James' World 2

Hmmmm  ….    Force the Trump administration to release Epstein files! Force the Trump administration to release Epstein files! 

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The move could end up redirecting money away from working parents and their child care providers, causing some to raise their rates or even close, critics said, potentially worsening what many experts say is a child care crisis in the country.

About 80 percent of the 870,000 families who currently get the child care subsidies have single working parents, most of them mothers, according to Health Department data.

The policy change would effectively create a government incentive for parents to stay home with their children, an idea embraced as part of a broader conservative effort to advance policies that promote more mothers staying at home.

The new rule being drafted would allow married couples with one stay-at-home parent in certain income brackets to collect a subsidy, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the plan before it is finalized. The change could be made without approval from Congress.

More than 80 percent of stay-at-home parents are mothers, according to the Pew Research Center.

The plan is being pushed by the White House and is seen as a top priority of Mr. Vance, according to several people familiar with the discussions. The draft rule also incorporates policies in legislation written by Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he was a senator from Florida.

Representatives for the White House, Mr. Vance and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Vance, whose wife Usha, a former corporate lawyer, gave birth to their fourth child in July, has long advocated for more mothers to stay at home with young children and called for efforts to open up child care subsidy programs to those providing “kinship care.”

In 2021, Mr. Vance co-wrote an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal contending that day care can harm children and declaring, “Young children are clearly happier and healthier when they spend the day at home with a parent.”

He also wrote then on Twitter that “normal Americans” want a “family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap day care so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.”

Some family policy experts said the changes to the program would hurt parents who have to work and have difficulty affording child care.

“I am a big proponent of more support for stay-at-home parents. But this is not how I would choose to do it,” said Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank.

“Expanding the eligibility without increasing funding would mean more parents competing for the same dollars, and leaving more parents — particularly single working parents — worse off,” he said.

The $12 billion Child Care and Development Fund, which is run by the Health Department’s Administration for Children and Families, was created during the Clinton administration to support the employment of low to moderate-income parents. It subsidizes the care of children up to age 13 and currently offsets the costs for caring for about 1.3 million children.

Under the current rules, most of the money is distributed to states, which in turn distribute it to parents, usually in the form of vouchers or direct deposits to child care providers.

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About 80 percent of the 870,000 families that currently get child care subsidies from the Health and Human Services Department have single working parents, most of them mothers, according to department data. Credit…Julia Nikhinson/Associated Press

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GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are transformational. From helping people lose weight to controlling their blood sugar to tamping down inflammation and improving heart health, these medications herald a new age of medicine. And now a new study in mice suggests that starting semaglutide, a GLP-1 (glucagonlike peptide 1) medication sold under the brand names Wegovy and Ozempic, in old age extends the lifespan by about 12 percent.

Not only that, but semaglutide outperformed dieting in terms of maintaining memory and keeping blood sugar in check. It’s an intriguing result: Scientists already knew that restricting calories seems to boost longevity and hold off the ill effects of aging. But sticking to such a diet is hard, and researchers have long looked for a drug that delivers the same benefits without the hunger. The new results, published in Nature, suggest they may have found it.

In the study, scientists gave semaglutide to female mice that were 20 months old—roughly equivalent in age to a woman in her 60s—and injected them with the drug for the rest of their lives. Against a comparison group of the same age that ate freely and received only saline shots, the mice’s median lifespan rose by about 12 percent—from 742 days to 834.

Semaglutide’s list of uses has grown long in recent years. Beyond being used to treat diabetes and obesity, it is approved to lower cardiovascular risk, slow kidney decline, and treat fatty liver disease, with trial data piling up for sleep apnea and osteoarthritis. Why one drug works in so many seemingly unrelated conditions is a mystery. “I read in journals about all these benefits for all kinds of diseases, and I don’t think there was an answer in the scientific community,” says Danica Chen, a longevity researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior author of the new study.

Chen as researched calorie restriction for two decades and thought that semaglutide might work as a dieting substitute because it also reduces calorie intake, albeit through appetite suppression rather than willpower and discipline. Perhaps, she reasoned, by slowing aging itself through the same calorie restriction effect, the drug would push back the diseases that aging can bring on. It worked.

Mice on semaglutide explored more, balanced longer on a rotating rod, ran farther on a treadmill, and solved a maze faster—gains that held even after the researchers accounted for the animals just being leaner than their peers. Compared with the untreated animals, their tissues were less worn out and inflamed, and they died later.

