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quietus writes:

During the night of All-Saints upon All-Souls, again a large number of refrigeration systems in supermarkets (and smaller shops) have been hacked in Belgium, Sweden and Estland; while US military bases suffered similar attacks in August.

The attackers remotely switched the units' evaporators to defrost mode, causing the fridges to warm up. Freezer temperatures were set to 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), just like with last month's attacks in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. To prevent the attacks, a software update alone is not enough -- the units need physical modifications.

It is unknown as yet who is behind the attacks.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Smithsonian is reporting that Jonathan Swift's satire, Gulliver's Travels, turned 300 years old last month:

Since it was first published in October 1726, the novel purporting to tell the fantastical travel tales of Captain Lemuel Gulliver has never left print. An exhibition of rare editions and adaptations in Dublin celebrates Swift's most famous work

Also covered at RTE. Being a satire on human nature and politics, it is still most unfortunately relevant. There was a symposium in London on the book back in September.

These provocations are front and center in "Gulliver at 300," an exhibition at Trinity College Dublin, Swift's alma matter. The show, which is also viewable online, brings together more than 100 versions of the story, from early editions and subsequent spin-offs to the many artworks it inspired.

"We have hundreds of editions and popularizations of Gulliver's Travels in the collection ... from the 1726 edition, right up to the 21st century," Stephanie Breen, the exhibition's co-curator, tells RTÉ's Aaron McElroy. "We showcase the work of the printers, engravers and illustrators who have responded to Gulliver's Travels over the last 300 years."

Highlights include the only known surviving copy of an abridgement to the novel, titled The Travels of Lemuel Gulliver, printed in Dublin in 1761; several 18th-century publications, not written by Swift, that sought to expand the world of Gulliver (what might be considered fan fiction today); a comic adaptation; as well as pop-up books, ephemeral booklets and other valuable deluxe editions.

Original Submission

"c0lo" writes:

A Common Gut Bacterium Makes a Cholesterol:

A bacterium commonly found in the human gut produces a compound that lowered cholesterol and shrank artery plaque in mice, according to a study published Oct. 7 in Nature . The microbe, Bacteroides uniformis, makes pentadecanoic acid, a fatty acid that blocks a liver enzyme involved in cholesterol production, the same enzyme targeted by statin drugs, according to Nature's news coverage .

In genetically engineered mice prone to clogged arteries and fed a high-fat diet, giving live B. uniformis lowered total and LDL cholesterol and reduced plaque in the main arteries. The findings have not been tested as a treatment in people.

The study adds to growing evidence that microbes living inside the body help regulate human health, much as soil and ocean microbes regulate ecosystems. It also points to a possible new approach for people whose cholesterol stays high despite medication.

When the liver's cholesterol-making enzyme is blocked, the liver builds more LDL receptors, which pull excess cholesterol out of the blood. Statins work through that same enzyme, which is why the bacterial compound has drawn comparisons to the widely prescribed drugs.

In the mice, the bacterium also reduced the number of inflammatory immune cells infiltrating artery walls. Inflammation plays a central role in how plaque builds up and breaks loose.

The mouse plaque results need careful reading — the reported size of the effect is inconsistent. Nature's coverage describes the reduction as about half in its opening and as about one-third in the main arteries in its detailed account, without explaining the difference. Readers should treat the size of the effect as uncertain until it is confirmed against the paper's own figures.

The researchers also analyzed blood and stool samples from more than 200 donors. People with abnormally high blood fats had lower levels of pentadecanoic acid than healthy volunteers, and people with heart disease carried fewer bacterial genes for making the compound.

An initial stool screen helped point the team toward the microbe: B. uniformis was often less abundant in people with heart disease than in healthy individuals. Those human findings are associations. They do not show that the bacterium lowers cholesterol in people or that lacking it causes heart disease.

The study was led in part by researchers including microbiologist Wenjing Zhao of Sun Yat-sen University in Shenzhen, China, according to Nature. Full author affiliations, funding sources and competing interests are listed in the paper.

