World
Iran fired missiles at American allies in the Gulf this week after a US air strike hit a wedding party in southern Iran, the heaviest exchange between Washington and Tehran in months. US forces struck Iranian Revolutionary Guard targets, including air defense sites and radar, starting Tuesday. One strike hit a home in Kuhestak where families were celebrating a wedding; the Iranian Red Crescent said four people, including a child, were killed and more than 50 wounded. Iran said it targeted at least seven bases used by US forces across the Middle East and fired missiles at American bases in Jordan that were intercepted. The fighting comes six months into the Iran war, with the Strait of Hormuz shipping lane again at the center of the conflict.
AP News
Politics
The US Postal Service is rushing to build a computer system to screen mail-in ballots ahead of November's midterm elections, even as courts weigh challenges to the executive order behind it. A whistleblower told Congress the system is being built in about three months when it would normally take a year or more, and that a single scanning glitch could turn away entire batches of ballots. The system grew from President Donald Trump's March executive order, which requires states to give USPS lists of voters eligible to receive mail ballots. More than two dozen Democratic state attorneys general and voting rights groups have sued over the order. Senators called the project perilously rushed and potentially unlawful.
AP News
Business
US employers added 162,000 jobs in August, a much stronger gain than forecasters expected and a clear rebound after weak hiring in July, the Labor Department reported Friday. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.1 percent. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected only about 55,000 new jobs, and the government raised its counts for June and July by a combined 55,000. Hiring was concentrated in healthcare and hospitality, with factories and construction also adding workers. After the report, investors raised the odds of a September rate increase to about 60 percent. Many economists say next week's inflation report will matter more for the Federal Reserve's decision.
NPR
Technology
Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, one of the most used platforms for open-source AI, for $12.9 billion. Chief executive Jensen Huang announced the deal Wednesday, saying it will expand access to AI for developers worldwide. The purchase is Nvidia's second-largest on record, after it paid $20 billion for assets from chipmaker Groq in December. Hugging Face hosts thousands of open language models and datasets and was valued at $4.5 billion in 2023. The deal moves the world's largest AI chipmaker beyond hardware and deeper into the software layer of the industry, at a time when rival model builders such as OpenAI and Anthropic are working on their own chips.
CNBC
Science
Alzheimer's disease may leave marks on the brain more than seven years before the first signs appear on a standard amyloid PET scan, according to a study published in Nature Neuroscience. Researchers at the University of Oslo followed cognitively healthy older adults with repeated MRI scans for nearly two decades. They found structural brain changes at least seven years before high levels of amyloid plaques became visible on PET scans, which are currently treated as the earliest detectable sign of the disease. The authors say the finding represents the earliest brain-imaging signal linked to Alzheimer's detected to date, and it suggests the disease process starts earlier and involves more than plaque buildup.
ScienceDaily
Sports
The United States opened the FIBA Women's Basketball World Cup with a 94-61 win over China on Friday in Berlin. Caitlin Clark finished with 14 points and 11 assists for her first double-double with the senior national team at a World Cup, and Rhyne Howard led the scoring as the US built a 30-point lead. The Americans shot 45 percent from the field and forced 16 turnovers while committing eight. China played without Dallas Wings center Li Yueru, whose lost passport kept her from traveling to Berlin. The win starts the US bid for a fifth consecutive FIBA Women's World Cup gold medal.
ESPN
Health
Low levels of vitamin B12 and folate in fathers, as well as mothers, around the time of conception are linked to a higher risk of birth defects, a new study finds. Researchers led by Children's Hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai recruited couples planning pregnancy from 29 sites and published the results in Annals of Internal Medicine. Higher B12 before conception was tied to lower birth-defect risk for both parents: moderately high maternal levels were linked to 19 percent lower odds and high levels to 38 percent lower odds. Of more than 400 defects recorded, more than half affected the heart. The findings suggest the protective role of these vitamins reaches beyond neural tube defects.
Medscape
Environment
Children born in New York City scored higher on early thinking and learning tests as the air their mothers breathed during pregnancy became cleaner, according to a 20-year study from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, published in the journal Environmental Health. Researchers followed more than 1,000 mother-child pairs in Northern Manhattan and the South Bronx from 1998 to 2020, tracking exposure to fine particles, nitrogen dioxide and other pollutants across three groups of participants. As pollution declined after the city adopted clean-air and climate policies, children's cognitive development scores at ages 1, 2 and 3 climbed. The team calls it the first study to link cleaner air policy with improved early brain development.
Columbia Mailman