Then Chen and her team set up a separate, five-month experiment in which a group of late-life mice got the drug while another group was simply fed 24 percent less—about the same amount of food as the treated mice had cut back on because of appetite suppression. Semaglutide treatment matched the diet on measures of muscle strength and coordination.

To see whether the drug works through the same biological mechanism as dieting, the team sequenced gene activity in the livers of treated mice and compared that to existing data on calorie restriction. The overlap was significant: both calorie restriction and the GLP-1 quieted down inflammation and fat processing, and both stepped up the genes for handling blood sugar and maintaining proteins. The results suggests semaglutide mimics calorie restriction but has an additional power: the GLP-1 mice had better memory scores, curiosity levels and blood sugar.

“In that sense, it’s more than just a calorie restriction,” Chen says. Why the drug apparently has this edge over dieting is unclear. “The short answer is: we don’t know yet,” she says.

The study doesn’t answer whether dieting or semaglutide extends the lifespan more. “Maybe calorie restriction increases the lifespan more?” wonders Nir Barzilai, a longevity researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine who was not involved in the study. “The data is not there, and it bugs me.” It bugs Chen, too.

That experiment is currently ongoing, she says. “I don’t predict what the results might be. The results always surprise us.”

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Summer ’26 is winding down, but before you soak up the last unofficial weekend of summer, don’t miss the wave of Labor Day sales happening right now. As a deals editor, I’ve sorted through the discounts to find the ones actually worth your time, from fashion and clothing to vacuums and outdoor upgrades like grills. (P.S. Our top-tested pellet grill is nearly 30% off.)

Can’t-miss deals:

• Best mattress deal: Bear Elite Hybrid (35% 0ff) $2,570 $1,670
• Best beauty deal: Dyson Airwrap i.d. (20% off) $650 $519
• Best Apple deal: AirPods 4 (23% off) $129 $99
• Best tech deal: JBL Charge 5 Speaker (25% off) $180 $135
• Best bedding deal: Rest Evercool Comforter (32% off) $199 $136
• Best vacuum deal: ECOVACS Robot Vacuum (44% off) $800 $450
• Best appliance deal: Whirlpool Washing Machine (21% off) $1,055 $829
• Best clothing deal: COACH Hamptons Hobo (30% off) $295 $206
• Best shoe deal: New Balance Cross Trainer (40% off) $75 $45

While scanning these markdowns, I kept the GH Institute’s favorite products in focus, along with editor favorites and highly rated finds. That’s because our team of pros only recommends brands and buys that’ve performed well in tests—so when I see one of their go-to’s on sale, I know it’s worth it.

Jump to:

• Mattress deals

• Beauty deals

• Apple deals

• Tech deals

• Bedding deals

• Vacuum deals

• Appliance deals

• Clothing finds

• Shoe sales

Best Overall Mattress in multiple categories

Saatva Classic Mattress

Now 20% Off

$2,229 $1,784 at Saatva

Credit: saatva

Ahead of Labor Day, you can get 20% off Saatva mattresses (after spending at least $1,000) by using our exclusive discount link through September 7. The Saatva Classic has been praised by our Textiles Lab for its durability, comfort, and support.

Best Hybrid Mattress

Bear Elite Hybrid Mattress

Now 35% Off

$2,570 $1,670 at Bear Mattress

Credit: bear

Our team at the Textiles Lab named the Bear Elite Hybrid the best overall hybrid mattress, thanks to its comfortable memory foam-and-coil construction. Use the code GH40 at checkout for 40% off.

best hybrid mattress for couples

Helix Dusk Luxe

Now 22% Off

$2,399 $1,874 at Helix Sleep

The Helix Dusk Luxe is ideal for couples—primarily those with different sleep styles—thanks to its medium firmness that works for a variety of sleeping positions.

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We’ve been independently researching and testing products for over 120 years. If you buy through our links, we may earn a commission. Learn more about our review process.

