u/InterstellarKinetics

Alabama’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources intentionally sank the Argosy VI, a 408-foot, four-deck vessel once known as the world’s largest riverboat casino, on July 1, 2026, placing it in 120 feet of water roughly 23 nautical miles south of Orange Beach at coordinates 29.8701, -87.583067, with about 62-64 feet of water now sitting above the top of the structure. The vessel, built in 1997 for 6.5 million dollars, once housed more than 1,700 slot machines and could carry up to 4,407 passengers during its years operating on the Ohio River in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, before sitting unused at the Bayou La Batre docks since before Hurricane Sally in 2020.

Governor Kay Ivey approved Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act funding for the purchase in 2025, and Conservation Commissioner Chris Blankenship said the sinking “completes the dream” of a three-vessel reef program that began with the LuLu in 2013 and continued with the New Venture in 2018. Biologist Craig Newton noted the Argosy VI’s 80-foot width makes it “more vertically complex” than the older Liberty ship reefs already in the zone, and estimated it will “probably be about a year before we have a complete community of species” colonizing the wreck.

The ship now joins Alabama’s Dr. Robert “Bob” Shipp Alabama Artificial Reef Zone, a network spanning roughly 1,060 to 1,100 square miles with more than 12,000 reef structures, officially the largest artificial reef system in the United States, expected to draw species including gray snapper, red snapper, grouper, gray triggerfish, vermilion snapper, and amberjack. The project continues Alabama’s decades-long reef-building tradition, which began in 1953 with the sinking of 250 junk cars and has since included everything from oil platforms to army tanks, all built to create sturdy habitat in Gulf waters where the natural sea floor is largely soft sediment unsuitable for coral growth.

Microsoft laid off 4,800 employees, about 2.1 percent of its global workforce, in cuts spanning its Xbox gaming division and commercial sales teams, part of what new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma called “the most significant restructure in Xbox history.” Of those cuts, 1,600 came directly from Xbox, with the division expected to lose roughly 3,200 total positions through fiscal year 2027 as Microsoft addresses what Sharma described as “the most severe hardware crisis in gaming industry history.”

Sharma was blunt about the state of the business, telling staff “our business today is not healthy” and that Xbox is “operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses.” As part of the overhaul, four Xbox studios are being restructured, Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions will become independent studios again, while Ninja Theory and Undead Labs are moving to new ownership with funding, and Xbox is flattening its management structure from 14 layers down to just three to five, with longtime executive Helen Chiang named Xbox COO with full profit-and-loss authority.

Chief People Officer Amy Coleman said in an internal memo that the eliminated roles “are not being replaced by AI,” even while acknowledging “AI is changing how work gets done,” a distinction that comes as Microsoft pours resources into its new “Frontier Company” business unit, backed by a $2.5 billion investment focused on enterprise AI deployment. This marks Microsoft’s third major layoff round in just over a year, following roughly 15,000 cuts across two rounds in 2025 and an April 2026 buyout program affecting an estimated 5,500 employees, as the broader tech industry has already cut close to 154,000 jobs in just the first half of 2026 alone, including reductions at Meta, Oracle, Amazon, and Cognizant.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed Senate Bill 315 into law on Monday, July 6, 2026, joining Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch in backing what they described as one of the toughest AI safety laws in the country. The bill passed unanimously in both chambers in May and was explicitly framed as part of a broader effort to build a national standard for AI safety in the absence of federal regulation.

SB 315 targets the largest frontier AI developers, specifically companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue that are building cutting-edge models trained with massive computing resources. Covered companies must publish a transparency framework showing how they identify dangerous capabilities, assess catastrophic risk, apply mitigations, and respond to safety incidents, and they must also submit to independent third-party audits verifying compliance.

The law also creates whistleblower protections for employees, establishes reporting channels for safety concerns, and sets civil penalties of up to $3 million per infraction, with Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul holding enforcement authority. Pritzker said the goal is to ensure AI is used responsibly, while supporters argued the state should not repeat the mistakes made with social media by waiting too long to regulate a powerful new technology.

Health officials are racing to pin down the source of a growing wave of cyclosporiasis, an intestinal illness caused by the microscopic parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis, which has sickened at least 145 people across 17 states between May 1 and June 16, 2026, with 20 hospitalizations and no deaths reported so far. Patients have ranged in age from 5 to 86, with a median age of 42, and women make up about 61 percent of reported cases, while New York alone (excluding New York City) accounts for 107 of the 145 national cases, making it by far the hardest-hit state in the CDC’s count.

Michigan is dealing with a separate, rapidly escalating outbreak that is tracked apart from the CDC’s national tally: after its first case appeared on June 22, the state’s case count has surged past 300 as of July 2, spreading across 21 counties and Detroit, with Monroe County alone reporting dozens of cases. Despite this wide geographic spread nationally, the CDC has been careful to note there’s currently no evidence connecting all these cases into one single nationwide outbreak, stating plainly that it has “no evidence of a single, multistate Cyclospora outbreak linking all cases,” even as the agency works alongside the FDA and state health departments to investigate several potential multi-state clusters.

The illness typically spreads through contaminated produce and causes watery, sometimes explosive diarrhea along with nausea, cramping, bloating, and fatigue that can persist for weeks or months if untreated. Health officials recommend washing and peeling vegetables, scrubbing thick-skinned produce like melons and cucumbers thoroughly, and cutting away any damaged or bruised sections before preparation, as the CDC’s official “cyclosporiasis season” runs from May through August, when warmer weather tends to drive case spikes.

Researchers presenting at the FENS Forum 2026 in Barcelona found that multilingual people have measurably younger-looking brains, building on a 2025 Nature Aging study by the same research group that analyzed 86,149 people across 27 European countries and found multilingual people were roughly half as likely to show signs of accelerated biological aging. For this new research, led by Dr Lucia Amoruso of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language alongside senior researcher Dr Agustín Ibáñez of Trinity College Dublin and the Latin American Brain Health Institute, the team studied people from Spain’s Basque region who spoke between one and four languages, including combinations of Spanish, Basque, French, and English.

The researchers first built a “brain ageing clock” using magnetoencephalography and artificial intelligence on a group of 728 people to establish what normal brain connectivity looks like at different ages, then applied that clock to a second group of 144 people to estimate each person’s brain age relative to their actual age. Bilingual speakers showed brains around six years younger than expected, trilingual speakers about seven years younger, and those speaking four languages showed brains up to 13 years younger than their chronological age, consistent with Dr Amoruso’s earlier finding that the protective effect is cumulative, meaning the more languages someone speaks, the greater the protection against age-related decline.

Dr Amoruso emphasized that the effect depends not just on how many languages someone speaks, but also on proficiency and how early a second language was learned, describing multilingual experience as working more like a gradient than a simple on-off switch. The team controlled for age, sex, and education, though they caution other factors like lifestyle and social engagement could still play a role, and they next plan to study whether these brain benefits extend to people with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, with the full findings set to be presented as a poster on July 8, 2026, ahead of formal peer-reviewed publication.

A viral video has brought fresh attention to Paradise Valley, Arizona’s fake cactus license-plate cameras, a surveillance setup that has been in place since the mid-2010s rather than being a new installation. The town uses three faux saguaro structures to conceal stationary license-plate readers as part of a broader system meant to monitor for stolen vehicles, Amber Alerts, and other investigative hits.

Town officials have long defended the disguise as an aesthetic choice, not a secrecy tactic, and the system’s data-retention rules have been described in earlier reporting as roughly 180 days unless tied to an active investigation. Fox 10’s later reporting also confirmed the town’s license-plate system is not limited to the cactus units alone, but includes additional stationary and cruiser-mounted cameras feeding the same enforcement network.

The renewed controversy comes as automated license-plate readers are facing broader legal and privacy challenges nationwide, especially when cameras are deployed at large scale and data can be searched over time. That makes Paradise Valley’s cactus camouflage less of a novelty than a symbol of a larger question: how much surveillance should be hidden in plain sight before the public loses meaningful oversight?

