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Chinese fishing 'militia' formations signal rising gray-zone pressure on Taiwan

FOX News

China's People's Armed Forces Maritime Militia deployed thousands of fishing vessels in coordinated formations that could disrupt global shipping lanes, analysts warn.



The tiny tuxedo cat who became a naval hero

Popular Science

A 17-year-old British sailor saved Simon from the Hong Kong docks when he was likely a year old. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. One day in March of 1948, George Hickinbottom, a British sailor, was walking around the docks of Stonecutters Island in Hong Kong. When the 17-year-old spotted a small black-and-white tuxedo cat, barely out of kittenhood, he decided to smuggle the hungry, scrawny animal aboard his ship, the HMS . Hickinbottom didn't get in trouble.


You've Never Heard of China's Greatest Sci-Fi Novel

WIRED

You've Never Heard of China's Greatest Sci-Fi Novel Thousands of authors. is barely known outside China--but it contains the secret to the country's modernization and malaise. Ma Qianzhu was unsatisfied with Chinese progress. An engineer at a large state-owned enterprise, he belonged to a generation that grew up believing engineering is destiny, that China's future would be built, bolt by bolt, by people like him. Then Ma discovered something extraordinary: a wormhole to the late Ming Dynasty. With more than 500 peers, he commandeered a ship and traveled back in time 400 years, to a preindustrial China wracked by foreign invasion and internal decay. Their mission: trigger an industrial revolution in the past that would, in the future, make modern China great (again).


Musk seeks up to 134 billion damages from OpenAI, Microsoft

The Japan Times

Elon Musk is seeking between $79 billion and $134 billion in damages over his claims that OpenAI defrauded him by abandoning its nonprofit roots and partnering with Microsoft. Elon Musk wants OpenAI and Microsoft to pay him damages in the range of $79 billion to $134 billion over his claims that the generative AI company defrauded him by abandoning its nonprofit roots and partnering with the software giant. Musk's lawyer detailed the damages request in a court filing Friday, a day after a federal judge rejected a final bid by OpenAI and Microsoft to avoid a jury trial set for late April in Oakland, California. Citing calculations by a financial economist expert witness, C. Paul Wazzan, the filing says Musk is entitled to a chunk of OpenAI's current $500 billion valuation after he was defrauded of the $38 million in seed money he donated to OpenAI when he helped found the startup in 2015. OpenAI and Microsoft later disputed the calculations.


How AI Companies Got Caught Up in US Military Efforts

WIRED

Two years ago, companies like Meta and OpenAI were united against military use of their tools. Now all of that has changed. At the start of 2024, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI were united against military use of their AI tools. But over the next 12 months, something changed. In January, OpenAI quietly rescinded its ban on using AI for "military and warfare" purposes, and soon after it was reported to be working on "a number of projects" with the Pentagon. In November, in the same week that Donald Trump was reelected US president, Meta announced that the United States and select allies would be able to employ Llama for defense uses.


China military reaches 'war footing' with new missile silos and advanced AI warfare systems

FOX News

A new congressional report warns China's military buildup has reached a war footing with 350 new missile silos and 20% nuclear expansion, threatening U.S. deterrence.


Skies at stake: Inside the U.S.–China race for air dominance

FOX News

Military experts warn that Chinese missile strikes on U.S. air bases could cripple American airpower in the Pacific, as both nations pursue different strategies for air superiority.


CoralVQA: A Large-Scale Visual Question Answering Dataset for Coral Reef Image Understanding

Han, Hongyong, Wang, Wei, Zhang, Gaowei, Li, Mingjie, Wang, Yi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Coral reefs are vital yet vulnerable ecosystems that require continuous monitoring to support conservation. While coral reef images provide essential information in coral monitoring, interpreting such images remains challenging due to the need for domain expertise. Visual Question Answering (VQA), powered by Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), has great potential in user-friendly interaction with coral reef images. However, applying VQA to coral imagery demands a dedicated dataset that addresses two key challenges: domain-specific annotations and multidimensional questions. In this work, we introduce CoralVQA, the first large-scale VQA dataset for coral reef analysis. It contains 12,805 real-world coral images from 67 coral genera collected from 3 oceans, along with 277,653 question-answer pairs that comprehensively assess ecological and health-related conditions. To construct this dataset, we develop a semi-automatic data construction pipeline in collaboration with marine biologists to ensure both scalability and professional-grade data quality. CoralVQA presents novel challenges and provides a comprehensive benchmark for studying vision-language reasoning in the context of coral reef images. By evaluating several state-of-the-art LVLMs, we reveal key limitations and opportunities. These insights form a foundation for future LVLM development, with a particular emphasis on supporting coral conservation efforts.


Leveraging Teleconnections with Physics-Informed Graph Attention Networks for Long-Range Extreme Rainfall Forecasting in Thailand

Chobtham, Kiattikun, Sarinnapakorn, Kanoksri, Torsri, Kritanai, Deeprasertkul, Prattana, Kamma, Jirawan

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Accurate rainfall forecasting, particularly for extreme events, remains a significant challenge in climatology and the Earth system. This paper presents novel physics-informed Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) combined with extreme-value analysis techniques to improve gauge-station rainfall predictions across Thailand. The model leverages a graph-structured representation of gauge stations to capture complex spatiotemporal patterns, and it offers explainability through teleconnections. We preprocess relevant climate indices that potentially influence regional rainfall. The proposed Graph Attention Network with Long Short-Term Memory (Attention-LSTM) applies the attention mechanism using initial edge features derived from simple orographic-precipitation physics formulation. The embeddings are subsequently processed by LSTM layers. To address extremes, we perform Peak-Over-Threshold (POT) mapping using the novel Spatial Season-aware Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD) method, which overcomes limitations of traditional machine-learning models. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms well-established baselines across most regions, including areas prone to extremes, and remains strongly competitive with the state of the art. Compared with the operational forecasting system SEAS5, our real-world application improves extreme-event prediction and offers a practical enhancement to produce high-resolution maps that support decision-making in long-term water management.