• Sometimes I have to take my child out of school for healthcare appointments.
• Perfect attendance can depend on health, access to care, and whether a parent can leave work.
• I'd rather schools reward kids for showing up after hard times than for perfect attendance.

Whenever I schedule an appointment during the school day, I feel guilty.

I ask for their latest available appointment. If that doesn't work, I pull up the school calendar. Then I start doing the ridiculous parent math: How long is the drive? What class will my child miss? Can I get them back before the final bell? Is there some magical way to make a 10:30 appointment happen without blowing up half the school day? Usually, there isn't. So I take the appointment.

I'm a mother in rural North Carolina. Healthcare providers aren't always five minutes down the road, and appointments that fit perfectly between school dismissal and dinner aren't exactly falling from the sky. Sometimes the appointment you need is at 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. And sometimes you take it. I still feel guilty about it almost every time.

I want my child in school. Of course I do. I know how quickly one missed class can turn into a missing assignment, which then becomes another assignment they don't understand because they missed the first one. But I also have to take care of my child. Sometimes those two responsibilities bump right into each other. And that's probably why perfect-attendance awards have always bothered me.

My child is my priority

I understand why schools care about attendance. Kids need to be in classrooms. They need instruction, routine, relationships with teachers and classmates, and all the little pieces of school that are hard to recreate at home. When a child is missing a lot of school, I absolutely think families should be supported in figuring out why and helping that child get back into a routine.

But perfect attendance is something different. An unbroken attendance record isn't necessarily a measure of how hard a child tried. Kids don't choose when they get the flu. They don't control when the specialist finally has an opening. They can't give their parents paid time off, fix the car when it won't start, make the school bus come down a road it doesn't serve, or move a doctor's office 45 minutes closer to home.

The certificate may have a child's name printed on it, but there's a whole lot of family circumstance behind that streak. I work for myself, which gives me more flexibility than many parents have. I can move things around when an appointment pops up. That doesn't mean the lost work hours don't matter, but I can usually make it happen.

A parent working an hourly job may be making a completely different calculation. Can I afford to lose three hours of pay? Will my boss be irritated? How many times have I already had to leave early this year?

And that's before we even get into transportation, housing instability, access to healthcare, chronic illness, or any of the other things families may be dealing with that nobody sees when the certificates get handed out. Those circumstances matter. They just aren't evidence that one child tried harder than another.

One sick day shouldn't erase a year's worth of effort

As parents, we already have to make enough judgment calls when our kids are sick. Is this a stay-home sick or a send-them-and-see sick? Are they actually exhausted or just really, really not interested in going to math?

We're told attendance matters. And it does. We're also told to keep our kids home when they're contagious because sending them to school sick exposes others to illness. Both things can be true.

Then we turn around and give an award for never missing a day. That's where I get stuck. One fever in October can knock a child out of the running for an award handed out in June.

I don't want to hesitate before keeping my sick child home because some part of my brain is thinking about an attendance record. And I definitely don't want my child learning that dragging yourself through school when you feel awful is proof that you're more dedicated.

Sometimes staying home is the responsible choice. Sometimes missing school for an appointment is the responsible choice. And sometimes the impressive part isn't never missing school at all, it's coming back.

I'd rather see schools recognize persistence

I'm not suggesting schools stop caring whether kids come to school. Chronic absenteeism is a real problem, and families dealing with it may need more support, not less. But perfection doesn't have to be the prize.

Recognize the kid whose attendance improved from one grading period to the next. Celebrate shorter milestones. Acknowledge the student who had a rough stretch and worked their way back into a routine.

Despite my views, I know I'll keep doing the school-day appointment math. I'll keep asking for the latest opening. I'll keep checking the calendar. I'll keep trying to minimize what my child misses and help them catch up when missing school can't be avoided. And I'll probably still feel a little guilty every time.

My child may never earn a perfect-attendance award. I'm fine with that. I'd much rather they learn that taking care of themselves is responsible, staying home when they're contagious is considerate, and showing up again after a hard stretch is something worth being proud of.

• Dr. Katie S. Davis is a clinical neuropsychologist who evaluates children for learning disorders.
• She said some parents are rushing to diagnose their children for normal kid behavior.
• She suggested some softer interventions before booking an evaluation appointment.

