South America
No Phone, No Social Safety Net: Welcome to the 'Offline Club'
No Phone, No Social Safety Net: Welcome to the'Offline Club' Across Europe's largest cities, people are gathering for semi-silent, offline hangouts, in search of an experience that isn't mediated through their smartphones. On cue, the room fell silent. A man seated to my left at a long wooden table began to scratch at a piece of paper with a coloring pencil. To my right, another guy picked up a book. Across the way, someone buried themselves in a puzzle.
At least three people killed in Russian attacks on Ukraine
Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' A Russian air attack has killed two people in Kyiv region's Bilohorodska community, and a drone attack killed another person in central Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region, according to local authorities. The deadly attacks came overnight on Wednesday, just hours after a deadly drone attack on a commuter train in northeastern Ukraine's Kharkiv - an incident denounced as "terrorism" by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who put the number of people on that train at 200.
Prediction Markets as Bayesian Inverse Problems: Uncertainty Quantification, Identifiability, and Information Gain from Price-Volume Histories under Latent Types
Madrigal-Cianci, Juan Pablo, Maya, Camilo Monsalve, Breakey, Lachlan
Prediction markets are often described as mechanisms that ``aggregate information'' into prices, yet the mapping from dispersed private information to observed market histories is typically noisy, endogenous, and shaped by heterogeneous and strategic participation. This paper formulates prediction markets as Bayesian inverse problems in which the unknown event outcome \(Y\in\{0,1\}\) is inferred from an observed history of market-implied probabilities and traded volumes. We introduce a mechanism-agnostic observation model in log-odds space in which price increments conditional on volume arise from a latent mixture of trader types. The resulting likelihood class encompasses informed and uninformed trading, heavy-tailed microstructure noise, and adversarial or manipulative flow, while requiring only price and volume as observables. Within this framework we define posterior uncertainty quantification for \(Y\), provide identifiability and well-posedness criteria in terms of Kullback--Leibler separation between outcome-conditional increment laws, and derive posterior concentration statements and finite-sample error bounds under general regularity assumptions. We further study stability of posterior odds to perturbations of the observed price--volume path and define realized and expected information gain via the posterior-vs-prior KL divergence and mutual information. The inverse-problem formulation yields explicit diagnostics for regimes in which market histories are informative and stable versus regimes in which inference is ill-posed due to type-composition confounding or outcome--nuisance symmetries. Extensive experiments on synthetic data validate our theoretical predictions regarding posterior concentration rates and identifiability thresholds.
Humanity edges closer to annihilation as Doomsday Clock lurches forward because of new global threats
A simple trick cured my tinnitus after a long-haul flight left me in misery for months. Here's the miracle method I wish everyone knew I was diagnosed with cancer after strange things began happening to my hands - here are the symptoms you can't ignore Explosive twist in'diva' inmate Bryan Kohberger's life in prison revealed in the FREE The Crime Desk newsletter Marco Rubio'cocoons like a mummy' in bizarre strategy to hide naps from Trump Food Network star Valerie Bertinelli's heartbreaking struggles laid bare after confession about shock firing Devastating truth about Blind Side actor Quinton Aaron: More to this'than everyone is letting on', friends reveal... as co-star Sandra Bullock'monitors' situation Mother hit by unimaginable triple tragedy after'son, 6, fell through icy pond and brothers aged 8 and 9 jumped in to save him' Sydney Sweeney shows off her bombshell curves in racy lingerie to promote her new SYRN line - as it's revealed Hollywood Sign bra stunt could leave her facing trespassing and vandalism charges Lawyer, 44, who died on flight to London after falling asleep on her mother's shoulder had undiagnosed cardiac condition, inquest hears Top Citi banker displayed'sexually charged' behavior towards female underling and let co-workers think they were having affair, harassment lawsuit alleges Revealed: Tupac Shakur's'crack fiend mama' lived in'SCARY' houseboat community full of drug addicts like'Psycho Steve' before shock death My perfect life at $2m Manchester-by-the-Sea mansion took nasty turn when neighbors tried to ban me from getting a gun because of my HUSBAND - now I've had the last laugh Boy, 15, has been missing for two weeks after sneaking away to New York to meet stranger he'd chatted to on Roblox Nicola Peltz could barely speak Victoria Beckham's name, says interviewer who quizzed her about THAT wedding dress row in explosive new chapter of family feud Doctor who was branded'tone deaf' for flaunting her Louboutin heels at work furiously hits back at critics Doomsday Clock ticks forward... moving humanity closer to annihilation than ever before The Doomsday Clock, which has been ticking down to the end of the world for decades, is now officially closer to annihilation than ever before. On Tuesday, scientists with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the symbolic clock four seconds forward to 85 seconds to midnight . It's also the closest the clock has ever been to midnight in its 79-year history, meaning experts believe humanity has never faced a more dire threat of a world-ending catastrophe than it does in 2026. The group, which decides where the hands are set annually, cited multiple threats to global stability, including nuclear weapons, climate change, disruptive technologies like AI, and the creation of synthetic biological substances called'mirror life.' Alexandra Bell, president and CEO of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, said: 'Every second counts and we are running out of time.
