Media
AI Is Coming for YouTube Creators
At least 15 million videos have been snatched by tech companies. Listen to more stories on the Noa app. W hen Jon Peters uploaded his first video to YouTube in 2010, he had no idea where it would lead. He was a professional woodworker running a small business who decided to film himself making a dining table with some old legs he had found in a barn. It turned out that people liked his candid style, and as he posted more videos, a fan base began to grow.
Scientists are finally learning what's inside mysterious 'halo' barrels submerged off US coast
The suspect in Charlie Kirk's assassination has been captured, FBI director Kash Patel announced MSNBC sparks outrage for'disgusting' Charlie Kirk comments following Utah shooting Tragedy as Charlie Kirk's wife left behind with two young children after conservative activist is fatally shot A DEI mayor, an inconvenient crime and video they never wanted you to see: MAUREEN CALLAHAN knows why the Left has sympathy for that killer... but none for his victim Sweater weather starts here - the cozy, chic pieces from Soft Surroundings you'll actually wear all season We only had one symptom we dismissed... but then we were diagnosed with the rarest form of melanoma Soft-touch prosecutor let felon walk free... before crook'slit Auburn professor's throat in random attack' I tried the 30 cent'miracle chill pill' before a big event.. now I'm taking it for everything Donald Trump and House Republicans lead prayers for Charlie Kirk's family after conservative star is fatally shot Prince Harry says his father King Charles is'great' following their first meeting in 19 months... which was over a cup of tea and just 55 minutes long Liberal media defends thug who killed Ukrainian woman in cold blood: 'This man was hurting' Knifeman accused of stabbing Ukrainian refugee to death gives chilling reason for the attack... as he speaks for the first time from jail on the murder that shocked America Fox News reveals new lineup and elevates star White House reporter who's sparred with Trump Horrific new details of passenger injuries after they were'thrown' around Delta flight during'severe turbulence' Scientists are finally learning what's inside mysterious'halo' barrels submerged off US coast Scientists are just beginning to learn what is inside thousands of mysterious'halo' barrels submerged off the US coast. The barrels were discovered in the deep waters of the San Pedro Basin, near Los Angeles, in 2021. Scientists were initially worried that the barrels could contain DDT, a toxic pesticide that was banned in 1972 due to its serious environmental and health impact. However, a new study now shows that the barrels contain an unknown caustic alkali waste, which is creating eerie halos as it leaches into the sea floor. Using the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) SuBastian, the researchers carefully collected samples at a set distance from barrels with halos.
Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (2nd Gen) review: Subtle never seemed so obvious
The new Gen. 2 QuietComfort Ultra earbuds reinforce everything Bose active noise cancellation does right. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Washington-Dulles airport, red-eye to Berlin, time to kill and batteries to fill. Time was that would force a hard choice, because time was that the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Bluetooth earbuds didn't charge wirelessly. Drop the new QC Ultra Gen. 2 case on the Qi pad, however, and it blinks to life, no awkward adapters or extra plugs required.
Top Japan startup Sakana AI touts nature-inspired tech
David Ha, the head of AI tech company Sakana AI, points at his laptop during an interview at the company's office in Tokyo on Aug. 28. When David Ha started an artificial intelligence company in Japan with his former Google colleague, they had a choice: create another huge, energy-intensive tool like ChatGPT, or go their own way. Since its 2023 launch, the value of their company Sakana AI has soared past $1 billion, making it Japan's fastest startup to reach so-called unicorn status. They're just like collecting the world's data, building a gigantic model, sucking up all this energy, Ha said. 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.
Flotilla headed to Gaza reports second drone attack at Tunisian port
Supporters of Global Sumud Flotilla gather to show support in Sidi Bou Said port, Tunisia, on Wednesday. SIDI BOU SAID, Tunisia - The Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), an international aid initiative to deliver vital supplies to the Gaza Strip, said Wednesday that one of its boats was attacked by a drone at a Tunisian port in the second such strike in two days. The GSF, which is seeking to break Israel's naval blockade and deliver humanitarian aid to war-torn Gaza using civilian boats, said in a statement that all passengers and crew were unharmed. The GSF reported the first attack on Tuesday, saying one of its vessels had been struck by a drone in Tunisian waters at the Sidi Bou Said port. Tunisian authorities said the reports were false. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.
A Systematic Literature Review of Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Techniques, Metrics, and Challenges
Brown, Andrew, Roman, Muhammad, Devereux, Barry
This systematic review of the research literature on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) provides a focused analysis of the most highly cited studies published between 2020 and May 2025. A total of 128 articles met our inclusion criteria. The records were retrieved from ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, ScienceDirect, and the Digital Bibliography and Library Project (DBLP). RAG couples a neural retriever with a generative language model, grounding output in up-to-date, non-parametric memory while retaining the semantic generalisation stored in model weights. Guided by the PRISMA 2020 framework, we (i) specify explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria based on citation count and research questions, (ii) catalogue datasets, architectures, and evaluation practices, and (iii) synthesise empirical evidence on the effectiveness and limitations of RAG. To mitigate citation-lag bias, we applied a lower citation-count threshold to papers published in 2025 so that emerging breakthroughs with naturally fewer citations were still captured. This review clarifies the current research landscape, highlights methodological gaps, and charts priority directions for future research.
Re-Bottleneck: Latent Re-Structuring for Neural Audio Autoencoders
Bralios, Dimitrios, Casebeer, Jonah, Smaragdis, Paris
Neural audio codecs and autoencoders have emerged as versatile models for audio compression, transmission, feature-extraction, and latent-space generation. However, a key limitation is that most are trained to maximize reconstruction fidelity, often neglecting the specific latent structure necessary for optimal performance in diverse downstream applications. We propose a simple, post-hoc framework to address this by modifying the bottleneck of a pre-trained autoencoder. Our method introduces a "Re-Bottleneck", an inner bottleneck trained exclusively through latent space losses to instill user-defined structure. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in three experiments. First, we enforce an ordering on latent channels without sacrificing reconstruction quality. Second, we align latents with semantic embeddings, analyzing the impact on downstream diffusion modeling. Third, we introduce equivariance, ensuring that a filtering operation on the input waveform directly corresponds to a specific transformation in the latent space. Ultimately, our Re-Bottleneck framework offers a flexible and efficient way to tailor representations of neural audio models, enabling them to seamlessly meet the varied demands of different applications with minimal additional training.
SemCAFE: When Named Entities make the Difference Assessing Web Source Reliability through Entity-level Analytics
Shahi, Gautam Kishore, Seneviratne, Oshani, Spaniol, Marc
With the shift from traditional to digital media, the online landscape now hosts not only reliable news articles but also a significant amount of unreliable content. Digital media has faster reachability by significantly influencing public opinion and advancing political agendas. While newspaper readers may be familiar with their preferred outlets political leanings or credibility, determining unreliable news articles is much more challenging. The credibility of many online sources is often opaque, with AI generated content being easily disseminated at minimal cost. Unreliable news articles, particularly those that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, closely mimic the topics and writing styles of credible sources, making them difficult to distinguish. To address this, we introduce SemCAFE, a system designed to detect news reliability by incorporating entity relatedness into its assessment. SemCAFE employs standard Natural Language Processing techniques, such as boilerplate removal and tokenization, alongside entity level semantic analysis using the YAGO knowledge base. By creating a semantic fingerprint for each news article, SemCAFE could assess the credibility of 46,020 reliable and 3,407 unreliable articles on the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our approach improved the macro F1 score by 12% over state of the art methods. The sample data and code are available on GitHub