Plus: Autonomous drones may have killed soldiers for the first time. Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally kick the ball out of bounds. You may question the logic of surrendering possession seconds into a game. If you were Jesse Davis, though, you'd know that this play could be a prime setup to score. Davis is a professor of computer science at KU Leuven in Belgium and head of its Sports Analytics Lab, which has been at the vanguard of a data awakening in soccer. Using AI and data analytics, his team has uncovered hidden tactical patterns and challenged long-held assumptions about how the game should be played.

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems have countless applications, from energy-grid management to protein design. However, such real-world scenarios are often extremely difficult, combinatorial in nature, and require complex coordination between multiple agents. This level of complexity can cause even state-of-the-art RL systems, trained until convergence, to hit a performance ceiling which they are unable to break out of with zero-shot inference. Meanwhile, many digital or simulation-based applications allow for an inference phase that utilises a specific time and compute budget to explore multiple attempts before outputting a final solution. In this work, we show that such an inference phase employed at execution time, and the choice of a corresponding inference strategy, are key to breaking the performance ceiling observed in complex multi-agent RL problems. Our main result is striking: we can obtain up to a 126% and, on average, a 45% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art across 17 tasks, using only a couple seconds of extra wall-clock time during execution. We also demonstrate promising compute scaling properties, supported by over 60k experiments, making it the largest study on inference strategies for complex RL to date. We make all of our experimental data and code available.

Pope Leo XIV has described Barcelona's Sagrada Família as a masterpiece of stones, colours and light as he inaugurated its newest - and tallest - tower. The giant Tower of Jesus Christ, completed in February, has brought the church to a soaring height of 172.5m (566ft) - cementing it as the tallest church in the world. His visit to the iconic basilica also marks 100 years since the death of its architect, Antoni Gaudí. Among those attending the service were Spanish royals King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, as well as Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. The pope's week-long visit to Spain, which began on Saturday, is the first by a pope in some 15 years.

The increasing energy demands and carbon footprint of large-scale AI require intelligent workload management in globally distributed data centers. Yet progress is limited by the absence of benchmarks that realistically capture the interplay of time-varying environmental factors (grid carbon intensity, electricity prices, weather), detailed data center physics (CPUs, GPUs, memory, HVAC energy), and geo-distributed network dynamics (latency and transmission costs). To bridge this gap, we present DCcluster-Opt: an open-source, high-fidelity simulation benchmark for sustainable, geo-temporal task scheduling. DCcluster-Opt combines curated real-world datasets, including AI workload traces, grid carbon intensity, electricity markets, weather across 20 global regions, cloud transmission costs, and empirical network delay parameters with physics-informed models of data center operations, enabling rigorous and reproducible research in sustainable computing. It presents a challenging scheduling problem where a top-level coordinating agent must dynamically reassign or defer tasks that arrive with resource and service-level agreement requirements across a configurable cluster of data centers to optimize multiple objectives. The environment also models advanced components such as heat recovery. A modular reward system enables an explicit study of trade-offs among carbon emissions, energy costs, service level agreements, and water use. It provides a Gymnasium API with baseline controllers, including reinforcement learning and rule-based strategies, to support reproducible ML research and a fair comparison of diverse algorithms. By offering a realistic, configurable, and accessible testbed, DCcluster-Opt accelerates the development and validation of next-generation sustainable computing solutions for geo-distributed data centers.

The automaker today is turning on vehicle-to-grid charging for its GM Energy customers. Will people actually use it? Some 250,000 electric vehicles manufactured by General Motors are driving around the US today--right now!--with an oft-secret capability: Their big, powerful batteries can charge other things. Potentially appliances, homes, and now, thanks to a software update pushed by the automaker this week, an electrical grid . Twelve of GM's EVs have this "bidirectional charging" capability, way more than US competitors' battery-electrics.

Plus: The EU has proposed new legislation to end its Big Tech dependence. Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by people without a lawyer. The number of these filings has more than doubled compared to before 2023. She puts that jump down to AI. But while AI appears to be expanding access to justice, it doesn't seem to be improving people's chances of winning. Judges are starting to question what rights and duties chatbots should have as they stand in for lawyers.

