South America
UK fighters to defend Polish skies after Russian drone incursion
Fighter jets from the UK will join Nato allies in defending Polish airspace after last week's incursion of Russian drones, the defence secretary has confirmed. RAF Typhoon jets will fly air defence missions over Poland as part of the military alliance's mission to bolster the eastern flank. Other allies including Denmark, Germany and France are already taking part - a jet from the latter was scrambled earlier on Monday in response to another potential incursion by Russian drones. Nato said that alert was quickly over. Tensions have risen across Europe since Poland accused Russia of the incident, which saw 19 drones enter its territory.
Hundreds of Google AI Workers Were Fired Amid Fight Over Working Conditions
Over 200 contractors who work on improving Google's AI products, including Gemini and AI Overviews, have been laid off, sources say. Workers enter a building on the Google headquarters campus on July 23, 2025, in Mountain View, California. More than 200 contractors who worked on evaluating and improving Google's AI products have been laid off without warning in at least two rounds of layoffs last month. The move comes amid an ongoing fight over pay and working conditions, according to workers who spoke to WIRED. In the past few years, Google has outsourced its AI rating work--which includes evaluating, editing, or rewriting the Gemini chatbot's response to make it sound more human and "intelligent"--to thousands of contractors employed by Hitachi-owned GlobalLogic and other outsourcing companies.
USA Today Enters Its Gen AI Era With a Chatbot
DeeperDive, a new tool that converses with readers, is an effort to beat the AI industry at its own game. The publishing company behind USA Today and 220 other publications is today rolling out a chatbot -like tool called DeeperDive that can converse with readers, summarize insights from its journalism, and suggest new content from across its sites. "Visitors now have a trusted AI answer engine on our platform for anything they want to engage with, anything they want to ask," Mike Reed, CEO of Gannett and the USA Today Network, said at the WIRED AI Power Summit in New York, an event that brought together voices from the tech industry, politics, and the world of media. "and it is performing really great." Most publishers have a fraught relationship with AI, as the chatbots that trained on their content are now summarizing it and eating the traffic that search engines used to send them.
Belarus and Russia's show of firepower appears to be a message to Europe
Belarus and Russia's show of firepower appears to be a message to Europe In a large field 45 miles (72km) from Belarus' capital Minsk, a battle is raging. There are giant explosions as Sukhoi-34 bombers drop guided bombs. Helicopter gunships join the attack, while surveillance drones sweep overhead to view the damage. Together with other international media we've been brought to the Borisovsky training ground where Belarusian and Russian forces are taking part in joint manoeuvres. Military attachรฉs, too, from a variety of embassies are observing the drill from a viewing platform.
OpenAI Ramps Up Robotics Work in Race Toward AGI
The company behind ChatGPT is putting together a team capable of developing algorithms to control robots and appears to be hiring roboticists who work specifically on humanoids. OpenAI appears to be ramping up its efforts in robotics, hiring researchers who work on humanoid systems as it explores new ways to advance artificial intelligence . The company has recently recruited a number of researchers with expertise in developing AI algorithms for controlling humanoid and other types of robots. Job listings show that the company is putting together a team capable of creating systems that can be trained through teleoperation and simulation. Sources with knowledge of the company's efforts also say OpenAI is recruiting people to work specifically on humanoid robots, or robots with a partial or full human form.
WIRED Health Recap: Cancer Vaccines, CRISPR Breakthroughs, and More
This year's WIRED Health summit in Boston featured Moderna CEO Stรฉphane Bancel, CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, and a day's worth of insights and provocative conversations. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. At the WIRED Health summit in Boston on September 9, we hosted some of the leading experts in CRISPR, whole-genome sequencing, vaccines, and more for a series of eye-opening conversations and keynotes. If you weren't able to join us in person, no worries; you can watch them all right here.
