Ten stories from the last day or so.
The 46th Chess Olympiad opened in Samarkand with IM Prin Laohawirapap beating India's world no. 2 Arjun Erigaisi — game of the day, and India still took the match 3–1. Iraq's CM Ali Ehsan Aryan held Levon Aronian to a draw on the same day.
Otherwise the seeds held: China, Poland and nine of the top ten women's teams swept 4–0. Round two is today.
GM Sina Movahed and GM Vincent Keymer both finished 9.5/11; Movahed took it on tiebreaks. That's his third Titled Tuesday win of the year, which puts him in rare company for a single season.
After the Spanish Grand Prix, Kimi Antonelli sits on 292 points to George Russell's 211 — an 81-point gap, with Mercedes running one-two. Hamilton (191), Norris (186) and Leclerc (167) are scrapping over the rest of the podium places.
Piastri is seventh on 120. The regulation reset has been unkind to McLaren, and on current form the title fight is an intra-Mercedes one rather than anything he can reach.
MUA members at Transdev Sydney Ferries are running protected industrial action — bans on certain work arrangements and overtime — through to 11:59pm on Wednesday 30 September. Expect short-notice cancellations and timetable changes across the network, Pyrmont Bay included.
Transport for NSW says most services should still run and that bargaining is close to done. Worth checking the Opal Travel app before you walk down to the wharf.
A very good engineering-margins story. Falcon Heavy's insertion was unusually accurate, the spacecraft came in under its mass budget so the tanks were filled to capacity, and the 31 August mid-course correction hit better than 99% accuracy using 18 kg of a 200 kg allocation.
Compound those and Roman gains roughly twelve extra years of observing, most of it likely going to the General Observer program.
New work argues that deviations from the no-hair theorem should leave a detectable signature in the quasi-normal ringing of a post-merger black hole. It turns a philosophical-sounding question into a measurement that gravitational-wave detectors can actually make.
JWST keeps finding small red objects in the early universe that are hard to explain as ordinary galaxies. One camp reads them as overweight early black holes; another proposes "black hole stars" — a black hole swaddled in enough gas that the whole thing radiates like a giant star.
The disagreement is unusually sharp, and the answer changes how quickly the first black holes are allowed to have grown.
With agents authoring around 80% of new code internally, test volume rose tenfold and engineers shipped roughly eight times more code per quarter than in the 2021–25 baseline. CI became the bottleneck, and they leaned on test-impact analysis to only run what a change can actually break.
The useful takeaway isn't the multiplier — it's that when generation gets cheap, verification infrastructure becomes the thing you have to engineer.
A developer gave a coding agent an ESP32, a camera and a thermal printer, and let it write its own firmware, build a web interface for itself, and then photograph what it had printed. A closed loop from prompt to solder joint to physical output.
Toy-scale, but it's the first properly charming demonstration of agents crossing out of pure software into hardware they can observe.
Announced yesterday, with multiple variants, out 13 November — one of the great pressure-cooker scores, written in about four weeks and still the template for a certain kind of militarised orchestral tension.
Elsewhere on the assignment sheet: Nainita Desai is scoring BBC drama The Split Up, and Nathan Matthew David's score for DreamWorks' Forgotten Island lands digitally on 18 September.