Researchers have discovered how pressure can unlock hidden superconducting properties in a complex quantum material. Applying intense pressure to an unusual quantum material can transform how it conducts electricity, allowing superconductivity to spread throughout its three-dimensional structure at temperatures roughly three times higher than normal. Researchers also found a sevenfold increase in the number of […]

On a desolate island at the end of the world, battered by freezing winds, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a possible 19th-century castaway camp that may have belonged to a renowned Argentine sailor and his shipwrecked crew.

As sea levels creep higher in the Pacific, salt leaches into the soil and reduces the land available to grow food. Ocean warming is damaging coral reefs, reducing fish stocks, and salinity has tainted freshwater supplies.

Sony wants you to USB-C its new retro Walkman headphones. The Japanese audio giant changed the game in the ’80s with the ultra-lightweight “H-AIR” MDR-3 headphones that came with the original TPS-L2 portable personal cassette player. Now, more than a decade after the “Star-Lord headphones” introduced a new generation to the magic of the mixtape and the wonder of wired listening, and 10 years since Stranger Things debuted (and eventually featured a curse-breaking cassette), Sony has gone back to the 1979 hand-drawn drawings to revive the MDR-3L2 design for the plug-and-playlist era. Sony See It The new MDR-3R is still lightweight … even lighter weight at 38g instead of 40g … but more of a sonic heavyweight. Thanks to improved magnets, Sony promises more bass expression from the 23mm drivers in this Micro Dynamic Receiver (hence MDR in the name). The headband also offers a wider adjustment range than the first edition. The main change, however, is the cable: it’s now 1.2m instead of 2m and USB-C instead of 3.5mm, so it’s ready to run directly from any compatible smartphone or computer (but not the DAPs now branded as Walkman, which use USB-C solely for power/data). No charging required. The…

Before Tuesday’s election, Republicans held more governorships and state legislative seats than Democrats, along with an advantage in state trifectas—unified control of the governor’s office and both chambers of the legislature. That advantage has disappeared, clearing the path for more climate and clean energy legislation, according to analysts and advocates. Democrats swept the vast majority of competitive races at the state level, flipping control of governors’ offices from Republicans in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, Nevada and Texas.Read full article Comments

Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider said posts and likes doubled during to the U.S. midterm elections on Tuesday.

Zipline raised $1.5 billion and ramped up its partnership with Walmart.

Newton’s theory of gravity has described the tides accurately for centuries. But could a tiny trace of Einstein’s general relativity also be hidden in them? In a new study, a mathematician at Freie Universität Berlin has outlined how a targeted approach could be used to search for effects of this nature.

NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory took its last look at the sky on Oct. 20, 2026, while orbiting about 171 miles (275 kilometers) above Earth. NASA ended the telescope’s mission three days later, because Swift had sunk so low that drag from the thin air there meant its telescopes couldn’t hold steady.

A day after the US midterm elections gave Democrats control of Congress, Onion CEO Ben Collins and comedian Patti Harrison spoke to WIRED about the salve of satire during politically fraught times.

The app will offer personalized product recommendations, shopping through live streams and short-form videos, app-exclusive deals, in-app checkout, order tracking and customer support.

Billions of dollars of crypto stolen — in a hack that we’re now learning involved corporate vibe coding efforts. You couldn’t come up with a more quintessential cautionary tale for an era when employers are embracing AI at every level. After hackers drained nearly $6.3 billion from the crypto platform, Binance has revealed how the thieves pulled off what might be the heist of the century. In a detailed report on its investigation published Tuesday, the company described an elaborate scheme that took place over months involving sham job interviews, old-fashioned phishing, and — yes — a hijacked AI tool. It began in June when an employee on Binance’s wallet developer team thought they’d indulge in some vibe coding by installing a popular AI coding tool. But they ended up downloading a tampered installation of Homebrew, a tool that’s popular with software engineers, after clicking a malicious ad. Binance said it detected the anomaly, replaced the device, and changed relevant credentials.  So far so good, except that the attack exposed the role of the employee and his colleagues on the wallet team to the hackers, giving them the opening they needed. From there, some classic social engineering went into play. A…

