“NASA is now aiming to launch four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday, in another delay over weather conditions, the US agency announced Tuesday. It is targeting February 13 for the lift-off of Crew-12’s mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with a window opening at 5:15am local time (10:15am GMT). … Weather at the site in Florida has been in fact favourable, NASA officials told a briefing Monday, but higher winds forecast across the rest of the East Coast are to blame for the delays.” (02/10/26)
“How high is your risk of developing pancreatic cancer or suffering a heart attack in the next 20 years? A new generative artificial intelligence system called Delphi-2M aims to answer that question and offer personalized forecasts of your long-term health trajectory. Developed by a team of European biomedical researchers and detailed in a September 2025 Nature article, Delphi-2M represents one of the most ambitious efforts yet to apply AI to predictive medicine. Large language models (LLMs) that power chatbots such as ChatGPT trained on massive amounts of text data to predict the next word in a sentence. Delphi-2M trained on a vast amount of medical data to predict the next stage in a person’s health.” (02/26)
“Facing growing calls for his resignation, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted Tuesday to having lunch on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in 2012, but strenuously denied any closer relationship with the convicted sex offender. Lutnick’s ties to Epstein have come under intense scrutiny after email exchanges included in newly released files undermined his earlier insistence that he had cut all links with the late financier back in 2005. So far, President Donald Trump’s administration has stood by Lutnick, with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt saying the president ‘fully supports’ him.” (02/10/26)
“In the summer of 2010, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and some of the most powerful tech executives in the world were invited to gather in the rolling hills of Napa as part of an exclusive retreat that discussed proteomics, a niche scientific field adjacent to the study of genetics. The event, which was scheduled to take place in St. Helena, was called ‘EDGE Master Break’ and hosted by John Brockman, a prominent science writer who established an esoteric nonprofit called Edge.org. Danny Hillis, an entrepreneur, was scheduled to appear that year, along with author Stewart Brand. The invitees included Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin and several other high-profile guests, documents released by the Justice Department as part of the Epstein files show. Though it’s not clear whether Epstein attended the 2010 event, he did end up meeting with some of its invitees eventually …” (02/10/26)
“Because black holes emit no light, scientists cannot see them with telescopes. Instead, they confirm their existence by observing signs, such as the extreme distortions they cause in the visible matter around them or by watching stars orbit a void. And if you refuse to observe these signs, adopting willful blindness, you cannot detect black holes. It’s a valid question to ask whether law enforcement agencies monitored any U.S. laws, rules, or regulations that apply to Little St. James, a 71-acre island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.” (02/10/26)
“South Korea plans to increase medical school admissions by more than 3,340 students from 2027 to 2031 to address concerns about physician shortages in one of the fastest-aging countries in the world, the government said Tuesday. The decision was announced months after officials defused a prolonged doctors’ strike by backing away from a more ambitious increase pursued by Seoul’s former conservative government. Even the scaled-down plan drew criticism from the country’s doctors’ lobby, which said the move was ‘devoid of rational judgment.’ Kwak Soon-hun, a senior Health Ministry official, said that the president of the Korean Medical Association attended the health care policy meeting but left early to boycott the vote confirming the size of the admission increases.” (02/10/26)
“The Guardian is very concerned about mining: ‘The Guardian view on the scramble for critical minerals: while powers vie for access, labourers die …. A mining disaster in the Democratic Republic of Congo underscores the human cost of extraction. Intensified competition for resources isn’t helping.’ It’s fair to be worried about this. Hundreds have died just recently in a series of flood driven cave-ins at one area of mining in DR Congo, just as the one example. The problem is, of course, the absence of capitalism. For these mines are what are known as ‘artisanal’ mines. This means mines being dug and operated by the literally dirt poor locals with pick and shovel. … The problem is the economy around the mines, not the mines themselves.” (02/10/26)
