New Rules for Dogs Entering U.S. to Help Prevent Spread of Rabies

(NEW YORK) — All dogs coming into the U.S. from other countries must be at least 6 months old and microchipped to help prevent the spread of rabies, according to new government rules published Wednesday.

The new rules require vaccination for dogs that have been in countries where rabies is common. The update applies to dogs brought in by breeders or rescue groups as well as pets traveling with their U.S. owners.

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“This new regulation is going to address the current challenges that we’re facing,” said Emily Pieracci, a rabies expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who was involved in drafting the updated regulations.

The CDC posted the new rules in the federal register on Wednesday. They take effect Aug. 1 when a temporary 2021 order expires. That order suspended bringing in dogs from more than 100 countries where rabies is still a problem.

The new rules require all dogs entering the U.S. to be at least 6 months, old enough to be vaccinated if required and for the shots to take effect; have a microchip placed under their skin with a code that can be used to verify rabies vaccination; and have completed a new CDC import form.

There may be additional restrictions and requirements based on where the dog was the previous six months, which may include blood testing from CDC-approved labs.

The CDC regulations were last updated in 1956, and a lot has changed, Pieracci said. More people travel internationally with their pets, and more rescue groups and breeders have set up overseas operations to meet the demand for pets, she said. Now, about 1 million dogs enter the U.S. each year.

Dogs were once common carriers of the rabies virus in the U.S. but the type that normally circulates in dogs was eliminated through vaccinations in the 1970s. The virus invades the central nervous system and is usually a fatal disease in animals and humans. It’s most commonly spread through a bite from an infected animal. There is no cure for it once symptoms begin.

Four rabid dogs have been identified entering the U.S. since 2015, and officials worried more might get through. CDC officials also were seeing an increase of incomplete or fraudulent rabies vaccination certificates and more puppies denied entry because they weren’t old enough to be fully vaccinated.

A draft version of the updated regulations last year drew a range of public comments.

Angela Passman, owner of a Dallas company that helps people move their pets internationally, supports the new rules. It can especially tricky for families that buy or adopt a dog while overseas and then try to bring it to the U.S., she said. The update means little change from how things have been handled in recent years, she said.

“It’s more work for the pet owner, but the end result is a good thing,” said Passman, who is a board member for the International Pet and Animal Transportation Association.

But Jennifer Skiff said some of the changes are unwarranted and too costly. She works for Animal Wellness Action, a Washington group focused on preventing animal cruelty that helps organizations import animals. She said those groups work with diplomats and military personnel who have had trouble meeting requirements, and was a reason some owners were forced to leave their dogs behind.

source https://time.com/6976083/6976083/

How Blake Crouch Turned His Best-Selling Sci-Fi Thriller into Apple TV+’s Dark Matter

When we meet Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) in Apple TV+’s Dark Matter, it’s quickly clear he’s a committed family man who cares deeply about his wife, Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), and their teenage son, Charlie (Oakes Fegley). But as a humble college professor who gave up what could’ve been a groundbreaking career in quantum physics, he sometimes still thinks about the road untraveled.

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That all changes when a mysterious masked man abducts Jason off the Chicago streets one night and transports him into an alternate version of his life where he chose work over family 15 years earlier. In this universe, Jason is an award-winning physicist who built a metal cube that functions as a gateway to multiple realities. And it’s that Jason, Jason2, who kidnapped our Jason in a ploy to switch places with him.

Based on showrunner Blake Crouch’s best-selling 2016 novel of the same name, Dark Matter follows Jason as he fights to make it back to his own reality and reunite with his wife and son. The story and the show, the first two episodes of which are now streaming, explore the “what ifs” of existence, which Crouch says he was reflecting on in his own life when he came up with the idea for the book.

“I was in my mid-30s,” he says. “And I felt like I’d been alive long enough to sort of look back at all the paths I’d taken and not taken and start to wonder what if I had done this instead of that.”

That line of thinking was also what got executive producer Matt Tolmach (The Amazing Spider-Man, Spider-Man: Homecoming) on board for the adaptation. “I was immediately drawn to the existential questions running through the heart of this series that are so universal and deeply rooted,” he told TIME in an email. “They’re questions that I think most people ask themselves at some point in their lives: Is this all there is? Is this who I am meant to be? Am I happy? Would I choose this life if I could go back to some of the forks in the road? They’re basic questions, but in Blake’s world, they open a wild can of worms.”

