Science Talk: Bridging Climate Science and Engineering through Climate-Informed Engineering - UNU | United Nations University

(Toronto, October 16, 2026) — JMIR Publications this week released three News and Perspectives features on the latest digital health news: stories on how informed consent must be rethought for clinical trials involving AI; Canada’s proposed Safe Social Media Act and the Canadian Medical Association’s support; and a promising new autonomous oxygen titration device for health care. In "Informed Consent in the AI Age: Why and How Documentation Must Change", JMIR Correspondent and researcher Hankun Su argues that traditional informed consent frameworks, which tend to assume that risks to patient safety are static and that clinicians will be able to fill in any gaps in understanding, are inadequate for clinical trials that use AI. “Documents must anticipate questions clinicians cannot answer and provide accessible responses within the text itself,” he writes. Su and his colleagues developed an informed consent framework for AI-related clinical trials that mandates transparency and disclosure, uses tiered standards based on risk, and employs dynamic consent mechanisms—one of many possible frameworks.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

Milky Way’s first microblazar candidate sits 12,000 light-years away, offering a rare ground-level lab for studying relativistic jetsA black hole 12,000 light-years away is firing a jet of plasma almost directly toward Earth. At that distance, no known or expected danger to Earth has been identified by the researchers or the institutions involved. What astronomers have actually found is rarer and more interesting than a threat. Researchers have identified IRAS 18293-0941 as a compelling candidate for the Milky Way’s first microblazar, a class of object that gives astrophysicists a close-up laboratory for studying some of the most violent physics in the galaxy. What Astronomers FoundThe discovery centers on a binary system whose black hole expels plasma jets at close to three-quarters the speed of light, pointed almost directly toward Earth. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a black hole that completes a full orbit roughly every 11.38 days. Material drawn from the companion star feeds the black hole, and some of that matter gets expelled outward as opposing jets traveling at approximately three-quarters the speed of light. Terminology matters here.