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.
The New iMac Doesn't Have an OLED Display—but It's Much More Powerful
Still no OLED in this generation, but the iMac gets a two-generation upgrade to Apple's M6 chip.
Center-of-Mass Interpretation of Evolution Strategies
Evolution strategies (ES) update a model by sampling a population of perturbed copies, scoring each one, and moving in the reward-weighted direction of the perturbations. This update is usually presented as an estimate of a smoothed gradient. We present a geometrical interpretation of this update instead. Treat each perturbed model as a particle and its reward as the particle's mass. Before scoring, every particle has the same mass and the population balances at its centroid. Once rewards are as
Information-theoretic entropy imaging of quantum matter
Phase transitions can generate intricate spatial organization invisible to spatially averaged probes, yet quantitative measures of this organization remain limited. Here we develop "entropy imaging," an information-theoretic technique that harnesses lossless compression to quantify spatial complexity, predictability, and order in quantum materials. Using this approach, emergent spatial textures can be imaged and converted into an experimentally-accessible observable: the computable information d
Congo’s Ebola outbreak tops 10,000 cases as authorities race to slow the spread
Congo’s fast-moving Ebola outbreak has topped 10,000 confirmed cases as authorities race to slow the spread across Africa
Use BetMGM bonus code CBSSPORTS to get $1,500 bonus bets for Brewers-Rays World Series Game 4, Knicks-Pistons
Use the latest MGM promo code CBSSPORTS to get $1,500 in bonus bets if your first bet loses for World Series, NBA, NFL betting on Tuesday
Hegseth heads to Manila to shore up US ties with Asia-Pacific partners
The Iran war and Trump's criticisms of allies have led Asia-Pacific countries to recalibrate their calculations.
AI in Econometric Theory: An Example
This note contains a story and a paper. The paper is about the admissibility of two-stage least squares with weak instruments, a topic we have worked on together since 2019. The story is about how we (or, rather, our LLMs) wrote the paper, and some thoughts on what this may mean for our field.
Noah Wyle Crowned PEOPLE's 2026 Sexiest Man Alive
Noah Wyle was "incredulous" when he first heard he was PEOPLE's 2026 Sexiest Man Alive -- but that's only because he never believed for a minute that he'd win the title!
Security Researcher Claims Samsung Smart TVs Use AI To Monitor Audio, Screenshots, and Viewing Habits For Targeted Ads
Samsung's 2025 Smart TVs face privacy concerns over extensive user tracking capabilities, including audio monitoring and AI-driven profiling
Apple iPhone Duo review: Two screens, two experiences, two thousand dollars
I understand the appeal of foldable phones—they let manufacturers keep expanding screen sizes while still producing devices that can reasonably fit in a pocket. In practice, though, every foldable Android phone I've seen in public has had a ridiculously visible seam between the two halves of the screen, often with what looks like delamination from the underlying surface, giving the display an ugly, bubbly appearance. Back when Android phones began shipping with bigger and bigger screens and the iPhone was stuck at a miserly four inches, I was jealous.
Third harmonic generation in the transition metal trichalcogenides
The transition metal trichalcogenides (TMTs) are an interesting class of layered 2D materials that have strong anisotropic electrical and optical properties. We report on the polarization-dependent nonlinear optical response of exfoliated crystals at the third harmonic using non-resonant excitation with a 1560 nm femtosecond laser. All members of the TMT crystal family explored (ZrS3, HfS3, TiS3, and NbS3) display large anisotropy in their polarized third harmonic generation signal, with anisotr
A possible treatment for brain-eating amoebas, found in the sea
Brain-eating amoebas are hard to treat and nearly always fatal. But researchers have isolated a compound that could help stop the disease.
'I'll never be able to repay him': How Seth Doege saved Arizona QB Noah Fifita's career
After a miserable 2024 season left the Wildcats quarterback questioning his future, a former Texas Tech gunslinger turned offensive coordinator restored his confidence and sparked a resurgence
Russia targets Kyiv as Finnish, Norwegian leaders hold rare call with Putin
Strikes hit a major bridge in the Ukrainian capital as leaders push for 'direct discussions' to end the war.
