This week has been an eventful one for America's public health agency. Two former leaders of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explained why they suddenly departed in a Senate hearing. They also described how CDC employees are being instructed to turn their backs on scientific evidence. They painted a picture of a health agency in turmoil--and at risk of harming the people it is meant to serve. And, just hours afterwards, a panel of CDC advisers voted to stop recommending the MMRV vaccine for children under four. This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter.

The skeletal remains of a man who went missing six years ago were found by a walker in a secluded area in south Wales, an inquest has heard. Jordan Moray, from Cwmbach, near Aberdare in Rhondda Cynon Taf, was reported missing from his flat with his games console still running and mobile phone on charge in July 2019. Despite extensive police searches, his remains were not found until 29 August 2025 . On Friday, an inquest at Pontypridd Coroner's Court heard the discovery was made in a remote area near Merthyr Tydfil. South Wales Police previously said it had received a report of human remains near the Llwyn-on Reservoir in Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, also known as the Brecon Beacons .

A drone crashed into a hotel in the southern Israeli city of Eilat on Thursday, causing a fire but no casualties, authorities said. Yemen's Houthi group, who have been firing drones and missiles in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, claimed responsibility for the attack. Palestinians turn to the sea to flee Israel's bombardment Trump says US wants Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base back from Taliban What did Jimmy Kimmel say about Charlie Kirk's killing?

Kim Jong Un declares AI military drone development a'top priority' North Korea's Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un has said the use of artificial intelligence is a "top priority" in modernising his country's increasingly sophisticated weapons technology and building up drone capabilities, state media reports. During a visit to the Unmanned Aeronautical Technology Complex in the capital Pyongyang on Thursday, Kim presided over performance tests of multipurpose drones and unmanned surveillance vehicles, North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said on Friday. Kim also called for "expanding and strengthening the serial production capacity of drones". The visit to the aeronautical complex comes just a week after Kim oversaw another test of a new solid-fuel rocket engine designed for intercontinental ballistic missiles, which he hailed as a "significant" expansion of Pyongyang's nuclear capabilities. North Korea's military power includes nuclear-armed ballistic and cruise missiles, an increasing stockpile of nuclear weapons and a nascent spy satellite programme, according to the United States Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

ChatGPT was used'to help scammers do their thing' at Asia fraud compound ChatGPT owner OpenAI says it actively works to identify and disrupt scam-related misuse of ChatGPT." Duncan Okindo says he was lured to Southeast Asia last year by the promise of a customer service job in Thailand. Instead, he ended up spending four months in a scam compound on the lawless Myanmar-Thai border, where he saw first-hand how criminal groups are at scale. Okindo, 26, says he was struggling to find a job as the breadwinner for his family in his native Kenya when a local recruitment agency promised him work in Bangkok. The flight was his first trip overseas. On landing, he says, he was abducted at the airport and spirited across the border, into the notorious KK Park complex, guarded by heavily armed men and fortified like it was meant for war."

The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, from virtual assistants [Kepuska and Bohouta, 2018] to recommendation engines [Gomez-Uribe and Hunt, 2015] and autonomous vehicles [Shladover, 2018], has reshaped human-machine interaction. Y et, African languages, with over 2,000 spoken across the continent [Eberhard et al., 2023], remain severely underrepresented in NLP due to their low-resource status [Ahia and Boakye, 2023, Nekoto et al., 2020]. This exclusion risks exacerbating the digital divide, limiting access to AI-driven services in critical domains like education, healthcare, and governance [Ndichu et al., 2024, Joshi et al., 2020]. Shona, a Bantu language spoken by millions in Zimbabwe and southern Zambia, exemplifies this challenge. Existing Shona corpora primarily consist of formal texts, such as news articles or religious documents [Eberhard et al., 2023], while everyday communication, particularly among younger speakers, is dominated by slang, code-mixing with English, and informal expressions [Eisenstein, 2013]. Standard NLP models, trained on formal data, struggle to process these dynamic linguistic patterns, hindering the development of culturally relevant conversational AI.

