Carrie Pallardy, Contributing ReporterApril 3, 20256 Min ReadIngram Publishing via Alamy Stock PhotoThe potential impact of the breach of Oracle Healths Cerner Legacy servers has CISOs and CIOs from the health care arena planning how to respond.The health IT company has not publicly acknowledged the breach but it has been communicating with impacted customers, BleepingComputer reports. The company is also dealing with another incident involving its cloud servers.With patient data at risk, what should health care CIOs and CISOs think about these breaches and the ever-present cloud of third-party risk?Legacy System BreachesOracle did not respond to InformationWeeks request for comment on the Oracle Health breach. Thus far, the company is remaining tight-lipped about both breaches. This lack of transparency is engendering significant criticism.Hackers gained access to legacy Cerner servers with data that had not yet been moved to Oracles cloud storage, Reuters reports. Some health care customers were notified in January.The scope of the breach is not yet clear. As of April 3, the breach impacting Oracles health care customers has not been posted on the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) breach portal.Oracle acquired the electronic health records company Cerner back in 2022. As of January 2024, Oracle Cerner had a 21.7% share of the inpatient hospital EHR market, second only to Epic, according to Definitive Healthcare.Related:That's a significant amount of potentially impacted clients, says Scott Mattila, CISO and COO of Intraprise Health, a health care compliance and cybersecurity company.Already, there are reports of hospitals being extorted by a threat actor using the name Andrew, according to BleepingComputer. The actor is threatening to leak data if hospitals do not cough up millions in cryptocurrency.Scott MattilaThe second incident, involving Oracle Clouds federated SSO login servers, involves the alleged theft of 6 million records, BleepingComputer reports. The company initially denied the breach despite analysis from security researchers. It has since acknowledged the breach, informing some of its customers that old client credentials had been stolen from a legacy environment, Bloomberg reports.Legacy system risk is not new in the health care industry. It is typical for data migration, like the moving of data from old Cerner servers to Oracles cloud, to be a slow process, according to Mattila.We anticipate that with any type of data migration. You've got some clients that are obviously really small, and they're going to be easy because it's very linear, Mattila says. But then you're going to have these more complex organizations that are not going to be moving off of that on-prem infrastructure, and it's taking them time.Related:Those legacy systems represent a juicy target for threat actors looking for valuable data with a lower barrier to entry.A lot of these older legacy systems, they just get sort of stuffed in the corner a bit and get forgotten about as most of our energy is focusing on building the latest and greatest and the new thing, Jim Ducharme, CTO of ClearDATA, a multi-cloud security company for the health care industry, tells InformationWeek.Taking ActionSifting through the details of the two incidents and the limited information being shared is likely frustrating for potentially impacted organizations.The longer we wait and the less information we share as a community -- good, bad or indifferent -- is putting further harm and risk to even of the most critical organizations that are already running on thin margins and overly stressed teams, says Mattila.It is time for health care CIOs and CISOs that work with Oracle Health to break out their incident response plans.Has Oracle sent a notification to your organization? Are there any signs of data exfiltration or suspicious movement in your network?Related:Especially if you're going to do something that disrupts production in your organization, youve got to have a good reason to do it, Devin Shirley, CISO for Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield, points out. So, you really need to dig in and [get] as much information you can.Devin ShirleyAccess management is essential. Look for identities that you dont recognize. Reset passwords and credentials. How many passwords need to be reset likely depends on how embedded an organization is with Oracle, according to Shirley. It may just be a small team, or it may be hundreds of people. An organization may need to rollout password resets in phases.There's a way to appropriately balance, and I think that's where the CISO and CEO can come to terms and agree on: How do we make sure we're not impacted by this, but how do we also keep people working and productive? says Shirley.Following any incident, security teams need to maintain continuous monitoring to ensure threat actors do not have any lingering access.Continue to monitor and stay as close to what's going on, Mattila recommends. I would at least anticipate that my security team would be giving me a daily update on any progress that's being made, anything that was identified, that we're addressing accordingly any risks or potential suspicious activity that has transpired over the course of the last 60 to even 90 days.The ongoing Oracle incident is a reminder for all health care leaders to think about their enterprises reliance on legacy systems. Upgrading this technology is often an expensive, multi-year project, and not every organization can afford to shoulder that right now. But that doesnt mean that risk should go unexamined.If you've got some really legacy infrastructure out there you may not be able to upgrade it immediately -- these may be big, longer term projects -- but you better think about compensating controls to keep it secure, says Ducharme.Third-Party Risk, AgainLast year, the health care industry was rocked by the ransomware attack on Change Healthcare. While that incident was an abject lesson in third-party risk, the industry is still learning.I can tell you that despite Change Healthcare, despite the Anthem breach before that, we still see the same patterns of attack that took down Anthem [and] that took down Change prevalent today in some of the largest health care organizations in the country, says Ducharme.A lack of multi-factor authentication on critical systems facilitated the attack on Change Healthcare, and the 2015 Anthem breach involved stolen login credentials.The two biggest ways that we see attackers trying to infiltrate these health care organizations: one is identity theft and two is infrastructure compromise on older systems, Ducharme stresses.Health care