Read more: The Best Sci-Fi TV Shows of All Time

What is Dark Matter about?

Without giving the game away, Dark Matter sends Jason on what at first seems to be a wild goose chase into the multiverse of the box, a never-ending corridor that serves as a physical manifestation of human consciousness. The mind-bending hallway contains an infinite number of doors leading to an infinite number of parallel universes representing every possible outcome of every possible event. Think Schrödinger’s cat on a grand-scale level.

The scientific concepts on which the show’s plot hinges have the potential to send viewers down a rabbit hole of quantum mechanics. But Crouch doesn’t think it’s necessary to get caught up in the specifics. “The science is there for those who want it,” he says. “But we went out of our way not to beat people over the head with it. All you really have to know is, you go into the box, you take a drug, the box becomes an infinite corridor, and behind each door in that corridor is a different world.”

How the show brings the book to life

In adapting Dark Matter for the screen, Crouch saw an opportunity to explore a road not taken in his book. While the novel is told almost exclusively from Jason’s point of view, the show jumps back and forth between a variety of character’s perspectives, giving viewers more insight into different relationships.

“A few years after Dark Matter was published, there was this lingering thing in the back of my mind about not having really given any time to the Daniela and Jason2 storyline,” he says. “And I always wondered what that story would have been like, if we had followed this woman living with a man who looks just like her husband but isn’t, and she’s slowly realizing that something is off. It felt like a bit of a missed opportunity. So when the chance to do the show came up, I immediately was like, ‘Well, that would be amazing.'”

But in establishing the laws of the series’ universe, Crouch also realized he would have to do away with elements of the novel he had become attached to. “There’s a moment in the book that I love when Jason is alone in the corridor and he sees another version of himself stumbling around who’s cut up and naked and has obviously been through some terrible thing,” Crouch says. “But I realized I had broken the rules of my own book by doing that scene. It didn’t actually track logically. That was a hard one to let go.”

Entering the fray of the multiverse

As the show got closer to becoming a reality, there was also a major surge in multiverse-centric content to consider. When Crouch published Dark Matter in 2016, it was before the multiverse boom brought on by the Marvel movies, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and more. Nearly 10 years on, an abundance of universe-hopping stories have entered the mainstream, all garnering their own praise and criticism. “The question was how do we sort of set ourselves a little bit apart,” Crouch says.

For Tolmach, that meant establishing a tone that would get viewers to buy into the show’s fantastical sci-fi premise. “When Blake and I started working on this adaptation, there weren’t nearly as many shows or movies in the multiverse space,” he says. “But what I was most drawn to [with Dark Matter] was this idea playing out in a very grounded world, among very relatable characters—not superheroes, ordinary people exploring the roads not taken. That still feels very original and unique to me.”

Ultimately, it’s Dark Matter‘s engaging characters that Crouch believes will keep viewers coming back for more. “You can kind of do anything you want in storytelling if you make the audience fall in love with the characters,” he says. “We tried to inoculate ourselves against the alt-reality fiction craze by saying, ‘Let’s just make great characters that people care about and hope that they want to follow them along on their journey.'”

source https://time.com/6974391/dark-matter-apple-tv-blake-crouch-interview/

Google DeepMind’s Latest AI Model Is Poised to Revolutionize Drug Discovery

Researchers at Google DeepMind have developed AlphaFold 3, an AI model that can predict the structure of and interactions between biological molecules including proteins, DNA and RNA, and small molecules that could function as drugs. Google DeepMind will make the model available for non-commercial use through AlphaFold server. The landmark innovation, the details of which were published in the journal Nature on May 8, is likely to dramatically accelerate biological research. 

“It’s a big milestone for us today, announcing AlphaFold 3,” said Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, at a briefing on May 7 announcing the breakthrough. “Biology is a dynamic system and you have to understand how properties of biology emerge through the interactions between different molecules in the cell. You can think of AlphaFold 3 as our first big step towards that.”

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The AI system is a descendant of previous AlphaFold models built by Google DeepMind that essentially solved the problem of predicting the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid structure. Google DeepMind’s first AlphaFold model, announced in 2018, attempted to predict protein structures, coming first in an international protein structure prediction competition. AlphaFold 2, released in 2020, significantly improved on the first’s protein structure accuracy predictions. 

