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US National Academies report outlines barriers and solutions for scientist carers

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Many academics grapple with caregiving responsibilities, and yet they are not always given the support that they need — even when doing so could address long-standing gender, racial and ethnic biases in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM). Such are the conclusions of the report Supporting Family Caregivers in STEMM: A Call to Action, released last month by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report provides a road map for institutions and individuals aiming to better support academics who are looking after children, family members or friends.

An uneven burden

Elena Fuentes-Afflick, a perinatal epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who chaired the report committee, says that the group was motivated by high levels of attrition among carers in STEMM, particularly among women and especially women of colour, who have historically been more likely to assume caregiving roles. The report notes that Black, Asian and Hispanic carers are more likely to provide care for non-relatives or extended family members than are those in other groups.

Research has shown that parenthood disproportionately affects the careers of women in STEMM1. Nearly half of new mothers (and one-quarter of new fathers) in STEMM reported leaving full-time employment after the birth of their first child2. Much less research touches on other forms of caregiving, including that for older people, spouses, dependent adults, extended family or non-relatives, and language in policies is often geared towards heterosexual couples with young children and can alienate those with other types of responsibility.

“Caregiving is a universal experience, whether one is a recipient or a giver,” Fuentes-Afflick says. “But as a country, we haven’t created an environment where all caregivers can thrive.”

Addressing this spectrum of needs will require buy-in across the entire academic ecosystem, the report argues, from federal agencies and funders to institutions and individual department heads and peers. The United States, for example, is one of 38 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development — and is the only member without national, paid caregiving leave (the report suggests that a minimum of 12 weeks should be offered). Existing US federal and state policies that protect carers — such as the landmark federal civil-rights law Title IX, which bans sex-based discrimination in federally funded educational programmes, along with the Family Medical and Leave Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act — are inconsistently applied.

“There are many best practices that exist right now that are firmly grounded in the law, and yet are not always adhered to,” Fuentes-Afflick says. For example, pregnancy-related discrimination is a violation of three federal laws, yet universities do not always follow them when making hiring and promotion decisions. “The first step is fully implementing all of the current laws.”

The report also highlights ways in which funders can offer support, such as by providing flexibility in the timing of grant eligibility and application due dates. Institutions in turn should appoint dedicated leaders to highlight resources — including paid leave; stop-the-clock tenure policies, in which candidates are given extra time before tenure evaluation to compensate for lost productivity owing to caregiving responsibilities; and free or subsidized childcare — in a centralized online repository, and to ensure that successful policies are made permanent. The report authors note that such resources exist at many universities, but they’re often not adequately advertised or funded, resulting in programmes that either are underutilized or have prohibitively long waiting lists. Although many of the report’s suggestions require financial buy-in, others, such as not scheduling meetings during school pick-up or drop-off times, require only discussions.

Improving conditions

Having frank conversations is essential to maintaining a diverse and competitive workforce, says Leonard Pace, a science-programme senior manager at the Schmidt Ocean Institute headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Pace has organized several conference sessions on caregiving. “Obviously, there’s an ethical incentive to support each other, but it also benefits us financially to retain experienced people,” he says.

The institute offers flexible working arrangements, paid parental leave and caregiving supplements for those conducting fieldwork — policies that Pace has used as a father and while providing care remotely for a parent with lung cancer. As the culture at his workplace shifts away from stigmatizing people with caregiving roles, Pace says, more people are using these resources.

Indeed, creating an environment in which carers can do their best work will require a broader shift away from the stigma attached to deviating from what the report calls the “ideal worker norm” — the idea that scientists should focus on their careers to the exclusion of all other aspects of life (see ‘Stepping up for carers’).

Several scientists who spoke to Nature expressed feeling shame when caregiving responsibilities pull them away from work. Some say that stigma kept them from seeking support. Sarah Bacon, a reproductive physiologist at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, is both a parent and a carer for her mother, who has been hospitalized twice this year and now requires home care.

To fully support her, Bacon has pulled her work back to the bare minimum, teaching classes and holding virtual office hours — and has shared this with only a few key colleagues. “But in the afternoons, when I go to be with my mom, I know my office is dark, and I feel embarrassed,” she says. “Everybody works so hard, and it looks like I’m just slacking off.”