Over years of evaluating children for learning disorders, Dr. Katie S. Davis noticed an interesting phenomenon: Some parents seemed visibly disappointed when she told them their kids didn't meet the criteria for ADHD or autism.

"I found that those conversations can be more difficult to have than with a parent whose kid is really disabled and whose needs are very high," Davis, a clinical neuropsychologist and author of "Actually, You're Fine," told Business Insider.

Though she would try to reassure those parents that their concerns about their children's behavior were valid and worth addressing even without a formal diagnosis, "it's not as tangible or concrete as parents want, and they often leave the conversation feeling dissatisfied."

Parent-reported diagnoses of several childhood developmental and learning conditions have increased in recent years. For example, the estimated share of US children ages 3 to 17 with a current ADHD diagnosis rose from 8.6% in 2016 to 10.5% in 2023. Separately, a study of children ages 6 to 17 found parent-reported lifetime learning-disability diagnoses rose 16.4% over the same period.

While some argue that greater awareness of learning disabilities and disorders accounts for the increase, Davis doesn't feel that explains the full story. From what she's observed, ever-growing expectations for kids — and parents desperate for explanations for why their child is lagging behind — also play a role.

She said rushing to a diagnosis can have negative long-term implications for everyone.

"People don't think that ADHD means anything, people don't think dyslexia means anything," Davis said. "Then those people who are truly disabled by those conditions have enough battle to justify their need for accommodations and services."

Higher and higher expectations

In order to qualify for a diagnosis such as ADHD, symptoms must be present in at least two major settings, such as both at home and at school. For autism, they must be persistent across multiple contexts.

But some parents focus on how their child behaves in the classroom, in part due to ever-increasing expectations around academic success, Davis said.

"Doing well in school is no longer good — you have to be at the top of the pack," Davis said, noting that similar patterns have arisen in higher education settings with parents arguing for their teenagers' grades to be inflated. "Parents want excellence, and if it's not excellent, it's bad."

When worrying about their child's behavior, some parents zero in on their child's behavior in class while overlooking how their child compares to others, Davis said.

"If you're in a kindergarten classroom, probably all of the kids to some degree are going to have trouble sitting on the rug for 30 minutes at circle time," Davis said. Most will cluster in the middle of the bell curve, while some will get antsier earlier or later. The kids who consistently stand out compared to their peers are the ones who should probably be evaluated, Davis said.

Otherwise, "for nine kids out of 10, that sounds like a kid in an elementary school."

Labels are a double-edged sword

Whether they're diagnosed with ADHD or not, a child being hyperactive in class isn't a parent's fault. Still, parents can feel like they're personally responsible.

"There is an eagerness to medicalize the feelings of insecurity, because if it's due to a diagnosis, then it's not a knock on your decisions," Davis said.

Whether or not their child is formally diagnosed, Davis warned against treating it as a catch-all explanation for everything your child does.

"Despite our best intentions, if we put a label on the kid and the kid is aware of that label, they are given the message 'there is something wrong with how you are developing,'" she said. Even positive spins, like "ADHD is a superpower," can send a message to the kid that their life will be forever defined by struggle, she said.

It can also imply that symptoms like difficulty focusing or reading can't meaningfully improve with the right interventions.

"We all want to develop resilience in our children, to make them feel like they have agency and control and they're in charge of their own destinies," Davis said. "Especially when kids are very young and don't understand the fluidity of these labels, we could potentially be working against them."

Try softer interventions first

Davis wants to be clear: Diagnoses such as autism and ADHD are real. There are children who are unambiguously and significantly impaired by them in every setting, who need clear support academically and socially. "There are evidence-based interventions at our disposal that are enormously helpful," she said.

However, for parents who believe their child falls into some gray areas, Davis recommended trying a few things before booking an evaluation appointment. She compared it to a young child with a mild fever: A responsible pediatrician would guide parents through modest steps, such as taking a temperature and offering plenty of fluids, before rushing to the ER.

Instead of assuming your child might have autism if they struggle to make friends or always hang out alone at recess, Davis suggested first making other plans with their parents to set up playdates. You can also sign up your child for a karate class or call the school's teacher to see if they can intervene and help the kids play together more.

Alternatively, she said, if you immediately seek out a diagnosis and place your child into therapy and social skills groups, you could be taking away from more enriching social activities.

