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Pope Leo tells Villanova and Notre Dame basketball teams he is neutral. Prevost has other ideas
Pope Leo told the basketball teams from Villanova and Notre Dame that in matters of sport, the pontiff is neutral. Then the pope, who was born Robert Prevost, said his former self might disagree.
Why Joanne's New Nemesis on 'Nobody Wants This' Season 3 Looks So Familiar
A new season of Nobody Wants This just dropped on Netflix, and if you found yourself wondering where you've seen one of the new faces before, you're definitely not alone. I'm talking about Andrew Rann...
How to grow a nest egg while protecting it from inflation and market drops
There is nothing more agitating for everyday investors than markets falling out of bed and rising inflation eating away at their wallets.
Opinion | Brace Yourself for an ‘Unusual Election’
Democratic sweep or not, politics are about to change.
Greg Abbott Runs the GOP’s Top Political Machine. Can It Keep Texas Red?
The country’s longest-serving governor is trying to notch another victory for the GOP — and himself.
JACOB MISIOROWSKI WAS ABSOLUTELY HAMMERED AT THE BREWERS PARADE
Jacob Misiorowski might be one of the most intimidating pitchers in baseball, but at the Milwaukee Brewers’ World Series championship parade, he showed fans a completely different side of himself. The Brewers ace was ready to celebrate, and one fan made sure he had a drink in his hand. As Misiorowski rode along the parade…
Rex Ryan reportedly lobbying for Maryland coaching job
Rex Ryan has been a fixture of the media for a decade now, having joined ESPN after he was fired by the Buffalo Bills following the 2016 season. While he’s a media veteran at this point, it appears that Ryan has not fully rid himself of the coaching bug. According to a story from Jeff…
Alina Habba’s Husband Ignited Drama in Trump’s Circle. Now He’s Under Scrutiny.
Turhan Mildon, who married Alina Habba this summer, presents himself as a 29-year-old billionaire with ties to global leaders. His story has inconsistencies.
How Will the Dodgers Increase Shohei Ohtani’s Adaptability in 2027
The Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani was a shell of himself in the latter stages of 2026. It was just one of the reasons that they had an abbreviated postseason. From the beginning of July to end of the season the two-way player had just two home runs at the plate and was forced …
Video: Opinion | Elon Musk’s $450 Million Political Gamble
Why did Musk donate about $450 million to the elections? On “The Ezra Klein Show,” a co-author of “Muskism,” Quinn Slobodian, argues that Musk is insulating himself by making his businesses too essential for any future administration, Democratic or Republican, to rein in.
Hackers just stole $6 billion in crypto. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last
For years, the crypto industry has tried to shed its affiliation with crime while marketing itself as a safe alternative to traditional banking and investing. But once again, a record-shattering heist is deepening concerns about crypto’s vulnerabilities.
I worked out with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Why I made him mad
VENICE, CALIFORNIA — I broke a sweat before I even entered Gold's Gym in Venice, California, the gym where Arnold Schwarzenegger built himself from scratch long before he was the
The Guardian view on 50 years of The Selfish Gene: flawed, outdated, yet still a model of truly popular science writing
Editorial: Richard Dawkins’ first work has thrilled fans and frustrated critics for five decades. The science has moved on, but any writer looking to supplant its place must learn its lessons
Will Wade Has Put Himself In A Hilarious Situation
Will Wade has put himself between a rock and a hard place.
Milan and Juventus set sights on Ghilardi
Daniele Ghilardi is carving out an increasingly important place for himself in Gian Piero Gasperini’s pecking order. After a season with few chances, the 2003-born defender has begun to find greater...
TN Politics: Election Day nears and nude photos enter the chat
State Sen. Brent Taylor says telling the truth about sending unsolicited nude selfies to multiple people makes him honest. Otis Sanford says it should make him disqualified.
Giants Reveal Potential Jaxson Dart Return Date
Had someone told New York Giants fans that the team would be leading the division entering Week 8 of the NFL season, the logical assumption a fan might have had is that quarterback Jaxson Dart had taken the next step in his development and cemented himself as the future of the franchise.Instead, it’s been a […] The post Giants Reveal Potential Jaxson Dart Return Date appeared first on HEAVY.
‘Golden Bachelor’ subtly addresses breakup with Peg Munson
‘Golden Bachelor’ star Mel Owens subtly addressed his breakup with Peg Munson after he posted a gym selfie on Instagram.
SLOPAGANDA! How to combat MAGA’s AI manipulation POISONING politics
Slopaganda has spread far and wide in the midterm elections, and there’s only one question: Can it be stopped? Brandy Zadrozny, a senior enterprise reporter for MS NOW, provides answers in the latest episode of The Deep End, a digital video series about how disinformation is changing your world — from politics to health to culture. Her investigation covers the rise of AI-generated propaganda and President Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of it, the shadowy operatives who used it to swing an election in Florida, and Brandy’s own slopaganda experiment that shows why AI technology is in desperate need of guardrails that protect voters and democracy itself.
DataFi Donation Ceremony at the Ministry of Health-Remarks by ADCM Steve Bremner
DataFi Donation Ceremony at the Ministry of Health Remarks by Acting Deputy Chief of Mission a.i. Steve Bremner (…) I’m pleased to join the Ministry of Public Health and our implementer, Palladium, today to hand over IT equipment including 80 laptops, 300 tablets, and Monitoring and Evaluation reporting tools for CSBII. Good health decisions start with good data. When a health worker in a remote commune notices unusual fever cases, that information must reach district and national teams fast. Every hour counts. Fast, reliable data helps the Ministry detect an outbreak early, send teams where they’re needed, and stop a disease before it spreads. These laptops and tablets will help do exactly that. They’ll strengthen Madagascar’s health information system and disease surveillance so health workers can collect, report, and use data faster and more accurately. This support reflects the America First Global Health Strategy. Under this strategy, the United States works directly with partner governments based on country ownership, shared investment, and accountability for results. Together, we’re strengthening Madagascar’s ability to detect and respond to outbreaks quickly though the MOU signed in December 2025. This work protects Malagasy families and the American people. Today also marks a transition. The Data.FI project is ending, but the work will continue. Palladium will continue to carry these same activities forward through a new project, AFGHS Palladium, under the State Department’s Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy. The new project will put an even stronger focus on results. Mister SG, your ministry’s close collaboration with Data.FI made today possible. I hope you will bring the same commitment to this new project. Together, we can deliver even greater results and speed up the transfer of skills to Ministry teams. Our shared goal is to build the ministry’s capacity to lead, manage, and sustain these systems on its own. That is Madagascar’s path to self-reliance. Equipment alone doesn’t stop an outbreak. People do. To the health workers and data managers who will use these tools: thank you for your dedication. To the Ministry: we count on you to put these devices to work quickly, keep them in good condition, and protect the data they hold. That’s how this investment will deliver results for years to come. The United States stands with the Government of Madagascar. We commend the Ministry of Public Health for its leadership. We look forward to continuing our collaboration through AFGHS Palladium and beyond. Thank you. Misaotra betsaka.
Could AI ever build itself? Scientists map the road to the 'last AI built by humans.'
Researchers hope recursive self-improvement could tackle the skyrocketing costs of developing advanced AI models. But is it viable?