Bacon adds, however, that seeing her experience reflected in the testimonies of the 40 scientists interviewed in the report nearly brought her to tears. Similarly, Taghreed Al-Turki, a single mother and cell biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says that after reading the report, “I wanted to print copies and go through, lab by lab by lab, and hand it to every single principal investigator”. Al-Turki now plans to organize a committee in her department to read through the report, and Bacon has pledged to ask her university’s Title IX officer what policies her university offers.

“As one person, it can feel risky to speak out, but seeing many people amplify how you feel — that’s hope, and I am so thankful,” Al-Turki says. “I love being a scientist, it’s been a dream since I was a kid, and my son is a piece of my heart. There’s no reason I can’t have both.”

Stepping up for carers

There are a number of steps that institutions and individuals can take to create a more supportive environment for scientists with caregiving responsibilities.

• Make caregiving policies easily accessible. Owing to the hodgepodge of federal, state and institutional regulations, people might not always be aware of existing resources. Make a single repository — such as this University of California, San Diego, website, which also includes links to local and national policies — and display it prominently on the university homepage.

• Promote good work–life balance. Scientists fear being ostracized by peers if they are perceived as undedicated because they have to devote time to caregiving tasks. Support flexible working arrangements, and make it clear that those on caregiving leave are not expected to work; this creates a culture in which science exists alongside, and not above, other responsibilities.

• Prioritize funding for innovative pilot programmes. In 2012, Stanford University’s School of Medicine in California piloted a time-banking system. Faculty members could exchange time spent on unpaid labour — such as mentoring, sitting on committees or covering a colleague’s shift — for assistance with grant writing or home activities, including childcare, housecleaning and preparing premade meals. Those who participated received, on average, 1.3 times more grant awards, totalling around US$1.1 million per person. (As of 2022, only one department, emergency medicine, retained the programme.)

• Include caregiving in union negotiations. If you are represented by a union, ask the bargaining committee to include caregiving in their negotiations with university administrators. Postdocs in the University of California system were able to secure eight weeks of paid caregiving leave, paid time off, annual childcare subsidies and lactation support at work.

• Don’t limit caregiving to childcare. Many scientists are children of people in the baby-boomer generation, who in the United States are now aged 60–78. As such, more researchers have caregiving responsibilities for ageing parents, often alongside childcare obligations. Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond met this need by establishing a family care centre on campus that provides both child and adult daycare.

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Report Examines GM’s Controversial Move to Abandon Apple CarPlay

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An in-depth Bloomberg report today resurfaced General Motors’ decision to replace Apple CarPlay with its own software.

Apple CarPlay Dash
Last year, GM announced that it planned to forgo Apple ‌CarPlay‌ in its new electric vehicles, starting with the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV. Instead, GM introduced a proprietary infotainment platform, aiming to control and customize the digital experience within its vehicles. This transition is part of GM’s strategic pivot toward enhancing its software capabilities and establishing a stronger digital services revenue stream. However, the change has not been without its hurdles, with numerous customers and automotive reviewers reporting technical issues and a steep learning curve associated with the new system.

‌CarPlay‌ has become a staple of most new vehicles, offering drivers a familiar interface that mirrors their iPhone‘s functionality onto the vehicle’s dashboard. Apple reported in 2022 that 79% of US car buyers insisted on ‌CarPlay‌ support when considering a new vehicle purchase.

GM’s new in-house system, Ultifi, is envisioned as a comprehensive digital platform that offers a range of services such as navigation and media streaming, enhanced by subscription-based add-ons to drive revenue. Despite these aspirations, the rollout of Ultifi has encountered significant obstacles such as software malfunctions that dealerships have struggled to resolve.

GM’s move is driven by a wish to reclaim customer connections and data insights from third parties, but customer resistance to abandoning a familiar and popular system like ‌CarPlay‌ that directly integrates with their ‌iPhone‌ poses a significant challenge to GM’s strategy.

The outcome of GM’s decision could influence future industry practices significantly. If GM can refine Ultifi into a robust, user-friendly platform that rivals or surpasses ‌CarPlay‌’s functionality, it may set a precedent for other automakers to follow suit. Conversely, if consumers continue to prefer established systems like ‌CarPlay‌, automakers may find themselves in a difficult position, needing to balance their wishes with consumer preferences.

See Bloomberg‘s full article for more insights into GM’s move to abandon Apple ‌CarPlay‌.

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What to Expect From Apple’s Earnings Report This Week Following Vision Pro Launch

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Apple will report its earnings results for the second quarter of its 2024 fiscal year on Thursday, May 2 at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri will discuss the results on a conference call with analysts a half hour later.

