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This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Ticks are taking over the United States. Due to climate change, changing land use, and an explosion in the deer population, ticks have been expanding their territory and infecting more people than ever. They carry pathogens that cause everything from Lyme disease to the red meat allergy-inducing Alpha gal syndrome. In some cases, tick bites can be fatal.

Ticks usually lurk in the tall grass in wooded areas. That means going on a hike or even just hanging out in your backyard or a park can expose you to a tick bite. In many parts, of the country fear of ticks is changing how people live their lives, including the way they dress, how they enjoy their hobbies, or even whether they spend much outdoors at all.

The tick surge is catching public health officials off guard. Emergency room visits due to tick bites are the highest they’ve been since 2017. In spite of the uptick, most public health departments still focus on lowering the population of mosquitos in their areas over ticks.

“Thanks to warmer winters, ticks are expanding their hunting season.”

Climate reporter Jonathan Mingle says we can fix this problem. As Mingle explained in a recent New York Times op-ed, encouraging the public to do tick checks and use bug spray is a part of the solution, but we’re leaving a bunch of larger interventions on the table. Mingle joined Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram to explain why ticks are expanding their range and what we can do about it.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

We covered Lyme disease and tick bites on this show back in 2018 because the tick situation was getting out of hand. How much more out of hand has it become since then?

You know, some experts I talked to used the word exponential. So what’s happening is that some of these tick species are spreading into areas where people aren’t familiar with them, and doctors aren’t familiar with them. Thanks to warmer winters, ticks are expanding their hunting season. You may have a day that’s like 40 degrees in January; ticks are out looking for you, waiting for you to walk by and grab on and grab a meal.

“Why are we letting the ticks keep us, if not out of these places that we need and love, why aren’t we fighting back?”

In 2024, a pilot named Brian Weitzel, father of three in northern New Jersey, had a hamburger at a barbecue, went home to mow his lawn, and a few hours later was unresponsive on the floor, and he died that night. His family was left in shock, of course, trying to figure out why he had died. And it turned out that he had likely been bitten by the lone star tick and had developed an allergy to red meat. This is referred to as Alpha-gal syndrome, which is just the latest entrant into the files of all the many ways tick bites can make us sick. The most familiar one, of course, is Lyme disease. Each year, about half a million people are treated for Lyme disease. It’s the fastest-growing vector-borne disease in the US. Cases have more than doubled over the past decade, and those cases are mostly as a result of getting bitten by the black-legged tick or the deer tick. The thing is, both of these ticks—and many other ticks that are also marching northward and westward and expanding their empires rapidly across North America—can deliver all kinds of pathogens.

They’re claiming more and more of the map, and they’re claiming more and more of our psychic map, right? I tell people I’m not a tick expert, although I’ve talked to a bunch of them, but I’ve become a tick expert in the sense that I am very familiar with tick paranoia and how it can keep you from venturing out into the places you love: hiking paths or picnic grounds or parks. And so that was part of the story I wanted to write about, too—Why are we letting the ticks keep us, if not out of these places that we need and love, why aren’t we fighting back?

And why is it? Are we not fighting back against the ticks?

Not really. I mean, this is one of the surprising takeaways from my reporting is that we’re barely even trying. One way of understanding that is to think about two numbers. One number is 90 percent. 90 percent of vector-borne disease cases in the US are from ticks.

90 percent?

Yeah. And yet despite the fact that 90 percent of cases of vector-borne illness come from tick bites, if you look at what local city and county health agencies do in terms of vector control, 80 percent of what they do is mosquito control, and only about 10 or 11 percent of these local health agencies around the country do any kind of tick control. So why is that? It’s a familiar story in the public health world. It’s not enough funding or policy support for trying out, testing, and deploying new approaches to controlling ticks.

Even though people are dying?

We’re just kind of taking for granted that, ‘Oh, well, what can you do? You just tuck your pants in and spray some insecticide on your boots, and that’s all you can do.’ It’s like, well, actually we have a long history of going to war with mosquitoes. Before there was tick control, there was mosquito control. The CDC was founded with the sole mandate in 1946 of wiping out malaria and fighting mosquitoes.

It feels like they lost that fight because in my neighborhood you can’t go out between the hours of seven and nine o’clock.

The mosquitoes haven’t gone away, but malaria did, for the most part. You know, in talking to experts today, including folks at the CDC, they told me that there’s a suite of tools we could be using if we wanted to get serious about fighting ticks. As one veteran tick expert at the CDC told me, if you want to make a dent in this problem, you have to get to the deer. The deer are the engine driving a lot of these tick species spreading, and we just have way more deer than we did decades ago, especially in the eastern US and suburban parts of America. So how do you get to the deer? I had people in the comments section of my piece saying the clear answer is just we should all be hunting deer. But in talking to the experts, they’ll tell you it’s not really a feasible solution. You would have to knock deer populations way down to make a dent in the tick populations.

“We’re not even funding this research in a serious way. “

What is more promising is a combined approach of stuff like vaccines. There are people developing vaccines that you could deliver to deer or to rodents, which are another important host for these ticks, so that when the tick bites them, they’ll die. That, I learned from talking to folks who do this kind of research for a living, is a more promising avenue for controlling ticks than all of us picking up crossbows and becoming deer hunters.

So why is it that we’re not doing anything?

What I heard from experts is that we’re not even funding this research in a serious way. We do this stuff for mosquitoes. People don’t realize it, but your local county health agency they go out, and they find where the mosquito breeding grounds are and stagnant pools of water, and they treat it. It takes this sustained quiet effort.

