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Europe wants to kick its Palantir habit

The U.S.-based data crunching firm is deeply embedded in the most sensitive European workflows, from policing to intelligence to health care. Finding alternatives won’t be easy.

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This article is also available in: French

August 3, 2026 7:34 pm CET

By Antoaneta Roussi, Émile Marzolf and Anouk Schlung

BRUSSELS — When French and German security chiefs announced plans last month to develop a “European sovereign digital backbone,” tech and defense industry insiders on both sides of the Atlantic knew what they really meant: Adieu Palantir.  

Across Europe, the hunt is on for alternatives to the U.S.-based data analytics company that a growing number of government officials believe is too deeply lodged in some of the most sensitive areas of government, from local policing and global intelligence to national defense and health systems. 

Yet it is precisely Palantir’s crucial functions in daily workflows, and its largely unmatched data expertise, that will make it extremely hard for Europe to cut it off in pursuit of greater digital sovereignty. 

“Let’s be honest, Palantir’s product is very good and addictive, it’s pretty much like the sugar in Coca-Cola,” said French digital sovereignty advocate, Philippe Latombe. “Palantir can treat massive amounts of data with great precision and with their experience, they had time to improve their algorithms with many clients and adapt them to many use cases.” 

Still, the drive to break free from Palantir is sweeping across the continent, from Madrid, where the government of Pedro Sánchez has instructed state-backed companies to block Palantir from future public procurement contracts, to France’s domestic intelligence services (DGSI) selecting French company ChapsVision over Palantir. In Britain, the next test may come in February 2027, when the new Labour government of Andy Burnham will face a choice of whether to cut off Palantir’s £330 million National Health Service Federated Data Platform contract. 

Last month’s decision by the French and German intelligence agencies to choose ChapsVision was a double-blow for Palantir’s leadership. CEO Alex Karp showed little patience for the sudden turn away from his company’s wares, declaring that he wasn’t worried about European competitors. “We have a model of what doesn’t work,” he quipped last week on Fox Business. “It’s called Europe.” 

Olivier Dellenbach, ChapsVision’s chief executive, told POLITICO that his company has benefited from what he calls a “visceral rejection of Palantir” in Europe.  

But he also cautioned that he did not want ChapsVision reduced to an anti-Palantir way out. Digital sovereignty, he argues, will remain an empty phrase unless governments turn it into industrial policy. “We need more public procurement,” Dellenbach said. 

Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Romania, the Netherlands and Canada have already shown interest in the French Army’s Artemis AI, according to Patrick Moreau, one of the architects of the solution built by French aerospace and defense company Thales. 

“They all want to be able to choose a sovereign solution that is compatible with NATO standards,” he said. “Unlike Palantir’s black box.” 

But for now, even officials who want sovereign alternatives acknowledge that Europe’s replacement market remains fragmented and European companies are yet to match Palantir’s scale and track record.

Admiral Pierre Vandier, NATO’s supreme allied commander transformation, recently told POLITICO the alliance has no viable alternative to Palantir’s battlefield AI technology.  

Another NATO official, granted anonymity to speak frankly, said that Palantir’s system has an unmatched capacity to sift through mountains of satellite imagery to help identify a target, advise on the weapon to strike it, inform how much ammunition is required — and automatically put in an order to replenish the stock. 

“As far as I know, today there is no real competitor for Palantir,” Vandier said in May. 

Freedom or democracy? 

Co-founded by Karp and billionaire investor Peter Thiel, Palantir built its reputation inside the U.S. national security apparatus. Today, the company has a market capitalization of $330 billion.

Thiel has been one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump, while the company’s work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Israeli military has come in for criticism from Amnesty International and others for alleged human rights violations. Adding to unease about Palantir’s ideology-driven business were recent revelations of Thiel’s secretive Dialog society, an invitation-only ideas club for the global elite, and Karp’s manifesto arguing that Palantir is the democratic West’s best hope to stay ahead of authoritarian rivals.

“Peter Thiel explains that the defense of freedom does not necessarily require democracy,” French member of Parliament Aurélien Saintoul, who wrote a report on foreign military dependencies, told POLITICO. “He is clearly putting technical means to serve his political project, and we are talking about technofascists here.” 

A Palantir spokesperson who declined to be named dismissed such accusations as “ludicrous,” noting that similar characterizations about the company have been made recently by the Russian foreign ministry.

