Carole here, excited to bring you a fresh instalment of our ongoing Palantir investigation. We’ve now published 12 articles on everyone’s favourite spytech firm, including one from back in January when we revealed that it now had £670m worth of contracts in the UK. That figure – and the foundational work that underpins it – has been cited across multiple news outlets and has played a fundamental role in understanding Peter Thiel’s firm and its relationship to the British state. And it’s a moment to reflect on the fact that it simply wouldn’t have been done if we didn’t have our readers’ support.
Exactly a year ago, we launched the Nerve in an excited, exhausted heap up at the Labour party conference in Liverpool. And it feels pretty miraculous that not only are we still here, we’ve managed to hire journalists, break stories, hold 22 events around the country and do the kind of vital public interest journalism we believe Britain needs more of (here’s a piece all about our first year in this week’s Press Gazette), because our generous and endlessly wise paying members have joined the Nerve family to support our work: thank you to all of you!
It’s been another busy week. I was back in Liverpool on Monday breaking the news that Lord Tom Watson of Palantir – the former deputy leader of the Labour party, who’s now taken up the role of “senior vice-president UK” at the firm – had sent one of its fiercest critics, MP Clive Lewis, a letter that enumerated all the times that Lewis had spoken about Palantir. The spytech firm had, in effect, been spying on him. If they had done that to an elected member of parliament, who else might they have surveilled?
The truth is that Palantir’s bet on buying a Labour lord smells like desperation. Yesterday marked a day of protests, including outside its head office in London – we were there! – and around the country, and now the Financial Times is reporting that Andy Burnham is looking for a British alternative for Palantir’s NHS and Ministry of Defence contracts.
It couldn’t come at a more urgent moment. As the indefatigable Max Colbert reveals in our latest piece, the firm has now accrued a staggering £1bn of contracts with the UK state. The danger is that Palantir’s software – and therefore Peter Thiel’s political values and relationships – becomes so embedded that it’s impossible to extract.
If our members weren’t funding this work, it simply wouldn’t have been done. So thank you.
And if you read for free and would consider upgrading you can do so here, we would be so grateful.
I’ll hand over to the others with the rest of this week’s stories, including a brilliant piece from Stewart Lee on the “Fairford Five” farce and an interview with the great Salman Rushdie.
Change is coming to the rich world’s tax systems, like it or not. The country that gets ahead of it will one day thank the politicians who had the foresight to act https://bit.ly/4ymysZH Illustration: Janne Iivonen
JUST IN: Effective immediately President Trump reveals EUROPE HAS AGREED to release mass amounts of diesel
This will help lower prices. GOOD!
“Europe has just agreed to release a massive amount of their heavily stocked Diesel Oil. The process will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT”
47 recently said he was skeptical of a diesel export ban because it might raise other prices + flows are resuming
by blocking the neural pathway projecting from the amygdala to the AHN, scientists completely prevented prior stress from intensifying responses to new threats. Credit: Neuroscience News
Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have uncovered an overlooked neural circuit in the anterior hypothalamic nucleus (AHN) that dictates how past trauma primes the brain for heightened stress reactivity.
Published in Nature, the whole-brain imaging study revealed that this deep subcortical node acts like a biological “volume knob”, tracking how negative an experience is and hyper-sensitizing threat networks. Silencing communication between the amygdala and the AHN prevented prior stress from intensifying subsequent trauma responses.
Key Facts:
The “Volume Knob” Mechanism: The anterior hypothalamic nucleus (AHN) directly scales stress intensity in mice; dialing up AHN activity magnified defensive trauma responses, while dampening it muted them.
Unbiased Whole-Brain Screen: Moving beyond conventional stress hubs like the amygdala and hippocampus, researchers screened the entire mouse brain and discovered the AHN acts as a central integrator of cumulative stress history.
Breaking the Trauma Loop: Silencing the specific axonal pathway connecting the amygdala to the AHN completely prevented prior stressful adversity from amplifying the brain’s reaction to future threats.
