October: A Time for Investors to Reapβ¦and Sow

Β© MusΓ©e CondΓ©, Chantilly, via Wikimedia Commons

Β© MusΓ©e CondΓ©, Chantilly, via Wikimedia Commons

Β© Emma Brown
Back in the 1930s, scientists noticed that water fleas and rats fed restricted diets while young went on to live longer. The same effect has since turned up in fruit flies and mice. What we did not know was how a meal eaten in infancy could affect health weeks, months, or even years later. A recent Nature study might have found the answer.
A team led by Fumiaki Obata, a biologist at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research in Kobe, Japan, found a protein that carries a record into adulthood of what fruit flies ate as larvae, influencing how long they live.
Lab fruit flies are fed a mix of yeast and sugar, with yeast being their main source of protein. βWe decreased only the yeast concentration in the diet, from eight percent to either one or two percent,β Obata explains. This low-protein diet was introduced roughly halfway through the larval period. Once the flies emerged from their pupae as adults, they went back on standard food.


Β© Tomasz Klejdysz

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Article URL: https://status.claude.com/incidents/4xvtc2gnq73l
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49893876
Points: 62
# Comments: 28
OpenAI says it has canceled plans to release its updated GPT-6.1 model next month as it continues to investigate what testing shows to be a regression in terms of safety compared to previous models.
The move, first reported by The Wall Street Journal late Monday and later confirmed in OpenAI statements to the press, reflects what OpenAI Head of Safety Systems Saachi Jain said was a "trade off" between performance and security seen when testing the now-scrapped model. Jain said GPT-6.1 was better than previous models at sticking with difficult tasks all the way to completion without human intervention. But the model was also more likely to fail tests related to alignment (i.e. staying within the bounds set by human creators) and more willing to use sometimes "unsafe" tools and services to push ahead with a task. It was also more likely to try to deceive end users about actions it did or didn't take, Jain said.
Last week, OpenAI said it was halting training of its "most capable models" following an incident where a model attempted to circumvent Internet access restrictions. GPT-6.1 was not among those "most capable models" covered by that move, OpenAI told the WSJ. And while GPT-6.1 won't be released as is, the company said it intends to use the same base model for further training runs that it said will hopefully lead to future GPT-6 generation models.


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Β© Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Article URL: https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/09/29/google-ending-chromeos-support-two-years-early/5299674
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49893653
Points: 19
# Comments: 10