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

Santa Clara is seeking a development partner for a 4.83-acre site at 900 and 1000 Lafayette Street, part of the downtown core razed in the 1960s. The city expects at least 300 homes, 25% affordable, plus retail, a food hall, a town square and a theater; selection could take about nine months.

— via Hoodline, Nina Singh-Hudson

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

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

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

The article argues that the Trump administration has expanded executive power over the Department of Defense while Congress has largely deferred. It says the FY26 and FY27 defense authorization bills quietly give Congress tools to reassert oversight, and that a future Congress should use them.

— via War on the Rocks, Margaret M. Cassidy

An opinion piece by Rommel Banlaoi argues that Philippine-Japanese security ties, built on the Reciprocal Access Agreement and a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, are about stability rather than containing China. He urges continued dialogue with Beijing and ASEAN centrality.

— via Asia Times, Rommel C Banlaoi

A pitch for SwiftPM to resolve and build multiple major versions of the same package in one dependency graph instead of failing on diamond-dependency conflicts. It proposes PURL-based package identification, major-version buckets in PubGrub, module aliasing, and an opt-in flag, backed by a prototype.

— via Swift Forums, bripeticca

A Cargo maintainer examines the confusing overlap of feature activation forms like foo/bar, dep:foo and foo?/bar, and proposes a phased cleanup: deprecate foo/bar in manifests, change CLI semantics under a new resolver, and possibly reintroduce foo/bar later. Downsides noted include Cargo.lock bloat and index syntax concerns.

— via Rust Internals, epage

President Trump announced a major rollback of Biden-era methane rules for oil and gas producers, with the EPA claiming $45 billion in savings. Proposed changes would end the Super Emitter Program and loosen rules on marginal wells and routine flaring of associated gas, while critics call the standard toothless.

— via Phys.org

Qwenputer is a stock Qwen 3.5 4B with a 32-bit RISC-V CPU compiled directly into its weights, using Gated DeltaNet layers as exact RAM and running entirely within forward passes. It matches a Python tool on arithmetic benchmarks and adds an experimental in-model filesystem.

— via Hacker News (top 30), csmantle

Control of the U.S. Senate is heading toward a hard-to-predict finish, with Democrats needing a net gain of four seats. Cook Political Report counts 14 competitive races versus nine two years ago, with North Carolina seen as a likely Democratic pickup and Michigan as a key toss-up.

— via PBS NewsHour, Lisa Desjardins

A Science Tokyo study found that macromolecular crowding agents such as PEG, dextran and Ficoll raise the temperature at which synthetic DNA nanostar droplets form. Adjusting PEG, nanostar ratios and salt levels also let researchers organize distinct droplets into patterns without fusion, supporting programmable artificial cell design.

— via Phys.org

Three days after Brazil's presidential election, Flávio Bolsonaro, who faces criminal investigations, defied a court order and left for the U.S. via Argentina and Ecuador. Analyst Brian Winter doubts a government-in-exile strategy will work, and notes President Trump voiced approval of his arrival while keeping some distance.

— via PBS NewsHour, Stephanie Sy

Researchers at the University of Vienna and TU Wien explain why an iron-based metal-organic framework photocatalyzes ammonia formation from nitrogen under light while its chromium analogue does not. Differences in magnetic coupling within the metal triangles set how strongly nitrogen binds, which determines catalytic success.

— via Phys.org

The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady while acknowledging elevated inflation, and two officials favored another hike. Other items include the death of Judge Alvin Hellerstein, a ruling against LA's top federal prosecutor, stranded MV Odyssey passengers in Cambodia, and a bid for Wendy's.

— via PBS NewsHour

Kyushu University researchers found that inserting an ultrathin iridium manganese layer between a YIG magnetic insulator and platinum boosts both the spin Seebeck effect and spin Hall magnetoresistance. A 0.3 nm layer gave the strongest responses, which could inform ultralow-power, battery-free devices.

— via Phys.org