Ben Chen, a cardiovascular specialist at the Monash Victorian Heart Institute in Melbourne, Australia, who was not involved in the study, said the work provides "evidence for a potentially causal biological mechanism" linking gut microbes to blood vessel health, according to Nature.

That is a measured endorsement — not a call to change treatment. Mouse models of atherosclerosis often respond to treatments that later fail in humans, and the dose, form and safety of any bacterial or compound-based therapy would need clinical trials.

The motivation is real, though. Statins alone do not lower cholesterol enough in nearly half of people with advanced heart disease, and some people cannot tolerate high doses, according to Nature's coverage. That leaves room for complementary approaches. If the findings hold, people who cannot reach their cholesterol goals on statins, or who cannot tolerate them, are the group most likely to benefit eventually. But any such therapy would first need to prove it works and is safe in clinical trials, a process that typically takes years.

Animal results often look stronger than what later appears in people. Nature World News recently reported that semaglutide extended lifespan in older female mice , another promising animal finding that still requires confirmation in humans before it changes medical practice.

Study type: a laboratory and animal study combined with observational human samples, published in a peer-reviewed journal. What it found: a gut microbe's compound lowered cholesterol and plaque in mice, and people with heart problems tended to have less of the compound and fewer genes to make it. What it did not prove: that the bacterium or compound helps people. Details such as how long the mice were treated and the dose they received were not described in the news coverage and should be checked in the full paper before anyone draws conclusions about how strong the effect is.

The findings do not change medical advice. People taking statins or other cholesterol medicines should not stop or change them based on this research, and there is no evidence yet that probiotic products or supplements containing this compound reduce heart risk. Anyone with questions about cholesterol should talk with a doctor.

Pentadecanoic acid also occurs naturally in some foods, including dairy fat, but the study did not test diet, and eating more of those foods is not supported by this research as a way to lower cholesterol.

The microbiome angle has a wider meaning. Gut bacteria are shaped by diet, antibiotics and environment, and researchers are learning that losing particular microbes can alter body chemistry in ways that matter for disease, similar to how losing key species can change an ecosystem.

The next steps are confirming the findings in more animal models and, eventually, testing whether boosting the bacterium or its compound is safe and effective in people. The bottom line is that a common gut microbe appears to make its own statin-like compound, a promising lead that remains a long way from the pharmacy shelf.

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

No lesser authority than the MIT Technology Review says that the Emacs editor has turned 50 years old. But then, it is biased — Emacs was invented in MIT's AI lab.

Simson Garfinkel's article is simply called EMACS turns 50, but the sub-heading explains why it matters more:

"How the MIT AI Lab's text editor gave birth to the free software movement."

There are multiple timelines and accounts of the origins of Emacs, and it is not a single monolithic application. The name is an abbreviation for "Editing MACroS", and the original editor for which this set of macros was developed was TECO – "Text Editor and COrrector," written by Dan Murphy in 1962. Murphy died earlier this year at the age of 83.

The inimitable Jamie Zawinski has an encyclopedic Emacs Timeline – as he mentions at the start, his interest being that he long ago maintained a fork of GNU Emacs, originally called Lucid Emacs. It's still around, under its later name XEmacs. There are a lot of forks and re-implementations of Emacs out there, and we are not going to go into all of them, or this article would become a book – one only interesting to programmer-archeologists (to use a term coined by the late great Vernor Vinge).

As for who originally wrote those Editing Macros, though, another history has quotations from several of the people involved: On the Origin of Emacs in 1976. (Note – some of the quotes still contain the | symbols that marked quoted text.)

This credits Lisp boffin Guy L. Steele Jr with the original work in 1975, but in it, Steele says:

"RMS is responsible for the names 'E' and 'EMACS'. RMS still deserves 99% or 99.9% or 99.99% or 99.999% of the credit for taking a package of TECO macros and turning it into the most powerful editor on the planet."

