WIRED brought 10 of the most popular artificial Christmas trees into a studio and got three interior designers to pick the best through blind judging. For extra trimming, we checked in on how those trees fared once they were taken home and decorated. Shopping for an artificial Christmas tree can be overwhelming, especially when you're doing it online. You'll find yourself staring at product photos, wondering: How realistic does it look? Will it shed all over my living room? Can you see daylight through the branches? Are the branches strong enough to hold that lopsided homemade macaroni ornament you've hung on your tree since 2004? We got tired of guessing, so we did a little experiment. We brought 10 of the most popular artificial trees from three top brands (Balsam Hill, King of Christmas, and National Tree Company) and hauled them to a photo studio in Kansas.

We brought 10 of the most popular artificial Christmas trees into a studio, had volunteers assemble them, then got three interior designers to pick the best through blind judging. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. You can spend hours scrolling through lists of the best artificial Christmas trees and still end up wondering what to buy. How real does it look? Are the branches strong enough to hold that lopsided homemade macaroni ornament you've hung on your tree since 2004? We decided to settle the debate once and for all by bringing the best-selling artificial trees from three leading brands into a studio for a blind-judged contest. We got 10 trees from Balsam Hill, King of Christmas, and National Tree Company, then found 10 assemblers to put the trees together and fluff them.

The extraction and standardization of pharmacokinetic (PK) information from scientific literature remain significant challenges in computational pharmacology, which limits the reliability of data-driven models in drug development. Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in text understanding and reasoning, yet their adaptation to structured biomedical data, such as PK tables, remains constrained by heterogeneity, noise, and domain shift. To address these limitations, we propose HySim-LLM, a unified mathematical and computational framework that integrates embedding-weighted fine-tuning and manifold-aware denoising to enhance the robustness and interpretability of LLMs. We establish two theoretical results: (1) a similarity-weighted generalization bound that quantifies adaptation performance under embedding divergence, and (2) a manifold-based denoising guarantee that bounds loss contributions from noisy or off-manifold samples. These theorems provide a principled foundation for fine-tuning LLMs in structured biomedical settings. The framework offers a mathematically grounded pathway toward reliable and interpretable LLM adaptation for biomedical and data-intensive scientific domains.

The safe use of pharmaceuticals in food-producing animals is vital to protect animal welfare and human food safety. Adverse events (AEs) may signal unexpected pharmacokinetic or toxicokinetic effects, increasing the risk of violative residues in the food chain. This study introduces a predictive framework for classifying outcomes (Death vs. Recovery) using ~1.28 million reports (1987-2025 Q1) from the U.S. FDA's OpenFDA Center for Veterinary Medicine. A preprocessing pipeline merged relational tables and standardized AEs through VeDDRA ontologies. Data were normalized, missing values imputed, and high-cardinality features reduced; physicochemical drug properties were integrated to capture chemical-residue links. We evaluated supervised models, including Random Forest, CatBoost, XGBoost, ExcelFormer, and large language models (Gemma 3-27B, Phi 3-12B). Class imbalance was addressed, such as undersampling and oversampling, with a focus on prioritizing recall for fatal outcomes. Ensemble methods(Voting, Stacking) and CatBoost performed best, achieving precision, recall, and F1-scores of 0.95. Incorporating Average Uncertainty Margin (AUM)-based pseudo-labeling of uncertain cases improved minority-class detection, particularly in ExcelFormer and XGBoost. Interpretability via SHAP identified biologically plausible predictors, including lung, heart, and bronchial disorders, animal demographics, and drug physicochemical properties. These features were strongly linked to fatal outcomes. Overall, the framework shows that combining rigorous data engineering, advanced machine learning, and explainable AI enables accurate, interpretable predictions of veterinary safety outcomes. The approach supports FARAD's mission by enabling early detection of high-risk drug-event profiles, strengthening residue risk assessment, and informing regulatory and clinical decision-making.

Abstract--Pharmacokinetics (PK) plays a critical role in drug development and regulatory decision-making for human and veterinary medicine, directly affecting public health through drug safety and efficacy assessments. However, PK data are often embedded in complex, heterogeneous tables with variable structures and inconsistent terminologies, posing significant challenges for automated PK data retrieval and standardization. In the first stage, AutoPK identifies and extracts PK parameter variants using large language models (LLMs), a hybrid similarity metric, and LLMbased validation. The second stage filters relevant rows, converts the table into a key-value text format, and uses an LLM to reconstruct a standardized, machine-readable table. Evaluated on a real-world dataset of 605 annotated PK tables, including captions and footnotes, AutoPK demonstrates significant improvements in precision and recall over direct LLM baselines. For instance, AutoPK with LLaMA 3.1-70B achieved an F1-score of 0.92 on half-life and 0.91 on clearance parameters, outperforming direct use of LLaMA 3.1-70B by margins of 0.10 and 0.21, respectively. Smaller models such as Gemma 3-27B and Phi 3-12B with AutoPK achieved 2-7 fold F1 gains over their direct use, with Gemma's hallucination rates reduced from 60-95% down to 8-14%. Notably, AutoPK enabled open-source models like Gemma 3-27B to outperform commercial systems such as GPT -4o Mini on several PK parameters. AutoPK enables scalable and high-confidence PK data extraction, making it well-suited for critical applications in veterinary pharmacology, drug safety monitoring, and public health decision-making, while addressing heterogeneous table structures and terminology and demonstrating generalizability across key PK parameters. Personal use of this material is permitted. This is the author's version of the work accepted for publication in: Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE 37th International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICT AI). The final published version will be available via IEEE Xplore.

