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Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison announced on X that the combined Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery company will be called Skydance, ahead of the acquisition's completion on October 6. Ellison had previously said Paramount+ and HBO Max would be merged into a single streaming service with roughly 200 million subscribers if regulators approved the deal.
A federal judge approved Paramount's consent decree settling an antitrust lawsuit brought by 12 states over its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, removing the last major legal obstacle to the $81 billion deal. The merger is expected to close on October 6, and Paramount announced Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz will join as co-CEO alongside David Ellison once the deal completes.
Plex has rolled out social discovery tools to its Android TV app, including Discussions, Lists, Reviews, Reactions, and Follows, allowing users to interact around content instead of relying solely on algorithmic recommendations. The update also moves the app's primary menu to the left side of the screen. This follows a similar rollout on Apple TV in mid-September.
Paramount has appointed former Mattel chairman and CEO Ynon Kreiz as co-CEO, working alongside chairman and CEO David Ellison, ahead of the close of its $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Ellison will oversee long-term strategy, creative direction and partnerships, while Kreiz handles day-to-day management and integration of the combined companies; Kreiz starts October 5th. Separately, a judge approved Paramount's settlement with states that had been blocking the merger, and streaming chief Cindy Holland announced her departure.
MIT Technology Review says it has finalized its annual list of 10 climate tech companies making progress in energy storage, nuclear power and transportation, set for publication on October 6. Separately, Anthropic announced its AI molecular biology lab had flagged an uncatalogued enzyme pattern it likened to a precursor of CRISPR, but several biologists disputed whether this qualifies as a genuine discovery, with one saying his team had already found the same pattern.
The source page, hosted on nature.com, does not display its intended content about creatures observed during the Challenger expedition. Instead, visitors are shown a generic notice about limited browser support for CSS and a recommendation to update their browser or disable compatibility mode.
An engineering guide describes how staff engineers on platform teams—who typically lack product managers, roadmaps, or revenue metrics—can identify what to build next. It categorizes signals into four sources: system-generated signals like crashes and cost data, plus signals from users, the organization, and the broader industry. The piece details methods such as analyzing postmortem patterns and scrutinizing cloud costs and vendor contracts to surface opportunities.
A commentary argues that the rapid expansion of AI computing infrastructure—chips, data centers, cloud systems and new power sources—needs applications that convert that capacity into real economic and human value. It points to medicine, particularly drug development, as a leading candidate for where that value could materialize.
A coalition including Free Press, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Committee for the First Amendment filed a court brief arguing that California's settlement with Paramount Skydance over its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery offers the public 'virtually nothing.' The filing asks Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, who had earlier found the deal likely to substantially reduce competition, to reject the settlement that California Attorney General Rob Bonta and eleven other states agreed to this week. The League of United Latin American Citizens raised similar objections in a separate filing.
Enveda, a biotech startup using AI to identify drugs from plants and microbes, closed a $311 million Series E funding round at a $2 billion valuation. Catalio Capital Management led the round, with Iconiq and other investors participating. The valuation doubles what the company achieved a year earlier.
Anthropic announced a new life sciences research group that uses its Claude AI model to analyze DNA datasets, identify uncharacterized protein families, and generate testable hypotheses. The company reported an early result in which Claude, given only high-level guidance from scientists, identified a previously unknown enzyme system with features resembling CRISPR, which was then validated through lab experiments.
Paramount Skydance is preparing to merge with Warner Bros. Discovery, placing CEO David Ellison in control of major entertainment brands including HBO, HBO Max and Paramount+. Both companies have undergone repeated name and platform changes in recent years, from Warner Media to WBD and from Paramount+ rebrands, reflecting ongoing restructuring across the industry.