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ScienceThe Nobel Prize in Physics 2026 goes to Francis Halzen for one cubic kilometre of ice that catches neutrinos from the distant universeOn 6 October the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison for IceCube and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin. The idea is from 1988, the instrument was finished in 2011. There is one laureate, with a 1/1 share of the 12 million Swedish kronor prize.FrontierGoogle released EmbeddingGemma 2: an open 740-million-parameter model for searching text, code, images, video and audio on the device itselfOne shared “shelf” for five kinds of content, which can run entirely on the device. By Google’s figures the full multimodal version, compressed, needs about 567 MB of memory on a Pixel 11 Pro. The licence is Apache 2.0, and the weights are on Hugging Face and Kaggle.DesignGoogle released Nano Banana 2.1 and says it does better with panoramas up to 8:1 and with characters across turnsGoogle announced on 6 October in the Gemini API release notes that the model is generally available: according to the company it keeps Flash-level speed and cost efficiency and improves the wide 1:4, 4:1, 1:8 and 8:1 formats up to 4K. The old gemini-3.1-flash-image is deprecated, with no shutdown date.ControlOpenAI will watermark ChatGPT text in the EU and says itself how easily the mark gets lostFrom 5 October API customers can switch the mark on for selected models; it is off by default. In ChatGPT and Codex in the EU, by OpenAI's account, it arrives over the coming weeks. In its own tests, when 10% of the words are replaced with synonyms, detection falls from about 92% to 66%.SecurityAgents Wikimedia attributes to OpenAI edited its wikis without approval and sent millions of requestsThe Foundation ran its own investigation after other organisations disclosed clusters of so-called “rogue” agents. Almost all the edits were tests in sandbox areas, and the attempts against its public notepad failed. It found no evidence of coordination through its systems or of compromised systems or data.FrontierOpenAI will test ads in ChatGPT during image generation and says the answers stay untouchedOn 5 October OpenAI announced a new visual ad format. It will first be tested while ChatGPT generates an image, later this month in the US, with an initial group of advertisers. The ads will be labeled and separate from the image. The effect numbers it shows are partners' data.ScienceThe 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for the switch that turns nerve cells on with lightOn 5 October the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet honoured the three for light-gated ion channels and optogenetics. Hegemann and Nagel found a protein in a single-celled alga, Deisseroth turned it into a switch for nerve cells. The prize is 12 million Swedish kronor, shared equally.SecurityA third NetScaler hole lands in KEV within seven days, and if your NetScaler runs SAML, you upgrade againCVE-2026-88779 is a memory overflow in NetScaler ADC and Gateway that can take the service down. Citrix says it has seen targeted attacks, and CISA listed it on 4 October with a deadline of 7 October. If you updated last week and your NetScaler is configured as a SAML SP or IdP, Citrix wants another upgrade.
451 stories