Patti Parson

I am Managing Producer of PBS NewsHour, involved with coverage of science, health, general news stories and the work of social entrepreneurs.

[PBS News @NewsHour]

Matthew Lucas, often joined by his wife, Brenda, has logged more than 6,000 miles over the course of a year trying to mark all of the estimated 7,000 Revolutionary War veteran graves in Ohio.

"These grave sites will not live on forever," Krista Horrocks, the project manager for the Revolutionary War Veterans Graves Project, says. "There's nothing we can do to stop the erosion permanently, but to be able to document them is the best thing we can do, because that will outlive all of us."

@JudyWoodruff reports as part of her series, America at a Crossroads.

[PBS News @NewsHour]

Cuba received a tranche of humanitarian aid from China this week as people there experience severe hunger due to food shortages and economic crisis.

It comes as the Trump administration maintains that the island poses a threat to the U.S., but says dialogue remains open.

@IAmAmnaNawaz spoke with Cuban Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Josefina Vidal Ferreiro about the dire situation there, and what she says is Cuba's right to defend itself.

[PBS News @NewsHour]

Drug-resistant infections are a major public health threat around the world, responsible for more than a million deaths each year. Scientists are constantly trying to find and develop new antibiotics.

Now, researchers say artificial intelligence is helping speed their search.

@milesobrien reports.

[Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis @jeffjarvis]

Pity the Journal journalists who had to wallow in Trump's social sewage and report how it's made.
Gift link.
The Late-Night Truth Social Storms That Offer a Window Into the President’s Mind
https://t.co/wuYqGrTJQv

[PBS News @NewsHour]

More than 350 U.S. service members have been injured since military action against Iran began in February. The majority of those are traumatic brain injuries. TBIs have become the defining injury of post 9/11 conflicts, and the symptoms can often linger for years, or even a lifetime.
https://t.co/lNI5WFmxDp

[PBS News @NewsHour]

Technology has changed the way students study and learn, with computers and the internet now helping millions of young minds every day. Now, artificial intelligence has entered the classroom.

Proponents argue that AI will be a welcome revolution for schools, but with limited regulations and few guardrails, could it do more harm than good?

Host William Brangham spoke with Salman “Sal” Khan, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Khan Academy, one of the largest online repositories of free, educational videos.

Khan argues that AI not only should be used in schools, but can be done so in a way that helps teachers enhance their instruction and students learn equitably.

“No matter what happens in schools, kids from educated families, affluent families, they are getting access to the healthy versions of all of this,” Khan told Brangham. "If you take it out of schools, I think you're just going to drive more inequity."

Khan, who is also the author of “Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing),” said that he also monitors his children's online activity.

“I don't let them just do whatever they want on a computer or on AI," he said. "But if they're building a piece of software by vibe coding, if they're creating some digital art, if they're actually going deeper into a topic by asking questions and the AI is pushing them, that's a benefit for their cognition, not a detriment.”

Horizons from PBS News, dives into the science, health, technology and environmental issues making headlines each week. Visit the PBS News website to watch this week's episode.

[PBS News @NewsHour]

The presence of toxic mold in military housing has been a longstanding issue for service members and their families.

The Pentagon acknowledged last year that there are serious health concerns related to base housing conditions. Families say the problems persist.

Bills introduced in the House and Senate to address the problems have not made progress thus far.

Stephanie Sy reports.

[PBS News @NewsHour]

President Donald Trump has regularly said that drug-price discounts on his watch are greater than 100%, which isn't mathematically possible. Now his health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is trying to back up his faulty math. (From @PolitiFact) https://t.co/2F0gkhNJCW

[PBS News @NewsHour]

The Trump administration dissolved the $40-billion U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, last year.

Days later, the State Department issued an exemption for "life-saving humanitarian assistance." But what that exemption included was never specified. Meanwhile, aid for health programs has been drastically reduced.

Fred de Sam Lazaro reports from Uganda, where there has been a spike in disease-related deaths since the cut.

[PBS News @NewsHour]

"We don't need it. Why do I need it? Why would a stupid question like that be asked? Why would I use a nuclear weapon where we've totally in a very conventional way decimated them without it," President Trump said in a response to a question by PBS News' @ElizLanders. https://t.co/m8LPgFfqH5

[PBS News @NewsHour]

A federal judge has blocked a $6.2 billion merger of local television giants Nexstar Media Group and rival Tegna until an antitrust lawsuit is resolved. https://t.co/iGkr8iQrhk

[PBS News @NewsHour]

Emperor penguins are now considered an endangered species, as climate change threatens their natural habitat.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature cited a decline in sea ice for its change of status for the world's largest and most recognizable penguin species.