Congo suspends artisanal mining agency head for failing to prevent illegal activities
Democratic Republic of Congo's mines minister has suspended the head of the state agency overseeing artisanal and small-scale mining, accusing him of failing to prevent illegal mining on licensed concessions, according to an order seen by Reuters. Mines minister Louis Kabamba Watum suspended Jean-Pa
Meghan Markle's acting comeback suffers major blow as Netflix 'safety net' disappears: expert
Meghan Markle is no longer in talks to join "The Gentlemen" as sources allege Netflix leaked casting news to boost the show's publicity online.
Japan internet giant GMO says hackers posted stolen customer data
Japan's GMO Internet is verifying alleged customer data posted by suspected hackers following a cloud service breach.
Auto-Research Arena: Benchmarking and Advancing Auto-Research in Language Modeling
As autonomous research systems become more capable, benchmarks must both evaluate their performance and support meaningful research progress. We introduce Auto-Research Arena, a multi-target benchmark for evaluating autonomous research systems and discovering ideas in language modeling. Arena supports diverse research objectives within a shared experimental environment by separating admissibility from improvement: model quality and resource constraints determine whether a result qualifies, while
China Zorrilla: World’s largest electric ferry starts commercial runs
The world’s largest battery-electric ship begins service on the Argentina–Uruguay route with a 40 MWh-plus battery system.
Emergency pediatric care is now in permanent crisis mode
“In 2026, the unprecedented pediatric patient crowding of 2022 has become a normal Tuesday,” write Jonathan Kohler and Mary King.
NBA player props, odds, picks: Lakers star Luka Doncic among best bets for Tuesday, Oct. 27
We'll use the SportsLine Projection Model to go over the best player prop bets for Tuesday's NBA games
King Charles’s Caribbean tour: Will he discuss slavery reparations?
UK's King Charles launches nine-day Caribbean tour amid monarchy questions and growing demands for slavery reparations.
Adequacy radii for stepped-wedge trials with time-varying effects
Complete stepped-wedge designs guarantee eventual intervention delivery, but their final periods contain no concurrent controls. Under exposure-time heterogeneity this creates a design-analysis tension: a constant-effect analysis can be precise while targeting a design-dependent contrast, whereas an exposure-time indicator (ETI) analysis targets a prespecified time-averaged effect but may be much less precise. We develop an adequacy radius that quantifies the size of exposure-time heterogeneity
Who Was BP Singh? The Man Who Made Us Love CID And Fear Aahat
BP Singh, veteran producer and creator of the iconic Indian television series CID and Aahat, passed away at the age of 77 following a massive heart attack.
The iMac is back with an M6 chip and faster connections
Apple's 24-inch iMac sees a big speed increase, not just from the chip
Retriever-Free Retrieval: Navigating Documents with Decision Models
While language models have become dramatically more capable, retrieval still largely relies on lexical matching or similarity in fixed embedding spaces. This creates a capability asymmetry: what the retriever fails to find, even the strongest generator cannot recover. We propose DecisionRAG, which brings the capabilities of pretrained language models to retrieval using decision models that jointly evaluate candidate branches in a single forward pass, without generating any tokens, and show that
220-second X-ray scan delivers images 27 times faster than conventional method
Instead of multiple elements, the team used a reflection zone plate, which can reflect, focus, and separate soft X-rays at the same time.
Dynamic heart rate variability for classification of arrhythmia burden
Purpose: Heart rate variability (HRV) may provide information beyond heart rate (HR) for identifying arrhythmia burden, but the value of temporal HRV variation remains unclear. This study developed a dynamic HRV measure quantifying the interquartile range of window-level root mean square of successive RR-interval differences (IQRRMSSD) and evaluated its utility in classifying total abnormal-beat and premature ventricular contraction (PVC) burden compared with the conventional RR-based HRV measur
Use FanDuel promo code to get $350 in bonus bets by targeting Brewers-Rays, World Series Game 4 on Tuesday
Sign up with the latest FanDuel promo code to get your bonus bets when you wager on Tuesday's top games
Sudan’s war steals children’s future with school closures and displacement
The conflict in Sudan has left millions of children without education, as they work to help their families.
