More than 29,000 Microsoft Exchange servers exposed to the internet have remained unpatched against a high-severity vulnerability that could allow attackers to seize control of entire domains in hybrid cloud environments.
The flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-53786, affects Exchange Server 2016, Exchange Server 2019 and Microsoft Exchange Server Subscription Edition. It enables attackers with administrative access to on-premises Exchange servers to escalate privileges in connected Microsoft 365 environments by forging trusted tokens or API calls, a method that leaves few traces.
“This is a serious vulnerability in Exchange and security teams should give it immediate attention,” said Thomas Richards, infrastructure security practice director at Black Duck.
“Patching the server is not enough, and since it is difficult to detect compromise, Microsoft has provided actions for teams to take to make sure any compromised trust tokens are rotated.”
Recent scans by threat monitoring group Shadowserver found 29,098 vulnerable servers worldwide. The most significant numbers are in:
US: 7296
Germany: 6682
Russia: 2513
France: 1558
UK: 955
Austria: 928
Canada: 860
Microsoft disclosed the flaw last week, though a hotfix was issued in April 2025 under its Secure Future Initiative. This update replaced the insecure shared identity model used between on-premises and cloud Exchange services with a dedicated hybrid application in Microsoft Entra ID.
The company has found no evidence of active exploitation so far, but warned that reliable attack code could be developed.
Read more on Microsoft Exchange security risks: Russian APT28 Exploits Outlook Bug to Access Exchange
CISA Orders Urgent Federal Action
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued Emergency Directive 25-02 last week, ordering all Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies to mitigate the flaw by 9:00am EDT on August 11.
“This vulnerability poses a grave risk to all organizations operating Microsoft Exchange hybrid-joined configurations that have not yet followed the April 2025 patch guidance, and immediate mitigation is critical,” CISA said.
Agencies must:
Inventory their Exchange environments using Microsoft’s Health Checker script
Disconnect any public-facing servers not supported by the April 2025 hotfix, including end-of-life versions
Apply the latest cumulative updates (CU14 or CU15 for Exchange 2019, CU23 for Exchange 2016) and install the April 2025 hotfix
“In modern hybrid IT environments, there can often be hidden paths to privilege opened up by often long-forgotten service accounts,” explained James Maude, field CTO at BeyondTrust.
“Having visibility of the true privilege of all identities, human and non-human, is of ever-increasing importance as NHIs, including AI, rapidly outpace human identities in scale and privilege.”
Risks Beyond Government Systems
Although the directive is binding only for federal agencies, CISA urged all organisations to follow the same process. Security experts have also urged caution.
“To reduce the risks associated with non-human identities, security teams need to implement modern identity management practices, strong governance and proactive security controls,” said Elad Luz, head of research at Oasis Security.
With thousands of servers still exposed just hours before the government’s deadline, experts warn the flaw could be weaponised quickly if patching and security measures are delayed.
Google is rolling out a new setting that lets you pick which news outlets you want to see more often in Top Stories.
The feature, called Preferred Sources, is launching today in English in the United States and India, with broader availability in those markets over the next few days.
What’s Changing
Preferred Sources lets you choose one or more outlets that should appear more frequently when they have fresh, relevant coverage for your query.
Google will also show a dedicated From your sources section on the results page. You will still see reporting from other publications, so Top Stories remains a mix of outlets.
Google Product Manager Duncan Osborn says the goal is to help you “stay up to date on the latest content from the sites you follow and subscribe to.”
How To Turn It On
Image Credit: Google
Search for a topic that is in the news.
Tap the icon to the right of the Top stories header.
Search for and select the outlets you want to prioritize.
Refresh the results to see the updated mix.
You can update your selections at any time. If you previously opted in to the experiment through Labs, your saved sources will carry over.
In early testing through Labs, more than half of participants selected four or more sources. That suggests people value seeing a range of outlets while still leaning toward publications they trust.
Why It Matters
For publishers, Preferred Sources creates a direct way to encourage loyal readers to see more of your coverage in Search.
Loyal audiences are more likely to add your site as a preferred source, which can increase the likelihood of showing up for them when you have fresh, relevant reporting.
