Refusals in US hospitals of vital newborn vitamin rose 57% from January-June, analysis finds. Girl babies more likely than boys to not receive the shot within a day of birth, data shows. Doctors express growing concern over rising risk of catastrophic bleeding in newborns. Health agency says it is evaluating data and surveillance related to vitamin K refusals and bleeding events.

Gov. Josh Shapiro accused Robert Kennedy Jr. of spreading misinformation last week, prompting the HHS secretary to suggest Shapiro's office 'fabricated' the deaths.

I'm seeking a term - or if needed, terms - for a person who:

• Is not religious
• Is not superstitious
• Is not spiritual
• Doesn't believe in fate, destiny, and pre-determinism
• Doesn't believe in a "meaning" of life
• Doesn't believe in heaven and hell
• Doesn't believe in the supernatural and paranormal (e.g., ghosts)
• Doesn't believe in the existence of souls
• Doesn't believe in astrology
• Doesn't believe in crystals
• Doesn't believe in numerology
• Doesn't believe in the afterlife and reincarnation

I wouldn't say I'm aggressively against these things. I just... don't think they're real and don't care much... lol. Thank you.

The Trump administration is shuttering research projects key to the federal government’s fight against cyclospora, the foodborne parasite sickening thousands of Americans this summer. Two of the three projects that represent nearly all of the Agriculture Department’s study of the parasite were defunded by Congress earlier this year, according to the agency. The third is slated to move from Maryland to Iowa this fall as part of a sweeping USDA reorganization. Even though that project still has money, every scientist working on the parasite has declined to relocate, according to three people familiar with the plans and documents shared with POLITICO, granted anonymity to discuss personnel issues.

full article text in comments

AI chatbots are better at humans than, for example, quickly searching through thousands of articles to trace a specific claim to Russian state media. Even if a response is false or contains misleading information, it may still include useful information.

You still need sufficient subject matter expertise to do any "research" and figure out the extent to which any response is useful.

Suppose my current self which I am experiencing right now is me-1, if my brain was obliterated and rearranged atom by atom exactly as it was in the previous version and if I wake up would the consciousness generated by the grain have the same self i.e. would it contain me-1 or an identical copy of my self me-2? Is there an objective answer?

It seems quite common in popular culture to consider food preservatives to be unhealthy, and to want to avoid them. My instinct would be to dismiss it as an example of the appeal to nature fallacy, but a good skeptic should always ask themselves first if they could be wrong.

When googling, the answers you get are a mixed bag. Google’s AI search answer tells me that salt and sugar are natural preservatives and are therefore safe. This doesn’t sound quite right, as over-consumption of either is associated with many health problems.

What does nutritional science say about food preservatives? Is there even one answer to this? How should we think about them? And what to say to people around us when they make preservatives a bogeyman, if we want to convey the scientific answer in an easily digestible way?

Breaking down a puff piece the NYT recently did about a "small family farmer" who was actually a millionaire, Farm to Tabor talks about the myth that farmers are struggling yeoman agrarians who are constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and need government support.

This sub is a community of people with strong critical thinking skills, and I have been very confused by some of Max’s tricks, so I thought as a community we could work off each other’s ideas and potentially figure out how these tricks can be done.

This is the video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUEB-_4qS2s

Quick note: obviously, all of these tricks could be done if all of Kai’s crew were in on it. But in my opinion, the reactions all seemed truly genuine. Granted, all these streamers are essentially actors.

Below, I am going to write how I think each trick was done, along with timestamps and other useful information.

First trick (mentalism) 0:58:
Genuinely no idea! I would say something like a thumb writer or special notepad (although it looks like thin, legit paper to me), but to my understanding, he showed Punga the paper before Kai revealed his number. So help is definitely needed here lol!

Second trick 2:15:
Simply a rough-and-smooth Invisible Deck.

Third trick (string) 4:49:
Thread by Wayne Houchin

Fourth trick (magazines) 6:05:
Fourth trick - the magazine was likely planted there somehow. Notice how he asks for a long word. That's because on every page all the text contains short simple words except for one word that's longer / more complicated and stands out, therefore it's the only word the person could choose.

