Chemistry Nobel goes to reactions like those that gave life a hand

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Life is remarkably selective. Life relies on many molecules with what is termed “handedness”—they’re chemically identical but are mirror images of each other. Most chemical reactions will make a 50-50 mix of the left- and right-handed forms of a chemical, but life uses only one of them. In fact, because of the differences between left- and right-handed chemicals, most of the key enzymes used by organisms will fail to work if they’re presented with chemicals that have the wrong handedness.

That poses a bit of a challenge for origin-of-life research, as we’re forced to explain how a world that may have started with an even mix of left- and right-handed chemicals produced organisms that only used one of them.

Today’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to two individuals, Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai, who discovered chemical reactions could be biased, producing large excesses of one of the two forms of a chemical.

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Pediatricians renew call to ban raw milk as anti-science rhetoric reigns

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As many doctors are moving ahead with the latest advances of modern medicine—from powerful obesity drugs to breakthrough cancer treatments—pediatricians are being forced to turn back, fighting to maintain advances in children’s health that were hard-won decades ago.

With anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has spent a considerable amount of time and resources in the past year fiercely defending lifesaving vaccinations—safe, routine shots that have saved the lives of millions of children over decades and thwarted untold suffering and disability.

But just this week, The New York Times reported that Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, has opened aggressive investigations against pediatricians simply because they vaccinated their patients. Paxton falsely claims vaccines are part of a “multi-level, multi-industry scheme.” But critics say his anti-vaccine campaign appears more aimed at currying favor with Kennedy, President Trump, and their supporters as Paxton runs for the US Senate.

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Fraudster jailed for using 10K bots and AI songs to outstream Taylor Swift

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After pleading guilty, a 54-year-old North Carolina man, Michael Smith, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using artificial intelligence to generate songs for a scheme that stole millions from music streaming platforms.

In a press release Tuesday, the US Department of Justice said that Smith is the first American criminally charged with AI-assisted streaming fraud.

First charged in 2024, Smith successfully ran the scheme for seven years without detection.

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Microsoft and Nvidia Unveil Surface Laptop Ultra For $2,599

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At a press event today, Microsoft unveiled the new Surface Laptop Ultra featuring an NVIDIA RTX Spark platform with a Blackwell-based GPU capable of up to one petaflop of AI compute. The laptop supports up to 128GB of unified memory for running models as large as 120 billion parameters locally, while also adding a 15-inch mini-LED display, expanded ports, upgraded cooling, and support for hundreds of AAA games. It’s available for pre-order today starting at $2,599. Neowin reports: To keep the device’s temperature under control, Microsoft has also developed a new cooling system that offers up to 2.5 times the thermal capacity of the 15-inch Surface Laptop 7th Edition. The Surface Laptop Ultra comes with a 15-inch PixelSense Ultra mini-LED touchscreen with a 3:2 aspect ratio, a pixel density of 262 PPI, and peak HDR brightness of up to 2,000 nits.

Despite its beefy specs, the Surface Laptop Ultra measures less than 18mm thick and weighs under 4.5 pounds (around 2kg). The laptop will be available in Platinum and Nightfall finishes. Microsoft has also increased the size of the precision haptic touchpad by more than 30% compared to the Surface Laptop 7th Edition for improved haptic input. The Surface Laptop Ultra includes a broader selection of ports, featuring USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a full-size SD card reader. It also features the world’s first built-in USB-C magnetic charging.


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon’s New ‘About You’ Page Lists Everything It Knows About You

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It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Amazon collects data about you based on what you buy. And now, you can get a direct look at what the company has concluded from all that activity.

Amazon’s “About You” page, currently in beta after launching this May, uses data from customers’ activity to generate details about them in categories like Product Preferences, Interests & Hobbies, and Home & Family. Amazon uses those details to personalize the shopping experience. Here’s how to navigate and personalize your “About You” page in your Amazon account.

What Amazon thinks it knows about you

The results can be oddly specific. My editor-in-chief, Jordan Calhoun, shared his page, which includes these entries:

  • “Likely has 2 adults”

  • “Owns a PlayStation 5 console”

  • “Prioritizes plant-based meat alternatives over traditional options”

  • “Subscribes to multiple streaming services continually”

  • “Owns a large dog”

  • “Likely has a cat”

Full disclosure: I try to never use Amazon personally. I pretty much exclusively use it to round up deals for you, my dear reader. That being said, here’s what Amazon thinks it knows about me: “Values durable travel gear,” “prefers athletic and casual clothing styles,” “practices yoga regularly,” and “listens to music frequently.”