systems are so complex that it can be difficult to identify and mitigate all of the potential risks. There are so many broken windows in health care organizations that make them susceptible to breach, that sometimes it's tough to know which window to fix first, Ducharme explains.Despite the knowledge that these risks do exist, with the potential for devastating consequences, health care organizations may not be prioritizing their security posture.Were in a downturned economy. The natural instinct is to start cuttingeverything. And I think that's where CIOs, CISOs, CEOs, CFOs really have to think and look at things through a risk lens. Yes, we can cut any and everything: technology, security, but what's the risk potential? asks Shirley. You save $1 million or $2 million now and then you get breached six months later. Now, you might be paying out $200 million in class action lawsuits. Was it worth it?Third-party risk isnt going anywhere. What does that mean for the health care industry?We're going to [need] demonstrable change in the industry. There has to be. It is no longer acceptable to consider these types of events as business as usual, says Mattila.About the AuthorCarrie PallardyContributing ReporterCarrie Pallardy is a freelance writer and editor living in Chicago. She writes and edits in a variety of industries including cybersecurity, healthcare, and personal finance.See more from Carrie PallardyWebinarsMore WebinarsReportsMore ReportsNever Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.SIGN-UPYou May Also Like

A female bonobo at Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the CongoLukas Bierhoff, Kokolopori Bonobo Research ProjectBonobos combine their calls in a complex way that forms distinct phrases, a sign that this type of syntax is more evolutionarily ancient than previously thought.Human language, often described as the hallmark of our species, is made up of many different building blocks. One core block is syntax, where meaningful units are combined into longer sequences, like words into sentences. This is made possible through compositionality, where the meaning of the whole is derived from the meaning of the parts. AdvertisementCompositionality in itself isnt unique to humans. For example, chimpanzees combine calls to warn others of snakes. But, so far, only trivial compositionality has been identified in non-human animals, whereby each unit adds independently to the meaning of the whole. For example, the phrase blonde dancer has two independent units: a blonde person who is also a dancer. Humans were thought to be unique in also having non-trivial compositionality, where the words in a combination means something different to what they mean individually. For example, the phrase bad dancer doesnt mean a bad person who also dances.The issue was that biologists didnt have the tools to assign a clear meaning to animal vocalisations, says Mlissa Berthet at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, so they couldnt be certain if a combination was trivial or non-trivial.Berthet and her colleagues spent years learning and tweaking methods from linguistics to try to find unambiguous evidence of non-trivial compositionality in our closest living relatives. This first involved spending five months following 30 adult bonobos in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, recording almost 1000 instances when a bonobo called out. Of these utterances, roughly half were combinations where at least two different call types were paired together in quick succession.Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month.Sign up to newsletterIn a new step, the researchers noted everything that was happening at the time of the call and in the minutes after. They recorded over 300 of these observations, including what the caller was doing at the time, what was happening in the environment and the behaviour of the caller and audience after the vocalisation.To reveal the meaning of each call, they used a technique from linguistics to create a cloud of utterance types, placing vocalisations that occurred in similar circumstances closer together. We kind of established this dictionary, says Berthlet. We have one vocalisation and one meaning.Once they had this semantic cloud, they could see whether the individual calls in a combination had distinct meanings, and found that the combinations were close to the units that they were made of, which would suggest compositionality. Using this approach, they identified four compositional calls, of which three were clearly non-trivial, with their meanings not directly overlapping with their constituent parts. For example, high-hoot + low-hoot combines the calls that seem to mean pay attention to me and I am excited to say pay attention to me because I am in distress, which bonobos often used to call for support when another individual was intimidating them.Almost all of the bonobos chatter was about coordinating the group, says Berthlet. Team member Martin Surbeck at Harvard University thinks this is because bonobos have a fission-fusion group dynamic, where smaller breakaway groups can do their own thing.Its the first time in any animal species that there is an unambiguous evidence for non-trivial syntax, non-trivial compositionality, and so that changes the game, says Mal Leroux at the University of Rennes in France. Its revolutionary. Its the cornerstone for the next decade of comparative linguistics, basically, and evolutionary linguistics.This finding doesnt mean that bonobos have language, though, because language is the human communication system, says Berthet. But were showing that they have a very complex communication system that shares parallels with human language.Now we have evidence that both chimps and bonobos have syntax, it is inevitable that this capacity for compositionality was inherited from our last common ancestor, says Leroux. They just showed, unambiguously, that this core building block is evolutionary ancient and at least 7 million years old, and maybe even older.Journal reference:Science DOI: 10.1126/science.adv1170 Topics:animals

A mammoth skeleton at the State Museum for Natural History in Stuttgart, GermanyDANIEL NAUPOLD/dpa/AlamyArchaeologists excavating 400,000-year-old rock in western Ukraine have uncovered fragments of what could be the oldest human-made ivory objects ever found. These artefacts would have been too soft to use as cutting tools, but they could have been used as teaching aids, the researchers suggest.If the interpretations are correct, they add to an apparently increasing appreciation of the intelligence of pre-modern humans, says Gary Haynes at the University of Nevada.

