Plus: A CDC panel voted to recommend delaying the hepatitis B vaccine for babies. If you're a longtime reader, you probably know that our newsroom selects 10 breakthroughs every year that we think will define the future . This group exercise is mostly fun and always engrossing, with plenty of lively discussion along the way, but at times it can also be quite difficult. The 2026 list will come out on January 12--so stay tuned. In the meantime, we wanted to share some of the technologies from this year's reject pile, as a window into our decision-making process. These four technologies won't be on our 2026 list of breakthroughs, but all were closely considered, and we think they're worth knowing about.

Jon Kotwicki jokes that converting an aluminum plane in Alaska is the "worst idea that a person could possibly have." This 108-foot-long former cargo plane now has a king size bed, washer dryer, and heated floors, but the build was by no means easy. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. When flight instructor and former commercial airline pilot Jon Kotwicki happened upon a DC-6 air freighter for sale in 2022, he knew it was the perfect plane to transform into an overnight rental. However, once he made the purchase, "my first thought," says Kotwicki, "was, 'My God, what have I done?'" Built in 1956, the 117-foot-wide, 108-foot-long cargo plane had spent its days carrying freight and fuel to remote villages in Alaska before retiring from flight.

Perch 2.0 is a supervised bioacoustics foundation model pretrained on 14,597 species, including birds, mammals, amphibians, and insects, and has state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. Given that Perch 2.0 includes almost no marine mammal audio or classes in the training data, we evaluate Perch 2.0 performance on marine mammal and underwater audio tasks through few-shot transfer learning. We perform linear probing with the embeddings generated from this foundation model and compare performance to other pretrained bioacoustics models. In particular, we compare Perch 2.0 with previous multispecies whale, Perch 1.0, SurfPerch, AVES-bio, BirdAVES, and Birdnet V2.3 models, which have open-source tools for transfer-learning and agile modeling. We show that the embeddings from the Perch 2.0 model have consistently high performance for few-shot transfer learning, generally outperforming alternative embedding models on the majority of tasks, and thus is recommended when developing new linear classifiers for marine mammal classification with few labeled examples.

Wisdom has been laying eggs since the Eisenhower Administration. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. One of the world's most famous birds has returned to her nesting site. Wisdom, the 75-year-old albatross is known as the world's oldest breeding bird . Earlier this month, she returned to Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the central Pacific Ocean for the 2025-2026 nesting season.

In particular, we introduce the notion of a hierarchical route distribution and show how they can be leveraged to construct tractable PSDDs over route distributions, allowing them to scale to larger maps.

Maximum likelihood for LDS estimation, on the other hand, has several advantages.

Gaussian processes (GPs) with derivatives are useful in many applications, including Bayesian optimization, implicit surface reconstruction, and terrain reconstruction.

We present a novel approach to probabilistic time series forecasting that combines state space models with deep learning. By parametrizing a per-time-series linear state space model with a jointly-learned recurrent neural network, our method retains desired properties of state space models such as data efficiency and inter-pretability, while making use of the ability to learn complex patterns from raw data offered by deep learning approaches. Our method scales gracefully from regimes where little training data is available to regimes where data from large collection of time series can be leveraged to learn accurate models. We provide qualitative as well as quantitative results with the proposed method, showing that it compares favorably to the state-of-the-art.

Due to the recurrent structure of RNN, the long information propagation path poses limitations in capturing long-term dependencies, gradient explosion/vanishing issues, and inefficient sequential execution. Based on this, we propose a novel paradigm called Parallel Gated Network (PGN) as the new successor to RNN.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Chance of more showers in L.A., with a new storm set to hit Thursday A driver navigates a flooded street during a storm Monday in Santa Barbara. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Showers could linger in Los Angeles on Tuesday following four straight days of rain -- and even more rain is likely on Thursday and Friday.