What it's like to be in the middle of a conspiracy theory (according to a conspiracy theory expert) It's something of a familiar cycle by now: Tragedy hits; rampant misinformation and conspiracy theories follow. It's often even more acute in the case of a natural disaster, when conspiracy theories about what "really" caused the calamity run right into culture-war-driven climate change denialism. Put together, these theories obscure real causes while elevating fake ones. I've studied these ideas extensively, having spent the last 10 years writing about conspiracy theories and disinformation as a journalist and researcher. I've covered everything from the rise of QAnon to whether Donald Trump faked his assassination attempt. I've written three books, testified to Congress, and even written a report for the January 6th Committee.

Is a Robot Vacuum Worth It? It's not for everyone, but sometimes my robot vacuum is my only friend. Every single day--weekend, weekday, rain or shine--whichever robot vacuum I'm currently testing starts running at 9 am. I heave a sigh of relief and continue with whatever else I was doing, content that at least f*cking chore in my house is getting done. When I first started testing robot vacuums eight years ago, it sometimes seemed like more trouble than it was worth. I cleaned up the floor .

Google Chrome now offers enhanced autofill for passports, driver's licenses and vehicle registration, joining existing options for passwords and payment details.

Watch: Russia's AI robot falls seconds after being unveiled Footage shows the moment Russia's first anthropomorphic robot, AIdol, fell just seconds after its debut at a technology event in Moscow. The robot was being led on stage to the soundtrack from the film'Rocky', before it suddenly lost its balance and fell. Assistants could then be seen scrambling to cover it with a cloth - which ended up tangling in the process. Catherine Connolly has'never believed more' in the spirit of Ireland New Irish President Catherine Connolly says she has been given a powerful mandate to articulate a vision for a new republic. The online shopping giant opened its first physical shop in the world - in a Parisian department store.

Trump backflips on visas for foreign workers as he stuns Laura Ingraham with brutal take on America's workforce Trump bristles as Laura Ingraham awkwardly asks if '24 karat gold' adorning Oval Office is from Home Depot Bill de Blasio's secret lover REVEALED: Latina politician'thinks she's won the jackpot'... but friends spill wild details on scandalous tryst Cloud hangs over Don Jr's socialite girlfriend Bettina Anderson... as insiders reveal the MAGA titan she was originally chasing Trump'obesity ban' preventing overweight foreigners from entering the US revealed in bombshell leak Michelle Obama's greatest fear is being seen as her true self. Well, let's cut the bottomless victimhood and race-baiting... here it is: MAUREEN CALLAHAN Sydney Sweeney's movie flop sparks cruel remark about her body from plus-size model James Van Der Beek forced to auction off Dawson's Creek keepsakes amid'expensive' colon cancer treatments JFK's grandson Jack Schlossberg, 32, announces bid for congress as he responds to critics who call him'crazy' Trump pardons trail runner facing charges for'illegal' shortcut during run Colorado woman's body is found feet from her home seven years after she disappeared CHERYL HINES: The day I met Donald Trump in a private hotel suite... and broke out in hives Diddy seen in first prison mugshot... and once-groomed rapper has now gone completely gray Can YOU spot the fake faces? Can YOU spot the fake faces? Can you tell the difference between a real face and one generated by artificial intelligence ( AI)? According to a new study, the answer is probably'no'.

Gina Rinehart is an honorary life member of the IPA and'a generous contributor to many causes,' IPA executive director, Scott Hargreaves, says. Gina Rinehart is an honorary life member of the IPA and'a generous contributor to many causes,' IPA executive director, Scott Hargreaves, says. Australia's richest person, Gina Rinehart has previously donated to Institute of Public Affairs but thinktank won't say if she remains a donor A thinktank known for its rejection of the climate crisis and a conservation group that has opposed renewable energy projects refused to identify their funders during a fiery Senate inquiry into climate and energy misinformation on Wednesday. Chair of the committee, Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson, asked Rainforest Reserves Australia's vice-president, Steven Nowakowski, who had funded nine full-page newspaper advertisements promoting an open letter attacking a shift to renewable energy and promoting nuclear. Nowakowski said they were paid for by donations, some coming from the signatories of the letter, but would not name them.

The Munich court found that OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, was not entitled to use song lyrics to train its artificial intelligence without licenses, and that the artists who wrote them are entitled to compensation. The Munich court found that the maker of ChatGPT was not entitled to use song lyrics to train its artificial intelligence without licenses, and that the artists who wrote them are entitled to compensation. 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.

Volker Turk, United Nations high commissioner for human rights, attends the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Sept. 8. | REUTERS Geneva - A few tech giants accumulating massive power coupled with artificial intelligence is posing huge global rights challenges and needs regulation, the U.N. human rights chief said in an interview. Amid increasing worries over threats to democracy and with a growing number of countries at risk of sliding towards autocracy, Volker Turk said a key concern was the seeming unbridled power of a small number of technology companies. In an interview this week at the UN rights office overlooking Lake Geneva, he pointed to how seven or eight big tech companies now boast more wealth than the entire economies of even industrialized nations. 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.

The diffusion of ideas and language in society has conventionally been described by S-shaped models, such as the logistic curve. However, the role of sub-exponential growth -- a slower-than-exponential pattern known in epidemiology -- has been largely overlooked in broader social phenomena. Here, we present a piecewise power-law model to characterize complex growth curves with a few parameters. We systematically analyzed a large-scale dataset of approximately one billion Japanese blog articles linked to Wikipedia vocabulary, and observed consistent patterns in web search trend data (English, Spanish, and Japanese). Our analysis of 2,963 items, selected for reliable estimation (e.g., sufficient duration/peak, monotonic growth), reveals that 1,625 (55%) diffusion patterns without abrupt level shifts were adequately described by one or two segments. For single-segment curves, we found that (i) the mode of the shape parameter $α$ was near 0.5, indicating prevalent sub-exponential growth; (ii) the peak diffusion scale is primarily determined by the growth rate $R$, with minor contributions from $α$ or the duration $T$; and (iii) $α$ showed a tendency to vary with the nature of the topic, being smaller for niche/local topics and larger for widely shared ones. Furthermore, a micro-behavioral model of outward (stranger) vs. inward (community) contact suggests that $α$ can be interpreted as an index of the preference for outward-oriented communication. These findings suggest that sub-exponential growth is a common pattern of social diffusion, and our model provides a practical framework for consistently describing, comparing, and interpreting complex and diverse growth curves.

End-to-end speech-to-speech (S2S) dialogue systems have recently garnered increasing research attention for their lower latency and more natural integration of nonverbal cues such as emotion and speaker identity. However, these systems face key challenges, particularly in incorporating external knowledge, a capability commonly addressed by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in text-based large language models (LLMs). The core difficulty lies in the modality gap between input speech and retrieved textual knowledge, which hinders effective integration of information. To address this issue, we propose a novel end-to-end RAG framework that directly retrieves relevant textual knowledge from speech queries. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the performance of end-to-end S2S dialogue systems while achieving higher retrieval efficiency. Although the overall performance still lags behind the SOTA cascaded models, our framework offers a promising direction for enhancing knowledge integration in end-to-end S2S systems. Our code and dataset are released.