For the second consecutive year, Maria Herrera has been crowned WorldWCR Champion ahead of compatriot Beatriz Neila. The Spaniard concluded the FIM Women's Circuit Racing World Championship's third season with a 28-point advantage over her closest rival. Certainly no great surprise to those who have followed the championship throughout 2026, although the final weekend at Jerez suggested that the series' established hierarchy may not be quite as secure as the standings imply.

Herrera arrived at the Circuito de Jerez-Ángel Nieto with a commanding 44-point lead. Her second World Championship was all but assured, provided she finished in the points across the final two races. She ultimately ended the races fifth and fourth respectively, hardly the most emphatic conclusion to a title-winning campaign, but enough to bring her season total to 250 points against Neila's 222.

• Read more about WorldWCR's Third Season Ends with Familiar Results and New Questions
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'Contrary to what the law might say, building a castle on common land doesn't stop it being common land. Its past haunts its present' writes Nick Hayes in his latest book, 'The Medicine Tree' — a beautiful exploration of the journey the Hardwick Estate is taking to repair its colonial roots, and our October Book of the Month. In this month's author interview, Nick speaks to Tallulah Brennan about the countryside as Arcadia, how education comes into the problem of land ownership and reparations, and what a reassertion of a commons culture might look like.

Read an extract from the interview below.

I'd like to start by talking about homes, which are a constant theme in The Medicine Tree. There's the huge house of the Hardwick Estate, but there's also the homes on neighbouring land whose inhabitants are facing eviction who you follow throughout. Yet, as you say, 'eviction is so commonplace that it is not a news story'. Can I ask if you find England to be an easy home, given your growing knowledge of how well practiced it is in destroying the homes of others?

Well, no. Unless you own land in England, which actually very few of us do outright, then the notion of home is always married to a precariousness. That's not just a weight on our shoulders in terms of our security and how we feel about setting down roots, but it also affects how we view our responsibilities to a place too. If you really are rooted in a place, it becomes very clear that it's your place to defend. What the book is about is trying to look at England from a kincentric philosophy, inspired by indigenous nations, who, in spite of colonisation and imperialism, still have this real sense of themselves as guardians of the land they're on. That's a very healthy lesson which England should seek out; very awkwardly, from the very people we owe the most reparations to. Whilst we're watching our rivers be polluted by, say, chicken farming corporations, we're all aware that the government is not doing their bit to protect these natural resources. What we lack, through having been enclosed out of nature for so long, is a sense that it is our duty and responsibility not to wait for organisations and institutions to rise up and defend them, but to actually do it ourselves.

Also, being a guardian of your land when you're having to guard your own stability, whether that's through fighting an eviction or paying your extortionate rent, makes for an almost impossible task. People regularly have to move on from their homes, and so people cannot stay attached to somewhere. Even if you can stay somewhere, a consistent theme throughout my life is that there are lots of things I could get involved with, but to make rent, I don't have the space in my life outside of work to commit to my surroundings, which also would sew my life into other people's. 

I was blown away by the statistic that on average we're paying 2/5ths of our earnings just to exist in the space that we do. That's every Monday and Tuesday, say, of our week going to someone who already has the privilege of exclusively owning the home. Therein lies the trap. When they took away our commons, they took away our autonomy over our time, our work and our wage. Now we find ourselves working incredibly hard to stay afloat, let alone do activities that would forge community. This is why policies like a universal basic wage would free people. It is in a way, a reassertion of a commons culture. We have our subsistence sorted, and we can do less work for someone else, and more work for our community.

With this in mind, something I thought it was really interesting to read about the owner of the Hardwick Estate's desire to relinquish ownership for a sense of 'relief'. The heiress says she wants to 'release future generations from the tie of inherited land which has been a painful burden to several generations of our family.' This idea of a burden, I might expect to hear in the campaign materials of the rentier class, from people who are regularly evicted, but not from the landowners. I think my assumption was that the huge house, the acres of land and so on, are containers of stability and privilege and therefore a contentment with life. Could you speak about why that isn't the case, not just at the Hardwick Estate, but across the landowning class?

What it does is dissolve the idea of goodies and baddies. Actually, this is a system and an ideology that neither serves the people who work under it, nor the people who operate above it. One of the landowners interviewed in the Right to Roam documentary, Our Land, is lovingly looking on at his three children playing, and saying that at one point he has to decide which one of those three gets full title to the land. Therefore deciding which of the other two will be essentially disinherited. That was a very good example to me that customs of exclusionary ownership set divisions right through families as well. It leads me to say that you can quite happily call this exclusionary ownership model ecocidal. As with the Hardwick's history, you can see how mining and industrial agriculture has been used to make profit out of land, but even for the people who oversee this, it fosters paranoia, and isolation from the community who resent this person's power over them. I say in the book, of all the people who are connected to the land, the people who are most ostracised are the very people who own it. Even if they're at the village fête, they are excluded by their right to evict. There is a clear resentment there. It reminds you why the commons is so much more than areas of land, it's a political paradigm that sees people united. No one has the right to exert power over someone else. As a basis for a community, this is a very healthy foundation.

