Thursday, 22 October 2026
Picked from the best of the world's press
Jim Buckley’s Red Dragon sculpture from 1985 during River Lee flooding, October 2023
The 2026 midterms are the first federal election where tens of millions of voters get political information from generative AI tools, and those tools are already giving wrong answers and citing dubious sources.
A California intelligence center warned police that city council meetings about Flock cameras could be targeted by extremists, and listed what counts as suspicious behavior.
Training the model behind early ChatGPT used 185,000 gallons of water, and a single hyperscale data center can draw up to 5 million gallons a day, competing with residents for drinking water.
Two decades-old PHP vulnerabilities are severe enough that roughly 70 percent of websites need to update core software, exploits are already live, and researchers call them among the worst in software history.
The evidence points one way: men invest more in romantic relationships and suffer more when they end, because they outsource all their emotional support to a partner.
The Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum at Longwood Gardens looks like hundreds of plants assembled into a dome, but every blossom grows from one stem, coaxed there over eighteen months of pinching, tying and disbudding.
Research shows that the meme people send a close friend or partner most often means one thing: 'I'm thinking of you.'
Chinese humanoid robot companies are paying ordinary people to wear cameras and repeat everyday chores so the footage can train robot hands, while the costs, privacy rules and actual demand all remain unsettled.
Behind France's latest riots, investors are starting to doubt the country will ever cut pensions or raise taxes, and the cost of insuring against a French default has jumped.
A genetic study traces Native Hawaiians to Easter Island, about 4,400 miles away, and finds that a chain of founder effects amplified their risk of rare inherited disorders.
