Pine is the Creative Director at TIME. To illustrate the choice of the Architects of AI as TIME's 2025 Person of the Year, we asked two separate artists to help us visualize the incredibly complex technological revolution that is currently underway. London-based illustrator and graphics animator Peter Crowther and digital painter Jason Seiler each created an image that speaks to the duality AI has produced - man vs. machine. Inspired by the inner workings of computer chips, Crowther's intricate AI structure looms large over the busy construction site.

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.

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) and recent breakthroughs by Huanting Wang's team at Monash University establish angstrom-scale channels as promising post-silicon substrates with native integrate-and-fire (IF) dynamics. However, utilizing these stochastic, analog materials for deterministic, bit-exact AI workloads (e.g., FP8) remains a paradox. Existing neuromorphic methods often settle for approximation, failing Transformer precision standards. To traverse the gap "from stochastic ions to deterministic floats," we propose a Native Spiking Microarchitecture. Treating noisy neurons as logic primitives, we introduce a Spatial Combinational Pipeline and a Sticky-Extra Correction mechanism. Validation across all 16,129 FP8 pairs confirms 100% bit-exact alignment with PyTorch. Crucially, our architecture reduces Linear layer latency to O(log N), yielding a 17x speedup. Physical simulations further demonstrate robustness against extreme membrane leakage (beta approx 0.01), effectively immunizing the system against the stochastic nature of the hardware.

Multi-agent role-playing has recently shown promise for studying social behavior with language agents, but existing simulations are mostly monolingual and fail to model cross-lingual interaction, an essential property of real societies. We introduce MASim, the first multilingual agent-based simulation framework that supports multi-turn interaction among generative agents with diverse sociolinguistic profiles. MASim offers two key analyses: (i) global public opinion modeling, by simulating how attitudes toward open-domain hypotheses evolve across languages and cultures, and (ii) media influence and information diffusion, via autonomous news agents that dynamically generate content and shape user behavior. To instantiate simulations, we construct the MAPS benchmark, which combines survey questions and demographic personas drawn from global population distributions. Experiments on calibration, sensitivity, consistency, and cultural case studies show that MASim reproduces sociocultural phenomena and highlights the importance of multilingual simulation for scalable, controlled computational social science.

Abstract--In this paper, the time-varying formation tracking control of wheeled mobile robots with region constraint is investigated from a generalized Udwadia-Kalaba framework. The communication topology is directed, weighted and has a spanning tree with the leader being the root. By reformulating the time-varying formation tracking control objective as a constrained equation and transforming the region constraint by a diffeomor-phism, the time-varying formation tracking controller with the region constraint is designed under the generalized Udwadia-Kalaba framework. Compared with the existing works on time-varying formation tracking control, the region constraint is taken into account in this paper, which ensures the safety of the robots. Finally, some numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy. VER the past three decades, cooperative control of wheeled mobile robots has attracted considerable attention [1]. The cooperative control of wheeled mobile robots is generally categorized into synchronization control [2]- [5], formation control [6]-[8], formation-containment control [9]-[11], and so on.

The Endless Tuning is a design method for a reliable deployment of artificial intelligence based on a double mirroring process, which pursues both the goals of avoiding human replacement and filling the so-called responsibility gap (Matthias 2004). Originally depicted in (Fabris et al. 2024) and ensuing the relational approach urged therein, it was then actualized in a protocol, implemented in three prototypical applications regarding decision-making processes (respectively: loan granting, pneumonia diagnosis, and art style recognition) and tested with such as many domain experts. Step by step illustrating the protocol, giving insights concretely showing a different voice (Gilligan 1993) in the ethics of artificial intelligence, a philosophical account of technical choices (e.g., a reversed and hermeneutic deployment of XAI algorithms) will be provided in the present study together with the results of the experiments, focusing on user experience rather than statistical accuracy. Even thoroughly employing deep learning models, full control was perceived by the interviewees in the decision-making setting, while it appeared that a bridge can be built between accountability and liability in case of damage.

