Bryan Walsh

On August 5, 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services canceled 22 mRNA vaccine projects worth roughly $500 million and told the country it would stop investing in the technology that had b...

The fake identities were the part that stopped me. In late July, according to a report published this week by Britain’s AI Security Institute (AISI), an Anthropic model called Claude Mythos 5 tried...

Let me start with the most local of local stories: the intersection down the street from my apartment in Brooklyn, where Columbia Street meets Summit Street. Since my family moved into the neighbor...

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a small pill called enlicitide. It is a tablet you swallow once a day on an empty stomach with a sip of black coffee, water, or tea. But i...

In 2019, the AI researcher Rich Sutton published a short essay called “The Bitter Lesson.” Seventy years of AI research, he argued, kept demonstrating the same thing: the most effective ways to tra...

Physicists have longed for a theory of everything, a single framework that would explain every force in the universe. After the better part of a century, they’re still looking. But social science, ...

Scientists have started calling it the “Godzilla El Niño.” The nickname comes from actual climate researchers, which should tell you something; they are not generally in the habit of comparing clim...

It’s been feeling very 1995 lately.  Oasis, whose last good song came out back when Macs were still see-through, was the second-biggest tour on the planet last year. Gen Z is snapping up the flip p...

America is a uniquely sick, unhealthy country — just ask Americans. We’re addicted to ultraprocessed food and succumb to deaths of despair. The current US health secretary, who insists we’ve been r...

As temperatures blew past 100°F in cities across Europe last week, it was difficult to tell what was generating more hot air: the weather or the discourse around the right way to endure it. On the ...

America in the summer of 1976 was not in a good place.  The president who presided over the country’s Bicentennial, President Gerald Ford, only had the job because the previous president and vice p...

In 1954, years after he led the project that created the atomic bomb, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was called to testify before the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The ostensible subject of the ...

Most major sporting events do not live up to their names — literally, at least. Major League Baseball’s World Series apparently envisions a world that only includes the US and Canada. The National ...

I turned 48 this week, which meant it was time for my annual physical. After the usual battery of questions from my doctor — How much did I drink? Was I exercising? How was I sleeping? — it was my ...

How do we know when the world has changed? On June 1, a team of scientists published a preprint scientific paper claiming they had edited human embryonic DNA with more precision than any previous a...

In a darkened convention hall in Chicago on May 31, a Harvard oncologist named Brian Wolpin stood at a podium and in a voice that sounded as if he was reading from the phone book, recited a set of ...

There are many ways to bomb a college commencement speech.  You can tell everyone you composed the talk while high on ayahuasca, like Chris Pan at Ohio State. You can deliver the entirety of your s...

You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the...

If there’s one thing Americans can agree on — beyond the fact we hate data centers and love Dolly Parton — it’s that we’re busier than ever, and it’s all too much. We don’t have time to socialize, ...

Should you be worried about the hantavirus outbreak? Should you be afraid? Should you be panicking? Should you start freaking out? If you’ve been following the coverage of the hantavirus outbreak a...