We saw the consequences of not doing that recently. This is a bit tangential, but screwworm. Screwworm was this flesh-eating larval pest that devastates cattle herds; it was eradicated in the US in 1966, and it was kept at bay by the vigilance of people at USDA and USAID who ran these programs to release millions of sterile screwworm males out of airplanes. It created this wall that kept the screwworm from coming into the southern US. And probably if we stopped doing the mosquito control at a local scale, we’d see more cases of dengue fever, West Nile virus, and all these other rare but serious illnesses that climate change is making more of a threat here in the US.

Could you just practically help people understand how they can protect themselves in the absence of, I don’t know, a functional government?

Doing tick checks. And we do it in my household pretty much daily when you come home: do a thorough tick check, throw your clothes in the dryer. Ticks hate heat. And some people like to use permethrin spray, which is this insecticide that’s designed to kill ticks on your boots or your pants when you go out for a hike. Researchers have known these things are really effective if you keep doing them, if you stay vigilant. And all it takes is that one time, that one time you go out for a hike and you come back and you forget to do the tick check.

So we need those kinds of personal measures of vigilance and protection, but we still need to kind of push for a bigger public health response to this. The ticks are going to keep spreading into the calendar, too, in the sense that as winters get warmer, more and more days of the year when you’re outdoors, you’re going to encounter ticks who are hungry, and they’re looking for you.

On July 8, Abdul El-Sayed had just wrapped up a campaign stop inside a sweltering church auditorium in Ferndale, Michigan. The room was packed with supporters fanning themselves with campaign signs, many braving the summer heat to hear the progressive Senate candidate make his case against his opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens.

Then came the applause.

It wasn’t for Medicare for All or his warnings about the rise of data centers. It was for a message that has come to define what is expected to be the most expensive Democratic Senate primary in history.

“The central corrupting feature of our politics right now is the power of money to buy politicians so that government is captured by them, not for us,” El-Sayed said as he fielded questions from the stagefrom the stage, wearing his signature black T-shirt and blue jeans. “AIPAC will spend huge amounts of money if you’re uppity like me and you speak out of turn to beat you, and you’re seeing it play out on TV every day.”

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its affiliated groups have poured more than $30 million into the race in support of Stevens. It is the largest investment the organization has made in an electoral contest since launching its United Democracy Project super PAC in 2021.

“I have been very clear, consistent and transparent, and I have continued to be,” Stevens said during a recent televised debate when asked about AIPAC’s support for her campaign. “I want to see long-term peace. I want to see a two-state solution. I am deeply proud to represent one of the largest Jewish populations in a congressional district in the country.”

The stakes in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary extend far beyond the state. The winner will face Republican Mike Rogers in one of the country’s marquee general election contests, and Democrats need to win races like Michigan if they hope to take control of the Senate.

But first, Democratic voters are deciding a different question: whether the party’s future lies with its establishment, represented by Stevens, or with an ascendant progressive movement embodied by candidates like El-Sayed. The race has become a proxy fight over money in politics, the influence of pro-Israel groups such as AIPAC, and whether Democratic candidates can openly criticize U.S. support for Israel without sacrificing electability.

It is also unfolding in the shadow of Michigan’s 2024 Uncommitted movement, which turned the state into the epicenter of Democratic dissent over the war in Gaza and exposed fractures that continue to divide the party’s coalition, including an ongoing debate over how much the issue contributed to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat.

We spoke with El-Sayed earlier this summer about AIPAC, electability and what he believes his race means for the future of Democratic politics.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Nearly two years ago, you joined members of the Uncommitted Movement at the Democratic National Convention asking them to have a Palestinian speak on stage. What was your involvement in that group?

I thought we needed to take a shot across the bow to remind the Biden administration that Arab and Muslim voters were an important part of his coalition, and that we would not stand by and watch him use our tax dollars to drop bombs on other people and their kids to do a genocide, and that he was at risk of losing a lot of important voters if they didn’t course correct. 

When Vice President Harris became the nominee, I was the first Arab or Muslim leader to endorse her openly. I took it on the chin, you can imagine. 

In both instances,  I was trying to lead with my values. Because if you saw this election from the eyes of a child in Detroit, where I was leading Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veteran Services, or you saw it from the eyes of a child in Gaza, Trump would be worse. 

But how does that contrast with the idea of where are now, where a number of progressive candidates who have campaigned around the issue of Palestine are winning Democratic primaries across the country?

That’s how democracy works. Democracy is supposed to work by giving the voters a choice about what vision they want. And I think voters are choosing their morals rather than political expediency.

When you started your campaign, it seemed like you had a Bernie-style approach centering on issues like Medicare for All. You even had a video where you interviewed a veteran who responded to the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. When did your race become so foreign policy focused? 

My campaign is not really this heavy on foreign policy. It just happens to be what all y’all in the media want to talk to me about. 

Respectfully, you bring it up yourself sometimes.

When a $30 million super PAC spend is being dropped on your face by an organization whose key interest is something happening over there, then it would be ridiculous not to name it.  AIPAC is the biggest spender in this race by far, and that’s pretty insane. And they’re not spending to keep our money here, they’re spending to send our money there. So they’ve made it an issue, and it’s just another example of why we have to get money out of politics. Because so long as they can spend that kind of money buying attack ads against me, we are going to continue to watch as too many politicians bow out of having any kind of moral courage to keep our money here at home and actually do the things that we need here at home. 

But I’m running on getting money out of politics, putting money in your pocket, passing Medicare for all. 

It  just so happens that the question right now that everybody’s asking is, “How are you gonna pay for it?” Well, look at what we’re doing abroad. Look at this ridiculous war we never should have fought or have been fighting. Think about the genocide that we backstopped, the apartheid that continues to be done, the attempted annexation of Lebanon. Like, why? 

And what could we do with that money if we kept it here?

So all I’m saying is, if we wanna have nice things here, it’s better to use our money to do nice things here than to do bad things there. It’s not that hard. 

