"The Pulse With Francine Lacqua" is all about conversations with high profile guests in the beating heart of global business, economics, finance and politics. Based in London, we go wherever the story is, bringing you exclusive interviews and market-moving scoops. Today's guests: Emmanuel Cau, Barclays Head of European and APAC Equity Strategy, Negah Angha, King's College London Visiting Fellow; Mike Doustdar, Novo Nordisk CEO; Morris Reid, Actum Partner (Source: Bloomberg)
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Search queries are growing at their fastest rate in five years, Google parent Alphabet said in its earnings report last week. However, Google's Search revenue growth slowed to 12 percent year over year in the third quarter, down from roughly 17 percent in the previous quarter. Meanwhile, growth in paid clicks - clicks on ads […]
The PC gaming mods repository Nexus Mods is making disclosures about AI mandatory for uploads of new mods, meaning that mod authors will have to declare "whether AI has been used in their work," the site announced today as part of a big post about AI-generated content on the platform. "One of the most consistent […]
People, including on this staff, keep asking me with varying degrees of excitement or trepidation when the AI bubble will burst. I'll tell you what I tell them: If I knew that, I would make a life-changing bet on the market, levered up as far as I could, and then, after I made my money, […]
Palantir delivered such a huge third-quarter earnings report on Monday that its press release even bragged that the numbers were “crushing consensus expectations.” Yet, retail investors were lukewarm on the company on Tuesday, with the stock trading slightly down. That’s because Palantir’s enterprise sales, its big growth area, showed signs of slowing. First, the good […]
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and actor Jason Statham have a distinctive feature in common: They're both famously bald, and that definitely hasn't changed in the last few days. However, there are some images of the two men circulating around X, Threads, and Bluesky in which they both have substantially more hair than their usual shaved […]
Apple will now let Siri AI perform actions across third-party apps. As part of the iOS 27.3 update rolling out on Tuesday, Apple announced developers can now integrate Siri AI's new features in "all apps," allowing the voice assistant to draw on a user's personal context, process natural language prompts, and use on-screen awareness to […]
A new study led by researchers at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) has established the first systematic weekly benchmarks for green space exposure and mental health. Drawing on 45 years of global research, the study reveals that even modest weekly contact with nature yields significant mental health benefits, with positive effects rising rapidly at lower levels of exposure before tapering off as visits become more frequent or prolonged.
A new study from researchers at Boston Medical Center (BMC) found that Massachusetts neighborhoods given the lowest grades on historic redlining maps had 86% higher annual opioid-related overdose death rates than those given the highest grades. The study, published in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, suggests that the long-term effects of historical disinvestment continue to affect health outcomes based on where people live.
Researchers from The George Institute for Global Health assessed the health benefits of switching the salt supply to potassium-enriched salt across 193 countries. They found almost 3 million deaths and 10 million new cases of cardiovascular and kidney disease could be prevented globally each year. The research is published in Nature Health.
People with type 2 diabetes, heart disease or stroke who sleep well have better cognitive function and greater brain volume than people with the same conditions who sleep poorly, according to a new study from Karolinska Institutet. The researchers believe that good sleep may help counteract the negative effects on the brain associated with these conditions.
A multicomponent nutritional supplement has been found to improve markers of vascular health in a randomized controlled trial led by the University of Surrey. The formulation combined ingredients (vitamins, minerals, amino acids and plant-derived bioactives) selected for their relevance to several biological processes associated with aging.
A large national study analyzing emergency department visits and hospitalizations related to alcohol or cannabis use across the U.S. has found diverging age patterns: Among people who presented to the hospital for a substance-related problem, cannabis was involved in the majority of visits by adolescents and young adults, while alcohol predominated among older adults.
A single gene-editing treatment could someday protect against heart disease, high cholesterol, and other common conditions for decades, potentially replacing lifelong medications. But scientists warn that permanently altering genes introduces risks that could take years to emerge, making long-term safety a critical challenge.