Anthropic’s Claude Code tool was found to contain hidden detection logic that checked whether users were located in China or connected to Chinese AI labs, after a Reddit user known as “LegitMichel777” reverse-engineered the software and discovered the mechanism embedded since version 2.1.91 in April 2026. The code checked a user’s system timezone against “Asia/Shanghai” or “Asia/Urumqi” and cross-referenced proxy URLs against a list of Chinese domains, then used steganographic techniques like altered date formatting and apostrophe characters, along with XOR encryption, to make the behavior harder to detect in a plain text scan.

Anthropic did not deny the feature existed. A Claude Code engineer explained on X that it was an anti-abuse experiment launched in March meant to prevent unauthorized resellers and “distillation,” where rival labs allegedly train competing models off Claude’s outputs, since Claude is officially unavailable in China. Anthropic has pointed to a concrete incident behind this concern, telling the US Senate Banking Committee that Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab used nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to generate 28.8 million exchanges with Claude in an apparent attempt to extract the model’s capabilities.

Importantly, Anthropic’s existing privacy policy already discloses that it collects this type of network and proxy-related data, which complicates the “secret spyware” framing that spread online. Cybernews’ own reporting characterizes the incident as “not spyware, not malware,” but a fairly ordinary anti-distillation technique based on network settings readable by many other installed programs, and even the original Reddit poster later clarified they were calling for more transparency rather than alleging malicious spying. Still, the controversy triggered real consequences: Alibaba reportedly flagged Claude Code as high-risk software, and Anthropic has already rolled back the feature following the backlash.

A Florida Keys sheriff’s deputy was fired and arrested after a sheriff’s office warrant report detailed how he misused two law enforcement databases and a license plate reader hotlist to track down a woman he met while working security on the set of Apple TV+’s “Bad Monkey.” Deputy Lamar Roman first encountered the woman, a 27-year-old background extra, in February; the two mutually exchanged names and phone numbers on set, and he later sent her an unanswered Instagram direct message before escalating to database misuse.

Roman then illegally accessed both DAVID (Florida’s Driver and Vehicle Information Database) and FCIC/NCIC (the Florida and National Crime Information Centers) to search for information about the woman multiple times, and placed her license plate on a real-time surveillance hotlist that would alert him whenever an AI-powered license plate reader detected her car. He later admitted to investigators he knew this was illegal, saying he saw her as “a shiny thing” and recalling that he thought “fuck” the moment he ran her plate, yet continued pursuing her anyway.

When the hotlist eventually pinged her location, Roman sped up to 70 mph in a no-passing zone, passing two dump trucks and an SUV before crossing into oncoming traffic, forcing a white pickup traveling the opposite direction to veer off the road to avoid a head-on collision. He pulled her over in front of Bobalu’s Southern Café on Big Coppitt Key; his dash camera captured video of the stop but recorded no audio since his microphone wasn’t activated, though the warrant report documents him telling her he’d find her and pull her over. The Monroe County Sheriff’s Office fired Roman and charged him with one felony count of accessing a computer or electronic device without authority; he was released from jail the next day and scheduled for arraignment on March 26, while the woman told investigators she did not personally want to pursue charges against him.

Super Typhoon Bavi made landfall on the U.S. island of Rota in the Northern Mariana Islands on Monday, July 6, as a catastrophic Category 5-equivalent storm, with the National Weather Service recording sustained winds of 180 mph as the storm’s western eyewall passed directly over the island. The NWS had urged residents to treat the approaching winds “as if a tornado was approaching,” warning that a direct hit could leave the island “uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer,” with total roof failures, snapped trees, and power outages lasting weeks to months.

Rota’s public information officer confirmed reports of major damage and disrupted cellphone service on the island, though communication problems have made it difficult to fully assess the destruction. The storm also triggered typhoon and flash flood warnings across Guam, Tinian, and Saipan, with forecasters warning of up to 20 inches of rain across the region. Guam Governor Lou Leon Guerrero moved the territory into heightened emergency readiness, urging roughly 200,000 combined residents across Guam and the Marianas to shelter in place, stay off the roads, and avoid the water as power outages, flight cancellations, and port suspensions began even before the storm’s closest approach.

