Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi were awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their collective work in the discovery of specialized immune cells that roam the body and keep potentially harmful immune responses in check—preventing them from attacking the body directly (autoimmune responses) or causing harm with overzealous responses to invaders.

Those specialized cells—regulatory T cells—are now well established as playing a key role in peripheral immune tolerance. That is, a non-central process that allows the immune system to strike a delicate balance between being appropriately responsive and aggressive toward intruding germs or foreign dangers while also not running amok.

Before the trio of prize winners came along, researchers thought that such immune tolerance occurred centrally, in the thymus, the primary lymphoid organ that sits in the center of the chest. There, T cells mature, including into two key types: T helper cells, which go on to trigger immune responses when they recognize foreign dangers; and the aptly named T killer cells, which kill cells, including foreign cells, cancer cells, and cells infected by a virus.

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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sent a letter to the nonprofit operator of Wikipedia alleging a pattern of liberal bias in articles on the collaborative encyclopedia.

"I write to request information about ideological bias on the Wikipedia platform and at the Wikimedia Foundation," Cruz wrote to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander in a letter dated October 3. "Wikipedia began with a noble concept: crowdsource human knowledge using verifiable sources and make it free to the public. That's what makes reports of Wikipedia's systemic bias especially troubling."

Citing research from the conservative Manhattan Institute , Cruz wrote that "researchers have found that articles on the site often reflect a left-wing bias." Cruz alleged that "bias is particularly evident in Wikipedia's reliable sources/perennial sources list" because it describes "MSNBC and CNN as 'generally reliable' sources, while listing Fox News as a 'generally unreliable' source for politics and science. The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center gets a top rating, but the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, is a 'blacklisted' and 'deprecated' source that Wikipedia's editors have determined 'promotes disinformation.'"

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At an OpenAI Dev Days keynote today , CEO Sam Altman announced that the company is launching an SDK preview that will allow developers the ability "to build real apps inside of ChatGPT." Altman said that, starting today, the new SDK will give developers "full stack" control over app data, action triggers, and even interactive user interfaces for apps that can appear inline as part of an existing ChatGPT conversation window.

The SDK is built on the open source Model Context Protocol (MCP), Altman said. That means developers that already use MCP only need to add an HTML resource to enable ChatGPT integration, he added.

The new integration means a ChatGPT user can directly ask Figma to turn a sketch into a diagram, for instance, and get results integrated into their ChatGPT conversation. It also means that ChatGPT can suggest apps that might be suited to a more general query, like recommending and creating a Spotify playlist when someone asks for song suggestions.

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“Illusions are fun, but they are also a gateway to perception,” says Hyeyoung Shin, assistant professor of neuroscience at Seoul National University. Shin is the first author of a new study in Nature Neuroscience that has identified a specific population of neurons in the visual cortex—dubbed IC-encoders—and shows their direct role in representing a visual illusion. The work is the result of a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, the Allen Institute in Seattle, and Seoul National University.

What the brain “knows”

Illusory contours are edges we see even though they aren’t physically there. A classic example is the Kanizsa triangle : three “Pac-Man” shapes make us perceive a bright white triangle floating on top. Hide the Pac-Men with your fingers and the trick is revealed: there is no border, just a uniform background. Neurophysiology agrees with perception here: for over 20 years, studies in primates and later imaging in humans and mice have described neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) and higher visual areas that respond both to real and illusory contours.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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The Environmental Protection Agency was sued Wednesday over an allegedly politically motivated decision to end a program that Congress intended to help low-income and disadvantaged communities across the US save money on electricity bills through rooftop and community solar programs.

In their complaint , a group of plaintiffs who would have benefited from the EPA's "Solar for All" program—including a labor union, several businesses, and a homeowner who cannot afford her electricity bills without it—accused the EPA of violating federal law and the Constitution by unlawfully terminating the program.

Solar for All was "expected to save an estimated $350 million annually on energy bills during and after the five-year program, providing energy bill relief for more than 900,000 low-income and disadvantaged households," plaintiffs noted. Additionally, it was "expected to secure 4,000 megawatts of new solar energy over five years and generate 200,000 new jobs."

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The Australian Financial Review reports that Deloitte Australia will offer the Australian government a partial refund for a report that was littered with AI-hallucinated quotes and references to nonexistent research.

Deloitte's "Targeted Compliance Framework Assurance Review" was finalized in July and published by Australia's Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) in August ( Internet Archive version of the original ). The report, which cost Australian taxpayers nearly $440,000 AUD (about $290,000 USD), focuses on the technical framework the government uses to automate penalties under the country's welfare system.

Shortly after the report was published, though, Sydney University Deputy Director of Health Law Chris Rudge noticed citations to multiple papers and publications that did not exist. That included multiple references to nonexistent reports by Lisa Burton Crawford, a real professor at the University of Sydney law school.

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Few modern F1 venues are as dazzling as the Marina Bay circuit in Singapore. If you watch the early practice or the young women of F1 Academy in their races, you'll get an idea of the street circuit's relationship to the city in daylight as it takes in landmarks and crosses the water. At night, the brilliant white ribbon of racetrack throws the rest of the surroundings into darkness. Unlike a Le Mans car, there are no headlights in F1.

Just over 1,600 lights are needed for the job, which got underway in mid-June. They're LED now, a switch made in 2023 that cut energy consumption by a noticeable 30 percent. The light itself is even carefully tuned—a color of 5,700 K and a color rendering index of 90 best replicate daylight for the drivers. Oh, and there can't be any flickering that could affect the TV broadcast. The results look spectacular, especially in 4K.

As for the racing this year? Perhaps not so much. Past Singaporean Grands Prix have tended to be action-packed—or even chaotic. In the inaugural 2008 race, Red Bull came away convinced that electromagnetic interference from an underground train line caused the failure of one of its race cars, as well as a sister car belonging to the team we now call Racing Bulls. Other teams remained worried about this phenomenon as late as 2015, although no similar failures had been recorded. For the record , Singapore's Land Transit Authority says there was no train track below the relevant corner of the circuit—the nearest train tunnel is more than 600 feet away (200 m) and 32 feet (10 m) below ground level.

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On Monday, AMD announced it will supply AI chips to OpenAI in a multi-year deal worth tens of billions of dollars annually that gives the ChatGPT creator an option to acquire up to 10 percent of the chipmaker's stock for 1 cent per share, Reuters reports . The agreement covers hundreds of thousands of AMD's AI graphics processing units over several years starting in the second half of 2026.

The deal marks a major endorsement of AMD's AI hardware and software capabilities as the company competes with Nvidia for dominance in the AI chip market. AMD executives project the agreement will generate more than $100 billion in new revenue over four years from OpenAI and other customers who follow OpenAI's lead.

"We view this deal as certainly transformative, not just for AMD, but for the dynamics of the industry," AMD Executive Vice President Forrest Norrod told Reuters on Sunday. The chipmaker will start booking income from the deal next year when OpenAI starts building a 1 gigawatt facility based on AMD's forthcoming MI450 series chips.

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OpenAI and star designer Jony Ive are grappling with a series of technical issues with their secretive new artificial intelligence device, as they push to launch a blockbuster tech product next year.

The San Francisco-based startup run by Sam Altman acquired the former Apple design chief’s company io for $6.5 billion in May, but the pair have shared few details on the projects they are building.

Their aim is to create a palm-sized device without a screen that can take audio and visual cues from the physical environment and respond to users’ requests.

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