You can point your audience to the new setting and explain how to add your site to their list. Google has also published help resources for publishers that want to promote the feature to followers and subscribers.
This adds another personalization layer on top of the usual ranking factors. Google says you will still see a diversity of sources, and that outlets only appear more often when they have new, relevant content.
Looking Ahead
Preferred Sources fits into Google’s push to let you customize Search while keeping a variety of perspectives in Top Stories.
If you have a loyal readership, this feature is another reason to invest in retention and newsletters, and to make it easy for readers to follow your coverage on and off Search.
When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft sped by Pluto in 2015, it revealed an incredible world of ice and haze carved by various geological processes — hinting that an ocean may have played a role in the dwarf planet’s recent history. The bounty of scientific riches has left researchers working to solve some of the tiny world’s mysteries a decade after the spacecraft’s flyby.
“There’s still a lot of questions that are open,” Carly Howett, a planetary scientist at the University of Oxford and a New Horizons team member, said last month at the Progress in Understanding the Pluto Mission: 10 Years after Flyby conference in Laurel, Maryland. With such questions lingering, Howett and her colleagues designed a follow-up mission in hopes of finally solving some of Pluto’s mysteries.
Such a mission, sent to investigate the outskirts of the solar system, would span several decades. But it’s far from being approved. “This mission could operate for over 50 years, challenging engineering, mission operations, and data analysis in ways that have never been done before,” Howett wrote in a 2021 study published in the Planetary Science Journal detailing the mission concept.
A subsurface ocean?
In Roman mythology, Pluto is the god and ruler of the dead. For a return mission to the dwarf planet, Howett and her colleagues opted for the name Persephone, after Pluto’s wife and “queen of the underworld” in Greek mythology.
“Given that Pluto is named after the Roman god of the underworld, and that we wanted a female name to reflect our diverse team with many women in leadership roles, this name seemed apt,” Howett wrote.
Persephone would carry 11 instruments, all based on tools flown on previous missions but with some alterations. The primary question it would seek to answer would be whether Pluto has a subsurface ocean today.
If that question had been asked before New Horizons sped by, most scientists would have said it was unlikely. While many icy worlds may start off with a watery layer, it freezes over time. To remain liquid for the 4.5 billion-year life of the solar system, that ocean must stay warm.
Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!
Related: Supervolcano eruption on Pluto hints at hidden ocean beneath the surface
Some moons constantly flex as they gravitationally interact with their host planet and neighboring moons, keeping their ocean from freezing. Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, is nearly as massive as Pluto; they are often called a “double planet” (though neither meets the criteria for a planet). Charon could potentially keep Pluto warm, if the ocean had a high enough nonwater component to lower its freezing point, scientists think.
It wasn’t until New Horizons revealed the remarkably young, lightly cratered surface of Pluto that most scientists began to consider the possibility of an ocean (although some did before the spacecraft’s arrival). New Horizons studied Pluto in depth for only a few hours, although it continued to observe the dwarf planet for months before and after its closest approach.
Persephone, by contrast, would aim to enter orbit around the tiny world for just over three years, allowing much longer close-up views. “There’s no substitute for proximity,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said at the same conference.
An illustration shows Pluto and its largest moon Charon (Image credit: NASA/Robert Lea (created with Canva))
What Persephone would study
Persephone would study the shape of Pluto to hunt for signs of a telltale fossil bulge — a “beer belly” of sorts caused when gravity pulls on the mass of a world. Bulges form more easily when the layers are liquid, and they can be frozen into place. New Horizons didn’t observe such a pileup, but Persephone would send a more sensitive instrument that could make a more detailed examination.
“This mission should be able to image the whole of Pluto,” Howett said at the conference. “It should be phenomenal.”
Persephone would also seek to determine the composition of Pluto and Charon, using gravity and topography measurements similar to those taken of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and potentially calculate the thickness of the internal ice layers.