The politics of war
Israel went to the polls last Tuesday and it is the turn of the United States next Tuesday. The differences in the two elections are self-evident. Compared with the US, which has favourable geography and does everything at scale, Israel is tiny and part of an unstable region. For its elections, it has adopted an almost pure form of proportional representation based on lists. This encourages multiple parties and can make it almost impossible to form a government, as we can now see. The US system is complex in its own way but discourages third parties. Yet for all the differences in size, geography, and political systems, the fates of the two countries are closely connected. Israel has come to depend on the US to sustain its military strength, and over the past few tumultuous years that dependence has created resentment in the United States. The Biden administration was punished for appearing to give Netanyahu a blank check after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, and not holding Israel back as it employed ruthless tactics in Gaza. Because of the treatment of Palestinians, American views of Israel have grown progressively more negative over the past few years. Only a third now support the Israeli government. While on the left, this is largely because of how Israeli forces have operated in Gaza and, more recently, how the settler movement has behaved in the West Bank, for the American right the issue has been about how Benjamin Netanyahu persuaded Donald Trump to forget his wariness about more Middle Eastern wars and agree to a joint attack on Iran, which has gone badly wrong. The Palestine question was not a big issue for the two large Jewish blocs in last Tuesday’s election. Both supported a tough response to Hamas after October 2023 and neither accepts a two-state solution. It was, however, the threat posed by the ethno-nationalist policies of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the two extreme members of Netanyahu’s coalition, and their tolerance, even encouragement, of settler violence, that brought out the Arab voters. (In principle this should strengthen their position though to turn into real power would require the ‘Change Bloc’ overcoming their opposition to involving Arab parties. The alternatives are a National Unity government, defection from the Change Bloc to Netanyahu, or deadlock and another round of elections in the new year.) There was also broad support for the war against Iran among the Jewish parties. The difficulty here is that the objectives behind the war have yet to be met, and that continuing with military operations depends on the United States. In this way the two elections have come together at a crucial moment. If Netanyahu hoped that a victory over Iran would help him retain his majority, cementing his legacy as an Israeli war leader, it did not work out that way. Trump also expected a great victory about which he could boast. He promised at most the end of a hateful and aggressive regime, with a record of hostility to both the United States and Israel, or at least the elimination of Iran’s military capabilities and the end of its nuclear programme. Eight months on, there is not much to boast about; vital objectives remain elusive: the Iranian regime is even more hardline than before; the international economy is barely coping with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz; and Saudi Arabia is struggling with an unwanted conflict with the Yemeni Houthis. For all these reasons, the Iran War has been a dark cloud hanging over both elections. Yet the issue has been approached in different ways. Netanyahu sought to push the issue before the election while Trump has been more cautious. Trump’s essential claim is that there is nothing to worry about and he’s still working out what final steps need to be taken to provide a definitive conclusion to the conflict. Netanyahu’s final pitch was that there was lots to worry about. He focused on Israel’s dire security situation, with the Iran War unfinished and the prospect of imminent economic isolation because of international sanctions. For him it is imperative to defeat Iran decisively, and without delay. Why this different response to the same war? Part of the answer lies in how public opinion in the two countries responded to the war. In this post, I show how this came about. We await the outcome of the US midterms but know the result, at least in terms of the share of the vote if not yet the shape of the new government, of the Israeli election. With the elections out of the way Netanyahu is pressing for another round in the war. Trump is less sure. I conclude with thoughts on the importance of how he decides.
Brash architect of Trump’s midterm strategy could become midterm scapegoat
Intense and self-assured, James Blair has had the president’s backing, but a major loss could set off a search for someone to blame.
Opening the EU debate again is clearly a political minefield. But we have to do it
Andy Burnham must tread cautiously, but Brexit was a very grave act of self-harm – and he is right to address it, says Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins
In China, the War on Mosquitoes Has Entered the A.I. Era
Using sensors developed for self-driving cars, a Chinese start-up claims it can track and destroy tiny flying targets while avoiding people, pets and reflective surfaces.
"Put Yourself In Shape": Trump Body-Shames Reporter Over Health Question
In a similar instance in Kentucky, he boasted of Republican candidates' handsomeness to further their cause in the US midterms.
Britt McHenry says ‘truly vile’ comment sparked drink-throwing incident: ‘I was sticking up for myself’
Former ESPN reporter Britt McHenry says she threw a drink at a man after he said “something truly vile to me” during an incident at a Washington Wizards game last
Guest columnist: Science of finding cancer early just proved itself
Residents of Houston’s Fifth Ward live adjacent to documented creosote contamination. The neighborhood is 94% non-Hispanic Black. It is a state-designated cancer cluster. Those who live there do not need […]
Reviewer Gets His Hands On Trump Mobile’s $499 Phone, And What He Finds Is “Absolutely Brutal”
“Seeing a tech guy speak so freely about the current state and evil of the Trump administration and Trump himself was so refreshing,” a netizen said. Celebrities, Entertainment
Monte Carlo Launches Bayes, an AI Teammate That Fixes Production AI Agents and Their Data
The agent trust platform delivers self-improving agents, so enterprises can scale trust at the speed of AI SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 29, 2026 — Monte Carlo has launched Bayes, an AI teammate that brings its platform capabilities into a single system to autonomously detect, troubleshoot, and fix issues across agents and the data they run on. […]
Caesars Entertainment Rolls Out Free Parking and Holiday Discounts for Nevada Residents
Las Vegas locals have a new reason to head to the Strip this holiday season. Caesars Entertainment is offering Nevada residents free self-parking and 25% off food and drinks at…
Hall Reinvented Himself to Help Brewers Win World Series Title
After battling persistent injuries, DL Hall transformed his delivery and velocity and became a late-inning anchor during the Milwaukee Brewers’ historic World Series win.
The ‘Pain in the Ass’ Math That Could Save Vibe Coding From Itself
A new startup called &Truth is joining the race to automate formal verification, a painstaking process that uses math to prove software works as intended.
Alejandro Balde’s last chance to prove himself at Barcelona?
Injuries mean he could start against Alaves on Saturday.
Michigan Football edge rusher Tariq Boney exceeding freshman expectations
Though expected to be a bit-part contributor, true freshman edge rusher Tariq Boney is carving out a big role for himself in Michigan’s rotation:
US Health Secretary RFK Jr. opens access to some unapproved peptides
Kennedy has supported broader access to peptides, calling himself a \
Anthropic’s business plan: Build God or die trying
Anthropic faces intense competitive pressure and huge fixed costs. Can Claude build itself fast enough to succeed?
'South Park' has made a major change with its new season
"South Park" opened its 29th season by rebranding itself as "South America," but that wasn't the only change the show had in store.
Boo-ming business: KSU expert explains why consumers spend on Halloween
The National Retail Federation projects Halloween spending to reach a record $13.5 billion. Kennesaw State's Patrick Fennell explains how nostalgia, family traditions, social connections and self-expression drive spending on costumes, candy and decorations.
