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How WWI and WWII revolutionized period products

Popular Science

For centuries, menstruation was managed with homemade solutions--until the world changed in a hurry. Patented in 1931, the first Tampax tampons were sold in 1936 as the first widely marketed internal menstrual product. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. About half of us will use them at some point in our lives. But few of us like to talk about them, at least in public.


How AI Is Changing White-Collar Work

TIME - Tech

Booth is a reporter at TIME. Booth is a reporter at TIME. Julian Pintat, a freelance English-to-German translator has watched his 15-year career gradually unravel. Specializing in high-stakes fields like medical technology and pharmaceutics, his expertise has been repriced as an AI cleanup service. Fixing such basic flaws, which now constitutes 95% of his work, often takes longer than translating from scratch, he says--a frustrating reality that has halved his income and put life plans including marriage and starting a family on indefinite hold.


Revealed: The 44 jobs most likely to be replaced by AI - is YOURS at risk?

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker says Trump to deploy 400 National Guard troops from Texas to'invade' liberal states Mark Sanchez's alleged victim's family breaks silence as grim photos emerge after violent attack Trump reveals plan to'restore the American Dream' by unlocking 2 million lots for new homes He slaughtered her son in cold blood. But mom of Idaho murder victim reveals why she is happy NEVER knowing Bryan Kohberger's motive I ran America's infamous Supermax prison. Hell awaits 37 killers Joe Biden refused to execute... but a notorious villain did beat the system Trump's immigration guru Stephen Miller gets called'the face of evil' by his own cousin Charlize Theron ignores former co-star Johnny Depp while greeting Bernard Arnault and Brigitte Macron as she shuns his'slow return to the spotlight' at Dior PFW after court case South Carolina judge's $1.5M beachfront home burned to the ground in possible arson attack just weeks after brutal decision against Trump administration Meghan Markle savaged for'utterly bewildering' Instagram video as she's driven past Diana crash tunnel with feet on the seat... and royal expert suggests Harry could take a dim view A near-death experience left Eric Dane in tears, forced to confront his terminal diagnosis but would it stop his wife from abandoning him? 'Dirty hippies' lose 25-year battle to save their homes after their community was deemed a 12-acre bio-hazard It was a dream vacation. But then my vision went and I could barely breathe.


Ernest Shackleton knew 'Endurance' had shortcomings, new study says

Popular Science

Ernest Shackleton knew'Endurance' had shortcomings, new study says Issues with the ship's hull, deck beams, and more show the ship was no match for Antarctic sea ice. The'Endurance' leaning to one side, during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914-17, led by Sir Ernest Shackleton. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. For almost 110 years, the has rested at the bottom of the icy waters of the Antarctic's Weddell Sea . Long held as the poster ship for Antarctic exploration, Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated ship was no match for the crushing sea ice that sank it in November 1915 .


Vibe Coding Is the New Open Source--in the Worst Way Possible

WIRED

As developers increasingly lean on AI-generated code to build out their software--as they have with open source in the past--they risk introducing critical security failures along the way. Just like you probably don't grow and grind wheat to make flour for your bread, most software developers don't write every line of code in a new project from scratch. Doing so would be extremely slow and could create more security issues than it solves. So developers draw on existing libraries--often open source projects--to get various basic software components in place. While this approach is efficient, it can create exposure and lack of visibility into software.


Nobel Prize 2025: What they are, when will the awards be announced?

Al Jazeera

Nobel Prize 2025: What they are, when will the awards be announced? The Nobel Prize 2025 officially kicks off with the first award, for physiology or medicine, to be announced on Monday, setting the stage for a week of global anticipation. The full schedule, spanning from October 6 to 13, maps out a rapid succession of announcements: medicine, followed by physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and finally culminating with the economics prize next Monday. Here are the complete details of the schedule - and what to expect from this year's Nobel Prizes. What is the Nobel Prize?


The true extent of cyber attacks on UK business - and the weak spots that allow them to happen

BBC News

The first day of September should have marked the beginning of one of the busiest periods of the year for Jaguar Land Rover. It was a Monday, and the release of new 75 series number plates was expected to produce a surge in demand from eager car buyers. At factories in Solihull and Halewood, as well as at its engine plant in Wolverhampton, staff were expecting to be working flat out. Instead, when the early shift arrived, they were sent home. The production lines have remained idle ever since.


Learning Multi-Index Models with Hyper-Kernel Ridge Regression

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Deep neural networks excel in high-dimensional problems, outperforming models such as kernel methods, which suffer from the curse of dimensionality. However, the theoretical foundations of this success remain poorly understood. We follow the idea that the compositional structure of the learning task is the key factor determining when deep networks outperform other approaches. Taking a step towards formalizing this idea, we consider a simple compositional model, namely the multi-index model (MIM). In this context, we introduce and study hyper-kernel ridge regression (HKRR), an approach blending neural networks and kernel methods. Our main contribution is a sample complexity result demonstrating that HKRR can adaptively learn MIM, overcoming the curse of dimensionality. Further, we exploit the kernel nature of the estimator to develop ad hoc optimization approaches. Indeed, we contrast alternating minimization and alternating gradient methods both theoretically and numerically. These numerical results complement and reinforce our theoretical findings.


Comparative Analysis of Parameterized Action Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Web Search Match Plan Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study evaluates the performance of Soft Actor Critic (SAC), Greedy Actor Critic (GAC), and Truncated Quantile Critics (TQC) in high-dimensional decision-making tasks using fully observable environments. The focus is on parametrized action (PA) spaces, eliminating the need for recurrent networks, with benchmarks Platform-v0 and Goal-v0 testing discrete actions linked to continuous action-parameter spaces. Hyperparameter optimization was performed with Microsoft NNI, ensuring reproducibility by modifying the codebase for GAC and TQC. Results show that Parameterized Action Greedy Actor-Critic (PAGAC) outperformed other algorithms, achieving the fastest training times and highest returns across benchmarks, completing 5,000 episodes in 41:24 for the Platform game and 24:04 for the Robot Soccer Goal game. Its speed and stability provide clear advantages in complex action spaces. Compared to PASAC and PATQC, PAGAC demonstrated superior efficiency and reliability, making it ideal for tasks requiring rapid convergence and robust performance. Future work could explore hybrid strategies combining entropy-regularization with truncation-based methods to enhance stability and expand investigations into generalizability.


Evaluating Large Language Models for IUCN Red List Species Information

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly being adopted in conservation to address the biodiversity crisis, yet their reliability for species evaluation is uncertain. This study systematically validates five leading models on 21,955 species across four core IUCN Red List assessment components: taxonomy, conservation status, distribution, and threats. A critical paradox was revealed: models excelled at taxonomic classification (94.9%) but consistently failed at conservation reasoning (27.2% for status assessment). This knowledge-reasoning gap, evident across all models, suggests inherent architectural constraints, not just data limitations. Furthermore, models exhibited systematic biases favoring charismatic vertebrates, potentially amplifying existing conservation inequities. These findings delineate clear boundaries for responsible LLM deployment: they are powerful tools for information retrieval but require human oversight for judgment-based decisions. A hybrid approach is recommended, where LLMs augment expert capacity while human experts retain sole authority over risk assessment and policy.