Inside the Colosseum's Passage of Commodus, where emperors once walked One theory suggests the infamous Roman emperor survived an assassination attempt in the tunnel now open to the public. From October 2024 to September 2025, a team of experts restored part of the tunnel that's open to visitors for the first time. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. They say all roads lead to Rome . But in the Eternal City, all of the major roads were thought to lead somewhere very specific--a single column called the Milliarium Auereum, or the golden milestone.

Moreover, the model tends to generalize well to unseen tasks that did not appear in the training data.

This intervention significantly improves the performance of LLaMA models on the TruthfulQA benchmark.

Bidets are extremely common in northern Italy, where the Milano Cortina Games are being played. One of the first bidets in Italy was installed at the Palace of Caserta for Queen Maria Carolina in the late 1700s. Bidets are now, once again, having a moment. As international athletes and journalists descend on northern Italy for the 2026 Winter Olympics, certain participants have wondered about the additional piece of equipment in their bathrooms. Europeans, quite familiar with the oval basins, have found themselves similarly perplexed by their confusion.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in his secret hideout these days, knows he is now a marked man. He will not be sitting on his veranda anytime soon. When discussing what the United States might do next to help the protesters in Iran, US President Trump has mentioned Qassem Soleimani and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The former, Iran's all-important military strategist in the Middle East, was killed on 3 January 2020 in a drone strike just outside Baghdad's international airport on the president's order. The latter, who was the leader of IS, killed himself and two children by detonating a suicide vest on 27 October 2019 when US forces raided his hideout in northern Syria after the approval of the president.

Environment Animals Wildlife 14,000-year-old woolly rhinoceros DNA extracted from wolf's stomach The two-horned prehistoric mammal went extinct about 8,700 years ago. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Towards the end of the last ice age, an ancient wolf feasted on a young woolly rhinoceros (). When the wolf died, it ended up buried in Siberian permafrost for about 14,000 years until it was uncovered by paleontologists in 2015. Luckily for scientists, some woolly rhinoceros tissue remained inside of the wolf's stomach.

With human help, the mammals can defy'the world's most fundamental natural boundaries.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Despite not exactly being world-renowned swimmers, pigs have spread across the Asia-Pacific region for thousands of years . With the genetic and archeological data from over 700 pigs, a team of scientists documented how people helped the mammals make their way across thousands of miles. "This research reveals what happens when people transport animals enormous distances, across one of the world's most fundamental natural boundaries," evolutionary geneticist and study co-author author Dr. David Stanton of the University of Cardiff and Queen Mary University of London said in a statement. "These movements led to pigs with a melting pot of ancestries. These patterns were technically very difficult to disentangle, but have ultimately helped us understand how and why animals came to be distributed across the Pacific islands."

Reliable estimation of feature contributions in machine learning models is essential for trust, transparency and regulatory compliance, especially when models are proprietary or otherwise operate as black boxes. While permutation-based methods are a standard tool for this task, classical implementations rely on repeated random permutations, introducing computational overhead and stochastic instability. In this paper, we show that by replacing multiple random permutations with a single, deterministic, and optimal permutation, we achieve a method that retains the core principles of permutation-based importance while being non-random, faster, and more stable. We validate this approach across nearly 200 scenarios, including real-world household finance and credit risk applications, demonstrating improved bias-variance tradeoffs and accuracy in challenging regimes such as small sample sizes, high dimensionality, and low signal-to-noise ratios. Finally, we introduce Systemic Variable Importance, a natural extension designed for model stress-testing that explicitly accounts for feature correlations. This framework provides a transparent way to quantify how shocks or perturbations propagate through correlated inputs, revealing dependencies that standard variable importance measures miss. Two real-world case studies demonstrate how this metric can be used to audit models for hidden reliance on protected attributes (e.g., gender or race), enabling regulators and practitioners to assess fairness and systemic risk in a principled and computationally efficient manner.

Arabic is one of the world's most widely spoken languages with at least 400 million speakers, including 200 million native speakers and 200 million to 250 million non-native speakers. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) serves as the formal language for government, legal matters and education, and it is widely used in international and religious contexts. Additionally, more than 25 dialects are spoken primarily across the Middle East and North Africa. The date was chosen to mark the day in 1973 on which the UN General Assembly adopted Arabic as one of its six official languages. In the following visual explainer, Al Jazeera lists some of the most common words in today's English language that originated from Arabic or passed through Arabic before reaching English.

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.