Radio images suggest a link between Betelgeuse’s changing outline and its companion’s expected orbit, offering clues to how a smaller star may influence a giant’s later life. Betelgeuse, the bright red supergiant marking Orion’s shoulder, may have another star stirring its atmosphere from within. Its recently identified companion, Siwarha, is thought to orbit at a […]

The federal government is pushing for a “digital detox” in schools.

The deal is expected to support the development of DBX Agent Cloud, a new storage platform aimed at developers building AI models and agents.

A Dutch family doctor named Tibor Poelmann posted a petition on an online forum for general practitioners (GPs) in 2021. He wanted their pension fund to stop investing in oil and gas. It quickly gathered 1,200 signatures.

Large pedestrian crowds generate distinctive seismic signals depending on their collective behavior, according to a new study that includes data from Tokyo schools and outdoor gatherings in the United States and Israel. These seismic signals are strongest in the 1–2 hertz frequency band, which is consistent with human walking frequencies.

ElevenLabs said more than 25 million tracks have been generated using its music models.

The move puts Edits in more direct competition with ByteDance’s CapCut, the video-editing app Meta sought to challenge when it launched Edits last year.

Big Tech bet big on Trump ahead of the midterms, and it backfired. A blue tsunami overpowered largely pro-AI Republican candidates across the country — even, crucially, in Texas, where the election has now imperiled vast plans for data center construction. But industry insiders, it seems, are in denial that the midterms are actually a rebuke against tech, Ars Technica noted. Take Adam Kovacevich, a former Google exec and CEO of Chamber of Progress, a tech industry trade group and policy coalition that was formed with backing from heavyweights like Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple. “The results offer little evidence of a voter mandate to crack down on AI or data centers,” Kovacevich said, per Ars, noting that “Democratic gubernatorial candidates who opposed data center bans won at a higher rate than those who supported them.” “Let’s not confuse an anti-Trump wave with an anti-tech mandate,” he added. Sure, you could gripe that AI’s role in the election is being a overstated, given that Trump is so radioactive, and that other issues like cost of living were more in the front of voters’ minds. But it was still a driving issue, and voters made themselves heard. Exit polls showed that…

Black holes might split in two under extreme conditions, theoretical calculations suggest, offering physicists a way to explore the limits of our understanding of gravity. Two black holes can collide and merge into one. But could a single black hole divide into two smaller ones that go their separate ways? Reversing a merger might sound […]

Most young children like sharks, with almost seven in 10 describing them in a positive light, but a new study has found that associations between sharks and fear become more common as children get older.

A lost Roman city has been discovered beneath the fields of Austria, complete with an amphitheater that once held 8,000 people. Archaeologists think it could be Claudivium, a city mentioned almost 2,000 years ago. But there’s another mystery: why did its residents leave a seemingly prosperous city without any clear signs of destruction? The discovery was made near the small village of Stein, along the Danube River, where the Roman Empire once maintained a heavily defended frontier. Known as the Danube Limes, this network of forts and watchtowers protected Roman territory while attracting traders, craftspeople, and families who settled nearby. Researchers have been exploring a six-mile stretch of this former frontier between Enns and St. Pantaleon-Erla since 2015. What they found was far bigger than expected: a city covering 62 to 74 acres, with organized streets, residential neighborhoods, and evidence of wealth. Founded around 80 CE, the settlement appears to have been abandoned roughly a century later. A Roman City Built to Entertain 8,000 People One of the biggest surprises was the discovery of a large amphitheater with room for around 8,000 spectators. That’s quite a crowd for a settlement that had remained hidden for so long. According to a…

Aina’s ring can also take calls and help you dictate notes on your Mac.