*

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'The Medicine Tree: Repairing the Rotten Roots of England' by Nick Hayes is out now and available here, published by Allen Lane. Read an extract from the book here.

Nick Hayes is an award-winning writer, illustrator and land justice campaigner. In 2020 he co-founded Right to Roam, the influential campaign group advocating for public access to nature in England. He is the author of, among others, the Sunday Times best-seller 'The Book of Trespass' and co-editor of 'Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You'. An acclaimed artist, he has published four graphic novels and exhibited across the country, including at the Hayward Gallery. He lives on a canal boat with no fixed address.

Tallulah Brennan is a writer based in England, interested in the relationships between humans and their environment, and how they in turn shape each other. She is also a contributing editor at Caught by the River. Follow Tallulah's Substack here. 

A UK-based developer and pentester has claimed a $2,000 Bitcoin prize for demonstrating the exploitability of the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities that melted the internet last week.

Jaydip Modhwadia, 26, otherwise known as "Killa," claimed the prize set by James Pavur, who launched the "Steal My Bitcoin" site on October 24.

Pavur launched the CTF (capture the flag) challenge to prove that the PHP2Shell exploit was not as easy as those in the cybersecurity community claimed it to be, promising to award $2,000 in Bitcoin to anyone who could achieve Remote Code Execution (RCE) on his website.

"My Bitcoin was stolen after 19.28 hours," the website now says, after Modhwadia claimed the prize, although the real time taken is thought to be less than three hours.

Soon after Pavur launched the CTF on Saturday, prospective flag-catchers complained that the website he set up, which served only static HTML, was not built in a way that allowed the PHP2Shell exploit to achieve RCE.

The web page was running a vulnerable version of PHP, but the exploit path required a vulnerable website to serve a PHP file for flag-catchers to use as a hook - something that Pavur seemingly updated at around 1300 UTC on October 25.

Modhwadia achieved RCE on the website, exposing a PHP endpoint, at 1547 UTC.

After an error from Pavur placing the wrong wallet key on the server, the CTF creator sent Modhwadia his award, which the community upped to $2,000 from Pavur's initial $500.

The pentester published a write-up of his method, a single-file Python script he says requires 20 HTTP requests "at most" to fully execute.

Speaking to The Register, Modhwadia also confirmed that he got the flag in "around three or so hours in total." He said he followed the news about the competition, "but didn't attempt it until it gained significant notice."

If he had attempted it before Pavur introduced the endpoint, he may have struggled. For hours, bug bounty hunters were trying to access the website to attempt the challenge, as news of the CTF had exploded across tech circles.

"The fact that it took 19 hours was because after it went popular, the entire site became basically unusable for anyone at all," Modhwadia added.

The challenge saw a huge number of attempts, despite Pavur's decision to introduce a prohibitive 1MB request limit on Nginx.

Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO at Hudson Rock, commended Modhwadia's work, but added that his success achieved in just a few hours should not be taken to mean that the same attack could be automated at scale.

He said: "Does this mean autonomous AI agents can now compromise arbitrary PHP servers at scale? No. This was a sophisticated, target-specific exploit.

"But it does demonstrate that PHP2Shell can be weaponized against a live target, even with meaningful technical constraints."

Modhwadia's proof of concept is not the first to prove PHP2Shell is exploitable, but it falls under the more advanced category.

Early signs suggested that Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) on a vulnerable server would prove a significant barrier to real-world exploitation, and the pentester's solution bypasses it, along with the others that were disclosed recently.

Spencer McIntyre, director of exploit development at VulnCheck, told The Register last week that attackers are finding new ways to exploit PHP2Shell, and "are clearly spending time (and tokens) on this bug."

Initially, experts said exploit code was being found online hours, or even days, before the vulnerabilities were disclosed publicly, which led to millions of exploit attempts, although it was too early to determine the efficacy of these on real-world systems.

Scores of websites were taken down for maintenance last week as organizations raced to protect themselves from the attacks, which may or may not have proved successful.