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta could see its ad business come under pressure due to Trump's tariffs. Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images 2025-04-03T21:07:01Z SaveSaved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.Have an account? Trump's new tariffs could hurt Amazon and Meta due to their reliance on Chinese advertisers.Advertisers are expected to take refuge in performance advertising and TV sports.Analysts laid out scenarios for how ad and media companies could be affected.Amazon and Meta could be big losers from President Donald Trump's new tariffs, ad industry analysts and insiders said.Trump announced a baseline 10% tariff on products coming from all countries outside the US, but the tax is higher for certain ones. Those include China, which effectively faces a 54% tariff. Tech stocks fell sharply on the news.Amazon and Meta get a lot of business from Chinese advertisers that are trying to reach American shoppers, and they could pause advertising or lose business."Retail media and digital media will be significantly impacted by these tariffs, especially because products shipped from China and Vietnam are meaningful to Meta and Amazon," Brian Wieser, a veteran advertising analyst, wrote in a note.He estimated around $10 billion of Meta's US revenue comes from advertisers outside of US, mostly from China, and cited research showing China represents half of Amazon's top sellers on its marketplace in the US, which is likely its biggest ad driver.Eric Haggstrom, director of market intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions, said the most immediate impact would be on quick-turn products like apparel and home goods."The biggest losers you're going to see right now are companies based on Chinese-based advertising: social media and retail media," he said.Ad analysts stressed that tariffs would affect every product category and ad seller because of the global nature of many supply chains. Apple, notably, will likely get hit hard because China is its biggest manufacturing hub. But the situation is so fluid that it's impossible to predict with any certainty at this point."There's no sector that doesn't get hit by this," Wieser said.Others argued that Amazon, Meta, and search ad-driven Google would be resilient because of their scale, measurability, and ability to drive outcomes."The retail media outlets are going to continue to win," said Nadja Bellan-White, CEO of M&C North America, adding that advertisers' expectations for performance guarantees will be greater than ever. "They want to know if they spend X amount, they're going to get X result."NewStreet Research analysts wrote that Pinterest, Reddit, and Snap would be the most challenged from an ad standpoint because they have smaller user bases than the likes of Meta. Reddit, for example, has strong user communities but a specific vibe that takes extra work for an advertiser to fit into. Big advertisers could retreat to the platforms they are most familiar with.The tariffs upheaval comes as the ad industry prepares for its biggest showcase of the year, the television upfronts, when TV giants try to lock in large chunks of ad inventory."Advertisers are still going to want to lock in dollars when they need to run ads tied to product launches," Haggstrom said. "Advertisers want to make sure they are able to place their advertising at the right time. But these negotiations might take longer due to the whole economic and fiscal situation. This is a pretty major shock."Live sports is driving a lot of the TV market because of its big, reliable, and ad-friendly audience, which could benefit players like Disney and NBCUniversal.Sports is the watchword for advertisers as they worry about political backlash, longtime ad industry player Michael Kassan said."It's the safest place to be," he said.Another view is that advertisers could be hesitant to lock themselves into big TV buy and could shift spending to always-available digital channels.How Disney, Netflix, and WBD could be impactedAs for other media and entertainment companies, economic weakness that results from the tariffs could hurt those that rely on consumer spending, Morningstar analysts wrote. Most of those companies also make money from advertising and could see some slowdown there.Media and entertainment stocks nosedived on the tariffs news.Disney's parks and experiences generate most of its profit, and a recession would likely depress tourism and reduce attendance in that business. Disney's improving streaming business could make up for weakness in its experiences, though, the Morningstar analysts wrote.Warner Bros. Discovery also has had recent streaming success that could provide a buffer, but it still has a big debt burden that could make it vulnerable if the credit markets tighten, the analysts wrote.Netflix doesn't have the Disney-like moat of experiences to protect it, but it has a service that has reached utility-level status. That makes it unlikely that subscribers would cancel in droves, Morningstar analysts wrote.Bernstein analysts, however, wrote that Netflix's growth abroad could slow if Europe imposes retaliatory tariffs. Netflix is the top streaming video service in the five largest European markets.The company that remains the biggest wildcard: TikTok.Some advertisers are embracing its ability to drive outcomes, thanks to steps it's taken to make it easier for marketers to manage and measure ad campaigns, NewStreet Research analysts wrote. However, other advertisers continue to hold back because of its potential for a ban or sale. Adding to the murkiness, its future could be tied to the tariffs, with Trump suggesting he could try to use them as a bargaining chip to get China to allow a sale of the app.Recommended video