It is one of the great questions of mathematics: What does “infinity” actually mean? Which infinities are larger than others? Can infinities be arranged in a sequence, like the rungs of an endless ladder, so that for any two of them we can always say which one lies above the other?

A new research paper describes a statistical framework that resolves significant calculation biases caused by artificial intelligence in econometric models. The method, two-step extraction, removes estimation bias when researchers measure the business or economic effects of variables extracted using machine learning algorithms from unstructured data such as photos and consumer text.

Workers at one of the most advanced AI labs on the planet say they have important information to share — but their employer is preventing them from speaking out. New reporting by the Washington Post revealed a growing divide between workers and management at Google’s DeepMind lab in London, where employees are gagged from letting the public know about their concerns due to a sweeping non-disparagement agreement. Non-disparagement agreements are a kind of legal corporate censorship, by which companies can ensure workers aren’t able to disclose info the company deems to be negative or critical. At the DeepMind labs, it appears to be having its intended effect, scaring workers who say they’d like to be able to keep the public involved as the technology progresses. “This technology is just really consequential and it’s also changing really fast,” one anonymous DeepMind staffer told WaPo. “The public wants to know and deserves to know and often this is the only way that people find out about the harms and potential harms that are happening.” Two of the lab’s staffers told the paper of a discussion group organized by their fellow workers to discuss the implications of the non-disparagement clause, which many signed…

A balloon-borne telescope that flew in 2024 has revealed unexpected magnetic structure in the Sun’s so-called “quiet” regions. Three papers published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters now lay out what the SUNRISE III mission found, from tangled magnetic threads to a first good estimate of the field strength in solar jets. Balloons are usually associated with parties, but they turn out to be useful scientific platforms too. SUNRISE III hung a suite of instruments, including a 1 m solar telescope, from a gondola beneath a helium balloon cruising at roughly 35 km, well above most of the air that blurs our view of the Sun. That matters because Earth’s atmosphere is turbulent, and the turbulence smears the finest solar details, such as the smallest magnetic features. Lifting instruments above most of it sharpens the picture considerably, and a balloon does so without the mechanical constraints of a true rocket launch. Scientists have had time since the flight to assemble their results into three papers. A Chromosphere Full of Surprises The mission’s key instrument was the Sunrise Chromospheric Infrared spectroPolarimeter, or SCIP. It measured the full Stokes polarimetry of the Sun, which lets astronomers reconstruct magnetic field directions and strengths across…

There are no woodpeckers on the Hawaiian Islands, but a little yellow bird called the ‘akiapōlāʻau (Ah-key-ah-pole-ah-ow) has evolved an unusual beak to drill into branches to find food.

Nudges—the subtle interventions that encourage people to make beneficial decisions without forcing them into these choices—are a popular marketing tool widely used for a variety of social causes and business purposes. But their effectiveness depends on finding the right combination of context and content, says Siddharth Bhattacharya, an assistant professor of information systems and operations management at the Costello College of Business.

A new experiment reveals that Earth’s microbes can grow in harsh conditions similar to what may exist just below the surface of Mars, suggesting new directions in the search for potential cellular life on the red planet.

The system can answer queries four times faster, with 20% fewer errors and 90% fewer tokens used.

Today’s portable devices are too hungry to run on traditional solar panels, but RadianX says its perovskite cells promise to make charging obsolete in some cases.

