October 2026

A new study reveals that improved hurricane forecast graphics may help people identify threatened areas without making them more likely to recognize the danger or take protective action. Researchers also found that a widespread misunderstanding of the hurricane cone persists, highlighting a potentially dangerous gap between accurate forecasts and public preparedness.

Scientists have uncovered a surprising reason why statins, the widely prescribed cholesterol-lowering drugs that help prevent heart attacks and strokes, can sometimes cause muscle pain, weakness, and even severe muscle damage. Using advanced imaging technology, researchers discovered that statins can attach to a crucial protein in muscle cells and force open a channel that normally

A new report exposes thousands of scam websites flooding the web with AI-generated recipes. In the report, Decrypt Ads — a startup that tracks the supply chains of online advertisements — identified more than two thousand websites that strongly appear to be AI slop farms masquerading as blogs run by real chefs and home cooks.

AI is increasingly getting good at doing some tasks, but it can never replace human workers’ judgment Autonomous cars, which may be the safest we have built, keep getting easily avoidable parking tickets. While Waymos crash far less often than human drivers over tens of millions of miles, they’re still terrible at performing basic tasks

Use of tools ‘may result in the transfer of sensitive data to (China)’, defense department says The US government on Monday ordered its agencies to stop using artificial intelligence (AI) tools from Chinese startup DeepSeek, as the countries race for dominance in the fast-moving sector. A notice from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced

Scientists have discovered that an exotic particle that existed at the birth of the universe might solve one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology and help explain reality as we know it, according to a new study in Physical Review Letters. Our modern universe is dominated by matter, but it also contains fleeting amounts of

Consumer research is a slow and cumbersome challenge that few companies do well, but if Vectorial AI Inc. is successful, they’ll never have to worry about doing it again. The startup today said it has raised $3 million in seed funding to propel the launch of its new artificial intelligence-driven platform that simulates human behavior

IBM Corp. and several other contributors to the open-source llm-d project are releasing version 1.0 of their distributed artificial intelligence inference framework, adding operational controls intended to help enterprises run large models reliably on their own infrastructure. The release, announced ahead of the PyTorch Conference North America in San Jose today and tomorrow, focuses on

As AI-driven traffic surges, that layer is struggling to keep pace, and it’s quickly becoming the constraint on how fast AI can scale. Every model, every inference, and every data centre depends on the optical networks that move data between them. Hyperscalers are responding with Managed Optical Fiber Networks (MOFNs): dedicated networks built and operated

In his annual speech on threats to the nation, Sir Ken McCallum, the head of the UK’s intelligence service, MI5, warned that AI had the potential to ‘change the stakes’ on existing and even new bioweapons. To find out why, and how, Ian Sample speaks to Dr Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center