Media
Revealed: The five key stages of the human brain - with the 'adolescent' phase lasting until age 32
'Guerilla' liberals form a'Fight Club' to oust Schumer after walking right into Trump's Oval Office trap Billionaire family posts VERY unusual obituary after heir, 40, met violent end at $2.8m hunting lodge following marriage scandal I know why Usha Vance ditched her wedding ring. Most women would do the same if they'd suffered her humiliation: KENNEDY'Canceled' comedian Louis C.K. devours Hollywood legend's widow on streets of NYC as steamy romance is revealed Troubled 350lbs son of Hollywood icon is forced to humiliating new low... as his movie star brother luxuriates in $7m Montecito mansion Brigitte Bardot, 91, is rushed to hospital again as she battles a'serious illness' after undergoing surgery'Dementia gene' now linked to another devastating neurological disease, study shows Trump's losing control... MAGA's imploding... and White House insiders tell me why they're REALLY worried: ANDREW NEIL Anna Kepner's grim cause of death aboard Carnival cruise ship confirmed, as homicide investigation continues Dawson's Creek star James Van Der Beek looks healthy in new social media video as his wife gushes'he's bouncing back' amid cancer battle Her moving videos about the handsome boyfriend who ghosted her went viral and catapulted her to overnight fame. Pam Bondi's furious response after beauty queen prosecutor who upstaged her has Comey and James indictments thrown out by judge Google Maps blunder turns tiny village into shortcut route, causing it to be'bombarded' by lorries that are damaging people's Grade II-listed homes READ MORE: Scientists issue warning over mind-altering'brain weapons' There are five key stages of the human brain, a new study has revealed. Researchers from the University of Cambridge compared brain scans of 3,802 people aged between 0 and 90. Their analysis revealed that the average human life is split up by four pivotal'turning points' between five key stages - childhood, adolescence, adulthood, early ageing, and late ageing.
From two weeks to two hours: How AI might reboot Britain's economy
Employees work on laptops in the Moore Kingston Smith office in London on Nov. 13. LONDON - When accountants at mid-tier firm Moore Kingston Smith began using artificial intelligence to speed up their work, profit margins jumped. Colleagues in another team running checks against corporate fraud created a report for customers in two hours, something that previously took two weeks. The rollout of AI is raising hopes that Britain's economy can escape the productivity problem that has dogged it for two decades, even as slow growth pushes finance minister Rachel Reeves toward tax hikes in Wednesday's budget. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.
China's AI promise lures top Asia fund away from Korea and Taiwan
China's AI promise lures top Asia fund away from Korea and Taiwan The AI frenzy that's gripped global equity markets for months is getting a fresh look from investors, as focus shifts to finding stocks that can drive the next leg of the sector's rally or at least withstand future selloffs. A top-performing Asian money manager is boosting exposure to artificial-intelligence stocks in China while retreating from those in South Korea and Taiwan, citing relatively better valuations and outlook. "Some of the names are still quite cheap in terms of valuation," said Kelly Chung, who helps oversee the Value Partners Asian Income Fund as well as the Asian Innovation Opportunities Fund. "The capital expenditure in China to invest in AI is still very low. There is still a big room for them to actually go up in terms of AI infrastructure investment" when compared to the U.S., she said in an interview.
Explicit Tonal Tension Conditioning via Dual-Level Beam Search for Symbolic Music Generation
Ebrahimzadeh, Maral, Bernardes, Gilberto, Stober, Sebastian
State-of-the-art symbolic music generation models have recently achieved remarkable output quality, yet explicit control over compositional features, such as tonal tension, remains challenging. We propose a novel approach that integrates a computational tonal tension model, based on tonal interval vector analysis, into a Transformer framework. Our method employs a two-level beam search strategy during inference. At the token level, generated candidates are re-ranked using model probability and diversity metrics to maintain overall quality. At the bar level, a tension-based re-ranking is applied to ensure that the generated music aligns with a desired tension curve. Objective evaluations indicate that our approach effectively modulates tonal tension, and subjective listening tests confirm that the system produces outputs that align with the target tension. These results demonstrate that explicit tension conditioning through a dual-level beam search provides a powerful and intuitive tool to guide AI-generated music. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that our method can generate multiple distinct musical interpretations under the same tension condition.
Data Flows and Colonial Regimes in Africa: A Critical Analysis of the Colonial Futurities Embedded in AI Ecosystems
A, Ndaka., F, Avila-Acosta., H, Mbula-Ndaka., C, Amera., S, Chauke., E, Majiwa.
