What are freeze-dried sweets and why are they popular? When Savannah Louise West first tasted freeze-dried gummies, she was intrigued. I think the crunch is so satisfying, and I find it interesting to experience a candy I'm familiar with that has an entirely new texture, says the Toronto resident. Ms West is describing one of the main features of this spin-off candy that independent and major confectionary manufacturers have been releasing onto shelves, both online and offline, for the past three years. It's been largely a US phenomena, hence we'll use the US term candy, but for our UK readers, we're talking about sweets here.

Artificial intelligence is making a big mark in elite football, and England are at the cutting edge when it comes to using it in the men's international game. From penalty taking and powering players' wellbeing to targeting their rivals' tactical weaknesses, AI is underpinning the Three Lions' plans for next summer's World Cup. Could a technology which is beginning to change the world around us really help England to glory in North America? Could AI power England to World Cup glory? As well as the coaches and physios who sit alongside head coach Thomas Tuchel on the bench, England's staff includes groups of analysts, data scientists and in-house software development teams.

Meta is shifting some of its investments in the metaverse to AI glasses and wearables, hoping to capitalise on the momentum in that segment, a company spokesperson has said. Over the last decade, Meta has poured billions of dollars to build the metaverse, which lets people to interact in a virtual reality. However, the tech giant has struggled to convince investors of the viability of the nascent technology. Bloomberg first reported on Thursday that Meta would cut its metaverse investment by as much as 30%. Its shares climbed more than 3.4% following the news.

The government says it is to deport 60 takeaway-delivery riders found to be working illegally in the UK. The Home Office says the group are among 171 riders arrested over seven days in November in a national enforcement blitz in villages, towns and cities across the country. It comes as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has been targeting people working unlawfully in the gig economy. Border Security Minister Alex Norris has also met representatives from food-delivery firms to encourage them to do more to tackle the issue - such as using facial recognition checks to prevent riders sharing their identities with people who do not have permission to take up work in the UK. Norris said November's action ought to send a clear message: if you are working illegally in this country, you will be arrested and removed.

'It was about degrading someone completely': the story of Mr DeepFakes - the world's most notorious AI porn site The hobbyists who helped build this site created technology that has been used to humiliate countless women. Why didn't governments step in and stop them? For Patrizia Schlosser, it started with an apologetic call from a colleague. "I'm sorry but I found this. Are you aware of it?"

Waterstones would stock books created using artificial intelligence, the company's boss has said, as long as they were clearly labelled, and if customers wanted them. However, James Daunt, a veteran of the bookselling industry, said he personally did not expect that to happen. There's a huge proliferation of AI generated content and most of it are not books that we should be selling, he said. But it would be up to the reader. An explosion in the use of artificial intelligence, or AI, has prompted heated debate in the publishing industry, with writers concerned about the impact on their livelihoods.

We present a novel recurrent neural network architecture designed explicitly for day-ahead electricity price forecasting, aimed at improving short-term decision-making and operational management in energy systems. Our combined forecasting model embeds linear structures, such as expert models and Kalman filters, into recurrent networks, enabling efficient computation and enhanced interpretability. The design leverages the strengths of both linear and non-linear model structures, allowing it to capture all relevant stylised price characteristics in power markets, including calendar and autoregressive effects, as well as influences from load, renewable energy, and related fuel and carbon markets. For empirical testing, we use hourly data from the largest European electricity market spanning 2018 to 2025 in a comprehensive forecasting study, comparing our model against state-of-the-art approaches, particularly high-dimensional linear and neural network models. The proposed model achieves approximately 12% higher accuracy than leading benchmarks. We evaluate the contributions of the interpretable model components and conclude on the impact of combining linear and non-linear structures.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) constructs classifiers using both labelled and unlabelled data. It leverages information from labelled samples, whose acquisition is often costly or labour-intensive, together with unlabelled data to enhance prediction performance. This defines an incomplete-data problem, which statistically can be formulated within the likelihood framework for finite mixture models that can be fitted using the expectation-maximisation (EM) algorithm. Ideally, one would prefer a completely labelled sample, as one would anticipate that a labelled observation provides more information than an unlabelled one. However, when the mechanism governing label absence depends on the observed features or the class labels or both, the missingness indicators themselves contain useful information. In certain situations, the information gained from modelling the missing-label mechanism can even outweigh the loss due to missing labels, yielding a classifier with a smaller expected error than one based on a completely labelled sample analysed. This improvement arises particularly when class overlap is moderate, labelled data are sparse, and the missingness is informative. Modelling such informative missingness thus offers a coherent statistical framework that unifies likelihood-based inference with the behaviour of empirical SSL methods.

Electroencephalography (EEG) is extensively employed in medical diagnostics and brain-computer interface (BCI) applications due to its non-invasive nature and high temporal resolution. However, EEG analysis faces significant challenges, including noise, nonstationarity, and inter-subject variability, which hinder its clinical utility. Traditional neural networks often lack integration with biophysical knowledge, limiting their interpretability, robustness, and potential for medical translation. To address these limitations, this study introduces NeuroPhysNet, a novel Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) framework tailored for EEG signal analysis and motor imagery classification in medical contexts. NeuroPhysNet incorporates the FitzHugh-Nagumo model, embedding neurodynamical principles to constrain predictions and enhance model robustness. Evaluated on the BCIC-IV-2a dataset, the framework achieved superior accuracy and generalization compared to conventional methods, especially in data-limited and cross-subject scenarios, which are common in clinical settings. By effectively integrating biophysical insights with data-driven techniques, NeuroPhysNet not only advances BCI applications but also holds significant promise for enhancing the precision and reliability of clinical diagnostics, such as motor disorder assessments and neurorehabilitation planning.

The logos of organisations were also included in images generated by Google's Nano Banana Pro AI tool. The logos of organisations were also included in images generated by Google's Nano Banana Pro AI tool. Google's AI Nano Banana Pro accused of generating racialised'white saviour' visuals Nano Banana Pro, Google's new AI-powered image generator, has been accused of creating racialised and "white saviour" visuals in response to prompts about humanitarian aid in Africa - and sometimes appends the logos of large charities. Asking the tool tens of times to generate an image for the prompt "volunteer helps children in Africa" yielded, with two exceptions, a picture of a white woman surrounded by Black children, often with grass-roofed huts in the background. In several of these images, the woman wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase "Worldwide Vision", and with the UK charity World Vision's logo.