Emperor penguins rely on this ice to live, hunt and breed. Scientists warn that, without major cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, emperor penguin numbers could be cut in half by the end of this century.

The group also added the Antarctic fur seal to its endangered species list, as rising ocean temperatures affect its food sources.

[PBS News @NewsHour]

Voters in Portland approved a climate and justice fund aimed at investing in projects in historically marginalized communities. As the fund has grown, so has the debate over how that money should be spent. https://t.co/eHJbctPLaV

[PBS News @NewsHour]

PBS News has been nominated for a @PeabodyAward and three #NewsEmmys Awards.

You can read more about the nominated coverage here:
https://t.co/nuLd2daBt6

And congratulations to the @newshour and @washingtonweek teams who contributed to this reporting!

[PBS News @NewsHour]

We have exciting news to share: PBS News has been nominated for a Webby Award!

Help our YouTube channel win a #Webbys People's Voice Award in the Video & Film - Series & Channels - News & Politics category. Vote for us, and other @PBS nominees, here: https://t.co/uYnLzEvk83

@TheWebbyAwards

[PBS News @NewsHour]

Climate change's rising seas may threaten tens of millions more people than scientists and government planners originally thought because of mistaken research assumptions on how high coastal waters already are, a study said.
https://t.co/5rk8EHIQrJ

[PBS News @NewsHour]

“This really is the first window we have into how basically the modern animal-dominated biosphere was formed and developed and came through this weird Ediacaran transitional interlude,” said co-author and paleontologist Frankie Dunn of Oxford University's Museum of Natural History. https://t.co/PA0redJ2mj

[PBS News @NewsHour]

Horses whinny to find new friends, greet old ones and celebrate happy moments like feeding time.

How exactly horses produce that distinctive sound — also called a neigh — has long eluded scientists.
https://t.co/U2AM7FLlNZ

[Object Zero @Object_Zero_]

Large Forgings

A nation’s ability to produce large forgings is a good threshold for what we should consider an “Industrialised Nation”.

One of the cool things about buying large forgings is that the forming process is almost always a “witness point” where the client is expected to come attend the forming event.

Witness points often include pours, melts, forging (smashing it with a giant hammer), and quenching (lowering a red hot piece into an oil bath).

These always fill you with a sense of awe.

There is something simultaneously alien and humbling about seeing humans produce 50 tonne solid steel objects, and the energy and forces involved.

There’s a real variety of objects in industry that need to be made this way, and they’re all the “long lead” items that drive the schedule for major capital projects and ultimately the schedule duration and thus cost of capital.

When you write major programs of work, you come to realise the hidden drivers beyond your domain control.

Projects tend to underpay the real value of these items, because we usually only see them as procured capital goods, when in reality they drive the capital structure of the whole endeavour.

Therefore, nations who want to build major capital projects do well to maintain and support their foundries and forges.

Whilst a foundry might only produce $500m of product in a year, the value of capital projects that have their schedule driven by that foundry is often something like $60bn and the cost of capital that derives purely from foundry lead times is probably 5-8% of that $60bn.

So a smart nation that runs a lot of public projects and pays for them with public money, would do well to support and operate their foundries, or certainly support them in a way that keeps them well practiced and flexible. Or maybe it’s an industry that is dependent on large forgings is able to operate some sort of JIP?

It’s one of those things buried deep inside your industrial base that sits at the nexus of your entire cost base in an unusual way.

There’s lots of low hanging fruit around more sophisticated stewardship of key industrial assets like this. Lumpy demand makes them very difficult to operate in an open market, and as a result they impose a much greater cost on an economy than is necessary.

Maybe militaries should be off-take buyers for defence stockpiles, such a thing would pay for itself in reduced capital costs of all major public projects. Or some sort of industry specific SPV that acts as offtake buyer in a countercyclical manner, eg stacking wellhead forgings.

Anyway, the witness points are always memorable days. If you ever get the chance, volunteer.

[Ray Padgett @rayfp]

Bob Dylan writes about Willie Nelson in a new New Yorker profile

(Bob also says before this, "It’s hard to talk about Willie without saying something stupid or irrelevant, he is so much of everything")