We can’t “make American children healthy again” without tackling the gun crisis

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We can’t “make American children healthy again” without tackling the gun crisis

Note for readers: This newsletter discusses gun violence, a raw and tragic issue in America. It was already in progress on Wednesday when a school shooting occurred at Evergreen High School in Colorado and Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University. Earlier this week, the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again movement released a strategy for improving the health and well-being of American children. The report was titled—you guessed it—Make Our Children Healthy Again. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who leads the Department of Health and Human Services, and his colleagues are focusing on four key aspects of child health: diet, exercise, chemical exposure, and overmedicalization. Anyone who’s been listening to RFK Jr. posturing on health and wellness won’t be surprised by these priorities. And the first two are pretty obvious. On the whole, American children should be eating more healthily. And they should be getting more exercise. But there’s a glaring omission. The leading cause of death for American children and teenagers isn’t ultraprocessed food or exposure to some chemical. It’s gun violence. Yesterday’s news of yet more high-profile shootings at schools in the US throws this disconnect into even sharper relief. Experts believe it is time to treat gun violence in the US as what it is: a public health crisis. I live in London, UK, with my husband and two young children. We don’t live in a particularly fancy part of the city—in one recent ranking of London boroughs from most to least posh, ours came in at 30th out of 33. I do worry about crime. But I don’t worry about gun violence. That changed when I temporarily moved my family to the US a couple of years ago. We rented the ground-floor apartment of a lovely home in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a beautiful area with good schools, pastel-colored houses, and fluffy rabbits hopping about. It wasn’t until after we’d moved in that my landlord told me he had guns in the basement. My daughter joined the kindergarten of a local school that specialized in music, and we took her younger sister along to watch the kids sing songs about friendship. It was all so heartwarming—until we noticed the school security officer at the entrance carrying a gun. Later in the year, I received an email alert from the superintendent of the Cambridge Public Schools. “At approximately 1:45 this afternoon, a Cambridge Police Department Youth Officer assigned to Cambridge Rindge and Latin School accidentally discharged their firearm while using a staff bathroom inside the school,” the message began. “The school day was not disrupted.” These experiences, among others, truly brought home to me the cultural differences over firearms between the US and the UK (along with most other countries). For the first time, I worried about my children’s exposure to them. I banned my children from accessing parts of the house. I felt guilty that my four-year-old had to learn what to do if a gunman entered her school. But it’s the statistics that are the most upsetting. In 2023, 46,728 people died from gun violence in the US, according to a report published in June by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That includes both homicides and suicides, and it breaks down to 128 deaths per day, on average. The majority of those who die from gun violence are adults. But the figures for children are sickening, too. In 2023, 2,566 young people died from gun violence. Of those, 234 were under the age of 10. Gun death rates among children have more than doubled since 2013. Firearms are involved in more child deaths than cancer or car crashes. Many other children survive gun violence with nonfatal—but often life-changing—injuries. And the impacts are felt beyond those who are physically injured. Witnessing gun violence or hearing gunshots can understandably cause fear, sadness, and distress. That’s worth bearing in mind when you consider that there have been 434 school shootings in the US since Columbine in 1999. The Washington Post estimates that 397,000 students have experienced gun violence at school in that period. Another school shooting took place at Evergreen High School in Colorado on Wednesday, adding to that total. “Being indirectly exposed to gun violence takes its toll on our mental health and children’s ability to learn,” says Daniel Webster, Bloomberg Professor of American Health at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions in Baltimore. The MAHA report states that “American youth face a mental health crisis,” going on to note that “suicide deaths among 10- to 24-year-olds increased by 62% from 2007 to 2021” and that “suicide is now the leading cause of death in teens aged 15-19.” What it doesn’t say is that around half of these suicides involve guns. “When you add all these dimensions, [gun violence is] a very huge public health problem,” says Webster. Researchers who study gun violence have been saying the same thing for years. And in 2024, then US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared it a public health crisis. “We don’t have to subject our children to the ongoing horror of firearm violence in America,” Murthy said in a statement at the time. Instead, he argued, we should tackle the problem using a public health approach. Part of that approach involves identifying who is at the greatest risk and offering support to lower that risk, says Webster. Young men who live in poor communities tend to have the highest risk of gun violence, he says, as do those who experience crisis or turmoil. Trying to mediate conflicts or limit access to firearms, even temporarily, can help lower the incidence of gun violence, he says. There’s an element of social contagion, too, adds Webster. Shooting begets more shooting. He likens it to the outbreak of an infectious disease. “When more people get vaccinated … infection rates go down,” he says. “Almost exactly the same thing happens with gun violence.” But existing efforts are already under threat. The Trump administration has eliminated hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for organizations working to reduce gun violence. Webster thinks the MAHA report has “missed the mark” when it comes to the health and well-being of children in the US. “This document is almost the polar opposite to how many people in public health think,” he says. “We have to acknowledge that injuries and deaths from firearms are a big threat to the health and safety of children and adolescents.” This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Earlier this week, the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again movement released a strategy for improving the health and well-being of American children. The report was titled—you guessed it—Make Our Children Healthy Again.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who leads the Department of Health and Human Services, and his colleagues are focusing on four key aspects of child health: diet, exercise, chemical exposure, and overmedicalization.

