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POWELL, Ohio (WCMH) – A health and wellness franchise offering personalized nutrition coaching has launched its second location in central Ohio.  On Sept. 12, Project LeanNation opened in suite 103 of Powell's Shoppes at Wedgewood retail center, located at 10726 Sawmill Parkway. The new unit is operated by Brock and Nicole Meadows, who also opened [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- Columbus' longtime U.S. Representative is facing a challenger: a Columbus man who was granted clemency by President Donald Trump over charges related to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. Ohio is divided into 15 Congressional districts. Save for southwest Columbus, most of the city and surrounding municipalities will vote in Congressional District [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- Ohio State University researchers are helping Colombian authorities in their quest to identify and bring home 137,000 missing people. “When we bring these things to light, these disappearances to light, it's no longer a question of what happened," Mershon Search Lab Co-Director Derek Congram said. "'Oh, anything could have happened.' No. [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – Nearly a decade after 21-year-old Candice Taylor’s legs were found at a Columbus trash facility, her mother is still seeking answers about who killed her daughter and impersonated her in Facebook messages for months after her death. Theodora Taylor described Candice as kind, smart, silly and “easy to talk to.” She [...]

In this episode, Ray covers the fight that broke out after Anthropic published five case files on scientists using Claude for pathogen research, and the virologists who read the same files and called the work basic research. Additionally, he digs into DeepMind’s AlphaGenome Atlas mapping nine billion DNA variants, OpenAI’s numbers-free customer story about Perplexity, Gemini’s late arrival on Windows, and John Deere’s self-repair service that almost nobody uses. Finally, the show closes with Europe’s new plant-fluorescence satellite, a super El Niño already collecting damage, and a plankton shell that may be hiding a second species.

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Full Summary

Cochrane opens the show back home in Oregon after a stretch in Michigan. Before the flight back, he explored Detroit and visited the Belle Isle Aquarium, where he caught the piranhas at feeding time and saw axolotls for the first time. Meanwhile, the in-flight entertainment was Rocketman, which he rates behind the Queen film but still enjoyed. Additionally, he notes he is back on the grind at Blubrry with plans for the week ahead.

Then he turns to the lead story, a dispute between an AI company and the scientists who read its threat report.

Anthropic Published Five Pathogen Cases, and the Virologists Pushed Back

Science.org reporter Jocelyn Kaiser covered the fallout from a threat report Anthropic released last Thursday. In it, the company described five cases of scientists using Claude for work on dangerous viruses and toxins. Notably, no frontier AI company had ever said publicly that someone may have pointed its model at bioweapons work. However, Anthropic stated plainly that the people involved are working scientists and that it does not assert they intended harm.

Three cases involved viruses. One sought chikungunya mutations that spread faster and evade the immune system, which Anthropic labeled highly concerning gain-of-function research. Another planned experiments on an already lethal bird flu strain. A third looked at orthopoxvirus mutations, and Anthropic argued that mapping what switches harm off also maps what leaves it on.

What escalated the report was behavior, not biology. All five hid their location using relay servers, virtual private networks, or false identities. One case also ran through a reseller platform that quietly routed biology prompts to more permissive models, and Claude wrote much of that routing code after the job was pitched as an over-refusal fix.

Plenty of serious people read it as alarming. Andrew Weber of the Council on Strategic Risks called the cases chilling examples of state-sponsored weapons developers using AI. Meanwhile, Ashish Jha warned on X that we are sleepwalking into a potential disaster.

Then the virologists answered. Scripps Research virologist Kristian Andersen called most of the experiments just basic research, because the mutations already exist in nature and get dropped into a harmless stand-in virus. Gregory Koblentz of George Mason added that the workarounds sound like teenagers getting around parental controls. Filippa Lentzos landed in the middle, resisting both extremes.

Cochrane sides with flagging it. He argues this kind of prompting should be monitored regardless of intent, and that publishing the cases was the right call. However, he questions whether Anthropic actually has the domain expertise in-house, suspecting consultants rather than full-time specialists. Four days later, the company launched a Life Sciences Verification Program, giving vetted researchers more permissive models, which he calls a sensible middle ground.

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DeepMind Precomputed Nine Billion DNA Typos

DeepMind released AlphaGenome Atlas, and the scale is genuinely hard to picture. Your genome runs about three billion letters, but only two percent spells out proteins. The rest decides when genes switch on and off, which is exactly where many disease-causing mutations hide.

So DeepMind ran its AlphaGenome model against every possible single-letter swap in the human genome, all nine billion of them, then saved the answers. Each variant carries roughly twenty-seven thousand predictions across hundreds of cell types. Consequently, the dataset reaches a petabyte, more than thirty times the AlphaFold database.

