HOUTHIS NAME THREE SAUDI TARGETS FOR RETALIATION Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree has threatened a major response if the Saudi-led coalition strikes the oil facility in Sanaa. He specifically named: • Saudi Aramco headquarters in Dammam • King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh • Saudi Aramco’s Riyadh refinery
October 12, 2026
October 12, 2026
In this Quick Take, Ian Bremmer explains why President Donald Trump is pressuring Ukraine over strikes on Russian refineries, and what his new deal to buy Russian diesel means for the war.
Trump warned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky against hitting Russian refineries, first privately and then publicly. He said the strikes help push up diesel prices. Zelenskyy refused to back off. Trump then announced a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy diesel directly and let Russia export it more widely.
Oct 11, 2026 #tragicstories#LuciaJoyce#biographydocumentary
The Tragic Story of Lucia Joyce – Schizophrenia & Half a Century Locked Away James Joyce’s daughter Lucia was a gifted dancer in 1920s Paris, until schizophrenia took her into psychiatric care for almost half a century. In 1929, Lucia Joyce danced in a silver fish-scale costume she had sewn herself, and the crowd at Bal Bullier booed the judges for not giving her the prize. Three years later, her mind began to break. Her father refused to accept that she was ill. He spent a fortune on doctors and clinics, and even took her to Carl Jung. Nothing could bring her back. This is one of the most tragic stories in literary history: a daughter left behind in wartime France, a family that stopped visiting, and a man who once broke her heart, Samuel Beckett, who kept coming to see her until the end. After her death, most of her letters were destroyed.
Undertold brings you the tragic stories of real people whose lives were told wrong, told halfway, or never told at all. Subscribe for the next story. Full Series: 
• Tragic Stories Timestamp: 00:00 The Dancer of Paris 07:40 The First Cracks 11:20 The Father Who Refused to Believe 16:46 Left Behind for Fifty Years 24:15 Silenced a Second Time Sources:
Oct 13, 2026
Build or ban? Here’s what every citizen should know before a giant AI data center gets built in their community. Debating the benefits and dangers of developing AI data centers in this episode of “Can We Agree?”: Brian O’Neill, a Pennsylvania developer aiming to build $18 billion of data centers in the suburbs. He says one of his projects will pay over $30 million a year to the township’s school district. That’s $109,000 per teacher and $8,827 per student. He also makes the case for improved technology and providing high-paying community jobs that don’t even require a high school degree. Abre’ Conner is director of the NAACP’s Center for Environmental and Climate Justice and is leading its federal lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI over the gas turbines powering a massive data center near Memphis. She says jobs cannot justify harm.
What can they agree on? Is there a “right” way to build a data center? How reliable are claims about emissions and closed loop systems? What is the actual impact on communities, both environmentally and financially? Nobody leaves until they agree. “Can We Agree?” is the program that asks whether two brilliant minds from opposite corners of an argument can find any common ground on the questions that matter most to Americans today.
Subscribe to the Smerconish YouTube channel to never miss an episode: / @michaelsmerconish Watch more “Can We Agree?” https://www.youtube.com/show/VLPLArM1…00:00 AI Data Centers: What’s at stake? 04:50 Is this just what change looks like? 07:25 How to AI data centers impact communities? 09:07 Counter-arguments for AI data centers 09:48 What if data centers met all emission standards? 12:42 Data center emissions in focus 14:42 Are there developers who build data centers “right”? 22:19 How does America win the AI race without data centers? 22:38 Defining community and who represents them 24:44 Are arguments against data centers “anti-business”? 29:05 Listeners share their views on data centers 32:58 What about the revenue? 34:12 How much money can data centers bring to communities? 37:56 Jobs and data centers 52:15 Will activists take “yes” for an answer if developers meet objectives? 53:37 Can We Agree?
https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/2109713209439457362/video/1
“No signal” might become one of those things we eventually forget used to happen.
SpaceX is moving to acquire nationwide low-band spectrum licenses in the U.S. Low-band is the useful stuff for phones: it travels farther and gets through walls, trees and difficult terrain much better.
Cities. Highways. Farms. Mountains. Remote areas. Pair that with Starlink Gen 2 satellites and ordinary phones can stay connected across far more of the map.
