Domestic
About a week ago, the Federal Government shut down after lawmakers failed to agree on a spending bill. All non-essential workers have been furloughed and essential workers will have to work without pay. The impact of the staffing shortages has been seen on airports this week, with several delayed flights due to shortages in air traffic controllers, who are federal employees. Medicare and Medicaid payments may also be delayed. Once a spending bill is passed, essential workers will receive backpay for the work they performed during the shutdown. The longest and most recent shutdown occurred in December of 2018 and lasted until January of 2019.
ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, recently held its OpenAI DevDay. Improvements announced include the ability to build apps and call apps inside of ChatGPT, a developer kit to build and deploy AI agents, an updated Codex (a software engineering model) and more AI models available to use in the API. This comes about a week after OpenAI publicly released Sora 2, an updated version of its AI image and video generation platform, which is already under scrutiny for the way it approaches copyrighted works.
International
Nobel Prizes for 2025 were announced this week. John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis won the prize in physics for their work on the behavior of subatomic particles in a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling. This occurs when a particle is able to pass through an energy barrier that it otherwise should not have the energy to do. Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi won the prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on the human body’s immune system. The Nobel Assembly’s news release concludes that their discoveries “launched the field of peripheral tolerance, spurring the development of medical treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases.”
Due to a blizzard on Mount Everest, around 900 hikers, guides and other stranded staff members have been rescued. Due to the freezing weather, some were being treated for hypothermia. The blizzard occurred during a weeklong holiday in China, celebrating the rule of the Communist Party. According to a local guide, such a storm is unusual this early in the season.
