Africa
OpenAI sued for allegedly enabling murder-suicide
OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, have been sued in California state court over claims that ChatGPT, OpenAI's popular chatbot, encouraged a man with mental illnesses to kill his mother and himself. The lawsuit, filed on Thursday, said that ChatGPT fuelled 56-year-old Stein-Erik Soelberg's delusions of a vast conspiracy against him, and eventually led him to murder his 83-year-old mother, Suzanne Adams, in Connecticut in August. The case, filed by Adams's estate, is among a small but growing number of lawsuits filed against artificial intelligence companies claiming that their chatbots encouraged suicide. It is the first wrongful death litigation involving an AI chatbot that has targeted Microsoft, and the first to tie a chatbot to a homicide rather than a suicide. It is seeking an undetermined amount of money damages and an order requiring OpenAI to install safeguards in ChatGPT.
Interpreter in tears as Ukrainian boy recalls losing mother in Russian strike
An interpreter broke down in tears at the European Parliament in Brussels while translating for an 11-year-old Ukrainian boy who was injured in a Russian missile strike on a hospital in central Ukraine in 2022. Roman Oleksiv's mother was killed in the attack and he has undergone multiple surgeries since. The aspiring ballroom dancer, who was also the subject of an award-winning film, has also received an award from the Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky. A waterspout is a whirling column of air and mist that can form over oceans, seas or large lakes. 'I don't want to be part of this war machine': Young Germans protest against military service plans Germany is introducing voluntary military service to boost national defences after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Roman generals gifted kittens and piglets to their pet monkeys
The macaques were status symbols all the way from India. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Elites in Ancient Rome went to great lengths to advertise their status and wealth. Based on recent archaeological excavations in Egypt, at least some high-ranking military officials even showed off with their choice of pets. In the, researchers at Poland's University of Warsaw described a nearly 2,000-year-old animal cemetery in the Egyptian port city of Berenike that includes the remains of multiple macaque monkeys .
Asexual parasitic plants break biology's rules
Environment Conservation Land Asexual parasitic plants break biology's rules Mushroom-looking'Balanophora' plants mostly live underground feeding off of tree roots. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Learning how plants use the sun and water to make their own food is a staple of biology class and makes life on Earth possible. Still, not all of the over 300,000 known plant species are food-producing powerhouses that reproduce sexually. Instead, plants like those in the genus are asexual parasites.
OpenAI makes deal to bring Disney characters to ChatGPT and Sora
Disney has agreed to invest $1bn (£740m) in OpenAI as part of a deal which will let people use many of its iconic characters in the chatbot ChatGPT and video-generation tool Sora. It is the first major studio to license parts of its catalogue to the tech giant, in a move which could have major implications for the studio's future plans. It means fans will be able to generate and share pictures and videos of more than 200 characters from Disney's franchises, including Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars. The move comes as OpenAI faces mounting questions about how its rapidly advancing tech is used - and as anxiety in Hollywood increases over the impact of AI on the creative industries. According to a blog post announcing the news, the list of eligible characters include those from Disney films Zootopia, Moana and Encanto - as well as characters like Star Wars' Luke Skywalker and Marvel's Deadpool.
'Architects of AI' named Time Magazine's Person of the Year
'Architects of AI' named Time Magazine's Person of the Year Time Magazine's Person of the Year for 2025 is not a single person. Instead, the magazine has recognised the year's most influential figure as the architects of artificial intelligence (AI). Nvidia boss Jensen Huang, Meta head Mark Zuckerberg, X owner Elon Musk and AI godmother Fei-Fei Li are among those depicted on one of the magazine's two covers. Experts say it highlights how quickly AI, and the firms behind it, are reshaping society. It comes as a boom in the technology, ushered in by OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, continues at pace.
AI has entered the classroom - but is it the solution for overworked teachers?
AI has entered the classroom - but is it the solution for overworked teachers? Schools across the UK are trialling the use of deepfake teachers and even employing remote staff to deliver lessons hundreds of miles away from the classroom. It comes as the use of AI is becoming increasingly prevalent in schools. The government says AI has the power to transform education, and improve teacher workload, particularly around admin for teachers. The BBC has spoken to teachers, school leaders and unions who seem divided on what the future of the UK's classrooms should look like.
Revealed: Amazon Alexa's most-asked questions of 2025 - including 'how tall is Tom Cruise?' and 'how long do I poach an egg for?'
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WTNN: Weibull-Tailored Neural Networks for survival analysis
Rives, Gabrielle, Lopez, Olivier, Bousquet, Nicolas
The Weibull distribution is a commonly adopted choice for modeling the survival of systems subject to maintenance over time. When only proxy indicators and censored observations are available, it becomes necessary to express the distribution's parameters as functions of time-dependent covariates. Deep neural networks provide the flexibility needed to learn complex relationships between these covariates and operational lifetime, thereby extending the capabilities of traditional regression-based models. Motivated by the analysis of a fleet of military vehicles operating in highly variable and demanding environments, as well as by the limitations observed in existing methodologies, this paper introduces WTNN, a new neural network-based modeling framework specifically designed for Weibull survival studies. The proposed architecture is specifically designed to incorporate qualitative prior knowledge regarding the most influential covariates, in a manner consistent with the shape and structure of the Weibull distribution. Through numerical experiments, we show that this approach can be reliably trained on proxy and right-censored data, and is capable of producing robust and interpretable survival predictions that can improve existing approaches.