“We know what side we’re on, and who we’re standing with,” the spokesman said, citing ongoing work to support the Ukrainian military. “Since our inception, protecting privacy and civil liberties has served as the foundation for how we conduct our work across both public and private sector institutions. Western politicians should think hard about who the real enemy is and not allow themselves to be ventriloquized by the Kremlin.”

Many of the company’s European critics maintain that the Palantir question is much more about tech sovereignty than political ideology. Extracting the company from some of the most delicate corners of European security structures would offer a blueprint for claiming more technological independence.

Instead, if governments in Europe cannot wean themselves off a company that provides software solutions, it would reveal how unrealistic hopes are to reduce dependence on U.S. technology giants that provide cloud infrastructure and hardware.

There is also the uncomfortable reality that at the same time that political leaders are calling for a break from Palantir, Europe’s biggest banks and asset managers have dramatically increased their investments in the U.S. company over the past year as it positions itself to profit from the AI gold rush, reports investigative outlet Follow the Money.

From crisis tool to critical infrastructure

Palantir’s European foothold was built long before the current boom in AI. A hallmark of its growth was that it never wasted a crisis to demonstrate its value for governments in need.  

In France, for instance, Palantir arrived in the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks as security services scrambled to respond to a fervent public backlash on how they could have allowed such a tragedy to happen. The domestic intelligence agency signed a contract with the data analytics giant in 2016. 

A similar pattern played out in Germany, where Palantir’s first major deployment came in Frankfurt, in the central state of Hesse, where police purchased Palantir’s Gotham in 2017 and deployed it under the name hessenDATA. It proved to be a crucial tool for officers to turn sprawling information into leads to help solve crimes.

Germany remains deeply divided over whether to use Palantir’s software. At the national level, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has pushed to expand the use of Palantir and introduced legislation that could pave the way for broader federal use. But the move has run into opposition from coalition partners the Social Democrats, as well as senior security officials.

The same crisis-to-contract pattern appeared in the U.K. during the Covid-19 pandemic. Palantir’s relationship with the National Health Service (NHS) began when it was paid a nominal £1 fee to help aggregate data during the crisis, according to Palantir’s U.K. lead Louis Mosley. 

Europol, the EU’s police agency, used Palantir’s Gotham platform from 2016 to 2021 before ultimately dropping it. For one Europol official who was granted anonymity to discuss the matter freely, the problem with Palantir is less ideological than practical. Yes, the platform is expensive, raises sovereignty concerns and leaves clients dependent on Palantir for updates, the official said. But the more basic question is whether every agency needs the full Palantir machine. 

“[Palantir] is really good when you have massive amounts of data and want to connect everything,” they said. “But that is not the case for us. In many cases, the alternatives are close enough. If we used it, I’m not sure our efficiency would increase dramatically.” 

Part of Palantir’s approach in Europe is to hire former officials from the institutions it wants as customers. OpenDemocracy reported that Palantir hired four former officials from the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence before winning a £240 million MoD contract.

The influence drive 

Moreover, Palantir is now seeking new business on the continent in defense.

On Jul. 1, Palantir’s Maven Smart System — which was first used by the Pentagon — became fully operational at NATO, meaning it’s been given security clearance to operate on the classified network. According to a NATO statement, the platform links command-and-control systems across the Alliance. 

“I think this is a very important milestone for European defense,” said Palantir’s U.K. chief Louis Mosley. 

But Palantir’s grip on Europe does not stop at the doors of government or army barracks. It also runs through some of the continent’s industrial crown jewels. Airbus signed with Palantir in 2015, making Palantir’s Foundry the backbone of its aviation data platform. Automaker BMW, energy company British Petroleum and media publisher Axel Springer — POLITICO’s parent company — all use Foundry to improve their business productivity as well. 

Looking for alternatives 

Even if Europe manages to loosen Palantir’s grip, the company’s model built on top of the latest AI large-language systems appears to only be getting stronger. On Jun. 30, Amazon Web Services said it would invest $1 billion in a new “Forward Deployed Engineering” organization, embedding teams of engineers inside customer headquarters to build AI systems alongside them.  

Days later, Microsoft announced a $2.5 billion push to send 6,000 engineers and industry specialists into client organizations. Both initiatives echo Palantir’s pioneering model to not simply sell software but put engineers inside a buyer’s operation. 

Both the strength of its products and the sensitive areas where they’re applied, make Palantir Europe’s sovereign test case par excellence. If governments and companies can replace a software layer that helps turn data into decisions, they may have a blueprint for clawing back some digital sovereignty. If they cannot, the next generation of AI tools from U.S. tech giants may prove even harder to quit. 

