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Women really do live longer than men. Here's why.

Popular Science

Environment Animals Wildlife Women really do live longer than men. Female mammals live 12 percent longer than males, on average. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It's fairly obvious that women live longer than men on average. This pattern holds true across most countries and historical time periods.


AI Is Learning to Do the Jobs of Doctors, Lawyers, and Consultants

TIME - Tech

RadVid-19, a program which identifies lung injuries through artificial intelligence, is used at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. RadVid-19, a program which identifies lung injuries through artificial intelligence, is used at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. The tasks resemble those that lawyers, doctors, financial analysts, and management consultants solve for a living. One asks for a diagnosis of a six-year-old patient based on nine pieces of multimedia evidence; another asks for legal advice on a musician's estate; a third calls for a valuation of part of a healthcare technology company. Mercor, which claims to supply "expert data" to every top AI company, says that it spent more than $500,000 to develop 200 tasks that test whether AIs can perform knowledge work with high economic value across law, medicine, finance, and management consulting.


Pope Leo condemns climate change critics

BBC News

Pope Leo XIV has hit out at those who minimise the increasingly evident impact of rising temperatures in his first major statement on climate change. Reiterating the words of his predecessor Pope Francis, the new pontiff lambasted critics who ridicule those who speak of global warming. The Pope's remarks, at a speech in Castel Gondolfo near Rome, will be seen as an implied criticism of US President Donald Trump, who last month called climate change a con. Pope Leo also called for greater action from citizens the world over on climate change, saying there was no room for indifference or resignation. The Pope was speaking at a conference to mark 10 years since the publication of Laudato Si'.


Watch: See students pulled from rubble of collapsed school

BBC News

'It's safe now': See students pulled from rubble of collapsed Indonesian school Dramatic rescue footage shows the boys in Indonesia pulled to safety after their school building collapsed on Monday. The three students, Yusuf, Haikal and Dani were all trapped under the rubble for several hours. It is thought around 38 people are still stuck and unaccounted for. Six students have died so far. Watch: Moments as 6.9 magnitude earthquake hit Philippines At least 69 people are killed after it struck on Tuesday night with officials declaring a state of calamity.


Watch: Families in anxious wait for students trapped under collapsed school in Indonesia

BBC News

Four students have died after a school building collapsed in Indonesia on Monday, 99 others were taken to hospital but it is thought 38 people are still trapped. The BBC reports from a nearby centre where relatives face an anxious wait for any updates. Rescuers say they have been able to communicate with seven students and give them oxygen. Watch: Moments as 6.9 magnitude earthquake hit Philippines At least 69 people are killed after it struck on Tuesday night with officials declaring a state of calamity. Social media footage showed the massive crater in Thailand's capital leaving cars teetering on the edge.


Emily Blunt among Hollywood stars outraged over 'AI actor' Tilly Norwood

BBC News

Emily Blunt among Hollywood stars outraged over'AI actor' Tilly Norwood An AI actor named Tilly Norwood has been causing a stir after its Dutch creators said the synthetic performer is in talks with talent agencies. Norwood could be mistaken for a young, aspiring actress when one glances at its social media. The brunette poses for photos and showcases a fully AI-generated comedy sketch, where it is described as having girl next door vibes. I may be AI, but I'm feeling very real emotions right now, Tilly's creators wrote on her page. I am so excited for what's coming next!


90% Faster, 100% Code-Free: MLLM-Driven Zero-Code 3D Game Development

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Developing 3D games requires specialized expertise across multiple domains, including programming, 3D modeling, and engine configuration, which limits access to millions of potential creators. Recently, researchers have begun to explore automated game development. However, existing approaches face three primary challenges: (1) limited scope to 2D content generation or isolated code snippets; (2) requirement for manual integration of generated components into game engines; and (3) poor performance on handling interactive game logic and state management. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate potential capabilities to ease the game generation task, a critical gap still remains in translating these outputs into production-ready, executable game projects based on game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine. To bridge the gap, this paper introduces UniGen, the first end-to-end coordinated multi-agent framework that automates zero-coding development of runnable 3D games from natural language requirements. Specifically, UniGen uses a Planning Agent that interprets user requirements into structured blueprints and engineered logic descriptions; after which a Generation Agent produces executable C# scripts; then an Automation Agent handles engine-specific component binding and scene construction; and lastly a Debugging Agent provides real-time error correction through conversational interaction. We evaluated UniGen on three distinct game prototypes. Results demonstrate that UniGen not only democratizes game creation by requiring no coding from the user, but also reduces development time by 91.4%. We release UniGen at https://github.com/yxwan123/UniGen. A video demonstration is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyJjFfnxUx0.