What counts as data

In its Privacy Notice, Amazon lists every activity that provides user data to the company. That includes the obvious, like searching for items and placing orders. It also includes actions you may not realize are being tracked, like interacting with Alexa Voice Service, participating in discussion boards, or linking an Amazon account to a third-party business.

How to view your own “About you” page

On desktop:

  1. Hover over where Amazon says “Hello, [your name]” in the upper right corner.

  2. Under the “Your Account” section, click “Account.”

  3. Under the “Ordering and shopping preferences” section, click “Your Shopping preferences.”

From here, you can add information of your own, like your shoe size, interests, and dietary preferences. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and you’ll see a blue hyperlinked option that says, “Manage your information.” Click it, and you’ll see what dirt Amazon has on you.

On the mobile app:

Tap the hamburger icon in the bottom menu bar, then go to Account > Shopping preferences > About you.

You can edit it, but not opt out

Shoppers can’t directly opt out of the “About you” feature. They can, however, customize the data by adding details they want Amazon to know and deleting assumptions they consider inaccurate or too personal.

Importing data from other AI chatbots

On the “About you” page, customers also have the option to “make Amazon even more personal to you” by importing personal data they’ve shared with other AI agents. Amazon provides a prompt for you to feed to your chatbot to generate a shopping profile, then asks you to copy the bot’s response and paste it back into Amazon.

Whether that’s worth doing is up to you. Given how much Amazon already infers from your browsing and buying, handing over a profile from another AI service is a choice worth thinking through. Either way, taking a few minutes to review your page and delete anything inaccurate or too personal is a simple way to see and shape what Amazon knows about you.

10 Shows Like ‘Carrie’ You Should Watch Next

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Do we need another adaptation of Carrie? Maybe/maybe not, but the horrific bullying faced by the teen protagonist of Stephen King’s first book is not even the tiniest bit less relevant now than it was way back in 1974, and Mike Flanagan has proven himself King’s most adept modern-day translator—and that’s before taking his other work into consideration. So we’ll happily give it a shot before diving into these other shows to remind ourselves that growing up is hell.

The Glory (2022)

There are at least a couple of different levels to The Glory, a justifiably well-received South Korean import, rather remarkably holding together despite some wild shifts in tone. Most obviously, it’s a revenge drama, with a relatively simple set-up: Song Hye-kyo plays Moon Dong-eun, an elementary school homeroom teacher who’s playing a very long game: Her school bullies are grown up now, and their kids (some of them, anyway) are now in Dong-eun’s care. Right where she wants them. Smartly, the show makes clear the extent of the past violence faced by Dong-eun (much of it hard to watch), and the resulting post-traumatic stress that’s consumed her life. The parents of her tormentors were all far too wealthy for the girls to face any consequences for their actions, so Dong-eun feels like she has no choice. It could have been a revenge fantasy, or a straight horror show about a woman carrying out a questionable revenge, but instead it’s a more nuanced tale of high school bullying, with a victim whose revenge takes a much colder path than Carrie’s. Stream The Glory on Netflix.

I Am Not Okay With This (2020)

Sophia Lillis, straight from playing Beverly Marsh in the It movies (if you wanted a Stephen King connection), stars as Sydney Novak, a 17-year-old living in a small town with her mother and sister. Her father recently died by suicide; she has a crush on her best friend; and all she and her mother do is argue. In the middle of all of that, she discovers that she has powers triggered by her emotions, both of which she’ll need to learn to control if she wants to get her life in order. As the lead, Lillis sells the hell out of this offbeat coming-of-age story—the tone is more dark comedy than horror, but Sophia definitely has some Carrie moments of her own before it’s over. Stream I Am Not Okay With This on Netflix.

The Wilds (2020–2022)

Situated between flashbacks and flash-forwards (think Lost or Yellowjackets), mystery/thriller The Wilds sees an airplane full of teenage girls crash on the way to an empowerment program in Hawaii. It quickly becomes clear that the accident was engineered and that the whole thing is some sort of social experiment, and the survivors are forced to compete against each other if they want to live. The show understands the ways in which young women are exploited and expected to compete against each other in the real world, mirroring the horrors of the high school social hierarchy that dominate Carrie’s life. Stream The Wilds on Prime Video.

The Midnight Club (2022)

Likely the least buzzy of Mike Flanagan’s Netflix offerings, coming, as it did, near the end of his contract with the streamer, is every bit as good as the others. Based on the YA novel by Christopher Pike, it follows a group of eight terminally ill young patients at a bucolic hospice home run by a secretive and mysterious doctor (A Nightmare on Elm Street‘s Heather Langenkamp). Each night, the kids meet secretly to share scary stories, with each also promising to return from beyond the grave when the time comes. Spooky, funny, and impressively moving as a coming-of-age story about kids who know they’ll never come of age, the show was planned as more than a miniseries, but the ending is still pretty satisfying. Stream The Midnight Club on Netflix.