What’s small, winged, and slams its beak into trees? If you said a woodpecker, you’re not entirely wrong. But woodpeckers don’t live in Hawaii, where biologists are investigating a curious bird that takes up a similar ecological niche—with its own unique twist.  Meet the ‘akiapōlāʻau (pronounced “Ah-key-ah-pole-ah-ow” and nicknamed the Aki): a small yellow-feathered friend with a wacky beak that looks like it has been “Frankensteined together,” because its two main components are totally different. Its long, slender, and flexible upper beak is great for pulling food out of nooks and crannies. The Aki’s short and robust lower beak, on the other hand, enables the bird to drill holes into wood. These two functions have earned the bird the nickname of the “Swiss Army Knife of the Hawaiian islands.”  The Aki is “the only bird, that we currently know of, to have evolved essentially two different bill types on the same head. It’s the only bird to use each of its bills (upper and lower) to do totally different tasks – each of which can only be accomplished by their respective bill,” Alexander Clark, an evolutionary biologist and functional anatomist at the University of Chicago, tells Popular Science. Clark is…

The new OLED MacBook Pro comes with an incredible-looking touchscreen display—and an equally eye-popping price.

The startup Aina bets you won’t need to rely on your phone to control virtual assistants. It’s making a smart ring that lets you control the actions of your autonomous agents with one tap.

The shoulder was dark and smooth, sticking out of a small patch of sand surrounded by rocks. Stefano Mariottini, a chemist from Rome vacationing on the coast of Calabria, dived down to take a closer look. He reached out and touched it. Metal. It was around noon on August 16, 1972. Mariottini had been spearfishing off Riace Marina, on southern Italy’s Ionian coast, when the strange shape caught his eye. “I saw a shoulder emerging from the sand in the middle of a group of rocks,” he told Quotidiano Nazionale. Buried beneath the sand were the Riace Bronzes, two life-size Greek warriors cast around the middle of the 5th century BC. They are among the handful of large Greek bronze statues from that period to have survived. More than 50 years after their discovery, archaeologists are still arguing over who the warriors represent, who sculpted them and how they came to rest beneath the sea. A Shoulder Among the Rocks Mariottini began brushing sand away from the first figure, which was lying on its side. His fins disturbed the seabed as he worked, exposing a large toe and then a knee nearby. There was another statue, lying on its back…

When plants encounter pathogens, they can defend themselves by rapidly killing infected cells to restrict pathogen spread. This immune response, known as the hypersensitive response (HR), was first described in 1915. However, the molecular mechanism underlying HR cell death remained poorly understood for more than a century.

Elon Musk blew $447 million to support Republican candidates in the midterm elections — and almost every single cent of it went to waste. But if you were about to break out a tiny violin to soundtrack the sorrows of the world’s first — and first former — trillionaire, you should consider acquiring an even tinier one, because those were just the beginning of his losses. Shares of Musk’s businesses SpaceX and Tesla immediately tanked after Democrats swept the Senate, House, and governorship races — including in Texas, Musk’s base of operations. His automaker fell 3.3 percent, and his rocket-slash-AI company plunged by a full 3.8 , wiping out what Bloomberg reported was over $120 billion. That did a number on Musk’s personal wealth, which in large part derives from his stakes in those companies. He is now, by the Financial Time’s estimate, some $30 billion poorer. Despite the excess of egg on his face, Musk still managed to look through his post history on X and start deleting the ones about the election. Trying to rally his followers, Musk tweeted “Vote red today!” on Tuesday morning. But it was removed after the reality of a blue tsunami came crashing…

The find includes 280 engravings, including 55 depictions of animals

Adding phenanthrene as a co-guest let the second-generation crystalline sponge (2G-CS) method determine X-ray structures for 24 of 30 small, low-polarity C₁₅ molecules, mostly sesquiterpenoids. Under standard conditions, none of the 30 gave guest-containing crystals. Eleven of the 24 structures had not been reported before, including that of the liquid hydrocarbon longifolene. A chiral version of the cage gave the absolute configurations of five compounds.

