Super producer Tay Keith, whose resume includes collaborations with Future, Travis Scott, and Beyoncé, was found dead in his Nashville apartment on Thursday afternoon. He was 29.
A statement by the Metro Nashville Police Department said that no foul play is suspected in the death of the Grammy-nominated artist, born Brytavious Chambers. “He was found dead in his Martin St apt this afternoon by officers performing a welfare check,” read the statement. “His death is unclassified pending autopsy results.”
Born Sept. 20, 1996, the Tennessee native began making beats at the age of 14 and crafted a signature sound adapted from Southern hip-hop royalty like Three 6 Mafia and 8Ball & MJG. In 2018, Keith’s work with fellow Memphis native BlocBoy JB began to garner buzz beyond the borders of Memphis and their local rap music caught Drake’s attention. At 21, Keith had his first hit with Drake and BlocBoy’s “Look Alive.”
That same year, he worked on a slew of collaborations including co-producing Travis Scott’s 2018 hit track “Sicko Mode,” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Song. He also co-produced Eminem’s “Not Alike” for the rapper’s 10th studio album, Kamikaze.
Keith also co-produced “Before I Let Go,” a bonus track on Beyoncé’s Homecoming: The Live Album, and executive produced Sexyy Red’s 2024 album, Sexyy We Trust, whose breakout hits “Pound Town” and “SkeeYee” he also produced.
During a Rolling Stone interview in 2022, Keith discussed the influence growing up in Memphis had on his work. “I was born into this shit and raised in this shit,” he said. “Memphis music is all I listened to and all my family listened to. My stepfather who I am still close with really influenced my taste for music.”
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When catching up with the publication a few years later, Keith shared that he had partnered with the National Museum of African-American Music the previous Christmas to provide young people with gifts and food, while also offering a seminar and free admission to the museum to show them “that this is where I come from too, and music was my outlet for my success. So you can always go to school and go to college, but also, you can chase your dreams too.”
When reflecting on his own hardships growing up and how he relates to the youth he’s helping, Keith said, “I’m working with the city of Memphis where I’m from, to partner up with a lot of the programs to basically help the children in our communities. I was raised in Section 8, I was raised with a single mom majority of my life. I have been put out. I’ve been in situations where we had to get government assistance. I had free lunch and food stamps my whole life. I had to overcome a lot of adversity growing up and I made it a mission to be able to show the youth that it’s possible.” The artist added, “I always motivate the kids, the young producers who reach out to me and want advice. I never hesitate to talk to them.”

Next time you’re in the supermarket, you might want to steer clear of foods high in certain preservatives. New research identifies a laundry list of additives potentially linked to poorer heart health.
Government scientists in France and others studied the self-reported dietary habits of more than 100,000 people in the country. They found at least eight common food additives that were associated with a higher risk of high blood pressure or cardiovascular disease, while people who consumed higher amounts of these additives had a higher risk of developing these conditions. Though more study is needed, the researchers argue it might be due time to reassess the safety of these ingredients.
“If confirmed, these new data call for the re-evaluation of regulations governing the use of these additives to improve consumer protection,” they wrote in their paper, published last month in the European Heart Journal.
Additives and human health
Preservatives have long helped keep our food safe from spoiling. In recent years, however, some studies have suggested that at least some of the most commonly used preservatives in our food supply might be riskier to our cardiovascular system than assumed.
Much of this research has been in animals, so the researchers wanted to get a better sense of the situation. They turned to data from the NutriNet-Santé study, an ongoing project proactively tracking the health and diets of French residents. As part of the project, volunteers regularly fill out questionnaires about their health, lifestyle, and dietary intake. Participants’ reported major medical events, including heart disease, are also verified through linked medical or insurance records.
For this study, the researchers looked at the diets and health of 112,395 volunteers who were followed for a median length of roughly eight years. They focused on two broad groups of preservative food additives: antioxidant additives that help prevent browning or food from becoming rancid and non-antioxidant additives that prevent spoiling from microbes like bacteria and mold.
People whose diets were the highest in antioxidant preservatives had a 22% greater risk of hypertension compared to people whose diets had the lowest levels of antioxidant additives, the researchers found. Similarly, people who ate the most non-antioxidant additives had a 29% greater risk of hypertension compared to people who ate the least, and they had a 16% greater risk of cardiovascular problems like heart attack and stroke.
