In Brownsville, Texas, some families found a buzzy new school's methods--surveillance of kids, software in lieu of teachers--to be an education in and of itself. At Alpha School's campus in Brownsville, Texas, a student works on exercises in a learning app. One day last fall, Kristine Barrios' 9-year-old daughter got stuck on a lesson in IXL, the personalized learning software that served as her math teacher. She had to multiply three three-digit numbers without using a calculator. Then she had to do it again, her mom says, more than 20 times, without making mistakes. At Alpha School, the private microschool the girl and her younger brother attended in Brownsville, Texas, she had been working a grade level ahead of her age in math, Barrios says. She could do three-digit multiplication correctly most of the time. But whenever she made an error in IXL, the software would determine she needed more practice and assign her more questions. She told her mom that she had asked her "guide," the adult who supervised her classroom in lieu of a teacher, to make an exception and let her move on. She said the guide's reply was that she needed to get it done, that it was expected of her. The adult guides in Alpha's classrooms "don't do any teaching," says the current head of the Brownsville school.

Erotic imagery and curiosity often arise in intimate relationships, especially when there's safety, play, and mutual recognition. It doesn't mean you've done anything "wrong." On the contrary, it shows that your imagination is alive and searching for ways to bridge the gap between closeness and distance, fantasy and reality. You offer me something charged, even a bit embarrassing, and you're watching--will I crumble?

-- Human activity intensity prediction is crucial to many location - based services. Despite tremendous p rogress in modeling d ynamics of human activity, most existing methods overlook physical constraints of spatial interaction, leading to uninterpretable spatial correlations and over - smoothing phenomenon . To address these limitations, this work proposes a physics - informed deep learning framework, namely Gravity - informed Spatiotemporal Transformer (Gravityformer) by integrat ing the universal law of gravitation to refin e transformer attention. Specifically, it (1) estimates two spatially explicit mass parameters based on spatiotemporal embedding feature, (2) models the spatial interaction in end - to - end neural network using proposed adaptive gravity model to learn the physic al constrain t, and (3) utilizes the learned spatial interaction to guide and mitigate the over - smoothing phenomenon in transformer attention. Moreover, a parallel spatiotemporal graph convolution transformer is proposed for achieving a balance between coupled spatial and temporal learning. Systematic experiments on six real - world large - scale activity datasets demonstrate the quantitative and qualitative superiority of our model over state - of - the - art benchmarks. Additionally, the learned gravity attention matrix can be not only disentangled and interpreted based on geographical laws, but also improved the generalization in zero - shot cross - region inference . This work provides a novel insight into integrating physical laws with deep learning for spatiotemporal prediction . Index Terms -- Human activity intensity prediction; Gravity model; Spatial interaction; Physics - informed machine learning; Over - smoothing phenomenon; Spatiotemporal graph neural network . This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China ( Grant # 42430106, 42371468, 424B2013) . Y i Wang, Zhenghong Wang, Fan Zhang, Chengling Tang, Weiyu Zhang and Yu Liu are with Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System, School of Earth and Space Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China. Chaogui Kang is with National Engineering Research Center of Geographic Information System, China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) 430074, China. Sijie Ruan is with School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China . Di Zhu and Zhongfu Ma are with Department of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA . Y u Zheng is with JD iCity, JD Technology, Beijing 100176, China . P hilip S. Yu is with Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago 60607, USA .

Simulating society with large language models (LLMs), we argue, requires more than generating plausible behavior; it demands cognitively grounded reasoning that is structured, revisable, and traceable. LLM-based agents are increasingly used to emulate individual and group behavior, primarily through prompting and supervised fine-tuning. Yet current simulations remain grounded in a behaviorist "demographics in, behavior out" paradigm, focusing on surface-level plausibility. As a result, they often lack internal coherence, causal reasoning, and belief traceability, making them unreliable for modeling how people reason, deliberate, and respond to interventions. To address this, we present a conceptual modeling paradigm, Generative Minds (GenMinds), which draws from cognitive science to support structured belief representations in generative agents. To evaluate such agents, we introduce the RECAP (REconstructing CAusal Paths) framework, a benchmark designed to assess reasoning fidelity via causal traceability, demographic grounding, and intervention consistency. These contributions advance a broader shift: from surface-level mimicry to generative agents that simulate thought, not just language, for social simulations.

Travel chaos as unpaid air traffic controllers abandon towers... while Thanksgiving threat looms Beloved TikTok star's cause of death revealed after she moved to LA to seek fame aged 19 Inside Andrew's family summit: How Fergie wailed and'melted down' at title loss, Beatrice and Eugenie were'blindsided' and now daughters' assets face'ethics check' to avoid more scandal: BARBARA DAVIES I have no sympathy for Britney Spears. What if her latest stunt had killed a kid? It's time to admit the truth about this public menace: KENNEDY Cardiologist reveals the five'healthy' foods he would never eat Professional gambler made staggering claims about Chauncey Billups' poker games two YEARS before his arrest Amy Schumer, 44, has'lost at least 40lbs' thanks to Mounjaro as she flashes tiny waistline in selfie Statins taken by 40 million Americans recalled after it's discovered they aren't releasing medication effectively I got the body of my dreams at 51 by following 9 simple rules, says beauty guru ROSIE GREEN. They're easy, non-negotiable... and not what you expect. Outrage as New York mayoral shoo-in Zohan Mamdani plans to bring back Bill de Blasio's boondoggle program to sub social workers for cops Experts reveal if a break up can really cause a brain aneurysm...after Kim Kardashian's startling diagnosis NBA star Terry Rozier's secret past explodes into public after gambling bust - and it's far more sordid than anyone imagined I think I've discovered Meghan's secret plan for if - or when - William strips away the Sussexes' royal titles: SHARON HUNT Thousands of objects sent by a non-human intelligence may have been spying on the world's nuclear tests all the way back in the 1940s.

