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Medical emergency uncovers unexpected diagnosis, saves life

Caroliena McCoy's medical emergency led to the discovery of blood clots in her lungs and legs. Then the ECU Health team stepped in.

Oct 20 • 2:42 PM EDT • Health • ecuhealth.org

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

Legendary Entertainment Submits Takeover Offer for Lionsgate

The move comes after the "Dune" producer first eyed a potential acquisition of the Hollywood studio last year

Oct 20 • 1:40 PM EDT • Entertainment • finance.yahoo.com

Legendary Entertainment Submits Takeover Offer for Lionsgate

The move comes after the "Dune" producer first eyed a potential acquisition of the Hollywood studio last year

Oct 20 • 1:40 PM EDT • Entertainment • thewrap.com

‘Healthy Rounds’: Supercharging the Immune System

Dr. Kapil Meleveedu, director of UConn Health’s Blood and Marrow Transplant and Cellular Therapy Program, joins Dr. Anthony Alessi’s podcast

Oct 20 • 1:15 PM EDT • Health • today.uconn.edu

Trump uses antisemitic slur to defend GOP Kansas senator

GOP Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall Marshall is locked in an unexpectedly tight reelection battle against Democrat Adam Hamilton in what might be the biggest surprise of the midterms.

Oct 20 • 12:14 PM EDT • Politics • seattletimes.com

The non-gamer CEO racing to save Microsoft’s Xbox

Asha Sharma has cut thousands of jobs, consolidated studios, and rewritten the playbook. Insiders wonder if she’s saving the brand or preparing it for a non-Microsoft future.

Oct 20 • 12:10 PM EDT • Technology • fortune.com

Ranking the Rockies, 2026: No. 39, Blake Adams

After uneven production in the farm system, Adams made his lone MLB appearance in August.

Oct 20 • 12:00 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Arkansas’ September nonfarm job numbers hit a record high

A 1% gain in the number of nonfarm payroll jobs and a more than 8% decline in the number of unemployed helped push Arkansas’ jobless rate to 3.9% in September,...

Oct 20 • 11:23 AM EDT • Business • talkbusiness.net

Republic Business Credit Provides $15 Million Factoring Facility to Temporary Staffing Agency

Republic Business Credit has provided a $15 million factoring facility to an established Midwestern staffing agency. The funding delivers essential working capital to support daily operations, resolve an unexpected liability, and position the Company to execute its long-term growth plans.

Oct 20 • 10:00 AM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com

Shop from Black-owned businesses at this free festival

Celebrate #BlackJoyUnfiltered at Daptoberfest with 150+ Black-owned vendors Oct. 24 at Warren Central High School.

Oct 20 • 9:55 AM EDT • Business • mirrorindy.org

Tacoma Dome eatery gets 60 red points. Here are Oct. 12 Pierce Co. food scores

Seven food establishments received 35 or more red points last week, which means they must be reinspected by the Health Department.

Oct 20 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • thenewstribune.com

Study links rise in online sports betting to mental health issues

The study’s authors said gambling and sports betting have never been more accessible.

Oct 20 • 7:52 AM EDT • Health • wbay.com

Knicks’ OG Anunoby Drops Unexpected Photo Featuring Anne Hathaway

For Knicks fans, this week feels like Christmas came early.After 53 years of waiting, the championship banner finally goes up at Madison Square Garden, and the players get their rings in front of a crowd that has earned it.The players have spent the last few days at practice, getting ready for LeBron James and the […] The post Knicks’ OG Anunoby Drops Unexpected Photo Featuring Anne Hathaway appeared first on HEAVY.

Oct 20 • 6:58 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Commentary: Stable jobs support healthier Hoosiers and a more sustainable Medicaid program

Indiana's low unemployment rate is good news for Indiana’s economy, and also matters for the health and stability of Hoosiers.