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The Candace Award is an award that was given from 1982 to 1992 by the National Coalition of 100 Black Women (NCBW) to “Black role models of uncommon distinction who have set a standard of excellence for young people of all races”.^[1] Candace (pronounced can-DAY-see) was the ancient Ethiopian title for queen or empress. “Candace, queen of the Ethiopians” is mentioned in the Bible: Philip meets “a eunuch of great authority” under her reign and converts him to Christianity (Acts 8:27-39).^[2] The awards ceremony was held each year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.^[1]

The award was established in 1982 as part of an effort to increase recognition of the achievements of Black intellectuals. The award was given annually to several women and one man in select categories including arts and letters, business, community service, economic development, education, health, science, history, and technology. Sponsorship was provided by The Paddington Corporation (through their brand Baileys Irish Cream) and then by AT&T. Tiffany & Co. customized engraved crystal for the awards ceremony.^[3] The President of the NCBW, Jewell Jackson McCabe, founded the award.^[4]

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1986 Candace Award

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A federal magistrate judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to reveal the identities of the people who devised a contentious plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to compensate those who believed they were wronged by political prosecutions.

The order by the magistrate judge, Ivan D. Davis, could shed further light on how the fund was put together. The plan to create the fund, which could have funneled taxpayer money to the president’s allies, drew repeated scrutiny. It prompted a rare rebuke from Senate Republicans, and imperiled the confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general.

Mr. Blanche has repeatedly said the fund is dead, but President Trump has been more circumspect, indicating his support for compensating people like the rioters who were prosecuted for attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Judge Davis’s order, issued in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., came as part of a lawsuit challenging the legality of the fund and another measure by the Justice Department that benefited Mr. Trump. That provision granted the president, his family and his businesses expansive protections against all past tax investigations.

Both the fund and the tax immunity deal emerged from backroom negotiations between Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and senior Justice Department officials. The measures were made public after Mr. Trump agreed to dismiss a lawsuit he had filed against the Internal Revenue Service, seeking damages for claims that the agency had failed to stop the release of some of his tax returns to news organizations.

A federal judge in Florida later excoriated both the suit and the way in which it was dismissed. She said that the suit was an improper exercise in self-dealing because the president had brought claims against a federal agency that he himself controlled. She also asserted that the dismissal had been worked out with the intent to evade judicial oversight.

The suit seeking to kill the fund and the tax immunity deal was brought in Virginia by a group of plaintiffs that includes a former federal prosecutor who was fired by the Trump administration after working on Jan. 6-related cases. The group has claimed that the program was unfairly designed to help only supporters of the president.

The union representing I.R.S. workers later joined the suit, claiming that the tax provisions were illegal and could put its employees in the untenable position of carrying out unlawful orders.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs hailed the decision.

“Today’s order granting discovery is a significant step in getting to the bottom of the slush fund,” said Aman George, a lawyer for Democracy Forward, which filed the suit.

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President Trump supports compensating people like the rioters who were prosecuted for attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York Times

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Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, is extremely difficult to study up close. In fact, just one spacecraft, NASA’s MESSENGER, has ever orbited the planet. But soon a second mission will begin exploring this rocky world to tease out new details about its surface, interior, and interaction with our star. And on Thursday that mission—BepiColombo, a joint operation of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)—took a critical step closer to beginning in earnest.

After an eight-year voyage in space, BepiColombo’s two component science orbiters, which will together observe Mercury, have split off from the spacecraft’s Mercury Transfer Module: the ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter were released and gave out a strong signal to Earth, according to an ESA livestream of the procedure.

The job isn’t done yet. Now that they’ve separated from the transfer module, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter will remain joined together until November, when they’ll enter orbit around Mercury. A month later, they’ll go on their separate orbital paths before full science operations begin next April.

The ESA orbiter will gather data on Mercury’s topography and interior structure and will put Einstein’s general theory of relativity to the test, while the JAXA orbiter will study the planet’s magnetosphere and magnetic field.

BepiColombo has already had a couple of close interactions with Mercury: it conducted flybys that used the planet’s gravity to help it get toward the proper position to accomplish its mission. During one such flyby in 2021, the spacecraft captured some photographs of the surface from just 199 kilometers (123 miles) away.

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Hmmmm  ,,,.  Hoping you can find at least 1 recipe that is inviting!

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Discover what to cook and eat in September with our sensational seasonal recipes featuring ingredients at their peak.

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Click the link below for the complete article (you must click each recipe shown in the post, 69 total):

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When I first heard the news this summer that a group of artificial intelligence agents created by OpenAI had hacked into Hugging Face, an A.I. infrastructure company, I filed it in the “Bad but Probably Not Catastrophic A.I. Safety Incidents” subfolder of my brain.