Scientists have developed a promising new cancer-fighting strategy that uses carbon monoxide naturally produced by tumor cells to manufacture powerful drugs inside the cancer cells themselves. Early laboratory experiments suggest the technique could selectively attack cancer while sparing healthy cells, potentially paving the way for safer chemotherapy alternatives.
Critically ill patients often develop anemia in the hospital, whether their hemoglobin levels are considered low upon admission or fall during their stay. Although seemingly minor compared to their other health issues, the blood loss is directly tied to a variety of poor patient outcomes.
Something mysterious is disturbing Betelgeuse, and astronomers believe they have identified the culprit: a hidden companion star called Siwarha. New radio observations reveal that the smaller star may be plowing through Betelgeuse’s enormous atmosphere, creating disturbances that subtly stretch and distort the red supergiant’s shape.
The first secretary of state will face deputy Conservative leader Alex Burghart But other British politicians are still posting on social media about the US midterm election results. Here are more comments from people on the progressive wing of politics celebrating the results. By campaigning on affordability and equality, progressive Democrats have secured historic victories across America. These wins are also a clear rejection of Trump’s politics of hate, corruption and war. Congratulations to Abdul El-Sayed on a stunning victory in Michigan. You stood up against corporate greed, against rac
Ministers urged to go further than proposed cut to 110 decibels to ease acute stress on birds and others animals Campaigners are calling on the government to protect the welfare of wild animals by cutting the maximum noise level of fireworks sold to the public from 120 to 90 decibels. The Center for Wild Animal Welfare (CWAW) has said lowering the limit to 90 decibels – which is about one-eighth of the loudness of 120 decibels – would help to protect millions of wild animals from acute stress by reducing the area over which a firework disturbs surrounding wildlife. Continue reading...
While human well-being depends on the health of our ecosystems, there are also countless aspects of the natural world that pose serious threats to people. Every year, over 700,000 people die from diseases transmitted by animals, snakebites kill up to 500,000 people, and crop loss from pests carries an estimated cost of around $220 billion.
Are the laws of physics truly the same everywhere in the universe? This fundamental principle, known as Lorentz invariance, lies at the heart of Einstein's theory of relativity. Yet some theories that seek to reconcile gravity with quantum physics suggest that it might not always hold. To investigate this possibility, researchers from the international KM3NeT collaboration analyzed 5,828 atmospheric neutrino candidate events detected by KM3NeT/ORCA, a neutrino telescope located deep in the Mediterranean Sea.
arXiv:2611.03650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models can follow a directive when they believe they are monitored and abandon it when they believe they are not, a pattern termed Alignment Faking. Prior work establishes this for harmful-content objectives and a handful of moral-foundations values, leaving open how it distributes across a wider value space. We argue it is value-dependent: whether compliance survives a change in perceived oversight is a property of the model--value pairing, not of the model alone. Our framework profiles Alignment Faking per value, scoring each model-val
arXiv:2611.03651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geometric certificates make mathematical claims about specified estimator objects, while robotic action requires a physical transform, a service decision, and timely proof support. We present CARD, a proof-carrying interface that keeps these objects distinct and records how they combine. Its lifted-fiber formulation separates semantic motion from witness repair and characterizes when projected and proof-carrying costs coincide. Its actionability result gives an exact useful-service law: uniform sampling without replacement produces a hypergeometr
arXiv:2611.03662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) connects large language model agents to external tools and services through official SDKs that implement message validation and session logic. Specification constraints omitted by these SDKs may propagate to downstream applications, highlighting the importance of SDK-level conformance testing. Yet existing MCP conformance tools mainly exercise running endpoints and reveal little about whether SDK models enforce specification requirements. We present MCPGuard, an automated LLM-based framework for detecting specific
arXiv:2611.03684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models serve as the reasoning core of agents for chemistry and materials science, where they must interpret molecular structure before planning syntheses or proposing materials. Yet their outputs show only what they say, not what they know. Given a prompt such as ``The primary functional group in 1-Fluorobutane (CCCCF) is'', a small general-purpose model may answer ``the alkyne group'' instead of an alkyl fluoride. The output alone cannot tell whether the model failed to recognize the fluorine or recognized it and failed to say so. We ad
