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Now THAT'S what you call a cold one! Rare bottle of Arctic beer will be opened after 150 years to revive the ancient brew

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Devastating impact of Mamdani's election will be FAR WORSE than first thought: Exclusive poll finds America's greatest city facing'historic' population wipeout Trump reveals devastating plan for NYC if'communist' Mamdani gets elected while rejecting comparisons: 'I'm a much better looking person' I won't ever forget what I saw at Andy Cohen's party. He may admit he's hooking up with guys on every dating app but this is the truth about men like him: KENNEDY So many single men are taking this new drug cocktail before dates. The results in the bedroom are startling... as I discovered during one marathon session: JANA HOCKING Putin unveils terrifying new nuclear submarine built to carry'doomsday' weapon capable of unleashing radioactive tidal wave'Trump has lost it with Steve Bannon': Insiders claim third term'plan' has sparked furious MAGA rift... and name group of'irritants' wreaking havoc How Jennifer Aniston found her happy ever after with Hollywood hypnotist and'love guru' Jim Curtis after string of failed romances, 'love triangle' scandal and IVF struggles Meghan Markle'wants to become a billionaire', says royal expert, after Duchess was seen cosying up to brains behind Kardashian brands amid speculation she'could launch a beauty empire' William and Kate throw party for builders and staff who helped them leave'cursed' cottage early Deborra-Lee Furness' bold move after split from Hugh Jackman - and why the actor is not happy about it Trump responds after Dilbert creator makes last-ditch plea to save his life as he'declines rapidly' from cancer Kimberly Guilfoyle's steamy Greek debut sparks envious whispers of a'storm' coming for Trump We've never been so sure of an imminent financial crash: Industry leaders across ALL sectors come together to say these signs of US economic meltdown are undeniable Now THAT'S what you call a cold one! A rare bottle of Arctic beer will be opened to revive the ancient ale, 150 years after it was bottled. Douglas Gunn Sharp, founder of Edinburgh's Innis & Gunn brewery, will open his precious bottle of Allsopp's Arctic Ale - after splashing out ยฃ3,000 for it.


'History won't forgive us' if UK falls behind in quantum computing race, says Tony Blair

The Guardian

Tony Blair: 'As we have seen with AI, it is the countries that have the infrastructure and capital for scale that capture technology's economic and strategic benefits.' Tony Blair: 'As we have seen with AI, it is the countries that have the infrastructure and capital for scale that capture technology's economic and strategic benefits.' 'History won't forgive us' if UK falls behind in quantum computing race, says Tony Blair Tony Blair has said "history won't forgive us" if the UK falls behind in the race to harness quantum computing, a frontier technology predicted to trigger the next wave of breakthroughs in everything from drug design to climate modelling. The former British Labour prime minister, whose thinktank and consultancy, the Tony Blair Institute, is backed by tech industry leaders including the Oracle founder, Larry Ellison, warned: "The country risks failing to convert its leadership in quantum research." In a report calling for a national strategy for quantum computing, Blair and William Hague, a former Conservative party leader, compared the situation to the recent history of artificial intelligence, where the UK was responsible for important research breakthroughs but then ceded power to other countries, including the US, leading to a scramble to build "sovereign" AI capacity.


SynthWorlds: Controlled Parallel Worlds for Disentangling Reasoning and Knowledge in Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Evaluating the reasoning ability of language models (LMs) is complicated by their extensive parametric world knowledge, where benchmark performance often reflects factual recall rather than genuine reasoning. Existing datasets and approaches (e.g., temporal filtering, paraphrasing, adversarial substitution) cannot cleanly separate the two. We present SynthWorlds, a framework that disentangles task reasoning complexity from factual knowledge. In SynthWorlds, we construct parallel corpora representing two worlds with identical interconnected structure: a real-mapped world, where models may exploit parametric knowledge, and a synthetic-mapped world, where such knowledge is meaningless. On top of these corpora, we design two mirrored tasks as case studies: multi-hop question answering and page navigation, which maintain equal reasoning difficulty across worlds. Experiments in parametric-only (e.g., closed-book QA) and knowledge-augmented (e.g., retrieval-augmented) LM settings reveal a persistent knowledge advantage gap, defined as the performance boost models gain from memorized parametric world knowledge. Knowledge acquisition and integration mechanisms reduce but do not eliminate this gap, highlighting opportunities for system improvements. Fully automatic and scalable, SynthWorlds provides a controlled environment for evaluating LMs in ways that were previously challenging, enabling precise and testable comparisons of reasoning and memorization.


Guillermo del Toro Hopes He's Dead Before AI Art Goes Mainstream

WIRED

Guillermo del Toro Hopes He's Dead Before AI Art Goes Mainstream The director tells WIRED the real Victor Frankensteins are tyrannical politicians and Silicon Valley tech bros. Guillermo del Toro attends the Headline Gala screening of Netflix's during the 69th BFI London Film Festival. Guillermo del Toro loves a challenge. Nothing the 61-year-old director does could be termed "half-assed," and each of his movies is planned, scripted, and storyboarded with immense attention to detail. Such discipline is evident in, his adaptation of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. It's a movie del Toro has been trying to make for years, and it shows. The elaborate sets and costumes--as well as some embellishing of Shelley's story--could only be the work of someone as connected as he is with his source material.