Watch: Winning moments from the 77th Emmy Awards
The 77th Primetime Emmy Awards have taken place in Los Angeles on Sunday night, with shows The Studio, The Pit and Adolescence dominating the awards. Owen Cooper became the youngest ever male Emmy winner at 15-years-old, for his breakout role in the Netflix miniseries Adolescence. Seth Rogan's comedy series The Studio scooped up four Emmys, while The Pitt beat out the likes of Severance and The White Lotus to win Best Drama. 'No doubt' Russia will cross Nato border if Ukraine falls, former US VP says Former US Vice-President Mike Pence calls for security guarantees in Ukraine to help deliver "just and lasting peace". The US House Oversight Committee has released new surveillance footage recorded hours before the convicted paedophile's death.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,299
How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? Despite Russian drone strikes, Kharkiv's factories stand firm for Ukraine's security Russian forces killed two people in Ukraine's Kherson, including a 49-year-old woman who was found dead in the rubble of her home, authorities said, a day after Russian attacks killed six people across the country. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian soldiers were advancing in the border areas of the northern Sumy region, and said Russian forces had suffered significant losses in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions along the 1,000km (620-mile) front line.
Generating Energy-Efficient Code via Large-Language Models -- Where are we now?
Apsan, Radu, Stoico, Vincenzo, Albonico, Michel, Dhar, Rudra, Vaidhyanathan, Karthik, Malavolta, Ivano
Context. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to their widespread adoption in development pipelines. Goal. We empirically assess the energy efficiency of Python code generated by LLMs against human-written code and code developed by a Green software expert. Method. We test 363 solutions to 9 coding problems from the EvoEval benchmark using 6 widespread LLMs with 4 prompting techniques, and comparing them to human-developed solutions. Energy consumption is measured on three different hardware platforms: a server, a PC, and a Raspberry Pi for a total of ~881h (36.7 days). Results. Human solutions are 16% more energy-efficient on the server and 3% on the Raspberry Pi, while LLMs outperform human developers by 25% on the PC. Prompting does not consistently lead to energy savings, where the most energy-efficient prompts vary by hardware platform. The code developed by a Green software expert is consistently more energy-efficient by at least 17% to 30% against all LLMs on all hardware platforms. Conclusions. Even though LLMs exhibit relatively good code generation capabilities, no LLM-generated code was more energy-efficient than that of an experienced Green software developer, suggesting that as of today there is still a great need of human expertise for developing energy-efficient Python code.
Pragmatic Frames Evoked by Gestures: A FrameNet Brasil Approach to Multimodality in Turn Organization
Abreu, Helen de Andrade, Torrent, Tiago Timponi, Matos, Ely Edison da Silva
This paper proposes a framework for modeling multimodal conversational turn organization via the proposition of correlations between language and interactive gestures, based on analysis as to how pragmatic frames are conceptualized and evoked by communicators. As a means to provide evidence for the analysis, we developed an annotation methodology to enrich a multimodal dataset (annotated for semantic frames) with pragmatic frames modeling conversational turn organization. Although conversational turn organization has been studied by researchers from diverse fields, the specific strategies, especially gestures used by communicators, had not yet been encoded in a dataset that can be used for machine learning. To fill this gap, we enriched the Frame2 dataset with annotations of gestures used for turn organization. The Frame2 dataset features 10 episodes from the Brazilian TV series Pedro Pelo Mundo annotated for semantic frames evoked in both video and text. This dataset allowed us to closely observe how communicators use interactive gestures outside a laboratory, in settings, to our knowledge, not previously recorded in related literature. Our results have confirmed that communicators involved in face-to-face conversation make use of gestures as a tool for passing, taking and keeping conversational turns, and also revealed variations of some gestures that had not been documented before. We propose that the use of these gestures arises from the conceptualization of pragmatic frames, involving mental spaces, blending and conceptual metaphors. In addition, our data demonstrate that the annotation of pragmatic frames contributes to a deeper understanding of human cognition and language.