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Tech News
NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on August 30, marking the first space telescope named after a woman. The mission, previously known as WFIRST, will study dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets, continuing work in the field Roman helped establish as NASA's first chief of astronomy in 1959.
An editorial in Nature argues that prediction markets allowing wagers on the outcomes of clinical trials pose risks to research integrity and public trust in science. It calls for limits on such betting activity to prevent interference with ongoing trials.
Responding to Ming Li's proposal to separate academic 'titles' from resource allocation in Chinese universities, a Nature correspondence argues the reform is unlikely to succeed. The author agrees that suppressed performance indicators tend to resurface under different labels, but contends university administrators benefit from the current metric-based system and thus have little incentive to change it.
The authors of a study on histone 3 lysine 27 demethylases in acute lymphoblastic leukaemia have issued a correction after discovering that an H3K4me3 immunoblot in Extended Data Fig. 9e was mistakenly duplicated from the H3K27me3 blot during figure preparation. The correct blot image has been posted in the Supplementary Information, and new scans of all panels from the original source films have been provided, with source films archived on Figshare.
Two children died in separate Chinese gene-editing trials — a boy in a 2025 trial by HuidaGene Therapeutics and a six-year-old girl in March 2024 after treatment developed by researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Xinhua Hospital. Shanghai Jiao Tong University has launched an investigation into the girl's case and a related study published in Nature, while HuidaGene disclosed the boy's death publicly in August.
Two children reportedly died after receiving gene-editing treatments in separate investigator-initiated trials (IITs) in China, drawing scrutiny to the country's rapid trial pathway. The deaths surfaced just months after Beijing introduced Order 818, a rule effective May 1 that tightens oversight of IITs, including restricting stem-cell and gene therapy trials to top-tier sanjia hospitals.
Rene Haas, chief executive of Arm Holdings, told the BBC that AI will eventually cure cancer by modelling complex cellular and DNA processes beyond current human or computing capability, though he said this progress is being constrained by a shortage of chips needed to build data centres. He also predicted humanoid robots would become widespread within five years, while expressing doubt that chip manufacturing could realistically be built up in the UK.
A security researcher has released a reverse-engineered reconstruction of Stuxnet, the 2010 worm that sabotaged Siemens industrial control systems used in Iran's uranium enrichment program. The repository rebuilds the malware's loader, privilege-escalation exploit, rootkit drivers, and PLC-tampering payload from previously decompiled binaries, organized for study rather than deployment. Its author frames the project as educational, aimed at malware analysts and defenders rather than as usable attack code.
A security researcher tested how generative AI models behave when fed their own outputs repeatedly, using Nano Banana 2 to make a video poster undergo successive localized edits until the image degraded into visual noise. Testing the same recursive approach on text rewrites, the researcher found that unlike images, text doesn't spiral into total chaos because encoding is lossless and per-token entropy is low—but open-ended rewrites still drift substantially from the original, eventually stabilizing into a distinct, homogenized style.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said the 21 Air Boeing 767-300 operating Prime Air Flight 7598 overshot Miami International Airport's runway by roughly 1,300 feet after arriving from San Juan on Sunday. The jet struck a cleaning-company van inside the airport, broke through a perimeter fence and hit a passenger car outside, killing at least five people and injuring five more before sliding through a second fence near parked Tesla robotaxis.
Instructors at the University of Baltimore's writing program are moving away from surveillance-style tracking of student edits in Google Docs toward assignments that deliberately incorporate generative AI. Using the university's BoodleBox platform, faculty built chatbots with personas like the 'Confrontational Parent' for students to debate in simulated scenarios, such as a mock school board meeting on book bans. New assignments now require transcripts of chatbot conversations, handwritten outlines, and video reflections alongside traditional writing.
Apple's WebKit team has opened a call for proposals for Interop 2027, the next round of the annual cross-browser project run with Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Bocoup, and Igalia. Developers can submit ideas through September 23, with entries required to focus on mature, testable web standards measured via Web Platform Tests.