You mention AIPAC repeatedly in your campaign speeches, debate responses and on and I’m curious why you think calling them out resonates with voters?

AIPAC is the biggest spender in this race, so you can’t talk about money out of politics without talking about AIPAC. You just can’t. Like, it’d be like ignoring the elephant.

But this is nothing new, no?

But I want people to see it anew. Because you’re right, it’s nothing new. It is so common in our politics that we take it for granted, and that’s some ridiculous shit. Like, it’s ridiculous that we take it for granted that we have a bipartisan consensus on the idea that your US senators wanna send your money to some other country to buy bombs and tanks instead of keeping your money here. And it’s not just about Israel, by the way. It’s also Egypt. It’s also Pakistan. It’s also Saudi Arabia. It’s all of these places where we send foreign military aid where we should not.

What do you say to Democratic old heads who are, you know, might look at your campaign, might look at you and be like, “You’re just throwing some, some red meat to, to the lefties,” so to speak, when it comes to the issue of Palestine, that this is politically advantageous for you? 

People are asking two questions: what do you say you’re gonna fight for, and then do I believe that you’re gonna fight for it? The Democratic Party brand is in the shitter because nobody actually believes that we’re gonna show up and fight for the things that we say we wanna fight for. You know why? Because we say we’re for human rights, and then we watch them get viciously violated, and then we say nothing. So what that tells me is you’re gonna back down. So I would tell them, how about our party finds some courage, and I’m just telling you exactly what I believe, come what may. So when we beat $50 million of spending from AIPAC, I’d love to have a conversation with them. 

What do you think Palestine or Israel or the two of them together symbolize for this year’s midterms?

Moral Rorschach test.  Are you someone who is willing to be courageous and truthful, or are you someone who is willing to bend to money and power? And people are showing themselves in real time.

What do you say to people that think you are being divisive in your rhetoric, and that if you’re trying to coalition build, being this brash or loud only hurts your cause?

I’m building a coalition on the truth. And sometimes when a coalition is built on falsehood, you have to make sure that you can move it to the truth. And I’m finding that we’re building a much bigger coalition than the one that they think, you know, we’re breaking apart, because a lot of people wanna be a part of the truth. They want their kids to have good healthcare. They want to be able to travel good roads. They want good schools, and they wanna know that our tax dollars aren’t hurting other people.

What do you think the outcome of your race will say about the future of the party? 

A lot. I think everybody and their mom running for president is watching this race with a very keen eye. And if we can demonstrate that campaigning on, on truth and on courage can win in Michigan, it can win anywhere.

 If I prove that you can win statewide, taking on AIPAC and winning, that is catastrophic  because of what it says about the future of the party. It is existential to oppose it. I think this race is going to change a lot of minds, and it’s going to scramble a lot of expectations.

This interview was originally conducted as part of an upcoming episode of Reveal, slated for release later this September about the role Israel has in reshaping American politics. 

Subscribe to Reveal wherever you get your podcasts to hear the conversation and many more around this topic and other news of the day.

My family group chat has been consumed by one particular question of late: “Do you think Mitch McConnell is still alive?” I’m an editor, not a clairvoyant. But for the record: I think he is alive, albeit probably in a bad way. Those close to McConnell have, in recent days, disclosed a pair of “proof of life” photos, which, in the age of AI and deepfakes, have only fueled conspiratorial scrutiny. Meanwhile, the former Senate majority leader lies in Schrödinger’s hospital suite, in a state of being and unbeing. And all over social media, some have urged Democrats—especially Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear—to either do more to get to the bottom of McConnell’s condition or do something more radical, like unilaterally declare him deceased and call a special election.

Such calls are, I believe, ill advised. But there is probably an avenue here for Democrats to use this to their advantage.

I understand why McConnell and the state of his health have become such an idée fixe, here at what looks to be his final act. First of all, McConnell is basically the Final Boss of a couple recent trends: the spate of disappearing lawmakers who have made news over the last year or so, and the country’s growing negative feelings toward the gerontocracy and the perception that too many aging and infirm lawmakers are clinging to power long past their sell-by date.

But there are deeper layers of anger and resentment on display among those looking to shove McConnell out the door. He achieved mythic villain status during the Obama era, when his strategy of total obstruction, and the belief that the GOP must never give the president a win, was so total that it abrogated Washington norms. The parallels you can draw at this moment between McConnell shielding his health status from public view and his refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing and insistence on leaving a Supreme Court seat empty are extremely obvious. Moreover, as Democratic voters search for “fighters” in their party to replace lawmakers deemed to be too accommodating to Trump, they are essentially beseeching their own to adopt the tactics that McConnell deployed to maintain and increase his party’s power.

The passions of the public, driven in equal measure by vindictiveness and projection, have lately become Beshear’s problem, as calls mount for him to do some undefined thing to force the issue itself. And this isn’t just coming from the social media randos (though it is coming from them): Former Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger recently took to Threads (which is still a website, apparently) to say, “I think the Governor of Kentucky has every right and responsibility to either see Mitch or declare the seat vacant.”

Folks, just some friendly advice here. Before I make demands of a Democratic governor of a red state to do something that’s likely to put state Republican lawmakers in a hysterical fury, I like to check on whether or not it’s likely that the governor will end up impeached. In this case, Republicans occupy 80 of the 100 seats in the state House (where you need 51 to impeach) and 32 of the 38 seats of the state Senate (where you need 26 to convict). So this maybe isn’t the best time for Beshear to bully his way into McConnell’s hospital wing like some righteous commando. Unless, that is, you want us to be down one blue-state governor (and one promising Democratic presidential candidate).

Beshear seems to know what he’s doing, in any case. In an appearance on Bloomberg TV, he shot down the idea of his calling a special election, saying that those who “are really pushing I think are under the impression that a Democrat in Kentucky might be able to win that election. It’s been since 1992 that we had a Democratic senator in Kentucky.” He also noted that McConnell missing votes while the seat goes unoccupied “might not be a bad thing.”

