Alphabet's third-quarter revenue rose 25% to $127.58 billion but missed analyst expectations, and shares fell roughly 9% after hours. Free cash flow turned negative at $9.07 billion amid heavy AI spending, while Google Cloud revenue grew 103% to $30.7 billion.

After studying video and photos of 75 meteorite falls, researchers described seven stages by which space rocks become meteorites. Melting and fragmentation, not evaporation, mainly control mass loss, and the findings inform understanding of dangerous asteroid airbursts.

Researchers at TU Wien and UC San Diego used ultraviolet lasers on helium atoms and produced X-rays above the conventional energy cutoff. The effect arises when two correlated electrons return to the atom together and release their energy at once; the work appeared in Nature Photonics.

Philadelphia voters will decide on November 3 whether to make the city's arts and culture office, Creative Philadelphia, a permanent part of the city charter. The measure, proposed by Councilmember Isaiah Thomas, would shield the office, created in 1984, from changes by future mayors.

— via Hyperallergic, Anna Lee

Two critical bugs in PHP, the open source language used by roughly 70% of websites, forced organizations to patch urgently, with some taking sites offline. Wiz's Tomer Schwartz discusses the fix effort alongside OpenAI, Calif and the PHP team, and warns that AI is speeding up discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities.

— via TechCrunch, Theresa Loconsolo

Reddit is introducing a "For You" feed alongside a "Following" feed on its homepage, mixing joined-community posts with tailored recommendations to aid discovery. The change is rolling out globally over the next few weeks, and some users who tested it have voiced frustration.

— via TechCrunch, Aisha Malik

A Science Advances study used hydrological models to trace how climate change affected the September 2024 Storm Boris floods. Without human-driven warming, rainfall would have been about 6%–9% lower, but flood peaks would have been 14%–22% lower on average.

— via Phys.org

Google launched a Connected Apps Platform in beta for U.S. developers, letting businesses build and submit apps that work inside Gemini and Search. Developers connect via an MCP server, and over 50 apps already exist in Gemini, with more coming to Search.

— via TechCrunch, Sarah Perez

Caltech researchers analyzed smoke from the January 2025 Eaton Fire and found the urban plume far richer in toxic metals than wildfire smoke, including more than 50-fold more lead. They estimate nearly 7 million people in the Los Angeles area faced lead levels about 80 times typical values at the peak.

— via Phys.org

Flight-tracking records and CNN footage show Flávio Bolsonaro and his family landed at Opa-Locka Executive Airport near Miami after leaving Brazil, where he faces a money laundering and corruption investigation following his election loss to Lula.

— via Miami New Times, Allison Beck

Reviewing Justice Alito's new book, the author argues that what Alito calls judicial "insecurity" is really humility, tracing it to Scalia's "bad judge" maxim. He proposes anti-partisanship practices, such as caution on certiorari and narrow holdings, while acknowledging the risk of overcorrecting.

— via SCOTUSblog, Richard Re

The Bank of Canada raised its policy rate by 0.25 points to 2.5 per cent, its first hike since July 2023, citing persistently high oil prices from the Middle East conflict. Governor Tiff Macklem said more increases are possible, and the housing market faces added pressure.

— via Daily Hive Vancouver, Kenneth Chan

Mid-century modern furniture, once a favourite of millennials, is losing appeal among younger buyers who prefer eclectic, mismatched interiors. Dealers and designers cite rising prices, mass-market imitations and a wish to avoid identikit homes, while defending the original designs' quality.

Rapper Nicki Minaj attacked Gov. Kathy Hochul as an "evil woman" on X and urged New Yorkers to vote for Republican Bruce Blakeman, citing Hochul's 2024 remark about Bronx kids and computers. Hochul, who leads by double digits, told Minaj to get outside and stop attending Trump rallies.

Stephen Graham plays the imprisoned murderer Jurek Walter in the ten-part psychological thriller Nocturne, which the reviewer finds terrifying and mesmerising. The series, adapted from Lars Kepler's novels, is a slow burn that leaves some supporting roles underdeveloped but is lifted by its cast.

Jim Boyd, a Harlem-born broadcaster who began his career in New York City, has died at 84 after nearly four decades as a news anchor at Boston's WCVB. He later earned a Tufts degree at 71 and took small film roles.

Anthony Ippolito, 27, talks about landing the role of Sylvester Stallone in Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky after sending unsolicited audition tapes for years. The film dramatises Stallone's lean years and his refusal of $300,000 unless he starred in Rocky, which was released fifty years ago.

A federal judge, David O. Carter, declined to order California to set aside 20,000 ballots the Trump administration flagged as possibly cast by noncitizens, citing a pattern of attempted election interference. Civil rights groups separately sued over a federal voter initiative.

Cloudflare launched a beta Web Search API via AI Gateway, letting AI agents pull live results from Ceramic.ai, Exa and Linkup with unified logging, billing and access controls. Providers must meet verified-bot rules and return source links; community discussion raised data-retention and value-versus-alternatives questions.

Using David Foster Wallace's essay on boiling lobsters alive, Marianne Janack asks whether it is wrong to make people confront ethical questions they cannot immediately change. She draws on Descartes, Malebranche, and Beauvoir and Sartre's idea of facticity to argue that comfortable ignorance is easier but not better.

— via 3 Quarks Daily, Marianne Janack

Traces how if-then-else evolved from early computers through Fortran, Flow-Matic and the Algol proposals. "Else" first appears in the 1958 German Algol proposal, probably as a hasty translation, and Klaus Samelson folded it into the standard conditional in 1959.

The post presents scaling-law results for hierarchical networks (H-Nets), which learn chunking directly from bytes instead of using tokenizers. It reports 1-stage H-Nets giving compute gains of up to 3-5x over BPE Transformers, and a 2-stage model beating an open-source baseline with 10x less compute and data.

Flamerix AI reports that Claude Code's default background-agent status-line summaries consume roughly 16-20% of spend and requests, with no official off switch. They publish a Bun preload that suppresses the summary timer, verified across several Linux versions up to 2.1.312.

Two Philadelphia laws from the Safe Healthy Homes Act take effect Sunday, extending good-cause protections to all renters and barring retaliation for tenant organizing or cooperating with investigations. Landlords oppose them, and a related lawsuit remains pending ahead of a federal hearing.

— via WHYY, Aaron Moselle