Founded during the US Civil War to provide advice to the government, the National Academies of Science have become one of the most prestigious scientific organizations. Its primary function is to prepare comprehensive reports on scientific and technological issues, aided by its ability to attract top talent from across the country.

Those reports have not been afraid to weigh in on matters of public controversy and risk offending powerful groups, which it has managed to do without losing the respect of the governmental organizations that fund these reports. But this year, there have been increasing signs that the Academies' ability to dodge political firestorms has reached its limit. Yesterday, a deeply reported story from Politico explained the breakdown between the National Academies and Republican politicians.

The National Academies is preparing an expert report on attribution of weather events to human-driven climate change, and fossil fuel companies are worried it will lead to findings of liability in the many cases where those companies are being sued.

A fight over climate

In public, the National Academies has been very circumspect in its approach to the overt hostility toward science displayed by the Trump administration. The organization's president, Marcia McNutt, almost completely ignored the attacks in her annual "state of the science" address last year, and repeated that approach in this year's. But that hasn't helped the organization stay out of Republican crosshairs.

The problem, apparently, was projects that were started during previous administrations. One of these was the production of the fourth edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. This was prepared for the Federal Judicial Center to help judges determine how to handle scientific issues that come before the courts.

The fourth edition was the first to contain a chapter on climate change, but a group of Republican state attorneys general had issues with it. The chapter included information from people who had been involved in litigation over climate damages; rather than seeing that as a sign of expertise, the AGs viewed it as a form of bias. Also an issue: the chapter treated human-driven climate change as established science (which it is), which was termed a failure to be impartial.

The state attorneys general demanded that the Federal Judicial Center pull the chapter, and it immediately caved. But the National Academies had already placed the original, intact report on its website. When the state attorneys general demanded that it follow the Judicial Center's lead, it declined.

At that point, Republicans in Congress stepped in. A group of 11 representatives sent a letter to the head of the Office of Management and Budget in which they "respectfully urged" the office's director to "investigate whether NASEM should be suspended or debarred from all
federal funding under your jurisdiction." Again, the issue is that they feel there should be some sort of affirmative action for the views of people who refuse to accept the evidence for human-driven climate change: "Most shocking is that there was no fully independent, meaningful peer review from scientists with differing views on climate science."

Similarly, members of Congress threatened to investigate the National Academies when it organized an updated climate report at the same time as the Department of Energy had brought together a group of fringe contrarians to produce something that said that all those carbon emissions are probably fine.

The fight over attribution

Why is there so much fuss about scientific advice to judges? The Politico piece puts it into context and suggests that things are likely to get worse.

The issue is one of attribution: Can we detect the cause of climate change in individual weather events? A few decades ago, that simply wasn't possible. But researchers have since developed tools that allow them to determine the probability that different events would occur with and without the influence of our greenhouse gas emissions. And so it has become clear that some of the most extreme events simply wouldn't have occurred without the warming we've driven.

That clarity has allowed other researchers to tie the financial damages from catastrophic weather events to the influence of fossil fuels produced by individual companies. If those studies are widely accepted as valid scientific work, then judges will be compelled to admit them as evidence in any lawsuits against said companies.

There have been a number of lawsuits filed against fossil fuel companies, but most have not succeeded because judges have decided that they impinged on policies that needed to be set on the federal level. But things like economic damages have long been considered the domain of the courts, and a direct connection between business practices and damage caused by a storm may be a harder accusation to dodge.

Those instances are where the National Academies come in again, as a committee it formed during the Biden administration is in the process of evaluating the scientific standing of attribution studies. The oil companies are concerned enough that, as the Politico article details, they've hired third parties to file for access to the emails of committee members who work at public universities.

All of which suggests that the fight over this report is going to get intense, and both the credibility and funding of the National Academies is likely to come under sustained assault, which may permanently damage science-based policy in the US. And that would provide yet another demonstration that, when even basic facts can become politicized, trying to avoid becoming a target by saying "we're just focused on the science" will not be a successful strategy.

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It's clear that communities now have an effective playbook to block data center construction. This week, researchers flagged the first quarter of 2026 as producing the "most blocked and delayed data center projects on record," NBC News reported.

Data Center Watch, a project from AI intelligence firm 10a Labs that tracks data center fights around the US, reported that protestors "blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide worth about $130 billion from January through March," NBC News reported.

