For me, it's the amber glow of the fry machine gently illuminating the exhausted 45th president of the United States of America. The glare of the potato-warming apparatus casts a shadow on the left side of Donald Trump's face as he works at a McDonald's in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. This man, who held the nuclear codes just 1,369 days ago, is now wearing an apron and doling out fast food. The images of Trump's McDonald's stunt--in which he jiggled the fryer and handed burgers out of a window yesterday--are uncanny. There's Trump, face contorted in the appearance of deep concentration, tilting a fry basket to the heavens; Trump hanging two-thirds of the way out a drive-through window, waving like a beleaguered Norman Rockwell character; Trump, mouth agape, appearing to yell into the middle distance of a fast-food parking lot.

Ears perked up across the tech sector as US vice president Kamala Harris spoke the words "quantum computing" during a presidential debate in September – the first mention of the term by any US presidential candidate. It was brief but signalled that science and technology are playing a key role in the contest for the presidency. Harris and her opponent, Donald Trump, are both relatively known quantities, each having spent four recent years in the White House.

A Russian-aligned propaganda network notorious for creating deepfake whistleblower videos appears to be behind a coordinated effort to promote wild and baseless claims that Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz sexually assaulted one of his former students, according to several specialists tracking the disinformation campaign. Experts believe that the campaign is tied to a network called Storm-1516, which has been linked to, among other things, a previous effort that falsely claimed vice president Kamala Harris perpetrated a hit-and-run in San Francisco in 2011. Storm-1516 has a long history of posting fake whistleblower videos, and often deepfake videos, to push Kremlin talking points to the West. The propaganda unit's work has successfully reached the highest levels of the Republican party, with vice presidential candidate JD Vance repeating at least one of their narratives. NBC reported this week that the group has pushed at least 50 false narratives in this manner since last fall, which comes amidst a broader Russian government effort to disrupt next month's election with the aim of helping former president Donald Trump return to the White House.

It was once one of Cold War Britain's best-kept secrets. But now, you can take a look inside the'top secret' bunker where the government prepared for nuclear war. For the very first time, incredible 3D scans reveal the interior of the Nottingham War Rooms. Built between 1952 and 1953, the rooms protected one of the 11 Regional Seats of Government which would have controlled the surviving population in the event of an atomic blast. Inside, you can still see the original dormitories, kitchens, and offices built to house up to 400 government officials.

New reporting about over a dozen unidentified drones that were allowed to fly over Langley Air Force Base has prompted fresh calls for change to a threat that experts say will only become more prevalent. For more than two weeks in December 2023, the mystery drones traipsed into restricted airspace over the installation, home to key national security facilities and the F-22 Raptor stealth fighters. Experts say the incident is likely one of many that U.S. authorities are underprepared to tackle in an evolving threat environment. Lack of a standard protocol for such incursions left Langley officials unsure of what to do – other than allow the 20-foot-long drones to hover near their classified facilities. The Pentagon has said little about the incidents other than to confirm they occurred after a Wall Street Journal report this month.

Man guilty of army veteran hammer attack murder Cumbria PoliceJack Crawley attempted to burn Paul Taylor's body, before burying him in woodland A man who attacked an army veteran he had met for sex and bludgeoned him with a hammer has been found guilty of murder. Paul Taylor, 57, from Annan, Dumfriesshire, went missing last October, with his remains found in a shallow grave in woodland near Carlisle, Cumbria, in May. Jack Crawley, 20, of Carlisle, was found guilty of attacking him and trying to burn his body following a trial at the city's crown court. He will be sentenced on Wednesday. Crawley was also found guilty of the attempted murder of a man in York, who he met on the gay dating app Grindr and also attacked with a hammer, while he was on bail for killing Mr Taylor.

If Donald Trump wins the US presidential election in November, the guardrails could come off of artificial intelligence development, even as the dangers of defective AI models grow increasingly serious. Trump's election to a second term would dramatically reshape--and possibly cripple--efforts to protect Americans from the many dangers of poorly designed artificial intelligence, including misinformation, discrimination, and the poisoning of algorithms used in technology like autonomous vehicles. The federal government has begun overseeing and advising AI companies under an executive order that President Joe Biden issued in October 2023. But Trump has vowed to repeal that order, with the Republican Party platform saying it "hinders AI innovation" and "imposes Radical Leftwing ideas" on AI development. Trump's promise has thrilled critics of the executive order who see it as illegal, dangerous, and an impediment to America's digital arms race with China.

The Intelligence Community Campus-Bethesda, a vast office complex covered in vertical panels of maroon siding and mirrored glass, sits on a cliff overlooking the Potomac, surrounded by a forty-acre lawn and a tall wrought-iron fence. Roughly three thousand employees of various United States spy agencies work there. About two dozen of them are assigned to the Foreign Malign Influence Center--the command hub of the battle to protect the Presidential election from manipulation by foreign powers. The center, which opened in 2022, is responsible for deciphering, and defeating, surreptitious efforts to rig or tilt the American vote. The October before an election is the busy season.

Modeling strong gravitational lenses is prohibitively expensive for modern and next-generation cosmic survey data. Neural posterior estimation (NPE), a simulation-based inference (SBI) approach, has been studied as an avenue for efficient analysis of strong lensing data. However, NPE has not been demonstrated to perform well on out-of-domain target data -- e.g., when trained on simulated data and then applied to real, observational data. In this work, we perform the first study of the efficacy of NPE in combination with unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). The source domain is noiseless, and the target domain has noise mimicking modern cosmology surveys. We find that combining UDA and NPE improves the accuracy of the inference by 1-2 orders of magnitude and significantly improves the posterior coverage over an NPE model without UDA. We anticipate that this combination of approaches will help enable future applications of NPE models to real observational data.

In this letter, we address the task of adaptive sampling to model vector fields. When modeling environmental phenomena with a robot, gathering high resolution information can be resource intensive. Actively gathering data and modeling flows with the data is a more efficient alternative. However, in such scenarios, data is often sparse and thus requires flow modeling techniques that are effective at capturing the relevant dynamical features of the flow to ensure high prediction accuracy of the resulting models. To accomplish this effectively, regions with high informative value must be identified. We propose EnKode, an active sampling approach based on Koopman Operator theory and ensemble methods that can build high quality flow models and effectively estimate model uncertainty. For modeling complex flows, EnKode provides comparable or better estimates of unsampled flow regions than Gaussian Process Regression models with hyperparameter optimization. Additionally, our active sensing scheme provides more accurate flow estimates than comparable strategies that rely on uniform sampling. We evaluate EnKode using three common benchmarking systems: the Bickley Jet, Lid-Driven Cavity flow with an obstacle, and real ocean currents from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).