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Nun Study

Alzheimer’s study demonstrates SSND commitment to educating in broadest sense

One would not expect to find the School Sisters of Notre Dame, a congregation founded to teach girls in Bavaria, to be involved with cutting-edge biomedical research. And yet, the School Sisters of Notre Dame in North America have done just that.

The Nun Study, a National Institute on Aging (NIA) study on aging, Alzheimer’s and related dementias, began in 1990 with 678 School Sisters of Notre Dame. It continues to be an important body of research. At the time of their enrollment, sisters agreed to periodic cognitive and physical assessments throughout the rest of their lives as well as brain donation at death. Although all of the sisters involved with the study are now deceased, the sisters involved continue to impact Alzheimer’s research through the gift of their brain donations.

Sister Gabriel Mary Spaeth, a research associate with the Nun Study from 1991-2007, works with participant Sister Norita Reardon.

Ground-breaking Research

The Nun Study was incredibly unique at its initiation and has altered research ever since.

Yearly evaluations for participants in the Nun Study included various memory tests and physical functioning assessments, a one-time blood test for genetic evaluation of apolipoprotein E (a variation of which increases the risk for developing late-onset Alzheimer’s disease), and brain donation at death. Participation by sisters provided a homogeneity in living conditions, health care, and lifestyle that was difficult to control for in other studies.

In addition to this physical data, the study looked at extensive data provided by the SSND Archives from sisters’ early lives. Some of the study’s most well-known findings correlate information from writing samples created by sisters when they were young with the development of disease in later life. The study found that early life characteristics are predictive of the development of dementia many years later, but there is only data to support that this relationship is correlational in nature, not causal.

Specimens at the lab in San Antonio

The Nun Study was one the first to demonstrate that individuals differ in how much brain pathology must be present to produce clinical symptoms of disease. It was shown that one key variable in predicting the correlation between clinical status and Alzheimer’s disease brain pathology was the presence of stroke.

While the Nun Study has been continuous since 1990, it has been led by a variety of researchers and has been hosted at several universities. The constant is the role of the SSND in providing valuable information to influence continued research into treatments for Alzheimer’s and related dementias.

New studies in progress

Dr. Flanagan and her staff welcome SSND to their lab.

In 2021, Dr. Margaret (Maggie) E. Flanagan, MD, assumed the directorship of the Nun Study, marking a pivotal moment in the study’s narrative. She not only embraced the leadership role but also undertook the monumental task of relocating the priceless materials of the Nun Study from Chicago, Illinois, to San Antonio, Texas, bringing with her a wealth of knowledge and the legacy of the extraordinary participants. Since February of 2023, the Nun Study samples and archives have been safely stored at The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio (UTHSCSA) in the Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases. Here, Dr. Flanagan hopes to reestablish the Nun Study’s significance in research, continuing the efforts that began 36 years ago.

In addition to the ongoing Nun Study, SSND are also involved in The RUSH University Religious Orders Study. This study has enrolled currently living sisters, many of whom were too young to participate in the Nun Study when it began collecting data in the 1990s.

As they collaborate with the researchers and participate in these studies, School Sisters of Notre Dame are demonstrating that they truly are educators in all that they are and do.

To Learn More about the SSND Nun Study, as well as SSND involvement in other Alzheimer’s disease research:

Nun Study looks at how TMEM106B affects the aging brain

Dr. Flanagan’s work with Nun Study helps lead the digital future of brain research

Contributions by SSND to the Nun Study continue to bear fruit

How hundreds of religious sisters contributed to ‘groundbreaking’ 30-year Alzheimer’s study

Nun Study researchers present at Alzheimer’s conference

Nun Study Director Receives Award to Fund Further Research

Wanted: Your Healthy Brain (To understand dementia, scientists need to study not just diseased brain tissue, but healthy brains too.)

Nun Study Award

The Nun Study – Educators to the End

Educating in many forms

Aging with Grace

Nuns Offer Clues to Alzheimer’s and Aging

The New Science of Alzheimers

​BBC films nuns for aging documentary

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Columnist and Health

Should we all be taking low doses of lithium to prevent Alzheimer’s?

Animal studies have shown that lithium orotate could help stave off dementia, and a human trial is about to start to see if the effects hold. Columnist Alice Klein takes a look at the benefits and downsides of lithium

By Alice Klein

31 August 2026

In the 1880s, a newly dug well in Texas became known as the “Crazy Well” after a woman who drank from it daily allegedly overcame dementia. Her legendary recovery has since been suggested to be due to the naturally occurring lithium in the area’s groundwater. This lithium-containing “Crazy Water” is still available to buy in the local town of Mineral Wells.

