Week ending 11 October 2026

For thousands of years, the night sky has inspired humanity, guided explorers and helped scientists unlock the mysteries of the Universe.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and the International Astronomical Union’s Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky (IAU CPS) have signed an agreement at the International Astronautical Congress to strengthen cooperation and develop technical solutions to keep the sky dark and quiet.

ProPublica’s reporting has found it can delay or outright deny patients’ critical medical care.

The Bombay High Court (HC) on October 1 granted actor Samantha Ruth Prabhu interim protection against AI-generated deepfakes, pornographic content, chatbots impersonating her and unauthorised merchandise.

Justice Jamdar found a “very strong prima facie case” for restraining the misuse of Prabhu’s persona.

Prabhu’s team discovered the misuse in the third week of July 2026, which the order describes as widespread, organised and systematic.

Earlier this year the government of France issued a mandate to replace Windows with Free software.

Scale AI cut 89 tasks from the public SWE-Bench Pro leaderboard and locked its evaluation runtime after an independent preprint found the benchmark gameable.

Scale AI's$29B — Scale AI's, private, latest valuation $29B SWE-Bench Pro V2 cuts the public set from 731 to 642 tasks across 11 repositories, drops 89 tasks the company judged invalid, and adds a 51-task HARD subset drawn from tasks that at least two of five model families failed under a locked protocol 1.

On 7 October 2026, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot and her Crew-12 crewmates will undock from the International Space Station at around 12:05 GMT/14:05 CEST to begin their journey back to Earth.

Sophie and her crewmates are planned to splash down off the coast of California on 8 October at 15:34 GMT/17:34 CEST, where a recovery team will pick the four astronauts up and then return them to solid ground for the first time in nearly eight months.

Ron Wyden is seeking a privacy review report about the HIDTA license plate program.

The Kerala High Court has observed that a public opinion or public objection cannot be considered as a reason to reject an application for explosive license, unless accompanied by a valid ground recognisable in the Explosive Rules.

The petitioner relied on Joy Joseph v District Collector, Kannur and Others [2016 (3) KLT 514] to contend that the public objection, by itself, cannot be taken to reject an application for explosive license.

An Oklahoma oil and gas company plugged a well that disposes of oil production’s toxic byproduct after an investigation by The Frontier and ProPublica revealed that regulators had approved the well in violation of state rules meant to protect public groundwater supplies.

The black spot is not a camera failure, but an expected behaviour of imaging sensors under extreme illumination, known as the Black Sun effect – when the over-saturation of pixels causes very bright areas to appear dark.

Launched in early September with a follow-up experiment, Trisat-S is a mission led by the University of Maribor in cooperation with Slovenian space company SkyLabs and carries six miniature cameras that cover the satellite’s surroundings in all directions.

On 1 October, they announced the completion of a probe that is expected to career into the reddish rock known as Justicia in 2035.

The Emirates Mission to the Asteroid belt (EMA) will observe six asteroids using an array of cameras and spectrometers, which can analyse material composition remotely.

The asteroid mission will be the country’s second interplanetary venture, building on the success of its Hope orbiter, which reached Mars in 2021 after six years of development.

Companies owned by Hungarian oligarch Lőrinc Mészáros — a longtime friend of former prime minister Viktor Orbán — donated heavily to a right-wing influence operation that peddled propaganda online for the ruling Fidesz party, according to a new investigation by ICIJ media partner Direkt36.

Megafon was founded in 2020 to enlist “professional Facebook warriors” to spread conservative ideas, according to the independent media outlet Telex, which found that the organization later outspent both Fidesz and the Hungarian government on political advertising on the platform.

“The responses will be sent to MCA for further examination,” the person added.

India-specific evidence: Evidence of repeated violations or market failures in India before the government imposes preventive obligations.

No transplanting: A study of India’s market structure before adopting rules from other jurisdictions.

Launched two years ago today, the European Space Agency’s Hera mission for planetary defence has been hurtling away from Earth ever since.

Early next Tuesday 15 October Hera will rotate around so that its ring of Orbit Control Thrusters face towards the Didymos system.

Following a busy few days of checks and calculations, the telecommand sequence for a second shorter braking manoeuvre, BRM-2, will be uplinked to Hera to be implemented on the early morning of Thursday 22 October.

The National Medical Commission (NMC) has prohibited registered medical practitioners (RMPs) and hospitals from using AI-generated promotional campaigns to further commercial interests where the content misleads audiences, while restricting synthetic endorsements and misleading AI-generated medical content.

The NMC issued its Guidelines on Ethical Advertising and Public Communication by Hospitals/Medical Institutions and Registered Medical Practitioners through a public notice dated 6 October 2026.

The Andhra Pradesh High Court has held that that a donor cannot cancel a registered gift/settlement deed at will once the property has been transferred to the donee.

Section 123 of the Transfer of Property Act, 1882 requires a gift of immovable property to be made through a registered instrument, while Section 126 permits revocation only in specified circumstances and not at the donor's mere will.

Scientists using the European Space Agency's Mars Express, in combination with a state-of-the-art meteorological model of the Red Planet, have found that there may be some very exotic physics behind Mars’s most curious cloud.

While some aspects of the modelled cloud don’t exactly match the observations, “the result is remarkable,” says Jorge.

The spacecraft has now added another crucial piece to this puzzle by tracing a switchback back to its source at the Sun.

Closed regions have lines that initially extend into space before curving back to the Sun, creating closed loops.

Court said lawyers are increasingly disregarding its orders and using apologies to escape consequences.

The Bombay High Court has ordered the Bar Council of Maharashtra & Goa (BCMG) to weed out advocates who willfully and casually refuse to obey the court orders and to further take a strict action against such advocates and give a clearly strong message to the members not to defy court orders.

The announcement comes three months after a BBC Eye investigation found Instagram running paid ads in India that promoted such material.

Meta said it “actioned” 5.3 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content on Facebook and Instagram in India between January and June 2026, and found more than 98% of it before any user reported it.

Destination checks: Meta said it now examines “where an ad leads, not only what it shows.”

The investigation found an annual total of up to 608bn litres of industrial wastewater entering sewage works from sites such as power stations, pharmaceutical plants, food factories, hospitals, abattoirs and waste facilities.

Most sewage works only have biological treatment facilities, which are not designed to remove industrial chemicals, including flame retardants, Pfas, solvents and pharmaceuticals.

While the drafts have been months in the making, their official introduction follows mounting media scrutiny, including a ProPublica investigation last month that showed weaknesses in the guardrails that companies like DraftKings have erected to address problem gamblers on their platforms.

After the oven, the VUV light is separated spatially from the fundamental beams using a Brewster-angle MgF2 prism18 and approximately 5 μW of VUV power is delivered to the front surface of the 229Th:CaF2 crystal with a Gaussian diameter of approximately 1 mm (Fig. 1a,b).

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Online gambling has surged in the U.S. since the Supreme Court allowed states to legalize sports betting in 2018, prompting public health concerns about gambling addiction and calls for stricter consumer protections.

Bankrolled by ProPublica, he mimicked the betting patterns of a problem gambler for 10 weeks, consulting a panel of addiction specialists, recovering gambling addicts and professional sports bettors for advice.