The Israel debate reshaping Jewish American politics
“There are plenty of people who believe, as I do, that Israel has a right to protect itself,” says David to Lauren, both pictured below, over the dinner table. Subscribe “How does starving children protect Israel?” she replies. “I don’t think Israel is intentionally starving children.” “It’s a little bit absurd to be sitting here talking about all of these very specific things,” Lauren says, “as opposed to looking at the totality of him as a candidate, and the 90% of things that you agree with him on.” This is a snapshot from a conversation between a Jewish father and daughter in Michigan ahead of the crucial Senate race. Lauren supports the Democratic candidate, Abdul El-Sayed. Her father is undecided. That is mainly because of El-Sayed’s stance on Israel, one that mirrors a growing wing of the party that has become critical of the US-Israel relationship following the war in Gaza. You’re reading FourSight, a newsletter from Channel 4 News’ expert journalists explaining the complexities of the biggest global stories Could that alienate Jewish American voters who have a strong connection to Israel - and the majority of whom have voted Democratic? A shifting stance on Israel “An ally that takes your money to push you into wars you shouldn’t be fighting is not an ally,” El-Sayed recently told ABC News, referring to the Iran war and how some Americans believe that Israel pushed President Trump into the conflict. Foreign policy has become an economic issue that’s hitting Americans’ pockets, with the soaring cost of petrol and diesel. El-Sayed, pictured below, has opposed military aid for Israel and accused the nation of genocide in Gaza. That led to the pro-Israel lobby group, AIPAC, funding his opponent, Hayley Stevens, to the tune of $30m during the Democratic primary here. “I frequently criticise AIPAC because I think the way that they are pouring dollars into defeating Abdul and others around the country… is really corrosive to American democracy,” Brad Lander says at a canvassing event in Detroit. Lander, a Jewish Democratic congressional candidate in New York, is an ally of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and has come to campaign for El-Sayed. “Democrats and Americans don’t want to keep paying for Netanyahu’s wars,” he says. “They want a reset in the US relationship with Israel.” The 2026 election has clearly been a bruising one for AIPAC; the Wall Street Journal reported that, in an unpublished letter, the group described the cycle as one of the “most challenging environments in recent memory”. Share And significantly, after the midterms, the group will stop direct contributions to candidates through one of its political action committees. Voters’ concerns We followed a group of Jewish canvassers around one suburb in Detroit. They think that among the 130,000 Jewish voters in Michigan, between 20 and 30,000 are undecided. In a swing state where El-Sayed beat his primary rival by just 13,000, that could prove pivotal. We meet one voter, Jen Friedman, pictured below, who has a “Democrats for Rogers” sign, referring to the Republican candidate. The issue of Israel is very important to her because “having a safe haven is crucial”, she tells me. “What I see is one candidate, Mike Rogers, who is associating himself with people who are very proudly American,” says Jen. “Abdul, on the other hand, is associating with people who say they are anti-American.” Friedman raises two issues. Firstly, Hasan Piker, a left-wing streamer who has campaigned alongside El-Sayed and has been criticised for his comments on the US and Israel. [ ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/who-is-hasan-piker-the-socialist) [ Why Hasan Piker thinks the US needs a socialist Trump ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/who-is-hasan-piker-the-socialist) Anushka Asthana · Aug 19 [ Read full story ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/who-is-hasan-piker-the-socialist) The other concern regards an attack on a Michigan synagogue back in March. The FBI said the man was inspired by Hezbollah and had lost relatives in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon. El-Sayed condemned the antisemitic attack, but also said “hurt people hurt people”. That upset many here, with El-Sayed apologising numerous times for his choice of language. Jews for Abdul As we follow the canvassers, there are still plenty of lawn signs supporting El-Sayed. Elissa Driker, pictured below, runs out of her house wearing a “Jews for Abdul” t-shirt. “I feel like the values that Abdul has align with how I live my Judaism,” she tells me. She says “Abdul is not Hasan Piker, so I don’t conflate them”. I ask why Piker keeps coming up. “It gets weaponised. I don’t know if you watched the debate the other night, but talk about… weaponising fear and weaponising anxiety and all that Islamophobic dog-whistling that was coming towards Abdul.” I also talk to Elissa about how Americans more broadly appear to be questioning the US-Israel relationship and whether American Jews were ready to do that too. “A lot of American Jews are. My experience is absolutely the tide is turning.” For the first time, Gallup found this year that Americans now sympathise more with the Palestinians than the Israelis. In another poll of Jewish American voters, 65% said they were pro-Israel but also critical of Israeli government policies, 52% support cutting or eliminating aid to Israel. Father and daughter Back at the dinner table, I bring up those polls with David Fink. Why does he think Americans sympathise less with Israelis? [ ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/how-support-for-israel-in-us-is-declining) [ How support for Israel in US is declining ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/how-support-for-israel-in-us-is-declining) Kiran Moodley · May 4 [ Read full story ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/how-support-for-israel-in-us-is-declining) “Because the news media and the extremes of both parties are so willing to tell what I think is a false narrative.” Lauren chimes in: “Do you really think the actions of Israel have nothing to do with the shift in the sympathies?” “I think that’s very relevant,” he replies. “I just don’t think that people really have a full understanding.” Lauren again: “It sounds like you’re saying that the shift is due to how the atrocities are being described, as opposed to what the actual atrocities are.” “There have been some things that shouldn’t have happened,” David says. “I think the polling is being driven by politicians who are taking advantage of this issue.” Lauren then asks, “I’m curious what your response would be if my children were killed in an Israeli airstrike and someone said there have been some things that shouldn’t have happened?” A long pause from her father. “Any reference to my grandchildren has a very deep emotional impact on me. Well done,” he says. “I have an empathy for any civilian in war and I don’t mean to belittle those losses. The loss of any one life is a horrible thing. But it doesn’t make it a war crime and it doesn’t make it genocide.” Lauren and David cannot agree but tell me how proud they are of one another for sticking to their convictions and for agreeing to let me sit in on their conversation. I cannot thank them enough for their time, and hope their honesty informs and educates many people during such a fraught election. Abdul El-Sayed: The candidate testing the US - Israel relationship Thanks for reading our latest FourSight newsletter. Subscribe to receive free weekly newsletters from Channel 4 News. Subscribe Share Channel 4 News Leave a comment
Commentary: Netflix is going through an identity crisis
Netflix has found itself in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. The streamer laid off around 1,000 employees — its largest staff cuts since 2022 — and underwent
A golden age of science is coming
It’s almost hard to remember, but just a few years ago, a lot of very smart people thought that science was in terminal decline. Respected researchers were writing papers with titles like “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time”, and “Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science”. In 1996, science writer John Horgan even published a book called The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age. The fundamental idea was that the Universe only has so many insights to discover, and that we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit. It was the idea that Joseph-Louis Lagrange expressed when he said that “we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.” As the big ideas and the simple ideas get mined out, we’re forced to throw ever more brains at the mysteries of nature just to keep scientific progress going at a fraction of its old pace: It looked like science was hitting a wall. Then along came AI. It’s far too early to tell how much AI will eventually speed up the growth of total factor productivity. But already we can see signs of a speedup in science. Anthropic Founder Jack Clark assembled some of the hopeful data points in a recent lecture: [ Dror Poleg@drorpoleg "If you pick different parts of science, you see the same pattern show up: Progress is accelerating, and it has started to accelerate in the last two years." Jack Clark @jackclarkSF I’m speaking at the IMF in an hour about the singularity and why I believe it has begun and the choices we'll need to make. Watch live here: https://t.co/Hj9HzcXx5h 6:08 PM · Oct 18, 2026 · 21.2K Views 2 Replies · 10 Reposts · 123 Likes ](https://x.com/drorpoleg/status/2111882070376980529) Anthropic is accelerating its investment into drug discovery, and is already announcing some impressive preliminary results: [ BioTender@Junioryu136689 BREAKING: Anthropic unveils early results from six Claude-powered drug development collaborations. • 70% shorter CAR-T signaling domain • ~35,000 antibody designs • >10× tighter antibody binding • 89% less batch-record review time Still largely preclinical. Anthropic @AnthropicAI Over the past few months, Anthropic scientists have engaged in deep research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines. We've also begun drug discovery efforts of our own. In doing so, we’ve learned much more about how Claude can support the many stages of 9:43 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 11.2K Views 3 Replies · 24 Reposts · 205 Likes ](https://x.com/Junioryu136689/status/2115197821150495150) Claude also appears to be enabling rapid progress toward a treatment for food allergies. OpenAI, meanwhile, announced a possible breakthrough treatment for neurodegenerative disease. Meanwhile, Google Cloud Chief Scientist Pushmeet Kohli has a list of recent scientific advances that have been enabled by its new Gemini model, including breakthroughs in nuclear fusion reactor design, rare disease research, and quantum computing: [ Pushmeet Kohli@pushmeet Gemini 4 Argon is a step change in model performance. In recent weeks, it has had a transformative impact on the Science projects in our team at @GoogleDeepMind and our external collaborators, and helped make a number of remarkable advances across scientific disciplines. 