'Sopranos' star Dominic Chianese continues to age in reverse, starts podcast at 95 years old Australia's'Queen of Infomercials' wants'no-strings attached fun,' the O-dome is back & you're not weird? Pizza delivery man deserves a raise after walking past a black bear to deliver customer's order Nicolas Cage leads all-star cast in'Fortitude,' a WWII film about the D-Day deception campaign Florida police learn the hard way to not trust'Crooked Jess' with money to buy crack for undercover operation Dale'Grey Beard' Sanders reclaims title as oldest person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail at 91 'I literally think this is going to be it for me': Hiker recounts grizzly bear encounter in Canada Creature dubbed'Syracuse Figure' spotted in New York: Is it Bigfoot or an elderly skinny-dipper? Taylor Sheridan's Landman faces lengthy wait as season 3 production timeline revealed Man in trouble for using robot vacuum to record wife's affair, friends with benefits lease up & hall pass wins Country music star Riley Green keeps cooking with new single'That's Just Me' from upcoming album Iran's government is'paying its people' to stay compliant: Ret Marine colonel Iran's government is'paying its people' to stay compliant: Ret Marine colonel Seattle police union chief warns city hasn't recovered from'defund the police' movement Clancy attorney has been'demonstrative' throughout, began to'fray': Mauro Vance: America's inflation was created by'very bad' Biden administration policies Everybody is'running out of patience' with Iran, Iraq war veteran says Iranian-American: 'It's going to take boots on the ground, the Iranian people need to be armed' OutKick Culture Eva Shockey says she received'thousands and thousands' of death threats from anti-hunting activists Rock legend Ted Nugent criticizes an Oregon ballot measure that would restrict hunting and fishing on'The Ingraham Angle.' Eva Shockey says the anti-hunting backlash she faced at the height of her rise in the outdoor industry went far beyond angry comments on social media. It included thousands and thousands and thousands of death threats. Shockey, the daughter of legendary hunter Jim Shockey, opened up about the years of harassment during a recent appearance on the Country Outdoors podcast, explaining that she became a frequent target of anti-hunting activists as she gained notoriety.

Machine learning (ML) is transforming modeling and control in the physical, engineering, and biological sciences. However, rapid development has outpaced the creation of standardized, objective benchmarks--leading to weak baselines, reporting bias, and inconsistent evaluations across methods. This undermines reproducibility, misguides resource allocation, and obscures scientific progress. To address this, we develop a Common Task Framework (CTF) for scientific machine learning. The CTF features a curated set of datasets and task-specific metrics spanning forecasting, state reconstruction, and generalization under realistic constraints, including noise and limited data. Inspired by the success of CTFs in fields like natural language processing and computer vision, our framework provides a structured, rigorous foundation for head-to-head evaluation of diverse algorithms.

The simple linear threshold units used in many artificial neural networks have a limited computational capacity. Famously, a single unit cannot handle nonlinearly separable problems like XOR. In contrast, real neurons exhibit complex morphologies as well as active dendritic integration, suggesting that their computational capacities outperform those of simple linear units. Considering specific families of Boolean functions, we empirically examine the computational limits of single units that incorporate more complex dendritic structures. For random Boolean functions, we show that there is a phase transition in learnability as a function of the input dimension, with most random functions below a certain critical dimension being learnable and those above not.

However, their adoption is limited by two main challenges: the accuracy gap compared to large-scale networks during training, and discrepancies between simulated and fabricated systems that further degrade accuracy. While previous work has proposed end-to-end optimizations for specific datasets (e.g., MNIST) and optical systems, these approaches typically lack generalization across tasks and hardware designs. To address these limitations, we propose a task-agnostic and hardware-agnostic pipeline that supports image classification and segmentation across diverse optical systems. To assist optical system design before training, we design the metasurface layout based on fabrication constraints. For training, we introduce Neural Tangent Knowledge Distillation (NTKD), which aligns optical models with electronic teacher networks, thereby narrowing the accuracy gap. After fabrication, NTKD also guides fine-tuning of the digital backend to compensate for implementation errors. Experiments on multiple datasets (e.g., MNIST, CIFAR, Carvana Image Masking Dataset) and hardware configurations show that our pipeline consistently improves ONN performance and enables practical deployment in both pre-fabrication simulations and physical implementations.

