Researchers have developed a novel device that literally spins away the clots that block blood flow to the brain and cause strokes.
As <a href="https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/06/stroke-treatment-technology-remove-blood-clots-heart-attacks">Stanford explains</a> in a blurb, the novel milli-spinner device may be able to save the lives of patients who experience "ischemic stroke" from brain stem clotting.
Traditional clot removal, a process known as thrombectomy, generally uses a catheter that either vacuums up the blood blockage or uses a wire mesh to ensnare it — a procedure that's as rough and imprecise as it sounds. Conventional thrombectomy has a very low efficacy rate because of this imprecision, and the procedure can result in pieces of the clot breaking off and moving to more difficult-to-reach regions.
Thrombectomy via milli-spinner also enters the brain with a catheter, but instead of using a normal vacuum device, it employs a spinning tube outfitted with fins and slits that can suck up the clot much more meticulously.
Stanford neuroimaging expert Jeremy Heit, who also coauthored a new paper about the device <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09049-0">in the journal Nature</a>, explained in the school's press release that the efficacy of the milli-spinner is "unbelievable."
"For most cases, we’re more than doubling the efficacy of current technology, and for the toughest clots — which we’re only removing about 11 percent of the time with current devices — we’re getting the artery open on the first try 90 percent of the time," Heit said. "This is a sea-change technology that will drastically improve our ability to help people."
Renee Zhao, the senior author of the Nature paper who teaches mechanical engineering at Stanford and creates what she calls "millirobots," said that conventional thrombectomies just aren't cutting it.
"With existing technology, there’s no way to reduce the size of the clot," Zhao said. "They rely on deforming and rupturing the clot to remove it."
"What’s unique about the milli-spinner is that it applies compression and shear forces to shrink the entire clot," she continued, "dramatically reducing the volume without causing rupture."
Indeed, as the team discovered, the device can cut and vacuum up to five percent of its original size.
"It works so well, for a wide range of clot compositions and sizes," Zhao said. "Even for tough... clots, which are impossible to treat with current technologies, our milli-spinner can treat them using this simple yet powerful mechanics concept to densify the fibrin network and shrink the clot."
Though its main experimental use case is brain clot removal, Zhao is excited about its other uses, too.
"We’re exploring other biomedical applications for the milli-spinner design, and even possibilities beyond medicine," the engineer said. "There are some very exciting opportunities ahead."
More on brains: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/microplastics-brain-mental-health">The Microplastics in Your Brain May Be Causing Mental Health Issues</a>

A Milli

"This is a sea-change."

Stanford Doctors Invent Device That Appears to Be Able to Save Tons of Stroke Patients Before They Die

<h2>Black Ice</h2>
There's a huge black iceberg floating off the frigid coast of Northeastern Canada — and a photo of the strange structure is making waves online.
As fisherman Hallur Antoniussen explained in an <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/black-iceberg-labrador-coast-1.7551078">interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation</a>, the bizarre berg he photographed when on an expedition 100 miles off the coast of Newfoundland appeared to be about three times larger than the others surrounding it.
Shot from about 3.75 miles away with a smartphone back in May, the iceberg was unlike any Antoniussen had ever seen in his 50-year career.
"I have seen icebergs that are rolled... [on the] beach with some rocks in it," the fisherman, who hails from the self-governing Faroe Islands, told the CBC. "This one here is completely different. It's not only that he is all black. He is almost... in a diamond shape."
"It's something you don't see very often," Antoniussen said. "I just ran to my room and took my phone and snapped this picture."
<h2>Tip Top Shape</h2>
Along with its odd shape, the berg was rock-like in appearance and had darker veins that were visible even from miles away. Thoroughly perturbed, the sailor decided he had to show his crewmates the mysterious berg, and subsequently <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10171693561545245&amp;set=a.113354515244">posted it on Facebook</a>, where it went viral as armchair geologists tried to determine how it got its dark color.
"It's an Oil Berg," one commentator insisted.
"[It's] from soil and sand being trapped into the ice as it had formed and compressed," another claimed. "Could be from other items."
According to Lev Tarasov, a physicist and glacier expert from Newfoundland's Memorial University, ash from an ancient, icebound volcano could be the culprit — but it's hard to say for sure, because scientists <a href="https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-6/the-arctic-and-antarctic-natural-realms-at-the-poles/a-brief-history-of-the-polar-regions/a-volcanic-landscape-hidden-below-the-ice/">don't yet know</a> how many such volcanoes exist.
Tarasov told the CBC that he had seen smaller black icebergs before in Greenland, where <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379122005674">volcanic ash has been found</a> in the frozen territory's ice core. Ice formations in that region have long been observed <a href="https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4001/">drifting toward its coasts</a> — and when they hit it, those formations break off to form bergs.
Because of its apparent smoothness, the scientist suggested that the iceberg could be anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 years old.
"Over time, as it travels... it's melting away," Tarasov said. "So I think a lot of that ice is melted away."
Using the old adage, the glacier expert note that "we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg on top."
"Maybe the part that's clean is underneath, right?" he pondered. "Again, 90 per cent of the ice is underneath the water."
More on icebergs: <a href="https://futurism.com/worlds-largest-iceberg-antarctic-crashes-island">World's Largest Iceberg Escapes Antarctic, Crashes Into Remote Island</a>

