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How a walk in the woods can be good for mental health

Ever wonder why a walk through the woods can be such a mood booster? Research from the University of New Hampshire shows that it can be as simple as the sounds people experience in nature, people's awareness ...

Oct 20 • 7:20 PM EDT • Health • medicalxpress.com

How much does Wurstfest cost in New Braundels?

Wurstfest returns November 6-15 with German food, live music and ticket prices that vary by day.

Oct 20 • 7:08 PM EDT • Entertainment • mysanantonio.com

What Trump’s Women’s Health Plan Promises

The administration's promises deserve a much closer look.

Oct 20 • 6:23 PM EDT • Health • yahoo.com

NASA Study Refines Projections for Thwaites Glacier

Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier could contribute more to sea level rise by the end of the century than some previous estimates. In some model simulations, the glacier’s contribution was as much as twice current projections.

Oct 20 • 4:09 PM EDT • Science • science.nasa.gov

Devastating 2025 Myanmar earthquake sheds light on how the 'Big One' could play out in California

The fault that triggered a massive earthquake in Myanmar last year is tilted much like California's San Andreas, which can influence how much shaking takes place and where.

Oct 20 • 4:04 PM EDT • Science • livescience.com

Apple's Touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro: Everything We Know

Apple is working on a high-end MacBook Pro, and it's nearly ready to launch. It will have several firsts in a Mac, including an OLED display and a touchscreen. Design Apple hasn't redesigned the MacBook Pro since the launch of the M1 Pro and M1 Max models in 2021, so it's due for a new look. The new MacBook Pro is expected to feature some minor design changes.

Oct 20 • 3:40 PM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

iPad Mini 8 Expected Next Week With These 10 New Features

Apple reportedly plans to unveil an iPad mini 8 with an OLED display next week, with those invited to Apple's Los Angeles experience on Wednesday, October 28 expected to receive hands-on time with the device, alongside MacBook Pro models with touch-enabled OLED displays, a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M6 chip, and an iMac with an M6 chip.

Oct 20 • 3:35 PM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

‘Wicker’ review: Colman, Skarsgård shine in twisted but well-woven tale

You may find yourself involuntarily smiling several times throughout the course of “Wicker,” a delightfully dark, often humorous and, well, downright horny fable about a man who’s seemingly such a

Oct 20 • 3:07 PM EDT • Entertainment • recorderonline.com

Sen. Banks among politicians receiving ‘potentially hazardous’ letters under investigation by FBI

Indiana Senator Jim Banks (R) reportedly received suspicious mail as federal authorities investigate a string of such instances involving politicians nationwide.

Oct 20 • 2:42 PM EDT • Politics • wndu.com

‘High Potential’ star Matthew Lamb, 14, reveals his mother died: ‘Still doesn’t feel real’

‘High Potential’ star Matthew Lamb, 14, shared a heartbreaking message announcing the death of his mother: ‘There’s so much she is going to miss in my life.’

Oct 20 • 2:36 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake File Size Officially Confirmed

You'll never believe how much bigger the Switch 2 game is than the Nintendo 64 original

Oct 20 • 1:54 PM EDT • Technology • polygon.com

Walbridge seals deal to remain downtown and expand into a much larger office

It’s official: Walbridge Group is moving its headquarters — and they’re staying downtown.

Oct 20 • 1:48 PM EDT • Business • crainsdetroit.com

Sundar Pichai: Google’s Frontier Imperative, Compute Scarcity Dilemmas, Future AI Products and Businesses