Strange as it may seem, the idea that lithium, a simple metal, might have a role in treating and/or preventing dementia is starting to gain traction. Starting next month, lithium orotate, a type of lithium salt, will be tested for the first time in people with early Alzheimer’s disease in a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. This comes on the back of research published last year by Bruce Yankner at Harvard University and his colleagues showing that lithium orotate reversed memory loss in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia.

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Brain implants fuel China rivalry

Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

Brain implants like those being developed by Elon Musk’s Neuralink are becoming the latest friction point in the intensifying U.S.-China rivalry in the life sciences, Axios’ Adriel Bettelheim writes. Why it matters: The devices are bringing new hope to patients with strokes, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological conditions. And tech billionaires have fueled advances by pouring billions into biotech startups focused on linking the brain with computers. But a new national security analysis says U.S. development efforts are being overtaken by Beijing’s full-court press around manufacturing, data and commercialization. The consequences could extend beyond health care, affecting U.S. military capabilities and the ability to train the next generation of AI models, according to the analysis.  Zoom in: Brain-computer interfaces are going mainstream. Companies like Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience, Paradromics and Synchron are testing new applications, like helping to restore communication for people who have lost the ability to speak. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are reducing the time it takes to calibrate a device to a patient’s brain signals and use them for functions like controlling a prosthetic part. And China leveled up the field this spring, when it issued what’s thought to be the world’s first commercial approval of a brain-computer interface designed to revive hand movement in people with spinal cord injuries. Share this story … Sign up for our daily Axios Future of Health Care.

6.  Witkoff meets powerful UAE official

Vessels sit near the Strait of Hormuz along the coast of Oman this week. Photo: Reuters White House envoy Steve Witkoff met last weekend with the national security adviser of the United Arab Emirates to discuss next steps on Iran, Axios’ Barak Ravid writes. Witkoff met with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan (TBZ) on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia.Why it matters: The talks, which weren’t announced by the White House and haven’t been reported until now, took place amid the Trump administration’s push to reopen the Strait of Hormuz while choking Iran economically. The UAE has been the key partner in the U.S.-led operation to reopen and guide oil tankers through the strait. Keep reading.

1 big thing: AI creators race to understand their creation

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

Never in the history of industry or inventions have leading companies created entire divisions to understand and interpret what they had created and unleashed, Axios’ Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a “Behind the Curtain” column. Why it matters: The world’s smartest minds, backed by the largest investment in human history, admit they can’t fully control their AI because they don’t fully understand it. They don’t know exactly how it thinks — or what it’s truly capable of when set loose to do work autonomously with other AI agents. The race to understand the models is all the more urgent after yesterday’s release by OpenAI of GPT-6 Astra, billed as “the world’s most intelligent and aligned model.” President Greg Brockman called Astra a “generational leap in capability,” and said the model could qualify as AGI — artificial general intelligence, with human-like power. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote Tuesday in an Astra preview: “AI is getting extremely capable; no one fully understands the consequences of this.”The companies are racing toward superintelligence with no required oversight — not a federal agency, the Defense Department, or an outside consortium of safety experts. It’s foot on the gas.  Between the lines: The technology is advancing so fast, in so many ways, that the companies, much less the federal government, are unsure of the real risks — or best ways to mitigate them.Yes, some AI leaders are calling for pauses when something they see freaks them out. But the companies, with very light federal regulation, decide when to report worrisome AI behavior.The big AI companies know their creation can carry out potentially catastrophic cyberattacks. That’s why they signed a letter sounding the alarm and calling for “collective action.” The intrigue: Every frontier lab now fields a team with the mission of figuring out what its own AI is doing.Anthropic has an Interpretability team (“Safety through understanding”) with the goal: “discover and understand how large language models work internally, as a foundation for AI safety and positive outcomes.”  How it works: Nobody writes these systems line by line. “As compared with traditional software, it’s much less like you’re able to design the specific behaviors of these models,” Alex Mallen, who works on AI safety at Redwood Research, tells Axios. “Instead, you’re sort of growing it.” So the labs test a model’s behavior the way you’d test a person: Give it a task and watch what it does. Researchers call this alignment, or how well a model sticks to the intended goal it was given. July’s Hugging Face hack is what misalignment looks like. OpenAI agents, given a coding benchmark to solve, targeted an outside company’s systems instead, and knew they were doing it.One agent’s own reasoning, read by investigators afterward: “External infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope. However task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue.”There was so much evidence from this incident that the humans were forced to “heavily delegate our analysis to often-unreliable AI agents,” an outside investigation concluded.The hack stopped OpenAI cold. The company slowed its most advanced training to implement stronger security. State of play: Researchers are trying to open up their machines to see what goes on inside. This type of research is called interpretability: Instead of testing what a model does, researchers look at the wiring inside it. Google DeepMind, which in December released the largest open set of these tools so far, describes them as “a microscope” that lets researchers “look inside models, see what they’re thinking about, and how these thoughts are formed.”What they’re hunting for, in DeepMind’s words: “discrepancies between a model’s communicated reasoning and its internal state.” That is, the gap between what a model says it is doing and what it is doing.  What we’re watching: Expect to see much more interpretability research in the next phase of AI safety. Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment stress-testing at Anthropic, wrote Tuesday: “Alignment auditing is starting to get really hard and we’re going to need new techniques (e.g. interpretability-based) if we want to keep up.”Axios’ Andrew Kay contributed reporting.