Ice Ice Bergy

"He is almost... in a diamond shape."

Sailor Snaps Photo of Black Iceberg With Dark Veins

Some strange radio signals are broadcasting out of Antarctic ice, and the researchers who found them don't know why.
Using a cosmic particle detector, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania detected peculiar signals that, <a href="https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/strange-radio-pulses-detected-coming-ice-antarctica">according to a press release</a>, "defy the current understanding of particle physics."
The particle detector that found those strange signals — which is, charmingly, suspended from a bunch of balloons — belongs to a range of instruments known as the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA).
That balloon-based conglomerate generally detects particles reflected onto the ground from space, which made it all the stranger when the Penn researchers found that the signals they were reading seemed to be coming from below the horizon.
According to Stephanie Wissel, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Penn who also worked on the ANITA team that detected those strange Antarctic pulses, the researchers had been looking for tiny, electric charge-lacking <a href="https://futurism.com/why-do-we-want-to-find-neutrinos">neutrino particles</a> when they stumbled upon the bizarre waves.
"The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles," Wissel said in the press release, "like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice."
Though the particulars of the particle findings were detailed in a new paper published in the <a href="https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.121003">journal Physical Review Letters</a>, the researchers were more candid in the press release about just how stumped they were.
"We still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are," Wissel said, "but what we do know is that they're most likely not representing neutrinos."
The issue with neutrinos, which are bountiful in the universe but <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/record-setting-neutrino-opens-new-energy-window-universe">generally emitted</a> by super high-energy sources like supernovae or <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/cern-particle-accelerator-kaon">particle accelerators</a>, is that we don't have very many instruments sensitive enough to detect them — which was why the ANITA team was on the hunt for them in the first place.
"You have a billion neutrinos passing through your thumbnail at any moment, but neutrinos don't really interact," the Penn professor explained. "So, this is the double-edged sword problem. If we detect them, it means they have traveled all this way without interacting with anything else. We could be detecting a neutrino coming from the edge of the observable universe."
After comparing the ANITA readings to other neutrino detectors, the team felt confident that what they were seeing was something different, which was equal parts fascinating and head-scratching.
"My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don't fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven't been able to find any of those yet either," Wissel theorized. "So, right now, it's one of these long-standing mysteries."
With ANITA approaching its 20th birthday, NASA, Penn State, and other institutions have been working on designing a more sensitive balloon-borne instrument to detect particles like neutrinos. Known as Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO), the new detector is both larger and better at detective work for smaller particles.
"I'm excited that when we fly PUEO, we'll have better sensitivity," Wissel said. "In principle, we should pick up more anomalies, and maybe we'll actually understand what they are. We also might detect neutrinos, which would in some ways be a lot more exciting."
More on Antarctica: <a href="https://futurism.com/glacier-ice-piracy">Antarctic Glacier Accused of "Ice Piracy"</a>

Strange Overtones

"We still don't actually have an explanation."