Bavi marks the second super typhoon to strike the U.S. Pacific territories since April 2026, and its arrival forced residents to abandon plans for celebrating the United States’ 250th anniversary in favor of last-minute storm preparations, including rushes on gas stations, hardware stores, and grocery supplies. The storm is forecast to maintain super typhoon strength as it continues moving toward the Philippines and potentially Taiwan.

Researchers at Duke-NUS Medical School have pinpointed a specific gene called DEAF1 as a key driver behind age-related muscle decline, and discovered that exercise directly counteracts it. As muscles age, a growth pathway called mTORC1 becomes overactive, causing cells to focus on building new proteins while losing their ability to efficiently clear out damaged ones, a buildup that gradually weakens muscle strength over time.

The team found that rising DEAF1 levels are what push mTORC1 into overdrive in the first place, and that DEAF1 is normally kept in check by a group of proteins called FOXOs, whose activity naturally declines with age. Lead author Tang Hong-Wen explained that exercise works by activating proteins that lower DEAF1 levels, restoring the pathway’s balance and allowing aging muscles to clear damaged proteins and properly rebuild themselves. Notably, the researchers found this effect has limits, in muscles where DEAF1 has climbed extremely high or FOXO activity has dropped too far, exercise alone may not fully restore the muscle’s repair capacity, which could help explain why some older adults respond to exercise better than others.

The findings, confirmed consistently in both fruit flies and older mice and published in PNAS, suggest DEAF1 plays a conserved biological role across species. Because DEAF1 also affects muscle stem cells responsible for tissue repair, researchers believe targeting it directly could eventually help people recovering from surgery, illness, or chronic conditions like cancer maintain muscle strength even when they’re physically unable to exercise, though that application remains a future research direction rather than an existing treatment.

STUDY: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2508893122

Microsoft is introducing a new feature called “Meeting AI” that gives Teams organizers and presenters a direct, in-meeting toggle to turn Copilot, Facilitator, and automatic recap on or off in real time, rather than being locked into whatever AI settings were active when the meeting started. Confirming the update to Windows Latest, Microsoft stated the toggle allows granular control, users can disable just Copilot and Recap while keeping Facilitator running, switch everything off entirely, or adjust each AI tool independently depending on what a specific meeting actually needs.

The feature respects existing organizational policy, meaning it will only appear if a company’s IT administrators have already allowed Meeting AI at the tenant level, and won’t show up at all if AI has been disabled by policy. There’s one important technical catch: transcription and Meeting AI are linked together, turning either one on automatically activates the other along with recap generation, so fully avoiding AI in a meeting requires switching off both features together, not just one.

The rollout begins with Targeted Release in early July 2026, reaching General Availability by mid-to-late July, and will be available across Windows, macOS, mobile, and web. Microsoft is also testing a more contentious feature where Facilitator automatically listens for knowledge gaps during a meeting and proactively jumps into the chat with Bing-powered answers, a capability the company says won’t be enabled by default given the privacy concerns it raises, though the new Meeting AI toggle would let users switch it off if an organization does turn it on.

Researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have given remote-controlled cyborg cockroaches a striking new ability: walking underwater. The team, led by Hirotaka Sato, designed tiny 3D-printed suits that seal off the spiracles cockroaches use to breathe, connecting them via small hoses so the insects can still move their legs freely, all detailed in a new study published this week in Nature Communications.

Instead of relying on a stored oxygen tank, the suit uses a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and manganese dioxide that gradually decomposes to generate breathable oxygen over time. Researchers also moved the control chip and battery inside the roach’s body rather than mounting them externally, after discovering that earlier backpack-style designs limited the insects’ mobility. In testing, the suited-up Madagascar cockroaches, chosen for their five-year lifespan and finger-sized resilience, walked underwater for up to three hours at nearly the same speed they move on land, showing no adverse health effects even days later.

The researchers see this as a meaningful step toward using cyborg insect swarms in disaster response, where flooding often limits what conventional robots can access, and cyborg insects offer a cheaper, more energy-efficient alternative to fully mechanical designs. Sato went even further, telling New Scientist that the underwater suit represents “one big step towards space suits for cyborg insects,” floating the idea of one day using similar technology to explore the surface of Mars.

