Species range maps (SRMs) are essential tools for research and policy-making in ecology, conservation, and environmental management.

As we look back on 2025, the world experienced a year of both remarkable achievement and profound challenge in global health. Multilateralism, science and solidarity were tested as never before, underscoring a fundamental truth: International cooperation is not optional. It is essential if we are to protect and promote health for everyone, everywhere in 2026 and beyond. Perhaps the most significant milestone was the adoption by WHO Member States of the Pandemic Agreement, a landmark step towards making the world safer from future pandemics. Alongside this, amendments to the International Health Regulations came into force, including a new "pandemic emergency" alert level designed to trigger stronger global cooperation.

Consistency-based methods have emerged as an effective approach to uncertainty quantification (UQ) in large language models. These methods typically rely on several generations obtained via multinomial sampling, measuring their agreement level. However, in short-form QA, multinomial sampling is prone to producing duplicates due to peaked distributions, and its stochasticity introduces considerable variance in uncertainty estimates across runs. We introduce a new family of methods that employ beam search to generate candidates for consistency-based UQ, yielding improved performance and reduced variance compared to multinomial sampling. We also provide a theoretical lower bound on the beam set probability mass under which beam search achieves a smaller error than multinomial sampling. We empirically evaluate our approach on six QA datasets and find that its consistent improvements over multinomial sampling lead to state-of-the-art UQ performance.

Pots, quadrants, confederation constraints, group position grids... the 2026 World Cup finals draw on Friday is not going to be a straightforward affair. There's a lot to unpack so we're going to explain it as simply as we can. Luckily, Fifa will have a computer to do most of the heavy lifting and make sure everything runs smoothly. Though as Uefa found out in 2021, sometimes technology does go wrong. Let's hope there will be no gremlins in Washington once the draw ceremony kicks off.

For example, in the Pandemic Response Challenge experiment, the context consisted of data about the geographic region for which the predictions were made, e.g., historical data of COVID-19 cases and intervention policies; actions were future schedules of intervention policies for the region; and outcomes were predicted future cases of COVID-19 along with the stringency

Species range maps (SRMs) are essential tools for research and policy-making in ecology, conservation, and environmental management.