Apple Vision Pro with battery Feature Blue Magenta
Keep reading for some key things to know about the quarter, including a recap of new products announced, revenue expectations, and more.

New Products During Quarter

The quarter ran from December 31, 2023 through March 30, 2024, according to Apple’s fiscal calendar. The following products launched during this period:

  • Apple Vision Pro
  • 13-inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
  • 15-inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

Revenue Expectations

Apple has not provided formal revenue guidance since before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the average Wall Street estimate for Apple’s second quarter revenue is $90 billion, according to Zacks Investment Research. This would be around a 5% decline compared to the $94.8 billion revenue the company reported in the year-ago quarter.

Maestri provided the following commentary on Apple’s earnings call last quarter:

As a reminder, in the December quarter a year ago, we faced significant supply constraints on the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max due to COVID-19 factory shutdowns. And in the March quarter a year ago, we were able to replenish channel inventory and fulfill significant pent-up demand from the constraints. We estimate that this impact added close to $5 billion to the March quarter’s total revenue last year. When we remove this impact from last year’s revenue, we expect both our March quarter total company revenue and iPhone revenue to be similar to a year ago.

Conference Call

Cook and Maestri will hold a conference call at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday to discuss the company’s quarterly earnings results. The call should last around one hour, and it will include a Q&A segment with analysts.

A live audio stream of the conference call will be available on Apple’s Investor Relations page, and a recording will be available later in the day for replay.

What’s Next

Apple’s current quarter runs through June 29. Apple has yet to announce any new products during the quarter, but it is expected to unveil new versions of the iPad Pro, iPad Air, Apple Pencil, and Magic Keyboard at its “Let Loose” event on May 7.

AAPL is trading above $172 as of writing, down from a 52-week high of $199.62.

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Apple Shares 2024 Environmental Progress Report Ahead of Earth Day

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Apple today announced that it has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by more than half since 2015, advancing towards its 2030 carbon neutrality goal.

Apple Park View

Apple’s latest Environmental Progress Report details the company’s efforts and innovations in clean energy, efficient recycling practices, and sustainable material usage that have contributed to this substantial decrease in emissions. According to the report, the major reduction has been driven by extensive use of clean energy, including the integration of recycled materials across Apple’s product lines and improvements in energy efficiency throughout its global supply chain.

Apple has fostered significant advances in recycling and material recovery as part of its broader environmental strategy for several years. The company has increased the use of recycled cobalt and lithium in its batteries, with last year’s statistics showing that 56% of the cobalt and 24% of the lithium used were sourced from recycled materials. These efforts are part of a larger initiative to transition to 100% recycled and renewable materials across all products.

The report also highlights achievements in energy efficiency and renewable energy sourcing. Over 16.5 gigawatts of clean energy are now being produced as a result of Apple’s Supplier Clean Energy Program, which supports projects around the world. The program has been essential in reducing the carbon footprint Apple and its suppliers, who collectively saved more than two billion kilowatt-hours of electricity last year. The company is also actively removing plastics from its packaging, shifting towards fiber-based alternatives.

Apple also provides financial support to various organizations and programs aimed at improving environmental conditions and promoting sustainability education. In the U.S., for example, Apple supports Justice Outside’s Network for Network Leaders program, which focuses on outdoor and environmental education.

See Apple’s full 2024 Environmental Progress Report for more information.

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Sketchy report says base iPhone 16 Pro storage will double

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iPhone 16 Pro storage could start at twice that of any iOS predecessor.
Graphic: Rajesh

iPhone 16 Pro storage will start at 256GB, according to a tipster. That’s twice as much capacity as any previous iOS device.

If true, it’ll help differentiate Apple’s Pro handsets from the standard ones.

Base iPhone 16 Pro storage could jump to 256GB

iPhone Pro models comes with higher profit margins, and to encourage people to buy them Apple builds in features not available in its lower-price models.

But the Dynamic Island that was once reserved for premium devices is now on all iOS models. And the Action button will also supposedly be added to every iPhone 16 version this autumn.

Apple needs new ways for the iPhone 16 Pro might stand out. Additional storage might be one of them.

Tipster LeaksApplePro says on The Mac Observer, “According to people close to the industry, Apple could be considering increasing the base storage of the iPhone 16 Pro to 256GB.”

All current iPhone models start with 128GB of capacity, whether Pro or non-Pro.

