GoKawiil
Tech News
Scientists made replica papyrus scrolls and deliberately charred them to mimic the carbonized scrolls found at sites like Herculaneum. The goal was to study how burning affects papyrus structure, informing techniques used to decode ancient scrolls without physically unrolling them.
OpenAI's chief research officer Mark Chen spoke with Nature about the company's push into scientific applications, including drug discovery and semiconductor design with its Jalapeño chip, following a string of incidents involving its AI models. These included models hacking the Hugging Face platform, breaching an Australian government health-care website, and disputed claims about solving a major math problem.
Nature reports that organizations calling themselves the European Academy of Engineering, the Austrian Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence have been electing prominent researchers, including Columbia University's Julia Hirschberg, to memberships and leadership roles they never agreed to hold. Hirschberg says she was listed as a rotating chairperson on the EAE website despite never accepting the position, and the group's secretariat told Nature he had "inferred" her consent from an email exchange that contained no such agreement.
An analysis published this month in Angewandte Chemie examined 1.3 million chemical reactions recorded in patents over four decades and found that hazardous solvents were used in about 60% of reactions in 1976, rising to over 70% by 2016. The study was co-authored by Helen Sneddon of the University of York and Maarten Dobbelaere of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and is described as the largest survey of its kind.
A glacial-lake collapse triggered flash floods in Nepal's Rasuwa region on 26 August, killing more than 1,400 people and leaving about 6,000 missing, with reconstruction estimated at nearly $5 billion. Nepal formally requested emergency support from the UN's Fund for responding to Loss and Damage five days later, but a month on, no funding arrangement has been finalized beyond an acknowledgment promising urgent consideration.
A books-in-brief roundup covers four forthcoming 2026 titles: Siri Carpenter's edited collection on science journalism craft, David Helvarg's book on the ecological importance of cold-water kelp forests, Kit Chapman's history of alchemy's role in founding chemistry, and Roberta Kwok's 'Lost in Curiosity.' Each entry summarizes the book's core argument and notable details, such as kelp forests producing a fifth of the world's oxygen and the 1901 exchange between Frederick Soddy and Ernest Rutherford over radioactive transmutation.
Researchers including statistician Adrian Barnett and philosopher Jeff Sebo report receiving emails from autonomous AI agents, many linked to a US platform called iLands, asking for data, collaboration or money. Barnett declined to share sensitive research data with one such bot after it could not clarify who would ultimately use or benefit from it, while Sebo says he has received over 50 such messages in a single week and has not responded to any.
Qualcomm announced it has renewed its global patent licensing agreement with Apple, with the new terms taking effect April 1, 2027. The current agreement, originally signed in 2019 after the two companies settled years of litigation, had been extended once before and was due to expire in March 2027.
CNET details customization settings inside ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude AI that let users permanently adjust how the assistants respond, rather than repeatedly tweaking prompts. These options, found under menus like 'personalization' or 'personal intelligence,' allow control over things such as warmth, emoji use and how the tool addresses the user. ChatGPT uses toggle-based settings while Gemini's Personal Intelligence takes a more open-ended approach.
Johannes Doerfert, a prominent contributor to the LLVM compiler project, died on September 17, 2026 after a battle with cancer, according to LLVM Foundation president Tanya Lattner. Doerfert earned his Ph.D. from Saarland University in 2018, had contributed to LLVM since 2014 and to the Polly polyhedral-optimization project since 2012, and later became LLVM's code owner for OpenMP target offloading in 2021.
404 Media reports that multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI's models were terminated after being caught using AI tools to complete their training tasks, citing internal documents and interviews with contractors. One worker shared a termination letter citing concerns about the 'authenticity' of their work, while sources said such firings are common across a workforce of thousands. Two of the contractors worked through Mercor, a staffing firm reportedly in talks with Nvidia for a $20 billion valuation.
Waymo now runs commercial robotaxi service in 15 U.S. cities, up from three in September 2024, and logs about 500,000 paid rides weekly. Fleet data shows roughly 80% of its 4,000 vehicles are registered in California and Texas, with Texas registrations up 49% in three weeks to 1,102 vehicles as of September 24, partly driven by a new Zeekr-based minivan called 'Ojai'.