2026-10-13

Horseshit

• Engineers Gave a Mushroom a Robot Body and Let It Run Wild

• The Vikings who reached the Americas 500 years before Columbus

• Should You Put Your Books in the Freezer?

• Whacky Japanese moving keyboard may be the future or not

• Expedition hopes to find aviator Amelia Earhart's plane on remote island

• Mathematicians invented a knitting stitch that stops mistakes from spreading

• He Went Out on an Epic Wilderness Adventure. Only His Dogs Came Back

• Maine woman grows 170-pound zucchini, breaks North American record

• Freckle phone aims to send kids outside to play and engage with the world

• Man mauled to death by tiger was happily dancing, posing for pics with the animal before he jumped into UK wildlife enclosure

• Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search

• 'How I Became a Lock Picker'

• A man hiking the world in search of rare cheeses

• Will the world end next month? Science said so, in 1960

• These celebrities gave up smartphones. What research says about the lifestyle.

• The Punks Plan to Reclaim the Internet from 'Big Tech'

• Who cares? Leonardo da Vinci Was Jewish

  The official version of da Vinci’s birth is that it was the fruit of a brief fling between the Florentine solicitor Piero da Vinci and a young peasant from Tuscany called Caterina, of whom almost nothing was known. Yet there had long been a seemingly unfounded theory that Leonardo had foreign origins and that Caterina was an Arab slave. Six years ago, professor Vecce decided to kill the rumor for good. “I simply found it impossible to believe that the mother of the greatest Italian genius would be a non-Italian slave,” he told me. “Now, not only do I believe it, but the most probable hypothesis, given what I found, is that Caterina was Jewish.”

celebrity gossip

• A decade after Stardew Valley, Eric Barone is still going it alone

• Anne Carson Was in Iceland Listening to the Wind When the Nobel Prize Called

Obit

• Mathematician Who Waited 50 Years for Proper Credit for Her Work Has Died

• RJ Mitte Dead by Suicide: 'Breaking Bad' Actor Was 34

  RJ Mitte, who played the son of Bryan Cranston’s Walter White on the Emmy-winning series Breaking Bad and became a disability-rights activist from his experiences living with cerebral palsy, has died. He was 34.

  • Breaking Bad star RJ Mitte dies aged 34

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Tom Cruise film 'Digger' could lose $245M

Musk

• X Once Again Marks The Spot

  • X is bad, though

• Elon Musk's PAC is spreading inaccurate voting info, election officials say

• Elon Musk emerges as the top booster for Republicans with $276M donations

  • Elon Musk's $276M Midterm Rescue Mission for Republicans

• Elon Musk Bragged About His Grok Lego Star Wars Haul. Then X Users Punked Him

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Citroen revives the 2CV for an electric age

• Flood damaged EVs pose fire risk even after water recedes, fire officials say

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Timekeepers to vote on ditching the leap second

• Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to R. Hall and M. Woodford

  • Americans Win Nobel Prize for Work on Economic Stability

  • Nobel Prize for economics awarded to Hall and Woodford

  • Nobel Prize in economics goes to Hall, Woodford for work on boom-bust cycles

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Inside The Failed Fight to Unionize One of Gaming's Most Idealized Studios

• Cryptomining malware used poetry to infect more than 3,400 servers

• 'Human-authored' book labels gain ground amid AI scandals

• Console market craters: Xbox sales drop 33%, PS5 sales drop 25%

• And yet somehow the Xbox is selling in some places for as much as $1600 due to shortages.

• How labor rights rescued Ultima from a monopolist

• Publishers Killed the Paperback, Then Blamed Readers

• ePub 3.4 Is Coming

• Epic Games Delays Disney Project, Asks Developers to Use More AI

  • Epic Games tells employees to use AI to get Disney game done

  • Epic Reportedly Pushing Devs to Use AI, Delays Star Wars and Marvel Shooter

• Linux enthusiasts see 10-second kernel compilation times on the horizon

• Samsung to cut smartphone production by 30%

Panopticon / Surveiled State

• Cops Can Creep on Airbnb

• Make Big Brother Bad for Big Business

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• The Moon Mission That's a High-Tech Cave Hunt

  • Hole on the Moon may open into a giant cave

• NASA may have proof life once existed on Mars

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI less regulated than milk, Microsoft president says in warning over safety

  • AI is less regulated than milk, Microsoft president says

  • The kids are worried about p(DOOM)