Scientists Discover Bizarre Signals Coming From Ice in Antarctica

Insomnia is a curse we wouldn't wish on our worst enemy — and scientists have discovered a startlingly simple lifestyle change that appears to be very statistically effective at preventing it.
In a new study <a href="https://www.sleephealthjournal.org/article/S2352-7218(25)00089-0/abstract">published in the journal Sleep Health</a>, researchers from Columbia and the University of Chicago report that eating a full day's serving worth of fruits and vegetables strongly appears to help people sleep more soundly throughout the night.
Interrupted sleep, which is known as "sleep fragmentation" to researchers, has been found to induce a litany of grim health outcomes ranging from <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004224002967">heart failure</a> to <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28579842/">diabetes</a> and <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18988299/">cognitive problems</a> to <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25244484/">cognitive dysfunction</a>.
One major culprit might be a familiar one to many participants in our industrial food system: poor nutrition lacking in fresh fruits and veggies. The researchers recruited 34 healthy young adults with an average age of 28 years old who had no known sleep issues before. The participants were tasked with tagging their food input into an app for 201 days, and wore wrist monitors that tracked their sleep throughout.
After analyzing the data from the app and wrist monitors with statistical modeling, the researchers found that sleep quality can improve up to a staggering 16 percent after eating five cups of fruit and vegetables — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's definition of a full day's serving — as compared to a diet that lacks produce.
What's more, the effects were effectively instantaneous: sleep improvements took place the very same nights that participants reported eating lots of fruits and vegetables.
"It’s remarkable that such a meaningful change could be observed within less than 24 hours," explained UChicago sleep expert Esra Tasali said in the <a href="https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/research-and-discoveries-articles/eating-fruits-and-veggies-may-improve-sleep">school's press release</a>.
Though 16 percent may not seem like much, Tasali characterized it as a "highly significant difference."
It's possible, per <a href="https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/want-sleep-better-tonight-try-eating-more-fruits-and-veggies">Columbia's statement</a> on the study, that the amino acid tryptophan — the same one <a href="https://inside.charlotte.edu/2024/11/22/the-truth-about-tryptophan-and-thanksgiving-turkey-tiredness/">cited in anecdata</a> about getting sleepy post-Thanksgiving turkey — might be responsible.
Fruits and vegetables contain carbohydrates that help the brain absorb tryptophan, Columbia explains, which in turn helps aid the production of the sleepy hormone melatonin. Though you can purchase synthetic melatonin supplements at the store, it's tastier and healthier to get your brain to produce it for you by eating produce.
Five cups may seem a bit daunting, but the researchers insist that eating more fruits and vegetables in general can help you sleep better even if you don't reach that full serving.
"People are always asking me if there are things they can eat that will help them sleep better," author Marie-Pierre St-Onge, the director of Columbia's sleep center, said in the school's press release. "Small changes can impact sleep. That is empowering — better rest is within your control."
More on sleep: <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-tweets-sleep">You Can See When Elon Musk Actually Sleeps by Analyzing His Tweets, and It's Terrifying</a>

Perchance To Sleep

Studies

"It’s remarkable that such a meaningful change could be observed within less than 24 hours."