The Society (2019)

Kathryn Newton heads this surprisingly smart William Golding/Lord of the Flies riff about a group of teenagers forced to create their own community after all the adults disappear and a dense new forest crops up around their small enclave, cutting them off from everything and everyone else. This one’s about coming of age in a world where the usual rules are no longer in effect, and about how we’re quick to reestablish an oppressive social order even when outside forces are no longer at work. Stream The Society on Netflix.

Stranger Things (2016–2025)

A cloistered, repressive upbringing for a young woman with dramatic telekinetic powers? The stories of Carrie and Eleven play out very differently, but that’s largely because they’re in different kinds of stories—one’s a more introspective high school drama, while the other is a retro government conspiracy adventure involving demons and parallel universes. Still! You kinda feel like Carrie and El would recognize each other’s trials, with hope that the bullied kids of Hawkins would welcome them both. You’re probably familiar with Stranger Things by now, but just in case: An ensemble cast of mostly kids uncover dark deeds in their small Indiana town after a mysterious girl (Millie Bobby Brown) turns up displaying impressive, if alarming, abilities. Stream Stranger Things on Netflix.

It: Welcome to Derry (2025– )

The big link here is, of course, Stephen King, who’s not just great at situating horror in small towns, but in conveying the unique trauma of being a kid trapped in a small town—Carrie and It being two of his best in that vein. Set in the 1960s, this It prequel dives into the backstory of Derry and Pennywise the clown through the eyes of children who met him during his previous visit to the town. By the end of the first episode, it’s clear that even the most adorable children aren’t safe, and this is a show that will, if nothing else, go hard—and that’s before Bill Skarsgård’s memorably creepy Pennywise even shows up, and before we dig deeper into the secrets and lies of the adults of Derry. As in the book and earlier adaptations, each kid here has their own specific family and social issues, and Pennywise is very good at exploiting those dynamics to make the kids feel isolated and afraid. Stream It: Welcome to Derry on HBO Max.

Teach You a Lesson (2026– )

Hang in there, Carrie! Help is on the way! Well, OK…maybe if you lived in South Korea and in the very specific world of this webtoon adaptation. Following a rise in bullying, violence, and generally shitty behavior in high schools, including the murder of a teacher, the government establishes the Educational Rights Protection Bureau (ERPB)—tasked with reforming the school system BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. The team’s first assignment takes them to a school where a bullied student has recently died by suicide, strongly related to the actions of the son of a prominent politician. What else to do but expose dad’s secrets, knocking the bully down a few pegs and leaving him vulnerable to the consequences of his own actions. It’s a little less Carrie and a little more Avengers: High School, but it’s a fun fantasy for anyone who had a rough time back then. Stream Teach You a Lesson on Netflix.

AlRawabi School for Girls (2021–2024)

Mariam (Andria Tayeh) is brutally bullied by the cool clique at her private school in this Jordanian import, a high school drama that’s both universal and distinctly Muslim in character. Fed up, Mariam convinces a couple of similarly outcast friends to join forces with her in a revenge plot that quickly gets out of hand. The show deals with Jordanian-style patriarchy head-on, without drawing any easy conclusions about its characters—Mariam catfishes one of her bullies and convinces her to send a revealing picture, one that she immediately posts, exploiting the very same repressive cultural elements that she claims to deplore. It’s a smart and compelling drama with soapy elements (as well as a surprise hit for Netflix), and few if any clear heroes or villains. Stream AlRawabi School for Girls on Netflix.

Chucky (2021–2024)

One of our most reliable horror franchises went the series route with impressively smart results. Zackary Arthur is Jake Wheeler, a queer teen subject to relentless bullying at school and abuse at home from his homophobic father. Jake picks up America’s favorite serial-killing doll at a garage sale school art project. Before long, Jake’s tormentors are facing consequences rather a bit beyond what Jake would have hoped for, and he’s torn between fighting Chucky or leaning into the chaos. The tone is very different, of course, but Chucky’s violence plays out very much like an externalized (and quippier) manifestation of Carrie’s abilities—both teens dealing with forces that they have little control over. Stream Chucky on Peacock and Prime Video.

All of These Shokz Running Headphones Are up to $90 Off During October Prime Day

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Amazon’s October Prime Day sale ends tonight, which means you have a few more hours to snag some great deals on my favorite brand of workout headphones: Shokz. If you’re unfamiliar with Shokz (and the world of bone conduction headphones in general), I could talk your ear off about the big selling points: better situational awareness, all-day comfort, and ears that stay free and open. If you want to join the club, or need an upgrade, these are the best Shokz deals from this year’s October Prime Day sale.

