"The Rachel" was the most copied hairstyle of the 1990s. Jennifer Aniston has called it the ugliest haircut she's ever seen, wore it for exactly six months, and needed her hairstylist physically present just to style it.

She once said you'd leave the salon feeling beautiful and alive, then immediately feel screwed because nobody on Earth could recreate what he did.

Millions of women asked for it. The woman whose head it lived on would rather have shaved hers.

What’s in store:

Read Time: 5 minutes

GOOGLE

Your Gemini Gem is moving

Google is phasing out Gems, Gemini’s custom AI assistants, and replacing them with a new feature called Skills.

From 17 November 2026, existing Gems will automatically be converted into Skills.

Google says users won’t need to do anything, and Gems will continue working normally until the change takes effect.

Google launched Gems in 2024 as a way for people to create AI assistants for specific jobs without repeating the same instructions every time.

Its ready-made options included tools for learning, brainstorming, careers, coding and editing, while users could build their own for things like fitness, nutrition or holiday planning.

In brief:

The Gem cut

Gems could also be shared with other people.

The main idea isn’t disappearing. Instead, Google is changing how these custom instructions work inside Gemini.

Once migrated, Skills will be available across different AI tasks rather than existing as their own separate Gemini feature.

The interface is also changing. Google says users will be able to call up a Skill by typing “/” inside a task thread and selecting the one they want.

The move comes as AI companies experiment with broader, multi-purpose agents that can handle several different jobs from one interface.

Quick, do what Claude did! - MV

Vote for live results + see results and opinions from yesterday at the bottom of the email.

AI WORKFLOW

Stop Copy-Pasting CRM Data Into AI — Claude Can Just Read It

Every time you paste a contact record into an AI chat, you're doing a job the machine should handle. The HubSpot connector for Claude pulls your ownHubSpot data directly into every conversation — no tab-switching, no manual context-building.

What it brings into Claude: 

Connect in minutes. From there, your AI answers know your business.

Number Crunch

Two cars leave the same point. One travels north at 50 mph, the other south at 70 mph. How far apart after 3 hours?

Find the answer at the bottom of the email!

That’s Weird

All we need is retro Claude

A developer has somehow got Claude working through a 2007 Nokia with 8 MB of memory. The phone itself isn’t running the model, obviously, but it can send prompts to a server, which talks to Claude and sends the answers back.

The best part is that the developer is now reverse-engineering the phone’s firmware to push it even further. So yes, one of today’s fanciest AI models is now chatting through hardware that probably still has Snake somewhere on it.

AI SCIENCE

The lab assistant never sleeps because, well, software

AI is starting to do more than summarise research. New “AI co-scientist” tools can search papers, compare ideas, suggest hypotheses and help design experiments.

Google’s Co-Scientist was recently given a difficult cancer problem involving MYC, a protein linked to many cancers.

After researchers corrected a few early mistakes, the system searched more than 700 papers and came up with 108 possible approaches before narrowing them down to one unusual idea.

Here’s what you should know:

AI speedran the literature review

These tools are already being tested across biology and medicine.

In one case, Google’s system reached a conclusion about how bacteria exchange DNA in around two days, after researchers had spent years studying the same problem.

But humans are still very much needed.

AI can misunderstand data, suggest weak experiments or come up with ideas that are too expensive or impractical to test.

Scientists still need to ask the right questions, spot mistakes and test the results in the real world.

AI generating an incredible scientific breakthrough and then finding out the PhD budget is £14 and a Tesco meal deal.- MG

Mindstream Picks

Health: A global study of 2.8 million children has linked higher screen time to poorer academic and language development and more emotional and behavioural problems, though experts stress the associations are relatively small.

Gaming: Early footage of The Witcher 3 Remastered on Steam Deck shows improved visuals but some performance issues ahead of the free update’s September 29 release.

Movies: Oasis documentary Don’t Look Back in Anger will arrive on Disney+ and Hulu on October 9, with previously unseen interview footage and full performances of “Wonderwall” and “Slide Away”.

Don’t Miss: Walmart says it will not use customers’ personal data, shopping history, or the time of day to dynamically change prices as it rolls out digital shelf labels across its US stores. CEO John Furner says the technology is designed to save employees time, not charge shoppers different prices.

AI Art

Image of the Day

Daily Image Prompt

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Yesterday’s Poll

“Was OpenAI's delay in disclosing the incident worse than the breach itself?”

Yes, a three-month gap is inexcusable. - 85% ✅

No, a government breach is really bad. - 15%

Your Views:

“You play, you pay! Be accountable!” - maureen

““Can you really trust that this really happened though? So many times we have seen a situation overblown just to prove the need for more legislation” - fran

“Regardless of how bad the breach was, it was made substantially more sinister because of the delay in issuing a notification” - jwros

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