The sight was a common one for Andrew Kolpacki. For many a Sunday, he would watch the National Football League (NFL) games on TV and see quarterbacks (QBs) putting their hands on their helmets, desperately trying to hear the play call from the sideline or booth as tens of thousands of fans screamed at the tops of their lungs.

When the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA’s) playing rules oversight committee this past spring approved the use of coach-to-player helmet communications in games for the 2024 season, Kolpacki, Michigan State’s head football equipment manager, knew the Spartans’ QBs and linebackers were going to have a problem.

“There had to be some sort of solution,” he said. As it turns out, there was. And it was right across the street.

Kolpacki reached out to Tamara Reid Bush, a mechanical engineering professor who not only heads the school’s Biomechanical Design Research Laboratory but also is a football season ticket-holder.

Kolpacki “showed me some photos and said that other teams had just put duct tape inside the (earhole), and he asked me, ‘Do you think we can do anything better than duct tape?” Bush said. “And I said, ‘Oh, absolutely.’”

Bush and Rylie DuBois, a sophomore biosystems engineering major and undergraduate research assistant at the lab, set out to produce earhole inserts made from polylactic acid, a bio-based plastic, using a 3D printer. Part of the challenge was accounting for the earhole sizes and shapes that vary depending on helmet style.

Once the season got underway with a Friday night home game against Florida Atlantic on August 30, the helmets of starting quarterback Aidan Chiles and linebacker Jordan Turner were outfitted with the inserts, which helped mitigate crowd noise.

“We kind of just did this as a one-off favor to the Texans and honestly didn’t forecast it becoming our viral moment in college football,” said Jeff Klosterman, a vice president at XO Armor Technologies, which provides on-site, on-demand 3D printing of athletic wearables. “We’ve now got about 60 teams across college football and the NFL wearing our sound-deadening earhole covers every weekend.”

“It can be just deafening,” Kolpacki said. “That’s what those fans are there for is to create havoc and make it difficult for coaches to get a play call off.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Unlike scores of people who scrambled for the blockbuster drugs Ozempic and Wegovy to lose weight in recent years, Danielle Griffin had no trouble getting them.

The 38-year-old information technology worker from New Mexico had a prescription. Her pharmacy had the drugs in stock. And her health insurance covered all but $25 to $50 of the monthly cost.

For Griffin, the hardest part of using the new drugs wasn’t access. It was finding out that the much-hyped medications didn’t really work for her.

I kept hearing about how it was a miracle drug and it was helping so many people, said Griffin. And I'm like, 'what am I doing wrong?' So it was very disheartening.

In clinical trials, most participants taking Wegovy or Mounjaro to treat obesity lost an average of 15% to 22% of their body weight—up to 50 pounds or more in many cases. But roughly 10% to 15% of patients in those trials were “nonresponders” who lost less than 5% of their body weight.

Now that millions of people have used the drugs, several obesity experts told The Associated Press that perhaps 20% of patients—as many as 1 in 5—may not respond well to the medications. It's a little-known consequence of the obesity drug boom, according to doctors who caution eager patients not to expect one-size-fits-all results.

When people go into this process starting a medication that they anticipate is going to, you know, be the answer, it can be so frustrating when that medication doesn't work for them, said Dr. Katherine Saunders, an obesity expert at Weill Cornell Medicine and co-founder of the obesity treatment company FlyteHealth.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

A Spanish court has upheld a ruling that a supermarket worker was unlawfully fired for having eaten a croquette that was going to be thrown away after not having been sold from the store’s deli section.

The worker was fired in July 2023 after he had snarfed down the fried snack, which was destined for the trash after the store had closed for the day.

In a verdict that The Associated Press saw in November, the Superior Court of Castilla-La Mancha recently rejected an appeal by the supermarket chain Mercadona of a decision by a lower court in May 2024 in favor of the worker.

The company’s policy is that workers are prohibited from consuming any product found in the store without having paid for it previously.

But the superior court found that it was common practice for workers to snack on “ready-to-eat” food products that were going to be thrown away after closing hours. In its ruling, it also insisted in “the important detail that the worker didn’t eat an entire package of croquettes, but instead one single croquette” that was “not going to be put back on sale the following day.”

