Editions

Climate & Energy

The US environment agency is expected to scrap carbon limits on coal and gas power plants →

Reports say the EPA will announce the repeal at a G20 energy meeting in Houston, three days after a court ruled the US government overstepped its powers keeping a Michigan coal plant open.

Cybersecurity

Microsoft fixed a hole in its built-in antivirus on 3 September. A researcher published a way round the fix within a week. →

A researcher who has fought Microsoft since April released ShieldCrash, attack code aimed at Windows Defender that gets round a fix Microsoft shipped on 3 September. Also: Wildberries sellers still owed about $240 million after an attack, a hidden bitcoin mine found in Mexico's mountains, two Singapore phone-shop workers arrested, and 5,400 small-business websites turned into traps.

Biotech & Longevity

Baby girls exposed to paracetamol in the womb had 40% smaller ovaries. The study cannot say the drug caused it. →

A Danish study of 302 baby girls linked the most common painkiller in pregnancy to smaller ovaries and fewer egg sacs, and nobody yet knows what that means for their fertility.

Food & Farming

South-west Scotland is now a bluetongue zone for at least two years. Its farm minister says the virus is not going away. →

Bluetongue, a sheep and cattle virus spread by midges, has reached 20 Scottish farms, and animals leaving Dumfries and Galloway now need a licence until the region is free of it for two years.

Personal Money

Kalshi and Polymarket sell sports bets as financial contracts. Twenty US states are in court to call them gambling. →

Prediction markets register each bet with a federal markets agency, which lets them skip state gambling licences, taxes and age limits, and the Trump administration is suing states on their side. Elsewhere, US mortgage rates passed 7% and a record 7.4 million low-income UK families went without essentials.

Space

SpaceX flew its 700th Falcon mission. It finished a satellite network that needed two extra satellites after a fault. →

A Falcon 9 carried the last three of SES's 13 O3b mPOWER internet satellites on Sunday. Two of the 13 were added after an electrical fault, and the new three are not due to start work until mid-2027.

Finance News

Saudi Arabia's pipeline around Hormuz stays shut, the Gulf talks are postponed, and oil passes $107 →

Saudi Arabia's main way of shipping oil around the closed Strait of Hormuz has been shut since Friday, and a Monday meeting on the strait was postponed. Oil rose past $107 a barrel, two days before the US central bank is expected to raise rates.

Gaming

Blizzard names 2029 for Diablo 5 and 2030 for a StarCraft shooter. Xbox is cutting 1,600 more jobs over the next year. →

At BlizzCon, its first fan show since 2023, Blizzard put release years on two games that are three and four years away, and said the dates are there to prove it can ship on time.

Mind & Body

In sleep apnoea the throat muscles go slack and the airway shuts, and the mask that holds it open works only for the hours it is worn →

A mask that pushes air into the throat stops almost every blocked breath, but people wear it for about half the night, so pills and a weight-loss injection are now being tested on those who take it off.

World News

Sweden's left bloc is projected to win by one seat, and the far right loses votes for the first time →

Sweden voted on Sunday and the count points to 175 seats for Magdalena Andersson's centre-left bloc against 174 for Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson's right-wing bloc. The far-right Sweden Democrats, promised cabinet seats if the right won, fell back for the first time since 2010. Votes cast abroad are still to come. Elsewhere, Oman called off Monday's Hormuz talks, Trump told Ukraine to stop hitting Russian diesel, and a Russian drone hit a train 800 metres from Poland.

Sports

Athletics put $10m on three nights in Budapest. Second place there paid more than a world title. →

World Athletics ran its first Ultimate Championship, with the best 16 in each event, no limit per country and $150,000 for every winner. It wants a big television event for the one year in four with no Olympics and no World Championships.

Information Technology

Anthropic picked the Nasdaq for its share sale. In Asia on Monday, AI shares fell after its boss asked the industry to slow down. →

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models, will list its shares on the Nasdaq, possibly in October, after filing at a value of $965 billion. On Monday SoftBank fell as much as 13.2% in Tokyo, after Anthropic's boss asked AI companies over the weekend to slow down.