“McConnell hasn’t been there to vote on the SAVE Act, which would tear voting rights away,” said Beshear. “He hasn’t been there to vote to support this war on Iran that this president started and shouldn’t be continuing ... not having Mitch McConnell show up isn’t necessarily a bad thing because he certainly doesn’t show up to help the American people.” In the meantime, the governor has called on McConnell to either disclose his health status or resign. That, I think, covers all the bases as far as what Beshear can and should be doing. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for other elected Democrats to play in harnessing the passions of their base and channeling them to a larger purpose.

The McConnell affair is emblematic of many pernicious aspects of Trumpism: The lack of transparency is part and parcel of a party that centers lies and obfuscations in its politics; the clinging to power by corrupt means reflects the party’s larger desire to suppress the vote and dodge the Constitution. Echoing Beshear’s commentary on how good it is for the country to have McConnell out of commission, and thus unable to cast destructive votes, would be a great way for Democrats to highlight how important it is to evict other GOP senators from their perches. And this is maybe the best time for Democrats to talk about McConnell’s toxic legacy—we all know that when he does pass, those who’ve had a front-row seat to his vicious power-mongering will feel the urge to not speak ill of the dead.

Most of all, this is a moment when Democrats should respect and make use of what seems to be a deep vein of anger toward McConnell among their base. I think this whole episode is stirring a lot of recollections: the memory of Democrats fruitlessly trying to entreat Republicans into the policymaking process even as McConnell urged gridlock; the remembrances of McConnell controlling the makeup of the Supreme Court even as it becomes more apparent that Democrats will need to be similarly radical. I think it’s possible that the weird way McConnell’s camp opted to go into hiding may contribute to the GOP’s destruction in the midterms. But it will only work if Democrats make it clear that the obsolete politics of bipartisan comity, which McConnell took it upon himself to destroy in order to bring rack and ruin to the Democrats, will die with him.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Some New New Republic Newsletter News:This week, The New Republic launched the TNR Blue Book: a daily newsletter that will get you up to speed on the important Democratic and liberal-progressive news of the day in just a few minutes. With a panoramic view of left-wing politics from Capitol Hill to way outside the Beltway, original reporting from Emma Janssen, and contributions from the entire TNR team, it’s an informative and entertaining way to get your day started. As with all TNR newsletters, it’s free. Subscribe here if you haven’t already.

Weary travelers making their way through airports have enough to contend with these days without some Microsoft borkage popping up over departure information. Spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader identifying themselves as Ethel Grapefruit (Mrs), one of the information boards at Heathrow Terminal 5's check-in area has decided that whatever is running behind the scenes does not meet with Microsoft's approval, and requires activation. The message is familiar to many Windows users, and appears as a watermark when something has made the knickers of the computer behind the scenes get a bit twisty. Perhaps there's been a hardware replacement, and Windows needs to be reactivated. Or an update that sent the operating system into a tizzy. There are any number of reasons the watermark may appear, and any number of ways to remove it. The good news is that, while annoying, the presence of the watermark is unlikely to have much adverse effect at a technical level. There'll be nagging. There won't be much in the way of customization to make the computer your own. And, of course, Microsoft won't be offering much – if anything – in the way of support (other than security updates). Not that any of that matters much for a sign showing where to go to check in for a flight and hand bags over to be weighed by a member of staff. However, it might matter for a passenger already a little tense about being flung through the air in a metal tube at ludicrous speed after passing through multiple (and occasionally performative) security gates. If, after stepping through the airport doors, the first sight a person has is of an approach to IT that would have the head of their home tech team given a stern talking-to by The Boss, what hope is there for the rest of the journey? Heathrow and British Airways are names that rarely feature in sentences that include the words "competent IT." There was the 2024 British Airways luggage whoopsie or last year's Heathrow fire-related closure. Digital signage indicating that some IT contractor has not done their work to the required standard is therefore the least of their worries. And it's not as if either entity couldn't afford a Windows license. Let's face it, the cost of some baggage tipping the scales would probably go a long way toward acquiring a license key (if that is indeed the issue). However, for an already jumpy customer, a Windows activation message is unlikely to assuage nerves already jangling over EU passport queues and overly complicated airplanes doing some odd things on approach. Perhaps the moral of today's bork is that it is better to forget all this traveling malarky. Instead, how about a nice sit-down, a beverage, and a delicious biscuit? ®