That's "the most in a three-month period since the group began tracking in 2023," and it shouldn't be parsed as "a cyclical spike," the researchers said. Instead, there's been a "structural shift," as "communities have internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states," researchers said.

The political momentum behind data center protests is expected to influence the upcoming midterm elections, with both parties increasingly sympathizing with resistance as opposition intensifies.

Sociologist's unique take on data center opposition

Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has been spending time with organizers in North Carolina to better understand the playbook that's fueling this momentum. In an op-ed for the New York Times encouraging Democrats to make data centers a key campaign issue, she noted that she "wasn’t sold on data center resistance as a political possibility," but "time on the ground changed my mind."

Not only are people crossing political divides to oppose local construction projects, but also people "are passionate enough to attend political education sessions about water rights, land use, and thermodynamics," McMillan Cottom wrote. As she explained, people aren't just educating themselves to keep noisy factories from driving up utility costs, threatening public health, or wasting local resources; some people are, for the first time, experiencing what it's like to work with their neighbors to overcome adversity through political will:

"I have been watching this new groundswell of dissent firsthand in community meetings, organizing sessions and civic trainings here in North Carolina. The resistance has lifelong joiners, alumni from environmental and housing movements and young organizers. There are also a lot of people who have never dreamed of being disagreeable in public, much less considered joining a raucous social movement. The imminent risk of living next to a data center may be why they show up for a meeting, but they’re committing to the issue for bigger, deeper reasons. Political corruption and corporate malfeasance make them feel politically impotent. Voicing their objections, sharing their anxieties with others, recalling politicians who override them and in some cases beating the opposition is giving them something few politicians are offering—a taste of political power."

Although it may be hard for Democrats to craft a national message that capitalizes on anti-data-center sentiment, McMillan Cottom suggested that, if they could, it would be the "greatest untapped opportunity" to win more elections.

Data Center Watch noted that the record of $130 billion data centers blocked or delayed in early 2026 was close to matching the value of the total number they recorded for all of 2025, about $156 billion. The researchers suggested that the back half of 2025 marked a "turning point, as data center opposition emerged as a national-level narrative" that showed the AI industry can no longer see the fights as individual zoning disputes. It "is now reshaping elections, regulation, and site viability nationwide," Data Center Watch reported last year.

For officials hoping to quickly build data centers to propel America's AI ambitions, facing the mounting opposition as the playbook has come together has been tough, NBC News reported. Where before, officials were criticized for quietly signing deals without discussing construction with nearby residents, now they're encountering backlash before any deal is in the books, Data Center Watch found.

"In some cases," researchers reported, "opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed, the mere rumor of a data center was enough to trigger organized resistance."

AI industry struggles to counter narrative

AI firms and data center developers, as well as officials who hope to benefit from striking deals, are beginning to counter the data center hate as best they can.

Most recently, OpenAI released a report claiming that China was trying to influence the US data center debate by using ChatGPT. OpenAI quickly banned the bad actors, they reported, who were creating comics and memes to post on X, as well as generating social media comments, supposedly in the hopes of swaying US sentiment.

There has also been a push to paint public dissent as "naïve," McMillan Cottom noted, "or, worse, un-American."

Proponents of data centers argue that debates over electricity price hikes or water resources are misinformed. In a recent Atlantic piece claiming "the data-center panic is overblown," it's emphasized that only drought-stricken locations or areas with strained grids need to worry about those concerns. And economists suggested that communities risk overlooking little-discussed long-term benefits, like employment gains that "are likely to grow as new data centers attract businesses that use AI."

In Loudon County, Virginia, The Atlantic noted, 53 million square feet of data centers have been constructed over the past 20 years. Although data centers account for only about 3 percent of the county’s land area, they generate "almost half of its property-tax revenue—a projected $1.3 billion in 2026," The Atlantic reported. Although some data center projects were removed from residential zones due to noise complaints, communities have largely benefited from letting data centers in, with lower tax rates and more affordable housing.

This week, Meta claimed a similar data center PR win in Louisiana. One of the tech giant's data center projects more than doubled Richland Parish's sales and use tax, leading some teachers to get $50,000 bonuses, due to an ordinance that "lets the school board collect a 1 percent sales tax to fund teacher bonuses," The Wall Street Journal reported. Scott Franklin, a director of the parish’s chamber of commerce and a farmer who sold the land to Meta for the data center, told WSJ that "anybody that complains about teachers getting a $50,000 check, they just instantly lose all credibility with me."

