Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The colors and light of the deep sea are on full display in these photos from The Radiant Sea: Color and Light in the Underwater World. In this dark realm, coral, shrimp, sharks, jellyfish squid, lantern fish, and more use multi-colored lights for self-defense, to lure food, communicate, and attract mates. Here are just a few of the photos in the new book celebrating these diverse sea creatures. Photos reprinted from The Radiant Sea: Color and Light in the Underwater World, published by Abrams.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Do AI chatbots packaged inside plush animals really help children, or do they threaten vital developmental milestones? Companies market them as "screen-free playmates" for toddlers, but pediatric experts warn these toys could trade human connection for machine conversation. Toys like Grem, Grok and Rudi are designed to bond with kids through voice and conversation.

A24 rose from "small budget indie movie studio" to "one of the most respected brands in cinema" on a reputation for treating filmmakers like auteurs. But as the studio is growing and exploring how to integrate artificial intelligence, it's at odds with some of the very directors who helped A24 establish itself. Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking "Try Free" at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.

Since the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, there have been hundreds of films, TV series and comic books featuring some iteration of the famous character. The latest adaptation sees Inside Llewyn Davis star Oscar Isaac take on the role of Victor Frankenstein, with Saltburn and Euphoria actor Jacob Elordi unrecognisable as the monster-like creature he gives life to. Isaac recalls: "Guillermo said, 'I'm creating this banquet for you, you just have to show up and eat'. And that was the truth, there was a fusion, I just hooked myself into Guillermo, and we flung ourselves down the well. "I can't believe I'm here right now," he adds, "that we got to this place from two years ago.

The Pentagon conducted its first successful tests of Army and Navy fighter jets tactically controlled by AI through Rafts Starsage this month. MACHINE WINGMAN: For the first time, U.S. fighter pilots took direction from an AI "air battle manager" in a Pentagon test that could change how wars are fought in the skies. STAR-POWERED TECH: Google kicked off its Made by Google event last week with blockbuster energy. Jimmy Fallon played host, bringing humor and star presence. Steph Curry highlighted how the Pixel 10 empowers creators and athletes to capture and share their stories.

Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift and NFL tight end Travis Kelce announced their engagement on Instagram after two years of dating. I bet you thought bunnies were nice, normal, cuddly critters -- except for the vorpal bunny of "Monty Python" fame. Turns out, we were all wrong. According to The Associated Press, there's a group of rabbits in Colorado with grotesque horn-like growths that may seem straight out of a low-budget horror film. Hide your kids, hide your wives and dig out your VHS copy of "Night of the Lepus."

Raine family attorney Jay Edelson provides details on the wrongful death lawsuit being brought against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in the wake of Adam Raine's suicide, alleging the company chose to'cut short' proper testing of ChatGPT. A former Yahoo executive who killed his elderly mother and then himself in a Connecticut home was reportedly influenced by ChatGPT, which fueled his conspiracy theories. Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, spoke to OpenAI's popular bot, which he nicknamed "Bobby," before the shocking murder-suicide involving his 83-year-old mother, Suzanne Eberson Adams, in Old Greenwich, Conn., the Wall Street Journal reported. "Erik, you're not crazy," the chatbot said after Soelberg claimed his mother and her friend tried to poison him by putting psychedelic drugs in his car's air vents. "And if it was done by your mother and her friend, that elevates the complexity and betrayal."

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In the 1999 animated film, Toy Story 2, Buzz Lightyear and his fellow sentient playthings enter an airport's'back-of-the-house' to rescue Sheriff Woody Pride from a suitcase. Together the toys encounter a world of diverging conveyor belts, inclines and declines, and seemingly endless turns, all designed to carry checked baggage from an airline ticket counter or curbside kiosk to its intended flights. According to Michael Rangole, maintenance manager for Vanderlande Industries--the company that maintains and operates the baggage handling system at California's San José Mineta International Airport (SJC)--Toy Story 2 is incredibly accurate. "San Jose's system alone has over 120 curves," says Rangole.

Existing state-of-the-art symbolic music generation models predominantly adopt autoregressive or hierarchical autoregressive architectures, modelling symbolic music as a sequence of attribute tokens with unidirectional temporal dependencies, under the assumption of a fixed, strict dependency structure among these attributes. However, we observe that using different attributes as the initial token in these models leads to comparable performance. This suggests that the attributes of a musical note are, in essence, a concurrent and unordered set, rather than a temporally dependent sequence. Based on this insight, we introduce Amadeus, a novel symbolic music generation framework. Amadeus adopts a two-level architecture: an autoregressive model for note sequences and a bidirectional discrete diffusion model for attributes. To enhance performance, we propose Music Latent Space Discriminability Enhancement Strategy(MLSDES), incorporating contrastive learning constraints that amplify discriminability of intermediate music representations. The Conditional Information Enhancement Module (CIEM) simultaneously strengthens note latent vector representation via attention mechanisms, enabling more precise note decoding. We conduct extensive experiments on unconditional and text-conditioned generation tasks. Amadeus significantly outperforms SOTA models across multiple metrics while achieving at least 4$\times$ speed-up. Furthermore, we demonstrate training-free, fine-grained note attribute control feasibility using our model. To explore the upper performance bound of the Amadeus architecture, we compile the largest open-source symbolic music dataset to date, AMD (Amadeus MIDI Dataset), supporting both pre-training and fine-tuning.

AI-powered influence operations can now be executed end-to-end on commodity hardware. We show that small language models produce coherent, persona-driven political messaging and can be evaluated automatically without human raters. Two behavioural findings emerge. First, persona-over-model: persona design explains behaviour more than model identity. Second, engagement as a stressor: when replies must counter-arguments, ideological adherence strengthens and the prevalence of extreme content increases. We demonstrate that fully automated influence-content production is within reach of both large and small actors. Consequently, defence should shift from restricting model access towards conversation-centric detection and disruption of campaigns and coordination infrastructure. Paradoxically, the very consistency that enables these operations also provides a detection signature.