“Europe’s public institutions cannot become dependent on software built by a small circle of U.S. tech billionaires with an obscure political worldview,” said German Green MEP Hannah Neumann, who sits on Parliament’s defense committee. “It would be like outsourcing part of the democratic state to a private intelligence service that answers neither to voters nor to parliament.”

David Pargamin contributed reporting from Paris.

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@ShiningScience

Julian Assange sounded the alarm about this years ago.

Today, it is a normal part of how the internet (and politicians) work. The sudden deactivation of federal resources like Climate. gov highlights a growing crisis: our history is being quietly erased by centralized digital servers.

When the Trump administration deactivated the federal government’s official climate portal, Climate. gov, and removed key National Climate Assessments, it exposed a profound systemic flaw in the modern internet.

Today, almost all digital information is stored on centralized servers controlled by a small number of institutions. When political administrations or organizations pull the plug on a domain, the public is left with nothing but a ‘page not found’ error.

As Julian Assange warned, this is more than just data loss—the very act of disappearance is rendered completely invisible, leaving future generations with no way of knowing what was once there.

While websites undergo routine updates, recent executive directives have sparked unprecedented, silent purges of public research. Federal agencies have modified or removed thousands of datasets and webpages containing vital environmental, public health, and scientific findings.

This growing digital instability reveals that without proactive external archiving, our collective scientific knowledge remains highly vulnerable to political whim. source: The 19th News. (2026). Trump dismantled a federal climate website. These women rebuilt it.

https://twitter.com/BrianMcDonaldIE/status/2087143934770172167/video/1

Brian McDonald

@BrianMcDonaldIE

Putin warns AI could divide society into a “small intellectual elite and a much larger group of people who no longer need to think for themselves,” simply pushing buttons while their “grey matter” gradually shrinks. He told a group of scientists in Novosibirsk that whether educators can realistically prevent that outcome is a big question, claiming that as AI becomes capable of instantly producing answers, the number of people who actually think, develop ideas and build the technology could become smaller and smaller, while for the majority there would be little need to think at all.

Mojtaba Khamenei. Photo Credit: PMOI

Iran’s Khamenei Rebuilds A Command Structure Gutted By War – Analysis

 August 12, 2026

By RFE RL

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By Kian Sharifi

Key Takeaways:

• Mojtaba Khamenei formalized six senior military and security appointments within 48 hours, converting a five-month wartime improvisation (after heavy losses of top commanders) into a permanent structure built around his trusted circle.
• The moves include structural integration of the Armed Forces General Staff with Khatam al-Anbiya headquarters and the return of hardliner Hossein Taeb as Basij commander, signaling both military consolidation and tighter domestic control.
• Analysts view the reshuffle primarily as the new leader asserting authority rather than a major policy shift, with the same security and foreign-policy logic largely continuing.

Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s decision to formalize six senior military and security postings within 48 hours is less a personnel story than the closing chapter of a five-month improvisation.

Read together, the appointments announced on August 10 show a new supreme leader moving to convert an emergency wartime chain of command, cobbled together after Israeli and US strikes killed much of Iran’s senior military leadership, into a permanent structure built around his own circle of trust.

Rebuilding From The Top Down, Twice

The scale of the vacancy Khamenei, who has not been seen in half a year, was filling is easy to lose in a list of names.

Mohammad Baqeri, chief of the Armed Forces General Staff, was killed in the opening days of the 12-day war in June 2025. His successor, Abdolrahim Musavi, lasted barely a summer before he too was killed — in the February 28 strike that also killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself. For roughly five months after that, Iran’s Armed Forces General Staff had no chief at all; coordination defaulted to the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, then run by Ali Abdollahi.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) command line suffered an identical pattern: IRGC chief Hossein Salami killed in the 12-day war, his successor Mohammad Pakpur killed alongside Musavi in the 40-day war earlier this year, and Ahmad Vahidi running the IRGC in an acting capacity ever since, until Khamenei’s August 10 decree finally made it official and promoted him to major general.

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That two parallel chains of command were both operating on acting, undeclared leadership for months is itself a story about how thin Iran’s senior officer corps was cut by Israeli and US targeting. The new decrees don’t just install new men, they close out a period in which Iran’s military hierarchy existed more as a wartime improvisation than as a chain of command with the supreme leader’s formal seal on it.

Integration, Not Just Replacement

The more interesting signal is in the language of the decree appointing Abdollahi, which calls for “completing the integration” of the Armed Forces General Staff with the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters — a merger that the new supreme leader attributes to a strategy his father initiated.

