The year 2025 marked a series of anniversaries. Chief among them are the end of World War II and the subsequent establishment of the UN. Eighty years ago, the foundation of the world order was laid, a legacy that endures to this day. One of the most important results of World War II for Russia was the "nullification" of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. The repeal of the Treaty of…
Quick Hits Two Texas produce associations filed suit against OSHA, challenging the constitutionality of its general safety standards. The plaintiffs argue that OSHA’s broad mandate lacks the necessary intelligible principle required by the U.S. Constitution. The lawsuit seeks to invalidate OSHA’s general safety regulations, potentially impacting federal workplace safety enforcement. That motion mounts a frontal attack on the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s (OSH Act) core delegation for general safety…
The DEN-HOST trial - a multi-site, placebo-controlled, randomised adaptive trial - is being delivered through a collaboration between the Pandemic Sciences Institute, the Programme for Research in Epidemic Preparedness and REsponse (PREPARE) under the Communicable Diseases Agency in Singapore, and the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU). It will initially involve trial sites in ten countries across Asia and Latin America, where dengue is endemic and represents a major public…
The University of Oxford has launched the world’s first Phase II clinical trial of a Nipah virus vaccine candidate.The trial, conducted in Bangladesh in partnership with the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), and funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), will assess the safety and immune response of the ChAdOx1 NipahB vaccine in a region where the virus causes recurrent outbreaks.The trial started earlier this…
The University of Manchester has played a central role in helping Rolls-Royce double the durability of some components in its jet engines operating in the Middle East.Engineers and geologists in the “DUST” group at the University have developed a synthetic test dust supported by an EPSRC IAA Proof of Concept grant, led by Dr Merren Jones and Dr Alison Pawley, that accurately replicates the fine, talcum-powder-like particles commonly found in…
Quick Hits The UK Employment Rights Bill has been described as “the biggest upgrade in employment rights for a generation.” The scope of the bill covers permanent and agency workers, maternity and bereavement leave, statutory sick pay, flexible working, whistleblowing protections, collective redundancy, trade union reform, outsourcing, and seafaring. On 1 July 2025, the government published a roadmap for the delivery of the Employment Rights Bill. Its purpose was to…
So, the first, vital interest is the prosperity and preservation of Russia as a sovereign, free country, and the prevention of a universal catastrophe, a global nuclear war. Its implementation must be based on powerful deterrence forces and efforts to maintain strategic stability, which, in turn, implies maintaining constructive relations with potential adversaries among the great powers. Second, the creation of a security belt and good-neighbourhood along the perimeter of…
Through a strategic collaboration with Microsoft, the AI assistant has been integrated into Microsoft Teams and will be piloted at Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) NHS Foundation Trust, marking one of the earliest deployments of 'agentic AI' within a clinically realistic tumour board setting.Multidisciplinary Tumour Board meetings (MDTs) are the gold standard for cancer treatment planning in the UK, convening radiologists, pathologists, surgeons, and oncologists to review diagnostic results and formulate…
January 06, 2025We asked Yale SOM faculty for their best tips on living happily, healthily, and productively in the new year.January 21, 2025Ordinary investors generally can only see an average of analysts’ target prices for a given stock. In a new study, Yale SOM’s Thomas Steffen and Frank Zhang find that when the degree of variation within that “consensus” figure is large, it’s a bad sign for future returns.January 30,…
Key Points: CP Marketing + Agentic AI Agentic AI is reshaping consumer products marketing by shifting manual, fragmented workflows to autonomous AI agents that plan and optimize campaigns, enabling faster decisions and scalable personalization once core data foundations are established. Organizational readiness will determine real competitive advantage, with governance to guide safe and brand-aligned AI use, and project management to coordinate implementation across functions. Marketers will shift into more strategic…
Quick Hits The U.S. Department of Justice recently published a final rule eliminating liability for disparate impact discrimination for organizations that receive federal money. Intentional discrimination, including disparate treatment based on race, color, or national origin, remains unlawful under Title VI. The rule took effect immediately. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in any program or activity…
Introduction Infringement by common design was established for the first time in Canada by the Federal Court (FC) in the decision Adeia Guides Inc. v. Videotron Ltd, released on Nov. 14, 2025. The FC found Videotron liable for infringement of two patents on the theory of common design. Discussing the concept of infringement by common design, the FC stated at paragraph 476: The concept stems from the principle of holding…
Which headline are you more likely to click on?Headline A: “Stocks Plunge Amid Global Fears.”Headline B: “Markets Decline Today.”Online publications frequently test headline options like this in what’s called an A/B test. In this case, a publication shows headline A to half of its readers, headline B to the other half, then measures which receives more clicks.Marketers have long used A/B tests to determine what drives engagement. Generative AI is…
Dr Tonya Lander. As the holidays approach, many of us will be buying chocolate as gifts for loved ones, but chocolate can no longer be relied on as an ‘affordable luxury.’ For the last 25 years, the price of cocoa was fairly stable, at around 2-3,000 GBP/metric ton. During the first half of 2024 and the start of 2025, however, the price quadrupled to over 8000 GBP/metric ton. Even though…
