He Xiaopeng launches Xpeng's next-gen Iron humanoid robot during a press conference at the company's headquarters in Guangzhou on November 5, 2025. He Xiaopeng launches Xpeng's next-gen Iron humanoid robot during a press conference at the company's headquarters in Guangzhou on November 5, 2025. It was a controversy laced with pride for He Xiaopeng. In November, He, the founder and CEO of Chinese physical AI firm XPeng, had just debuted his new humanoid robot, IRON, whose balance, posture shifts, and coquettish swagger mirrored human motion with such eerie precision that a slew of netizens accused him of faking the demonstration by putting a human in a bodysuit. To silence the naysayers, He boldly cut open the robot's leg live on stage to reveal the intricate mechanical systems that allow it to adapt to uneven surfaces and maintain stability just like the human body. "At first, it made me sad," He tells TIME in his Guangzhou headquarters.

Only users who have already registered and completed age verification will be able to access the world's largest porn site. Pornhub is blocking itself in the United Kingdom on February 2, arguing that the country's age verification laws are ineffective, the company announced on Tuesday. As of February 2, only users who have already registered with Pornhub and completed age verification will be able to access the site. New users will not be able to register. The move comes after a new set of provisions aimed at keeping minors from viewing porn kicked in last July, requiring adults to submit to age-estimating face scans, ID document uploads, credit card checks, and more, in order to verify that they are not minors.

Apple could unveil Gemini-powered Siri in Feb. California will investigate TikTok's alleged censorship of anti-Trump posts Users also complained about being unable to upload ICE-related videos, but TikTok is blaming issues on a power outage. California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced that his office is investigating whether TikTok is truly censoring content critical of Trump, days after ByteDance finalized a deal to spin off its business in the US. Newsom made the announcement in response to a post on X, claiming that you can no longer send messages in the app with the word "Epstein" in it. Newsom's office, in a separate post, said it was able to independently confirm instances wherein TikTok suppressed content critical of President Donald Trump.

Lawyer, 44, who died on flight to London after falling asleep on her mother's shoulder had undiagnosed cardiac condition, inquest hears Winter Storm Fern death toll climbs to 34 after brutal freeze batters the US... and meteorologists warn even colder weather is on the way Top lawyer, event planner and pilot identified as three of six killed in private jet crash while taking'girls' trip' to Paris Insidious secret life of promiscuous neurosurgeon found dead in his $2.5m mansion'He has no loyalty': The bitter secret fallout between One Direction star Harry Styles and his former bandmates - as insiders reveal for the first time what really happened at Liam Payne's funeral Ricky Gervais' long-term partner Jane Fallon says she has no regrets about not having children as she opens up about their relationship'Gunfight' as Chinese general is purged by President Xi: Rumours sweep Beijing that'coup-plotting' military chief was axed'for leaking nuclear secrets to US' Is Angelina Jolie quitting America? Private struggles emerge... as actress weighs major lifestyle that threatens to rupture her family Brandi Glanville debuts dramatic new look after facial disfigurement caused by'parasite'... see RHOBH alum now Matthew Stafford's wife Kelly shares emotional moment NFL star returned home after heartbreaking playoff defeat Swiss inferno bar owners place blame on tragic'waitress in the helmet' and say fire was result of her'show' climbing on to colleague's shoulders with lit sparklers Coco Gauff's behind-the-scenes meltdown at the Australian Open: World No 3 smashes racket in a rage after losing in just 59 minutes - and it was all caught on camera Insiders reveal the REAL misstep that got Kristi Noem humiliatingly ditched by Trump... and the weak excuse she's peddling to try and save herself Boiling Britain: Number of'uncomfortably hot' days in the UK is set to increase by 150% by 2050, study warns READ MORE: 2025 was Britain's hottest year on RECORD, Met Office confirms The number of'uncomfortably hot' days in the UK is set to increase by a whopping 150 per cent by 2050, a new study has warned. Researchers from the University of Oxford modelled what the weather will look like if the world warms by 2 C. While this sounds like a lot, they warn this scenario is becoming'increasingly likely'. The results revealed that under these conditions, the number of uncomfortably hot days will increase by 150 per cent in the UK, and by staggering 230 per cent in Ireland. Given these countries are largely designed to cope with cold conditions, this temperature increase could have'disproportionately severe impacts', the experts warn.

A whistleblower trapped inside a "pig butchering" scam compound gave WIRED a vast trove of its internal materials--including 4,200 pages of messages that lay out its operations in unprecedented detail. Just before 8am one day last April, an office manager who went by the name Amani sent out a motivational message to his colleagues and subordinates. "Every day brings a new opportunity--a chance to connect, to inspire, and to make a difference," he wrote in his 500-word post to an office-wide WhatsApp group. "Talk to that next customer like you're bringing them something valuable--because you are." He and his underlings worked inside a " pig butchering " compound, a criminal operation built to carry out scams --promising romance and riches from crypto investments--that often defraud victims out of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars at a time. The workers Amani was addressing were eight hours into their 15-hour night shift in a high-rise building in the Golden Triangle special economic zone in Northern Laos. Like their marks, most of them were victims, too: forced laborers trapped in the compound, held in debt bondage with no passports. They struggled to meet scam revenue quotas to avoid fines that deepened their debt.

A source trapped inside an industrial-scale scamming operation contacted me, determined to expose his captors' crimes--and then escape. It was a perfect June evening in New York when I received my first email from the source who would ask me to call him Red Bull. He was writing from hell, 8,000 miles away. A summer shower had left a rainbow over my Brooklyn neighborhood, and my two children were playing in a kiddie pool on the roof of our apartment building. Now the sun was setting, while I--in typical 21st-century parenting fashion, forgive me--compulsively scrolled through every app on my phone. The message had no subject line and came from an address on the encrypted email service Proton Mail: "vaultwhistle@proton.me." I'm currently working inside a major crypto romance scam operation based in the Golden Triangle," it began. "I am a computer engineer being forced to work here under a contract." "I've collected internal evidence of how the scam works--step by step," the message ...