Pairing this with the fact that no new Khatam al-Anbiya commander was named alongside Abdollahi’s promotion suggests the post itself may be getting absorbed rather than filled — a structural consolidation, not just a staffing decision.

If Khatam al-Anbiya effectively folds into the General Staff, it marks a real centralization of Iran’s wartime coordination apparatus under a single command rather than the semi-parallel structure that existed under the slain Ali Khamenei.

Taeb’s Return

Perhaps one of the most overlooked appointments in the media is the one carrying the most domestic-facing weight: Hossein Taeb as Basij paramilitary force commander.

Taeb is not a wartime replacement in the way Abdollahi or Vahidi are; he’s a return. He built his career at the Ministry of Intelligence before being pushed out, then constructed a parallel intelligence apparatus inside the Revolutionary Guards — the notorious IRGC Intelligence Organization — that he ran until his own ouster in mid-2022.

The language of the degree announcing Taeb’s appointment reinforces the domestic angle: it calls for strengthening a “popular intelligence network” and realizing the slogan “every Iranian, a Basij member,” explicitly invoking the pro-Islamic republic street mobilizations that have run since the start of the 40-day war as a base to build on “in defense of the Islamic Revolution.”

Where the other five appointments answer a military attrition problem, this one answers a different question: who does the new supreme leader trust to watch the population and manage internal threats as the state’s legitimacy is tested by dynastic succession and wartime hardship.

Paris-based analyst Reza Alijani, speaking to RFE/RL’s Radio Farda, argued that the appointments — including Mohsen Rezaei being named as Iran’s new security chief — are primarily about Khamenei “activating and displaying” his own authority rather than a real shift in direction. Most of the men being elevated, he noted, already served within the Islamic republic’s executive apparatus, suggesting that the same military logic in foreign policy and security logic at home are simply reproducing themselves.

He singled out the Taeb and Rezaei moves as, in essence, rehabilitating “politically and security-wise bankrupt figures,” but cautioned that on the domestic-security front specifically, little actually changes: the same apparatus, without Taeb at the helm, already killed thousands of people during widespread protests in January.

Still, Alijani’s broader read is that, factional optics aside, the reshuffle “doesn’t carry much significant political meaning” for either domestic or foreign policy. He predicts that, ultimately, the “expediency of the system” will narrowly “prevail over its ideology”, at a cost paid from the pockets and lives of ordinary Iranians.

Elaheh Ravanshad of RFE/RL’s Radio Farda contributed to this report.

• Kian Sharifi is a feature writer specializing in Iranian affairs in RFE/RL’s Central Newsroom in Prague. He got his start in journalism at the Financial Tribune, an English-language newspaper published in Tehran, where he worked as an editor. He then moved to BBC Monitoring, where he led a team of journalists who closely watched media trends and analyzed key developments in Iran and the wider region.

About RFE RL

RFE/RL journalists report the news in 21 countries where a free press is banned by the government or not fully established.

View all posts by RFE RL →

USA Today Journalists Horrified by Newspaper’s Partnership With Palantir

They were “shocked” by the news and are calling for the company to “immediately end its partnership.”

By Victor Tangermann

Published Aug 10, 2026 1:02 PM EDT

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Last week, Nieman Lab revealed that USA Today‘s parent company USA Today Co (formerly Gannett) was partnering with AI surveillance firm Palantir to monetize “actionable intelligence” on its audience.

According to USA Today CEO Mike Reed, the goal is to “build a common intelligence layer” on reader data to “monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value.”

The largest newspaper’s new partnership with the Peter Thiel-cofounded company, which has long been mired in controversy — from collaborating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and being linked to US airstrikes that killed over 120 schoolchildren in Iran to its mercurial CEO, who has a long history of strange outbursts — has raised plenty of eyebrows.

Workers represented by The News Guild, the country’s largest communications and media labor union, including journalists at USA Today, were “shocked” by the news, according to a new statement, and are calling for the company to “immediately end its partnership with Palantir.”

“While [Reed] championed this partnership as a way to drive revenue, we believe it threatens to undermine trust in our news outlets and raises serious questions about the data security of our readers,” the statement reads.

“We have significant ethical issues with Palantir, whose artificial intelligence software has been used to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns,” the union wrote. “Not only does partnering with Palantir, a major player in the news we cover, create an inherent conflict of interest, but it fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests.”

The News Guild accused USA Today Co of not disclosing details regarding the new partnership and raised concerns over how readers’ personal information and data will be treated and protected.