🧵👇 4:47 PM · Oct 13, 2026 · 36.5K Views 8 Replies · 41 Reposts · 497 Likes ](https://x.com/pushmeet/status/2110049807385702623) But as cool as these stories sound, they’re just very minor, preliminary efforts. There are a number of reasons to think that AI is going to propel us into a golden age of scientific discovery. That age might not last forever — AI might still run into diminishing returns eventually. But the next few decades are probably going to be an absolutely amazing time for human science. The number of “effective researchers” is no longer limited The most important input into science is scientists themselves. Until this year, that meant human brains — talented, highly trained human brains. The number of trained human brains could be increased by sending more people to grad school, but only to a point — the smartest people tend to be sent into the hardest research fields first, and if you 10x the number of researchers, the average quality will go down. This constraint was already starting to bite, as Ekerdt and Wu argued in 2024: We argue that a substantial portion of the downward historical trend in U.S. research productivity is a composition effect resulting from self-selection in researcher ability and the dramatic expansion of the research sector…[W]e find that this composition effect has lowered average researcher ability by between 37% and 53%[.] And of course, low fertility was making the problem worse, because fewer children meant fewer people who were able to become future scientists. AI just blows up this constraint completely. If an AI agent can function as an autonomous researcher, there’s no constraint on the number of researchers in the world — you can just build more of them, by building more computer chips and data centers that enable the running of more AI agents. Whether or not massive hordes of agents can collaborate to solve individual problems much faster, increasing the number of agents allows them to tackle many different research questions in parallel. What’s more, these AI “researchers” can be trained incredibly quickly compared to human beings. A human scientist takes decades to train, and more years to reach the frontier of their research field by diligent reading and conversation. This is the “burden of knowledge”, and it’s commonly believed to be one reason ideas have been getting harder to find — by the time human scientists can get up to speed, they’re often so old that their ideas are no longer novel. AI just annihilates this constraint — it can assimilate the entire literature and reach the frontier of research extremely quickly, and it can also tell human scientists where the frontier lies without forcing them to discover that for themselves. It can also pivot to new research directions more easily than humans can. And there’s also a self-reinforcing economic cycle here. Because scientific advances enable higher GDP, they enable more resources to be invested into the creation of yet more electronic “scientists”. Now that doesn’t mean the amount of scientific research goes to infinity — there may still be some essential bottleneck task that human researchers are still needed to perform. There are some indications that AI’s progress on open-ended conceptual research tasks is slower than in other dimensions, and it may be that humans are still needed to provide some of this long-term conceptual thinking. I’d bet against this being true for much longer, but it might be true for a long time. Even in this most “pessimistic” case, though, the amount of effective capital that scientists can use to leverage their work just went up by a lot. AI eliminates the theory bottleneck Science proceeds by an iterative process of theory and experiment. The theory part of that cycle is typically short, but non-trivial — it took a couple of years after the blackbody radiation spectrum was observed for Max Planck to come up with the quantum hypothesis to explain it, and decades longer before quantum theory as we now know it was created. It took about a year for Watson and Crick to figure out the shape of DNA after the requisite data was gathered. AI will basically eliminate the theory bottleneck entirely — or at least shorten the turnaround time between experiment and theory by an order of magnitude. AI is an absolute beast at math. Recently, an OpenAI model solved some of the most important open problems in computer science, math, and theoretical physics, and no one even batted an eyebrow because that sort of triumph is becoming increasingly commonplace. One of those solutions was a proof that the Standard Model of Particle Physics could be mathematically well-defined — a problem that human theorists had so far been unable to tackle. Not all research relies equally on theory, but understanding novel experimental results almost always involves some important component of either mathematical or spatial reasoning. That part of the task has now been made much, much faster. And on top of that, science is now open to a greater number of humans who aren’t naturally good at theorizing. AI can read the whole literature Much of the work of human scientists involves reading and understanding endless amounts of papers and going to endless conferences and seminars. The purpose of that work is to understand the existing scientific literature. Understanding the literature allows scientists to do the following things: Come up with new ideas for hypotheses to test Avoid doing research that someone else has already done Synthesize approaches from different areas or fields AI can reduce this effort to almost zero. Consider this excerpt from OpenAI’s blog post about their new research into neurodegenerative disease: The team divided the analysis among thousands of AI agents powered by GPT‑Rosalind, an approach we call distributed biological reasoning. The agents examined a whole-brain CRISPR atlas…a dataset showing how gene disruptions affect different types of cells across the mouse brain. Each agent investigated a gene disruption, analyzed cellular responses, searched scientific literature, and proposed explanations for the results. Their reports were combined into a reasoning atlas linking genes, cellular effects, relevant publications, and possible biological mechanisms. The research team estimated that comparable human analysis and literature review, conducted one perturbation at a time, would take months to a year. The agents reproduced findings from human analyses while uncovering additional leads. Their assessments of novelty and scientific value also aligned with judgments from blinded human experts. These findings help prioritize further experiments needed to test the proposed biological mechanisms. Some of these insights point to new leads for understanding brain disease. [emphasis mine] This is one case in which parallel work by a large number of agents really does make a huge difference: [ Haider.@haider1 this is actually insane openai deployed thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents to analyze millions of mouse brain cells in 32 minutes, work that could take human researchers months to a year also the agents uncovered new leads for brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's OpenAI @OpenAI GPT-Rosalind surfaced a new lead for drug discovery: could restoring cholesterol transport protect neurons from degeneration? DCTN1 is a gene linked to Perry syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder. In mouse-brain data, disrupting it increased expression of genes involved in 2:41 PM · Oct 21, 2026 · 51.5K Views 26 Replies · 95 Reposts · 1.26K Likes ](https://x.com/haider1/status/2112917197903540516) Not only does instantaneous literature review vastly speed up the research process, but it allows AI to make novel conceptual leaps from combining approaches from wildly different fields of research. AI regularly does this in math research, combining results, approaches, and theorems from far-flung places that no human mathematician would have thought to combine. It can do it in science, too. Much of scientific innovation, historically, has been “recombinant” innovation — scientists applying insights from one field to another. With AI, essentially all research is now cross-disciplinary — AI can read not just the literature on a particular subject, but the literature on a million other subjects that might have produced useful techniques or insights for the problem at hand. Superscience So far, all of the factors I’ve listed are ways that AI can speed up science as it’s already done. I’ve basically described how AI can send gigantic hordes of superhumanly fast, superhumanly well-read, superhumanly mathematically gifted researchers to re-accelerate scientific discovery. But it’s also possible that AI will enable types of discovery — and ways of understanding the natural world — that no network of humans, no matter how large or how brilliant it was or how long it had to work, would ever be able to discover. In a post back in July, I wrote about how that might work: What if there are lots of…aspects of the Universe that [are] too complex to understand in terms of simple laws, but not so complex that they just dissolve into unknowable chaos? It’s possible that we can reliably control these complex phenomena with AI, even if we never reduce them to the kind of principles that we can teach a grad student in a textbook… Another way of saying this is that there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can. I call these “cloud laws” — causal regularities that can be exploited by technology, but which are too diffuse and complex for an individual human being to either intuit or communicate… Perhaps social sciences like economics, sociology, and political science obey similarly complex regularities, and AI can help us find them. Perhaps there are physical processes — plasma, or topological materials, or aerial turbulence, etc. — that obey cloud laws instead of chaos?… [H]uman collaboration is bottlenecked — it’s limited by our ability to intuit patterns at an individual level, and to communicate these patterns from one individual to another. AI, being a computer, just doesn’t have this sort of limitation; it can work with vast, diffuse patterns without having to break them into pieces or simplify them in order to compress them into the tiny pipelines of person-to-person explanation… If much of the Universe turns out to be ruled by cloud laws, we could be on the precipice of a scientific renaissance. In order to discover cloud laws, AI will need huge amounts of data about the natural world. AI figured out human speech by assimilating essentially all of the text humans have ever written. If it’s going to figure out hidden patterns in biology, neuroscience, materials science, etc., it’s going to need similarly massive amounts of data from physical instruments. That data will be far, far more than humans — individually or collectively — would be able to parse, label, characterize, or model. But AI was built to do this. If scientists simply build huge arrays of sensors to measure complex phenomena like the brain, the cell, the economy, etc., they may be able to feed this flood of data to AI directly and bypass human cognitive intermediation entirely. AI would then learn about the world directly, and it might learn things that humans never could. This “superscience”, if you want to call it that, would actually go beyond the kind of science humans have done heretofore. Many of the technologies it yielded would be beyond human comprehension — indistinguishable from magic. But to the AIs, they would make perfect scientific sense. In any case, it seems clear that the scientific slowdown that threatened human progress will now be delayed — at least for a while. Unless humans have somehow found most of the actual exploitable regularities in our Universe, we’re about to enter a new golden age of science. Subscribe Share
