Increased defense spending is a boon for Germany's ailing industrial sector. Numerous companies, even those with no previous military experience, are now hoping to get in on the act. Visiting the works of Ilsenburger Grobblech GmbH is like taking a trip back in time. Way back in the 16th century, copper used to be produced at this site in the northern Harz Mountains, not far from eastern Germany' tallest peak, the Brocken. Today, slabs of steel up to 35 centimeters thick are piled up in front of the factory halls, delivered from the blast furnaces and converters of parent company Salzgitter, less than an hour's drive away. What is happening behind the factory walls, though, is part of a new hype that has gripped Germany's crisis-ridden industrial sector. A hype which many are hoping will be enough to revive it.

U.S. cable industry invested $340 billion in broadband networks, but national strategy needed to secure AI dominance over China through better internet infrastructure.

ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok are serving users propaganda from Russian-backed media when asked about the invasion of Ukraine, new research finds. OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, DeepSeek, and xAI's Grok are pushing Russian state propaganda from sanctioned entities--including citations from Russian state media, sites tied to Russian intelligence or pro-Kremlin narratives--when asked about the war against Ukraine, according to a new report. Researchers from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) claim that Russian propaganda has targeted and exploited data voids --where searches for real-time data provide few results from legitimate sources--to promote false and misleading information. Almost one-fifth of responses to questions about Russia's war in Ukraine, across the four chatbots they tested, cited Russian state-attributed sources, the ISD research claims. "It raises questions regarding how chatbots should deal when referencing these sources, considering many of them are sanctioned in the EU," says Pablo Maristany de las Casas, an analyst at the ISD who led the research.

Japan's gaming industry moves to improve accessibility A player uses eye movement to play a game during the Tokyo Game Show held in the city of Chiba in September. The Japanese gaming industry is working to improve video game accessibility by developing equipment and systems that allow people with disabilities affecting their hands to play by using other parts of their body, such as their cheeks, feet and eyes. There were people playing games without using their hands at an area dedicated to accessibility set up for the first time at the Tokyo Game Show in the city of Chiba in September. One of items on display was a special gaming controller system developed mainly by Tokyo-based Technotools for Nintendo's Nintendo Switch game console. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

American companies led by Alphabet's Waymo have drawn much of the limelight with driverless cars deployed almost entirely on home soil. Now that some are beginning to look abroad, they'll have to share roads with Chinese companies quietly making plenty of progress. Baidu's Apollo Go, WeRide and Pony AI are outnumbering their American counterparts with more robotaxi projects progressing from testing to various stages of commercialization, according to a BloombergNEF analysis. While much of that headway is being made domestically, the Chinese companies are standing up operations in places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Singapore, and looking to launch in Germany, the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe. Comparing autonomous-vehicles companies' progress isn't a straightforward exercise -- the industry has been synonymous with false dawns and unfulfilled promises. Players that have looked promising and raised billions at rich valuations have been doomed by singular crashes they never recovered from, or been cut off by benefactors that have lost patience.

'People thought I was a communist doing this as a non-profit': is Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron? In an online landscape characterised by doom and division, the people's encyclopedia stands out - a huge collective endeavour giving everyone free access to the sum of human knowledge. But with Elon Musk branding it'Wokipedia' and AI looming large, can it survive? W ikipedia will be 25 years old in January. Jimmy Wales's daughter will be 25 and three weeks. It's not a coincidence: on Boxing Day 2000 Wales's then wife, Christine, gave birth to a baby girl, but it quickly became clear that something wasn't right. She had breathed in contaminated amniotic fluid, resulting in a life-threatening condition called meconium aspiration syndrome. An experimental treatment was available at the hospital near where they lived in San Diego. Did they want to try it?

In Russia's'blitz' of Ukraine, the question of appeasement is back Following another week of intensive and lethal Russian bombardment of Ukraine's cities, a composite image has been doing the rounds on Ukrainian social media. Underneath an old, black-and-white photo of Londoners queuing at a fruit and vegetable stall surrounded by the bombed-out rubble of the Blitz, a second image - this time in colour - creates a striking juxtaposition. Taken on Saturday, it shows shoppers thronging to similar stalls in a northern suburb of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, while a column of black smoke rises ominously in the background. Bombs can't stop markets, reads the caption linking the two images. The night before, as the city's sleep was interrupted once again by the now all-too-familiar booms of missile and drone strikes, two people were killed and nine others injured.

Yoshihiro Murai, 65, celebrates his victory in the Miyagi gubernatorial election on Sunday night. SENDAI - Yoshihiro Murai held off four other candidates to clinch his sixth term as governor of Miyagi Prefecture in Sunday's gubernatorial election. Murai, an independent candidate who had support from prefectural assembly members of the Liberal Democratic Party, Japan Innovation Party and Komeito, highlighted his achievements as the prefecture's governor spanning five terms, or 20 years. The 65-year-old former chief of the National Governors' Association pledged to enhance productivity by promoting digital transformation using generative artificial intelligence, in anticipation of a further population decline. He successfully fended off Masamune Wada, 51, also an independent candidate, who had been closing in.

Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Will sanctions against Russian oil giants hurt Putin? How much of Europe's oil still comes from Russia? Russian drone attacks on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, early on Sunday killed at least three people and wounded 29 others, according to Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko. The wounded included seven children, Klymenko said.

Accurate and compact representation of signed distance functions (SDFs) of implicit surfaces is crucial for efficient storage, computation, and downstream processing of 3D geometry. In this work, we propose a general learning method for approximating precomputed SDF fields of implicit surfaces by a relatively small number of ellipsoidal radial basis functions (ERBFs). The SDF values could be computed from various sources, including point clouds, triangle meshes, analytical expressions, pretrained neural networks, etc. Given SDF values on spatial grid points, our method approximates the SDF using as few ERBFs as possible, achieving a compact representation while preserving the geometric shape of the corresponding implicit surface. To balance sparsity and approximation precision, we introduce a dynamic multi-objective optimization strategy, which adaptively incorporates regularization to enforce sparsity and jointly optimizes the weights, centers, shapes, and orientations of the ERBFs. For computational efficiency, a nearest-neighbor-based data structure restricts computations to points near each kernel center, and CUDA-based parallelism further accelerates the optimization. Furthermore, a hierarchical refinement strategy based on SDF spatial grid points progressively incorporates coarse-to-fine samples for parameter initialization and optimization, improving convergence and training efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method can represent SDF fields with significantly fewer parameters than existing sparse implicit representation approaches, achieving better accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency. The corresponding executable program is publicly available at https://github.com/lianbobo/SE-RBFNet.git