“Without answers, how can journalists encourage readers to subscribe to our news outlets?” the union wrote.

As a result, the union is calling for USA Today Co to “steer clear” in order to maintain journalistic integrity and maintain “with the kind of responsibility and skepticism that the nation’s largest network of journalists should exhibit.”

The union also called attention to the dire state of the news industry, with a major pivot to AI being cited to justify major layoffs at countless newspapers and publications.

Even within Palantir’s own ranks, employees are starting to speak up, with some starting to wonder whether “they’re the bad guys,” as Wired reported earlier this year.

The company’s reputation has taken such a major hit that even its major contract with the UK government’s National Health Service is on shaky ground. Earlier this year, London mayor Sadiq Khan also blocked a Palantir contract with the city’s Metropolitan police force, arguing the department “did not adequately demonstrate value for money for Londoners.”

More on Palantir: USA Today Partners With Palantir to Gain “Actionable Intelligence” On Its Audiences

Victor Tangermann

Senior Editor

I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.

Masih Alinejad

@AlinejadMasih

Islamic Republic in Iran hangs 24-Year-old woman who defended herself from sexual assault.

Yesterday the regime executed Marziyeh Neyri, a young woman who was forced into marriage at age 17 and hanged for fighting back against her attacker.

Marziyeh was 18 years old when her husband’s associate attempted to sexually assault her in her own home, in front of her husband. She grabbed a kitchen knife to defend herself. Her husband died in the struggle. She told the court she had been repeatedly assaulted by her husband’s associates before that day. Iran’s courts didn’t care. The regime rejected her self-defense claim.

Her attacker, who survived, took the stand and called her a murderer. The court believed him over her. She was sentenced to death. No clemency. No mercy. The sentence was carried out at Chubindar Prison in Qazvin. Marziyeh Neyri never had a chance.

Forced into marriage as a child under Iran’s Islamic laws, she spent the few years of her adult life in a courtroom, fighting for her life after defending it. She lost. This is the Sharia Laws in Islamic Republic of Iran where a woman can be hanged for surviving.

Grok Bot is the latest AI agent teammate build

Image source: xAI

The Rundown: SpaceXAI and Cursor just rolled out Grok Bot, a new beta app that turns Grok into an iMessage-style chat of teammates that have their own dedicated computers, work autonomously, and can access everyday apps just like a real user.

The details:

Bots are able to coordinate with each other independently or in group chats, and learn from workflows and improve over time.New specialist agents can be generated by Bots inside a job or receive handoffs from another worker, with work continuing 24/7 without a laptop open. Bots can also access websites and apps on a user’s behalf and observe and create workflows to automate tasks.The beta covers iPhone and Mac, Windows, and Linux desktops for SuperGrok Heavy and top Cursor tiers, with Elon Musk saying access will expand soon.

Why it matters: The group chat is becoming a top form factor for running teams of agents. OpenClaw and Hermes already live in messaging apps, and Jack Dorsey’s Buzz built a Slack rival where agents are channel members. Grok Bot feels like a middle-ground version built for the masses (if the price comes down significantly).

https://twitter.com/BowesChay/status/2087457720538480890/video/1

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A fall from an electric scooter (e-scooter) can look deceptively minor. The rider is standing only a short distance above the road and, unlike a motorcycle, most e-scooters are limited to relatively modest speeds.

Yet trauma surgeons are seeing injuries that tell a different story. E-scooter crashes can cause serious head injuries, damage to internal organs, and complex fractures – sometimes after what appears to have been a simple fall.

This matters as e-scooters become an increasingly common form of transport in cities around the world. New research from England and Wales offers one of the clearest pictures yet of the injuries involved.

The study examined more than 15,000 people with moderate or severe injuries recorded in a national trauma database. This included 580 e-scooter riders, more than 7,000 motorcyclists, and more than 7,000 cyclists.

The clearest difference was what happened to riders’ heads.

Among seriously injured adults, traumatic brain injuries were around three and a half times as common among e-scooter riders as among motorcyclists, and around 1.7 times more common than in cyclists. More than a third of the injuries recorded among adult e-scooter riders involved traumatic brain injury.

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Damage to internal organs and blood vessels was also proportionally more common. Fractures, however, were actually less common among e-scooter riders than among motorcyclists or cyclists.

There is an important qualification. These figures do not mean that taking an e-scooter journey makes someone three and a half times more likely to suffer a brain injury than riding a motorcycle. The researchers did not have comparable information on the number of journeys or distance travelled by motorcyclists and cyclists.

