OpenAI published three claimed results on 26 October 2026, including a refutation of a conjecture that hundreds of complexity papers assume to be true. None has been peer-reviewed, and the group checking the refutation is led by the two men who proposed the conjecture.
Merck and Moderna reported a hazard ratio of 0.58 for recurrence-free survival in more than 1,100 patients with completely resected stage IIB to IV melanoma, the first phase 3 evidence that a vaccine built from each patient's own tumour mutations adds to a checkpoint inhibitor.
MMX separated from H3 flight No.10 about 71 minutes after liftoff from Tanegashima. If the five-year plan holds, it will collect at least 10 grams of regolith from the Martian moon Phobos and drop a capsule in Australia in 2031.
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and Italy's National Institute of Health modelled four patterns of behavioural adaptation to heat and found the combined case added 46 lung cancer deaths per 10,000 people in the United States and 42 in a pooled French, German and Italian population, published on 17 October 2026.
A study in Science on 15 October 2026 maps more than 15,000 Antarctic ice cliffs and finds the tall ones collapse faster than models assumed, then restabilise instead of eroding the ice sheet behind them. The authors argue Thwaites Glacier would not retreat immediately even if its shelf failed.
Writing in Nature Physics on 12 October 2026, the group reports nearly 5,000 two-qubit operations alongside nearly 5,000 mid-circuit measurements and resets on a chain of up to 100 qubits. The transition from chaos to control sharpened as the system grew, matching a theory that began with a bet at a birthday party.
Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai share the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for completing a chemical recipe that a Bristol physicist wrote down in 1953. Their work explains how a reaction can produce a single mirror image of a molecule rather than an even mix of both.
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos from beyond the solar system. Identifying which cosmic objects produce them is, on the Academy's own account, work that is only beginning.
Oxford-led researchers surveyed phosphatised microfossils from the Kheseen Biota in northern Mongolia, deposited at a time when animals are known to have existed elsewhere, and found none that can be identified as an animal. That undermines the use of a 590-million-year-old Chinese deposit as a maximum age for animal origins, and shifts molecular clock estimates back into the late Tonian.
Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai share the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for completing a chemical recipe that a Bristol physicist wrote down in 1953. Their work explains how a reaction can produce a single mirror image of a molecule rather than an even mix of both.
