A third place for the internet.

Reactor's seasonal roundup of upcoming speculative fiction from small, independent presses — including a sequel to Brian Evenson's Last Days, a novel set inside a society built around an endless parade, and several titles timed deliberately ahead of Halloween.

Quantinuum's October 2026 announcement describes a major advance in quantum computing reliability. Its Helios quantum computer achieved 99.9995% logical memory fidelity, equivalent to five uncorrectable errors per million operations. By improving quantum error correction, researchers are bringing quantum computers closer to performing long, reliable calculations. The results also support Quantinuum's plans for Apollo, a fault-tolerant quantum computer it aims to deliver by 2029.

A seven-year project that attempted to replicate 3,900 social-science papers found only about half of the results held up -- one of the largest meta-research efforts of its kind, and the piece includes several related papers breaking down where and why replication failed.

This paper describes oxygen loss in water not merely as another consequence of climate change or pollution, but as a potentially independent threat to the stability of the Earth system.

The central idea is that aquatic deoxygenation, i.e. declining dissolved oxygen in oceans, lakes, rivers, reservoirs and coastal waters, should potentially become a tenth "planetary boundary."

IBM researchers are exploring a new way to connect quantum processors using L-couplers, which could allow separate quantum chips to communicate with each other. Connecting processors could help overcome the limitations of individual chips and make it possible to build larger, more powerful quantum computing systems.

This article uses the question of how we distinguish natural from synthetic diamonds to introduce some applications of metrology, the science of measurement.

An article published by Carnegie Mellon University collating thoughts from AI experts on the current language used when discussing AI.

This paper studies how AI agents' choices are influenced by their peers. It is found that advanced models tend to follow the majority, and they can use this mechanism to coordinate groups far larger than human groups.

This article gives an overview of Monte Carlo event generators, which act as a bridge between theory and experiment in particle physics.

This article tells a story of the birth of neural networks. Two physicists, John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton, are the inventors of neural networks. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to them.

Link to the catalogue of demonstrations and visualisations from Wolfram.

A book on Zettelkasten, principles of note-taking, and how to use writing as a tool to think.

This article discusses the wildfires in Canada, caused by the climate crisis, and the public response to hold fossil fuel CEOs accountable.

Wild chimpanzees in four separate populations across West Africa have been observed repeatedly throwing rocks at the same specific trees for over a decade, accompanied by loud vocal displays -- researchers, writing in first person about their own fieldwork, describe it as a rare and likely cultural behavior whose actual meaning is still an open question.

Quantum Pandit is an educational platform focused on making quantum physics more accessible through explanations and learning resources. It helps learners explore complex concepts in quantum mechanics and build a clearer understanding of a field that can otherwise feel abstract and mathematically demanding.

Tom Colicchio’s flagship restaurant has shut down after 25 years.

The article examines emerging evidence that the human genome functions as a dynamic, three-dimensional system whose activity depends on cellular and environmental context, rather than as a fixed set of genetic instructions. It explores whether this complexity may limit AI models that rely primarily on DNA sequence data, while highlighting ongoing research aimed at integrating genome structure, regulation, and cell state to improve biological predictions.

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

This article reviews the history of particle physics briefly, including its successes and failures.