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IRAN THREATENS TO SEVER 7 CRITICAL UNDERSEA INTERNET CABLES Iran’s IRGC reportedly threatens to target seven major undersea internet cables in the Strait of Hormuz if war with the U.S. and Israel escalates. Such attacks could severely disrupt regional internet connectivity, banking, telecommunications and international data traffic.

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1947

Congress investigates Communists in Hollywood

HISTORY.com Editors

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Published: November 24, 2009 Last Updated: May 27, 2025

On October 20, 1947, the notorious Red Scare kicks into high gear in Washington, as a Congressional committee begins investigating communist influence in one of the world’s richest and most glamorous communities: Hollywood.

After World War II, the Cold War began to heat up between the world’s two superpowers—the United States and the communist-controlled Soviet Union. In Washington, conservative watchdogs worked to out communists in government before setting their sights on alleged “Reds” in the famously liberal movie industry. In an investigation that began in October 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) grilled a number of prominent witnesses, asking bluntly “Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Whether out of patriotism or fear, some witnesses—including director Elia Kazan, actors Gary Cooper and Robert Taylor and studio honchos Walt Disney and Jack Warner—gave the committee names of colleagues they suspected of being communists.

Sound Smart: The Hollywood Ten

Historian Yohuru Williams discusses key facts about the Hollywood Ten, a group of film directors, screenwriters and producers blacklisted for Communist affiliations in 1947.

1:41m watch

A small group known as the “Hollywood Ten” resisted, complaining that the hearings were illegal and violated their First Amendment rights. They were all convicted of obstructing the investigation and served jail terms. Pressured by Congress, the Hollywood establishment started a blacklist policy, banning the work of about 325 screenwriters, actors and directors who had not been cleared by the committee. Those blacklisted included composer Aaron Copland, writers Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker, playwright Arthur Miller and actor and filmmaker Orson Welles.

Some of the blacklisted writers used pseudonyms to continue working, while others wrote scripts that were credited to other writer friends. Starting in the early 1960s, after the downfall of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the most public face of anti-communism, the ban began to lift slowly. In 1997, the Writers’ Guild of America unanimously voted to change the writing credits of 23 films made during the blacklist period, reversing—but not erasing—some of the damage done during the Red Scare.

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Archiving Radharc’s TV documentaries

The Archive Scheme of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland is making a serious effort to encourage an ‘archiving culture’ in the broadcast sector. The Radharc Archive Project is one of the first of the BAI-funded projects to come to fruition. Fifteen Radharc programmes from 1962/3 have now been digitally remastered in high definition, along with the digitisation of the associated paperwork.

Radharc started out as an experimental religious affairs programme on Telefís Éireann in 1962 and continued for another 35 years. What made Radharc particularly interesting, even peculiar, however, was that it was a TV programme made by Catholic priests. The ‘Radharc team’ of clerics (later joined by lay people) was Ireland’s first independent TV production unit, which made over 400 documentaries exploring issues of faith, values and social justice around the world. Contrary to what one might expect, Radharc programmes became noted for challenging the cosy Catholic conservatism of 1960s and 1970s Ireland and for presenting a radical theological perspective on the issues of the developing world.

Radharc ceased television production in 1997 after the death of co-founder Fr Joe Dunn. These days, the Radharc Trust works to promote the legacy of the production unit through initiatives like the biennial Radharc Awards for TV programmes in the spirit of Radharc. The Trust also oversees the film archive, which is carefully stored in the vaults of the Irish Film Institute and RTÉ Archives. Importantly, Radharc’s own collection includes production files of research notes, scripts and thousands of photographs. Each is an artefact from the archaeology of Irish broadcast history—and now there are more opportunities for researchers to explore that history.

Every archivist knows that good archive practice is much more than just storing material safely. With thousands of individual items involved, quality cataloguing is a prerequisite. Decisions in this regard required close collaboration with the Film Archive of the IFI and RTÉ Archives. The digital age is ideal for cataloguing and facilitating access, but digitising audio-visual material is complicated by literally hundreds of options when it comes to video format.