Oct 20 • 5:00 AM EDT • Health • indianacapitalchronicle.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

UK unemployment rate falls in pre-budget boost, but firms keep cutting vacancies

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Oct 20 • 2:17 AM EDT • Business • theguardian.com

MTSU group selected for prestigious Berkeley Lab learning opportunity

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Five students from Middle Tennessee State University will travel to California this November for an immersive “mini-semester” at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, also known as Berkeley Lab. Nyah Bentley, Addison Berry, Tomy Chet, Sarah A. Holzmann, Gavin Liles and Gloria Silva will join groups from two other universities, Spelman College and the University of […]

Oct 19 • 7:01 PM EDT • Science • mtsunews.com

State extends UMOS’s contract to provide food, health and housing services in Milwaukee County

UMOS will continue providing food, housing and health services for low-income residents in Milwaukee County through June 30, 2027.

Oct 19 • 6:44 PM EDT • Health • milwaukeenns.org

Dan Campbell Reveals Surprising Possibility for Lions Offensive Line

The return of Cade Mays could create an unexpected opportunity for Juice Scruggs. Dan Campbell is considering ways to keep both offensive linemen involved as Detroit prepares for Green Bay.

Oct 19 • 5:44 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Prediction markets are now ‘bespoke insurance’ for businesses, and a Los Angeles restaurant group’s $60,000 hedge on Kalshi is the latest example

One unnamed hospitality group placed a $60,000 trade on Kalshi to offset revenue losses from the Dodgers’ World Series miss, according to the platform.

Oct 19 • 4:41 PM EDT • Business • fortune.com

11th-century 'pizza peel' discovered in Russia doubled as a medieval game board

Archaeologists in Russia unearthed a flat wooden "pizza paddle" that had a board game carved into it.

Oct 19 • 3:38 PM EDT • Science • livescience.com

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

Roman child’s grave contains coin to pay afterlife entry fee

The 1,750-year-old remains were unearthed under a construction site in Bulgaria.

Oct 19 • 2:48 PM EDT • Science • popsci.com

Announcing Call for Editors: American Political Science Review (APSR) -

The American Political Science Association (APSA) invites applications for the editorship of American Political Science Review (APSR), with a term beginning on June 1, 2028. APSR is one of the Association’s flagship journals now in [...]

Oct 19 • 12:00 PM EDT • Science • politicalsciencenow.com

This Week: Politics 101, 20th Street Bikeway, Muni Trivia

Here is a list of events this week. Monday/Tonight! SF Politics 101 with Joel Engardio. Learn how local politics shaped San Francisco. Monday/tonight, October 19, 5:30-6:45 p.m. SPUR Urban Center, 654 Mission Street, S.F. Wednesday 20th Street Protected Bikeway Ribbon Cutting. The Oakland Department of Transportation, city officials, Bike East Bay and other community partners will celebrate the completion of the 19th Street BART to Lake Merritt Urban Greenway. Wednesday, October 21, 1:30 p.m. 400 Thomas L Berkley Way, Oakland. Thursday 2026 Silver SPUR Awards. This SPUR event brings together elected officials and business, civic, and philanthropic leaders to celebrate four individuals and their contributions. Thursday, October 22, 4-7:30 p.m. Blue Shield of California Theater at YBCA, 700 Howard Street, S.F. Get tickets here. Friday Woman and Non-Binary Morning Ride. Join the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition for a socially distanced bike ride for women and nonbinary cyclists. Friday, October 23, 7:15-8:45 a.m. McLaren Lodge, 501 Stanyan Street, S.F. Friday Muni Trivia Night. Bring your friends or come solo and make some new ones. Friday, October 23, 7:30 p.m. Standard Deviant Brewing, Pier 70, suite 195, 1070 Maryland Street, S.F. RSVP here. Saturday Fifth Annual Firefighter Family Ride. Join SFFD, SF Safe Routes to School, and the SF Bicycle Coalition for a fun, low-stress bike ride through one of the city’s most beautiful routes. Saturday, October 24, 10:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Panhandle Park Blacktop (Fell & Ashbury) to JFK Promenade (Whale’s Tail). Sunday Canvas for No on Prop G. Join the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition to canvas for No on ‘G’ to save Sunset Dunes Park. Sunday, October 25, 10 a.m.-12 p.m. Marina Blvd & Laguna Street, S.F. Got an event we should know about? Drop us a line.

Oct 19 • 11:38 AM EDT • Politics • sf.streetsblog.org

Christiane Amanpour announces she will leave CNN next June

CNN legend Christiane Amanpour, the network’s chief international anchor, said Monday that she will sign off from CNN next June.