If a child continues to struggle, Davis recommended getting a neuropsychological assessment — a form of standardized test that is broader than getting an autism or ADHD evaluation.

While not perfect, she said neuropsychological assessments can measure a child's motor skills, sensory processing, attention, cognitive efficiency, language, memory, and social functioning. Their scores are typically compared with norms for peers of the same age.

More importantly, it helps parents know which interventions are the best. "If your kid perceives life to be very stressful or upsetting, they're not making it up. Let's talk about what we can do to support them better in that environment," Davis said. "But we don't need a diagnosis to do that."

Security forces say groups raise money for PFLP, provide legal aid for terrorists; settlers reportedly set fire to mosque and car in West Bank village

For Boston Magazine, Kara Baskin explores a growing subculture of tweens and teens who don’t feel entirely human. Some identify as one animal, like a cat or a dog; others identify with multiple animals. One kid Baskin speaks to, Sol, says she “doesn’t summon the animals, but rather they come and go on their own schedule.” These young people call themselves therians (distinct from furries, who are fans of anthropomorphic animal characters). Baskin provides a fascinating glimpse into a world where adolescents can express themselves and explore their identities.

Bafflement is the baseline condition of raising kids right now. The adolescent quest for self-discovery is timeless—but today’s parents experimented in ways that were analog: new hairstyles, inscrutable music, beer snuck in the woods. Their own parents might not have liked it, but they could at least relate.

Now the landscape of adolescent discovery is literally foreign, thanks to social media, which has turbocharged once-obscure subcultures like the furry fandom—and, at its rarer edge, therianthropy—and redefined what “fringe” even means. Even if a kid is the only therian at school, she can find 400 more people just like her online. That’s one of the biggest challenges for parents in the algorithm age: The world your kid actually lives in is one you can’t enter. It touches the fear in every parent, therian kid or not: What happens when our kids inhabit a world we don’t understand, with idols we don’t recognize?

The settlement resolves a lawsuit brought in 2024 that accused the healthcare giant of providing massive amounts of opioids and other controlled substances "to fuel its own profits at the expense of public health and safety."

Among the stone tools that early humans left beside a lake in northern Israel, archaeologists found something far bigger: the molar of an elephant, about 8 inches (20 cm) tall and 3 inches (8 cm) wide, lying next to several pieces of tusk. It sat at the same level of ground as handaxes and cleavers […]

Beijing’s refusal to restrict shipments of Chinese hybrid vehicles has sharpened a dispute over Europe’s widening trade deficit, with EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič seeking concessions during negotiations in China.

China has rejected a European Union request to restrict exports of hybrid cars to Europe, increasing the likelihood of new trade defence measures against Chinese manufacturers as negotiations continue in Beijing.

The disagreement comes during a visit by EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič, who is seeking commitments from Chinese officials to address the bloc’s growing trade deficit and improve access for European businesses to the Chinese market.

According to accounts of the negotiations, Beijing has declined the EU’s proposal for voluntary restrictions. The European Commission is consequently considering safeguard measures that could limit hybrid vehicle imports or impose additional tariffs when shipments exceed specified thresholds.

No final decision has been announced, and the precise scope of any restrictions remains under discussion.

The dispute adds another difficulty to EU–China economic relations before European leaders meet in Brussels on 15–16 October, when the bloc’s commercial relationship with Beijing is expected to feature prominently.

Hybrid Vehicles Become New Trade Battleground

The latest confrontation follows the introduction of EU countervailing duties on battery-electric vehicles manufactured in China in October 2024.

Those measures, imposed after an investigation into Chinese state subsidies, did not cover hybrid vehicles.

Chinese manufacturers have since increased their presence in Europe’s hybrid market, offering competitively priced vehicles that combine combustion engines with electric propulsion.

The European Commission previously confirmed that its original anti-subsidy investigation applied specifically to battery-electric vehicles and could not automatically be extended to hybrids.

Consequently, any additional import restrictions must have a separate legal basis.

One option under consideration is a safeguard mechanism that would permit a defined quantity of imports before higher tariffs apply.

Such a measure would differ from the existing anti-subsidy duties, which target alleged unfair financial support provided to manufacturers.

Safeguard restrictions are designed to address injury caused by increased imports. They may also create difficulties for Brussels because measures directed at a particular product can affect suppliers from countries other than China.

