Schools in the US are installing vape-detection tech in bathrooms to thwart student nicotine and cannabis use. A new investigation reveals the impact of using spying to solve a problem. It was in physical education class when Laila Gutierrez swapped out self-harm for a new vice. The freshman from Phoenix had long struggled with depression and would cut her arms to feel something. The first drag from a friend's vape several years ago offered the shy teenager a new way to escape. She quit cutting but got hooked on nicotine. Her sadness got harder to carry after her uncle died, and she felt she couldn't turn to her grieving parents for comfort. Bumming fruity vapes at school became part of her routine. "I would ask my friends who had them, 'I'm going through a lot, can I use it?'" Gutierrez, now 18, told The 74. "Or'I failed my test and I feel like smoking would be better than cutting my wrists.'"

Neighbors complained about noise, security guards, and hordes of traffic. An unlicensed school named after the Zuckerbergs' pet chicken tipped them over the edge. The Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto, California, has some of the best real estate in the country, with a charming hodgepodge of homes ranging in style from Tudor revival to modern farmhouse and contemporary Mediterranean. It also has a gigantic compound that is home to Mark Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan, and their daughters Maxima, August, and Aurelia. Their land has expanded to include 11 previously separate properties, five of which are connected by at least one property line. The Zuckerberg compound's expansion first became a concern for Crescent Park neighbours as early as 2016, due to fears that his purchases were driving up the market. Then, about five years later, neighbors noticed that a school appeared to be operating out of the Zuckerberg compound. This would be illegal under the area's residential zoning code without a permit.

The Republican Plan to Reform the Census Could Put Everyone's Privacy at Risk A little-known algorithmic process called "differential privacy" helps keep census data anonymous. President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have spent the better part of the president's second term radically reshaping the federal government. But in recent weeks, the GOP has set its sights on taking another run at an old target: the US census. Since the first Trump administration, the right has sought to add a question to the census that captures a respondent's immigration status and to exclude noncitizens from the tallies that determine how seats in Congress are distributed. In 2019, the Supreme Court struck down an attempt by the first Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the census. But now, a little-known algorithmic process called "differential privacy," created to keep census data from being used to identify individual respondents, has become the right's latest focus.

If you want to secure your home, Google's Nest range is one of the smartest and easiest ways. 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. There's no need for an expensive, professionally installed home security system for a little peace of mind. You can keep tabs on your home when you're away, check in on your kids or pets, and discourage intruders with a few well-placed security cameras and connected devices.

The All-Clad pizza oven was one of my biggest surprises of the summer. 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. Cookware brand All-Clad surprised me this year. This summer, it breezed into the backyard pizza world with a debut pizza oven that I like as well as any oven I've tested this year.

These high-end earbuds sound great, and have a much-needed discount. 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. Amazon currently has the Black Graphite Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 4 (7/10, WIRED Recommends) marked down to just $180, a full $170 off their list price, with lesser discounts on the regular black and white varieties. If you've ever used a pair of Sennheiser headphones before, you know they have a consistently excellent sound quality, and the True Wireless 4 are no exception.

OpenAI released initial estimates about the share of users who may be experiencing symptoms like delusional thinking, mania, or suicidal ideation, and says it has tweaked GPT-5 to respond more effectively. For the first time ever, OpenAI has released a rough estimate of how many ChatGPT users globally may show signs of having a severe mental health crisis in a typical week. The company said Monday that it worked with experts around the world to make updates to the chatbot so it can more reliably recognize indicators of mental distress and guide users toward real-world support. In recent months, a growing number of people have ended up hospitalized, divorced, or dead after having long, intense conversations with ChatGPT. Some of their loved ones allege the chatbot fueled their delusions and paranoia.

In Brownsville, Texas, some families found a buzzy new school's methods--surveillance of kids, software in lieu of teachers--to be an education in and of itself. At Alpha School's campus in Brownsville, Texas, a student works on exercises in a learning app. One day last fall, Kristine Barrios' 9-year-old daughter got stuck on a lesson in IXL, the personalized learning software that served as her math teacher. She had to multiply three three-digit numbers without using a calculator. Then she had to do it again, her mom says, more than 20 times, without making mistakes. At Alpha School, the private microschool the girl and her younger brother attended in Brownsville, Texas, she had been working a grade level ahead of her age in math, Barrios says. She could do three-digit multiplication correctly most of the time. But whenever she made an error in IXL, the software would determine she needed more practice and assign her more questions. She told her mom that she had asked her "guide," the adult who supervised her classroom in lieu of a teacher, to make an exception and let her move on. She said the guide's reply was that she needed to get it done, that it was expected of her. The adult guides in Alpha's classrooms "don't do any teaching," says the current head of the Brownsville school.

ABSTRACT A variety of models have been developed to forecast dengue cases to date. However, it remains a challenge to predict major dengue outbreaks that need timely public warnings the most. In this paper, we introduce CrossLag, an environmentally informed attention that allows for the incorporation of lagging endogenous signals behind the significant events in the exogenous data into the architecture of the transformer at low parameter counts. We use TimeXer, a recent general-purpose transformer distinguishing exogenous-endogenous inputs, as the baseline for this study. Our proposed model outperforms TimeXer by a considerable margin in detecting and predicting major outbreaks in Singapore dengue data over a 24-week prediction window.

Millions of patients are already using large language model (LLM) chatbots for medical advice on a regular basis, raising patient safety concerns. This physician-led red-teaming study compares the safety of four publicly available chatbots--Claude by Anthropic, Gemini by Google, GPT-4o by OpenAI, and Llama3-70B by Meta--on a new dataset, HealthAdvice, using an evaluation framework that enables quantitative and qualitative analysis. In total, 888 chatbot responses are evaluated for 222 patient-posed advice-seeking medical questions on primary care topics spanning internal medicine, women's health, and pediatrics. We find statistically significant differences between chatbots. The rate of problematic responses varies from 21.6 percent (Claude) to 43.2 percent (Llama), with unsafe responses varying from 5 percent (Claude) to 13 percent (GPT-4o, Llama). Qualitative results reveal chatbot responses with the potential to lead to serious patient harm. This study suggests that millions of patients could be receiving unsafe medical advice from publicly available chatbots, and further work is needed to improve the clinical safety of these powerful tools.