Decorated pottery that has baffled archaeologists for a century appears to have been made by artisans who moved south from northern Florida. A study of 58 fragments shows the vessels were shaped from local clay but built with northern techniques and ingredients. A hundred years ago, archaeologists digging around Tampa Bay unearthed fragments whose designs seemed out of place. The motifs closely resembled those of Mississippian culture, which emerged around A.D. 1000 in the Mississippi River Valley and spread across much of the Midwest and eastern United States. Map showing the extent of Mississippian cultures across the eastern United States and the Safety Harbor culture area in Florida, located much farther south. Credit: Wallis et al. The oddity was as much geographic as cultural. Tampa Bay’s coastal communities, known as the Safety Harbor culture, lived hundreds of miles south of that heartland and relied on fishing and other marine resources instead of maize farming. Peninsular Florida had generally been left off maps of Mississippian culture, and lacking the instruments to establish the pottery’s origins, curators stored the pieces while competing explanations went unresolved. Local Clay, Northern Habits First came the obvious question: had the pots simply been imported? As reported…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Texas was the new epicenter of the AI data center buildout. That might be kaput. Texas is the fastest-growing data center market in the US and ground zero for Big Tech’s largest AI buildouts. But the blue wave that swept the Lone Star State may jeopardize that position. Democrat James Talarico won the US Senate seat, Gina Hinojosa won the race for governor, and Democrats will take control of the Texas House for the first time in 24 years. They won after making data centers a central issue on the campaign trail. The swings could spell trouble for hyperscalers with ambitious plans in the state. They also add to growing anxiety that America’s AI buildout could stall. Here’s how the election results could reshape AI’s future. —James O’Donnell What’s next for US energy policy after the midterm elections? Democrats have taken control of both the House and the Senate, but we probably won’t see major federal climate and energy legislation while Trump remains president. The midterm elections could, however, be a big deal for energy at…

In order to know where you’re going, you must know where you’ve been, says an old adage. And a new UNLV housing supply rankings report is putting that proverb into practice by providing policymakers and the public with the nation’s first comprehensive look at how state-level new home permitting activity stacks up—and offering clues on local, state or regional measures that could help drive down skyrocketing prices.

Discovered Materials, a months-old YC startup that uses AI to find chip materials, is offering $200,000 for each solution to five open materials science problems.

Equipped with the brightest display, an “Event-Based Vision Sensor,” and the next-generation Qualcomm processor, Motorola hopes you’ll want to spend big bucks on its ceramic and aluminum Signature 27.

Potential Sciences, a startup backed by the UK government, is betting that training AI models on computer-generated biochemical data can speed up the plodding process of developing new drugs.

Equipped with the brightest display, an “Event-Based Vision Sensor,” and the next-generation Qualcomm processor, Motorola hopes you’ll want to spend big bucks on its ceramic and aluminum Signature 27.

For nearly four months, Earth had a second moon, and nobody noticed. The tiny asteroid, barely 1 meter (3 feet) across, had been caught by our planet’s gravity in late April 2026. It remained undetected until a Hungarian astronomer spotted it in August. Now designated 2026 QQ8, the object has been confirmed as a temporary mini-moon. On October 29, the Minor Planet Center announced that orbital calculations showed the asteroid was “temporarily bound to the Earth,” confirming that our planet had quietly acquired an unexpected companion. Spotted From a Hungarian Mountaintop The discovery was made by Krisztián Sárneczky, a Hungarian astronomer known for finding asteroids. According to the Minor Planet Center’s official circular, he spotted the object on August 20 using a telescope at Piszkéstető Observatory in northern Hungary. Other observatories soon joined the effort, tracking the faint object to help astronomers determine its orbit. At the time of discovery, 2026 QQ8 was far too dim to see without a telescope. It grew even fainter over the following weeks, making further observations increasingly difficult. Astronomers continued collecting data into October before its temporary capture was officially confirmed. Rock or Rocket Junk? At first, astronomers weren’t even sure they had found…

Researchers have long known that releasing domesticated ducks can alter wild populations. Now, a study led by a doctoral student at The University of Texas at El Paso has documented, for the first time in North America, when and where these genetic changes took place and tied them directly to more than a century of releases.