Albany's $1.7 billion public health lab has its last steel beam in place. The five-story, roughly 663,000-square-foot Wadsworth Center building will pull operations now spread across five Capital Region sites under one roof, with construction expected to finish in 2030.

— via Hoodline, Kayla Jennings

Retail scanner data from 2015 to 2020 shows shoppers bought less yogurt and cookies with higher added sugar once labels began listing it. In the researchers' model, total sugar consumption would have been about 4% higher for yogurt and 11% higher for cookies without the updated label.

— via Phys.org

Portland Police shot and killed a man downtown Thursday who they say was using a box cutter to assault two people, and officers fired as soon as they arrived. The Mercury's morning roundup also reports an estimated 3,000 marchers at Saturday's fourth "No Kings" rally and flags an October 27 mailing deadline for ballots.

— via Portland Mercury, Wm. Steven Humphrey

Jalen Hurts has blood clots in both lungs, and the Eagles quarterback is out indefinitely on injured reserve with no football activity allowed until he's off blood thinners. The team and his agent say he's expected to make a full recovery, though the clots could cost him the rest of the season.

— via WHYY, Associated Press

It's easier to send probes to Saturn's and Jupiter's icy moons, or even to Pluto, than to land on Mercury. With BepiColombo the only mission on the way and nothing planned after it, scientists say the planet's oversized iron core and other puzzles will stay unsolved without a lander.

— via Phys.org

A new analysis of more than 109,000 listed prices from 2,254 NYC menus puts the median cocktail at $19.50 in NoMad and $12 in Bayside. The neighborhood gaps run wider than the borough gaps, and cheap cocktails don't reliably mean cheap draft beer.

— via Gothamist, Hannah Frishberg

A Metra Electric train struck and injured a man near the Stony Island station in South Shore around 7 a.m. Monday, the second Metra pedestrian crash in three days. Service in both directions was restored around 8:15 a.m., with delays of up to 45 minutes, and Metra is investigating.

— via Block Club Chicago, Maxwell Evans

Pinterest's streaming ingestion has no job-completion signal to tell downstream jobs a partition is ready, so it now computes a non-regressing watermark in the Flink-to-Iceberg sink and stores it as an Iceberg table property. By default it takes the minimum event time across recent commits, and percentile policies can trade some completeness for fresher data.

— via InfoQ, Leela Kumili

Steinbeck wrote unsent letters to his editor while drafting East of Eden, complaining that reviewers fear ideas and only accept parables "fully clothed with flesh." The Paris Review has unlocked both parts of his Art of Fiction interview, stitched from those letters, including his view of the writer as a distant star signaling out of loneliness.

— via The Paris Review, Hazel Byers

Scammers cloned the voice and photo of an Osceola County, Florida, sheriff and left a voicemail with a resident, a sheriff's office official told News6. Similar jury duty and arrest warrant scams hit Georgia and Pennsylvania in the past week, though those reports don't say AI was involved.

— via 404 Media, Samantha Cole

Criminal networks in Southeast Asia are using AI both to lure people into scam centers and to defraud victims once they're inside. The IOM has assisted more than 3,500 trafficked people since 2022, a fraction of the estimated 300,000 coerced into the compounds across the region.

— via CFR (Council on Foreign Relations)

Forty per cent of Greater Vancouver and Fraser Valley homes sold between January and September needed a second listing, up from 19 per cent in 2021, according to Zealty. Sellers who got it done on the second try took 13.5 per cent off their asking price, versus 3.5 per cent for those who sold on the first.

— via Daily Hive Vancouver, Hanna Hett

Democrats are spending money in Colorado's 5th District for the first time in years, betting that an unpopular Iran war and turmoil in the armed forces can pry loose a seat in a conservative stronghold that includes five military facilities. Nearly 6 in 10 veterans voted for Trump two years ago, and one retired Air Force colonel and registered Republican is now backing the Democrat.

— via Colorado Sun, The Associated Press

A farmer harvesting corn in Stevens County, Minnesota, found an 11-foot metal circle that matches the upper stage of a Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket. The stage fired its engine after releasing 10 satellites on September 15 and came down before finishing a single orbit.

— via Ars Technica — Science, Stephen Clark

Richmond's utilities department logged 80 error alerts by 10 a.m. on launch day, then needed 13 days to get its billing vendor to agree to a conversation. Internal emails show the vendor later acknowledged disruptions affecting 25% of customers, and by August 6 more than 5,700 customers still hadn't received a bill.

— via Hoodline, Tanner Kowalczyk

A federal judge denied DOJ's bid to disqualify the ABA's law firm, Susman Godfrey, after the government conceded it couldn't name a single lawyer there who would be a necessary witness. Judge Amir Ali also noted that the rule DOJ invoked restricts individual lawyers, not whole firms.

— via Above the Law, Kathryn Rubino

Collins' Senate reelection PAC in Maine bought ad time in Portland, Oregon instead of Portland, Maine, according to this local columnist's account. She also reports Jane Fonda's PAC gave $5,000 to Gov. Tina Kotek's reelection campaign, and that Vance's "I'm the vice president, not James Talarico" line landed at a Texas rally.

— via Portland Mercury, Elinor Jones

Salt-N-Pepa play MOPOP's Icons of Pop Culture Gala on October 22 at the 250-capacity Sky Church, which the writer calls probably your only shot at seeing them in a room that small. The week's other picks include Barbara Kingsolver at Benaroya Hall and experimental composer Tyondai Braxton at Vera Project.

— via The Stranger, Julianne Bell, Amanda Manitach, Dave Segal, and Audrey Vann

Philadelphia's second annual One Philly HBCU Week starts Oct. 26 and ends with two football games at Lincoln Financial Field, including Lincoln University vs. Virginia Union on Oct. 30 with Ludacris performing at halftime. The six-day schedule also has a Battle of the Bands, a step show, and a college and job fair.

— via WHYY, Jassmyn Nesmith

Alberta votes today on starting a path toward independence, and a new Ipsos poll has 70% of residents planning to stay in Canada against 23% for the separatist option. A separate Angus Reid survey found that 60% of those backing the process say they mainly want to send Ottawa a message, while 37% name independence as their goal.

— via Southwest Journal, Nebojša Vujinović

E. coli stuck in a gel maze packed with phages sat still for as long as 15 hours, then took off toward food anyway, surviving phage levels that should have wiped them out. The pause isn't caution, since the bacteria can't sense phages; it's the time the colony needs to outgrow the cells that phage infection keeps killing.

— via Phys.org

Knocking out five Hox9–10 genes in zebrafish eliminated the pelvic fins entirely, and disrupting all seven Hox9–10 paralogs in newts produced hindlimb loss in some animals. The genes act before any fin bud appears, at the stage when the progenitor cells that will build the hind appendage are first set up.

— via Phys.org

Fingerprints pressed into clay from 36 Terracotta Army figures suggest adult men left only about 45% of the marks, with adult women near 33% and children under 15 around 22%. The sample is small, comes from one spot in Pit 1, and multiple prints could belong to one person.

— via Phys.org

In 1940, Guderian protected a single German pontoon bridge over the Meuse at Sedan with more than 300 anti-aircraft guns, and the Allies lost 167 aircraft without a hit. At Kherson in 2022, Russian forces also leaned on three bridges, and Ukrainian rocket strikes put all of them out of use between July 19 and 28.

— via War on the Rocks, Randy Noorman