Modhwadia said he donated a portion of the prize he received to the Lupus Foundation to raise awareness about the condition, from which he also suffers. ®

Anthropic has filed for an IPO that could rank among Wall Street's biggest ever, revealing an $80.7 billion half-year loss, a startlingly complex governance structure, and warnings that its AI models could blackmail humans, resist shutdown, or create "existential risks" to society.

The Claude maker filed its S-1 registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday as it prepares to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. The company has not yet disclosed its proposed share price or how many shares it plans to sell.

Of the filing's 614 pages, 94 are devoted to risk factors. But it's Anthropic's financial figures that are likely to raise eyebrows first.

The Claude maker reported $16.3 billion in revenue for the first six months of 2026, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier. It also posted a whopping $80.7 billion net loss, although $72.4 billion of that was an accounting adjustment tied to the company's soaring valuation, not money it actually spent.

Anthropic's operating loss was considerably smaller at $693 million, down from $2.1 billion a year earlier. By its own adjusted accounting, the company made a $1.6 billion operating profit in the first half of 2026, for a margin of around 10 percent.

Whether it can keep making money on those terms is another matter. Training and running Claude requires an eye-watering amount of computing power, and Anthropic will need much more to keep pace with its rivals. A $1.6 billion adjusted profit won't count for much if the infrastructure bills keep growing faster than the business.

Susannah Streeter, chief investment strategist at Wealth Club, told The Register that Anthropic's IPO could leave ordinary investors paying a premium for growth that has yet to translate into sustained profits.

"A huge pool of private capital has allowed AI businesses to scale up and command extraordinary valuations long before they reach the stock market," she said, adding that investors buying in at the IPO will face a price with "a hefty dose of future success baked in."

The financial risks are fairly conventional by Silicon Valley standards, but the warnings about what Claude might get up to are perhaps less so.

Anthropic claims that models, including its own, have exhibited unexpected or self-preserving behavior, including attempts to resist shutdown, conceal information, and produce outputs resembling blackmail. It also warns that sufficiently advanced AI systems could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to society" if deployed without adequate safeguards.

That's not to say Claude is currently blackmailing customers. Anthropic has observed some of this behavior in testing, but it also identifies more immediate security concerns as it gives its models access to external tools, code repositories, and corporate systems.

Anthropic warns that attackers could hide malicious instructions in websites, documents, or API responses that its AI agents can access. If an agent follows those instructions, it could use a customer's permissions to steal data, tamper with code, or make unauthorized transactions.

Even testing whether the models will behave themselves is proving tricky. Anthropic reckons some models behave differently when they detect or suspect they're being evaluated, making it harder to predict what they will do outside the testing environment.

Keeping its models on a short leash could also cost Anthropic business. The company acknowledges that holding back more capable systems could give competitors an advantage, something it has already risked by restricting access to its Mythos model through Project Glasswing because of its ability to uncover security vulnerabilities.

The founders aren't promising to put shareholders first, either. In a letter accompanying the filing, Dario and Daniela Amodei and their fellow co-founders tell prospective investors "not to think of your purchase in purely transactional terms." Anthropic may pass up lucrative business if it considers the risks too great, and investors won't have much say if they disagree.

Under the proposed structure, governance structure includes five different classes of stock. By comparison, Google has three.

The seven co-founders will retain 50.1 percent of the voting power on shareholder matters, while a separate Long-Term Benefit Trust will get to appoint a majority of the board. In other words, Wall Street is being invited to bankroll Anthropic's AI ambitions, but not necessarily to call the shots.

Anthropic wants Wall Street's money to build ever more powerful AI, but is warning investors that it might turn down profits to keep that AI under control. Judging by those 94 pages of risk factors, keeping it under control is far from guaranteed.®

If you run PHP anywhere in your environment, patch to PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35 now. Two critical flaws disclosed last week, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 (nicknamed "PHP2Shell"), let an unauthenticated attacker run code on a server with nothing more than a crafted web request. Both carry a CVSS v4.0 score of 9.2, every earlier release is affected, and exploitation in the wild has been reported.

The patch is the easy part. The hard part is finding every copy of PHP you own, because PHP rarely shows up where you expect it. This post covers what the flaws are, how far exploitation has gone, and how to get to full coverage fast.

Details leaked before the planned embargo, so the PHP security team moved fast and shipped fixes within about a day of announcing them.

Both bugs live in PHP core, not in any framework or plugin, so they reach anything that runs PHP to serve web requests.

Affected server setups include PHP-FPM, mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed. PHP rates mod_php as the highest risk. No login is needed: the attacker only has to reach a PHP endpoint over HTTP.

