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

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

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

United Flight 1372 from Seattle declared an emergency on approach to SFO after a cabin odor was detected, but landed safely with all 88 passengers and five crew unharmed. The piece places it within a wider pattern of fume events, including a separate United turnback at SFO and FAA-reported incident rates.

Eugene Volokh used Westlaw to catalog 23 court cases from 2025-26 in which FIRE represented a party, classifying each challenged speech restriction as coming from the right, left, or neither. He concludes FIRE challenges restrictions from across the ideological spectrum, while disclosing his own ties to the group.

A California appeals court vacated the convictions and sentences of three Stockton men in a 2019 San Jose killing, ruling a prosecutor's pit bull analogy and predator language during jury selection violated the Racial Justice Act. The case returns to Santa Clara County Superior Court.

Bloomberg Law reported that a lawyer's misconduct complaint against US District Judge Ada Brown stems from an April 2026 Dallas hearing where she repeatedly made racial remarks toward Latino attorney Ezra Young, calling him White-presenting and a "White savior." The author argues this reflects academic anti-racism dogma.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has spent about $1.2 million of his own money on political consultants since taking office. The article also tracks roughly $13 million raised for his three ballot measures and a downtown nonprofit that reported over $60 million in private commitments.