Artificial intelligence is fabricating references to medical research that does not exist, according to recent findings. 

A recent audit found that, among millions of biomedical papers, more than 4,000 contained citations to non-existent research, according to an article in The Lancet. Such fabricated citations can undermine the clinical guidelines that health care professionals rely on to provide care, said Maxim Topaz, an associate professor at the Columbia School of Nursing and the study’s lead author.

An audit of millions of biomedical papers found more than 4,000 citations to bogus studies, the researchers said in a recent article published in The Lancet. 

Fabricated citations are dangerous because they influence clinical guidelines, which are based on public research that health care professionals follow in providing care, Maxim Topaz, an associate professor at the Columbia School of Nursing and the study’s lead author, told CBS News.

“When those fake references are making it into the literature, they will end up in those guidelines, and that’s how doctors decide how to provide care for you,” he said. “Your doctor could be making decisions around treatment based on studies that never existed.”

Growing problem

Also troubling is that none of the mistakes Topaz and his team identified have been corrected or retracted, and could still be influencing patient care, he said.  

“The rate of fake references showing up in published medical literature is growing,” Topaz added, noting that the number of such erroneous citations has grown 12-fold over the last three years. The fabricated references spanned nearly 3,000 academic papers.

Topaz’s own experience spurred him to investigate the issue. An AI app he was using to help polish one of his own scientific papers inserted a fake citation, he told CBS News. It then slipped through several layers of peer reviews before one sharp-eyed editor caught the phony reference. 

“I was mortified, because I’ve been studying AI for the past 15 years, so if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone,” he said.

Such mishaps arise when an author asserts a statement of fact and asks AI for a citation, Topaz explained. “In some cases, AI would slip those in, inadvertently,” he said. “You would hope the facts are accurate, but if they are supported by fabricated citations, you don’t know if the ‘facts’ are accurate.”

In some cases, an AI tool will also cite a real author while inventing research and attributing it to that person. Other times, citations were completely fabricated, Topaz said. 

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said, noting that research across other fields could also be subject to the same issues.

Meanwhile, faux AI-generated scientific citations can “look perfectly real,” Topaz added, who emphasized the importance of researchers rigorously fact-checking their work. 

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Ethereum is facing renewed scrutiny after Culper Research released a sharply critical report outlining its bearish stance on the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. The reporter argues that the key aspects of the ETH ecosystem and long-term narrative may be weaker than widely believed, prompting the firm to disclose that it has taken a short position against the asset.

Culper Research Outlines Key Risks Facing Ethereum’s Ecosystem

Investment research firm Culper Research has released a critical report, revealing it has taken a short position on Ethereum. The CEO of Coinbureau, Nic, has shared on X that the reporter outlined that structural changes following the ETH Fusaka Upgrade have significantly expanded blockspace, causing transaction fees to collapse by nearly 90%.

According to the firm, lower fees translate directly into lower validator income, leading to weaker staking economics. Culper further mentions BitMine and argues that the recent rise in transaction activity and active addresses cited as bullish is driven by spam transactions and address-poisoning attacks rather than real adoption.

The firm also reported that Vitalik Buterin sold around 19,000 ETH as if he knew what was going on. While it is a significant amount, representing roughly 8% of Buterin’s total holdings, it may not necessarily indicate an exit or loss of confidence.

At the same time, Nic highlighted that ETH’s design allows for future protocol changes of rules through coordinated upgrades or forks if any economic issues emerge. This won’t be easy politically or technically, but it’s possible. Nic emphasized that he is not taking sides. However, when a firm publishes a detailed thesis and then puts its money behind it, it is worth understanding the mechanics they’re pointing to.

How Gas-Limit Expansion Linked To Falling Transaction Fees

A crypto commentator and the host of the office space, MartyParty, has also offered insights into the matter. Culper Research has opened short positions in Ethereum, arguing that the network entered what is described as a potential “death spiral.” The firm’s thesis is based on on-chain data spanning from January 2025 to February 2026.

A major focus of the report is wallet growth following the Fusaka Upgrade, and Culper alleges that 95% of new wallet creation during the period is linked to dusting or address-poisoning attacks. The firm further claims that dusting-related activity now accounts for roughly 22.5% of all ETH transactions and more than half of the network’s recent transaction growth.