Cybersecurity

One person's AI helpers broke into 395 organisations. Two hundred of them were schools. →

A single attacker used hundreds of automatic AI helpers to attack two flaws in printing software that PaperCut had already fixed, reaching at least 395 organisations in 48 countries. Elsewhere two law firms and the banking app Revolut lost other people's documents without anyone breaking their systems at all.

Personal Money

Five million Americans dropped marketplace health insurance after a 2021 subsidy ended on schedule →

Congress did not vote to raise anyone's premium. It let extra health credits reach the end date written into them, and enrollment fell from 24.2 million to 19.2 million.

Climate & Energy

Qatar sold the Gulf's gas to the world. Now it is trying to buy American gas until 2031. →

QatarEnergy is negotiating multi-year contracts for US liquefied gas to cover a plant Iranian strikes damaged in March, and Europe is heading into winter with its gas stores at a 15-year low.

Food & Farming

The mackerel in British tins is now a Chilean fish from a different family. The rule was changed so the tin can still say mackerel. →

Atlantic mackerel stocks fell by three-quarters after seven governments could not agree how to share them, so Princes and Lidl put cheaper Chilean jack mackerel in the tin, and the UK changed its labelling rule to allow the name.

Biotech & Longevity

Ten women's fractures nearly stopped after one infusion of their own cells, given a sugar coat so they could reach bone →

A small trial in Spain took bone-marrow cells from ten women with advanced osteoporosis, added a sugar that lets the cells leave the bloodstream, and put them back in one infusion. The women went from a broken bone every year or two to about one a decade. There was no comparison group, and nobody tracked where the cells went.

Gaming

VR headset shipments fell 18% in a year after Meta raised prices. Valve is about to sell a new one into that market. →

Counterpoint Research counted 18% fewer VR headsets shipped in the second quarter than a year earlier, and says Meta's Quest price rises added pressure to a market that was already cooling. Meta holds 54% of it outside China. The studio behind Moss closed this week, and a lottery for Valve's Steam Frame is already sitting in Steam's backend.

Finance News

Oracle's founder filed a plan to sell $7.5bn of his shares. One day later the company said the plan is cancelled and nothing was sold. →

Larry Ellison, who founded Oracle and still controls more than 40% of it, dropped a plan to sell up to 50 million shares a day after it was disclosed. Oracle is raising $40bn this year to build data centres for AI companies, and gave no reason for the reversal.

Space

Astronomers found 84 objects of a new kind in old Chandra pictures. They were hiding in the light X-ray telescopes see worst. →

A University of Alabama team searched Chandra's public archive for dots that vanish in high-energy X-ray images and found 84 objects of a kind never catalogued, in six galaxies.

Mind & Body

Migraine is a slow wave across the brain and a messenger released outside it - and the drugs that stop it barely enter the brain →

The brain cannot feel pain; the ache comes from its covering, where a messenger called CGRP fires the nerve. The new drugs block it there, and a first narcolepsy drug aimed at the cause was approved.

World News

BRICS signs a paper against war that names nobody, and the Gulf keeps shooting →

Ten countries, two of them on opposite sides of the Iran war, adopted a 45-page declaration in New Delhi that calls for restraint and names no country. The same day Iraq closed its border with Iran, Bahrain refused to sit with Iran, and a ship was hit in Hormuz.

Sports

The NBA's owners meet on Monday. The record Lakers sale is not up for a vote; two new teams and a suspended owner are. →

Basketball's 30 owners gather in New York on Monday and Tuesday. The $12.5bn sale of the Lakers is reported to be off the agenda, while the price of two new teams, a league in Europe and the punished Clippers are on it. Across the day, a league is a club: its members vote on who joins, who is thrown out, and what a newcomer pays.