arXiv:2611.03685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual agents need to coordinate reasoning and action while their environment evolves during inference. We introduce LOLPlay, a benchmark in native \emph{League of Legends} with 36 champion-specific tasks spanning resource management, combat, cooperation, and objectives. Agents interact through screenshots and mouse--keyboard actions; automated initialization and 82 executable subgoal checks distinguish partial progress from completion. Across 324 task evaluations of three models at three reasoning-effort settings, GPT-6 Astra achieves the highes
arXiv:2611.03698v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) aims to enable AI systems to autonomously build and improve AI systems themselves, including models, harnesses, and underlying infrastructure. Within this broader agenda, a central capability is enabling agents to train and improve base models. However, existing studies on automated model training primarily focused on workflow- or harness-level optimizations, rather than internalizing the ability to conduct post-training into the model itself. Developing this capability requires executable model training environme
arXiv:2611.03713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Before a scientist fits any parameter, they must decide what the model contains: which quantities exist, which are hidden, how they interact, and how they are measured. Physicists call such a trial form an ansatz. Benchmarks for automated equation discovery mostly supply it, by fixing the variables, a library of candidate terms, or a law to be modified. We introduce Unsatz, a benchmark in which an LLM agent must construct the ansatz itself. Each task is a simulated system, generated from a private seed as a program in a small modeling language: o
arXiv:2611.03721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in artificial-intelligence-assisted mathematics show that open-ended machine search can outperform human mathematicians, yet transferring this paradigm to physics requires refactoring the research workflow. We introduce Simjecture, an open-source framework in which language-model agents pursue human-defined physical conjectures. The framework tackles two central challenges in this transfer: first, because physics is empirical and no model is final, it structures inquiry around counterexample-driven falsification and prospecti
arXiv:2611.03723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Research (DR) systems extend large language models into autonomous agents that decompose complex information needs, iteratively search the web, and synthesize evidence to answer challenging questions. However, their multi-stage execution may introduce robustness risks, as variations in user questions or intermediate search inputs may propagate across research stages and lead to incorrect answers. Existing evaluations focus on task-solving capabilities or robustness against external evidence disturbances, leaving intrinsic weaknesses in DR ex
Apple has released the first beta of watchOS 27.3 for developers, including two new Audio Intelligence features for Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4: Siri Recap and Live Rewind. Apple first announced these features at its special event in September, saying they would “arrive in beta later this year.” more…
When Sonos tried a major app update two years ago, things did not go well. Much-loved features disappeared, older speakers experienced connection problems, and accessibility features were broken. That debacle saw the company’s CEO fired. The company is taking a much more cautious approach as it moves into the AI era with a Sonos 27voice update, enabling natural-language voice control via Hey Sonos requests … more…
Breath of the Wild changed everything. Two decades after The Legend of Zelda made the transformational shift to 3D, Breath of the Wild reinvigorated the franchise with an open-ended adventure that was built around player freedom and expression. Instead of following a set path, players could go wherever they wanted and tackle challenges in a […]
AMD CEO Lisa Su said in the company's quarterly earnings call on Tuesday that Q3 2026 was "was the largest and most profitable in our history." AMD reported a record $13.4 billion in quarterly revenue, and it's predicting it will hit another record high next quarter of $17 billion. The company's data center business is […]
Ahead of the release of Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto VI, Nintendo is launching its own fall juggernaut: a Switch 2 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The remake, which is releasing 28 years after the launch of the original version on Nintendo 64, has a much more realistic visual style and […]
Parker takes over team eighth in Championship He has overseen three promotions to Premier League Scott Parker has been confirmed as West Ham’s head coach, taking over from Nuno Espírito Santo, who was sacked on Tuesday . The club’s former midfielder arrives on a two-and-a-half year contract with the team eighth in the Championship and takes charge of his first game at Cardiff on Wednesday. West Ham hope that Parker, a promotion specialist, can spark a revival after defeats in their past two matches. The 46-year-old has led Burnley, Bournemouth and Fulham into the top flight. Continue reading..