Anyone who’s been listening to RFK Jr. posturing on health and wellness won’t be surprised by these priorities. And the first two are pretty obvious. On the whole, American children should be eating more healthily. And they should be getting more exercise.

But there’s a glaring omission. The leading cause of death for American children and teenagers isn’t ultraprocessed food or exposure to some chemical. It’s gun violence.

Yesterday’s news of yet more high-profile shootings at schools in the US throws this disconnect into even sharper relief. Experts believe it is time to treat gun violence in the US as what it is: a public health crisis.

I live in London, UK, with my husband and two young children. We don’t live in a particularly fancy part of the city—in one recent ranking of London boroughs from most to least posh, ours came in at 30th out of 33. I do worry about crime. But I don’t worry about gun violence.

That changed when I temporarily moved my family to the US a couple of years ago. We rented the ground-floor apartment of a lovely home in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a beautiful area with good schools, pastel-colored houses, and fluffy rabbits hopping about. It wasn’t until after we’d moved in that my landlord told me he had guns in the basement.

My daughter joined the kindergarten of a local school that specialized in music, and we took her younger sister along to watch the kids sing songs about friendship. It was all so heartwarming—until we noticed the school security officer at the entrance carrying a gun.

Later in the year, I received an email alert from the superintendent of the Cambridge Public Schools. “At approximately 1:45 this afternoon, a Cambridge Police Department Youth Officer assigned to Cambridge Rindge and Latin School accidentally discharged their firearm while using a staff bathroom inside the school,” the message began. “The school day was not disrupted.”

These experiences, among others, truly brought home to me the cultural differences over firearms between the US and the UK (along with most other countries). For the first time, I worried about my children’s exposure to them. I banned my children from accessing parts of the house. I felt guilty that my four-year-old had to learn what to do if a gunman entered her school.

But it’s the statistics that are the most upsetting.

In 2023, 46,728 people died from gun violence in the US, according to a report published in June by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That includes both homicides and suicides, and it breaks down to 128 deaths per day, on average. The majority of those who die from gun violence are adults. But the figures for children are sickening, too. In 2023, 2,566 young people died from gun violence. Of those, 234 were under the age of 10.

Gun death rates among children have more than doubled since 2013. Firearms are involved in more child deaths than cancer or car crashes.

Many other children survive gun violence with nonfatal—but often life-changing—injuries. And the impacts are felt beyond those who are physically injured. Witnessing gun violence or hearing gunshots can understandably cause fear, sadness, and distress.

That’s worth bearing in mind when you consider that there have been 434 school shootings in the US since Columbine in 1999. The Washington Post estimates that 397,000 students have experienced gun violence at school in that period. Another school shooting took place at Evergreen High School in Colorado on Wednesday, adding to that total.

“Being indirectly exposed to gun violence takes its toll on our mental health and children’s ability to learn,” says Daniel Webster, Bloomberg Professor of American Health at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions in Baltimore.

The MAHA report states that “American youth face a mental health crisis,” going on to note that “suicide deaths among 10- to 24-year-olds increased by 62% from 2007 to 2021” and that “suicide is now the leading cause of death in teens aged 15-19.” What it doesn’t say is that around half of these suicides involve guns.

“When you add all these dimensions, [gun violence is] a very huge public health problem,” says Webster.

Researchers who study gun violence have been saying the same thing for years. And in 2024, then US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared it a public health crisis. “We don’t have to subject our children to the ongoing horror of firearm violence in America,” Murthy said in a statement at the time. Instead, he argued, we should tackle the problem using a public health approach.