The researchers also looked specifically at 17 of the most common preservatives (meaning they were regularly consumed by at least 10% of volunteers in the study). Of these, eight were associated with a higher risk of hypertension: potassium sorbate, potassium metabisulphite, sodium nitrite, ascorbic acid, sodium ascorbate, sodium erythorbate, citric acid, and rosemary extracts. Ascorbic acid was additionally associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
“This study has some limitations inherent to its observational design. However, the findings are based on highly detailed data, and we have taken account of other factors that can increase or lower the risk of cardiovascular disease,” said senior study author Mathilde Touvier, one of the project leaders of the NutriNet-Santé study and a research director at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (Inserm), in a statement released by the European Society of Cardiology, publishers of the journal. Inserm is the French equivalent of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S.
What comes next
There should be more studies to confirm these findings, the authors say, and to better understand the mechanisms underlying this potential harm. To that end, the team is moving ahead with research studying how these additives might affect inflammation or the gut microbiome, among other factors.
That said, the authors are already pushing for regulatory agencies in Europe and the U.S. to start re-evaluating the data on these additives. And if nothing else, this study should reinforce the notion that highly processed foods, which tend to be chock full of preservatives, ought to be eaten only in moderation.
“In the meantime, these findings support existing recommendations to favor non-processed and minimally processed foods, and avoid unnecessary additives,” said Touvier.

The average price of US gasoline fell to just under $4 a gallon on Thursday for the first time since March, following the announcement of a preliminary agreement between the US and Iran to end the war and reopen the strait of Hormuz.
The development has provided some relief to drivers who have seen soaring costs amid Washington’s war with Iran. But filling up still remains more expensive than it was before the conflict began.
According to the motor club AAA, the current national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline stands at $3.999, marking the first time in months that prices have been that low. The decline aligns with easing crude oil costs overall, with some optimism surrounding the initial agreement between the US and Iran.
Still, American drivers are collectively paying roughly $1 more per gallon than they were before the US joined Israel to attack Iran in February. Gas prices are also about 25% higher than they were a year ago, which has put strain on many household budgets across the country.
Gas isn’t the only thing that has become more expensive over the course of the war. Higher gasoline prices have also contributed to rising airline fares, while consumer goods such as groceries, and shoes have also gone up in cost amid global supply chain disruptions.
Even if oil and other core necessities – such as fertilizer – begin flowing from the Middle East again, experts warn that the sticker shock is likely to outlast the fighting.
“Product prices across the United States are projected to keep climbing for the rest of 2026,” Patrick Penfield, a professor of supply chain practice at Syracuse University, told the Associated Press on Thursday.
Penfield pointed to depleted inventories and ongoing supply chain consequences spanning from the war. He noted that farmers, for example, already had to pay higher costs for fertilizer and other supplies in the spring, which will “ripple through to increased food prices by autumn”. And at the gas pump, he noted that limited refinery capacity in the US “remains a significant bottleneck” towards bringing down prices.
The rising fuel costs have already pushed US inflation to its highest level in three years. And many consumers are still filling their tanks for much more than $4 a gallon.
That price is a national average, with costs varying between states due to factors such as proximity to supply and differing tax rates. In California on Thursday, regular gasoline averaged about $5.64 a gallon, according to AAA, followed by $5.57 in Hawaii. By contrast, prices in Indiana and Texas sat at about $3.40 and $3.49 a gallon.
Recent relief for fuel prices arrived with cooling costs for crude oil – the main ingredient in gasoline. Brent crude, the international standard, fell below $78 a barrel on Thursday, while US benchmark crude dropped to just over $74 a barrel. That’s still a little higher than the pre-Iran war level of roughly $70, but way below the $100-plus price seen a few weeks ago.
Major shipowners have reportedly begun moving vessels through the strait of Hormuz after Wednesday’s signing of the memorandum of understanding, according to maritime data from Lloyd’s List Intelligence – though some operators reported that only more limited side shipping routes were open.
On Thursday, US Central Command said in a statement that it has lifted its blockade on all maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports and coastal areas in the strait of Hormuz.
“American forces are not impeding the transit of vessels to or from Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman,” it said.
Despite these developments, experts warn that it could take weeks or months for traffic to return to prewar levels.