A reasonable move

The boost makes sense: the camera on the top-tier models is capable of taking very high-resolution pictures and video that take up many gigabytes of date.

That said, this is hardly definitive. It’s a leak that says Apple is “considering” increasing storage capacity. And while LeaksApplePro has broken some solid news in the past — including a correct tip that interactive widgets were coming to iOS 16 — not everything they predict comes true.

We’ll know the iPhone 16 Pro base storage capacity for sure in September when Apple is expected to unveil all its next-generation handsets.



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AI now beats humans at basic tasks — new benchmarks are needed, says major report

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Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as the chatbot ChatGPT, have become so advanced that they now very nearly match or exceed human performance in tasks including reading comprehension, image classification and competition-level mathematics, according to a new report (see ‘Speedy advances’). Rapid progress in the development of these systems also means that many common benchmarks and tests for assessing them are quickly becoming obsolete.

These are just a few of the top-line findings from the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024, which was published on 15 April by the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University in California. The report charts the meteoric progress in machine-learning systems over the past decade.

In particular, the report says, new ways of assessing AI — for example, evaluating their performance on complex tasks, such as abstraction and reasoning — are more and more necessary. “A decade ago, benchmarks would serve the community for 5–10 years” whereas now they often become irrelevant in just a few years, says Nestor Maslej, a social scientist at Stanford and editor-in-chief of the AI Index. “The pace of gain has been startlingly rapid.”

Speedy advances: Line chart showing the performance of AI systems on certain benchmark tests compared to humans since 2012.

Source: Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024.

Stanford’s annual AI Index, first published in 2017, is compiled by a group of academic and industry specialists to assess the field’s technical capabilities, costs, ethics and more — with an eye towards informing researchers, policymakers and the public. This year’s report, which is more than 400 pages long and was copy-edited and tightened with the aid of AI tools, notes that AI-related regulation in the United States is sharply rising. But the lack of standardized assessments for responsible use of AI makes it difficult to compare systems in terms of the risks that they pose.

The rising use of AI in science is also highlighted in this year’s edition: for the first time, it dedicates an entire chapter to science applications, highlighting projects including Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), a project from Google DeepMind that aims to help chemists discover materials, and GraphCast, another DeepMind tool, which does rapid weather forecasting.

Growing up

The current AI boom — built on neural networks and machine-learning algorithms — dates back to the early 2010s. The field has since rapidly expanded. For example, the number of AI coding projects on GitHub, a common platform for sharing code, increased from about 800 in 2011 to 1.8 million last year. And journal publications about AI roughly tripled over this period, the report says.

Much of the cutting-edge work on AI is being done in industry: that sector produced 51 notable machine-learning systems last year, whereas academic researchers contributed 15. “Academic work is shifting to analysing the models coming out of companies — doing a deeper dive into their weaknesses,” says Raymond Mooney, director of the AI Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, who wasn’t involved in the report.

That includes developing tougher tests to assess the visual, mathematical and even moral-reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), which power chatbots. One of the latest tests is the Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark (GPQA)1, developed last year by a team including machine-learning researcher David Rein at New York University.

The GPQA, consisting of more than 400 multiple-choice questions, is tough: PhD-level scholars could correctly answer questions in their field 65% of the time. The same scholars, when attempting to answer questions outside their field, scored only 34%, despite having access to the Internet during the test (randomly selecting answers would yield a score of 25%). As of last year, AI systems scored about 30–40%. This year, Rein says, Claude 3 — the latest chatbot released by AI company Anthropic, based in San Francisco, California — scored about 60%. “The rate of progress is pretty shocking to a lot of people, me included,” Rein adds. “It’s quite difficult to make a benchmark that survives for more than a few years.”

Cost of business

As performance is skyrocketing, so are costs. GPT-4 — the LLM that powers ChatGPT and that was released in March 2023 by San Francisco-based firm OpenAI — reportedly cost US$78 million to train. Google’s chatbot Gemini Ultra, launched in December, cost $191 million. Many people are concerned about the energy use of these systems, as well as the amount of water needed to cool the data centres that help to run them2. “These systems are impressive, but they’re also very inefficient,” Maslej says.

Costs and energy use for AI models are high in large part because one of the main ways to make current systems better is to make them bigger. This means training them on ever-larger stocks of text and images. The AI Index notes that some researchers now worry about running out of training data. Last year, according to the report, the non-profit research institute Epoch projected that we might exhaust supplies of high-quality language data as soon as this year. (However, the institute’s most recent analysis suggests that 2028 is a better estimate.)