The lower court ruling in May determined that the worker be reinstated to his job and that the supermarket chain pay him 39,700 euros ($41,800) in lost wages. The higher court has now added that Mercadona also must pay the worker 600 euros ($633) for his legal fees.

Mercadona did not immediately respond to an email from the AP asking for comment on the case.

The court documents didn’t indicate the flavor of the croquette, which in Spain is a popular food typically made from ham, chicken, or cod.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Electric grids have buckled more frequently and outages have become longer across the U.S. as the warming atmosphere carries more water and stirs up more destructive storms, according to an AP analysis of government data. In the Pacific Northwest, a “bomb cyclone” caused roughly half a million outages.

People with disabilities and chronic health conditions are particularly at risk when the power goes out, and many live in homes that lack the weatherizing and backup power supplies needed to better handle high temperatures and cold freezes or can't pay their electricity bills, said Columbia University sociomedical sciences professor Diana Hernandez, who studies energy instability in U.S. homes.

CenterPoint Energy, Houston’s power utility, says it is focused now on improving resiliency, customer communications and community partnerships with the one defining goal: “to build the most resilient coastal grid in the country that can better withstand the extreme weather of the future.”

Texas lawmakers, meanwhile, are debating whether assisted living facilities need more regulation. One suggestion: requiring them to have enough emergency generator fuel to power lifesaving equipment and keep indoor temperatures safe during an extended blackout.

The legislative panel also reviewed emergency responses in November. Regulated facilities and nursing centers fared better than places such as senior communities that aren't subject to strict oversight, according to city and state officials. This meant hundreds of apartment complexes catering to older adults, as well as private homes, were likely more susceptible to losing power and going without food.

Texas energy companies have been required since 2003 to provide advance notice of scheduled outages to medically vulnerable households that submit a form with physician approval. But that law didn't require the utilities to share these lists with state or local emergency management agencies.

The utility's efforts bring little solace to community members at a Houston living center for seniors, Commons of Grace, where outages have become a haunting facet of life for more than 100 residents, said Belinda Taylor, who runs a nonprofit partnered with the managing company.

“I’m just frustrated that we didn’t get the services that we needed,” Taylor said. “It’s ridiculous that we have had to suffer.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Walmart, Target, Aldi and other grocers competed for a place on holiday tables with turkey dinner deals and other promotions to tempt Americans who haven’t recovered from recent food price inflation.

Walmart, the nation’s largest food retailer, bundled the makings of a traditional turkey feast into a meal deal three years ago. This year, the 29-item offer, which included a frozen turkey and ingredients for side dishes, cost less than $55 (the exact total depends on the region) and was intended to serve eight. That calculates to less than $7 per person. Last year’s two bundles had different items, but Walmart said the total price of this year’s selected products was 3.5% lower than it was a year ago.

“Some of the holiday’s most special moments take place around the dinner table,” John Laney, executive vice president of food at Walmart U.S., said in a recent statement. “We are committed to offering customers even deeper savings.”

Target’s version for four people cost $20, $5 less than the company’s 2023 Thanksgiving meal, and included a frozen turkey, stuffing mix and canned green beans and canned jellied cranberry sauce. Aldi offers a frozen Butterball turkey with gravy mix as well as pumpkin ingredients for pumpkin pie and ingredients for side dishes like sweet potato casserole. The German-owned supermarket chain priced it at $47 and said that was less than what it charged for the same items in 2019.

Comparing the respective menus to determine which represented the best value is difficult since recommended serving sizes and contents vary. But the promotions, introduced earlier than ever and at a time when many households remained put off by higher prices, underscored the importance of Thanksgiving to grocers, analysts said.

While consumer perceptions of grocery prices are based on the cost of staples like eggs and milk, “the Thanksgiving meal has become essentially a new benchmark,” Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Groupe, a global marketing and communications company.

It’s the occasion for the second-largest holiday meal for retailers behind the feasts that accompany the winter holidays.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Schools in Australia are being asked to open up their grounds after hours to give families more green space and areas for children to play.