Part of that approach involves identifying who is at the greatest risk and offering support to lower that risk, says Webster. Young men who live in poor communities tend to have the highest risk of gun violence, he says, as do those who experience crisis or turmoil. Trying to mediate conflicts or limit access to firearms, even temporarily, can help lower the incidence of gun violence, he says.

There’s an element of social contagion, too, adds Webster. Shooting begets more shooting. He likens it to the outbreak of an infectious disease. “When more people get vaccinated … infection rates go down,” he says. “Almost exactly the same thing happens with gun violence.”

But existing efforts are already under threat. The Trump administration has eliminated hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for organizations working to reduce gun violence.

Webster thinks the MAHA report has “missed the mark” when it comes to the health and well-being of children in the US. “This document is almost the polar opposite to how many people in public health think,” he says. “We have to acknowledge that injuries and deaths from firearms are a big threat to the health and safety of children and adolescents.”

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

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Whenever behemoth chipmaker NVIDIA announces its quarterly earnings, those results can have a massive influence on the stock market and its position as a key indicator for the AI industry. After all, NVIDIA is the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, valued at $4.24 trillion—ahead of Microsoft ($3.74 trillion), Apple ($3.41 trillion), Alphabet, the parent company of Google ($2.57 trillion), and Amazon ($2.44 trillion). Due to its explosive growth in recent years, a single NVIDIA earnings report can move the entire market. So, when NVIDIA leaders announced during their August 27 earnings call that Q2 2026 sales surged 56% to $46.74 billion, it was a record-setting performance for the company—and investors took notice. Executive VP & CFO Colette M. Kress said the revenue exceeded leadership’s outlook as the company grew sequentially across all market platforms. She outlined a path toward substantial growth driven by AI infrastructure. Foreseeing significant long-term growth opportunities in agentic AI and considering the scale of opportunity, CEO Jensen Huang said, “Over the next 5 years, we’re going to scale into it with Blackwell [architecture for GenAI], with Rubin [successor to Blackwell], and follow-ons to scale into effectively a $3 trillion to $4 trillion AI infrastructure opportunity.” The chipmaker’s Q2 2026 earnings fell short of Wall Street’s lofty expectations, but they did demonstrate that its sales are still rising faster than those of most other tech companies. NVIDIA is expected to post revenue growth of at least 42% over the next four quarters, compared with an average of about 10% for firms in the technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. On August 29, two days after announcing their earnings, NVIDIA stocks slid 3% and other chip stocks also declined. This came amid a broader sell-off after server-maker Dell, a customer of those chipmakers,

Cologix and Lambda Debut NVIDIA HGX B200 AI Clusters in Columbus, Ohio

In our latest episode of the Data Center Frontier Show, we explore how powerhouse AI infrastructure is moving inland—anchored by the first NVIDIA HGX B200 cluster deployment in Columbus, Ohio. Cologix, Lambda, and Supermicro have partnered on the project, which combines Lambda’s 1-Click Clusters™, Supermicro’s energy-efficient hardware, and Cologix’s carrier-dense Scalelogix℠ COL4 facility. It’s a milestone that speaks to the rapid decentralization of AI workloads and the emergence of the Midwest as a serious player in the AI economy. Joining me for the conversation were Bill Bentley, VP Hyperscale and Cloud Sales at Cologix, and Ken Patchett, VP Data Center Infrastructure at Lambda. Why Columbus, Why Now? Asked about the significance of launching in Columbus, Patchett framed the move in terms of the coming era of “superintelligence.” “The shift to superintelligence is happening now—systems that can reason, adapt, and accelerate human progress,” Patchett said. “That requires an entirely new type of infrastructure, which means capital, vision, and the right partners. Columbus with Cologix made sense because beyond being centrally located, they’re highly connected, cost-efficient, and built to scale. We’re not chasing trends. We’re laying the groundwork for a future where intelligence infrastructure is as ubiquitous as electricity.” Bentley pointed to the city’s underlying strengths in connectivity, incentives, and utility economics. “Columbus is uniquely situated at the intersection of long-haul fiber,” Bentley said. “You’ve got state tax incentives, low-cost utilities, and a growing concentration of hyperscalers and local enterprises. The ecosystem is ripe for growth. It’s a natural geography for AI workloads that need geographic diversity without sacrificing performance.” Shifting—or Expanding—the Map for AI The guests agreed that deployments like this don’t represent a wholesale shift away from coastal hyperscale markets, but rather the expansion of AI’s footprint across multiple geographies. “I like to think of Lambda as an AI hyperscaler,”

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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