A team of neuroscientists from Nanyang
Technological University (NTU Singapore), the University of
Pennsylvania, and California State University has uncovered a biological
difference between psychopaths and non-psychopaths. Using magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) scans, they found that the striatum, a region in the forebrain,
was about 10% larger in individuals with psychopathic traits compared to people
with little or no such tendencies.
Psychopaths, or individuals who display psychopathic traits,
tend to show a combination of self-centeredness, emotional coldness, and a lack
of empathy or remorse. In some cases, these characteristics are accompanied by
antisocial or criminal behavior.
The striatum, part of the brain’s subcortical forebrain
region, is involved in functions such as motivation, decision-making, and
reward processing. It also helps coordinate motor actions and plays a role in
how people plan and respond to stimuli.
You brush twice daily, floss religiously and see your dentist every six months. But what if these acts of oral hygiene are quietly contributing to one of the planet’s most pressing environmental crises?
A growing body of research reveals that our pursuit of clean, healthy teeth comes with an unexpected cost: we’re washing billions of microplastic particles down the drain every day.
Take toothpaste, for example. Decades of using toothpastes with plastic microbeads triggered bans in many countries, but studies show that many modern toothpastes still contain microplastic particles.
And toothpaste isn’t the only offender; dental floss is another stealth culprit. Most flosses are made of nylon or Teflon – non-biodegradable fibers – that shed and linger in ecosystems.
Even the simple toothbrush sheds dozens of nylon bristle fragments during normal use. These fragments enter sewage, pass through treatment systems and end up in marine food chains where they are ingested by plankton, shellfish, fish and, eventually, us.
ICE trolls courthouses looking for immigrants to grab
Rhode Island Deportation Defense Coalition
On Saturday, November 1st, over 30 Rhode Island
organizations, court workers and politicians, including Providence City
Council, penned an open letter calling on Governor Dan McKee, Chief Justice
Suttell, and the RI Judiciary to immediately implement virtual court hearings
in response to the brutal kidnappings of immigrants at Rhode Island’s
courthouses.
These organizations and individuals have added their support
to the nearly 2,200 individuals who signed the petition for virtual courts since it was launched in
July.
The full text of the letter and list of signatories is
printed below:
–––––––––––––
ICE is a pandemic: We demand virtual court hearings now!
To Governor McKee, Chief Justice Suttell, and the Rhode
Island Judiciary,
Every week, ICE vehicles wait outside of RI courthouses to
abduct our immigrant community members. Since the end of July, we have
witnessed over 20 abductions outside the courts, and those are only the ones we
have seen. These community members are trying to navigate a system that fails
them — like the well-documented case of a woman who was a victim of domestic
violence, was never charged with anything, but was still kidnapped while
leaving court.
I saw some of my former Naval War College colleagues at the recent No Kings rally in Providence. Given that National Guard troops and protestors had clashed in Los Angeles at an earlier June rally protesting ICE raids, we wondered whether we would see National Guard troops as we marched, where they would be from, and their mission?
We didn’t. That doesn’t mean, however, that there is no need for concern about the future.
The National Guard is unique to the U.S. military given it is under the authority of both state governors and the federal government and has both a domestic and federal mission.
Governors can call up the National Guard to help when states have a crisis, either a natural disaster or a human-made one. Federal authorities can call on the National Guard for overseas deployment and to enforce federal law.
President Dwight Eisenhower used both federalized National Guard units and regular U.S. Army units to enforce desegregation laws in Arkansas in 1957. But using military troops to intimidate citizens and support partisan politics, especially by bringing National Guard units from other states has never been, and should never be, part of its mission.
But that’s what is happening now.
A host of Democratic U.S. senators, led by Dick Durbin of Illinois, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and 25 others has called for an inquiry into the Trump administration’s recent domestic deployment of active-duty and National Guard troops to Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Portland, Oregon, and Memphis, Tennessee.
In an Oct. 17 letter to the Defense Department’s Inspector General, the senators challenge the legality of the domestic troop deployment and charge that it undermines military readiness and politicizes the nation’s military.
Ostensibly, the troops have been sent to cities “overrun” with crime. Yet data shows that has not been the case. Troops have been sent to largely Democratic-run cities in Democratic-led states.
The case for political theater being the real reason behind the deployment certainly was strengthened when largely Republican Mississippi sent troops to Washington D.C., even though crime in Mississippi cities like Jackson is higher than in D.C. Additionally, there is an even more dangerous purpose to the troop presence — that of normalizing the idea of troops on the streets, a key facet of authoritarian rule.
There are fundamental differences in training and mission between military troops and civilian law enforcement, with troop presence raising the potential for escalation and excessive force, and the erosion of both civil liberties and military readiness.
The Trump administration’s widespread cancellation and freezing of clean energy funding is also hitting essential work to improve the nation’s power grid. That includes investments in grid modernization, energy storage and efforts to protect communities from outages during extreme weather and cyberattacks. Ending these projects leaves Americans vulnerable to more frequent and longer-lasting power outages.
The Department of Energy has defended the cancellations, saying that “the projects did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.” Yet before any funds are actually released through these programs, each grant must pass evaluations based on the department’s standards. Those included rigorous assessments of technical merits, potential risks and cost-benefit analyses — all designed to ensure alignment with national energy priorities and responsible stewardship of public funds.
I am an associate professor studying sustainability, with over 15 years of experience in energy systems reliability and resilience. In the past, I also served as a Department of Energy program manager focused on grid resilience. I know that many of these canceled grants were foundational investments in the science and infrastructure necessary to keep the lights on, especially when the grid is under stress.
