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AI is making daily life more expensive, at least for now. Here’s why

The AI boom is proving complicated for everyday Americans. It’s raising the cost of living and stopping the Fed from lowering interest rates. It is making some things faster and easier, but it is also changing how we live.

If other inflation drivers, such as tariffs and the Iran war, don’t drive prices higher from here, many economists think the inflation picture could brighten.

“Inflation remains uncomfortably high, but it’s moving in the right direction,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics.

Air traffic controllers head says hiring gamers will help

Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, commended the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Wednesday for its recent hiring surge targeting video game players.

Daniels told NewsNation, The Hill’s sister company, that gaming skills “absolutely” translate to working as an air traffic controller and called the FAA’s move an “innovative approach to capture the attention of the American youth.”

Why eye contact may help babies learn: A hidden link between two brains

Have you ever noticed how babies get hooked the moment someone makes eye contact with them? That eye contact is not only cute; it may also send a powerful message to a baby. For years, scientists have been investigating whether social messages like eye contact and baby talk do more than engage babies. They may help synchronize babies’ brains with adult brain waves. But the biggest question remained: Does it actually help babies learn?

A new study, published in Nature Communications, offers an answer. Scientists found that 9-month-old infants were able to learn a novel language when the face in a video looked directly at them with fully visible eyes.

Using electroencephalography, or EEG, brain scanning, scientists detected a kind of “neural handshake” between the adult’s and infant’s brains, synchronized through eye contact.

3D lifespan map suggests mouse ovaries keep a constant share of eggs primed

As mice age, their total egg reserve collapses around tenfold. Yet, according to a new study published in Nature Aging, the proportion of eggs in the brief window where a follicle is shifting from dormant to growing stays constant throughout life, at approximately 14%.

“The same percentage of oocytes are being activated regardless of how old the mouse is. That means the ovary has a sensing mechanism that knows how many oocytes are in there and only awakens a fixed proportion. No one has ever known that before. It is completely new biology,” says Dr. Elvan Böke, group leader at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona and senior author of the study.

The finding challenges the perception that ovaries are a passive reservoir of eggs. The study’s authors reframe the female reproductive organ as an actively monitored system and suggest the ovary could be counting its own egg supply through a yet-to-be-identified hormone or neuronal signaling.

In vivo CRISPR screen identifies gene edits that strengthen CAR-T therapy against solid tumors

For patients with blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma, the immunotherapy known as CAR-T cell therapy can be lifesaving. Doctors remove a patient’s immune cells, called T cells, engineer them in the lab to better recognize and attack cancer, and infuse them back into the bloodstream. But for solid tumors—which include lung, pancreatic, ovarian, colon, breast and other cancer types—these engineered immune cells still face too much resistance to effectively treat the disease.

Now, scientists at Gladstone Institutes and UC San Francisco (UCSF) have discovered a pair of genetic edits that make CAR-T cells more effective at infiltrating and fighting solid tumors. In mice, T cells with these edits dramatically outperformed standard CAR-T cells, clearing tumors in many cases where unedited CAR-T cells had little or no effect.

The discovery, published in Nature, was made using the world’s first in vivo genome-wide CRISPR screen in human T cells. Developed by the same team, this platform enabled researchers to study the effects of gene edits on CAR-T cells inside living mice across the entire genome, rather than only in isolated cell cultures in a dish.

Famous oddball quasar isn’t X-ray weak after all, astronomers say

For more than two decades, the quasar PHL 1811 has been considered the prototype of a rare class of “intrinsically X-ray weak” quasars, thought to produce unusually little X-ray radiation. But in 2024, the Einstein Probe spacecraft caught the object in a bright X-ray flare. In a new study, astronomers combined that observation with more than 20 years of archival data to revisit the mystery. The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal on July 28.

In active galactic nuclei (AGN), material spiraling into the central black hole releases enormous amounts of energy. The accretion disk—the swirling ring of hot gas around the black hole—releases this energy primarily in optical and ultraviolet (UV) light. Additionally, a separate region of extremely hot plasma, called the corona, sits above the disk and is responsible for the X-ray emission. The link between these two emissions is well established.

A rare subset of AGNs breaks this pattern, appearing far dimmer in X-rays than expected, often linked to black holes feeding faster than the theoretical limit. This could mean either that gas is blocking the X-rays without dimming the optical/UV, or that it is “intrinsically weak” as the X-ray-emitting corona itself is genuinely suppressed.

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