Oct 19 • 11:04 AM EDT • Business • cnn.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

How Boston Dynamics is turning robots into a real business

CFO Amanda McMaster explains how Spot found paying customers and why Hyundai's backing could help Atlas scale.

Oct 19 • 9:15 AM EDT • Business • fortune.com

New TV shows to watch this week: Tune in to ‘Eternally Yours’ on CBS, stream ‘Yaga’ on AMC+ and revisit ‘Servant’ on Apple TV

Plus, Connie Britton plays a mom under suspicion in "Phony," and "The Diplomat" returns for Season 4.

Oct 19 • 8:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.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

Lead with gut health substantiation, not speculation at SupplySide Global

From digestive comfort to immune health and mental wellbeing, discover how Bimuno GOS supports targeted product innovation. Visit booth 4249 at SupplySide Global to explore the science

Oct 19 • 6:18 AM EDT • Health • nutraceuticalbusinessreview.com

Business Starts for Oct. 19, 2026

In June, 1,412 new businesses filed InCorporation paperwork with the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, in order to do business in the state. Here is a selection of some of […]

Oct 19 • 6:01 AM EDT • Business • wbjournal.com

Opinion | Warning signs are flashing for Minnesota’s health care system

"However, having a strong health care system and having a sustainable health care system are two different things. Increasingly, Minnesota is struggling to achieve both," state Rep. Danny Nadeau writes.

Oct 19 • 5:59 AM EDT • Health • startribune.com

Video: Griffon Bookstore co-founder looks back on 50 years in business

Oct 19 • 5:07 AM EDT • Business • southbendtribune.com

Researchers have uncovered a likely origin of our allergies

While bacteria and viruses set off immediate alarm in our immune system, allergies follow a different path.

Oct 19 • 5:00 AM EDT • Technology • washingtonpost.com

Consumer apprehension grows as US retailers adopt AI-assisted pricing tools

U.S. consumers are uneasy about the increasingly high-tech ways that restaurant chains and major retailers are setting prices. Digital price tags are replacing paper ones in grocery aisles. AI tools

Oct 19 • 5:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • rockymounttelegram.com

Researchers have uncovered a likely origin of our allergies

While bacteria and viruses set off immediate alarm in our immune system, allergies follow a different path.

Oct 19 • 5:00 AM EDT • Health • washingtonpost.com

Burnham urged to launch inquiry into unequal health impacts of air pollution

Letter from 150 scientists, MPs and activists calls for action to protect lower-income and minority-ethnic communities

Oct 19 • 1:00 AM EDT • Health • theguardian.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

Celtics Get Unexpected Devin Carter Update After Roster Decision

Boston Celtics guard Devin Carter faces an unexpected setback just one day after securing a two-way contract. The post Celtics Get Unexpected Devin Carter Update After Roster Decision appeared first on HEAVY.

Oct 18 • 5:31 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Trust In Science Falls Fastest Among Those Left Behind

Poor access to healthcare, limited local influence over research priorities, and an unequal distribution of scientific benefits are undermining public

Oct 18 • 5:06 PM EDT • Science • eurasiareview.com

‘This is disgusting’: Nebraska’s independent Senate candidate rips dark money in politics

Democrats are hoping to whittle away at the Republican Senate majority in unexpectedly vulnerable red states like Nebraska. Incumbent Senator Pete Ricketts, a multimillionaire former governor, is defending his seat against independent challenger Dan Osborn, a Navy veteran and industrial mechanic. Osborn says he wants Congress to take back its power, end the war in Iran, lower fuel costs, so we “can worry about little league and bake sales.”

Oct 18 • 1:46 PM EDT • Politics • ms.now

I was annoyed at my noisy neighbor. I found out she had Parkinson's.

I was annoyed by my noisy upstairs neighbor until I learned she had Parkinson's. Helping her led to an unexpected friendship.

