Environment Animals Wildlife Spiders Psychologists made people look at spiders. Humans will try to focus on almost anything else. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. There are plenty of studies examining why humans are so hardwired to detest spiders . However, fewer researchers have spent time investigating just far we'll go to avoid even looking at them.At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, psychologists decided to find out for themselves.

Hump crossings, or high-profile Highway Railway Grade Crossings (HRGCs), pose safety risks to highway vehicles due to potential hang-ups. These crossings typically result from post-construction railway track maintenance activities or non-compliance with design guidelines for HRGC vertical alignments. Conventional methods for measuring HRGC profiles are costly, time-consuming, traffic-disruptive, and present safety challenges. To address these issues, this research employed advanced, cost-effective techniques and innovative modeling approaches for HRGC profile measurement. A novel hybrid deep learning framework combining Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Transformer architectures was developed by utilizing instrumentation and ground truth data. Instrumentation data were gathered using a highway testing vehicle equipped with Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors, while ground truth data were obtained via an industrial-standard walking profiler. Field data was collected at the Red Rock Railroad Corridor in Oklahoma. Three advanced deep learning models Transformer-LSTM sequential (model 1), LSTM-Transformer sequential (model 2), and LSTM-Transformer parallel (model 3) were evaluated to identify the most efficient architecture. Models 2 and 3 outperformed the others and were deployed to generate 2D/3D HRGC profiles. The deep learning models demonstrated significant potential to enhance highway and railroad safety by enabling rapid and accurate assessment of HRGC hang-up susceptibility.

Replicability is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), as RL algorithms are empirically observed to be unstable and sensitive to variations in training conditions. To formally address this issue, we study \emph{list replicability} in the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) RL framework, where an algorithm must return a near-optimal policy that lies in a \emph{small list} of policies across different runs, with high probability. The size of this list defines the \emph{list complexity}. We introduce both weak and strong forms of list replicability: the weak form ensures that the final learned policy belongs to a small list, while the strong form further requires that the entire sequence of executed policies remains constrained. These objectives are challenging, as existing RL algorithms exhibit exponential list complexity due to their instability. Our main theoretical contribution is a provably efficient tabular RL algorithm that guarantees list replicability by ensuring the list complexity remains polynomial in the number of states, actions, and the horizon length. We further extend our techniques to achieve strong list replicability, bounding the number of possible policy execution traces polynomially with high probability. Our theoretical result is made possible by key innovations including (i) a novel planning strategy that selects actions based on lexicographic order among near-optimal choices within a randomly chosen tolerance threshold, and (ii) a mechanism for testing state reachability in stochastic environments while preserving replicability. Finally, we demonstrate that our theoretical investigation sheds light on resolving the \emph{instability} issue of RL algorithms used in practice. In particular, we show that empirically, our new planning strategy can be incorporated into practical RL frameworks to enhance their stability.

This article analyzes the existential risks artificial intelligence (AI) poses to humanity, tracing the trajectory from current AI to ultraintelligence. Drawing on Irving J. Good and Nick Bostrom's theoretical work, plus recent publications (AI 2027; If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies), it explores AGI and superintelligence. Considering machines' exponentially growing cognitive power and hypothetical IQs, it addresses the ethical and existential implications of an intelligence vastly exceeding humanity's, fundamentally alien. Human extinction may result not from malice, but from uncontrollable, indifferent cognitive superiority.

Unit testing is an essential but resource-intensive step in software development, ensuring individual code units function correctly. This paper introduces AgoneTest, an automated evaluation framework for Large Language Model-generated (LLM) unit tests in Java. AgoneTest does not aim to propose a novel test generation algorithm; rather, it supports researchers and developers in comparing different LLMs and prompting strategies through a standardized end-to-end evaluation pipeline under realistic conditions. We introduce the Classes2Test dataset, which maps Java classes under test to their corresponding test classes, and a framework that integrates advanced evaluation metrics, such as mutation score and test smells, for a comprehensive assessment. Experimental results show that, for the subset of tests that compile, LLM-generated tests can match or exceed human-written tests in terms of coverage and defect detection. Our findings also demonstrate that enhanced prompting strategies contribute to test quality. AgoneTest clarifies the potential of LLMs in software testing and offers insights for future improvements in model design, prompt engineering, and testing practices.

Inference queries have been routinely issued to graph machine learning models such as graph neural networks (GNNs) for various network analytical tasks. Nevertheless, GNN outputs are often hard to interpret comprehensively. Existing methods typically conform to individual pre-defined explainability measures (such as fidelity), which often leads to biased, ``one-side'' interpretations. This paper introduces skyline explanation, a new paradigm that interprets GNN outputs by simultaneously optimizing multiple explainability measures of users' interests. (1) We propose skyline explanations as a Pareto set of explanatory subgraphs that dominate others over multiple explanatory measures. We formulate skyline explanation as a multi-criteria optimization problem, and establish its hardness results. (2) We design efficient algorithms with an onion-peeling approach, which strategically prioritizes nodes and removes unpromising edges to incrementally assemble skyline explanations. (3) We also develop an algorithm to diversify the skyline explanations to enrich the comprehensive interpretation. (4) We introduce efficient parallel algorithms with load-balancing strategies to scale skyline explanation for large-scale GNN-based inference. Using real-world and synthetic graphs, we experimentally verify our algorithms' effectiveness and scalability.

The application of spectral-shifting films in greenhouses to shift green light to red light has shown variable growth responses across crop species. However, the yield enhancement of crops under altered light quality is related to the collective effects of the specific biophysical characteristics of each species. Considering only one attribute of a crop has limitations in understanding the relationship between sunlight quality adjustments and crop growth performance. Therefore, this study aims to comprehensively link multiple plant phenotypic traits and daily light integral considering the physiological responses of crops to their growth outcomes under SF using artificial intelligence. Between 2021 and 2024, various leafy, fruiting, and root crops were grown in greenhouses covered with either PEF or SF, and leaf reflectance, leaf mass per area, chlorophyll content, daily light integral, and light saturation point were measured from the plants cultivated in each condition. 210 data points were collected, but there was insufficient data to train deep learning models, so a variational autoencoder was used for data augmentation. Most crop yields showed an average increase of 22.5% under SF. These data were used to train several models, including logistic regression, decision tree, random forest, XGBoost, and feedforward neural network (FFNN), aiming to binary classify whether there was a significant effect on yield with SF application. The FFNN achieved a high classification accuracy of 91.4% on a test dataset that was not used for training. This study provide insight into the complex interactions between leaf phenotypic and photosynthetic traits, environmental conditions, and solar spectral components by improving the ability to predict solar spectral shift effects using SF.

The decarbonization of transportation relies on the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), which requires an accurate understanding of charging behavior to ensure cost-effective, grid-resilient infrastructure. Existing work is constrained by small-scale datasets, simple proximity-based modeling of temporal dependencies, and weak generalization to sites with limited operational history. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes a framework that integrates clustering with few-shot forecasting to uncover site archetypes using a novel large-scale dataset of charging demand. The results demonstrate that archetype-specific expert models outperform global baselines in forecasting demand at unseen sites. By establishing forecast performance as a basis for infrastructure segmentation, we generate actionable insights that enable operators to lower costs, optimize energy and pricing strategies, and support grid resilience critical to climate goals.