There are 5,500 Radharc programme elements in the vaults: finished films, rough cuts, soundtracks and off-cuts. The project set out to tackle the first fifteen films only and began by retrieving the best-quality elements. Fifty-three separate film reels were identified that provided the restoration team with routes to reconstruct the best version of each of the fifteen films involved.

Every frame of 16mm film was hand-inspected by staff at the IFI before undergoing telecine scan in high definition at Dublin facility house Screen Scene. Making a digital file from film requires the marrying of projection and sprocket technology with computer chips. Once in the digital domain, however, software restoration delivered the Radharc programmes as high-definition images to a standard never seen before. Although half a century old, the films are in remarkably good condition. And where there were problems, digital restoration smoothed away some of the wrinkles and flaws of old age.

Digitising the paper and photographic collection is simpler in some ways, but still a big task because of the volume of material. Thanks to the good working practices of the original Radharc teams, there is a file for each programme—scripts, shot lists, research and technical notes, interview transcripts, even fan mail. It is an extraordinary treasure trove, giving a fascinating insight into the workings of a small TV production unit. There are also scrapbooks of press cuttings, which are a wonderful companion for researchers to appreciate the context of the original broadcasts. About 1,300 scanned files have been digitised as part of this project.

One example of the value of the paper archive is the file relating to the film ‘Fr Casey and the Land War’, first broadcast in 1963, which recounts the story of the parish priest of Abbeyfeale, Fr William Casey. The film features interviews with elderly contributors who were eyewitnesses to nineteenth-century evictions and Land League agitation. The production file includes the original interview transcripts—the sections used in the film are clearly marked, but what are especially interesting are those sections of testimony that did not make the final cut. The interviewees, for instance, give the names of landlords with a bad reputation, as well as the names of some of those evicted.

The Archive Project will bring Radharc’s first fifteen films to new audiences, allow screenings and exhibitions, and ensure that vulnerable material is digitally preserved. An exhibition and screening of the restored films will take place in September 2015 at the Irish Film Institute, Temple Bar, Dublin.

Peter Kelly is a TV producer with Esras Films and a trustee of the Radharc Trust (and member of the Radharc team from 1985 to 1996).CategoriesEditorial, Issue 4 (July/August 2015), Volume 23

Daniel Doyle: Young Irelander

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First Large-Scale Study Shows How Doctors Use AI in Medicine

Which practitioners use artificial intelligence in the clinic, and what do they ask?

Research 2 min read

By JAKE MILLER

October 15, 2026

The future of federally funded research at Harvard Medical School — supported by taxpayers and done in service to humanity — remains uncertain. Learn more.

The first large-scale study of how often clinicians use artificial intelligence tools in patient care, who those clinicians are, and what they are using it for finds that a significant number of medical practitioners are using AI in the clinic and that they are often using it to explore treatment options for their patients in areas outside their clinical specialty.

The study, led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, looked at how 950,000 physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners in the United States used OpenEvidence, a popular AI-enabled clinical information platform, over the last two and a half years. Most queries were related to clinical decision making (51.9 percent), particularly treatment and management. Diagnosis accounted for 13.9 percent of queries.

The results of this federally funded study were published Oct. 15 in JAMA.

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“Two key takeaways are that an enormous number of physicians are using AI for clinical care and that they are often using it in areas where they don’t have specific expertise,” said corresponding author Anupam Jena, the Joseph P. Newhouse Professor of Health Care Policy in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and HMS professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“Everyone appreciates the huge potential for AI to change how medicine is practiced, but right now we have limited information on how many doctors are using it, what they are using it for, and how it’s impacting patients,” Jena said. The JAMA study tackles the first two of those questions.

Dramatic increase in use of AI

The researchers found that use has been dramatic, in terms of both the speed and scale of adoption, Jena said. That was in contrast to what research showed with electronic health records, where the pace of adoption was slow and “only really occurred after government regulation,” Jena said.

From January 2024 to June 2026, the number of monthly active OpenEvidence users increased from 355 to 703,265, the team found. Over that time, practitioners included in the study submitted 270 million queries to the platform.

