Europe
Woman builds EpiPen cannon, because why not?
Technology Engineering Woman builds EpiPen cannon, because why not? It's not the most efficient way to deliver the life-saving medicine, but it's definitely the most entertaining. 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. The bolt-action device can hold up to four pens. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week.
'Doors to Death' reveal how Romans upgraded a stadium for bloodsport
Science Archaeology'Doors to Death' reveal how Romans upgraded a stadium for bloodsport The ruins in present-day Turkey tell a grisly tale of wild animals eating prisoners. 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. The ancient city of Perge is located in present-day Turkey. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The ancient Roman city of Perge--in present-day southern Turkey--was one of the region's most prominent urban centers.
From crying to dentistry: 6 odd skills astronauts need to go to space
Everything is more complicated in space, from toilet vacuums to tech support. 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. The Artemis II crew--(clockwise from left) Mission Specialist Christina Koch, Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen, Commander Reid Wiseman, and Pilot Victor Glover--pause for a group photo with their zero gravity indicator "Rise," inside the Orion spacecraft on their way home on April 7, 2026. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. When the four-person Artemis II crew safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, they landed with a deeper understanding of what it will take to finally bring humans back to the moon.
How Audi's electromechanical progressive steering works
The new A6 sedan is fast, so stable handling is critical. 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. The A6 is capable of zipping from 0 to 60 mph in 4.5 seconds, and high-tech steering makes a big difference in handling. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Audi is having a big moment: two years ago, the German brand announced it would launch 20 brand-new or significantly new models.
Is YOUR phone safe? Facial recognition on 21 popular devices can be easily spoofed with printed photos, tests reveal - so, is yours on the list?
Nancy Guthrie sheriff's appalling past revealed: Beat handcuffed suspect so badly he needed intensive care, used VILE language about woman and lied in sworn statement Vance grounded at White House as Iran peace talks in turmoil and Trump declares: 'I expect to be bombing' New'Hollywood dose' pill: A-listers hooked on'youth elixir' that dermatologists say is anti-ageing, shrinks pores, smooths wrinkles... and even banishes rosacea Days after we got engaged, the love of my life told me he'd killed a man and buried him in a bog. I reported him to police... but then I made this irreversible mistake Ark of the Covenant's final resting place pinpointed by archaeologists as fresh search begins Ritzy Bay Area town torn apart after teacher's daughter, 16, crashed car while speeding and killed four friends... then posted a TikTok video that poured fuel on the flames Jordon Hudson extends her control over Bill Belichick's empire with secret move that is set to leave his family and friends furious Two CIA officers killed in Mexico when their car skidded off ravine and exploded after meeting about bust of'largest ever drug lab' Life-threatening cantaloupe recall in four states upgraded to FDA's highest risk level... 'reasonable probability of death' AMANDA PLATELL: Why Sarah Ferguson - with the ghost of Princess Diana at her side - is ready to sensationally blow up the Royal Family. She knows ALL their secrets... Trump confronts Xi as US forces seize Chinese ship carrying mysterious'gift' to Iran Team USA Olympics star Noah Lyles slammed for'horrible' reaction to his wife's wedding dress reveal Humiliating moment runner celebrates winning marathon... only to be pipped at the line by rival in brutal finish In honour of the Queen's (purple!) reign: Kate mirrors late monarch's colourful wardrobe and wears her pearl earrings and necklace How to lose weight when perimenopause sabotages your metabolism: I'm a trainer but when I hit 46, I piled on the pounds overnight. The new'posh' drug that's easier to order than Uber Eats - and why all my middle-class friends have ditched booze and cocaine for it: JANA HOCKING Grieving mother says she went to LA school every day to complain daughter was being bullied... then tragedy struck when the lead tormentor, 12, hurled metal water bottle at victim's head Autistic woman, 24, worked hard to build independent life for herself... now she's PARALYZED thanks to selfishness of stranger Facial recognition on 21 popular devices can be easily spoofed with printed photos, tests reveal - so, is yours on the list? Facial recognition might seem like one of the safest ways to keep your phone secure, but experts say your device might be easy prey for hackers.
Zeroth-Order Optimization at the Edge of Stability
Song, Minhak, Zhang, Liang, Li, Bingcong, He, Niao, Muehlebach, Michael, Oh, Sewoong
Zeroth-order (ZO) methods are widely used when gradients are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, including black-box learning and memory-efficient fine-tuning of large models, yet their optimization dynamics in deep learning remain underexplored. In this work, we provide an explicit step size condition that exactly captures the (mean-square) linear stability of a family of ZO methods based on the standard two-point estimator. Our characterization reveals a sharp contrast with first-order (FO) methods: whereas FO stability is governed solely by the largest Hessian eigenvalue, mean-square stability of ZO methods depends on the entire Hessian spectrum. Since computing the full Hessian spectrum is infeasible in practical neural network training, we further derive tractable stability bounds that depend only on the largest eigenvalue and the Hessian trace. Empirically, we find that full-batch ZO methods operate at the edge of stability: ZO-GD, ZO-GDM, and ZO-Adam consistently stabilize near the predicted stability boundary across a range of deep learning training problems. Our results highlight an implicit regularization effect specific to ZO methods, where large step sizes primarily regularize the Hessian trace, whereas in FO methods they regularize the top eigenvalue.
