Say More Safety Net Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Versus Mashable Selects Creator Playbook In My Bag Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off All Series Dreame's recently announced vacuums are set to make this year's spring clean easier than ever. The following content is brought to you by Mashable partners. If you buy a product featured here, we may earn an affiliate commission or other compensation. This year's IFA conference was chock-full of cutting-edge technology announcements. One of the highlights was from leading vacuum brand Dreame, who unveiled a fresh range of innovative cleaning devices including a powerful new robovac, the Aqua20 Ultra Roller, an upgrade to their X60 Ultra robot vacuum (which our own Leah Stodart reviewed at 4.5/5 stars earlier this year), and an upgraded steam mop, the T16 Pro TriForce.

China's fears about the technology are increasingly distinct from those of the U.S. What does that mean for international coöperation? On Sunday, China's Minister of State Security published an article in a state-run magazine that warned about artificial intelligence posing a threat to the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.). This coincided with increasing concern among Americans that A.I. could pose existential risks to humanity, and rising calls for Washington to regulate it. Many of those pushing for regulation work at leading A.I. companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, and they have received support from a broad ideological coalition on Capitol Hill. But there remains little appetite for regulation in the White House; President Trump has said that the United States must accelerate A.I. development to outpace China. I recently spoke by phone with Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who focusses on Chinese technology policy.

A new report from the nonprofit Reflective lays out the experiments needed to better understand our ability to dim the sun. A San Francisco nonprofit has published a detailed road map of the experiments, studies, and infrastructure that it says would be needed to make informed decisions about the use of solar geoengineering, can reveal. Scientists have now spent half a century exploring the possibility that we could counteract climate change by releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere, mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. But even after at least hundreds of studies on the concept, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), big gaps remain in the scientific understanding of how well it would work and what else it might do--and there has been no systematic plan for clearing up that uncertainty. Reflective, a research organization that funds studies on solar geoengineering, has today attempted to fill that gap with the release of its SAI Research Roadmap . "Our mission is to equip the world with the data and tools required for informed decision-making about sunlight reflection fast enough to matter," says Dakota Gruener, the organization's cofounder and chief executive.

Plus: A judge has blocked the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic. A startup claims it's found a drug to make your blood young I knew I'd officially become a "longevity influencer" when a company called Generation Lab offered me the chance to write about--and even receive--their new rejuvenation treatment. A company fact sheet says that it "blocks the systemic spread of aging in the bloodstream, reawakens the body's own repair mechanism and restores health and youth to multiple tissues." The approach is based on research by Generation Lab's irascible scientific founder, Irina Conboy. She found that joining the circulatory systems of old and young mice improved the old animals' ability to heal from injury. Conboy now says she has found a combination of two existing drugs that can produce youthful effects without the need for any bodily fluid exchange.

Kimi Onoda, minister for intellectual property strategy, speaks to reporters Tuesday about the government's adoption of guiding principles on intellectual rights protection. The government on Tuesday adopted guiding principles on intellectual property protection for generative artificial intelligence operators, calling on such businesses to disclose an outline of data and methods used to train their AI tools. The Principles Code, while not legally binding, is designed to boost transparency related to AI and promote both the protection of intellectual property rights and innovation amid the rapidly spreading use of the cutting-edge technology. Businesses that accept all or part of the code will notify the government and disclose the learning processes, types of learning data and methods of collecting such data for their generative AI models on their websites. The code covers not only domestic businesses but also overseas operators that provide AI systems and services in Japan. There are growing concerns that texts, images and other materials are being used by generative AI for learning without permission, potentially resulting in intellectual property rights violations.

A government advisory panel is planning to discuss how best to use AI in education amid growing concerns the technology could be reducing the ability of students to think for themselves. A Japanese government advisory panel is set to start considering ways to appropriately and effectively utilize artificial intelligence in school education amid the continuing evolution of the new cutting-edge technology. At a general meeting of the Central Council for Education on Friday, education minister Yohei Matsumoto asked the panel for discussions on the government's next five-year basic education promotion program from fiscal 2028. The council plans to compile its recommendations in fiscal 2027, which begins next April. There are growing concerns that excessive reliance on AI may reduce opportunities for students to think and make decisions on their own.

The games industry's obsession with visual fidelity is costing them money and talent Big developers are discovering that the technical progress of photorealism doesn't always translate into the creative spark that gives gamers joy - and keeps them playing Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. L ast week, Asha Sharma, the new head of Xbox, laid out her vision for the future of the console and interestingly, the two titles she picked out as potential areas of growth were Minecraft and Candy Crush Saga - games that don't exactly scream next-generation entertainment. Neither relies on hyper-realistic visuals, which is the north star that games consoles and gaming PCs have been aiming at for the past 40 years.

Would you choose £50,000 over the chance of £1m? You have the choice of instantly receiving £50,000 or flipping a coin for a 50/50 chance of £1m. The vast majority decide on taking the £50k, according to a survey of thousands of people by YouGov. Women voted 82% in favour of the guaranteed cash. The poll has sparked a debate about why Brits appear more risk-averse than people in the US.

Travel, said users should'scroll past these summaries and look at guest reviews'. Travel, said users should'scroll past these summaries and look at guest reviews'. AI-generated overview found to gloss over allegations of sexual harassment and describes hotel being sued over hygiene as'spotless' A hotel being sued for mass food poisonings was described as "spotless" and a resort where guests complained of sexual harassment by staff was praised for "friendly" service by an AI intended to summarise millions of Tripadvisor reviews. The overviews of customer feedback downplayed serious complaints, ranging from the stench of mould to a lack of mains water, according to an investigation by the consumer campaign organisation Which? The AI-generated reviews appear on the travel website's hotel webpages to help holidaymakers decide where to book.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) frequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) medical images because of variations in scanners and acquisition protocols. Retraining DNN models to address these distribution shifts is often impractical due to the high cost of acquiring and annotating new medical datasets. To address this, we introduce VarDeepPCA, a novel lightweight variational DNN framework designed to restore/refine degraded segmentation maps by leveraging intrinsic geometric priors. Unlike existing approaches that require target-domain data or extensive pre-training, our VarDeepPCA explicitly learns a distribution of valid anatomical geometries using only small in-distribution (ID) datasets. Theoretically, our novel variational learning framework leverages a reinterpretation of the softmax mapping to implicitly perform exact distribution modeling, thereby enabling computationally efficient, sampling-free learning and inference. This also enables VarDeepPCA to provide uncertainty estimates associated with its restored segmentation maps. We empirically validate our framework across 4 distinct clinical applications, using 14 publicly available datasets, involving segmentation of the myocardium, neuroretinal rim, prostate, and fetal head. Comparisons against 15 existing methods demonstrate that VarDeepPCA consistently restores segmentation maps produced by the existing methods on OOD data to (i) significantly improve anatomical plausibility of geometries and clinical utility of the segmentations, and (ii) significantly reduce errors, without needing any more training data than that used by existing methods.