Information Technology

Anthropic's chief says AI must slow down, and OpenAI agreed within a day. Neither said it would train any slower. →

Dario Amodei asked the industry to "pace the frontier" on Saturday and committed Anthropic to letting outside evaluators work inside the company. Sam Altman said OpenAI will do the same. Both want the US government to permit the safety talks that competition law would otherwise forbid.

Food & Farming

Bayer wants one court to close 65,000 Roundup cancer claims, and the ones nobody has filed yet →

Bayer goes before a Missouri judge on Monday asking for approval of a $7.25 billion deal that would settle about 65,000 cancer lawsuits over its weedkiller Roundup, and bar future ones. Its last settlement paid about $10 billion and left the future open.

Gaming

Roblox will let creators ship games outside Roblox, and pay them in ordinary money each working day →

At its developers' conference Roblox said creator-made games can become standalone apps on PC, console and mobile, and that a new wallet will pay creators in real currency every working day. In the same week Sony told a court its customers never owned the digital games they bought.

Sports

Rugby's biggest rivalry moved to Baltimore, where the two unions bank about $9m more than at home →

South Africa and New Zealand are playing the last match of their series in an American football stadium, and splitting the takings 50-50. World Rugby's chief executive says the same money now makes a Six Nations match in the United States possible.

Personal Money

A Hull funeral director admitted 67 offences. In England, nobody needs a qualification to handle a dead body. →

Robert Bush is being sentenced this week after police found 35 bodies and more than 100 sets of ashes at his funeral home. England still has no licence, no register and no inspection for the trade.

Mind & Body

Your enamel has no living cells, so it cannot heal a hole - but before the hole it can be rebuilt from the outside →

Enamel is the hardest thing in the body, and there is nothing alive inside it. It cannot repair itself, so every repair it gets is chemistry arriving from the saliva and the paste on the outside - and a protein gel from a team in Britain has now grown new crystals on eroded human teeth.

Space

Rocket Lab asks a US watchdog to reopen NASA's $700m Mars radio contract →

NASA picked Blue Origin to build the spacecraft that will carry Mars data home. Rocket Lab, which lost, says NASA did not follow the rules the US Congress wrote.

Biotech & Longevity

The US regulator cleared a lung cancer pill for untreated patients, on 69 people and no comparison group →

Sevabertinib was already allowed for lung cancer that had grown through other treatment. On 9 September the US drug regulator allowed it as the first treatment, on a single-arm trial of 69 patients in which 75% of tumours shrank.

Climate & Energy

Sixty-nine gas turbines in Mississippi power an AI data centre in Tennessee, and a NASA satellite measured the pollution →

SpaceXAI could not get grid power fast enough for Colossus 2, so it parked portable gas turbines next to a neighbourhood in Southaven. No air permit was needed. State inspectors counted 69 of them by July, more than double what the company had said.

Information Technology

OpenAI ran 10,000 AI agents for 88 hours on a 90-year-old maths problem. It says they solved it, and it will not claim the $1m prize. →

The proof is published in a form any computer can check. Whether OpenAI's model benefited from a rival mathematician's sessions on OpenAI's own tool is the part nobody outside the company can check.

World News

Saudi Arabia shuts the pipeline that goes around Hormuz, after drones from Iraq →

The 1,200km line to the Red Sea was carrying 4% to 5% of the world's oil after the Strait of Hormuz closed. Drones launched from Iraq hit it on Thursday, Saudi Arabia shut it on Friday, and Iraq sacked the commander of the province they came from.

Cybersecurity

A remote-control program is sitting on 178 company firewalls. US agencies had until today to close the hole. →

The US cyber agency put three flaws in network security gear on its must-fix list and set today as the deadline. All three are already being used, by a money-motivated crew, a ransomware gang and a Russian military hacking unit.

Finance News

US inflation held at 3.4% in August. The odds on a rate rise next Wednesday jumped to 87%, and shares rose anyway. →

Underlying US prices rose more than economists expected in August, so traders now put an 87% chance on the first US rate rise in three years. Government borrowing costs sat just under 5%, gold headed for a third weekly fall, and $32bn left US share funds.