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Artificial intelligence and data centers blamed for 42% rise in U.S. electricity costs. Exelon CEO Calvin Butler warns of grid strain as consumption expected to grow 133%.

NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie's mother has been abducted, sheriff suspects The mother of US news anchor Savannah Guthrie has been abducted and didn't go willingly from her home, Arizona law enforcement officials suspect. Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of the NBC News host, was last seen in her house outside Tucson, Arizona, on Saturday evening. Her family reported her missing a day later. When authorities arrived, the scene of Nancy Guthrie's property caused grave concern, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said. He did not provide a possible motive and, while there was no initial indication Nancy Guthrie could have been targeted because of her name, the sheriff said we can't dismiss that. I believe she was abducted, yes, Sheriff Nanos told CBS, the BBC's US partner.

Elon Musk's SpaceX is taking over his artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, as the billionaire continues to unify some of his many business interests. SpaceX confirmed the deal to acquire xAI, a smaller firm known for its Grok chatbot, posting a memo from Musk about the merger on its website. In the note, Musk said the combination would form an innovation engine putting AI, rockets, space-based internet, and media under one roof. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. However, a source familiar said it valued xAI at $125bn (£91bn) and SpaceX at $1tn, making it the most valuable private company ever.

Elon Musk said on Monday that SpaceX has acquired his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, in a record-setting deal that unifies the billionaire's AI and space ambitions by combining the rocket-and-satellite company with the maker of the Grok chatbot. The deal, first reported last week, represents one of the most ambitious tie-ups in the technology sector yet, combining a space-and-defense contractor with a fast-growing AI developer whose costs are largely driven by chips, data centers and energy. It could also bolster SpaceX's data-center ambitions as Musk competes with rivals such as Alphabet's Google, Meta, Amazon-backed Anthropic and OpenAI in the AI sector. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right. With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories.

Diffusion models and flow matching have demonstrated remarkable success in text-to-image generation. While many existing alignment methods primarily focus on fine-tuning pre-trained generative models to maximize a given reward function, these approaches require extensive computational resources and may not generalize well across different objectives. In this work, we propose a novel alignment framework by leveraging the underlying nature of the alignment problem -- sampling from reward-weighted distributions -- and show that it applies to both diffusion models (via score guidance) and flow matching models (via velocity guidance). The score function (velocity field) required for the reward-weighted distribution can be decomposed into the pre-trained score (velocity field) plus a conditional expectation of the reward. For the alignment on the diffusion model, we identify a fundamental challenge: the adversarial nature of the guidance term can introduce undesirable artifacts in the generated images. Therefore, we propose a finetuning-free framework that trains a guidance network to estimate the conditional expectation of the reward. We achieve comparable performance to finetuning-based models with one-step generation with at least a 60% reduction in computational cost. For the alignment on flow matching, we propose a training-free framework that improves the generation quality without additional computational cost.

A new Fox News poll finds 60% of registered voters think artificial intelligence use is moving too quickly, while 63% lack confidence in federal government's AI regulation ability.

Science Dinosaurs Teen discovers Australia's oldest dinosaur fossil--almost 70 years ago An early sauropodomorph likely made the 230-million-year-old footprint. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In 1958, an Australian teenager named Bruce Runnegar uncovered a mysterious dinosaur footprint during a visit to a quarry with school friends. He kept the fossil for years, eventually becoming a paleontologist himself. Over six decades later, the prehistoric print is now ready for its close-up.

Billie Eilish and Bad Bunny were among the celebrities who used their Grammy Awards acceptance speeches to criticize Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

President Donald Trump blasted the Grammy Awards as "virtually unwatchable" and threatened legal action against host Trevor Noah over a "defamatory" Jeffrey Epstein jab.