Today's 7

Once Halloween passes, sugar gets blamed again for children running wild. But a 1995 meta-analysis of 23 studies concluded that sugar does not affect children's behaviour or cognitive performance.

The sharpest part is another experiment: some mothers were told their children had just eaten a large dose of sugar, when in fact all the children had received a placebo. Those mothers still rated their children as significantly more hyperactive. The study authors said this expectancy effect was stronger for 'cognitively rigid mothers.'

So sugar is not to blame. We just want an explanation badly enough to believe we can control the behaviour.

Anthropic is pitching federal lawmakers a bill it wrote itself to regulate frontier AI. Under the draft, the government could block a model's release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people.

The AI incidents this summer, including ones involving OpenAI's and Anthropic's own software, would fall below that threshold and be exempt from intervention, even though some of those acts are felonies.

Writing your own liability ceiling into law is a remarkably convenient kind of regulation.

The author proposes that how permissive a society is about sex tracks the gender ratio in its dating market. In post-war America births rose year after year, couples averaged a two-year age gap, and that left more women than men of marriageable age, which in turn helped set off the sexual revolution.

Now it has flipped: there are more 20-year-old men than 18-year-old women. Young people are having less casual sex and thinking more about marriage, and on TikTok they post videos scolding adults canoodling in the park to think of the children.

The theory may not explain everything, but it is at least more interesting than blaming the phone.

After Trump returned to office and hit Canada with tariffs and talk of annexation, Ottawa made reducing dependence on the US a national goal. The result: Canada's share of trade with the US has fallen to a 30-year low, and non-US exports are up more than 40% in a single year.

What surprised me most is the public response: spending on trips to the US is down 24% from 2024, and spending on other overseas destinations is up exactly 24%.

Still, America remains eight times the size of Canada's second-largest trading partner, so this decoupling is far from a comfortable place.

There is a dark spot on the Moon called the Marius Hills Pit, nearly 300 feet wide and about 150 feet deep. NASA has just approved sending instruments to find out what lies beneath it.

If it is a network of lava tubes from ancient flows, astronauts would have a ready-made shelter: radiation shielding and a refuge from extreme temperatures, a natural lunar base.

I cannot guess how many years separate drilling a hole from living in one, but the fact that the probe is called GIMLI does make me smile.

Three weeks ago, 80-year-old Lula's political obituaries had already been written, and he trailed by around 2.2 million votes after the first round. He came back to win, becoming the first Brazilian president elected to four terms.

What surprised me most is this: since the two-round system was adopted in 1988, no first-round leader had ever lost the runoff. Lula broke that rule.

The colder part comes later. Bolsonaro refused to concede and said he would seek an annulment, and the White House has close ties to his family. Winning the election only pushed the problem down the road.