We propose Point-PNG, a novel self-supervised learning framework that generates conditional pseudo-negatives in the latent space to learn point cloud representations that are both discriminative and transformation-sensitive. Conventional self-supervised learning methods focus on achieving invariance, discarding transformation-specific information. Recent approaches incorporate transformation sensitivity by explicitly modeling relationships between original and transformed inputs. However, they often suffer from an invariant-collapse phenomenon, where the predictor degenerates into identity mappings, resulting in latent representations with limited variation across transformations. To address this, we propose Point-PNG that explicitly penalizes invariant collapse through pseudo-negatives generation, enabling the network to capture richer transformation cues while preserving discriminative representations. To this end, we introduce a parametric network, COnditional Pseudo-Negatives Embedding (COPE), which learns localized displacements induced by transformations within the latent space. A key challenge arises when jointly training COPE with the MAE, as it tends to converge to trivial identity mappings. To overcome this, we design a loss function based on pseudo-negatives conditioned on the transformation, which penalizes such trivial invariant solutions and enforces meaningful representation learning. We validate Point-PNG on shape classification and relative pose estimation tasks, showing competitive performance on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN under challenging evaluation protocols, and achieving superior accuracy in relative pose estimation compared to supervised baselines.

"Everyone thinks they're on this big now," Debbie said, refilling her glass. "I've had it with the journey. I've had it with you people." "I don't think I'm on a journey," Burt said. Life's too short to find out who we really are." It was the first time the six of them had got together for dinner in more than a year (since Maria's diagnosis), and after such a long time (and in celebration of Maria's remission) they'd expected to have more interesting things to tell one another, deeper things, but they were entering dessert territory now, a cake was on the table, and only superficial topics had been broached: Ervin's promotion, Jane and Burt's move to the suburbs, Katherine's recent purchase of a metabolism-tracking device--a pen-shaped item and the cause of Debbie's rant. "How much can you know about yourself, exactly?" she said. "The therapy, the vision quests, the birth charts--do we really need the data on metabolic flexibility, too?" Jane, in Katherine's defense, said that, the more you knew about yourself, the more useful you could be to society. Knowing whether Kat is in fat-or carb-burning mode doesn't help anyone." As a result of Katherine declining cake five minutes earlier, no one had touched it. No one, Debbie included, really wanted to. They'd all overeaten already, drunk too much, made private plans to atone for it the next day. The cake presented a challenge, it sat there taunting them, and Debbie knew this, that you couldn't serve cake to a group of fortysomethings without causing ripples, but what else could she have done? She got it, no one wanted to put on weight, but this was a gorgeous princess cake, just gorgeous, she'd had to drive all the way to Andersonville to get it from that Swedish bakery everyone talked about. Staring at it now, though, she wondered if the cake didn't look a little bit like a tit, the smooth half sphere, the small pink marzipan flower nippling the top of it--and, oh, God, did think it looked like a tit?

The Nobel-winning author, whose newest book is out this week, discusses work by a few of her favorite writers. The Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk's fiction is known for its interest in the porosity of boundaries--between nations, between ethnicities, between fiction and reality, consciousness and dreams. As her novels and stories stage the constant flux of national borders, particularly in Eastern Europe (Tokarczuk is Polish), they also delight in supernatural and science-fictional elements. In " House of Day, House of Night," out from Riverhead this week, she writes, "All over the world, wherever people are sleeping, small, jumbled worlds are flaring up in their heads, growing over reality like scar tissue." Not long ago, Tokarczuk sent us some remarks about a few of her favorite sci-fi and speculative-fiction writers, whose books mix the fantastical and the prosaic masterfully.

'U.S. sanctions equate us with drug traffickers,' ICC deputy prosecutor says The Hague - The deputy prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on Friday lashed out at U.S. sanctions, arguing they effectively put top court officials on a par with terrorists and drug traffickers. In a wide-ranging interview, Mame Mandiaye Niang also said it would be conceivable to hold an in-absentia hearing against high-level ICC targets such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sixty-five-year-old Niang, along with top ICC judges, is subject to sanctions from the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, in retaliation at the court's arrest warrants for Netanyahu over Israel's campaign in Gaza. 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. With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories.