Advanced in organs on chips, digital twins, and AI are ushering in a new era of research and drug development. Earlier this week, the UK's science minister announced an ambitious plan: to phase out animal testing. Testing potential skin irritants on animals will be stopped by the end of next year, according to a strategy released on Tuesday . By 2027, researchers are "expected to end" tests of the strength of Botox on mice. And drug tests in dogs and nonhuman primates will be reduced by 2030. The news follows similar moves by other countries.

The Asahi, along with the Nikkei and the Yomiuri Shimbun, filed a lawsuit with the Tokyo District Court against Perplexity in August. "Journalism should not tolerate freeloading," said Shiro Nakamura, who is also the chair of the Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association (Nihon Shinbun Kyokai, or NSK), during a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan on Friday. Nakamura said Japan's publishers across the board were concerned about the impact generative AI is having on the news business. 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.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a pivotal technique for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on specific tasks. However, prevailing RL fine-tuning methods predominantly rely on PPO and its variants. Though these algorithms are effective in general RL settings, they often exhibit suboptimal performance and vulnerability to distribution collapse when applied to the fine-tuning of LLMs.

Three people have died and at least 26 others injured in a wave of Russian drone and missile strikes on Kyiv, Ukrainian officials say. Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko described strikes, which caused explosions and fires in residential buildings across the city, as massive. Kyiv's energy infrastructure was also damaged, leaving some buildings in the north-east without heat, he said. Ukraine's air force reported several other regions across the country were also being targeted. Russia's defence ministry said it had downed or intercepted 216 Ukrainian drones that had targeted its industrial facilities and disrupted air travel, according to Reuters news agency.

I t seems like an anachronism now, in this age of live service " forever games ", that the annual release of a new Call of Duty title is still considered a major event. But here is Black Ops 7, a year after its direct predecessor, and another breathless bombard of military shooting action. This time it is set in a dystopian 2035 where a global arms manufacturer named the Guild claims to be the only answer to an apocalyptic new terrorist threat - but are things as clearcut as they seem? The answer, of course, is a loudly yelled "noooo!" Black Ops is the paranoid, conspiracy-obsessed cousin to the Modern Warfare strand of Call of Duty games, a series inspired by 70s thrillers such as The Parallax View and The China Syndrome, and infused with'Nam era concerns about rogue CIA agents and bizarre psy-ops.

Health Nutrition Gastronomists study 100 years of menus to reveal food's political power Menus from 457 diplomatic meals served in Portugal reveal how food can make and break alliances. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A nice, warm meal is one of the great unifiers. Food communicates everything from love and tradition like a home cooked dinner with all of the trimmings and even political stances. At a state dinner, food has the power to cultivate understanding across cultures-or potentially create tensions.

To help address these issues, a natural approach is to consider games with special structures. In this paper, we focus on congestion games.

This work was done when the second author was jointly with Google Research.