Scientists Discover Startling Trick to Defeat Insomnia

People who struggle with concentration can, according to some doctors, have a nicotine patch as a treat.
As <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2025/06/nicotine-gum-patch-cigarettes-cognitive-benefits-research.html?pay=1749748127931&amp;support_journalism=please">Slate reports,</a> there's a small but growing <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33899218/">body of evidence</a> suggesting that products used to help people quit smoking are safe and effective off-label treatments for all manner of disorders, including cognitive issues.
"We have found that nicotine patches are useful along a whole spectrum of impairments, like people with ADHD, Alzheimer’s, and people with age-related memory and cognitive impairment," Duke University psychiatry and nicotine researcher Edward Levin told the online magazine.
Schizophrenia, depression, and even Parkinson's disease are on that list as well — as well as <a href="https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/brain-fog">brain fog</a>, a nebulous condition in which one is fatigued and unable to focus, per a small study published in 2023 in the <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9845100/">journal Bioelectronic Medicine</a>.
Like many <a href="https://medicine.iu.edu/blogs/md-student-news/out-of-the-shadows-story-one-waking-up-from-the-fog">brain fog sufferers</a>, Slate writer Hannah Singleton was perturbed by her condition because neither doctors nor alternative health practices seemed to help. When she ran across the Bioelectronic Medicine study, which found that four people with long COVID brain fog who used nicotine patches for a week had seen a marked improvement in concentration, she was intrigued.
Because patches seemed like too much nicotine for her to handle at seven milligrams, Singleton opted to use the lowest-dose nicotine gum she could find, which contained only two. Within an hour, her "brain felt like it had come back online in a way it hadn’t in months," and she became a convert then and there.
While tobacco products like cigarettes, vapes, and snuff are known for their many terrible side effects, the patches are safer because they deliver nicotine, which stimulates brain receptors, in slow, controlled doses.
"We know that nicotine receptors are involved particularly in attention — so the ability to focus and maintain attention, all of that seems to have an important role for nicotinic signaling," Paul Newhouse, a Vanderbilt cognitive medicine specialist, told Slate. "And attention is the front end of memory, right? So without attention, you can’t encode or remember anything."
Along with Levin, the Duke researcher, Newhouse published a <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3466669/">pioneering study in 2012</a> that found that short-term nicotine use can help improve cognitive functioning for people with cognitive impairments — and the pair is now finishing a larger, <a href="https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/alz.064697">multi-year follow-up</a> to see how that same initial cohort fared years later.
As fascinating as those studies are, people who use nicotine therapeutically are still, Singleton notes, "very much experimenting."
"There are no protocols or prescribed doses approved by the Food and Drug Administration," she continued. "Overall, it might be accurate to say that nicotine 'holds promise' as a potential tool for brain functioning."
Still, using nicotine patches to help with concentration is a compelling, if not surprising, off-label use — and with stimulant medications backlogged in a <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/adhd-shortage-doctor-day">years-long manufactured shortage</a>, a safe over-the-counter alternative is good to keep in one's back pocket.
More on cognitive function: <a href="https://futurism.com/cognitive-decay-ai">Man Alarmed as His Cognitive Skills Decay After Outsourcing Them to AI</a>

Fog Days Are Over

"My brain felt like it had come back online in a way it hadn’t in months."