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Photo Essay: College of Science and Engineering Research Showcase
Fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major Jess Visaya and Fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major Dorette Pirie show off their soft robots. The robots are made to mimic worms, whose bodies bunch up before extending to propel themselves forward. The robots use pneumatic actuators to make linear movement outwards. Visaya and Pirie set up two of their worms with syringes attached to tubing which was then threaded through the end cap into the worms. Visitors to their station were encouraged to race the two worms by pumping the attached syringes. Third-year Biochemistry major Ira Evetts worked in Dr. Christopher Whidbey’s lab studying the vaginal microbiome, in an attempt to better understand the different microbes that build it up and how it affects health outcomes. Evetts’ research was specifically focused on lactobacillus iners, one of several bacteria naturally present in a healthy vaginal microbiome, and methylation systems. Fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major John Diesko Boehm and Fourth-Year Mechanical Engineering major Ian Agopsowicz hold up their “DAQMobile.” They built their project, a modified RC kit car, to help teach mechanical engineers about circuits and electrical design through real-world application. Fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major Ben Murphy holds up his mole crab and crawfish-inspired burrower. Murphy wanted to imitate the motion of a crab’s legs through robotics, with the primary goal to “turn the rotation of one motor into four alternating legs that would successfully displace soil.” Murphy was inspired by works that take inspiration from the natural world, and he found mole crabs particularly interesting. Although a mole crab is at an advantage with its burrowing being underwater, thus the sand being fluidized and easier to displace, Murphy’s machine is able to successfully burrow three centimeters into the ground. Second-year Mechanical Engineering major and Physics major Arabelle Miller shows off her rubber gripper, inspired by kirigami and origami. She took a piece of rubber and strategically cut slits into it to make it fold the way she needed, then glued googly eyes to the front. The gripper is able to hold up to 38 times its weight, or 226 grams. Third-year Mechanical Engineering major Joonseong Park talked about how his project took an unused and broken 3-D printer and transformed it into a testing platform for soft robotic grippers. The former-printer was reprogrammed and had its extruder part modified to be a mount for the grippers. Park shows off some of the other grippers that can be attached to the testing platform. Park classified grippers into two large categories. The first set of grippers is designed to deal with small delicate objects with great precision, and the second is made to lift heavy or large objects. Third-year Mechanical Engineering major Jiashuo Liu set out with a goal to deploy free open-source AI models to pre-existing robots to integrate object recognition and retrieval and command. The models are used to process the data received from the robots’ cameras in order to detect certain objects and their locations. Fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major Cole Purohit focused on agricultural automation of raspberry picking. His project utilizes kirigami to make grippers to close around a raspberry when the two ends are pulled. “Nobody wants to eat a squished raspberry,” Purohit said. Fourth-Year Biochemistry major Mariel Nolan’s project focused on bacteria and proteins within the bacteria whose functions are unknown. Nolan’s research is finding a way to isolate those proteins with the ultimate goal of determining their functions. Fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major Kai Boydon and Fourth-year Mechanical Engineering major Evan Nguyen show off their project, which uses custom extensors to help with the rehabilitation of stroke patients. They compared their project to a “party-popper” in the way it unfurls itself when placed under a patient’s fingers, helping the stroke patient rehabilitate finger movement. Boydon shows off the testing rig built for their project. It works as a mount for their extensor, as a way to test against resistance. Their program inflates the extensor through an air pump, which then makes the extensor push against the bed whilst an arduino calculates the force created and air pressure associated with the force. Navigate Left Navigate Right
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Beneath the hum of filtration pumps and the rhythmic trickle of saltwater tanks, Briana Maltez is completely in her element. The Texas A&M University at Galveston marine biology major is following her lifelong love of animals—and that passion drives her pursuit for a second bachelor’s degree in a field that endlessly ignites her curiosity.As a native of nearby Sugar Land, Maltez did not initially set out toward coastal science. She initially earned a degree in agricultural business through the Texas A&M RELLIS campus in Bryan, but her subconscious fascination with ocean life grew into an unignorable question during her time there: What if? Photo courtesy of Briana MaltezThe query continued to plague her until a turning point came during a Florida trip to near the end of her first degree. Up-close encounters with marine life reignited a childhood dream and shifted her trajectory toward the sea. Yet, stepping into an entirely new field required a leap of faith. Faced with the daunting prospect of starting over, Maltez placed her trust in Texas A&M Galveston as the premier marine biology program in the state. Deciding that she would never feel satisfied unless she tried, she applied—finding the resolve to face the demanding science curriculum head-on.Any lingering doubts vanished during her first semester on the island campus. The close-knit campus environment and small class sizes allowed Maltez to build immediate connections with her professors and peers—a welcoming backdrop where her love for ocean stewardship could truly take root.“I instantly fell in love with the campus and the small classes,” Maltez recalled. “I was like, ‘Yep, I’m so happy I came here.'”Before long, Maltez found a second home inside the university’s Sea Life Facility. Designed to mirror complex, large-scale aquarium infrastructure on a manageable scale, the space offered Maltez a safe training ground to grow familiar with system maintenance and water chemistry under the tutelage of Sea Life Facility Manager Katie St. Clair. While tending to the tanks there, she grew especially fond of watching the facility’s resident clownfish breed and care for their clutches.“Katie definitely wants us to learn, ask questions, and get hands-on experience,” said Maltez. “So, it has been great having her help with getting pre-experience before doing it in the real world.”That hands-on experience quickly sparked a deeper interest in animal husbandry—the daily art of monitoring the animal’s diets, observing their behavior, and maintaining the aquarium’s overall health. Eager to turn those newfound practical skills into technical credentials, Maltez even earned certifications in life support systems and water quality management through Aquatic Animal Life Support Operators courses.Maltez’s passion soon extended beyond campus boundaries. During a summer study abroad program in South Caicos, Turks and Caicos, Maltez immersed herself in underwater field research. In addition to learning about local history and ecotourism impacts, she snorkeled daily, utilizing drones and hydrophones to record underwater bioacoustics and listen to the often-missed crackles of snapping shrimp, fish, and lobster larvae. Maltez at SeaWorld San AntonioPhoto courtesy of Briana Maltez“What you don’t realize is that there’s so many animals around you, but because they sense, you already, they run away,” Maltez explained. “I think that’s really cool to experience, because you don’t even think about that when you travel.”Yet, among all her academic adventures, a week-long course at SeaWorld San Antonio through MARB 302 stands out as a defining milestone. Camping on-site alongside fellow marine biology majors, Maltez gained behind-the-scenes access to professional veterinary and husbandry operations, building lasting friendships and even interacting with penguins in the snow.The undeniable highlight of the trip was face-to-face interaction with beluga whales. Having admired the titanic cetaceans for years, getting to learn directly from their trainers solidified her ultimate aspiration: to care for belugas and contribute to conservation research supporting wild populations in Alaska.“They are one of my favorite animals, and I had heard so much about them,” said Maltez. ”Getting to see them up close was an amazing experience.”When she is not analyzing marine environments, Maltez documents campus life through her camera lens. As a photographer for the Nautilus student newspaper, the Yell Leaders at Midnight Yell, and the Shark Scholars club, she brings the university’s passionate energy into sharp focus. With less than a year remaining until graduation, Maltez looks back on her decision to return to school with gratitude. Taking her journey one day at a time helped her push through demanding coursework, unlocking opportunities she once thought were out of reach. Today, Maltez stands as a compelling example of what happens when passion meets purpose: By trusting her drive and embracing every hands-on experience, she has transformed a second chance at college into an opportunity to dive into a career beneath the waves.