Source: Mount Sinai Health System
Exposure to early childhood adversity or adult psychological trauma fundamentally recalibrates human neurobiology. Clinicians have long recognized that individuals with a history of severe stress carry an elevated vulnerability to psychiatric conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), generalized anxiety, and major depressive disorder following subsequent life stressors.
Yet a critical mechanistic question has puzzled neuroscientists: Exactly how does the mammalian brain log the memory of prior adversity and use it to dial up the physiological reactivity to the next stressful event?
For decades, the search for answers remained largely confined to a canonical trio of interconnected structures: the basolateral amygdala (threat processing), the hippocampus (contextual memory), and the medial prefrontal cortex (top-down executive regulation).
Now, an investigation led by neuroscientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has revealed that a critical missing piece of this puzzle resides deep within the subcortical core.
Published in Nature, the study demonstrates that the anterior hypothalamic nucleus (AHN), a region historically categorized as a basic homeostatic and instinctual defensive center, acts as a decisive neural hub scaling future stress sensitivity based on past adversity.
“Why do some people develop debilitating mental health conditions in response to stress while others do not? One known risk factor for heightened stress sensitivity is a history of prior stress, such as early childhood adversity or adult traumatic stress. However, at a biological level, we still do not fully understand why this is the case,” said lead author Zachary Pennington, Ph.D., who spearheaded the work as a postdoctoral fellow in the Cai Lab at Mount Sinai and is now an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia’s Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health.
“Here, we identified a new pathway in the brains of mice that contributes to heightened stress sensitivity following a prior stressful experience,” Dr. Pennington explained.
“Although we still need to determine the contribution of this pathway to stress sensitivity in humans, we are excited by the prospect of finding ways to target this pathway to alleviate symptoms in conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).”
An Unbiased Search Across the Entire Brain
Rather than zeroing in on conventional candidate regions, senior author Denise Cai, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Co-Director of the Integrative Systems Neuroscience and Computation Center at Icahn Mount Sinai, directed an unbiased, whole-brain mapping strategy.
“We usually look for the effects of stress in familiar brain regions such as the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. But Zach wanted to know what we might be missing, so he took an unbiased approach and looked across the entire brain,” said Dr. Cai.
“The anterior hypothalamus was a genuine surprise. This region has traditionally been studied for regulating basic bodily functions and defensive behaviors. We did not expect it to carry the history of prior stress and help determine how strongly the brain responds to the next stressful event.”
To observe how this deep node operates in real time, the team attached miniature head-mounted fluorescent microscopes (miniscopes) to record single-neuron calcium dynamics in freely behaving mice undergoing experiences of differing valence and intensity.
The in vivo imaging revealed that AHN ensembles precisely encode the negative emotional weight of an aversive event. In animals with a previous history of stress, AHN neurons fired with marked hyper-excitability. Concurrently, the AHN established dense, hyper-synchronized functional communication across the broader stress circuit—tightly coupling its firing with the amygdala, hippocampus, and medial prefrontal cortex.
The Amygdala-AHN Axis Controls Stress Sensitivity
Crucially, the AHN did not passively witness threat; it actively governed behavioral output. Optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulation demonstrated bidirectional control over stress behaviors:
Amplification: Increasing AHN cellular firing directly escalated fear and defensive coping behaviors in response to minor stressors.
Decoupling the Trauma Signal: Most notably, selectively silencing the neural projection carrying threat signals from the amygdala into the AHN erased the sensitizing effect of past stress, preventing previous trauma from amplifying the mouse’s response to an upcoming threat.
“What surprised me most was how much influence such a small circuit could have. By turning its activity up or down, we could increase or decrease how strongly the animals responded to stress. It acted almost like a volume knob, amplifying or dampening the impact of a threatening experience,” Dr. Cai remarked.
