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Canadian premier wants to ban social media and AI chatbots for kids in Manitoba

Engadget

The province's premier, Wab Kinew, proposed the ban during a fundraiser, but didn't elaborate on key details. Manitoba could be the first province in Canada to establish a social media ban for kids, but the proposal's details aren't very clear yet. The province's premier, Wab Kinew, announced during a fundraiser event on Saturday and on X that Manitoba would put in place a ban for social media and AI chatbots for its youth. They're doing these very awful things to kids all in the name of a few likes, all in the name of more engagement, and all in the name of money, Kinew said at the event. Our kids will never be for sale and their attention and their childhoods should never be profited from.


Water flow in prairie watersheds is increasingly unpredictable -- but AI could help

AIHub

In recent years, the Prairies have seen bigger swings in climate conditions -- very wet years followed by very dry ones. That makes an already unpredictable landscape even harder to forecast, with real consequences for flood preparedness and water quality. The challenge is the landscape itself. Much of the Canadian Prairies sit within the Prairie Pothole Region, a landscape dotted with millions of shallow wetlands and depressions. Water doesn't simply run downhill into a stream, it is stored first.






The Doomsday Glacier Is Getting Closer and Closer to Irreversible Collapse

WIRED

An analysis of the expansion of cracks in the Thwaites Glacier over the past 20 years suggests that a total collapse could be only a matter of time. Known as the "Doomsday Glacier," the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is one of the most rapidly changing glaciers on Earth, and its future evolution is one of the biggest unknowns when it comes to predicting global sea level rise. The eastern ice shelf of the Thwaites Glacier is supported at its northern end by a ridge of the ocean floor. However, over the past two decades, cracks in the upper reaches of the glacier have increased rapidly, weakening its structural stability. A new study by the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) presents a detailed record of this gradual collapse process.


Rare polar bear adoption could save cub's life

Popular Science

Rare polar bear adoption could save cub's life The cubs were born into a well-studied'celebration' of polar bears in Canada. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Scientists in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (aka the polar bear capital of the world) have confirmed that a wild female polar bear has adopted a cub that is not her own. This rare behavior was captured on cameras during the polar bear's annual migration along Western Hudson Bay . Researchers from Environment and Climate Change Canada and Polar Bears International spotted the mother bear (designated as bear X33991) during spring 2025, when she came out of her maternity den.


Physics-Guided Conditional Diffusion Networks for Microwave Image Reconstruction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--A conditional latent-diffusion based framework for solving the electromagnetic inverse scattering problem associated with microwave imaging is introduced. This generative machine-learning model explicitly mirrors the non-uniqueness of the ill-posed inverse problem. Unlike existing inverse solvers utilizing deterministic machine learning techniques that produce a single reconstruction, the proposed latent-diffusion model generates multiple plausible permittivity maps conditioned on measured scattered-field data, thereby generating several potential instances in the range-space of the non-unique inverse mapping. A forward electromagnetic solver is integrated into the reconstruction pipeline as a physics-based evaluation mechanism. The space of candidate reconstructions form a distribution of possibilities consistent with the conditioning data and the member of this space yielding the lowest scattered-field data discrepancy between the predicted and measured scattered fields is reported as the final solution. Synthetic and experimental labeled datasets are used for training and evaluation of the model. An innovative labeled synthetic dataset is created that exemplifies a varied set of scattering features. Training of the model using this new dataset produces high-quality permittivity reconstructions achieving improved generalization with excellent fidelity to shape recognition. UANTIT A TIVE Microwave Imaging (MWI) is a noninvasive technique with applications in a wide range of areas such as medical diagnostics, and non-destructive testing in agricultural and industrial settings [1]-[3].


ChatGPT's Horny Era Could Be Its Stickiest Yet

WIRED

ChatGPT's Horny Era Could Be Its Stickiest Yet OpenAI will soon let adults create erotic content in ChatGPT. Experts say that could lead to "emotional commodification," or horniness as a revenue stream. In May of 2024, while I was combing through OpenAI's "Model Spec" laying out how ChatGPT should act, one comment buried in the document struck me as peculiar. It said OpenAI was "exploring" how to let adult ChatGPT users generate content with mature themes such as "erotica, extreme gore, slurs, and unsolicited profanity." Seems like the exploration phase is over.