The dollar-value estimates vary, and some of the money has already been spent. A list of canceled projects maintained by energy analysis company Yardsale totals about US$5 billion. An Oct. 2, 2025, announcement from the department touts $7.5 billion in cuts to 321 awards across 223 projects. Additional documents leaked to Politico reportedly identified additional awards under review. Some media reports suggest the full value of at-risk commitments may reach $24 billion — a figure that has not been publicly confirmed or refuted by the Trump administration.
These were not speculative ventures. And some of them were competitively awarded projects that the department funded specifically to enhance grid efficiency, reliability and resilience.
Earlier
research has shown that consuming large amounts of ultra-processed
foods increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, while other studies have
found that diets rich in well-balanced, nutrient-dense plant-based foods can
help lower that risk.
To better understand how diet affects heart health, the
INRAE and Inserm team went beyond the basic comparison of plant-based versus
animal-based diets. They examined not only the ratio of plant to animal foods
but also their nutritional composition—such as levels of carbohydrates, fats,
antioxidant vitamins, and minerals—and the extent to which they were
industrially processed.
Two Instagram images put out by the White House. White House Instagram
A grim-faced Donald J. Trump looks out at the reader,
under the headline “LAW AND ORDER.” Graffiti pictured in the corner of the White House Facebook post reads “Death to ICE.” Beneath that, a photo of protesters, choking on tear gas. And underneath it all, a smaller headline: “President Trump Deploys 2,000 National Guard After ICE Agents Attacked, No Mercy for Lawless Riots and Looters.”
In the Trump administration, White House social media posts often blur the lines between politics and entertainment, and between reality and illusion.
The White House has released AI images of Trump as the pope, as Superman and as a Star Wars Jedi, ready to do battle with “Radical Left Lunatics” who would bring “Murderers, Drug Lords … & well-known MS-13 Gang Members” into the country.
Most recently, on the weekend of the No Kings protests, both Trump and the White House released a video of the president wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet, from which he dispenses feces onto a crowd of protesters below.
Underpinning it all is a calculated political strategy: an appeal to Trump’s political base – largely white, working-class, rural or small-town, evangelical and culturally conservative.
During the first Trump administration, Washington Post fact
checker Glenn Kessler documented more
than 30,000 lies by the president. Now Trump’s back in the White House and
Kessler is gone, as the Post’s owner Jeff Bezos seeks to make the storied paper
more MAGA-friendly.
The nature of lies in MAGA-world has changed, too. We’re a
long way from “covfefe” and tumescent
hurricanes Sharpied® on a weather map. This is an era of lies as
policy, where government priorities are based on right-wing conspiracy theories
and fear-mongering. The federal agencies that survived Elon Musk’s wrecking
ball are now captured by the echo chamber of his social media platform, with
cabinet secretaries staring furiously into a digital funhouse mirror to divine
the will of the most internet-addled members of the MAGA base.
Harmeet Dhillon, a former Trump lawyer placed in charge of
the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, even bragged to
the Wall Street Journal that she “wakes up around 6am and begins her workday
scrolling through X, searching for claims of discrimination … After spotting ‘a
list of new horrors,’ she said, ‘I text my deputies, and we assign cases, and
we get cranking.’”
Dhillon’s office has been bleeding
staff, since experienced lawyers are largely disinclined to waste their
time chasing down the latest target of conservative ire. But she did find
someone to harass
the Portland Police Bureau for daring to arrest conservative
provocateur Nick Sortor during a demonstration in which he stole a burning flag
from a protester. Sortor was invited to the White House the following week,
where he held forth alongside Jack Posobiec, of Pizzagate fame, and online
propagandist Andy Ngo, a former Dhillon client.
The message was clear: The White House is fully occupied by
conspiracy theorists, and their maniacal postings will inform federal policy.
Americans' trust in federal health agencies like the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and its childhood vaccine
recommendations is declining, and more than twice as many people think the
administration's policies have made the country less healthy as those who think
they have made the nation healthier, according to the latest Axios/Ipsos
American Health Index poll.
The poll included 1,125 representative US adults and was
conducted from October 10 through 13 by the Ipsos Knowledge Panel.
Trust in CDC drops from 66% to 54%
The survey found that 54% of respondents trust the CDC, down
from 60% in June and 66% in December 2024, before Donald Trump took office.
Trust in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) likewise has ebbed, from 60%
last December to 52% in the current poll.
This increasing mistrust is primarily driven by Democrats,
whose trust in these agencies has dropped since June. "There certainly is
an erosion of trust, primarily driven by Democrats, but Republicans are not
immune," said Mallory Newall, Ipsos vice president for US public affairs,
in an Axios news release.
Among all adults surveyed, 74% agree that parents should
follow the CDC's child immunization schedules, down from 81% in March. The
share who "strongly agree" has fallen from 51% to 39% over that
period, "likely reflecting both shifts in trust toward the CDC as well as
in attitudes about childhood vaccines," according to the Ipsos news release.
What prevents spaghetti from falling apart when cooked in
boiling water? According to recent research, gluten is the key factor. The
quantity of salt added to the cooking water also plays a surprisingly important
role.
To investigate, scientists used advanced analytical methods
to examine the internal structure of store-bought spaghetti in both regular and
gluten-free forms. Their results indicate that gluten is essential for
maintaining the pasta’s structure while it cooks.
“We were able to show that the gluten in regular spaghetti
acts as a safety net that preserves the starch. The gluten-free pasta, which
contains an artificial matrix, only works optimally under exactly the right
cooking conditions – otherwise the structure easily falls apart,” says Andrea
Scotti, senior lecturer in physical chemistry at Lund University.
Scotti used both small-angle neutron scattering and X-rays
in the research. These methods make it possible to study foods at the
microscopic level – down to a billionth of a meter – and link these findings to
product characteristics such as texture, shelf life, and glycaemic index.
The new study also concludes that the salt in the pasta
water plays a role in the end result.
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