.58) and SCLC (HR = 1.44; 95% CI = 1.03–2.10) specifically were similar.
The results remained statistically significant even after subgroup and sensitivity analyses.
The study authors noted that since this is an observational study, no firm conclusions as to cause and effect can be drawn from these results, and they must be confirmed in other large-scale studies. Yet, limiting consumption of ultraprocessed foods could help to reduce the global burden of lung cancer, they noted.
Disclosure: For full disclosures of the study authors, visit thorax.bmj.com.
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Health Experts Call For Greater Investment In Women-Led TB Solutions
Women leadership in TB (illustrative) As South Africa marks Women’s Month this August, the global health community is preparing to spotlight the vital role women play in tackling tuberculosis—often in overlooked and underfunded areas of research, care, and advocacy.
A special webinar, hosted by Global Health Strategies, the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism, and Health Policy Watch, will recognize and amplify the voices of women transforming TB research, policy, and community engagement. The event aims to inspire action, call for increased investment, and promote a future that is TB-free, equitable, and inclusive—driven by those most impacted by the disease.
Register Now
According to the organizers, TB remains one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases. In 2023, approximately 8.2 million people were newly diagnosed with TB—the highest number recorded since the World Health Organization began tracking global cases in 1995.
In South Africa alone, around 280,000 people are diagnosed with TB each year.
From the lab to the frontlines, women are shaping a more inclusive and effective response to the disease. But their contributions are often overlooked and underfunded. Celebrating these efforts isn’t just symbolic—it’s about opening the door to leadership, sharing knowledge, and driving real systems change.
Register to join the conversation
Image Credits: Erinbetzk from Pixabay.
Combat the infodemic in health information and support health policy reporting from the global South. Our growing network of journalists in Africa, Asia, Geneva and New York connect the dots between regional realities and the big global debates, with evidence-based, open access news and analysis. To make a personal or organisational contribution click here on PayPal.
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United States, Japan Secure Top Seeds for 2025 Hanwha LIFEPLUS International Crown – LPGA
- United States, Japan Secure Top Seeds for 2025 Hanwha LIFEPLUS International Crown LPGA
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Virgin Music Group Shifts Physical Distribution Business to AMPED
Virgin Music Group, the indie distribution arm of Universal Music Group (UMG), is offloading a big chunk of its U.S. physical distribution of CDs and vinyl to Alliance Entertainment’s AMPED distribution company, sources tell Billboard.
Virgin currently distributes labels including ATO, Dirty Hit Records, Sumerian and Fader, along with artists such as Cigarettes After Sex, IDLES, beabadoobee, My Morning Jacket, Bad Omens and Black Pumas. The deal, which a source says is not yet completed, has created a degree of uncertainty for the labels distributed by the two companies, creating worries for label executives about how the new arrangement will work out for their respective labels and artists.
But some of the Virgin labels say the UMG-owned company is a much better digital distributor than physical distributor, and are hopeful that the move to AMPED will therefore prove to be a good one for their businesses.
Still other sources suggest that this move will serve as an enhancement and will expand Virgin’s physical reach, given that Alliance is the largest music wholesaler in the world, servicing more than 1,500 indie retailers and selling to chains and mass merchants while offering fulfillment services to online physical music merchants. The deal will ensure more complete coverage of indie retail within the U.S. and Canada, as well as nontraditional retail locations, according to sources familiar with the deal. Those sources expect the deal to fuel the growth of physical sales in the U.S. and Canada at independent retail for the company’s distributed independent label clients. Reps for both companies did not comment.
Over the last two years, UMG has been expanding and fortifying its indie distribution presence. In September 2022, the company placed its indie distribution arms, Virgin and InGrooves, under the Virgin Music Group banner, led by mTheory founders JT Myers and Nat Pastor. In October 2023, UMG then merged the two distribution companies into one. The following October, it acquired full ownership of [PIAS], which owns some labels and one of the larger European indie distribution companies, and merged it into Virgin Music Group. And in December, UMG followed that up by announcing that through Virgin, it was buying Downtown Music Holdings, which has a suite of music companies that includes two indie distributors, FUGA and CD Baby. That $775 million deal has yet to close, as it faces antitrust scrutiny from governmental regulatory agencies and opposition from some of the big players in the indie label sector.
As for the anticipated new physical distribution channel for Virgin’s domestically distributed indie labels, Billboard estimates that last year in the U.S., Virgin had about $25 million to $30 million in physical sales, based on Luminate data. However, it’s not known if AMPED will be getting all of those sales; AMPED’s parent may already have a share of that physical because Virgin probably only sells to bigger indie retailers directly and relies on one-stop wholesalers like Alliance to sell to smaller indie stores, meaning that for those sales the switch amounts to an internal accounting change within the company. Also, some sources suggest that K-pop releases, which are known to have a huge physical presence, might remain within the Universal system. Some sources estimate that when all the details of the deal and its transition are worked out, Alliance’s AMPED could land anywhere from $20 million to $25 million in sales from the deal.
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Alliance Entertainment is the biggest physical music wholesaler in the world; in its annual report last year, it said that about $450 million of its $1.1 billion in revenue came from music. Based on the nine months reported so far this fiscal year, where its music revenue totaled $358 million as of March 31, 2025, Billboard estimates that Alliance will close out the fiscal year with at least $475 million in music revenue. Those results are expected to be disclosed in mid-September.
Within that, sources say AMPED has annual revenue of about $80 million, so it’s conceivable that the addition of physical from the Virgin labels could see the indie distributor generating $100 million in revenue on an annualized basis, while putting parent Alliance’s music revenue at the $500 million mark, regardless of how the company accounts for the sales.
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