STUDY: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-74235-1

Long before the Inca Empire became the largest and most elaborate society in pre-Columbian America, a far more mysterious civilization called the Tiwanaku polity ruled the Andes, developing around Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca between roughly 500 and 1100 CE. At its height, the Tiwanaku numbered only 10,000 to 20,000 people, and since they left behind no written records, most of what’s known about them comes entirely from painstaking archaeological detective work.

One of the biggest breakthroughs came from a 2013 underwater excavation at the Khoa Reef near Bolivia’s Island of the Sun, where anthropologist Jose Capriles and his team used sonar and 3D photogrammetry to map submerged ritual offerings dating to the 8th through 10th centuries. Dredging the lakebed revealed puma-shaped incense burners, gold medallions bearing a rayed-face deity motif, and the bones of four young llamas believed to have been ritually sacrificed and deliberately placed in the water as offerings, complete with nearby anchors suggesting the ceremonies were conducted from boats. Capriles noted that while most people associate the Island of the Sun with the Incas, this research proved the Tiwanaku were actually first to treat the area as sacred ground.

Researchers describe these findings as evidence of “a complex interaction” carried out by a small ruling elite, using powerful religious imagery and costly sacrifice to project authority and possibly reach out to neighboring Andean groups. That picture was reinforced further last year, when Capriles’s team uncovered a massive Tiwanaku temple called Palaspata, perched on a Bolivian hilltop roughly 134 miles from the main Tiwanaku site and strategically positioned at the crossing point of three major trade routes, suggesting the civilization was far more organized and far-reaching than its modest population size might suggest.

Johns Hopkins researchers have developed an experimental intranasal DNA vaccine aimed at a persistent problem in tuberculosis treatment: drug-tolerant bacteria known as “persisters” that survive lengthy antibiotic courses and can trigger relapse long after a patient appears cured. TB remains staggeringly deadly on a global scale, with roughly 2 billion people carrying latent infections worldwide and 1.2 million deaths recorded in 2024 alone, making it the leading cause of death from any single infectious pathogen.

The vaccine works by fusing two genes, relMtb and Mip3α, and delivering them through the nose rather than by injection. TB bacteria naturally use the relMtb gene to survive hostile conditions like antibiotic exposure by entering a dormant, drug-tolerant state, so fusing it with Mip3α generates a signal that recruits immune cells capable of identifying and attacking that hidden bacterial reservoir. Because the vaccine is delivered intranasally, it concentrates immune activity directly in the lungs, where TB infections actually take hold, rather than relying purely on a systemic immune response.

In mouse studies, the vaccine accelerated bacterial clearance, reduced lung inflammation, and prevented relapse when paired with standard first-line TB drugs, and it also boosted the effectiveness of a drug combination specifically used against drug-resistant TB. Follow-up testing in rhesus macaques, whose immune systems more closely resemble humans, showed measurable immune responses lasting at least six months, though researchers caution this primate study only measured immune activation, not actual protection against live infection. Lead author Styliani Karanika says more preclinical work is still needed before the vaccine can move into human trials, but called the primate results “an important translational bridge” toward that next step.

STUDY: http://dx.doi.org/10.1172/jci196648

A new study published in Science argues that Earth’s earliest crust never had a real chance to survive, not because plate tectonics eventually recycled it away, but because relentless asteroid bombardment kept it too hot and molten to stabilize in the first place. Geologist Tim Johnson of Curtin University and planetary geophysicist Craig O’Neill of Queensland University of Technology reconstructed the Hadean eon’s impact history using evidence preserved on the Moon, Mercury, Mars, and meteorites, since almost no direct terrestrial record survives from Earth’s own first half-billion years.

Rather than simply tallying how many asteroids struck early Earth, as earlier research had done, this team modeled what all that impact energy actually did to the planet. Their findings suggest the heat generated by these collisions, transferred into Earth’s mantle and triggering widespread melting, may have rivaled or even exceeded the planet’s own internal heat output for much of the Hadean period. That constant injection of energy kept rock just a few kilometers below the surface partially molten, making it essentially impossible for the crust to stiffen into stable, long-lived continents or tectonic plates.