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has little patience for doubts about Google’s willingness or capacity to compete at the frontier of AI. His company’s latest Gemini 4 Argon model — long-promised and recently delivered — beats OpenAI and Anthropic’s latest public models on coding, math, science, and knowledge-work benchmarks and has placed Google’s AI back among the world’s best. Amid chatter that Google was fine with good-enough lightweight ‘Flash’ models, Pichai pushed back hard against any suggestion that company is limiting its research ambitions. “We won’t do it any other way,” he told me in a Big Technology Podcast interview recorded this week at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Pursuing cutting-edge research is costly for Google, requiring compute and chips that otherwise could be sold at a high markup by its cloud business. But Pichai said allocating resources to frontier AI development is “ground zero” for Google. “Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development,” Pichai told me. In our conversation, we discussed Argon (which Pichai says processed three times as many tokens as Gemini 3 in the 72 hours after launch), AI’s role in developing better models, the AI interface of the future, competition with OpenAI, Google’s partnerships with Anthropic and Apple, data centers in space, and the nature of his optimism. You can read the full conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, below, or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice. Alex Kantrowitz: Google is back at the frontier with Gemini 4 Argon, which beats OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s public models on benchmarks spanning coding, math, science, and knowledge work. The conventional wisdom was that Google had given up on the frontier to focus on fast, good-enough models for its products. That was wrong? Sundar Pichai: Very wrong. Look, we are so committed to being at the frontier. It’s in our DNA. We won’t do it any other way. We’ve been thinking about the AI frontier for well over a decade now. The frontier is very dynamic. It’s very competitive. It’s very exciting. I couldn’t be more pleased with how Argon has come together. We took our time with it. We made sure we tested it safely and deployed it carefully. We took a bit longer than our other models, given its capabilities. Across the board, be it for agentic work, knowledge work, coding, creative tasks, Argon is one of the really good frontier models. The first 72 hours since we launched, it’s almost up to 25 trillion tokens used, which is about three times what Gemini 3.0 had in the first 72 hours. And we are capacity constrained as we are serving it. Excited, but there are always areas….. You know, the frontier is very dynamic, and you have to keep evolving the models. There are areas which we can see we need to improve as well. We’ll be at work on all of that as well. Which areas? On any given model, Argon would be across the board better at everything if you just look even two months back. But the space is so evolving. Even on coding, for example, there are pockets where we know we need to do better, and there’s clear feedback. We’ll make it better. The argument for standard models is that they’re already good enough to build great products, with the frontier valuable only for certain tasks. Meta built Muse with good models rather than the best, and Google could put standard models into Maps, Gmail, and Search. Why isn’t that sufficient? It’s definitely not how I have thought about it at all. We are deeply committed to driving the state of the art and actually pushing where this technology can go, all the way from transformers. That’s a journey we’ve been on. You will see us continue to do that. When you’re at the frontier, you get an earlier look into the emerging capabilities, earlier than others, which helps you better prepare for the future. We are fortunate to have a wide set of opportunities across consumer and enterprise. Some of our cloud customers, for sure, want the model at the frontier. The frontier models will be better at developing the next set of models in an era of recursive self-improvement. I would argue it matters there. Internally, we have definitely seen a steep point of inflection by deploying Argon to our developers. It definitely tackles problems which our previous models could not do. Being at the frontier puts you at the innovation frontier and helps you drive that as well. There is room for models of all sizes and capabilities. That’s why we did Flash, Flash-Lite, etc. I agree with you that you can develop very good product experiences with not necessarily the most frontier model, because they tend to be slower and more expensive too. But we care about the Pareto frontier, and we’re committed to doing all of that. You said developing frontier models gives you a look at what’s coming. What do you see on the horizon? What makes this moment so exciting is you build something which you think is a culmination of months of work, and you put it out. You already see clear headroom ahead. We’ve all been working on these agentic, long-horizon capabilities, but clearly the frontier is going to have multiple of these agents working together to do things. That’s an example of an exciting paradigm underway. It’s also clear to me that users, both in consumer and enterprise, will have access to some multi-agent framework for them, working all the time doing things. It feels like a moment of infinite possibilities. Sergey Brin said one of Argon’s core innovations was relying more on the model to help develop the model. Yet incidents involving OpenAI’s bots breaking containment and Google’s bots accessing a site they shouldn’t have suggest these systems still aren’t perfectly aligned. Isn’t there reasonable cause for concern about accelerating toward recursive self-improvement? There are three parts to your question. Let’s first talk about RSI itself. You’re right, Sergey mentioned RSI being a critical contributor as we are developing Argon. But to be very clear, today, in a continuum, we are pretty far from the end state of RSI or something like that. The right way to describe it is you have RSI loops along with AI researchers in various aspects of model development. You almost have agents helping AI researchers in some automated way work together to build these models. It’s good to at least understand where we are today, and it’s super exciting. I expect that continuum to keep making progress as we go into next year. The second question is around safety. Security comes from defense in depth. You’re talking about alignment, obviously. We all are doing a lot of work to make sure the models are as aligned as possible. But it’s an active area of research, and there are clear gaps. That’s not the only thing we rely on. You have the work you do on alignment, but beyond that, we put a lot of effort into real-time monitoring as these models are working. Making sure you have good telemetry into what’s happening so that you can intervene in real time if you see unexpected behaviors. How you do that, the architecture with which you do that, how you make sure it’s all sandboxed and isolated in a way that it can continue doing its job during real-time monitoring — these are all areas of investment. Obviously, when we deploy these models, giving customers, enterprises, control, both with real-time monitoring, but their ability to decide where they deploy, what type of data which models ever have access to, etc. All that work is very, very important, and we are doing a lot of that. As an industry, we need to constantly up our game and take the time to do all this stuff, including dedicating the compute required to make sure you can safely deploy these models. The third part is: Is it all enough? This is why there are a lot of conversations in the industry, and I think it’s reasonable to be worried. The right way to approach something you worry about is early on thinking about what more we can do. As an industry, you’re definitely seeing increased levels of work on alignment, testing for safety, etc., as we deploy these models. The next step would be developing better standards so there are cross-industry standards of how we do these things, including the ability to evaluate using independent evaluators. If you look at areas like financial controls, we have accounting standards, we have independent auditors. Those are all the next natural steps for us as an industry to work toward, and regulation will end up playing a role as we go through all of that as well. Google pursues both language models and world models, while some other AI companies like OpenAI have focused more heavily on LLMs as the path to AGI. Why is world-model research important to you? As humans, you obviously perceive the world around you, and you’re taking all those inputs. Making sure these models are able to understand the laws of physics, simulate the world in high fidelity. All that, I think, are key enabling blocks for intelligence. We are working across all possible applications of this. Take an area like robotics. It’s not an accident: If you look at embodied reasoning benchmarks, Argon is state of the art. That all comes from our experience building world models. Inherently, I would expect there will be architectures which will converge all of this in the future. But for us, we view this as, today, this jagged frontier that is intelligence. We want to be at the frontier of all the possible approaches, and that will help us both drive better research, better insights, and develop a much better AGI model, is how we think about it. Some people argue Google should focus on selling its computing resources rather than using them for AI research. Cloud wants to sell compute at a high markup, while researchers need a very big computer to build the best models. How do you balance those demands? Ground zero for us is making sure we are investing in the compute that’s needed to be at the AI frontier. In 2015, I set the company to be AI-first. AI is that key horizontal ingredient across everything we do, all the way from Search to Cloud to Waymo. That is ground zero for us, making sure both for research and developing the models that we have enough compute needed. Beyond that, we have these independent businesses which each have their own long-range plans. They’re using those long-range plans to project forward, and we plan for compute for all of them. The cloud team, they have a business and they have a projection and they have demand signals. They have committed contracts. With that help, we can plan on a long-term compute trajectory for them. We’re fortunate to have this wide set of opportunities. There’s no company in the world which isn’t making trade-offs at any given moment in time. But the first principles we operate on is making sure we have enough compute to invest in the frontier, and that’s non-negotiable, and everything else works on top. Remember, we are building our own compute, our own data centers. There are long lead times. The compute we have today is a function of decisions I made in 2024. Even if you think back to a year from today, last year the agentic coding takeoff hadn’t happened. Today, obviously, when you sit and look at anything, everyone is short—not just us, other companies—and everyone wishes you had two times what you had planned for. That comes with the territory. At any given moment in time, we are planning for what we would need two to three years out in the future. You’re going to find some decisions you make may look suboptimal two years out, depending on where the state of the art is. I don’t spend too much time thinking about it. The way I think about compute allocation is making sure Google DeepMind, both for research and frontier model development, is cutting edge in terms of compute access. After that, we plan for all our businesses. It’s great we can provide our compute to other people too, like we have done. It allows us to scale that up, get real tests for it in the widest application set possible, test it in the real world, and make sure we are at the cutting edge of technology at every layer of our AI stack as well. Ben Horowitz relayed on a podcast that Andy Jassy had said compute was sold out until 2028. Are you seeing the same thing? If today a customer is coming out and asking us for compute in ’27, that is incredibly difficult to do. Even last year we went out and leased some short-term compute to accommodate some customers and help them out. But yes, we are all dealing with similar timelines. Every major technology shift seems to involve overbuilding, from railroads to fiber. Do you think that’s happening here? It depends on the time frames you’re looking at. This level of build, if I take a long enough time frame, it makes complete sense to me. We are at early stages of the most consequential technology ever, and this is not like fiber. It’s not dark. We are using it. We are capacity constrained on a daily basis. The applications, the underlying technology is improving rapidly. But running a company, the way I work through the moment is you look at your demand signals. You look at your committed revenue opportunities that you’re getting in the form of contracts. You balance that with the underlying technical capability, or internally you balance how we are using it internally, the model trajectories. Based on all that, you take a disciplined approach—a confident, aggressive, but disciplined approach—to plan out compute. But when you talk about the broader economy as a whole, you’re having people operate with various levels of risk. I focus on what I can control as a company and plan through it. If your question is, can there be an overbuild? Yes, because you can have some constrained components. Remember, what matters is a set of everything you need to build out that compute. Memory, electricity, electricians…. Land. Like 2,000 components or more. You could get constrained at some point. There could be things which cause bottlenecks, and then you could have overbuilds. There could be external shocks to the economy. There are macro risks. All that is possible at any given time. But am I confident that the compute we are planning for, we will have uses for it given enough time? Absolutely, yes. I was in the room when you said AI would be as profound as fire and electricity. If you believe that, shouldn’t you give researchers the biggest possible computer, even at the expense of today’s cloud profits? We’re all doing some form of that. Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development. What you’re seeing is true already. But you want to be thoughtful. Even our AI researchers have some constraints, which are also good. That’s what inspires creativity. That’s what helps you come up with a more efficient algorithmic breakthrough, maybe to use less memory. What we are committed to is to invest what’s needed to stay at the frontier. OpenAI President Greg Brockman told me a few months ago that the ideal AI product might have no interface at all—just as natural as conversation. What do you think the interface looks like in the age of AI? Computing historically has been humans adapting to computing. With AI, it’ll be the other way around. The technology will adapt seamlessly to how humans live and go about their day-to-day life. You want to be able to speak to that AI when you want to. It has context. It can be persistently running somewhere, give you continuity. You’re not dealing with a lot of complexity. It’s natural. All that makes sense to me. That doesn’t mean it won’t have any interface, however. Nowadays, even on my phone, Gemini voice models are so good. I can just press the microphone button. I can just ramble. That’s why we call it Rambler. I can ramble. It intelligently corrects with my personal context. Even my friends’ names, weird names, it gets it right, even if it first guesses it wrong. It’s amazing. I’m not going in, backspacing, editing once I finish saying it. It’s remarkable how good it’s gotten. But there are going to be moments you will need an interface. You may want to entertain yourself. You may want to watch a video. You may ask your AI to create something, and you want to watch it, consume it. The way I think about it is, you want it to be as seamless and as natural as possible, and that you are not doing the hard work adapting to whatever the interface is. The technology is adapting to how you’re working at any given moment in time. When I asked Sam Altman about competition from Google, he argued that OpenAI was building AI-native products and implied Google was bolting AI onto existing ones. Do you accept that framing, and can a “bolt-on” compete with an AI-native product? First of all, it’s a very dynamic moment. We are all pushing each other. OpenAI has pushed us as a company too. This is not just we are doing something to them. Far from it. Yes, Google went into its own version of a code red too. In the AI moment, all of us have to respond with varying levels of urgency at any given moment in time. We are constantly building new products as well. Gemini was built from the ground up as a product—the Gemini app I’m talking about. Or tomorrow, as all of us are adapting to agents, are you bolting agents onto ChatGPT, or are they building it natively? How would you think about that? You can always put these questions back. I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as you want to build world-class product experiences that are AI-native and they are winning. Some of it is adapting products, some of it is rethinking new experiences. They will all be part of how you approach this moment. How do you expect to make money from these AI interfaces? If an agent recommends a product and I buy it, should it take a cut of the sale, even if that’s disclosed? I’m going to put enterprise aside. Consumers are going to increasingly value this technology. Take software developers today. Developers are willing to pay for these coding models because it really helps make them more productive. Nobody would want to code the way they were coding three years ago, or even the same time last year. When you’re delivering value, there’s value to be had. I’ve never seen examples where consumer products really scale to billions of users, where people are using it intensely, and haven’t had monetization to go along with it. If you’re providing value to people, there is inherent value to be had. The nature of it may change. You’re asking a scenario in which agents are doing stuff for you. At the end of the day, you will have commercial needs. The agents need to fulfill those commercial needs. The providers on the other side are going to see value in that. There’s going to be some mechanism by which it gets fleshed out. That’s what an efficient system does. But what matters is that you’re building those world-class consumer experiences. I promised myself one product feature request: Can you make Gemini-powered search in Gmail as good as searching Gmail through ChatGPT? What’s going on here? One of the exciting things we announced recently is the unified Gemini agent for enterprise, and we’re bringing that to consumers. These are persistent agents which run 24/7 in the cloud. We’re spinning up a micro VM effectively for every query, and from the runtime, the harness, the model—it’s all a headless service. It’ll work everywhere, and it has your context with you. You can address this agent whether you’re in Workspace, in Search, in Gemini. Agents are going to drive this unification from a customer experience, which people are looking for. When you have a broad product portfolio and you’re moving forward fast, there are always areas where you’re moving forward faster than some other areas. That’s valid feedback. But we are putting a lot of time and effort into making sure, as we build out our agentic experience, that unification and that capability works well across all these services. People have asked where Google’s equivalent of Muse or Dots is. Do you anticipate creating a new product to compete with them? Our goal with Gemini is to be a personal, proactive, and powerful assistant. That’s what we are working toward. You saw us describe the early versions of it at Google I/O this year with Spark. Effectively, already, if you open the Gemini app as a Pro or an Ultra user, you see Chat and Task, and they start giving you that agentic experience. With Argon now, that capability is dramatically accelerated. What we announced recently in our enterprise event, we are bringing that to consumers as well. Soon in Gemini, you will be able to ask something, and it’s a continuum. You don’t need to think about whether you’re asking a chat or an agentic task. It’ll just automatically do the right thing, and it can work persistently in the background securely and get things done for you. Already, empirically, when I look at what’s coming into Gemini in our app, last year you would have tagged them and most of them would have been chats. But a steadily growing percentage is already agentic tasks in Gemini. Yes, we are going to bring personal agents to our consumers. It’ll work in the Gemini app. It’ll work in Google Search. It’ll work in Gmail. You can address it, call it, etc. We want to make sure we’re getting it right. It’ll be powered by Argon, and we are very excited to bring it to our users. Google has invested and committed tens of billions of dollars to Anthropic. What do you see in Dario Amodei that makes you want such a deep investment and partnership? Very early on, when we looked at the founding team of Anthropic, it was very clear to us this was a world-class team which was involved in some of the earliest GPT models. We were quickly able to assess that they would be at the frontier. We’ve always tried to identify and partner with companies which would be at the cutting edge of technology. We’ve done that with SpaceX. We’ve done that with Anthropic. That’s what we saw, and we had a chance to partner. Is your partnership with Apple to license Gemini for Siri expanding, contracting, or standing still? For both us and Apple, that partnership was about translating the capabilities of AI into better experiences for users. I thought Apple has done a phenomenal job of incorporating—they customize these models and build it into Siri—and it’s been great to see the reception. We are committed to doing more. You’re going to do more with them? There’s nothing specific to comment, but it’s a partnership. It’s working well. What have you learned so far about the feasibility of data centers in space? It’s a very exciting project. Projects like this remind me—I still recall that moment in the desert for the DARPA Grand Challenge, watching the Stanley car compete in it, which ended up being the basis for Waymo. With all these technologies, you’re at a moment in time where it looks a bit like sci-fi, but 10 to 20 years down the line, it’s actually working in a meaningful way. I feel the same in space. We’ve always believed in betting big on these technologies. Quantum has been a great example of it. We’re probably 10 years into the journey. Waymo, we are almost 20 years into the journey. Space, we are two to three years into the journey. It’s clear to me that it’s an approach which will make a lot of sense in the future. Being in sub-synchronous orbits with 24/7 access to the most abundant form of energy we have access to will make a lot of sense for this exponential increase in compute that we are going to need. Having said that, this is a challenging project. The team has disciplined milestones. It was a super exciting milestone to send the TPUs up to space. Sometime, as we are speaking, we are expecting a “hello world” moment from them. I look forward to seeing that happen, and we’ll continue investing here too. You previously said 25% of the code written within Google was written by AI. What’s the number today? That number in our world today is meaningless in the sense that every part of what we now touch is influenced by AI deeply. What we are tracking with Argon, for example, it’s been a point of inflection. People are using Argon to really go tackle complex projects, including projects which affect millions of lines of code. In the four weeks since we have launched Argon, we have seen a 30% increase in CLs, and more importantly, almost a similar increase—a one-third decrease in rollbacks. People are writing code more productively and better code with it. We are tracking it with newer metrics now. How are you dealing with opposition to data centers? If you can’t build in the U.S. the way you want to, where else do you go? We’re very committed to building our data centers very responsibly. When I look at our largest data centers in some of the communities where we have been the longest, I visit them, I talk to people. There are people who come and tell us their kids have gone to college because of our investments in these communities, and we’ve grown in those communities. To me, this is about doing it right. Engaging with the communities early, doing it transparently. We are committed to making sure we are bringing incremental power, and we cover 100% of the cost of our power needs for these projects. It’s understanding the impact on neighborhoods and making sure you’re working thoroughly to address them. Done rightly, you can continue making progress. But we are constantly taking feedback into account. I do worry not everyone operates the same way. People have been surprised by data centers showing up in their backyard. Those are all important. As an industry, we should continue to do better. But part of the reason, in a 20-year time frame, we are thinking about things like data centers in space is making sure we are able to put these data centers where maybe the trade-offs will be different. What unproven area of AI is Google working hardest to crack? Is it continual learning—getting models to keep updating after release—or something else? There are multiple parallel paths. You saw with Argon we have a million output tokens. With our Gemini models early on, we had a one-million context window on the input side. These are all examples of breakthroughs we are constantly working on. How do you think about synthetic data? How do you think about continual learning? How do you think about more efficient architectures? We do dedicate a meaningful percentage of our compute to these research bets too. It always goes hand in hand, including our world models. Those are all bets we are placing. Sometimes, as part of these bets, there are ideas that emerge which just make their way into the mainline models. Maybe we don’t fully talk about it, but we have multiple steps in these areas. Working in technology requires optimism that building something will improve the world, but those bets can leave real consequences when they fail. I recently returned to a town in El Salvador where enthusiasm for Bitcoin had given way to unfinished construction and something resembling a ghost town. How do you maintain the optimism you spoke about in your Stanford commencement address while accounting for those risks? I genuinely have a deep conviction that improving technology and improving access to technology makes people’s lives better. It’s been my personal experience in my life, out of which comes that deep conviction, optimism. But with that, I’ve always felt humanity’s journey is always about working hard to harness that technology to make it work well for society. The optimism is not an optimism that you just build whatever you want, whenever. You work hard to make sure you’re building technology in the service of humanity, to make the human condition better. That’s got to be the defining goal as we are approaching it. With that framework, I’m very, very optimistic. We are in very early stages of the kind of progress that we are going to see on many areas. We’re all talking about areas like healthcare. A lot of the progress is ahead. The ability to make things in a fundamentally cheaper way on many things where things have been getting expensive for a long, long time, discovering new materials, etc., which really bend the curve—it’s tough to step today and understand the impact of all that, but they’re going to be very profound. I’m very optimistic, but we have to be rightfully concerned about all the ways this technology can go wrong. Sundar, I know you don’t do many of these. Thank you. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate it.

