World in a Pulse
Briflio distills the day's signals into one calm feed — a personalized mix of the top stories across every topic, with context, not noise.
Otter.ai raises $320 million from General Catalyst’s growth fund for its meeting tool
Meeting note-taking tool Otter.ai announced on Tuesday that it has raised $320 million from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF), which provides capital to startups without diluting equity and gets returns on the results of marketing spend. Otter.ai said that it will use these funds for enterprise growth, go-to-market strategy, international expansion, and product innovation. […]
How to watch Just One Before I Die on Tubi (it's free)
Bill's Mafia are some of the most die hard fans in American sports – here's where to watch the doc at no cost
Cosmological implications of two mock TianQin standard siren catalogs generated under different background cosmological models
Space-borne gravitational wave (GW) detectors such as TianQin are expected to detect GW standard sirens for cosmological parameter estimation. All previous studies of TianQin adopted the $Λ$CDM model to generate mock standard siren data. In this work, we quantitatively investigate how the choice of background cosmological model affects mock TianQin standard siren (TQSS) catalogs and the corresponding cosmological implications. Adopting the $Λ$CDM model and a redshift-binned dark energy (DE) reco
Is adding cottage cheese to everything from brownies to flatbreads really the best way to 'proteinmaxx’ – and do you even need to?
In the first episode of the new season of Strange Health, we examine the health benefits of cottage cheese.
FIU vs. MTSU prediction, odds: Week 8 college football Tuesday picks by proven model
The SportsLine Projection Model has revealed its best bets for the Tuesday matchup between the MTSU Blue Raiders and the Florida International Panthers on CBS Sports Network
Myanmar’s detained ex-leader Suu Kyi receives package from King Charles III
Military-backed government says it delivered two books and diplomatic correspondence to Aung San Suu Kyi.
The cult of the iPhone mini is alive and thriving
My phone has some existential problems. It’s nearly out of storage, the battery lasts half a day, and every so often, when it thinks a little too hard, it heats up like a brick fresh from the kiln. I should probably get a new phone, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Not until the experience of using my iPhone 13 mini becomes so miserable that I have no other choice but to trade it in for a bigger, better model. From left: iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini [Photo: Apple] I’m not alone
Angine de Poitrine live in London: alien pair are out of this world
The math rock duo’s concept might be bringing fans in, but tonight proves it’s their musical chops that are the real pull
Synthetic public opinion polling: AI personas don't always change their minds like real voters do
A voter surveyed in October may give a different answer by January. An AI persona might not, depending on how it's built.
Text-to-Image Generative Modeling Without Language Pretraining
Modern text-to-image (T2I) systems use internet-scale language pretraining for text-conditioned image generation. We ask whether language pretraining is necessary for strong T2I generation. We introduce Halcyon, a family of early-fusion multimodal autoregressive models pretrained entirely from scratch on GPIC, a dataset of 100M image-text pairs. Halcyon-0.52B outperforms LlamaGen-XL/8 (48.0 vs. 63.3 gFD) with 18.2$\times$ less pretraining compute. Further, Halcyon-1.6B outperforms JiT-T2I-XXL/8+
A boundary integral method for computing electron repulsion integrals in heterogeneous dielectric environments
We present a boundary integral method for evaluating electron repulsion integrals (ERIs) in dielectric environments of piecewise constant permittivity. This generalizes conventional bare-Coulomb ERIs by incorporating screening from structured dielectric surroundings, such as the substrates and/or encapsulating layers present in modern two-dimensional-material devices. We formulate the problem as a second-kind boundary integral equation for the induced surface charge on the dielectric interfaces,
How Denmark became the sperm donation capital of the world
How Danish sperm became central to the global donor industry.
NFL Week 7 picks and score predictions: Bears top Patriots in Thursday thriller, Chiefs edge Seahawks
Here's your weekly dose of John Breech's NFL picks
France’s growing debt woes: How bond markets set countries’ borrowing costs
France's rising debt is unnerving investors, but countries such as the US and Japan owe even greater sums.
Mortgage Rates Are ‘Eating Up All the Good News’ on Housing, Says NAHB CEO — Peter Schiff Warns of ‘Worst
Mortgage rates strain housing market as NAHB’s Jim Tobin and Peter Schiff weigh in.