The bombardment is estimated to have persisted until roughly 3.9 to 3.5 billion years ago, after which Earth’s internal heat sources finally took over as the dominant force shaping the crust, allowing it to cool, thicken, and eventually stabilize enough for plate tectonics to emerge. Johnson argues the theory neatly explains several longstanding puzzles in early Earth geology, including the unusually round shape of the best-preserved ancient cratons, though he readily acknowledges the idea challenges mainstream models favoring internal, Earth-driven explanations, and expects it to gain traction gradually rather than through a single definitive proof.

STUDY: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aeb5402

Washington DC’s Fourth of July celebrations faced a second major weather disruption Saturday when severe thunderstorms prompted evacuations on the National Mall, just hours ahead of President Trump’s scheduled Salute to America speech marking the nation’s 250th anniversary. The storms compounded an already chaotic holiday weekend, after organizers canceled the city’s annual Independence Day Parade late Friday night due to an extreme heat warning that pushed forecast heat indices as high as 115°F.

The heat wave’s disruption extended well beyond the parade. The Great American State Fair, a centerpiece of Trump’s 250th anniversary programming, briefly shut down Friday afternoon amid 101°F temperatures before reopening with added cooling tents and misting stations, and organizers pushed Saturday’s opening time back from 10 a.m. to noon. The Washington Monument grounds delayed public access until 5 p.m., and gates for the annual “A Capitol Fourth” concert opened later than scheduled, all aimed at limiting crowd exposure during peak heat hours. Nationally, more than 185 million people were under heat alerts, and DC Fire and EMS confirmed at least 11 people were hospitalized for heat-related illnesses.

Despite the back-to-back weather disruptions, President Trump remained scheduled to deliver his Salute to America speech at 9:45 p.m., which he promised would be lengthy regardless of conditions, followed by a fireworks show organizers billed as record-breaking. The evening fireworks display itself remained on schedule even as storm evacuations unfolded on the Mall, underscoring how organizers tried to balance safety concerns against the symbolic weight of not disrupting the country’s 250th birthday celebration entirely.

Egyptian authorities unveiled two significant archaeological finds on July 4, led by a remarkably well-preserved Byzantine-era residential city uncovered in the Dakhla Oasis, deep in the country’s western desert. The site reveals an organized fourth-century urban settlement, complete with intersecting north-south and east-west streets forming public squares, a heavily fortified structure with thick defensive walls, and two watchtowers built to safeguard the outskirts, according to officials from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

At the heart of the settlement stands a mid-fourth-century basilica church overlooking the main streets, alongside the House of Tisous, believed to have belonged to a church deacon and likely used as a house church before the basilica was built. Archaeologists also recovered everyday artifacts including bread ovens, kitchens, and stone grinding tools, alongside bronze coins bearing Byzantine emperor portraits and Christian symbols, plus a notable group of gold coins dating to the reign of Roman Emperor Constantius II, who ruled from 337 to 361 AD.

In a separate announcement, archaeologists also revealed 18 newly discovered tombs at the Marina el-Alamein site near Alexandria, including 11 rock-cut tombs reaching depths of about 8 meters and seven surface limestone-built tombs, bringing the site’s total tomb count to 48. First excavated in 1986, Marina el-Alamein is believed to be the ancient Greco-Roman port city of Leukaspis, which thrived along the Mediterranean coast from the second through fourth centuries. Egypt’s Tourism and Antiquities Ministry says it hopes both discoveries will help draw renewed interest to the country’s vital antiquities-driven tourism sector.

For centuries, science dismissed smell as the least important human sense, with 19th century researcher Paul Broca famously calling it “the bestial sense.” That view stalled research for decades, until Covid-19 caused unprecedented numbers of people to lose their sense of smell almost overnight, with a 2023 study finding 60 percent of Covid patients experienced some smell loss. Unlike vision or hearing, which pass through the thalamus first, smell signals go directly into the amygdala and hippocampus, the brain’s emotion and memory centers, explaining why a single scent can trigger a vivid memory instantly. Chrissi Kelly, who lost her sense of smell 14 years ago, described the experience as “climbing the walls” and no longer feeling like herself.