Oct 20 • 1:47 PM EDT • Technology • bigtechnology.com

Romania Politics Government

Romanian Prime Minister Luca Niculescu walks during a swearing in ceremony for the new government at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace, in Bucharest, Romania, Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

Oct 20 • 1:38 PM EDT • Politics • postregister.com

Romania Politics Government

Romanian Prime Minister Luca Niculescu, left, smiles standing next to Romanian President Nicusor Dan after a swearing in ceremony for the new government at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace, in Bucharest,

Oct 20 • 1:38 PM EDT • Politics • postregister.com

Romania Politics Government

Ministers of the Luca Niculescu cabinet stand during a swearing in ceremony at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace, in Bucharest, Romania, Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru)

Oct 20 • 1:36 PM EDT • Politics • postregister.com

Romanian lawmakers back a minority government to end monthslong stalemate

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — Romanian lawmakers sought Tuesday to end a monthslong political impasse by voting for a minority government led by an independent diplomat, who now faces the challenge of securing support in a fragmented Parliament while tackling a large budget deficit. Prime Minister Luca Niculescu won 280 votes for his proposed Cabinet in

Oct 20 • 12:13 PM EDT • Politics • mymotherlode.com

Panthers playmaker earns Week 6 game ball from CBS Sports

Panthers RB Chuba Hubbard earned some much-deserved recognition for his strong Week 6 performance.

Oct 20 • 11:20 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Ghosting Someone Might Actually Be Bad for Your Mental Health, According to Science

New research suggests people who ghost others often feel guilty afterward, while those left behind underestimate how much they care.

Oct 20 • 11:00 AM EDT • Science • vice.com

Paxton campaign showing ‘desperation’ with manufactured story: Political commentator

In the final days until election, President Trump is set to hold another rally in Texas for Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton. MS NOW National Reporter Rosa Flores shares what she is hearing from voters there. MediasTouch Journalist Adam Mockler, Democratic Strategist Basil Smikle, Bloomberg Businessweek Journalist Max Chafkin, and Rolling Stone Magazine Politics Reporter Nikki McCann Ramirez join the Group Chat with Stephanie Ruhle to share their analysis.

Oct 20 • 10:02 AM EDT • Politics • ms.now

New Apple TV 4K Features 'Whole Room Audio' With Four HomePods

The new fourth-generation Apple TV 4K announced last week can connect to up to four HomePods in front-left, front-right, rear-left, and rear-right positions, enabling an all-Apple surround sound system for home theater setups. There is also a related new feature that has not received as much attention: Whole Room Audio. Apple says the Whole Room Audio feature spreads sound evenly across four HomePods in a room.

Oct 20 • 10:02 AM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

Romania Politics Government

Romanian Prime Minister designate Luca Niculescu attends a joint parliament session called to give a vote of confidence for the new government team, in Bucharest, Romania, Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026.

Oct 20 • 8:55 AM EDT • Politics • postregister.com

KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust: Fall 2026 Update on Vaccine Views

The latest KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust finds about half of parents mistakenly believe spacing out vaccines is healthier for children, while confidence in many long-standing childhood vaccines is high across partisans. These findings take on new relevance following President Trump's recent executive order calling for changes in U.S. childhood vaccine recommendations, including splitting the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine—currently given as a single combined shot—into three separate vaccines across multiple visits.

Oct 20 • 8:30 AM EDT • Health • kff.org

At $10,000, Would You Race To Buy This 1987 Chevy Sprint Turbo?

Known by many names, but rarely found in such mint condition.

Oct 20 • 8:25 AM EDT • Technology • jalopnik.com

How much is DeForest Buckner worth on the trade market?

DeForest Buckner is still one of the Colts’ best defensive players, but age and his contract complicate his trade value.

Oct 20 • 8:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

How much longer will Sacramento’s progressive politics let Califia suffer?

“Cali is dying on the streets because there is no way...to help her.”

Oct 20 • 8:00 AM EDT • Politics • sacbee.com

Romania Politics Government

Romanian Prime Minister designate Luca Niculescu arrives for a joint parliament session called to give a vote of confidence for the new government team, in Bucharest, Romania, Tuesday, Oct. 20,

Oct 20 • 7:45 AM EDT • Politics • postregister.com

NC State a touchdown favorite at Stanford

NC State is making its first trip to Stanford since the Cardinal joined the ACC, which is to say that we’re in for a very late night of who-knows-what. Should be fun. The Wolfpack is a seven-point favorite to win this one, and if there’s any sort of turnaround on the horizon for this group, […]

Oct 20 • 7:44 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

How Much Of Cisco Stock's Rise Did The Business Earn?

Cisco Systems (CSCO) supplies businesses and the hyperscalers building AI infrastructure with networking and security products, along with services. The company's stock climbed 92% between late July 2021 and mid-October 2026, before dividends. A rally of that magnitude makes it natural to credit a growing business. So take a guess: how much of that rise came from Cisco selling more.