Jena and colleagues used a large language model to classify the clinical purpose and topic areas of a random sample of 38.8 million queries.

What are doctors using AI for?

The data showed that queries were frequently for aiding in treatment decisions rather than diagnostic tasks and that questions were often about subjects that were outside of the practitioner’s specialty. For example, surgeons often ask questions that are not about surgery, the team found.

The level of use varied across clinician types, specialties, and career stages.

The researchers compared the number of queries made by a particular specialty with the percentage of the physician workforce that they represent. Some specialties used more than their share of queries. Oncology/hematology specialists accounted for 3.8 percent of queries, while they comprise just 1.9 percent of the workforce and internal medicine doctors accounted for 27.3 percent of physician queries, while they make up 14.5 percent of the physician workforce. Other specialties, including radiology, orthopedics, and ophthalmology, used less than their share.

More than half of the users in the sample (556,200) were physicians. They submitted an average of 37 queries per month of use. Early-career physicians and those in oncology, hematology, internal medicine, and family medicine submitted a higher-than-average share of queries.

The next step will be to examine whether use of these tools improves clinical care, the researchers said.

“AI tools have become integrated into routine in clinical practice faster than almost any technology we’ve seen, but until now we’ve had very little data on how clinicians actually use them,” said first author Vishal Patel, HMS clinical fellow in surgery at Brigham and Women’s. “This research gives us an early picture of where these tools fit into clinical decision-making and where we need to study their accuracy and effects on patient care next.”

Three of the co-authors are employees of OpenEvidence, which did not fund the study but provided the de-identified data that was analyzed.

Authorship, funding, disclosures

Additional authors include Samuel G. Finlayson, Michael Liu-Hass, Mondira Ray, Jesse Burk-Rafel, and Travis I. Zack.

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (grant F32EB040202).

Finlayson reported being a salaried employee of OpenEvidence during the conduct of the study. Liu-Hass reported receiving personal fees from Accompany Health for consulting outside the submitted work. Ray reported receiving personal fees from OpenEvidence as a full-time employee outside the submitted work. Zack reported being the chief medical officer of OpenEvidence during the conduct of the study. Jena reported receiving personal fees from Analysis Group; Freakonomics, MD; Doubleday Books; The New York Times; Los Angeles Times; The Wall Street Journal; and Harry Walker Agency outside the submitted work and serving as an unpaid board member for the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS). No other disclosures were reported.

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James Lucas

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This is the last known photograph of Nikola Tesla. On 7 January 1943, the man who helped bring electricity into every home in the world died alone in a small hotel room in New York, with almost nothing to his name.

In the 1880s, Tesla’s inventions for alternating current, above all his AC motor, were licensed by Westinghouse, made him rich and famous, and helped make possible the kind of electrical system that still powers the world today. But a few years later, when Westinghouse ran into financial trouble, Tesla agreed to give up the royalty deal that might have made him a fortune, and he poured much of what he had left into his next idea, and his next idea was enormous… He wanted to send messages, and even electricity itself, through the earth without wires.

In 1901 he persuaded the most powerful banker in America, J.P. Morgan, to give him $150,000 to build a giant tower at Wardenclyffe, on Long Island. Morgan thought he was paying for wireless communication but Tesla’s real plan was to prove he could transmit power. When he asked for more money to make the tower bigger, Morgan refused. The project collapsed, and in 1917 the tower was blown up and sold for scrap to pay Tesla’s debts.

Ever since, one line has followed the story, supposedly Morgan’s reason for walking away: “If anyone can draw on the power, where do we put the meter?” Tesla never recovered… he moved from one New York hotel to another, leaving unpaid bills behind him, and spent his last days in parks feeding pigeons, even nursing injured ones back to health in his room.

His life ended in solitude: a maid at the Hotel New Yorker found him dead in Room 3327. He was 86. Within days, the federal government ordered his belongings and papers to be seized, even though he was an American citizen, and an engineer was brought in to examine them. Whatever else Tesla left behind, the world has been arguing about it ever since…

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