Russia intensifies attacks on Ukraine's trains in'battle for the railways' Propped up in her hospital bed, railway conductor Olha Zolotova speaks slowly and quietly as she talks about the day her train was hit by a Russian drone. When the Shahed [drone] hit I was covered in rubble. I was in the second car. People pulled me out, she says. There was fire everywhere, everything was burning, my hair caught fire a little.

The toxic metal may have rewired early human brains--and sealed the Neanderthals' fate. Lead exposure may have negatively affected Neanderthal abilities for language and speech development. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Today, lead exposure directly correlates to a post-industrialized world. However, new evidence indicates that exposure to the poisonous element is not necessarily a new issue.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Apple M5 unveiled: 10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, and the'next big leap' in AI New iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, and Vision Pro all benefit from upgraded Apple silicon. Apple on Wednesday announced the launch of its M5 processor, saying the chip "ushers in the next big leap in AI performance for Apple silicon." The M5 appears in new editions of the iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, and Vision Pro, all of which are available for U.S. and U.K. customers to pre-order as of today. The M5, as you would expect, is a higher-performance chip than its M4 predecessor.

Mario's super-sized mushroom exists in real life While they actually power-up trees and not plumbers, the 40 year-old video game helped make toadstools mainstream. Mario's expansive world is modeled after the real-life mushroom'Amanita muscaria.' We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Nintendo's is undisputedly one the most iconic and successful video games ever made, with more than 58 million copies sold worldwide. Even if you've never played the original game or any of the hundreds of titles that span the expansive Mario Universe, you've undoubtedly seen Mario or his brother Luigi with their matching hats, dungarees, and mustaches, jumping up and breaking bricks to uncover fire flower or super mushroom power-ups along the way.

A Tesla Takedown alum has launched a campaign for stricter regulation of autonomous vehicles in the US. Tesla's self-driving robotaxis use only cameras and software to navigate. Critics say this approach is less safe than designs that use additional sensors like lidar. A new advocacy group is pushing state lawmakers to pass more stringent autonomous vehicle regulations. The group, Safe Autonomous Vehicles Everywhere in the United States (SAVE-US), says its goal is to ensure that new self-driving technology will save lives instead of doing harm.

Artificial intelligence is helping health-care providers better assess their patients' discomfort. For years at Orchard Care Homes, a 23 facility dementia-care chain in northern England, Cheryl Baird watched nurses fill out the Abbey Pain Scale, an observational methodology used to evaluate pain in those who can't communicate verbally. Baird, a former nurse who was then the facility's director of quality, describes it as "a tick box exercise where people weren't truly considering pain indicators." As a result, agitated residents were assumed to have behavioral issues, since the scale does not always differentiate well between pain and other forms of suffering or distress. They were often prescribed psychotropic sedatives, while the pain itself went untreated. Then, in January 2021, Orchard Care Homes began a trial of PainChek, a smartphone app that scans a resident's face for microscopic muscle movements and uses artificial intelligence to output an expected pain score.

Scientists hope to prevent deaths from climate change, but heat and cold are more complicated than we thought. Libby Cowgill is an anthropologist at the University of Missouri who hopes to revamp the science of thermoregulation. Libby Cowgill, an anthropologist in a furry parka, has wheeled me and my cot into a metal-walled room set to 40 F. A loud fan pummels me from above and siphons the dregs of my body heat through the cot's mesh from below. A large respirator fits snug over my nose and mouth. The device tracks carbon dioxide in my exhales--a proxy for how my metabolism speeds up or slows down throughout the experiment. Eventually Cowgill will remove my respirator to slip a wire-thin metal temperature probe several pointy inches into my nose. Cowgill and a graduate student quietly observe me from the corner of their so-called "climate chamber. Just a few hours earlier I'd sat beside them to observe as another volunteer, a 24-year-old personal trainer, endured the cold. Every few minutes, they measured his skin temperature with a thermal camera, his core temperature with a wireless pill, and his blood pressure and other metrics that hinted at how his body handles extreme cold. He lasted almost an hour without shivering; when my turn comes, I shiver aggressively on the cot for nearly an hour straight. I'm visiting Texas to learn about this experiment on how different bodies respond to extreme climates. I jokingly ask Cowgill as she tapes biosensing devices to my chest and legs. After I exit the cold, she surprises me: "You, believe it or not, were not the worst person we've ever seen." Climate change forces us to reckon with the knotty science of how our bodies interact with the environment. Cowgill is a 40-something anthropologist at the University of Missouri who powerlifts and teaches CrossFit in her spare time. She's small and strong, with dark bangs and geometric tattoos. Since 2022, she's spent the summers at the University of North Texas Health Science Center tending to these uncomfortable experiments. Her team hopes to revamp the science of thermoregulation. While we know in broad strokes how people thermoregulate, the science of keeping warm or cool is mottled with blind spots. "We have the general picture.

Driverless taxis from Waymo will be on London's roads next year, US firm announces Wed 15 Oct 2025 05.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 15 Oct 2025 05.02 EDT Driverless taxis from Waymo will be available for hire on London's roads next year, the US company has announced. The UK capital will become the first European city to have an autonomous taxi service of the kind now familiar in San Francisco and four other US cities using Waymo's technology. Waymo said its cars were now on their way to London and would start driving on the capital's streets in the coming weeks with "trained human specialists", or safety drivers, behind the wheel. The company - originally formed as a spin-off from Google's self-driving car programme and part of the same parent group, Alphabet - said it would scale up operations and work closely with the Department for Transport and Transport for London to obtain the necessary permissions to offer fully autonomous rides in 2026. Uber and the UK tech company Wayve have also announced their own plans to trial their driverless taxis in the capital next year, after the British government said it would accelerate rules allowing public trials to take place before legislation enabling self-driving vehicles passes in full.

Google's autonomous taxi subsidiary will hit the UK's capital next year, regulations permitting--but its first international service could be Waymo's biggest challenge yet. Waymo is expanding to London, the self-driving vehicle developer announced on Wednesday. The Google sister company aims to start service next year, when the UK government plans to allow autonomous vehicles to begin operating on its roads in limited pilot programs. Waymo says it's working with the government to receive the necessary permissions for its launch. This is only Waymo's second venture outside the United States--though could be its first international robotaxi service.

Many popular practical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ evolving reward functions-through techniques such as reward shaping, entropy regularization, or curriculum learning-yet their theoretical foundations remain underdeveloped. This paper provides the first finite-time convergence analysis of a single-timescale actor-critic algorithm in the presence of an evolving reward function under Markovian sampling. We consider a setting where the reward parameters may change at each time step, affecting both policy optimization and value estimation. Under standard assumptions, we derive non-asymptotic bounds for both actor and critic errors. Our result shows that an $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ convergence rate is achievable, matching the best-known rate for static rewards, provided the reward parameters evolve slowly enough. This rate is preserved when the reward is updated via a gradient-based rule with bounded gradient and on the same timescale as the actor and critic, offering a theoretical foundation for many popular RL techniques. As a secondary contribution, we introduce a novel analysis of distribution mismatch under Markovian sampling, improving the best-known rate by a factor of $\log^2T$ in the static-reward case.