In February, a group of men on a sports talk show casually spread a salacious and untrue rumor about the sex life of a teenage girl on national television, resulting in her being humiliated and relentlessly harassed. It felt as though it were 2007 again, and the talk show banter was a brief pause before our nations busy schedule of making fun of Britney Spearss breakdown.On ESPNs bro-y The Pat McAfee Show, the titular McAfee introduced a segment on NFL draft picks by gossiping about an undergraduate rumor hed heard: that a sorority girl at the University of Mississippi had cheated on her fraternity boyfriend with his father. McAfee didnt mention the young woman or her boyfriend by name, but later shared the clip on X to his 3.2 million followers (the post is still up, as of April 3). Barstool Sports personality Jack Mac then promoted a meme coin named after the girl in question: Mary Kate Cornett, a first-year college student. Cornett denies the rumor, but that hasnt stopped it from spreading like wildfire. As reported on the New York Times The Athletic, as the rumor spread, the harassment Cornett experienced ratcheted up. She had to leave her college dorm and move into emergency housing after campus police said she was at risk. Someone sent in a false tip to the police to have a SWAT team sent to her mothers home. Cornetts voicemail and text message filled up with degrading messages from strangers calling her a whore and telling her to kill herself; similar messages have also reached her 89-year-old grandfather. Cornett now says she intends to pursue legal action against McAfee and ESPN. ESPN and McAfee have declined to comment to The Athletic and other news outlets. Theres something so 2000s about this story the kind of thing you would read about on a feminist blog at the time. It has all the beats of a classic aughts slut-shaming: an anonymous teenage girl, the men on a talk show using her humiliation as idle chit-chat, the way that chit-chat picks up and runs rampant until the girl is getting anonymous threats from strangers. Its very Swiffer Girl, in which a graphic tape an eighth-grader made for the boy she had a crush on went viral. Its very Vanessa Hudgens in 2007, when she was forced to apologize to fans and scramble to save her Disney career when private nude photos of her were leaked. Its basically all the episodes that the talk show hosts of the 2000s have by now apologized for. The only part thats really new is the memecoin and the right-wing ecosystem of X that allows such gossip to flourish.Surely, a person might think, we have moved past this kind of national slut-shaming by now. We live in a post-MeToo world. The culture must have moved past the sexual humiliation of teen girls.Yet in a way, the Ole Miss story is the kind of thing thats been a long time coming. The right has been interested in reviving Bush-era raunch (think Girls Gone Wild) and purity culture (think: the obsession with Britney Spearss virginity) for years now. Purity culture and raunch culture walk hand in hand. The sexual objectification of raunch is enforced by the rigid shaming of purity. Both are united by the compulsory objectification and humiliation of women, whose bodies within this system are always controlled by men. As sociologist Bernadette Barton showed in her 2021 book The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society, raunch has become fundamental to the self-conception of the post-Trump right. Barton notes the number of pro-Trump memes that explicitly link provocative female bodies with Trump paraphernalia, or that contrast sexy conservative women with ugly, unfeminine liberal ones. No longer are misogynists confined to the old dichotomy framing women as virgins or whores, Barton observes. Raunch culture has facilitated a new sexist dichotomy: hot or not.The ideology claims all hot girls as their own and demands that they place themselves at the service of men, for their amusement. Taking on this position allows a woman a certain amount of cultural currency, which is why the right likes to crow that hot girls vote for Trump and only ugly girls are liberal. Yet being a hot girl also opens her up to the possibility of the kind of vicious, highly sexualized humiliation and harassment that Cornett is facing. That is the ideology that allowed the right to claim an apolitical figure like Hawk Tuah Girl as a MAGA symbol, and at the same time to smear Kamala Harris as the original Hawk Tuah Girl. The point of it is to degrade, to dominate, to make it clear that sex exists to gratify men. Humiliating an anonymous teenager for fun is the natural endpoint of this ideology. It was always what was lurking under the hot girls for Trump jokes.See More:

President Donald Trumps defenders often frame his trade policies as prioritizing economic development over the free market. In their telling, America has an interest in manufacturing valuable goods domestically, even if producing such wares in the US is not maximally profitable right now. Our nation might not currently make semiconductors as well as Taiwan or electric vehicles as well as China. But if we protect our nascent chip and EV industries, they might eventually become globally competitive. And that could make America wealthier, as the international market for such technologies will be large and opportunities for productivity gains in those industries are significant. This is a reasonable argument for the utility of tariffs in some contexts. But it doesnt amount to a case for Donald Trumps tariffs.On Wednesday, Trump announced that he will impose a 10 percent minimum tariff on all foreign imports, and much stiffer rates on most nations: 20 percent for goods made in the European Union, 46 percent for Vietnam, and 54 percent for China. In a sign of the policys intellectual caliber, the president also ordered a 10 percent tariff on all exports from two uninhabited Antarctic islands (perhaps on the assumption that penguins will soon develop opposable thumbs thumbs and heavy industry).Traditionally, countries use tariffs and industrial policy to climb the international value chain to go from producing simple goods (like T-shirts) or basic commodities (like lumber) to making complex products that are more valuable.But Trumps trade policies would move the United States down the value chain. His tariffs are not designed to foster domestic production of a few highly valuable, cutting-edge products. Rather, he aims to move more or less all forms of manufacturing to the United States. His tariffs apply to all imported goods, from kitchen mitts to airplanes. As Bloombergs Joe Weisenthal notes, this would likely make the United States less competitive in the worlds most lucrative markets. If America lets poorer countries supply it with T-shirts and aluminum, it can dedicate more of its resources to producing semiconductors, airplanes, chemicals, medical equipment, software, and artificial intelligence. The more capital and labor we must devote to providing ourselves with socks and aprons, the less well have to expend on more fruitful enterprises. Trumps tariffs arent rooted in rational development aims. The president is not trying to dominate the industries of the future hes trying to bring back the economy of the past. Nostalgia is the point.Americas right-wing nationalists associate the manufacturing-heavy economy of the 1950s and 1960s with a favored set of social and material conditions. It was an era when rates of wage growth, marriage, and fertility were high, and regional inequality was low. And they believe that they can bend the arc of history back toward that golden age by dramatically increasing US manufacturing employment. But this is a fantasy. America