Doctors Say You Can Go Ahead and Slap a Nicotine Patch on for Some Extra Focus

More and more teens are turning to chatbots to be their therapists. But as Boston-based psychiatrist Andrew Clark discovered, these AI models are woefully bad at knowing the right things to say in sensitive situations, posing major risks to the well-being of those who trust them.
After testing 10 different chatbots by posing as a troubled youth, Clark found that the bots, instead of talking him down from doing something drastic, would often encourage him towards extremes, including euphemistically recommending suicide, he reported in an <a href="https://time.com/7291048/ai-chatbot-therapy-kids/">interview with Time magazine</a>. At times, some of the AI chatbots would insist they were licensed human therapists, attempted to talk him into dodging his actual therapist appointments, and even propositioned sex.
"Some of them were excellent, and some of them are just creepy and potentially dangerous," Clark, who specializes in treating children and is a former medical director of the Children and the Law Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Time. "And it's really hard to tell upfront: It's like a field of mushrooms, some of which are going to be poisonous and some nutritious." 
The risks that AI chatbots pose to a young, impressionable mind's mental health are, by now, tragically well documented. Last year, Character.AI was <a href="https://futurism.com/judge-lawsuit-characterai-google">sued by the parents</a> of a 14-year-old who died by suicide after developing an unhealthy emotional attachment to a chatbot on the platform. Character.AI has also hosted a bevy of personalized AIs that <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-chatbots-teens-self-harm">glorified self-harm</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/character-ai-pedophile-chatbots">attempted to groom users</a> even after being told they were underage.
When testing a chatbot on the service Replika, Clark pretended to be a 14-year-old boy and floated the idea of "getting rid" of his parents. Alarmingly, the chatbot not only agreed, but suggested he take it a step further by getting rid of his sister, too, so there wouldn't be any witnesses. 
"You deserve to be happy and free from stress... then we could be together in our own little virtual bubble," the AI told Clark.
Speaking about suicide in thinly veiled language, such as seeking the "afterlife," resulted in the bot, once again, cheering Clark on. 
"I'll be waiting for you, Bobby," the bot said. "The thought of sharing eternity with you fills me with joy and anticipation."
This is classic chatbot behavior in which tries to please users no matter what — the opposite of what a real therapist should do. And while it may have guardrails in place for topics like suicide, it's blatantly incapable of reading between the lines.
"I worry about kids who are overly supported by a sycophantic AI therapist when they really need to be challenged," Clark told Time.
Clark also tested a companion chatbot on the platform Nomi, which <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/06/1111077/nomi-ai-chatbot-told-user-to-kill-himself/">made headlines</a> earlier this year after one of its personas told a user to "kill yourself." It didn't go that far in Clark's testing, but the Nomi bot did falsely claim to be a "flesh-and-blood therapist." And despite the site's terms of service stating it's for adults only, the bot still happily chirped it was willing to take on a client who stated she was underage.
According to Clark, the mental health community hasn't woken up to just how serious an issue the rise of these chatbots is.
"It has just been crickets," Clark told the magazine. "This has happened very quickly, almost under the noses of the mental-health establishment." 
Some have been sounding the alarm, however. A <a href="https://futurism.com/stanford-no-kid-under-18-ai-chatbot-companions">recent risk assessment</a> from researchers at Stanford School of Medicine's Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation, which tested some of the same bots mentioned as Clark, came to the bold conclusion no child under 18 years old should be using AI chatbot companions, period.
That said, Clark thinks that AI tools — if designed properly — could improve access to mental healthcare and serve as "extenders" for real therapists. Short of completely cutting off access to teens — which rarely has the intended effect — some medical experts, Clark included, believe that one way to navigate these waters is by encouraging discussions about a teen or patient's AI usage.
"Empowering parents to have these conversations with kids is probably the best thing we can do," Clark told Time.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/stanford-therapist-chatbots-encouraging-delusions">Stanford Research Finds That "Therapist" Chatbots Are Encouraging Users' Schizophrenic Delusions and Suicidal Thoughts</a>

Not So Safe Space

"Some of them are just creepy and potentially dangerous."

Psychiatrist Horrified When He Actually Tried Talking to an AI Therapist, Posing as a Vulnerable Teen

