David Gandy: 'Britain produces some of the greatest models. We want to keep it that way' The Essex-born supermodel is sitting in his light-filled kitchen, sipping a glass of water and reflecting on his almost 25-year career. At 45, Gandy's striking dark brown hair, sharp cheekbones and piercing blue eyes have been at the centre of some of fashion's most iconic campaigns of the last two decades, and he is one of the few male models to become a household name. I always say that I was inspired by the female supermodels, Gandy says, name-checking Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. You don't even need to say the surnames.

In the old Camden Town Hall opposite London's St Pancras station, away from the white tie and tails of the pageantry at Windsor Castle, was perhaps the most substantive display of the consequences of Donald Trump's state visit. In front of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, many members of the British and US cabinets and the cream of the European tech industry, a highly-crafted video played, featuring the long history of UK science. It included George Stephenson, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing and Sir Demis Hassabis, with dozens of UK start-up companies from every corner of the country listed. It was a cross between a UK government investment promotion video and the Danny Boyle 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony, except for one crucial detail - it was voiced by Jensen Huang, the American Nvidia artificial intelligence (AI) and microchip magnate. This week, Trump said the tech tycoon was taking over the world and the boss of the company, which hit a market value of $4tn (£2.9tn) this summer, appears to have gone all-in on the UK in quite an extraordinary way.

US and UK sign major nuclear power deal: What does it include? British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and United States President Donald Trump have signed a multibillion-pound deal to expand nuclear power across both nations. Known as the Atlantic Partnership for Advanced Nuclear Energy, the agreement aims to speed up the construction of new reactors and provide reliable, low-carbon energy for high-demand sectors, including energy-intensive artificial intelligence data centres. Britain's largest energy supplier, Centrica, will pair up with the US firm X-energy to develop up to 12 advanced modular reactors in Hartlepool, a port town in northeast England, which could power 1.5 million homes and create up to 2,500 jobs. US nuclear technology company Holtec, France's state-backed energy giant EDF Energy, and United Kingdom real estate and investment firm Tritax will develop advanced data centres powered by small modular reactors (SMRs) in Nottinghamshire, East Midlands, valued at about 11 billion pounds ($15bn).

To build a conversational agent that interacts fluently with humans, previous studies blend knowledge or personal profile into the pre-trained language model. However, the model that considers knowledge and persona at the same time is still limited, leading to hallucination and a passive way of using personas. We propose an effective dialogue agent that grounds external knowledge and persona simultaneously. The agent selects the proper knowledge and persona to use for generating the answers with our candidate scoring implemented with a poly-encoder. Then, our model generates the utterance with lesser hallucination and more engagingness utilizing retrieval augmented generation with knowledge-persona enhanced query. We conduct experiments on the persona-knowledge chat and achieve state-of-the-art performance in grounding and generation tasks on the automatic metrics. Moreover, we validate the answers from the models regarding hallucination and engagingness through human evaluation and qualitative results. We show our retriever's effectiveness in extracting relevant documents compared to the other previous retrievers, along with the comparison of multiple candidate scoring methods. Code is available at https://github.com/dlawjddn803/INFO

China's'artificial sun' nuclear fusion reactor in Hefei has set a new world record after running at 126 million F (70 million C) for 1,056 seconds – more than 17 minutes. This record, set on December 30, marks the longest running duration for an experimental advanced superconducting tokamak (EAST) fusion energy reactor, Xinhua News Agency reports. EAST already set a previous record in May by running for 101 seconds at a higher temperature – 216 million F (120 million C). Nuclear fusion power works by colliding heavy hydrogen atoms to form helium, releasing vast amounts of energy, mimicking the process that occurs naturally in the centre of stars like our sun. How it works: This graphic shows the inside of a nuclear fusion reactor and explains the process by which power is produced.

Updated Facial recognition technology is being employed in more UK schools to allow pupils to pay for their meals, according to reports today. In North Ayrshire Council, a Scottish authority encompassing the Isle of Arran, nine schools are set to begin processing meal payments for school lunches using facial scanning technology. The authority and the company implementing the technology, CRB Cunninghams, claim the system will help reduce queues and is less likely to spread COVID-19 than card payments and fingerprint scanners, according to the Financial Times. Speaking to the publication, David Swanston, the MD of supplier CRB Cunninghams, said the cameras verify the child's identity against "encrypted faceprint templates", and will be held on servers on-site at the 65 schools that have so far signed up. He added: "In a secondary school you have around about a 25-minute period to serve potentially 1,000 pupils. So we need fast throughput at the point of sale."

Privacy campaigners have raised concerns about the use of facial recognition technology on pupils queueing for lunch in school canteens in the UK. Nine schools in North Ayrshire began taking payments for school lunches this week by scanning the faces of their pupils, according to a report in the Financial Times. More schools are expected to follow. The company supplying the technology claimed it was more Covid-secure than other systems, as it was cashless and contactless, and sped up the lunch queue, cutting the time spent on each transaction to five seconds. With break times shortening, schools are under pressure to get large numbers of students through lunch more quickly.

Schools in Scotland are trialling facial recognition to allow pupils to pay for their lunches from Monday. The software is to be trialled across nine schools in North Ayrhsire, and hopes to speed up lunchtime sales by scanning the faces of pupils when at tills. Many schools already use biometric software, such as fingerprint recognition, to take payments but facial recognition is billed as being quicker and more Covid-secure. David Swanston, the manging director of CBR Cunninghams, who installed the software, said it was "the fastest way of recognising someone at the till." "In a secondary school you have around about a 25-minute period to serve potentially 1,000 pupils. So we need fast throughput at the point of sale, he told the Financial Times. MPs and peers urge education secretary to rethink plans to scrap most BTECs Covid cases near peak of second wave as schoolchildren fuel rise Schools reminded to allow absences arising from Covid'in exceptional circumstances' Schools reminded to allow absences arising from Covid'in exceptional circumstances' Mr Swanston said the software cut the average transaction time five seconds per pupil. But the new system has been criticised by privacy campaigners who say it normalises facial recognition software where there is little need for and was often operated without clear consent from the user. Silkie Carlo, of the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: "It's normalising biometric identity checks for something that is mundane.

Facial recognition may soon play a role in your child's lunch. The Financial Times reports that nine schools in the UK's North Ayrshire will start taking payments for canteen (aka cafeteria) lunches by scanning students' faces. The technology should help minimize touch during the pandemic, but is mainly meant to speed up transaction times. That could be important when you may have roughly 25 minutes to serve an entire school of hungry kids. Both the schools and system installer CRB Cunningham argued the systems would address privacy and security concerns.

Newspapers are a popular form of written discourse, read by many people, thanks to the novelty of the information provided by the news content in it. A headline is the most widely read part of any newspaper due to its ap - pearance in a bigger font and sometimes in colour print. In this paper, we sug - gest and implement a method for computing inferences from English news headlines, excluding the information from the context in which the headlines appear. This method attempts to generate the possible assumptions a reader formulates in mind upon reading a fresh headline. The generated inferences could be useful for assessing the impact of the news headline on readers includ - ing children. The understandability of the current state of social affairs depends greatly on the assimilation of the headlines. As the inferences that are indepen - dent of the context depend mainly on the syntax of the headline, dependency trees of headlines are used in this approach, to find the syntactical structure of the headlines and to compute inferences out of them.