October 2026

Actual footage of warfare is horrific enough. But now that AI slop floods every social media feed on the web, we get to experience the trauma and propaganda of war regurgitated from the bowels of generative AI, all in a cynical search for likes and follows. When generative AI was in its infancy back in […]

A two-year randomized clinical trial involving 493 adults with overweight or obesity found that diet soft drinks were essentially as effective as water for long-term weight loss and weight maintenance. Participants drinking beverages sweetened with aspartame, acesulfame-K, or sucralose lost a similar amount of weight to those drinking water, while both groups also saw improvements

A vitamin D analog may help break down pancreatic cancer’s protective defenses, potentially making tumors more vulnerable to chemotherapy and immune attack. A small clinical trial found encouraging responses, especially in patients whose tumors had high levels of the vitamin D receptor.

A new light-activated material can efficiently produce hydrogen from water without requiring an additional expensive metal catalyst. Researchers say its unusual sulfur-based chemistry could point toward cheaper and more practical ways to turn sunlight into clean fuel.

A UCLA study links faster brain aging to specific gut bacteria and chemical byproducts, with older-looking brains also associated with poorer memory, focus, and mood. The findings suggest that biological signs of brain aging may appear decades before obvious symptoms and could eventually make the gut a target for prevention.

A 30-year forestry experiment in Australia found that heavily thinned mountain ash forests grew unusually large trees while recovering enough carbon to match or exceed untouched areas. The results suggest carefully managed thinning could support timber production, wildlife habitat, and carbon storage at the same time.

Tiny magnetic fields created shortly after the Big Bang may help explain the long-running disagreement over how fast the universe is expanding. Detailed simulations show that these primordial fields could have changed the formation of hydrogen in the early universe, affecting the cosmic microwave background and the expansion rate inferred from it.

A meteor crater buried beneath Oklahoma has turned out to be nearly 100 million years younger than scientists thought. Zircon crystals show the Ames impact occurred about 370 million years ago, meaning it was not part of the mysterious Ordovician bombardment once linked to a possible ring of debris around Earth. Instead, the impact coincided

Women hold just a fraction of new AI jobs but are overrepresented in roles with high risk of AI disruption There’s a common fear among people who work in Silicon Valley: snag one of the fast-growing, high-paying jobs in artificial intelligence, or get trapped in the “permanent underclass”, a phrase describing the fate of those

If one form of energy becomes the cheapest, most secure, and cleanest, you’d probably adjust your economy to use more of it, right? That’s one of the ideas underpinning a report the International Energy Agency issued last week about the global move toward electrification. Fatih Birol, head of the IEA, discussed some of the concepts