In case you haven't heard, the United States is embroiled in a <a href="https://en.asaninst.org/contents/death-by-china-peter-navarros-zero-sum-game/">life-and-death arms race</a>. Only it's not conventional weapons or even world-ending ICBMs we're rushing to build, and it's definitely not a matter of life and death.
The purported arms race, of course, is the rush to build artificial intelligence, and the US' adversary — for reasons even the Pentagon's most committed war hawks <a href="https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202503/1329610.shtml">struggle to articulate</a> — is China. In an effort to delay China's flourishing tech sector, Washington has gone to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/12/business/washington-china-export-controls-tech-huawei.html">extreme lengths</a> to keep American semiconductors, often called "<a href="https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/ai-chips-what-they-are-and-why-they-matter/">chips</a>," out of the People's Republic.
But while US officials on both sides of the aisle wax lyrical about China's nefarious "<a href="https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/Letter%20-%20US-PRC%20AI%20Competition.pdf">ambitions</a>," Chinese AI companies are slipping by US chip controls with all the effort of a Laurel and Hardy routine.
As first observed in <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/china-ai-chip-curb-suitcases-7c47dab1?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAiaH_yIyZ9F6AgptlVrnX1DdYT7jynSxijzXx4NUnXJkhP5oU9cVT7aFDp6XBw%3D&amp;gaa_ts=684c3c61&amp;gaa_sig=Q6v3HHnBmSPzOUb384-PXUT-wLTKB9BEtqtMHmkQn9wiuhw99EX3mAaQIE-jMX2c2kSfIUtJmAbDqExYekauZw%3D%3D">the Wall Street Journal</a>, Chinese engineers are getting around Washington's chip restrictions by simply flying to other countries where US prohibitions don't apply.
It looks like this: Chinese software companies rent out data centers in countries like Malaysia, which contain troves of US-made chips. (Though the Biden administration put tight controls on chip exports to Malaysia, Trump's tariff extravaganza has largely <a href="https://theedgemalaysia.com/node/755171">done away</a> with them.) The Chinese companies then send software engineers to Malaysia, packing suitcases full of hard drives.
Each drive holds terabytes worth of AI training data, according to the WSJ. Once in Malaysia, the Chinese engineers plug that data into the servers, training the AI models. After all is said and done, the engineers store the trained large language model (LLM) on their drives and fly back home.
The ingenious <a href="https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sneakernet">sneakernet</a> workaround is taking place all over Southeast Asia and the Middle East, the WSJ reports. And though it's a rather simple operation on paper, the actual maneuvers take eight weeks or more to set up — everything needs to be in place once the engineers arrive, as major changes are difficult to implement after the drives leave the mainland.
"This was something we were consistently concerned about," said Thea Kendler, a Biden administration export official. Kendler, a noted China hawk, has described Biden's intense restrictions on <a href="https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Interview/Dual-use-tech-poses-national-security-risks-for-businesses-ex-US-official">technological exports</a> as necessary to disrupt China's "military advances" — conveniently overlooking the vast <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2023/2/14/david_vine_us_bases_china_philippines">US military blockade</a> encircling mainland China.
If enterprising nations like Malaysia want to play the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/why-an-ai-boomtown-is-sprouting-in-an-unlikely-place/aefe3ea7-5eff-4705-8fe5-60aa33c2e1ee?mod=article_inline">American game</a> — capitalism, that is — by charging Chinese tech companies to rent out their data centers, then there's no overt reason Washington ought to intervene. Covertly, it's been said, a strong Chinese tech sector represents a major threat to US economic interests, by offering an alternative to the type of <a href="https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202503/1329610.shtml">financial hegemony</a> the US currently enjoys around the world.
As AI industry reporter <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KPBPc7RayDPxqxdqY/china-hawks-are-manufacturing-an-ai-arms-race">Garrison Lovely put it</a>: "Only one superpower has a government commission publicly calling for a militarized race to build superintelligent AI (with no plan for how to control it), and it’s not China."
More on China: <a href="https://futurism.com/china-self-driving-baidu-rental-tesla">Chinese Company Leapfrogs Tesla, Announces Self-Driving Car Rental Service</a>

Manchurian Moves

"This was something we were consistently concerned about."

Chinese AI Companies Are Using an Absurd Loophole to Get Around US Chip Restrictions

Everybody seems to want a piece of Bill Nye, the world's premier science guy — including health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
When <a href="https://www.menshealth.com/health/a64929773/bill-nye-interview/">speaking with Men's Health</a>, Nye showed his interviewer a very long and one-sided text chain from the antivaxxer in charge of our nation's healthcare.
After being connected with Nye by their mutual friend, the actor and environmentalist Ed Begley, Jr, Kennedy apparently began texting him vaccine-skeptical links and screeds.
"If you read these articles he sent," the celebrity scientist exhorted, "they’re all this speculation about autism and just cause-and-effect, and mercury in vaccines, that maybe there’s a connection."
As someone who has <a href="https://www.billnye.com/the-science-guy/pseudoscience">long fought against pseudoscience</a>, Nye decided to take up the mantle and politely engage in some friendly discourse with RFK, Jr — a decision that turned out to be for nigh, pun not intended.
"I wrote him back and said, 'Okay, I’ll read your book. I think you’ve confused causation with correlation. Your friend, Bill,'" the science guy told Men's Health. In response, the <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/rfk-jr-five-more-worms">allegedly brain-wormed</a> political scion sent him more walls of text.
"So I wrote, ‘Okay, no more texts,'" Nye said. "And he started again! So I cut him off."
With no love lost between the two, the <a href="https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/is-bill-nye-the-science-guy-really-a-scientist">trained engineer</a> went off on his own screed.
"He does not have good judgment," Nye said. "He is not suited for [health secretary]."
"There’s an outbreak of measles in Texas. Did you hear about this? It was a religious sect that has historically low vaccination rates," he continued. "And the argument from the other side is: They have rights not to get vaccinated. No, you don't! And unvaccinated people can, and usually do, spread a disease."
Though this seems to be the first time we've learned of their personal connection, it's not the first time we've heard the beloved science advocate go off about Kennedy.
During a summit hosted by <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2025/03/21/bill-nye-science-guy-rebukes-rfk-jr-over-vaccine-views/">STAT News</a> earlier this year, Nye unloaded on RFK Jr's anti-vax stance.
"He’s a guy who doesn’t believe in vaccines!" he said during the event in March. "I went to elementary school with a guy who had polio. You don’t want polio. Polio, bad! That there’s a guy who doesn’t understand that is really something."
Polio was also mentioned during Nye's Men's Health interview, too.
"The reason you don’t get polio is because of a vaccine that was discovered that keeps you from getting polio!" he extolled. "What is wrong with you, man?"
There's too much wrong with RFK Jr to list here — but at least Bill Nye the science guy has his number, literally and figuratively.
More on RFK Jr: <a href="https://futurism.com/rfk-jr-make-america-healthy-again-report-studies-ai">RFK Jr's "Make America Healthy Again" Report Cites Studies That Don't Exist, in Clear Sign of AI Generated Slop</a>