Malnutrition among pregnant women is a major public health challenge in Ethiopia, increasing the risk of adverse maternal and neonatal outcomes. Traditional statistical approaches often fail to capture the complex and multidimensional determinants of nutritional status. This study develops a predictive model using ensemble machine learning techniques, leveraging data from the Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey (2005-2020), comprising 18,108 records with 30 socio-demographic and health attributes. Data preprocessing included handling missing values, normalization, and balancing with SMOTE, followed by feature selection to identify key predictors. Several supervised ensemble algorithms including XGBoost, Random Forest, CatBoost, and AdaBoost were applied to classify nutritional status. Among them, the Random Forest model achieved the best performance, classifying women into four categories (normal, moderate malnutrition, severe malnutrition, and overnutrition) with 97.87% accuracy, 97.88% precision, 97.87% recall, 97.87% F1-score, and 99.86% ROC AUC. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of ensemble learning in capturing hidden patterns from complex datasets and provide timely insights for early detection of nutritional risks. The results offer practical implications for healthcare providers, policymakers, and researchers, supporting data-driven strategies to improve maternal nutrition and health outcomes in Ethiopia.

This paper discusses our exploration of different data-efficient and parameter-efficient approaches to Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI). In particular, we investigate various soft-prompting strategies, including prefix-tuning, prompt-tuning, P-tuning, and P-tuning V2, as well as LoRA reparameterizations. For the data-efficient strategy, we analyze hard prompting with zero-shot and few-shot inferences to analyze the dialect identification capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). For the parameter-efficient PEFT approaches, we conducted our experiments using Arabic-specific encoder models on several major datasets. We also analyzed the n-shot inferences on open-source decoder-only models, a general multilingual model (Phi-3.5), and an Arabic-specific one(SILMA). We observed that the LLMs generally struggle to differentiate the dialectal nuances in the few-shot or zero-shot setups. The soft-prompted encoder variants perform better, while the LoRA-based fine-tuned models perform best, even surpassing full fine-tuning.

The never-before-studied region'holds vital traces of early human activity.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It took time for ancient humans to finally arrive in present-day Europe . The common consensus is that some of the earliest trekked thousands of miles from Africa and across the Middle East before reaching the Balkans. However, an archaeological team in Turkey says a major historical reassessment is required after they discovered nearly 140 Stone Age artifacts along the country's Aegean coast.

Donald Trump's helicopter is forced to make an emergency landing with US President and Melania on board Disturbing full story of singer D4vd's relationship with girl, 13, found dismembered in his Tesla... as creepy messages, songs and links to stars are exposed'Signal 13' cop killer Matthew James Ruth donned camo and binoculars to stalk ex-girlfriend then slaughtered her helpless Labrador before murdering three officers I predicted Jimmy Kimmel's downfall. Want to understand why Disney's Bob Iger REALLY canceled Jimmy Kimmel? MARK HALPERIN brilliantly breaks down this seismic shift in America's culture war Melania insider JANE TIPPETT: I was aghast at that dress and hat, then it dawned on me... everyone has missed something quite radical Millions under tsunami threat as fallout from monster 7.8 earthquake threatens US Humiliating state of Joe Biden finances revealed: Unwanted president can't get a paid job and will likely die in debt'Israel-hating' man, 22, sports ponytail as plot to'assassinate' Republican governor is revealed Congressional staffer, 35, dies after CATCHING FIRE at her Texas home... as her eerie last words are revealed Charlie Kirk suspect's disturbing secret kinks: Sickening cache of porn searches revealed... his pedophile friend.. and'Furry Shades of Gay' game Mindset driving celebration of Charlie Kirk's death revealed... as Jimmy Kimmel is canceled over comments Chanel-toting'Karen' treats cops like servants as she's marched out of plane's first-class cabin for entitled behavior Jimmy Kimmel goes nuclear over ABC cancelling him for outrageous Charlie Kirk comments... as insiders reveal he ALREADY has new job plans Terrifying risks of new Ozempic trick celebrities swear by... but one woman tells us: 'I'm willing to take my chances' The unsolved family murder that haunted Robert Redford for decades... as police reveal'new evidence' on'killer' who is STILL one of America's most wanted Turning Point USA names Charlie Kirk's widow Erika as its new CEO Should you buy a soundbar for your TV? Here's our expert take Daily Mail journalists select and curate the products that feature on our site. And with them being sold and seen at just about every tech retailer, everyday shoppers are wondering two things: What do they do? Well, I'm here to give you my expert take on all-things soundbars and answer those burning questions, and then some.