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Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who led development of the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo missions at MIT, has died aged 90. She is widely credited with coining the term 'software engineering' and later founded companies building programming systems used in aerospace, defence and other industries.
A reassessment of 892 reef-building coral species against IUCN Red List criteria found that of the 774 with sufficient data, 340 species (44%) now qualify as threatened, including 33 Critically Endangered, 251 Endangered and 56 Vulnerable. The analysis, an update of a 2008 assessment, used proxies such as global coral cover trends and projected severe bleaching frequency under a moderate-emissions climate scenario, since population data for most coral species are lacking.
Member states of the General Conference on Weights and Measures voted on 15 October to end the practice of adding leap seconds to Universal Coordinated Time, a change originally scheduled for 2035. In its place, timekeepers will allow a full hour of drift to accumulate between atomic time and Earth's rotation-based time before making a single correction, a threshold not expected to be reached for thousands of years.
Researchers observed that orangutan mothers facilitate play dates for their young, deliberately bringing infants together with peers. The behavior suggests a level of social planning previously undocumented in wild orangutans, a largely solitary species.
ArXiv began enforcing a limit of two paper submissions per month per researcher on October 1, after monthly uploads jumped from about 30,000 to 40,000 in September. Scientific director Steinn Sigurðsson says the surge, driven largely by AI-generated 'slop', has overwhelmed arXiv's roughly 300 volunteer moderators, who now screen about 1,000 manuscripts daily with nearly 4,000 submissions backlogged. Social-sciences server SocArXiv has similarly moved to limit authors to one submission per week.
Scientists have described two new sea spider species from the Salish Sea and reclassified a penguin population on the Kerguelen Islands as a distinct species, the southeastern gentoo. Separately, Mauritius has become the first country reported to reduce its diabetes prevalence, according to Nature's roundup of positive science news.
Gudea, founded in 2023 by Keith Presley, Jonathan Sperber, and James Thomin, presented its platform at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026's Startup Battlefield. The company uses AI to analyze behavior and information flow across more than 500 websites and platforms, including X, Reddit, and TikTok, to help organizations detect potentially damaging narratives before they escalate.
Liquid AI released LFM2.5-24B-A2B, a 24-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with only 2 billion active parameters per token, as the largest and final entry in its LFM2.5 family. The model is reasoning-only, generating an explicit chain of thought, and both base and post-trained open-weight versions are now available on Hugging Face and Liquid's Playground.
AidData has launched the Development Finance Observatory, a platform that aggregates data on cross-border development finance from governments and institutions worldwide. The tool lets users query the data using plain-language questions rather than requiring technical analysis skills, pulling from numerous disparate sources into one searchable system.
Disney+ has launched its new series 'VisionQuest' with a two-episode premiere. The opening episodes introduce an ambitious narrative built around themes of family and humanity, alongside multiple other story threads.
YouTube announced it is expanding its labeling system to flag songs identified as primarily AI-generated on YouTube Music, with plans to extend the labels to the main YouTube app. The company says detection relies on its own tools plus input from music partners, though it hasn't specified how much AI content a track needs to qualify.
During a hearing, OpenAI voluntarily agreed not to use trade secrets Apple claims were stolen, after Judge Edward Davila signaled he was likely to grant Apple's preliminary injunction request. OpenAI also agreed to collect forensic images from 14 employees' devices that may contain Apple's confidential information, with the judge empowered to enforce compliance.