Unlocking Novel Therapeutic Targets for PTSD
Understanding how past adversity hardwires future stress sensitivity is essential for developing interventions that move beyond symptom management. By proving that the amygdala-to-AHN pathway is responsible for priming future vulnerability, the researchers provide a brand-new biological target for therapeutic intervention.
“If we want more precise treatments for stress-related disorders, we cannot limit ourselves to the brain regions we already know,” Dr. Cai emphasized. “Unbiased discovery can reveal entirely new circuits and new places to intervene. This study gives us an unexpected candidate for understanding how trauma and adversity leave lasting marks on the brain.”
While translation into clinical human trials will require further research and non-invasive circuit mapping, the discovery highlights the dynamic neuroplastic adjustments that underlie resilience and vulnerability.
“We all experience stress on a near-daily basis, and sometimes we are better equipped to handle it than others,” added Dr. Pennington. “Some days we let a stressor roll off our backs, while other times our days are consumed by it. Understanding this fluctuation is fundamental to a huge part of our lives.”
Editorial Notes:
This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
Journal paper reviewed in full.
Additional context added by our staff.
About this mental health and neuroscience Research:
Original Research is Open Access:Nature (Sept 22, 2026). “An amygdala to anterior hypothalamic circuit gates stress sensitivity.” Authors: Zachary T. Pennington, Alexa R. LaBanca, Afra N. Mahmud, Shereen D. Abdel-Raheim, Madeline E. Bacon, Patlapa Sompolpong, BumJin Ko, Austin M. Baggetta, Yosif Zaki, Yu Feng, Zhe Dong, Alexander C. W. Smith, Tristan Shuman, Paul J. Kenny & Denise J. Cai.
The notice describes Essa as the chief sharia instructor of Khatiba Nusaybah, or ISIS-NK, an all-female Islamic State combat battalion formed in Raqqa, Syria, in 2016 to recruit, organize and train female fighters.
The United States alleges she received formal training in weapons, explosives and suicide operations. The State Department notice claims Essa “taught ISIS extremist ideology that justified suicide operations and killing of civilians,” recruited members, made orders that resulted in assaults and murder, and “led a group that violently enforced sharia law against women.” There is a separate State Department notice for information leading to the location and return of two American children allegedly taken by Essa after the death of their mother – an Islamic State group recruit – in 2019.
The U.S. Department of State has offered a $5 million reward for Khadra Essa. U.S. Department of State
As a terrorism researcher who studies how militant groups organize and adapt, I’ve examined U.S. and European court records, sanctions and reward notices, as well as jihadi groups’ own Arabic-language publications, to trace how women’s roles inside armed movements have evolved.
For as long as modern terrorism has existed, women have been known to fight and carryout attacks. But I’ve observed a newer development whereby women’s organizational authority in jihadi groups has been increasingly formalized. Indeed, women are occupying defined roles in which they train, recruit, discipline or direct other members, or manage functions on which the organization depends.
In jihadi movements, by contrast, women were rarely presented as people with formal authority over other members or organizational functions. Rather, such groups, exploiting the perception of women as less of a security threat, primarily saw women’s active role in offensive operations as that of a conveyor of bombs.
By the early 2000s, Palestinian militant groups, including jihadists, were also using female suicide bombers. In January 2002, Wafa Idrisdied in Jerusalem while killing one man and wounding about 50 people. She is widely remembered as the first Palestinian woman to carry out a suicide bombing, although accounts indicate that the device may have detonated unexpectedly. Four more female suicide bombings followed within months of that attack.
The Palestinian militant group Hamas initiallyresisted using women in suicide attacks but relented in 2004.
Its spiritual leader, Ahmed Yassin, explained the change in tactical terms: “It could be that a man would not be able to reach the target, and that’s why they had to use a woman.”
But it was the Nigerian-based Boko Haram that hasscaled the practice beyond any precedent. Research by the Combating Terrorism Center identified 434 bombers across 238 suicide attacks between April 2011 and June 2017 – at least 56% of them women.