Fifth trick (Max’s phone) 9:55–11:45:
Almost certain that his lock screen is some kind of app that, after the first three tries from Kai, would allow him to put in any code and work.

Sixth trick (Kai’s phone) 11:54–12:04:
No idea, other than perhaps he had an informant or even a private investigator. (To those who say this is too far-fetched, even Stevie Baskin, who made the Oz Pearlman video, said it was not out of the realm of possibility. Especially considering the publicity Max got from this video, I would not be surprised if the business he got from all the publicity would pay for the cost of a private investigator and then some.) Not saying this is the method, though, just an idea.

Important: At 12:23, he does the same trick and unlocks the cameraman’s phone.

Seventh trick (dice) 12:54:
Almost certain it is a gimmicked die. I am guessing that somehow, whatever number he rolls would be sent back to Max via vibrations on his phone or another device.

Eighth trick (dice and planted thoughts) — 13:44:
The die is likely the same method as the last one, and Kai’s planted thought was almost 100% done by Mental Voice 1.0.

Ninth trick (Nyel) 15:05:
Simply 0 idea how. It can’t be a gimmicked pad, as the “pad” was Kai’s friend’s hand 😂. It also can’t be a gimmicked pen because they are all looking at it.

Important: At 18:05, Kai, Deshae Frost, and some other dude swear up and down that it is not scripted. This is especially highlighted by the fact that Kai had already been live-streaming for eight days straight at that point, sleeping and all.

Eleventh trick (glass) 19:00:
To my understanding, it must be some kind of non-piercing glass lookalike.

I know this is a lot, but as a community, I really believe we can figure this out! If my hypotheses are wrong, please let me know. Can’t wait to hear what you guys come up with!

Recently, I've been reading a lot about Fatima, and since a lot of what we know about this event came later (at least 20years after the fact most of the time), I'm focusing on reading the documentation that we got from the actual time of the event. Lucky me, the Shrine of Fatima has the Documentação Crítica de Fátima Seleção de documentos (1917-1930) (Critical Documentation of Fatima Selection of documents (1917-1930)) that everyone can access. Unfortunately, it's in Portuguese, and I'm a native French speaker. There's an English translation, but it's awful and incomplete.

Here's my question about Doc.11 (p.61): from what I can understand, the last paragraph of the letter (p.69) is not supposed to be the last paragraph. The last sentence of this letter is: "Forneceu-me informações bastante interessantes que passo a referir, porque lançam muita luz sobre esses acontecimentos." (Google Translate to English: "It provided me with some very interesting information which I will now refer to, because it sheds a lot of light on these events.").

Q: Am I crazy? Do I lack context because of the English version I'm using? Is the full letter somewhere in the Portuguese version? I don't really understand how they source their thing, like what the "Publ.: DCF, I - Doc. 12" means, but I'm pretty sure the original documentation can't be accessed.

Original Portuguese document: https://www.fatima.pt/files/upload/fontes/F001_DCF_selecao.pdf

*Really bad* english translation: https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/fatima_critical1.pdf

I saw it on my Facebook feed, and it's an old story from last year but it keeps getting reposted. The story goes that the boy died from an obstructed bowel after eating three packets of uncooked noodles. Koreans eat packets of raw noodles as a snack all the time and there's been no cases of this in Korea. Why did this story come out of Egypt, and not a country where noodles are extremely popular such as Korea or Japan? I dunno just seems a little bit odd to me.

Pasta expands way more than noodles do, and since I was little I've easily consumed 200 grams or more of raw pasta in a single sitting with no ill effects. Not to mention that the whole idea of pasta swelling up and causing stomach or intestine rupture or blockage is a known urban myth. The pasta absorbs water, so the overall volume stays the same.

Plus, he would have been chewing the raw noodles, and they would've been digested by his stomach acid before reaching his intestines.

edit: another plothole in the story: it says the boy began feeling ill in 30 minutes with extreme abdominal symptoms, but instant noodles would take 4 to 6 hours to reach the intestines...

Still, the article seemed to use a photo of a teen boy. each time I've seen this story the same teen boy's photo is posted. Could've been AI generated though?