Ethical concerns about how AI is built and used are also mounting. “People are way more nervous about AI than ever before, both in the United States and across the globe,” says Maslej, who sees signs of a growing international divide. “There are now some countries very excited about AI, and others that are very pessimistic.”

In the United States, the report notes a steep rise in regulatory interest. In 2016, there was just one US regulation that mentioned AI; last year, there were 25. “After 2022, there’s a massive spike in the number of AI-related bills that have been proposed” by policymakers, Maslej says.

Regulatory action is increasingly focused on promoting responsible AI use. Although benchmarks are emerging that can score metrics such as an AI tool’s truthfulness, bias and even likability, not everyone is using the same models, Maslej says, which makes cross-comparisons hard. “This is a really important topic,” he says. “We need to bring the community together on this.”

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Apple to Report Earnings on May 2 Following Vision Pro Launch

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Apple today announced that its next quarterly earnings conference call will be held on Thursday, May 2 at 2 p.m. Pacific Time.

Apple Vision Pro with battery Feature Blue Magenta
On the call, which will be streamed live on Apple’s investor website, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri will discuss the company’s earnings results for the second quarter of the 2024 fiscal year. During the quarter, which ran from December 31, 2023 through March 30, 2024, Apple launched the Vision Pro headset in the U.S., and it updated the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air models with its latest M3 chip.

Apple has not provided formal guidance since early 2020, but analysts expect the company to report quarterly revenue of $90.6 billion on average, according to Yahoo Finance. Apple reported $94.8B revenue in the year-ago quarter.

AAPL closed at $168.82 today, down from a 52-week high of $199.62.

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Report: Apple Podcasts Favors Shows With Subscriptions

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Apple favors podcasts in its “Browse” tab that participate in its subscriptions program, according to Semafor.

Podcasts Feature
To be featured at the top of Apple Podcasts‘ Browse tab, creators simply have to submit a form to Apple, but the report noted that, last week, five of the first seven shows in the “Browse” carousel in the ‌Apple Podcasts‌ app were participants in ‌Apple Podcasts‌ Subscriptions.

Apple launched podcast subscriptions in 2021, allowing creators to offer premium content to their audience, such as bonus episodes and exclusive segments, in exchange for a small subscription fee. Apple, in return, takes up to a 30 percent cut of the revenue generated from these subscriptions.

One executive at an independent podcast told Semafor that Apple explicitly said to them that podcast subscription enrolment would help their chances of being promoted in the carousel, while another remarked that ‌Apple Podcasts‌ Subscriptions was worth participating in simply for in-app placement advantages. An individual at Apple added that the ‌Apple Podcasts‌ app is now designed to offer more features to shows that participate in the subscription program, with several key slots reserved for this purpose.

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More than 4,000 plastic chemicals are hazardous, report finds

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Individually plastic wrapped fruit and vegetables on a black background in Tokyo, Japan.

Plastic wrappers are known to leach some chemicals into food.Credit: Carl Court/Getty

After a year of trawling through scientific reports and national regulatory databases, scientists funded by the Norwegian Research Council have compiled a list of more than 16,000 ‘plastic chemicals’ — compounds found in plastics or thought to be used in them, including raw ingredients and additives such as stabilizers and colourants.

Of these, at least 4,200 are “persistent, bioaccumulative, mobile and/or toxic”, the group found. That “is quite staggering”, says lead author Martin Wagner, an environmental toxicologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. The group also discovered that hazard data were unavailable for more than 10,000 chemicals, and for more than 9,000 there was no publicly available information about which plastics they are used in.

Solid information on all these chemicals is difficult to come by, in part because industry doesn’t always share proprietary information, Wagner says. That makes the effort to compile the known data all the more important, researchers say. “This is the most comprehensive report to date,” says Bethanie Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, who was not involved with the effort. “The numbers presented are jarring.”

The report was released on 14 March, in time for the next round of negotiations for a United Nations treaty on global plastic pollution. Scientists have been campaigning for the treaty, which deals with all aspects of plastic production and waste management, to include a list of plastic polymers and chemicals of concern — some of which are known to leach into food, water and the environment, with impacts for human and ecosystem health. Discussions regarding the treaty continue in Ottawa next month and are scheduled to conclude in Busan, South Korea, in December.

