A flotilla of uncrewed wolf pack drone boats has successfully been used to escort warships in a Royal Navy and Army trial. The Navy said it was a milestone demonstration of how it could utilise such technology in a real-life scenario. With camera and sensor data being fed back to Patrick Blackett, five 7.2m autonomous Rattler boats safely escorted the two ships playing the role of foreign warships during the 72-hour milestone training exercise, it said. The demonstration was a culmination of months of trials by the Navy's Disruptive Capabilities and Technology Office (DCTO) and the Fleet Experimentation Squadron (FXS). Each of the Rattler boats were operated by a two-person team, with one responsible for piloting the drone and the other monitoring and operating onboard systems, as well as helping to manage live data streams.

ChatGPT on App Store displayed on a phone screen on 07 June 2025. ChatGPT on App Store displayed on a phone screen on 07 June 2025. Has OpenAI really made ChatGPT better for users with mental health problems? Prompts indicating suicidal ideation got alarming replies, which experts say shows'how easy it is to break the model' A n OpenAI statement released this week claimed the company had made its popular service ChatGPT better at supporting users experiencing mental health problems like suicidal ideation or delusions, but experts tell the Guardian they need to do more to truly ensure users are protected. The Guardian tested several prompts indicating suicidal ideation with the ChatGPT GPT-5 updated model, which is now the default, and got alarming responses from the large language model (LLM) chatbot.

Several new sites such as this are in the pipeline in the UK. Several new sites such as this are in the pipeline in the UK. 'A lot of this is speculative': faith and fear mix amid $3tn global datacentre boom The global investment spree in artificial intelligence is producing some remarkable numbers and a projected $3tn (£2.3tn) spend on datacentres is one of them. These vast warehouses are the central nervous system of AI tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Veo 3, underpinning the training and operation of a technology into which investors have poured vast sums of money. Despite concerns that the AI boom could be a bubble waiting to burst, there are few signs of it at the moment.

Adults over 70 who regularly listen to music show 39% lower dementia risk while instrument players have 35% reduced risk, according to new Monash University research.

Environment Animals Wildlife Spiders Beware, beachgoers: New spider discovered in California's sand dunes Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Just in time for Halloween, researchers have identified a new species of trapdoor spider. The newly discovered is about the size of a quarter, brown, and pretty chunky. It's the fourth known species of trapdoor spiders in California whose habitat is limited to sandy coastal dunes. Female trapdoor spiders are basically vampires .

Victims of the Horizon Post Office scandal could meet face-to-face with Fujitsu and Post Office representatives as part of a restorative justice effort. The charity overseeing a new scheme said the first five months were an initial pilot phase, but it hoped the scheme would last five years and include extra initiatives such as a special commemorative postage stamp. It comes on top of the various financial compensation schemes in place for sub-postmasters. The Horizon IT scandal saw hundreds of sub-postmasters falsely accused of embezzling Post Office funds after faulty software suggested money was missing from their branch accounts. Children affected by Post Office scandal'should get grants' More than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted because of incorrect information from the Horizon computer system.

There's a surprisingly competitive global race on to grow a 3,000-pound pumpkin. Ian (left) and Stuart Paton pose with a giant pumpkin in their nursery in the New Forest, Hampshire. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The pumpkin's name was Muggle and it weighed as much as a bull moose. At 2,819 pounds and over 21 feet in circumference, this enormous gourd claimed the dual titles of "heaviest pumpkin" and "largest pumpkin by circumference" in the on October 4, 2025.

US chip giant Nvidia will supply more than 260,000 of its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips to South Korea's government, as well as Samsung, LG, and Hyundai. The companies will all deploy the AI chips in factories to make everything from semiconductors and robots to autonomous vehicles and meant that South Korea can now produce intelligence as a new export, chief executive Jensen Huang said. Mr Huang did not disclose the value of the South Korean deals. It caps off a busy week for Nvidia, which on Wednesday became the first company to be valued at $5 trillion and on Thursday saw signs of a thaw in US-China trade relations that may mean it can export more of its chips to China . Speaking at a CEO summit on the sidelines of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) in Gyeongju, South Korea, Mr Huang added that with the chips, companies would be able to create digital twins with other factories around the world.

With the increasing use of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods to support science workflows, we are interested in the use of discourse-level information to find supporting evidence for AI generated scientific claims. A first step towards this objective is to examine the task of inferring discourse structure in scientific writing. In this work, we present a preliminary investigation of pretrained language model (PLM) and Large Language Model (LLM) approaches for Discourse Relation Classification (DRC), focusing on scientific publications, an under-studied genre for this task. We examine how context can help with the DRC task, with our experiments showing that context, as defined by discourse structure, is generally helpful. We also present an analysis of which scientific discourse relation types might benefit most from context.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in content moderation systems, where ensuring fairness and neutrality is essential. In this study, we examine how persona adoption influences the consistency and fairness of harmful content classification across different LLM architectures, model sizes, and content modalities (language vs. vision). At first glance, headline performance metrics suggest that personas have little impact on overall classification accuracy. However, a closer analysis reveals important behavioral shifts. Personas with different ideological leanings display distinct propensities to label content as harmful, showing that the lens through which a model "views" input can subtly shape its judgments. Further agreement analyses highlight that models, particularly larger ones, tend to align more closely with personas from the same political ideology, strengthening within-ideology consistency while widening divergence across ideological groups. To show this effect more directly, we conducted an additional study on a politically targeted task, which confirmed that personas not only behave more coherently within their own ideology but also exhibit a tendency to defend their perspective while downplaying harmfulness in opposing views. Together, these findings highlight how persona conditioning can introduce subtle ideological biases into LLM outputs, raising concerns about the use of AI systems that may reinforce partisan perspectives under the guise of neutrality.