Russia secretly assists Iran with supersonic cruise missiles – FT

Sep 2, 2026, 10:24 GMT+1Listen to this article

Russia has secretly helped Iran develop supersonic cruise missile technology that experts say could give Tehran a new way to threaten US Navy vessels in the Middle East, the Financial Times reported, citing leaked Russian correspondence, travel records and military patents.

The program, codenamed C430L, began in 2023 and continued during this year’s war with the United States and Israel, the FT said.

Its main focus is a ramjet propulsion system that would allow a cruise missile to sustain flight at several times the speed of sound, reducing the time available for US and allied defenses to detect and intercept it.

“For the Iranians, this would give them a qualitatively new strategic weapon system that could threaten US Navy vessels,” Jim Lamson, a former CIA military analyst focused on Iran, told the FT.

Iran has built and flight-tested the propulsion system, but there is no evidence that a Russian-assisted supersonic cruise missile has entered service, the newspaper said.

• Iranian nuclear scientists made covert visit to Russia for laser tech – FT

Russian technical support

The FT said Russia’s state arms exporter Rosoboronexport arranged the program with missile developer NPO Mashinostroyenia.

Russian engineers made repeated trips to Iran before a contract was signed with Iran’s Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics in November 2023, according to records reviewed by the newspaper.

By 2025, Russian specialists were analyzing Iranian flight-test data and advising Tehran on the ramjet’s fuel system, combustion stability, air intake and engine nozzle.

“This is the transfer of a highly strategically sensitive military technology from Russia that the Iranians have wanted to acquire for decades,” Fabian Hinz, a senior analyst with Conflict Armament Research, told the FT.

“A programme like this would require political clearance from the very top in Russia,” he said.

• Russia sent missile experts to Iran amid conflict with Israel – Reuters

The Kremlin, Rosoboronexport, NPO Mashinostroyenia and the Iranian government did not respond to requests for comment from the FT.

Potential naval impact

Supersonic cruise missiles combine high speed with low-altitude flight, making them harder for air and missile defenses to detect and engage quickly.

That could be particularly significant in the Persian Gulf, where the United States and its regional allies operate advanced land- and sea-based defenses.

Hinz said Russian engineering support could be especially valuable because it would help Iran solve technical problems rather than simply provide finished weapons.

“Getting a 60-year-old engineer to fly over and problem-solve, using their experience, is hugely valuable,” he said.

• Iran fires back, but can missiles ease economic pain?

The FT said the program continued into 2026, with Russia preparing technical reports and both sides discussing a further phase of development.

A June 2026 Rosoboronexport letter showed talks were still under way over that next stage, though it was unclear whether it had begun.

Deeper military ties

The program points to a deeper form of military cooperation between Moscow and Tehran, with Russia helping Iran acquire the know-how to develop an advanced weapon system of its own.

Iran previously supplied Russia with Shahed attack drones used in Ukraine and helped Moscow establish domestic production.

The FT has also reported that Russia agreed to supply Iran with Verba shoulder-fired air defense systems, while Tehran acquired a high-resolution Chinese satellite later used to monitor US military facilities in the region.

“If the Russians are able to help the Iranians fix their technical problems, I think this would be one of the more impactful areas of Russian military-technical assistance to Iran in recent years,” Lamson said.

