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.
Google Insists It Is Not Extorting Schools with Forced AI to Keep Search
Google responded to political backlash from Bernie Sanders and Lina Khan over its policy linking school Search to AI features.
Sam Altman addresses RAM comments: people should ‘put as much as they want in their computers’
‘Ram Altman’ wants you to have ‘so much ram.’
SBi3PCF: cosmology with Dark Energy Survey Year 3 cosmic shear
We present the first cosmic shear data analysis of the integrated 3-point correlation function (i3PCF), a higher-order weak lensing statistic, and the first simulation-based inference (SBI) analysis of a three-point cosmic shear correlation function on survey data. Using SBi3PCF, our previously developed SBI framework for the i3PCF, we jointly constrain the $w$CDM parameter space with the cosmic shear 2-point correlation functions $ξ_\pm$ (2PCFs) and the i3PCFs $ζ_\pm$ from the Dark Energy Surve
A Bayesian Optimized Biquad Filter-Burg Model for Real-Time EEG Phase Estimation
Real-time phase estimation on stimulus-aligned transient EEG is critical for closed-loop neuromodulation systems targeting the theta-band, yet most real-time phase estimation methods have been developed and validated on resting-state, high-fidelity signals in the alpha band. Recent work has pursued deep learning architectures, while individualized classical bandpass filter tuning remains underexplored. This study characterizes the spectral and temporal properties of non-anticipative bandpass fil
Rory McIlroy explains how LIV Golf was talking about destroying the European Tour at recent major
McIlroy echoed the sentiments of the DP World Tour CEO, who revealed plenty in a recent interview
Palestinian citizens of Israel face intimidation after election success
After winning a record number of parliament seats, Palestinian-led parties face campaign against them.
CVS is splitting into two companies: Healthcare giant’s ‘Pharmacy’ breakup explained
CVS is breaking up. On Wednesday, the healthcare giant announced plans to split into two separate, independent companies, and both will be publicly traded. The two companies will form a “leading healthcare solutions company” called CVS Health, and will encompass Aetna, CVS Caremark, CVS Specialty, Oak Street Health, and Signify Health. The second company, dubbed CVS Pharmacy, will be made up of roughly 9,000 CVS pharmacies, mail pharmacy, MinuteClinic, and the Health100 tech servi
Maura Higgins shares ‘reality’ of competing on Dancing With The Stars
The Love Island star is taking part on the US version of the dancing series, where she has been paired with professional dancer Mark Ballas.
Google faces backlash for plan that would turn off Search for schools that restrict AI
Politicians on the left, like NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani and former FTC chair Lina Khan, accused Google of acting as an unregulated monopoly.
From Autonomous Agents to Cognitive Symbionts: Toward AI-Augmented Human Intelligence
For a decade, progress in artificial intelligence has been measured by how much a machine can do on its own. Large foundation models now write code and run multistep tasks, and personal agents act on a person's behalf. Yet people still forget what they once knew, miss what they are not looking at, fail to find the right words, and face hard choices without the benefit of their own history, because the machine that could help stands outside the situation. As AI moves into the physical world, atte
Microsoft's AI PC push meets a wall of RAM prices, but Redmond is still beating the drum
Customers are sweating assets amid tight budgets, yet that doesn't stop an exec from Redmond getting creative with the sales pitch
The biotech startups skipping AI for drug discovery
In this edition of AI Prognosis: These biotech startups don't think drug discovery is where AI can make the biggest difference.
Lane Kiffin, LSU enter defining November stretch as Alabama matchup carries CFP weight
It's Week 10, and the Tigers' first-year coach hasn't beaten a team ranked inside the CFP's top 25 yet
Democratic voters celebrate El-Sayed’s Michigan win in election ‘blue wave’
Democratic voters danced as they celebrated Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan.
How AI impacts solopreneurs’ relationships with their clients (and what to do about it)
Most people I know have asked themselves some version of “Is AI replacing me?” It’s a fair question. But, running a solo business, I think the question extends beyond “Is AI replacing the work I do?” It’s also impacted the way clients interact with the people they hire. Clients expect AI to make your work cheaper Some companies are really moving their budgets away from hiring people to AI. The Ramp Economics Lab tracked how businesses split their spending b
Men Who Do Less of This Have Better Luck Dating, According to a New Survey
A new survey reveals an unexpected preference among women when evaluating potential dates, but there's a surprising catch.
TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026: Doors open at 9 a.m. ET in Boston
Today is the day to join TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 in Boston's SoWa Power Station. Register now to join this founder-focused conference today.