Oct 20 • 7:02 AM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com

'We recreate the Big Bang here on Earth' – scientists know what happened during the first few seconds of the Universe | BBC Sky at Night Magazine

What happened after the Big Bang? How much do scientists know about the formation of the first stars and galaxies during those first seconds?

Oct 20 • 6:39 AM EDT • Science • skyatnightmagazine.com

I’ve used the Pixel 11 Pro XL and iPhone 18 Pro Max, and Apple’s ecosystem isn’t enough anymore

I've used iPhones for almost two decades, and much of what made Apple's devices an easy choice has eroded.

Oct 20 • 6:30 AM EDT • Technology • androidauthority.com

Pfizer makes ‘business decision’ to end phase 2 trial of autoimmune drug as program’s future uncertain

Pfizer has called time on a phase 2 trial of its CXCR5 antibody in an autoimmune blood disorder, with the company tight-lipped on whether this marks the end of the road for the asset. The Big Pharma had been evaluating the therapy, dubbed PF-06835375, in a phase 2 study of 61 patients with primary immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) that kicked off in 2022, according to the federal trials register. However, Pfizer confirmed to Fierce on Monday that this study had been terminated “due to a business decision.” “The decision to terminate the trial was not based on any safety concerns,” a spokesperson pointed out. At time of publication, PF-06835375 remained listed on Pfizer’s website for both ITP and lupus. A phase 1 study in lupus wrapped up in 2022, according to the trials database. ITP is an autoimmune disorder characterized by a low platelet count. Novartis was at one point evaluating its B-cell-depleting antibody ianalumab—recently approved as Fabhalta to treat immunoglobulin A nephropathy—as a potential treatment ITP. But the therapy struggled to demonstrate a benefit in the clinic for this indication. When contacted by Fierce, Pfizer wouldn’t confirm whether all work on PF-06835375 has been halted, and whether the company has any other plans to explore C-X-C chemokine receptor type 5 (CXCR5) as a mechanism. CXCR5 is found in blood cancers such as diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and mantle cell lymphoma chemokine receptor. However, there is little expression in normal tissue, which has led some drug developers to explore its potential. Vincerx Pharma had at one point been planning to take an anti-CXCR5 ADC into the clinic to treat B-cell malignancies, but that ambition was scrapped due to cash constraints. Where Big Pharma is placing its bets is one of the hot topics being discussed at Fierce Biotech's high-impact event in London next month. Find out more information and register by clicking on the banner below: [ ](https://qtxasset.com/quartz/qcloud5/media/image/where_big_pharma_is_placing_its_bets.png?VersionId=B8JrRbJ.pFUSK1pJgjeWHLGm_18RdLAy)

Oct 20 • 3:59 AM EDT • Business • fiercebiotech.com

Wow, Andoni Iraola now wants Spanish superstar to join Liverpool

Andoni Iraola has requested Liverpool to sign an exciting Spanish midfielder. Julian Ward has ushered in Liverpool’s new era without making too much noise. There has been no grand announcement or bi...

Oct 20 • 3:40 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

49ers, Jaguars Floated Trade Idea Involving $14.6 Million Player

The San Francisco 49ers appear to be one of the buyers ahead of the Nov. 10 trade deadline. So far this 2026 NFL season, the Niners have established themselves as a Super Bowl contender. Despite the impressive start to the campaign, San Francisco does have areas of concern such as the wide receiver position. During […] The post 49ers, Jaguars Floated Trade Idea Involving $14.6 Million Player appeared first on HEAVY.

Oct 20 • 2:14 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

The political calculus of peace in Ukraine

In Ukraine, few words carry as much weight — or as much political risk — as peace. In early October, several prominent Ukrainian politicians publicly called for an end to Russia's war on terms many considered to be closer to the Kremlin's desires. Their proposals differed, but the public reaction revealed a deep-seated fear: that calls for peace could be a prelude to concessions to Moscow rather than a path to a just settlement. For years, Ukraine's leadership framed victory, not compromise, a

Oct 20 • 1:57 AM EDT • Politics • kyivindependent.com

MN Governor Candidates Klobuchar, Demuth Take Part in Business Forum in Brainerd

https://youtu.be/9XgT9HmAWKc

Oct 20 • 12:06 AM EDT • Business • lptv.org

Nearly 1.6M pounds of hot dogs, bacon and other meats recalled nationwide

Kayem Foods recalled nearly 1.6 million pounds of meat items such as hot dogs, bacon, brisket and ham after a warehouse cooler experienced temperature deviations.

Oct 19 • 9:37 PM EDT • Business • foxbusiness.com

How Cardinals Engineered a Much-Needed Defensive Turnaround vs rams

Mike LaFleur remembers what it was like to go up against Arizona Cardinals defensive coordinator Nick Rallis when Rallis’ unit was operating at its best. Sunday’s shocking 18-16 victory over...

Oct 19 • 7:53 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Return of Josh Jacobs should help Packers boost rushing attack

But how much the three-time Pro Bowl running back will contribute right away remains uncertain.

Oct 19 • 7:13 PM EDT • Sports • spectrumnews1.com

PFF bye week grades: transfer grades

Nebraska football heads into its bye week at 5-2 after two gut-wrenching losses: a top-10 Indiana team at home and former quarterback Dylan Raiola leading back-to-back touchdown drives to steal

Oct 19 • 7:00 PM EDT • Sports • dailynebraskan.com

Percival AI can uncover unseen health issues in CT scans

When analyzed by a new artificial intelligence model developed at Penn Medicine, CT scans reveal much about a patient's health beyond the specific condition they were originally ordered for, according ...

Oct 19 • 5:30 PM EDT • Health • medicalxpress.com

Symposium highlights MIT’s wide range of innovations for aging brain health

In six talks, researchers from across MIT described Aging Brain Initiative projects aimed at advancing the understanding of and interventions against neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ALS.

Oct 19 • 5:15 PM EDT • Health • news.mit.edu

House District 13 candidates discuss heating costs and housing

Maine House District 13 candidates Republican incumbent Russell White and Democrat Michael Cunningham shared their input on hot topics such as heating costs and access to rural healthcare during a

Oct 19 • 5:15 PM EDT • Politics • ellsworthamerican.com

'There's No One Person That Has This Whole Thing in Their Head' — GTA 6 Devs Had Freedom to Add Cool Features Just Like RDR2's Horse Balls

Rockstar Games gave the GTA 6 developers so much freedom to add cool details that not even the studio's top executives are aware of everything in the game.

Oct 19 • 5:06 PM EDT • Technology • ign.com

Erika Donalds weighs in on immigration, school vouchers, state power over local governments

In a wide ranging conversation with WLRN, Erika Donalds, the wife of Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, offered thoughts on immigration, the role of local governments in Florida and education policy. She spoke with WLRN on Friday before she addressed the Tower Club in Fort Lauderdale.

Oct 19 • 3:36 PM EDT • Politics • wusf.org

Apple Starts Moving Up iPhone Duo Delivery Dates

Apple has started bumping up estimated delivery dates for some customers who pre-ordered the iPhone Duo in countries such as the U.S. and Japan. In the U.S., for example, well-known YouTuber Matt Gonzalez today said his iPhone Duo pre-order initially showed a December delivery estimate, but Apple's online store now shows him an earlier delivery estimate of between November 20 and November 30. He ordered a Star White model with 512GB of storage.