With the population of Australia’s south-eastern Victoria state growing rapidly, the demand for additional green spaces in cities and towns is also increasing.

Asking to go back to school during the holidays isn’t something parents would expect from their children, but mom of five Amanda Murray-Alston says it’s a little different these days.

“First day of school holidays, the first thing they said to me on the Saturday was ‘Can we go up to school and play?’” she quips. She says her children need space to play and run around, so they come to the local primary school which is open all week long.

On Sundays, they can even enjoy a farmers’ market on school grounds. “Often we’ll turn up to do something and there will be half a dozen people here already,” says Murray-Alston.

According to research conducted by Infrastructure Victoria, two-thirds of Melbourne’s public schools stay open for the wider community outside of school hours. That allows local families to have a space to come to and play next to their homes.

“Especially as our city and our population grows there’s a really big opportunity to make better use of our school grounds,” says Infrastructure Victoria CEO Johnathon Spear.

The advisory body is now urging the state government to help more schools stay open after hours. Their research indicates that if all public schools in the city were accessible, an extra 450,000 residents would gain access to green spaces nearby.

Some school principals have expressed concern that opening their facilities to the public might lead to increased graffiti and damage.

Spear says the project would offer funding to counter any additional costs incurred by the school. “We've recommended that schools that open up for community use get funding to help them with any additional maintenance or administrative burden to do that,” he says.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The ever-present TV drug ads showing patients hiking, biking or enjoying a day at the beach could soon have a different look: new rules require drugmakers to be clearer and more direct when explaining their medications’ risks and side effects.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) spent more than 15 years crafting the guidelines, which are designed to do away with industry practices that downplay or distract viewers from risk information.

Many companies have already adopted the rules, which became binding November 20. But while regulators were drafting them, a new trend emerged: thousands of pharma influencers pushing drugs online with little oversight. A new bill in Congress would compel the FDA to more aggressively police such promotions on social media platforms.

“Some people become very attached to social media influencers and ascribe to them credibility that, in some cases, they don’t deserve,” said Tony Cox, professor emeritus of marketing at Indiana University.

The new rules, which cover both TV and radio, instruct drugmakers to use simple, consumer-friendly language when describing their drugs, without medical jargon, distracting visuals or audio effects. A 2007 law directed the FDA to ensure that drug risk information appears “in a clear, conspicuous and neutral manner.”

The FDA has always required that ads give a balanced picture of both benefits and risks.

But in the early 2000s, researchers began showing how companies could manipulate images and audio to de-emphasize safety information. In one example, a Duke University professor found that ads for the allergy drug Nasonex, which featured a buzzing bee voiced by Antonio Banderas, distracted viewers from listening to side effect information, making it harder to remember.

The new rules are “significant steps forward,” said Ruth Day, director of the medical cognition lab at Duke University and author of the Nasonex study, but certain requirements could also open the door to new ways of downplaying risks.

One requirement instructs companies to show on-screen text about side effects while the audio information plays. A 2011 FDA study found that combining text with audio increased recall and understanding.

But the agency leaves it to companies to decide whether to display a few keywords or a full transcript.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The Vatican and Microsoft in November unveiled a digital twin of St. Peter’s Basilica that uses artificial intelligence to explore one of the world’s most important monuments while helping the Holy See manage visitor flows and identify conservation problems.

Using 400,000 high-resolution digital photographs, taken with drones, cameras, and lasers over four weeks when no one was in the basilica, the digital replica went online alongside two new on-site exhibits to provide visitors—real and virtual—with an interactive experience.

“It is literally one of the most technologically advanced and sophisticated projects of its kind that has ever been pursued,” Microsoft’s president Brad Smith told a Vatican press conference.

The project has been launched ahead of the Vatican’s 2025 Jubilee, a holy year in which more than 30 million pilgrims are expected to pass through the basilica’s Holy Door, on top of the 50,000 who visit on a normal day.

“Everyone, really everyone should feel welcome in this great house,” Pope Francis told Smith and members of the project’s development teams at an audience.