A major new global study led by a researcher at The University of Manchester has found that younger generations around the world are embracing a more diverse and fluid understanding of sexual identity than ever before.The research - which analysed data from over 900,000 users of the queer women’s and nonbinary dating app Zoe - offers one of the first truly global pictures of how people identify their sexuality in…
Quick Hits The Washington State minimum wage for nonexempt employees sixteen years of age and older will increase 2.8 percent over the 2025 rate to $17.13 per hour in 2026. In order to qualify as an overtime-exempt worker, an employee must be paid at least 2.25 times the minimum wage rate, or $80,168.40 annually, regardless of the size of the employer. Several localities, including Seattle, Bellingham, Burien, Everett, Renton, SeaTac,…
On November 27, 2025, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) published for comment proposed amendments to National Instrument 81-102 Investment Funds (NI 81-102) and its Companion Policy, and issued a related consultation paper. Why now? In 2020, the CSA issued CSA Staff Notice 81-333 Guidance on Effective Liquidity Risk Management for Investment Funds (LRM Guidance). In 2022, the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) published a report assessing how IOSCO’s member…
Russia’s prospective engagement with the Organisation of Turkic States cannot be treated as a linear policy option. It is, instead, a multidimensional issue shaped by institutional constraints, normative tensions, ethnic relations, geopolitical rivalries, and symbolic considerations, writes Lucas Leiroz de Almeida. The author is a participant of the Valdai – New Generation project. A growing discussion has recently emerged over how Russia could engage more systematically with the Organisation of…
Quick Hits The New York City Council enacted two new pay data reporting laws, requiring large employers to submit annual reports detailing pay data by race, ethnicity, and sex. The designated agency will collect demographic information modeled after the former federal EEO-1 Component 2 reports and will have the authority to modify reporting requirements, including options for different gender identities. Employers face penalties for noncompliance, including written warnings and fines,…
Further to our recent article discussing the Building Canada Act and the announcement by the federal government to launch the Major Projects Office (MPO) to facilitate the advancement of major infrastructure and energy projects that are of national interest, the federal government has announced the first and second tranches of nation-building projects that have been referred to the MPO. Per the federal government’s recent statement, the projects referred to the MPO…
Two new studies have found that people affected by the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack showed improvement in mental health after engaging with dedicated support services.Led and funded by researchers at The University of Manchester and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration Greater Manchester (ARC-GM), and NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC). The papers, published in The British Journal of Psychiatry, examined adults and…
Howie and Harlan are joined by Basmah Safdar, a Yale School of Medicine emergency physician and an expert on sex-specific differences in cardiovascular and microvascular health, which have important implications for the understanding and treatment of heart attacks, long COVID, and other conditions. Harlan reports on Australia’s ban on social media for kids, and a Medicare pilot program that will pay providers based on improved outcomes in chronic conditions. Howie…
Quick Hits In its 2025–26 term, the Supreme Court of the United States will decide the constitutionality of President Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship. Oral arguments are expected to take place in the spring of 2026; the Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling by summer 2026. Although the executive order is on hold pending the Supreme Court’s decision, USCIS has issued guidance outlining how the order would…
In November 2025, Alberta’s Superintendent of Insurance (the Superintendent) updated two important guidelines related to licencing and capital requirements for the captive insurance industry in Alberta: the Captive Insurance Company Licensing Guide and the Capital Guideline for Captive Insurance Companies. For those unfamiliar with captive insurance companies (Captives), these entities can be established as an alternative to traditional insurers, providing strategic insurance coverage for the organizations that create and own…
The paper, 'The Levers of Political Persuasion with Conversational AI', published in Science, examines how large language models (LLMs) influence political attitudes through conversation. Authored by a team from OII, AISI, the LSE, Stanford University and MIT, the research draws on nearly 77,000 UK participants and 91,000 AI dialogues, to provide the most comprehensive evidence to date on the mechanisms of AI persuasion and their implications for democracy and AI governance. Our results demonstrate the remarkable persuasive power of…
Quick Hits Technological advancements enable employees to work remotely for foreign companies without relocating, as illustrated by a recent ruling from a German regional labor court. The Rhineland-Palatinate Regional Labor Court ruled that the German Unfair Dismissal Protection Act does not apply to an employee working from home in Germany for a Spanish company, emphasizing the principle of territoriality. The decision highlights that exceptions to the territoriality principle in dismissal…
ISS Guidance (ISS) has published policy updates for its 2026 Global Proxy Voting Guidelines (Guidelines) which include key clarifications specifically for Canadian issuers with respect to (i) advance notice provisions (ANPs), (ii) amendments to equity-based compensation plans, and (iii) non-employee director (NED) deferred share unit (DSU) plans. The updated Guidelines also provide general policy updates applicable to all global issuers with respect to environmental and social-related (E&S) shareholder proposals and…
