All posts tagged: weapon

Lenacapavir is a mighty weapon against HIV. How’s the rollout?

Lenacapavir is a mighty weapon against HIV. How’s the rollout?

Published by Sam Flores

An injection of the new drug lenacapavir provides six months of protection against infection by HIV. Osodi Emmanuel/Reuters hide caption toggle caption Osodi Emmanuel/Reuters Kalisizo, Uganda — Along the deeply rutted red dirt roads of central Uganda’s Lake Victoria coast, there is little for miles beyond banana groves and bustling markets. The landscape is unassuming — and very dusty. Yet few places have done more to shape HIV care. Irene knows this well. For the past three years, the soft-spoken 22-year-old, who is HIV-negative, has been a participant in one of the most influential HIV clinical trials. She asked NPR to only use her first name for fear of discrimination within her community, where participating in an HIV trial can lead others to assume she has HIV. She was motivated to participate by her uncle, who lives with HIV. “I can see that his life is so hard. Like he gets strong illnesses and even right now he’s so slim,” she says. “Once you get it, your life changes for the worse.” But HIV is …

The Secret Weapon Against AI Dominance

The Secret Weapon Against AI Dominance

Published by Sam Flores

More than 90 lawsuits have been filed by creators against AI companies for copyright infringement. Authors, musicians, visual artists, and news publishers have all accused firms such as OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic of using their copyrighted works to train AI models without permission. (The Atlantic is involved in one such lawsuit, against the AI firm Cohere.) These cases are frequently framed as the defining fight over the future of creative labor and the entertainment industry as a whole. As one of these lawsuits put it, artists are seeking to end “infringement of their rights before their professions are eliminated by a computer program powered entirely by their hard work.” But the future of creative labor will more likely be decided through a different question within copyright law, one that has received far less attention: To what extent should AI-generated works receive copyright protection at all? In a 2024 case, Thaler v. Perlmutter, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that a work generated autonomously by an AI system cannot be protected by …

The End Of Oil Volatility As A Weapon

The End Of Oil Volatility As A Weapon

Published by Jenni Sidey

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog, This is the only chart that matters right now…not borrowing costs (@lukegromen). It’s the weekly chart of Brent Crude. I’ve been telling my patrons for three weeks in the Market Reports that the Brent Crude chart has all the earmarks of a market being manipulated UP to support a narrative… That narrative is Donald Trump is a madman who broke the world and is losing in Iran. Look at the chart carefully, you see big gaps between weekly closes and opens. Also, note the tails to the downside versus the wicks to the upside. Tails are much longer than wicks…. telltale signs of a market that has topped but someone is trying to keep reflating it. Why? Many reasons, from speculations, positions, narrative control, etc. Markets are the sum total of all of these players. But the reality is that you can only manipulate a market over a short period of time (H/T@armstrongeconomics) unless you control the total pricing system for that market… i.e. central banks …

Iran Had a Doomsday Weapon All Along

Iran Had a Doomsday Weapon All Along

Published by José Betancourt

President Trump has said that he went to war to stop Iran from ever having a nuclear bomb. Unfortunately, the war he launched led Iran to discover that it already had an extremely effective doomsday weapon—one that promised the economic equivalent of mutual assured destruction. The Strait of Hormuz has always been vulnerable; the United States has always known that Iran might try to close it if attacked. But neither Washington nor Tehran imagined how easy it would be for Iran to do so, how hard it would be for the U.S. to reopen it, or how widely and rapidly the economic effects of a closed strait would fan out. Fossil fuels are to modern industrial civilization what air is to the lungs: About 80 percent of the global economy is powered by oil, coal, and natural gas. Much of this comes from the states along the Persian Gulf: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. About 25 percent of global seaborne oil trade and 20 percent of global …

Could a person ever wield lightning as a weapon? 

Could a person ever wield lightning as a weapon? 

Published by Miika Tikkanen

arc: A curve, often mapping out what appears to be part of a circle.  atom: The basic unit of a chemical element. Atoms are made up of a dense nucleus that contains positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons. The nucleus is orbited by a cloud of negatively charged electrons.  biodiversity: (short for biological diversity) The number and variety of species found within a localized geographic region.  biologist: A scientist involved in the study of living things.  caiman: Alligator-like members of the crocodile family that live along rivers, streams and lakes in Central and South America.  cell: (in biology) The smallest structural and functional unit of an organism. Typically too small to see with the unaided eye, it consists of a watery fluid surrounded by a membrane or wall. Depending on their size, animals are made of anywhere from thousands to trillions of cells. Most organisms, such as yeasts, molds, bacteria and some algae, are composed of only one cell.   cloud: A plume of molecules or particles, such as water droplets, that move under the action of an …

The Writer’s Secret Weapon

The Writer’s Secret Weapon

Published by José Betancourt

For someone who is not a professional swimmer, I spend an awful lot of time under water. I consider it an act of mobile meditation: Sensory input is muffled, so the chaos of the surface world eventually recedes. What’s left is activity—familiar, comforting, and hypnotic, almost second nature. My brain, normally trying to create order out of chaos, is free to fumble for deeper meaning. This is especially useful as a writer: I believe I generate my best material while swimming. But, as I discovered several years ago when I was working on a book about swimming, one can’t actually write about the experience in the moment. Sometimes, I found myself rushing from the pool to the locker room. With water puddling at my feet, I’d struggle with damp fingers to unlock my phone and tap out the lines that had appeared in my head while I was gliding through the lanes. I have notebooks splotched with water stains and running ink, testaments to this repeated effort to capture quicksilver. [Read: Why I run] In …

How Doubt Became a Weapon in Iran

How Doubt Became a Weapon in Iran

Published by José Betancourt

The protests in Iran are real. The country’s economic desperation runs deep, and millions of citizens want to see a corrupt and repressive regime gone. The violent crackdown on the protests is also real and appears to have cost thousands of lives. Yet the accounts, photos, and videos coming out of Iran are riddled with accusations of AI manipulation and fakery that have the effect of calling even what’s true into doubt. There’s a term of art for the benefit that accrues to bad actors when they sow public uncertainty as to whether anything at all is real: It’s the liar’s dividend, and it’s very much in evidence in Iran. AI-generated or -enhanced online content has become a global problem for those seeking to understand or document protest movements, because it allows interested parties to shape narratives. In 2025, AI-generated images of real protest moments muddied the view of events in Turkey, and AI-generated content became a mobilization tool for Nepal’s Gen Z uprising. But Iran is perhaps the most fraught arena of all. Multiple …