A panther, a leopard and a Canadian lynx are among the reported sightings of big cats in Wales, according to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. Fifteen big cats were reported to authorities in Wales between January 2020 and July 2025, the FOI to the Welsh government found. The apparent spottings were made in areas ranging from Pembrokeshire to Ceredigion, Powys, Swansea, Denbighshire and Carmarthenshire. One reporter described seeing what they believed was a panther jumping over a hedge onto the road in front of them while they were driving. A leopard sighting was reported to Dyfed-Powys Police in Cwmtwrch, Swansea, on 16 January 2023, when the reporter saw a leopard with spots walking around the garden when their dog was let out.

What does the data tell us about immigration in Wales? Like many countries, Wales sees a steady flow of people arriving and leaving for other countries each year. The difference between those arriving and those leaving is known as net migration. Focusing on people moving from abroad, latest estimates say Wales' population - which was 3.2 million in June 2024 - had increased by about 23,000 over the previous year as a result of net international migration. A recent YouGov poll found a quarter of people surveyed in Wales believed that immigration, alongside the economy, should be among the issues prioritised by the Welsh government, even though immigration is controlled by the UK government.

What I've learned from 25 years of automated science, and what the future holds: an interview with Ross King We're excited to launch our new series, where we're speaking with leading researchers to explore the breakthroughs driving AI and the reality of the future promises - to give you an inside perspective on the headlines. Our first interviewee is Ross King, who created the first robot scientist back in 2009. He spoke to us about the nature of scientific discovery, the role AI has to play, and his recent work in DNA computing. Automated science is a really exciting area, and it feels like everyone's talking about it at the moment - e.g. But you've been working in this field for many years now. In 2009 you developed Adam, the first robot scientist to generate novel scientific knowledge. Could you tell me some more about that? So the history goes back to before Adam.

In optimization problems, some variable subsets may have a joint non-linear or non-monotonical influence on the function value. Therefore, knowledge of variable dependencies may be crucial for effective optimization, and many state-of-the-art optimizers leverage it to improve performance. However, some real-world problem instances may be the subject of noise of various origins. In such a case, variable dependencies relevant to optimization may be hard or impossible to tell using dependency checks sufficient for problems without noise, making highly effective operators, e.g., Partition Crossover (PX), useless. Therefore, we use Statistical Linkage Learning (SLL) to decompose problems with noise and propose a new SLL-dedicated mask construction algorithm. We prove that if the quality of the SLL-based decomposition is sufficiently high, the proposed clustering algorithm yields masks equivalent to PX masks for the noise-free instances. The experiments show that the optimizer using the proposed mechanisms remains equally effective despite the noise level and outperforms state-of-the-art optimizers for the problems with high noise.

This new task holds significant potential for human-centric applications such as assistive robotics and sports analysis.

Detecting and segmenting salient objects from given image scenes has received great attention in recent years.

It is an online romance that has overcome a 3,500-mile distance, and also the Covid pandemic - which meant they had to get married virtually. Welsh cheesemaker Lewis Relfe struck up a relationship with Ameila Henderson, from Virginia, USA, while playing the Friday the 13th horror video game in 2017. She made a number of visits across the Atlantic, including one for six months, and he proposed on Aberystwyth Pier, dressed as the game's main character, Jason Voorhees. While they admit to seeing the humour in being the couple that met and married virtually, they now live together in Ceredigion, with daughter Evelyn. But because of parental responsibilities, they no longer get to enjoy the thing that brought them together.