Perceptual Influence: Improving the Perceptual Loss Design for Low-Dose CT Enhancement

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Perceptual losses have emerged as powerful tools for training networks to enhance Low-Dose Computed Tomography (LDCT) images, offering an alternative to traditional pixel-wise losses such as Mean Squared Error, which often lead to over-smoothed reconstructions and loss of clinically relevant details in LDCT images. The perceptual losses operate in a latent feature space defined by a pretrained encoder and aim to preserve semantic content by comparing high-level features rather than raw pixel values. However, the design of perceptual losses involves critical yet underexplored decisions, including the feature representation level, the dataset used to pretrain the encoder, and the relative importance assigned to the perceptual component during optimization. In this work, we introduce the concept of perceptual influence (a metric that quantifies the relative contribution of the perceptual loss term to the total loss) and propose a principled framework to assess the impact of the loss design choices on the model training performance. Through systematic experimentation, we show that the widely used configurations in the literature to set up a perceptual loss underperform compared to better-designed alternatives. Our findings show that better perceptual loss designs lead to significant improvements in noise reduction and structural fidelity of reconstructed CT images, without requiring any changes to the network architecture. We also provide objective guidelines, supported by statistical analysis, to inform the effective use of perceptual losses in LDCT denoising. Our source code is available at https://github.com/vngabriel/perceptual-influence.


Neglected Risks: The Disturbing Reality of Children's Images in Datasets and the Urgent Call for Accountability

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Including children's images in datasets has raised ethical concerns, particularly regarding privacy, consent, data protection, and accountability. These datasets, often built by scraping publicly available images from the Internet, can expose children to risks such as exploitation, profiling, and tracking. Despite the growing recognition of these issues, approaches for addressing them remain limited. We explore the ethical implications of using children's images in AI datasets and propose a pipeline to detect and remove such images. As a use case, we built the pipeline on a Vision-Language Model under the Visual Question Answering task and tested it on the #PraCegoVer dataset. We also evaluate the pipeline on a subset of 100,000 images from the Open Images V7 dataset to assess its effectiveness in detecting and removing images of children. The pipeline serves as a baseline for future research, providing a starting point for more comprehensive tools and methodologies. While we leverage existing models trained on potentially problematic data, our goal is to expose and address this issue. We do not advocate for training or deploying such models, but instead call for urgent community reflection and action to protect children's rights. Ultimately, we aim to encourage the research community to exercise - more than an additional - care in creating new datasets and to inspire the development of tools to protect the fundamental rights of vulnerable groups, particularly children.


Neighbor-aware informal settlement mapping with graph convolutional networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Mapping informal settlements is crucial for addressing challenges related to urban planning, public health, and infrastructure in rapidly growing cities. Geospatial machine learning has emerged as a key tool for detecting and mapping these areas from remote sensing data. However, existing approaches often treat spatial units independently, neglecting the relational structure of the urban fabric. We propose a graph-based framework that explicitly incorporates local geographical context into the classification process. Each spatial unit (cell) is embedded in a graph structure along with its adjacent neighbors, and a lightweight Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is trained to classify whether the central cell belongs to an informal settlement. Experiments are conducted on a case study in Rio de Janeiro using spatial cross-validation across five distinct zones, ensuring robustness and generaliz-ability across heterogeneous urban landscapes. Our method outperforms standard baselines, improving Kappa coefficient by 17 points over individual cell classification. We also show that graph-based modeling surpasses simple feature concatenation of neighboring cells, demonstrating the benefit of encoding spatial structure for urban scene understanding.