Media
From 'dinosaur tartare' to seaweed butter - would you try any of these dishes created by the world's first AI chef?
Prince William says he's'not in a calm state' as he arrives at the BAFTAs amid Andrew arrest drama: Prince of Wales says he's not in right frame of mind to watch weepy contender Hamnet - as Kate reveals it left her in floods of tears Who is Austin Tucker Martin? It's sensational, but William and Kate are the real King and Queen now. Read what my royal insiders are saying... it's the only way: MAUREEN CALLAHAN Tulsi Gabbard's personal life with mysterious videographer husband revealed in new intimate pictures I've met the man of my dreams... if he discovers my dirty little secret, he'll be disgusted: DEAR JANE JFK Jr took drugs'every single day': Everyone knows about Carolyn Bessette's cocaine snorting and cheating. But friends hid his binges, experimental sex and Jackie Kennedy's gay fears... until now Tide turns for little abandoned monkey Punch who had no one to love but his stuffed toy... as he's finally accepted into family Moment tourist minibus sinks in the world's deepest lake killing seven after crashing through the frozen ice Tucker Carlson forced to apologize to Israel's president for implying he went to Epstein's pedo island My American friends are all whispering the same rancid royal rumor. It's not just Andrew... this could bring everyone down: KENNEDY The Alexander brothers' alleged'rape playbook': Almost too monstrous to read, an exhaustive account of hideous secrets dating back to high school Vulgar squatter lazed around $2.3m mansion all day and sent child to work in BAKERY to help pay the bills... but now karma has caught up with her in the most delicious way The show must go on!
Nominations are now open for our global 2026 Innovators Under 35 competition
It's free and easy to nominate yourself or someone you know--here's how. We have some exciting news: Nominations are now open for's 2026 Innovators Under 35 competition. This annual list recognizes 35 of the world's best young scientists and inventors, and our newsroom has produced it for more than two decades. It's free to nominate yourself or someone you know, and it only takes a few moments. We're looking for people who are making important scientific discoveries and applying that knowledge to build new technologies. Or those who are engineering new systems and algorithms that will aid our work or extend our abilities.
The best new science fiction books of December 2025
Author Simon Stålenhag has a new work out this month. December is traditionally a quieter month for new releases from publishers and that's definitely true this year, with a sparser than usual science-fiction offering to chew over. That said, there are some intriguing titles out this month, and I'm looking forward to the new book from artist and author Simon Stålenhag, another illustrated dystopia, as well as a mysterious-sounding Russian novel, and the conclusion of Bethany Jacobs's excellent space opera trilogy. Jacobs has written a piece for the New Scientist Book Club about how the late Iain M. Banks inspired her own world-building. The Book Club is currently reading Banks's classic Culture novel - do join us .
A Very Big Fight Over a Very Small Language
In the Swiss Alps, a plan to tidy up Romansh--spoken by less than one per cent of the country--set off a decades-long quarrel over identity, belonging, and the sound of authenticity. After reformers launched Rumantsch Grischun, a standardized version of Romansh's various dialects, traditionalists denounced it as a "bastard," a "castrated" tongue, an act of "linguistic murder." Ask him how it all began, and he remembers the ice. It was a bitter morning in January, 1982, when Bernard Cathomas, aged thirty-six, carefully picked his way up a slippery, sloping Zurich street. His destination was No. 33, an ochre house with green shutters--the home of Heinrich Schmid, a linguist at the University of Zurich. Inside, the décor suggested that "professor" was an encompassing identity: old wooden floors, a faded carpet, a living room seemingly untouched since the nineteen-thirties, when Schmid had grown up in the house. Schmid's wife served, a Swiss carrot cake that manages bourgeois indulgence with a vegetable alibi. Cathomas had already written from Chur, in the canton of the Grisons, having recently become the general secretary of the Lia Rumantscha, a small association charged with protecting Switzerland's least known national language, Romansh. Spoken by less than one per cent of the Swiss population, the language was itself splintered into five major "idioms," not always readily intelligible to one another, each with its own spelling conventions. Earlier attempts at unification had collapsed in rivalries. In his letter, Cathomas said that Schmid's authority would be valuable in standardizing the language. Cathomas wrote in German but started and ended in his native Sursilvan, the biggest of the Romansh idioms: " ." Translation: "I thank you very much for your interest and attention to this problem." Schmid, the man he was counting on, hadn't grown up speaking Romansh; he first learned it in high school, and later worked on the "Dicziunari Rumantsch Grischun," a Romansh dictionary begun in 1904 and still lumbering toward completion.
Amazon slashed Birdfy smart bird feeder cameras to their lowest prices ever for Cyber Monday
These smart bird feeders use connected cameras to capture up-close images and videos of visiting birds. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Birds are difficult to photograph. They move quickly, arrive sporadically, and have an uncanny knack for avoiding the camera. Birdfy's smart bird feeders make it easy to capture photos and videos of your feathered friends with a connected camera.
