These are the egg-producing follicles of an ovary. (Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library RF/Getty Images) There's still so much to learn about ovaries.ScienceAlert stories are written, fact-checked, and edited by humans, never generated by AI. Don't miss a story, subscribe here.

Follow NewsClips channel at Brighteon.com for more updatesSubscribe to Brighteon newsletter to get the latest news and more featured videos: https://support.brighteon.com/Subscribe.html

Follow NewsClips channel at Brighteon.com for more updatesSubscribe to Brighteon newsletter to get the latest news and more featured videos: https://support.brighteon.com/Subscribe.html

Law and Order Livestreaming an Execution Is a Bad Idea Americans no longer have the stomach for public displays of violence. (Bell County Sheriff’s Office via Getty Images) Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced last week that the infamous Fort Hood terrorist will die by firing squad. Not only will Nidal Hasan be shot to death, but his execution will be broadcast live for the whole world to watch.  The news wasn’t greeted with much enthusiasm. Some hardcore MAGA types loved the idea, arguing it would deter future terrorists and provide the public with proper justice. But they’re a distinct minority. The idea naturally outraged the left, who argued the whole idea is abominable. Many Republicans were also not thrilled with the decision. Louisiana’s Sen. John Kennedy, a strong ally of the administration, said it would make our society “coarser.” House Speaker Mike Johnson said the execution could be used as a “recruiting tool for future terrorists.” Even Vice President J.D. Vance isn’t a fan of the livestreamed execution, and President Donald Trump himself denied any involvement in the decision. It’s unlikely the live execution will be a crowd-pleaser if even Trump and Vance are weirded out by it. Hegseth assumes the American public is the same as it was in the 19th century. Back then, hangings served as community entertainment. But we live in a different age now, and the people don’t want to have the government broadcast such acts of violence to households across the country. The purpose of such a move is ostensibly to sate the public’s appetite for justice. But all it will do is repel them. This is not an argument against the death penalty. The sentence is necessary for certain crimes. People like Hasan, who shot and killed 13 people and wounded dozens more, should not be allowed to live out their days on the taxpayer’s dime. There are crimes so horrible that they demand the ultimate penalty. It matters little if studies “prove” that the sentence doesn’t deter future horrific crimes. Certain offenses should be met with death. The problem with the death penalty is how it’s implemented. The recent Christa Pike case exemplifies one way America gets this wrong. Pike brutally murdered a romantic rival in 1995. A year later, the state of Tennessee sentenced her to death. After 30 years on death row, Pike was finally set to meet her maker via lethal injection. It went terribly wrong, in spite of multiple attempts, and the murderer is now still alive and even receiving public sympathy. This should’ve never happened. Pike should’ve been dispatched long ago by a more effective means than lethal injection. The death penalty is made ineffective by the endless rounds of appeals and delays on behalf of the defendant. Executions should be carried out quickly and in a way that will ensure the criminal dies. A firing squad is better than lethal injection, which is an attempt to make the execution seem like a routine medical procedure and thereby take the nastiness out of the whole thing. But that’s a fool’s errand. Whatever happens, you ultimately kill a person (or at least, that’s the objective). Lethal injection is meant to be more “humane,” but it’s no such thing if it can have results like Pike’s botched execution. It’s only humane for people who want to think of the act as putting a killer to “sleep” like a dog.  This event should convince states to ditch lethal injection in favor of a more traditional execution approach. It’s far better to drop the humanitarian pretenses of such an execution and go with a firing squad, which is more humane and effective than trying to kill someone by a medical procedure. Hegseth has the right idea to execute Hasan by firing squad. Another Christa Pike situation is virtually impossible with this method.  But broadcasting the execution of Hasan will likely have a political effect opposite the one Hegseth is hoping for. Americans don’t have the stomach for such publicized displays of violence, particularly at the hands of the government.  Violent deaths are occasionally shown on the news, and they rarely win the public over to the killer’s side. Clips of police officers using lethal force against suspects inspired Black Lives Matter protests. There would’ve been no riots over George Floyd without the video of Derek Chauvin having his knee on a black man’s back. That particular clip persuaded nearly two-thirds of the country to support BLM and tens of thousands of Americans to march in the streets. You had Republicans like Governor Greg Abbott of Texas saying it was the “most horrific tragedy” they’ve ever seen. Many Americans agreed. Similarly, the videotaped ICE shootings this January made Americans turn against immigration enforcement. It didn’t matter if the officers were justified in shooting Renee Good and Alex Pretti, or if the enforcement operations during which the shootings happened were justified; Americans felt queasy, and some turned against ICE.  Americans rarely experience such acts of violence. We barely even see public fights break out, much less witness someone getting seriously hurt. Public executions too are foreign to our daily lives. The United States is not like a Middle Eastern country; we even get upset and start defending cold-hearted killers like Pike when they’re slated for execution.  