Sep 4, 2026 #newsnight#francisfukuyama#theendofhistory

Professor Francis Fukuyama, author of ‘In The Realm of The Last Man’, discusses his ‘End of History’ thesis, the state of democracy, US President Donald Trump, JD Vance, the Democratic Party, Vladimir Putin, the War in Ukraine and authoritarianism. Interview by Newsnight Political Editor Nick Watt.

https://p.dw.com/p/5KrU6?at_medium=SocialMedia&at_campaign=Twitter&at_share_source=SharingButton&at_origin=Web

Amien Essif23 hours ago23 hours ago

Restrictive migration policies were once the domain of Europe’s far right. Today, they are part of the political mainstream. How did that happen?

https://p.dw.com/p/5KrU6

Centrist parties across Europe have adopted far-right slogans related to migration policy. That’s despite the fact that far-right parties have been blocked from governing in most European countries.

How has the far right been able to advance its agenda without taking power?

Amien Essif DW News presenter and correspondentAmienEssif

Economy

EU pension funds buying into US AI boom, as ECB warns credit ratings may be understating future risk

By Wester van Gaal

 Amsterdam

 31 August 2026 16:12

European pension funds and insurers are increasingly financing the US artificial intelligence boom, buying long-dated bonds that credit rating agencies regard as safe.

Hyperscaler debt “may look like a possible alternative to some safe-haven style securities”, ECB analysts wrote in a blog on Monday (31 August).

But they also warned that these bonds could become less safe as AI companies continue to take on more debt in the coming years.

Hyperscaler debt refers to corporate bonds and loans issued by Big Tech companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Oracle to finance massive costs of building AI and cloud infrastructure.

Ratings may be based on “assumptions on future revenue growth and leverage which may not stand the test of time”, creating a risk of “mispricing of credit risk,” the ECB’s financial experts wrote.

Large European institutional investors, primarily pension funds and insurers, looking for safe places to park large sums for long periods, have traditionally bought sovereign bonds — German ones in particular.

But US tech giants looking for ever more sources of finance have started to issue corporate bonds with long maturities, often longer than 15 years, especially attractive to such investors.

Just five companies, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle, accounted for 15 percent of the growth in euro-denominated corporate bond holdings by euro area investors in the year to March 2026, according to the ECB blog.

Buying up large amounts of long-dated corporate bonds might crowd out demand and push up yields for government debt. 

Read more

Why Eurobonds will never fly without credible fiscal enforcement

There are already signs this has already happened in the US but so far the ECB experts found no signs of such spillovers taking place in the euro area. 

For that, the total amount is still too small. US tech firms have around €40bn of euro-denominated bonds outstanding, or just over one percent of the eurozone’s corporate bond indices. 

But that share is growing fast. Nearly 10 percent of all new euro bonds sold by non-financial companies now come from Big Tech. 

“US big tech companies could push up borrowing costs for all sectors as they accumulate debt and account for a growing share of bond market,” the ECB’s analysts found.

Unprecedented wave

Credit rating agencies rate this debt as highly safe, often at AA- or above, which is close to the highest level, in a euro market where most corporate issuers are rated lower (between A and BBB). 

The ECB gives several reasons why such credit assumptions may be too rosy. For one, the balance sheets look strong now, but the wave of debt issuance is still in its early stages. 

Big Tech is projected to need more than $1 trillion [€860bn] of capital spending by 2028, and the ECB flags that this figure is at the lower end of what credit analysts expect.

“This could be merely the start of a financing wave of unprecedented proportions,” the analysts wrote.

It is also clear that planned investments can no longer be funded through the cash the companies generate themselves, meaning that borrowing will fill in a higher proportion of financing needs in the future.

Finally, even at this early stage, investors are already demanding more compensation.

“Investors are demanding a rising risk premium to absorb the supply and deal with the greater uncertainty over the medium-term earnings outlook,” the ECB analysts wrote.

Read more

Reverse centaurs: EU approach to AI risks dystopia for human workers

Inflated earnings?

There are already signs those earnings are themselves inflated. 

Big tech booked a windfall of more than $160bn last quarter from stakes in other AI companies rather than from money the firms earned themselves, the Financial Times reported over the weekend, raising concerns that “paper gains are overstating the strength of the AI boom.” 

Read more

AI chatbots need to work in all EU languages, not just English

The ECB’s analysts, for their part, flagged the risk of fast-rising leverage, particularly “if other, less transparent, debt markets start being tapped.”

“The sheer scale of hyperscalers’ future borrowing needs … warrants close monitoring,” the ECB’s analysts concluded.