But The Atlantic story seems to gloss over one of the biggest complaints that locals have about data centers: a lack of comprehensive environmental reviews. Mostly, communities simply don't want local officials to take the kind of shortcuts to expedite data center approvals that Donald Trump and other Republicans have called for.

In Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker is pushing lawmakers to develop a legislative framework for responsible data center development in the state with proper environmental reviews at its center. And other cities, counties, and states are pivoting to get residents more information as deals are increasingly obstructed by residents loudly vocalizing opposition. Most recently, a data center developer in Utah vowed to handle all communications himself to make his construction project more transparent, after backlash reduced the total approved land area for the site by 50 percent.

Dems slow to embrace data center resistance

McMillan Cottom suggested that no public officials on the right or the left have perfected their messaging to align with anti-data center sentiments. It may be money standing in the Democrats' way of fully embracing the data center resistance, she suggested, as many AI firms are donating hundreds of millions to campaigns to sway elections.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren's plans to tax AI firms to force more transparency are "wonky," she said. And Sen. Bernie Sanders' call for Americans to profit off AI—which Trump, to some degree, agrees on—depends on creating a wealth fund that at least one critic warned "would enshrine the tech sector’s as-yet-unproven claims of its importance."

Perhaps Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has come closest to plugging into the nationwide rage. After joining Sanders in calling for a nationwide data center moratorium in March, she used jars she claimed were filled with dirty data center water to press the Environmental Protection Agency over its alleged failures to investigate a Meta project in Georgia.

Meta has denied that its Georgia data center is polluting waters. But analysts think that Ocasio-Cortez's instinct to use the jars to symbolize data center opposition seems more likely to strike a nerve and drum up support than even the most genuine pushes to regulate or tax data centers, so long as the long-term harms of construction remain unknown and the risks of AI remain abstract.

The Atlantic's piece concluded that the "reasons for resisting data centers may ultimately have less to do with the tangible costs than the symbolic ones."

Along similar lines, McMillan Cottom suggested that "the voters showing up to fight data centers demonstrate that a lot of us want something different." And what many politicians and AI fans see as a sea of unsubstantiated backlash is actually "the righteous rage driving millions of Americans to look up from their enemy and finally see, instead, a neighbor and future worth fighting for," she wrote.

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Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a long, enraged social media response to a New York Times article reporting that health department insiders think Kennedy is disengaged from the work of his sprawling agency. His response, however, seems to back the Times' claim.

The report, published Sunday, June 7, relied on accounts from a dozen people who have had direct contact with Kennedy during his time as health secretary. Collectively, the sources indicate that Kennedy has little interest in the details of the health department's work and little direct interaction with career staff. Kennedy misses critical, regularly scheduled meetings with agency leaders, is sometimes "checked out" in the meetings he attends, and has been out of the loop on key decisions, such as the firing of Tracy Beth Høeg, a political appointee elevated to top drug regulator at the Food and Drug Administration. In his stead, Kennedy often refers people to his protective, longtime assistant, Stefanie Spear, who colleagues say has slowed department operations and fueled some significant leadership departures.

On Wednesday night, Kennedy responded to the report with an 871-word diatribe on social media against the reporter, veteran journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and the Times. His key argument was that much of the story could be refuted by a look at his jam-packed public calendar.

"All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar," he wrote in his opening paragraph. At another point, he elaborated, writing "Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff..."

The problem with Kennedy's argument is that he does not have a publicly available calendar. This journalist is not aware of any such calendar. On Thursday, journalists at Stat News reported that Kennedy's public calendar was news to them, too. Over the past year, they have requested his calendar multiple times through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) press office and by filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

"Unwilling to talk to you"

"None of STAT’s FOIA requests have been completed, and some haven’t been acknowledged—despite HHS policy requiring a response with tracking and contact information within 10 days of submitting a request," the journalists wrote. "That includes three STAT inquiries from September 2025. The web page previously used to track requests has been taken down."

The outlet noted that it's not just journalists who are not able to get information from HHS; requests from citizens and lawmakers have also gone unanswered, though a leader of Kennedy's anti-vaccine group, Children's Health Defense, reportedly is getting his FOIA requests fulfilled, Stat noted.

