Unofficial results show Alberta voters rejecting independence by a 50-point margin, with three in four choosing to stay in Canada, the widest gap among comparable secession referendums. Polls had put support for separatism at barely one in five before the vote was called, and the piece traces how that small minority still set the political agenda.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Jared Wesley, Professor, Political Science, University of Alberta

Florida put William Reaves, 77, to death Tuesday, its 18th execution this year and the eighth of a prisoner over 70. One more scheduled next month would tie last year's state record of 19.

— via PBS NewsHour, David Fischer, Associated Press

CBC and CTV projected shortly after 11 p.m. that a majority of Albertans voted to remain in Canada on Question 10, which asked whether the province should begin the legal process toward a binding separation referendum. Premier Danielle Smith said the initial results show widespread support for staying, and official results are due Oct. 29.

— via Daily Hive Vancouver, Laine Mitchell

In 1914, fewer than 1% of American Jews belonged to the largest American Zionist organisation, while around 90% now back Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Benjamin Moser's new book profiles 12 Jewish opponents of Zionism, from Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares to Nan Goldin, to show the argument was once mainstream.

— via 3 Quarks Daily, Azra Raza

Nineteenth-century U.S. laws boxed in nearly every part of Chinese immigrants' lives, from where they could work to whether they could stay. Historian Beth Lew-Williams describes how she dug those statutes out of the archives and what they reveal about how the controls worked.

— via HistoryExtra (BBC), Elinor Evans

Caltech researchers had more than 3,000 people arrange faces by personality similarity, with no trait words or rating scales, and still found five dimensions of first impressions: approachability, warmth, competence, morality and youthfulness. Those dimensions matched historical word-rating data well, though the second experiment also showed prominent effects of racial stereotypes.

— via Phys.org

A vegetation fire on Panoramic Way above UC Berkeley's campus burned about one and a half acres and caused limited damage to one home's roof. More than 60 firefighters from across the East Bay stalled its forward progress within a few hours, according to Oakland fire officials.

— via KQED, Steph Rodriguez

Defense drones used about 4.3 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity in 2025, a sliver of a market roughly 1.6 terawatt-hours in total, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. With the Pentagon's drone buy heading from tens of thousands this year to more than 200,000 by 2027, the military will be a price taker for a supply chain it can't afford to see break.

— via War on the Rocks, Morgan Bazilian

About 1,000 Swiss volunteers buried identical pairs of white briefs, plus tea bags, so University of Zurich researchers could measure how fast the cotton rots in different soils. The weirdest thing may be that the underwear idea made it from the lab all the way to a runway.

— via Popular Science, Popular Science Team

BK channels carry roughly 10 times the current per molecule of other potassium channels, and since the early 1980s no one could say why evolution built them that way. Simulations and evolutionary modeling now point to spike timing as a probable pressure, with conductance highest in mammals and birds and lowest in mollusks.

— via Phys.org

To reach the peppercorns, harvesters often tear down the vine and the trees holding it up, feeding the loss of forests that shrank 27% between 1990 and 2025. Madagascar's voatsiperifery pepper sells for 150 to 200 euros per kilogram in France, yet no national system tracks how much is harvested or exported.

— via Phys.org

When strangers' skin conductance moved in step during a face-to-face trust game, it did not reliably predict that they would repay each other's trust. The Dutch study of 122 participants found that matching bodily responses are not always linked to greater reciprocity and cooperation, a challenge to earlier work tying synchrony to trust.

— via Phys.org

Home security video shows a plainclothes ICE agent drawing a gun on a man in a navy suit on 6th Street in SoMa, who appears unarmed and tells agents he is a U.S. citizen on his way to work. About six minutes later, agents led him away in handcuffs, and DHS had no comment.

— via Hoodline, Emily Johnson

A Long Island wing festival will shut down the street outside a Lindenhurst sports bar Saturday, with more than 20 vendors competing for the title of the island's best wing. Entry is $45, which includes sampling every wing being judged, and "Sopranos" actor Joe Gannascoli is on the guest list.

— via NY Post, Brandon Cruz

In Irish legend, a young prince who sleeps with a hideous old woman at a well is rewarded with a kingship, but a king who marries a woman of the aes sidhe brings famine on all Ireland. Turn one down, as Cú Chulainn does with the Morrigan, and she starts shape-shifting to trip him in battle.

— via Literary Hub, Sarah Clegg

Fewer than 40 percent of American twelfth graders are proficient in basic literacy, despite decades of calculators, tablets and laptops sold as catalysts for learning. The author, a member of the first free-born generation of Black Americans, argues that AI enthusiasm and a surge of racial backlash now converge on the country's 250th birthday.

— via Literary Hub, Kamau Bobb

A homeless man spent more than five months in jail on a murder charge because his DNA was on the victim's fingernails, though he was unconscious in a hospital that night with a blood alcohol level of .40. Investigators came to believe paramedics who treated him and later responded to the crime scene carried his DNA there, possibly via a pulse oximeter.

— via Hoodline, Eric Tanaka

A Brooklyn bookstore refused to sell the author a Nabokov first novel she'd found in its dollar bin, calling it a rare collector edition. It came from Ardis, the Michigan press that Carl and Ellendea Proffer started in 1971 to publish Russian literature that wasn't meant to exist.

— via Literary Hub, Nina Chayka

Artists with very different schedules and family commitments all report the same problem: not enough time for their work. Consultant Beth Pickens says that complaint tracks perception as much as reality, which means a reframing exercise built on four questions and a flipped sentence may do more for a creative practice than a clearer calendar.

— via 3 Quarks Daily, Herbert Lui

CUNY says its new CARES program connected an estimated 7,500 Bronx students to food, health care, housing and mental health services in fiscal 2026, after a 2022 survey found half of Bronx students have two or more unmet needs. Most get help through a virtual benefits hub, not the hands-on casework one student used to contest $50,000 in rental arrears.

— via The City, Aisha Baiocchi

Oxford physicists linked two trapped-ion nodes by optical fiber and shared entanglement across up to four ions of two elements, strontium and calcium. Storing that entanglement in the calcium ions kept it alive for roughly 10 seconds, far longer than the millisecond timescales of the network qubits.

— via Phys.org

A 37-year-old driver died late Monday night after his car left State Route 390 in Mount Morris, hit a guardrail, flipped down an embankment and caught fire in a creek bed. State police have not released his name or a cause, and an autopsy has been ordered.

— via Hoodline, Nadia Latham

Canadian kids who skip eligible post-secondary education must hand their Learning Bond back to the government, while American kids with a Trump Account can keep their money invested for retirement. Both countries are moving to open accounts automatically after sign-up systems left most eligible children out: only 43.9 per cent of eligible Canadian children had received the bond by the end of 2025.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Denis Schweizer, Professor of Finance, Concordia University