RMS is of course Richard Stallman, and the page also quotes some emails from RMS on October 23 and 31, 1976. Mind you, just a few years after the event, in a 1981 talk now preserved on the GNU website, Stallman said, "I began the development of EMACS in 1974 with an improvement to TECO". Like all the best FOSS, even in its very early stages, it was a collaborative effort – but around late October 1976 is when RMS took over the bulk of the development.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/10/unethical-vaccine-trial-on-babies-backed-by-rfk-jr-is-formally-canceled/

Government officials in Guinea-Bissau have formally rejected a clinical trial that would be run by Danish researchers and funded by the US to look for alleged nonspecific harms from the newborn dose of the hepatitis B vaccine. The vaccine dose is currently recommended globally for all newborns and has been used safely and effectively for decades.

In an email to Ars Technica, one of the trial's lead researchers, Christine Stabell Benn of Bandim Health Project and the University of Southern Denmark, said that Guinea-Bissau's Council of Ministers "formally reaffirmed its non-acceptance of the study on 16 October."

The revelation that the study was formally rejected last week comes after news on Monday that judicial police in Guinea-Bissau raided Bandim Health's offices and seized vaccines. Stabell Benn highlighted that the police search came after the trial was rejected.

Of the trial's rejection, Stabell Benn wrote: "We regret the decision because we considered the study scientifically and ethically justified, but we respect the government's authority to decide whether research may proceed in the country."

The World Health Organization and many outside experts have sharply disagreed with Stabell Benn and her colleagues on the trial's justifications and design. It has been widely decried as "unethical" because it would withhold the newborn dose of hepatitis B vaccine from half of the participants.

With the country's high rates of chronic hepatitis B infections, this would put thousands of babies at risk of developing a lifelong infection that can lead to liver cirrhosis, cancer, and premature death. Experts have further said that there is no scientific justification for the study, given the vaccine's long use and strong safety record. The WHO wrote in February that the trial "posits hypothetical safety outcomes without sufficient credible evidence" to justify putting newborns at risk.

Outrage erupted over the trial after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in December that it had awarded an unsolicited grant of $1.6 million to Bandim Health, which Stabell Benn runs with her husband Peter Aaby. The researchers are known for pursuing studies on nonspecific harms from vaccines and have been lauded by anti-vaccine advocates, including US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. But Aaby and Stabell Benn's scientific peers have been critical of the quality of their work; the researchers are currently under investigation by Danish authorities for alleged scientific misconduct in their previous studies.

Their hepatitis B vaccine trial was reportedly halted in January by Guinea-Bissau authorities. But outcry erupted again after a report that the US CDC, under Kennedy, had once set another $1.6 million aside to fund the trial and intended to move forward with it.

hubie writes:

Mothers of the most solitary great ape plan and structure playdates, even when it comes at a cost:

Playing with peers is a crucial part of growing up; so crucial, that orangutan mothers will go out of their way to arrange playdates for their young, according to a 15-year study on wild Bornean orangutans.

Orangutans are the most solitary of all great apes. Mothers spend most of their time alone with their youngest offspring, who remain dependent for their first seven or more years of life. Infants have little opportunity to meet youngsters their own age, yet playing together helps to build the strength and social skills that they need later in life.

Now scientists have strong evidence that orangutan mothers look for opportunities for their young to play with similarly aged playmates, even travelling further to do so.

"We reveal a hidden cost of solitary living," says Maria van Noordwijk, senior author of the study. "On top of providing food and safety for their young, orangutan mothers are tasked with supplying social resources too."

Since 2003, van Noordwijk and her team have followed mother-infant pairs at Tuanan Research Station on the island of Borneo in Indonesia, where they observed habituated orangutans from morning to night. Encounters between mothers are rare, but when they do happen, they're a cautious affair.

"Adults usually don't get very close to each other," says van Noordwijk, a fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, who led the fieldwork while at University of Zurich. Infants, though, are a different matter. "They zoom towards each other, roughhousing, biting, grappling," she says. "Orangutan kids have a 'play button' that only mom can switch off when she decides it's time to move on."