Ars Technica has reached out to the HHS press office for comment as well as a link to the publicly available calendar. There was no immediate response. Stat reported that HHS did not respond to their comment requests in light of Kennedy's post.

That Kennedy seems to be under the false impression that his calendar is public adds to the argument that he is not in touch with the workings of his agency, backing the Times' report that Kennedy is disengaged.

Kennedy's unfamiliarity with his calendar's accessibility and the lack of information from HHS are also particularly striking, given that Kennedy came into the position touting plans for "radical transparency." In April 2025, he told reporters: "We’re restoring all the FOIA offices, and we’re going to make it much easier for people to get the information. We’re going to post as much as we can."

But Kennedy's social media outburst on Wednesday further made clear that Kennedy is not committed to transparency as health secretary. In it, he acknowledged that the HHS is withholding information from select journalists, in other words, blacklisting them.

"[S]ince we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important," Kennedy wrote of the Times. "The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention."

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In the documentation for best practices for implementing process and thread-related callback functions, it calls out

• Keep routines short and simple.
• Don’t make calls into a user mode service to validate the process, thread, or image.
• Don’t make registry calls.
• Don’t make blocking and/or Interprocess Communication (IPC) function calls.
• Don’t synchronize with other threads because it can lead to reentrancy deadlocks.

So far so good. It seems that these callback functions need to operate quickly and cannot block. These are callbacks that are invoked when a process starts or exits, when a thread starts or exits, when a DLL or EXE is loaded or unloaded, and various other low-level events.

The various prohibitions above suggest that these callouts are called during the process creation/termination sequence, so if you take a long time to deal with them, you are slowing down the entire system. And the rather extreme requirements, like “Don’t make registry calls,” suggest that they might even be called while the system holds internal locks.

The list of best practices continues:

• Use System Worker Threads to queue work especially work involving:
  • Slow APIs or APIs that call into other process.
  • Any blocking behavior that could interrupt threads in core services.

Okay, so this is providing a suggestion on how you can offload expensive work to code running outside the callback. This once again highlights that the callback itself needs to be fast with minimal blocking.

My colleagues in enterprise support often run into cases where the reason for a system hang is a driver violating the rule that these callbacks must return quickly. For example, a common anti-pattern is a driver whose callback starts by following the guidance above to queue work to a System Worker Thread, but then they block until the work item completes.

This is a case of following the rules without understanding why the rules are there.

The rule is that the callback needs to be fast and return quickly. The driver followed the letter of the law by delegating the work to a System Worker Thread, and there’s no rule that says “Don’t wait for work items”, so they must have figured that this gave them a loophole for executing synchronous long-running work.

But the rules “Don’t make blocking and/or Interprocess Communication (IPC) function calls” and “Don’t synchronize with other threads because it can lead to reentrancy deadlocks” make it clear that you shouldn’t be blocking in your callback for extended periods of time. The “Don’t”s are just calling out some common ways that your callback can block.

And it looks like the documentation was updated in 2020 to call out this specific case:

• If you use System Worker Threads, don’t wait on the work to complete. Doing so defeats the purpose of queuing the work to be completed asynchronously.

One could argue that this rule is already covered by the “Don’t synchronize with other threads” rule, but I guess the driver vendor interpreted it as “But I’m not synchronizing with another thread. I’m synchronizing on an event!” But of course, the event is set by another thread, so you are effectively synchronizing with another thread.

My colleague in enterprise support describes this as the “It wasn’t me, it was my brother” excuse. You are told by your parents not to turn on the television set, so you tell your brother to do it. Technically, you didn’t turn the television set on, but in effect, you did because your brother is acting under your instructions. (This is why contracts often contain wording like “may not disclose or cause to be disclosed,” so that you can’t say “No, I totally didn’t disclose it. I gave the information to Bob, and it was Bob who disclosed it!”)

The documentation should open with something like this:

The callback function must perform its work quickly without blocking. If you need to do complex work or synchronize with other threads or processes, do the work asynchronously, such as by using System Worker Threads.

And then it can give a list of examples of things that count as blocking.

Some examples of blocking that is not allowed from the callback function:

And then it can follow up with additional constraints.

Furthermore, the callback function may not perform any of the following operations:

The post Understanding the rationale behind a rule when trying to circumvent it appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Nearly a month into the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, cases continue to rise as officials are still trailing the virus in their response efforts.