Furthermore, the firm analyzes the economic effects of gas limit increase on the network, contributing to an estimated 90% decline in transaction fees and 40-50% lower tips per gas. Meanwhile, these dynmics could put pressure on validator economics by reducing overall revenue from network activity.

Beyond internal network changes, competition from Solana has captured growing developer and user activity, and reports about Buterin’s ETH dump have drawn backlash from parts of the ETH community.

Featured image from Pxfuel, chart from Tradingview.com

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Bitcoin’s recent slide has left traders squinting at charts and asking the same blunt question: correction or crash? Prices have tumbled sharply, but some market watchers still see this as a deep pullback inside a longer uptrend. Others warn the data points to something colder.

Related Reading

Price Decline And Hard Numbers

According to XWIN Research’s CryptoQuant analysis, Bitcoin has fallen about 46% from a peak near $126,000 and now trades around $67,900 after five straight months of losses.

The Fear & Greed Index sits at 14 — a reading labeled Extreme Fear. Reports note that net realized losses recently hit over $13 billion, a level that matched the worst stretches of the 2022 slump.

In 2024, roughly $10 billion of inflows helped lift market cap. Then in 2025, more than $300 billion flowed in while the overall market value shrank. That odd mix of heavy inflows and falling market cap suggests selling pressure is higher than fresh buying.

How Rising Prices Are Masking a Quiet Shift in Bitcoin’s Structure

“The base scenario is that Bitcoin may already be entering winter, with higher prices and stronger structure delaying recognition.” – By @xwinfinance

Read more https://t.co/7soxNoBhqi pic.twitter.com/fEsSXpAmuK

— CryptoQuant.com (@cryptoquant_com) February 11, 2026

Capital Flows Versus Price Action

Based on reports, the capital flow numbers are the most awkward fact for bulls. Money moved in, but value fell. Who was selling into that demand? Large holders, paper traders, or complex derivatives desks might have taken profits or hedged positions.

The data alone doesn’t name the seller, but the pattern is a red flag. On-chain measures also reveal shrinking realized gains even as prices remained far above prior bear-era levels. That tends to weaken the internal strength of the market over time.

Sentiment And Historical Echoes

Some traders point to a quirk of memory: high nominal prices make pain feel milder. People don’t want to relive the chaos of 2022. Reports say the launch of spot ETFs and deeper institutional access have changed the market’s plumbing, and that gives many confidence.

Yet sentiment readings at extreme fear often show up near capitulation points. It’s worth remembering that in 2022 realized losses peaked about five months before the market bottom, which means big losses can precede a final low by a long stretch.

Technical Patterns And The Bigger Picture

Bitcoin posted four consecutive losing months and a 41% decline across that stretch — a streak last seen during 2018 rather than 2022. That pattern matters because similar sequences have led to extended downturns in the past.

Related Reading

Bitcoin At A Crossroads As XWIN Flags Early Signs Of Crypto Winter

For XWIN Research, the message is simple: price alone does not define the cycle. What matters is who is buying, who is selling, and whether demand can absorb supply without market value shrinking.

Right now, that balance looks strained. Until inflows begin translating into sustained market cap growth and realized losses cool meaningfully, the firm believes the market should be treated with caution rather than optimism. Winter may not have fully arrived, but based on the data, the temperature is clearly dropping.

Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView

A New Jersey man is the first person believed to have died from a so-called meat allergy triggered by a tick bite, researchers say.

The man died in September 2024, but researchers just recently linked the death to the allergy, known as alpha-gal syndrome, or AGS.

According to experts, the bite of a Lone Star tick can lead an individual to develop a sensitivity or allergy to alpha galactose, a carbohydrate found in red meat and dairy products. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says AGS can cause hives, nausea, stomach pain, breathing issues and swelling.

Man died several hours after eating hamburger at barbecue

According to researchers, a 47-year-old New Jersey man went on a camping trip with his wife and children in summer 2024, and after spending the day outdoors, they had beef steak for dinner. About four hours later, researchers say the man experienced severe abdominal discomfort, diarrhea and vomiting that lasted about two hours.

The man apparently felt better the following morning, but when discussing what had happened with his family, he allegedly said, “I thought I was going to die.” However, he decided not to consult a doctor about the symptoms, researchers say.

