The Problematic Rise of Personalized Nutrition | A ‘Green’ Search Engine Sees Danger—and Opportunity—in the Generative AI Revolution | Powerful Donors Push Universities to Condemn Criticism of Israel | 6-Year-Old Boy Dead in Anti-Muslim Attack Near Chicago, Police Say

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The Problematic Rise of Personalized Nutrition - WIRED

Chrissy Kinsella was looking for a more personalized approach to her health. “You know, what is good for you as an individual may not necessarily be good for the next person,” she says. So she reached for a subscription to Zoe—a personalized nutrition service cofounded by Tim Spector, a celebrity scientist and a genetic epidemiologist at King’s College London. Kinsella paid the £299 ($365) for a testing kit and later received a bright yellow package in the mail: a bundle of vials, patches, and muffins.

By testing, scoring, and monitoring how you respond to different foods, Zoe says, it can help with a whole host of problems. Its personalized recommendations can help you “reach a healthy weight,” “feel less bloated,” and “avoid chronic health issues,” claims its website. The program can even help with menopause, Zoe says.

But doctors are more ambivalent. Sure, getting people to think critically about what they eat can be beneficial, but scoring and monitoring someone’s diet could lead to unnecessary health concerns or even disordered eating. British doctors say they have seen perfectly healthy patients with concerns about their blood sugar control prompted by readings in their Zoe app.

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A ‘Green’ Search Engine Sees Danger—and Opportunity—in the Generative AI Revolution - WIRED

In the era of search wars fought between giants, it's tough to be small. Berlin-based Ecosia offers a search engine for the climate-conscious, promising to be carbon-negative by investing all of its profits into planting treesâmore than 180 million of them since it launched in 2009. It's not likely to topple Google, but it has won a stable clientele of around 20 million users with that green branding and by repackaging search results from Microsoft's Bing. But after a decade of little change in the search business, everything is now in flux, thanks to generative AI. "I've never seen so much change in the market as in the last six months," says Christian Kroll, Ecosia's CEO.

The tumult has forced Ecosia to rethink its business plan in order to compete with new chatbot-like search engines built on large language models. Today, the company began switching from providing results exclusively from Microsoft's Bing, as it has for the past 14 years, to primarily sourcing them from Googleâthough it will still syndicate some Bing results via marketing company System 1. At the beginning of the year, Kroll says, Ecosia "got some signals from Microsoft that kind of triggered us to be a bit more on the lookout for other potential providers." In March, Microsoft hiked its prices for search results, which was "a wake-up call for alternative search engines," according to Kroll. Microsoft declined to comment.

Ecosia switched partners in hopes of finding a way to participate in the profound shift in how people search the internet triggered by AI. The company is only testing its partnership with Google and isn't immediately going to be using the search giant's AI toolsâthough it hopes to do so in future.

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Powerful Donors Push Universities to Condemn Criticism of Israel - The New York Times

Wall Street financiers are pressing elite schools to condemn criticism of Israel. Amid pressure, the University of Pennsylvania on Sunday issued a statement referring to Hamas’s attack as terrorism.

In reporting this story, Rob Copeland spoke to big donors to Harvard, Cornell, Stanford and other universities, some of whom have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars.

Kenneth Griffin has donated more than half a billion dollars to Harvard University, committing $300 million this year alone. Last Monday, with his alma mater convulsed after a coalition of student groups blamed Israel for Hamas’s attack that had left more than 1,000 people dead, Mr. Griffin, who earned his billions on Wall Street, placed a call to the head of the university’s board.

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6-Year-Old Boy Dead in Anti-Muslim Attack Near Chicago, Police Say - The New York Times

Officials said they considered the attack, outside of Chicago, a hate crime, tied to the fighting in Israel and Gaza.

Mitch Smith reported from Chicago. Robert Chiarito reported from Chicago and Plainfield Township, Ill.

The authorities in suburban Chicago accused a man of fatally stabbing a 6-year-old boy on Saturday and seriously wounding the boy’s mother because they were Muslim, an attack that officials tied to the violence in Israel and Gaza.

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