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Used electric cars now offer buyers the LOWEST lifetime cost of ownership, study claims

Daily Mail - Science & tech

A simple trick cured my tinnitus after a long-haul flight left me in misery for months. Here's the miracle method I wish everyone knew I was diagnosed with cancer after strange things began happening to my hands - here are the symptoms you can't ignore Explosive twist in'diva' inmate Bryan Kohberger's life in prison revealed in the FREE The Crime Desk newsletter Marco Rubio'cocoons like a mummy' in bizarre strategy to hide naps from Trump Food Network star Valerie Bertinelli's heartbreaking struggles laid bare after confession about shock firing Devastating truth about Blind Side actor Quinton Aaron: More to this'than everyone is letting on', friends reveal... as co-star Sandra Bullock'monitors' situation Mother hit by unimaginable triple tragedy after'son, 6, fell through icy pond and brothers aged 8 and 9 jumped in to save him' Sydney Sweeney shows off her bombshell curves in racy lingerie to promote her new SYRN line - as it's revealed Hollywood Sign bra stunt could leave her facing trespassing and vandalism charges Lawyer, 44, who died on flight to London after falling asleep on her mother's shoulder had undiagnosed cardiac condition, inquest hears Top Citi banker displayed'sexually charged' behavior towards female underling and let co-workers think they were having affair, harassment lawsuit alleges Revealed: Tupac Shakur's'crack fiend mama' lived in'SCARY' houseboat community full of drug addicts like'Psycho Steve' before shock death My perfect life at $2m Manchester-by-the-Sea mansion took nasty turn when neighbors tried to ban me from getting a gun because of my HUSBAND - now I've had the last laugh Boy, 15, has been missing for two weeks after sneaking away to New York to meet stranger he'd chatted to on Roblox Nicola Peltz could barely speak Victoria Beckham's name, says interviewer who quizzed her about THAT wedding dress row in explosive new chapter of family feud Doctor who was branded'tone deaf' for flaunting her Louboutin heels at work furiously hits back at critics Used electric vehicles (EVs) now offer buyers the best value over the entire lifetime of the car, a study claims. According to experts from the University of Michigan, compared to a new mid-sized SUV with an internal combustion engine, a three-year-old EV version offers lifetime savings of £9,486 ($13,000). In comparison, buying a used petrol version would only save you £2,190 ($3,000) over the car's lifetime. However, the researchers point out that this difference is primarily driven by how fast EVs lose their value compared to other power systems.


World Economic Forum at Davos 2026: Dates, location and what to expect

Al Jazeera

The World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting kicked off in the Swiss resort city of Davos on Monday, with global figures from politics, business, academia and civil society attending the five-day event. The annual forum that attempts to shape global agendas comes at a time of massive global upheaval. United States President Donald Trump will attend the annual event along with other global leaders. His attendance comes amid strained US ties with its European allies over his threat to take over Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. Here is more about the WEF and what to expect at the meeting.


Zelenskyy denies Russian claim of Ukrainian strike on Putin residence

Al Jazeera

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Volodymyr Zelenskyy quickly denied a claim by Moscow that his country's military launched a drone attack on Vladimir Putin's residence in the city of Novgorod. The Ukrainian leader accused Russia of trying to derail peace talks a day after Zelenskyy met with US President Donald Trump.


Ukrainian soldiers target Russian drones with rifles

Al Jazeera

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Video released by the Ukrainian military showed soldiers shooting down small Russian drones with their rifles near the small Donetsk village of Kostiantynivka. Russian forces have made steady yet costly gains in the region, claiming on Monday to have captured nearby Dibrova.


What the evolution of tickling tells us about being human

New Scientist

From bonobos and rats to tickling robots, research is finally cracking the secrets of why we're ticklish, and what that reveals about our brains In a grey-walled room in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, a strange activity is underfoot. Wearing a cap covered in sensors and positioning themselves into a chair, a person places their bare feet over two holes in a platform. Beneath this lies a robot, which uses a metal probe to begin to tickle their soles. Here, at Radboud University's Touch and Tickle lab, volunteers are being mercilessly tickled in the name of science. "We can manipulate how strong the stimulation is, how fast and where it is going to be applied on your foot," says Konstantina Kilteni, who runs the lab, of the robot tickling experiment.

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Deadly attack on kindergarten reported in Sudan

BBC News

A drone attack on the town of Kalogi, in Sudan's South Kordofan region, is said to have hit a kindergarten and killed at least 50 people, including 33 children. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group battling the army in Sudan's civil war, was accused of Thursday's attack by a medical organisation, the Sudan Doctors' Network, and the army. There was no immediate comment from the RSF. The RSF in turn accused the army of hitting a market on Friday in a drone attack in the Darfur region, on a fuel depot at the Adre border crossing with Chad. Sudan has been ravaged by war since April 2023 when a power struggle broke out between the RSF and the army, who were formerly allies .