Oct 19 • 3:31 PM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

PEGI begins moving existing digital-only games with loot boxes up to a 16 rating

Existing digital-only games that include paid random items, such as loot boxes, are being re-rated PEGI 16 if they curr…

Oct 19 • 3:12 PM EDT • Technology • gamesindustry.biz

Klobuchar and Demuth spar over taxes, costs and regulation at business forum

With roughly two weeks until Election Day, Lisa Demuth and Amy Klobuchar went head-to-head on economic policy.

Oct 19 • 3:11 PM EDT • Business • startribune.com

Final Fantasy 7 Revelation's Hard Mode is available from the start this time, so you won't need to replay the mammoth RPG to get to the good stuff

Final Fantasy 7 Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi has confirmed that Hard Mode will be available to select from the beginning, unlike Remake and Rebirth.

Oct 19 • 2:27 PM EDT • Technology • eurogamer.net

Apple Announcing New Products Next Week: 'Pro and Tell'

Apple's Greg Joswiak today hinted at new product announcements coming next week, sharing a social media post that says "Can't wait to pro and tell next week". Rumors suggest Apple is planning to debut the new MacBook Pro with an OLED touchscreen display, an M6 entry-level MacBook Pro, an M6 iMac, an iPad mini with an OLED display. Can't wait to pro and tell next week.

Oct 19 • 12:05 PM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

The RTX 5090 Isn’t 'Alive' if It Costs $10,000, No Matter What Nvidia Says

Nvidia's flagship GPU may still be in production, but that isn't saying much for the state of Nividia's RTX 50-series lineup.

Oct 19 • 11:30 AM EDT • Technology • gizmodo.com

Factbox-Top cases on the US Supreme Court's docket

Oct 19 (Reuters) - The US Supreme Court is hearing a series of important cases during its current nine-month term involving issues such as President Donald Trump's immigration policies, asylum,

Oct 19 • 10:59 AM EDT • Politics • centraloregondaily.com

Would never do it again: Ex-international regrets Germany decision

Former Germany international Kerim Demirbay regrets his decision to play for the German national team. The 33-year-old said as much in an interview with Turkish journalist Yağız Sabuncuoğlu, in whi...

Oct 19 • 10:30 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Scientists Thought Water Carved These Gullies on Mars. Now They Suspect Something Much Stranger

New observations suggest that seasonal dry ice can send soil rushing downhill, carving channels that look deceptively familiar.

Oct 19 • 10:22 AM EDT • Science • zmescience.com

Duchess Meghan is reading 'a lot of scripts' as she plans acting return

LONDON – Returning to acting is still a priority for Duchess Meghan.

Oct 19 • 9:35 AM EDT • Entertainment • centraloregondaily.com

Live: Governor candidates Demuth and Klobuchar to talk business issues at forum

The forum hosted by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce begins at 9 a.m. Monday in Brainerd.

Oct 19 • 9:30 AM EDT • Business • startribune.com

Carl Sagan Institute director to deliver URI Honors Colloquium lecture on Oct. 27

KINGSTON, R.I. – Oct. 19, 2026 – Over the past decade, Lisa Kaltenegger, founding director of the Cornell University Carl Sagan Institute, has worked with NASA, academic institutions and multiple countries to find new ways to spot life in the cosmos. Finding such life has significant implications when it comes to understanding outer space more […]

Oct 19 • 9:15 AM EDT • Science • uri.edu

Wyze moved the screen on its new smart scale to the handle so it’s easier to read at eye level

The screen on Wyze’s new smart scale is much easier to see.

Oct 19 • 9:00 AM EDT • Technology • theverge.com

Where they stand: Amy Klobuchar and Lisa Demuth on health care

Klobuchar as made lowering health care costs a pillar of her campaign, while Demuth has pointed to her record at the Capitol to show how she would address the issue as governor.

Oct 19 • 7:00 AM EDT • Health • startribune.com

Women are baring their souls to make the midterm elections feel personal

By sharing their stories, everyday women are becoming trusted messengers on issues such as immigration, intimate partner violence and healthcare.

Oct 19 • 6:00 AM EDT • Politics • 19thnews.org

Taiwan Railway to ban political advertising in stations from 2027

State-owned Taiwan Railway Corp. (TR) on Monday said it would ban political advertisements in its stations with effect from next year, following criticism that such ads violated administrative neutrality.

Oct 19 • 5:18 AM EDT • Politics • focustaiwan.tw

Scientists Revived Dying Corals With Something Surprisingly Simple — A Touch From Healthy Corals

A simple touch can go a long way.

Oct 19 • 4:33 AM EDT • Science • zmescience.com

Matthew Golden tops 100 yards despite brutal drops on SNF

Matthew Golden posted a 6-104-1 line in a win over the Dallas Cowboys in Week 6 but also dropped a pair of touchdown passes.

Oct 19 • 2:56 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Christian Watson lets touchdown slip through his fingers

Christian Watson dropped a sure touchdown in Week 6 against Dallas and finished with 64 yards on just three catches.

Oct 19 • 2:38 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Jordan Love accounts for two total touchdowns in win

Jordan Love had three touchdown passes dropped on SNF, finishing with 276 yards, one TD and one INT in the win over Dallas.

Oct 19 • 2:20 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Ryan Flournoy scores late touchdown in Week 6 defeat

Ryan Flournoy was targeted nine times in Week 6, finishing with 40 yards and a touchdown on seven receptions versus Green Bay.

Oct 19 • 1:37 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

George Pickens good for 73 yards on Sunday night

George Pickens was held in check for much of Week 6 but did make a few plays in the closing moments to finish with a 6-73-0 line.

Oct 19 • 1:19 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Population matters in politics

Population growth has big political impacts. Wisconsin’s population is growing but not as fast as some other states, so political experts predict the state will lose a congressional seat after the 2030 Census. And recent stats show the power of liberal Dane County in state elections — such a boost to statewide Dem candidates that...

Oct 19 • 1:01 AM EDT • Politics • royalpurplenews.com

St. Petersburg dengue patient, 73, shares experiences with the mosquito disease

Maurice Kurtz tells CIDRAP News he woke up with 101-degree fever and "ached so much." After tests for flu and COVID came back negative, he went to an urgent care clinic for a dengue test.

Oct 19 • 12:36 AM EDT • Health • wusf.org

Tough night for Dak Prescott in loss at Lambeau

Dak Prescott passed for 258 yards and a touchdown along with a pair of interceptions during a Week 6 loss to the Green Bay Packers.

Oct 19 • 12:21 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Patrick Mahomes throws for 272 yards in Week 6

Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes completed 23 of 30 passes for 272 yards, no touchdowns and one interception in Week 6

Oct 18 • 10:36 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

AmTrust announces plans to be bigger than Lloyd’s in London

The New York specialty insurer has hired Canary Wharf veteran Sir George Iacobescu to plan a skyscraper that would rival the Shard - and the project says a lot about how much London matters to its business

Oct 18 • 10:24 PM EDT • Business • insurancebusinessmag.com

Blake Corum handles 11 touches in Week 6 loss

Los Angeles Rams RB Blake Corum logs 60 total yards against Cardinals

Oct 18 • 9:48 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Political Shift Brewing on Michigan Farms Ahead of 2026 Midterms

Oct 18 • 9:35 PM EDT • Politics • yahoo.com

Bills QB Josh Allen Makes History With Wild Touchdown Pass

Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen made team history with a memorable touchdown. The post Bills QB Josh Allen Makes History With Wild Touchdown Pass appeared first on HEAVY.