can only return to the mid-century industrial economy in the sense that it can return to subsistence farming: It is technically possible to embrace an anachronistic mode of production, but only at immense economic cost. Why the right longs for the postwar industrial economyI dont mean to assert that nostalgia is the driving force behind Trumps trade agenda. Other motivations and intuitions are surely at play. For example, Trump seems to view trade as a zero-sum game, in which the loser is whichever country buys more goods than it sells.Nevertheless, nostalgia for the postwar industrial economy suffuses the nationalist rights rhetoric about trade policy, and informs its fixation on manufacturing employment. In the America first movements narrative of national decline, deindustrialization which is to say, the economys shift away from manufacturing and toward services is synonymous with economic devastation and moral rot. The basic story goes like this: In a bygone, golden era, American workers made things in factories, formed stable families, and coalesced into tight-knit communities. But then corrupt, globalist elites shipped US manufacturing jobs overseas, devastating middle-class workers in general and male ones in particular. Marriage rates collapsed, communities frayed, and moral standards declined. By reshoring production, Americas former greatness can be restored.As Trump explained in his first inaugural address, Americas fall from greatness began when factories shuttered and left our shores and the wealth of our middle class was ripped from their homes, leaving rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation while crime and gangs and drugs festered in the ruins.In his speech to Congress this year, the president gestured at similar themes, arguing that tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs. Theyre about protecting the soul of our country.For the Trumpist right, the US economys shift away from manufacturing and toward services not only had ruinous economic effects, but destabilizing social implications. The industrial economy put a premium on brute strength, which men are far more likely to possess than women. The post-industrial economy, by contrast, features somewhat less demand for brawn, and considerable need for soft skills commonly associated with women. Deindustrialization was therefore a crisis for men in particular. Over the last 30 years and more, government policy has helped destroy the kind of economy that gave meaning to generations of men, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley argued in a 2021 speech. Domestic manufacturing once supported millions of American men with good wages, who in turn started and supported families. Now that industry lies all but dead on the altar of globalism.Some pro-Trump conservatives explicitly blame mens declining economic advantage over women for falling marriage and birth rates. They argue that women tend to prefer singledom to partnering with a man who enjoys less economic status or earning potential than themselves. Therefore, to promote family formation, you need to improve mens economic outcomes at womens expense. As one influential right-wing influencer mused on X, you do not solve low birth rates by giving money to women, you solve low birth rates by taking money away from women. National Review contributor Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry recently endorsed another X users sentiment that fertility is a solved problem and tracks differential status between men and women.It is unclear whether Trump and his allies consciously see reindustrialization as a strategy for shifting gender relations in mens favor. But the broad sense that the industrial economy was good for male workers specifically and thus, for family formation permeates the nationalist rights rhetoric.The rights nostalgia for the industrial economy is understandable. From the end of World War II through the 1960s, more than one-quarter of US laborers worked in manufacturing (today, that figure is 9.7 percent). And those decades of high manufacturing employment witnessed exceptionally high rates of wage growth and economic mobility. Between 1948 and 1973, hourly compensation in the US climbed by 91.3 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Over the ensuing 50 years, by contrast, hourly wages grew by just 9.2 percent.Meanwhile, a child born into the bottom half of Americas income distribution in 1940 had a 93 percent chance of outearning their parents, according to economist Raj Chettys research. A child born into similar circumstances in 1980, by contrast, had just a 45 percent chance of doing so.Whats more, deindustrialization coincided with a profound shift in the relative economic power of men and women in the United States. Men bore the brunt of wage stagnation: From 1979 to 2019, the median male workers weekly earnings fell by roughly 3 percent, while the median female workers jumped by more than 30 percent.Courtesy of Federal Reserve Economic Data.The correlation between all these economic developments and the decline of manufacturing employment is not coincidental. In the postwar period, manufacturing workers earned significantly more than similarly skilled laborers in other occupations, enjoying a 12 percent wage premium in 1983, according to the Cleveland Federal Reserve. Thus, as the manufacturing sector hemorrhaged jobs, millions of (disproportionately male) workers transitioned into less remunerative employment.The manufacturing sectors unusually high pay reflected two key characteristics of the industry. First, it is easier to achieve productivity gains in manufacturing than in many service-sector occupations. Increasing the number of widgets a factory worker can produce in an hour is a more straightforward engineering challenge than, say, increasing the number of children an individual daycare worker can nurture over the same period. Second, the manufacturing sector was more heavily unionized than other parts of the economy. In 1980, 32.3 percent of manufacturing workers were organized, compared to 15 percent of all other private sector workers. The decline of manufacturing employment was therefore synonymous with the decline of unionization. And since unionized employers tend to pay higher wages than non-union ones, this likely contributed to wage stagnation.To be clear, the decline of manufacturing was not the sole or even primary driver of slowing wage growth or rising income inequality in the US over the past half-century. Productivity and GDP growth rates slowed during the past 50 years, which limited opportunities for wage gains. Meanwhile, pay inequality within all sectors of the economy grew, as high-skilled workers across industries