Tennessee fails to execute Christa Pike after two doses of pentobarbital

Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R. staged a company that manufactured human-like machines for hard, dull, dangerous work, and Merriam-Webster says Čapek took the name from his brother Josef, a painter and writer. ¹ It comes from Czech robota, “compulsory labor,” a cousin of German Arbeit and, through a deeper root, of Latin orbus, “orphaned.” ² The English translation brought it into the language, first recorded in 1922 by Merriam-Webster's count and 1923 by Etymonline's. A line from the play shows what the first robots were: “Mechanically they are more perfect than we are… but they have no soul.” ²

Christa Pike was still alive after Tennessee's two doses

Tennessee officials gave Christa Pike, 50, two doses of pentobarbital on the evening of September 30 and she did not die, according to her attorneys' filings and media witnesses quoted by the Associated Press. ³ The Supreme Court had vacated a Sixth Circuit stay of her execution that day, 6-3, with Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson dissenting. ⁴ The state says it followed its protocol, which “does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening.” It says she was taken to an off-site medical facility. ⁵ Her attorneys say she is critically ill, unconscious and on a ventilator, and the state has not confirmed her condition. ⁶ Gov. Bill Lee ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” and said the remaining scheduled execution would not take place this year. Corrections Commissioner Frank Strada announced Saturday that he will resign at the end of the month. ^{3 7} What happened inside the chamber rests on those witnesses and attorneys, since no state document describes it. The Death Penalty Information Center says no one else is known to have lived after receiving the drugs. ³

Hochul gives Letitia James a Cornell assault case the Tompkins County DA declined

Gov. Hochul signed Executive Order 64 on October 1, appointing Attorney General Letitia James special prosecutor for an alleged sexual assault in Tompkins County, New York, on October 19–20, 2024. ⁸ The order says her authority “will displace and supersede the jurisdiction of the Tompkins County District Attorney.” Its recitals say the DA declined to prosecute in November 2024 without speaking to the woman, who is identified as Jane Doe. These are the governor's stated reasons, not findings. ⁸ DA Matthew Van Houten reopened the investigation on September 28 after Jane Doe sued seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity in civil court. He defended the original decision, saying prosecutors had reviewed a six-page sworn statement that in his account described consensual conduct. ⁹ NPR reports that the woman told campus police in 2024 she was raped. That is her allegation, and nothing in the reporting establishes what happened that night. ¹⁰

Coast Guard finds debris from a medical jet that vanished between Bermuda and Boston

The Coast Guard said Saturday night that it had found a debris field it confirmed belongs to a missing Gulfstream G100, tail number C-GRJP. The search for the six people aboard continues. ¹¹ The jet was flying from Bermuda to Boston as an air ambulance, and the FAA lost contact with it early Saturday. CBS reports that the six were four Canadian and two Bermudian nationals, and that crews had covered 1,644 square miles over 27 hours. ¹² Boston 25 News reports, citing the Nantucket Current, that the jet is registered to Latitude Air Ambulance, and Bernews reports two pilots, two medical staff and two Bermuda passengers aboard. ^{13 14} Latitude has issued no statement that reporters found, and none of the reporting cites an investigator giving a cause.

OpenAI prices GPT-6.1 Sol at a fifth of GPT-6 Astra and says it nearly matches it

OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol at its DevDay event on September 29, describing it as delivering “near-Astra performance at a lower cost for complex coding, computer use, and professional work.” ¹⁵ Its API prices are $2 per million input tokens, $10 per million output tokens and $0.10 per million cached input tokens, against $10, $50 and $1.00 for GPT-6 Astra on OpenAI's pricing table. That is a fifth on input and output and a tenth on cached input. ¹⁶ The capability claim and the benchmarks are OpenAI's. The Next Web, which ran no tests of its own, reports OpenAI's results have Sol within 2.1 points of Astra on OSWorld 2.0 and Astra still highest on Terminal-Bench Science 0.1 at 68.1%. ¹⁷ Sol is available in ChatGPT Work and Codex for Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu users and in the API as gpt-6.1-sol, but not yet in main ChatGPT chat. ¹⁷

DeepMind says watermarked protein binders matched unwatermarked ones in lab tests

Google DeepMind announced SynthID Bio on September 30, a family of watermarking methods that guide the choice of amino acids in AI-designed protein sequences. ¹⁸ DeepMind tested three targets in the wet lab: VEGF-A, the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein's receptor-binding domain, and PD-L1. It reports that binders from AlphaProteo and a SynthID Bio-enabled ProteinMPNN “matched the hit rate, binding affinity, and natural sequence diversity of unwatermarked versions.” ¹⁸ Hit rate is the share of designs that bind their target. The blog post gives no counts or affinity values, and for a separate watermark on AlphaFold 3 structure predictions it calls detectability “near-perfect” without a rate. ¹⁹ DeepMind labels the work a proof of concept and lists robustness against deliberate tampering as a challenge still open. James Diggans of Twist Bioscience, who gave early feedback on the paper, calls watermarking “a promising new addition to the biosecurity toolbox.” ^{18 19}