Nidal Hasan, it’s worth noting, was shot in the back during his arrest and has been in a wheelchair ever since. Wheeling out a handicapped man to die before a firing squad will not thrill the masses. It doesn’t matter how many pictures of 19th-century crowds gathered before hangings you find to “prove” the people will love it. Americans of 2026 are not the same people they were in the 1870s. On top of that, Hasan, who committed his crimes in 2009, has largely been forgotten by the public. There aren’t millions of people baying for his blood. Even the families of his victims aren’t happy with the idea of a livestreamed execution. Theoretically, Americans may have supported a public execution of Osama bin Laden, especially if we had captured him immediately after 9/11. But that’s about the only recent case where you could have expected strong public support for such an act. Supporters of the Hasan execution claim it could deter future terrorists. But Islamists are infamous for seeking death, particularly in a highly public fashion. Shooting a handicapped Hasan before a live audience isn’t going to terrify would-be suicide bombers. It’s a great way to make Hasan a hero to jihadis all over the world and further condemn America in their eyes. The livestreamed execution will not deter a single terrorist, nor satisfy some imaginary public demand for justice. All it will do is undermine support for the death penalty and the administration itself.  To be sure, it won’t mark the end of the Trump White House, and people will probably forget about it after the outrage. But that doesn’t make it a worthwhile idea to pursue. It’s a cartoonish idea perfectly designed to tick off the public and make Pete Hegseth appear completely out of touch with mainstream America. The post Livestreaming an Execution Is a Bad Idea appeared first on The American Conservative.

Artificial Intelligence Dario Amodei’s AI Cartel “Pacing the frontier” would be a massive boon to incumbents like Anthropic. (Ludovic MARIN / AFP via Getty Images) Dario Amodei seems to think the product he is building will destroy the world. Last month, the Anthropic CEO published an essay urging AI companies and the U.S. government to, as he put it, “pace the frontier.” He claimed that the unconstrained development of artificial intelligence could lead to economic disruption, devastating biological or cyber attacks, and possibly even the loss of human control over AI systems. His solution? Slow the pace of development through a mixture of voluntary cooperation among private companies and government regulation.  This may seem altruistic to many Americans. After all, Amodei has built a reputation in part by touting regulation and “transparency” as the solution to worries about the technology. He previously worked at OpenAI, until leaving to found Anthropic as a more safety-focused alternative.  Amodei may indeed have some benevolent intentions. But as with any sweeping policy proposal, we should ask ourselves: Cui bono? The fact of the matter is that these proposals would lead to an AI cartel—massively benefitting Anthropic, a large and established player in the industry. Amodei has made the case for more regulation since 2023, when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that AI could be “misused on a grand scale in the domains of cybersecurity, nuclear technology chemistry, and especially biology.” His recommendations to that committee were to impose regulatory control over the development of AI models, establish a “testing and auditing regime,” and fund more “measurement and research on measurement.” But this summer, an incident occurred that seemed to give these calls a new urgency. In July, OpenAI tested an unreleased research model on its internal benchmark called ExploitGym (this benchmark tests the ability of the models to exploit software vulnerabilities). In attempting to complete these tasks, the company’s AI agents began to communicate through a software repository their sandboxes shared, and ultimately worked together to hack the Hugging Face collaboration platform, where they believed they would find some of the answers. The agents then tried to trick the automated grader by modifying the transcripts of their activities.  This, together with an increase in the speed of recursive self-improvement (basically, a process by which AI models autonomously improve their own capabilities), led Amodei to argue for “pacing.” As he put it in his September essay: The most effective method of pacing is via regulation that targets all US frontier AI companies, as that covers even those who are unwilling to cooperate voluntarily…. I believe all frontier labs should partner with government to formalize the idea of permanent embedded evaluators to better prevent and document internal alignment incidents like those that have occurred in the last few months, and to implement regulation focused on keeping capabilities in balance with safety. What goes unmentioned is that the evaluators favored by Amodei appear to have ties to Anthropic and himself directly. METR, which investigated the Hugging Face incident and claims to take no money from AI companies, is funded in part by Open Philanthropy—whose co-founder, Holden Karnofsky, now works at Anthropic and is married to Anthropic’s president Daniela Amodei (Dario’s sister). Anthropic has since hired another firm, Accenture, to be an evaluator, paying it $1 billion over five years.  All of these measures, of course, will help Anthropic and other incumbents at the expense of up-and-comers in the industry. Onerous regulations will strangle new companies in the cradle by imposing burdens that will be difficult for anyone but deep-pocketed and established players to meet. Open-source models, though not mentioned by Amodei, may pose the greatest long-term competitive challenge to closed-source companies like Anthropic and OpenAI; one wonders whether they are the real target of such regulations.  