Guestbook

Brianfuelf

17 Jul 2025 - 02:31 pm

High costs are still a big barrier to prospective customers, said Alan Gibson, principal at Maine-based builder GO Logic, where a shell for an ultra-efficient, two-story, 1,400 square foot home with three bedrooms can cost around $600,000.
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Homeowners also need to factor in additional costs, like buying and developing a suitable plot of land, and in some cases, getting access to water, electricity and septic, Gibson added.
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The way to bring down costs, Gibson believes, is more panelized, multi-family housing.

“It can be done so much more efficiently,” Gibson said, “and there’s a lot more repetition” for the developer, making the process faster and less expensive than custom multi-family builds.
Goodson, the homeowner in Maine, was able to save big money with his engineering background and penchant for DIY. He installed a rooftop solar system and electrical improvements himself, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. He wound up spending around $500,000 in all, which he estimates was $200,000 less than he otherwise would have.
“It’s a big number to swallow, I’m not making light of that at all, but it’s not that far out of what’s reasonable,” Goodson told CNN. It’s also not considering the long-term savings he will experience with no utility bills.

He was also able to take advantage of federal tax credits that reduced the cost of his rooftop solar, which saved him more than $10,000 on his panels. Those tax credits are now endangered with House Republicans’ tax bill.

“That was huge,” he said. “It’s fairly unfortunate they’re looking at doing away with it.”

Stanleytheor

17 Jul 2025 - 10:46 am

Following court decisions that blocked some NIH grant cancellations or rendered them “void” and “illegal,” NIH official Michelle Bulls in late June told staffers to stop terminating grants. However, NCI workers told KFF Health News they continue to review grants flagged by NIH to assess whether they align with Trump administration priorities. Courts have ordered NIH to reinstate some terminated grants, but not all of them.
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At NCI and across NIH, staffers remain anxious.

The White House wants Congress to slash the cancer institute’s budget by nearly 40%, to $4.53 billion, as part of a larger proposal to sharply reduce NIH’s fiscal 2026 coffers.
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Bhattacharya has said he wants NIH to fund more big, breakthrough research. Major cuts could have the opposite effect, Knudsen said. When NCI funding shrinks, “it’s the safe science that tends to get funded, not the science that is game changing and has the potential to be transformative for cures.”

Usually the president’s budget is dead on arrival in Congress, and members of both parties have expressed doubt about Trump’s 2026 proposal. But agency workers, outside scientists, and patients fear this one may stick, with devastating impact.

It would force NCI to suspend all new grants or cut existing grants so severely that the gaps will close many labs, said Varmus, who ran NCI from 2010 to 2015. Add that to the impact on NCI’s contracts, clinical trials, internal research, and salaries, he said, and “you can reliably say that NCI will be unable to keep up in any way with the promise of science that’s currently underway.”

The NCI laboratory chief, who has worked at the institute for decades, put it this way: “If the 40% budget cut passes in Congress, it will destroy clinical research at NCI.”

KFF Health News Correspondent Rae Ellen Bichell contributed to this report.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

Clintonbem

17 Jul 2025 - 10:22 am

Unity and BrightBuilt factory-built homes share an important feature: They are airtight, part of what makes them 60% more efficient than a standard home. GO Logic says its homes are even more efficient, requiring very little energy to keep cool or warm.
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“Everybody wants to be able to build a house that’s going to take less to heat and cool,” said Unity director Mark Hertzler.

Home efficiency has other indirect benefits. The insulation and airtightness – aided by heat pumps and air exchangers – helps manage the movement of heat, air and moisture, which keeps fresh air circulating and mold growth at bay, according to Hertzler.
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Buntel, a spring allergy sufferer, said his Somerville home’s air exchange has made a noticeable difference in the amount of pollen in the house. And customers have remarked on how quiet their homes are, due to their insulation.

“I’m from New England, so I’ve always lived in drafty, uncomfortable, older houses,” Buntel said. “This is really amazing to me, how consistent it is throughout the year.”
Some panelized home customers are choosing to build not just to reduce their carbon footprint, but because of the looming threat of a warming planet, and the stronger storms it brings.

Burton DeWilde, a Unity homeowner based in Vermont, wanted to build a home that could withstand increasing climate impacts like severe flooding.