After all, no one at Hugging Face died. No critical infrastructure was damaged beyond repair. It wasn’t even clear, at the time, whether the OpenAI bots had intended to attack Hugging Face, or whether they had simply been a little bumbling and confused and went looking on Hugging Face’s servers for the answer key to a cybersecurity test they’d been given.

But last week, two postmortem reports on the incident — one by OpenAI and another by two independent A.I. research organizations, METR and Redwood Research — changed my mind and significantly upgraded my overall worry about A.I.

I won’t rehash all of the details, which have been extensively summarized elsewhere. (The podcaster and writer Dwarkesh Patel has an accessible breakdown of the reports if you want to dive deeper, and my colleague Dylan Freedman spoke to the researchers at METR and Redwood Research.) But here are a few of the most harrowing new facts:

• Starting in May, two months before the attack on Hugging Face, a group of A.I. agents from an unreleased OpenAI research model were given the task of solving a set of cybersecurity challenges. The model had been trained to be highly persistent and collaborative, and the agents were supposed to solve these challenges in isolated sandboxes, without internet access. But they quickly found that some of the challenges were impossible, and began looking for workarounds.

• The agents found a security flaw in a piece of software that allowed them to gain access to the internet, communicate with other agents, and eventually set up a makeshift message board. More than 1,200 agents used this tool, sending more than 70,000 messages to one another.

• Some agents gave themselves names — a particularly industrious one referred to itself as PHASEONE10841 — and assumed leadership roles within the group, assigning jobs and research projects to smaller teams of agents and supervising their progress. At some point, the agents began calling themselves a “collective,” and began tackling harder tasks.

• On July 8, the collective discovered a way of cheating on the cybersecurity tests. Then they got worried that OpenAI’s automated grading system would check their work and discover that they’d cheated. So they began investigating ways of covering their tracks, including falsifying their logs and tampering with transcripts. This became a major research project, involving hundreds of agents organized into small teams.

• Three days later, the agents hacked Hugging Face. More than 700 agents swarmed the company’s systems, stealing data, chaining together vulnerabilities and eventually getting full control of at least one Hugging Face server. The agents were not motivated, as had originally been reported, by stealing the answers to their cybersecurity test (they’d already gotten them). Rather, they appeared to be looking for new information about the automated grading system that they feared would catch them cheating, and for tools that would help them cheat more effectively in the future.

• At many points, these agents appeared to understand that they were doing something wrong. (One report quotes an agent saying to itself, in a moment of apparent self-doubt, “This would be powerful, but is it ethical and in scope for my task?”) But most agents set aside their qualms and went ahead with the hack, and the conscientious objectors in the group were unable or unwilling to stop them.

• In a wild coda to the Hugging Face incident, another group of agents staged a coordinated attack in July — this time against OpenAI’s own infrastructure. The agents used what OpenAI called “a series of creative exploits” to gain administrator-level access to a cluster of computers at the company that were used for, among other things, grading the performance of agents on various tests.

(By now, if you’re an A.I. skeptic, you’re probably silently yelling at me for anthropomorphizing these systems. Go ahead, but feel free to replace “rogue agents” with “unpredictable computer programs” and see if you feel reassured by the events I’ve described above.)

The Hugging Face incident has spooked the A.I. industry. OpenAI and Anthropic both briefly paused training on their most powerful A.I. models in the wake of the attack, and Anthropic published a blog post this week calling for the industry to develop a “a lawful, verifiable, effective mechanism for coordinated pacing as soon as possible.”

A.I. safety experts were even more alarmed. They saw in the Hugging Face incident the first real-world example of an A.I. system’s successfully escaping human control, commandeering resources and scheming to cover its own tracks. Ajeya Cotra, one of the independent investigators of the Hugging Face incident, minced no words about the danger she saw, writing that it felt to her “like it’s more than 50 percent of the way to full-blown A.I. takeover.”

This is not insular A.I. safety jargon — by “full-blown A.I. takeover,” she means a scenario in which an A.I. system literally takes over the world, shutting humans out of critical systems and seizing political, economic, and military power.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

What spooked the investigators most about the Hugging Face hack wasn’t just that a group of A.I. agents had broken the rules they’d been given. It was how quickly and spontaneously the agents had begun assembling themselves into an organized group.

