The Ozempic headlines just keep getting better!
REPUBLICAN SENATORS JOIN DEMOCRATS, INCREASE PUSHBACK ON PUTIN DEAL
Trump posted on Oct. 9 that a talk with Putin had gone great and Russian diesel was coming back to the world market. Three weeks earlier he had signed a Russia sanctions bill built to do the exact opposite, a law named for the late Lindsey Graham. Senate Republicans found out about the deal the same way you did, by checking their phones. On Tuesday a dozen senators, six from each party, signed a letter telling him to tear it up. The Republicans are not backbenchers: Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis and Oklahoma's Alan Armstrong. The deal "will not achieve just ends, nor will it benefit Americans," they wrote, calling it a gift to an adversary and a betrayal of allies that should be rescinded. The White House is not budging, and this is where the stories split. Trump told a crowd in Wasilla that fuel prices are already coming down. The senators, his own party included, say Russian diesel will deliver "limited to no relief" to Americans. Oil analysts land closer to the senators. CNBC pegs the arrangement at up to 4.8 million metric tons through mid-April, nearly 36 million barrels, and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak has already said Russia can ship more than Trump laid out.
DIVERS FIND 4,700-YEAR-OLD SHIPWRECK, POTENTIALLY OLDEST EVER DISCOVERED
Turkish divers working off Kekova Island in Antalya have brought up more than 30 ceramic jars and three big stone anchors from a wreck sitting about 100 feet down, and the culture minister announced on X that it is the oldest shipwreck ever found. Mehmet Nuri Ersoy put the jars at 4,700 years old, which means this boat went under while crews in Egypt were still stacking the Great Pyramid. The ship itself is gone. Every plank rotted off, so there is nothing organic left to radiocarbon test, and the entire claim rests on pottery shape. Two handles, a ridge at the middle of the body, a flat base. Hakan Öniz of Akdeniz University says his team got there by spotting the same jar forms in a publication on Egyptian archaeology and going back to the site, and he puts his confidence in the date at 100%. Bold number for a man whose evidence is handles. Karin Sowada of Macquarie University examined the pots once they hit the surface and found a viscous, glossy residue inside some of them. Her words to the BBC: "I looked inside and nearly fainted." Olive oil, wine and tree resin are all on the table. Clay analysis points to workshops in the Jordan Valley, and Öniz figures the ship was hauling the stuff west, maybe toward Troy or Minoan Crete. It never got there.
39% OF OZEMPIC USERS SAY THEIR FINGERNAILS ARE FALLING OFF
Researchers surveyed 575 people on GLP-1 drugs against 1,329 people with type 2 diabetes or obesity who had never taken them, recruited across France, the US, Brazil and Mexico, then presented it at the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology congress in Vienna. Result: 39% of users reported onycholysis, the medical term for your fingernail resigning from your finger. Controls came in at 9%. Nail discoloration ran 46% versus 17%, and two thirds of users reported at least one nail disorder. The companion hair study is worse. Unusual shedding in 50% of users versus 34% of controls, lost density or volume in 42% versus 19%, and scalp redness about three times more common. Smaller pants, thinner hair, nails sold separately. Now the part the headlines keep sprinting past. All of this is self-reported at a single point in time, with no dermatologist ever looking at anyone's hands. About half the GLP-1 group already had nail trouble before they started, and when the team isolated brand new damage, the gap largely collapsed. The study author said it plainly: not everything that happens during GLP-1 treatment is caused by the treatment. Crash weight loss and thin intake of protein, iron and zinc wreck nails and hair all on their own, and they don't cost $1,000 a month.
EPIC GAMES LET AI WRITE ITS WHOLE LAUNCHER AND IT SOMEHOW BEAT STEAM
Epic rebuilt its store launcher from the ground up and opened the announcement blog post with "Programming is hard," followed by an explanation that instead of doing that, it vibe coded a new launcher. The preview is out now, and Epic's X account used it to take a swing at Valve, bragging the thing is faster than "the other guy." The numbers mostly hold up. Epic commissioned the testing from Keywords Studios, which averaged five runs on each of 13 machines and threw out the three lowest-end systems. Cold start came in at 5.47 seconds against Steam's 10.07, the 46% headline, and restoring from the system tray took 0.36 seconds versus Steam's 0.42. That second one is six hundredths of a second, and Epic charted it anyway. Store GM Martin Keely confirmed AI wrote new code on a new architecture: "We started from scratch." The internet responded by calling it vibeslopped. Epic admits the first release is light on features and asks you to think of it as a speedboat, not a yacht, which is one way to describe software where the company tells Fortnite and Rocket League players to keep using the old client. It's the first consumer product out of Tim Sweeney's "maximum AI acceleration" pivot, at a studio that just shoved its Disney shooter team into AI-first mode to internal shock.
APPLE WANTS $299 FOR A KITCHEN SCREEN THAT SCANS YOUR FACE AND CAN'T RUN APPS
Apple spent years letting Amazon and Google own the kitchen counter, and on Tuesday it finally showed up. HomeView is a $299 smart display with a square 7-inch screen, an A18 chip, and a camera that recognizes up to six people in the house by face. Your Messages and Calendar only show up when it sees your face and your unlocked iPhone is nearby. It's also the first launch outside of iPhones for new CEO John Ternus, who took over from Tim Cook at the start of September. Hell of a debut, except for one detail: the conversational Siri AI running the whole thing is technically still in beta. Three hundred bucks for a counter ornament fronted by software with training wheels on. There's no App Store either, so it controls your house and not much else. The wall-mounted version is the same $299, plus a mount starting at $59.95. And it isn't launching in the European Union at all, because of the Siri AI requirements, with Apple saying it's "working constructively with the EU" to find a path forward. Translation: the regulators read the privacy pitch and asked follow-up questions.
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