Google DeepMind Staffers Ask Leaders to Keep Them 'Physically Safe' From ICE
Google DeepMind Staffers Ask Leaders to Keep Them'Physically Safe' From ICE A federal agent allegedly tried to enter Google's Cambridge campus in the fall, WIRED has learned. Now, staffers want policies that protect them from immigration officials. Employees at Google DeepMind have asked the company's leadership for plans and policies to keep them "physically safe" from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while on the company's premises, according to screenshots of internal messages obtained by WIRED. On Monday morning, two days after federal agents shot and killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti, a Google DeepMind employee sent the following message in an internal message board for the company's roughly 3,000-person AI unit: "US focused question: What is GDM doing to keep us physically safe from ICE? The events of the past week have shown that immigration status, citizenship, or even the law is not a deterrent against detention, violence, or even death from federal operatives."
'It's 2C in our flat': Inside Kyiv apartment as Russia targets power and heating
Russia has been exploiting Ukraine's harshest winter in years to pummel energy infrastructure across the country. Repeated strikes have crippled the power supply to major Ukrainian cities, leaving millions without heating or light as temperatures hover around -15C (5F) for the third week in a row. Electrical companies carry out round-the-clock repairs - only for their work to be undone at night, when Russian drone and missiles again damage power stations. In Kyiv, people were initially able to keep the cold at bay by using electric heaters or wrapping up warm. But the freezing temperatures have lasted weeks now, with no end in sight.
Revealed: Leaked Chats Expose the Daily Life of a Scam Compound's Enslaved Workforce
A whistleblower trapped inside a "pig butchering" scam compound gave WIRED a vast trove of its internal materials--including 4,200 pages of messages that lay out its operations in unprecedented detail. Just before 8am one day last April, an office manager who went by the name Amani sent out a motivational message to his colleagues and subordinates. "Every day brings a new opportunity--a chance to connect, to inspire, and to make a difference," he wrote in his 500-word post to an office-wide WhatsApp group. "Talk to that next customer like you're bringing them something valuable--because you are." He and his underlings worked inside a " pig butchering " compound, a criminal operation built to carry out scams --promising romance and riches from crypto investments--that often defraud victims out of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars at a time. The workers Amani was addressing were eight hours into their 15-hour night shift in a high-rise building in the Golden Triangle special economic zone in Northern Laos. Like their marks, most of them were victims, too: forced laborers trapped in the compound, held in debt bondage with no passports. They struggled to meet scam revenue quotas to avoid fines that deepened their debt.
He Leaked the Secrets of a Southeast Asian Scam Compound. Then He Had to Get Out Alive
A source trapped inside an industrial-scale scamming operation contacted me, determined to expose his captors' crimes--and then escape. It was a perfect June evening in New York when I received my first email from the source who would ask me to call him Red Bull. He was writing from hell, 8,000 miles away. A summer shower had left a rainbow over my Brooklyn neighborhood, and my two children were playing in a kiddie pool on the roof of our apartment building. Now the sun was setting, while I--in typical 21st-century parenting fashion, forgive me--compulsively scrolled through every app on my phone. The message had no subject line and came from an address on the encrypted email service Proton Mail: "vaultwhistle@proton.me." I'm currently working inside a major crypto romance scam operation based in the Golden Triangle," it began. "I am a computer engineer being forced to work here under a contract." "I've collected internal evidence of how the scam works--step by step," the message ...
Where Tech Leaders and Students Really Think AI Is Going
We asked tech CEOs, journalists, entertainers, students, and more about the promise and peril of artificial intelligence. The future never feels fully certain. But in this time of rapid, intense transformation--political, technological, cultural, scientific--it's as difficult as it ever has been to get a sense of what's around the next corner. Here at WIRED, we're obsessed with what comes next. Our pursuit of the future most often takes the form of vigorously reported stories, in-depth videos, and interviews with the people helping define it.