AlphaFold 3 goes further by predicting the structures of almost all biological molecules and modeling the interactions between those molecules. While researchers have long developed specialized computational methods for modeling interactions between specific types of biological molecules, AlphaFold 3 marks the first time that a single system has been able to predict the interactions between nearly all molecular types with state-of-the-art performance.

The properties and functions of molecules in biological systems are typically a result of how they interact with other molecules. Using experiments to understand molecular interactions can take years of research time and be prohibitively expensive. If these interactions can instead be estimated computationally with sufficient accuracy, then biological research can be dramatically accelerated. For example, if researchers believe that a molecule that binds to a specific site on a certain protein would be a promising drug candidate, they can use computational systems such as AlphaFold 3 to test potential drug molecules.

“AlphaFold continues to get better, and increasingly more relevant for biological investigations,” said Paul Nurse, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and chief executive and director of the London-based biomedical research center the Francis Crick Institute, in a statement accompanying the Google DeepMind announcement. “This third version will enable increased accuracy in predicting the structures of complexes between different macromolecules, as well as associations between macromolecules, small molecules and ions.”

Google DeepMind was founded as DeepMind in 2010 by Hassabis, along with Google DeepMind Chief AGI Scientist Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. (Suleyman is now CEO at Microsoft AI, Microsoft’s consumer AI products and research organization.) DeepMindwas acquired by Google in 2014, and in 2023 Google merged DeepMind with Google Brain, another Google AI division, to form Google DeepMind, putting an end to efforts by DeepMind’s leadership to secure greater autonomy from their parent company.

In addition to the AlphaFold family of AI systems, Google DeepMind has made several breakthroughs that use AI to further science and technology. In 2022 the company released an AI system that can discover novel algorithms, and in 2023 it released an AI model that could forecast the weather with unprecedented accuracy. Also in 2023, Google DeepMind released an AI model that it claims accurately predicts the structures of materials, although the utility of this model has since been called into question by independent researchers.

In 2021, Google parent company Alphabet announced the creation of Isomorphic Labs, which aims to take an AI-first approach to drug discovery. Researchers from Isomorphic Labs contributed to the development of AlphaFold 3 and, while AlphaFold Server can be used by anyone from non-commercial research, researchers at Isomorphic Labs will have exclusive access to AlphaFold 3 for commercial use.

“We’ve been using AlphaFold 3’s capabilities day-to-day in our drug design programmes,” said Max Jaderberg, chief AI officer at Isomorphic labs, at the announcement briefing. “We’re already seeing that potential to accelerate, improve, and ultimately transform the way that we do drug discovery, and it’s really because of the new level of accuracy of this model, and the increased breadth of biomolecules that this model is able to predict, that really enables that for us.”

source https://time.com/6975934/google-deepmind-alphafold-3-ai/

New York Governor Regrets Saying Black Kids in the Bronx Don’t Know What a Computer Is

ALBANY, N.Y. — New York Gov. Kathy Hochul says she regrets making an offhand remark that suggested Black children in the Bronx do not know what the word “computer” means.

Hochul, a Democrat, made the extemporaneous comment Monday while being interviewed at a large business conference in California to discuss expanding economic opportunities in artificial intelligence for low-income communities.

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“Right now, we have young Black kids growing up in the Bronx who don’t even know what the word computer is. They don’t know, they don’t know these things,” Hochul said while on stage at the Milken Institute Global Conference.

The remark was not addressed during the interview and the governor went on to explain that her goal is to provide avenues for communities of color to access emerging artificial intelligence technologies as a means to address social inequality.

Still, the gaffe drew immediate criticism from some political leaders in New York, including state Assemblywoman Amanda Septimo, a Bronx Democrat, who said the remark was “harmful, deeply misinformed, and genuinely appalling.”

In a statement later Monday, Hochul said “I misspoke and I regret it.”

“Of course Black children in the Bronx know what computers are — the problem is that they too often lack access to the technology needed to get on track to high-paying jobs in emerging industries like AI,” Hochul said. “That’s why I’ve been focused on increasing economic opportunity since Day One of my Administration, and will continue that fight to ensure every New Yorker has a shot at a good-paying job.”

New York state Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Democrat who represents the Bronx in the Legislature, came to Hochul’s defense as her remarks began to gain traction online.

