'Something special is happening on Madagascar.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Lemurs first arrived on the island of Madagascar 53.2 million years ago, probably hitching a ride on a vegetation raft from mainland Africa. The island was predator free, and the lemurs evolved into an abundance of species to thrive in its various habitats--an expansion that hasn't stopped since. Scientists typically expect such rapid species growth to eventually slow down. However, in a study recently published in the journal a team of researchers presents evidence that lemurs defy this evolutionary principle.

Scarecrows do a much better job scaring humans than they do scaring birds. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. For most Americans, scarecrows are synonymous with autumn. They pop up in corn mazes and crop fields at harvest festivals, on hay bales in grocery store displays, and as set dressing or (increasingly) as villains in fall-flavored horror films . But for all their ubiquity, agricultural scientist Rebecca Brown reflects, "I don't think I've ever seen a commercial farm that used a scarecrow with the intent of scaring birds. If they've got one, it's as seasonal decoration."

OpenAI has temporarily stopped its artificial intelligence (AI) app Sora creating deepfake videos portraying Dr Martin Luther King Jr, following a request from his estate. It said disrespectful content had been generated about the civil rights campaigner. Sora has become popular in the US for making hyper-realistic AI-generated videos, which has led to people sharing clips of deceased celebrities and historical figures in outlandish and often offensive scenarios. OpenAI said it would pause images of Dr King as it strengthens guardrails for historical figures - but it continues to allow people to make clips of others. The firm has faced controversy over this stance, as videos featuring notable figures such as President John F. Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II and Professor Stephen Hawking have been shared widely online.

As the Group of 20 leaders gather in Cape Town, clean air features on the agenda as a standalone priority for the first time in the forum's history. The reality, however, is stark. Outdoor air pollution claims 5.7 million lives each year, and a report released last week highlights the lack of international development finance for clean air. Only $3.7bn was spent globally in 2023, representing barely 1 percent of aid, with only a fraction reaching Africa. As the minister chairing the G20's environment workstream this year, I am proud to have worked with member countries and international organisations to place air pollution firmly on the agenda.

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Chief global affairs officer of company behind ChatGPT tells Sydney audience'we are going to be in Australia, one way or the other' Fri 17 Oct 2025 03.33 EDTLast modified on Fri 17 Oct 2025 03.35 EDT "No we are going to be in Australia, one way or the other." And now the internet claims many people don't even care. What is going on?! | First Dog on the Moon "We will engage in either country - we will find ways to work with those who want to build up big frontier models and have robust ecosystems, or those who just want to have much more narrowly defined AI," he said. "We will work with them under either scenario, regardless." "This is the nature of how technology works. Innovations come along, and then societies adapt to those innovations," he said.

Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Why are Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine a'red line' for Russia? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? Russian war correspondent Ivan Zuyev has been killed by a Ukrainian drone strike while on assignment on the front line of the war in southern Ukraine's Zaporizhia region, his publication, state news agency RIA said. Zuyev's colleague, Yuri Voitkevich, was seriously wounded in the attack.

Taylor Swift fans are driving a surge in popularity of a German museum exhibiting a portrait of the Shakespeare character Ophelia, recently reimagined in a song and music video from Swift's new album The Life of a Showgirl. The Hessische Landesmuseum in the central German city of Wiesbaden saw hundreds more visitors than usual over the weekend, as fans hoped to see the real version of the painting that opens the music video for The Fate of Ophelia. In the video, viewed more than 65 million times on Youtube, the painting comes alive, with Swift at its centre. We're really enjoying this attention - it's a lot of fun, museum spokesperson Susanne Hirschmann told the Associated Press. Hirschmann said that one family had travelled from the northern city of Hamburg, a five-hour drive away, while some of the visitors were Americans from an army base nearby.

China's biggest shopping event starts five weeks early to revive spending It's known to be China's biggest online shopping event - taking place on 11 November each year. But this year, Single's Day sales have already begun in mid-October, as part of efforts by Chinese retailers to boost spending in a sluggish market. China has been plagued with issues like growing youth unemployment, a prolonged property crisis, steep government debt and an ongoing trade war with the US - all of which is making the country's consumers cut back on spending. The Chinese government has been spending billions - through family subsidies, more wages and discounts for consumer goods in a bid to counter this, but retail sales growth is still failing to meet expectations. Originally created by Alibaba as a Chinese shopping festival, Singles' Day is akin to Amazon's Prime Day or Black Friday promotions elsewhere in the world.

Selecting the latent dimensions (ranks) in tensor factorization is a central challenge that often relies on heuristic methods. This paper introduces a rigorous approach to determine rank identifiability in probabilistic tensor models, based on prior predictive moment matching. We transform a set of moment matching conditions into a log-linear system of equations in terms of marginal moments, prior hyperparameters, and ranks; establishing an equivalence between rank identifiability and the solvability of such system. We apply this framework to four foundational tensor-models, demonstrating that the linear structure of the PARAFAC/CP model, the chain structure of the Tensor Train model, and the closed-loop structure of the Tensor Ring model yield solvable systems, making their ranks identifiable. In contrast, we prove that the symmetric topology of the Tucker model leads to an underdetermined system, rendering the ranks unidentifiable by this method. For the identifiable models, we derive explicit closed-form rank estimators based on the moments of observed data only. We empirically validate these estimators and evaluate the robustness of the proposal.