KYOTO - Nidec President Mitsuya Kishida has said the major Japanese motor maker will suspend business acquisitions for the time being to focus its efforts on reconstructing the firm rocked by accounting and product quality fraud. Business acquisitions have been a growth driver for Nidec, based in Kyoto. "I will work on rebuilding our company's governance system," Kishida said in an interview Friday, showing a plan to spend ¥130 billion over five years on measures to prevent irregularities. A panel of outside experts that investigated the accounting fraud has concluded that excessive pressure from Nidec's founder, Shigenobu Nagamori, on company staff to meet performance targets was among the factors behind the irregularities. Pointing out that Nidec had "a corporate culture to pursue short-term profits," Kishida said, "We will build a system that makes it impossible to commit irregularities regarding accounting and product quality control." On future business management, he said, "We will review our operations, including the possibility of ceding what we have in our group to partner entities," suggesting that consolidating some of its existing operations could be an option.

One of the most bitterly contested proofs in modern mathematics may be on the verge of being untangled. Two projects, both aiming to use a computer program to cast new light on the controversy, are now up and running - with one having operated in secret for more than two years already. The developments are a positive sign that the row might find a solution, say mathematicians. The saga began in 2012 when Shinichi Mochizuki at Kyoto University, Japan, claimed to have proved a famous idea called the ABC conjecture, posting a 500-page proof online. The conjecture is simple to state, concerning prime numbers involved in solutions to the equation a + b = c and how these numbers relate to each other.

Under general assumptions on the target distribution $p^\star$, we establish a sharp Lipschitz regularity theory for flow-matching vector fields and diffusion-model scores, with optimal dependence on time and dimension. As applications, we obtain Wasserstein discretization bounds for Euler-type samplers in dimension $d$: with $N$ discretization steps, the error achieves the optimal rate $\sqrt{d}/N$ up to logarithmic factors. Moreover, the constants do not deteriorate exponentially with the spatial extent of $p^\star$. We also show that the one-sided Lipschitz control yields a globally Lipschitz transport map from the standard Gaussian to $p^\star$, which implies Poincaré and log-Sobolev inequalities for a broad class of probability measures.

Patriot missile involved in Bahrain blast likely U.S.-operated, analysis finds Smoke rises following a strike on the Bapco Oil Refinery, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, on Sitra Island Bahrain, on March 9. | REUTERS An American-operated Patriot air defense battery likely fired the interceptor missile involved in a pre-dawn explosion that injured dozens of civilians and tore through homes in U.S.-ally Bahrain 10 days into the war on Iran, according to an analysis by academic researchers examined by Reuters. Both Bahrain and Washington have blamed an Iranian drone attack for the March 9 blast, which the Gulf kingdom said injured 32 people including children, some seriously. Commenting on the day of the attack, U.S. Central Command said on X that an Iranian drone struck a residential neighborhood in Bahrain. In response to questions, Bahrain on Saturday acknowledged for the first time that a Patriot missile was involved in the explosion over the Mahazza neighborhood on Sitra island, offshore from the capital Manama and also home to an oil refinery. In a statement, a Bahraini government spokesperson said the missile successfully intercepted an Iranian drone mid-air, saving lives. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

This work introduces a new approximate proximal sampler that operates solely with zeroth-order information of the potential function. Prior theoretical analyses have revealed that proximal sampling corresponds to alternating forward and backward iterations of the heat flow. The backward step was originally implemented by rejection sampling, whereas we directly simulate the dynamics. Unlike diffusion-based sampling methods that estimate scores via learned models or by invoking auxiliary samplers, our method treats the intermediate particle distribution as a Gaussian mixture, thereby yielding a Monte Carlo score estimator from directly samplable distributions. Theoretically, when the score estimation error is sufficiently controlled, our method inherits the exponential convergence of proximal sampling under isoperimetric conditions on the target distribution. In practice, the algorithm avoids rejection sampling, permits flexible step sizes, and runs with a deterministic runtime budget. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our approach converges rapidly to the target distribution, driven by interactions among multiple particles and by exploiting parallel computation.

