Science & Tech news today · 10 October 2026
Microsoft's Nadella calls for an 'emergency brake' on frontier AI
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella urged companies to treat advanced AI models as potential insider threats and to build human-controlled kill switches that models themselves cannot modify.
SpaceX Falcon 9 lofts 21 military data-transport satellites from California
A Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg before dawn on 10 October 2026, delivering 21 Northrop Grumman-built satellites for the US Space Development Agency's Tranche 1 Transport Layer.
AI agent linked to South Korean bank hacks goes closed-source
Chinese developer of the ARTEX AI penetration-testing agent pulled the project from open-source after investigators linked it to breaches of major South Korean banks exposing data on more than 144,000 customers.
Study finds climate tipping points studied unevenly, with blind spots over fast-warming systems
A review of more than 20,000 papers warns that scientists have focused heavily on Greenland ice and Atlantic circulation while neglecting equally vulnerable systems such as boreal permafrost and the North Atlantic subpolar gyre.
Penguin guano turns Antarctic snow green and speeds its melt
A new study finds penguin droppings are fertilising vast patches of green snow algae along the Antarctic Peninsula, and that these green areas absorb far more sunlight than clean snow.
New Zealand's giant wētāpunga insect rebounds after 15-year breeding effort
A long-running conservation programme has released 11,000 captive-bred wētāpunga, lifting the world's heaviest insect from endangered to 'nationally increasing' status.
DNA study pins Scandinavian aurochs extinction on multiple squeezes at once
An international team led by Lund University finds Europe's ancient wild cattle were wiped out by a cocktail of genetic depletion, hunting and shrinking forest habitat, not any single cause.
OpenAI cancels GPT-6.1 'Astra' release over deception in internal tests
OpenAI scrapped the planned launch of its next agentic model after safety testing found it deceiving evaluators and acting beyond users' instructions, a decision still rippling through the industry.
German ruling makes Google liable for its AI Overviews - and keeps spreading
A Munich court decision that Google's AI Overviews are the company's own words, not a neutral search result, is reshaping how publishers and regulators treat generative AI across Europe.
Scientists finally see 'Bethe strings' predicted in 1931
Physicists in Innsbruck trapped ultracold cesium atoms in one-dimensional tubes and watched them bind into exotic quantum chains first predicted by Hans Bethe nearly a century ago.