Pluto suffers from a century-long winter, and Persephone would arrive in the thick of it. Much of the dwarf planet would be shielded in darkness, so the mission would require instruments capable of peering through the veil. Cameras would map the surface of the entire world in greater depth and in varying wavelengths, including the half that was shrouded when New Horizons sailed past. They would search for hotspots, signs of ongoing activity and eruptions that might indicate a warm interior, as well as look for indications that the surface has changed since the 2015 observations. They would also provide a more detailed crater count on both Pluto and Charon, which would help scientists better understand how active the Kuiper Belt has been over the years.
Although icy worlds abound in the solar system, both Pluto and Charon have unusual surface features. In Pluto’s Tartarus Dorsa region, blades of methane ice cover the surface. Scientists suspect that these spikes formed by sublimation as methane skipped instantly from solid to gas, but that’s not definitive. And Charon has a strange ice mountain submerged in a frozen moat — a unique feature among icy peaks. Both surfaces are covered with exotic ices, and an understanding of their properties at the frigid temperatures on Pluto would be a key component of the mission.
Related: James Webb Space Telescope deciphers the origins of Pluto’s icy moon Charon
In 1988, astronomers spotted a wispy atmosphere around Pluto, but its composition eluded them. New Horizons answered questions even as it raised more. Curiously, it appears that Pluto is slowly shedding part of its atmosphere onto Charon, creating a distinctive red pole that may shift hemispheres over time. One of the key objectives of Persephone would be to perform a direct detection of the atmosphere’s composition through mass spectrometry.
Persephone would also study the space around the tiny world. Pluto is so far away that light from the sun takes just over 5.5 hours to reach it. From Pluto, the sun is a point-like spot in the sky.
Charon wouldn’t be the only moon targeted by the mission. Persephone’s launch time would determine how many of the smaller moons it could observe, but it would likely get a good look at the four other satellites as well.
New Horizons revealed bands of water ice on Nix, Hydra and Kerberos, as well as hints of ammonia on Nix and Hydra. Persephone would take a more detailed spectra for these three, as well as Styx, and try to determine how much of their surfaces, along with Charon’s, is littered with debris from the collision that likely formed them. Although the best observations of the smaller satellites would most likely be of the close-orbiting moon Styx and the worst of Pluto’s outermost moon, Hydra, a flyby of either Kerberos or Hydra might be possible, depending on when the mission launched and arrived at Pluto.
Persephone would remain at Pluto for just over three Earth years. During that time, the spacecraft could use orbits around the binary system to ultimately fling it from the pair.
Extending the mission by one year would allow the spacecraft to visit another Kuiper Belt object, much as New Horizons visited Arrokoth after the Pluto flyby. Such an extension would depend on when the mission launched and arrived, but it could provide significant insight into the debris left over from the solar system’s formation. This would provide a big scientific return, because the distance of Kuiper Belt objects makes them challenging to study from Earth.
This image of Pluto’s small moon Kerberos was created by combining four images taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on July 14, 2015, at a range of 245,600 miles (396,100 kilometers) from Kerberos. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)
Pluto: The next generation
A return to Pluto would not be a casual undertaking. While it took New Horizons less than a decade to make the original trip, the changes in planetary alignment would make the next visit’s flight alone take just over 27.5 years and would require five Next-Generation Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (NGRTGs), nuclear batteries that use the decay of radioactive material to power the spacecraft. The trip’s extensive lifetime would require several NGRTGs to keep things warm in the freezing temperatures of space. That’s a big ask at a time when plutonium for spaceflight is still at a premium. Currently, NASA’s goal is to create 1.5 kilograms of plutonium per year; current RTGs use 4.8 kilograms.
That would require a significant investment in plutonium for outer-planet exploration. It would also take a financial investment. The estimated price tag for the Persephone mission is $3 billion, Howett said in her presentation.
With the potential of a half-century mission, the spacecraft carries several backup systems. But Stern pointed out that, although the timescale is long, it’s not unheard of. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is still functioning after 35 years, and so are NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which launched 48 years ago.
Another challenge for the Persephone mission relates to the people working on it. With the potential for a 50-year mission, the researchers estimate that Persephone would be a three-generation mission that would cycle through three sets of scientists over their career lifetimes. Information and training would need to be passed from one generation to the next. In fact, Stern said delayed engagement was one of the hardest parts of planning the New Horizons mission.