Oct 18 • 1:14 PM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Independent Journalist Warns That Global Health Diplomacy Is Deeply Unequal, Newsrooms Struggle To Survive

Independent journalism is increasingly important to understanding the political and financial forces shaping global health, yet the reporters covering these

Oct 18 • 11:46 AM EDT • Health • healthpolicy-watch.news

“Something out of Science Fiction” – Astronomers Discover a Star That Glows a Bizarre Shade of Green

A star’s color usually reflects its temperature, but white dwarfs can break that pattern, with models revealing unexpected shades of green, pink, and purple. A star that has drawn in rocky debris from its planetary system would appear chartreuse green to the human eye, according to new calculations by University of Warwick astronomers. As far

Oct 18 • 11:08 AM EDT • Science • scitechdaily.com

Pat Sajak Issues Bold Political Statement Dividing ‘Wheel of Fortune’ Fans

Sajak's message came on the heels of 'Jeopardy!' host Ken Jennings appearing in a political ad.

Oct 18 • 9:34 AM EDT • Politics • yahoo.com

Magic mushroom ingredient takes the fight out of aggressive fish

A psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms appears to have an unexpected effect: calming highly aggressive fish. Researchers discovered that low doses of psilocybin significantly reduced aggressive attacks in mangrove rivulus fish without disrupting their normal social interactions. The findings suggest psilocybin may selectively calm escalating aggression rather than simply suppressing all behavior.

Oct 18 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Scientists discover a surprising twist in Japan's 7,300-year-old volcanic apocalypse

A catastrophic volcanic eruption 7,300 years ago devastated Japan, but new research reveals that its impact on prehistoric populations was far more complex than previously believed. While some communities disappeared or declined, others unexpectedly flourished as survivors migrated, adapted, and found new ways to thrive.

Oct 18 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Man's Meta Muse Agent Sends Him Message So Bizarre That He Permanently Quits

A software engineer was stunned by an unexpected message he received from his Muse agent, convincing him to quit it for good.

Oct 18 • 7:50 AM EDT • Technology • futurism.com

Scientists Discover a Surprising New Effect of a Popular Blood Pressure Drug

A drug for high blood pressure could inspire future treatments for people with normal readings, thanks to an unexpected effect on the body’s energy-burning fat. Losartan already helps people control high blood pressure. New research suggests it could have a second use in activating brown fat, a tissue that burns energy to produce heat and

Oct 18 • 6:52 AM EDT • Science • scitechdaily.com

Move slow and make things: What Japanese craftsmanship can teach business about quality, patience, and expertise when AI makes speed cheap

AI makes it easier to produce more. The Japanese craft tradition of shokunin offers a guide to making something better.

Oct 18 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • fortune.com

Naomi Watts, 58, wants women to know about this unexpected menopause symptom – here’s how to fix it

We shouldn't just put up with discomfort as 'normal',

Oct 18 • 3:30 AM EDT • Health • goodhousekeeping.com

Consumer apprehension grows as US retailers adopt AI-assisted pricing tools

U.S. consumers are uneasy about the increasingly high-tech ways that restaurant chains and major retailers are setting prices.

Oct 18 • 3:11 AM EDT • Business • seattletimes.com

Consumer apprehension grows as US retailers adopt AI-assisted pricing tools

U.S. consumers are uneasy about the increasingly high-tech ways that restaurant chains and major retailers are setting prices.

Oct 18 • 3:07 AM EDT • Business • clickondetroit.com

Consumer apprehension grows as US retailers adopt AI-assisted pricing tools

U.S. consumers are uneasy about the increasingly high-tech ways that restaurant chains and major retailers are setting prices.

Oct 18 • 3:07 AM EDT • Business • news4jax.com

New guided search tool helps Kentuckians navigate treatment, mental health and recovery resources

By Leah Dick University of Kentucky Finding the right support for substance use disorder treatment, mental health care, recovery housing or naloxone distribution can be an important step toward better…

Oct 18 • 12:34 AM EDT • Health • nkytribune.com

Opinion - John Schickel: Public service, not politics — why I’m running for Boone County Commissioner

Editor’s Note: The NKyTribune is offering one free op-ed postings from NKY candidates in major races in which there is opposition for the November 3 General Election. All candidates may send op-ed’s…

Oct 18 • 12:32 AM EDT • Politics • nkytribune.com

Business Spotlight: Greenway Landscape Design & Build turns outdoor living spaces into true ‘bonus room’

In San Diego, the backyard has become more than a patch of grass — it’s where families gather, where friends connect and where homeowners invest in comfort and long-term property value. That shift has helped fuel the rise of outdoor living …

Oct 17 • 8:00 PM EDT • Business • sandiegouniontribune.com

SMH and United Healthcare at odds on Medicare Advantage pact

Dispute does not affect traditional Medicare coverage or commercial contract negotiations

Oct 17 • 3:59 PM EDT • Health • heraldtribune.com

SMH talks with United Healthcare on Medicare Advantage pact stall

Talks could affect 33,000 SMH and First Physicians Group patients in 2027 if a deal is not reached by Dec. 31

Oct 17 • 3:59 PM EDT • Health • heraldtribune.com

Readers Write: Political ads, sexual violence, the demise of Hourcar, letter writing

These ad makers must think our brains are mush.

