Oceania
David Gandy: 'Britain produces some of the greatest models. We want to keep it that way'
David Gandy: 'Britain produces some of the greatest models. We want to keep it that way' The Essex-born supermodel is sitting in his light-filled kitchen, sipping a glass of water and reflecting on his almost 25-year career. At 45, Gandy's striking dark brown hair, sharp cheekbones and piercing blue eyes have been at the centre of some of fashion's most iconic campaigns of the last two decades, and he is one of the few male models to become a household name. I always say that I was inspired by the female supermodels, Gandy says, name-checking Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. You don't even need to say the surnames.
Faisal Islam: Will the US tech bromance turn around the UK economy?
In the old Camden Town Hall opposite London's St Pancras station, away from the white tie and tails of the pageantry at Windsor Castle, was perhaps the most substantive display of the consequences of Donald Trump's state visit. In front of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, many members of the British and US cabinets and the cream of the European tech industry, a highly-crafted video played, featuring the long history of UK science. It included George Stephenson, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing and Sir Demis Hassabis, with dozens of UK start-up companies from every corner of the country listed. It was a cross between a UK government investment promotion video and the Danny Boyle 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony, except for one crucial detail - it was voiced by Jensen Huang, the American Nvidia artificial intelligence (AI) and microchip magnate. This week, Trump said the tech tycoon was taking over the world and the boss of the company, which hit a market value of $4tn (£2.9tn) this summer, appears to have gone all-in on the UK in quite an extraordinary way.
EVs Have Gotten Too Powerful
When an entry-level Volvo can get to 60 mph quicker than a Porsche 911, and in the same time as a Ferrari, electric car makers need a reset. It's difficult to imagine it happening now, but cars have in the past seriously triggered politicians. Australia's predilection for big, bluff muscle sedans prompted the so-called " supercar scare " in the early '70s, when various state ministers of transport united in calling for a nationwide ban on what one called "bullets on wheels." Fast forward 20 years and the UK's House of Commons found itself debating the Lotus Carlton, in very many ways the successor to those Antipodean bruisers. An outrageous reimagining of a competent but far from stellar Opel/Vauxhall sedan (it was badged the latter in the UK), the Daily Mail decided the nation's moral well-being was imperiled by its very existence.
Skeletal remains of missing man found by walker
The skeletal remains of a man who went missing six years ago were found by a walker in a secluded area in south Wales, an inquest has heard. Jordan Moray, from Cwmbach, near Aberdare in Rhondda Cynon Taf, was reported missing from his flat with his games console still running and mobile phone on charge in July 2019. Despite extensive police searches, his remains were not found until 29 August 2025 . On Friday, an inquest at Pontypridd Coroner's Court heard the discovery was made in a remote area near Merthyr Tydfil. South Wales Police previously said it had received a report of human remains near the Llwyn-on Reservoir in Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, also known as the Brecon Beacons .
Data coarse graining can improve model performance
Nguyen, Alex, Schwab, David J., Ngampruetikorn, Vudtiwat
Lossy data transformations by definition lose information. Yet, in modern machine learning, methods like data pruning and lossy data augmentation can help improve generalization performance. We study this paradox using a solvable model of high-dimensional, ridge-regularized linear regression under 'data coarse graining.' Inspired by the renormalization group in statistical physics, we analyze coarse-graining schemes that systematically discard features based on their relevance to the learning task. Our results reveal a nonmonotonic dependence of the prediction risk on the degree of coarse graining. A 'high-pass' scheme--which filters out less relevant, lower-signal features--can help models generalize better. By contrast, a 'low-pass' scheme that integrates out more relevant, higher-signal features is purely detrimental. Crucially, using optimal regularization, we demonstrate that this nonmonotonicity is a distinct effect of data coarse graining and not an artifact of double descent. Our framework offers a clear, analytical explanation for why careful data augmentation works: it strips away less relevant degrees of freedom and isolates more predictive signals. Our results highlight a complex, nonmonotonic risk landscape shaped by the structure of the data, and illustrate how ideas from statistical physics provide a principled lens for understanding modern machine learning phenomena.
BabyHuBERT: Multilingual Self-Supervised Learning for Segmenting Speakers in Child-Centered Long-Form Recordings
Charlot, Théo, Kunze, Tarek, Poli, Maxime, Cristia, Alejandrina, Dupoux, Emmanuel, Lavechin, Marvin
Child-centered long-form recordings are essential for studying early language development, but existing speech models trained on clean adult data perform poorly due to acoustic and linguistic differences. We introduce BabyHuBERT, the first self-supervised speech representation model trained on 13,000 hours of multilingual child-centered long-form recordings spanning over 40 languages. We evaluate BabyHuBERT on speaker segmentation, identifying when target children speak versus female adults, male adults, or other children -- a fundamental preprocessing step for analyzing naturalistic language experiences. BabyHuBERT achieves F1-scores from 52.1% to 74.4% across six diverse datasets, consistently outperforming W2V2-LL4300 (trained on English long-forms) and standard HuBERT (trained on clean adult speech). Notable improvements include 13.2 absolute F1 points over HuBERT on Vanuatu and 15.9 points on Solomon Islands corpora, demonstrating effectiveness on underrepresented languages. By sharing code and models, BabyHuBERT serves as a foundation model for child speech research, enabling fine-tuning on diverse downstream tasks.
