Trump's new world order has become real and Europe is having to adjust fast Downtown Munich is best-known for chic shops and flashy fast cars but right now its streets are bedecked with posters advertising next generation drones. Europe's security under construction boasts the slogan on an eye-catching set of sleek black-and-white photographs, festooned across a scaffolding-clad church on one of this town's best known pedestrian boulevards. Such an unapologetic public display of military muscle would have been unimaginable here just a few years ago, but the world outside Germany is changing fast, and taking this country with it. The southern region of Bavaria has become Germany's leading defence technology hub, focusing on AI, drones and aerospace. People here, like most other Europeans, say they feel increasingly exposed - squeezed between an expansionist Russia and an economically aggressive China to the east, and an increasingly unpredictable, former best pal, the United States, to the west.

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Ukraine's capital Kyiv came under Russian missile attack early on Thursday morning, the country's military administration said, with witnesses reporting the sound of explosions. There were no initial reports of casualties and the extent of damage from the attack was not known.

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Russian forces launched artillery and drone attacks on Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region on Saturday, killing a 68-year-old man, wounding three others and causing fires to break out in residential buildings, according to Ukraine's emergency service. Russian shelling also killed another person in the Kramatorsk district of Ukraine's Donetsk region, the service said.

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Russian forces launched an air attack on Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, on Monday, killing one civilian in the first reported death in the city this year, according to the Ukrainian military. Russia's military also carried out drone attacks on northeastern Ukraine on Sunday, killing at least two people in the Sumy region and wounding three in the Kharkiv region, according to local officials.

Science Archaeology Who built Scandinavia's oldest wooden plank boat? An ancient fingerprint offers clues. Archeologists are closer to solving the Hjortspring Boat's mysteries. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Archaeologists examining an ancient boat discovered in Denmark over a century ago are getting some help from a clue usually associated with crime scenes .

Environment Animals Wildlife Endangered Species German hairy snails are disappearing from London's River Thames Londoners are scouring riverbanks to save the endangered mollusk. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Researchers believe that its signature hairs help the strange creature live in its damp, riverside environments by enabling it to sweat off moisture. By wicking off that excess moisture, the slime gets more sticky, so the snail can hold onto the slick riverside debris and the plants it eats. However, the snail needs some extra support.

Accurate sensor placement is critical for modeling spatio-temporal systems such as environmental and climate processes. Neural Processes (NPs), particularly Convolutional Conditional Neural Processes (ConvCNPs), provide scalable probabilistic models with uncertainty estimates, making them well-suited for data-driven sensor placement. However, existing approaches rely on total predictive uncertainty, which conflates epistemic and aleatoric components, that may lead to suboptimal sensor selection in ambiguous regions. To address this, we propose expected reduction in epistemic uncertainty as a new acquisition function for sensor placement. To enable this, we extend ConvCNPs with a Mixture Density Networks (MDNs) output head for epistemic uncertainty estimation. Preliminary results suggest that epistemic uncertainty driven sensor placement more effectively reduces model error than approaches based on overall uncertainty.

Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) enables access to multilingual knowledge but remains challenging due to disparities in resources, scripts, and weak cross-lingual semantic alignment in embedding models. Existing pipelines often rely on translation and monolingual retrieval heuristics, which add computational overhead and noise, degrading performance. This work systematically evaluates four intervention types, namely document translation, multilingual dense retrieval with pretrained encoders, contrastive learning at word, phrase, and query-document levels, and cross-encoder re-ranking, across three benchmark datasets. We find that dense retrieval models trained specifically for CLIR consistently outperform lexical matching methods and derive little benefit from document translation. Contrastive learning mitigates language biases and yields substantial improvements for encoders with weak initial alignment, and re-ranking can be effective, but depends on the quality of the cross-encoder training data. Although high-resource languages still dominate overall performance, gains over lexical and document-translated baselines are most pronounced for low-resource and cross-script pairs. These findings indicate that cross-lingual search systems should prioritise semantic multilingual embeddings and targeted learning-based alignment over translation-based pipelines, particularly for cross-script and under-resourced languages.

Scientists are finally learning who was onboard. Preserved machine guns may finally reveal the names of the lost Flying Fortress crew. The B-17 bomber was specifically designed for high altitude, long distance missions. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A team of marine archaeologists is one step closer to identifying an Air Force crew who lost their lives aboard a B-17 bomber amid the height of World War II .