The report notes that although nearly 1,000 concerning chemicals are regulated by global efforts such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, more than 3,600 are not. The authors assign these chemicals to a ‘red list’ that should be regulated, they argue. “The message is very clear,” says Wagner, who is a member of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, a grass-roots group that has formed to advise the treaty process. “Something needs to happen,” he adds, although the report’s authors decline to be proscriptive about whether treaty delegates should put in place bans or other regulatory measures.

The Plastics Industry Association, a group based in Washington DC that aims to “protect, promote and grow the plastics industry”, did not respond to Nature’s request for comment. A statement from Kimberly Wise, vice-president of regulatory and technical affairs at the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a trade group in Washington DC representing US chemical companies, says: “Plastic additives provide many important benefits that enhance the function and durability of plastic products, enabling us to do more with less….Unfortunately, today’s report seeks to advance a hazard framework that ignores real-world exposures and paints an incomplete picture for regulators and the public.”

Pervasive hazards

Many attempts to regulate chemicals, such as the 1976 US Toxic Substances Control Act, take a risk-based approach, evaluating a chemical by taking into account both its hazards and the likelihood of exposure to it. The authors of the report instead use a more precautionary approach that looks only at hazards — in part because plastics are so pervasive that evaluating exposure would be logistically problematic. “This is necessary,” agrees Miriam Diamond, an environmental chemist at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Wagner was surprised by how many chemicals of concern the team found, and how prevalent they are. In the past, many researchers and others have argued that most chemicals of concern were “legacy compounds”, no longer really used in plastics production, he says. But the team found convincing evidence that plenty are still in use. “We found more than 400 chemicals of concern across all major polymer types. That was surprising,” Wagner adds.

Given the huge number of chemicals of concern and the lack of data for many, the team divides them into 15 groups for priority action. These include phthalates (often used to make polyvinyl chloride more flexible) and bisphenols (used to make durable polycarbonate).

The report also recommends getting companies to be more transparent about what is in their plastics, to fill in many of the information holes. “It is not possible to mitigate harm, to the environment or to humans, given these knowledge gaps, and it is completely irresponsible [for policymakers] to allow this to continue,” says Carney Almroth.

“We are encouraged that today’s report emphasizes the need for greater transparency,” says Wise in the ACC statement. “The International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA) supports these efforts and is already developing an additives database and risk assessment framework to provide critical information to regulators around the globe.”

Scientists can help, Wagner says, by finding out about the hazards of chemicals with data gaps and performing meta-analyses on well-studied compounds. The world also needs better analytical techniques, he says — such as improved bioassays that can measure the effect of a chemical on living organisms.

It’s unclear whether the plastics treaty will be completed in December. So far, the negotiations have been hampered by a few petrochemical states that are resisting strong regulation of plastics production, Wagner says. “We’re at a stalemate, I’d say,” he adds. “My view is, the evidence is very clear. Governments just need to get their act together.”

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Report: Most Subscription-Based Apps Do Not Make Money

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Most mobile apps with subscriptions do not make money, a new in-depth analysis finds.

iOS App Store General Feature Clorange
The “State of Subscription Apps” report comes from RevenueCat (via TechCrunch), a prominent mobile subscription toolkit provider. With nearly 30,000 apps utilizing its platform for monetization management, RevenueCat is able to provide a reliable overview of the subscription app landscape thanks to its data collection capabilities. The analysis delves into data from over 29,000 apps and 18,000 developers, collectively responsible for more than $6.7 billion in revenue and over 290 million subscribers.

RevenueCat found that while the top-performing 5% of subscription apps amass revenue 200 times greater than those in the bottom quartile, the median monthly revenue for apps after one year is less than $50. Only 17.2% of apps cross the $1,000 monthly revenue mark. Reaching this milestone significantly boosts the likelihood of further financial growth, with 59% of these apps progressing to achieve $2,500 in monthly revenue, and 60% of those reaching the $5,000 mark. A mere 3.5% of apps achieve $10,000 in monthly revenue.

Health and fitness apps generate at least twice the revenue of all other categories combined, both in the bottom quartile and among the top 5% of earners. In contrast, travel and productivity apps face the most significant challenges, with even the top performers in these categories struggling to make over $1,000 per month after a year on the market.

Despite these statistics, the subscription app market continues to grow and the average price for monthly subscriptions has increased by 14% from $7.05 to $8.01. However, the report also noted a recent shift in consumer behavior, with a 14% drop in subscriber retention over 12 months.

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