The OpenRun Pro 2 are $90 off

For runners, the OpenRun Pro 2 are down to $109.95 in Rose Gold (originally $199.95). In other colors, they’re discounted down to $119.95 (originally $179.95). This beloved bone-conduction model combines Shokz’s signature open-ear design with a bassy sound and long battery life (up to 12 hours), making it one of the most popular choices for outdoor workouts.

The regular OpenRun headphones are also discounted, dropping down to $89.95 (originally $129.95). They offer many of the same benefits of the Pro line at a lower price point, including a lightweight frame and open-ear design geared toward runners and all kinds of outdoor athletes.

For anyone with a smaller head size, the OpenRun Mini have 0.83-inch (21mm) shorter band than the standard size, and they’re seeing the same discount—currently available for $89.95 (originally $129.95).

The trendy OpenDots ONE are $60 off

If you’ve been following the trendiness of clip-on-style earbuds, the OpenDots ONE are 30% off, dropping down to $139.95 (originally $199.95). One of Shokz’s newer designs, the OpenDots ONE sit outside the ear canal, offering a lightweight alternative to traditional earbuds while still maintaining that signature situational awareness. Plus, they’re a strong alternative to the pricier Bose Ultra open earbuds.

These swimming headphones are $50 off

Swimmers can save 22% on the OpenSwim Pro, now $179.95 (originally $229.95). Unlike most workout headphones, this bone conduction model has an IP68 rating and is built for use in the water. They support onboard MP3 storage, allowing you to listen to music even when Bluetooth connectivity isn’t available.

October Prime Day FAQs

When is Prime Day in October?

October Prime Day is a two-day event that starts Oct. 6 and ends on Oct. 7.

Is Shokz a reliable brand?

Yes, Shokz is one of the best brands when it comes to bone conduction and sports headphones. The OpenRun Pro 2 model especially is a go-to pick for battery life, comfort, and situational awareness.

Do Shokz Prime Day discounts apply to all their product lines, or just select items?

Unfortunately, not all Garmin products are on sale. However, there are many Shokz products on sale, and you can find them all on the Amazon landing page.

What else goes on sale on Prime Day?

Since Prime Big Deal Days happens in the fall, you’re likely to see more deals on gaming and indoor gym equipment. Amazon has already announced some of the 35 categories that will be on sale, including beauty, tech, kitchen, fashion, and home. Some brands Amazon has already mentioned are: Shark, Princess Polly, Soundcore by Anker, UGG, Nest New York, Sony, Tarte, Adidas, and Barefoot Dreams.

Our Best Editor-Vetted Prime Day Deals Right Now

Deals are selected by our commerce team

Jaguar Type 01 debuts; now, no one remembers the electric Ferrari

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Does it feel like people are perhaps a little grumpier or more on edge these days? It’s not like it’s without reason. There are wars. The climate is going haywire. Someone just died of plague. Scientific research is under attack. Machines keep stealing humans’ work. The media is a mess. And just when it all starts to feel a little overwhelming, Jaguar goes and unveils a new car.

The Type 01 is the first model to arrive from Jaguar’s rebirth. The British carmaker was an early entrant to the modern EV market with the 2017 I-Pace, which was fun to drive even if it was too small inside and perhaps completely unreliable. An all-electric sedan was supposed to be next, but a year from the showroom, it was abruptly canceled, leaving the automaker with nothing to sell as old models like the F-Pace ceased production.

Instead, Jaguar got to work on an all-new electric vehicle platform called JEA, which will underpin an all-electric product line. An elevated ownership experience and a starting price of about double the brand’s previous $60,000 entry point was the idea, Jaguar boss Rawdon Glover told me in 2024. Then last year the brand started teasing its relaunch, and everyone got upset. Things got even worse when the first images of the slab-sided and pastel-shaded Type 00 coupe concept leaked.

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Trade group crunches numbers on Trump’s impossible push for 100% US-made tech

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One of Donald Trump’s biggest goals as president is to increase domestic manufacturing and reshore supply chains so that the most in-demand technologies in the world can be 100 percent made in the United States.

By executive order last December, he launched his “Genesis Mission,” an ambitious plan seeking to leverage US dominance in AI to maintain or seize an edge in advanced robotics, biotechnology, semiconductors, and nuclear technologies. According to Trump, that plan works best with self-sustaining supply chains. Not even neighboring countries or longtime allies should be relied upon to manufacture a single component of any US product in his ideal world.

The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) has long warned that Trump’s reshoring goals are not grounded in reality, but only recently has America’s largest technology trade association attempted to estimate what it would cost businesses and consumers to follow through on Trump’s plan.

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