Do that globally and Starlink becomes a communications layer reaching people almost wherever they go.
@SpaceX / Writer: Annette, Designer: Janné
Germany’s Solar Sleeping Pods Are Turning Freezing Nights Into a Chance for Survival.
Imagine spending a freezing winter night on the street, with nowhere warm to go. Now imagine a small shelter that uses the power of the sun to help protect you from the cold. In Germany, solar-powered sleeping capsules are offering homeless people a safer place to rest during harsh winter nights.
Designed to provide protection from the elements, these compact shelters show how renewable energy can serve a deeply human purpose. But there is more to these unusual shelters than meets the eye. The Ulmer Nest capsules have insulated walls, fresh-air systems, and sensors that alert support workers when someone uses a shelter. The next morning, workers can check on the person and connect them with additional help.
These capsules are an emergency safety measure, not a replacement for permanent housing or proper shelters. But on a bitterly cold night, a small, secure space can make a meaningful difference. Sometimes, the most powerful use of technology is not changing the world. It is helping someone survive another night. Source: Stadt Ulm. Ulmer Nester stehen ab dem 10. November wieder bereit.
Neuroimaging reveals that disruption within a circuit connecting the amygdala, thalamus, and cerebellum is tied to adolescent anxiety as early as age 11. Credit: Neuroscience News
FeaturedNeurosciencePsychology
October 12, 2026
Summary:
Brain imaging in nearly 3,500 adolescents reveals that disrupted connectivity across a key subcortical-cerebellar circuit—connecting the amygdala, thalamus, and cerebellum, is directly associated with heightened anxiety. The alterations, already detectable by ages 11 to 12, also correlate with reduced visuospatial processing abilities, offering specific neurobiological targets for precision psychiatry.
Source: Boston Children’s Hospital
Adolescence represents a critical, vulnerable window for neurodevelopment during which emotional and cognitive systems undergo massive structural rewiring. It is also the developmental stage where clinical mental health conditions most frequently surface, with anxiety disorders affecting more than 30% of teenagers in the United States.
Despite its prevalence, the precise neurobiological changes underlying adolescent anxiety have remained difficult to pinpoint.
Now, in a study published in Imaging Neuroscience, researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital have mapped specific brain circuit alterations that distinguish youth suffering from generalized and social anxiety disorders. By analyzing neuroimaging data from nearly 3,500 adolescents, the team isolated a compromised subcortical-cerebellar network that correlates not only with emotional distress, but also with subtle everyday cognitive deficits.
Led by Caterina Stamoulis, PhD, Principal Investigator of the Computational Neuroscience Laboratory at Boston Children’s, the research team analyzed brain scans from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, the largest long-term investigation of brain development and child health in the United States.
The researchers discovered that adolescents experiencing elevated anxiety showed distinct structural alterations and weakened functional connections across a specific triad:
In youth with high anxiety, the organization of this circuit was disorganized, showing weaker connection strength. Conversely, adolescents who exhibited high topological efficiency and structural resilience in other parallel brain networks demonstrated a protective buffering effect against both generalized and social anxiety disorders.
Crucially, the team identified that these neural alterations did not exist in an emotional vacuum. The structural and network disruptions in the amygdala-thalamus-cerebellum circuit were closely tied to measurable reductions in visuospatial processing, the cognitive ability to perceive, evaluate, and integrate the spatial relationships between shapes and objects.
Visuospatial integration is essential for core daily life activities, ranging from navigating physical environments and operating vehicles to fine motor tasks like assembling objects or tying shoes. The finding illustrates how developmental anxiety can ripple into broader cognitive and functional domains during formative school years.
Importantly, these circuit-level anomalies were already prominent in children aged 11 and 12 years old. This early appearance emphasizes that neurodevelopmental pathways diverging toward anxiety are already detectable at the very threshold of adolescence.
According to the authors, isolating these precise neural signatures offers a crucial roadmap for moving beyond trial-and-error behavioral therapies and toward targeted neuromodulation or cognitive training.
“Precision psychiatry is likely to play an important role in future mental health care,” said Stamoulis. “In this study, we have identified specific circuits that are implicated in anxiety, which could become the targets of precision interventions to improve short- and longer-term mental health outcomes in youth.”
