A 2024 study found that cats learn to associate images with words faster than human babies. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. "My cat always watches my phone as I text or read a book," someone wrote on Reddit . "Even right now she is on my shoulder, intently watching what I am typing on this post. Can she read or is she just interested in what I am doing?"

Children take part in an extracurricular club about coding and AI in Cambridge. Children take part in an extracurricular club about coding and AI in Cambridge. Generation AI: fears of'social divide' unless all children learn computing skills In a Cambridge classroom, Joseph, 10, trained his AI model to discern between drawings of apples and drawings of smiles. "AI gets lots of things wrong," he said, as it mistakenly identified a fruit as a face. He set about retraining it and, in a flash, he had it back on track - instinctively understanding the inner nature of artificial intelligence and machine learning in a way few adults do.

Trump's ominous warning to Colombia as acting Venezuelan president issues message to world calling for'peace and dialogue, not war' Trump plans a military'quarantine' of Venezuela's oil to strong-arm Maduro's successor I got a GLP-1 drug with few questions asked... and never meeting a doctor face-to-face. But could that convenience have put my health at risk? Addicted, arrested and dead in a hotel corridor...Victoria Jones is the latest child of a famous parent to tragically spiral. So why ARE so many children of the rich and famous cursed? Marco Rubio'runs laps' around CBS reporter who asked why US commandos didn't nab Maduro associates in daring night time raid Prince Harry'desperately wants King Charles to come to Montecito and see Archie and Lilibet' Travis Kelce finally addresses possible retirement as Chiefs lose to NFL's worst team in what could be humiliating end to his iconic career State of Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Lopez's relationship revealed by insiders... as parents gossip about'less sociable' star at school play NASA's'queen of diamonds' EXPOSED: Genius is accused of treachery over top secret mission... as chilling details emerge Michael B. Jordan's unimpressed face sends fans wild as Timothee Chalamet cries on stage over Kylie Jenner North West, 12, sparks face piercing speculation after backlash over'risky' body modification'Out-of-touch' Gayle King slammed for complaining that her upper class seat doesn't have a window on her eight-hour flight'back to work' from Hawaii American family of seven stranded after Venezuela raids say they're trapped in a living hell... while oblivious influencers BOAST about getting stuck Ten people who spread false claims France's First Lady Brigitte Macron was born a man are found guilty of cyberbullying in Paris EXPOSED: The Air Force vet who let China steal America's nuclear secrets... and KEPT his $200K tax-funded salary From'sand theft auto' to space BABIES: The global innovations and trends set to shape 2026 From the rise of the humanoid robot to the weird world of AI girlfriends, 2025 had no shortage of strange and transformative inventions. Now, experts from the Nesta research foundation have revealed the global innovations and trends set to shape the world in 2026.

Big hitter Peter F. Hamilton has a new sci-fi novel out this month - and Booker winner George Saunders ventures into speculative fiction with his latest book, Vigil Is it an asteroid or an alien in Van Jensen's Godfall? Welcome to January, a month when many of us are keen to escape from the world into the pages of a book. Thankfully, science fiction is here to help, whether that's with a story set on a generation ship where things aren't as they seem, courtesy of Peter F. Hamilton, or journeying to an alternate version of this world where the Roman Empire is still in charge, in Solitaire Townsend's . Add to the mix a time-loop murder, a UFO romance and some eco-horror, and there's plenty of choice for sci-fi fans this month. A generation ship is in search of a new home in Peter F. Hamilton's latest sci-fi novel Big hitter Peter F. Hamilton sets his latest outing on a generation ship in search of a new world, where people are only allowed to live for 65 years so they don't deplete the ship's resources. When a teenager Hazel's brother has an accident that means he is no longer productive, he is set to be killed off.

Innovative research into the gene-editing tool targets influenza's ability to replicate--stopping it in its tracks. As he addressed an audience of virologists from China, Australia, and Singapore at October's Pandemic Research Alliance Symposium, Wei Zhao introduced an eye-catching idea. The gene-editing technology Crispr is best known for delivering groundbreaking new therapies for rare diseases, tweaking or knocking out rogue genes in conditions ranging from sickle cell disease to hemophilia . But Zhao and his colleagues at Melbourne's Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity have envisioned a new application. They believe Crispr could be tailored to create a next-generation treatment for influenza, whether that's the seasonal strains which plague both the northern and southern hemispheres on an annual basis, or the worrisome new variants in birds and other wildlife that might trigger the next pandemic.

The US military action in Venezuela breaches international law and the UK should make clear it is unacceptable, the chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee has said. Dame Emily Thornberry is the most senior Labour MP so far to criticise Donald Trump's strikes on the country over the weekend, which saw President Nicolas Maduro and his wife captured. The UK government has so far refused to say whether the move was illegal, insisting it is for the Americans to lay out the legal basis for the action. But the US president's actions have been criticised by some Labour MPs, as well as the leaders of the Lib Dems, Greens and the SNP. Dame Emily told BBC Radio 4's Westminster Hour the strikes were not a legal action and she cannot think of anything that could be a proper justification.

I'm watching myself on YouTube saying things I would never say. These inventions trigger rage, but also optimism. I t was my blue shirt, a present from my sister-in-law, that gave it all away. It made me think of Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, the lowly bureaucrat in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novella The Double, a disconcerting study of the fragmented self within a vast, impersonal feudal system. It all started with a message from an esteemed colleague congratulating me on a video talk on some geopolitical theme.

Some major retailers and independent stores have introduced AI body scans, CCTV or facial recognition equipment to identify crimes like shoplifting.

While modern multivariate forecasters such as Transformers and GNNs achieve strong benchmark performance, they often suffer from systematic errors at specific variables or horizons and, critically, lack guarantees against performance degradation in deployment. Existing post-hoc residual correction methods attempt to fix these errors, but are inherently greedy: although they may improve average accuracy, they can also "help in the wrong way" by overcorrecting reliable predictions and causing local failures in unseen scenarios. To address this critical "safety gap," we propose CRC (Causality-inspired Safe Residual Correction), a plug-and-play framework explicitly designed to ensure non-degradation. CRC follows a divide-and-conquer philosophy: it employs a causality-inspired encoder to expose direction-aware structure by decoupling self- and cross-variable dynamics, and a hybrid corrector to model residual errors. Crucially, the correction process is governed by a strict four-fold safety mechanism that prevents harmful updates. Experiments across multiple datasets and forecasting backbones show that CRC consistently improves accuracy, while an in-depth ablation study confirms that its core safety mechanisms ensure exceptionally high non-degradation rates (NDR), making CRC a correction framework suited for safe and reliable deployment.

Dalrymple said there was a gap in understanding between public sector and AI companies about the power of looming breakthroughs in the technology. Dalrymple said there was a gap in understanding between public sector and AI companies about the power of looming breakthroughs in the technology. World'may not have time' to prepare for AI safety risks, says leading researcher The world "may not have time" to prepare for the safety risks posed by cutting-edge AI systems, according to a leading figure at the UK government's scientific research agency. David Dalrymple, a programme director and AI safety expert at the Aria agency, told the Guardian people should be concerned about the growing capability of the technology. "I think we should be concerned about systems that can perform all of the functions that humans perform to get things done in the world, but better," he said.