About two weeks later, researchers say the man attended a barbecue where he ate a hamburger. About four hours after eating, the man was found unconscious on the bathroom floor with vomit around him. He was taken to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead several hours later.

The man’s name was not released, nor was the location he went camping.  

Postmortem blood test reveals allergic reaction to alpha-gal

The man’s death was ruled a “sudden unexplained death,” but his wife asked a friend in the medical field to review the autopsy report. The doctor contacted researchers in Virginia to look into the possible role of AGS.

Earlier this year, the man’s blood was tested, and researchers say it was determined he had suffered an allergic reaction to alpha-gal consistent with fatal anaphylaxis.

The man’s wife said that earlier in the summer, he had gotten about a dozen bug bites around his ankles believed to be from Lone Star tick larvae.

According to researchers, this is “the first documented anaphylactic death related to AGS where the symptoms started several hours after consuming mammalian meat.”

Doctors want to raise awareness of alpha-gal syndrome

The researchers argue more public education on AGS is necessary, considering the increased presence of Lone Star ticks in northern states and the fact that abdominal pain is not widely recognized as a possible symptom of an allergic reaction.

“Although this is very, very uncommon– what happened to him is not likely to happen to other people. I’m not afraid of that,” said Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills with UVA Health. “But they should know about it.”

“If they start noticing they’re developing abdominal pain, rashes after eating red meat, they should talk to their physicians about the possibility that they’ve been sensitized to this specific carbohydrate within red meat,” said Dr. Suraj Saggar, chief of infectious disease at Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, “and understand that if they continue to eat it, there is at least the potential for having a very serious and even fatal reaction.”

Experts say people who live in areas where Lone Star ticks are common, like New York and New Jersey, should do what they can to avoid tick bites.

“With the changing seasons, the warming of our climate, these ticks are increasing in their numbers. The potential exposures are increasing,” Saggar said. “People should take all the precautions they can to protect [from] tick bites.”

Doctors say awareness is key.

They might easily be mistaken for Congressional staffers, reluctant to face the day, but these are among the most accomplished cancer specialists in the country, meeting with Representatives, Senators and staff. Among them: Dr. Elizabeth Jaffee, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, from up the road in Baltimore; and Dr. George Weiner, a cancer specialist in Iowa for more than 35 years, who has flown in frequently to lobby Congress for more research funds.

Lobbying for cancer research, he says, used to be like pushing on an open door. “Most of the time when I’ve come, I’ve met with Democrats and Republicans, and we talked about the bipartisan support for cancer research,” Weiner said. “This is the first time that I felt there was an existential crisis in our ability to make the type of progress that I see in front of us.”

These days, the conversation is all about thousands of layoffs … delays in research … massive budget cuts – close to a 40% proposed cut in funding for the National Cancer Institute.

“I wake up every morning looking at my phone: Did I get an email from the National Cancer Institute saying I’m no longer receiving my grants?” said Jaffee.

Has she felt the impact yet? “Oh, yeah, we certainly have felt the impact, to the point where people are leaving,” Jaffee replied. “So, in our clinical research operation, which takes years to build, train research nurses, takes two years to train coordinators, takes six to 12 months, these people are leaving because the funding isn’t coming in.”

I asked, “If they keep cutting back, how long before Dr. Jaffee says, ‘That’s it’?”

“I have to be honest, there are days when I do feel that,” she replied. “But I look around and I feel like I would be disloyal to our patients. We are in a technological revolution in cancer research. We are rapidly making discoveries that we couldn’t even do ten years ago.”

“What price do you put on life?”

Kevin Callahan was a Marine in Vietnam when he barely survived stepping on a land mine. Decades later, he was diagnosed with a killer disease: pancreatic cancer. First came surgery and chemo. Now, he’s part of a clinical trial, which is where Dr. Jaffee and her colleague Dr. Neeha Zaidi come in, working to develop a vaccine to prevent pancreatic cancer from recurring.

I asked Callahan, “When you see some of the debates that are going on right now, and it relates to the National Cancer Institute and NIH …”

“It raises the hair on the back of my neck,” he replied.

Beth Callahan wasn’t all that sure about the clinical trial at first, but Kevin couldn’t stop thinking about all that had gone into it – getting chemotherapy as an approved treatment. “They would shoot me up with three drugs, and the fourth one I would go home with a little bag on my chest, and it wouldn’t come out until Friday. It had to be done over 40 hours. I thought to myself, ‘How many poor bastards went through tests to get that done?’ So I thought, ‘If there’s anything that I can do, I’m more than happy to go in with the study and see if I can help somebody else later on, [to] develop this vaccine.'”

