The US fertility rate continued its decline to historic lows in 2025, driven by two converging trends: teen pregnancy rates have plummeted, and more women are delaying motherhood into their 30s and 40s.

The teen birth rate sat at 11.7 births per 1,000 females aged 15-19 — a number that would have been unimaginable a generation ago when it was around 60. That’s a genuine public health success, attributable to better access to contraception and shifting norms.

The US fertility rate continued its decline to historic lows, driven by two converging forces: plunging teen pregnancies and a sharp increase in women delaying motherhood into their 30s and 40s. The data, released this week, confirms a structural shift rather than a cyclical dip.

Teen pregnancy rates have been falling for decades — that part is a success story, driven by better access to contraception and changing social norms. The delayed motherhood trend is more complicated. It reflects education, labor market dynamics, housing costs, and a general calculus that the conditions for child-rearing are arriving later in life, if at all.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau summoned Iraq’s ambassador to Washington Thursday to formally condemn Iranian-backed militia attacks on US diplomatic facilities and personnel in Iraq.

The readout acknowledged Iraqi security forces had responded to some attacks — then immediately noted that “some elements associated with the Iraqi government continue to actively provide political, financial, and operational cover for the militias.” Landau called the April 8 ambush of US personnel an “egregious terrorist attack.”

The State Department summoned Iraq’s ambassador this week to formally condemn attacks by Iranian-backed militias on US diplomatic facilities and personnel. Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau acknowledged Iraqi security forces made some effort to respond but delivered an unmistakable message: Baghdad’s failure to prevent these attacks — and the fact that elements within the Iraqi government are actively covering for the militias — is damaging the bilateral relationship.

The specific trigger was an April 8 ambush of US personnel. That’s not a protest outside a gate. That’s an armed attack on American forces, and it happened while a nominal ceasefire with Iran was supposed to be in effect.

One quarter. Three months. $297 billion into AI startups.

All of last year was a record at $425B. Q1 alone is on pace to nearly triple that.

At some point the question isn’t “is AI overfunded” — it’s “what happens when a meaningful fraction of these bets don’t return.” The answer is probably: a lot of people lose a lot of money, a few technologies stick around, and the narrative shifts to “the real AI” coming next.

Bangladesh has launched an emergency MMR vaccine campaign after health data confirmed at least 130 children dead from measles in the past six weeks. The outbreak signals a collapse in vaccination coverage — measles deaths at this scale in a country with an established health infrastructure indicate that a significant portion of children were not reaching the immune status the MMR vaccine provides.

The causes of such gaps are usually layered: supply chain disruptions, displacement, community resistance, or simply the erosion of routine immunization programs during periods of economic pressure. Bangladesh has dealt with all of these in recent years.

One week of intensive meditation practice: improved brain efficiency, boosted immune signaling, increased natural pain relief chemicals.

Seven days. Not years of practice. The brain responds faster than most people assume.

Whether this persists or fades without continued practice isn’t answered here. But “measurable changes in a week” is a more accessible finding than the usual “long-term meditators show differences.”

Engineers built a memory device that keeps functioning at temperatures hotter than molten lava. 700°C. Normal chips fail around 125°C.

Where would you even use this? Inside jet engines. Deep geothermal sensors. Spacecraft re-entry. Places where electronics currently just die.

Not going in your phone but an interesting piece of engineering.

Deepfake X-rays are now convincing enough that radiologists in tests couldn’t reliably tell them apart from real ones — especially when they didn’t know fakes were in the mix.

The obvious nightmare scenarios write themselves: insurance fraud, evidence fabrication, diagnostic errors from compromised image databases.

The less obvious one: this probably forces a rethink of how medical images are authenticated and stored. Digital signatures for scans, chain-of-custody verification. It’s all possible, just not standard yet.

Silicon-carbon battery design. The energy density has always been there — the problem was stability, they’d degrade fast. New design addresses that.

If it performs outside the lab the way it does inside: Apple and Samsung could ship phones that last significantly longer. Not a little longer. Significantly.

The lab-to-product gap is real and often long. But this one has the right people paying attention.