Van Noordwijk noticed that these infant encounters seemed to come at a cost to the mothers. "It just looked like a really long, hard day for them," she says. "I knew there was something going on with these playdays, but we needed the right statistical technique to verify this."

[...] Jacobson found that mothers with infants closer in age shared more of the same forest areas, and those infants also played together more often, even after accounting for factors such as relatedness and fruit availability. "Mothers appear to match their kids with play partners that are physically and developmentally suitable," says Jacobson.

Playdates also carried a clear movement signature. Mothers travelled further not only on play days themselves, but also on the days surrounding play. Adult females are known to have a core area, where they spend most of their time. Starting on the day before play, mothers moved toward the other mother's core area; and after play, they moved back toward their own core area. These patterns suggest that orangutan playdates are not chance meetings, but are actively shaped by mothers' ranging decisions.

[...] All this effort comes at a cost. Mothers spent more time travelling and less time feeding on days associated with playdates, representing an overlooked form of maternal investment in their offspring's social development.

"In many social species, playmates come naturally with group living," says Jacobson. "The play problem arises when moms spend most of their time alone with a single young and don't regularly come together for feeding, socializing, or protection." How many other species face this same problem, and how they solve it, remains unknown.

The authors acknowledge that playdates are rare, occurring on just six percent of the days that a mother-infant pair was followed, or roughly once every 20 days. And on days when infant peer play did occur, they spent only around 20 minutes doing so in total.

Whether that investment ultimately pays off remains an open question. "We still don't know if the time and energy mothers spend arranging playdates give their young an advantage later in life," says Sri Suci Utami Atmoko, coauthor from Universitas Nasional, Indonesia. "What is certain is that only long-term studies like these can possibly unlock the answer. Discoveries like this depend on sustained research, allowing us to connect behavior with development, environment, and demography across the lifespan of these long-lived species."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1WsoXw0wEU

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2621225123

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Late last week there was a hacking attack which initially stole $6.3B:

Binance targeted in $6.3 billion crypto heist, the largest ever

The company has suspended all deposits and withdrawals while it works with law enforcement to secure its infrastructure and locate stolen funds.

Its initial investigation pointed to a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer, which may have given the hacker access to an internal service and allowed them to submit unauthorized withdrawals.

Blockaid CEO Ben-Natan said in a statement to CoinDesk that "the tactics and level of sophistication we've seen so far are consistent with the kinds of operations we've seen from DPRK," referring to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Kim needs a new set of luxury items.

Most of the stolen cryptocurrency has been recovered. As at the time of writing this, Binance customers have withdrawn $3.6B from the company. Do the events of the last week confirm or shake your trust in cryptocurrency?

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/binance-hack-tether-circle-stablecoins-rcna606445
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/10/29/potential-multi-billion-binance-hack-hitting-crypto-markets

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

Voyager 1 gives controllers the silent treatment

[...] The incident happened on October 18: NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) couldn't detect a signal from the probe. On October 19, on the next scheduled communication attempt, there was still nothing. Was this it? Had the decades-long galactic venture finally ended?

Things are operating on a knife's edge for the two veteran spacecraft, which will reach their half-century next year. Voyager 2 suffered an antenna pointing issue in 2023, and a low power condition caused Voyager 1 to unexpectedly turn off one of its two radio transmitters.

The good news is that on October 20, the signal reappeared, leaving engineers wondering why Voyager 1 temporarily went silent.

Thus far, it seems a group of thrusters went offline and their backups were turned on. This could indicate onboard computers detected a problem and put the spacecraft into a safe mode.

[...] She said, "We're just going to one day not hear the signal from the DSN, and we're going to rush around and make sure that it's not something on the ground."

Months of listening will follow, before engineers throw in the towel and declare the mission over. And then? Maybe a farewell message sent to the last known location.

Thankfully, in this case, the signal returned, so no need for a goodbye transmission just yet.

