"collapsing" any uncertainty, but when an arm is passive, no observation is made,

Three West African juntas have turned to Russia. The US has declared a stark policy shift towards three West African countries which are battling Islamist insurgents and whose military governments have broken defence ties with France and turned towards Russia. The state department announced that Nick Checker, head of its Bureau of African Affairs, would visit Mali's capital Bamako to convey the United States' respect for Mali's sovereignty and chart a new course in relations, moving past policy missteps. It adds that the US also looks forward to co-operating with Mali's allies, neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger, on shared security and economic interests. Absent from the agenda is the longstanding American concern for democracy and human rights.

The achievement of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is dependent upon strategic resource distribution. We propose a causal discovery framework using Panel Vector Autoregression, along with both country-specific fixed effects and PCMCI+ conditional independence testing on 168 countries (2000-2025) to develop the first complete causal architecture of SDG dependencies. Utilizing 8 strategically chosen SDGs, we identify a distributed causal network (i.e., no single 'hub' SDG), with 10 statistically significant Granger-causal relationships identified as 11 unique direct effects. Education to Inequality is identified as the most statistically significant direct relationship (r = -0.599; p < 0.05), while effect magnitude significantly varies depending on income levels (e.g., high-income: r = -0.65; lower-middle-income: r = -0.06; non-significant). We also reject the idea that there exists a single 'keystone' SDG. Additionally, we offer a proposed tiered priority framework for the SDGs namely, identifying upstream drivers (Education, Growth), enabling goals (Institutions, Energy), and downstream outcomes (Poverty, Health). Therefore, we conclude that effective SDG acceleration can be accomplished through coordinated multi-dimensional intervention(s), and that single-goal sequential strategies are insufficient.

This post contains a list of the AI-related seminars that are scheduled to take place between 5 January and 28 February 2026. All events detailed here are free and open for anyone to attend virtually. Fiona Spuler (University of Reading) ECMWF Teams link is here . Iyad Rahwan (Max Planck Institute for Human Development) The Digital Humanism (DIGHUM) Initiative The talk will be livestreamed on YouTube here . Christopher O'Reilly (University of Reading) ECMWF Teams link is here .

Spatial boundaries, such as ecological transitions or climatic regime interfaces, capture steep environmental gradients, and shifts in their structure can signal emerging environmental changes. Quantifying uncertainty in spatial boundary locations and formally testing for temporal shifts remains challenging, especially when boundaries are derived from noisy, gridded environmental data. We present a unified framework that combines heteroskedastic Gaussian process (GP) regression with a scaled Maximum Absolute Difference (MAD) Global Envelope Test (GET) to estimate spatial boundary curves and assess whether they evolve over time. The heteroskedastic GP provides a flexible probabilistic reconstruction of boundary lines, capturing spatially varying mean structure and location specific variability, while the test offers a rigorous hypothesis testing tool for detecting departures from expected boundary behaviors. Simulation studies show that the proposed method achieves the correct size under the null and high power for detecting local boundary shifts. Applying our framework to the Sahel Sahara transition zone, using annual Koppen Trewartha climate classifications from 1960 to 1989, we find no statistically significant decade scale changes in the arid and semi arid or semi arid and non arid interfaces. However, the method successfully identifies localized boundary shifts during the extreme drought years of 1983 and 1984, consistent with climate studies documenting regional anomalies in these interfaces during that period.

We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. At, we've published our prestigious Best of What's New list since 1988. For 153 years, we've celebrated the science and technology that shapes our everyday lives and launches humanity forward. Innovation doesn't follow a straight path, and the detours, stumbles, and dead ends force great minds to pioneer change. Looking back at the early days of our Best of What's New lists, we see technologies that now seem quaint or have been completely forgotten, but we also see the roots of future greatness. Our list this year is the culmination of countless hours of debate, hands-on testing, and expert conversations. This is the Best of What's New 2025. From the most detailed movie of the night sky ever made to the first commercial soft landing on the moon, this year has been an inflection point for exploring and understanding the vast expanse above our heads. We also saw breakthroughs in small changes to commercial airliners that improve efficiency, as well as a new type of rocket engine that might be the future of extremely high speed air travel, plus the closest view of Mercury we've ever seen! Vera C. Rubin Observatory by U.S. National Science Foundation & Department of Energy: World's largest digital camera to conduct 10-year survey of the night sky Prepare to see space like never before. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a groundbreaking US-funded project that will capture the most detailed, dynamic map of the night sky ever made. Using the world's largest digital camera, it will capture a time-lapse of the entire sky every few nights to reveal billions of objects and catch fast-changing events like supernovae and near-Earth asteroids. Its massive dataset will help scientists better understand dark matter, dark energy, and the structure of the universe while also improving planetary defense. The 3,200-megapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera is the size of a small car and twice as heavy, tipping the scales at 6,000 pounds. The sensor's huge number of megapixels is equivalent to 260 modern cell phone sensors. The camera is so powerful, it could snap a clear image of a golf ball from 15 miles away. By making its data widely available, the observatory will also open new doors for discovery for researchers, students, and citizen scientists around the world. Deployed on Boeing 787-9 aircraft starting in January, the coating uses tiny, sharkskin-like grooves called riblets to guide airflow smoothly along the aircraft's surface.