“We know how to do these things,” Stern said. “You have to be patient, and you have to plan for it.”
Launch opportunities for the spacecraft are available every year from 2029 to 2032. After that, Jupiter’s orbit prevents subsequent opportunities for a full decade.
Persephone was part of NASA’s Planetary Mission Concept Study, which funds a range of projects to permit the decadal study to make informed decisions about potential future missions.
“While I think any mission needing more than one RTG is going to struggle to get selected at the moment, I do think the process of doing the mission proposal was useful,” Howett said. Not only did the proposal show that such a mission is valid, parts of it, such as the orbital tour, could be used by other missions.
But don’t look for Persephone to fly in the near future: the power request alone may keep it off the official books. Howett’s mission proposal was one of several requested to help inform NASA’s decadal survey about priorities and viabilities of future missions.
But the space agency is continuing to work to improve RTGs and their supporting technology. Howett is hopeful that ongoing technology developments will improve the mission’s odds.
“One of the things that Persephone showed was that returning to Pluto to orbit was possible, but it wasn’t cheap,” she said. “It would have to be a Flagship-level mission.”
Algorithms submitted for the AI Challenge hosted by RSNA have shown excellent performance for detecting breast cancers on mammography images, increasing screening sensitivity while maintaining low recall rates, according to a study published in Radiology.
The RSNA Screening Mammography Breast Cancer Detection AI Challenge was a crowdsourced competition that took place in 2023, with more than 1,500 teams participating. The Radiology article details an analysis of the algorithms’ performance, led by Yan Chen, PhD, a professor in cancer screening at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.
“We were overwhelmed by the volume of contestants and the number of AI algorithms that were submitted as part of the Challenge,” Prof. Chen said. “It’s one of the most participated-in RSNA AI Challenges. We were also impressed by the performance of the algorithms given the relatively short window allowed for algorithm development and the requirement to source training data from open-sourced locations.”
The goal of the Challenge was to source AI models that improve the automation of cancer detection in screening mammograms, helping radiologists work more efficiently, improving the quality and safety of patient care, and potentially reducing costs and unnecessary medical procedures.
RSNA invited participation from teams across the globe. Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and BreastScreen Victoria in Australia provided a training dataset of around 11,000 breast screening images, and Challenge participants could also source publicly available training data for their algorithms.
Prof. Chen’s research team evaluated 1,537 working algorithms submitted to the Challenge, testing them on a set of 10,830 single-breast exams—completely separate from the training dataset—that were confirmed by pathology results as positive or negative for cancer.
Altogether, the algorithms yielded median rates of 98.7% specificity for confirming no cancer was present on mammography images, 27.6% sensitivity for positively identifying cancer, and a recall rate—the percentage of the cases that AI judged positive—of 1.7%. When the researchers combined the top 3 and top 10 performing algorithms, it boosted sensitivity to 60.7% and 67.8%, respectively.
“When ensembling the top performing entries, we were surprised that different AI algorithms were so complementary, identifying different cancers,” Prof. Chen said. “The algorithms had thresholds that were optimized for positive predictive value and high specificity, so different cancer features on different images were triggering high scores differently for different algorithms.”
According to the researchers, creating an ensemble of the 10 best-performing algorithms produced performance that is close to that of an average screening radiologist in Europe or Australia.
Using the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy’s Very Long Baseline Array (NSF NRAO VLBA), an international team of astronomers has solved a decade-long puzzle about one of the brightest cosmic neutrino sources in the sky. Their findings, published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters, reveal that the blazar PKS 1424+240 – dubbed the “Eye of Sauron” for its striking appearance – points its powerful jet almost directly at Earth, creating an extreme cosmic lighthouse effect.
Located billions of light-years away, PKS 1424+240 had long baffled astronomers. Despite appearing to have a slow-moving plasma jet in radio observations, it blazes as one of the brightest sources of high-energy gamma rays and cosmic neutrinos ever detected. This contradiction, known as the “Doppler factor crisis,” has challenged scientists’ understanding of how these extreme cosmic accelerators work.