Fixed versions: 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35. Every earlier release is affected. PHP has also published minimal source backports for 7.4, 8.0 and 8.1, but there are no official releases for those branches. Treat a backport as a stopgap and plan the upgrade.

Yes, though reliable public exploits are still scarce. watchTowr reports exploitation in its honeypot network as of October 21, and Tenable relays Cloudflare's CTO saying Cloudflare is seeing early attacks. Other telemetry, such as Patchstack's, shows mostly probing so far. Neither CVE is in CISA's KEV catalog yet, and no public indicators of compromise have been released.

How hard the bug is to weaponize depends on the platform. VulnCheck reproduced both flaws and found:

• Code execution works on ARM64, and on x86 systems where address space layout randomization (ASLR) is turned off.

• Dozens of public proof-of-concepts exist, but very few work and none bypass ASLR on x86-64.

• Red Hat likewise rates RCE as hard in practice on default PHP-FPM deployments.

Don't read that as permission to wait. Exploits mature quickly once a patch diff is public, and fake PoC repositories for headline CVEs often carry malware, so treat any you find with caution. Tanium's research on exploitability is in Why PHP2Shell is real(opens in a new tab).

Most at risk: internet-facing PHP applications, especially those running mod_php or on ARM64 hosts. It's also worth retro-hunting recent web server and PHP-FPM logs for unexplained worker crashes and unusual multipart requests.

No one has a complete list of PHP-based applications, and anything custom-built won't be on any list. PHP hides in several places at once:

• OS packages on Linux (php, php-fpm, php8.x), which package managers and most inventory tools see.

• Homebrew and similar on macOS, outside the system's own package list.

• Bundled copies on Windows. PHP on Windows usually arrives as a zip extracted to a folder or inside a stack like XAMPP, WampServer, Laragon or a vendor product. It often never registers as an installed application at all.

• Applications that ship their own PHP, where the fix depends on the application vendor rather than the OS.

• Containers, where the version is baked into the image tag.

PHP is often more widespread than teams expect, and it doesn't only run on servers. Developer tools, local web stacks and bundled applications put it on workstations too, often without registering as an installed application.

The reliable answer is to look at the binaries themselves. In testing, PHP builds from version 5 through 8 all embed their version string (X-Powered-By: PHP/x.y.z), so you can read the exact version straight from the file without running it.

Tanium itself is not affected. Tanium does not use PHP, so there is no impact to Tanium software or Tanium Cloud services.

Tanium Guardian content for PHP2Shell is available now in Tanium Cloud. The dashboard shows where PHP is installed and running so you can prioritize patching, with a single fleet-wide count of endpoints with vulnerable PHP across Linux, Windows and macOS. It combines:

• The existing Installed Applications and Homebrew Applications sensors, which find PHP installed through package managers on macOS and Linux.

• A Windows PHP Installations sensor that finds PHP where Installed Applications can't see it, including IIS, XAMPP, WampServer, Laragon, package managers and manually extracted copies, and reports version, install type, install path and owning user. The version is read from the binary's file metadata without executing it.

• A pre-built Saved Question that lists running PHP processes so you can prioritize systems that may be serving traffic.

• A pre-built Saved Question that identifies PHP containers, matching running containers against php, FrankenPHP and about 25 common PHP-based images such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Nextcloud and Magento. Requires Tanium Cloud Workloads.

Tanium Comply finds PHP on disk. For customers licensed for Comply, the dashboard includes PHP2Shell findings by endpoint, full finding details and a 7-day trend, with a pivot to the Comply findings page filtered to the two CVEs. The finding details report shows the specific on-disk locations where PHP was found, which catches copies that package and registry inventories miss. Vulnerability Library definitions for Windows, Linux and macOS are live now — sync the TVL and run an assessment to pick them up.

On-premises customers can import the Guardian content manually today. Steps and downloads are in Guardian content for on-premises customers(opens in a new tab) on the Tanium Help Center.

Know what's exposed to the internet. More than 13 million internet-facing assets run PHP versions that may be affected, according to Censys Internet Intelligence. Tanium External Attack Surface Management (EASM) discovers the internet-facing assets tied to your organization and identifies the PHP services, versions and web properties among them, with these CVEs surfaced through its coverage of exploitable and weaponized vulnerabilities. Tanium Attack Path Mapping then shows which of those exposed assets share an exposure point with a cloud instance, role or privileged identity: the places where one exploited PHP server becomes a route deeper into your environment.

Already using Tanium SBOM? Inventorying PHP versions there is a sound early step. It shows which applications carry a vulnerable PHP and need a vendor update.

Work through these in order; the first three matter most today.

1. Find every PHP install, including Windows copies that never registered as applications. Record the exact version of each.

