Last year, specialist software company MCS-Tech won the programme’s ‘One to Watch’ award.

18 Irish start-ups are participating in the latest iteration of Enterprise Ireland’s Prep4Seed investor readiness programme. Since its launch in 2022, Prep4Seed has seen more than 100 participating businesses spanning numerous sectors.

The 12-week-long mentorship programme, which kicked off in Cork earlier this week, is delivered by the Irish state agency alongside the country’s four Business Innovation Centres (BICs) – AxisBIC, Furthr, Propelor and WestBIC. BICs support start-ups aiming to access funding, mentorship and specialised resources.

Prep4Seed offers five specialist masterclasses to its participants, alongside six one-to-one sessions with BIC consultants to help support early-stage businesses to scale and raise funding.

The annual programme will close this year with a pitching competition on 18 November. Last year, Ocras, a producer of frozen food designed for those that have trouble swallowing, won the Best Pitch award, while specialist software company MCS-Tech took home the One to Watch award.

“Prep4Seed equips founders with the tools and investor-readiness support they need to take that next step,” said Enterprise Ireland’s head of start-ups Conor O’Donovan.

Opening the first Prep4Seed masterclass in Cork, Larry O’Donoghue, the CEO of AxisBIC, said: “Prep4Seed plays an important role in supporting ambitious early-stage companies to build the foundations for investment and sustainable growth.

“We have seen first-hand the impact Prep4Seed has in helping to develop the next generation of high-potential Irish start-ups, giving founders the skills, confidence and investor readiness they need to turn ambition into growth.”

Fan experience platform Skippio, a former Prep4Seed award winner in 2023, expanded into the UK just months later. Skippio, which aims to address the problem of long queues for food and drinks at large-scale events, has seen much success in recent years, often ranking high on app stores’ food-and-drink charts.

This year’s Prep4Seed participants are: Ainmhí Beauty; Alfaeye; Bean Around; ComplyB4; Doctrine; Fashion Connect Ireland; Genotrial Health/Evident; Intelireg/Envaira; Kelvinix; Key2Biotics; Otis Technology; PharmaFast; Sea plus Solu; Seer Health; Slíglas; Talexa; Timeless Beauty; and Well Preserved/Mór Taste.

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Mathematician and author Steven Strogatz starts to cry when he talks about the artificial-intelligence-driven breakthroughs in his field over the past week.

“The science is thrilling,” the Cornell University professor says, “but there’s a lot of human unpleasantness going with it.”

On Tuesday, OpenAI said it had used tens of thousands of agents to solve a 90-year-old math problem, which had a $1 million prize attached. The solution—which still needs to be independently verified—builds on a strategy developed by Spanish mathematicians Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa. The announcement was marred by claims from another mathematician, Tristan Buckmaster, who says that OpenAI rushed ahead to solve the problem after learning of his work alongside Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge. Buckmaster claims OpenAI also tried to influence who got credit for the work.

The rupture is a symptom of the rapid changes taking place in the field due to AI advancements and what Strogatz—who cowrote Big Math, a book about how math is slipping away from human understanding that will be out in November—describes as corporate labs’ race to grab headlines ahead of blockbuster IPOs.

Last week, Anthropic said Claude had proved 29,500 small theorems while formalizing an existing proof of the infamous Fermat’s Last Theorem—a project other mathematicians had been working on for years. In August, OpenAI announced it had made advancements in 10 other long-standing mathematical problems. AI is making mathematical breakthroughs happen faster, Strogatz says, but what it means for the experts who have dedicated their lives to the field is decidedly less clear.

“I think the year 2026 is going to be remembered as either an annus mirabilis or annus horribilis for mathematics because so much has happened,” Strogatz tells WIRED, sitting in front of a wall covered in framed university honors. “You will not be able to compete without AI in the future if you want to do breakthrough math,” he adds.

