Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Oceania


Vintage port, a menu in French and 1,452 pieces of cutlery - a glimpse of the state banquet

BBC News

The state banquet is the spectacular showstopper of a state visit, a glittering feast with speeches, royal toasts, trumpet fanfares and fancy food and wine. It's diplomacy served up with fine dining. A cut-glass shock-and-awe approach to hospitality designed to make a visiting leader like President Trump feel special. The setting in St George's Hall inside Windsor Castle is a remarkable sight, a mix of medieval banquet and Harry Potter film. Elaborately uniformed staff around the hall are as drilled as the soldiers who have been on parade during the day.


AI can forecast your future health – just like the weather

BBC News

Artificial intelligence can predict people's health problems over a decade into the future, say scientists. The technology has learned to spot patterns in people's medical records to calculate their risk of more than 1,000 diseases. The researchers say it is like a weather forecast that anticipates a 70% chance of rain - but for human health. Their vision is to use the AI model to spot high-risk patients to prevent disease and to help hospitals understand demand in their area, years ahead of time. The model - called Delphi-2M - uses similar technology to well-known AI chatbots like ChatGPT.


A zookeeper's burnt lunch revealed a lizard's secret survival skill

Popular Science

Environment Animals Wildlife A zookeeper's burnt lunch revealed a lizard's secret survival skill Australia's sleepy lizards know to go when they smell smoke. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Millions of years of evolution have taught some reptiles the importance of the old adage, "Where there's smoke, there's fire." Take the sleepy lizards () of Australia. Researchers at Macquarie University found that these small, stubby-tailed reptiles become agitated after catching a whiff of something burning.


Why random lines of video game dialogue get stuck in our heads

The Guardian

S ome snippets of video game dialogue, like classic movie quotes, are immediately recognisable to a swathe of fans. From Street Fighter's "hadouken!" to Call of Duty's "remember, no Russian" to BioShock's "would you kindly?", there are phrases so creepy, clever or cool they have slipped imperceptibly into the gaming lexicon, ensuring that whenever they're memed on social media, almost everyone gets the reference. But there are also odd little phrases, sometimes from obscure games, that stick with us for seemingly no reason. I recall most of the vocal barks from the second world war strategy game Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, even though I haven't played it for 20 years. Why is it that I'll lose my headphones, wallet and phone on a daily basis, but I have absolute recall when it comes to the utterances of burly soldier Samuel Brooklyn?


Nvidia boss 'disappointed' by reported China chip ban

BBC News

Nvidia boss'disappointed' by reported China chip ban The boss of Nvidia says he is disappointed that China has reportedly ordered its top technology companies to halt purchases of the firm's artificial intelligence (AI) chips. Jensen Huang added he would be patient in response to the move from China's internet regulator. There are a lot of places we can't go to, and that's fine, he told reporters on Wednesday. Mr Huang is one of a number of tech bosses, including Microsoft's Satya Nadella, accompanying US President Donald trump on his state visit to the UK. Nvidia - the world's leading chipmaker - had previously been banned from selling its most advanced chips to China, before Trump reversed the ban in July.


This Giant Subterranean Neutrino Detector Is Taking On the Mysteries of Physics

WIRED

Located in China, Juno is a 17-country collaboration that will try to detect neutrinos and antineutrinos to learn more about their mass. Juno's sphere (bottom left) and photomultipliers (top right) for neutrino detection. Located 700 meters underground near the city of Jiangmen in southern China, a giant sphere--35 meters in diameter and filled with more than 20,000 tons of liquid--has just started a mission that will last for decades. This is Juno, the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory, a new, large-scale experiment studying some of the most mysterious and elusive particles known to science. Neutrinos are the most abundant particles in the universe with mass.


Speed up B-21 Raider stealth bombers to counter China

FOX News

America's most sophisticated B-21 Raider stealth bomber program gains momentum with Spartan's successful flight, showcasing advanced AI and aerodynamic technology.


Ben & Jerry's co-founder quits over social activism row

BBC News

Ben & Jerry's co-founder quits over social activism row Ben & Jerry's co-founder Jerry Greenfield has left the ice cream maker after almost half a century at the firm, deepening a dispute with parent company Unilever. In a letter shared on social media by fellow co-founder Ben Cohen, Mr Greenfield said the Cherry Garcia maker had lost its independence after Unilever put a halt to its social activism. His exit marks the latest episode in a row that started in 2021 when Ben & Jerry's said it would stop selling its ice cream in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. A spokesperson for The Magnum Ice Cream Company, which is being spun off from Unilever, said it was grateful to Mr Greenfield but disagreed with his stance. In his letter Mr Greenfield said leaving the firm was one of the hardest and most painful decisions he had ever made but he could no longer in good conscience work for a business that had been silenced by Unilever.


ChatGPT developing age-verification system to identify under-18 users after teen death

The Guardian

OpenAI will restrict how ChatGPT responds to a user it suspects is under 18. OpenAI will restrict how ChatGPT responds to a user it suspects is under 18. Sam Altman said if there is doubt the system will default to the under-18 experience putting'safety ahead of privacy and freedom for teens' OpenAI will restrict how ChatGPT responds to a user it suspects is under 18, unless that user passes the company's age estimation technology or provides ID, after legal action from the family of a 16-year-old who killed himself in April after months of conversations with the chatbot. OpenAI was prioritising "safety ahead of privacy and freedom for teens", chief executive Sam Altman said in a blog post on Tuesday, stating "minors need significant protection". The company said that the way ChatGPT responds to a 15-year-old should look different to the way it responds to an adult.


Reversible Deep Equilibrium Models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Deep Equilibrium Models (DEQs) are an interesting class of implicit model where the model output is implicitly defined as the fixed point of a learned function. These models have been shown to outperform explicit (fixed-depth) models in large-scale tasks by trading many deep layers for a single layer that is iterated many times. However, gradient calculation through DEQs is approximate. This often leads to unstable training dynamics and requires regularisation or many function evaluations to fix. Here, we introduce Reversible Deep Equilibrium Models (RevDEQs) that allow for exact gradient calculation, no regularisation and far fewer function evaluations than DEQs. We show that RevDEQs achieve state-of-the-art performance on language modelling and image classification tasks against comparable implicit and explicit models.