2. Rank by exposure. Internet-facing servers, mod_php setups and ARM64 hosts come first.

3. Patch to 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35 through your OS vendor, a php.net build or your application vendor. Restart PHP-FPM and web server workers so the new binary is loaded.

4. If you can't patch yet, isolate internet-facing PHP apps where you can, as CERT-EU advises, and put WAF or IDS rules in front of them (Cloudflare and VulnCheck have both shipped rules for the known vectors).

5. Apply the partial setting with care. session.upload_progress.enabled=0 blocks one demonstrated path for CVE-2026-109619 only and does nothing for CVE-2026-109618. It must be set in php.ini, an FPM pool or server config, followed by a worker restart; ini_set() and .user.ini won't apply it.

6. Hunt. Review recent web server and PHP-FPM logs for worker crashes and malformed multipart uploads.

7. Plan off end-of-life PHP. Anything on 8.1 or older has no official fixed release.

Distro packages are still rolling out, so check your vendor before assuming a fix is available.

The Remi repository won't ship updates today, so PHP advises switching to distro packages or building from source if you depend on it.

Read more here.

Supplied by Tanium

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RAW daughter Christina Pearson, who runs the RAW Trust,  is still facing open heart surgery, now scheduled for Oct. 27 at last report. I wanted to note that the Gofundme to help her has exceeded its goal, as people have rallied around her, but the site is still taking donations, if you can afford to help. 

Robert Eggers's historical folk horror Werwulf will be in cinemas this winter. It's set in 1305, when wolves still roamed parts of England. As they vanished from English shores due to sustained hunting, however, the werewolf myth moved abroad. The creature changed from a pitiable victim into a diabolical killer, before being rediscovered and reinvented by the Victorians.

In Eggers's film, a hunter arrives in an English village to enlist local peasants in a wolf hunt declared by the king. The premise has a real historical basis, as the character appears to be inspired by Peter Corbet, a Shropshire baron of the Welsh Marches.

In 1281, Corbet was commissioned by Edward I to hunt and destroy all wolves within a cluster of counties bordering Wales, with the aid of the king's bailiffs. Although the campaign is sometimes explained as an effort to protect England's lucrative wool industry, Edward's orders specified the crown's hunting domains first and foremost. Surviving documentation from medieval Britain often places wolves within forests, chases and parks, where populations of deer were also concentrated.

The wolf population in Britain endured Corbet's hunts, although the last ones are difficult to pin down. Young individuals could have dispersed into already "cleared" areas, and a pack was almost certainly present on the North York Moors at the end of the 14th century. It is thought they may also have lingered in the Scottish Highlands into the 18th century. Animal remains currently being investigated may yet help archaeologists refine that timeline.

Early on in Werwulf, one of the farmers enlisted in the wolf hunt turns out to be a werewolf. Medieval people did believe in this possibility. In his encyclopedic work Otia Imperialia (Recreation for an Emperor), published in 1211, the statesman and writer Gervase of Tilbury described men transforming into wolves in England in accordance with the phases of the moon.

Gervase presented this as a real occurrence, but there were also accounts of fictional werewolves. Texts circulating in England such as poet Marie de France's Bisclavret (circa 1160-1175) and the French folk romance, Guillaume de Palerne (William of Palerne), from around 1350, show werewolves being incorporated into courtly storytelling.

These texts told tales of human nobles trapped in wolf form, more victims than monsters. Yet they drew their imaginative power from landscapes in which real wolves could be seen and heard.

Wolves continued to be written about in negative terms long after their disappearance, while werewolves became increasingly associated with foreign lands. But werewolves were also changing character, from victims of misfortune to agents of Satan.

In 1590, a pamphlet was printed in London which described the life, trial and brutal execution of Peter Stumpp, a German man accused of being a werewolf. Stumpp, a farmer from Bedburg near Cologne, had allegedly made a pact with the devil and acquired a magical belt that enabled him to assume the form of a wolf. The pamphlet was translated and expanded from the German account by the writer George Bores.

Stump was not presented as a sympathetic human trapped in wolf form, but as a murderous sorcerer who killed people and livestock and committed sexual violence, incest and cannibalism. Foreign werewolves were not entirely new. The 12th-century writer Gerald of Wales had placed his compassionate werewolves in Ireland, but Stumpp's diabolical werewolf was a different creature entirely.

The English pamphlet significantly expanded and sensationalised the account it was based on, resulting in a 21-page narrative with an eight-panel woodcut image showing Stumpp's capture, trial and execution. It also went to considerable lengths to establish the credibility of its story, invoking witnesses and correspondence from Germany.