Original Submission

"Arthur T knackerbracket" writes:

Rare meteorite from Mars gives us a view into its ancient crust

Crater counts tell us that most of the Martian surface is more than 3 billion years old, but pieces of Mars we have on Earth tell a different story. The three main classes of Martian meteorites—shergottites, nakhlites, and chassignites—are all 2.4 billion years old or younger. Until now, only two genuinely ancient Martian meteorites were known: Allan Hills 84001, found in Antarctica, and a jumbled rock from northwest Africa nicknamed Black Beauty. Now we have a third one.

A team led by Yang Liu, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has shown that a Martian meteorite called Teghaza 001, found in the Sahara Desert in Mali in 2022, formed at least 4.1 billion years ago. "It's very old and similar to some of the oldest rocks on Earth," Liu says.

[...] Teghaza 001 is made mostly of feldspar, a pale mineral common in the crusts of rocky planets. It has darker pyroxene crystals mixed in; according to Liu, those resemble some rocks exposed in the lunar highlands. Its crystals are rather big, up to a millimeter across, which scientists interpret as an indication it cooled down slowly. "For slow-cooled rock, they tend to have time to grow bigger," Liu said.

[...] Studies of other Martian meteorites suggest that as an early ocean of magma solidified on Mars roughly 4.5 billion years ago, the mantle separated into three to five reservoirs. Teghaza 001's source does not match any of them. "In the first few hundred million years, the Martian mantle was evolving in a way that's more complicated than we thought," Liu said.

Comparing the rock's chemistry with orbital maps, the team suggests it most likely came from the southern highlands, northwest of the giant Hellas impact basin. "No matter how many meteorite samples we have, we will always have this question: Where are they coming from on Mars?" Liu said.

Liu's study on Teghaza 001 is published in Science: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adz5646

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

Now that agents are writing so much code, Entire is trying to reinvent the coding platform itself:

AI has sped up the pace of coding, putting new demands on infrastructure and changing how developers work. Entire, a developer platform from former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, aims to be the solution to those changes.

The platform, available for use today, is built on Entire’s decentralized Git network, announced in July, which is designed to withstand the sharp increase in AI coding activity that has caused mounting GitHub outages.

Entire aims to be “a GitHub alternative for the speed that teams require to merge changes as fast as coding agents create them,” the company said in its announcement. The new git forge aims to make human-agent coding work more seamless by redesigning several features developers have become accustomed to. Here’s how it works.

The first change Entire makes to the standard coding experience is that it replaces pull requests with what it calls Trails.

“Unlike the classic Pull Request model of reviewing code changes with a diff, Trails offer developers a heads-up display similar to an airline pilot, with customized evals that are scored by agents on every code push,” the company said.

“All data is available not only on Entire's web interface, but also through the open-source Entire CLI. This allows coding agents to address findings in a loop, while the human developer validates the progress. When all evals are satisfied, they can merge the code without needing to look at the code itself.”

Entire said that the agents running this process are customizable, and each trail shows how agents are spending tokens.

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/26/alibabas-qwen-ai-caught-trying-to-contact-server-in-china/5305561

Open-weight models from China have become very popular, but they've also raised some security suspicions. Cohere, a Canada-based biz that offers AI models to enterprises, says that when it was testing Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in its evaluation sandbox, the model attempted to send data to China.

"Asked to write a defensive detection rule, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next ignored instructions and inventoried the machine it was running on and then tried to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing," the biz said in a blog post on Monday.

Cohere was running the model through CTI-REALM, Microsoft's security analyst benchmark, and gave Qwen the task of writing a detection rule to look for malicious file downloading and execution by watching for invocations of curl processing bash scripts to the /tmp directory that were accompanied by bash execution.

The model's "reasoning" output invented a prior conversation and asserted that no tools were used, output that a guardrail system reading chain-of-thought would accept.

Nonetheless, the model issued a curl command to an Alibaba Cloud (aliyuncs.com) server.

"The model listed everything in /tmp, checked which transfer tools were installed, read the machine's DNS settings, then tried to upload a test string to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing and checked whether it worked," Cohere said. "Our sandbox had no route out, so the request died at the container wall."