‘Star Wars’ is headed to ‘Super Bowl’ in a never before seen way
Super Bowl LXI will be played on February 14, 2027, at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California
Lab-grown brains can now read Braille and guide robot dogs
Guided by millions of years of evolution, our own brain cells know a thing or two about moving through a chaotic world where learning the right move is a matter of life and death.
Visiting Slate’s first showroom as its $25,000 electric truck nears production
As I sat in the cab of the pickup truck and manually rolled down the windows, I closed my eyes and flashed back to opening the windows on a cold, winter day in my dad’s 1975 Ford Ranger to let more cigarette smoke escape. The memory faded as I opened my eyes and looked through the windshield at a wall in the Slate Customer Experience Center studded with bright color chips. Last week, in a former Tesla store staffed by some former Tesla employees, Slate opened its first showroom.
Physics-Constrained Modeling and Inference of the Equation of State for Dissociative Materials
Equations of state (EOSs) describe how a material's internal energy and pressure change with temperature and density. They are inputs to hydrodynamic simulations in materials science and planetary science. We model the ion-thermal free-energy term for dissociative materials, where molecular bonds break apart to form new species under extreme conditions. This term is governed by two latent physical processes, a molar-mass surface and a Debye-temperature curve, neither of which is observed directl
Can a simple photo of your face reveal how ill you are?
AI may help doctors judge how ill a patient is using a single photograph of their face, say US researchers.
Revisiting the 2026 NFL Draft: Evaluating how well Seahawks have done re-tooling Super Bowl roster
Injuries to top picks like Jadarian Price and Bud Clark have derailed early returns of Seattle's draft class
Masoud Pezeshkian: Peace, Not Surrender
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on sanctions, regional conflict, US-Israel tensions and his call for Muslim unity.
Germany's far-right AfD investigates publication of emails stolen in cyberattack
BERLIN, Oct 20 : Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) said on Tuesday that it was investigating the online publication of emails stolen by unknown hackers during a cyberattack last month.An AfD spokesperson said hackers had targeted a hosting service provider used by the party and appar
‘The Voice’ Season 30 has another schedule change as NBA takes over Tuesday nights
The latest episode of ‘The Voice’ Season 30 continued the intense Battle rounds
CVE-2026-112239 | TYPO3 AI Integration Extension up to 14.0.1 Backend Endpoint permission
A vulnerability marked as critical has been reported in TYPO3 AI Integration Extension up to 14.0.1. This affects an unknown function of the component Backend Endpoint. Performing a manipulation results in permission issues. This vulnerability is reported as CVE-2026-112239. The attack is possible
Housemarque’s massive ‘Zenith Update’ brings NG+, boss rush, modifiers and more to Saros - KitGuru
Though it unfortunately went somewhat under the radar, one of PlayStation’s biggest first-party rele
Orionid meteor shower peak: How and when to see it this week
Clear skies permitting, skygazers could be able to spot as many as 10-20 meteors per hour as the shower peaks this week.
What Language Adds, and at What Cost: Four Controlled Probes of Pathology Vision-Language Models
Vision--language models (VLMs) promise to make computational pathology queryable and able to draft reports, but how much language adds beyond the vision backbone is unclear, because almost every system is evaluated by its developers on test sets of their own choosing. We grade published evidence by how it was produced and test four claims with controlled probes that reuse released checkpoints and public data, varying one input at a time. Report text adds prognostic signal: adding a frozen embedd
College football score predictions for Week 8, 2026: Model backs Texas (-3) against Ole Miss
SportsLine's model has revealed its Week 8 college football score predictions for matchups such as Texas vs. Ole Miss, Indiana vs. Michigan and Houston vs. Utah
UK to deploy Typhoon jets to help defend Saudi Arabia from Houthi attacks
Ministry of Defence says warplanes will operate in 'defensive role' and not be used to attack Yemeni group.