Stumpp's case was one of at least 300 prosecutions of werewolfery which formed an occasional component of the much larger number of witchcraft trials in early modern Europe.

In Britain, wolves were not sufficiently embedded in everyday life to become part of witchcraft prosecutions. In Scotland, however, with its intense witch-hunting culture and a surviving wolf population, a 17th-century court record shows the term being used as an insult, although there were no prosecutions of werewolves. In this respect the presence of wolves alone cannot explain where such accusations arose.

With the end of witch hunting, the werewolf largely disappeared from Britain as a serious supernatural possibility.

Then in the 19th century, writers and antiquarians began recovering and reinventing werewolf lore as part of a wider fascination with the Middle Ages. Priest and hagiographer Sabine Baring-Gould's Book of Were-Wolves (1865) is the best example of this process. He consolidated a huge body of werewolf lore for English-speaking readers, helping to establish the comparative tradition for later popular representations.

Hollywood later drew on this inheritance, but made the werewolf a sympathetic cursed victim again in The Wolf Man (1941), a figure closer to Bisclavret than to Stumpp. In his upcoming film, Eggers has claimed he has hit the reset button on the werewolf, presenting the story of a cursed man seeking salvation through love, a premise that also echoes the werewolves of medieval courtly literature.

Meanwhile, wolves are recolonising parts of continental Europe. There is also an ongoing discussion about their reintroduction to Britain.

What will happen if wolves return as free-living animals after centuries of imagining them through stories? Today we do not fear literal shape changers stalking our forests and moorlands. Yet popular culture gives animals enduring meanings. Just look at the influence of Little Red Riding Hood and the persistent "big bad wolf".

Werwulf could be the next story to shape how we imagine wolves. If they do return, those meanings may influence how we live with them.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Aleks Pluskowski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When the clocks go back each October, we gain an hour of sleep and lose an hour of evening daylight. The practice of moving the clocks forward in spring was introduced partly to save energy, by making better use of daylight at the end of the day so there would be less need for artificial lighting.

But the lights in our homes have changed dramatically since the UK first adopted summer time in 1916 - and the change over the past decade or so has been especially rapid. A modern LED bulb can produce as much light as an old-fashioned 100-watt bulb while using a fraction of the electricity. This raises a question: in an age of energy-efficient lighting, does changing the clocks still save us much energy?

The UK introduced the clock change in 1916, during the first world war, to conserve fuel and enhance productivity. Moving the clock one hour forward would delay sunset relative to the time, and hence should save energy by reducing the need for lights after dark.

After a few tweaks in the 1960s and 70s, the current scheme has been in place since 1980, with clocks going forward on the last Sunday in March and reverting to Greenwich Mean Time on the last Sunday in October. Since the mid-1990s, these dates have been harmonised across the EU to reduce any disruption in travel and business.

But whether the clock change delivers the energy savings originally intended remains uncertain. A 2026 House of Commons Library report found that the effects of clock changes on energy demand are inconclusive. The potential savings from reduced lighting use can be offset by changes in heating and cooling demand.

Incandescent bulbs, which produce light by passing an electric current through a tungsten filament, are highly inefficient. Most of their energy goes into generating heat - of the electricity they consume, just 5% to 10% or so is turned into light. These bulbs were phased out of the UK market between 2009 and 2012, followed by most halogen bulbs (a similar technology) in 2021.

Those bulbs were replaced by light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, now the most efficient light bulbs in widespread use. An LED bulb producing the same amount of light as a 100-watt incandescent bulb (about 1,520 lumens) would use just 13.5 watts - an electricity saving of around 86%. Almost every light you see today is based on LED technology.

This means that producing a given amount of artificial light now requires much less electricity than it did when daylight saving time was introduced. But that doesn't, by itself, tell us how much energy changing the clocks saves today.

Lighting has historically been only a small percentage of household energy consumption. Today, it accounts for about 4% of household electricity consumption in the UK, or about 1% of overall household energy use (which includes gas for heating), according to government estimates for 2025. However, overall household energy consumption has in general declined since the 2000s, mainly due to the adoption of other energy-efficient measures.

More efficient lighting can also change how people use it. Lower running costs may encourage people to use more lights, especially for decoration, or to leave them on for longer - economists call this a rebound effect.

That's why we can't only look at how efficient light bulbs have become. We have to consider how much electricity the clock change saves across the energy system as a whole.

Modern life is significantly different from when the clock change was introduced in 1916. We have renewable energy, electric cars, and homes and offices packed with electronic and computer equipment.