“While the governor’s words were inartful and hurtful, I don’t believe that is where her heart is. I firmly believe she wants to see all of our students excel,” Heastie said.

source https://time.com/6975656/new-york-governor-apologizes-for-remarks-black-children/

Police Investigating Shooting Outside Drake’s Mansion That Left Security Guard Wounded

TORONTO — Police are investigating a shooting outside rapper Drake’s mansion in Toronto that left a security guard seriously wounded.

Authorities did not confirm whether Drake was at home at the time of the shooting, but said his team is cooperating. The shooting happened around 2 a.m. Tuesday in the affluent Bridle Path neighborhood of Toronto.

Toronto Police Inspector Paul Krawczyk said video of the shooting had been recovered and the guard who was wounded remains hospitalized.

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In recent weeks, Drake has been engaged in a rap feud with Kendrick Lamar, with each artist dropping diss tracks attacking the other.

Krawczyk was asked whether the feud was a factor in the shooting and he said while investigators are aware of it, it was too early to discuss motive.

Drake, born Aubrey Drake Graham, is one of the best-selling artists of the modern era, began his career as a child actor on the popular teen program “Degrassi: The Next Generation” before setting his sights on music, dropping some of the most influential albums of any genre in the 2010s: “Take Care,” ’Nothing Was the Same,” and “Views” among them. He’s released 13 No. 1 hits across his career, including “God’s Plan,” “Work” featuring Rihanna, and “One Dance” with WizKid and Kyla.

The “Hotline Bling” performer was named Spotify’s most streamed artist of the decade, has won five Grammy awards, and is often credited for ushering in the new era of hip-hop where rappers sing, weaving R&B sensibilities into the genre.

source https://time.com/6975650/drake-shooting-mansion/

Boy Scouts of America Changing Name to More Inclusive ‘Scouting America’

IRVING, Texas — The Boy Scouts of America is changing its name for the first time in its 114-year history and will become Scouting America. It’s a significant shift as the organization emerges from bankruptcy following a flood of sexual abuse claims and seeks to focus on inclusion.

The organization steeped in tradition has made seismic changes after decades of turmoil, from finally allowing gay youth to welcoming girls throughout its ranks. With an eye on increasing flagging membership numbers, the Irving, Texas-based organization announced the name change Tuesday at its annual meeting in Florida.

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“In the next 100 years we want any youth in America to feel very, very welcome to come into our programs,” Roger Krone, who took over last fall as president and chief executive officer,said in an interview before the announcement.

The organization began allowing gay youth in 2013 and ended a blanket ban on gay adult leaders in 2015. In 2017, it made the historic announcement that girls would be accepted as Cub Scouts as of 2018 and into the flagship Boy Scout program — renamed Scouts BSA — in 2019.

There were nearly 1,000 young women in the inaugural class of female Eagle Scouts in 2021, including Selby Chipman. The all-girls troop she was a founding member of in her hometown of Oak Ridge, North Carolina, has grown from five girls to nearly 50, and she thinks the name change will encourage even more girls to realize they can join.

“Girls were like: ‘You can join Boy Scouts of America?’” said Chipman, now a 20-year-old college student and assistant scoutmaster of her troop.

Within days of the announcement that girls would be allowed, Bob Brady went to work. A father of two girls and a proud Eagle Scout himself, the New Jersey attorney eagerly formed an all-girls troop. At their first weekend gathering with other troops, the boys were happy to have the girls involved but some adult leaders seemed concerned, he recalled. Their worries seemed to melt away as soon as the girls led a traditional cheer around the campfire.

“You could see a change in the attitude of some of the doubters who weren’t sure and they realized, wait, these kids are exactly the same, they just happen to have ponytails,” said Brady. His daughters are among the 13 girls in his troop and 6,000 girls nationwide who have achieved the vaunted Eagle Scout rank.

Like other organizations, the scouts lost members during the pandemic, when participation was difficult. After a highpoint over the last decade of over 2 million members in 2018, the organization currently services just over 1 million youths, including more than 176,000 girls and young women. Membership peaked in 1972 at almost 5 million.

The move by the Boy Scouts to accept girls throughout their ranks strained a bond with the Girl Scouts of the USA, which sued, saying it created marketplace confusion and damaged their recruitment efforts. They reached a settlement agreement after a judge rejected those claims, saying both groups are free to use words like “scouts” and “scouting.”

