📌 Hurricane Milton, Election Meddlers, More

Hurricane Milton will ramp up in intensity today, with cities at risk of tornadoes, the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) warns.

The SPC said over three million people in parts of central and southern Florida, including Fort Myers, Sarasota, and Melbourne, are now at an enhanced risk (Level 3 of 5) of severe thunderstorms.

Hurricane conditions are expected in some areas beginning Wednesday evening through early Thursday and are possible in other areas on Thursday. Florida’s Department of Health warned residents to avoid floodwaters as they increase the risk of Vibrio infections, such as Vibrio vulnificus, which can be life-threatening.

People should avoid swimming or wading in floodwaters, cover open cuts or wounds with waterproof bandages, and wash their skin thoroughly with soap and water if they come in contact with the water.

Iranian hackers looking to undermine confidence in next month's US elections are prowling for victims, US officials say.

The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the government body responsible for overseeing election security, urged politicians and their teams Tuesday to strengthen their cybersecurity posture to combat Iran's threat.

They encouraged former US government officials, academics, journalists and activists to take necessary precautions, noting the Iranian-linked hackers are operating at the behest of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

FBI and CISA guidance warns that Iranian hackers have been targeting personal and business email accounts, often impersonating professional contacts, to steal login credentials and passwords. Iranian officials have previously and repeatedly rejected US accusations of election meddling.

Previous intelligence assessments have accused Tehran of using AI to create social media posts and fake news articles to enrage voters and stoke divisions ahead of the election.

Serial entrepreneur Markus Fuhrmann plans to help rebuild Ukraine with prefabricated buildings using robotic tools.

Fuhrmann’s startup, Gropyus, raised €100 million to expand operations across Germany and plans to assist in Ukraine’s reconstruction.

Using robots to construct parts in its factory, Gropyus can assemble nine-story apartment buildings in nearly half the time of traditional methods. The buildings include embedded wiring and management software for precisely tracking carbon footprints, streamlined lifecycle management and online updates.

Gropyus is in discussions to fund a pilot project in Ukraine to build 50–100 apartments. The company will use its latest funding to scale its factory in Germany and automate up to 86% of production.

When completed by the end of the year, the factory will be able to manufacture a wall or ceiling in around 16 minutes, and up to 86% of the process will be automated. Annual production capacity will total 250,000 square meters of gross floor area, equivalent to more than 3,500 apartments.

A development in biomedical engineering involves electrical stitches for expediting muscle healing.

Researchers have created flexible, strong threads that convert the body's natural muscle movements into electrical energy. The electricity stimulates the surrounding tissue and promotes faster healing.

In an experiment in rats, rodents treated with the electrical sutures made a quicker recovery and were less likely to develop an infection than rats treated with traditional sutures.

The threads from piezoelectric materials generate small electrical currents when stretched or compressed. They are thought to activate biological processes that support tissue repair. The innovation holds promise for improving post-surgical recovery and could eventually be applied to human patients.

Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield received a Nobel Prize in Physics for enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks.

Hinton (pictured) is a renowned AI researcher, often called the “godfather of deep learning.” After gaining a PhD in artificial intelligence in 1978, Hinton co-created the backpropagation algorithm, which allows neural networks to learn from their mistakes, transforming how AI models are trained.

Hinton joined Google in 2013 after it acquired his company DNNresearch. He quit Google last year, citing his concerns over the role that AI was playing in the spread of misinformation. Today, Hinton is a professor at the University of Toronto.

Hopfield, a Princeton University professor, was also an early pioneer in some of the foundational work in AI. He developed what came to be known as the Hopfield network, a type of neural network that transformed AI by demonstrating how neural networks could store and retrieve patterns.

Nobel Prize winners, also known as “laureates,” receive several rewards, including a gold medal, a diploma, and a cash prize of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million), split between the winners if there is more than one, and the global prestige of the award.

A report finds that abuse by “angry sports bettors” is one of the most common types of harassment college athletes receive.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) partnered with data science company Signify Group, which analyzed social media accounts for over 3,000 college athletes, around 500 coaches, 200 event officials and 165 teams during major collegiate sporting events.

At least 12% of publicly posted social media abuse was from “angry sports bettors,” defined as individuals who “engage in problematic and intrusive communications due to match events and results contradicting bettors' predictions.”

Athletes received abusive messages before, after, and during events, with 73% occurring during March Madness, the most popular event among American bettors. Women athletes received about 59% more abusive messages than men, the report says.

Signify used AI to flag potentially abusive social media posts on X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. Data scientists reviewed the posts and flagged those that met the criteria for harassment or abuse. Some were deemed serious enough to be referred to authorities.

Eighteen of the 38 states that offer legal sports betting and the District of Columbia prohibit licensed sportsbooks from offering college prop bets, a ban the NCAA supports.

An airline apologized after a mature-rated film was played for all passengers on a flight — including families with young children.

The "inappropriate" screening happened on a Qantas flight from Sydney to Tokyo after the plane's in-flight entertainment system failed to work before takeoff. Staff were unable to fix the fault, so the plane took off after a delay of more than an hour, with the crew deciding to show the same film to everyone instead.

To the horror of some passengers on board the nine-and-a-half-hour flight, the sexually explicit drama “Daddio” began to play. To make matters worse, travelers reported they were effectively forced to watch because they could not turn off, pause or even dim their screens.

One passenger wrote on Reddit's website: "The movie they played was extremely inappropriate. It featured graphic nudity and a lot of sexting – the kind where you could literally read the texts on screen without needing headphones.

Qantas said: "The movie was clearly not suitable to play for the whole flight, and we sincerely apologize to customers for this experience. All screens were changed to a family-friendly movie for the rest of the flight, which is our standard practice for the rare cases where individual movie selection isn't possible.”

“Dadio,” released in the US in June, stars Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson and tells the story of a woman and a taxi driver who discuss sex and relationships.