French drone strikes have killed nearly 40 fighters earlier travelling on motorcycles near Niger's border with Burkina Faso, France's military said on Thursday. In a statement, the French military called the strikes a "new tactical success" for France's counterterrorism efforts in Africa's Sahel region, named Operation Barkhane. "Intelligence obtained from Nigerien units in contact with the column confirmed that the motorcycles belonged to an armed terrorist group moving between Burkina Faso and Niger," Barkhane said in the statement. "In close coordination with Niger's Armed Forces, the Barkhane force conducted several strikes against the column. Nearly 40 terrorists were neutralised."

Scientists think they could have come across the location of the world's oldest campfire - and it's over a million years old. Flint tools and animal bones had been excavated from a quarry in Israel, thought to have been inhabited by our ancient ancestors, Homo erectus. Researchers investigated the ability of these artefacts to absorb ultraviolet (UV) and infrared (IR) radiation – which is affected by burning. They compared the results to those from similar unburnt materials, and concluded that they had been heated to temperatures between 390 F (200 C) and 1100 F (600 C). The team from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel also analysed bits of tusk from of an elephant-like animal that had been found in the same sedimentary layer as the tools.

IT IS ONE of the oldest tropes in science fiction. On June 11th the Washington Post reported that an engineer at Google, Blake Lemoine, had been suspended from his job for arguing that the firm's "LaMDA" artificial-intelligence (AI) model may have become sentient. The newspaper quotes Mr Lemoine as saying: "If I didn't know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I'd think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics." And if not, might another machine do so one day? Arguing about intelligence is tricky because, despite decades of research, no one really understands how the main example--biological brains built by natural selection--work in detail.

Investigating active learning, we focus on the relation between the number of labeled examples (budget size), and suitable querying strategies. Our theoretical analysis shows a behavior reminiscent of phase transition: typical examples are best queried when the budget is low, while unrepresentative examples are best queried when the budget is large. Combined evidence shows that a similar phenomenon occurs in common classification models. Accordingly, we propose TypiClust -- a deep active learning strategy suited for low budgets. In a comparative empirical investigation of supervised learning, using a variety of architectures and image datasets, TypiClust outperforms all other active learning strategies in the low-budget regime. Using TypiClust in the semi-supervised framework, performance gets an even more significant boost. In particular, state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods trained on CIFAR-10 with 10 labeled examples selected by TypiClust, reach 93.2% accuracy -- an improvement of 39.4% over random selection. Code is available at https://github.com/avihu111/TypiClust.

In scientometrics, scientific collaboration is often analyzed by means of co-authorships. An aspect which is often overlooked and more difficult to quantify is the flow of expertise between authors from different research topics, which is an important part of scientific progress. With the Topic Flow Network (TFN) we propose a graph structure for the analysis of research topic flows between scientific authors and their respective research fields. Based on a multi-graph and a topic model, our proposed network structure accounts for intratopic as well as intertopic flows. Our method requires for the construction of a TFN solely a corpus of publications (i.e., author and abstract information). From this, research topics are discovered automatically through non-negative matrix factorization. The thereof derived TFN allows for the application of social network analysis techniques, such as common metrics and community detection. Most importantly, it allows for the analysis of intertopic flows on a large, macroscopic scale, i.e., between research topic, as well as on a microscopic scale, i.e., between certain sets of authors. We demonstrate the utility of TFNs by applying our method to two comprehensive corpora of altogether 20 Mio. publications spanning more than 60 years of research in the fields computer science and mathematics. Our results give evidence that TFNs are suitable, e.g., for the analysis of topical communities, the discovery of important authors in different fields, and, most notably, the analysis of intertopic flows, i.e., the transfer of topical expertise. Besides that, our method opens new directions for future research, such as the investigation of influence relationships between research fields.

Artificial intelligence is nowhere near good enough to address problems facing content moderation on Facebook, according to whistleblower Frances Haugen. Haugen appeared at an event in London Tuesday evening with Daniel Motaung, a former Facebook moderator who is suing the company in Kenya accusing it of human trafficking. Meta has praised the efficacy of its AI systems in the past. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told a Congressional hearing in March 2021 the company relies on AI to weed out over 95% of "hate speech content." In February this year Zuckerberg said the company wants to get its AI to a "human level" of intelligence.

Defence ministers from NATO countries and other parts of the world will convene to discuss weapons deliveries to Ukraine on Wednesday. The meeting comes as Kyiv seeks a significant increase in arms to fight off Russian forces. Ahead of the talks, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said allies would continue to deliver heavy weapons and long-range systems to Ukraine. Since the Russian invasion on February 24, Ukraine has received billions of dollars' worth of weapons and military equipment from at least 28 countries. Twenty-five of the 28 nations providing military assistance to Ukraine are NATO members, including the US and UK, which are supplying Kyiv with sophisticated weapons such as multiple rocket launch systems (MLRS). Despite its growing arsenal, Ukraine, which has an active military personnel of just 200,000, is significantly outgunned by Russian forces.

We've all heard the adage, "Every coin has two sides." The same is true for AI; just as it has benefits, it may also have drawbacks if trained improperly. Microsoft discovered the dangers of developing racist AI, but what happens if the intelligence is actively directed at a poisonous forum? Yannic Kilcher, an AI researcher and YouTuber, trained an AI on 3.3 million postings from 4chan's infamously toxic Politically Incorrect /pol/ board. Kilcher released the AI on the board after implementing the model in 10 bots, which resulted in a wave of hatred.

A machine learning program has been used to distinguish between cancerous and healthy cells by identifying patterns in characteristic combinations of genes.

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