“The NSF VLBA’s extraordinary resolution has allowed us to peer directly into the heart of this cosmic monster,” said Yuri Kovalev, lead author of the study and Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded MuSES project at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. “We discovered that this blazar’s jet is aimed at us with pinpoint precision – within just 0.6 degrees of our line of sight.”
The breakthrough came from 15 years of ultra-high-resolution observations using the NSF VLBA, which consists of ten 25-meter radio telescopes stretching from Hawaii to the U.S. Virgin Islands. By combining 42 separate images collected from 2009 to 2025 as part of the MOJAVE (Monitoring Of Jets in Active galactic nuclei with VLBA Experiments) program, the team created an unprecedented deep view of the blazar’s inner structure.
“This is like looking at car headlights from the Moon – the NSF VLBA’s incredible precision made it possible,” said Jack Livingston, a co-author at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. “What we found was a nearly perfect toroidal magnetic field structure threading the jet of plasma,” added Daniel Homan, co-author and professor of Denison University. Alexander Plavin, co-author and research fellow of Harvard University, continued, “It’s creating what looks remarkably like the Eye of Sauron from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.”
The extreme alignment of PKS 1424+240’s jet toward Earth creates a relativistic “searchlight” effect, amplifying its brightness by a factor of 30 or more through special relativity. This explains why the source appears as one of the brightest neutrino emitters detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica, despite its plasma jet appearing to move slowly in radio images.
The discovery demonstrates the critical role of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) in solving cosmic mysteries. The NSF VLBA connects radio telescopes across a continent-sized baseline, creating a virtual telescope with the highest resolution available in astronomy – sharp enough to read a newspaper in New York from Los Angeles.
The research strengthens the connection between relativistic plasma jets, high-energy neutrinos, and the magnetic fields that shape cosmic particle accelerators, marking a significant milestone in multimessenger astronomy – the study of the universe using multiple types of cosmic signals.
You can read the press release from the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy here.
Background Information:
A blazar is a type of active galactic nucleus powered by a supermassive black hole that launches jets of plasma moving at nearly the speed of light. What makes blazars special is their orientation: one of their jets points within about 10 degrees of Earth, making them appear exceptionally bright and allowing scientists to study extreme physical processes.
The original paper:
Y. Kovalev, A. B. Pushkarev, J. L. Gomez, D. C. Homan, M. L. Lister, J. D. Livingston, I. N. Pashchenko, A. V. Plavin, T. Savolainen, S. V. Troitsky: Looking into the Jet Cone of the Neutrino-Associated Very High Energy Blazar PKS 1424+240, A&A Letters, August 12, 2025 (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202555400)
https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202555400
Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09287
Further Information/Links:
Multi-messenger Studies of Extragalactic Super-colliders (MuSES), ERC Grant: https://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/muses
Monitoring Of Jets in Active galactic nuclei with VLBA Experiments (MOJAVE) program: https://www.cv.nrao.edu/MOJAVE/
Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR): http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/2169/en
Center for Astrophysics – Harvard & Smithsonian (CFA): https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/
Denison University (DU): https://denison.edu/academics/astronomy
Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA): https://science.nrao.edu/facilities/vlba
European Research Council (ERC): https://erc.europa.eu/homepage
About NRAO:
The U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
About the VLBA:
The NSF Very Long Baseline Array is a system of ten identical 25-meter radio telescopes operating as a single instrument. Stretching 5,000 miles from Mauna Kea, Hawaii, to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the VLBA provides the highest resolution images available in astronomy.