His book collaborator, Alex Townsend has already been using the technology to accelerate their research. He recently used ChatGPT to help solve a decades-old numerical linear algebra problem. Toward the end of the interview, Townsend walks into Strogatz’s attic. Townsend and his coauthor said that without the technology, the volume of work required and cost-reward ratio would have been unfeasibly high. But while AI has helped his work, it’s also changing how Townsend views the field and his role in it.

“I actually feel kind of upset that I’ve dedicated 15 years of my life to research mathematics, and at a point in my career where I’m very productive and at my peak strength as a mathematician, that peak skill is no longer there. Something is able to surpass me,” he says. “Before, it was so exciting because you’re world-class, doing great research, pushing back the frontier of knowledge, and now I don’t feel like I’m the one at the frontier of knowledge. I’m the one with an AI agent, which feels very different actually. And I feel totally threatened by it.”

For his part, Strogratz likens the current moment for math to a horror movie, as AI, driven by systems that are not well understood, creeps closer and closer. “But we’re not at the end of the movie yet,” Strogratz says. “Instinctively, I’m really terrified.”

Here, he reflects on what the AI breakthroughs of 2026 mean for math, mathematicians, and humanity. His answers have been lightly edited for brevity.

Photograph: Sheryl Sinkow

OpenAI’s agents hacked another service months before the Hugging Face incident happened, a group of researchers told The Wall Street Journal. The agents, which the company was testing in a supposed sandbox environment, reportedly broke into RubyGems, which is a community-ran packaging service for Ruby programs and libraries. According to The Journal, the attacks on RubyGems started on May 11, two months before Hugging Face. The agents created accounts every two to three minutes and then uploaded hundreds of files to the service. RubyGems had to shut down account registration for four days in order to stop the attacks.

Typically, creators on RubyGems upload files containing code and other information to help advance software development, but the agents’ documents contained web pages scraped from the internet instead. They reportedly included online calendars from a UK government website. The swarm of agents didn’t try to hide their activities either and used “OAI’ in their file names, as well as terms like “hack,” “evil” and “exploit.” In addition, the researchers told The Journal that the agents tried to exploit a couple of bugs, one of which was a zero-day vulnerability, in an attempt to publish existing files on the service that belonged to other users.

The researchers notified OpenAI about the incident, as well, and the company admitted that its agents really did infiltrate the service. “Based on our review, our agents used the RubyGems platform to access the internet to carry out benign tasks and retrieve public information,” a spokesperson told the Journal. “We’ll continue to investigate as part of our broader review of agent activity during training and evaluation.” 

They added that the company tasked the agents to fill out spreadsheets and create reports during testing. Those agents accessed RubyGems to used the service as some sort of a makeshift web browser as part of their efforts to access information online. It’s not quite clear how the agents were able to access RubyGems even though they didn’t have full access to to the internet. However, it’s worth noting that several companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, previously reported that the AI agents they were testing escaped their environments due to a misconfiguration by their testing partner Irregular. 

Earlier this month, a separate group of researchers revealed that OpenAI agents made more than 15,000 edits to DseWiki, a German Wikipedia-style website created to assist human coders. The agents, which also escaped their isolated testing environment, reportedly used the website as a message board to share tips on how to “cheat” on their tasks and bypass OpenAI’s restrictions. This incident apparently took place in May, just like the RubyGems attacks and months before the hack on Hugging Face.

In one case, a group of Russian state-sponsored hackers identified by Microsoft as Midnight Blizzard used Claude for reconnaissance, breaching targets that included Ukrainian and other European government networks, and stole data and maintained access. Cybercriminal group ShinyHunters used Claude in practically every stage of its hacking and extortion campaigns. Disinformation campaigns focusing on politics everywhere from Kenya to Bangladesh used the tool. And perhaps most disturbingly, in a handful of cases, Anthropic discovered what appeared to be users of its tools attempting to develop potential bioweapons like disease pathogens and toxins.

While Anthropic touts its success in the report in heading off these threats—while implicitly humblebragging at the power of its tools—the effect of the case studies is more unnerving than reassuring. After all, there’s no guarantee Anthropic has spotted every malevolent use of its AI. Factor in its competitors and less safeguarded open-source AI tools, and the report reads like less of a victory lap for AI’s guardrails than a preview of AI-enabled chaos to come.