Oct 17 • 2:28 PM EDT • Politics • startribune.com

Global survey links financial hardship to lower trust in science

Poor access to health care, limited local influence over research priorities and an unequal distribution of scientific benefits are undermining public confidence in science, experts warn, following the ...

Oct 17 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • phys.org

This bird flies thousands of miles, but its wings have a catch

Scientists have uncovered an unexpected trade-off in the wings of the European nightjar, a bird that migrates thousands of kilometers but sacrifices high-speed flight efficiency to hunt insects with remarkable agility. Even more surprisingly, it generates thrust on the upward wingbeat, a technique that could inspire new flying technologies.

Oct 17 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Mikel Arteta Defends Viktor Gyökeres: 'This is just a phase!'

Despite a prolific international break, Arsenal’s £55million man remains goalless for his club this season. Mikel Arteta has defended the Swede’s work rate, insisting small margins will soon transform his fortunes at the Emirates.

Oct 17 • 7:35 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Dear Abby: Daughter with grudges makes herself hard to love

Dear friend regularly attends funerals of people she does not know

Oct 17 • 7:00 AM EDT • Technology • chicago.suntimes.com

Campaigns already know a lot about voters. AI could change what they do with it.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping familiar campaign practices in Minnesota and beyond. Whether it can sway more votes is less certain.

Oct 17 • 7:00 AM EDT • Politics • startribune.com

Susan Dell is the one running the Dells’ $10 billion giving operation—and her biggest bets are on kids, health care, and UT Austin

Michael Dell may be one of the richest men in the world, but his wife Susan is helping decide where billions of their fortune go.

Oct 17 • 6:48 AM EDT • Health • fortune.com

Retail price impacts from the Iran war are uneven but add up for US households before midterms

High fuel prices are making it more expensive to drive, fly and buy some goods more than seven months into the U.S.-Iran war.

Oct 17 • 3:24 AM EDT • Politics • clickondetroit.com

Valkyries set tremendous entertainment offerings for Finals Games 1 and 2

Alanis Morissette, Goapele, Rita Moreno, Too $hort, Larry June, LaRussell set for Golden State Valkyries Finals games in San Francisco.

Oct 16 • 9:57 PM EDT • Entertainment • mercurynews.com

Juneau family business accused of embezzlement and theft from Switzer Village Mobile Home Park

Josette and Marciano Duran, of Duran Construction, dispute the allegations brought by Josette’s mother, who owns the mobile home park.

Oct 16 • 5:45 PM EDT • Business • ktoo.org

Scientists turn cancer-promoting protein into a weapon against tumors

Researchers have discovered that a protein known to help cancer cells thrive can also make immune cells more effective at destroying tumors.

Oct 16 • 5:40 PM EDT • Science • yahoo.com

Mayor Parker’s administration told Congress it doesn’t endorse Krasner and Bilal’s anti-ICE statements

In its report, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee portrayed Philadelphia as obstructive to ICE, saying that officials ignored 162 detainer requests between January 2024 and June 2026.

Oct 16 • 2:50 PM EDT • Politics • inquirer.com

Women with autoimmune diseases are more likely to be misdiagnosed with mental health conditions

More than 40% of women with autoimmune diseases are told they have psychiatric conditions, new research shows. That is only true of 33% of men.

Oct 16 • 2:23 PM EDT • Health • phillyvoice.com

Apple TV 4K and HomePod Mini Price Increases 'Much More Striking' Than New Features

Daring Fireball's John Gruber shared his first impressions of the new Apple TV 4K and HomePod mini 2 this week, and he concluded that the price increases the devices received are "much more striking" than any of the new features introduced. Prior to receiving price increases in late June, the previous Apple TV 4K started at $129 in the U.S., while the previous HomePod mini was priced at $99.