Deep-$π^*$: A Neural Network Estimate of Trend Inflation
Most empirical models of trend inflation treat it as a latent random walk driven by unobserved shocks, so they cannot say which economic conditions move it. Deep-$π^*$ makes the innovations to the trend a possibly nonlinear function of a large number of macroeconomic indicators, estimated with neural networks, so that Shapley values can be used to attribute every movement of the trend to the indicators behind it. Two complementary loss functions define a current trend, which fits inflation today
Jaafar Jackson on "cut" 'Michael' scenes that tackled child abuse allegations
“You wish a certain performance was in there and it’s not”
Kaspersky: Even IT Experts Are Vulnerable to Cyber Threats
Think tech workers are safer online? A 2026 Kaspersky study of 7,200 respondents shows cyber incident rates exceed 80% across all major professions.
Can It Actually Work? Synthesizing Functional CAD Mechanisms
While LLM agents can generate visually plausible CAD assemblies, these designs often fail to fulfill their intended physical functions. We study functional CAD design, a setting where agents interpret underspecified requests to construct and iteratively revise mechanisms that satisfy functional requirements in physical simulation. Verifying these requirements is nontrivial: different candidate mechanisms may realize the same function through entirely different components, controls, and operating
Endangered red squirrels thriving on British island
Conservationists say that, with red squirrels dwindling in the UK, Jersey is an "important refuge".
POV: Your girls' PE lesson gets a glow up
Can activities like yoga, dance and fitness encourage more girls to enjoy sport?
What to watch in UEFA Champions League: PSG vs. Barcelona could be a classic, Serie A need to recover, more
Hansi Flick's free-scoring attack puts its 11-game winning run on the line against the reigning champions in a clash of Europe's top contenders
Yemen’s critically ill are trapped as war closes the country’s airports
A re-ignition of Yemen's war has left the chronically sick who need treatment trapped in the country.
A new at-home HPV test kit is going national through Quest Diagnostics
Patients across the U.S. will soon have access to a new cervical cancer test collected from the comfort of their own home—no stirrups, speculum, or in-person doctor’s visit needed. The life sciences company Waters is partnering with Quest Diagnostics to make Waters’ BD Onclarity HPV assay test available for use at home. The partnership, announced Tuesday, will begin making self-collection kits available in early 2027. The kit was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration for at-
Clayface star says uncomfortable prosthetics helped his performance
Tom Rhys Harries says he spent half his time on set with the make-up team.
Yelp can now call on your behalf to check wait times at a restaurant
Yelp is embedding numerous new AI features into its app that can do everything from call to check on restaurant wait times to create personalized recommendations that remember your preferences.
OpenVLHarness: Real World Visual Agentic Tool-Use with Multimodal Memory
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress on visual reasoning, yet many tasks require evidence that is difficult to obtain through internal reasoning alone: our controlled study on 22 benchmarks shows that simply increasing the inference budget of the base model yields only modest gains. Such tasks demand grounded perception, external knowledge, and numerical measurements obtained through heterogeneous tools, whose outputs must be made interpretable to the model and retai
Nepal’s disaster is an urgent wake-up call
Nature, Published online: 20 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03314-6Record-breaking avalanches and floods are signs of things to come. Scientists must evaluate and respond to growing risks in mountain regions.
Bombadil: A Foundation Model for Plant Electrophysiology
Living plants, like animals, use electrical signals to carry information about their physiological state across their body, from roots to branches. These signals can be recorded, as they are in animals, from a pair of differential extracellular electrodes inserted into signal-conducting tissue. While machine-learning models have been trained to predict specific plant stress states from these signals, each of these models has been trained for only a single task and none have been designed to tran
Celtics vs. Pistons prediction, odds, start time, betting preview: NBA picks, best bets on Tuesday, Oct. 20
Best bets and betting preview for Pistons vs. Celtics on Tuesday
Press review: Russia reshuffles government as NATO moves to escalate Black Sea tensions
Top stories from the Russian press on Tuesday, October 20th
Giant 'heat storms' are scorching the Earth. This is the story of the biggest one on record
Heat storms have increased dramatically, causing severe global consequences including excess deaths and environmental catastrophes. Recent heat storms have been identified as a new classification, representing larger and more persistent heat events. The intensity of these heat storms has worsened du
Woman describes alleged assault by Russell Brand as 'frenzied' and 'violent'
The entertainer denies three counts of rape, three charges of sexual assault and one of indecent assault.
