A Ukrainian flying ace is leveraging his aerobatics skills to protect his countrymen from nightly attacks. The most challenging part of an international aerobatics contest is the Free Unknown. Pilots arrive at a competition after having polished sequences of loops, stall turns, and barrel rolls. But for the Free Unknown section they learn which assortment of tricks they must perform only a day in advance. Contestants plan out how they will string together the stipulated moves in the most pleasing fashion, but they cannot rehearse the routine, except in their minds. It's a test of imagination and airmanship that often decides the competition. In 2019, the World Intermediate Aerobatics Championship, which was held on an airfield in the Czech town of Břeclav, contained three Free Unknowns. The winner of the first was a twenty-five-year-old Ukrainian pilot named Timur Fatkullin. At the controls of his red-and-silver Extra 330LX--a nimble German sports plane--he made the unusual move of starting his sequence upside down. He then executed a complicated routine as if he'd practiced it for months. The Ukrainian team, boosted by Fatkullin's performance, won gold. Trevor Dugan, who served as a navigator with the R.A.F. in Afghanistan and Iraq, was on the British team, which took bronze. Fatkullin, he said, was "absolutely phenomenal." Not long after that championship, Fatkullin stopped entering aerobatics competitions: first came the pandemic, then the war with Russia. He moves through life impatiently. Now thirty-two, he has five children. He is tall, with a tight beard, pale-green eyes, and a square jaw. Even in casual situations, he stands ramrod straight, as though about to give or receive an order. He often wears a shirt with three buttons undone, a beige leather flying jacket with the collar turned up, combat pants, and Nike high-tops. He plays the guitar, a little piano. He often carries a thick fold of high-value bills. He speaks several languages, including English (almost perfectly) and Spanish (conversationally). He once spent thirty days in jail after breaking the ribs of a man who'd threatened his wife. He can dance the tango. When Fatkullin was in his mid-twenties, he started doing stunts with a group of other extreme athletes: parachutists, motorcyclists, a free diver.

The individual pieces create a kind of illusion. When a horse trots, is there a moment when its four feet are in the air simultaneously? In the 1870s, Leland Stanford, the railroad magnate and benefactor of the university that bears his name, funded an effort to find out. The answer shocked many equestrian experts and artists: The horse's feet leave the ground together, but not when outstretched as commonly depicted in paintings and carousels; the feet do so when they reach inward, toward the horse's belly. Surprisingly, this discovery about a horse's gait sheds light on a much more modern debate--whether A.I. is on a path to consciousness.

Premier League predictions - how accurate were BBC Sport pundits? Last summer, 33 BBC TV and radio pundits made their predictions for the Premier League season, picking their champions and their top four. Twenty-one of them thought Liverpool would win it, and none of them got more than two clubs right. Although six pundits correctly picked Arsenal as champions, and everyone had the Gunners and Manchester City in their top four, Matthew Upson was the only one to have the top two in the order they actually finished. Martin Keown, Thomas Hitzlsperger, Sue Smith, Leon Osman and Jermaine Beckford were the other pundits who also backed Mikel Arteta's side.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX is preparing to list its shares on the US-based Nasdaq in what will be the most hotly anticipated initial public offering (IPO) in years. Here's everything you need to know about the deal: Founded in 2002 by Musk, now the world's richest man, SpaceX is best known for designing and launching rockets, spacecraft and reusable launch vehicles. Since 2006, the company has partnered with NASA to deliver cargo and crew to the International Space Station (ISS). The Texas-based company has also launched rockets, satellites and spacecraft for various private companies. As well as its aerospace business, SpaceX provides internet services and artificial intelligence platforms through its dedicated divisions, Starlink and xAI.

Drone games put Ukraine's best military pilots to the test TRUSKAVETS, Ukraine - In the sky over western Ukraine, a bullet-shaped P1-SUN interceptor drone dived toward its target as dozens of soldiers looked on. A cheer went up as it cut through a tow line from another drone to a balloon, which drifted away. Ukraine's most skilled military drone pilots squared off this week not against Russia, but against each other in a competition to win bragging rights and state-of-the-art hardware for their units. Drone technology has transformed the war in Ukraine. Young men using video game consoles to operate strike drones packed with explosives -- sometimes from command centers far behind the front line -- are deeply feared by enemy soldiers.

