We provide an inferential framework to assess variable importance for heterogeneous treatment effects. This assessment is especially useful in high-risk domains such as medicine, where decision makers hesitate to rely on black-box treatment recommendation algorithms. The variable importance measures we consider are local in that they may differ across individuals, while the inference is global in that it tests whether a given variable is important for any individual. Our approach builds on recent developments in semiparametric theory for function-valued parameters, and is valid even when statistical machine learning algorithms are employed to quantify treatment effect heterogeneity. We demonstrate the applicability of our method to infectious disease prevention strategies.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) extend large language models with visual reasoning, but their multimodal design also introduces new, underexplored vulnerabilities. Existing multimodal red-teaming methods largely rely on brittle templates, focus on single-attack settings, and expose only a narrow subset of vulnerabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce VERA-V, a variational inference framework that recasts multimodal jailbreak discovery as learning a joint posterior distribution over paired text-image prompts. This probabilistic view enables the generation of stealthy, coupled adversarial inputs that bypass model guardrails. We train a lightweight attacker to approximate the posterior, allowing efficient sampling of diverse jailbreaks and providing distributional insights into vulnerabilities. VERA-V further integrates three complementary strategies: (i) typography-based text prompts that embed harmful cues, (ii) diffusion-based image synthesis that introduces adversarial signals, and (iii) structured distractors to fragment VLM attention. Experiments on HarmBench and HADES benchmarks show that VERA-V consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both open-source and frontier VLMs, achieving up to 53.75% higher attack success rate (ASR) over the best baseline on GPT-4o.

The £5.30 orange juice that tells the story of why supermarket prices are sky high There has been more than a bitter twang in the glasses at British breakfast tables. Only five years ago, a typical supermarket own-label carton of orange juice could be bought for 76p for 1 litre. One colleague was outraged to be sent a bill for £9 for a glass of hangover-busting orange juice and lemonade at an unassuming little restaurant in Kent. Asked why so much, she was told that the orange juice - albeit freshly squeezed - accounted for £5.30 of the price. Yet as costs have surged, the taste is changing too, with certain manufacturers substituting oranges for mandarins to cut costs.

In a small clinical study, people with above-the-knee amputations said it helped them navigate more easily and felt more like part of their body. A subject with the osseointegrated mechanoneural prosthesis overcomes an obstacle placed in their walking path by volitionally flexing and extending their phantom knee joint. Control signals from their residual knee muscles are used to produce movement of the powered prosthetic knee that mirrors the phantom knee. MIT researchers have developed a new bionic knee that is integrated directly with the user's muscle and bone tissue. It can help people with above-the-knee amputations walk faster, climb stairs, and avoid obstacles more easily than they could with a traditional prosthesis, which is attached to the residual limb by means of a socket and can be uncomfortable. For several years, Hugh Herr, SM '93, co-director of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics, has been working with his colleagues on techniques that can extract neural information from muscles left behind after an amputation and use that information to help guide a prosthetic limb.

Encouraged early on by Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, the "Queen of Carbon" laid the foundation for countless advances in nanotechnology--and mentored countless young scientists along the way. At MIT, Mildred Dresselhaus became a beloved professor who pushed her students to be their very best and provided support in ways big and small. Institute Professor Mildred "Millie" Dresselhaus forever altered our understanding of matter--the physical stuff of the universe that has mass and takes up space. Over 57 years at MIT, Dresselhaus also played a significant role in inspiring people to use this new knowledge to tackle some of the world's greatest challenges, from producing clean energy to curing cancer. Although she became an emerita professor in 2007, Dresselhaus, who taught electrical engineering and physics, remained actively involved in research and all other aspects of MIT life until her death in 2017. She would have been 95 this November.

MIT astronauts aboard the International Space Station--and the MIT researchers who have sent up experiments--have advanced our understanding of science, space, and the universe. This image of the International Space Station and space shuttle Endeavour, flying at an altitude of approximately 350 kilometers, was taken by Expedition 27 crew member Paolo Nespoli from the Soyuz TMA-20 on May 24, 2011. On November 2, 2000, NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd, OCE '78, SM '78, and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko made history as their Soyuz spacecraft docked with the International Space Station. The event marked the start of 25 years of continuous human presence in space aboard the ISS--a prolific period for space research. MIT-trained astronauts, scientists, and engineers have played integral roles in all aspects of the station's design, assembly, operations, and scientific research. One of MIT's most experienced NASA astronauts, Mike Fincke '89, is celebrating that milestone from space.

Should We Look on New Technologies with Awe and Dread? The technological sublime helps us grasp the power of what we're creating--but at a cost. One of the most famous cuts in cinema history, from "2001: A Space Odyssey," perfectly captures a concept known as the technological sublime. First, we see an angry ape bludgeoning one of his fellows to death with a scavenged bone; he's only just discovered that bones can be used this way, and he hurls his weapon into the air in celebration. We follow the bone upward as it tumbles against the unpolluted blue sky.

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Melania Trump Used as'Window-Dressing' in Elaborate Memecoin Fraud, Legal Filing Claims The first lady of the United States became a pawn in an intricate memecoin scam that resulted in millions of dollars in losses, crypto investors have alleged. A cryptocurrency promoted in January by US first lady Melania Trump was part of a sophisticated fraud that "leveraged celebrity association and'borrowed fame' to sell legitimacy to unsuspecting investors," a new legal filing has alleged. In April, crypto investors brought a federal class action lawsuit against Benjamin Chow, cofounder of crypto exchange Meteora, and Hayden Davis, cofounder of crypto venture capital firm Kelsier Labs, among other defendants, accusing them of a multimillion-dollar fraud involving a single memecoin, $M3M3. Later, the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint, expanding the allegations to include racketeering activity. They claimed the pair had colluded to rig the market for $LIBRA, a coin promoted by Javier Milei, president of Argentina, which collapsed in value shortly after launch.

OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on 8 May. OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on 8 May. Company's AI-powered browser built around marquee bot is designed to provide more personalized web experience OpenAI on Tuesday launched an AI-powered web browser built around its marquee chatbot. The browser is designed to provide a more personalized web experience and includes a ChatGPT sidebar that enables users to asks questions about or engage with various aspects of each website they visit, as demonstrated in a video posted alongside the announcement. Atlas is now available globally on Apple's Mac operating system and will soon be made available on Windows, iOS and Android, according to OpenAI's announcement.