At this point, 80% of job seekers apply and hear nothing
In today’s hiring environment, job seekers are lucky to get rejected. In a recent survey by hiring platform Greenhouse, 81% of job seekers said they never heard back from a company, be it human or machine, at least once during the past year. Nearly one third (31%) say this happens “often or almost always,” including 38% of Gen Z applicants. Even those who get interviews are not immune: 45% of respondents said they interviewed with an organization only to be ghosted completely. Iro
Netherlands makes U-turn over Eurovision 2027 participation
A Dutch broadcaster reverses a decision to take part, citing "sensitivities" over Israel's participation.
General Compute raises $100 million Series A, countering the neocloud disaster narrative
General Compute is betting on inference chips from outside the Nvidia ecosystem.
US officials want Section 702 renewed before damaging court ruling goes public
Two Democratic senators who have long overseen US intelligence say the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court’s findings from Congress until lawmakers renew a program that lets federal agents read Americans’ communications without a warrant. Seven months ago, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court objected to search filters that let intelligence analysts pull Americans’ messages from intercepted data without the approvals, written justifications, or records the law requires. The court approved another year of surveillance anyway.
Ukraine improves drone interception rates despite Starlink disruptions
Ukraine made significant progress in countering Russia's jet-powered drones, with some air defence units reporting interception rates around 80%. But recent restrictions on US satellite services exposed Kyiv's reliance on US technology as it races to develop cheaper, more effective interceptors.
Long-term medication or modern crash diet? Inside the new world of GLP-1s
GLP-1s were designed and tested for long-term use, to combat chronic health conditions like diabetes and obesity. But what happens when you take ...
2026 NBA betting promos: Get over $3,000 in bonuses from top online betting apps, sportsbooks for Oct. 27
Top NBA betting apps include DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, bet365, Caesars, Fanatics Sportsbook and Hard Rock Bet
Carrick stays on as Manchester United manager for crucial Chelsea match
Carrick will be in charge of football's Man United when they visit Chelsea on October 31, reports in British media say.
Model Selection for Off-Policy Evaluation via Pairwise Bellman Validation
Model selection and hyperparameter tuning pose a central challenge in off-policy evaluation (OPE) because errors of fitted Q-functions and occupancy-ratio estimates cannot be directly evaluated from held-out transitions. Bellman-residual and minimax validation methods often require auxiliary regressions or optimization over separate critic classes, adding computational and tuning costs. We introduce pairwise Bellman validation (PBV), a tuning-free minimax procedure for selecting among finite cla
Trump Accused of Brutally Raping Former Miss Switzerland at Plaza Hotel in 1993, He Denies
President Trump brutally raped a former Miss Switzerland beauty pageant contestant at New York's Plaza Hotel in 1993 ... at least according to the accuser's account to Congress ... but Trump says it's all BS.
Meta AI director Rohit Patel leaves to take on Microsoft Office and Google Workspace
Rohit Patel is departing Meta after eight years working on AI evaluations and reinforcement learning, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. His startup, Ndoc, aims to take on Microsoft Office Suite.
Sculpture recreates odd optical effects of famed Lycurgus Cup
Dating back to around 400 CE and made of dichroic glass, the Lycurgus Cup is notable for exhibiting different colors depending on the light. (It gets its name from the scene depicted on its surface, of King Lycurgus of Thrace.) Light it from the front, and the cup looks green; light it from behind, and the color changes to a deep red. University of Sheffield scientists have recreated the original recipe to produce a contemporary glass sculpture with the same optical effect. The cup is considered one of the seven glass wonders of the world, one of just 40 glass cage cups that survived.
Halloween fans seek the ‘real’ thing on paranormal tours
From former psychiatric hospitals to funeral homes, US attractions offer ghost hunts and overnight stays for Halloween fans seeking an otherworldly encounter.
A theory of noisy linear recurrent neural network learning dynamics
Biological neural networks are noisy: their dynamics involve difficult-to-predict fluctuations which are likely due not just to chaos, but also to a variety of low-level biophysical processes. Despite the omnipresence of intrinsic noise, its theoretical consequences are incompletely understood, especially in the context of learning. For example, does noise meaningfully shape representation learning, or is it better viewed as a nuisance factor whose presence or absence changes little about what s
Why Giants' coach John Harbaugh is backing Cam Skattebo's plan to defy the NFL rulebook
New York's running back refuses to change his hard-nosed approach and his coach wants clarity from the league
Putin calls Africa 'continent of future'
The head of state added that Russia is promoting the creation of a new investment platform within BRICS, which will also target fast-growing markets
HelloNation Explains Construction Preparation for a Custom Home With Insights From Custom Home Expert Nick Randol
/PRNewswire/ -- What should homeowners understand before starting a custom home on their own land? HelloNation has published an article that answers this...