Data Flows and Colonial Regimes in Africa: A Critical Analysis of the Colonial Futurities Embedded in AI Recommendation Algorithms Angella Ndaka, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Fรกtima รvila - Acosta, Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany Harnred Mbula, Centre for Epistemic Justice, Nairobi, Kenya Christine Amera, Centre for Epistemic Justice, Nairobi Kenya Sandra Tiyani Chauke University of Pretoria, South Africa Eucabeth Majiwa Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Nairobi, Kenya Abstract In the last few years, Africa has experienced growth in a thriving ecosystem of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and systems, developed and promoted by both local and global technology players. While the sociotechnical imaginaries about these syst ems promote AI as critical to achiev ing Africa's sustainable development agenda, some of them have subtly permeated society, recreating new values, cultures, practices, and histories that threaten to marginalize minority groups in the region. Africa predominantly frames AI as an imaginary solution to address complex social challenges; however, the narrative subtly ignores deeper power - related concerns, including data governance, embedded algorithmic colonialism, and the exploitation that propag ates new digital colonial sites. However, the development of current AI ethics in Africa is in its infancy and predominantly framed through lenses of Western perspective, with the social and ethical impacts of the AI innovations and application on African epistemologies and worldviews not prioritized. To ensure that people on the African continent leverage the benefits of AI, these social and ethical impacts o f AI need to be critically and explicitly considered and addressed. This chapter will therefore seek to frame the elemental and invisible problems of AI and big data in the African context by examining digital sites and infrastructure through the lens of power and interests. It will present reflections on how these sites are using AI recommendation algorithms to recreate new digital societies in the region, how they have the potential to propagate algorithmic colonialism and negative gender norms, and what this means for the regional sustainable development agenda. The chapter proposes adopting business models that embrace response - ability and consider the existence of alternative socio - material worlds of AI. These reflections will mainly come from ongoing discussions with Kenyan social media users in this author's user space talks, which take place every month. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; algorithmic colonialism; Data; response - ability; digital sites Section 1: Introduction The growing global interest, combined with rising investments in AI skilling and infrastructure development, is a key driver of the expanding landscape of AI technologies and systems across Africa.
Dynamic Multi-Species Bird Soundscape Generation with Acoustic Patterning and 3D Spatialization
Zhang, Ellie L., Liao, Duoduo, Liao, Callie C.
Generation of dynamic, scalable multi-species bird soundscapes remains a significant challenge in computer music and algorithmic sound design. Birdsongs involve rapid frequency-modulated chirps, complex amplitude envelopes, distinctive acoustic patterns, overlapping calls, and dynamic inter-bird interactions, all of which require precise temporal and spatial control in 3D environments. Existing approaches, whether Digital Signal Processing (DSP)-based or data-driven, typically focus only on single species modeling, static call structures, or synthesis directly from recordings, and often suffer from noise, limited flexibility, or large data needs. To address these challenges, we present a novel, fully algorithm-driven framework that generates dynamic multi-species bird soundscapes using DSP-based chirp generation and 3D spatialization, without relying on recordings or training data. Our approach simulates multiple independently-moving birds per species along different moving 3D trajectories, supporting controllable chirp sequences, overlapping choruses, and realistic 3D motion in scalable soundscapes while preserving species-specific acoustic patterns. A visualization interface provides bird trajectories, spectrograms, activity timelines, and sound waves for analytical and creative purposes. Both visual and audio evaluations demonstrate the ability of the system to generate dense, immersive, and ecologically inspired soundscapes, highlighting its potential for computer music, interactive virtual environments, and computational bioacoustics research.
Large Language Models for the Summarization of Czech Documents: From History to the Present
Tran, Vรกclav, ล mรญd, Jakub, Lenc, Ladislav, Salmon, Jean-Pierre, Krรกl, Pavel
Text summarization is the task of automatically condensing longer texts into shorter, coherent summaries while preserving the original meaning and key information. Although this task has been extensively studied in English and other high-resource languages, Czech summarization, particularly in the context of historical documents, remains underexplored. This is largely due to the inherent linguistic complexity of Czech and the lack of high-quality annotated datasets. In this work, we address this gap by leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically Mistral and mT5, which have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks and multilingual settings. In addition, we also propose a translation-based approach that first translates Czech texts into English, summarizes them using an English-language model, and then translates the summaries back into Czech. Our study makes the following main contributions: We demonstrate that LLMs achieve new state-of-the-art results on the SumeCzech dataset, a benchmark for modern Czech text summarization, showing the effectiveness of multilingual LLMs even for morphologically rich, medium-resource languages like Czech. We introduce a new dataset, Posel od ฤerchova, designed for the summarization of historical Czech texts. This dataset is derived from digitized 19th-century publications and annotated for abstractive summarization. We provide initial baselines using modern LLMs to facilitate further research in this underrepresented area. By combining cutting-edge models with both modern and historical Czech datasets, our work lays the foundation for further progress in Czech summarization and contributes valuable resources for future research in Czech historical document processing and low-resource summarization more broadly.