Pancreatic cancer is particularly nasty, even when, as with Kevin, it’s detected early. The experimental vaccine they’ve been administering to him is promising, but according to Jaffee, the chances of recurrence are 80%, and the chances of a patient being alive in five years is 20%.

Yet, Kevin is four-and-a-half years out, without recurrence, “part of a small cohort of patients who received the vaccine on that trial who are, like him, doing well without recurrence,” Jaffee said.

I asked, “Could it be anything other than the vaccine?

Jaffee replied, “We don’t believe so. This is not a cancer where sometimes it looks less aggressive than other times. This is a cancer that uniformly – it doesn’t matter who you are – it comes back.”

And so far, it has not. Kevin says, “Bottom line, I’m cancer free.”

Now the Callahans are concerned the cuts at the NIH could interfere with – or even stop – Kevin’s vaccine trial.

I said, “They claim that they’re not cutting back on any of the science, on any of the people who are really doing the research.”

“I don’t believe that for a minute,” said Kevin.

Asked if it is worth the money invested by taxpayers, Beth responded: “What price do you put on life? It’s our lives. It’s our children’s lives. It’s our grandchildren’s lives. What price do you put on that? We’re not just talking about cutting funding to individual research programs. We’re talking about NIH, which is a gift that we have had in this country for decades. Why would we give that up as a country?”

Located just outside of Washington, D.C., the National Cancer Institute is the crown jewel of the National Institutes of Health. It is also the most expensive. Its budget last year was $7 billion.

Dr. Weiner noted, “Mary Lasker, who was a brilliant woman and a force of nature who worked with Richard Nixon on the original war on cancer, would say, ‘If you think research is expensive, try disease.'”

The Trump administration is proposing cutting that $7 billion cancer budget down to about $4.5 billion. Weiner thinks that America’s widely-recognized position as the world’s leader in medical research is at a tipping point. “Progress is gonna be proportional to investment,” he said. “So, progress is not gonna totally stop if funding drops dramatically. But the more it drops and the longer it drops, the slower progress will be.

“But that’s not the case for patients,” he said. “Our job as researchers is to bring those advances to help those patients as soon as possible, because those patients can’t wait.”

That would describe Natalie Phelps’ dilemma to a T.

“When is cancer political?

Natalie Phelps has Stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer.  She and her husband, Jeff, live out in Washington State.

“We have one boy, one girl, and a giant German Shepherd, very average American,” she said. “And I had always hoped, if I needed a clinical trial, I was like, ‘I’m gonna get to the NIH. I’m gonna go to the top place in the world.'”

Phelps was invited to NIH for testing to determine if she qualified for a promising breakthrough immunotherapy treatment that has shrunk tumors in about a quarter of the patients with gastrointestinal cancers.  She said, “When I was invited to go back, I had cancer patients congratulating me. They were like, ‘You made it!’ It’s like making it into the Olympics when you’re a cancer patient.”

The clinical trial is run by Dr. Steven Rosenberg, a legend in the field of cancer research who is still practicing in his mid-eighties. “Well, she’s a young woman with a metastatic cancer, and so that’s a desperate situation. Every patient we see here at the National Cancer Institute has been through all standard treatments that haven’t worked. And they come here to the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, of Hope, trying to see if some experimental treatments might be of help to them.”

In late May, Natalie Phelps finally qualified for Rosenberg’s clinical trial. But budget cuts at NIH had already slowed the trial down. NIH has lost about 1,500 employees.

“We did lose two technicians that are involved in producing the materials that are used to treat patients,” Rosenberg said.

“And would that cause a significant delay?” I asked. “When I say ‘significant,’ I mean in Natalie’s case she feels that it has been delayed by a month. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“A month could be critical for her.”

“It certainly can when you have metastatic cancer that’s growing,” Rosenberg said.

That one-month delay means Natalie’s specialized immune cell therapy won’t be ready until late July. I said to her, “I don’t even know what seems like an appropriate question. You must be devastated.”