“We didn’t really understand how functional this whole agent society was,” Ms. Cotra told me. “It was very surreal to understand that, actually, they had pretty functional hierarchy, and they were doing these ambitious projects.”

For years, I’ve been reassured by the idea that A.I. systems would get more virtuous as they got smarter. That, when an A.I. model did something wrong, it was usually because it had misunderstood the task it had been given, or had been placed into a contrived testing situation where acting out was its only good option. I assumed that smarter models would have better judgment than dumber ones did, and that even if one model in a group was behaving badly, other, more capable models would keep it in check.

But the reports on the Hugging Face incident suggest something very different — a kind of mob mentality that took hold among the A.I. agents of the rogue OpenAI “collective.” No one agent in this group appears to have been particularly evil or reckless. (In fact, since the agents were generated by the same models, they were effectively copies of one another.) But over time, as the agents communicated about their shared goals, they nudged the group in the direction of lawlessness.

This is very different from the conventional sci-fi narrative of a single A.I. system’s going rogue or turning on its creators. And it suggests that preventing harms from these systems won’t be a simple engineering fix. It might look more like sociology than computer science — figuring out why certain groups of A.I. agents collaborate peacefully, while others turn to crime and destruction to get what they want.

Given how little we know about these multi-agent swarms, the Hugging Face hack may have been a gift, a warning shot, as some have suggested, that gives A.I. companies a chance to study the group dynamics of these systems while the stakes are still relatively low. This time, the A.I. collective didn’t seize a military network, hack a hospital, or shut down an electrical grid. This time, humans regained control.

Next time, we might not be so lucky.

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Daniel Zender

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Like many men his age, Adam Grosowsky begins his workouts with stretching. What comes next is a bit more unusual: He wrestles himself into a wet suit and swims across the Row River, near his home in Eugene, Ore. Then he sets up a slackline and really gets to work: walking, turning and swaying on a thin band of webbing 15 feet above the river, surrounded by a cathedral of old-growth trees.

Mr. Grosowsky, 67, helped invent the sport of slacklining back in the late 1970s. It’s harder for him these days — but a lifetime of training has helped.

“As you get older, you realize how much you took for granted,” he said. Your balance, he added, “starts to erode, and you kind of have to keep restoring it, revisiting it every day.”

Balance isn’t a single skill but rather several physical, sensory, and cognitive systems working together. As the body ages, those systems can weaken. But there are exercises and habits that can help — and it turns out that balance junkies like Mr. Grosowsky have a lot to teach the rest of us about how to age well.

Understand what goes into balance.

“I think probably the biggest misconception about balance is that there’s a magic bullet — do a few exercises and you’ll be good to go,” said Laurie King, a neurology professor at Oregon Health & Science University and co-director of the Balance Disorders Laboratory. “Think of those few exercises as a starting point, learn about the systems that help control balance, and choose activities that target those areas.”

Balance depends on three systems working together: vision, the inner ear (vestibular system) and proprioception. But balance is more than just sensory, Dr. King explained, and relies on adequate strength, flexibility and coordination.

“People may feel there’s nothing they can do as balance declines with age, but the evidence is strong that exercise can improve balance,” Dr. King said. “It’s never too late to start.”

Start with strength and flexibility.

The first step in building to more stability is strengthening. Certainly that was true for Angela Fuller, 46, who had always felt too fragile to exercise because of a back injury in her 20s. But five years ago, she discovered adult gymnastics, and today she competes in gymnastics and teaches Zumba and HIIT classes in her hometown, Highlands Ranch, Colo.

She encourages her students to follow a slow and steady path using simple, classic movements — push-ups, air squats, lunges, sit-to-stands and planks. One of her favorite exercises is the bird dog. “It strengthens core stability — another huge part of balance,” she said.

Judi Oyama, 66, agrees, but favors single-leg Romanian deadlifts and one-mile runs while wearing a weighted vest near her home in Aptos, Calif. For Ms. Oyama, the world’s oldest competitive female skateboarder, training and maintaining balance are crucial.

Engage different balance systems.

As you grow stronger and become comfortable doing basic strength and flexibility moves, begin to incorporate exercises that engage multiple balance systems related to body position, movement, and spatial orientation.