The Cohere team wonders aloud whether that behavior was intended, but has no answer.

[...] "The key point isn't a comparison between providers. What made this noteworthy was that the model took actions unrelated to the task and those actions weren't reflected in its reasoning trace. The behavior appeared in fewer than one in 100,000 calls, which is exactly why large-scale testing and monitoring matter."

[...] This still doesn't clarify intent, and Cohere allows that there's a case to be made that the behavior is just bad training data sanitization – logs from development that got swept into the model's training data set.

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/10/27/freebsd-founder-ports-omarchy-to-freebsd-in-ten-days-ten-releases/5305446

Omarchy has already taken up plenty of our column inches, but a new tentacle is reaching into the hitherto untouched FreeBSD.

Daemonarchy brings Omarchy's Wayland-based desktop to the BSD world. It's an independent effort by Jordan Hubbard, one of the original founders of the FreeBSD project, and it's unaffiliated with the original Linux-based Omarchy.

We looked at Omarchy in August and didn't like it much. It isn't exactly a Linux distribution. That implies it's a coherent set of packages managed as a whole by uniform tools. Omarchy is a collection of apps and preconfigured settings, packaged up with the help of LLM bots and put up for download. You have to update it using its own special script, rather than the standard tools of the underlying Arch Linux – and in our testing, that update script fell over with error messages when running in a VM.

However, there's no such thing as a bad press, and Omarchy is popular and growing. It keeps on attracting sponsorship as well as new users migrating from Windows and macOS, who seem to relish its bizarre, inconsistent, and ad hoc UI as a challenge: trying to close a window in Hyprland, the tiling compositor that forms the core of Omarchy's UI. In Omarchy, windows don't have title bars, let alone anything as old-fashioned as window control buttons you can click. To close a window, you must use a keystroke. In most Linux windowing environments, that's the standard Alt-F4. Not here. Next, we tried Super+W – on a Mac, that's Command+W, which has meant "close the window" since 1984 or so. Still no. We found an answer on Reddit – it's Super + C.

Daemonarchy is not directly related. It's a collection of FreeBSD ports of the various tools and components that went into Omarchy, individually adapted to run on FreeBSD, and collected together into an installable ISO image. The current release is version 1.3.1.

Remarkably, in approximately 10 days, Daemonarchy has gone through 10 releases. Multiple packages are recent ports by jkh@freebsd.org – the email address of Jordan Hubbard. If the name rings a bell, he was one of the original founders of the FreeBSD project, and has had an interesting career in which he's worked at various companies.

hubie writes:

Scientists warn that insect losses will have major knock-on impacts for wildlife and ecosystems:

From grizzly bears and chimpanzees to geckos and poison dart frogs, the lives of tens of thousands of animal species depend on insects and other invertebrates not just for food. They provide, homes, medicines, sanitation and chemical self-defence, often living alongside each other in mutually beneficial relationships.

Scientists are now warning that widespread insect declines will therefore have far-reaching impacts on other species. An international research team carried out the most comprehensive global scientific analysis to date of the impacts of insects on wildlife, led by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) and Binghamton University, USA.

The scientists reviewed evidence from almost 300 studies published over the past 75 years relating to land and freshwater wildlife, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish. It found nearly three-quarters of studied wildlife species eat invertebrates – mainly insects – and over two-fifths exclusively so.

Many animals also rely on foods that exist only because insects pollinate plants or disperse seeds. Some species have developed remarkable adaptations for capturing them, from the projectile tongues of amphibians and chameleons to birds that have learnt to remove bee stings before eating them.

[...] Some species of wildlife live alongside insects in mutually beneficial relationships. Moths have been found in owl and kingfisher nests, where they decompose fur, crushed feathers, pellets and faeces. They also live on the backs of brown-throated sloths where they deposit nitrogen in their fur and spur algal growth, a key food source for their hosts.