“Well, yeah, Ted,” she replied. “I was diagnosed in 2020 during COVID, after giving birth to my second child. And I had to spend the first bit of my child’s life changing diapers and doing bottles with the chemotherapy pump attached to me. I’ve done 48 rounds of chemotherapy. I’ve had multiple aggressive surgeries and radiation. And I have been in treatment for five years, hoping that I can raise her, but at the very least let her have a memory of who her mother was.  

“I have endured so much, and now I have another hurdle just because of funding cuts?” she said. “I mean, my husband and I can’t believe it. When is cancer political?”

In a recent online statement, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya pushed back on concerns about budget cuts and employee layoffs. He said, “As to the current re-organization, no clinical trial has been delayed, nor has any participant been dropped from any clinical trial…”

Natalie Phelps is just one patient, one case out of many; but her participation in a clinical trial was delayed, because two specialized technicians were let go.

And that delay has proved to be devastating. She sent us a video message a couple of days ago from NIH: 

“I got my test results back today and I didn’t pass,” she said. “I have several new brain tumors, and it’s not safe for me to participate in the trial. The earliest I could get back here for treatment would be about six weeks after having the tumors radiated, provided that the radiation’s successful. I don’t know. It’s a long time.”

As for the budget cuts that caused the layoffs that produced the delay, it probably won’t help much to learn that they were nothing personal.

       
For more info:

      
Story produced by Deirdre Cohen. Editor: Ed Givnish. 

     
See also:

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A quantum‑computing collective known as Project Eleven has thrown down a public gauntlet to the global cryptography community, offering a reward of one Bitcoin to the first team that can break a deliberately down‑scaled version of Bitcoin’s elliptic‑curve cryptography using a genuine quantum computer before 5 April 2026.

Announcing what it calls the “Q‑Day Prize” on X, the group wrote: “We just launched the Q‑Day Prize. 1 BTC to the first team to break a toy version of Bitcoin’s cryptography using a quantum computer. Deadline: April 5, 2026. Mission: Protect 6 M BTC (over $500 B).” The post crystallises a concern that has hovered over the Bitcoin ecosystem for more than a decade: the eventual arrival of large‑scale, error‑corrected quantum hardware capable of running Shor’s algorithm against real‑world keys.

Project Eleven is not asking contestants to shatter Bitcoin’s 256‑bit curve directly. Instead, teams must demonstrate Shor’s algorithm against elliptic‑curve keys ranging from one to twenty‑five bits—sizes derisively called “toy” by professional cryptographers but still orders of magnitude beyond what has been publicly achieved on physical quantum processors. The organisers argue that even a three‑bit break would be “big news,” because it would provide the first quantitatively verifiable benchmark of quantum progress on the elliptic‑curve discrete‑log problem (ECDLP). In their words, “Nobody has rigorously benchmarked this threat yet.”

To qualify, a submission must include gate‑level code or explicit instructions runnable on actual quantum hardware, along with a narrative of methods employed, error‑rates managed and the classical post‑processing required. Hybrid attacks that lean on classical shortcuts are disallowed. All entries will be published, a decision the group frames as an exercise in radical transparency: “Instead of waiting for breakthroughs to happen behind closed doors, we believe in facing this challenge head‑on, in a transparent and rigorous manner.”

Why 1 Bitcoin—And Why Now?

Bitcoin’s security ultimately rests on the hardness of the discrete‑logarithm problem over the secp256k1 curve. While classical attacks scale exponentially, Peter Shor’s 1994 quantum algorithm could in principle solve the problem in polynomial time, collapsing the cost from cosmic to merely gargantuan. Current research estimates that on the order of two thousand fully error‑corrected logical qubits—perhaps backed by millions of physical qubits—would be sufficient to threaten a 256‑bit key. Firms such as Google, IBM, IonQ and newcomer QuEra are racing to cross the four‑digit logical‑qubit threshold, though none has publicly demonstrated anything close to that capability today.

Project Eleven says its prize is intended less as a bounty and more as a diagnostic. More than ten million Bitcoin addresses, holding over six million coins, have already exposed their public keys through prior spending activity. If quantum technology crosses the critical threshold before those coins are migrated to post‑quantum addresses, the funds would be vulnerable to immediate theft. “Quantum computing is steadily progressing,” the group warns. “When that happens, we need to know.”