“I think of myself as a preemptive climate refugee, which is maybe a loaded term, but I wasn’t willing to wait around for disaster to strike,” he told CNN.

Sustainability is one of Unity’s founding principles, and the company builds houses with the goal of being all-electric.

“We’re trying to eliminate fossil fuels and the need for fossil fuels,” Hertzler said.

Goodson may drill oil by day, but the only fossil fuel he uses at home is diesel to power the house battery if the sun doesn’t shine for days. Goodson estimated he burned just 30 gallons of diesel last winter – hundreds of gallons less than Maine homeowners who burn oil to stay warm.

“We have no power bill, no fuel bill, all the things that you would have in an on-grid house,” he said. “We pay for internet, and we pay property taxes, and that’s it.”

Stanleytheor

17 Jul 2025 - 08:42 am

Following court decisions that blocked some NIH grant cancellations or rendered them “void” and “illegal,” NIH official Michelle Bulls in late June told staffers to stop terminating grants. However, NCI workers told KFF Health News they continue to review grants flagged by NIH to assess whether they align with Trump administration priorities. Courts have ordered NIH to reinstate some terminated grants, but not all of them.
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At NCI and across NIH, staffers remain anxious.

The White House wants Congress to slash the cancer institute’s budget by nearly 40%, to $4.53 billion, as part of a larger proposal to sharply reduce NIH’s fiscal 2026 coffers.
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Bhattacharya has said he wants NIH to fund more big, breakthrough research. Major cuts could have the opposite effect, Knudsen said. When NCI funding shrinks, “it’s the safe science that tends to get funded, not the science that is game changing and has the potential to be transformative for cures.”

Usually the president’s budget is dead on arrival in Congress, and members of both parties have expressed doubt about Trump’s 2026 proposal. But agency workers, outside scientists, and patients fear this one may stick, with devastating impact.

It would force NCI to suspend all new grants or cut existing grants so severely that the gaps will close many labs, said Varmus, who ran NCI from 2010 to 2015. Add that to the impact on NCI’s contracts, clinical trials, internal research, and salaries, he said, and “you can reliably say that NCI will be unable to keep up in any way with the promise of science that’s currently underway.”

The NCI laboratory chief, who has worked at the institute for decades, put it this way: “If the 40% budget cut passes in Congress, it will destroy clinical research at NCI.”

KFF Health News Correspondent Rae Ellen Bichell contributed to this report.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

Michaelded

17 Jul 2025 - 08:37 am

Tbilisi, Georgia — Jailed journalist Mzia Amaghlobeli gets weaker every day as her hunger strike has reached three weeks in Rustavi, a town near the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, her lawyer says. Now the 49-year-old is having difficulty walking the short distance from her cell to the room where they usually meet, and human rights officials, colleagues and family fear for her life.
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Amaghlobeli was arrested Jan. 12 during an anti-government protest in the coastal city of Batumi, one of over 40 people in custody on criminal charges from a series of demonstrations that have hit the South Caucasus nation of 3.7 million in recent months.
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The political turmoil follows a parliamentary election that was won by the ruling Georgian Dream party, although its opponents allege the vote was rigged.

Protests highlight battle over Georgia's future. Here's why it matters.
Its outcome pushed Georgia further into Russia's orbit of influence. Georgia aspired to join the European Union, but the party suspended accession talks with the bloc after the election.

As it sought to cement its grip on power, Georgian Dream has cracked down on freedom of assembly and expression in what the opposition says is similar to President Vladimir Putin's actions in neighboring Russia, its former imperial ruler.
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Michaeldaw

17 Jul 2025 - 08:26 am

The bow of a US Navy cruiser damaged in a World War II battle in the Pacific has shone new light on one of the most remarkable stories in the service’s history.

More than 80 years ago, the crew of the USS New Orleans, having been hit by a Japanese torpedo and losing scores of sailors, performed hasty repairs with coconut logs, before a 1,800-mile voyage across the Pacific in reverse.

The front of the ship, or the bow, had sunk to the sea floor. But over the weekend, the Nautilus Live expedition from the Ocean Exploration Trust located it in 675 meters (2,214 feet) of water in Iron Bottom Sound in the Solomon Islands.
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Using remotely operated underwater vehicles, scientists and historians observed “details in the ship’s structure, painting, and anchor to positively identify the wreckage as New Orleans,” the expedition’s website said.