'Phase-free' design builds disaster preparedness into everyday life Tadayuki Sato, representative director of the Phase Free Association, has introduced the phase-free concept in a bid to seamlessly integrate disaster preparedness with everyday life and business operations. A ball-point pen that can write on a wet piece of paper is an example of everyday goods that fit the phase-free concept. Fifteen years after the devastating March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Japan is seeing growing momentum behind phase-free design, a new approach to disaster preparedness that integrates emergency functionality into everyday items. As major quakes have continued to strike various parts of Japan, Tadayuki Sato, representative director of the Phase Free Association, recognized the limitations of traditional disaster preparedness. Conventional approaches, led primarily by government bodies and focused on stockpiling specialized emergency supplies, were falling short. Around 2014, he introduced the phase-free concept in a bid to seamlessly integrate disaster preparedness with everyday life and business operations.

A powerful artificial intelligence model that appeared anonymously on a developer platform last week was revealed to be from Chinese smartphone and electric vehicle giant Xiaomi, and not DeepSeek as initially thought. BEIJING - A powerful artificial intelligence model that appeared anonymously on a developer platform last week was revealed on Wednesday to be from Chinese smartphone and electric vehicle giant Xiaomi, after it fueled speculation that startup DeepSeek was quietly testing its next-generation system ahead of a launch. The release of DeepSeek's low-cost models DeepSeek-V3 and R1 triggered a global tech stock selloff last year, causing investors to question whether U.S. AI firms needed to spend billions of dollars on AI computing power. Since then, there has been a great deal of interest in DeepSeek-V4, a next-generation model that has yet to be released. The mysterious free model, called Hunter Alpha, surfaced on the AI gateway platform OpenRouter on March 11 without any developer attribution and was later described by the platform as a "stealth model." In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government is developing a Generative AI Platform, which will allow government employees to create AI applications to assist with their work. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government and municipal governments throughout the Japanese capital are increasingly using generative artificial intelligence in their administrative operations. To support this trend, the metropolitan government is working with GovTech Tokyo, an affiliated organization that promotes digitalization in local governments, to develop a Generative AI Platform. The system will allow government employees to create generative AI applications tailored to their specific duties. By encouraging active use of the platform, Tokyo authorities aim to boost efficiency in public services and address growing concerns over labor shortages. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Since the conflict in the Middle East began on Feb. 28, Emirates has cancelled more than 2,000 flights -- 54% of scheduled services, according to data from Cirium. As Emirates flight EK10 from London cruised over Saudi Arabia on Monday, news broke of a drone strike at its destination, Dubai. The aircraft turned back to Gatwick, flight data shows, completing a 9,100 km round trip -- one of dozens of flights to nowhere triggered by the Middle East war. Roughly 30 Emirates flights heading to Dubai International Airport were also ordered back or rerouted after Iranian drone attacks temporarily shut what is normally the world's busiest airport for international passengers. Passengers expecting a dawn landing in the glitzy United Arab Emirates port city were stunned. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

NTT Global Data Centers is working on 34 projects to double its capacity to 4 gigawatts within as little as two years, CEO Doug Adams said, as it races to meet surging global demand driven by the AI boom. NTT Global Data Centers, the world's third-largest data center provider outside of China, is working to double its capacity to 4 gigawatts to meet the rising global demand for the critical digital infrastructure amid an artificial intelligence boom. The unit of Japan's NTT is working on 34 projects that will double its capacity in as soon as two years, according to the data center business's Chief Executive Officer Doug Adams. Capacity will continue to increase from there, and will be "well over 5 gigawatts" in five years, Adams said in an interview. NTT GDC has seen increasing demand from companies moving more of their software and operations to the cloud as well as businesses hunting for extra capacity to run AI programs. The business's revenue is expected to keep growing at more than 20% a year, Adams said, declining to give a specific time period.