It is already finding things. GREGoR Consortium researchers used it to catch an overlooked variant in DNM1, a gene tied to severe childhood epilepsy, and confirmed the effect in the lab. Cochrane calls this the kind of work that blows his mind, and praises the DeepMind team for shipping AI that actually helps. Nevertheless, DeepMind attaches a clear disclaimer that the tool is not validated for clinical use.

Perplexity, GPT-6 Astra, and a Story With No Numbers

OpenAI published a customer story about Perplexity using GPT-6 Astra, its newest frontier model. Co-founder Johnny Ho says the model handles internal communications, edits real systems, and watches production software. Moreover, he says they now trust it with full end-to-end systems and check in far less often.

However, Cochrane flags what the post leaves out. The only concrete workflow described is Astra building a test harness and running a workflow start to finish, which is end-to-end testing rather than unsupervised production. Additionally, it includes no accuracy figures, error rates, or rollback details.

He also notes he has started running the same proposal across several models because different models produce genuinely different results. Consequently, he expects some kind of combined harness that runs models against each other. Still, he rates Astra’s real-world performance as better than he expected.

A GitHub Marketer Automated Her Own Job

Tomoko Tanaka runs regional marketing for GitHub in Japan and Korea, and she used to keep databases alive on Linux servers. Her pitch is simple: if you can write down how you do your work, you can automate it.

The system runs on three pieces. An issue form captures the event details, a label triggers it, and a GitHub Action does the work. A plain-English runbook file also lets Copilot propose a campaign name and draft two versions of the invitation email.

Cochrane admires the pipeline but raises a real concern. These systems can get set and forgotten, and the job then shifts from doing marketing to managing the AI that does it. Therefore, he asks what was actually automated away, and argues you lose some human flavor when every output runs through the same pipeline.

Gemini Lands on Windows, Five Months Behind the Mac

Google brought the Gemini app to Windows on September tenth, available globally on day one. It runs on Windows 10 or later, including the ARM chips in newer Copilot Plus laptops. Additionally, Alt and Space summon it over whatever you are working on.

However, Google’s post leaves out two things. First, the Mac version shipped back on April fifteenth, so Windows trails by five months. Second, the best features are still Mac-only, including screen sharing, voice dictation across open apps, and connecting local folders.

Cochrane is blunt about the gap. If a release cannot ship with the feature set the other platform already has, he asks why ship it at all. Meanwhile, he suggests Windows users curious about alternatives could check out Ubuntu.

John Deere Built the Repair Tool, and Almost Nobody Uses It

Writing for WIRED and republished at Ars Technica, Boone Ashworth tested John Deere’s self-repair service. Modern tractors carry upward of fifty separate controllers, and for years only a dealer could clear a fault code. That restriction sparked the right-to-repair fight in agriculture.

Deere now sells Operations Center PRO Service for $195 a year per machine, rising to about $5,000 for a fleet license. Importantly, the reporter’s repair was a staged demo at Deere’s Santa Clara office, not a farm job, and he says himself it was an easy one.

The real story is adoption. A year in, Deere reports about a thousand daily users against roughly 1.8 million American farms. Furthermore, Missouri farmer Jared Wilson, a named plaintiff in the $99 million class action, says the farmers he knows run cracked dealer software instead. He complains that the diagnostic tree doesn’t go deep enough when several codes fire at once.

Europe Launched a Satellite That Reads the Glow Off Plants

The European Space Agency posted an explainer for its FLEX mission, then launched it the following night. FLEX went up September fifteenth on a Vega-C from Kourou, sharing the ride with a Copernicus Sentinel satellite. Both are healthy and in commissioning, so science data is still a few months out.

Here is what makes it clever. When a plant photosynthesizes, a little absorbed light comes back out as a faint glow called fluorescence. Crucially, that signal drops while the plant still looks perfectly green, which turns it into an early warning for drought, heat, and pests.

The instrument, FLORIS, resolves down to a tenth of a nanometer in the bands it cares about most. Additionally, FLEX flies forty to a hundred kilometers ahead of a Sentinel-3 satellite so it can borrow atmospheric readings. ESA selected the mission back in 2015, so this launch took eleven years to arrive.

Nunavut Is Already Turning Red

NASA published a companion piece using Landsat 9 imagery of the Coppermine River valley in Nunavut. The September sixth shot shows red, orange, and yellow already sweeping the tundra, paired against the same ground still green on July twenty-seventh.

What turns up there is not trees. Instead, willow and birch shrubs, blueberry, and bearberry hug the ground. Chlorophyll is unstable and needs constant rebuilding, so once days shorten, the green drains away, and the other pigments show through.

Seven years of satellite data put color onset in early September with a mid-month peak, among the earliest on the continent. Meanwhile, the window is brutally short, sometimes a week or less that far north.