On November 30, 1942, New Orleans was struck on its portside bow during the Battle of Tassafaronga, off Guadalcanal island, according to an official Navy report of the incident.
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The torpedo’s explosion ignited ammunition in the New Orleans’ forward ammunition magazine, severing the first 20% of the 588-foot warship and killing more than 180 of its 900 crew members, records state.

The crew worked to close off bulkheads to prevent flooding in the rest of the ship, and it limped into the harbor on the island of Tulagi, where sailors went into the jungle to get repair supplies.

“Camouflaging their ship from air attack, the crew jury-rigged a bow of coconut logs,” a US Navy account states.
With that makeshift bow, the ship steamed – in reverse – some 1,800 miles across the Pacific to Australia for sturdier repairs, according to an account from the National World War II Museum in Louisiana.

Retired US Navy Capt. Carl Schuster described to CNN the remarkable skill involved in sailing a warship backwards for that extended distance.

“‘Difficult’ does not adequately describe the challenge,” Schuster said.

While a ship’s bow is designed to cut through waves, the stern is not, meaning wave action lifts and drops the stern with each trough, he said.

When the stern rises, rudders lose bite in the water, making steering more difficult, Schuster said.

And losing the front portion of the ship changes the ship’s center of maneuverability, or its “pivot point,” he said.

“That affects how the ship responds to sea and wind effects and changes the ship’s response to rudder and propellor actions,” he said.

The New Orleans’ officers would have had to learn – on the go – a whole new set of actions and commands to keep it stable and moving in the right direction, he said.

The ingenuity and adaptiveness that saved the New Orleans at the Battle of Tassafaronga enabled it to be a force later in the war.

Everettunils

17 Jul 2025 - 08:26 am

Today was supposed to be the day that President Donald Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries kicked in after a three-month delay, absent trade deals. But their introduction has been postponed, again.

The new, August 1 deadline prolongs uncertainty for businesses but also gives America’s trading partners more time to strike trade deals with the United States, avoiding the hefty levies.
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Mainstream economists would probably cheer that outcome. Most have long disliked tariffs and can point to research showing they harm the countries that impose them, including the workers and consumers in those economies. And although they also recognize the problems free trade can create, high tariffs are rarely seen as the solution.
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Trump’s tariffs so far have not meaningfully boosted US inflation, slowed the economy or hurt jobs growth. Inflation is “the dog that didn’t bark,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent likes to say. But economists argue inflation and jobs will have a delayed reaction to tariffs that could start to get ugly toward the end of the year, and that the current calm before the impending storm has provided the administration with a false sense of security.

“The positives (of free trade) outweigh the negatives, even in rich countries,” Antonio Fatas, an economics professor at business school INSEAD, told CNN. “I think in the US, the country has benefited from being open, Europe has benefited from being open.”

Consumers lose out
Tariffs are taxes on imports and their most direct typical effect is to drive up costs for producers and prices for consumers.

Around half of all US imports are purchases of so-called intermediate products, needed to make finished American goods, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

“If you look at a Boeing aircraft, or an automobile manufactured in the US or Canada… it’s really internationally sourced,” Doug Irwin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, said on the EconTalk podcast in May. And when American businesses have to pay more for imported components, it raises their costs, he added.

Likewise, tariffs raise the cost of finished foreign goods for their American importers.

“Then they have to pass that on to consumers in most instances, because they don’t have deep pockets where they can just absorb a 10 or 20 or 30% tariff,” Irwin said.

Bobbyphity

17 Jul 2025 - 08:23 am

The wellness industry, depending on how its defined, is worth anything from many billions to trillions of dollars — $5.6 trillion, according to a recent report from industry group The Global Wellness Institute.
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And it’s been decades in the making. Its modern incarnation goes back to the late 1950s, said Stephanie Alice Baker, who researches health and wellness cultures at City University in the UK. American doctor Halbert L. Dunn started to popularize the idea that health was more than simply the absence of disease; instead “peak wellness” meant also finding purpose and meaning.
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The movement gained traction around the 1970s, then with the internet, came the entrepreneurs and influencers. Wellness has now come to mean almost anything, said Baker, but at its core it revolves around ideas of individualism, self-enlightenment and distrust of institutions — a near-perfect breeding ground for conspiracy theories to flourish.
“I don’t think the culture understood how dangerous the rhetoric in wellness spaces was until the pandemic,” said Derek Beres, co-host of the podcast Conspirituality, which explores the collision between wellness and conspiracy theories. One researcher, Marc-Andre Argentino, coined the term “pastel QAnon,” to describe the soft, pleasing aesthetic used by some influencers to spread their conspiratorial worldview.