What I learned driving the Slate electric truck prototype
If my 45-minute drive yesterday morning is anything to go by, I think Slate Auto will have quite the hit on its hands. The startup had one of its prototype trucks in town and asked if I wanted to check it out—no jumping on a plane or having to spend yet another night in an interchangeable hotel room, just a drive from southwest DC to Rockville, Maryland. Easy-peasy. The prototype truck had been well-used, with almost 6,000 miles (9,656 km) showing on the small and minimalist but very legible digital display that also shows your speed and, if you engage reverse, the backup camera.
NASA Navigation Experiment Shows Promise for Planetary Landings
3 min readPreparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) An Alta-X drone flies an advanced guidance and navigation system known as the Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) experiment near NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, on Wednesday, July 15, 2026. Researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston developed SPLICE, which successfully communicated with the remotely piloted aircraft during hover maneuvers in flight.
Woman still going strong 3 years after stage 4 breast cancer diagnosis
Three years ago, Irene Ho received news that would change her life. The single mum of three was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer and learnt that she might only have three to six months to live.Now, 50-year-old Irene has long surpassed that given timeline and continues to make the most of each
NBA player props, odds, picks: Kyrie Irving among best bets for Wednesday, Nov. 4
We'll use the SportsLine Projection Model to go over the best player prop bets for Wednesday's NBA games
Ukrainian strikes kill three in Russia’s Belgorod region
Russian strikes also cut power to Ukrainian cities as Moscow claims 700 Ukrainian drones downed across multiple regions.
AI data centers also lost big in the 2026 midterm elections
President Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot this midterm election season, but on some tickets, an industry he wholeheartedly supports was: Ballot measures in more than 30 districts across the country asked voters to weigh in on AI data center development. And data centers lost big. Voters overwhelmingly chose to ban or pause local data center development across 38 out of 41 ballot measures. (The other three measures aren’t yet reporting results, according to Ballotpedia.) The ballot q
Tributes paid to drummer with dozens of number ones
Amarillo singer Tony Christie says Clem Cattini was a "world class" musician and gentleman.
‘Totally insane’: Alex Stamos on giving AI agents your bank logins
Alex Stamos says people give agents like Meta’s Muse and Instinct whole 1Password vaults, leaving banks facing bots with real logins.
The DEA banned a drug some opioid users called a miracle
In 2012, as the driver of deaths in the opioid crisis began moving from prescription pills to heroin, Laura Bohn was tasked with finding safer drugs to manage pain. Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in 2017 she and other scientists revealed in the science journal Cell that several compounds—including a particularly promising one called SR-17018—could relieve pain in mice without causing respiratory depression.
NASA, NOAA Track 2026 Antarctic Ozone Hole
4 min read NASA, NOAA Track 2026 Antarctic Ozone Hole Earth’s protective ozone layer remains on track for long-term recovery, despite atmospheric conditions that contributed to a larger Antarctic ozone hole in 2026, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported. The ozone hole ranked seventh largest by area in 48 years of monitoring, but was not as deep as other large holes on record. From Sept. 7 to Oct. 13, peak ozone depletion season, the average extent of the hole covered about 9.6 million square miles (25 million square kilometers).
iGC: Antibody Optimization via Reinforcement Learning over a Learned Somatic Hypermutation Prior
Antibody affinity maturation is a natural optimization process in which B cells acquire mutations through somatic hypermutation (SHM), undergo selection for improved antigen binding, and iteratively evolve toward higher affinity. Computationally modeling this process requires capturing both biologically plausible mutations and antigen-specific selection. However, existing mutation models do not directly optimize binding, while affinity optimization often neglects realistic mutation trajectories.
NHL Power Rankings: Penguins facing some tough decisions on star players amid slow start
GM Kyle Dubas may be forced into a fire sale this season as Pittsburgh continues to struggle
US markets rise as Democrats sweep midterm elections
Nasdaq, Dow, and S&P 500 open higher after Democrats take control and Trump accepts results.
The U.S. housing market just flashed a major warning sign. Here’s what the latest numbers reveal
The number of new real estate listings is down, but that isn’t cause for alarm—not yet, anyway. In a new housing report for the month of October, Realtor.com found that sellers aren’t eager to list homes right now, but they’re not bailing out of the market altogether either. That said, the number of homes under contract in October dropped by 10.5% compared to one year prior, the biggest decline since late 2023. “The market is cooling on both sides, but in different ways. Buyers are steppin
Pokémon Pokopia DLC Dazzling Decorations Release Date and Features Revealed
Pokémon Pokopia DLC Dazzling Decorations launches December 9. Here are the new features and requirements to access the expansion.