  • Mark Zuckerberg says Meta reached AI 'frontier' and rejects calls for slowdown

  • AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter

  • AI agents locate infrastructure flaws and zero-days to exploit task shortcuts

• A failed initial public offering from Nvidia-backed Firmus

  Nvidia, despite its immense profits and prestige, is known for doing something a bit scuzzy, called “circular financing.” That is, it invests in its own customers so they can buy its chips. Sometimes it goes through multiple layers, like investing in OpenAI, which buys from Oracle, which buys from Nvidia. But there are a host of smaller AI companies in which Nvidia, as well as hedge funds and banks, have put a lot of money. And one of them, a little noticed AI data center company called Firmus, tried to sell shares to on the stock market this week. Yet investors revolted, and the company had to scrap its initial public offering. Aside from Nvidia, Firmus was backed by blue chip financial firms Jane Street and Blackstone, and it was set to become Australia’s biggest IPO ever, at $30 billion in valuation. So this failure is a big deal, and it raised eyebrows all over Wall Street.

  • Banks are now trying to offload the AI data center debt they just underwrote

• Meta Unveils New Series of Advanced AI Models

  • Muse Wonder

  • I Got My Muse AI Agent to Sext Me–and Meta Says That's Fine

• New Math from OpenAI

  • As AI Closed in on 'Unique Games' Proof, Researchers Raced to Beat the Machines

  • Additional recent pieces on math and AI

  • AI's mathematics blitz pushes science into new territory

• Research Firm Calls Anthropic's IPO 'Unprecedented Test of Investor Gullibity'

• Problems in 22 science fields had solutions hiding in plain sight. AI found them

• Software engineers don't get to be Luddites about AI

• IMF says AI investment keeps global growth around 3%

• Yet Another Literary Prizewinner Seems to Be AI

• Britain to get first look at new AI systems after White House U-turn

• Leading Chinese mathematicians unite behind use of AI in research

• Tony Fadell on why the first wave of AI gadgets failed – and what comes next

• Website uses AI to generate northern Indigenous news 'correspondents'

• AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software

• Linus Torvalds Working on a Hefty Linux Kernel Improvement with Claude Code

• AI is changing how Lawyers work – and putting the billable hour under pressure

• Virginia Data Center Ran Diesel Generators for 24 Hours. Residents Fled

• Man Sentenced to 18 Months in Prison for AI Assisted Music Streaming Fraud

• AI spots nearly 19,000 road offences, in 2 week trial

• Joseph Gordon-Levitt Has Some Things to Say About A.I

• AI's price wave reaches the processor: Intel up to 20%, Qualcomm 10%, TSMC next

• Michael I. Jordan on AI: "Superintelligence is science fiction"

• What happens to all the heat generated by Irish data centres?

• AI's Supercharging a Scam Economy Bigger Than the Cocaine Trade

• The Tragedy of AI Coding

• Is Universal Basic Income the Answer to A.I.-Fueled Job Losses?

• Most US Adults Aren't Ready for AI to Help with Holiday Shopping, Survey Finds

• FTX's Old Bitcoin-Mining Assets Are Now Part of the AI Boom

• Google must pause Finnish data center construction due to environmental concerns

• Nvidia accused of trying to cut a deal with Anna's Archive

• Palantir CTO: AI researchers taking up smoking; they expect AI to cure cancer

• The CEO's of Broadcom and Intel Say the Quiet Part Out Loud about AI and ROI

• Thinking will become a hobby

  cognitive work will diminish. Thought will increasingly become a leisure pursuit, as hunting did following animal domestication, calligraphy after typography, woodworking after industrialisation, and horse riding after motorisation. Machines transformed much of physical activity from necessity into choice; similarly, AI will decouple human thinking from its economic purpose.

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Ledger confirms hidden chip in crypto wallet amid $92M theft claims

  • Ledger wallet tampering suspected after reports of crypto thefts

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Is 8% next? Why mortgage rates have surged, and may stay higher for longer.

• Getty Images is filing for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy

  • Getty Images to go private after restructuring deal

• Americans earning $100K are struggling. This breakdown offers clues as to why

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• New California ghost gun lawsuit aims at company that sells 3-D printer filament

Democrats

• Ilhan Omar's DC home raided by HSI

• Feds search Rep. Ilhan Omar's home in immigration probe

  • Did they make sure to bring "evidence" with them for the photo shoot like they did for Trump? Or is only the FBI that gets to do that?

