Every year, the prizes recognize the weirdest research that often raises some very serious scientific questions. Achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think. That's the motto of the Ig Nobel Prizes, an annual competition that--parodying the Nobel Prizes--recognizes some of the world's most unusual scientific studies. The organization Improbable Research has been hosting the event since 1991 with the aim of showing that science also has a humorous side in its quest to meaningfully answer questions about the world. This year the ceremony was held in Zurich, Switzerland, and recognized 10 research projects ranging from an attempt to scientifically define what a kiss is to an experiment that used buried underwear to assess soil health.

Contestants from the U.S., Canada, Chile, and Colombia highlight how birds connect us across continents. 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. This photo of a common merganser (Mergus merganser) in East Bay Sandbar, Nova Scotia, Canada won the female bird prize for contestants in the United States and Canada. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .

This post contains a list of the AI-related seminars that are scheduled to take place in the next couple of months. All events detailed here are free and open for anyone to attend virtually. Jie Chao (Concord Consortium) Raspberry PI Sign up here to join. Pierre Marion (INRIA) EPFL The Zoom link is here . Stefan Klein and Anna Bon The Digital Humanism (DIGHUM) Initiative The talk will be livestreamed on YouTube here .

Bringing back in the specialists and generalists idea - could you have several specialists on each node, and then a generalist agent overseeing all the nodes? Yes, you can think of it that way. We use the term "orchestrator" - an orchestrator is trying to manage everything, but the complexity gets balanced with a hierarchical structure. You tested this policy on some leading LLMs, and they performed differently to each other. Why do you think Gemini did better than, say, Claude or ChatGPT?

AIhub monthly digest: August 2026 - IJCAI-ECAI in Bremen, the mathematics of simplicity, and does AI change the way we think? Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, recap recent events, and more. This month, we report on events at IJCAI-ECAI 2026, learn about the mathematics of simplicity, investigate the accountability vacuum, and find out how AI changes the way we think. On Rashomon sets, the mathematics of simplicity, and why we don't need black boxes: an interview with Cynthia Rudin In the latest in our series of interviews with AI pioneers, we hear from Cynthia Rudin about interpretability, noise, and the case against complexity for complexity's sake. The 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) was held from 15-21 August, in Bremen, Germany.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. 'I will never understand why:" Jake Reiner opens up about parents' slaying and brother's arrest Honoree Rob Reiner poses with his wife, Michele, and children Jake, center, Romy and Nick at the Chaplin Award Gala in 2014. Nick was indicted after his parents were fatally stabbed in December. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Eight months after Rob and Michele Reiner were fatally stabbed in their Brentwood home, son Jake opens up, describing his parents' deaths and brother's arrest as a "living nightmare." A grand jury has indicted younger son Nick Reiner on double-murder charges with special allegations of lying in wait, leaving him facing life without parole or the death penalty. Jake recalls learning of the killings during a memorial, confronting the surreal crime scene at his childhood home and honoring his parents with sister Romy in an emotional Dodger Stadium first pitch. Eight months have passed since Rob and Michele Reiner were killed and their youngest son was arrested and charged with murder, but the couple's eldest son still feels he "will never understand why this happened." The children of film director Rob Reiner and photographer Michele Reiner mostly have kept mum despite extensive coverage of the brutal stabbings of Dec. 14, 2025. In a television interview with ABC News, Jake Reiner, the eldest son, described the aftermath of the slayings and the arrest of his brother, Nick, as a "living nightmare." "Nobody really understands what it's like to go through something like that until you're living it," said Jake, 34. It feels like eight years at the same time. And it also feels like eight minutes because every moment that I wake up, I'm reminded of my reality."

Robots walking down the street, surrounded by astounded onlookers, is an increasingly common sight. But these machines aren't yet the do-it-all assistants you'd want working in a kitchen or factory, and a major bottleneck is data. Much like humans, robots learn best by experience. The challenge is that it's labor-intensive and time-consuming to physically teach these machines so many actions across different settings. "One natural idea is to use simulation as a training ground. While there has been significant progress over the last few years in the physics engines that power robotics simulators, one of the remaining challenges has been creating sufficiently rich and diverse simulation content to capture the complexity of the real world," says Russ Tedrake, the Toyota Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and a principal investigator at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

RoboCup 2026 saw history made, as two teams of 11 humanoids took to the soccer field, the first time a full complement of robots has competed. The game saw (Bremen, Germany) take on (Leipzig, Germany), with both sides using machines designed by Booster Robotics. Back in 1997, RoboCup's founders set the lofty goal of developing a team of autonomous robots that could beat the human World Cup champions by 2050. There has been significant progress since those early days, and this match saw another step towards that ambition. "This match shows how far humanoid robotics has come," said Ubbo Visser, President of the RoboCup Federation.

The 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) took place in Bremen, Germany from 15-21 August. In the second of our social media round-ups we find out about the doctoral consortium, drop into the keynotes, and look back on an action-packed week. If you missed it, you can catch our round-up part 1 here . Today: presented my work, LLM Parametric Knowledge Gaps as a Democratic Harm, at the Augmented Democracies Workshop, IJCAI-ECAI 2026. Jaap Jumelet, UvA, was awarded the 2025 EurAI Dissertation Award for his outstanding PhD thesis Finding Structure in Language Models by the EurAI Board member and 2025 EurAI Disseration Award Chair Fredrik Heintz, https://t.co/Uo8YHTNSRK

The 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) distinguished paper awards recognise some of the best papers presented at the conference each year. This year, three articles were named as distinguished papers . In approval-based budget division, the task is to allocate a divisible resource to the candidates based on the voters' approval preferences over the candidates. For this setting, Brandl et al. [2021] have shown that no distribution rule can be strategyproof, efficient, and fair at the same time. In this paper, we aim to circumvent this impossibility theorem by focusing on approximate strategyproofness.