How bout them Bengals - Charlie
LARGEST FAT BEAR WEEK EVER FEATURES 16 BEARS GOING FOR THE CROWN
Katmai National Park released the Fat Bear Week bracket Friday, and the field is 16 bears instead of the usual 12. The reason is a baby boom. The park says a record 19 bear families and 37 cubs turned up at Brooks River this summer, which broke the format. Fat Bear Junior, the separate cub bracket, is not happening in 2026. The kids just compete alongside their mothers in the main draw now. Defending champ is Bear 32, cleverly named Chunk, who took last year's final 96,350 votes to 63,725 over Bear 856. He did it after breaking his jaw in June 2025, likely in a fight with another bear. Over the summer he barely bothered showing up at the river, then arrived in September with a belly hanging low enough that nobody needs to ask if was eating. Chunk is also the bear who went after two of Grazer's cubs in 2024 sending them went over the falls. One of those cubs died... voters did not care. The bracket scores fat, not character. One new face this year is Bear 89, Backpack, son of 2019 champion Holly, nicknamed for riding on his mom's back after an injury as a cub. Voting runs September 22 through 29, noon to 9 p.m. Eastern, with no weekend ballots, no one and no bear is getting in the way of Roger Goodell's TV rights.
SEC HANDS CRYPTO A FIVE-YEAR HALL PASS TO TRADE REAL STOCKS
The SEC spent years dragging Coinbase into court over unregistered securities. On September 17 it handed the sector a five-year hall pass instead. The new Innovation Exemption covers qualifying Tokenized Securities Venues, which can trade tokenized National Market System stocks for the next five years without being treated as an exchange under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, using permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools. It runs until September 17, 2031, and Chairman Paul Atkins has called it a temporary bridge expected to inform later rulemaking. Markets did not need a second read. Coinbase closed Friday up 11.53% at $194.03, a gain of $20.06, with a market cap around $51.29 billion. Strategy climbed about 7%, MARA about 6%, and Circle and Galaxy Digital also advanced around 6%. Then there's the fine print. Tier One tokenized stocks face a 75-symbol limit and 0.25% volume caps. A venue has to publish a public notice at least 30 days before it starts operating, issuers get advance notice and the exemption dies if the issuer objects, and the tokens must convey the same dividends, voting and liquidation rights as the real shares, which shuts out synthetic products. That's a problem for Robinhood, whose own second-quarter filing describes its Stock Tokens as tokenized debt securities issued by a Jersey entity that grant no legal rights in the underlying companies. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says voting rights are "coming soon." Scale check on the revolution: by September 18, users had posted $104,401 of Coinbase-issued stock tokens as collateral on Morpho and borrowed $54,652 in USDC.
SOUTH KOREA IS SUSSED OUT BY A 6'11" QATARI 13 YEAR OLD
Qatar turned up to the AVC Men's Asian Championship in Fukuoka and lost all three group matches, to Thailand, Chinese Taipei and South Korea, then walked out with the only thing anybody remembers from the pool stage. Their leading scorer put up 40 points across those three matches, more than any of his teammates. He is also, per the paperwork, in eighth grade. Mubarak Musa Thiik Madut is listed at 210cm with a birth date of 24/11/2012, born in South Sudan and later given Qatari citizenship so he could play for the country in official tournaments. In the loss to Korea he was the best scorer of the match with 17 points, including an ace and a block. He is the tallest player on the Qatari team. He also won bronze at the Asian U18 Beach Volleyball Championship, so by the official documents he spent 2026 beating teenagers and grown men in the same calendar year. The skepticism is not really about the height. What sports people keep pointing at is how he moves and how obviously he knows the game, because most kids that age are still tripping over themselves. The popular theory is that his birth date was simply assigned at some point and everyone rolled with it, which is speculation, and Qatar's Volleyball Federation has said nothing about any of it. Total silence is a bold way to defend your guy.
TRUMP LAUNCHES AN 'AI FORCE' WITH NO BUDGET, NO DUTIES, AND A POLL TO RENAME AI
Saturday night on Truth Social, the president announced he is forming an AI Force, "much like I did Space Force." That is the entire plan. No budget, no structure, no word on where in the government it would live. He also promised an AI czar soon, with the hiring criteria listed as "Only High I.Q. individuals need apply." The last guy to hold a version of that job, venture capitalist David Sacks, stepped down earlier this year and went off to co-chair a science advisory council. The timing is not subtle. Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis have all called for slowing AI development, and an Anthropic alignment researcher said he personally puts the odds of AI killing all humans within a decade above 10%. Trump called that fear a hoax from the "Radical Left Dumocrats" and said the only guardrail AI needs is a strong and smart president. Fox framed the whole thing as shielding the industry from regulators. Axios pointed out the public is nowhere near as thrilled about AI as he is. Trump also guessed AI could reach 25% of U.S. GDP while citing nothing, then posted a poll asking followers to rename the technology: Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence, or Supreme Intelligence.
BUILDING-SIZED SPACE ROCK PUNCHED A 728-FOOT HOLE IN THE MOON AND NOBODY NOTICED FOR 18 MONTHS
Sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, a comet or asteroid roughly the size of a three- to six-story building hit the Moon's eastern edge and dug a hole 728 feet across and 141 feet deep. That is two football fields wide and deep enough to stack three school buses vertically. The impact was not detected when it happened. Nobody on this planet of backyard telescopes and orbiting cameras clocked the single largest fresh crater ever found in the solar system. It sat there unclaimed until October 24, 2025, when Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines on the LRO camera team, was paging through hundreds of old and new wide-angle images and noticed a bright spot with a dark halo. His comparison software throws hundreds of false positives from lighting and shadow, so he eyeballs every signal by hand. This one covered hundreds of pixels. "It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I've ever seen in one of these images," he said. The thermal follow-up is where it gets strange. The strike loosened lunar soil across a zone four miles wide that now runs about 16 degrees F colder at night, because fluffed-up dirt cannot hold heat. NASA puts an impact this size at about once a century or rarer, and the team's own number is once every 132 years. Two papers, both in Science Advances on September 16, 2026.
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