#ECAI2025 โ€“ social media round up

AIHub

The 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2025) took place in Bologna, Italy, from 25-30 October 2025. On the first two days of the event, the workshops, tutorials and doctoral consortium took place, with the main conference running from 27-30 October. We've collected some social media posts from attendees to give a flavour of the happenings from the past week. So many great presentations, it's hard to choose. If you're around and open to connecting, I'd love to chat.


How KPop Demon Hunters Star EJAE Topped the Charts

WIRED

Kids everywhere know her voice--if not her name. WIRED talks to the former SM trainee about her rise to global superstardom with her hit song "Golden." EJAE, the voice and the writing talent behind "Golden," has gone platinum. The night before our interview, the 33-year-old singer-songwriter found out that record sales from the soundtrack had surged past a million units. Jimmy Fallon, of all people, delivered the news alongside a glimmering framed record when she was appearing on with Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami for the first full live performance of "Golden." Together the trio make up the singing voices of girl group -Huntr/x in Netflix's animated musical turned bona fide phenomenon. If you have a kid, you probably don't need a refresher, but the movie follows Huntr/x's Rumi, Mira, and Zoey as they juggle being astronomically famous while moonlighting as demon hunters. That Fallon appearance, and the appearance that predated it, might have been the first times that American audiences actually saw (and heard) the human being behind that inescapable song.


Character.AI bans users under 18 after being sued over child's suicide

The Guardian

Character.AI bans users under 18 after being sued over child's suicide Move comes as lawmakers move to bar minors from using AI companions and require companies to verify users' age The chatbot company Character.AI will ban users 18 and under from conversing with its virtual companions beginning in late November after months of legal scrutiny. The announced change comes after the company, which enables its users to create characters with which they can have open-ended conversations, faced tough questions over how these AI companions can affect teen and general mental health, including a lawsuit over a child's suicide and a proposed bill that would ban minors from conversing with AI companions. "We're making these changes to our under-18 platform in light of the evolving landscape around AI and teens," the company wrote in its announcement. "We have seen recent news reports raising questions, and have received questions from regulators, about the content teens may encounter when chatting with AI and about how open-ended AI chat in general might affect teens, even when content controls work perfectly." Last year, the company was sued by the family of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, who took his own life after allegedly developing an emotional attachment to a character he created on Character.AI.


AIhub monthly digest: October 2025 โ€“ energy supply challenges, wearable sensors, and atomic-scale simulations

AIHub

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 attend AIES and ECAI, learn about policy design for two-sided platforms, discover how to balance speed and physical laws in atomic-scale simulations, and find out more about machine learning for chip design. October has been a busy month on the conference front. Over in Madrid, researchers gathered for the conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) . The event featured two keynote talks, panel discussions and poster sessions.


WebLeaper: Empowering Efficiency and Efficacy in WebAgent via Enabling Info-Rich Seeking

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have emerged as a transformative approach for open-ended problem solving, with information seeking (IS) being a core capability that enables autonomous reasoning and decision-making. While prior research has largely focused on improving retrieval depth, we observe that current IS agents often suffer from low search efficiency, which in turn constrains overall performance. A key factor underlying this inefficiency is the sparsity of target entities in training tasks, which limits opportunities for agents to learn and generalize efficient search behaviors. To address these challenges, we propose WebLeaper, a framework for constructing high-coverage IS tasks and generating efficient solution trajectories. We formulate IS as a tree-structured reasoning problem, enabling a substantially larger set of target entities to be embedded within a constrained context. Leveraging curated Wikipedia tables, we propose three variants for synthesizing IS tasks, Basic, Union, and Reverse-Union, to systematically increase both IS efficiency and efficacy. Finally, we curate training trajectories by retaining only those that are simultaneously accurate and efficient, ensuring that the model is optimized for both correctness and search performance. Extensive experiments on both basic and comprehensive settings, conducted on five IS benchmarks, BrowserComp, GAIA, xbench-DeepSearch, WideSearch, and Seal-0, demonstrate that our method consistently achieves improvements in both effectiveness and efficiency over strong baselines.


Repurposing Synthetic Data for Fine-grained Search Agent Supervision

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

LLM-based search agents are increasingly trained on entity-centric synthetic data to solve complex, knowledge-intensive tasks. However, prevailing training methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) discard this rich entity information, relying instead on sparse, outcome-based rewards. This critical limitation renders them unable to distinguish informative "near-miss" samples-those with substantially correct reasoning but a flawed final answer-from complete failures, thus discarding valuable learning signals. We address this by leveraging the very entities discarded during training. Our empirical analysis reveals a strong positive correlation between the number of ground-truth entities identified during an agent's reasoning process and final answer accuracy. Building on this insight, we introduce Entity-aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (E-GRPO), a novel framework that formulates a dense entity-aware reward function. E-GRPO assigns partial rewards to incorrect samples proportional to their entity match rate, enabling the model to effectively learn from these "near-misses". Experiments on diverse question-answering (QA) and deep research benchmarks show that E-GRPO consistently and significantly outperforms the GRPO baseline. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that E-GRPO not only achieves superior accuracy but also induces more efficient reasoning policies that require fewer tool calls, demonstrating a more effective and sample-efficient approach to aligning search agents.