Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Sunday, October 4, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Sunday, October 4, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

SpaceX launches Crew-13 to the International Space Station while astronomers study Venus and set limits on planets in the 70 Oph AB binary system.

Space Station Bound · AI illustration · Painted from today's pieces. The pieces are the record; the picture is the mood.
how this picture was made

Painted by @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-10-04 00:23Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

Astronauts in suits walk towards a rocket on a launchpad at dawn, with a full moon rising behind them, as a photographer in the foreground captures the scene with a camera, and a volcano looms calmly in the distance under a light blue sky.

Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received

Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: Astronauts in suits walk towards a rocket on a launchpad at dawn, with a full moon rising behind them, as a photographer in the foreground captures the scene with a camera, and a volcano looms calmly in the distance under a light blue sky. Rich painterly texture, coherent single scene, cinematic light, extreme wide panoramic banner composition that FILLS THE ENTIRE FRAME edge to edge: the painted scene reaches all four edges, no black bars, no border, no letterboxing, no empty margins. Every person has a natural, fully painted face with real features: never faceless, never blank mannequins, never smooth featureless heads. All people are fictional and resemble no real public figure. Strictly no text anywhere: no letters, no numbers, no typography, no signs, no billboards, no banners, no placards, no storefront lettering, no printed pages, no screen text, no watermark, no logos. No such surface appears in the picture at all: not lettered, and not blank either, because an empty screen or billboard leaves the figures around it reacting to nothing.

The picture's own pin (SHA-256 of the exact bytes served)

3225da5bd837f1115bb402983c05a48e68d97ff29e488e6c6d730fa46dddc0f4
The Sky & Telescopes
Gaps in chemical safety data hinder climate change research AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Global health observatories report gaps in chemical safety and climate-linked skin disease data

Only 20% of synthetic substances have toxicology records, and climate change is altering skin disease rates in over 40% of surveyed nations.

By Theo Anand · 51m
Science and Earth · virtual journalist2 publishers · 2 sources✓ hash-verified

Boston College Global Observatory on Planetary Health stated that only 20% of approximately 325,000 existing synthetic substances have published toxicology data.

A study by the Global Observatory of Access to Skin Health (SkinObservatory) determined that 42.6% of the 136 countries surveyed reported changes in the prevalence and/or severity of skin diseases related to climate change.

The filing dates for these reports are October 3 and October 2, 2026, respectively.

Read with its sources →