The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers announced on 28 October that it had retracted 1,417 conference papers in one batch on 23 October, after an external study linked them to paper mills selling authorship slots. The retraction notices state the papers 'may have been offered for sale,' and Nature's analysis found 1,622 of the 2,062 flagged papers have now been pulled, bringing IEEE's 2026 retraction total to nearly 3,000.
nature.com
· 2026-10-30
A Nature Briefing Chat discusses emerging scientific efforts to study and potentially extend the lifespans of companion animals, mirroring human longevity research. The discussion covers how researchers are applying aging biology, previously focused on humans and lab animals, to pets such as dogs and cats.
nature.com
· 2026-10-30
The co-founder of the UK Metascience Unit, a joint initiative of the UK's science department and UK Research and Innovation launched in 2024, describes experiments run on live funding processes. Tests included appeals to social obligation in reviewer recruitment e-mails (no effect), distributed peer review among applicants (which sped up assessment by expanding the reviewer pool), and ongoing trials of staff desk rejection to screen out non-competitive applications before peer review.
nature.com
· 2026-10-30
Researchers at universities in Türkiye tested plastic tea bags and found that steeping one can release between 555 and 2,498 microplastic particles into the cup. The study indicates this contamination is accompanied by additional chemical or material effects beyond the particle count.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-10-29
Mode has purchased JibJab, the e-card and video company known for its 2004 Bush-Kerry viral video, in a deal valued at up to $29.5 million. The acquisition is part of Mode's broader strategy of buying consumer software businesses and offering users free premium access or other rewards in exchange for sharing their data, including for AI training purposes.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-29
Researchers say emerging quantum computing tools may allow them to reopen scientific and computational problems that were set aside decades ago because classical computers could not handle them. The report notes that quantum computing is frequently discussed alongside artificial intelligence, though the two technologies serve different purposes and address different kinds of problems.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-29
Security researcher Orange Tsai of DEVCORE publicly detailed a Microsoft Edge sandbox-escape exploit chain built entirely from five logic bugs and two Windows features, with no memory corruption or AI assistance involved. The chain earned him $175,000 and 17.5 Master of Pwn points at Pwn2Own Berlin 2026, and he has since presented the full methodology at HITCON and Hexacon.
blog.orange.tw
· 2026-10-29
Court filings in an ongoing lawsuit against Meta have surfaced internal documents, after a judge ruled they were not protected by attorney-client privilege despite the company routing related correspondence through lawyers. The documents reportedly reveal internal plans and research touching on how Meta's products affect young users, adding to litigation alleging the company's products harm minors.
cailinoconnor.substack.com
· 2026-10-28
An investigation found that scientists working for chemical and plastics companies identified potential health risks from microplastics as early as the 1970s. The findings indicate this awareness predates public recognition of microplastics as a contaminant now found throughout human bodies and the environment.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-10-28
Cequence Security's CQ Prime Research found a threat actor impersonating 32 AI bots—including ones mimicking OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Meta—to search organizations for exposed passwords, API keys and cloud credentials. The scanner has run since late September, hit firms across retail, finance, telecom, energy and software, and on Oct. 21 alone reached 48% of Cequence-protected organizations, though nearly all requests were blocked or failed.
darkreading.com
· 2026-10-28
Purdue computer science professor Aniket Bera's IDEAS Lab posted a video showing a quadcopter autonomously following a person through dense woods using only onboard computing, without GPS, maps, or cloud processing. The drone uses an occlusion-prediction method to estimate the target's path when trees block its view, and relies on open-source navigation tools including SUPER and FAST-LIO, originally developed by the University of Hong Kong's MaRS Lab, despite Bera's claim his team built the system from scratch.
techspot.com
· 2026-10-28
Scientists are developing precision psychiatry, an approach that splits broad psychiatric diagnoses into finer subgroups and uses data such as genetics, biometrics and socioeconomic factors to match patients with specific treatments and doses. The goal is to cut down on the current trial-and-error process of prescribing mental-health medications. Some researchers are actively testing these data-driven models, while others caution that clear evidence of benefit is still lacking.
nature.com
· 2026-10-28
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