This conspiracy thinking “usually bubbles up during times of cultural confusion or tragedy,” Beres told CNN. Covid-19 provided one of these inflection points, climate change is now providing another.

Influencers crave relevance, said Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and “climate change is a big relevant issue that’s in the news all the time.”

It is a short ideological leap from vaccine conspiracies to climate conspiracies, Hood told CNN: If the establishment is wrong about health, the thinking goes, then they’re also lying to you about climate change.

Misinformation expert Tim Caulfield, a professor of health law and policy at the University of Alberta, said many wellness influencers are now expected to present a basket of beliefs that the community wants to hear. “Being anti-climate change becomes part of being on that team” and a way to “turbocharge your audience,” he added.

Vincentbok

17 Jul 2025 - 08:11 am

“AI expends a lot of energy being polite, especially if the user is polite, saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’”
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Dauner explained. “But this just makes their responses even longer, expending more energy to generate each word.”

For this reason, Dauner suggests users be more straightforward when communicating with AI models. Specify the length of the answer you want and limit it to one or two sentences, or say you don’t need an explanation at all.

Most important, Dauner’s study highlights that not all AI models are created equally, said Sasha Luccioni, the climate lead at AI company Hugging Face, in an email. Users looking to reduce their carbon footprint can be more intentional about which model they chose for which task.

“Task-specific models are often much smaller and more efficient, and just as good at any context-specific task,” Luccioni explained.
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If you are a software engineer who solves complex coding problems every day, an AI model suited for coding may be necessary. But for the average high school student who wants help with homework, relying on powerful AI tools is like using a nuclear-powered digital calculator.

Even within the same AI company, different model offerings can vary in their reasoning power, so research what capabilities best suit your needs, Dauner said.

When possible, Luccioni recommends going back to basic sources — online encyclopedias and phone calculators — to accomplish simple tasks.

Why it’s hard to measure AI’s environmental impact
Putting a number on the environmental impact of AI has proved challenging.

The study noted that energy consumption can vary based on the user’s proximity to local energy grids and the hardware used to run AI models.
That’s partly why the researchers chose to represent carbon emissions within a range, Dauner said.

Furthermore, many AI companies don’t share information about their energy consumption — or details like server size or optimization techniques that could help researchers estimate energy consumption, said Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside who studies AI’s water consumption.

“You can’t really say AI consumes this much energy or water on average — that’s just not meaningful. We need to look at each individual model and then (examine what it uses) for each task,” Ren said.

One way AI companies could be more transparent is by disclosing the amount of carbon emissions associated with each prompt, Dauner suggested.

Craigzer

17 Jul 2025 - 07:50 am

Guatemala has pledged a 40% increase in deportation flights carrying Guatemalans and migrants of other nationalities from the United States, President Bernardo Arevalo announced Wednesday during a press conference with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
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Guatemala has also agreed to create a task force for border control and protection along the country’s eastern borders. The force, composed of members of the National Police and army, will be tasked with fighting “all forms of transnational crime,” Arevalo said.
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Foreign nationals who arrive in Guatemala through deportation flights will be repatriated to their home countries, Arevalo said, adding that the US and Guatemala would continue to have talks on how the process would work and how the US would cooperate.
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Arevalo also said that Rubio has voiced his support for developing infrastructure projects in the Central American nation. He added that his government would send a delegation to Washington in the coming weeks to negotiate deals for economic investments in Guatemala – which he said would incentivize Guatemalans to stay in their home country and not migrate to the US.

Arevalo said Guatemala has not had any discussions about receiving criminals from the US as El Salvador’s president has offered. He also insisted his country has not reached a “safe third country” agreement with the United States, which would require migrants who pass through Guatemala to apply for asylum there rather than continuing to the US.
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