DEEP DIVE For the first time, Nvidia has directly challenged Intel and AMD's CPU dominance. With the launch of Vera, the AI arms dealer aims to flog its standalone CPUs to as many hyperscalers and other cloud providers as it can. Alibaba, ByteDance, Meta, Oracle, CoreWeave, Lambda, Nebius, and NScale have already signed up to deploy the chips in their respective clouds. The follow-on to Nvidia's Grace CPU promises 88 custom Armv9.2 cores, 176 threads, support for up to 1.5 TB of LPDDR5X memory, and, critically, availability as a standalone platform independent of Nvidia's GPUs. But beyond that, and a mountain of marketing about how it'll be the best CPU for everything AI, Vera's inner workings have largely remained a mystery until recently. That changed late last month, when Nvidia released a whitepaper spilling the beans on its first fully-custom CPU, which is far weirder than anyone could have anticipated. Ostensibly, Nvidia is aiming Vera at two key workloads: the first and least surprising is as the AI head node responsible for managing the GPUs in its upcoming Vera Rubin systems. The second, and more contentious, is as a host for AI agents, which, unlike the large language models (LLMs) that power them, don't actually run on GPUs. From what we gather, much of Vera's core architecture is predicated on quashing pipeline and execution bottlenecks in order to make it more effective in these roles. But before we dive into Nvidia's Olympus core, let's revisit the chip itself. Monolithic compute, multi-die memory and I/O Peel back Vera's rather substantial heat spreader and you'll find an assortment of chiplets responsible for I/O, memory, and compute. However, this isn't another rehash of the chiplet architecture popularized by AMD. Unlike x86 processor makers, which spread dozens of cores across multiple dies, Vera's compute die is monolithic. All 88 cores are housed in one big chunk of silicon that from what we understand is fabbed on TSMC's 3nm process. Nvidia argues its monolithic compute architecture has benefits for both core-to-core bandwidth and latency compared to competing designs. Surrounding the compute die is an assortment of chiplets, including eight LPDDR5x controllers, and what appears to be two distinct I/O dies, one responsible for PCIe 6.4 and CXL 3.1 connectivity and another dedicated to the chip's NVLink Chip-to-Chip interface. In terms of package design, Vera is somewhat reminiscent of Amazon's Graviton 4 CPUs, which also combine a monolithic compute die while disaggregating the I/O and memory functionality to dedicated silicon. The Vera CPU Superchip Like most modern datacenter CPUs, Vera supports both single- and dual-socket configurations, the latter of which Nvidia calls the Vera CPU Superchip. Unveiled at GTC in March, the Superchip features two Vera CPUs connected over NVLink-C2C at a blisteringly fast 1.8 TB/s of bidirectional bandwidth, for a total of 176 cores and 352 threads. The two chips are fed by 16 SOCAMM2 LPDDR5x memory modules, which deliver 2.4 TB/s of aggregate memory bandwidth (1.2 TB/s each) — roughly twice the bandwidth of AMD's Turin Epycs, which were launched in 2024. Nvidia's agentic AI reference designs call for cramming as many as 128 of these superchips (256 CPUs) totaling 22,528 cores and 384 TB of memory into a single liquid-cooled rack. Summiting Olympus Previously, Nvidia had relied on off-the-shelf CPU cores from Arm. For example, depending on the iteration, Nvidia's Grace CPUs used Arm's Neoverse V2 (GB200/300), Neoverse V3 (AGX Thor), or Cortex X925 and A725 cores (GB10), depending on which was most convenient. With Vera, Nvidia has moved on to designing its own ARMv9.2-compatible core, called Olympus. In fact, it's up for debate how custom the chip really is. We've been told that the chip builds heavily on existing Arm IP, and looking at Olympus' architectural block diagram, we can see why. Olympus features a 10-wide decoder and dispatch, eight integer arithmetic logic units (ALUs), six vector/FP pipelines (SVE 128), four load units, and 2x store units. So it's got a fat front and back end compared to the Zen 5 cores found in AMD's Turin Epycs or the Redwood Cove cores used by Intel's Granite Rapids Xeons. But compared to off-the-shelf Arm cores, Olympus' front and back end aren't breaking any records. In fact, Olympus looks a lot like a heavily modified Cortex X925. With that said, Nvidia claims Olympus features an entirely custom neural branch predictor, which is capable of exploring two branches simultaneously. Branch prediction is key to performance in modern CPUs, and involves anticipating future code paths and executing down them before they're needed. By predicting two paths per cycle, Vera decreases the likelihood of a mispredict, theoretically boosting its performance in the process. And from what we can tell, a lot of the customization that went into Vera was made explicitly to stamp out pipeline and execution bubbles in order to maximize the number of instructions per clock (IPC). In particular, Nvidia claims its neural branch predictor delivers higher hit rates than history-based approaches, making it ideal for running branch-heavy workloads, like the Python scripts generated on the fly by AI code assistants. Nvidia also claims to have made several innovations to the mid-core, again aimed at mitigating pipeline stalls. Memory renaming speeds up store-to-load dependency chains by allowing dependent instructions to execute before a load completes if the relationship to the data can be divined. "This is particularly beneficial for pointer-heavy software, graph traversal, runtime frameworks, and complex object-oriented workloads," the company explained. Nvidia also implemented a value prediction scheme which "identifies stable dependency chains and predicts future values before they are produced, allowing dependent instructions to execute speculatively while correctness is verified later." This functionality, the company claims, helps to speed up repetitive software patterns and sequential data processing. On the back end, Nvidia Olympus features a similar complement of ALUs and FP units as the X925, but they've been implemented differently. Eight of the ALUs are simple integer units which handle basic mathematics, while the company says two complex ALUs handle multiplication and division, CRC, and shift intensive workloads. The back end also features four dedicated branch units that work with the chip's branch predictor to resolve control flow decisions that would otherwise cause pipeline stalls. Meanwhile, for floating point operations, Olympus features six 128-bit Arm scalable vector engines (SVE2) extensions which also support FP8, along with a pair of vector units dedicated to speeding up crypto operations. Each core is supported by a 64 KB L1 instruction cache, 96 KB L1 data cache, and 2MB per core of L2. The chip also features 164 MB of system level cache (SLC) that's sharded across the chip. SMT makes a comeback on Arm Perhaps Olympus' most interesting party trick is support for simultaneous multithreading (SMT). SMT has been a mainstay of x86 chips since 2002. The technology boosts utilization by enabling two threads to harness idle execution units during a single cycle. While SMT doesn’t double throughput, for certain applications it can deliver double-digit percentage gains. While Arm has supported SMT in the past — you may recall Cavium ThunderX2's four-way SMT implementation prior to its acquisition by Marvell — the company has downplayed its value with its own agentic CPU. Arm's dislike for the tech didn't stop Nvidia from implementing SMT-like functionality in Olympus. We say SMT-like because it's not SMT in the conventional sense. Rather than simultaneous multi-threading, Nvidia markets it as spatial multithreading, which