Instead, the results tell us that when people sustain moderate or severe injuries, the pattern of injuries sustained on an e-scooter is different. Head and internal injuries make up a much greater proportion of the resulting trauma.

That distinction matters when headlines describe e-scooters as “three times riskier” than motorcycles. The study cannot tell us whether an e-scooter journey is three times more likely to result in serious injury than a motorcycle journey, because the researchers did not have comparable data on how far people travelled on each.

Why e-scooters can cause serious injuries

One explanation for this injury pattern lies in how e-scooters are designed and ridden. Riders stand upright, giving them a relatively high centre of gravity. Their wheels are much smaller than those on most bicycles, while the handlebars provide a narrow point through which the rider controls the vehicle.

Hit a pothole, kerb or piece of debris and the small front wheel can stop suddenly. The rider keeps moving forwards and can be thrown over the handlebars towards the road, with very little protection between their head and the ground.

This makes helmet use particularly important. Among seriously injured e-scooter riders in the study, only about 6% were recorded as wearing helmets, compared with 45% of cyclists and 76% of motorcyclists.

Children also featured disproportionately. Around 16% of injured e-scooter riders in the trauma database were under 18 – substantially higher than the proportion among injured cyclists or motorcyclists.

A second part of the research examined more than 23,000 incidents involving rental e-scooters across more than 33 million journeys and almost 78 million kilometres. Collision rates varied considerably between cities, suggesting that where people ride may matter as well as what they ride.

Official figures give some indication of the wider burden. In Great Britain, police recorded 1,312 collisions involving e-scooters in 2024, resulting in 1,390 casualties: six people died and an estimated 444 were seriously injured.

How e-scooter injuries are treated

Treatment depends on what has been damaged. Minor fractures may need a cast or brace. More complicated fractures can require surgery involving plates, screws or metal rods. Serious head injuries may need intensive care, brain surgery, or prolonged rehabilitation, while internal bleeding may require emergency surgery.

The consequences can therefore extend far beyond the initial crash. A few seconds on an e-scooter can lead to months away from work, rehabilitation and, in the most severe cases, permanent disability.

Many of the factors contributing to these injuries can be reduced. A helmet cannot prevent a fall, but it can protect the part of the body that appears particularly vulnerable.

Riders should also become familiar with the acceleration, braking and steering before entering heavy traffic. Speed matters, particularly on wet or uneven roads. Using a phone, carrying another passenger or riding after drinking alcohol adds further risk to a vehicle that already demands balance and concentration.

E-scooters have clear advantages: they are convenient, relatively cheap and can replace short car journeys. Millions of rides take place without serious injury.

But their appearance can be misleading. An e-scooter may look more like a child’s scooter than a motorcycle, yet the injuries seen in trauma centres show that falling from one is not necessarily a trivial event.

Exercise your brain

Illustration: Gabriella Turrisi/Axios

Your daily crossword is still a flex. But scientists are testing a more focused question: Can you train an aging brain to process information faster — and potentially change its trajectory?  Why it matters: A growing body of research suggests certain kinds of cognitive exercises can produce measurable changes in the brain. One long-running trial even linked a specific type of training to fewer dementia diagnoses, Axios’ Natalie Daher writes.  The evidence: Recent studies highlighted by The Washington Post (gift link) suggest that targeted cognitive training may affect systems involved in attention and memory as well as brain structure.  Zoom in: A separate, much smaller randomized clinical trial presented last month at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference offers a clue about what might be happening biologically. Researchers from Clemson University, the Medical University of South Carolina and Penn State randomly assigned 53 participants to three groups that trained two to three hours a week for about three months.  One group practiced higher-order thinking, such as planning, reasoning and shifting attention. Another concentrated on processing speed and visual attention. In one exercise, for example, participants had to identify a vehicle flashed briefly in the center of a screen while also remembering where a Route 66 sign appeared. A third, active-control group played familiar games, including Solitaire, word searches and a version of Connect Four. Before and after the training, researchers took blood samples to measure two forms of amyloid beta, a protein closely associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Only the speed-training group showed favorable shifts in those Alzheimer’s-related biomarkers.  Reality check: The science is still early. Researchers don’t yet know whether those changes translate into better everyday functioning or lower disease risk. There’s still no single accepted measure of a “healthy” brain, and braintraining isn’t a substitute for exercise or other healthy habits. The bottom line: Keep up your Sudoku if you enjoy it. The bigger question now: Can scientists figure out which mental workouts actually help our brains age better?