On Thursday, Senate Republicans released their discussion draft health care bill after weeks of secret meetings.
The bill, which was marketed as different from the health care legislation passed by the House in May, looks remarkably similar to its predecessor. It’s also complex and hard to understand.
For the less than fluent in health care policy, we’ve compiled a hand guide: everything you need know in one place. The big takeaways: The new bill will negatively affect key demographics, like Americans with substance use disorders, women, seniors and people with mental illness. It includes tax breaks for the rich and for businesses, eliminates the mandate requiring large employers to offer employees coverage, slashes the Medicaid budget, allows states to waive essential health benefits and defunds Planned Parenthood for one year.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Zombies and aliens may not be a realistic threat to our species. But there’s one stock movie villain we can’t be so sanguine about: sentient robots. If anything, their arrival is probably just a matter of time. But what will a world of conscious machines be like? Will there be a place in it for us?
Artificial intelligence research has been going through a recent revolution. AI systems can now outperform humans at playing chess and Go, recognizing faces, and driving safely. Even so, most researchers say truly conscious machines — ones that don’t just run programs but have feelings and are self-aware — are decades away. First, the reasoning goes, researchers have to build a generalized intelligence, a single machine with the above talents and the capacity to learn more. Only then will AI reach the level of sophistication needed for consciousness.
President Donald Trump signed a bill into law Friday designed to make it easier to fire Department of Veterans Affairs employees.
Trump promised during the campaign to dismiss VA workers “who let our veterans down.” He cast Friday’s signing at a White House ceremony as fulfillment of that promise.
While it plans to someday host a moon colony and space station, the proposed space-based nation Asgardia is starting small: The project will launch its first satellite this fall to store data for the nation’s newly selected citizens. Some 200,000 were chosen from the more than 500,000 applicants.
During a press conference in Hong Kong on June 13, Asgardia’s founder, Igor Ashurbeyli, revealed concrete details about the satellite: Asgardia-1 will be deployed from Orbital ATK’s Cygnus OA-8 resupply spacecraft launching in September.
The satellite is 10 x 20 x 20 centimeters (3.9 x 7.9 x 7.9 inches) and has eight batteries and four deployable solar arrays. It will orbit at up to 500 kilometers (310 miles) above Earth. Texas-based space-services firm NanoRacks acts as the satellite’s prime contractor and operator.
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Rocket at space station art | James Vaughan/Asgardia
The discovery of the gene-editing technology CRISPR came, in part, from Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s very profound,” she told NBC News. “It means that we can control human evolution now.”
With collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, Doudna was able to harness a curiosity in the DNA of certain bacteria and help turn CRISPR into the world’s most accessible gene-editing technology. The discovery is detailed in Doudna’s new book titled “A Crack in Creation.”
In the book, Doudna says that the days of costly, complicated processes to edit DNA are over. We’re now in an age of CRISPR, and it’s a profoundly simple technique. Doudna compares CRISPR to word-processing software that allows someone to correct a typo in a hefty document.
Mark Zuckerberg has spent the last dozen years making sure you know what your friends’ babies look like and what your high school friends think about politics.
And, of course, transforming media and politics by presenting news and opinion — true and fake — to billions of people around the world.
Now the Facebook CEO is acknowledging that connecting people online isn’t enough.
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“We used to have a sense that if we could just do those things, then that would make a lot of the things in the world better by themselves,” Zuckerberg told CNN Tech. “But now we realize that we need to do more too. It’s important to give people a voice, to get a diversity of opinions out there, but on top of that, you also need to do this work of building common ground so that way we can all move forward together.”
The United States and Iraq said ISIS blew up a historic mosque in Mosul that was the ideological heart of the terror group and the birthplace of its self-declared caliphate.
ISIS, through its news agency, said US warplanes were responsible for the loss late Wednesday of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri and its leaning minaret.
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US officials told CNN the ISIS claim was “1,000% false.”
raq Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said the ISIS act amounts to “an official announcement of their defeat.” His military commanders said militants blew the mosque up after troops closed in.
It sounds wild. But the idea that we live in a multiverse — a cosmos where an infinite number of universes exist beside our own — is no longer confined to science fiction. It’s a respectable theory among scientists, so much so that some are on the hunt for proof of a nearby universe.
Now, scientists might be one step closer. A study recently submitted to “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” actually places the multiverse theory on firmer ground. Ruari Mackenzie, a graduate student at England’s University of Durham, took a deeper look at a region in the sky that’s so frigid and so large that most scientists don’t think it can be a statistical fluke. Instead, some astronomers think this so-called “cold spot” is an optical illusion produced by a lack of intervening galaxies. But Mackenzie and his colleagues found that those galaxies are no less dense than anywhere else in the universe, disproving that theory.
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The belief that there might be an infinite number of universes is no longer confined to science fiction. | Victor De Schwanberg | Science Photo Library/Getty Images
For the first time ever, scientists have captured a single DNA molecule replicating on video — and it’s changing the way we think about the entire process. One of the most surprising findings is how much randomness characterizes the process.
“It’s a different way of thinking about replication that raises new questions,” Stephen Kowalczykowski, molecular genetics professor at University of California, Davis, said in a press release. “It’s a real paradigm shift, and undermines a great deal of what’s in the textbooks.”
The researchers watched replicating DNA from E. coli bacteria. The first step in the process always sees the double helix “unzipping” into two strands — a “leading strand” and a “lagging strand.” Each of these become a template for a new strand that is made to match it, leaving two complete DNA molecules when the process has reached the end. The researchers wanted to measure how fast the enzyme machinery moving along the different strands in opposite directions worked.
When a bullet pierces flesh, it ripples through the tissue in a chaotic fury. It will inevitably shred nerves, blood vessels and muscle. It might fracture bone. Deposit in an organ. Or zip out through another body part, leaving blood to ooze from the open pit.
Sometimes, the bullet carves a fatal path: About 36,000 Americans were killed by a firearm in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The majority of those deaths — almost two-thirds — were the result of suicide and involved mostly men 45 and older taking their own lives. Another third of deaths were linked to homicides, while the remaining sliver involved accidental shootings.
Most often, however, the bullet fails to kill: In 2015, nearly 85,000 people who were treated in emergency rooms survived. For those gunshot victims, their wounds were likely non-life-threatening — in either the legs or arms, National Institutes of Health data show. A smaller percentage of assaults or accidental shootings involved getting struck in the head or neck, with only about one-third of those victims surviving long enough to reach a hospital.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
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Sentient Robots
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Rocket at space station art 
Gene-Editing Breakthrough
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ISIS blew up famous Mosul mosque
The belief that there might be an infinite number of universes is no longer confined to science fiction.
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James' World 2 