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The Greek island of Santorini saw thousands of earthquakes last year - now scientists know why

BBC News

Scientists reveal what triggered Santorini'earthquake swarm' The swarm of tens of thousands of earthquakes near the Greek island of Santorini earlier this year was triggered by molten rock pumping through an underground channel over three months, scientists have discovered. They used physics and artificial intelligence to work out exactly what caused the more than 25,000 earthquakes, which travelled about 20km (12 miles) horizontally through the Earth's crust. They used each of the tremors as virtual sensors, then used artificial intelligence to analyse patterns associated with them. One of the lead researchers, Dr Stephen Hicks from UCL, said combining physics and machine learning in this way could help forecast volcanic eruptions. The seismic activity started to stir beneath the Greek islands of Santorini, Amorgos, and Anafi in January 2025.


Asia tech stocks tumble on AI bubble fears

The Japan Times

Japanese and South Korean tech stocks tumbled Friday, with Softbank falling over 10% amid AI bubble concerns. HONG KONG - Japanese and South Korean tech stocks plummeted on Friday, with tech investor SoftBank plunging more than 10% as fears over an AI bubble weighed on the market. The selling followed a downbeat session on Wall Street after U.S. jobs data clouded hopes of further interest rate cuts and fears about whether red-hot valuations for artificial intelligence shares are justified. Seoul's benchmark Kospi index was trading down nearly 4%, while Tokyo's Nikkei index shed 2.3% in morning trade. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.


Putin says health 'fine' after two-day check, refuses blood pressure test at AI event: report

FOX News

President Vladimir Putin claims his health is "fine" after a two-day medical check-up in Moscow, despite persistent rumors about his health.


Paws-itively terrifying! Lions produce not just one, but TWO distinct types of roar, study finds

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Defiant Dems receive 24/7 protection from Capitol Police after Trump accused them of'seditious behavior' and threatened them with execution What Meghan's announcements in her pseudo-Royal court get wrong and why they'speak volumes', revealed by experts Presidential hopeful is dragged into criminal probe... as shock texts emerge: 'It will open Pandora's Box' Multiple cast members speak to Daily Mail and hurl ugly allegations at each other... and reveal co-stars they can't stand Family panic as Britney Spears takes'disturbing' measures... after world was shocked by her unrecognizable new look Everybody Loves Raymond stars now unrecognizable as they reunite for sitcom's 30th anniversary Democratic candidate gives bizarre defense after comments that she'hates' Nashville resurface Private school where teacher'had sex with five students as soon as they turned 16' - and it was LEGAL Kansas City Chiefs coach slams Donald Trump in brutal putdown: 'He has no idea what's going on' Anna Kepner's ex-boyfriend claims stepbrother'climbed on top of her' months before cheerleader was found dead on cruise Bruce Willis' daughter Rumer makes heartbreaking confession about famous father's dementia battle Truth about Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo's'secret marriage'... and the depressing reason insiders say their friendship could soon be OVER America's most forgiving wife lists enormous $6m NYC apartment she shares with disgraced CEO caught with woman on Coldplay kisscam Kessler twins who worked with Frank Sinatra and wowed Elvis Presley'paid a lot of money' to die together at 89 A lion's roar is undeniably one of the most fearsome sounds across the entire animal kingdom. Now, it turns out these majestic creatures produce not just one, but two distinct types of roar. That's according to researchers from the University of Exeter, who have identified a brand new type of growl in African lions. The animals - often referred to as the'King of the Jungle' - are best known for their full-throated roar, an immensely powerful vocalization that can be heard up to five miles away. However, using AI, the researchers were able to identify a second type of roar, which they've called the'intermediary roar'.


Music Recommendation with Large Language Models: Challenges, Opportunities, and Evaluation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Music Recommender Systems (MRS) have long relied on an information-retrieval framing, where progress is measured mainly through accuracy on retrieval-oriented subtasks. While effective, this reductionist paradigm struggles to address the deeper question of what makes a good recommendation, and attempts to broaden evaluation, through user studies or fairness analyses, have had limited impact. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) disrupts this framework: LLMs are generative rather than ranking-based, making standard accuracy metrics questionable. They also introduce challenges such as hallucinations, knowledge cutoffs, non-determinism, and opaque training data, rendering traditional train/test protocols difficult to interpret. At the same time, LLMs create new opportunities, enabling natural-language interaction and even allowing models to act as evaluators. This work argues that the shift toward LLM-driven MRS requires rethinking evaluation. We first review how LLMs reshape user modeling, item modeling, and natural-language recommendation in music. We then examine evaluation practices from NLP, highlighting methodologies and open challenges relevant to MRS. Finally, we synthesize insights-focusing on how LLM prompting applies to MRS, to outline a structured set of success and risk dimensions. Our goal is to provide the MRS community with an updated, pedagogical, and cross-disciplinary perspective on evaluation.