While camping remains an integral activity for the Boy Scouts, the organization offers something for everyone today, from high adventures to merit badges for robotics and digital technology, Krone said: “About anything kids want to do today, they can do in a structured way within the scouting program.”

The Boy Scouts’ $2.4 billion bankruptcy reorganization plantook effect last year, allowing the organization to keep operating while compensating the more than 80,000 men who say they were sexually abused as children while scouting.

Angelique Minett, the first woman chairperson of Scouts BSA, gets excited about the future of scouting when she sees the about 20-person youth council from across the United States help guide the program by raising issues important to them, like sustainability, and things that they’d like to see changed, like the fit on some of the uniforms.

“When we think scouts we think knots and camping, but those are a means to an end,” Minett said. “We are actually teaching kids a much bigger thing. We are teaching them how to have grit, and we’re teaching them life skills and we’re teaching them how to be good leaders.”

The organization won’t officially become Scouting America until Feb. 8, 2025, the organization’s 115th birthday. But Krone said he expects people will start immediately using the name.

“It sends this really strong message to everyone in America that they can come to this program, they can bring their authentic self, they can be who they are and they will be welcomed here,” Krone said.

source https://time.com/6975641/boy-scouts-of-america-name-change/

Ex-CEO Howard Schultz Says Starbucks Needs to Refocus on Coffee as Sales Struggle

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says the company’s leaders should spend more time in stores and focus on coffee drinks as they work to turn around flagging sales.

In a LinkedIn post published over the weekend, Schultz said many people had reached out to him after Starbucks reported weaker-than-expected quarterly sales and earnings last week.

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The Seattle coffee giant said revenue dropped 2% in the January-March period as store traffic slowed around the world. It was the first time since 2020 that the company saw a drop in quarterly revenue. Starbucks also lowered its sales and earnings guidance for its full fiscal year.

Schultz, who bought Starbucks in 1987, is credited with growing the company into the global behemoth it has become with nearly 39,000 stores worldwide. He has been the chairman emeritus of the company since last fall, when he stepped down from Starbucks’ board.

Schultz remains Starbucks’ largest individual shareholder, holding shares that were valued at $1.5 billion at the end of last year.

In his post, Schultz said senior leaders – including board members – need to spend more time talking to baristas in the company’s stores.

“I have emphasized that the company’s fix needs to begin at home: U.S. operations are the primary reason for the company’s fall from grace,” he said. “The stores require a maniacal focus on the customer experience, through the eyes of a merchant. The answer does not lie in data, but in the stores.”

Laxman Narasimhan, who became Starbucks’ CEO last spring, has been working a half-day shift in Starbucks stores once a month.

At some points in his post, Schultz seemed to be questioning Narasimhan’s turnaround plans. In a conference call with investors last week, Narasimhan mentioned several new products he thinks will drive customers to stores later this year, including boba drinks, sugar-free options and the brand’s first energy beverage.

But Schultz said coffee is what differentiates Starbucks and reinforce the company’s premium positioning.

“The go-to-market strategy needs to be overhauled and elevated with coffee-forward innovation,” he said.

Narasimhan did announce plans for coffee pop-up stores in the U.S. and elsewhere last month. Starbucks plans to use the stores to experiment with limited-edition coffee drinks, teach younger customers about coffee and learn about customers’ preferences.

Schultz also said the company should update its mobile ordering and payment platform to “once again make it the uplifting experience it was designed to be.” He didn’t specify the changes he thinks should be made. Narasimhan said last fall that Starbucks is accelerating the introduction of new digital features and trying to personalize the customer experience within its app.

“We always appreciate Howard’s perspective. The challenges and opportunities he highlights are the ones we are focused on. And like Howard, we are confident in Starbucks long-term success,” Starbucks said Monday in a statement.

Schultz has a history of stepping in when he see Starbucks struggling. He retired as CEO in 2000 and became the company’s chairman, then returned as CEO in 2008 when the company was dealing with the recession.

Schultz stepped down again in 2017 but returned to lead the company on a temporary basis in 2022. In 2023, he named Narasimhan, a former PepsiCo executive, as CEO. Schultz left Starbucks’ board last fall and became chairman emeritus.

Starbucks shares were flat Monday. The company’s stock price has fallen more than 20% since the start of this year.

source https://time.com/6975167/ex-ceo-howard-schultz-says-starbucks-needs-to-refocus-on-coffee-as-sales-struggle/