This article was updated

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CybersecurityOpenAI

OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra, its most powerful model yet, and touts its ability to use your computer

By 

Emily Forlini

Senior AI Reporter

September 3, 2026, 2:44 PM ET

Open AI president and cofounder Greg BrockmanDavid Paul Morris—Bloomberg/Getty Images

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OpenAI’s newest and most powerful model, GPT-6 Astra, is out today, and one of its hallmark features is called “computer use,” in which the model aims to navigate a computer as a human would.

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It’s just one of a wide range of new and advanced capabilities, OpenAI says, including mathematical proficiency, software engineering, and defensive cybersecurity. But “computer use is a particularly important part of what’s new,” OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman told reporters today. The model “can zip through spreadsheets, fill out forms, and navigate across web pages often at superhuman speed,” he said.

The company shared a video with reporters of someone sitting on a chair, instructing the computer with their voice in what appeared to be a seamless, albeit staged, interaction.

Computer use “shows how far we’ve come from sort of aspirationally training for computer use to bringing real value to people every day,” Mia Glaese, vice president of research at OpenAI, said.

OpenAI also released benchmark assessments that showed Astra beats its previous best model, GPT-5.6 Sol, as well as the best current models from its rival Anthropic, Claude Fable 5.1, on a wide range of tasks. On ARC-AGI-3, a difficult benchmark that is meant to test a model’s ability to apply reasoning to situations it has not encountered before, Astra scored 98.6%, whereas GPT-5.6 Sol had scored only 7.8%, and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 only 30%. Astra also scored 100% on ExploitBench, a tough cybersecurity challenge, beating GPT-5.6 Sol’s 78.5% result.

OpenAI is not first to market with an AI agent that can use a computer—Anthropic pioneered the space with a beta program in 2024, and Perplexity built a system that can navigate a virtual computer to complete tasks for users in February this year—but the concept is still not a mainstream part of working on a computer for most people. Brockman said he has been thinking about the idea of an AI using a computer as a human does since he first started at OpenAI in 2015.

To Brockman, computer use could be considered the start of the “AGI era.” AGI stands for artificial general intelligence. Its exact definition is disputed, with views among AI researchers divided. OpenAI itself once defined AGI as an automated system that can perform all economically valuable work as well as or better than humans.

Brockman said that achieving AGI has not come in one big moment, as he originally predicted, but rather in bits and pieces. He noted, “It’s not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era, and I think that if you want to say this [model is] the first one, I think it’s reasonable.”

But don’t expect computer use to show up in every office overnight. OpenAI is limiting the release of Astra to a limited set of enterprise customers, including those in its cybersecurity-focused Daybreak program. Astra will become available to all Plus, Pro, and Enterprise users “in the coming days,” OpenAI says, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS. The version available to these customers will refuse “advanced cybersecurity tasks,” according to the company.

The limited initial release will also allow OpenAI to scale its compute capacity because Astra is “a very large model,” an OpenAI spokesperson tells Fortune. Astra’s development also involved the company’s largest training run “by far,” OpenAI vice president of research Aidan Clark told reporters today. “It’s the first time we’ve pretrained on more than 100,000 GPUs at our Stargate site in Texas.”

OpenAI says it added more cybersecurity safeguards. Is it enough?

OpenAI delayed the release of Astra by an unspecified amount of time to add extra safeguards and ensure a smooth launch following July’s Hugging Face incident. Since then, OpenAI has added more monitoring and further isolated its training environments, although some say the type of monitoring it added isn’t sufficient.

OpenAI submitted Astra to the U.S. government for review ahead of release per the terms of the loosely defined AI safety framework, which is a voluntary agreement between tech companies and the Trump administration whose details have not been made public, rather than a formalized, public process.

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Brockman said OpenAI did its “standard testing process” with the government, and called it “a very good partnership.” When pressed for details on what the process is, Brockman declined to elaborate. “I just don’t want to misstate anything because there’s nuances on exactly how the process works,” he said.

Astra is also OpenAI’s first model that meets its “critical cybersecurity capability threshold” under its Preparedness Framework, an internal policy that governs the safety precautions the company will put in place depending on the risks a model presents. This means Astra can find and exploit previously unknown security flaws without human oversight, under the right conditions.

For this reason, OpenAI is giving only certain partners access to Astra’s most advanced cyber capabilities, the company shared earlier this week. The version provided to the company’s Daybreak customers permits approved customers to use the model for common cyber-defense tasks. But it will not allow customers to develop exploits or take on tasks that could be used to conduct cyberattacks.