The Sony World Photography Awards announced the winning and shortlisted photographers of the 2026 National and Regional Awards . Captured during a dive in the Galápagos Islands, the image reveals the predator's agility against the fluid patterns of the fish, providing a raw look at the survival instincts, and the high-energy interactions that define this unique volcanic ecosystem. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. From a solitary leopard in Botswana to a herd of buffaloes in Sri Lanka, and a church in Slovenia to a rocky landscape in Saudi Arabia, beauty exists in all corners of our humble planet. The Sony World Photography Awards celebrates photographers who capture riveting images around the world in its 2026 National and Regional Awards.

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard pioneered quantum information theory. Now they've been awarded the highest honor in computer science. Today it's widely acknowledged that the future of computing will involve the quantum realm . Companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and a few well-funded startups are frantically building quantum computers and routinely claiming advances that seem to bring this exotic, world-changing technology within reach. In 1979 all of this was unthinkable.

You were awarded an Honourable Mention for the 2019 AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award. What was the topic of your dissertation research, and what were the main contributions or findings? My PhD dissertation was on the topic of Visual Question Answering, called VQA. We proposed the task of open-ended and free-form VQA - a new way to benchmark computer vision models by asking them questions about images. We curated a large-scale dataset for researchers to train and test their models on this task.

A number of prestigious AAAI awards were presented during the official opening ceremony of the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026) in Singapore, on Thursday 22 January. The AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for Humanity recognises the positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways with long-lived effects. The winner of this year's award is Shakir Mohamed Shakir has been recognised for . The Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award recognises outstanding contributions to automated planning, machine learning and robotics, their application to real-world problems and extensive service to the AI community. The annual AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator award was created to honour a person (or group of people) who has made major contributions to AI education that provide long-lasting benefits to the AI community and society as a whole.

Philip Noel-Baker ran middle-distance races at the Olympics before dedicating his life to disarmament. In 1959, Philip Noel-Baker became the only person to ever win both an Olympic medal and Nobel Pease Prize. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The serious son of Quaker parents, Philip Noel-Baker was first a scholar, then an Olympian, and finally a Nobel Peace Prize winner. He is the only person ever to have won both an Olympic medal and a Nobel.

We consider the problem of modifying a description logic concept in light of models represented as pointed interpretations. We call this setting model change, and distinguish three main kinds of changes: eviction, which consists of only removing models; reception, which incorporates models; and revision, which combines removal with incorporation of models in a single operation. We introduce a formal notion of revision and argue that it does not reduce to a simple combination of eviction and reception, contrary to intuition. We provide positive and negative results on the compatibility of eviction and reception for EL-bottom and ALC description logic concepts and on the compatibility of revision for ALC concepts.

But they certainly wish people were still taking their warnings really seriously. It's a weird time to be an AI doomer. This small but influential community of researchers, scientists, and policy experts believes, in the simplest terms, that AI could get so good it could be bad--very, very bad--for humanity. Though many of these people would be more likely to describe themselves as advocates for AI safety than as literal doomsayers, they warn that AI poses an existential risk to humanity. They argue that absent more regulation, the industry could hurtle toward systems it can't control. They commonly expect such systems to follow the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a slippery concept generally understood as technology that can do whatever humans can do, and better. Though this is far from a universally shared perspective in the AI field, the doomer crowd has had some notable success over the past several years: helping shape AI policy coming from the Biden administration, organizing prominent calls for international "red lines " to prevent AI risks, and getting a bigger (and more influential) megaphone as some of its adherents win science's most prestigious awards. But a number of developments over the past six months have put them on the back foot.

Eating boogers is funny no matter your species. A hilariously lucky moment I caught of these these three lions yawning at the same time. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Nature can be captivating, awe-inspiring, and downright metal . It can also be hilarious.

Hollywood's SAG Awards announces it will change its name The Screen Actors Guild Awards, the marquee awards ceremony honouring actors, is getting a new name. Known colloquially as the SAG Awards, the awards show will now be dubbed the Actor Awards presented by Sag-Aftra, the labour union representing US film, television and radio actors. Since the beginning, our statue has been called'The Actor' and we're a show that's entirely about actors, so this new name is a perfect next step in the show's evolution, the show's executive producer said on Friday. The rebrand comes ahead of the 32nd edition of the star-studded ceremony, which is set for 1 March 2026. The award show's executive producer Jon Brockett told the BBC that the name change - which was announced at a board meeting on Friday - gives viewers in more than 190 countries an immediate understanding of who we are and what we're about - a show about actors honouring actors.

The Case That A.I. Is Thinking ChatGPT does not have an inner life. Yet it seems to know what it's talking about. How convincing does the illusion of understanding have to be before you stop calling it an illusion? Dario Amodei, the C.E.O. of the artificial-intelligence company Anthropic, has been predicting that an A.I. "smarter than a Nobel Prize winner" in such fields as biology, math, engineering, and writing might come online by 2027. He envisions millions of copies of a model whirring away, each conducting its own research: a "country of geniuses in a datacenter." In June, Sam Altman, of OpenAI, wrote that the industry was on the cusp of building "digital superintelligence." "The 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before," he asserted. Meanwhile, the A.I. tools that most people currently interact with on a day-to-day basis are reminiscent of Clippy, the onetime Microsoft Office "assistant" that was actually more of a gadfly. A Zoom A.I. tool suggests that you ask it "What are some meeting icebreakers?" or instruct it to "Write a short message to share gratitude." Siri is good at setting reminders but not much else. A friend of mine saw a button in Gmail that said "Thank and tell anecdote." When he clicked it, Google's A.I. invented a funny story about a trip to Turkey that he never took. The rushed and uneven rollout of A.I. has created a fog in which it is tempting to conclude that there is nothing to see here--that it's all hype. There is, to be sure, plenty of hype: Amodei's timeline is science-fictional.