ChatGPT now processes around 2.5 billion queries every day UN researchers are urging people to be less polite to artificial intelligences after a report found that cutting words from prompts could reduce ChatGPT's energy consumption by up to 25 per cent. Removing "please", "thank you" and other unnecessary words from AI prompts could save 87 to 98 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, the report from the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) found. That is the equivalent of the annual residential electricity use of up to 760,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa. 'Flashes of brilliance and frustration': I let an AI agent run my day To reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint, people should write concise prompts, avoid getting sucked into conversation loops and refrain from starting relationships with AI, the researchers said. "We are not saying be rude to your AI. But don't fall into the interaction trap and don't go falling in love with it either," says Kaveh Madani at UNU-INWEH.

Rescuers work at the site of an apartment building hit by a Russian drone strike in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Saturday. Ukraine and Russia traded aerial attacks on Saturday as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy held what he called a special meeting on next steps with top aides. A Ukrainian drone struck the machine room building of one of power units at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine on Saturday afternoon, causing unspecified damage, Interfax reported, citing Rosatom Chief Executive Officer Alexey Likhachev. Core equipment wasn't damaged, he said. Ukraine's southern military command denied any strikes, saying its military personnel "act exclusively within the framework of international humanitarian law and are aware of the consequences of any actions against nuclear facilities." In a post on Facebook late Saturday, it added, "It is the Russian Federation that has illegally kept the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant under military control since March 2022, turning a civilian nuclear facility into an element of military infrastructure."

Umpire Dan Bellino's baffling foul tip call on Seiya Suzuki renews calls for robot review in MLB Dakich: sports media has created an'industry' out of complaining about white athletes like Caitlin Clark Greg Sankey insists SEC is'strongest league' despite Big Ten winning three straight national championships Phillies look to upset Dodgers behind Zack Wheeler as Philadelphia's turnaround continues in LA Joey McGuire calls Steve Sarkisian's bluff, dares Texas to play Texas Tech in Week 1 Rams troublemaker WR Puka Nacua says he's a changed man after biting incident and stint in rehab Chiefs have no plans to release Rashee Rice and see jail time as a'life lesson' opportunity Dr Oz: Is this a flaw or a feature? Father Mike Schmitz: Pope Leo XIV wants this world view in line with humanity's good Pompeo warns Iran will rebuild nuclear facilities'the moment' it gets the chance Purple Heart recipient speaks out after Graham Platner's controversial remarks'Chipotle Karen' caught hurling burrito bowl at worker's face Oklahoma City is -162 on the moneyline and -3.5 favorites with the total set at 212.5 as of Friday afternoon Despite getting to a Game 7, the 2026 Western Conference Finals between the San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder haven't lived up to the Game 1 double-overtime instant classic. While the winning team has alternated over the past four games, the margin has been at least 13 points. Plus, Oklahoma City's flopping has been the biggest storyline of the conference finals, which is a bummer for us die-hard NBA fans. However, that will be mostly forgotten if the Spurs-Thunder series finale is another thriller.

Umpire Dan Bellino's baffling foul tip call on Seiya Suzuki renews calls for robot review in MLB Dakich: sports media has created an'industry' out of complaining about white athletes like Caitlin Clark Greg Sankey insists SEC is'strongest league' despite Big Ten winning three straight national championships Phillies look to upset Dodgers behind Zack Wheeler as Philadelphia's turnaround continues in LA Joey McGuire calls Steve Sarkisian's bluff, dares Texas to play Texas Tech in Week 1 Rams troublemaker WR Puka Nacua says he's a changed man after biting incident and stint in rehab Chiefs have no plans to release Rashee Rice and see jail time as a'life lesson' opportunity Diamondbacks fans catch same player's home run on back-to-back nights after showing up on the wrong date Dr Oz: Is this a flaw or a feature? Father Mike Schmitz: Pope Leo XIV wants this world view in line with humanity's good Pompeo warns Iran will rebuild nuclear facilities'the moment' it gets the chance Purple Heart recipient speaks out after Graham Platner's controversial remarks'Chipotle Karen' caught hurling burrito bowl at worker's face The Carolina Hurricanes are in the Eastern Conference Final for the second straight season and the fourth of Rod Brind'Amour's tenure behind the bench, and they've got the chance to close things out in Game 5 against the Montreal Canadiens. Of course, teams coming into Game 5 with a 3-1 lead are historically almost guaranteed to move on to the Stanley Cup Final; the Canes are not going to get ahead of their skis. Hurricanes forward Jackson Blake, who scored the OT-winner to sweep the Philadelphia Flyers and send Carolina to the conference final, talked about the need to focus on the game tonight and not start thinking ahead to the Western Conference Champion Vegas Golden Knights. It's exciting for sure, Blake said.