While sorting your plastic recycling might be frustrating, scientists warn that a lack of waste collection could be deadly for millions around the world. Scientists from the University of Leeds have used AI modelling to reveal the 10 countries responsible for the most plastic pollution. Overall, the researchers calculate that 52 million tonnes of uncollected plastic waste entered the environment in 2020, creating a serious health risk for those exposed. India topped the table as the biggest producer of plastic pollution - creating 9.3 million tonnes of waste in a single year - followed by Nigeria and Indonesia. Lead author Dr Costas Velis says: 'This is an urgent global human health issue -- an ongoing crisis: people whose waste is not collected have no option but to dump or burn it.'

What a wonderful world for all to see. Photographers from around the globe highlighted the best of our planet as part of the open competition for the Sony World Photography Awards 2023. The World Photography Organisation announced last week the best single shots, all taken in 2022, chosen from more than 415,000 submissions from over 200 countries and territories, according to a press release. The competition was split into 10 categories: Architecture, creative, landscape, lifestyle, motion, natural world & wildlife, object, portraiture, street photography and travel. While 10 individual category winners were named -- and they will be awarded Sony digital imaging equipment and the ability to compete for the Open Photographer of the Year title -- finalists were also given honorable mentions.

Combinatorial problems which have been proven to be NP-hard are faced in Higher Education Institutions and researches have extensively investigated some of the well-known combinatorial problems such as the timetabling and student project allocation problems. However, NP-hard problems faced in Higher Education Institutions are not only confined to these categories of combinatorial problems. The majority of NP-hard problems faced in institutions involve grouping students and/or resources, albeit with each problem having its own unique set of constraints. Thus, it can be argued that techniques to solve NP-hard problems in Higher Education Institutions can be transferred across the different problem categories. As no method is guaranteed to outperform all others in all problems, it is necessary to investigate heuristic techniques for solving lesser-known problems in order to guide stakeholders or software developers to the most appropriate algorithm for each unique class of NP-hard problems faced in Higher Education Institutions. To this end, this study described an optimization problem faced in a real university that involved grouping students for the presentation of semester results. Ordering based heuristics, genetic algorithm and the ant colony optimization algorithm implemented in Python programming language were used to find feasible solutions to this problem, with the ant colony optimization algorithm performing better or equal in 75% of the test instances and the genetic algorithm producing better or equal results in 38% of the test instances.