The digital platform allows visitors to reserve entry times to the basilica, a novelty for one of the world’s most visited monuments that regularly has an hours-long line of tourists waiting to get in.

But the heart of the project is the creation of a digital twin of St. Peter’s Basilica through advanced photogrammetry and artificial intelligence that allows anyone to “visit” the church and learn about its history.

The ultra-precise 3D replica, developed in collaboration with digital preservation company Iconem, incorporates 22 petabytes of data—enough to fill five million DVDs—Smith said.

The images have already identified structural damage and signs of deterioration, such as missing mosaic pieces, cracks, and fissures invisible to the naked eye, with a speed and precision far beyond human capabilities.

Pope Francis has called for the ethical use of AI and used his annual World Message of Peace this year to urge an international treaty to regulate it, arguing that technology lacking human values of compassion, mercy, morality, and forgiveness was too great.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

When Massachusetts voters decided to ditch the state's standardized tests as a high school graduation requirement on Election Day, they joined a trend that has steadily chipped away at the use of high-stakes tests over the past two decades.

The vote on the ballot question leaves only seven states with mandated graduation exams, a number that could soon shrink further.

A backlash to standardized tests has been fueled by complaints that they take up too much classroom time and questions about how well they measure readiness for college or careers. It has gained steam in recent years with concerns about equity and learning setbacks during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Massachusetts, a teachers’ union led the campaign against the graduation requirement, arguing it was keeping too many students from receiving a diploma and weighing too heavily on choices about school curriculum. The other side received backing from prominent business leaders including former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and state officials including Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat.

We shouldn't have different expectations for students depending on which zip code they live in, Healey said. We should have a uniformity to our expectations and they should be high for our students and our families.

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests are given in mathematics, science and technology and English. The ballot question didn't end the tests, which are also used for assessing student progress. But passing them will no longer be required for a diploma.

About 1% of high school seniors in Massachusetts, about 700 students, are denied a diploma each year because they failed the MCAS despite meeting other requirements. Most are English language learners or students with disabilities.

Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest, which opposes using tests as graduation requirements, said it makes sense to shift away from the tests he calls a cheap and easy way to conduct education.

What we want out of high school grads isn't measured very well by a standardized test, he said, including whether students are critical thinkers, problem solvers or able to collaborate.

Critics say easing the graduation requirement will result in lower standards.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Deep in a dark warehouse, the sake sleeps, stored in rows of giant tanks, each holding more than 10,000 liters (2,640 gallons) of the Japanese rice wine that is the product of brewing techniques dating back more than 1,000 years.

Junichiro Ozawa, the 18th-generation head of Ozawa Brewery, founded in 1702, hoped sake-brewing would win recognition as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage when the decision was made earlier this month.

Sake, the drink of choice for the nobility in “The Tale of Genji”—Japan’s most celebrated work of literature—has been widening its appeal, boosted by the growing international popularity of Japanese cuisine.

Sake exports from Japan total more than 41 billion yen ($265 million) a year, with the biggest destinations being the U.S., according to the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association.

That’s up from about 22 billion yen in 2018. Brazil, Mexico, Southeast Asia, as well as France, and the rest of Europe, all places where Japanese restaurants are gaining popularity, are starting to take a liking to sake.

What’s key to sake-making, which takes about two months, including fermentation and pressing, are the rice and the water.

For a product to be categorized as Japanese sake, the rice must be Japanese. The relatively soft quality of freshwater in Japan, like the supplies provided by the two wells at Ozawa Brewery, is also critical.

The religious connotations of sake are evident at the brewery. The big cedar-leaves ball hanging under the eaves is a symbol of a shrine for the god of sake-making. In Japan, sake is used to purify and to celebrate. Sips from a cup signify the sealing of a marriage.

“Sake is not just an alcoholic beverage. It is Japanese culture itself,” said Hitoshi Utsunomiya, director of the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association.

The UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage designation is given to not just historical monuments but also practices passed down generations, such as oral traditions, performing arts, rituals, and festivals.

It’s not meant to be used for commercial purposes. But sake officials make no secret of their hope that it will boost global sales, helping the tradition stay alive amid competition from beer, wine, and other modern beverages.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.