Large Language Models Require Curated Context for Reliable Political Fact-Checking -- Even with Reasoning and Web Search
DeVerna, Matthew R., Yang, Kai-Cheng, Yan, Harry Yaojun, Menczer, Filippo
Large language models (LLMs) have raised hopes for automated end-to-end fact-checking, but prior studies report mixed results. As mainstream chatbots increasingly ship with reasoning capabilities and web search tools -- and millions of users already rely on them for verification -- rigorous evaluation is urgent. We evaluate 15 recent LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and DeepSeek on more than 6,000 claims fact-checked by PolitiFact, comparing standard models with reasoning- and web-search variants. Standard models perform poorly, reasoning offers minimal benefits, and web search provides only moderate gains, despite fact-checks being available on the web. In contrast, a curated RAG system using PolitiFact summaries improved macro F1 by 233% on average across model variants. These findings suggest that giving models access to curated high-quality context is a promising path for automated fact-checking.
Any4D: Open-Prompt 4D Generation from Natural Language and Images
While video-generation-based embodied world models have gained increasing attention, their reliance on large-scale embodied interaction data remains a key bottleneck. The scarcity, difficulty of collection, and high dimensionality of embodied data fundamentally limit the alignment granularity between language and actions and exacerbate the challenge of long-horizon video generation--hindering generative models from achieving a \textit{"GPT moment"} in the embodied domain. There is a naive observation: \textit{the diversity of embodied data far exceeds the relatively small space of possible primitive motions}. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{Primitive Embodied World Models} (PEWM), which restricts video generation to fixed shorter horizons, our approach \textit{1) enables} fine-grained alignment between linguistic concepts and visual representations of robotic actions, \textit{2) reduces} learning complexity, \textit{3) improves} data efficiency in embodied data collection, and \textit{4) decreases} inference latency. By equipping with a modular Vision-Language Model (VLM) planner and a Start-Goal heatmap Guidance mechanism (SGG), PEWM further enables flexible closed-loop control and supports compositional generalization of primitive-level policies over extended, complex tasks. Our framework leverages the spatiotemporal vision priors in video models and the semantic awareness of VLMs to bridge the gap between fine-grained physical interaction and high-level reasoning, paving the way toward scalable, interpretable, and general-purpose embodied intelligence.
Kitty: Accurate and Efficient 2-bit KV Cache Quantization with Dynamic Channel-wise Precision Boost
Xia, Haojun, Wu, Xiaoxia, Li, Jisen, Wu, Robert, Wang, Junxiong, Wang, Jue, Li, Chenxi, Singhal, Aman, Shah, Alay Dilipbhai, Ariyak, Alpay, Zhuang, Donglin, Zhou, Zhongzhu, Athiwaratkun, Ben, Zheng, Zhen, Song, Shuaiwen Leon
The KV cache is a dominant memory bottleneck for LLM inference. While 4-bit KV quantization preserves accuracy, 2-bit often degrades it, especially on long-context reasoning. We close this gap via an algorithm-system co-design for mixed-precision KV caching: Kitty. On the algorithm side, extensive experiments show that Dynamic Channel-wise Precision Boost -- which ranks Key-cache channels by sensitivity and keeps only a small fraction at higher precision -- maintains near-zero loss in accuracy drop while approaching 2-bit memory. The main challenge is handling dynamic 4-bit channel boosts while keeping the page layout coalesced and the dequantization uniform, with no scattered reads or hard-coded masks. Kitty addresses these issues by decompose each mixed-precision Key page into two tensors with unified 2-bit precision. Based on this, Kitty provides a page-centric KV layout, Triton-compatible page dequantization kernels, and a lightweight runtime pipeline that preserves coalescing and avoids divergence. Across seven tasks and two model families (Qwen3, LLaMA3), Kitty cuts KV memory by nearly 8x with negligible accuracy loss, enabling up to 8x larger batches and 2.1x-4.1x higher throughput under the same memory budget. We release the full implementation of Kitty at https://github.com/Summer-Summer/Kitty.