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Animals Starves while the Kardashians Miss the Charts Again
(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 going, I’d like to offer congratulations to Jonathan Funke, whose suggestion “midflicks” won the poll for what I should call straight-to-streaming films which aren’t big or cinematic enough to go to theaters but seem too expensive for a TV movie. It’s so useful a term, I just used it last week! Now I just need to add this term to my data dictionary! Okay, on to this week’s issue. We’re starting out looking at Netflix/Ben Affleck’s latest crime thriller, Animals. I’ll also look at Disclosure Day heading to Peacock (it did better than you’d remember in theaters...) and a new movie based on toys. Plus, a long-time streaming flop returns for its eighth season...will it finally chart? (No.) Will anyone at Disney care? Probably not. All that, plus another look at new shows landing on streaming on 1-Oct from Reelgood, what streamer hasn’t had a film make the Luminate charts since August, Reacher’s long run on the charts, M_onster: The Lizzie Borden Story’s_ short run, the top shows in 2026 according to Samba TV, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more. And I mean that last part: putting this week’s issue together, I assembled OVER 25 images, most of which are bespoke looks I made just for this report. Really, publishing articles like this takes the work of writing two articles: one is the narrative and the other is making charts/graphs. 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 week of October 5th to October 11th, 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe Film - Netflix’s Latest Star-Studded Thriller Goes For Glory The tempting angle for anyone writing about streaming film this month, like yours truly, is to ask, “Is this why Dan Lin lost his job at Netflix?” Take Animals, the Ben Affleck-starring-and-directing, Artists Equity-produced crime thriller that opened on 9-Oct. (Kerry Washington and Gillian Anderson are also in it.) If it did really well, then one could argue that Lin has another success on his resume. If it underperformed, then it’s another example of a Netflix underperformance this year. So where did Animals fall? Kinda in the middle, but that means it’s more “not a hit” than “big hit”. On Nielsen, it opened to 12.0 million hours, and here’s how that stacks up for 2026 films so far this year: Obviously, that’s not great. It’s both under my 15 million opening bar for “fine” for a Netflix film and 20 million bar for “great” opening. It did a bit better on Samba TV, getting to first place. That’s very, very good, though again, looking at the Nielsen data, it probably means that it was a light week overall. Luminate’s data is a bit closer to Samba TV’s, tied for 17th all time for single weeks since May of 2024: To top it off, no one seemed to like it. It has a 33 on Metacritic and only a 5.7 on IMDb. Both of these numbers could have been impacted by the stories about Affleck’s comments about using AI to make the film. Given the controversy, the film might not have been as bad as the ratings suggest, but it’s also not a bullish sign. All to say…yeah, on net this film isn’t a point in Dan Lin’s favor. At this point, Netflix’s slide has been long enough—going on since February—that I’m almost tempted to lower the bar for what a “hit” is on streaming. Post-February of 2026 or so, it seems like straight-to-streaming films just haven’t hit the same heights as they did from 2022 to 2025. Before we head onto the “Quick Hits” for film, I want to shout out a fellow newsletter whose articles I’ve been loving this year, LA Material, a new LA-based news outlet. For just a highlight of my favorite articles since July... I loved this article on Ghost Town, a group on Venice that clears homeless encampments. As a Los Angeleno, obviously I adore their articles on LA parking issues. Their article on illegal parking tickets got the City Council to address the issue! Also check out their article on people parking in medians. Check out their deep dive on what went wrong with the LA Jazz Festival and how it fell apart, or what’s wrong with USC’s finances. Finally, they wrote up a voter guide on voter guides for the LA General Election. So meta! In search of a city? L.A. Material is an independent news outlet covering the people, politics, culture and glorious chaos shaping Los Angeles. L.A. Material brings you intel on the city you can’t get anywhere else. From exploring how Reddit short stories became Hollywood’s hottest commodity to reporting on the survival jobs keeping entertainment workers afloat. And answering, once and for all, why the AMC Burbank escalator is always broken. Through their newsletters, podcast, videos, events, and member community, L.A. Material is designed to help Angelenos connect to Los Angeles and each other. Sign up now for the free weekday newsletter. Quick Notes on Film Steven Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, came to Peacock on 9-Oct, and I’ll admit that, after pulling its stats, I did a pinch of a double take. As I wrote throughout my deep, deep, deep dive on summer box office/Obsession/Backrooms/IP/superheroes, oftentimes the film media discusses films as “flops” or “misses” or “hits” without clarifying what they specifically mean. Since Disclosure Day didn’t make $250 million in the US or $500 million globally, it was definitely a disappointment by Spielbergian standards, who is the highest-grossing director of all time, and arguably even more ahead in adjusted grosses. But it did make $245 million globally on a $115 million budget, so it isn’t as big of a miss as I remember. That’s still probably not enough to break even in the theatrical window, when you factor in marketing costs…but it’s close. And it grossed a lot more even in the US than some titles with about ten times more coverage. Anyways, lots of preamble to say this one only did 4.5 million hours according to Nielsen, so it did make the charts, but on the low end. Here’s how it stacks up to other Peacock titles: Apple TV (née +) followed up their “success for them” Mayday with Matchbox The Movie. This one doesn’t look like a success even for them, but at least it’s not a miss. Apple/Skydance clearly tried to take advantage of the success of Barbie at the box office—let’s greenlight all the toy properties!!!—but of course, this didn’t make it to theaters. And it stars John Cena, who, as I argued earlier this summer, NEEDS to get his movies back in theaters. Anyways, this one has mixed-to-bad numbers. It missed the Samba TV and Nielsen charts in its first week, but did make Luminate with 7.1 million hours. That’s just enough to not be an outright miss, and about half what Mayday did earlier this summer. Speaking of Apple Studio’s Mayday, it ended up lasting five weeks on Luminate, which isn’t bad for Apple TV. On Nielsen, it had a three-week run, racking up 13.5 million hours total. Again, like Matchbox, the issue is the budget; I doubt that this viewership earned enough to justify that budget. Also, to be clear, neither of these films are “midflicks”; both should have gone to theaters. Toy Story 5 is not hanging around on the streaming charts on Disney+, so it’s not as leggy as either Zootopia 2 or Moana 2, and definitely not in the same class as Encanto. (It did make all the money at the box office, so Disney is going to be fine…) The Breadwinner on Netflix (from Sony) is down to 3.9 million hours in its third week. It only lasted for one week on the Samba TV charts. Netflix’s Doing Life had a smaller-than-normal binge release curve bounce, only going to 7.1 million hours from 6.0 to start, but it made Samba TV at fifth place in its second week. The Netflix documentary, The Widower: Til’ Death Do Us Part, also had a small binge release curve bounce to 6.5 million hours, but did make a second week on Samba TV. Meanwhile, Netflix’s Unabomber fell off after two weeks on Nielsen—which is not great at all—and Demon Slayer fell off after just one week. Over on Luminate, the two smaller titles The Swan: Behind the Mirror and Kill. Bury. Print both fell out of the Luminate top ten charts. The story of library film at the first of the month is the arrival of the Ice Age films on Netflix. Now, here’s a small example of optimizing your library that even Netflix could do better. Say you want to rent/license a new film series from Disney**.** A streamer could pay a big paycheck and then drop each Ice Age film on the exact same day of the month, the fourth of October. That’s one choice. In contrast, the streamer could have released each film one week apart, and make each one a mini-event for folks watching Ice Age films. Or even roll them out monthly. Netflix opted for the former strategy, and as a result, only three of the films made the Nielsen charts this week. The “Miss of the Week” goes to Tubi’s YA-ish horror film_, R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead 2_, which didn’t even make the Luminate charts like Tubi films usually do, or, should I say, “used to”? Tubi films, most of which are straight-to-streaming, used to reliably make the Luminate film charts (which only covers straight-to-streaming films), but a Tubi film hasn’t made it since August. The first Pumpkinhead got 1.4 million hours last year according to Luminate. As I wrote about this film before, it seems to be a bit muddled in terms of age: too scary for young kids but probably not scary enough for older kids. Speaking of Luminate, Netflix’s latest doc about a comic (expect more docs about comedians all month), Who Is Martin Mull?, flopped, getting just 200K and 700K hours according to Luminate. Three other film/special misses belonged to Hulu, including a standup special, Jamie Foxx: Take Care of Yourself, Neon’s latest horror film, Hokum, which made $17 million in the US, and a Family Guy Halloween special. (That last one was only 22 minutes, so it’s not a surprise it missed.) Finally, another Netflix standup special missed the charts, Mojo Brookzz: I Know You Lying missed too. I can confirm last week’s misses, most notably Paramount+’s Jackass: Best and Last, MUBI’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and HBO Max’s Evil Dead Burn. Television - I Can’t Visualize Nothing: The Kardashians Story Normally, in the mini-dive essays that open the Streaming Ratings Report, I focus on shows that do well or, at the very least, make the charts. Why? Because as I’ve said time and again, I can’t visualize nothing like, say, the Kardashians’ TV shows. Here’s the TV debuts chart for this week with a missing spot for The Kardashians, whose eighth season just landed on Hulu:
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Jay-Z picks himself to headline the Super Bowl halftime show
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Hi everyone! My name is Hannah Baker and I’m a 2025 Ernest F. Hollings Scholarship student studying Earth and Environmental Sciences with a minor in Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan. For my summer internship, I worked at the National Coastal Centers for Ocean Science (NCCOS) Hollings Marine Laboratory in Charleston, South Carolina, stud
Jay-Z picks himself to headline the Super Bowl halftime show at SoFi Stadium in Southern California
Jay-Z will be the featured performer for the halftime festivities on Feb. 14 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.
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Jay-Z Bravely Chooses Himself To Headline The 2027 Super Bowl LXI Half-Time Show
In an act of supreme nobility and humility, rap mogul Jay-Z has been selected to perform at the 2027 Super Bowl LXI Half-Time show, marking his first time headlining the ...
Jay-Z picks himself to headline the Super Bowl halftime show at SoFi Stadium in Southern California
Jay-Z will headline the Super Bowl halftime show on February 14 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. The NFL, Apple Music, and Roc Nation announced the news Monday night. NFL
Jay-Z picks himself to headline Super Bowl halftime show at SoFi Stadium
Jay-Z will headline the Super Bowl halftime show on February 14 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.
Jay-Z said he’ll just do the Super Bowl Halftime Show himself
By Lisa Respers France, CNN (CNN) — The NFL didn’t have to look far for next year’s Super Bowl Halftime Show performer. Rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z, who has served in an advisory role to the NFL through his company Roc Nation since 2019, announced he will perform at the Super Bowl LXI Halftime Show in
Jay Z will headline the Super Bowl halftime show in 2027
Jay-Z has been announced as the Super Bowl LXI halftime show performer, capping a banner year by doing something few artists have: choosing himself to headline one of the world's biggest stages for the first time ever.
Jay-Z picks himself to headline the Super Bowl halftime show at SoFi Stadium in Southern California
Jay-Z will headline the Super Bowl halftime show on February 14 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California | Newsradio 1140 WRVA
Jay-Z picks himself to headline the Super Bowl halftime show at SoFi Stadium in Southern California
Jay-Z will headline the Super Bowl halftime show on February 14 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California | WBBM Newsradio 780 AM & 105.9 FM
Jay-Z will headline the Super Bowl halftime show at SoFi Stadium in Southern California
The man who has helped produce the Super Bowl halftime show is stepping into the spotlight: Jay-Z will headline the show himself | Talk 1370
Jay-Z picks himself to headline the Super Bowl halftime show at SoFi Stadium in Southern California
Jay-Z will headline the Super Bowl halftime show on February 14 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.
What Is the Relationship Between Doing Good History and Entertainment?
[Cross-posted from The Tattooed Historian’s Dispatch] What exactly are we doing when we communicate history to the public? Most of us would agree that accuracy matters, evidence matters, context matters, historical rigor matters. But we also live in a world where attention matters (and attention spans are dropping at an alarming rate). Subscribe Whether we’re posting on social media, producing videos, hosting podcasts, giving public talks, or designing museum programs, we’re all competing with countless other demands on people’s time. The public doesn’t simply stumble into history anymore. Now, good history has to find people where they already are. This raises a difficult question: Is making history entertaining part of good historical practice, or is it simply what we must do to remain relevant? “Entertainment” is often treated as the opposite of seriousness. But what do we mean when we use the term itself? Does entertainment mean simplifying the historical record? Does it mean telling compelling stories in a lively manner? Is there a difference between being engaging and being entertaining? And who gets to decide where that line is? Share These questions become even more complicated online. Social media platforms reward attention. Algorithms reward engagement (the positive and the negative). Visibility often depends on producing content that people are willing to click, watch, share, and discuss. What happens when those incentives shape the way history is presented? Can historians work within those systems without letting those systems define the work? Are public audiences being served better than ever before, or are platform incentives changing what kinds of history rise to the surface? These are just a few of the issues that I discuss with John R. Heckman in our latest installment of “Historians Off the Cuff.” Feel free to suggest future topics for us to discuss in the comments section below. Hope you are entertained. LOL Civil War Memory is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
6 citizens sue Trump, saying media ban deprives them of news as audience stakeholders
A new lawsuit against President Donald Trump's media ban stakes a claim for the public itself. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of six ordinary citizens. It argues that Trump's
Wilmington Health facility sells for $9.4M
Wilmington Health’s main facility recently sold for more than $9 million. The 66,000-square-foot facility located at 1202 Medical Center Drive was purchased by Charlotte-based real estate investment firm Cedar Square in a $9.4 million sale-leaseback transaction, according to a deed recorded Oct. 21. Wilmington Health will continue leasing the facility, CEO Jeff James told the Business Journal in September. James said the lease term would likely be five years, with most services eventually transferring to a new medical office building under construction in the Midtown Park office area near The Pointe at Barclay. The Wilmington Health facility was originally listed earlier this year at $11.85 million. A Wilmington Health representative did not respond to a request for comment by press time. Steve Hall, vice president of BlueCoast Commercial, represented Wilmington Health in the transaction. “Wilmington Health wanted to unlock the value in its real estate without disrupting a single patient visit, and a sale-leaseback let them do exactly that,” said Hall in a text to the Business Journal Monday. “Cedar Square gets a long-term, absolute net investment anchored by one of the region’s leading physician groups, and Wilmington Health keeps its home on Medical Center Drive while redeploying that capital into care.” The sale marks Cedar Square’s first entry into the Wilmington market, according to Jon Dixon, the firm's managing partner and founder. “We are attracted to Wilmington's growth and what we see as strong long-term fundamentals,” said Dixon in an email Monday. “Population growth, relative affordability, and quality of life make it a compelling market for us. The climate and proximity to the coast are a big part of that appeal.” He added, “We hope to pursue additional opportunities across retail, industrial, medical office and multifamily in Wilmington. We will evaluate opportunities individually and remain disciplined about the properties we pursue. We would like this acquisition to be the beginning of a broader investment presence in Wilmington.” Given the facility’s age, Dixon said the site could eventually be redeveloped, potentially for medical office space or housing. Dixon said recent announcements from UNC Health and Atrium were among the factors behind the firm’s growing interest in Wilmington’s medical-office market. The announcements involve competing proposals for hospital expansion in New Hanover County, which are subject to the state’s Certificate of Need process. “Medical office remains one of the most sought-after asset classes in commercial real estate,” said Hall, “and well-located (medical office buildings) with strong operators are scarce in Southeastern North Carolina.” According to Dixon, Cedar Square describes itself as a boutique, hands-on real estate investment firm that values direct relationships with tenants and the communities where it owns property. “We’re very hands-on, and we like to be in direct contact with all of our tenants and the communities in which we own,” Dixon said. He added, “We’re definitely interested in building a presence with local owners, brokers and businesses or tenants.”