Japan, South Korea and Britain could therefore face consequences depending on the structure and legal basis of any proposed restrictions.

Trade Deficit Exceeds €360 Billion

The dispute is taking place against a widening imbalance in goods trade between the European Union and China.

The EU’s annual merchandise trade deficit with Beijing has reached approximately €360 billion, equivalent to almost €1 billion per day.

European officials are particularly concerned about Chinese industrial overcapacity and the export of manufactured goods at prices that European producers struggle to match.

During the latest trade negotiations, Brussels has sought commitments concerning market access, import volumes and restrictions affecting European companies.

Chinese exports of plug-in hybrid vehicles to the EU have reportedly increased by 86 per cent over the past year, while battery-electric vehicle imports have risen by approximately 40 per cent.

This expansion has intensified pressure on European manufacturers already confronting high production costs, weak demand in some domestic markets and substantial expenditure on electrification.

EU Today reported in September that Brussels had requested voluntary restrictions on Chinese hybrid exports as part of a broader effort to rebalance commercial relations.

Beijing’s refusal has now brought the possibility of unilateral European measures closer to consideration.

Germany and France Seek Stronger Protection

Germany and France have increasingly aligned their positions on the need for stronger European instruments to address unfair competition and dependence on Chinese industrial supply chains.

France has long advocated a more interventionist European industrial policy, while German manufacturers have traditionally placed greater emphasis on preserving commercial access to China.

That calculation is changing as Chinese competitors strengthen their position in the European automotive market.

The problem is particularly sensitive for Germany, whose automotive industry depends on extensive supplier networks, skilled employment and exports.

German manufacturers also operate significant businesses in China, meaning that new European trade measures could expose them to retaliation in one of their principal overseas markets.

China has already responded to previous European restrictions with trade investigations and duties affecting agricultural products and alcoholic beverages.

Further measures against Chinese vehicle imports could therefore extend the dispute into sectors unrelated to the automotive industry.

Brussels Faces Difficult Legal Choices

The European Commission must determine whether voluntary arrangements can produce measurable reductions in Chinese exports or whether formal restrictions are required.

The legal distinction between anti-subsidy duties and safeguard measures will be particularly important.

The existing electric-vehicle tariffs were introduced following an investigation that examined subsidies and their effects on European manufacturers.

A safeguard mechanism would require a different assessment, including evidence concerning increased imports and injury to domestic producers.

It would also have to comply with the EU’s international trade obligations.

Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturers are developing production facilities within Europe, potentially reducing their exposure to tariffs imposed on imported vehicles.

EU Today’s earlier examination of the proposed hybrid tariffs considered the broader consequences of Chinese investment in European manufacturing and the bloc’s dependence on critical raw materials.

The negotiations in Beijing are expected to influence whether the Commission proceeds with formal restrictions or continues seeking a negotiated settlement.

The immediate question is whether China is prepared to offer concessions sufficiently substantial to persuade Brussels that additional tariffs are unnecessary.

With EU leaders due to discuss relations with Beijing next week, the dispute has become a test of the Commission’s willingness to use trade defence instruments against one of Europe’s largest commercial partners.

During one of his son’s hockey games, Nick Paumgarten watches as his eight-year-old is hit from behind, only to rise to his feet and use his stick to hit the side of his opponent’s head. Alongside his concern for his son’s head and neck, Paumgarten, who has written about his own hockey-related concussions, rapidly processes the outcomes of the exchange: a game-deciding penalty, his own reflexive rationalization, and the evaluation of other parents who “held me in some way responsible, as both father and coach, for the violence and loss of self-control.” Paumgarten’s essay is rich with such moments of parent-coach double-consciousness, and sensitive to the numerous ways, some of them awful, in which those two identities intrude upon each other.

That Sunday, it wasn’t yet 8 A.M. when a Rye player shoved James from behind into the boards. James went down awkwardly and stayed prone a moment, then leaped up and, with an implausible ferocity, cross-checked the other kid in the ear. The Rye boy collapsed to the ice, and the other kids poured in and began grappling with one another, while parents shouted and pointed. Soon there was a pile of mites, with the two referees pulling players off and flinging them aside like puppies. Through the windows, you could see that the sun had risen over the Long Island Sound. I thought of my son’s fellow second graders back in the city, likely still asleep or watching cartoons in their pajamas or getting dressed for church or whatever the unrinked got up to on weekend mornings, but here at Playland my boy had instigated a munchkin brawl.