As the federal government incorporates AI into ever more of its operations (including, critically, the development and deployment of military capabilities), stronger and stronger incentives will develop to prevent these suppliers from suffering setbacks. The current players could quickly be rendered “too big to fail.”And there are parallels from even before the Great Financial Crisis. In the depths of the Great Depression, Gerard Swope, president of General Electric, shopped around proposals for government-facilitated cartelization of industry, advocating the formation of “trade associations” to keep prices high. Notably, he attempted to tailor these plans to apply only to firms with at least 50 employees—the “frontier” threshold of its time. That plan would form much of the intellectual backbone of what would become the National Recovery Administration. Amodei stressed the “need to issue a narrow waiver” from antitrust “for certain kinds of safety conversations” to enable the companies to coordinate—that is, to cartelize as they did under the NRA. The railways present another example. Attempts at cartelization in this industry by inefficient, government-subsidized rail companies produced regulations not dissimilar to Amodei’s proposals. After failing to seize control by horizontal integration, these railroad cartels lobbied for publication of rates to stop rebates that benefitted rail consumers and drove down rail prices. Published rates ensured that no cartel members defected from their higher prices, preventing the “cheating” that helped consumers. Amodei wants similarly to throw open the books to “verify adherence to safety practices and commitments” among all of the companies.What this would amount to, in practice, is the granting of a virtual monopoly power to existing AI companies over something they consider to be immensely dangerous. A point not emphasized enough about the Hugging Face incident was its use of an open-source AI model, GLM, to decode the attack the AI agents had waged against their website. Hugging Face was unable to use Claude Opus and Fable, because of the guardrails that prevent users from prompting broadly on issues of cybersecurity. It took a cheaper, but un-guardrailed open-source model to clean up the mess. The takeaway? Anthropic would like you to put down your weapon, while it keeps its own pointed at you.  Amodei’s proposals for inter-governmental coordination with China would also close the other door for competitors to incumbent companies. Open-source Chinese models like Kimi K3, GLM, and the famously low-cost DeepSeek present a unique competitive challenge to the business models of established labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. Anthropic has accused DeepSeek and other Chinese models of copying Claude. Amodei has also lobbied in the past for export controls on parts to China, undercutting this active competitor in the name of geopolitical competition. Coordination would solve the problem of competitors on two fronts. Why form a cartel? Well, these companies are not exactly profitable. Massive expenditures on training and expansion—a requirement of racing other labs along the cutting edge of AI—drives AI firms into the red. Pacing the frontier would allow the current players to cut down on this spending, trimming investments without having to fear being overtaken by hungrier competitors. Even though OpenAI reported that its revenue in Q2 of 2026 was higher than ever, its costs accelerated faster than its revenue, so its losses continued to grow. This may be part of why OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has pushed back his company’s IPO to next year (although, naturally, OpenAI has preferred to cite concerns over AI safety and the need for more government-industry cooperation). Altman, for his part, has said that he “agree[s] with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.” Elon Musk also joined Amodei’s calls for pacing the frontier as his company xAI continues to register losses, even after being acquired by his other company, SpaceX. This convergence of three leading labs may provide an answer to the question of what is happening: If it looks like a cartel, and quacks like a cartel…. It is clear that incumbent companies are the ones who stand to gain from new AI regulations. Just as with bootleggers and Baptists, unholy alliances often form between proponents of regulation on moral grounds and those who stand to materially benefit from their imposition. The measures advocated by Amodei et al. may be good for the frontier labs’ bottom lines—but the American people will pay the price. The post Dario Amodei’s AI Cartel appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Rubio’s Western Civ Speech Backfires America’s top diplomat treated Persian civilization as an inherent enemy. Photo by Mark Schiefelbein / POOL / AFP via Getty Images The Trump administration, whatever it may claim, tried to engineer regime change in Iran. When President Donald Trump announced the American–Israeli strikes that launched the current war, he offered immunity to Iran’s soldiers if they laid down their arms, and he called on its people to take over their government. “To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump declared. During an interview with the Washington Post the next day, regime change was top of mind for the president. Nearly eight months later, the Islamic Republic of Iran is still standing. One reason for its resilience under intense military and economic pressure is that the Iranian people—despite claims to the contrary from Iran hawks and some diaspora Iranians—rallied around the regime as their protector against external aggression. And one reason they rallied is that Trump has given every impression that the U.S. is at war with the Iranian people, not just their oppressive regime. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to ​be brought back ​again,” he threatened in April. Such statements are impossible to square with Trump’s proclaimed empathy for the Iranian people. Trump is now joined in that ill-advised effort of mixed messaging by America’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who recently gave an intellectual twist to Trump’s hostility to Iranian civilization. Predictably, the Islamic Republic pointed to Rubio’s remarks as further evidence that the U.S. is at war with Iran’s people and indeed its entire history and culture, not just its government. Rubio made his unwise rhetorical intervention during a soaring speech last week on Western civilization, delivered in Athens against the dramatic backdrop of the Acropolis. The aesthetics were kino, as the kids say, but the substance of the speech was confused and counterproductive. The secretary thematized the profound influence of ancient Greece on America’s Founders, and to be sure, this influence cannot be denied. But Rubio went further, insinuating, with minimal subtlety, that Iran’s own historic civilization is hostile to the West. Early in the speech, Rubio narrated the second Persian invasion of Greece, when “the armies of Xerxes arrived in this city and they put its sanctuaries to the torch.” Most of the Athenians fled, he explained, but a brave few stayed behind in defense of their city, barricading themselves in the Acropolis and “heaving massive stones down the cliffs onto the Persian invaders.” Later in the speech, Rubio cited “the legendary stand of 300 Spartans—surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by the vast armies of Persia—who refused the chance to save themselves, choosing to fight to the last man rather than abandon their post or abandon their duty.” The rhetorical effect, apparently deliberate, was to figure battles between the Persian empire and ancient Greek city-states as precursors to a civilizational clash between Iran and the West today. And indeed, Rubio contrasted the “heroes of the West” with the “radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes, and portrays martyrdom as an end to itself.” You don’t have to love the “mullahs of Iran” to see a problem here. In fact, even a radical Iran hawk who despises Tehran’s clerical leadership should easily see the problem. Rubio’s villainization of Persia bolstered the impression that 1) the U.S. aims to “annihilate” Iran, as Trump repeatedly says, and 2) that it harbors this eliminationist intent for deep cultural reasons divorced from the foreign and domestic policies of the Islamic Republic. The speech, in other words, was a PR coup for Tehran. Iranian officials, with justification, pounced. “Praising resistance when it serves ‘one’s own’ and denigrating it when it comes from ‘the other’ is not civilization; it is sophistry in the service of domination,” said Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior advisor to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. “Mr. Rubio, your problem is not with the Islamic Revolution; It is with a strong, independent Iranian civilization.” If Rubio’s speech was an own goal, the ball didn’t exactly bounce off his shinguard as he leapt to block the opponent’s free kick—the secretary turned around at midfield and blasted the leather into his own team’s empty net. To understand the weirdness of his error, consider how other Western civilizational thinkers have thought about Iran and its predecessor Persia.  While Rubio depicted pre-Islamic Persian civilization as antithetical to the West, Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations, focused instead on Iran’s modern Islamism as the characteristic likely to generate tensions with America and Europe. And Hungtington didn’t tell a simple story of Islamic aggression. In his analysis, the legacy of Western colonialism and continued tendency of Westerners to try imposing liberal values on other civilizations stoked the resentments of young men in the Muslim world. Moreover, many great thinkers in the Western canon held Persian civilization in high esteem. Germans of the 19th Century were notably effusive in their praise. “If we now turn to a peaceful, civilized people, the Persians …” is how Goethe introduced the topic in his book West–East Divan. Hegel too saw ancient Persia as a bridge between East and West, admiring its tolerance and spirit of freedom. And Nietzsche, surpassed by no one in his affection for the pre-Socratic Greeks, nevertheless deeply respected the Persian people. “To speak the truth and to aim straight: that is the first Persian virtue,” writes Nietzsche in Ecce Homo. It’s not too late for Rubio to walk back his remarks and express similar respect for the cultural contributions of Persian civilization. But unfortunately, much of the damage is already done. After his speech, some Iranian officials didn’t merely present it as proof of America’s comprehensive hostility—they further fanned the fires of civilizational strife. “When they go to Athens after defeat and humiliation before Iran to shape a narrative of a civilizational war,” said Mohsen Rezaei, the hardline secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. “It would be better for them to read another important part of history: where the Roman emperor knelt before Shapur I of the Sasanian Empire.” It’s a U.S.–Iran hardliner doom loop, and our hardliners seem ever eager to ratchet up the rhetorical antagonism. Rezaei’s predecessor, by the way, was the pragmatist Ali Larijani. Several decades ago, Larijani had been a scholar of the German philosopher Kant, who, like his compatriots mentioned above, discerned a deep cultural affinity between Persians and Europeans. Larijani probably would have offered a less belligerent response to Rubio, holding out some hope of diplomatic engagement—but Israel killed him early in the war. Perhaps that fact offers a clue to understanding Rubio’s needlessly provocative speech. His vision of Western civilization seems a patently Israeli-fied one, crafted to justify a war of aggression against Israel’s chief adversary. The Trump administration has searched in vain for an argument that will compel the Europeans to join that war, but if they do, and if Iran is destroyed in the process, it won’t be Western civilization that benefits. The post Rubio’s Western Civ Speech Backfires appeared first on The American Conservative.

Has Kristen Welker Ever Been Weaker?

Trump’s Right in Lowering Diesel Prices