Unexplained smell loss can also be an early warning sign of serious disease. The article follows “Dave,” a wine enthusiast who hid his smell loss for 20 years before being diagnosed with Parkinson’s after other symptoms emerged. Scientists suspect Parkinson’s-related toxic proteins may first accumulate in the olfactory bulbs, making smell loss one of the earliest detectable signs, sometimes years ahead of other symptoms, a pattern also seen in Alzheimer’s and Lewy body dementia. Altered smell has even been linked to depression, schizophrenia, and autism, part of a broader list of 139 conditions researchers now associate with smell disorders.

The good news is that smell appears at least partially trainable. Olfactory training, essentially physical therapy for the nose, involves smelling scents like lemon, rose, and clove twice daily to help regenerate receptor cells. Stanford’s Zara Patel found about 30 percent of patients improve after months of training, rising to 50 percent when paired with a steroid sinus rinse. For Kelly, that training paid off: two years into recovery, catching the scent of pine in the Austrian Alps, she felt “this flutter in my stomach, it was like, ‘I’m alive.’”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/health-disease/2026/what-happens-brain-lose-sense-of-smell

Three Sturtevant, Wisconsin residents filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Microsoft on July 1, alleging that its newly operational Fairwater data center in nearby Mount Pleasant emits excessive, constant noise that’s damaging their property and daily lives. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, specifically points to diesel generators and HVAC equipment, including chillers, cooling towers, and condenser fans, arguing the facility fails to use adequate acoustic barriers to stop the noise from spilling onto neighboring properties. Named plaintiff Garrett Ostergaard says the noise forced him to change his work shift entirely, while fellow plaintiffs David and Joy Wade say they can no longer enjoy their backyard deck the way they used to.

Microsoft doesn’t dispute that a noise issue existed. Back in April, the company investigated complaints and traced a disturbing humming sound to the data center’s cooling fans, and in a June 18 blog post, it announced mitigation measures were in place, with plans for additional sound reduction components. Microsoft has since told the Journal Sentinel its fixes “fully resolved the issue,” a company characterization that stands in direct tension with residents choosing to file a federal lawsuit just weeks later describing the same disruption as ongoing.

This case adds to a pattern of friction between Microsoft and Wisconsin communities over its AI infrastructure buildout. A separate 2025 dispute saw Milwaukee Riverkeeper sue the City of Racine after officials withheld public records for over six months on the data center campus’s projected water use, eventually revealed to be roughly 8.4 million gallons annually, while Microsoft also canceled an unrelated nearby data center project near Oak Creek in October 2025 following community pushback.

Jeffrey Sovern, a 41-year-old Air Force engineer and mechanic based in Virginia, is facing 13 counts of destruction of property, six counts of petit larceny, and possession of burglary tools after allegedly sawing down more than a dozen Flock Safety automatic license plate reader cameras, and his legal defense fund has become an unexpected rallying point for privacy advocates nationwide. Flock’s AI-powered cameras have spread rapidly across American towns and cities, marketed as crime-fighting infrastructure but increasingly criticized for sweeping up innocent drivers’ data and operating with limited public oversight, making the devices a flashpoint at the local political level.

Sovern launched his GoFundMe campaign in late December 2025 with a modest goal of $8,500, but community support quickly outpaced that target. Writing on the campaign page, he said, “My name is Jeff and I appreciate my privacy. I appreciate everyone’s right to privacy, enshrined in the fourth amendment,” adding that growing local news coverage of his case, and encouraging comments from strangers online, motivated him to start the fund in the first place. He also used the platform to urge supporters to pressure local governments directly, writing that people should “reach out to the local governments and demand that these systems are taken down.”

As of the most recent reporting, his fund has climbed to $15,440 from more than 400 individual donors, nearly double his original goal. Following a preliminary court hearing in late June 2026, Sovern posted a thank-you update noting “a huge uptick in awareness of the system and this case,” and encouraged continued action to “preserve privacy and roll back the pervasive data infrastructure.” His case fits into a wider pattern Futurism describes of privacy-minded direct action against Flock’s camera network, with other citizens across the country reportedly using everything from spray paint to chainsaws to disable similar devices in their own neighborhoods.