is an apt name given how it works. Rather than two threads that share the resources of one core, Olympus' SMT implementation looks more like core bifurcation with a shared cache line. You can either have one fat core or two skinny ones. To our eyes, it looks a bit like multi-instance GPU (MIG) for the CPU. The white paper makes a big to-do about how spatial multithreading avoids the thread contention you can see with x86 parts, which makes sense, because Nvidia's threads behave more like individual cores. We wouldn't read too much into these claims, though. There have always been applications that benefit from SMT and those that don't, and it's easy enough to turn it off if you don't want it. With that, Nvidia's SMT implementation could be beneficial to agent sandboxes for agentic workloads. With containers — that's all these sandboxes really are – there are two workloads. There's the job you're running inside the container – let's say a Python script and interpreter – and then there's the container runtime, which is responsible for orchestration of container workloads and managing networking and storage overlays. These are very different jobs. By bifurcating its cores, Nvidia can keep the workload and runtime separate, which in theory should make for more deterministic performance. Fat pipes galore Before we move on to Vera's memory subsystem, we need to spend a few minutes discussing Nvidia's second-gen scalable coherency fabric (SCF), which is used to stitch all 88 cores together. As we mentioned earlier, Vera features a monolithic compute die, which means all of its cores are packed on the same silicon. The SCF is essentially a cache-coherent superhighway designed to connect cores together at a whopping 3.4 TB/s of bisectional bandwidth. As Nvidia explains it: "SCF is organized as a distributed coherent interconnect connecting multiple cores through a collection of Coherency Switch Nodes (CSNs). Each CSN connects up to two cores and serves as a routing point within the fabric, enabling efficient movement of requests between cores, caches, memory controllers, and external interfaces." The SCF is also where the L3 cache lives, which explains why Nvidia opted to shard its SLC across the CPU rather than having one big, centrally located pool of it. The SCF is critical, as without it, Vera wouldn't actually be able to utilize its memory bandwidth effectively. Vera features eight LPDDR5x memory controllers with support for SOCAMM2 modules up to 9600 MT/s. At 1.2 TB/s and roughly 14 GB/s per core, Vera has one of the fastest memory subsystems in the world today, but it's worth pointing out that the competition's chips launched nearly two years ago. Both Intel and AMD's next-gen CPUs will make the jump to 16 memory channels. We're still waiting on details on Intel's 192-core Diamond Rapids platform, but we learned last week that AMD's Venice CPUs will boast up to 256 cores and support for 8,000 MT/s RDIMMs or 12,800 MT/s MRDIMMs, which translates to between 1 TB/s and 1.6 TB/s. Assuming AMD's GMI-links aren't a bottleneck this time around, the House of Zen's 96-core Epycs should hit around 17 GB/s per core, and there's no reason to think Intel's Xeon 7 processors won't do the same. With that said, Vera's memory subsystem should suck a bit less power thanks to the use of LPDDR5X rather than standard RDIMMs. The company claims under a sustained load, its memory subsystem contributes just 30 to 40 watts of consumption versus 100 to 200 watts depending on channel and DIMM count on a traditional server platform. For reference, Vera's TDP is configurable between 250W and 450W. Power consumption might explain why AMD is working on a new Epyc, codenamed Verano, which will also use LPDDR5X. An I/O trifecta Vera isn't bursting just with memory bandwidth, but with I/O bandwidth as well. The chip is among the first to support PCIe 6.4 and CXL 3.1, beating out Intel, and possibly AMD depending on the first systems to actually make it into customers' hands. As with past generational PCIe bumps, 6.0 sees per lane bandwidth double to 64 Gbps, which translates to 128 GB/s (256 GB/s bidirectional) for a single x16 slot. A single Vera socket can support 6 such slots (96 lanes in total) for connectivity to NICs, storage, and other peripherals. In the dual-socket Vera CPU superchip config, the lane count does drop slightly to 176 lanes or 11 x16 slots. Along with PCIe, those lanes also support Compute Express Link 3.1. CXL has been around for a while now, but the 3.1 iteration is notable for its support for fabrics and memory sharing. As we've previously discussed, this capability opens the door to network attached memory appliances — which we affectionately call memory godboxes — where multiple CPUs can share the memory. Finally, we need to talk a bit about Vera's NVLink chip-to-chip connectivity. First introduced back in its Grace CPUs, the high-speed interconnect's bandwidth has now been doubled to 1.8 TB/s of bidirectional bandwidth (900 GB/s up and down). This high-speed interconnect allows for coherent memory access across connected CPUs or GPUs. In the Vera Rubin superchip, NVLink is how the CPU talks to the two GPUs. Meanwhile for Vera CPU superchip, the NVLink-C2C interface provides a blazing fast interconnect that mitigates many of the bandwidth bottlenecks associated with multi-socket systems. Performance In agentic workloads, Nvidia estimates Vera will deliver 1.8x higher per-core performance than AMD's 128-core Epyc 9755 in benchmarks representative of agentic workloads, and up to 2.6x faster performance in graph traversal jobs. While that sounds impressive, we're not reading too deeply into Nvidia's performance claims just yet. Turin launched nearly two years ago, which makes it an advantageous comparison point. CPU benchmarks are notoriously easy to cherry pick, and microbenchmarks, while useful for quantifying hardware's capabilities, aren't always representative of real-world performance. A classic example of this is core-to-core latency on early AMD Epycs versus Intel Xeons. As we've already established, AMD employs a multi-chiplet architecture that, for Turin, used up to eight frequency-optimized cores or 16 density-optimized cores per core-complex die (CCD). For workloads that can fit within a single CCD, the core-to-core latency is extremely small. But if a core on one CCD needs to talk to a core on another CCD, it has to walk the I/O die, which incurs a stiff performance penalty. Intel, until recently, has favored higher core-count compute dies, which historically have fared better for latency-sensitive applications, like databases, for the same reason Nvidia opted for a big monolithic compute die on Vera. Whether this actually confers an advantage varies from application to application, and it's not a clear cut victory for one approach or the other. Both have their merits. AMD's chiplet architecture lets them use smaller, better yielding dies, which translates to better margins. We should also mention that Venice makes the jump to 12- and 32-core CCDs, which means the workload would need to be even more talkative for you to notice the latency hit. We've said it before and we'll say it again: there has never been and never will be one CPU to rule them all. Vera doesn't change that. After getting a peek at Vera's performance in the Phoronix Test Suite in a selected, Nvidia-dictated set of tests earlier this year, we're optimistic about Vera's performance in its target workloads, but look forward to seeing fully independent runs on production hardware, especially with AMD's Venice just a few months away. We fully anticipate Vera to sell extremely well, if not for its performance characteristics, then because if you want more than eight Rubins, it's probably coming with a Vera CPU attached. ®