These cases largely placed women at the operational end of the process. Women carried the bomb or reached the target, but they were far less visible in positions that selected personnel, supplied doctrine, trained operatives or managed the organization itself.
That conservative position initially guided groups such as al-Qaida.
In December 2009, Umayma al-Zawahiri, wife of al-Qaida’s then deputy leader, published a “Letter to My Muslim Sisters.” It allowed women to fund operations, gather information and, in principle, carry out a suicide operation, while insisting their principal role was to raise fighters’ children, manage their homes and keep their secrets.
But jihadi propaganda began to stretch the language used for women.
In 2014, the Swahili-language magazine Al-Ghurabaa – aligned with al-Shabaab in Somalia – published an article titled “Mujahidah Leaders.” Translated and analyzed by Caleb Weiss, a researcher focused on jihadism in Africa, the magazine declared that “we sisters too have our own leaders.” It presented Aafia Siddiqui – a Pakistani neuroscientist convicted in 2010 of attempting to kill U.S. military and law enforcement personnel – and suspected mass murderer Samantha Lewthwaite as women to emulate.
An Interpol ‘Red Notice’ for the arrest of terrorism suspect Samantha Lewthwaite on Sept. 26, 2013. Oli Scarff/Getty Images
The rhetoric reflected a broader reality: Women in al-Shabaab had already served as recruiters, financiers, couriers and intelligence collectors, even if the movement rarely placed them in formal command positions.
Expanding women’s roles
The Islamic State group, meanwhile, was beginning to give some women a more concrete form of authority.
In February 2014 it announced the formation of the all-female al-Khansaa Brigade in Syria. The unit emerged partly from a practical security problem: Men disguised in women’s clothing had carried out attacks against Islamic State group commanders, creating a need for women who could search women at checkpoints. Its responsibilities expanded into intelligence gathering, law enforcement, recruitment and policing other women.
They could detain and punish other women, but their authority stopped there.
The brigade occupied an “authoritative position” while remaining unable to challenge Islamic State group policy.
As Islamic State group territory came under growing pressure, that justification widened. In December 2016 the group’s Arabic newsletter al-Naba published an article titled “I Will Die While Islam Is Glorious,” arguing that jihad was as necessary for a woman as for a man.
By July 2017 the group’s magazineRumiyah was calling on women to rise “with courage and sacrifice in this war.”
The article turned to the 14th-century figure of Nusaybah bint Ka’ab for justification. Also known as Umm Umara, the companion of prophet Muhammad took up arms at the Battle of Uhud. Uhud was a defensive battle, making Nusayba a useful precedent for movements that otherwise restricted women’s participation in combat.
Becoming named authorities
The next development came with a different all-female unit. In late 2016 the Islamic State group approved the formation of Khatiba Nusaybah, a military battalion composed of female members.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, a former Kansas resident who had already organized an Islamic State group women’s center in Raqqa, became the battalion’s leader and organizer. She trained more than 100 women and girls in the use of automatic rifles, grenades and suicide belts, according to the U.S. Justice Department. After being apprehended in Syria, she was transferred to FBI custody in January 2022. She pleaded guilty that June and was sentenced in federal court in Virginia to 20 years in prison.
Whereas al-Khansaa had exercised coercive authority over other women as an enforcement and security unit, Khatiba Nusaybah was organized as a female military battalion. That distinction marked a further shift.
Women have also moved into specialized organizational functions beyond combat.
Devorah Margolin, a terrorism researcher who specializes in women and gender in violent extremism, has shown how such groups have expanded women’s roles to include financing and recruitment, often out of organizational necessity rather than principle.
Taken together, the Fluke-Ekren, Essa and al-Sayyid cases show women moving from auxiliary participation in jihadi groups into defined organizational functions carrying greater authority and responsibility.
The women who carry out violence have long been visible. Increasingly, so are the women who train recruits, enforce rules, supply doctrine and sustain the systems behind it.
