Chinese missiles and robots find warm welcome in EU's backyard Chinese leader Xi Jinping shakes hands with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic at the Palace of Serbia during the Chinese president's two-day state visit to Belgrade in May 2024. If the European Union has a red line in Serbia's relationship to China, President Aleksandar Vucic may be getting close. The Balkan nation, the only European buyer of advanced Chinese weaponry west of Belarus, upgraded its arsenal this year to include supersonic missiles from China. Next may be fighter jets, a possible discussion topic when Vucic visits China next week. A Beijing bridgehead at the border of the EU has deepened doubts about the prospect of Belgrade joining the bloc and the limits of Vucic's strategy of juggling ties to the West, China and Russia.

Two years ago, companies like Meta and OpenAI were united against military use of their tools. Now all of that has changed. At the start of 2024, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI were united against military use of their AI tools. But over the next 12 months, something changed. In January, OpenAI quietly rescinded its ban on using AI for "military and warfare" purposes, and soon after it was reported to be working on "a number of projects" with the Pentagon. In November, in the same week that Donald Trump was reelected US president, Meta announced that the United States and select allies would be able to employ Llama for defense uses.

From neuroscience and genomics to systems biology and ecology, researchers rely on clustering similarity data to uncover modular structure. Yet widely used clustering methods, such as hierarchical clustering, k-means, and WGCNA, lack principled model selection, leaving them susceptible to noise. A common workaround sparsifies a correlation matrix representation to remove noise before clustering, but this extra step introduces arbitrary thresholds that can distort the structure and lead to unreliable results. To detect reliable clusters, we capitalize on recent advances in network science to unite sparsification and clustering with principled model selection. We test two Bayesian community detection methods, the Degree-Corrected Stochastic Block Model and the Regularized Map Equation, both grounded in the Minimum Description Length principle for model selection. In synthetic data, they outperform traditional approaches, detecting planted clusters under high-noise conditions and with fewer samples. Compared to WGCNA on gene co-expression data, the Regularized Map Equation identifies more robust and functionally coherent gene modules. Our results establish Bayesian community detection as a principled and noise-resistant framework for uncovering modular structure in high-dimensional data across fields.

Former GOP operative Scott Leiendecker just bought Dominion Voting Systems, giving him ownership of voting systems used in 27 states. The news last week that Dominion Voting Systems was purchased by the founder and CEO of Knowink, a Missouri-based maker of electronic poll books, has left election integrity activists confused over what, if anything, this could mean for voters and the integrity of US elections. The company, acquired by Scott Leiendecker, a former Republican Party operative and election director in Missouri before founding Knowink, said in a press release that he was rebranding Dominion, which has headquarters in Canada and the United States, under the name Liberty Vote "in a bold and historic move to transform and improve election integrity in America" and to distance the company from false allegations made previously by President Donald Trump and his supporters that the company had rigged the 2020 presidential election to give the win to President Joe Biden. The Liberty release said that the rebranded company will be 100 percent American owned, that it will have a "paper ballot focus" that leverages hand-marked paper ballots, will "prioritize facilitating third-party auditing," and is "committed to domestic staffing and software development." The press release provided no details, however, to explain what this means in practice.

Conducting experiments and collecting data for machine learning models is a complex and expensive endeavor, particularly when confronted with limited information. Typically, extensive experiments to obtain features and labels come with a significant acquisition cost, making it impractical to carry out all of them. Therefore, it becomes crucial to strategically determine what to acquire to maximize the predictive performance while minimizing costs.

Ominous warning for humanity as birds suddenly adopt'unsettling' behavior Meghan is accused of'giggling as model stumbles on the catwalk': More Paris Fashion Week disasters emerge, including awkward moment with Kristin Scott Thomas More girls are starting their periods younger than ever before - scientists think they've finally found what's causing it The TRUTH to the doting mother who slaughtered her children and husband told by those she'd been quietly tormenting for years Insiders confirm what everyone suspects about Taylor Swift and Blake Lively... the private apology... and how any future friendship hangs on one humiliating condition Outrage as Baltimore's Dem mayor spends $164k of taxpayer cash on ultra-luxurious new SUV I have no sympathy for them - but this disturbing new trend isn't the answer: JANA HOCKING Taylor Swift reveals truth behind raunchy song about Travis Kelce's manhood Trump stuns CNN reporter as he muses about Ghislaine Maxwell pardon: 'I haven't heard that name in so long' Revealed: Which slimming jab REALLY works best. The doctors' ultimate expert guide on which to pick, how to save money, beat every side effect... and what you need to know about the'golden dose' Functioning alcoholics hide in plain sight... so are YOU one? Trump brands NFL's Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show selection'absolutely ridiculous' The troubled background of delivery man stabbed by Mark Sanchez... as he launches million-dollar lawsuit and sparks civil war at Fox People who don't like animals are more likely to have dark personality traits, study finds On-screen psychopaths such as Patrick Bateman in'American Psycho' and Villanelle in ' Killing Eve ' are often depicted hurting animals. Now, a study suggests this character flaw is not just the stuff of fiction. Scientists in Serbia have found a link between psychopathy and the belief that animals aren't as worthy as humans.