Today's 10

Google's new AI model had just won on a leaderboard, and on the same day the parent company's stock fell 12.6 percent, about $500 billion in market value, its worst day ever.

The sharpest detail was a line from the earnings call: the more people use AI Mode, the less money Google makes from it than from traditional search.

What I find more interesting is the Reddit ripple: with search traffic falling, it will now make users log in to read.

A loop is closing. Google's AI answers keep value on its own pages, sites lock their content and sell access, and Google pays to license it. In the end nobody can get around Google, but the web gets smaller.

Billie Eilish said on air that she started watching porn around 11 and became addicted. The first few times she had sex, she did not say no to things that were not good.

Clare McGlynn of Durham University says these platforms' algorithms do not care what you searched for, only how long you stay — so they feed you more extreme, more shocking material. Incest and strangulation were hardly present in 1980s content studies; today both are mainstream.

From early November, the UK will ban possession and publication of incest and strangulation porn. A study following 16,000 young people found heavy porn use is a big risk factor for problematic sexual behaviour in young teenage boys. 'I'm so angry that porn is so loved.'

'Foreigners use gunpowder to make bullets; China uses it to make firecrackers.' That line, from a 1933 essay by Lu Xun, has been revived to describe the AI gap: the US spends 58% of its tokens coding, China 55% generating short dramas.

What surprised me most is the accounting. A rough calculation from the regulator's published micro-drama output puts released AI dramas at about 7.4% of tokens; reaching 55% would take 75 times as much discarded footage as kept.

The anxiety behind the argument—that entertainment is worth less than productivity—feels far more real than the number.

The first image of a black hole did not come from a new telescope. It came from linking existing radio dishes into one virtual instrument the size of Earth, synchronised by atomic clocks.

The hard part was not building hardware but persuading observatories to let an outside team bolt on equipment and retune their delicate instruments, then wait months to learn what was captured.

What I like most is the detail that the ring in the image is exactly the size Einstein's equations predicted.

The Amazon is called the lungs of the planet because it inhales carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen. A study in Nature suggests that breathing may have reversed direction.

The team did not rely on satellites, because the cloud cover is too thick, or on ground stations, because there are too few. Instead it sent planes criss-crossing the forest for 15 years. The finding: even in the wettest years with the least human interference, the Amazon was only a weak carbon source.

What stays with me is the proposed fix: bring deforestation down to zero. It sounds almost dismissively simple.

Mathematics is in a collective vertigo: AI keeps solving Millennium Prize problems, and one PhD student wrote that he had been screaming internally for days.

A Fields Medal winner closed a talk by saying we need to develop new theories of care and love. Coming from that mouth, it says more about the panic than any headline.

The author's way out is to swap the checklist model of progress for a generative encounter model: stop ticking off famous problems and go back to defining problems through real-world encounters. That shift feels more worth chewing on than the question of whether AI replaces mathematicians.

AO3, the largest fanfiction site in the world, went down for maintenance on Thursday. Its operators say bringing it back will take about two weeks, possibly a month.

The scariest part came in Friday morning's update: no works have been deleted, but the organisation does not currently believe the user database was stolen and is also unable to rule it out. That database holds usernames, email addresses, IP addresses and hashed passwords.

A site carrying 18.4 million works is simply going to be gone for a while. What I am more curious about is where the writers go for that month.

Moses was New York's master builder: the bridges, highways, beaches and pools were his. What really kept him in place was a clause he buried in a bill: once the bonds were paid off, the authority could issue new ones 'from time to time'.

So an agency meant to build two bridges and dissolve became a giant that could build almost anywhere in New York on toll revenue, and borrow more than the city government itself.

Someone who reads legal fine print more closely than anyone else can weld power shut. The thought gives me a slight chill.

Chemistry only shuffles the outer electrons of atoms; isotopes change the nucleus itself. Alter the neutron count and you get a new version of the same element; alter the proton count and you get a different element entirely. The hard part is making them: a particle accelerator costs millions and produces a grain of sand's worth of material per hour.

That is why medical isotopes are so expensive. Only a handful of reactors worldwide can make molybdenum-99, and when some went offline for repairs in 2024, the world ran short.

The piece argues fusion could be the answer: its neutrons are high-energy, and the reaction could also generate power, so selling electricity could help pay for the plant. What surprised me most is the field it might open up. Isotopically pure silicon is useful for quantum computers, and much about such materials is still unknown, simply because they have always been too expensive to make.