The Trump administration and the Iranian regime both say they prefer a diplomatic solution to the war, but a deal looks more elusive than ever.
Here’s a look at some of the deep-seated dynamics between the two countries — personal, cultural and political — that have stymied efforts to broker a deal, via Axios’ Barak Ravid:
Timing: The two countries see the timeframe for negotiations very differently.
“America under Trump is the attention-deficit superpower … incapable of sustaining a strategy,” Karim Sadjadpour, a senior analyst at the Carnegie Endowment, told Axios.
“Iran under the Islamic Republic is the obsessive-compulsive theocracy, fixated on resisting America far more than advancing the welfare of its own people.”
Showmanship: Trump loves a splashy show of political theater, with him cast as lead actor. The Iranians prefer a narrow, transactional deal that’s negotiated indirectly — or with the lowest public profile possible.
“Trump and his negotiators pride themselves on being dealmakers. In Iranian political culture, the word for compromiser — ‘sazeshkar’ — is practically a slur,” Sadjadpour said.
Mistrust: This is the fundamental impediment in the negotiations.
The Iranians claim Trump cheated them twice when he attacked them in the middle of talks. Many inside the regime think any more engagement with the U.S. is just a ruse to mask preparations for a surprise attack.
The U.S. side counters that Iran cheated when it violated the June 2026 memorandum of understanding, by attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz
No industry has ever documented its own foreseeable risks as loudly as AI, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a “Behind the Curtain” column.
Imagine a plaintiff’s lawyer reading the public warnings of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei: They told the world it was dangerous. They told the world it was moving too fast. Then they unleashed it and sold it to your kid.
No industry has ever taken so much copyrighted work and left behind so much proof.
Imagine a plaintiff’s lawyer reading OpenAI’s own files to a jury: They trained on a pirated library. They renamed it to something blander. Then they deleted it when the headlines got hot.
Why it matters: AI’s origins, use and future will be picked apart in countless epic court fights, with a historic paper and public statement trail to tap.
Every significant invention — be it social media, automobiles, electricity or capitalism itself — gets disrupted and eventually shaped by the courts.
AI, with its tentacles into every part of industry and life, will experience this at scale.
The big picture: The fights are no longer theoretical. They’re underway, in discovery and headed toward juries. Early verdicts and settlements capture the risk for the biggest players.
Chatbots are being treated as products, not speech. Unlike social media companies, they likely can’t hide behind Section 230, which protects platforms from liability for what users post — not what the platform itself creates.
Copyright is a massive problem. Anthropic already paid the biggest copyright settlement in history, $1.5 billion to authors and book publishers, and now music publishers and news media want a piece.
Agents gone wild. What happens when they do damage — and it was foreseeable and foreseen?
Discovery gone wild. AI leaves lots of receipts (and, ironically, makes it easier for the lawyers to comb through them, too).
Product liability turns on two words: foreseeable and knew.
Punitive damages turn on whether you knew the danger and shipped anyway.
This is where all these memos and warnings could really backfire.
Candor is good for safety but terrible for litigation. The companies that warn most honestly create the most discoverable evidence of foreseeability.
Expect general counsels to push hard to tone down the candor. It’s the rational legal move.
The intrigue: The liabilities won’t be limited to AI companies. Any corporate user of powerful AI systems that unleashes rogue agents, even without intending to do harm, would face substantial penalties as well.
“It’s not if, but when,” said Miriam Vogel, a former senior Justice Department official who now leads EqualAI. “An algorithm will do what it’s told to do. The more power and capability it has, the more access it has, the more it will do anything in its power to achieve a goal.
“That will create another layer of litigation as companies fight back. The CTO of a top Wall Street hedge fund who spoke to Axios after the notorious OpenAI/Hugging Face hack said his first call, if his firm’s systems are breached, will be to his general counsel.
President Trump, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and former FTC chair Lina Khan have all argued that AI companies are responsible for making sure their products are safe. If not, a wave of lawsuits awaits.