Winter Storm Fern death toll climbs to 34 after brutal freeze batters the US... and meteorologists warn even colder weather is on the way Top lawyer, event planner and pilot identified as three of six killed in private jet crash while taking'girls' trip' to Paris Insidious secret life of promiscuous neurosurgeon found dead in his $2.5m mansion'He has no loyalty': The bitter secret fallout between One Direction star Harry Styles and his former bandmates - as insiders reveal for the first time what really happened at Liam Payne's funeral Nicola Peltz was raised by billionaire'bully' Nelson who became the most feared investor on Wall Street before starting his own dynasty with his 10 children Is Angelina Jolie quitting America? Private struggles emerge... as actress weighs major lifestyle that threatens to rupture her family Influencer shares haunting 911 call after crash that killed her son known for viral'Okay Baby' video Matthew Stafford's wife Kelly shares emotional moment NFL star returned home after heartbreaking playoff defeat Martha Stewart breaks political silence after being urged by teenage granddaughter: 'Things must change' Insiders reveal the REAL misstep that got Kristi Noem humiliatingly ditched by Trump... and the weak excuse she's peddling to try and save herself Defiant Trump dismisses Alzheimer's fears as he struggles to recall name of disease in interview How AI cops will be used to patrol Britain's streets: From live facial recognition to virtual chatbots - the Orwellian technologies that are set to tackle crime Britain's police forces are getting a high-tech upgrade, as artificial intelligence ( AI) tools are rolled out to tackle crime . As part of major police reforms, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced that over £140 million will be invested in new technology . Police will be given access to facial recognition vans, tools for rapid CCTV analysis, and a suite of digital forensics tools. How the public interacts with the police is also set to change, as 999 control rooms use'AI-assisted operator services' to filter'non-policing calls'.

Winter Storm Fern death toll climbs to 34 after brutal freeze batters the US... and meteorologists warn even colder weather is on the way Top lawyer, event planner and pilot identified as three of six killed in private jet crash while taking'girls' trip' to Paris Insidious secret life of promiscuous neurosurgeon found dead in his $2.5m mansion'He has no loyalty': The bitter secret fallout between One Direction star Harry Styles and his former bandmates - as insiders reveal for the first time what really happened at Liam Payne's funeral Nicola Peltz was raised by billionaire'bully' Nelson who became the most feared investor on Wall Street before starting his own dynasty with his 10 children Is Angelina Jolie quitting America? Private struggles emerge... as actress weighs major lifestyle that threatens to rupture her family Influencer shares haunting 911 call after crash that killed her son known for viral'Okay Baby' video Matthew Stafford's wife Kelly shares emotional moment NFL star returned home after heartbreaking playoff defeat Martha Stewart breaks political silence after being urged by teenage granddaughter: 'Things must change' Insiders reveal the REAL misstep that got Kristi Noem humiliatingly ditched by Trump... and the weak excuse she's peddling to try and save herself Defiant Trump dismisses Alzheimer's fears as he struggles to recall name of disease in interview READ MORE: Evolution debate reignited after'missing human link' is found A new AI app is helping to rewrite the evolution of flight. The app, developed by researchers from the University of Edinburgh, has been used to analyse footprints made by dinosaurs more than 200 million years ago. The results show that several tracks share'uncanny' features with both extinct and modern birds. According to the researchers, this suggests that birds could have originated 60 million years earlier than we thought.

Empirical investigations into unintended model behavior often show that the algorithm is predicting another outcome than what was intended. These exposes highlight the need to identify when algorithms predict unintended quantities - ideally before deploying them into consequential settings. We propose a falsification framework that provides a principled statistical test for discriminant validity: the requirement that an algorithm predict intended outcomes better than impermissible ones. Drawing on falsification practices from causal inference, econometrics, and psychometrics, our framework compares calibrated prediction losses across outcomes to assess whether the algorithm exhibits discriminant validity with respect to a specified impermissible proxy. In settings where the target outcome is difficult to observe, multiple permissible proxy outcomes may be available; our framework accommodates both this setting and the case with a single permissible proxy. Throughout we use nonparametric hypothesis testing methods that make minimal assumptions on the data-generating process. We illustrate the method in an admissions setting, where the framework establishes discriminant validity with respect to gender but fails to establish discriminant validity with respect to race. This demonstrates how falsification can serve as an early validity check, prior to fairness or robustness analyses. We also provide analysis in a criminal justice setting, where we highlight the limitations of our framework and emphasize the need for complementary approaches to assess other aspects of construct validity and external validity.

Boosting has garnered significant interest across both machine learning and statistical communities. Traditional boosting algorithms, designed for fully observed random samples, often struggle with real-world problems, particularly with interval-censored data. This type of data is common in survival analysis and time-to-event studies where exact event times are unobserved but fall within known intervals. Effective handling of such data is crucial in fields like medical research, reliability engineering, and social sciences. In this work, we introduce novel nonparametric boosting methods for regression and classification tasks with interval-censored data. Our approaches leverage censoring unbiased transformations to adjust loss functions and impute transformed responses while maintaining model accuracy. Implemented via functional gradient descent, these methods ensure scalability and adaptability. We rigorously establish their theoretical properties, including optimality and mean squared error trade-offs. Our proposed methods not only offer a robust framework for enhancing predictive accuracy in domains where interval-censored data are common but also complement existing work, expanding the applicability of existing boosting techniques. Empirical studies demonstrate robust performance across various finite-sample scenarios, highlighting the practical utility of our approaches.