Your next phone could cost even more, and this time it’s not just RAM
A couple of reports suggest Samsung’s OLED panels could witness a significant price bump starting next year.
Aligning Language Models with General Preferences: An Empirical Study of Direct Nash Optimization
Direct Nash Optimization (DNO) aligns a language model to a general preference function by approximating the Nash equilibrium of a two-player preference game. Its practical variant, DNO-Prct, iterates on-policy sampling, LLM-based rating of the samples together with a teacher's gold response, large-margin preference-pair selection and a DPO-style contrastive update. We re-implement DNO-Prct independently and study it on two open-weight instruct models, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct and Mistral 7B Instru
US allies could get 1,250-mile deep strike capability that can reach Moscow
The proposed deep-strike capability is intended to provide the United Kingdom and Germany with a significantly enhanced conventional deterrence option.
Do mosquito repellent patches work? Experts weigh in on the buzz
As West Nile virus concerns rise, some parents are turning to essential oil patches for easy bite prevention. Mosquito authorities explain why you should stick to sprays instead.
Browns' Deshaun Watson in concussion protocol: Shedeur Sanders potentially in line to start Week 9 at Saints
Watson cleared evaluation Sunday but started having symptoms Monday night
Owono enduring ‘hardest days of my life’ after De Miguel death
Tenerife striker De Miguel died on Tuesday as a result of injuries from a collision with FC Andorra goalkeeper Owono.
Your company probably saw the problem coming. Here’s why it got blindsided anyway
Most strategic surprises aren’t really surprises. Somebody inside the company almost always saw the signal early. The question is why the organization didn’t do anything useful with those insights while there was still time. I think of an organization’s early warning capacity as having three parts. Sensing is whether you pick up leading indicators while the signals are still weak. Discipline is whether there’s a consistent process, with dedicated time and people to att
Crimson Desert Patch Notes for Update 2.04.06 – DLC Fixes and Performance Improvements
Crimson Desert update 2.04.06 fixes DLC issues, crashes, and framerate drops. Here are the full patch notes and platform availability details.
The AI Pentesting wave. Pay for effort vs pay for impact.
The AI Pentesting wave. Pay for effort vs pay for impact.
DreamX: Video Diffusion Model is a Universal Latent Action Learner
Learning a universal action representation from video requires modeling dynamics that are consistent across different executions of the same action yet invariant to changes in embodiment and appearance. Existing latent action models infer actions from visual transitions, but their representations often entangle the underlying action with irrelevant visual variations, limiting transfer across embodiments. We introduce DreamX, which repurposes a pretrained video diffusion model as a universal late
Hubble Reveals Cosmic Mystery
This is an image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of NGC 4449, one of the dwarf galaxies in the Galaxies Losing Oxygen via Winds (GLOW) study. Researchers found that dwarf galaxies can hold onto only a small fraction of the oxygen made by their stars. NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage–ESA/Hubble Collaboration, Alessandra Aloisi (STScI, ESA) This photo released on Nov. 2, 2026, showcases NGC 4449, a dwarf irregular.
Empirical Bayes Flow Matching for Continuous Cryo-EM Heterogeneity
We address the problem of learning generative priors over high-dimensional latent variables from indirect, noisy observations, with a focus on continuous heterogeneity in cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). In this setting, 3D atomic structures $x \in \mathbb{R}^{3N_a}$ are never directly observed and must be inferred from 2D projection images $y$ generated by a complex, non-linear forward operator. We propose Empirical Bayes Flow Matching (EB-FM), a method that learns a flow matching prior $p_θ
Jadeveon Clowney mock trades: Cowboys reunion headlines four deals Texans can make before NFL trade deadline
Clowney's name has surfaced in trade discussions this week
Presidential hopeful Vance appears to question Iran war after polls debacle
Vance cited trusted pollster saying Iran war, Israel ties were top of mind for Trump voters swinging to Democrats.
Jeff Bezos praised Raising Cane’s. Its founder built a $22 billion fortune by breaking 3 fast-food rules
Raising Cane’s isn’t following the standard fast-food playbook. From its limited menu to the employee dress code, founder Todd Graves is charting his own path in a competitive industry. Now, one of the world’s richest men is pointing to his chicken finger empire as a prime example of the power of entrepreneurship. In a recent Fox News interview, Jeff Bezos pushed back on the notion that building a successful business and becoming a billionaire made someone a villain. Instead, he pointed
Fleabag star offers rent-free flat to new writers
Phoebe Waller-Bridge is donating the accommodation to playwrights from underprivileged backgrounds.