By intervening early to reinforce circuit resilience, clinicians hope to mitigate both psychiatric suffering and downstream cognitive challenges before they crystallize in adulthood.
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If you’ve delved into the worlds of Star Trek, The Terminator or William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, you’ll know that enhanced, electronic vision is a staple of science fiction. Now, what was once futuristic fiction is becoming a reality.
Researchers have developed bionic eyes that can restore some lost vision. These devices’ capabilities are currently basic, but they have been steadily improving in recent years.
One day, they might even offer features that transcend the limits of natural human eyesight – for instance by manipulating images in a way the human eye cannot or by seeing beyond the spectrum of visible light.
Technology that boosts people’s physical and mental abilities is no longer the preserve of science fiction. In this series, we explore cutting-edge ways that human capabilities could be augmented both now and in the near future – and the ethics of these innovations.
To date, implants have focused on combatting problems with the retina, the light-sensing layer of cells inside the back of the eye. Akin to the film in the back of a camera, the retina allows us to see the outside world. When things go badly wrong with it, the result can be a total loss of vision.
Work to fix retinal blindness with implants began more than two decades ago. One of the first devices, developed by the German manufacturer Retina Implant AG, featured a light-sensing chip placed under a person’s damaged retina. This connected with their remaining healthy retinal cells, which then transmitted the chip’s vision signal from the eye to the occipital cortex, the brain region where vision is perceived.
Surgery to implant the chip took about eight hours. This included creating a recess in the skull behind the ear to implant a power receiver and then connecting this with a wire beneath the skin to the chip.
The device offered only rudimentary vision, with patients seeing flashes of light that corresponded roughly to the shape of the object they were looking at. Many implants also broke over time, possibly because of the frequent rapid movements of the eye or corrosion caused by its salty liquid interior. Retina Implant AG ceased operations in 2019, citing its lack of medical progress as one of the main reasons.
The other leading early device, Argus II, combined a glasses-mounted camera with a chip surgically inserted on top of the retina. The camera’s picture was converted into a signal and transmitted wirelessly to the chip (along with power), which then stimulated healthy cells in the damaged retina using an array of 60 electrodes.
Despite positive early results and FDA authorisation in 2013, ARGUS II also ultimately failed to deliver sufficiently convincing results. It was discontinued in 2019.
Despite these setbacks, investigators have persisted in trying to create artificial vision.
A newer approach is to use an external camera that wirelessly transfers power and image data to a chip implanted in the occipital cortex. This built research that placed electrical probes directly into the occipital cortex to stimulate visual perception.
This approach can help both patients with diseases of the retina and those with conditions affecting the optic nerve, which connects the retina to the brain. But exactly how much resolution can be achieved with this technique isn’t clear, as the retina’s high resolution and complex signal processing is lost.
One company trying this technique, Belgium-based ReVision Implant, is launching its first human clinical test in October 2026.
Another option is to use spectacles that transmit both images and power to a surgically inserted subretinal chip via an infrared signal. A device using this technique, Prima, has been tested in a specific disease of the retina called dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of blindness.
In a small clinical trial, the device restored functional central vision to 81% of patients, allowing them to read letters, numbers and words. The device is now authorised in 30 European countries.
As AMD is far more common than the inherited retinal diseases treated by most earlier devices, this device is much more appealing to investors. However, there are ethical questions here. Unlike patients with inherited retinal diseases, most with AMD still have good peripheral vision, so have much to lose if things go wrong. The complex surgery to implant a subretinal chip is far from zero risk.
In the future, it is possible that devices may emerge that use cameras capable of seeing beyond the visible light spectrum. This could potentially offer thermal imaging and night vision. One device offering near-infrared vision has already been tested in primates.
But while exciting, these will probably not offer enhanced vision until the currently rudimentary artificial vision is advanced to the point that these “optional extras” become more relevant.
For now, there are still many biomaterial and electrical challenges preventing retinal implants from offering full, long-term vision restoration. However, a potentially greater challenge comes from competing biological solutions, such as stem cells, which are in the early stages of human trials.