Many incarcerated individuals face significant and complex challenges, including mental illness, substance dependence, and homelessness, yet jails and prisons are often poorly equipped to address these needs. With little support from the existing criminal justice system, these needs can remain untreated and worsen, often leading to further offenses and a cycle of incarceration with adverse outcomes both for the individual and for public safety, with particularly large impacts on communities of color that continue to widen the already extensive racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes. Responding to these failures, a growing number of criminal justice stakeholders are seeking to break this cycle through innovative approaches such as community-driven and alternative approaches to policing, mentoring, community building, restorative justice, pretrial diversion, holistic defense, and social service connections. Here we report on a collaboration between Johnson County, Kansas, and Carnegie Mellon University to perform targeted, proactive mental health outreach in an effort to reduce reincarceration rates. This paper describes the data used, our predictive modeling approach and results, as well as the design and analysis of a field trial conducted to confirm our model's predictive power, evaluate the impact of this targeted outreach, and understand at what level of reincarceration risk outreach might be most effective. Through this trial, we find that our model is highly predictive of new jail bookings, with more than half of individuals in the trial's highest-risk group returning to jail in the following year. Outreach was most effective among these highest-risk individuals, with impacts on mental health utilization, EMS dispatches, and criminal justice involvement.

This chapter provides an overview of recent and promising Machine Learning applications, i.e. pose estimation, feature estimation, event detection, data exploration & clustering, and automated classification, in gait (walking and running) and sports biomechanics. It explores the potential of Machine Learning methods to address challenges in biomechanical workflows, highlights central limitations, i.e. data and annotation availability and explainability, that need to be addressed, and emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary approaches for fully harnessing the potential of Machine Learning in gait and sports biomechanics.

Wearable sensors offer a non-invasive way to collect physical activity (PA) data, with walking as a key component. Existing models often struggle to detect gait bouts in individuals with neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs) involving involuntary movements. We developed J-Net, a deep learning model inspired by U-Net, which uses a pre-trained self-supervised foundation model fine-tuned with Huntington`s disease (HD) in-lab data and paired with a segmentation head for gait detection. J-Net processes wrist-worn accelerometer data to detect gait during daily living. We evaluated J-Net on in-lab and daily-living data from HD, Parkinson`s disease (PD), and controls. J-Net achieved a 10-percentage point improvement in ROC-AUC for HD over existing methods, reaching 0.97 for in-lab data. In daily-living environments, J-Net estimates showed no significant differences in median daily walking time between HD and controls (p = 0.23), in contrast to other models, which indicated counterintuitive results (p < 0.005). Walking time measured by J-Net correlated with the UHDRS-TMS clinical severity score (r=-0.52; p=0.02), confirming its clinical relevance. Fine-tuning J-Net on PD data also improved gait detection over current methods. J-Net`s architecture effectively addresses the challenges of gait detection in severe chorea and offers robust performance in daily living. The dataset and J-Net model are publicly available, providing a resource for further research into NDD-related gait impairments.

The detection of pilots' mental states is critical, as abnormal mental states have the potential to cause catastrophic accidents. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using deep learning techniques to classify different fatigue levels, specifically a normal state, low fatigue, and high fatigue. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to classify fatigue levels in pilots. Our approach employs the hybrid deep neural network comprising five convolutional blocks and one long short-term memory block to extract the significant features from electroencephalography signals. Ten pilots participated in the experiment, which was conducted in a simulated flight environment. Compared to four conventional models, our proposed model achieved a superior grand-average accuracy of 0.8801, outperforming other models by at least 0.0599 in classifying fatigue levels. In addition to successfully classifying fatigue levels, our model provided valuable feedback to subjects. Therefore, we anticipate that our study will make the significant contributions to the advancement of autonomous flight and driving technologies, leveraging artificial intelligence in the future.

The detection of pilots' mental states is important due to the potential for their abnormal mental states to result in catastrophic accidents. This study introduces the feasibility of employing deep learning techniques to classify different workload levels, specifically normal state, low workload, and high workload. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to classify workload levels of pilots. Our approach involves the hybrid deep neural network that consists of five convolutional blocks and one long short-term memory block to extract the significant features from electroencephalography signals. Ten pilots participated in the experiment, which was conducted within the simulated flight environment. In contrast to four conventional models, our proposed model achieved a superior grand--average accuracy of 0.8613, surpassing other conventional models by at least 0.0597 in classifying workload levels across all participants. Our model not only successfully classified workload levels but also provided valuable feedback to the participants. Hence, we anticipate that our study will make the significant contributions to the advancement of autonomous flight and driving leveraging artificial intelligence technology in the future.