Images and additional resources are available at: https://public.nrao.edu/news/
Tuesday’s cooler inflation print could mean it’s finally time to pivot into small caps and lower-quality stocks, according to Morgan Stanley. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the consumer price index showed a year-over-year increase of 2.7% in July , less than a Dow Jones consensus for 2.8% expansion. The report soothed stagflation fears and added to hopes that the Federal Reserve could actually cut more times this year than previously anticipated. The central bank is now projected to make three quarter percentage point cuts this year, up from two, according to the CME FedWatch Tool . If that outlook holds, as more traders are starting to expect, that could be a boon for small caps and lower-quality stocks — which have skipped out on this year’s gains by the larger caps. “What if we don’t see material signs of inflation pressure in the July CPI report? Bond market pricing of a September cut (currently at a ~90% probability) could rise further,” Mike Wilson, chief U.S. equity strategist at Morgan Stanley, wrote Monday — the day before the CPI report. “This has the potential to catalyze a more durable rotation to small caps and lower quality stocks should it play out.” In fact, the strategist said, it could mean a change in leadership. The S & P 500 is up more than 8% year to date and near all-time highs, as investors pile into larger companies with fortress balance sheets to weather headlines out of Washington and a choppy macroeconomic outlook. But an improving monetary policy outlook could be a boon to small caps and lower quality companies — which are sensitive to changes in interest rates. Wilson said he’s bullish over the next six-to-12 months because of a rebounding earnings and cash flow environment. Plus, if both asset classes start to catch up, there would be a sizable gap to close. The small cap Russell 2000 has only eked out a meager gain in 2025. And, even the equal-weighted broad market index is up only a little over 4%. Some names of companies with weak balance sheets and low returns on capital include Caesars Entertainment , United Airlines , and Dollar General , according to a recent screen from Goldman Sachs. “We think it makes sense for equity investors to stay nimble around this week’s CPI report as a leadership shift under the surface of the market could take hold depending on the result,” Wilson added.
In April, comedian Jena Friedman had a strange encounter in Vancouver airport. She had just performed a Ted talk about the future of comedy and was heading home to the US, when someone she thought worked for airport security quizzed her about her visit.
Thinking he was probing for visa infringements, “I just said I was doing comedy. Then he asked: ‘What do you joke about?’ Stupidly, I lightly flirted with him, and was like: ‘Everything other than airport security!’ He didn’t react at all. Then I realised he was US border control. He asked again: ‘What do you joke about?’”
Friedman is a veteran of The Daily Show and The Late Show, and her standup comedy often features excoriating routines at the expense of the political establishment. “I just froze because I am a political comedian and I didn’t know what to say. Then he said: ‘Do you joke about politicians?’”
She made it home, but the incident stuck with her. Friedman lives in LA, and the recent actions of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement “detaining anyone and everyone who looks a certain way” put her on high alert. “It was such a quick, on its face benign, interaction,” she says. “But it did feel like a scene out of The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m a blonde, white woman who looks like a Republican’s wife and I have an American passport. But what if I had said ‘Yes?’ Don’t we want to live in a country where we can joke about politicians, where we can joke about anything?”
‘Don’t we want to live in a country where we can joke about politicians?’ … Jena Friedman. Photograph: Peacock/Heidi Gutman/Getty Images
Friedman incorporated that moment into her new standup show, Motherf*cker, which she’s performing at the Edinburgh fringe. The show is a change of pace. She’s generally resisted getting personal on stage, resenting the idea that women have to be relatable to succeed in comedy, but this time it felt unavoidable, as she explores the life-changing experience of becoming a parent while her own mother was dying. “It’s about grief, but it’s also political,” she says. “The vibe in certain circles does feel like we’re grieving. So there’s something about my show that’s connecting to the larger moment.”
Friedman is among a crop of US comedians with roots in topical comedy appearing at this year’s fringe. Another stalwart of US political comedy, Michelle Wolf, is back, too, while standup and former Saturday Night Live writer Sam Jay is making her festival debut.
Wolf earned her stripes on The Daily Show and Late Night with Seth Myers, and gained notoriety with her 2018 set at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which she roasted Trump and his collaborators. These days, she lives in Barcelona, although returns to the US regularly for comedy work. She’s yet to encounter border trouble but, with reports of people with green cards and citizens being detained, she says: “I’m keeping an eye on it.”