Oct 16 • 1:30 PM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

Bumble’s buyout, Netflix’s shake-up, Reese Witherspoon’s do-over, and a wild week in business

Bumble is going private, Reese Witherspoon is buying back Hello Sunshine, and a Netflix shake-up. Here's what happened while we were at the MPW Summit.

Oct 16 • 12:46 PM EDT • Business • fortune.com

Artificially Infused exhibition to move forward at Brazosport Art and Science Center

Art lovers will have an opportunity to experience the inventive works of photographer Charles Jesse Miller Jr., who died unexpectedly last month.

Oct 16 • 12:20 PM EDT • Science • thefacts.com

Veteran Players Manage To Kill New RuneScape In Just Two Weeks

RuneScape Reignited was set to launch in early December

Oct 16 • 11:00 AM EDT • Technology • kotaku.com

Harvard's SpaceX bet helped its endowment grow faster than the S&P 500

Harvard's endowment grew to nearly $68 billion, helped by the university's $2.2 billion stake in SpaceX at the end of June.

Oct 16 • 10:58 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Pat McAfee Net Worth in 2026: ESPN Salary, NFL Earnings and Business Ventures

Pat McAfee has turned a seventh-round punting career with the Indianapolis Colts into a sports media fortune, and his next ESPN contract could double what he al

Oct 16 • 10:03 AM EDT • Business • si.com

Biz Starts: These new businesses recently launched in CT

These new Connecticut businesses launched from June 25 to Oct. 14: Already a Subscriber? Log in Get Instant Access to This Article Subscribe to Hartford Business Journal and get immediate […]

Oct 16 • 9:00 AM EDT • Business • hartfordbusiness.com

USC scientists discover how to create a never-ending supply of cancer-fighting cells

USC scientists have discovered a way to create a potentially renewable supply of genetically engineered immune cells that can attack cancer and strengthen the body's natural defenses. By growing and modifying immature immune cells rather than mature ones, researchers developed a system that can continuously produce tumor-fighting cells inside the body.

Oct 16 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Letters: I applaud the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry for improving accessibility

On behalf of those who would like to enter the building through the same doors with their family and friends, thank you to the museum.

Oct 16 • 6:00 AM EDT • Science • chicagotribune.com

Jagex cancels RuneScape Reignited less than two weeks after it was announced, due to "a ton" of player feedback

A new and visually improved version of RuneScape has been scrapped shortly after its reveal, following fears it would split the playerbase.

Oct 16 • 5:07 AM EDT • Technology • eurogamer.net

Maple Leafs’ Kirill Marchenko Makes Unexpected Claim After Sabres Loss

One of the few bright spots for the Toronto Maple Leafs in their loss to the Buffalo Sabres on Thursday, October 15, was Kirill Marchenko’s performance.The 26-year-old forward scored his first hat trick with the Toronto franchise, helping the Leafs take a 4-2 lead.However, Jim Hiller’s team let their guard down, and following John Tavares’ […] The post Maple Leafs’ Kirill Marchenko Makes Unexpected Claim After Sabres Loss appeared first on HEAVY.

Oct 16 • 3:18 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Arizona babies take a bite out of research

Like many parents, Megan Rivas wants to give her 6-month-old daughter, Monroe, a healthy start, and one of the ways she’s going about it could make a big difference for more than just her daughter. Rivas is among dozens of parents across the Valley feeding their babies an unexpected research ingredient — avocados — as part of an Arizona State University College of Health Solutions study called Guac & Grow.

Oct 15 • 6:18 PM EDT • Health • news.asu.edu

WATCH: 2nd Congressional District candidate forum with Goodlander and Williams

Tune into a livestream of our candidate forum with Republican Lily Tang Williams and Democrat Maggie Goodlander, starting at 6 p.m. on Oct. 15.

Oct 15 • 5:28 PM EDT • Politics • nhpr.org

The Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave Expansion Pass Adds Stories For Those Other Four Protagonists The Game Was Supposed To Have

But damn is it gonna cost you to get

Oct 15 • 5:00 PM EDT • Technology • kotaku.com

Political heavyweights campaign in Michigan amid crucial Senate race

The most recent Decision Desk HQ polling numbers show El-Sayed holds a 4% advantage over Rogers.