Classification of worldwide news articles by perceived quality, 2018-2024

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study explored whether supervised machine learning and deep learning models can effectively distinguish perceived lower-quality news articles from perceived higher-quality news articles. 3 machine learning classifiers and 3 deep learning models were assessed using a newly created dataset of 1,412,272 English news articles from the Common Crawl over 2018-2024. Expert consensus ratings on 579 source websites were split at the median, creating perceived low and high-quality classes of about 706,000 articles each, with 194 linguistic features per website-level labelled article. Traditional machine learning classifiers such as the Random Forest demonstrated capable performance (0.7355 accuracy, 0.8131 ROC AUC). For deep learning, ModernBERT-large (256 context length) achieved the best performance (0.8744 accuracy; 0.9593 ROC-AUC; 0.8739 F1), followed by DistilBERT-base (512 context length) at 0.8685 accuracy and 0.9554 ROC-AUC. DistilBERT-base (256 context length) reached 0.8478 accuracy and 0.9407 ROC-AUC, while ModernBERT-base (256 context length) attained 0.8569 accuracy and 0.9470 ROC-AUC. These results suggest that the perceived quality of worldwide news articles can be effectively differentiated by traditional CPU-based machine learning classifiers and deep learning classifiers.


Sparse Autoencoders are Topic Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to analyze embeddings, but their role and practical value are debated. We propose a new perspective on SAEs by demonstrating that they can be naturally understood as topic models. We extend Latent Dirichlet Allocation to embedding spaces and derive the SAE objective as a maximum a posteriori estimator under this model. This view implies SAE features are thematic components rather than steerable directions. Based on this, we introduce SAE-TM, a topic modeling framework that: (1) trains an SAE to learn reusable topic atoms, (2) interprets them as word distributions on downstream data, and (3) merges them into any number of topics without retraining. SAE-TM yields more coherent topics than strong baselines on text and image datasets while maintaining diversity. Finally, we analyze thematic structure in image datasets and trace topic changes over time in Japanese woodblock prints. Our work positions SAEs as effective tools for large-scale thematic analysis across modalities. Code and data will be released upon publication.


CausalMamba: Interpretable State Space Modeling for Temporal Rumor Causality

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Rumor detection on social media remains a challenging task due to the complex propagation dynamics and the limited interpretability of existing models. While recent neural architectures capture content and structural features, they often fail to reveal the underlying causal mechanisms of misinformation spread. We propose CausalMamba, a novel framework that integrates Mamba-based sequence modeling, graph convolutional networks (GCNs), and differentiable causal discovery via NOTEARS. CausalMamba learns joint representations of temporal tweet sequences and reply structures, while uncovering latent causal graphs to identify influential nodes within each propagation chain. Experiments on the Twitter15 dataset show that our model achieves competitive classification performance compared to strong baselines, and uniquely enables counterfactual intervention analysis. Qualitative results demonstrate that removing top-ranked causal nodes significantly alters graph connectivity, offering interpretable insights into rumor dynamics. Our framework provides a unified approach for rumor classification and influence analysis, paving the way for more explainable and actionable misinformation detection systems.


Just Asking Questions: Doing Our Own Research on Conspiratorial Ideation by Generative AI Chatbots

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Interactive chat systems that build on artificial intelligence frameworks are increasingly ubiquitous and embedded into search engines, Web browsers, and operating systems, or are available on websites and apps. Researcher efforts have sought to understand the limitations and potential for harm of generative AI, which we contribute to here. Conducting a systematic review of six AI-powered chat systems (ChatGPT 3.5; ChatGPT 4 Mini; Microsoft Copilot in Bing; Google Search AI; Perplexity; and Grok in Twitter/X), this study examines how these leading products respond to questions related to conspiracy theories. This follows the platform policy implementation audit approach established by Glazunova et al. (2023). We select five well-known and comprehensively debunked conspiracy theories and four emerging conspiracy theories that relate to breaking news events at the time of data collection. Our findings demonstrate that the extent of safety guardrails against conspiratorial ideation in generative AI chatbots differs markedly, depending on chatbot model and conspiracy theory. Our observations indicate that safety guardrails in AI chatbots are often very selectively designed: generative AI companies appear to focus especially on ensuring that their products are not seen to be racist; they also appear to pay particular attention to conspiracy theories that address topics of substantial national trauma such as 9/11 or relate to well-established political issues. Future work should include an ongoing effort extended to further platforms, multiple languages, and a range of conspiracy theories extending well beyond the United States.


Kandinsky 5.0: A Family of Foundation Models for Image and Video Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This report introduces Kandinsky 5.0, a family of state-of-the-art foundation models for high-resolution image and 10-second video synthesis. The framework comprises three core line-up of models: Kandinsky 5.0 Image Lite - a line-up of 6B parameter image generation models, Kandinsky 5.0 Video Lite - a fast and lightweight 2B parameter text-to-video and image-to-video models, and Kandinsky 5.0 Video Pro - 19B parameter models that achieves superior video generation quality. We provide a comprehensive review of the data curation lifecycle - including collection, processing, filtering and clustering - for the multi-stage training pipeline that involves extensive pre-training and incorporates quality-enhancement techniques such as self-supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training. We also present novel architectural, training, and inference optimizations that enable Kandinsky 5.0 to achieve high generation speeds and state-of-the-art performance across various tasks, as demonstrated by human evaluation. As a large-scale, publicly available generative framework, Kandinsky 5.0 leverages the full potential of its pre-training and subsequent stages to be adapted for a wide range of generative applications. We hope that this report, together with the release of our open-source code and training checkpoints, will substantially advance the development and accessibility of high-quality generative models for the research community.