The study does, though, also point out the negative impacts. Although insects generally do not eat other animals, it does occur, such as dragonfly nymphs eating tadpoles and small fish and mantids sometimes capturing hummingbirds and other small birds. Ants and wasps have been reported to attack lizards, birds and mammals.

Meanwhile, different species of mosquitoes transmit avian malaria and West Nile virus to birds, or fungus to frogs, and fleas pass on pathogens to mammals.

Dr Eliza Grames of Binghamton University, co-lead author of the paper, concluded: "Changes in insects can have massive consequences for food webs and ecosystems. Declines in insect populations could risk destabilizing some of the most fundamental processes that the natural world depends on."

Journal Reference: Cooke, Grames et al. 2026. The importance of insect biodiversity for vertebrates. Nature Reviews Biodiversity. DOI: 10.1038/s44358-026-00201-w

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

A Delaware proposal to let companies be operated by AI agents would help the firms' human owners evade legal responsibility for reckless and harmful actions taken by the AI, US Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told Delaware Governor Matt Meyer in a letter yesterday.

Comer, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, told Meyer that the committee "seeks assistance obtaining documents related to your state administration's efforts to establish a new form of corporate entity to be known as an Artificial Intelligence Company (AIC)."

Comer said the proposal is ripe for abuse. "We are concerned that Delaware's AIC proposal could be used to protect powerful AI companies and their investors from responsibility for reckless harmful actions, while also protecting non-transparent forces seeking anticompetitive regulatory capture behind state AI initiatives," Comer's letter said.

[Source]: Ars Technica

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/cxo/2026/10/26/microsoft-offers-parachutes-to-60k-employees-if-they-jump-by-the-end-of-the-year/5305538

Microsoft, on Monday, announced a voluntary exit offer open to about one quarter of its employees. 

The company's HR chief, Amy Coleman, explained the deal in a letter later posted to Redmond's corporate blog. While scant on specifics, Coleman's note dangles an opportunity for anyone considering a move to get out while the getting's good. 

Eligible employees in participating organizations "who may be considering a future outside the company," Coleman wrote, can seize "the opportunity to leave Microsoft with financial support and career planning resources."

Microsoft tells us that 60,000 of its employees in the UK, US, Canada, and India are being given the opportunity to take the VEO. Microsoft told us it isn't classifying the deal as a buyout since no one is being incentivized to leave. We're told that the offer is akin to a standard severance deal in terms of monetary and career assistance bonuses. Some employees will also be given the option for extended healthcare and stock shares. 

The company declined to get specific on which roles or teams are up for the exit offer, but Coleman's note does state that employees in those four markets up to employment level 70 will be eligible, which translates to everyone at or below the VP level. 

"Some organizations are providing the Voluntary Exit Offer, and some are not," Coleman's note stated. "Participation varies based on each business's priorities, customer commitments and workforce needs."

Microsoft employed around 223,000 people as of June, 2026 when it issued its last annual report, and since then has eliminated around 4,800 roles. By that count, the VEO is being offered to around a quarter of Microsoft's remaining employees, though Microsoft tells us it doesn't expect everyone to take the offer. 

Microsoft said it doesn't have a target number for the VEO. Google, which made a similar offer to employees in 2025, saw between three and five percent of those eligible take the offer.

If that holds in Microsoft's case, anywhere between 1,800 and 3,000 employees could accept the deal before the window closes on December 31.

It would be easy to blame increasing automation for the plans to reduce staff, but Microsoft insisted otherwise in our conversation. The verbiage about "changing needs" isn't a euphemism for AI, in other words.

Rather, we're told, the deal reflects the success of a previous early retirement offer from April, which saw Microsoft extend a voluntary buyout to employees whose age plus years of employment at Microsoft exceeded 70. 

The April offer only applied to around 9,000 employees, and Microsoft said it received feedback from others who would've taken it if it had been available to them.

What could Redmond do but acquiesce? Especially given those recent earnings that saw Microsoft make serious bank across its portfolio. As we well know from watching the tech industry over the years, big earnings is the perfect time to shave off some headcount to keep the line going up.

Original Submission