Monday, 19 October 2026
Picked from the best of the world's press
Panthera tigris tigris (Bengal tiger) in Sanjay Dubri Tiger Reserve, Madhya Pradesh, India
In Virginia, a woman who let her 5-year-old son walk alone to a nearby pond to collect goose feathers was placed on the child abuse and neglect registry and given a suspended jail sentence.
In a new experiment, people who solved math problems with ChatGPT did worse than those who never used AI once the chatbot was taken away — and many simply gave up.
While pursuing the ShinyHunters hacking group, the FBI found unusually close ties between ShinyHunters and executives at two ransomware negotiation firms, one of whom allegedly helped run the group's extortion website.
A Chinese organized crime ring hacked Staples, fraudulently issued gift cards worth over $5 million, then went on a nationwide shopping spree and shipped stolen goods back to China.
The internet's original sin is not advertising but surveillance, a decision to fuse the two that was chosen rather than inevitable.
Ramez Naam pulls together data from multiple experiments to show that adding more AI agents delivers far more speed than it delivers intelligence, and the intelligence gains taper off with striking steepness.
Electric washing machines took four decades to catch on in America, held back less by technology than by class and racial ideas about whose work laundry was.
A Swiss study found that between 2022 and 2025, new power capacity near US data centres was mostly renewables and batteries, with a much smaller gas share.
Human footprints spanning nearly two millennia at White Sands, New Mexico, show people repeatedly lived there during the coldest part of the last ice age.
Meta's and OpenAI's new AI assistants are spreading fast in the West, but expanding into Africa will hit language, infrastructure and regulatory hurdles.