The changing surface of the world's roads

Randhawa, Sukanya, Randhawa, Guntaj, Langer, Clemens, Andorful, Francis, Herfort, Benjamin, Kwakye, Daniel, Olchik, Omer, Lautenbach, Sven, Zipf, Alexander

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Resilient road infrastructure is a cornerstone of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Yet a primary indicator of network functionality and resilience is critically lacking: a comprehensive global baseline of road surface information. Here, we overcome this gap by applying a deep learning framework to a global mosaic of Planetscope satellite imagery from 2020 and 2024. The result is the first global multi-temporal dataset of road pavedness and width for 9.2 million km of critical arterial roads, achieving 95.5% coverage where nearly half the network was previously unclassified. This dataset reveals a powerful multi-scale geography of human development. At the planetary scale, we show that the rate of change in pavedness is a robust proxy for a country's development trajectory (correlation with HDI = 0.65). At the national scale, we quantify how unpaved roads constitute a fragile backbone for economic connectivity. We further synthesize our data into a global Humanitarian Passability Matrix with direct implications for humanitarian logistics. At the local scale, case studies demonstrate the framework's versatility: in Ghana, road quality disparities expose the spatial outcomes of governance; in Pakistan, the data identifies infrastructure vulnerabilities to inform climate resilience planning. Together, this work delivers both a foundational dataset and a multi-scale analytical framework for monitoring global infrastructure, from the dynamics of national development to the realities of local governance, climate adaptation, and equity. Unlike traditional proxies such as nighttime lights, which reflect economic activity, road surface data directly measures the physical infrastructure that underpins prosperity and resilience - at higher spatial resolution.


The World Cup draw is here - this is how it will work

BBC News

Pots, quadrants, confederation constraints, group position grids... the 2026 World Cup finals draw on Friday is not going to be a straightforward affair. There's a lot to unpack so we're going to explain it as simply as we can. Luckily, Fifa will have a computer to do most of the heavy lifting and make sure everything runs smoothly. Though as Uefa found out in 2021, sometimes technology does go wrong. Let's hope there will be no gremlins in Washington once the draw ceremony kicks off.


Beyond the Rubric: Cultural Misalignment in LLM Benchmarks for Sexual and Reproductive Health

Dey, Sumon Kanti, S, Manvi, Mehta, Zeel, Shah, Meet, Agrawal, Unnati, Jalota, Suhani, Ismail, Azra

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been positioned as having the potential to expand access to health information in the Global South, yet their evaluation remains heavily dependent on benchmarks designed around Western norms. We present insights from a preliminary benchmarking exercise with a chatbot for sexual and reproductive health (SRH) for an underserved community in India. We evaluated using HealthBench, a benchmark for conversational health models by OpenAI. We extracted 637 SRH queries from the dataset and evaluated on the 330 single-turn conversations. Responses were evaluated using HealthBench's rubric-based automated grader, which rated responses consistently low. However, qualitative analysis by trained annotators and public health experts revealed that many responses were actually culturally appropriate and medically accurate. We highlight recurring issues, particularly a Western bias, such as for legal framing and norms (e.g., breastfeeding in public), diet assumptions (e.g., fish safe to eat during pregnancy), and costs (e.g., insurance models). Our findings demonstrate the limitations of current benchmarks in capturing the effectiveness of systems built for different cultural and healthcare contexts. We argue for the development of culturally adaptive evaluation frameworks that meet quality standards while recognizing needs of diverse populations.


The SA-FARI Dataset: Segment Anything in Footage of Animals for Recognition and Identification

Wasmuht, Dante Francisco, Brookes, Otto, Schall, Maximillian, Palencia, Pablo, Beirne, Chris, Burghardt, Tilo, Mirmehdi, Majid, Kühl, Hjalmar, Arandjelovic, Mimi, Pottie, Sam, Bermant, Peter, Asheim, Brandon, Toh, Yi Jin, Elzinga, Adam, Holmberg, Jason, Whitworth, Andrew, Flatt, Eleanor, Gustafson, Laura, Ryali, Chaitanya, Hu, Yuan-Ting, Guo, Baishan, Westbury, Andrew, Saenko, Kate, Suris, Didac

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Automated video analysis is critical for wildlife conservation. A foundational task in this domain is multi-animal tracking (MAT), which underpins applications such as individual re-identification and behavior recognition. However, existing datasets are limited in scale, constrained to a few species, or lack sufficient temporal and geographical diversity - leaving no suitable benchmark for training general-purpose MAT models applicable across wild animal populations. To address this, we introduce SA-FARI, the largest open-source MAT dataset for wild animals. It comprises 11,609 camera trap videos collected over approximately 10 years (2014-2024) from 741 locations across 4 continents, spanning 99 species categories. Each video is exhaustively annotated culminating in ~46 hours of densely annotated footage containing 16,224 masklet identities and 942,702 individual bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and species labels. Alongside the task-specific annotations, we publish anonymized camera trap locations for each video. Finally, we present comprehensive benchmarks on SA-FARI using state-of-the-art vision-language models for detection and tracking, including SAM 3, evaluated with both species-specific and generic animal prompts. We also compare against vision-only methods developed specifically for wildlife analysis. SA-FARI is the first large-scale dataset to combine high species diversity, multi-region coverage, and high-quality spatio-temporal annotations, offering a new foundation for advancing generalizable multianimal tracking in the wild. The dataset is available at https://www.conservationxlabs.com/sa-fari.