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High-Resolution Water Sampling via a Solar-Powered Autonomous Surface Vehicle

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Accurate water quality assessment requires spatially resolved sampling, yet most unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) can collect only a limited number of samples or rely on single-point sensors with poor representativeness. This work presents a solar-powered, fully autonomous USV featuring a novel syringe-based sampling architecture capable of acquiring 72 discrete, contamination-minimized water samples per mission. The vehicle incorporates a ROS 2 autonomy stack with GPS-RTK navigation, LiDAR and stereo-vision obstacle detection, Nav2-based mission planning, and long-range LoRa supervision, enabling dependable execution of sampling routes in unstructured environments. The platform integrates a behavior-tree autonomy architecture adapted from Nav2, enabling mission-level reasoning and perception-aware navigation. A modular 6x12 sampling system, controlled by distributed micro-ROS nodes, provides deterministic actuation, fault isolation, and rapid module replacement, achieving spatial coverage beyond previously reported USV-based samplers. Field trials in Achocalla Lagoon (La Paz, Bolivia) demonstrated 87% waypoint accuracy, stable autonomous navigation, and accurate physicochemical measurements (temperature, pH, conductivity, total dissolved solids) comparable to manually collected references. These results demonstrate that the platform enables reliable high-resolution sampling and autonomous mission execution, providing a scalable solution for aquatic monitoring in remote environments.


Toffee Crisp and Blue Riband can't be called chocolate any more

BBC News

Toffee Crisp and Blue Riband can't be called chocolate any more Toffee Crisp and Blue Riband bars can no longer be called chocolate after maker Nestle changed their recipes. To be described as milk chocolate in the UK a product needs to have at least 20% cocoa solids and 20% milk solids, a level each product fell below once a higher amount of cheaper vegetable fat was used. Nestle said its reformulations were needed due to higher input costs but were carefully developed and sensory tested and there were no plans to alter the recipes of other chocolate products. As many ingredient costs, such as cocoa and butter, increased food companies have altered recipes to use less of the expensive ingredients, as well as shrinking serving sizes. Nestle now describes the treats as being encased in a smooth milk chocolate flavour coating rather than being covered in milk chocolate.


Stephen Hawking's computer gets a glow up: AI-powered AVATAR creates new possibilities for people with severe disabilities

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Ghislaine Maxwell's ultimate humiliation: Epstein's sex trafficker girlfriend poses in outrageous outfits and exposes herself in dozens of photos released from the billionaire paedophile's files Silent Trump flees growing storm over Epstein'cover-up' as he jets off for holidays without ANY comment How you can ease the agony of carpal tunnel syndrome. The'change of pace' sex move that sends ANY woman wild. Here's the precise moment to deploy it and what to do with your eyes. Corey Feldman walks back claim that Corey Haim'molested' him after late star's mother slammed his comments Emily in Paris cast left'aghast' and'walking on eggshells' as off-camera drama becomes overwhelming... and whispers swirl about a CURSE Truth about THIS photo of Karoline Leavitt's face... and why if she was non-binary and disabled, Vanity Fair would never have done this: KENNEDY After 27 years as a TV anchor I was suddenly pulled off screens. My boss's explanation was a brutal lesson in loyalty I was dead for 105 minutes and learned exactly how you get into heaven... then Jesus spoke six words into my mind and sent me back Jake Paul's jaw is broken in Anthony Joshua battering: YouTuber-turned-boxer rushes to hospital I was falsely accused of being the Brown University shooter... America's great divide laid bare as Wall Street splurges record bonuses on outrageously lavish homes while the rest of the country struggles Andrew's fury at anyone who doesn't bow and scrape.


McDonald's pulls AI Christmas ad after backlash

BBC News

McDonald's pulls AI Christmas ad after backlash McDonald's has taken down a Christmas advert made with Artificial Intelligence (AI) following online backlash. The 45-second advert was produced with generative AI clips and released publicly on McDonald's Netherlands YouTube channel on 6 December. Viewers on social media denounced the use of AI in the film, with one commenter calling it the most god-awful ad I've seen this year . On 9 December McDonald's Netherlands removed the video, adding in a statement to BBC News that the moment served as an important learning as the company explored the effective use of AI. The advert was created for McDonald's by Dutch company TBWA\Neboko and US production company The Sweetshop.


Tesla Optimus robot takes a suspicious tumble in new demo - sparking rumours it's being controlled by a human

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Ghislaine Maxwell's ultimate humiliation: Epstein's sex trafficker girlfriend poses in outrageous outfits and exposes herself in dozens of photos released from the billionaire paedophile's files Silent Trump flees growing storm over Epstein'cover-up' as he jets off for holidays without ANY comment How you can ease the agony of carpal tunnel syndrome. The'change of pace' sex move that sends ANY woman wild. Here's the precise moment to deploy it and what to do with your eyes. Corey Feldman walks back claim that Corey Haim'molested' him after late star's mother slammed his comments Emily in Paris cast left'aghast' and'walking on eggshells' as off-camera drama becomes overwhelming... and whispers swirl about a CURSE Truth about THIS photo of Karoline Leavitt's face... and why if she was non-binary and disabled, Vanity Fair would never have done this: KENNEDY After 27 years as a TV anchor I was suddenly pulled off screens. My boss's explanation was a brutal lesson in loyalty I was dead for 105 minutes and learned exactly how you get into heaven... then Jesus spoke six words into my mind and sent me back Jake Paul's jaw is broken in Anthony Joshua battering: YouTuber-turned-boxer rushes to hospital I was falsely accused of being the Brown University shooter... America's great divide laid bare as Wall Street splurges record bonuses on outrageously lavish homes while the rest of the country struggles Andrew's fury at anyone who doesn't bow and scrape.


Police in Tokyo use AI to spot shady job offers on social media

The Japan Times

Until now, Tokyo police had identified suspicious posts on social media platforms by manually searching for them using keywords. Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department has introduced an artificial intelligence tool that automatically gathers and analyzes social media posts that appear to offer dark part-time jobs, it announced Tuesday. For example, if a post on X is deemed to be an offer for shady jobs, police post a reply warning users the message in question may contain inappropriate content soliciting people who are prepared to do illicit part-time jobs. The number of such warning posts made between August and November this year came to around 18,500, more than double the roughly 8,800 replies made in the entire year of 2024. Until now, Tokyo police had identified suspicious posts by manually searching for such messages using keywords.


LUNA: Linear Universal Neural Attention with Generalization Guarantees

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Scaling attention faces a critical bottleneck: the $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ quadratic computational cost of softmax attention, which limits its application in long-sequence domains. While linear attention mechanisms reduce this cost to $\mathcal{O}(n)$, they typically rely on fixed random feature maps, such as random Fourier features or hand-crafted functions. This reliance on static, data-agnostic kernels creates a fundamental trade-off, forcing practitioners to sacrifice significant model accuracy for computational efficiency. We introduce \textsc{LUNA}, a kernelized linear attention mechanism that eliminates this trade-off, retaining linear cost while matching and surpassing the accuracy of quadratic attention. \textsc{LUNA} is built on the key insight that the kernel feature map itself should be learned rather than fixed a priori. By parameterizing the kernel, \textsc{LUNA} learns a feature basis tailored to the specific data and task, overcoming the expressive limitations of fixed-feature methods. \textsc{Luna} implements this with a learnable feature map that induces a positive-definite kernel and admits a streaming form, yielding linear time and memory scaling in the sequence length. Empirical evaluations validate our approach across diverse settings. On the Long Range Arena (LRA), \textsc{Luna} achieves state-of-the-art average accuracy among efficient Transformers under compute parity, using the same parameter count, training steps, and approximate FLOPs. \textsc{Luna} also excels at post-hoc conversion: replacing softmax in fine-tuned BERT and ViT-B/16 checkpoints and briefly fine-tuning recovers most of the original performance, substantially outperforming fixed linearizations.


Argus: A Multi-Agent Sensitive Information Leakage Detection Framework Based on Hierarchical Reference Relationships

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Sensitive information leakage in code repositories has emerged as a critical security challenge. Traditional detection methods that rely on regular expressions, fingerprint features, and high-entropy calculations often suffer from high false-positive rates. This not only reduces detection efficiency but also significantly increases the manual screening burden on developers. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent collaborative architectures have demonstrated remarkable potential for tackling complex tasks, offering a novel technological perspective for sensitive information detection. In response to these challenges, we propose Argus, a multi-agent collaborative framework for detecting sensitive information. Argus employs a three-tier detection mechanism that integrates key content, file context, and project reference relationships to effectively reduce false positives and enhance overall detection accuracy. To comprehensively evaluate Argus in real-world repository environments, we developed two new benchmarks, one to assess genuine leak detection capabilities and another to evaluate false-positive filtering performance. Experimental results show that Argus achieves up to 94.86% accuracy in leak detection, with a precision of 96.36%, recall of 94.64%, and an F1 score of 0.955. Moreover, the analysis of 97 real repositories incurred a total cost of only 2.2$. All code implementations and related datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/TheBinKing/Argus-Guard for further research and application.


FRIEDA: Benchmarking Multi-Step Cartographic Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Cartographic reasoning is the skill of interpreting geographic relationships by aligning legends, map scales, compass directions, map texts, and geometries across one or more map images. Although essential as a concrete cognitive capability and for critical tasks such as disaster response and urban planning, it remains largely unevaluated. Building on progress in chart and infographic understanding, recent large vision language model studies on map visual question-answering often treat maps as a special case of charts. In contrast, map VQA demands comprehension of layered symbology (e.g., symbols, geometries, and text labels) as well as spatial relations tied to orientation and distance that often span multiple maps and are not captured by chart-style evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce FRIEDA, a benchmark for testing complex open-ended cartographic reasoning in LVLMs. FRIEDA sources real map images from documents and reports in various domains and geographical areas. Following classifications in Geographic Information System (GIS) literature, FRIEDA targets all three categories of spatial relations: topological (border, equal, intersect, within), metric (distance), and directional (orientation). All questions require multi-step inference, and many require cross-map grounding and reasoning. We evaluate eleven state-of-the-art LVLMs under two settings: (1) the direct setting, where we provide the maps relevant to the question, and (2) the contextual setting, where the model may have to identify the maps relevant to the question before reasoning. Even the strongest models, Gemini-2.5-Pro and GPT-5-Think, achieve only 38.20% and 37.20% accuracy, respectively, far below human performance of 84.87%. These results reveal a persistent gap in multi-step cartographic reasoning, positioning FRIEDA as a rigorous benchmark to drive progress on spatial intelligence in LVLMs.


Harmonizing Community Science Datasets to Model Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) in Birds in the Subantarctic

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Community science observational datasets are useful in epidemiology and ecology for modeling species distributions, but the heterogeneous nature of the data presents significant challenges for standardization, data quality assurance and control, and workflow management. In this paper, we present a data workflow for cleaning and harmonizing multiple community science datasets, which we implement in a case study using eBird, iNaturalist, GBIF, and other datasets to model the impact of highly pathogenic avian influenza in populations of birds in the subantarctic. We predict population sizes for several species where the demographics are not known, and we present novel estimates for potential mortality rates from HPAI for those species, based on a novel aggregated dataset of mortality rates in the subantarctic.