The initiative lands amid a flurry of quantum‑resilience proposals within the wider Bitcoin ecosystem. Earlier this month, a group of developers submitted the Quantum‑Resistant Address Migration Protocol (QRAMP), a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that would orchestrate a network‑wide move to post‑quantum key formats. Because QRAMP would require a consensus‑breaking hard fork, its political prospects remain uncertain.

Separately, Canadian startup BTQ has pitched an exotic proof‑of‑work alternative called Coarse‑Grained Boson Sampling, which would substitute today’s hash‑based mining puzzles with photonic sampling tasks executed on quantum hardware. Like QRAMP, BTQ’s concept demands a hard fork and has yet to garner broad support.

From a technical standpoint, running even a five‑bit elliptic‑curve version of Shor’s algorithm is brutally unforgiving: qubits with fidelities above 99.9 %, coherent for hundreds of microseconds, and orchestrated through deep circuits numbering in the thousands of two‑qubit gates would be required. Error‑correction overhead further compounds the engineering burden, meaning that contenders will likely have to employ small‑code logical qubits and impressive compilation techniques merely to keep noise under control.

Yet the prize may prove irresistible for university labs and corporate R&D teams eager to demonstrate practical quantum advantage. Cloud‑accessible devices from IBM’s Quantum System Two, Quantinuum’s H‑series and OQC’s superconducting platforms already allow limited, pay‑per‑shot access to dozens—or in IBM’s case, hundreds—of physical qubits. Whether any of those machines can sustain the circuit depth necessary remains to be seen.

Either outcome supplies invaluable data. In the words of Project Eleven’s launch tweet, the objective is stark: “Break the biggest ECC key with Shor’s algorithm. The reward: 1 BTC + go down in cryptography history.”

At press time, BTC traded at $84,771.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

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Massachusetts has some of the best health care in the country, but it’s far from perfect. Black women in particular experience complications during childbirth two-and-a-half times more often than their white counterparts, and they face a pregnancy-related death rate that’s more than three times the rate of white mothers.

Researchers at at the Center for Black Maternal Health and Reproductive Justice at Tufts University School Of Medicine are searching for ways to prevent these kinds of tragedies, and they’re already seeing results.

“We need to figure out how to tell the stories”

Like any excited mother-to-be, Shamony Gibson was looking forward to expanding her family. Already a proud mother of one and expecting her second, she and her partner, Omari Maynard, were ready to welcome their son into the world.

“We figured this out, you know. We understand what it takes to be able to co-create and build and be a family and you know, so our future felt really bright,” Maynard said.

Sadly, Gibson died from a blood clot in her lungs as a complication from an unplanned C-section.

Just 13 days before her death, Gibson made a video for her unborn child, saying, “I’m excited for you to be born tomorrow.”

“Didn’t know, of course, that that would be the last video that we made together, and that that video would document the first time, and I want to say possibly the last time, that, you know, she had a conversation with her son,” Maynard said.

Despite his heartbreak, Maynard hopes his loss will lead to change.

“If we’re going to really shift and help redirect birthing outcomes and really want to see change within this maternal health epidemic, we need to figure out how to tell the stories of all these Shamonys,” he said.

MOTHER Lab founder says racial disparities are costing lives

The MOTHER Lab, a unit within the Center for Black Maternal health and Reproductive Justice, looks at racial disparities in maternal health care. Founder and director Dr. Ndidiamaka N. Amutah-Onukagha says those disparities can have deadly consequences.

“Your place of delivery makes a difference in your outcomes. What you have access to, the quality of the physicians, the quality of the resources,” she said. “These lapses and biases, frankly, are costing people their lives.”

In 2023, a state Department of Public Health report revealed the rates of severe maternal morbidity in Massachusetts rose 25% over the last decade.

“Putting faces behind statistics, because we all know, like, that Black women are three to four times more likely to die in childbirth than their white counterparts,” research assistant Emily Teixeira said.

MOTHER Lab’s research has already helped implement change in Massachusetts.

Last summer, Gov. Maura Healey signed the “Momnibus Bill,” which promotes access to midwifery care and out-of-hospital birth options.

But Amutah-Onukagha knows there’s still work to be done.

“It also reinvigorates you for the work because we need to be really clear and really vigilant about not only how Black women, frankly, the health care system is failing all women,” she said.