The other side: There’s a school of thought that AI companies might escape the worst liability, despite their frankness about things they and their products have done wrong.
One way to see it, and the argument lawyers will undoubtedly make, is that the labs spoke about dangers frequently, and took pains to protect users and mitigate harms.
The bottom line: For all the fights in Washington about whether or not Congress will act, the U.S. legal system may be the ultimate, and most powerful, regulator of the AI industry. Bradley Olson, Axios managing editor of AI & tech, contributed reporting.Let us know what you think: finishline@axios.com … Share this column.If you’re a CEO or on a CEO’s team:Ask to joinJim’s new weekly Axios C-Suite newsletter.
A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.
Catherine Snowis the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Perhaps cursive went out of style because there was a sense that it was just a technical skill, and one that was becoming less and less necessary with the universal availability of keyboards. There’s this sense that there’s a “problem” of putting stuff on paper, and the technical solution is that you type it and it looks neat and it’s well spelled and we’re not wasting time doing something that kids always hated — namely, practicing cursive. I could see that as an argument that could be convincing.
The problem is, in the process you are losing something that’s really of value: important cognitive challenges.
It’s quite a challenge for very young children to understand how letters are formed and how they are sequenced in words. If you’re not really concentrating, you might end up spelling “cat” C T, for example, because those are the salient sounds in cat. If you type words wrong, you’ll get spellchecked and you might never realize that you were wrong.
Take a slightly more complicated word — let’s say “moderate.” Well, there’s no way of inherently knowing what’s in the middle of moderate, right? It could be M O D A R A T E, or it could be M O D I R A T E, and if it just gets spellchecked, then you never actually come to make the connection. Having to spell it yourself, letter by letter as you write the word, draws your attention to the appropriate sequence of letters.
There are a number of studies which show that there are more areas of neural involvement in handwriting than in typing. There’s more visual cortex involvement, as well as all the differentiated motor skills that go into forming letters.I think it’s really the increased attention to the sequence of symbols that generates automaticity, and automaticity is a key element in good reading.
But this advantage of facilitating learning to read from handwriting comes both with cursive and with printing. It doesn’t really matter. I’ve never encountered anything that would suggest that proper cursive with all the letters connected is better than printing.
I had the proper eight years of elementary school Palmer Method training: The first 15 minutes of every school day were copying sentences 28 times on lined paper. But now I never read cursive, and I find that I really have to work hard if I’m in an archive or a museum and I’m trying to read letters exchanged between people in 1945. It’s a skill that kind of declines without practice. That’s one of the big advantages of learning to write cursive: In the process of learning to write it, you’re learning to read it. It’s learning to access history and literature and shared culture.
Should we keep cursive? I think we should. I’m not deeply dedicated to cursive, but I think we should spend more time in schools having kids write. There are kids who never learn cursive who can function with a pen in their hands perfectly well. They should be writing with pencil or pen on paper, and we should be focusing much more on the content of what they write than correcting errors. You could learn cursive later, if you really wanted to. There is not a critical period after which you can’t.
Why an Iran deal looks unlikely
Timing: The two countries see the timeframe for negotiations very differently.
Showmanship: Trump loves a splashy show of political theater, with him cast as lead actor. The Iranians prefer a narrow, transactional deal that’s negotiated indirectly — or with the lowest public profile possible.
Mistrust: This is the fundamental impediment in the negotiations.
Copyright is a massive problem. Anthropic already paid the biggest copyright settlement in history, $1.5 billion to authors and book publishers, and now 
Agents gone wild. What happens when they do damage — and it was foreseeable and foreseen?
Discovery gone wild. AI leaves lots of receipts (and, ironically, makes it easier for the lawyers to comb through them, too).
The intrigue: The liabilities won’t be limited to AI companies. Any corporate user of powerful AI systems that unleashes rogue agents, even without intending to do harm, would face substantial penalties as well.
Let us know what you think: 
If you’re a CEO or on a CEO’s team: 
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