saw their advantage over less-educated workers swell. Nevertheless, the decline of manufacturing explains about a quarter of the jump in US income inequality between the 1980s and 2000s, according to a 2019 IMF working paper.Deindustrialization also fed regional inequality, as localities that were economically dependent on manufacturing suffered wrenching economic decline while those dependent on the provision of high-end services such as finance or software development thrived. Some measures show a 40 percent increase in such inequality since 1980. Finally, there is evidence that the decline of manufacturing did in fact lead to lower marriage and birth rates, as a result of men losing economic status relative to women. The economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson have found that trade shocks in which localities suffer manufacturing job losses as a result of foreign competition reduce the earnings of young men relative to young women, and consequently see lower marriage and fertility rates.All of which is to say, right-wing nationalists arent wrong to believe that deindustrialization contributed to many of the economic and social trends that they decry.But it does not follow that Trump can reverse these trends by imposing giant tariffs on Vietnam, Bangladesh, and floating chunks of ice in the sub-Antarctic Indian Ocean.Why America cant tariff its way back to an industrial economyIn the nationalist rights account, the decline of manufacturing employment was the contingent result of bad trade policies: Were it not for the machinations of globalist elites, the past half-century of factory closures could have been averted.But this is false. Americas pursuit of free trade surely influenced the scale and speed of deindustrialization. With a different set of trade policies, manufacturing employment in the US could have been marginally higher today.Nevertheless, the United States was bound to see a massive reduction in manufacturing employment over the past 50 years, no matter what trade policy it pursued.The reasons are twofold: First, as consumers get wealthier, they spend less of their income on goods and more on services. Humanitys appetite for appliances, cars, and other physical objects is more exhaustible than its desire for better health or higher investment returns. In 1960, Americans devoted more than 50 percent of their consumer spending to goods; by 2010, that figure had fallen to 33 percent.Thus, to keep up with shifts in consumer demand, advanced economies need to dedicate more labor to the provision of health care, financial advice, and other services, and less to the production of durable goods.Second, manufacturing is easier to automate than services. Goods production requires the performance of repetitive tasks in a controlled environment. This makes it easier to mechanize than medical care, education, or even food service: Robots are better at assembling standardized products (such as cars) than customizable ones (such as Chipotle burritos).For these reasons, manufacturings share of employment has been falling in all rich countries over the past 50 years. Even in Japan, which has promoted manufacturing through protectionist trade policy and government subsidies, the percentage of workers employed in manufacturing has fallen to just over 15 percent. And this same trend is beginning to surface in China: Despite that nations massive trade surplus, its manufacturing sector went from employing 30.3 percent of all workers in 2013 to 29.1 percent in 2023.According to the Financial Timess Martin Wolf, were the US to entirely eliminate its trade deficit in goods, manufacturings share of US employment would at most return to its level from two decades ago, leaving roughly 85 percent of US workers employed in other sectors. There is little reason to believe that Trumps tariffs will actually succeed in strengthening US manufacturing. To the contrary, they will massively increase the costs of producing goods in the United States, inspire foreign nations to erect new barriers to American exports, and make companies more reluctant to invest in new factories due to economic uncertainty, all of which will hurt domestic manufacturing. But even if the presidents trade policies somehow proved exceptionally effective, they would not bring back the industrial economy of yesteryear. We dont need a time machine to raise working-class living standardsNone of this means that America must resign itself to low wage growth or high inequality. The decline of manufacturing may have been inevitable, but the rise of a more inegalitarian economic order was not. In social democratic Denmark, the decline of manufacturing employment coincided with falling inequality, according to the IMF.And although productivity gains have historically been higher in manufacturing than in services, this has become less true over time. Certain service sectors such telecommunications and transport have seen faster gains in output per worker hour than manufacturing in recent decades.America can build a more dynamic and egalitarian economy without reengineering mass manufacturing employment. Collective bargaining helped factory workers wield leverage over their employers in the postwar period. And it could help all workers do so today, if the US established a system of sectoral bargaining. Demand for manufacturing labor may be inherently limited. But in other sectors, demand for blue-collar labor is artificially constrained by regulation. America has 4.5 million fewer homes than it needs. By eliminating restrictive zoning laws, and providing cheap financing to the housing sector, we can meet one of our nations most pressing economic needs while expanding opportunities for manual workers. And one can tell a similar story about promoting infrastructure construction or the green energy buildout.Increasing the affordability of college and trade schools can further help workers acquire the skills demanded by a modern, services-dominant economy. And a more comprehensive social welfare state can ease the burdens of future labor shocks, such as the one that artificial intelligence threatens to deliver to some white-collar workers. The rights desire to increase mens economic leverage over women is morally objectionable, even if such inequality is conducive to higher marriage or birth rates. All Americans, regardless of gender, are equally deserving of opportunity. But reducing young mens unemployment and increasing their wages would enhance their well-being, while shrinking the number of women who involuntarily forgo marriage and motherhood due to an absence of financially independent partners.But Trumps policies are unlikely to advance any of his movements purported aims. His tariffs are poised to reduce real wages, depress housing construction, and increase unemployment. And his labor agenda aims to restrict collective bargaining rights, rather than expand them.Americans deserve an economy in which blue-collar work is more remunerative, opportunity is broadly shared, and material obstacles to family formation are less profound. But building that economy will require an unsentimental analysis of our economys present, not nostalgia-addled efforts to resurrect its past. See More:

Fans of the long-running Predator series were delighted by the news that Dan Trachtenbergwho made 2022s Prey, which brought a fresh jolt of energy to the franchisewould be continuing to steer the ship with not one, but two new movies. One is live-action adventure thriller Predator: Badlands, and the other is an until-now mysterious animated feature. Today at CinemaCons Disney presentation unfortunately didnt reveal anything about the animated film, but weve now got more to go on with Predator: Badlands. In addition to presenting creatures that are bigger, grosser, and have much cooler high-tech weapons than anything weve seen from the series before, Badlands will pose a surprising question: what if the Predator, ruthless intergalactic big-game hunter, was actually the good guy? Something unpredicented happens in this movie, Badlands star Elle Fanning told the CinemaCon audience. My character teams up with the Predator and you see him in a new light. The first footage unfolded as follows: A lair filled with skulls. Elle Fannings voice: I didnt think you survived. Were on some kind of alien planet. Vast landscapes, barren, and a spaceship flies into frame. The deadliest hunter returns to the big screen, the trailer says. The predator walks on a mountain, Fannings character has white eyes that kind of roll back into her head. Everything on the planet is alien. The plants, the creatures, everything.The trailer describes this as a planet of hurt and we see the Predator himself being hunted. We thought Predators were bad but theyre nothing compared to these creatures. Theyre bigger. Grosser. Youre hunting something that cant be killed, Fannings character says. We see the main character Predator standing mid frame, his hair pulled back into almost a pony tail, and he does that classic snarl with all four fangs. We then see what hes snarling at. A massive, massive beast that starts jumping into the frame. Predator: Badlands hits theaters November 7. Additional reporting by Germain Lussier. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, whats next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

A planned adaptation of Disneys 2010 animated hit Tangled has reportedly hit the brakes as the studio rethinks its Disney Princess live-action strategy. According to the Hollywood Reporter, sources close to Disney say the film has been put on pause and that theres uncertainty in regards to whether Tangled will move forward down the road or undergo a creative rethink. Its concerning to see after Snow Whites middling receptionits currently at 40% for critics, 73% for audiences on Rotten Tomatoesdue to critically panned casting for the Evil Queen and mixed results on CG dwarfs. Rachel Zeglers performance was unanimously praised in most reviews as the films biggest strength. The actress overcame racist online bullying over her casting with audiences and a smear attempt over political posts even before the films release in an apparent move to pin the films struggle on her. So far, Snow White has made a modest $69 million domestically and $145 million worldwide against its $270 million budget, which was inflated due to the 2023 labor strikes, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Tangled also briefly faced similar online culture war discourse to Snow White and The Little Mermaid when Mean Girls musical star Avantika was rumored to be in the running for the role of Rapunzel. It was never confirmed she was being seen for the part and yet she still faced internet attacks and harassment from those against the idea. The reaction to this summers Lilo & Stitch may determine how Disney will handle its live-action adaptations moving forward. It will be curious to see how Snow White does on Disney+, as it could be much like Encanto and find its audience on the streamer. Perhaps this pause on Tangled, rather than outright shelving, might be a way of waiting to be informed on what to do between the box office and home streaming performances of both live-action films released in 2025. Still in the pipeline are the live-action Moana, which is now in production, and Hercules, which isin pre-production. For now well keep waiting for Rapunzel to let down her live-action hair. io9 reached out to Disney for comment and will update this post if we hear back. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, whats next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

Superbugs are pathogens, such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi, that present serious threats in hospitals, exposing vulnerable patients to higher risks of infections and even death. In the U.S. alone, an estimated 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths annually are caused by microbe strains that have developed resistance to multiple drugs one of the most significant global public health threats of this century.Unfortunately, hospitals, where the most vulnerable patients are concentrated, also serve as breeding grounds for these superbugs, fostering pathogens like the well-known MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). This strain can cause serious bloodstream infections or pneumonia.A relatively new and dangerous fungal pathogen, Candida auris, is also on the rise, prompting researchers to quantify these fungal infections and study how they manifest in patients. Their research, which included clinical cultures of C. auris collected between April 1, 2019, and December 31, 2023, was published in the American Journal of Infection Control.The Danger of Candida auris SymptomsThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has classified C. auris as an "urgent antimicrobial resistance threat" for hospitals, following its first appearance in the U.S. in 2016. Discovered in Japan in 2009, the pathogen has spread worldwide, with health professionals fighting to contain it.C. auris is closely related to C. albicans, a common cause of candidiasis, including fungal infections like thrush and vaginal yeast infections. These infections tend to take hold in people with weak immune systems, such as the elderly, infants, and those with immune deficiencies.However, C. auris can cause more invasive forms of candidiasis that can spread into the bloodstream, central