Oct 18 • 9:27 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Omar Cooper Jr. hits triple digits in Week 6 vs. Patriots

New England Patriots wide receiver Omar Cooper Jr. had six receptions for 103 yards and a touchdown on a team-high seven targets in Week 6

Oct 18 • 8:43 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Geno Smith goes for 252 yards, TD in Week 6

New York Jets quarterback Geno Smith completed 20 of 30 passes for 252 yards, one touchdown and one interception in Week 6

Oct 18 • 7:45 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

AI Breach of Australian Healthcare Website Sparks Regulation Debate

Nearly three months after a June attack involving OpenAI on the Australian Medicare website, the Australian government received a five-paragraph email from the company informing officials of the breach. Although the Australian government has promised to take further action, such as establishing task

Oct 18 • 7:07 PM EDT • Health • carolinapoliticalreview.org

Cam Skattebo goes without a touch in loss to Saints, one week after critical OT fumble

Cam Skattebo has four fumbles in five games this season.

Oct 18 • 4:55 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

BUTCH’S BLOG: Unhealthy Health Care

Unhealthy Health Care Lately I’ve had to deal with some health problems—skin carcinomas to be precise. Too much sunning in my youth on the waves and beaches of New Jersey. My mother used to slather us with Coppertone. Wear hats, I say. And use that high SPF sunscreen. But for me, the horse is already way out of the barn. I’ve had two surgeries now, painful, but successful, one more to go. But I’m not here to whine. I’m lucky. I will survive. And, importantly, I have health insurance. Many are not so lucky. When the bill came from the clinic,...

Oct 18 • 4:47 PM EDT • Health • tillamookcountypioneer.net

Latino voters helped put Trump back in the White House. What's their next move?

The path to a U.S. House majority runs through heavily Latino districts in states such as Arizona, Colorado and Texas, where Democrats are counting on disaffected Trump supporters to swing back their way.

Oct 18 • 4:46 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org

Streaming’s Biggest Show Returns…and a Buzzy Genre Struggles

(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) Obviously, the big news of the week (if not month) is Netflix letting go of executive Bela Bajaria, their chief content officer. I’m going to cover this in my next “Most Important Story of the Week”, but I also have a data angle that I might publish before then. (Too much news this month, am I right?) But first, I have a bonus Streaming Ratings Report issue for you. Today’s article is a bit of a grab bag of topics I’ve wanted to write about, but couldn’t squeeze into the (already very long) Streaming Ratings Report issues. The NFL drives huge viewership numbers, so I’ve got a look at that. A whole bunch of TV shows returned to the traditional broadcast channels, and I have thoughts. And I have a quick look at adult animated shows, since a couple flopped earlier this month. Plus, the Emmys aired earlier this month, and we got some fun data bout how popular those nominated shows are and why I’m not optimistic about the show’s future. That’s a lot, so let’s dive right in. Subscribe Sports - Football Remains the King of Streaming Over the last two Streaming Ratings Reports, I sorta ignored the biggest “show” each week. (I was tempted to say “piece of content” but I know that word bugs folks.) In my database, I call these “specials”, and they sure are special. I speak of the king of American TV: football!!! Streaming football is back and, unlike some other sports, it routinely dominates all viewership. Probably the best way to show this is to update one of my favorite graphics, the “40 Million Hour Club”1 since football games have joined that club each week they’ve premiered: (Yep, that’s the data through 28-Sep, the first four weeks of the season. As a reminder, I take the average minute audience provided by Nielsen, factor out a percentage of linear TV viewers in home markets, and multiply the run time by the three-hour runtime.) Again, the numbers are huge. Let’s start with Netflix. They grabbed the rights to the bonus opening week NFL Kickoff game (which was on YouTube last year) and it put up 18.5 million viewers on average. That nets out to 47.4 million hours of estimated streaming hours. That’s good! Though, notably, it’s well below Christmas Day games from previous years. Compared to other streamers/broadcasters, that’s a bit of a mixed result. On one hand, Netflix’s 18.5 million average is about what YouTube claimed last year, though Nielsen used a bespoke methodology at that time, so I trust this viewership figure more. So that’s good. (The game also shifted from a Friday to a Thursday and that could have helped the viewership as well.) And Netflix continues to best Prime Video in total viewership—as you’ll see next—though Netflix has had much higher-profile (opening week and Christmas Day) games. NBC/Peacock’s opening game the night before averaged 25.1 million average viewers, which is just much bigger than Netflix (or Prime Video). That’s the big caveat to all streaming viewership records: even in success, they can’t compete with traditional linear TV. Previously, I called this my “hierarchy of viewership”, and the data keeps supporting that thesis. The downside for NBC is that this game’s viewership was down compared to previous years, though it may be a counting issue. Here’s a great chart from Sports Media Watch: Indeed, looking at all the opening week games across all windows, Netflix still lags the other primetime windows, but does well compared to the afternoon games: I saw a few folks make the case that streamers still lag traditional broadcasters in reach, and I’d add they really lag compared to “broadcast plus streaming” options like NBC/Peacock, ESPN/Disney+ and CBS/Paramount+. The best data I saw for this came from Samba TV, who charted reach through the 2025 season, and, wow. (Samba TV’s numbers are historically lower than Nielsen’s, so don’t compare their household figures to Nielsen’s hours, but use them as a proxy for the relative reach of the streamers.) The good news is Prime Video is NOT having a down year. Their opening Thursday Night Football game reached 18.6 million viewers (about what Netflix got), but that’s a high for Prime Video on Thursdays and the biggest Thursday night game since 2015. The TNF games the weeks of 21-Sep and 28-Sep continued this streak, getting 43.1 (16.8 million average viewers) and 42.5 total hours (16.6 million average viewers), which were both up from last year. Still, that continues the (typical) season slide: (For those new-to-streaming-football-numbers folks, the viewership declines for Thursday Night Football as the year goes along.) Overall, it appears as if Prime Video is now part of the “football habit”, be it for customers at home or out at places like bars and restaurants. And its viewership is slowly catching up to broadcast. One last chart shows this. Last season, Nielsen started adding out-of-home viewership to the charts, so I try not to do season-to-season comparisons as I did for the first few years. And while Nielsen added Big Data viewing this year, I’m going to compare the last two seasons. Here’s that chart, which shows the season-over-season gains: When it comes to streaming football, we have to keep a few seemingly contradictory thoughts in our head… First, streaming doesn’t come close to matching broadcast’s reach and, thus, viewership. Second, even with that gap, football is still the biggest “thing” on streaming. It’s very, very popular. Third, while some methodology changes have likely helped Prime Video’s numbers, their viewership does appear to be growing. Lastly, yeah, the NFL started the season off poorly, with week one dragging down the numbers in year-over-year comparisons. However—and again, methodology changes may have helped this—the viewership grew compared to previous seasons over the next couple of weeks. So football is still king. On streaming and off. Television - Adult Animation Continues to NOT Make the Streaming Charts In the last two reports, two adult-animated shows whiffed: Netflix’s animated comedy, Dang! Paramount+’s Sega-video-game-inspired fantasy/comedy, Golden Axe. Neither made the charts, but that’s usually the case for animated shows. I mean, here’s literally every animated show that’s made the Nielsen Original charts since the start of 2025: And one of those shows is G_abby’s Dollhouse_! A kids show! The problem with charts like this is that they don’t give you a sense of how many shows miss the charts. Netflix had at least eleven animated flops, including comedies like Big Mouth (a show everyone assumed was popular in the pre-Streaming Ratings Era), Long Story Short, Haunted Hotel, Mating Season, Strip Law, and Alley Cats, and action shows like Blood of Zeus, Castlevania: Nocturne, Devil May Cry, Splinter Cell: Deathwatch, and Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft. Prime Video had at least six animated misses, two in the same universe (Hazbin Hotel, Helluva Boss), three more comedies (#1 Happy Family USA, The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy and Kevin) and an action show (The Mighty Nein). Disney+ had MCU and Star Wars animated misses (Eyes of Wakanda, Marvel Zombies, Star Wars: Visions, Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord, and Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld) but I can’t tell how many of those shows were geared towards adults. HBO Max had Harley Quinn and Hulu had Solar Opposites. None of these shows made the charts! That’s a lot of misses! If I remade the chart with all those misses, here’s how it would look: Listen, I know the counter arguments. First, it’s cheaper to produce animated shows than live action. Fair enough, but with viewership this low, even that cheaper price point starts to not matter. Second, just look at the acquired charts. Hit animated comedies can generate viewership for years! Shows like The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, and Bob’s Burgers do really, really well. Fair enough, but streaming has failed to recreate the dynamic that Fox has mastered so well. That’s a problem for streaming still. Television - Emmys! The annual Emmys broadcast was a few weeks ago, and I’ve got data on how the nominees performed on streaming, plus hot takes on this year’s viewership (and the big news about the broadcast’s, er, streamcast’s future). We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… The top Emmy-nominated shows… ...why I’m worried about the future of the Emmys telecast... ...the pros of broadcast television ...and the cons... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. Coming Soon! Next week, we’ve got a double issue (since the weeks of 21-Sep and 28-Sep were so light), but then I’ll be all caught up after a deluge of streaming ratings data from Nielsen in September. In the meantime, I’m going to try to take a look at Netflix’s stats to explain why Bela Bajaria is out. But even light weeks give me plenty to talk about. The Great British Baking Show returns to Netflix and Apple TV has a buzzy new star-studded comedy. And Netflix has a controversial-but-appears-to-be-popular new game show. Plus big films like Toy Story 5, Backrooms and The Breadwinner head to streaming. And is East of Eden a hit? After that, The Kardashians return to Hulu, Prime Video has a reboot of Carrie, and Netflix has a horror show, Below. Disclosure Day heads to Peacock, The Housemaid heads to HBO Max_,_ a new Ben Affleck film, Animals, lands on Netflix, and Apple TV has a new John Cena action film based on, checks notes, Hasbro’s Matchbox toys. Okay. Longterm, some interesting TV production news. HBO Max ordered How to Survive Without Me, starring Kaley Cuoco, Joshua Jackson, Ray Romano and Rita Wilson, for fifteen episodes! I love that some streamers (or, at least, HBO Max) are finally ordering TV shows with more than eight episodes. In less wise production news, Landman does not appear to be coming back this year, since it just started production. Frankly, I don’t love this (get your shows out on time) but Landman is so popular, I doubt it matters.