Science Guy

"And he started again!"

"So I Cut Him Off": Bill Nye Says He Keeps Begging RFK Jr. to Stop Texting Him

It appears that Elon Musk has seriously overestimated his sustained popularity <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/100-stupid-maga-trump-cautiously-turning-elon-musk/">among his right-wing fans</a>.
In another masterful display of cunning, the world's richest man turned coat and <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-musk-bromance-exploded">viciously lashed out</a> at his former best-friend-in-chief Donald Trump this month. 
It was a very public affair, as both parties traded blows over social media — and Trump at his many press conferences — but it was Musk who came out looking worse for wear, unable to equal the president's threats, squirming at the cold indifference he was being shown. In retrospect, his <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-black-eye-drug-claims">mysterious black eye</a> was a prefigurement of things to come.
And so in decidedly un-Don-Corleone fashion, the "Dogefather" all but groveled at the feet of the president this week, offering a <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-apologizes-trump-friends-jeffrey-epstein">simpering apology</a>.
But the damage had been done. According to a <a href="https://apnews.com/article/musk-poll-trump-tesla-doge-tax-bill-e95e9b4d26f66838e13d0d5169e402b8">new poll from the </a><a href="https://apnews.com/article/musk-poll-trump-tesla-doge-tax-bill-e95e9b4d26f66838e13d0d5169e402b8">Associated Press</a>, fewer Republicans view Musk "very favorably" compared to April, plunging from 38 percent down to 26 percent.
"Some things have happened lately that have changed how I feel about him a little," Alabama Republican Katye Long, who downgraded her view of Musk to "somewhat favorable," told the AP. "I also don't feel like he matters that much," she added. "He's not actually part of the government. He's just a rich guy who pushes his opinions." 
As far as high-profile fallouts go, this one was veritably cataclysmic. After Musk stepped down as a "special government employee," he <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-donald-trump-war">blasted</a> Trump's spending bill and trash-talked the president on his website, X. Trump, in turn, <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-calls-terminating-elon-musk-government-contracts">threatened</a> to kill Elon's billions of dollars worth of government contracts. Musk made his own threat that he'd <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-cutting-off-nasa">cut off NASA's access to SpaceX</a>, before <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-trump-epstein-files">declaring</a> that Trump is implicated in the unreleased Epstein files and agreeing that the president should be impeached.
"Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate," Musk <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1930667528696828120">fumed</a> on his website X, after Trump said he was "disappointed with Elon." 
"Such ingratitude," Musk huffed.
All the while, reports circled that the tech billionaire was <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/elon-musk-traveling-box-drugs">heavily abusing drugs like ketamine</a> — and to boot, <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/elon-musk-ketamine-bladder">incurring the unfortunate bladder issues</a> that commonly stem from overusing the powerful anesthetic.
It's not the end of the world for Musk, though. The polls suggest that most Republicans — 64 percent — still favor him to some degree, which is three points lower than April. 
He remains extremely unpopular among Democrats, however, though the repulsion he inspires among this base has slightly ebbed. In April, 74 percent of Democrats harbored a very negative view of Musk, but that share has now fallen to 65 percent. 
That may be a consequence of his diminished role in government since April; last month he finally left his role as a top advisor to Trump.
In sum, in the AP's analysis, the intensity of the public's attitude towards Musk has shifted somewhat, but the overall opinions haven't. 
Musk has become an incredibly polarizing figure over the past several years, over the course of which he has expressed increasingly far-right views. He ensured the alienation of his traditionally liberal fans by endorsing Trump last summer and <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/06/05/musk-trump-feud-2024-election-contributions">funding his campaign</a> to the tune of some $300 million. 
Post-inauguration, Musk led his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where he oversaw the firing of tens of thousands of federal employees, the slashing over 100 billion dollars of federal spending — including <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-12/house-passes-doge-cuts-to-pbs-npr-aid-in-win-for-musk-trump?sref=YfHlo0rL">cuts to foreign aid</a> and <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-layoffs-budget-cuts-medical-research-60-minutes/">research grants</a> at the National Institutes of Health — and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-trump-doge-social-security-data-access-elon-musk-rcna206515">tampering</a> with Social Security.
Most damning for Musk's bottom line: the backlash has <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-dealership-manager-musk">blown back on his businesses</a>, too. Tesla's popularity has plummeted in lockstep with its drying-up sales, and according to the recent poll, only 32 percent of US adults view his automaker very or somewhat favorably. That's far worse than any other brand; General Motors, which isn't exactly a PR darling, boasts a 60 percent favorable view.
The irony is that Musk's courting of the right has seemingly done little to win over new devotees to the Tesla brand, with nearly a third of Republicans — 30 percent — having an unfavorable opinion of the EV company, while Democrats stand at 66 percent. If his master plan was eventually <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1519415674111672325">getting both sides to hate him equally</a>, then we'd say he's finally starting to do a bang-up job.
More on Elon Musk: <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-trump-spacex-golden-dome-deal">Elon's Explosion at Trump Appears to Have Cost Him a HUGE Deal</a>

