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

Jalen Hurts played 60 minutes in London on Oct. 11 with a calf clot an ultrasound had found the day before, throwing for 220 yards in a 19-17 loss. Eight days later the Eagles said the clot had traveled to his lungs, and he is expected to miss the rest of the season while on blood thinners.

— via WHYY, Associated Press

The Betsy on Ocean Drive has been running live music since 2010, making it Miami Beach's longest-running series, and this season adds a monthly Sofar Sounds residency plus an Overtown jazz legacy series. Thanksgiving weekend brings nightly jazz, including a Grammy-winning pianist hosting University of Miami's emerging players.

— via Miami New Times, Shawn Macomber

A Portland woman is suing PDX Nails and the Oregon Health Authority for $2.5 million, saying an acrylic nail appointment left her with herpes. The suit claims a state investigation four years earlier found the salon wasn't properly sanitizing its tools, and that another customer caught the same strain there in 2023, yet the state renewed its license anyway.

— via Portland Mercury, Courtney Vaughn

San Francisco's Cesar Chavez Street is set to become "Las Campesinas," a name honoring female farmworkers that led the other finalist by what the mayor's office called a significant margin among 668 online comments. The change is still weeks of review away: four supervisors introduced the ordinance Tuesday, and it must pass the full board and then go through Public Works.

— via Mission Local, Oscar Palma

Walmart is opening its site to AI shopping agents just as Amazon blocks them from buying. Its new Agent Gateway lets approved agents search inventory and purchase, with per-agent profiles, spending caps and a returns policy that covers agents that misfire.

— via TechCrunch, Sarah Perez

Prosecutors have charged both parents of a 13-year-old who died in a May e-motorcycle crash, accusing them of letting him ride unlicensed after repeated warnings and injuries. The father faces up to six years in state prison on a felony child endangerment count; arraignment is set for Nov. 12.

— via LAist

An AI system called BootLoops produced 36 manuscripts in three months, on topics from ecology and linguistics to health insurance and sunspots. Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz built the toolkit with Claude, then used it with 19 coauthors to carry math techniques across fields.

— via 3 Quarks Daily, Azra Raza

Bono says a Dan Savage line about AIDS activists burying friends by morning, protesting by afternoon and dancing by night helped inspire U2's new album, Carnaval De Luz. Also this week: Joni Mitchell became a US citizen after 62 years, and Billy Joel says his neurologist compares performing to getting a concussion.

— via The Stranger, Audrey Vann

The Valkyries beat Atlanta in Game 1 of the WNBA finals, then took a crushing home loss in Game 2, and Xingones is hosting a free outdoor watch party for Game 4 on a big LED screen with DJ Eleda. It kicks off at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 24, one of several Oakland events that weekend, along with a Filipino American History Month festival and a salsa block party.

— via The Oaklandside, Azucena Rasilla

A Minneapolis school board candidate who is writing a master's thesis on school-issued devices says the research shows Chromebooks and iPads hurt learning, and he wants fewer of them in classrooms. Ben Lattimore, a substitute teacher with a business background, argues that cutting screen time would lift math and reading scores and win back families.

— via Sahan Journal, Becky Z. Dernbach

Tyler Cowen says he reads partly to build a stake in future contact with authors, since he meets and spends time with many of them. A piece written by AI offers him almost none of that, and he puts its value at close to zero.

— via Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen

A fire along Panoramic Way on the Oakland-Berkeley border damaged at least one home and burned 2 to 3 acres, by Berkeley police's estimate, before crews held it in under three hours. It started on the 35th anniversary of the 1991 firestorm that killed 25 people, but the wind was blowing a different way and no evacuations were underway.

— via Berkeleyside, Darwin BondGraham and Alex N. Gecan

With Oct. 31 landing on a Saturday this year, Montreal's Halloween events will be competing hard for crowds and cover charges. The list runs from a $6.66 queer bar party and a roller-skating dance floor at SAT to a $69 all-night cult-film bash with RuPaul's Drag Race alumni.

— via CultMTL, Dave MacIntyre

A corporation expecting to owe $1 million in federal taxes can pay $900,000 for LIHTC credits that cut its bill by a full $1 million, and that discount is what turns future tax savings into upfront cash for affordable housing. The 1986 program lets developers raise equity from investors instead of piling on debt, which is what makes lower rents possible.

— via Greater Greater Washington, David Stembel

Cooking dinner from groceries you bought yourself has become an increasingly solitary choice, one food writer argues. The case for it rests on keeping your own hands in the work, even when no one else at the table seems to care.

— via SF Standard, Sara Deseran

Truong Tran has cut more than 10,000 butterflies from photographs of naked white men, a practice that began as a protest of Damien Hirst's installation that killed 9,000 butterflies. Asked by a white man why he won't cut into images of Black and Brown men, he says what he wishes he'd answered: that his violence is metaphor, and the real violence endured by Black and Brown bodies has no such luxury.

— via Literary Hub, Truong Tran

The author argues that China's ruling party, with 100 million members and a goal of running the strongest state on earth by 2049, could one day write the definitions and the history books of communism. That, he says, is reason enough to stop treating communism's history as a closed chapter.

— via Literary Hub, Paul Mason

In 1900, the US had twice as many physicians per capita as Britain and 14 times as many as Russia, and wealth differences can't explain the gap. Today the UK and France have 20% more doctors per capita than America, and the shortage is expected to worsen.

— via 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza

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

Blacksmith's valuation has gone from $60 million to $1 billion in a year, capped by a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia just two months after a Series B that valued it at $550 million. The CI platform says its annual recurring revenue is up 17x and it has run more than 90 million automated code checks, with demand driven by the flood of AI-written code.

— via TechCrunch, Dominic-Madori Davis