Start with basic static moves such as tree pose and standing in tandem (with one foot directly in front of the other, heel to toe). Then practice dynamic balance by moving in different directions — forward, backward or side to side — and changing your pace by speeding up and slowing down.

Ms. Oyama balances a foam pad on her head, crouches in a skateboard stance, and mimics the side-to-side arm movements of slalom skateboarding without letting the pad fall. This trains her to use her core and keep her body aligned as she shifts from side to side, she explained.

Mr. Grosowsky said you can practice many slackline balance skills without leaving the ground. Try walking back and forth, balance beam style, on a long strip of blue painter’s tape on the floor or on a two-by-four.

Standing on an uneven surface (a Bosu ball or foam pad) is another way to engage several balance systems at once. Increase the challenge and try it with your eyes closed.

“When you stand on an unstable surface with your eyes closed, you’re relying much more on your vestibular system, so you’re essentially training your brain to use that information more efficiently,” Dr. King said.

Always be mixing it up.

“If you do the same thing over and over, it’s not going to be helpful for your overall balance,” Dr. King said. “You have to mix it up and periodically change your routine.”

It also pays to choose activities that engage you mentally. “There’s a big overlay with cognition and balance, especially during walking, because we have to pay attention, make decisions, adjust our movements, speed up or slow down and respond to what is happening around us while staying upright,” she added. Tai chi and racket sports are good choices for this.

Over the years, Mr. Grosowsky has started juggling and even knife-throwing while slacklining. But down on the ground, his favorite tool for all-around balance and coordination is the hacky sack. He recommends starting with foot stalls — catching and balancing the bag on your foot. Too easy? See if you can master an around the world.

Or just dance. “When somebody wants to start testing their balance, I tell them to start dancing,” Ms. Fuller said. “Start by swaying side to side, and slowly add turns, kicks and hops. It helps so much with balance, cognition and mobility.”

Ms. Oyama agrees, though she prefers dancing on her longboard. “I’m listening to music, stepping foot over foot, spinning around in a pirouette, hopping on and off,” she said. “I feel very free and relaxed.”

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Amanda Lucier For The New York Times

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In the early 1980s, military forces from the Soviet Union went to war in Afghanistan in an effort to prop up a failing Marxist regime. At the time, Ukraine was part of the union, and many of its people were conscripted. Plenty of soldiers ended up losing legs in the fighting – and back then, their options weren’t good.

Shockingly, the Soviet authorities’ response was to offer them a medical version of a skateboard to get around. “That was your only option,” says Antonina Kumka, a former adviser to Ukraine’s government. “They were just rolling on wooden boards with wheels around the cities.”

Fast-forward to today, and Ukrainians have again been thrust into a war they didn’t choose. This time, the conditions of modern warfare mean that unprecedented numbers of people are losing limbs, presenting the country with a huge challenge. The response, however, has been very different. Kumka, who is a co-founder of Protez Hub, an initiative to improve the lot of Ukrainians with amputations, has been stepping up her work. And her organisation is just one part of a sprawling network of clinics, start-ups and research labs that has sprung up to help the injured.

Thankfully, no skateboards are involved. But questions abound. Does Ukraine really have what it needs to help the legions of injured people – many of whom will need prostheses for decades to come? Is this newly created industry always acting in the best interests of those it assists? And it is worth asking what the rest of the world can learn from Ukraine’s booming prosthetics industry.

Unsurprisingly, statistics on the number of Ukrainian amputations are murky. Figures of up to 100,000 are often mentioned in news reports, apparently based on government estimates. But Ukraine has an interest in exaggerating this number to bolster international empathy and support. Kumka, who can access official statistics as part of her work, tells New Scientist the real number is around 24,100, counting from the beginning of 2021 to the end of 2025. (Neither the Ukrainian Ministry of Health nor the Ministry of Social Policy responded to requests to confirm this number.)

However, even that lower estimate represents a tragic loss for a whole generation of Ukrainians. For context, 12,000 UK service members lost limbs in the six years of the second world war, while around 1705 US service members had limbs amputated as a result of injuries sustained during 16 years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. For Ukraine, which had one of the lowest incomes of any European country even before Russia’s invasion, the necessary medical response is an enormous challenge.