'It was extremely pornographic': Cara Hunter on the deepfake video that nearly ended her political career
'It was extremely pornographic': Cara Hunter on the deepfake video that nearly ended her political career The Irish politician was targeted in 2022, in the final weeks of her run for office. When Cara Hunter, the Irish politician, looks back on the moment she found out she had been deepfaked, she says it is "like watching a horror movie". The setting is her grandmother's rural home in the west of Tyrone on her 90th birthday, April 2022. "Everyone was there," she says. "I was sitting with all my closest family members and family friends when I got a notification through Facebook Messenger." It was from a stranger.
Interactive Query Answering on Knowledge Graphs with Soft Entity Constraints
Daza, Daniel, Bernardi, Alberto, Costabello, Luca, Gueret, Christophe, Mansoury, Masoud, Cochez, Michael, Schut, Martijn
Methods for query answering over incomplete knowledge graphs retrieve entities that are \emph{likely} to be answers, which is particularly useful when such answers cannot be reached by direct graph traversal due to missing edges. However, existing approaches have focused on queries formalized using first-order-logic. In practice, many real-world queries involve constraints that are inherently vague or context-dependent, such as preferences for attributes or related categories. Addressing this gap, we introduce the problem of query answering with soft constraints. We formalize the problem and introduce two efficient methods designed to adjust query answer scores by incorporating soft constraints without disrupting the original answers to a query. These methods are lightweight, requiring tuning only two parameters or a small neural network trained to capture soft constraints while maintaining the original ranking structure. To evaluate the task, we extend existing QA benchmarks by generating datasets with soft constraints. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods can capture soft constraints while maintaining robust query answering performance and adding very little overhead. With our work, we explore a new and flexible way to interact with graph databases that allows users to specify their preferences by providing examples interactively.
Multi-Modal Scene Graph with Kolmogorov-Arnold Experts for Audio-Visual Question Answering
Fu, Zijian, Lv, Changsheng, Qi, Mengshi, Ma, Huadong
In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Scene Graph with Kolmogorov-Arnold Expert Network for Audio-Visual Question Answering (SHRIKE). The task aims to mimic human reasoning by extracting and fusing information from audio-visual scenes, with the main challenge being the identification of question-relevant cues from the complex audiovisual content. Existing methods fail to capture the structural information within video, and suffer from insufficient fine-grained modeling of multi-modal features. T o address these issues, we are the first to introduce a new multi-modal scene graph that explicitly models the objects and their relationship as a visually grounded, structured representation of the audio-visual scene. Furthermore, we design a Kol-mogorov-Arnold Network (KAN)-based Mixture of Experts (MoE) to enhance the expressive power of the temporal integration stage. This enables more fine-grained modeling of cross-modal interactions within the question-aware fused audio-visual representation, leading to capture richer and more nuanced patterns and then improve temporal reasoning performance. W e evaluate the model on the established MUSIC-A VQA and MUSIC-A VQA v2 benchmarks, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code and model checkpoints will be publicly released.
Vision Bridge Transformer at Scale
Tan, Zhenxiong, Wang, Zeqing, Yang, Xingyi, Liu, Songhua, Wang, Xinchao
We introduce Vision Bridge Transformer (ViBT), a large-scale instantiation of Brownian Bridge Models designed for conditional generation. Unlike traditional diffusion models that transform noise into data, Bridge Models directly model the trajectory between inputs and outputs, creating an efficient data-to-data translation paradigm. By scaling these models to 20B and 1.3B parameters, we demonstrate their effectiveness for image and video translation tasks. To support this scale, we adopt a Transformer architecture and propose a variance-stabilized velocity-matching objective for robust training. Together, these advances highlight the power of scaling Bridge Models for instruction-based image editing and complex video translation.
Pooling Attention: Evaluating Pretrained Transformer Embeddings for Deception Classification
Mamtani, Sumit, Bhure, Abhijeet
Abstract--This paper investigates fake news detection as a downstream evaluation of Transformer representations, bench-marking encoder-only and decoder-only pre-trained models (BERT, GPT -2, Transformer-XL) as frozen embedders paired with lightweight classifiers. Through controlled preprocessing comparing pooling versus padding and neural versus linear heads, results demonstrate that contextual self-attention encodings consistently transfer effectively. BERT embeddings combined with logistic regression outperform neural baselines on LIAR dataset splits, while analyses of sequence length and aggregation reveal robustness to truncation and advantages from simple max or average pooling. In the pre-digital era, the dissemination of information to mass audiences was predominantly controlled by established publishing organizations and media conglomerates that maintained editorial standards and fact-checking processes. The advent of the Internet and the subsequent proliferation of social media platforms have fundamentally transformed this landscape, democratizing information sharing by enabling any individual to broadcast news and content to global audiences with unprecedented speed and scale [6]. While this democratization has fostered greater accessibility to diverse perspectives, it has simultaneously introduced significant challenges to ensuring the validity, authenticity, and reliability of the information being circulated [8].