Plus: Autonomous drones may have killed soldiers for the first time. Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally kick the ball out of bounds. You may question the logic of surrendering possession seconds into a game. If you were Jesse Davis, though, you'd know that this play could be a prime setup to score. Davis is a professor of computer science at KU Leuven in Belgium and head of its Sports Analytics Lab, which has been at the vanguard of a data awakening in soccer. Using AI and data analytics, his team has uncovered hidden tactical patterns and challenged long-held assumptions about how the game should be played.

I played the ultimate game of strategy on a variety of smart chess boards to find the best for online and in-person matches. Playing chess can be challenging, fun, and at times frustrating. Garry Kasparov called the game "mental torture." With virtually limitless possibilities, chess offers unparalleled depth, and you could easily fill a library with books on how to play it. The internet has opened up a wealth of potential competitors, and smart chess boards enable you to play anyone online or off, not to mention dabble in a variety of chess programs.

The new open-source project could serve as the basis for a future of apps with features as complex as Slack, Discord, or Google Docs--but with added protection against surveillance. End-to-end encryption, in which data is encoded so that only users on either "end" of a conversation can decrypt their communications--and not the server that relays that information or any other interloper--has become the standard for modern privacy on the internet. But its very name suggests a kind of simple pipe with two openings. The metaphor, and often the encryption technology that has enabled that model, doesn't fit neatly onto the world of Slack, Discord, Google Docs, and the other multiuser, complex, collaborative software where people now live and work. So one group of cryptographers has built what they describe as the foundation for a new generation of end-to-end encrypted apps, with a new metaphor: Instead of a mere pipe, they want to create "spaces" where users can hold group conversations, host information on a server, collectively make changes to it, invite in new collaborators or kick them out, all while maintaining the same strong encryption protections that prevent the server or network eavesdroppers from accessing their data.

Air pollution remains one of the most critical environmental challenges globally, posing severe threats to public health, ecological sustainability, and climate governance. While existing physics-based and data-driven models have made progress in air quality forecasting, they often struggle to jointly capture the complex spatiotemporal dynamics and ensure spatial continuity of pollutant distributions. In this study, we introduce CTENet, a novel chemical transport deep learning model that embeds the Advection-Diffusion-Reaction equation into a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) framework using an Eulerian representation to model the spatiotemporal evolution of pollutants. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that CTENet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, achieving a remarkable RMSE improvement of 45.8% on the USA dataset and 21.0% on the China dataset.

The tension between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is the driving force in today's biggest technological revolution. SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK - If not for the intense rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI, the generative AI boom might not have arrived so quickly. In late 2022, OpenAI caught wind that Anthropic was working on an AI-powered chatbot. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman immediately directed employees to fast-track a competing product, four people familiar with the matter said. Two weeks later, the company released ChatGPT, sparking a technological revolution that promises to overhaul the global economy and the way humans interact.

A sea drone was used to save two crew members of a downed US army helicopter off the coast of Oman earlier this week, according to the US military - making it the first publicly known instance of an unmanned vessel being used to conduct a rescue mission. President Donald Trump said the apache helicopter was shot down by Iran near the Strait of Hormuz - the dangerous waterway which has been largely blocked off to shipping since the start of the Iran war. The two soldiers were safely rescued within approximately two hours and are in stable condition, US Central Command (Centcom) said. BBC Verify has examined what we know about the drone boat and how the mission took place. What is the US sea drone?

Accurate visual localization from aerial views is a fundamental problem with applications in mapping, large-area inspection, and search-and-rescue operations. In many scenarios, these systems require high-precision localization while operating with limited resources (e.g., no internet connection or GNSS/GPS support), making large image databases or heavy 3D models impractical. Surprisingly, little attention has been given to leveraging orthographic geodata as an alternative paradigm, which is lightweight and increasingly available through free releases by governmental authorities (e.g., the European Union). To fill this gap, we propose OrthoLoC, the first large-scale dataset comprising 16,425 UAV images from Germany and the United States with multiple modalities.

As AI spreads across workplaces, China is also having to contend with chronic weakness in the jobs market. China's rapid adoption of artificial intelligence in the workplace has prompted an unusually blunt call from a state-run newspaper to protect labor rights, as Beijing considers how to contain risks posed by the new technology. In an editorial published on Thursday, the Workers' Daily -- the official mouthpiece of China's umbrella trade union organization -- urged government agencies to mount an active response as new threats emerge to the rights of employees. It called on regulators to improve labor standards and strengthen oversight of AI algorithms, including by giving a greater say to trade unions and workers' representatives. "The benefits of technological advancement should be shared by society as a whole, rather than becoming a tool for a small number of employers to undermine workers' rights," the editorial said.

Google DeepMind is funding research into the potential dangers of situations where millions of different AI agents interact with each other online. According to Rohin Shah, who directs the company's AGI safety and alignment research, the mass-market arrival of agents that can carry out tasks without human oversight and follow instructions given to them by other agents creates a whole new class of risk . In an effort to address this, Google DeepMind--which made agent-based tools a centerpiece of Google I/O last month --has teamed up with several other organizations to announce a $10 million funding pot for researchers to study the behavior of multi-agent systems and come up with ways to prevent unsafe scenarios. Joining Google DeepMind are Schmidt Sciences, a philanthropic foundation set up by Eric and Wendy Schmidt; ARIA, the UK government's moonshot agency; the Cooperative AI foundation, a UK-based nonprofit research outfit; and Google's charitable arm, Google.org. I asked Shah and James Fox, who leads the Science of Trustworthy AI program at Schmidt Sciences, what they hope to achieve with that $10 million.

Americans Are Trading Billions of Dollars on Polymarket's Banned Offshore Platform It's the first estimate of how many Americans are sneaking onto Polymarket's banned crypto-based platform. Approximately 30 percent of the trading volume on Polymarket comes from the United States, according to a new study--an eye-popping number, considering that none of those people are legally allowed to use the crypto -based platform. The study, conducted by Rutgers University statistician Harry Crane, estimated that people in the US funneled between $10.6 to $26.7 billion through Polymarket. To track the platform's activity, Crane looked at what appeared to be US-based trades on offshore prediction market platforms from May 2025 to the end of April 2026. He found that many of the highest-volume markets on Polymarket were US-centric, including those covering US elections and sporting events.