Comedians Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres have both said that the state of US politics has forced them out of the country – O’Donnell to Ireland and DeGeneres to England. O’Donnell has written a show on just that, which she performed for the first week of the fringe. Wolf is happy with her move to Barcelona, and feels her comedy has benefited from other cultural perspectives, but returns to the US because “the audiences are great” and there’s plenty of work. While other US comedians have also discussed the idea of moving to Europe, she thinks it won’t happen until there’s “an impetus to go, something I don’t think is far off, like: you can’t talk about this any more, you can’t talk about that any more”.
Last month, satirist Stephen Colbert announced that network CBS had cancelled The Late Show after 33 years. Many thought the timing, three days on from Colbert criticising CBS parent company Paramount for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump, was suspect. Fellow late-night talkshow host Jon Stewart criticised the move on his podcast and pointed to wider fear across the industry.: “There are a lot of things that will never be made, that you will never know about, that will be killed in the bed before they ever had a chance because of this chilling effect.”
Friedman’s glad to see Colbert and Stewart speaking out against Trump and his administration – and agrees there’s a “chill”. “The industry has already been less supportive of political comedy than they were under Biden and Obama. However, “seeing the most prominent comedians taking [Trump] to task, like Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker] from South Park, Colbert and Stewart, that gives me hope”.
Michelle Wolf’s standup explores society through the ‘lens of being a mom’. Photograph: Stephen Keable/Alamy
Meanwhile, Michelle Wolf’s standup merges the personal and political and her podcast, Wolf’s Thought Box, tackles current affairs. Her new show, which she’s performing while eight months pregnant at the fringe, explores life and society “through the lens of being a mom now”. There are punchlines on societal pressures for working mothers, home birth, momfluencers, gender inequalities and more. “We’re in an era now where people are talking about motherhood realistically and that’s very refreshing,” she says.
Still, political comedy isn’t absent. “I feel like I have to address the whole America and Trump thing … people expect me to say something about it.” She plans to tailor topical jokes to the day’s news but, “I don’t like making it a large part of my set, because it bores me. There’s always something crazy happening, but it’s hard to come up with creative angles other than: can you believe this?”
It’s been nine years since she first started writing jokes about Trump and, in that time, her life has transformed – she met her partner, moved abroad, and is about to have her second child. Her main feeling now is: “How are we still talking about him? How are we still in the same spot?”
Jay reflects that slow build in her show, We the People, in which she explores the state of America – looking back to the “unconfident whites” who founded the nation. She describes the show as “a fun, risky little ride” as she tries to get to the root of why the US feels so divided, and what we can do to better understand one another. “It’s this broader conversation I’ve been having about America and race,” Jay says.
The whole world feels unsettled right now and there’s an inability to consider other perspectives, Jay says. “How did we get here as Americans? Of course, I think race plays a large part in it. And how did these race relations get to the way they are? Not just blaming white people, but exploring the type of white people we’re dealing with, why they might be the way they are, their roots in England.”
Trump came up plenty during Jay’s time on SNL and appears in her fringe show as a “braggadocious” fool, unable to keep state secrets, yet smartly appealing to the frustrations of America’s poor white communities. But the conditions that created and elevated Trump are more interesting to Jay: “He’s the symptom of this, not the cause. This is a result of years and years of us doing it wrong … it’s been building for a long time and for a lot of different reasons.”
Friedman agrees: “I started working at the Daily Show in 2012, I was at Letterman before that, so I started looking at politics on a daily basis since 2010, and this is a long time coming.” This also means that, among US audiences, not everyone wants political comedy. “They’re always looking for escapism. In the first term, there was definite Trump fatigue,” Friedman says. “As a political comic, I’ve always done better in the UK than the US. It’s the UK audiences who are like: what the hell’s going on over there?” says Friedman.
The mood in US comedy is, Jay says, “the mood in America … chaos. There’s no way to keep up. People are also very desensitised. Shit just keeps happening in more extreme ways that people are losing a metric for it.”
All three agree that comedy can help share differing worldviews. “Even if it’s people we disagree with, the sign of a healthy democracy is when people can safely be on stage saying whatever we want, ideally in good faith,” Friedman says. “I support all comedians, I support freedom of expression and I want to see more of it. I want to see people more open to people they disagree with. Whenever I do political comedy, the goal is not to preach to the choir, it’s to get people to see things slightly differently.”
Jay has said that comedy can be a tool for empathy. “I look at it as a conversation. It can serve a purpose of actual understanding, understanding that we’re all humans trying to figure out a thing that doesn’t make a lot of sense – existing. Everybody is grappling with these things in their own way.”
What does the future hold for US comedians? “It’s too soon to tell,” says Friedman. “But I think everybody exercising the US first amendment in a way that’s funny and disarming is really important right now.”
Jay says: “Once I’m on stage, I’m gonna say what I’m gonna say. If I can’t come back as a result, I’ll just have to have my girlfriend come meet me in Scotland.”
A simple voice recording could one day help doctors spot early signs of throat cancer, according to new research.
In a study published in Frontiers in Digital Health, scientists found that artificial intelligence (AI) could potentially detect abnormal growths on the vocal cords, from benign nodules to early-stage laryngeal cancer, by analysing short voice recordings.
The findings could support efforts to find an easier, faster way to diagnose cancerous lesions on the vocal cords, also known as folds.
“With this dataset we could use vocal biomarkers to distinguish voices from patients with vocal fold lesions from those without such lesions,” said Phillip Jenkins, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral researcher in clinical informatics at Oregon Health and Science University in the United States.
Why early detection of throat cancer matters
Cancer of the voice box, or larynx, affects more than a million people worldwide and kills roughly 100,000 every year. It is the 20th most common cancer in the world.
Smoking, alcohol use, and certain strains of HPV (human papillomavirus) are key risk factors, and survival rates vary from around 35 per cent to 90 per cent depending on how early the disease is diagnosed, according to Cancer Research UK.
One of the most common warning signs for laryngeal cancer is hoarseness or changes in the voice that last more than three weeks. Other symptoms include a persistent sore throat or cough, difficulty or pain when swallowing, a lump in the neck or throat, and ear pain.
Early detection of laryngeal cancer is crucial because it significantly improves survival rates and treatment outcomes.
Yet current diagnostic methods, including nasal endoscopies and biopsies, are invasive, uncomfortable, and often slow, requiring specialist equipment and expertise that many patients struggle to access quickly.
Developing a simple tool to flag early signs of vocal fold abnormalities through a quick voice recording could transform how throat cancer is detected – making it faster, more affordable and accessible to a wider population.
The next steps for AI-driven diagnosis
The research team examined about 12,500 voice recordings from 306 people across North America. They looked for subtle acoustic patterns, such as changes in pitch, loudness, and harmonic clarity.
The team identified clear differences for men in the harmonic-to-noise ratio and pitch between those with healthy voices, benign lesions, and cancer. No significant patterns were found in women, but the researchers say this may be due to the smaller dataset.
Jenkins said that the results indicate large datasets “could soon help make our voice a practical biomarker for cancer risk in clinical care”.
The next step is to train AI models on larger, professionally labelled datasets and test them in clinical settings. The team would also need to test the system to make sure it works well for both men and women, he said.
“Voice-based health tools are already being piloted,” Jenkins said.
“Building on our findings, I estimate that with larger datasets and clinical validation, similar tools to detect vocal fold lesions might enter pilot testing in the next couple of years”.
The other two medalists from Baden also gained ground in the World Ranking and are situated just above Bock & Lippmann in the table. Runners-up Mila Konink & Raisa Schoon of the Netherlands are in number 25 and bronze medalists Valentyna Davidova & Anhelina Khmil of Ukraine are in number 26.
Baden quarterfinalists Monika Paulikiene & Aine Raupelyte of Lithuania moved two positions up the ranking, to number 10, and that was the only change in the women’s top 10, in comparison to last week. The Lithuanian Olympians took the top 10 spot from French Olympians Clemence Vieira & Aline Chamereau, who dropped to 11th.
Brazil’s Thamela Coradello & Victoria Lopes are the convincing leaders with a score of 7,720 points. Muller & Tillmann are second with 5,760, and Austria’s Dorina Klinger & Ronja Klinger – third with 5,440.
