ScienceESA orders four more Galileo G2 satellites for 2031, and the first of the generation has not launched yetESA extended its contracts with Thales Alenia Space and Airbus Defence and Space for four additional second-generation Galileo satellites, due for delivery in 2031. The G2 fleet grows to 16, and the first launch is planned for 2028.ScienceNASA ends the Swift mission after nearly 22 years: the orbit fell below 275 kilometres and the telescopes can no longer hold a target steadyThe Swift observatory made its final observation on 20 October. Designed for two years, it worked more than ten times longer. Below 275 kilometres, the air does not let the telescopes hold a target, and NASA expects it to enter the atmosphere within weeks.ScienceOpenAI bought Orchestra Bio and puts it with Rosalind, its models for the life sciencesOn 20 October OpenAI announced it has acquired Orchestra Bio, a platform that helps biopharma teams coordinate the complex process of drug development. Its team and technology join Rosalind. No deal price has been announced.ScienceThe 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai for the reactions in which chemistry picks one of two mirror-image moleculesOn 7 October the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored the two “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis”. Living organisms carry only one of the two mirror-image forms of amino acids; in the test tube chemists always got both in equal amounts.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.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.ScienceGuest essay at Anthropic: 36 manuscripts in three months, because the tasks were shaped around the modelMatthew Schwartz, author of the earlier "Vibe Physics", describes a method he calls "Claude-shaped science": instead of forcing the model into a scientist's classic workflow, you look for the tasks it is good at. The numbers are his: 36 manuscripts across 18 fields with 19 coauthors. The BootLoops tool is open on GitHub.ScienceStudy at Apple: a strong model with a minimal harness keeps up with elaborate agent scaffolding on an equal time budgetA paper published on Apple Machine Learning Research and on arXiv compares the best open-source harnesses for autonomous ML engineering with a single coding agent that has only read, write and bash. Under an equal time budget and the same model, the scaffolding gives no advantage. The authors conclude that hand-crafted harnesses around strong models yield poor returns.
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