A new artificial intelligence-powered tool can help researchers determine how well an enzyme fits with a desired target, helping them find the best enzyme and substrate combination for applications from catalysis to medicine to manufacturing. Led by Huimin Zhao, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the researchers developed EZSpecificity using new enzyme-substrate pair data and a new machine learning algorithm. They have made the tool freely available online and published their results in the journal Nature. "If we want a certain product using an enzyme, we want to use the best enzyme and substrate combination," said Zhao, who also is the director of the NSF Molecule Maker Lab Institute and of the NSF iBioFoundry at the University of Illinois "EZSpecificity is an AI model that can analyze an enzyme sequence and then predict which substrate best can fit into that enzyme. It is highly complementary to the CLEAN AI model that we developed to predict an enzyme's function from its sequence more than two years ago."

European diplomats reveal the'tough guy' US negotiator leading the charge on Greenland: 'He hates us' A former Marine was unmasked as the'Zodiac killer' after a bombshell new investigation. I suffered a horrific side effect of a drug used by millions of Americans... and my face'melted off' The ICE backlash isn't the end of Kristi Noem It may have just saved her career FedEx driver accused of abducting and killing little girl while delivering her Christmas present says he shouldn't be executed because he has autism Senator accused of steamy affair with her bodyguard in bombshell lawsuit from his WIFE: 'Bring MDMA so I can guide you' Hunter Biden's stripper baby mama asks for him to be ARRESTED over claims he is still failing to pay her child support Family of Tyler Robinson's transgender lover speaks out for first time since Charlie Kirk assassination and reveals where he is now Dodgers agree with Kyle Tucker'on $240m deal' as champs beat out Mets, Blue Jays for top free agent World's sexiest hockey star and OnlyFans model Mikayla Demaiter spills out of little dress in latest post Nicole Richie addresses her daughter's new identity after unveiling transformation on her 18th birthday Trump gushes over'young beautiful' hockey players and teases rebranding of famed presidential wall Trump's AG secretary sparks mockery with tone-deaf $3 dinner advice as food costs soar Karoline Leavitt reveals the thinking behind Trump's call to cancel elections Microsoft's paperclip mascot delights users as it returns - 18 years after it was axed from Office It was the original virtual assistant, released years before Siri, Alexa, and Bixby. Now, almost two decades after it was axed, Microsoft's Clippy is officially back. The friendly anthropomorphic paper clip has been spotted as an Easter egg in Microsoft's latest announcement about a new AI companion called Mico. Mico - whose name is a nod to Microsoft Copilot - is a small blob with a friendly smiley face, and doesn't look much like its much-loved predecessor.

In this episode of Uncanny Valley, we discuss the economics and environmental impacts of energy-hungry data centers and whether these facilities are sustainable in the age of AI. The Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas.Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Tech giants have been investing hundreds of billions of dollars into AI data centers just this year alone. But as the deals pile up, so have the concerns around their viability and sustainability. Michael Calore and senior correspondent Lauren Goode sit down with senior writer Molly Taft to discuss how these energy hungry facilities actually work, the different industry interests at stake, and whether it'll all come crumbling down. The AI Industry's Scaling Obsession Is Headed for a Cliff by Will Knight OpenAI's Blockbuster AMD Deal Is a Bet on Near-Limitless Demand for AI by Will Knight How Much Energy Does AI Use? The People Who Know Aren't Saying by Molly Taft Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com. You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors. It's so nice to be back in studio with you again, because our schedules were not aligning for the past few weeks. But the stars and the moon have aligned now, and here we are once again. Lauren Goode: Here we are. And I'm sure all of our listeners have just been sitting here wondering, "When are Lauren and Mike getting back together? When is the band getting back together?"

This week saw researchers gather in Madrid at the eighth AAAI / ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) . As well as keynote talks, panels and poster sessions, the organisers experimented with a slightly different format for the contributed talks. All speakers in a session gave their talks, then contributed in a joint discussion on common themes, before the floor was opened to questions from the audience. We cast an eye over social media platforms to find out what participants got up to at the event. Find out what's on the agenda at #AIES2025 next week.

Not long into his new documentary, Oobah Butler tells the cofounder of his newly minted company, Drops, that they should create a piece of luxury luggage that "looks like a bomb" and will sell for $200,000. Immediately, I'm thinking his quest to get £1 million in 90 days might have come to an early end. Butler is a British prankster documentarian who is known for his stunts, like managing to get Amazon to sell its drivers' urine as energy drinks or creating a fake restaurant called the Shed and gaming TripAdvisor to make it the top-rated London restaurant on the platform. His latest documentary, made for the UK's Channel 4, is called How I Made £1 Million in 90 Days Set in London and New York, it takes on the worlds of startups, venture capital, crypto, and what ultimately comes across as a lot of bullshitting, in the name of striking it rich quick. Butler opens the film by saying, as someone who didn't grow up with money and isn't particularly motivated by it, he's fascinated by the fact that people "idolize" wealthy entrepreneurs.