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Freak Pulse
Category: Other News
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Long & Good September 7, 2026: Genome Duplication Is a Radical Evolutionary Gamble
A tiny New Zealand snail, Potamopyrgus antipodarum, has undergone a whole-genome duplication within the last million years, offering a rare close view of how organisms survive and adapt to polyploidy.
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Long & Good September 7, 2026: Texas Police Used AI to Write Report About Using Flock to Search for Woman Who Had Abortion
The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas used Axon’s Draft One AI tool to help write a police report about its search for a woman who self-administered an abortion, according to documents shared with 404 Media.
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Emerging/Weak August 31, 2026: Thomson Reuters bets $40M on owning its AI instead of renting from OpenAI or Anthropic
Thomson Reuters has launched ‘Thomson,’ its first in-house language model built on Alibaba’s Qwen, after spending about $40 million on staff and computing power over more than two years.
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Emerging/Weak August 31, 2026: Six things OpenAI learned about AI from the Hugging Face incident
AI safety, security, and governance incidents this week: OpenAI has published a series of reports into a July incident in which its models dodged internal controls and; and Israel has spent at least $100 million since 2023 to influence…
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Culture Stuff August 31, 2026: Pitchfork Music Festival CDMX 2026 Announces Full Lineup
Pitchfork Music Festival CDMX has revealed a new slate of names for its 2026 edition, including Umru and Tygapaw, joining previously announced acts American Football, Lido Pimienta, Perfume Genius, Safety Trance, and…
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Culture Stuff August 31, 2026: The Latest in the Art World: Museums, Milestones, and a Major Loss – Arts To Hearts Project
The art world enters autumn with MoMA’s major exhibition on African independence-era art, Frieze Abu Dhabi’s inaugural fair, new High Line commissions, and Werner Bronkhorst’s Berlin debut.
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Long & Good August 31, 2026: The Building Blocks of Personhood: Oliver Sacks on Neurocognitive Pillar of What Makes Us Who We Are
Essays on Human Nature and Emotion this week: Maria Popova revisits Oliver Sacks’s 1985 classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, focusing on the twelfth; and Maria Popova examines Tove Jansson’s 1957 Moomin book ‘Moominland…
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Emerging/Weak August 24, 2026: How China’s gray market sells Claude tokens at a fraction of the price
Chinese developers are buying Claude tokens through ‘transfer stations’—API proxies hosted on overseas servers—at roughly 10 percent of the official price, bypassing Anthropic’s geoblocking, credit card checks, and…
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Culture Stuff August 24, 2026: Isaac Julien, Museum Dreams retrospective in Bergamo
Art Exhibitions and Museum News this week: Isaac Julien’s retrospective Museum Dreams has opened at gres art 671 in Bergamo, running from April 10 to October; and The Armory Show will introduce its first-ever museum acquisition prizes at…
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Long & Good August 24, 2026: Senators Criticize Trump Administration’s Demands to Access Health Data as a Condition for Lifesaving Aid
Eight Democratic U.S. senators, led by Raphael Warnock, have criticized the Trump administration’s demands for access to foreign health data as a condition for providing lifesaving aid.