They were testifying at a Seattle city council meeting. Five members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ) previously testified at Seattle city council meetings about AI data centers . Now, three of them are apparently under investigation by the company. The AECJ has filed a civil rights complaint against the company on behalf of the three engineers, according to CNBC and GeekWire, accusing Amazon of violating a Seattle law that prohibits companies from discriminating against employees based on their political ideology, race, religion and age. The engineers spoke at Seattle city council hearings over whether to put a pause on AI data center buildouts.

The software engineers filed a complaint with Seattle's civil rights office accusing Amazon of illegally retaliating against them for expressing their personal political beliefs. Earlier this month, five current Amazon employees publicly urged Seattle City Council to regulate data centers . It was an unprecedented act of advocacy by tech workers, and now three of the staffers say they are under internal investigation for what they understand to be allegedly representing themselves as spokespeople for the company without prior approval. "It's a totally ridiculous claim," says one of the affected employees, Patrick Schloesser. The three software engineers, who work in different divisions of Amazon and all live in Seattle, believe they are being unfairly targeted for expressing their political beliefs.

Seattle has passed a year-long moratorium on the construction of new datacenters. The city council voted unanimously in favor of the temporary ban on Tuesday. A major tech hub whose metro area is home to Amazon and Microsoft, Seattle is the largest US city to have passed such a moratorium as the backlash against AI infrastructure grows across the country. Lawmakers have framed the pause as an opportunity to draft regulations specifically targeting the electricity-hungry datacenters being built nationwide to serve the AI sector, and to protect local residents from environmental risks and rising electricity bills. According to Seattle's mayor, Katie Wilson, the moratorium will also let city officials determine whether datacenters are a "good use of urban land", and potentially impose new stipulations on their approval, such as requiring developers to invest in local transit and housing initiatives in exchange for construction permits.

ROV specialist Phil Parisi is documenting nearly 100 underwater targets in Seattle's Lake Union, calling the urban lake a "shipwreck city" hiding a century of maritime history.

Edward Cabrera's strikeout prop is the play as struggling Phillies face surging Cubs today Nuggets vs Timberwolves Game 3 pick hinges on Jaden McDaniels calling out Denver's entire defense Charles Barkley was disgusted by Magic's highly questionable pregame handshake ChatGPT predicted the first round of the NFL Draft and here's what it said Curt Cignetti was so focused this offseason, he turned down all external requests: 'I'm 95% football' Former MLB owner claims'despicable' San Francisco Giants are the reason the A's left Oakland Longtime NASCAR crew chief tells wild story about one of the sport's biggest characters WNBA finally embraces Caitlin Clark's stardom with unprecedented national TV schedule Why are the Mets so bad? Flyers mascot Gritty pens letter to fans ahead of first playoff game... eight years after he debuted Hasan Piker justifies'social murder' of CEO Fox News celebrates'Bring Your Kids to Work Day' Trump says there's'no time frame' to secure Iran deal Iranian activist praises Trump's intervention after female protesters saved from execution Steve Hilton praised for'offering solutions' in CA gubernatorial debate Middle East tensions escalate over US blockade, Iran's actions We had a homer land on top of the foul pole, and a line drive land in a pitcher's shirt Jo Adell just pulled off something you may NEVER see again -- robbing THREE home runs in a single game vs the Mariners. Is this the greatest defensive performance in MLB history? Ricky Cobb reacts like only the Super 70s Sports Guy can .... All eyes are on today's NFL Draft, but I doubt it'll produce anything like what Major League Baseball gave us Wednesday night.

Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They're the Bad Guys Interviews with current and former Palantir employees, along with internal Slack messages obtained by WIRED, suggest a workforce in turmoil. It took just a few months of President Donald Trump's second term for Palantir employees to question their company's commitments to civil liberties . Last fall, Palantir seemed to become the technological backbone of Trump's immigration enforcement machinery, providing software identifying, tracking, and helping deport immigrants on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), when current and former employees started ringing the alarm. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, "Are you tracking Palantir's descent into fascism?" "That was their greeting," the other former employee says.