These have also had a few false dawns and there are big obstacles to overcome in terms of cell survival and integration. But if new human retinal cells can replace those lost to disease, they could one day overtake bionic eyes entirely as the solution for vision restoration.
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The failed lethal injection of convicted Tennessee murderer Christa Pike, and the proposed livestreamed execution by firing squad of US Army major Nidal Hasan, sentenced to death for 13 murders, drew the world’s attention to America’s exceptional use of the death penalty.
In Australia, Queensland’s abolition of the death penalty in 1922, made it the first jurisdiction in the British Empire to do so. Western Australia, the final state to do away with capital punishment, abolished it in 1984.
Britain abolished the death penalty in 1965 and Canada did so in 1976.
By retaining the death penalty and inflicting capital punishment, the United States keeps company with countries such as Iran, North Korea and Somalia. If the military carries out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream Hasan’s execution, American-style justice will resemble Afghanistan’s, not the majority of the world’s democracies.
Most executions in the US are conducted under state authority in the 27 (out of 50) states that currently retain the death penalty. For capital crimes deemed federal offences, including ones prosecuted by courts martial, presidential approval is required for executions to be carried out.
One of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders in his second term reversed President Joe Biden’s moratorium on federal executions.
Since the mid-19th century, US politicians, judges, and religious and secular lobbyists have opposed the death penalty. The abolition movement peaked in the 1960s, when approval of capital punishment dipped to 42%. Today, that rate sits at 52%. Yet, just 23 states have abolished the death penalty.
Historically, the concept of American exceptionalism has referred to the republic’s founding in democracy, liberty and rights.
Paradoxically, Americans invoke those values to support the death penalty, not just its abolition.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, civil rights activists used evidence of racial bias in the use of capital punishment to argue it was unconstitutional. In 1972, the US Supreme Court agreed. Since state death penalty statutes failed to prevent their “arbitrary and capricious” administration, they were unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
That decision overturned every retentionist state’s death penalty laws and it spared close to 600 prisoners on death row. For five years, no executions occurred in the US.
Yet, the Supreme Court did not represent the will of the people. Was its ruling undemocratic?
Thirty-five states thought so, and they updated their death penalty statutes in response. In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled the revised statutes were constitutional on procedural grounds. Besides, the majority argued, “in a democratic society, legislatures, not courts, are constituted to respond to the will and consequently the moral values of the people”.
Executions resumed in the US in 1977, the first one in Utah, conducted by firing squad. Although the American Civil Liberties Union tried to intervene, the condemned man, Gary Gilmore, who twice attempted suicide, asserted his right to choose to die for committing two robbery murders.
Yet, that promise turned out to be false. Compared with the methods it replaced, lethal injection is the method most likely to be botched, as Pike’s case has revealed.
In South Carolina, where condemned prisoners can choose death by electrocution, firing squad or lethal injection, a convicted murderer, Brad Sigmon, opted for firing squad in March 2025 because he knew the previous three men the state executed by lethal injection had experienced prolonged suffering.
As legal and political battles brew over Pike’s and Hasan’s cases, bipartisan objections to her re-execution and his public execution have emerged. But the possibility of both outcomes remains.
In Tennessee, state Republicans are leaning in favour of returning to the electric chair, the method US Senator and state gubernatorial candidate, Marsha Blackburn, advocates.
Far from reckoning with the justifiability of capital punishment, the state majority leader pledged to “speed up” the appeals process and use a method “that’s far more reliable and predictable”.
Politicians typically frame such claims in terms of victims’ rights. The mother of Colleen Slemmer, the 19-year-old Pike confessed to torturing and murdering, watched as the state botched the execution of her daughter’s killer.
Similarly, Hegseth has justified the livestreamed execution of a man who brutally gunned down troops at Fort Hood before he was shot and paralysed. The execution must be public, Hegseth said, “because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things”.
The belief that the death sentence’s deterrent value is most potent when the public can witness executions is remarkably resilient. Yet, there is no compelling evidence to support its purportedly unique capacity to deter murderous violence.
Americans are not exceptionally brutal. But the prevailing politics of capital punishment in the US certainly are.
Carolyn Strange does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Australian National University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.
The Conversation UK receives funding from these organisations
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