from the you’re-fired? dept

Echo chambers are generally bad. Any group making important decisions should have a certain level of diversity of thought to avoid groupthink. But I would argue that there are some stances that are so fundamental that it’s good when everyone is on the same page about them. Vaccines, for instance. It would be just the best if everyone in the agencies that manage American health, all the way up to the top, believed in the power and benefit of vaccines. Sadly, that isn’t the case.

RFK Jr. has fired many people for not agreeing with his stance that vaccines make people autistic, kill them, are bad because too many undesirables poison the gene pool, or whatever other crap he’s spewing these days. He fired Susan Monarez after only weeks on the job, reportedly for not agreeing to rubber stamp changes to vaccine schedules he wanted to make. He fired literally everyone on the CDC’s ACIP panel, the group that advises the CDC on those very same changes to vaccine schedules. There’s probably been more, as well.

We’ll have to see if NIH boss Jay Bhattacharya just started the countdown to his own termination, now that he has publicly broken with Kennedy on vaccines. In a Senate Committee hearing, Bhattacharya was grilled by Bernie Sanders.

NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, 58, faced the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Tuesday. There, ranking member Bernie Sanders asked him point-blank, “Do vaccines cause autism? Tell that to the American people: Yes or no?”

After trying to hedge and say he did not believe the measles vaccine causes autism, he finally admitted, “I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism.”

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Asked specifically about what his approach would be to the current measles outbreak in America, Bhattacharya was even more forceful.

Unlike his boss, Bhattacharya was vocally pro-vaccine during Tuesday’s hearing. Discussing the measles outbreak in the United States, he said, “I am absolutely convinced that the measles epidemic that we are seeing currently is best solved by parents vaccinating their children for measles.”

Reluctantly stated or not, those are sane comments that are completely at odds with Kennedy. Now, so there is no misunderstanding, Bhattacharya is still terrible. He made his name railing against COVID-19 policies and vaccine schedules. He’s also engaged in some politically targeted attacks on elite universities when it comes to grant money and the like.

But on this, he’s right. And that potentially puts his job at risk. RFK Jr. doesn’t like dissenting opinions. He tends to avoid them through firings. On the other hand, I don’t know if he can afford more chaos at HHS and its child agencies.

But when it comes to placing bets, betting against RFK Jr.’s ego is rarely a winner.

Filed Under: autism, cdc, health & human services, jay bhattacharya, nih, rfk jr., vaccines

• Crime 101 writer-director Bart Layton has revealed the biggest challenge he faced on his new film
• The Chris Hemsworth-led movie is based on a short story of the same name
• It’s the first non-true crime project that Layton has worked on

Crime 101‘s writer-director has opened up about the biggest creative challenge he faced with approaching his new movie.

Speaking exclusively to TechRadar, Bart Layton said turning Don Winslow’s short story of the same name into a two-hour feature film was daunting in and of itself. However, he also admitted that, compared to previous movies he’s worked on, having the creative freedom to take Crime 101‘s film adaptation in a different direction to its source material was just as intimidating.

Until now, Layton’s body of work had consisted of crime genre fare – that being, big- and small-screen offerings centered on stories involving criminal activity. However, from the British filmmaker’s 2012 BAFTA award-winning The Imposter to 2018’s under-appreciated American Animals, such productions were all based on real-life crimes, such as the latter’s take on the 2004 Transylvania University book heist.

With one of 2026’s most anticipated new movies being based on a work of fiction rather than fact, Layton had to get to grips with not only embellishing upon Winslow’s novella, but also doing right by a tale that’s highly regarded among fans of the beloved US author. On top of all of that, the Amazon and Sony flick needed to deliver in the character arc stakes as well as being visually and narratively compelling. No pressure, then, Mister Barton!

Blink is refreshing its home security lineup with the Blink Outdoor 2K+, a new camera that ups image quality while sticking to the brand’s familiar low-maintenance formula.

The headline upgrade is right there in the name: 2K resolution, giving the Outdoor 2K+ a noticeable bump in clarity. This is an upgrade oveór Blink’s older 1080p models.

The camera records at 2560 x 1440, delivering sharper detail that makes it easier to spot faces, read package labels, or identify cars pulling into your driveway. There’s also 4x digital zoom. This lets you punch in without losing too much detail, useful when you want a closer look without scrolling through clips frame by frame.

A team of geologists has found for the first time evidence that two ancient, continent-sized, ultrahot structures hidden beneath the Earth have shaped the planet’s magnetic field for the past 265 million years.

These two masses, known as large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs), are part of the catalog of the planet’s most enormous and enigmatic objects. Current estimates calculate that each one is comparable in size to the African continent, although they remain buried at a depth of 2,900 kilometers.

Low-lying surface vertical velocity (LLVV) regions form irregular areas of the Earth’s mantle, not defined blocks of rock or metal as one might imagine. Within them, the mantle material is hotter, denser, and chemically different from the surrounding material. They are also notable because a “ring” of cooler material surrounds them, where seismic waves travel faster.

Geologists had suspected these anomalies existed since the late 1970s and were able to confirm them two decades later. After another 10 years of research, they now point to them directly as structures capable of modifying Earth’s magnetic field.

LLSVPs Alter the Behavior of the Nucleus

According to a study published this week in Nature Geoscience and led by researchers at the University of Liverpool, temperature differences between LLSVPs and the surrounding mantle material alter the way liquid iron flows in the core. This movement of iron is responsible for generating Earth’s magnetic field.

Taken together, the cold and ultrahot zones of the mantle accelerate or slow the flow of liquid iron depending on the region, creating an asymmetry. This inequality contributes to the magnetic field taking on the irregular shape we observe today.

The team analyzed the available mantle evidence and ran simulations on supercomputers. They compared how the magnetic field should look if the mantle were uniform versus how it behaves when it includes these heterogeneous regions with structures. They then contrasted both scenarios with real magnetic field data. Only the model that incorporated the LLSVPs reproduced the same irregularities, tilts, and patterns that are currently observed.

The geodynamo simulations also revealed that some parts of the magnetic field have remained relatively stable for hundreds of millions of years, while others have changed remarkably.

“These findings also have important implications for questions surrounding ancient continental configurations—such as the formation and breakup of Pangaea—and may help resolve long-standing uncertainties in ancient climate, paleobiology, and the formation of natural resources,” said Andy Biggin, first author of the study and professor of Geomagnetism at the University of Liverpool, in a press release.

“These areas have assumed that Earth’s magnetic field, when averaged over long periods, behaved as a perfect bar magnet aligned with the planet’s rotational axis. Our findings are that this may not quite be true,” he added.

This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.