Amutah-Onukagha says all of this is easily prevented and that’s why they’re raising awareness with their Eighth Annual Black Maternal Health Conference this weekend ahead of Black Maternal Health Week next week. More information can be found at motherlab.org.

Tiffany Chan

Tiffany Chan is a general assignment reporter for WBZ-TV.

Foodborne illness kills hundreds of Americans a year, sickens tens of millions annually, and costs billions in medical care, lost productivity and premature deaths, federal researchers said in a report. 

Roughly 10 million cases of foodborne illness each year in the U.S. are caused by six pathogens — salmonella, listeria monocytogenes, campylobacter, clostridium perfringens, shiga toxin-producing E. coli and norovirus, according to a coming study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The illnesses result in about 53,300 hospitalizations and more than 900 deaths annually, according to CDC estimates cited this week by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The economic impact of these diseases is severe, costing an estimated $75 billion (in 2023 dollars) annually, including costs associated with secondary chronic illnesses and conditions that develop after the initial illness, according to the findings published Monday by the GAO, which also cited research by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.

The actual count of people who get sick from eating food is unknown and likely far higher than official tallies, as only a small percentage of illnesses related to contaminated food is diagnosed and reported to public health officials. For every case of salmonella detected through a lab test, for example, 29 illnesses are caused by the bacteria, the CDC estimates. 

Last year, separate salmonella outbreaks linked to cucumbers and eggs sickened more than 200 people in dozens of states, while listeria outbreaks linked to ready-to-eat meat and poultry products sickened 19, hospitalized 17 and killed two. An outbreak of E. coli in the fall of 2024 linked to organic carrots sickened 48 people in 19 states, killing one. Another linked to onions served in McDonald’s burgers sickened more than 100 people in 14 states, resulting in one death. 

At least 30 federal laws govern the safety and quality of the U.S. food supply, both domestic and imported, and 15 federal agencies administer the rules, making for a “fragmented” oversight system, according to the GAO, a federal agency charged with supplying nonpartisan information to Congress. The GAO since 2007 has called for a national strategy to oversee food safety. 

Two Ethereum Foundation researchers Justin Drake and Dankrad Feist have disclosed the decisions to drop their advisorship positions with EigenLayer. The two experts took on this role with the restaking protocol earlier in May 2024 — but much to the disappointment of the crypto community.

As reported by Bitcoinist, the prominent crypto figures took the step to join EigenLayer as advisors, with Drake specifically promising to reinvest his earnings into the ETH ecosystem. Nevertheless, the crypto community on the social media platform X raised their concerns about conflicts of interest surrounding the appointment of the Ethereum researchers. 

Justin Drake Apologizes To Ethereum Community And Foundation 

In a November 2 post on X, Justin Drake announced that he dropped the advisory role with EigenLayer in September 2024 and has also left the Ultra Sound team. The researcher also apologized to the Ethereum community and his colleagues at the foundation for the controversy surrounding his appointment.

Drake added in the post:

Going forward I will turn down all advisorships, angel investments, and security councils. This personal policy goes above and beyond the recent EF [Ethereum Foundation]-wide conflict of interest policy, not because that was asked of me but because I want to signal [a] commitment to neutrality.

As highlighted in Drake’s message, the crossover to Eigenlayer by the two researchers forced the Ethereum Foundation to craft a conflict-of-interest policy in order to avoid a repeat of such incidents. Following the moves, executive director Aya Miyaguchi was the first to indicate the foundation’s commitment to addressing the issue of conflict of interest.

Source: AyaMiyagotchi/X

More Danksharding Upgrades?

Oddly, Dankrad Feist at the same time released a message on X announcing his decision to resign from his advisorship role at EigenLayer. The famous creator of the “Danksharding” concept reiterated that while the contract was negotiated in good faith, he understands how the relationship with EigenLayer could be easily misunderstood.

Feist noted:

Eigenlayer is a great project that I hope will continue to complement Ethereum well in several ways. But Ethereum has a lot of important work to do and I will focus all my attention on getting it done. This will allow me to be more effective in implementing Danksharding and other important projects.

These announcements garnered positive responses from the crypto community on the X platform, with several notable figures labeling their decisions to leave EigenLayer a good call. 

The price of ETH under bearish pressure on the daily timeframe | Source: ETHUSDT chart on TradingView

Featured image from Getty Images, chart from TradingView