The Associated Press contributed reporting

Ancient fossils have revealed that the earliest animals to walk on land more than 300 million years ago did not experience a metamorphosis similar to modern amphibians, a discovery that rewrites the evolutionary history of terrestrial vertebrates, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.
Humans and all other land-dwelling vertebrates descend from four-limbed “tetrapods” that left the seas to roam on land, an evolutionary process that took tens of millions of years. If you can recall your old biology textbook, this is probably what you were taught it looked like: the pioneering tetrapods adapted to land with a life cycle similar to frogs and toads, in which an aquatic larval phase, like a tadpole, is followed by metamorphosis into an amphibious adult form.
A pair of scientists at the Field Museum in Chicago looked at extremely rare fossils of hatchlings that span the “fin-to-limb” transition to identify direct evidence of this metamorphosis, such as the type of external gills seen on tadpoles. To their surprise, the researchers found no evidence of a transient larval phase in the early animals, thereby “falsifying hypotheses of an ancestral origin of metamorphosis,” according to the new study.
“There’s still this sense that these [tetrapods] had this gilled larva that is fundamentally and anatomically different from the terrestrial adult,” said Jason Pardo, a research associate at the Field Museum and a postdoctoral fellow at Vilnius University in Lithuania who co-led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “There are a lot of reasons why that would make sense, because it’s easier to make that transition from water to land if your baby, when it hatches out of the egg, is still fish-like, more or less. Then, you have this period of transition that allows it to get itself on land.”
“The problem is that we’ve never actually had direct evidence of that,” he continued. “The assumption has always been, ‘Of course we had a larval stage, and it would transition into an adult.’ But we didn’t really have information that went one direction or the other.”
To fill this gap, Pardo and Arjan Mann, the Field Museum’s assistant curator of early tetrapods and the other co-lead of the study, scoured both public museum archives and private collections for fossils that captured the early hatchling phase of primordial tetrapods.
Such specimens are extremely rare because these baby animals were small and had developing bones that required ideal conditions for preservation. But Pardo and Mann were able to track down a handful of particularly intriguing fossils sourced from the Mazon Creek fossil beds in northern Illinois, which has preserved incredibly detailed snapshots of life as it existed about 310 million years ago, during the tail end of the fin-to-limb transition.
These animals included two embolomeres, which were crocodile-like predators, a snake-like aïstopod, and several megalichthyid fish. Some of the tetrapods were so young when they died that their fossils preserve abdominal yolk that the hatchlings were feeding off until they were mature enough to seek their own food.
This selection represents “the most phylogenetically extensive sample of stem tetrapod early developmental stages to date and a definitive documentation of stem tetrapod hatchling anatomy and life history,” according to the study.
“We’ve been trying to look at the smallest animals that we can get out of these sites, where we can actually get very early stage babies,” Pardo said. “This is after the initial transition from water to land, but we have animals that span that transition. We have animals that branched off before [the development of] fingers and toes, and animals that branched off after fingers and toes.”
“When we started to look at these fossils, we were expecting that we were going to get something that looked kind of like a metamorphosis,” he added. “What we ended up finding is that there was no such evidence at all.”
External gills, for instance, are a telltale feature of the metamorphosis observed in frogs and toads. They appear on freshly hatched tadpoles and are slowly absorbed into the body to become lungs. But the hatchlings showed no signs of these gills, or anything else on the “checklist” of a transient larval phase, Pardo said.
“It was very striking that none of the structures that we would look at seemed like larval features that we would expect to see,” he said. “It was quite hard to make sense of at first because, at this point, there’s a 150-year tradition of treating these animals as amphibians.”
“What we ended up finding is that we can’t actually justify any claim of metamorphosis in those animals that are transitioning across that water-to-land transition,” he added.
The results suggest that early tetrapods had the same basic anatomy, more or less, throughout their life cycle. This evolutionary strategy may have delayed the transition to land for much longer than previously assumed, as tetrapods slowly acclimated to life in a terrestrial habitat. Amphibian-style metamorphosis probably emerged well after tetrapods established their foothold on land, perhaps to maximize their colonization of diverse new land environments, rather than as a condition for getting out of the seas in the first place.