Oct 15 • 4:55 PM EDT • Politics • newsnationnow.com

RuneScape Reignited Cancelled Less Than Two Weeks After Being Announced

Creative director Mod Ryan announced that RuneScape Reignited, a new game mode designed for both old and seasoned players to start fresh, has been canceled less than two weeks after it was first announced.

Oct 15 • 4:49 PM EDT • Technology • ign.com

Meditation Could Tune Into Signals from a Mysterious Source—And Enable Extrasensory Powers, Scientist Claims

The controversial idea might help explain experiences like remote viewing and out-of-body feelings.

Oct 15 • 4:48 PM EDT • Science • popularmechanics.com

City of Monticello rescinds Southern Business District

By Evan Newton, Editor The City of Monticello unexpectedly rescinded its Southern Business District zoning designation during a special-called meeting on Wednesday, Oct. 7. The Southern Business District was designed to provide zoning for large-scale industrial development within the city limits. The first reading was held on Tuesday, March 3 and the second reading was…

Oct 15 • 3:46 PM EDT • Business • themonticellonews.com

IP Saves the Day On Streaming

(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.) Before we get started, I wanted to highlight a new idea I saw from Real Good AI, proposing a ratings system for AI use. (H/T to Anthony Kaufman’s article highlighting this.) It would look something like this: In general, I think that this is a solid, middle-ground solution that should appease both the pro-AI camp (who love AI) and the anti-AI camp (who wants to know if what they’re watching didn’t come from humans). Regardless of your feelings on AI/LLMs—I’ll never use it for my writing—transparency is often the best solution to many problems. In general, I think way more media outlets need to be using way more AI disclosures. My quick “Yes and...” to this idea: what about ads? In particular, I hate it when I see or hear ads that are obviously AI-generated, but a person or voice says, “I used this product”. AI doesn’t use products! Just today, I watched a YouTube ad where a “person” said they use some sort of rain wind chime...but that’s not a real person! They didn’t use this product. (Especially since the video of the wind chime itself also appeared to be AI-generated...) I believe most traditional advertising already has standards like this anyway.1 Okay, on to this week’s issue. We’re covering the week of 14-Sep, and then next issue, I’ll be fully caught up with Nielsen’s new release schedule. In the future, I plan to put out Streaming Ratings Reports each Monday after Nielsen’s Thursday releases. Overall, we had some big new shows this week, like Prime Video’s Reacher spinoff_, Neagley_, which is off to a big, big start, and Netflix’s latest in its Monster anthology, which is their largest opening since June and the second-largest since One Piece came out in March. All that, plus Slow Horses returns, the trio of returning shows (Lioness, Reacher and Ted Lasso) continue to dominate the top tens, Paramount+’s latest crime drama, a big whiff for a Netflix original film and a precipitous drop for Netflix film charts, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more. Let’s dive right in! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, JustWatch and Reelgood interest data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of September 14th to September 20th 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe Television - IP For the TV Win Can I use the dirty word of entertainment journalism right now? IP. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone I said it. But IP works at the box office, and we’ve seen some evidence it works in TV too. Not as well, and not all the time—no absolutes here!—but often enough. And glancing at the Nielsen top ten…it worked this week! Take Prime Video, who has a monster hit in the crime drama Reacher. Would a spinoff work for that show? Yep! They binge-released Neagley, about a detective from the original Reacher series, and its eight episodes debuted to 29.6 million hours. Here’s how it stacks up to Reacher, one of Prime Video’s biggest shows: That’s great. Nearly as strong as Reacher’s opening! (Both shows started with eight, binge-released episodes, so this comparison is apples-to-apples.) Notably, Prime Video scheduled the debut of Neagley to overlap with Reacher’s most recent season, to help drive tune-in. Obviously, I love smart release strategies like that. And even though I wrote “obviously”, it’s not really that obvious, since streamers don’t often take advantage of natural overlaps like this_._2 Other data backs how well Neagley performed. It opened at second place on Samba TV for two weeks and got 51.7 million hours on Luminate. That’s the eleventh biggest opening on Luminate since May of 2024 and tied with Bridgerton’s third season opening. That’s a huge opening! Its IMDb is solid too, a 7.7 on 24K reviews. Netflix’s latest edition in the “Monster” series—which started with Jeffrey Dahmer and comes from Ryan Murphy—did well too, opening to 24.7 million hours. That’s the biggest opening for Netflix since I Will Find You in June, and second biggest since March. Unlike the Reacher series, this franchise is trending downward, though. The first Monster show—Dahmer - Monster—was giant. More than anything, I think this reflects that Netflix running out of extremely popular—if that’s the right word?