The European Investment Bank and BNP Paribas have agreed a €700 million guarantee programme designed to expand financing for European companies producing equipment for electricity grids.

The agreement targets a growing bottleneck in Europe’s energy system: manufacturers of transformers, cables, switchgear and other components are being asked to increase production while utilities and governments accelerate investment in transmission and distribution networks.

Under the deal, the EIB will provide up to €350 million in counter-guarantees, while BNP Paribas will commit an equivalent amount. The resulting €700 million portfolio of bank guarantees is expected to support companies investing in additional production capacity and supply contracts.

The European Investment Bank said the arrangement could stimulate as much as €2.8 billion in investment in the real economy.

The initiative is backed by the EU’s InvestEU programme and forms part of the EIB’s €1.5 billion Pan-EU Power Grid package. Guarantees are particularly important for infrastructure suppliers because large electricity projects often require manufacturers to provide financial guarantees before receiving contracts.

Those commitments can consume bank credit lines that companies might otherwise use to build factories, purchase machinery or finance working capital.

By sharing the risk with BNP Paribas, the EIB intends to increase the volume of guarantees available without requiring manufacturers to commit equivalent amounts of their own financing capacity.

The programme arrives as grid investment becomes one of the central constraints on European energy policy.

The EU is simultaneously attempting to expand renewable generation, electrify transport and industry, increase cross-border electricity trading and reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels.

All require additional transmission and distribution capacity. EU Today reported earlier this year that the EIB had approved almost €2 billion for clean energy and grid projects as part of a broader €10 billion financing package.

The latest BNP Paribas agreement concentrates specifically on the industrial supply chain needed to build those networks.

Grid investment is increasingly influenced by security concerns as well as electricity demand.

EU Today reported last week that Lithuania is designing part of the Harmony Link infrastructure to withstand drones, sabotage and vehicle attacks near the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Such requirements increase the cost and complexity of new electricity infrastructure while demand for conventional grid equipment is already rising.

European manufacturers face lengthy order books for some high-voltage equipment, particularly large transformers and specialised cables. Supply constraints can delay renewable projects and interconnectors even when planning permission and financing are available.

The EIB says its guarantee programme is intended to give manufacturers greater financial capacity to respond. The arrangement follows a similar partnership between the bank and BNP Paribas covering wind-energy manufacturing.

In February 2025, the two institutions agreed a €1 billion guarantee portfolio intended to support investment in the European wind industry. The EIB has subsequently expanded its focus from generation equipment to the networks required to transport electricity.

In 2025, the EIB Group invested €33 billion in energy projects worldwide, including €11.6 billion in grids and storage, according to the institution.

European energy policy has increasingly recognised that adding generating capacity without expanding grids can create congestion, delays and periods in which renewable electricity cannot reach consumers.

Political disagreements remain over how new infrastructure should be planned and financed.

In June, EU Today reported that member states had pushed back against stronger Brussels control over cross-border grid planning, preferring to preserve a significant role for national authorities.

Financing institutions are meanwhile moving ahead with programmes intended to expand the underlying industrial capacity.

For manufacturers, the EIB–BNP Paribas scheme does not provide €2.8 billion of direct public spending. Instead, public guarantees are being used to increase the volume of private financing available, with the EIB assuming part of the risk.

The distinction is central to InvestEU, which uses EU budget guarantees and EIB financing to attract additional private capital.

Europe’s electricity transition is increasingly dependent on this less visible part of the energy system. New wind farms, solar installations, nuclear reactors and industrial electrification projects ultimately require the same infrastructure: sufficient cables, substations, transformers and transmission capacity to move electricity from producers to users.

Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has announced the discovery of a Roman-period tomb whose architecture, according to the country’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has no exact parallel elsewhere in the cemetery where it was found. The tomb sits at Bir al-Shaghala, a site in the Dakhla Oasis, about 750 kilometers (roughly 465 miles) southwest […]

Roughly 315,000 years ago, a group of early humans lived in what is now Morocco. Their remains, unearthed at a site called Jebel Irhoud, are the oldest fossils ever attributed to our species, Homo sapiens. Now, an international team of researchers has digitally reconstructed the face of one of these individuals, building a composite skull […]

Enterprise security departments have typically been presented with one of two options: either the use of unified threat management systems (UTMs) to achieve a unified perimeter or an IDS solution that can offer greater insight into network activity. However, when considering solutions for enterprise environments running on Microsoft Windows-based products, it appears that both sides are focusing on the wrong issue. The argument from UTM vendors, who market their product as the "one-stop shop" for IT personnel with limited time resources, is that a UTM device provides all necessary functions (firewall, VPN, antivirus, etc.) within a single unit. On the other hand, the vendors of specialized IDS devices argue that the inclusion of these additional functionalities reduces the effectiveness of the IDS function. As such, organizations providing protection for Windows networks continue to be at increased risk due to this way of thinking.

Cybersecurity engineer Samuel Bemi investigated this gap through a controlled comparative evaluation of Snort, an open-source intrusion detection system, and pfSense, an open-source unified security platform, within a virtualised Windows 11 enterprise environment. His evaluation goes beyond the conventional question of whether a security control detects an attack, examining whether that detection remains operationally valuable once false positives, latency, throughput, and resource utilisation are taken into account.

Detection alone doesn't tell the whole story

The experiment simulated three of the most common attack patterns organisations face: ICMP flood attacks, port and service scanning, and denial-of-service traffic. Both Snort and pfSense were configured to defend a Windows 11 host inside an isolated network built specifically for testing.

The results were clarifying, not comforting. Snort detected 100 percent of ICMP flood attempts and 100 percent of denial-of-service traffic, and identified the large majority of port scanning attempts. Within the controlled test environment, Snort achieved strong detection performance against the traffic patterns tested. But the more important finding was that detection performance came with operational trade-offs.  Alongside that success sat a false positive rate high enough to be operationally significant, alongside a measurable increase in network latency and a meaningful drop in throughput once both systems were active.

Bemi's evaluation shifts the question from “which security control detects more attacks?” to a more consequential one: “does the security architecture remain effective when detection accuracy, false positives, and operational overhead are considered together?”  Rather than assessing IDS and UTM controls independently, Bemi's approach examines how detection accuracy, false positives, resource consumption, and network performance interact when the controls are deployed within the same enterprise environment. This perspective provides security teams with a more practical basis for designing defence-in-depth architectures, where protection is assessed not only by what threats a control detects, but also by how effectively it operates within the wider network.

"A 100 percent detection rate cannot be evaluated in isolation," Bemi says. "If achieving that result introduces significant false positives, latency or throughput degradation, the security control has to be assessed as an operational system rather than simply as a detection mechanism."

What UTM alone Mmisses

Bemi’s argument is that IDS will never replace or outperform UTM. Instead, he says both tools solve two different layers of the same issue. Layer one is Perimeter Enforcement (Firewalling, VPN termination, Traffic Shaping, Blocking Known-Bad traffic) as long as you have the correct settings with your UTM devices such as pfSense. The Layer Two that IDS addresses is what happens after you allow something past the first layer. This Layer two provides a level of detail that can't be replicated by UTM alone. In particular, this was very evident during Bemi's testing and evaluation based on Detection Capability and Operational Impact.

" A UTM determines whether traffic should be admitted into the Network," Bemi states. " An IDS answers a completely different Question; namely, now that it is inside the Network, does it appear to be anomalous?" Bemi stated enterprises who use only UTM are typically making only one determination regarding allowing traffic past the Firewall/VPN termination device. Then they are simply relying on anything that passes through to be safe."

Resource cost is a design input, not an afterthought

One of the study's most important findings is that defence-in-depth is not operationally free. Running both controls increased CPU and memory utilisation and introduced additional network latency, demonstrating that security architecture cannot be evaluated solely through detection effectiveness.

He argues the practical barrier to hybrid defence is often less about whether the controls can work together and more about whether organisations have planned for the capacity, tuning and monitoring they require. "Nobody disputes that defence-in-depth is the right architecture on a whiteboard," he says. "The resistance comes at implementation, when a smaller IT team realises that running both properly means capacity planning, rule tuning to bring false positives down, and ongoing log review. That is a resourcing conversation, not a technology conversation. But skipping it does not remove the risk; it just moves the risk from the network into the business."