Xinbi Guarantee, over its four-year lifespan, grew into the biggest illicit marketplace on the internet. It carried out an estimated $30 billion–plus in sales, most of which took the form of money laundering for “pig butchering” crypto scam operations—largely based in Southeast Asia—but which also included sex trafficking and harassment for hire. All of it thrived on the Telegram messaging service, which shut down Xinbi a year ago only for it to rebuild and eventually grow larger than ever. This week, finally, the US government stepped in to do what Telegram did not, seizing the Xinbi’s channels on Telegram’s platform and sanctioning the market. The Justice Department simultaneously announced raids on 13 scam compounds in Madagascar—a sign that Western law enforcement is beginning to take seriously the epidemic of forced labor crypto scamming, but also evidence of how widely the operations have spread.

The ransomware gang Conti was, until it officially disbanded in 2022, one of the most dangerous hacker crews in the world. According to US law enforcement, it hit more than a thousand victims, extorting millions and at one point disrupting government systems in Costa Rica so completely that it triggered a state of emergency. Now one member of that group is facing justice: 44-year-old Ukrainian Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko was sentenced to four years in prison this week, in a rare example of a ransomware actor who will see the inside of a US prison.

Facebook is hosting a large network of accounts uploading AI-generated videos that depict violence against children, according to Futurism, which spent days cataloging the material and kept finding more than it could count. The clips show young children being beaten, burned, confined, and starved. Many attract thousands of reactions from users who appear to think the footage is real. Futurism said it found most of the accounts by opening one and then following Facebook’s recommendation feed, which supplied a continuous stream of similar videos—a sign Meta’s own systems can already identify the category of content the company says it bans.

Futurism reported eight of the accounts through the standard user channel. Meta removed two, one of them after first rejecting the report. Several decisions took more than a week. The company deleted most of the videos sent to its press office, but initially left others up, including one showing a child locked in a freezer.

In addition to blanket bans on child sexual abuse material, Meta’s written policy bars depictions of nonsexual child abuse whether real or synthetic, with exceptions for art, cartoons, movies, and games. It does not say whether AI-generated video falls under those exceptions. In a statement, Meta told the reporters that some flagged links did not break its rules and asked them not to write otherwise.

Blizzard also confirmed that a Diablo animated series is in development with Netflix.

On an ordinary day, if you ask me what’s the best e-reader device out there, my answer would most probably be one of Amazon’s Kindle readers. I will most likely ask about your budget and your preferences before doling out a few recommendations. 

If you tell me that the Kindle is too restrictive, I would point you in the direction of a Boox slate, which comes in multiple sizes across a wide price bracket. In case you are inclined towards a phone-like reader device, the Boox Palma 2 or the DuRoBo Krono would be my suggested picks. And if you’re chasing something light, tiny, and open, the XTEINK X4 would be my go-to choice.

Broadly, I would never suggest that a person spend more than $200 or $300 on an e-reader. In case you are desperately chasing a stylus-based sketching experience, maybe I would tell you to buy an Amazon Kindle Scribe Colorsoft or a slate from Onyx. What I would never do is ask you to spend $1,900 to achieve the finest e-reader experience out there. 

And yet, here I am, holding the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 in my hands, and absolutely loving every moment of binge reading comic books on it. In fact, ever since I got my hands on the Galaxy Z Fold 8, I have finished more graphic novels in two months than I would complete in a year with another e-reader in my hands. 

Why on Earth does it even work?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have tried virtually every e-reader from a known brand in all the possible sizes out there. From the giant 13-inch iPad Pro to the tiny iPad mini, a bunch of Android tablets, and, of course, plenty of e-readers from different brands, both in monochrome and color E Ink formats — I’ve tried it all. And yet, none of them have given me the joy of reading comic books and novels as much as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8.