Oct 18 • 3:59 PM EDT • Entertainment • entertainment.substack.com

The Elizabeth Holmes documentary is crushing it at the box office. See how much it's made so far.

Nathan Fielders nearly three-hour documentary about disgraced entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes is running up numbers at the box office

Oct 18 • 1:56 PM EDT • Entertainment • africa.businessinsider.com

Broncos have perfect wordy excuse for Bo Nix’s struggles

Bo Nix has not been playing well this season. The Denver Broncos quarterback has 1,049 yards, six touchdowns, three interceptions and completed 60.3% of his passes through six games and is on pace for the worst statistical season of his…

Oct 18 • 1:48 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Apple's first touchscreen MacBook could debut on November 6: Here's what to expect

After over a decade of not adopting touch displays on its Mac notebook lineup, Apple will finally be releasing its...

Oct 18 • 10:48 AM EDT • Technology • 9to5mac.com

Andy Cohen Reveals the Two ‘Real Housewives’ Franchises That Hold a Special Place in His Heart

Andy Cohen says two Real Housewives cities hold a place in his heart: New York and Atlanta. However, he stops short of naming one cast member as his favorite. “I will say New York and Atlanta have alw...

Oct 18 • 10:15 AM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.com

Director Naoki Hamaguchi Confirms Hard Mode in FFVII Revelation, Gives Us the Details!

Director Naoki Hamaguchi sits down with Hardcore Gamer to talk everything from Hard Mode and FITS to his thoughts here at the journey's end.

Oct 18 • 10:03 AM EDT • Technology • hardcoregamer.com

Kelly Clarkson’s Home Decor Collection Contained Bird Products Before Apparent Removal Amid Store Feud

Oct 18 • 9:43 AM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.com

Kim Kardashian Reveals ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Left Her ‘Traumatized’ and Crying Every Night

Oct 18 • 9:43 AM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.com

Latino voters helped put Trump back in the White House. What's their next move?

The path to a House majority on Capitol Hill runs through heavily Latino districts in states such as Arizona, Colorado and Texas.

Oct 18 • 8:00 AM EDT • Politics • wsls.com

Latino voters helped put Trump back in the White House. What's their next move?

The path to a House majority on Capitol Hill runs through heavily Latino districts in states such as Arizona, Colorado and Texas.

Oct 18 • 8:00 AM EDT • Politics • ksat.com

Hot Wheels' female executive wants more girls to be part of the brand

"It has been such an honor to be part of a brand that so many people love," Alex Ries, global head of Hot Wheels, said.

Oct 18 • 6:05 AM EDT • Technology • abcnews.com

Contributor: How much would Becerra's healthcare promises cost the state? Not even he knows

The Democratic candidate is campaigning on making California affordable. That's why the missing numbers matter.

Oct 18 • 6:00 AM EDT • Health • latimes.com

Why someone paid $2.8 million for a bottle of Macallan whiskey

A staggering sum paid for a bottle of whiskey this month begs the question: what goes into the price of such high-flying booze?

Oct 18 • 5:50 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Guardians just one part of huge weekend for Ohio sports

Postponements due to inclement weather usually don’t include a positive outcome. But Friday night’s Game 4 postponement, pushing the ALCS back a day, made this weekend in the rock and roll capital of the world that much more jam-packed, with the Guardians' push for their seventh World Series appearance at

Oct 18 • 1:35 AM EDT • Sports • mlb.com

Is International Business Machines (IBM) A Bargain Or Fully Priced?

International Business Machines has delivered a strong multi year share price run. With the stock recently at US$232.14 and cash flows in focus, the live question is whether that price still lines up with what the business can earn and return over time. Over the past 5 years the share price has gained 130.1%, which puts a lot of weight on the idea that IBM’s future cash flows can justify a much higher valuation than in the past. Fresh commitments in areas such as quantum computing and...

Oct 17 • 11:38 PM EDT • Business • simplywall.st

The AI bubble is about to burst — and a big market correction is coming

On Jan. 1, 2000, the world got a reprieve from a much-hyped technological Armageddon when it turned out the Y2K crisis wasn’t a crisis after all.

Oct 17 • 8:21 PM EDT • Business • nypost.com