A fundamental challenge in cognitive neuroscience is understanding how cognition emerges from the interplay between structural connectivity (SC) and dynamic functional connectivity (FC) in the brain. Network neuroscience has emerged as a powerful framework to understand brain function through a holistic perspective on structure-function relationships. In this context, current machine learning approaches typically seek to establish direct mappings between structural connectivity (SC) and functional connectivity (FC) associated with specific cognitive states. However, these state-independent methods often yield inconsistent results due to overlapping brain networks across cognitive states. To address this limitation, we conceptualize to uncover the dendritic coupling mechanism between one static SC and multiple FCs by solving a flow problem that bridges the distribution of SC to a mixed distribution of FCs, conditioned on various cognitive states, along a Riemannian manifold of symmetric positive-definite (SPD) manifold. We further prove the equivalence between flow matching on the SPD manifold and on the computationally efficient Cholesky manifold. Since a spare of functional connections is shared across cognitive states, we introduce the notion of consensus control to promote the shared kinetic structures between multiple FC-to-SC pathways via synchronized coordination, yielding a biologically meaningful underpinning on SC-FC coupling mechanism. Together, we present BrainFlow, a reversible generative model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on not only synthetic data but also large-scale neuroimaging datasets from UK Biobank and Human Connectome Project.

It might not feel all that different from older World Cups--for better or worse. Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary offering robotaxi rides in 11 US metros right now, says it's ready for the FIFA World Cup . Match attendees can catch driverless rides to six of the 16 North American venues: stadiums in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The sprawling football event, expected to attract some 6.5 million visitors to the continent over more than a month, could prove an exciting close-up for Waymo . The company says it's serving half-a-million paid rides a week--paltry stuff compared to the likes of ride-hail giants Uber and Lyft, but more impressive once you remember that the things don't have drivers.

PanTS is a large-scale, multi-institutional dataset curated to advance research in pancreatic CT analysis. It contains 36,390 CT scans from 145 medical centers, with expert-validated, voxel-wise annotations of over 993,000 anatomical structures, covering pancreatic tumors, pancreas head, body, and tail, and 24 surrounding anatomical structures such as vascular/skeletal structures and abdominal/thoracic organs. Each scan includes metadata such as patient age, sex, diagnosis, contrast phase, in-plane spacing, slice thickness, etc. AI models trained on PanTS achieve significantly better performance in pancreatic tumor detection, localization, and segmentation than those trained on existing public datasets. Our analysis indicates that these gains are directly attributable to the 16 larger-scale tumor annotations and indirectly supported by the 24 additional surrounding anatomical structures. As the largest and most comprehensive resource of its kind, PanTS offers a new benchmark for developing and evaluating AI models in pancreatic CT analysis.

Analysis of noninvasive microvascular blood flow can improve the diagnosis, prognosis, and management of many medical conditions, including cardiovascular, peripheral vascular, and sickle cell disease. This paper introduces SAM2Flow, an interactive optical flow estimation model to analyze long Oblique Back-illumination Microscopy (OBM) videos of *in vivo* microvascular flow. Inspired by the Segment Anything Model (SAM2), SAM2Flow enables users to specify regions of interest through user prompts for focused flow estimation. SAM2Flow also incorporates a dual memory attention mechanism, comprising both motion and context memory, to achieve efficient and stable flow estimations over extended video sequences. According to our experiments, SAM2Flow achieves SOTA accuracy in foreground optical flow estimation on both microvascular flow and public datasets, with a fast inference speed of over $20$ fps on $512\times512$ inputs. Based on the temporally robust flow estimation, SAM2Flow demonstrated superior performance in downstream physiological applications compared to existing models. The code and dataset will be published with this paper.

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Trump's Border Crackdown Is Wreaking Havoc on the World Cup Travel bans and other visa issues are creating problems for World Cup participants even before the whistle blows. Even before the first whistle blows, the 2026 World Cup --taking place from June 11 to July 19 across the United States, Canada, and Mexico--already has winners and losers away from the field. Here, amidst denied visas, prolonged checks, and contested entries, a parallel competition is emerging where human rights are at stake. This World Cup was meant to be a global celebration of soccer in North America. For the first time in history, the tournament is being held in three different countries, a move meant to unite the entire continent and turn the World Cup into an even more inclusive event.

Soccer officials already rely on cameras to see who's offside and who sent the ball out of bounds. But during this World Cup, refs will use digital twins of each player to view plays from every angle. At the 2026 World Cup, the refs on the field and the officials on the sidelines will be able to use an abundance of tech to help call penalties, spot offside violations, and make other consequential decisions. The video assistant referee system, known as VAR, and the semi-automated offside technology (SAOT) have been used in soccer for years. But the setup at this summer's World Cup represents some of the most advanced uses of adjudication tech to date--not just in soccer, but across all high-level sports.

Many of the insights hitting soccer pitches today trace back to Jesse Davis and a team of computer scientists open-sourcing tools for some of the sport's trickiest problems. Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally send the ball all the way down the pitch and right out of bounds on the opponent's end. Casual fans might scratch their heads. If you were Jesse Davis, though, you'd know that this play could be a prime setup to score. Davis is a professor of computer science at KU Leuven in Belgium and head of its Sports Analytics Lab, which has been at the vanguard of a data awakening in soccer since its inception more than a decade ago. Though the research group brings machine-learning models to bear on a variety of sports--including basketball, volleyball, and field hockey--nowhere is its impact felt more than on the soccer pitch.

Venues hosting the 2026 World Cup must meet high standards to obtain environmental certifications, but FIFA also requires that they use natural grass, which is water-intensive to maintain. Estadio Banorte, formerly called Azteca stadium, in Mexico City. Because of their scale, soccer stadiums require a fair amount of energy and water. In that time, they also generate large volumes of waste, mainly plastics and food trash. For the 2026 World Cup, the first to be held in three countries in 16 different stadiums, FIFA maintained the requirement that the venues must have LEED environmental certifications, which measure performance in water, energy, and waste management.

Chemist Tim Cernak is using two decades of experience in Big Pharma to try to save Gila monsters, loggerhead sea turtles, and many more creatures. In 2018, after nearly two decades working in Big Pharma, chemist Tim Cernak was ready to put his skills to a new use. For Merck, he'd developed precision therapies for cancer, HIV, and diabetes that could target disease while minimizing harm to healthy cells. But as a lifelong nature lover, he was increasingly concerned about the health of ecosystems and wondered whether his expertise could transfer. Animals, he learned, are often treated with pharmaceuticals formulated for humans, which affect them like old-school cancer drugs: Though intended to kill abnormal cells, they're indiscriminate in the harm they cause. For instance, the standard of care for frogs infected with a deadly skin infection is itraconazole, an antifungal that is often lethal for the amphibian.