—serial killers to feature. Still, the data says this is a very good opening. It made it to third place on Samba TV for two weeks. It also opened to 40.0 million hours on Luminate. That’s not quite as elite as Neagley, but still very, very strong. I’ll be honest: my priors coming into any given week are that IP works to help drive buzz for new shows, but TV shows need to stand on their own even more than movies, so they will succeed or fail based on their quality. But these two spinoffs definitely worked. Quick Notes on TV The top show, film or special this week? Football, again. Specifically, Prime Video’s season opener of Thursday Night Football. The games run long (three hours) but mainly a lot of people watch each game. That adds up to a lot of viewership. Paramount released the second season of MobLand on an unusual day for that service, a Friday! Often, they put their new shows out on a Sunday, as they did last year with a run of shows (Lioness, Tulsa King and Landman). MobLand didn’t make Nielsen in its first week, but on Samba TV it got to eighth and seventh place. Luminate had a smaller opening too, only 5.3 million hours. MobLand missed the Nielsen charts for its first eight weeks, so this season is off to a stronger start. (Bonus note: the first season streams on both Prime Video and The Roku Channel, but I only have it as Paramount+ on those charts.) I’ve mentioned a few times that foreign-language originals do lower numbers than English-language originals on Netflix most of the time. But I don’t usually emphasize what country those originals come from, and observationally, they tend to be from Western or Northern European countries, in general. So credit to Not a Stranger, a Turkish Netflix original, for breaking through on Luminate, getting to 7.9 million hours in its first full week on those charts. As I mentioned last issue, Crew Girl ended up making the Nielsen charts in its second week. That’s still a soft performance compared to many shows, but again this, one looks affordable. And if you’re curious, here’s how it stacks up to some other sports romance shows: 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… …about a new data source and how it drives streaming viewership… ...what reality show is struggling in its latest season…. ...what Netflix film bombed…. ...How Reacher, Ted Lasso, and Lioness are doing on the charts… ...what obscure sport put up great viewership numbers… …how far streaming films are falling… …all the flops, bombs and misses for the last week… …and more… ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you want an idea of just how much content you’d get in a full issue, check out this older issue. Coming Soon! Next week, we’ve got a double issue, then we’ll be all caught up with Nielsen’s data. Yes! The goal is to have my report out on the Monday after I get Nielsen’s data. So next issue, I’m looking at East of Eden, The Great British Baking Show, a Willy Wonka game show (that people are upset uses AI, but viewers might not care), and a Cosby show spinoff reboot on Netflix, and Brothers on Apple TV (starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey). That’s about it for TV, but who’s going to win the streaming week, The Breadwinner or Backrooms on streaming? Answer: Toy Story 5. Plus Netflix has a Unabomber film and a new Tyler Perry film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma tries to repeat The Substance’s run on MUBI, and Paramount+ has Jackass: Best and Last. Long term, Netflix is remaking Lonesome Dove. I love this choice, but man, there are a lot of westerns on TV right now. And they’re making Sega TV shows, including a Crazy Taxi TV show and Sonic show with an “edge”.

Oct 15 • 3:32 PM EDT • Entertainment • entertainment.substack.com

Americans are warming to a healthcare idea that once seemed politically impossible

A new national survey reveals an unexpected divide over Medicare for All, but Americans appear to agree on one thing: Healthcare is getting too expensive.

Oct 15 • 2:46 PM EDT • Health • fastcompany.com

‘Close to zero’: 4 AI chiefs say no companies have truly changed in response to AI

At a Fortune event, executives from Accenture, AXA, Mastercard and Mistral AI said the technology isn't the main obstacle to AI payoffs.

Oct 15 • 2:02 PM EDT • Politics • fortune.com