Unnamed celebrity accused of 'inappropriate sexual activities', court hears
The man is asking the High Court to prevent two news organisations from publishing the allegations.
Anduril and Qualcomm to build laptops in the US for government use
Anduril and Qualcomm have unveiled BlueChip, a US-made laptop line for government and defence, with orders opening in 2027 and a Snapdragon X chip inside.
US tests 2-version cleanup system against chemical, biological agents
BLADE has won a contract to develop a transportable system that removes chemical and biological agents from sensitive military gear.
US method identifies radioactivity from 100-feet above in seconds
The aircraft with an aerial detector traced the radionuclide's identity, activity, and location nearly 100 feet above the source.
Hair surgeon warns against using 3 items in Halloween costume
Your Halloween costume choice could be harming your hair
How the Rays were broken by the merciless Brewers, who are on the verge of a World Series sweep
The Rays' chances at a comeback appeared to fall apart when the Brewers scored eight two-out runs in the fifth inning of Game 3
Design-forward, all-day restaurant Host to open in Detroit in 2027
Host restaurant first opened a Utica location in 2022 followed by one in Romeo earlier this year.
Want to be happier? Oxford research says ask yourself these 3 questions
What does it take to be happy? Three simple and surprising questions may hold the answer, research found. While most of us seek more money and greater achievement as paths to happiness, these questions are all about connection. They’re more strongly associated with self-measured life satisfaction than either money or success. That’s according to the 2025 World Happiness Report published by Oxford University and based on a study of people in 147 countries. The questions are: How often do you e
Trump Defends White House Renovations After Obama Cheesecake Factory Joke
President Trump isn't taking Barack Obama's criticism of his White House makeover lying down ... firing back at his predecessor and claiming the place was a total mess when he moved back in.
Opera introduces a new web standard to let users deploy AI locally in their browser
The new standard, WebAI, is designed to work with a variety of AI models.
Apple responds to iPhone Duo crackgate affecting "a small number of units"
Apple hits the first hurdle with its folding phone
Jay-Z and NFL seal deal for rapper to headline 2027 Super Bowl show
After days of speculation, Jay-Z, the rapper who became hip-hop's first billionaire by building a career as an executive and entrepreneur, is returning to his roots as an entertainer to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show.
On the stability of learning
Learning algorithms are usually analyzed under the assumption that informative gradients are continuously available. But this is not always true---learning signals in biological neural networks, for example, may be sparse, local, and only intermittently available at any given synapse. In this work, we show that if gradient information is noisy and only intermittently available, learning may be unstable. In particular, even if average learning dynamics converge to the correct optimum, variance in
Use DraftKings promo code to get $200 bonus, free NBA League Pass for Rays-Brewers World Series Game 4, NBA
DraftKings offers $200 in bonus bets and three free months of NBA League Pass after your first $5 wager for World Series, NBA, NFL betting on Tuesday
Israeli military detains Egyptian national who crossed border
Egyptian man held after crossing into Israel near Nitzana, his motive for the crossing still unknown.
Anthropic’s IPO strategy? Cloak itself in altruism
Anthropic’s cofounders, including CEO Dario Amodei, left OpenAI because they believed AI safety features should be developed alongside model capabilities from the very start of the development process. This mission has shaped the company, and has carried through to the way it’s framing its IPO, which could happen before Thanksgiving. In its S-1 filing, Anthropic tells the story of a company that wants to benefit all of the world’s people, but can do so only if it goes big and leads the
Imran Khan gets temporary relief, as 'leave India' notice put on hold, court to hear the actor's plea on November 2
Actor Imran Khan has received temporary relief in his legal battle against a notice asking him to leave India by October 28. The Bombay High Court on Tuesday adjourned the hearing on his petition to November 2 at 3 pm after the Centre sought additional time to respond.