Countries including Japan see the ability to control chips, data centers and AI models as directly related to national resilience in a landscape dominated by U.S. and Chinese technology. Sakura Internet's chief said the company may need to hike its capital spending by nearly seven times its initial plan to keep up with artificial intelligence demand in Japan. The data center operator is eyeing an allocation of as much as ¥20 billion to ¥30 billion ($125 million to $190 million) this fiscal year, founder and CEO Kunihiro Tanaka said. That's above the ¥4.4 billion in the Osaka-based company's official capital expenditure plan announced last month. "AI server usage rates are 80% to 90%," Tanaka, 48, said in an interview.

On London's streets, facial recognition tests the balance between security and liberty Temporary street signs warn pedestrians of a Metropolitan Police live facial recognition operation in London on May 11. | REUTERS London - Tourists, shoppers and office workers on a busy London street on an ordinary weekday found themselves part of a digital identity check as live facial recognition cameras scanned faces against a police watchlist. The operation was an example of a technology the Metropolitan Police say is transforming policing, helping officers arrest around 2,500 wanted people since the start of 2024, including suspects accused of violent and sexual offences. Critics, however, say live facial recognition undermines the presumption of innocence underpinning British law by treating every passerby as a potential suspect. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

How Saudi Arabia's spending spree reached the end of the line Autocratic monarchs once left an echo of their glory in the ruins of the megaprojects they commanded at the peak of their unchallenged power. Those monumental physical traces are to be found in the fertile plains, mountainsides and deserts of the Middle East. But one of their most prominent modern counterparts may only have a digital footprint to leave behind for some of his most ambitious concepts. A decade ago, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman - or MBS as he is widely known - decreed a revisioning of his country that leapt from the realm of science fiction. It was called Vision 2030. Extraordinary monolithic structures were to help bring forth new technological marvels not just for the Kingdom but for the world.

More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A tiny, bright blue octopus is small enough to fit inside the palm of your hand, but good luck trying to meet one. According to marine biologists, you'll likely have to settle with admiring it from afar for now unless you have access to a deep sea submersible--and a ticket to the Galápagos Islands . While conducting a deep sea expedition aboard the research vessel E/V, biologists spotted the diminutive invertebrate as they piloted a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) along the ocean floor near Darwin Island.

We study feature learning in two-layer neural networks within the linear-width regime, where the number of hidden neurons, sample size, and input dimension scale proportionally. While recent work has analyzed feature learning via a single step of gradient descent on the first layer weights in this regime, such one-step update schemes are fundamentally limited: the update to the weights is approximately rank-one, captures only a single direction, and requires the target function to have an information exponent of one. In this paper, we go beyond one-step updates to provide a full characterization of the features learned during the \textit{second step} of gradient descent with step-sizes $η_1\asymp N^{α_1}$ and $η_2 \asymp N^{α_2}$ for $α_1, α_2 \in [0,0.5)$, where $N$ is the number of hidden neurons. We derive a spectral characterization of the updated weights, demonstrating they behave as a spiked random matrix with multiple outliers, each corresponding to a learned direction. We show that the number of the outliers is determined by the parameters $α_1, α_2$ through $\lfloor \frac{α_2}{1/2 - α_1} \rfloor$. Furthermore, by analyzing the alignment between the learned directions and the target function, we identify a gap between training with independent versus reused batches. While independent batches restrict learning to directions with an information exponent of one, batch reuse enables the second update to capture directions even when the information exponent exceeds one, provided that $α_1, α_2$ are chosen properly. This shows that the benefits of batch reuse, previously observed in narrow-width regimes, persist in the linear-width limit as well. By characterizing these early-phase evolutions, our work proposes a tractable framework for studying optimization and feature learning phenomenology in modern overparameterized networks.