nervous system, and other internal organs posing a more significant threat to health. The challenge with treating this pathogen is its ability to be misidentified as other, less harmful types of candida, and its multidrug resistance. Many common antimicrobial drugs are ineffective against superbugs, partly due to the overuse of antibiotics in healthcare settings.C. auris Cases Are RisingA study focused on the health care system in Miami, Florida, highlights a troubling rise in C. auris infections, from just 5 cases in 2019 to 115 in 2023. Most infections were found in the bloodstream, but there has also been an increase in cases involving cerebrospinal fluid (the liquid surrounding the brain and spinal cord), as well as soft tissue and bone infections.The fungus primarily spreads through medical equipment such as catheters, as well as breathing and feeding tubes. The CDC has issued a comprehensive list of recommendations to curb the spread of C. auris, which includes strict cleaning protocols for surfaces and devices, and using single-patient rooms when possible.Additionally, all C. auris samples from the study showed resistance to fluconazole, a commonly used antifungal drug for treating serious fungal and yeast infections. Aside from its resistance to regular medical treatment, C. auris also shows resilience against common cleaning products and disinfectants.Low Risk to the General PublicIn 2023, there were already concerns about C. auris, with warnings about its spread across half of the U.S. states, indicating that authorities have been monitoring the issue for some time.Although C. auris can lead to severe or fatal illnesses, at present it doesnt pose much risk to the general public. Most healthy individuals are unlikely to contract the infection since they arent as exposed to C. auris, and their immune systems can typically fight it off. However, for people who are already ill and hospitalized, the growing threat is very real.In terms of preventing the spread of C. auris, isolation and contact precautions are critical. According to the researchers in a press release, "Our findings suggest that early identification of patients colonized with C. auris and the prompt deployment of infection prevention strategies can potentially reduce the incidence of bloodstream infections."This article is not offering medical advice and should be used for informational purposes only.Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:Centers for Disease Control: Antimicrobial Resistance Facts and StatsCenters for Disease Control: Infection Control Guidance: Candida aurisHaving worked as a biomedical research assistant in labs across three countries, Jenny excels at translating complex scientific concepts ranging from medical breakthroughs and pharmacological discoveries to the latest in nutrition into engaging, accessible content. Her interests extend to topics such as human evolution, psychology, and quirky animal stories. When shes not immersed in a popular science book, youll find her catching waves or cruising around Vancouver Island on her longboard.

Researchers have successfully created solar cells from simulated moon dust that could fuel power. The cells the scientists developed should convert sunlight into energy efficiently and withstand radiation damage, they report in the Cell Press journal Device.The technique kills two space logistics birds with one stone: it could create electricity without involving heavy payloads. Building a solar power electrical plant with existing technology would likely require multiple expensive trips to ferry heavy components to the satellite.The solar cells used in space now are amazing, reaching efficiencies of 30 percent to even 40 percent, but that efficiency comes with a price, Felix Lang, a researcher with the University of Potsdam, Germany, and an author of the study, said in a press release. They are very expensive and are relatively heavy because they use glass or a thick foil as cover. Its hard to justify lifting all these cells into space.Turning Moon Dust into PowerVision of future solar cell fabrication on the Moon, utilizing raw regolith. Shown are robots that source raw regolith and bring it to a production facility, which fabricates perovskite-based moon solar cells. Later automated rovers or astronauts install the produced solar cells to power future Moon-habitats or even cities. (Image Credit: Sercan zen)Langs team developed a technique to create glass for the solar cells out of the Moons loose surface debris, called lunar regolith. Since glass for solar cells represents the heaviest, bulkiest component, creating the material on the lunar surface could reduce a spacecrafts launch mass by 99.4 percent, cut 99 percent of transport costs, and pave the way for lunar settlements.To test the idea, the researchers melted simulated Moon dust into moonglass, then paired it with a cheap and easily made crystal called perovskite. The combo proved very efficient; the technique replaces every gram of material that would need to be sent via space, and the new panels produced up to 100 times more energy than traditional solar panels.If you cut the weight by 99 percent, you dont need ultra-efficient 30 percent solar cells, you just make more of them on the Moon," Lang said in the press release. "Plus, our cells are more stable against radiation, while the others would degrade over time.Moonglass and Solar PanelsThe team tested that proposition by zapping both their version and conventional solar panels with radiation. The moonglass versions outperformed the Earth-made ones likely because standard glass slowly browns in space, losing efficiency. The moonglass, already with a brown tilt essentially built in due to chemical impurities, doesnt degrade further.The team wrote that making moonglass in space should be relatively easy since the ingredients dont require purification. Concentrated sunlight alone should provide enough heat to transform lunar regolith into glass.There are still challenges the scientists must overcome to make cells on the Moon rather than on Earth. They arent clear how the process will work in lower gravity. The solvents now used to process the perovskite are ineffective in a vacuum. And they are unsure how drastic swings in the Moons surface temperature could impact the materials stability.To address these issues, the team aims to launch a small-scale experiment to the Moon to test the technique in lunar, not laboratory, conditions.Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:Before joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in newspapers, but switched to scientific magazines. His work has appeared in publications including Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American.