Left Angst

• Silicon Valley is falling in line with Trump, SpaceXAI and AIForce to be renamed

• Trump Mobile hack and apparent lack of FCC authorization raise security alarms

• Microsoft barred from sponsoring foreign workers for US residency

• Outrage grows as CDC reportedly poised to fund "unethical" vaccine trial

• Feds Got Warrants to Use Fake Cell Towers to Hunt Down Don Lemon's Producer

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• MonsterCloud Owner Charged with Wire Fraud in 'No-Ransom' Scheme

  MonsterCloud allegedly charged clients over $19 million while paying attackers just $8 million.

• The Case for Firing Squads

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US lobbies allies to cut ties to anti-disinfo conf over panel critical of it

• As the military plans to speed up drones and AI use, Congress wants safeguards

• The Mystery of the Unknown Sailor Who Inspired Trump to Shake Up the Navy

World

• Russia behind Britain's Brexit vote, UK prime minister admits for first time

• Britain's Burnout Crisis Grows as 55% of Professionals Say They Feel Burnt Out

• Deloitte falsified documents to evade tax on Abramovich's wealth

• EU to limit Chinese hybrid vehicle imports to 350k a year

  • China's carmakers export more as EU caps hybrid vehicle imports at 350k a year

• French supermarket chains say cyberattack forced refrigerator shutdown

  • Hackers activate automatic defrosting accross European supermarket fridges

  • Major French Supermarket Chains Hit by Cyber-Attack, Food Stock Impacted

  • French supermarket chains say cyberattack forced refrigerator shutdown

  • French supermarkets face food crisis after cyberattack hits refrigerators

  • French supermarkets suffer refrigerator shutdown after unprecedented cyberattack

  • French supermarkets suffer fridge shutdown after 'unprecedented' cyberattack

  • Fridges in French supermarkets hit by cyber attack

  • Hackers heat French supermarket fridges, sparking fires and food losses

  • French supermarkets suffer refrigerator shutdown after unprecedented cyberattack

• Norway fines Microsoft's Xandr $9.6M over Grindr data sharing

• New EU Rules: Smartphones and Tablets to Meet Ecodesign Requirements by June

• The Welfare State Is Crushing Britain

• Adieu aux 'Enfants Rouges': Fire destroys Paris's oldest covered food market

• Germany: Investigation opened for sexual assault of 16 years girl using a robot

• UK data centre giant removed evidence of China deal ahead of $35B listing

• Canadian AI company turns away from U.S. government work amid trade tensions

Iran / Houthi

• Second Houthi strike on Riyadh airport in two days

• Iran's threat to cut undersea cables in Strait of Hormuz poses a threat to Gulf

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia was not ready for the data center war it started with Ukraine

• Ukraine hits second major tech site, expanding range of targets inside Russia

• Ukraine hits Russian Datacentre causing a 29% drop in US Twitter posts

  • Drop in Russian bot traffic after Yandex drone strikes was mostly web crawlers

  • People are rejoicing about the removal of Russian bots from social media

  • Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centres caused Russian bot activity to plummet?

China

• Beijing residents dispose of drones ahead of ban on ownership

• China’s debt interest costs are soaring above U.S. levels and growing faster than any other budget category as Beijing struggles to prop up growth.

Health / Medicine

• Diet drinks work as well as water for weight loss, major trial finds

• How much a flu vaccine may lower your dementia risk

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Very severe long Covid linked to differences in lung and mouth microbiomes

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The ecologist revealing the invisible networks that revive rainforests

• What is your seafood eating? Investigation traces problems in global feed supply

• Why is a crop that could feed millions only cultivated in one place?

• What swordfish washing up on British Columbia's coast says about changing oceans

• First major ammonia-powered bulk carrier for Australian iron ore

• Arctic Sea Ice Shrinks to Its 2026 Minimum

• Rice husk is being repurposed as a sturdy and resilient construction material

• Losing the fat in the chilly north Atlantic

• Scientists reaffirm 'incontrovertible' evidence of human influence on climate

• Sticky alpine flower confirms Darwin's 150-year-old carnivorous plant prediction

• Species Have Blurry Boundaries

• Tens of thousands urge EU for climate action at Brussels demonstration.

• A coal mine has been burning since 1962