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Today β€” 14 October 2026Main stream

Fact-Checking Senate Debates in Georgia, Maine and Michigan

By: Linda Qiu
14 October 2026 at 20:06
With control of Congress hanging in the balance, nominees have attacked their rivals’ records, stock portfolios and families, with varying degrees of accuracy.

Β© Photographs by Mike Stewart/Associated Press; Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse β€” Getty Images and Emily Elconin for The New York Times

From left, Representative Mike Collins of Georgia; Troy Jackson, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine; and Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan.

Microsoft and Japan took down a cybercrime network behind over a billion scam messages

14 October 2026 at 20:03
A smartphone sits on top of a surface with red tape reading β€œDANGER.” Where one strip intersects the phone, it continues inside the phone’s screen.

We've all gotten a scam text about a nonexistent parking ticket or a fake package delivery, but hopefully you'll start seeing fewer of them. Microsoft says it helped dismantle a marketplace for scammers sending phishing messages like those around the world. Through an investigation with Japan's National Police Agency, it tracked scam activity back to a marketplace called YAM Store and a pair of phishing kits, CoGUI and Iron Man:

Since January 2026, YAM Store, CoGUI and Iron Man have collectively enabled more than one billion malicious messages targeting over 75,000 organizations worldwide, including more than 750 million messages geared to …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A Starlink Slowdown in Ukraine?

14 October 2026 at 19:47
Ukraine says its satellite data is being throttled and hamstringing the country’s ability to defend against Vladimir Putin. Plus, NATO’s top military commander unveils a plan to defend the alliance in the event Putin widens his war.

Greta Gerwig channels Bowie in psychedelic The Magician's Nephew trailer

14 October 2026 at 19:10

Director Greta Gerwig could have made pretty much any movie she wanted after 2023's Barbie racked up nearly $1.5 billion at the box office. She chose to make Narnia: The Magician's Nephew for Netflix, an adaptation of C.S. Lewis' sixth novel in The Chronicles of Narnia series. Gerwig has said little publicly about the film, other than she was inspired by 1960s-era David Bowie, although she said it would not be a musical. Netflix just released the trailer, set to "Stairway to Heaven," and it's quite the wild psychedelic ride.

The first book in the series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, was published in 1950, and Lewis did not initially intend to write any more Narnia adventures. But then an acquaintance asked how the London lamppost ended up in the middle of Narnia's woodland, and Lewis was intrigued enough by the question to start a prequel, The Magician's Nephew, in order to find an answer. Lewis found it difficult to finish the book, however, writing four other Narnia books first before completing The Magician's Nephew in 1955.

There have been several adaptations, in various media, of The Chronicles of Narnia, most recently the early 2000s film franchise adapting the first three novels in the series. Those films showed diminishing returns, however, and by 2011 the film rights had expired. There were initial plans to adapt the fourth novel, The Silver Chair.

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Β© YouTube/Netflix

The AI race is back on

14 October 2026 at 19:06

Last week, Anthropic and OpenAI looked like they had the AI race to themselves, pulling ahead with increasingly powerful models that left their rivals in the dust. Google seemed hopelessly far behind, while Meta, despite spending billions to revive its floundering AI ambitions, had yet to establish itself as a serious contender. Even the latest models coming out of China, impressive as they were, appeared to be playing catch-up.

Then, in the space of a few days, everything changed. Google and Meta both unveiled frontier models they claim can go toe to toe with the best from OpenAI and Anthropic. Suddenly, the race is back on - and it's anyo …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Researchers use AI to design proteins that cut up other proteins

14 October 2026 at 17:10

A protein is a chain of amino acids held together by what are called peptide bonds. On their own, those bonds are extremely stable; they're estimated to have a half-life of several hundred years. But in Earth's environment, most proteins don't last nearly that long. That's because organisms have evolved a handful of ways to catalyze the break-up of peptide bonds, which have diversified into countless specialized protein-digesting enzymes. Proteases are everywhere and generally make short work of any proteins that find their way into the environment.

Now, researchers have basically short-circuited the diversification process, using AI-based protein design tools to take the catalytic core of two types of protease and replace the entire rest of the protein. The resulting enzymes could be tuned to cut specific proteins in half, and the researchers demonstrated their effectiveness by using them to cut proteins associated with neurological diseases.

Cutting proteins

The basic peptide bond isn't especially interesting-lookingβ€”it's what you get when you link an amino group to an acid, releasing a water molecule in the process. As their name implies, amino acids have both an amino and an acid group, allowing them to form peptide bonds on two sides of the amino acid. This is critical for building up the long chains found in proteins. (The amino acids also have side chains with distinctive chemistry, which gives a backbone specific properties.)

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