I recently read Lane Kenworthy's Social Democratic America, and although its a bit old (2014), it did an amazing overview at the time of the case for raising the wage floor in America. It inspired me to explore the data mentioned there and any new studies since to see how raising the minimum wage affects various economic metrics.

In summary:

1. Economic Security - Low-income Americans have more income, in a time when a huge chunk of them can't afford basic necessities. This results in an economic stimulus (mainly from buying more food) and lower rates of depression and suicide.
2. Productivity & Business Efficiency - Higher base pay reduces costly employee turnover and pushes firms out of low-wage, high-churn traps, driving long-term modernization.
3. Net Employment and Automation - While wage hikes encourage automating routine cognitive tasks (like self-ordering kiosks), workers consistently shift into non-routine, customer-facing roles. Looking at 138 state-level increases across nearly four decades (Cengiz et al.), overall low-wage employment remained virtually flat while affected workers' earnings jumped ~7%.
4. Inflation & Price Pass-Through: A meta-analysis of over 30 studies (Lemos) shows that a 10% wage hike increases overall food prices by no more than 4%, with an impact on broader CPI under 0.4%—meaning workers retain substantial net purchasing power.

Full article here for those interested: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/the-minimum-wage-should-scale-with

We report three studies examining the impact of the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires, known as the Black Summer, on Australians’ climate-related opinions. Study 1 was conducted before the peak of the bushfires, whereas studies 2 and 3 were conducted afterwards. In all studies, participants completed a Q-sort task ranking opinion statements about climate change by degree of endorsement. Study 3 also incorporated measures of bushfire perceptions and climate policy support. Q-sort responses consistently revealed evidence for three opinion segments: climate change acceptors, fence-sitters and sceptics. Over time, the proportion of acceptors decreased, the proportion of fence-sitters increased, while sceptics remained stable. Perceptions of the bushfires varied across segments. Although all segments perceived the fires as severe, acceptors tended to attribute them to climate change, whereas fence-sitters and sceptics attributed them to mass arson. However, even many acceptors endorsed the mass-arson claim. On climate policy, acceptors favoured stronger action, fence-sitters were evenly divided, and sceptics mostly opposed change. Our results suggest the Black Summer bushfires did not elicit greater acceptance of anthropogenic climate change or heightened concern. Instead, misinformation, particularly conservative media narratives attributing the fires to mass arson, may have influenced beliefs about the fires’ causes, especially among undecided and sceptical individuals.

We put my 20 year old cat down this week. I'd had her since she was a weeks old. She's been with me through a lot, but it was time. That was Monday early afternoon.

Later that day, I had a feeling that she was there, jumping up on the couch, sitting down with her head up like cats do, and giving me that affectionate closed eye thing they also are known for. I've had a few other glimpses of her since then.

I know what this is. This is my brain constructing my reality, and superimposing my strong feelings about her onto it. I know she wasn't there externally. In fact, I didn't really "see" her so much as feel and experience her presence.

That said, I can imagine if I was equipped like some people with a more vivid imagination, not realizing my brain was layering internal creations onto my perception of external reality, and that I'd been socialized into thinking this was some experience or revelation, rather than the lingering after-effects of a very emotional experience, how I might come to believe in ghosts, gods, or whatever. I can also see how I might integrate that sense of an external reality beyond our normal perceptions into my self-identity, which gets protected from challenges in the same way we protect our body from physical threats.

But, being both the skeptic that I am, and having the tools to understand what I was experiencing was an internal generation layered by my brain over my perceptions of the external world, I'm not falling into that trap. Instead, it's given me a wonderful insight into why believers think the way they do, and how they come to understand their world, without realizing the experiential and perceptual mistakes they are making.

An ongoing outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a parasitic infection linked to recalled iceberg lettuce that is known to cause explosive diarrhea, has been detected in three new U.S. states since last week, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). ...The CDC, which lags significantly behind states in reporting infections, pinpointed 17,180 laboratory-confirmed cases in its latest update on Aug. 25, adding that there are also at least 11,841 additional non-laboratory-confirmed cases. ... Georgia, Tennessee and Texas have now been added to the list, according to the CDC.