The practical path forward

For organisations still treating this as a binary purchasing decision, the practical implication of Bemi's evaluation is not that every organisation should deploy both controls indiscriminately. Instead, security architects should treat UTM and IDS as complementary controls, evaluate their combined performance under realistic traffic conditions, and size infrastructure and monitoring capacity around the resulting operational overhead.

Conclusion

The challenge for Windows enterprise security is not choosing between UTM and IDS, but designing an architecture in which both controls address different layers of the same threat landscape. Bemi’s evaluation demonstrates that detection rates alone do not determine security effectiveness; false positives, latency, throughput, resource consumption, and the effort required to operate the controls also matter. The industry therefore needs to move beyond product-versus-product comparisons and assess how security controls perform together under realistic enterprise conditions. In practice, UTM can provide the first layer of perimeter enforcement, while IDS adds deeper visibility into suspicious activity that may pass through that boundary. Organisations considering a hybrid approach should test the combined architecture against representative workloads and establish clear thresholds for performance, false positives, and resource utilisation before deployment. They should also plan for ongoing rule tuning, monitoring, capacity management, and analyst involvement rather than treating these as secondary operational concerns. Ultimately, effective defence-in-depth depends not simply on deploying more security tools, but on ensuring that complementary controls work together in a way that is measurable, sustainable, and aligned with the organisation’s operational needs.

In this edition: Bad medicine, imperfect sound forever, know when to fold ’em, brainiacs, and a call of the wild.

Scientists are growing miniature human brains in labs around the world. (Yep, you read that right.) For Wired, Claire L. Evans reports on the latest research in the field of organoid intelligence, or OI, where scientists are artificially growing brain organoids from tiny human samples, whether skin, blood, teeth, or even hair. As these seed-sized globs mature, they are able to send and receive electrical signals, and even learn to remember and anticipate them. In other words, this living matter is programmable. “And this is where things get truly weird,” writes Evans.

For now, these neural computers are mostly of interest to researchers who want to work with neurons without taking on the tedious wet-lab husbandry themselves. Eventually, however, the company hopes that neurons will prove themselves to be an energy-efficient, resilient substrate for more general computing applications—including some tasks currently handled by AI, like image recognition and classification.

“When you think about what you want from AI, it’s biology,” said Brett Kagan, Cortical Labs’ chief operating officer, when I reached him over Zoom. “You want it to be self-repairing as much as possible. You want it to be adaptable. You want it to be long-lived. You want it to be energy-efficient. These are all features you get for free in biology.”

Midway through Boyce Upholt’s mind-boggling dispatch, one of his sources sums up the central challenge of the Gulf Coast canid: “Why is there not just a simple explanation for what this thing is?” The “wolfy coyotes” of southeastern Texas hold genetic traces that may link them to red wolves, which were declared extinct in the wild in 1980. But a lack of data makes it challenging to define the species—or, for that matter, to determine whether a private company has cloned the red wolf or something else entirely. Upholt doesn’t deal in simple explanations; the pleasure, here, is in the complexity.

The concept of a “species” is less sturdy than your high school biology teacher might have led you to believe. The most familiar definition is that a species consists of animals that can produce fertile offspring. But that’s a rule various species of canids violate all the time; it’s long been clear that North America’s soup of Canis genes is something less like a family tree and more like a river—one that’s broken by islands and sandbars into many braided channels that split and merge and re-split.

Travis Diehl’s feature on “Star Axis,” the half-century project of artist Charles Ross, is transportive, an ideal combination of explanatory and sensory writing. Not all of us will make it to the sparse section of Anton Chico, New Mexico, to ascend the steps of Ross’s pyramid and see the stars reel. For those of us who don’t, Diehl’s piece makes for an elegant consolation prize.

Ross broke ground during the U.S. Bicentennial year. Fifty years and more than $10 million later, he says “Star Axis” will be done by winter. In the final design, the staircase rises 11 stories through a tunnel blasted in the rock of Chupinas Mesa, 6,000 feet above sea level and into a viewing chamber in a concrete, stone and steel pyramid 52 feet tall. A circular window there frames Polaris. As viewers climb each of the 147 stairs, the rim of the window appears to broaden, giving an idea of how far Polaris has and will move in a given amount of time, during the 26,000-year cycle known as precession, the gravitational wobble of the Earth’s rotational axis.