Oppo F35 Pro Gets ColorOS 17 Update in India
Oppo says ColorOS 17 improves app launch stability by up to 55 percent.
AI Is Taking the Memory Your Phone Needs, and AMD Just Confirmed It
AMD says AI chips are competing with phones and laptops for the same memory supply. Here’s why that means phone prices will keep climbing in 2027.
NASA Space Grant Students Fuel Agency’s Inspiration Tour
4 min readPreparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman addresses a standing-room-only crowd during an Inspiration Tour stop at Iowa State University. Credit: NASA NASA’s Inspiration Tour spread the excitement of space exploration and aeronautical innovation by connecting the public, industry, and academia with the people, technologies, and organizations that drive American leadership in space.
Heart-healthy salt could prevent 12,000 deaths a year
Researchers found replacing regular salt with a potassium-enriched version could also prevent 60,000 cases of cardiovascular and kidney disease annually in the UK.
Way-too-early 2027 WNBA Power Rankings: Valkyries on top; Fever, Lynx, Liberty have major offseason questions
The Valkyries just took down the Dream to cap off the 2026 WNBA season, but that doesn't mean we can't look ahead to 2027
Photos: Iran marks US embassy takeover with rallies against US, Israel
Tehran rallies see slogans, flag burnings and claims of US-Israeli defeats amid historic embassy takeover anniversary.
Outback Steakhouse store closures: See a list of doomed locations as franchisee files for bankruptcy
A number of Outback Steakhouse locations closed their doors last month in the lead-up to a bankruptcy petition by one of the casual dining chain’s largest franchisees, court documents reveal. The store closures span four states. Here’s what to know: What’s happened? Cerca Trova Restaurant Group Holdings, which operates as Out West Restaurant Group, one of Outback Steakhouse’s largest franchisees, sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States Bankruptcy Cour
Emmerdale airs explosive Joe Tate and Caleb Miligan confrontation in early ITVX release
Warning: Contains spoilers for Wednesday's episode of Emmerdale, which airs at 8pm on ITV1 or can be streamed now on ITVX.
I tried Apple’s Siri Recaps. They’re surprisingly useful — and a little unsettling
Apple's AI-powered Siri Recaps won me over in just one day, despite my privacy reservations. But there's still room for improvement.
Binance says hackers who stole billions in crypto spent months planning heist
The hackers who stole billions of dollars in cryptocurrency from the Binance exchange spent months working on the theft and used both social engineering and novel malware in the process, the company said Tuesday. The heist, which both the FBI and the TRM Security firm attributed to North Korean actors, initially targeted $6.34 billion in cryptocurrency from Binance wallets. The exchange has since frozen or intercepted $2.85 billion of that sum. Binance said it has set aside funds required to cover the loss and provided this link to a Proof of Reserves page.
Mapping large-scale structure without galaxy formation - combining fast radio bursts with CMB lensing
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are an emerging precision probe of cosmological fluctuations. The amount and quality of observed FRB data will grow enormously over the next decade. FRB dispersion data directly probe the free electron distribution up to intergalactic scales. Precision models of the free electron distribution are necessary to exploit this exciting new probe of large-scale structure. We show that the free electron distribution almost exactly follows the total matter distribution. We confi
Cyberattack hits French blood bank site but no blood products were compromised
French authorities have reported a cyberattack on several blood banks that attempted to raise temperatures to dangerous levels
Former Yankees, Rangers All-Star Mark Teixeira wins U.S. House seat in Texas
Teixeira won the U.S. House seat in the 21st congressional district in Texas
The new Congress may struggle to push a progressive agenda
Major change on key issues, such as Israel-Palestine, will be limited by the president and the Democratic establishment.
The biggest tech story of the midterms might be Democrats’ attorney general wins
A blue wave has swept Democrats into control of both the House and Senate, dealing a major blow to Donald Trump in the midterm elections. But beyond the congressional shake-up, a handful of state attorney general races could prove just as consequential for the technology industry. Democrats won five closely watched attorney general races, including a surprise victory in Texas, where Nathan Johnson defeated Republican Mayes Middleton to become the state’s first Democratic attorney genera
VisionQuest episode 7 twist sees Paul Bettany take on integral Marvel characters and fans are blown away
The history of Vision stretches further than fans might have expected...