Scammers cloned the voice and photo of an Osceola County, Florida, sheriff and left a voicemail with a resident, a sheriff's office official told News6. Similar jury duty and arrest warrant scams hit Georgia and Pennsylvania in the past week, though those reports don't say AI was involved.
— via 404 Media, Samantha Cole
Criminal networks in Southeast Asia are using AI both to lure people into scam centers and to defraud victims once they're inside. The IOM has assisted more than 3,500 trafficked people since 2022, a fraction of the estimated 300,000 coerced into the compounds across the region.
— via CFR (Council on Foreign Relations)
Forty per cent of Greater Vancouver and Fraser Valley homes sold between January and September needed a second listing, up from 19 per cent in 2021, according to Zealty. Sellers who got it done on the second try took 13.5 per cent off their asking price, versus 3.5 per cent for those who sold on the first.
— via Daily Hive Vancouver, Hanna Hett
Democrats are spending money in Colorado's 5th District for the first time in years, betting that an unpopular Iran war and turmoil in the armed forces can pry loose a seat in a conservative stronghold that includes five military facilities. Nearly 6 in 10 veterans voted for Trump two years ago, and one retired Air Force colonel and registered Republican is now backing the Democrat.
— via Colorado Sun, The Associated Press
A farmer harvesting corn in Stevens County, Minnesota, found an 11-foot metal circle that matches the upper stage of a Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket. The stage fired its engine after releasing 10 satellites on September 15 and came down before finishing a single orbit.
— via Ars Technica — Science, Stephen Clark
Richmond's utilities department logged 80 error alerts by 10 a.m. on launch day, then needed 13 days to get its billing vendor to agree to a conversation. Internal emails show the vendor later acknowledged disruptions affecting 25% of customers, and by August 6 more than 5,700 customers still hadn't received a bill.
— via Hoodline, Tanner Kowalczyk
A federal judge denied DOJ's bid to disqualify the ABA's law firm, Susman Godfrey, after the government conceded it couldn't name a single lawyer there who would be a necessary witness. Judge Amir Ali also noted that the rule DOJ invoked restricts individual lawyers, not whole firms.
— via Above the Law, Kathryn Rubino
Collins' Senate reelection PAC in Maine bought ad time in Portland, Oregon instead of Portland, Maine, according to this local columnist's account. She also reports Jane Fonda's PAC gave $5,000 to Gov. Tina Kotek's reelection campaign, and that Vance's "I'm the vice president, not James Talarico" line landed at a Texas rally.
— via Portland Mercury, Elinor Jones
Salt-N-Pepa play MOPOP's Icons of Pop Culture Gala on October 22 at the 250-capacity Sky Church, which the writer calls probably your only shot at seeing them in a room that small. The week's other picks include Barbara Kingsolver at Benaroya Hall and experimental composer Tyondai Braxton at Vera Project.
— via The Stranger, Julianne Bell, Amanda Manitach, Dave Segal, and Audrey Vann
Philadelphia's second annual One Philly HBCU Week starts Oct. 26 and ends with two football games at Lincoln Financial Field, including Lincoln University vs. Virginia Union on Oct. 30 with Ludacris performing at halftime. The six-day schedule also has a Battle of the Bands, a step show, and a college and job fair.
— via WHYY, Jassmyn Nesmith
Alberta votes today on starting a path toward independence, and a new Ipsos poll has 70% of residents planning to stay in Canada against 23% for the separatist option. A separate Angus Reid survey found that 60% of those backing the process say they mainly want to send Ottawa a message, while 37% name independence as their goal.
— via Southwest Journal, Nebojša Vujinović
E. coli stuck in a gel maze packed with phages sat still for as long as 15 hours, then took off toward food anyway, surviving phage levels that should have wiped them out. The pause isn't caution, since the bacteria can't sense phages; it's the time the colony needs to outgrow the cells that phage infection keeps killing.
— via Phys.org
Knocking out five Hox9–10 genes in zebrafish eliminated the pelvic fins entirely, and disrupting all seven Hox9–10 paralogs in newts produced hindlimb loss in some animals. The genes act before any fin bud appears, at the stage when the progenitor cells that will build the hind appendage are first set up.
— via Phys.org
Fingerprints pressed into clay from 36 Terracotta Army figures suggest adult men left only about 45% of the marks, with adult women near 33% and children under 15 around 22%. The sample is small, comes from one spot in Pit 1, and multiple prints could belong to one person.
— via Phys.org
In 1940, Guderian protected a single German pontoon bridge over the Meuse at Sedan with more than 300 anti-aircraft guns, and the Allies lost 167 aircraft without a hit. At Kherson in 2022, Russian forces also leaned on three bridges, and Ukrainian rocket strikes put all of them out of use between July 19 and 28.
— via War on the Rocks, Randy Noorman
Meta's Muse has been downloaded 9 million times in the U.S. and Canada since September 8, and the company wants to take personal agents to billions more people. Experts warn that language gaps, Western cultural assumptions and shaky networks in places like Niger and eastern Congo could blunt the rollout.
— via Rest of World, Danai Nesta Kupemba
Fossil algae under 1 mm across, dissolved out of early Cambrian rock in South China, carry plug-like lids over openings in their outer shell. The structures hint at a reproductive system that may have let some algae release offspring in a controlled way.
— via Phys.org
Dwarf reedsnakes roll away from danger at up to 3.69 m/s, about four times their peak speed when slithering in the usual side-to-side way. Video analysis shows alternating left and right "strokes" that keep the head pointed forward and fairly steady while the rest of the body spins.
— via Phys.org
A new iridium catalyst for PEM water electrolyzers ran for more than 3,800 hours with very little loss in performance, and for over 3,200 hours in a separate, harsher test. The iridium nanoparticles grow out of a high-entropy perovskite by heating, so they stay locked in place instead of clumping or drifting.
— via Phys.org
Several 2026 AI bills and a California executive order center on a "kill switch" that could shut down a dangerous model in an emergency, but experts say today's advanced systems run on distributed infrastructure no single switch controls. The metaphor also hides the human decisions behind overseeing a runaway model.
— via The Conversation — Science, Trent Wintermeier, Ph.D. Candidate in Rhetoric and Writing, The University of Texas at Austin
NASA's Maven orbiter went silent in December 2025 and the agency declared it dead in June 2026, dropping NASA to two working Mars orbiters and the world to seven. The cause hasn't been made public, and a final report is due later this year.
— via The Conversation — Science, Margaret Landis, Assistant Professor of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University
Satellite measurements of how much the ground sinks during pumping were enough to map permeability across a municipal aquifer in Nevada, using free, public InSAR data. The maps revealed a high-permeability channel on the aquifer's southern end and a low-permeability zone that earlier research had suggested might be a fault.
— via Phys.org
Nameless narrators are everywhere in recent literary fiction, from Audition to Life of M, and the author argues the usual defense, that a blank name lets readers step into the character, doesn't hold up. A withheld name more likely closes the gap between narrator and writer than between narrator and reader.
— via Literary Hub, Ilana Bean
The Rangers signed 37-year-old center Luke Glendening to a professional tryout after Joe Veleno went on long-term injured reserve for three to three-and-a-half months with a lower-body injury. Under this season's CBA rules, a mid-season PTO lasts at most 10 days and the player can't appear in games.
— via NY Post, Mollie Walker
New York's Board of Regents says it "intends to repeal" part of its 2023 ban on Native American school logos, according to court documents, days before a Nov. 4 court showdown with Massapequa. The Long Island district, which has the Trump administration's backing, estimated rebranding away from the Chiefs would cost nearly $1 million.
— via NY Post, Alex Mitchell