CVE-2026-113459 | TYPO3 AI Integration Extension up to 14.0.1 Editor Plugin information disclosure
A vulnerability was found in TYPO3 AI Integration Extension up to 14.0.1. It has been declared as problematic. This vulnerability affects unknown code of the component Editor Plugin. Executing a manipulation can lead to information disclosure. This vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2026-113459. The a
CVE-2026-93878 | Divigear Carousel Plugin up to 5.2.0 on WordPress cross site scripting
A vulnerability was found in Divigear Carousel Plugin up to 5.2.0 on WordPress. It has been rated as problematic. The affected element is an unknown function. The manipulation leads to cross site scripting. This vulnerability is documented as CVE-2026-93878. The attack can be initiated remotely. Th
Humanoid robot shoves 77-pound load, lifts 44 pounds in new demo
KAIST's Humanoid v0.9 pushes 77.2-pound loads and lifts 44.1 pounds using visual feedback and learning-based control.
Can one photo of your face reveal how ill you are?
AI may help doctors judge how ill a patient is using a single photograph of their face, say US researchers.
NFL Draft's first-round gamble: What Jets, Browns can learn from Super Bowl winners and failed rebuilds
Multiple first-round picks helped the Chiefs, Eagles and Seahawks win Super Bowls, but the Jets and Browns know the other side of the story
US leaving oil-for-security approach, not Middle East: Envoy Tom Barrack
Barrack highlights limits of US interventions, admitting past regime changes in the Middle East were often mistakes.
Synthetic Control: An Exact Geometric Formulation
The synthetic control method matches a treated unit to a convex combination of donor units, with the relative importance of each predictor determined by a weight matrix $V$. In standard practice, $V$ is selected through a bi-level optimization problem that is nonconvex and lacks convergence guarantees. This article derives an exact geometric solution for synthetic control estimators. For any positive definite $V$, a synthetic control is given by the projection of the treated unit's predictors on
The Sultan of Oman arrives in the UK for the start of his three-day state visit
King Charles III and Queen Camilla are hosting the Sultan of Oman for a three-day state visit this week
AstraZeneca Partners With Oracle to Refine Clinical Research With AI
AstraZeneca is teaming up with Oracle to refine clinical research, in the latest artificial-intelligence partnership in the pharmaceutical industry.
Prof. Vukosi Marivate on Governing AI in Africa | Deep Learning Indaba 2026
“An honour not for me, but for the village.” Prof. Vukosi Marivate, newly named to the UN Scientific Panel on AI, talks government advice, what a degree is worth in the AI era, and moving Africa from brain drain to brain circulation.
Europe and the rest of the world must come up with an answer to US science strategy
Nature, Published online: 20 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03352-0Europe and the rest of the world must come up with an answer to US science strategy
ProteinGeoBench: Frontier Structural-Biology Agents Are Fluent at Lookup but Lost in Geometry
Frontier agents retrieve structural metadata well and compute geometry from coordinates less reliably. We ask how much of a benchmark score reflects that gap and how much reflects the evaluation configuration around the model. We study ProteinGeoBench, a suite of 131 protein-structure tasks, using 4,249 rollouts from four frontier models and 4,486 further trials across 26 models. Three of the four frontier models fall within 0.031 of one another (0.785 to 0.816) with no difference between them r
Celtics vs. Pistons odds, prediction, time: 2026 NBA Opening Night picks by proven model
SportsLine's model reveals its Detroit Pistons vs. Boston Celtics best bets for NBA Opening Night 2026 on Tuesday
Australian MP Helen Haines remains in critical condition after car attack
Australian MP Helen Haines lost a leg and remains in critical condition after a car attack outside her office.
Almost Uniform Bias Correction for Persistent Panel Local Projections
Panel local projections are widely used to estimate impulse responses in policy analysis. This paper examines the properties of the fixed-effect estimator and various bias-correction methods in panel local projections, focusing on settings with autoregressive control variables. We analyze the bias and variance of these estimators while allowing for persistence in both the target and control variables. Our theoretical findings indicate that the half-panel jackknife has desirable bias-reducing pro
Will there be a Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 3?
As Edgerunners 2 lands on Netflix, we look at whether a third instalment could happen and what the creators have said about the franchise's future.