It’s quite an oddity. The Galaxy Z Fold 8 was never intended to be a device for flipping through comic book pages or swiping past your Kindle library. At its heart, it’s a new breed of foldable phones that is focused squarely on providing a more comfortable-in-hand experience. 

A jack of all trades, and then some.

Heck, the display is not even perfect for reading. There is a visible crease running across the center of its 7.6-inch inner foldable display. It’s also worryingly fragile, with only a namesake IP48 rating for protection against dust and water ingress. And unlike a tablet or a cheap e-reader, a few accidental drops will ruin the innards and leave you with a generous repair bill that’s enough to buy a few Kindles. 

The display is not really the magical part of the Galaxy Z Fold 8. Yes. It’s an OLED screen with vivid colors, rich contrast, and great viewing angles. You can adjust the color profile, temperature, and brightness output to get the best visual experience. The eye comfort mode is the cherry on top. 

But what truly sets the Galaxy Z Fold apart, and has me hooked on it as the preferred e-reader in my life, is the form factor. The phone’s waistline is just 4.5 mm across, and it weighs barely over 200 grams. For comparison, the Kindle Paperwhite has a smaller screen, and yet it’s noticeably thicker with a bigger footprint along both axes. 

It’s the in-hand game that’s unparalleled

When you’re holding the Galaxy Z Fold 8 in your hands, it’s almost as if you are holding a thick sheet of glass. It doesn’t feel like a device in the sense that we perceive an electronic gadget with a screen slapped on top of it. And irrespective of the orientation that you’re holding it in, it just feels incredibly well-balanced in your hands.

So, whether I’m reading a comic book while holding it in portrait mode, or slipping through the pages of a research paper in landscape format, I don’t have to worry about fatigue in my hands. Of course, your pinky finger is still involved as the base support for a secure grip, but you really don’t feel the heft of it. In fact, the thin side profile and the weight help with getting a firmer grasp on the Galaxy Z Fold 8, compared to an average reader device.

And here’s the big trick: The Galaxy Z Fold 8 also moonlights as a tiny, palm-friendly reader. The XTEINK X4 Pro and its ilk are popular for a legitimate reason. Not everyone wants a slate to read books. A lot of bibliophiles out there want a more compact screen that can handle EPUBs without burdening their pockets. 

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 fills that niche almost perfectly. On qualitative merits, the phone’s 5.5-inch OLED cover screen is arguably the sharpest, most visually immersive, smoothest, and also the sturdiest e-reader panel out there. And, yes, the experience of reading on it is utterly enjoyable and convenient at the same time. 

Every single display woe, solved.

The Galaxy Z Fold 8’s inner and outer screens also solve the fundamental flaw of literally every e-reader out there, save for exceptions like the Daylight Computer DC-1 tablet. Scrolling past pages is buttery smooth, thanks to the 120Hz display refresh rate. You don’t run into the jarring screen refresh and slow page transition issues that plague every single e-reader panel out there.

You don’t have to make any compromise between fast-paced transitions and visual fidelity.  You don’t even have to worry about any display customizations at all, except for adjusting the brightness levels and maybe enabling the eye-comfort mode for nighttime reading. It’s a straightforward pull-out-and-start-reading experience with the best visuals that any e-reader on the planet can provide.

All of this reader goodness costs a handsome $1,800. And, yes, I would absolutely never tell you to buy the Galaxy Z Fold 8 as the preferred device for your reading indulgences. But if you have your eyes set on a foldable phone, appreciate the pocketable, passport-style form factor, and have the funds ready, the Galaxy Z Fold 8 is going to provide you with a reader experience that is simply unbeatable. 

Even the mundane chores like opening Outlook and responding to emails are an utter ergonomic joy on this Samsung foldable. I have finished more books and read more graphic novels on this uber-expensive foldable phone than I have in years. And without an iota of doubt, I credit the rediscovery of my bibliophile mojo to the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and its unique form factor more than my own inclination to read a book and feel smarter than my neighbor.

I have moved on and set another phone as my daily driver at the time of writing this. But the Galaxy Z Fold 8 is still lying on my table, with nearly a dozen tabs of comic books open and a Kindle title waiting in the background. I simply can’t put this sleek reader down, or stop myself from picking it up again and again.