Elvis has entered the courtroom
The owners of Elvis Presley’s music are suing Anthropic, alleging it helped itself to the King’s songs to train its AI — and sending a $41 million reminder, according to the New York Times.
Jon Batiste shares health update on wife's cancer battle with sweet selfie
Jon Batiste – whose wife, Suleika Jaouad, is battling cancer – shared new photos of the couple on social media amid Jaouad's treatment.
Leverkusen's Winning Streak Ends In Hoffenheim Nightmare
A late-game collapse and Andrej Kramarić’s historic penalty snapped Carles Martínez’s record-breaking scoring run, leaving the toothless Werkself stunned by three goals in a frantic final ten minutes.
Engelhaupt to explore science’s strangest questions at UWG
If you’ve ever found yourself captivated by a bizarre fact, an unsettling mystery or a question too strange not to ask, mark your calendar for Oct. 28.
📈 Monday data: The bottleneck isn’t intelligence
In the AI Investment Brief today: CapEx updates and lease commitment breakdowns Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark recently said in a speech at the IMF that the singularity has begun: For many years, researchers and science fiction authors have forecast a future in which AI systems drastically increase the pace of overall scientific and technical progress, making things move so quickly that it is hard for humans to keep up. They call this the singularity. I believe that this year we have gained convincing evidence that it has now begun. This follows Anthropic’s claim that in August, 26% of its AI R&D was led by Claude, with a human supervising its work. In October, OpenAI posted 719 math manuscripts1 made by its internal model. Math and coding are two fields where a research loop can close without leaving the desk. But can the loop close in the rest of science? Subscribe The loop is real The idea is not new. Mathematician Irving John Good, who had worked with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park, argued that a machine smarter than us “could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.” The Gödel machine, a self-improving computer that can rewrite its own code better than its prior, was first proposed in 2003. In 2025, researchers at Sakana AI and the University of British Columbia set out to show that this was possible. Their agents iteratively improved their own code through a feedback loop, resulting in gains of 30 pp on SWE-bench and more than 15 pp on Polyglot, testing coding skills beyond Python. The idea has since been tested in other labs. A Gemini-powered agent called AlphaEvolve found a faster matrix multiplication kernel used for training Gemini, speeding up the kernel by 23% and cutting Gemini’s training time by 1%. In China, MiniMax reported that its M2.7 model worked on improving its own agent’s harness, skills, sampling and memory. Over 100 rounds of rewriting led to a 30% gain, per its internal evaluations. In each case, what was being rewritten was not the model itself but everything around it. Is it better than human work? In September this year, in what seemed like a milestone, an AI-built agent proved as good at improving other AI agents as a human-built one. It did that in what appeared to be half the steps. But the result was inconclusive: the differences between runs were greater than the difference between the AI- and human-built agent results. Nonetheless, this is increasing the chatter around recursive self-improvement (RSI) in AI. Google’s Sundar Pichai said that “you have RSI loops along with AI researchers in various aspects of model development.” Sakana AI published a paper on RSI through multi-agent collaboration, finding that after two cycles its system scored 1.2–1.6x better per output token than the base model across four research benchmarks. Ramez Naam challenges that view. He splits AI self-improvement into five overlapping types. The first four describe how autonomous the AI is; so far, only types 1 and 2 have been observed. The fifth type describes accelerating returns, and he notes that greater autonomy doesn’t guarantee a takeoff scenario. Instead, each round of self-improvement would need to deliver at least as much as the last. The results from Sakana, AlphaEvolve and MiniMax above might look like type 3 or type 4 autonomy. But in each case, the AI wasn’t updating its own weights directly, only the ancillary parts — the harness, the memory. And where Claude leads its own R&D, for now a human still supervises.
6 citizens sue Trump, saying media ban deprives them of news as audience stakeholders
A new lawsuit against President Donald Trump's media ban stakes a claim for the public itself.
Financial Woes Looms Over Washington's Revenue Sports
With Washington basketball's season set to tip off in just a few days, the second of the Huskies' two revenue sports finds itself in a very similar predicament to the football team. According to a recent report from CBS surveying the roster spending of college basketball programs across the nation, Danny Sprinkle's program ranked last in the Big Ten, spending approximately $5-7 million in NIL on its players.
Student code takes the wheel in Formula 110’s simulated races - College of Arts and Sciences
In a packed lecture hall, first-time programmers raced simulated self-driving cars and got a robotics lesson from the provost. The cars were virtual. The cheering was not.
Rezilient Health Appoints Lisa Ness as Chief Revenue Officer
Rezilient Health announced today that Lisa Ness, MBA, RD, CDE, has joined the company as Chief Revenue Officer. Ness brings more than 30 years of healthcare industry experience, including executive leadership roles at QuadMed, CareATC and Proactive MD. In her new role, she will lead Rezilient's commercial growth strategy as the company expands its relationships with self-funded employers, brokers and health systems nationwide.
BCA rebrands political arm to WORKPAC
BCA's political arm will now be known as WORK PAC, BCA CEO Helena Duncan and Chairman Kevin Savoy announced to members gathered in Birmingham. The rebranding is meant to more closely align the business lobby's outward facing mission with the evolving nature of the business community itself, they said.
The Daily Mauling: 10/26/26
Kansas Jayhawks News The LJW talks about KU’s exhibition loss to Duke, with a focus on Bill Self’s small ball lineups UNLV coach Josh Pastner is whining about having to play Trey Kaufman-Renn when the Rebels visit Lawrence. Interesting complaints for a guy who went out and got AJ Storr this offseason SI also brings […]
Cameron Boozer Update: Rolling Right Along
It’s still early, but Cameron Boozer is quickly establishing himself in the NBA
Bobby Pulido’s Grand Old Democratic Party
The tejano musician who fashions himself as an old-school politician is fighting to win back South Texas—one wedding or quinceñera at a time.
The Brooklyn Democratic Party is at war with itself. Can they flip four seats this November?
In a potential blue wave year, four state legislative seats in Brooklyn are in play for Democrats. Will the county machine’s mess be a costly distraction?