Access to medication abortion in the years since Covid and the fall of Roe v. Wade has completely reshaped the abortion access landscape in America.

“There’s this irony that’s actually happened,” says Dr. Angel Foster, an abortion provider and researcher. “Tragically, 33 to 40 percent of women of reproductive age now have less of a right to an abortion. But access for many people has increased.”

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Foster is the founder of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, a clinic whose work is one major player in why abortions are up. Massachusetts and almost half the states in the US have passed shield laws that legally protect abortion providers. The one Foster operates under allows her to prescribe abortion pills to patients in states with abortion bans. 

And while the battleground may be shifting as medication abortions grow more common, the war is far from over. 

This week on Reveal, we explore post-Roe America through the eyes of three women with three very different missions: Foster, who offers medication abortions nationwide; a courier who risks arrest to stockpile abortion pills for an uncertain future; and a conservative activist whose life’s work is trying to stop them both.

Cloud infrastructure services grew at their fastest for eight years during the second quarter of 2026, thanks to the AI craze and continued demand for flexible and scalable IT infrastructure. According to the latest figures from Synergy Research, enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure passed $143 billion in Q2, a year-on-year growth rate of 43 percent. This followed 11 successive quarters of increasing growth rates, during which the market has now doubled in size. Synergy says that total market revenues for the preceding 12 months add up to an impressive $500 billion. Public IaaS and PaaS platforms account for the bulk of this, and these expanded by 47 percent during Q2. While cloud-based services have been growing at quite a decent rate for some time as organizations expand their IT using this route, the introduction of AI services has given them an extra boost. “AI has, of course, driven most of that incremental growth, and we now see year-on-year growth rates of 165 percent for AI-specific cloud services. It is the handful of leading cloud providers and neoclouds who are mostly benefiting from that market acceleration,” comments Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale. And the top three global players continue to dominate the market, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud together accounting for 67 percent of all the cloud revenue during the quarter. That percentage has increased since the third quarter of last year, when the triumvirate made up 63 percent of enterprise cloud infra spending. AWS is still the largest beast in this sector of the compute arena, taking 28 percent of the market, but its lead over Microsoft is now less impressive, with the Redmond giant making up another 20 percent. Google remains in third place on the global stage, at 15 percent. Among the tier two cloud providers, Synergy reckons those with the highest growth rates include CoreWeave, Oracle, Crusoe, Nebius, and Nscale. However, Oracle accounts for 4 percent of market share, while CoreWeave is another 2 percent. Other firms with a market share of 1 percent (to the nearest percentage point) include IBM, Akamai, Baidu, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Snowflake, Tencent, and SAP. Synergy says that nine rent-a-gpu neocloud operators are now among the top 40 cloud providers, based on service revenue. Geographically, the US remains the world’s largest cloud market by some margin, and its share is actually increasing, growing by 49 percent in Q2, well above the worldwide average. Other countries growing at above the average include India, Indonesia, Ireland, Thailand, and Malaysia. In Europe, the largest cloud markets remain the UK and Germany, but the fastest growing markets are Ireland, Norway, Denmark, and Finland.®

After several weeks of sold-out performances and standing ovations, Cabrillo Stage’s production of Sister Act is heading into its final weekend.

The musical, which closes Aug. 2 at the Crocker Theater on the Cabrillo College campus in Aptos, has earned rave reviews from audiences for its energetic performances, comedy and live orchestra.

Based on the hit 1992 film, Sister Act follows Deloris Van Cartier, a nightclub singer who is forced into witness protection after seeing a murder. Hidden in a convent, she shakes up the quiet religious community while finding an unexpected sense of belonging.

Leading the cast is Karriyma Pekary as Deloris, a role she describes as both glamorous and deeply human.

“She’s a boldly expressive force of nature wrapped in sequins, ambition, humor, and heart,” Pekary said. “Yet underneath all the flashy showmanship is a tender soul searching for validation and belonging.”

Pekary said she identifies with Deloris’ search for acceptance and especially enjoys performing “Raise Your Voice,” a song she said reveals the character’s heart as both an artist and mentor.

As the production has progressed, the cast has formed its own close-knit bond, she said.

“The bond that Deloris and her fellow nuns create is palpable,” Pekary said. “We have formed a true sisterhood, and I’m constantly inspired by the sharing of joy and love that we bring to each and every show.”

Jennifer Taylor Daniels stars as Mother Superior. A familiar face to Cabrillo Stage audiences from productions including Beehive, Scrooge and Hairspray, Daniels is also an educator in the Pajaro Valley Unified School District. One of her former students, Carlos Joel Gonzales, appears alongside her in the cast.

Daniels said her years as a teacher have given her a “teacher voice” that comes in handy when leading a convent full of nuns on stage.