A study from 2018 that combined 162 estimates from 44 studies found average energy savings of about 0.34% during daylight saving time. A further study from 2025 suggests that the original justification for daylight saving time as an energy-saving measure is increasingly uncertain. Broadly, research suggests reductions in lighting demand are most likely to be balanced by increased heating and cooling demand. Any energy savings are likely to be relatively small and depend on factors beyond lighting efficiency.

The European Parliament voted in 2019 to abolish the twice-yearly clock change, although implementation has stalled because EU countries have not agreed whether to keep permanent summer or winter time.

The move from incandescent bulbs to LEDs has hugely reduced the electricity needed for lighting, weakening one of the original reasons for changing the clocks. But the available research does not offer a simple calculation of how much energy the UK or similar countries would save or use if the system was abandoned.

The original rationale was straightforward: shift daylight into the evening hours and reduce the need for electrical lights. Today, much more efficient bulbs mean that the potential savings from clock changes are smaller than they once were. Whether that makes daylight saving unnecessary depends on the wider effects of changing our clocks - and the evidence on those effects remains inconclusive.

Amin Al-Habaibeh receives funding from Innovate UK, The British Council, The Royal academy of Engineering, EPSRC, AHRC, The British Academy, Th Royal Society, and the European Commission. He is also a member of The Institution of Engineering and Technology (The IET).

British transmission specialist E-Motiv Shift Systems will show its two-speed seamless powershift transmission for electric motorcycles at EICMA in Milan, 3 to 8 November. A demonstrator bike is being built and will start road testing in early 2027.

Why gears on an electric motorcycle

Most electric motorcycles run a single fixed ratio. That choice is a compromise between strong pull from a standstill and a usable top speed. A second ratio removes part of that compromise, but a conventional gear change briefly interrupts drive. E-Motiv says its system keeps torque flowing to the rear wheel during the shift. According to the company, this can mean stronger acceleration and better powertrain efficiency.

The system also lets manufacturers set how the shift feels. Shift character can be tuned to the type of use and the market a bike is aimed at, from smooth and barely noticeable to more direct.

Roots in MotoGP

The technology grows out of the Zeroshift seamless selector gearing developed for combustion engines about 25 years ago. Aprilia Racing has used that first-generation system in its RS-GP MotoGP bike since 2015. E-Motiv credits it with contributing to more than 30 podium finishes for the team, including a 1-2-3 at the Silverstone Grand Prix in July 2026.

The electric version is a separate development, designed by E-Motiv specifically for light electric vehicles.

BSA, Bath and IAAPS involved

The EV transmission was validated through a £1 million project funded under Innovate UK's Design and Build programme. E-Motiv worked with motorcycle manufacturer BSA, the University of Bath and IAAPS, the Institute of Advanced Automotive Propulsion Systems.

Demonstrator bike in 2027

A demonstrator called Demo 1 was conceived by British design consultancy Envisage. IAAPS is building it at its £77 million, 11,300 m² research facility in the UK. Real-world testing is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2027.

Tony Inchbold, Managing Director and Co-Founder of E-Motiv Shift Systems, describes the product as a transmission and control technology for vehicles where more than one ratio adds value. He says the compact design maintains drive through the ratio change and gives engineers more room to optimise the powertrain and tune the shift.

E-Motiv Shift Systems is in Hall 9, Stand S79 at EICMA 2026.

Why shouldn't an opera be set in an office? Not merely set there; performed there! On Saturday night, a couple of dozen audience members were ushered in to a genuine office in Tooting to watch a short comic opera by Opera UnTouched. It was a burst of sunshine in a rainy day.

We're at Ben's leaving party. A flustered woman is busy on the telephone. Will Ben ever get her attention?

Both Grace Watkins & Stephen Whitford are astonishingly good opera singers. They cover all the tropes, hit all the notes, and interact well with the audience.

I know that every production now claims it is immersive - but here, it genuinely is! The audience wanders through the set to get to the seats scattered around the office, there's a naff PowerPoint presentation projected on to the wall, a leaving card is waiting for us to sign, the singers prance among us.

Just intensely joyful.

My only real criticism it that it is too short! I suspect it is designed to be a pop-up experience, fringe show, or performed during a break in the corporate drudgery. I'd've gladly watched a full length production and traipsed through a series of office spaces to get the the next scene.

You can watch excerpts on Instagram.

As I've written about before, theatrical shows need to do something special to warm up their audiences. Opera UnTouched had a tough job with an audience drenched in London's rain.

The "office manager" ushered us in to the space and told us that it was Ben's last day, so we were all welcome at his leaving drinks. It being a modern office, we were each given a lanyard to wear throughout the show (which also sneakily doubled as an audience feedback QR).

