In the face of sea ice loss, some of the bears on the Norwegian archipelago are gaining weight. Three polar bear cubs gather around their tranquilized mother. She had a litter of three cubs (an unusual brood size) and the smallest cub only weighed 11 pounds (five kilograms). Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The Arctic's polar bears () are often the poster species for the perils of climate change .

Greenland'will stay Greenland', former Trump adviser declares Donald Trump will not be able to force Greenland to change ownership, a former top adviser to the US president has told the BBC. IBM's vice chairman Gary Cohn, who advised Trump on the economy in his first term, said Greenland will stay Greenland and linked the need for access to critical minerals to his former boss's plans for the territory. Cohn is one of America's top tech bosses, a leader in the race to develop AI and quantum computing, and served under Trump as director of the White House National Economic Council. In a sign of how seriously business leaders are taking the crisis, he warned invading an independent country that is part of Nato would be over the edge. He also suggested the president's recent comments about Greenland may be part of a negotiation.

"It seems like this past week has been quite challenging for you," a disembodied voice tells me, before proceeding to ask a series of increasingly personal questions. "Have you been feeling down or depressed?" "Can you describe what this feeling has been like for you?" "Does the feeling lift at all when something good happens?" When I respond to each one, my chatbot interviewer thanks me for my honesty and empathises with any issues. By the end of the conversation, I will have also spoken about my sleep patterns, sex drive and appetite for food.

We're about to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer The world's most powerful supercomputers can now run simulations of billions of neurons, and researchers hope such models will offer unprecedented insights into how our brains work What would it mean to simulate a human brain? Today's most powerful computing systems now contain enough computational firepower to run simulations of billions of neurons, comparable to the sophistication of real brains. We increasingly understand how these neurons are wired together, too, leading to brain simulations that researchers hope will reveal secrets of brain function that were previously hidden. Researchers have long tried to isolate specific parts of the brain, modelling smaller regions with a computer to explain particular brain functions. But "we have never been able to bring them all together into one place, into one larger brain model where we can check whether these ideas are at all consistent", says Markus Diesmann at the Jülich Research Centre in Germany.

Well, those little green shoots of recovery I forecast last year have flowered. This year is set to bring tighter scripts, cheaper projects (which is good, because studios can take more chances) and a more enjoyable cinema-going experience all round. On 16 January, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple will deliver (honest) on all those promises exasperatingly kept back in 2025's 28 Years Later . There will be Cillian Murphy reprising his role from 2002's 28 Days Later, plus more from actor Jack O'Connell's "Jimmys", an acrobatic killer cult. There will also be Nia DaCosta in the director's chair - a young, much-lauded talent who not so long ago had the misfortune to helm The Marvels .

These rare sea creatures live where the sun don't shine. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Like a scene out of a Jules Verne novel, scientists from Schmidt Ocean Institute recently encountered a giant phantom jelly (). The enormous deep-sea jellyfish was spotted about 830 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean by a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) exploring the Colorado-Rawson submarine canyon wall off the coast of Argentina. ROV pilots filmed this giant phantom jelly, or Stygiomedusa gigantea, at 253 meters during an ROV descent to explore the Colorado-Rawson submarine canyon wall.

The world's longest-living vertebrates maintain their vision for centuries. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The Greenland shark () is well-known for its impressive lifespan. Marine biologists believe the world's longest-living vertebrate often reaches over 400 years old, and possibly lives even longer. But while the shark isn't known for its vision, a lot could be learned from the deep-sea predator's eyes. According to new research recently published in the journal, the Greenland shark retained its visual organs throughout millions of years of evolution for a reason.

Who finds dad jokes funniest? Feedback had a birthday within the past 12 months, and Feedback Jr gave us a card that read: "My ambition in life is to be as funny as you think you are." Still, we persist with our dad jokes, if only because our offspring's exasperated reactions are so much fun. So we were delighted to learn that two psychologists, Paul Silvia and Meriel Burnett, have taken a scholarly interest in dad jokes. They have written an entire paper on the topic.

Searches are conducted to find missing persons and/or objects given uncertain information, imperfect observers and large search areas in Search and Rescue (SAR). In many scenarios, such as Maritime SAR, expected survival times are short and optimal search could increase the likelihood of success. This optimization problem is complex for nontrivial problems given its probabilistic nature. Stochastic optimization methods search large problems by nondeterministically sampling the space to reduce the effective size of the problem. This has been used in SAR planning to search otherwise intractably large problems but the stochastic nature provides no formal guarantees on the quality of solutions found in finite time. This paper instead presents $\rm{A}^{\rm{SAR}}$, an $\varepsilon$-optimal search algorithm for SAR planning. It calculates a heuristic to bound the search space and uses graph-search methods to find solutions that are formally guaranteed to be within a user-specified factor, $\varepsilon$, of the optimal solution. It finds better solutions faster than existing optimization approaches in operational simulations. It is also demonstrated with a real-world field trial on Lake Ontario, Canada, where it was used to locate a drifting manikin in only 150s.