As of Thursday, June 11, the DRC has reported 676 confirmed cases, 136 deaths, and 119 suspected cases. Uganda is reporting 19 confirmed cases and two deaths.

The outbreak, caused by the Bundibugyo strain of Ebolavirus, is already the third largest Ebola outbreak on record. But health experts fear that it could grow much larger and had been quietly spreading for months before the outbreak was declared on May 15.

Reuters reported Thursday that investigators with the DRC health ministry are working backward to find the first case—patient zero—and have identified what may have been an early superspreader event on February 4. They zeroed in on the funeral of a 44-year-old pastor in the remote gold-mining town of Mongbwalu.

The pastor was said to have died of a severe abdominal infection, which could have been a manifestation of Ebola. But he was never tested for the virus. More than 80 people attended his funeral, and many relatives and community members fell ill in the following days. Within two weeks of burial, nearly 50 deaths were recorded in the town, and many of those had reported symptoms that could have been from Ebola, including fever, vomiting, and bleeding.

As the scope of the outbreak is still coming into view, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released modeling of how it could unfold. The key finding was that if public health interventions aren't implemented swiftly and strongly—with contact tracing and case isolation—then the outbreak could rival or exceed the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded. That's the 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak, which totaled over 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths.

In one of the CDC modeling's worst-case scenarios, in which only 20 percent of Ebola cases are isolated, most simulations projected more than 20,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths within just three months.

"Utterly disgusted"

With the US withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) dismantled, American contributions to the response effort have been weaker and slower than in past outbreaks, diminishing the overall response.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration's isolationist strategy involving travel restrictions and border closures has raised tensions in other countries. The administration is planning to prevent even US citizens from returning to the States if they have been exposed or infected with the virus. Instead, the US is trying to stand up a makeshift quarantine facility at a military base in Kenya, a country currently unaffected by the outbreak.

The plans have sparked outrage and violent protests among Kenyans. According to reporting by The New York Times, protesters accuse Kenyan officials of bowing to Trump at the expense of allowing a deadly virus into the country, accepting Americans that America itself refuses to take in.

"We are utterly disgusted by the government’s apparent willingness to trade national biosecurity and the lives of its citizens for foreign aid," the Kenya Medical Practitioners Pharmacists and Dentists Union said in a statement.

The Times reports that hundreds of people have gathered for protests in Nanyuki, the town closest to the air base. At least three protesters have been shot and killed in conflicts with police, according to the Kenya Human Rights Commission.

Although a Kenyan court had temporarily suspended the quarantine facility from opening, the Trump administration continues to move forward with the plans.

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Two recent studies argue that smartphones may have contributed to falling birthrates by reducing in-person social interaction, sexual frequency, and other conditions tied to unintended pregnancies. "One of the studies published in May is called 'The Collapse of Teen Fertility in the Digital Era' and the other, published just Monday, is titled 'Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T's 2007-2011 Carrier Monopoly,'" reports KTLA. "Both were chronicled in a New York Times piece by political writer Sabrina Tavernise on Monday." Slashdot reader sabbede submitted the story. From the report: The one from May, authored by two University of Cincinnati professors, posits that teen fertility "collapsed globally" starting around 2007 -- the same year the first iPhone was released. "Smart phones changed how teens spend time with each other ... this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility," the study's abstract reads. "Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur." The study claimed that countries "across the income and policy spectrum" were affected by the teen fertility drop, and that researchers used data from multiple countries, including the U.S., England and Wales, to rule out "country-specific contraceptive access and welfare reform stories." "This model predicts that the shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium affects multiple aspects of teen behavior," the abstract continues, concluding that "the same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides." The study published on Monday looks more closely at the United States, explaining that nationwide general fertility rates have fallen 22% since 2007. "[This is] a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors," the National Bureau of Economic Researchers study states. "We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone." As mentioned before, the first iPhone was rolled out in 2007, and this study makes use of that timeframe as "a natural experiment" by using data from 2007 through 2011, when iPhones were only sold on AT&T. "From June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T's mobile broadband coverage," the study says. "Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5-8.0% at ages 15-19 and 3.2-6.6% at ages 20-24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint's pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women." "Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33-52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44," researchers continued. "National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use and reducing sexual frequency."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.