She describes Mother Superior as “a loving person, a bit afraid of the outside world, who seeks community.”

Daniels said she hopes audiences leave the theater thinking about how they can bring more joy into their own lives.

The remaining performances are July 31 and Aug. 1 at 7:30pm, with a final 2pm matinee on Aug. 2.

Performances are at the Crocker Theater, 6500 Soquel Drive on the Cabrillo College campus in Aptos. Tickets are available at cabrillostage.com or by calling the box office at 831-479-6154. The box office is open Thursday through Saturday from noon to 6pm and one hour before each performance.

Earlier this week, more than 30 municipal water systems in Minnesota came under a coordinated cyberattack, one that both U.S. and state officials suspect is the work of Iranian hackers. But if you think a president currently engaged in a war against Iran would therefore condemn the attacks, you’d be wrong. President Donald is blaming Minnesota. “We heard in Minnesota there was a…

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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. So much for Elon Musk staying out of politics He just can’t stop spending money on Republicans. Trump’s Gaza ‘deal’ will be as successful as his Iran one We’ll believe a “complete disarmament” when we see it. Why Fauci was once ‘on phone frequently’ with Stephen…

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A cartoon by Brian McFadden. Support my Patreon for early access and exclusives. Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, or at my website. Related | Trump’s plans for racist renovations to the Smithsonian are unbelievable…

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OpenAI has reportedly found evidence of additional agent misbehavior as it looks into the incident that occurred with Hugging Face.

Former President Barack Obama privately derided President Donald Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. in response to their mismanagement and rhetoric while America was dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, according to diary entries written by Dr. Anthony Fauci in November 2021. Fauci’s diary was released by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky as part of hearings conducted by the GOP earlier…

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The Justice Department moved Friday to dismiss a criminal case charging a former Olympian with deliberately damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Government lawyers said in a 20-page court filing that information provided since the indictment of David Hearn shows that the damage was the result of a “flawed installation by the contractor” as well as “the rush to complete the…

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Also has big plans beyond the TM-B. The startup mostly refers to itself as a "vehicle" company, and has plans to make four-wheel pedal-assist cargo vehicles for Amazon.

ph @ds_alxo

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing just what you’d want the nation’s top public health official to be doing: starring in a cooking show. Kennedy will be joined by chef and Fox News contributor Andrew Gruel for “The Real Food Show,” a purportedly healthy cooking show that will help propagandize the Trump administration’s terrible public health track record.

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India's app market generated a record $345 million in Q2.

Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz

The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music has returned to Santa Cruz for its 64th season, bringing two weeks of new orchestral works, world premieres and internationally acclaimed artists. The festival kicked off July 26 and runs through through Aug. 9. Centered on the theme “We the Dreamers,” this year’s festival explores the evolving story of America through music, with more than 20 living composers, four world premieres, eight West Coast premieres and two U.S. premieres performed by the Festival Orchestra under Music Director Cristian Măcelaru.

Music Director Cristian Măcelaru Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz

The festival offers audiences a rare opportunity to witness the creative process firsthand. During open rehearsals, composers work alongside musicians to refine their pieces in real time, giving listeners an inside look at how contemporary music is shaped before it reaches the concert stage.

Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music at the Civic Auditorium in Santa Cruz. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz

Find more information about the festival at https://cabrillomusic.org/

The post An inside look at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Tucked away at the end of a peaceful cul-de-sac in Live Oak, 1739 Katrina Court offers more than a beautifully maintained home—it offers a lifestyle. From its inviting living spaces to its thriving backyard orchard, every corner of this three-bedroom, two-bathroom property reflects comfort, thoughtful updates, and pride of ownership.

Step inside and natural light immediately fills the home through dual-pane windows, creating a warm and welcoming atmosphere. The spacious living room centers around a cozy fireplace, while a charming bay window seat provides the perfect spot to enjoy your morning coffee or unwind with a good book.

The updated kitchen serves as the heart of the home. Stainless steel appliances, a gas range, an oversized sink, and abundant cabinetry make everyday cooking and entertaining effortless. Whether you’re preparing a quick weeknight dinner or hosting family and friends, the space invites everyone to gather.

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The thoughtfully designed floor plan includes 1,291 square feet of comfortable living space. The primary suite offers a peaceful retreat with a generous walk-in closet, while two additional bedrooms feature soft carpeting and flexible space for family, guests, or a home office.

Outside, the approximately 5,663-square-foot lot truly shines. The backyard features a flourishing urban orchard with peach, apricot, cherry, nectarine, Bearss lime, Meyer lemon, and passion fruit, creating a private oasis that produces fresh fruit throughout much of the year. Relax in the hot tub on cool coastal evenings or enjoy the beautifully landscaped yard that has been lovingly maintained over the years.

Additional highlights include a finished attic storage space with automatic lighting above the oversized garage, offering exceptional storage and room for hobbies, projects, or a workshop.

Located just minutes from Santa Cruz’s best destinations—including Twin Lakes Beach, the Santa Cruz Harbor, Pleasure Point, and downtown Santa Cruz—this home combines quiet neighborhood living with easy access to the coast, dining, shopping, and recreation.

Homes on cul-de-sacs in Live Oak rarely become available, especially those that have been updated, meticulously cared for, and filled with unique features like this one. If you’ve been searching for a move-in-ready home with character, privacy, and an exceptional outdoor space, 1739 Katrina Court deserves a place at the top of your list.

Are you ready to write your future?  Listed By Celeste Faraola Perie 831-239-4646, Celeste@Faraola.com www.schoonersantacruz.com

1739 Katrina Court

Open House
Sunday, August 1, 2026
1:00–4:00 p.m.

Call Celeste for your private showing:
831-239-4646!
www.schoonersantacruz.com

The post Live Oak home for sale: Updated 3 bedroom retreat with fruit trees appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.