In addition to overturning conventional wisdom, the fossils offer a glimpse of the ancient trailblazers that took the first steps into a new realm hundreds of millions of years ago, paving the way for the rest of us. As a result of them gradually expanding onto land, these tetrapods became the progenitors of all vertebrate land animals. The exquisite fossils even include eerily preserved eyes in some cases, gazing out from a long-lost past.
“They look like they were around yesterday,” Pardo said. “You can see skin. Sometimes the animals have color patterns preserved. You can see the lenses in their eyes. You can see these really intricate and intimate details of these animals. You can understand this was a living animal. It’s there.”

A popular proposal in California to impose a wealth tax on billionaires has gained enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in November, state officials announced on Wednesday.
The news is set to intensify an already heated debate around the tax, which has pitted tech moguls and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, against the labor union backing the measure.
The California Billionaire Tax Act, colloquially known as the billionaire tax, would levy a one-time 5% tax on any California resident worth more than $1bn. The proposal is backed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) as a means of funding California’s strained healthcare, food assistance and education programs.
The proposal has become one of the state’s biggest political flashpoints. As it gained popular momentum throughout the year, it’s also prompted prominent billionaires, such as Google co-founder Larry Page and Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, to makemoves to cut ties with the state and Newsom vowing to block it from going to a vote. Although it has gained enough signatures for the ballot, the coalition backing the measure has until 25 June to decide whether to move forward or potentially strike a deal.
While the union that floated the proposal has framed it as a way of getting the ultra-rich to pay their fair share, many of the state’s tech elites have condemned the tax and spent millions attempting to crush it. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent at least $82m alone on efforts to fight the tax and has relocated just over the California border to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.
The Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, crypto billionaire Chris Larsen and the DoorDash CEO, Tony Xu, are among other tech moguls who have donated millions to oppose the tax. California has the most billionaires out of any state – more than 200 – many of whom have increased their wealth in recent years amid the AI boom.
Notably, Jensen Huang, the billionaire CEO of Nvidia, has said he’s fine with the proposed tax and that he chose to live in Silicon Valley. During a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in April, he said: “I say to everybody: ‘Move to California. Don’t leave.’ It’s the highest taxes in the world, but it’s OK.”
Battle lines
The proposed billionaire tax began to gain steam at the beginning of the year as the campaign sought to gather enough signatures to make it on to the November ballot. By late April, the SEIU-UHW said it had already filed more than 1.55m signatures – more than double the necessary amount and something the union has pointed to as testament to the popularity of the proposal.
On Thursday, the union announced it can now officially advance toward the November ballot.
“With today’s news, David won the second round against Goliath, but healthcare workers and our allies won’t quit until we protect patients from the looming California healthcare collapse manufactured by Trump and Congress,” said Debru Carthan, a spokesperson for the Billionaire Tax Now coalition.
The next step is for California’s secretary of state to confirm the measure by the 25 June deadline, which would officially certify it for November. The SEIU-UHW has the option, however, to withdraw it before next week. And this is where Newsom is stepping in.
The tech-friendly governor has long vowed to fight the measure. His spokesperson told the Guardian in January that he had consistently opposed such state-level wealth taxes, saying they “drive a race to the bottom”. He has publicly said that the tax would chase billionaires out of California and strip the state of revenue. Newsom is now reportedly whipping together a coalition to help him negotiate a deal with the union.
“From the get-go, SEIU-UHW has designed this measure as a ‘gun-behind-the-door’ to negotiate a better deal,” said David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University who studies the California ballot measure process. “Rather than go to the ballot and go nuclear in a ballot measure battle that can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the goal has been to threaten to go to war.”
While several local unions and lawmakers, including the California congressman Ro Khanna, have joined the coalition to support the billionaire tax, powerful organizations in the state have also stepped in to oppose it. Those include the California Teachers Association, the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, the California Medical Association and Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California.
McCuan said that made this week of capitol negotiations pivotal, adding that this was not the first time Newsom has waded into ballot measure campaigns. In 2024, the governor helped stave off several high-profile measures that had qualified for the November vote, including on issues such employer liability, children’s healthcare and oil drilling.
“Let’s see if that magic can be pulled off this time,” McCuan said, cautioning that the political climate was different this year with November shaping up to be the “mother of all midterms”.
“The stakes are much higher this time out,” he said.
The governor’s office declined to comment.