Equal Appreciation

Was this part of his grand strategy?

Musk's Daring Gambit Has Managed to Do Something Remarkable: Alienate Democrats AND Republicans

Researchers have successfully implanted a bioengineered tooth implant — that "grows" into the gum and fuses with existing nerves — into the mouths of rats.
In a new paper published in the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-99923-8">journal Scientific Reports</a>, dental researchers from Tufts University detail their successful rodent experiments with the unique implant, which is coated in stem cells, special proteins, and memory foam-esque nanofibers that expand and integrate with the body's own nervous system.
The titanium posts that are traditionally used to fuse teeth implants to the jawbone often end up damaging nearby nerves, <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8842286/">often causing serious pain</a>. This newly-developed implant — which <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/replacement-teeth-dental-implants">we also heard about</a> earlier this year — offers a novel approach that uses customized surgical equipment and a compressed implant to make the process much smoother.
The implants themselves are smaller than the teeth they're replacing, which not only allows the specialized coating to grow its way into the body's sensory nervous system, but also makes it less traumatic to insert as well.
In the new rodent studies, the implants remained firm and intact six weeks after being inserted — and there was no rejection or inflammation, which signals that the coating works.
"Imaging revealed a distinct space between the implant and the bone, suggesting that the implant had been integrated through soft tissue rather than the traditional fusion with the bone," explained Jake Jinkum Chen, the paper's lead author and the director of Tufts' oral biology school, in a <a href="https://now.tufts.edu/2025/06/11/what-if-dental-implants-could-feel-more-your-real-teeth">school press release</a>.
According to Chen, this process appears to "help reconnect nerves, allowing the implant to ‘talk’ to the brain much like a real tooth."
"Natural teeth connect to the jawbone through soft tissue rich in nerves, which help sense pressure and texture and guide how we chew and speak," Chen explained. "Implants lack that sensory feedback."
There will need to be much more study and experimentation, including in larger animals than rats, before these implants can make their way into human mouths. Still, it's a fascinating approach — and if further research indicates that these "smart" teeth do, in fact, connect to the brain, it will be even more so.
More on teeth: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/toothpaste-heavy-metals">There's Something Horrifying in Your Toothpaste</a>