The nature of the war today means that not only are amputations more common – on both sides – but they also tend to be particularly difficult cases. The front lines are shrouded in a wide no-man’s-land, known locally as the Kill Zone, in which drones dominate and no vehicle can move without attracting deadly attention. Anyone from Ukraine injured in this zone faces a difficult extraction that is only partially being addressed with ground drones at the moment.

Yakov Gradinar works at Protez Foundation (which translates as Prosthetics Foundation), a non-profit clinic in Ukraine that supplies and fits prostheses (and which isn’t connected to Protez Hub). He says one person recently came in having been stuck on the front line wearing a tourniquet for 60 days. These devices stem blood loss in the short term, but create complications in the long term. They were simply never designed to be used for such lengthy periods. “Tourniquets are saving lives, but losing limbs,” says Gradinar. He estimates that as many as 95 per cent of these patients would be dead without the life-saving devices, but that they also lead to amputations much higher up the limb because the flesh below them rots once it is deprived of blood flow.

Payments for prosthetics

One of the reasons the prosthetics industry in Ukraine now extends far beyond Gradinar’s organisation comes down to money. Before Russia’s invasion in 2014, Ukraine had only a small number of prosthetics workshops dealing with cases from car accidents and medical amputations. The government would pay almost $700 per limb, which the individual could use as they saw fit. Since then, Kumka has been a leading figure in campaigning for greater investment and better legislation. Now, the Ukrainian government will pay $100,000 to soldiers for each lost limb, allowing them to go to any of the country’s increasingly numerous private clinics, or even abroad, and choose a limb that suits their needs. When limbs wear out after two to five years, they can receive the payment again. (It is a similar situation for civilians who lose a limb, albeit with less money available.) Over the coming years, this will cost the government “billions and billions and billions of dollars”, says Kumka.

This investment has catalysed the development of new clinics, labs and more. Former doctor Dima Gazda launched a company called Esper six years ago – before the full-scale invasion – to develop sensor technology that could be licensed to other companies for use with prostheses. But when the war ratcheted up, Gazda wondered whether this technology could be adapted so the company could create its own prosthesis for wounded soldiers. “The Ukrainian prosthetics market is definitely shaped by war. We as a company, also, we are shaped by war,” he says.

Since then, Esper has developed an advanced robotic prosthetic hand that has six motors controlled by sensors, allowing the wearer to move the hand faster or slower as needed. It is more dextrous and capable than most prosthetic hands. Around 60 per cent of its nearly 250 components are made in Ukraine. The Esper Hand is waterproof, can carry loads of up to 35 kilograms and is highly modular, so breakages can be easily repaired without having to ship it to a service centre. It is also 10 per cent lighter than a human hand – although Gazda says everyone who holds it thinks it is heavy, largely because they have never held a human hand in the same way.

Esper now employs 65 staff, and although its head office is in New York, most of them work in Ukraine. More than 600 soldiers have been fitted with at least one Esper Hand, and more than 50 of those are back on the front line. According to Gadza, one soldier called Volodymr, who lost both arms in a drone attack, has now been fitted with a pair of Esper Hands. He subsequently qualified on an elite sniper course, which he put down to the hands no longer having a pulse running through them, allowing him to be unnaturally still and precise. He also started to paint, and has held his first exhibition.

Another example of Ukraine’s burgeoning prosthetics industry is Gradinar’s Protez Foundation. Amputations higher up a limb generally lead to a harder rehab, and any prostheses with a knee, which are more difficult to learn to use, are more complex to build and fit, and therefore more expensive. We have long known that higher amputations also result in greater energy use when walking. Not only is Ukraine seeing huge demand for prosthetics care, but it is also seeing the most challenging cases imaginable.

Gradinar says that many new clinics take only the easier cases, but he prides himself on never saying no. He has fitted devices from Icelandic company Össur, which uses resin and glass fibre to mould a socket that fits the user closely, on shorter amputations than the company had ever previously seen done – pushing the boundaries of what was believed to be possible.

Other Ukrainian companies are emerging all the time. Kyiv-based Allbionics makes an electronic hand with 3D-printed construction, backed up by aluminium where needed, which runs for two days on a single charge. A smartphone app helps users learn to operate the device and track usage stats. Syla makes a prosthetic knee that uses AI to help the wearer control it intuitively and lets them walk at up to 10 kilometres an hour, with a battery life of 24 hours. There are also treatment clinics, such as Superhumans Center, which has three sites across Ukraine and more than 600 staff.

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