Norway
Hiker stumbles on 6th century gold sword scabbard under fallen tree
'The odds of finding something like this are minimal.' More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Heavy wear suggests the scabbard's original sword wasn't ceremonial, but frequently wielded. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A hiker who paused to examine an old, uprooted tree found something much rarer than roots during a recent walk in the hills of Norway.
The Download: supercharged scams and studying AI healthcare
Plus: DeepSeek has unveiled its long-awaited new AI model. When ChatGPT was released in late 2022, it showed how easily generative AI could create human-like text. This quickly caught the eye of cybercriminals, who began using LLMs to compose malicious emails. Since then, they've adopted AI for everything from turbocharged phishing and hyperrealistic deepfakes to automated vulnerability scans. Many organizations are now struggling to cope with the sheer volume of cyberattacks. AI is making them faster, cheaper, and easier to carry out, a problem set to worsen as more cybercriminals adopt these tools--and their capabilities improve.
Pugs and Frenchies could find breathing relief for squishy faces with new treatment
Snoretox-1 uses inactive tetanus to help keep airways open. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Humans bred dogs that can't breathe. Science may finally give them some relief. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week.
Forthcoming machine learning and AI seminars: April 2026 edition
This post contains a list of the AI-related seminars that are scheduled to take place between 2 April and 31 May 2026. All events detailed here are free and open for anyone to attend virtually. What Do Our Benchmarks Actually Measure? Vukosi Marivate (University of Pretoria) University of Michigan Zoom link is here . Optimization Over Trained Neural Networks: What, Why, and How? Thiago Serra Azevedo Silva (University of Iowa) Association of European Operational Research Societies To receive the seminar link, sign up to the mailing list .
The rarest dog breed in the United States is a puffin hunter
More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Only around 1,500 Norwegian Lundehunds existed in the world in 2022. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Golden retrievers, poodles, and German shepherds are all instantly recognizable dog breeds . But these are only a fraction of the 202 pooch types officially recognized by the American Kennel Club (AKC).
Formal verification for safety evaluation of autonomous vehicles: an interview with Abdelrahman Sayed Sayed
In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. We sat down with Abdelrahman Sayed Sayed to chat about his work on formal verification applied to autonomous vehicles. Could you tell us a bit about where you're studying and the broad topic of your research? My PhD topic is formal verification of neural ODE (ordinary differential equations) for safety evaluation in autonomous vehicles. Could you say something about formal verification and why it's such an important topic?
Elon Musk snubs Paris legal summons over alleged child abuse images on X
Elon Musk was summoned by the French authorities for a voluntary interview that had been planned to take place on Monday. Elon Musk was summoned by the French authorities for a voluntary interview that had been planned to take place on Monday. Elon Musk did not appear on Monday for a voluntary interview with lawyers in Paris, who had summoned the American tech billionaire over an investigation into his social media platform X and AI chatbot Grok. The prosecutors told AFP that they had "taken note of the absence of the first people summoned", without mentioning Musk's name. The billionaire called the French authorities involved "retards" weeks earlier in a French-language post on X .
Yes, your lobster dinner probably died an excruciating death
Pain killers seem to work on lobsters, so being boiled alive may be just as gruesome as it sounds. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. A growing body of research suggests that the crustaceans can feel pain. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. When it's time to cook a lobster, the crustaceans are infamously boiled alive.
Stepwise Variational Inference with Vine Copulas
Griesbauer, Elisabeth, Rønneberg, Leiv, Frigessi, Arnoldo, Czado, Claudia, Haff, Ingrid Hobæk
We propose stepwise variational inference (VI) with vine copulas: a universal VI procedure that combines vine copulas with a novel stepwise estimation procedure of the variational parameters. Vine copulas consist of a nested sequence of trees built from copulas, where more complex latent dependence can be modeled with increasing number of trees. We propose to estimate the vine copula approximate posterior in a stepwise fashion, tree by tree along the vine structure. Further, we show that the usual backward Kullback-Leibler divergence cannot recover the correct parameters in the vine copula model, thus the evidence lower bound is defined based on the Rényi divergence. Finally, an intuitive stopping criterion for adding further trees to the vine eliminates the need to pre-define a complexity parameter of the variational distribution, as required for most other approaches. Thus, our method interpolates between mean-field VI (MFVI) and full latent dependence. In many applications, in particular sparse Gaussian processes, our method is parsimonious with parameters, while outperforming MFVI.
Hassan Took a Bike Ride. Now He's One of the Thousands Missing in Gaza
In a place denied access to basic forensic technology--and where people disappear into Israeli detention--the fate of thousands remains unknown. One of them is an autistic teenager. In the early morning dark, Abeer Skaik turned to her husband, Ali Al-Qatta, and said that today would be the day they would find their son. Ali nodded in silence, and she handed him the stack of flyers. Each bore a photograph of 16-year-old Hassan smiling widely, his shoulders loose, wearing a plain red T-shirt. He is looking directly at the camera, unguarded. On top of the page, in large letters, Abeer had written a single word in bold red ink: --an appeal. Abeer watched as Ali stepped into a car with a few close friends and drove away. They started the 30-kilometer trip south, from al-Tuffah, east of Gaza City, to the European Hospital in Khan Younis. They had heard that a group of people detained by Israel, including children, would be released there. The gate was already crowded. Families stood shoulder to shoulder, wrapped in blankets against the cold, clutching photographs and ID cards. Ali distributed the flyers among his friends. When the buses of released detainees arrived, he and the others moved slowly through the narrow gaps between clusters of people. Some of those who had just been released were being pulled into embraces. Ali waited at the edge of each reunion. "Have you seen my son?" he asked. One after another, people shook their heads.