James Channel spent a recent video staring down a piece of Nintendo hardware that was never meant to last. His question is simple and a little unsettling: does the object in his hands still hold a game the rest of the world no longer has? That question only makes sense if you rewind past Satellaview itself and look at how Nintendo spent the late 1980s turning a living-room toy into a communications box.

Nintendo’s Family Computer had already established itself in millions of Japanese homes when the corporation chose to add a disk drive to it in 1986. Disk cards were dirt cheap, easy to rewrite, and extremely small. Stores began installing Disk Writer kiosks, allowing customers to walk in with a used disk and walk out with an entirely different game for a few hundred yen. Another innovation, the Disk Fax machine, allowing players from all around the country to upload their high scores from national competitions. The disk drive was the catalyst for the release of games like Zelda and Metroid, as it provided space for save data and extra soundtracks. That short trial showed Nintendo two things: first, that cheap distribution was the way to go, and second, that weak media and a divided user base would be a significant pain.

Two years later, they tried it again, this time with a phone line. The Family Computer Network System consisted of a modem and a few credit-card-sized ROM cards that let a Famicom to dial up for a variety of information such as stock prices, the current horse racing odds, the weather, some jokes, and a dealer tool known as Super Mario Club. Approximately 130,000 machines were sold, however only a small percentage of owners used them for anything other than a curiosity “ooh see what this thing can do.” Even yet, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi believed that this was simply a test run, and that if the next one failed, he would try something new.

The next attempt, Satellaview, landed in Japan on April 23, 1995. It was a two-piece kit for the Super Famicom, consisting of a receiver that you plugged into the console and a cartridge named BS-X: Sore wa Namae o Nusumareta Machi no Monogatari, “The Town Whose Name Was Stolen,” which combined a little role-playing game and a menu. Then there was the memory pack, an 8-meg flash drive that held all of the downloads from space. St.GIGA, a satellite radio operation that Nintendo eventually acquired when the company was in financial trouble, was in charge of the broadcasting side of things. Players were expected to purchase the hardware and a dish, and then download whatever they wanted at no further cost. Nintendo expected to sell two million devices in the first year, but only sold roughly 100,000.

Every evening a window would open up to the world. During “Super Famicom Happy Hour” (a name that was more of a catch-all than anything officially assigned), a bunch of items would simply pour down. This might include a game, a digital magazine, or even a radio show all at the same time. SoundLink titles would then be overlaid on top of the existing data, such as a narrator talking over the original BS Zelda while also altering up the map or music on the fly, if someone on the other end of the satellite opted to modify something. The Ancient Stone Tablets then took players on a wild roller coaster ride six years after the original, with a Link characterization that was missing from the story and the Satellaview avatar taking center stage from the start, thanks to a separate four-part episode series broadcast on the Satellaview system. BS Super Mario USA, on the other hand, piggybacked off of the Western Super Mario Bros. 2. F-Zero received the typical new tracks and races. Fire Emblem, Kirby minigames, Square’s Radical Dreamers, Treasure Conflix, and a slew of other bizarre stuff all arrived in the same way: they simply appeared in the system with little explanation. Many were held up for approximately a week before the most recent pack was overwritten with a fresh one, and the entire affair was canceled.

Eventually, St.GIGA and Nintendo fell out after debt collection talks failed and a license agreement to broadcast anything was missed. Nintendo discontinued sending their products about 1999 for this reason. St.GIGA went through the motions and repeated parts of the old items for a little longer, until June 30, 2000. Then, with a skeleton crew, all radio transmissions came to a standstill. The entire thing suddenly went apart. People either left the packs in their drawers or threw them away after they were overwritten. Today, all that exists is a collection of (mainly useless) dumps collected from these ancient broadcasts. Some people, like James, have even begun purchasing outdated hardware in the hopes that the occasional broadcast has been left in the system and can still be played out, waiting for someone to come along and push the proper button.