Event-LAB: Towards Standardized Evaluation of Neuromorphic Localization Methods
Hines, Adam D., Fontan, Alejandro, Milford, Michael, Fischer, Tobias
Event-based localization research and datasets are a rapidly growing area of interest, with a tenfold increase in the cumulative total number of published papers on this topic over the past 10 years. Whilst the rapid expansion in the field is exciting, it brings with it an associated challenge: a growth in the variety of required code and package dependencies as well as data formats, making comparisons difficult and cumbersome for researchers to implement reliably. To address this challenge, we present Event-LAB: a new and unified framework for running several event-based localization methodologies across multiple datasets. Event-LAB is implemented using the Pixi package and dependency manager, that enables a single command-line installation and invocation for combinations of localization methods and datasets. To demonstrate the capabilities of the framework, we implement two common event-based localization pipelines: Visual Place Recognition (VPR) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). We demonstrate the ability of the framework to systematically visualize and analyze the results of multiple methods and datasets, revealing key insights such as the association of parameters that control event collection counts and window sizes for frame generation to large variations in performance. The results and analysis demonstrate the importance of fairly comparing methodologies with consistent event image generation parameters. Our Event-LAB framework provides this ability for the research community, by contributing a streamlined workflow for easily setting up multiple conditions.
Should you buy a soundbar for your TV? Here's our expert take
Donald Trump's helicopter is forced to make an emergency landing with US President and Melania on board Disturbing full story of singer D4vd's relationship with girl, 13, found dismembered in his Tesla... as creepy messages, songs and links to stars are exposed'Signal 13' cop killer Matthew James Ruth donned camo and binoculars to stalk ex-girlfriend then slaughtered her helpless Labrador before murdering three officers I predicted Jimmy Kimmel's downfall. Want to understand why Disney's Bob Iger REALLY canceled Jimmy Kimmel? MARK HALPERIN brilliantly breaks down this seismic shift in America's culture war Melania insider JANE TIPPETT: I was aghast at that dress and hat, then it dawned on me... everyone has missed something quite radical Millions under tsunami threat as fallout from monster 7.8 earthquake threatens US Humiliating state of Joe Biden finances revealed: Unwanted president can't get a paid job and will likely die in debt'Israel-hating' man, 22, sports ponytail as plot to'assassinate' Republican governor is revealed Congressional staffer, 35, dies after CATCHING FIRE at her Texas home... as her eerie last words are revealed Charlie Kirk suspect's disturbing secret kinks: Sickening cache of porn searches revealed... his pedophile friend.. and'Furry Shades of Gay' game Mindset driving celebration of Charlie Kirk's death revealed... as Jimmy Kimmel is canceled over comments Chanel-toting'Karen' treats cops like servants as she's marched out of plane's first-class cabin for entitled behavior Jimmy Kimmel goes nuclear over ABC cancelling him for outrageous Charlie Kirk comments... as insiders reveal he ALREADY has new job plans Terrifying risks of new Ozempic trick celebrities swear by... but one woman tells us: 'I'm willing to take my chances' The unsolved family murder that haunted Robert Redford for decades... as police reveal'new evidence' on'killer' who is STILL one of America's most wanted Turning Point USA names Charlie Kirk's widow Erika as its new CEO Should you buy a soundbar for your TV? Here's our expert take Daily Mail journalists select and curate the products that feature on our site. And with them being sold and seen at just about every tech retailer, everyday shoppers are wondering two things: What do they do? Well, I'm here to give you my expert take on all-things soundbars and answer those burning questions, and then some.
Nvidia to invest 5bn in Intel after Trump administration's 10% stake
Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, talks during the keynote address of Nvidia GTC on 18 March 2025 in San Jose, California. Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, talks during the keynote address of Nvidia GTC on 18 March 2025 in San Jose, California. Nvidia to invest $5bn in Intel after Trump administration's 10% stake Nvidia, the world's leading chipmaker, has announced plans to invest $5bn in Intel and collaborate with the struggling semiconductor company on products. A month after the Trump administration confirmed it had taken a 10% stake in Intel - the latest extraordinary intervention by the White House in corporate America - Nvidia said it would team up with the firm to work on custom datacenters that form the backbone of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, as well as personal computer products. Intel shares jumped nearly 23% after markets closed, making it the largest one-day percentage gain for the company since 1987.
Massive Attack remove music from Spotify to protest against CEO Daniel Ek's investment in AI military
Massive Attack remove music from Spotify to protest against CEO Daniel Ek's investment in AI military The band cited a'moral and ethical burden' placed on artists by revenue from their work ultimately funding lethal technologies Massive Attack have become the latest act - and first major-label one - to pull their catalogue from Spotify in protest at founder Daniel Ek investing €600m (£520m) in the military AI company Helsing. In June, Ek's venture capital firm Prima Materia led the defence tech firm's latest funding round. Helsing's software uses AI technology to analyse sensor and weapons system data from battlefields to inform real-time military decisions. It also makes its own military drone, the HX-2. Ek is also chairman of Helsing.