Scalable Model-Based Clustering with Sequential Monte Carlo
Trojan, Connie, Myshkov, Pavel, Fearnhead, Paul, Hensman, James, Minka, Tom, Nemeth, Christopher
In online clustering problems, there is often a large amount of uncertainty over possible cluster assignments that cannot be resolved until more data are observed. This difficulty is compounded when clusters follow complex distributions, as is the case with text data. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods give a natural way of representing and updating this uncertainty over time, but have prohibitive memory requirements for large-scale problems. We propose a novel SMC algorithm that decomposes clustering problems into approximately independent subproblems, allowing a more compact representation of the algorithm state. Our approach is motivated by the knowledge base construction problem, and we show that our method is able to accurately and efficiently solve clustering problems in this setting and others where traditional SMC struggles.
Generative Augmented Inference
Lu, Cheng, Wang, Mengxin, Zhang, Dennis J., Zhang, Heng
Data-driven operations management often relies on parameters estimated from costly human-generated labels. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems offer inexpensive auxiliary data, but introduce a new challenge: AI outputs are not direct observations of the target outcomes, but could involve high-dimensional representations with complex and unknown relationships to human labels. Conventional methods leverage AI predictions as direct proxies for true labels, which can be inefficient or unreliable when this relationship is weak or misspecified. We propose Generative Augmented Inference (GAI), a general framework that incorporates AI-generated outputs as informative features for estimating models of human-labeled outcomes. GAI uses an orthogonal moment construction that enables consistent estimation and valid inference with flexible, nonparametric relationship between LLM-generated outputs and human labels. We establish asymptotic normality and show a "safe default" property: relative to human-data-only estimators, GAI weakly improves estimation efficiency under arbitrary auxiliary signals and yields strict gains whenever the auxiliary information is predictive. Empirically, GAI outperforms benchmarks across diverse settings. In conjoint analysis with weak auxiliary signals, GAI reduces estimation error by about 50% and lowers human labeling requirements by over 75%. In retail pricing, where all methods access the same auxiliary inputs, GAI consistently outperforms alternative estimators, highlighting the value of its construction rather than differences in information. In health insurance choice, it cuts labeling requirements by over 90% while maintaining decision accuracy. Across applications, GAI improves confidence interval coverage without inflating width. Overall, GAI provides a principled and scalable approach to integrating AI-generated information.
Best of both worlds: Stochastic & adversarial best-arm identification
Abbasi-Yadkori, Yasin, Bartlett, Peter L., Gabillon, Victor, Malek, Alan, Valko, Michal
We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the rewards are sampled stochastically. Therefore, we ask: Can we design a learner that performs optimally in both the stochastic and adversarial problems while not being aware of the nature of the rewards? First, we show that designing such a learner is impossible in general. In particular, to be robust to adversarial rewards, we can only guarantee optimal rates of error on a subset of the stochastic problems. We give a lower bound that characterizes the optimal rate in stochastic problems if the strategy is constrained to be robust to adversarial rewards. Finally, we design a simple parameter-free algorithm and show that its probability of error matches (up to log factors) the lower bound in stochastic problems, and it is also robust to adversarial ones.
Early-stopped aggregation: Adaptive inference with computational efficiency
Ohn, Ilsang, Fan, Shitao, Jun, Jungbin, Lin, Lizhen
When considering a model selection or, more generally, an aggregation approach for adaptive statistical inference, it is often necessary to compute estimators over a wide range of model complexities including unnecessarily large models even when the true data-generating process is relatively simple, due to the lack of prior knowledge. This requirement can lead to substantial computational inefficiency. In this work, we propose a novel framework for efficient model aggregation called the early-stopped aggregation (ESA): instead of computing and aggregating estimators for all candidate models, we compute only a small number of simpler ones using an early-stopping criterion and aggregate only these for final inference. Our framework is versatile and applies to both Bayesian model selection, in particular, within the variational Bayes framework, and frequentist estimation, including a general penalized estimation setting. We investigate adaptive optimal property of the ESA approach across three learning paradigms. We first show that ESA achieves optimal adaptive contraction rates in the variational Bayes setting under mild conditions. We extend this result to variational empirical Bayes, where prior hyperparameters are chosen in a data-dependent manner. In addition, we apply the ESA approach to frequentist aggregation including both penalization-based and sample-splitting implementations, and establish corresponding theory. As we demonstrate, there is a clear unification between early-stopped Bayes and frequentist penalized aggregation, with a common "energy" functional comprising a data-fitting term and a complexity-control term that drives both procedures. We further present several applications and numerical studies that highlight the efficiency and strong performance of the proposed approach.