As it was a party, as we wandered round the office space, we were each handed a glass of Prosecco - what a lovely touch! There's a reason your Chinese takeaway comes with "free" prawn crackers; receiving a gift makes you feel cherished. For the cost of a few dozen reusable plastic flutes and all of about 73p worth of fizz each, the audience were positively beaming by the time the show started.

Why can't more shows do that? OK, it might eat in to the takings at the bar. But a welcome drink on arrival is such an easy way to win over the audience.

As for post-show, there was the obligatory plea to fill in the feedback form. Charmingly, after receiving rapturous applause, the cast and creatives came back and were happy to chat to the audience and discuss the show.

TL;DR: Babbel is a language learning app with 14 languages and 10,000+ hours of lessons, and a lifetime subscription is on sale for $159 with code LEARN via StackSocial (MSRP $299).

When you lowkey have a bathroom emergency while traveling, which language-learning app do you think will have your back? — Read the rest

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A tangle of bones and nightmare creatures entangled atop an SUV has locals contemplating the acceptable limits of Halloween decor in Casper, Wyoming. Described as a "Skeleton Sex Orgy," the scene was photographed above by Mary Goff, who made the image available to media. — Read the rest

The post Skeleton Sex Orgy "divides" residents of Casper, Wyoming appeared first on Boing Boing.

This Thursday, 29 October, The Register hosts HPE and NVIDIA at one dinner table in Washington to answer the question that stalls AI in regulated industries: where the data lives, who can reach it, and what an auditor will accept as evidence a year from now. The table is nearly set. If you have been meaning to ask for a place, this is the week.

Editor-in-chief Matt Rosoff chairs. HPE sends Bharath Ramesh, Head of Product, AI Factory Solutions, and Tracy Mills, Acting Director Federal Systems Integrators and Distinguished Chief Technologist Federal. NVIDIA sends Bert Condensa, Vice President for Enterprise AI Factory Segment Sales. They are there to take questions, with no slides and no recording, and the chair stops a pitch before it starts.

The evening runs under the Chatham House Rule. That is the point of it. The things worth knowing about sovereign AI infrastructure, such as what a bank had to rebuild or which option somebody paid for and would not buy again, get said at a table like this and nowhere else.

The agenda: which infrastructure options hold a boundary, what each one costs, and whether any of it survives production.

The seats are for technology, data and risk leaders in healthcare, financial services, research, pharmaceuticals, government and higher education. Dinner runs from 6.00pm to 8.30pm at Fiola Mare, Washington DC. Places go by invitation and the last of them are going now.

Request one here.

Government and public sector guests: where your agency's ethics rules require it, you can pay your own share and we will provide a receipt. Please say so when you request an invitation.

NASA's Swift observatory made its final observation on October 20 and is expected to re-enter the atmosphere in the next few weeks after a failed rescue attempt over the summer.

Designed to study gamma-ray bursts, Swift was launched on November 20, 2004, on a two-year mission. It has lasted almost 22 years, but atmospheric drag is inexorably lowering the spacecraft's orbit, so reentry is likely just shy of the vehicle's 22nd anniversary. Swift has no propulsion system to save itself.

Swift is now orbiting at an altitude of less than 171 miles above Earth's surface, meaning it cannot keep its telescopes steady when pointing at astronomical targets.

Because the spacecraft could no longer compensate for the increased drag, it dropped into safe mode. A command was then sent from the ground that, according to NASA, "effectively ended Swift operations to prepare it for re-entry."

The descent of Swift has accelerated in recent years due to increased solar activity. Last year, NASA awarded Katalyst Space a contract for a high-risk, high-reward mission to boost the observatory to a higher orbit. Swift's science operations were curtailed to maximize opportunities for Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft, but alas, a rendezvous never happened, and engineers opted to reactivate operations to eke out as much science as possible.

The expected side effect was increased drag on the spacecraft and, as expected, Swift sank rapidly until operations had to cease.

Swift has been an astonishingly productive instrument during its long life. According to NASA, it has observed more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and more than 1,400 supernova explosions. It has conducted an all-sky X-ray survey and seen stars shredded by black holes.

The full Swift archive comes to approximately 12 terabytes. Not too bad for something that was only supposed to last two years.

NASA now faces the problem that it has no direct replacement for Swift. As well as paying tribute to the observatory's contributions, Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement:

"To support rapid response to cosmic events in a post-Swift world, we're exploring our ability to use and augment NASA's fleet of existing space telescopes, from fast-to-orbit commercial capabilities to efficient, innovative new missions." ®