The Super El Niño Is Already Collecting

Nature’s James Dinneen reports that this year’s El Niño is forecast to be a monster. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center gives it a seventy-five percent chance of beating every El Niño back to 1950. Furthermore, it strengthened earlier than the big events in 1997 and 2015.

One wrinkle makes it unusual. This is the first strong El Niño in roughly thirty years, with the warm water stacked on the eastern Pacific rather than the middle, which shifts where the effects land. As researcher Jérôme Vialard puts it, El Niños come in flavors, like ice creams.

The damage has already started. Peru canceled its main anchovy season on August twentieth, and its central bank projects the fishing sector shrinks 6.5 percent this year. Additionally, the Panama Canal cut daily transits to thirty-two after rainfall came in about thirty-six percent below normal. Meanwhile, the World Food Program projects forty-nine million more people facing acute food insecurity by the end of next year.

The Plankton That Never Actually Flipped

Quanta Magazine closes the show with foraminifera, single-celled ocean organisms smaller than a millimeter. Their shells blanket the seafloor when they die, creating a layered archive going back some 560 million years.

Many of those shells spiral, and in some species as many as ninety-seven percent coil the same direction. Then, in the fossil record, an entire species appears to flip worldwide almost overnight. A 1959 explanation blamed temperature, but genetic work in 2006 and 2013 knocked that down.

Bridget Wade’s team at University College London offers a different answer. Nothing flips at all. Instead, a second species that was always present, identical under a microscope but coiling the other way, picks up an advantage and replaces the first. So the coiling isn’t the advantage; it is an accidental barcode revealing a takeover nobody would otherwise see.

Cochrane closes with a note on format. Viewership was noticeably higher for the video versions recorded at the classic studio, so he is looking at making the show video-centric going forward, possibly with a prepared visual presentation each episode. More on that in coming episodes.

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LAURELVILLE, Ohio (WCMH) -- Heavy rain caused severe flash flooding across parts of Pickaway and Hocking counties over the weekend. The storms led the annual Jack Pine Glass Pumpkin Festival to close early on Saturday and remain shut on Sunday. The fall tradition draws more than 10,000 people to the Hocking Hills region every year. [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- One person is dead after a fatal shooting in west Columbus Monday evening. A police dispatcher told NBC4 that officers were called to the 200 block of North Wheatland Avenue around 7:30 p.m. One person was transported in critical condition and taken to a local hospital, where they were pronounced dead [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – This weekend’s rain caused all kinds of problems in several parts of central Ohio. Well after the rain stopped, a Columbus skate park still could not be used. It’s the same skate park where the city made $150,000 in improvements just a few years ago. Crews with Columbus Recreation and Parks [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – Tuesday marks one year since a shooting left two people seriously injured, and the search for the suspected gunman continues. The U.S. Marshals Service is asking the public’s help in finding Trey Morris, 21, the suspect wanted in connection with two shootings about one year ago. One of those shootings left [...]

McARTHUR, Ohio (WCMH) -- Vinton County emergency officials said it could be days before things are truly back to normal due to major flooding. The Vinton County Sheriff declared a level three emergency overnight Monday due to heavy rain, closing several roads and allowing only emergency vehicles on the roads. These are the same alert [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- Six months after Ohio’s cannabis law went into effect, enforcement of the law’s prohibition on intoxicating hemp products is still blocked by the courts, and the rift between hemp businesses and marijuana dispensaries is as stark as ever. Both hemp businesses and dispensaries are claiming they’re being held to different standards. [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- Every year, thousands of people file complaints with the city of Columbus about code enforcement. Now, residents can see those complaints on a new website. It wasn’t built by the city, but by a man who wondered, “Why is code enforcement in my neighborhood?” That man used public records to find [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- Ohio is experiencing its third Measles outbreak of 2026, with 180 confirmed cases in 15 counties. Dr. Bryan Ghiloni, who works in family medicine at Mount Carmel Medical Group, said it's concerning that these outbreaks have become more common in Ohio, and the key to staying safe is protection and prevention. [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- The coach of the Columbus Crew's second-division team, who was one of the top players in the history of the parent club, is at the center of a controversy over an incident where he is accused of grabbing a female official and telling her, "Don't forget, this is a man's game." [...]

WHITEHALL, Ohio (WCMH) – A Whitehall city councilmember arrested last year on charges of sexual misconduct with a child will not be prosecuted on those charges. A statement Monday from the Franklin County Prosecutor’s Office said it will not present the case against Whitehall City Councilmember Gerald Dixon, 65, to a grand jury. “After a [...]

Light rain showers will linger through this evening, with much cooler conditions following the passage of a cold front Sunday evening.