The NVIDIA accelerated computing platform is leading supercomputing benchmarks once dominated by CPUs, enabling AI, science, business and computing efficiency worldwide. Moore’s Law has run its course, and parallel processing is the way forward. With this evolution, NVIDIA GPU platforms are now uniquely positioned to deliver on the three scaling laws — pretraining, post-training and test-time compute — for everything from next-generation recommender systems and large language models (LLMs) to…
Neutrinos are one of the most mysterious particles in the universe, often called “ghost particles” because they rarely interact with anything else. Trillions stream through our bodies every second, yet leave no trace. They are produced during nuclear reactions, including those that take place in the core of our Sun. Their tendency to not interact often makes detecting neutrinos notoriously difficult.Capturing this interaction is an extraordinary achievement. Despite the rarity…
The University of Oxford and UBS are proud to announce the launch of the Oxford-UBS Centre for Applied Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Centre will aim to deepen the understanding of the power of AI through cutting-edge research and promote its practical application. The Centre aims to be a ground-breaking interdisciplinary partnership involving UBS, the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and the University’s Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences division (MPLS).…
Crucially, it shows that thorium-229 can be studied inside far more common materials than previously thought, removing one of the biggest obstacles to building practical nuclear clocks.The technique also offers new insight into how thorium-229 behaves and decays, which could one day inform new types of nuclear materials and future energy research.“We had always assumed that in order to excite and then observe the nuclear transition the thorium needed to…
Dr Alistair Farley. Credit: The IOI. On 10 December 1945, Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey, and Ernst Chain were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine ‘for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases.’ The discovery of penicillin and its subsequent industrial production during World War Two is rightly hailed as one of the biggest medical breakthroughs of the 20th century. Penicillin played a…
Marking 75 years of the ECHR and 25 years since the Human Rights Act gave it effect in UK law, the research, ‘Examining 10 Reasons to Stay in the European Convention on Human Rights: Informing the Public Debate in the UK’, addresses a debate often dominated by claims about immigration control and widespread misunderstandings of what the ECHR does. Our analysis shows that the ECHR underpins everyday protections from digital privacy…
If Trumpism succeeds, the United States will not only adjust its foreign policy but could inaugurate a new post-Yalta international order – one bringing the West and Russia closer together. Trumpism affords a more compatible mechanism to resolve conflicts in the current bifurcated international system than the Western rules-based liberal international strategy, writes David Lane. Donald Trump’s two presidencies embody elements of both a personal leadership style and the emergence…
Today, Meesho, one of India's leading online retail and merchant tools companies, goes public. It is the second YC company to be listed in India.We met Meesho’s founders, Vidit and Sanjeev, three months into their journey. They applied to the Summer 2016 YC batch just after they launched their website. According to their application, they had 300 users at the time. As with most beginnings of great startups, they had…
How often do boycotts and other consumer protests change corporate behavior?Studies find boycott attempts are successful 25-40% of the time. However, boycott attempts only get analyzed after they’re getting some traction, and corporations don’t always follow through on their promises. So all we can say for certain is that boycotts lead to substantive changes often enough for activists, customers, and corporations to take them quite seriously.How should organizers frame their…
The study, ‘Effects of future climate extreme heat events and land use changes on land vertebrates’, published today in Global Change Biology, assessed nearly 30,000 species of amphibians, birds, mammals, and reptiles. It examined how future extreme heat events and projected land-use changes will affect species across their preferred habitats and thermal limits.Our research highlights the importance of considering the potential effects of multiple threats together to get a better estimation…
Consolidator Grants award around €2 million for projects typically lasting 5 years. Awardees must have 7-12 years of highly promising postdoctoral experience plus an excellent research proposal. With funding from the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, these grants will support cutting-edge research at universities and research centres in 25 EU Member States and associated countries. The ERC received 3,121 applications for this call, of which 11.2% were successful. Oxford received more grants…
9 December 2025By Piero Cipollone and Valdis DombrovskisThe ECB plans to prepare for the potential issuance of the digital euro by 2029, assuming the European co-legislators adopt the necessary regulation by 2026. Preparatory steps, including pilot exercises and initial transactions, could begin as early as mid-2027.From barter to coins to banknotes to cards, the payment systems Europeans have relied on have never stopped evolving. Throughout history, innovations have made these…
Many animals try to win a mate by displaying spectacular ornamentation – such as the famous tail of male peacocks. However, these impressive traits can have negative consequences, even hindering movement or making individuals easier for predators to find. New research has revealed a previously undocumented example of this: the feather ornamentation on the heads of male Chrysolophus pheasants restricts their field of view.We know surprisingly little about how birds…