Poodle crossbreeds have grown overwhelmingly popular, sparking controversy in dog parks and kennel clubs alike. The features of doodles such as Peaches (above), a goldendoodle, have become the canine equivalent of Instagram face. Meet the Breeds, the American Kennel Club's annual showcase of purebred dogs, took place over two eye-wateringly cold days in early February at the Javits Center, in Manhattan. About a hundred and fifty of the two hundred and five varieties recognized as official breeds by the A.K.C., the long-standing authority in the U.S. dog world, were in attendance for the public to ogle, fondle, and coo "So cute!" to, including the basset fauve de Bretagne, a hunting hound from France that's one of three newly recognized breeds recently allowed into the purebred pantheon. Some of the dogs had competed in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show earlier in the week, and past champions had their ribbons on display. In spite of the frigid weather, pavilions hosting the more popular breeds--the pug, the Doberman pinscher, the Great Dane, the St. Bernard--were packed. Lesser-known varieties, such as the saluki, the Löwchen, and the Lapponian herder, drew sparser crowds. There were exhibition spaces for each breed, and on the back walls were three adjectives supposedly describing that particular type of dog's temperament. There is, in fact, no evidence that temperament is consistent within a breed, but the idea is deeply rooted in dogdom. I stopped to caress the velvety ear leather of a pharaoh hound ("Friendly, Smart, Noble"), a sprinting breed once used to hunt rabbits in Malta; accept kisses from a Portuguese water dog, bred to assist with retrieving tackle ("Affectionate, Adventurous, Athletic"); and have my photograph taken with a Leonberger, a German breed from the town of Leonberg, in southwest Germany ("Friendly, Gentle, Playful"). No one was supposed to be openly selling dogs, but, if you asked, the breeders would share their information. Excluding what are known as companion dogs, like the Leonberger, most of the animals at the show were designed for a purpose that is no longer required of them. In Great Britain, foxhounds are legally barred from chasing foxes. Consider the fate of the otterhound, an ancient variety with a noble heritage which was once used in the U.K. to hunt river otters, which were prized for their thick fur and disliked by wealthy landowners because they ate fish in their stocked ponds.

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How did you arrive at this research area?

As the legal war over how to regulate prediction markets rages on, financial institutions are embracing the industry anyway. When Troy Dixon first suggested incorporating prediction markets into the electronic trading platform where he works, he was met with incredulity. "People told us we were crazy," Dixon, Tradeweb's cohead of global markets, tells WIRED. But after the company announced it was partnering with Kalshi in February, Dixon says, the mood changed dramatically. "We've been inundated with calls," he says.

'100 Video Calls Per Day': Models Are Applying to Be the Face of AI Scams Dozens of Telegram channels reviewed by WIRED include job listings for "AI face models." The (mostly) women who land these gigs are likely being used to dupe victims out of their money. "I can speak fluent English, I can speak good Chinese, I also speak Russian and Turkish," the glamorous, 24-year-old Uzbekistani woman explains in a selfie-style video made for recruiters. Angel had arrived in the Cambodian city of Sihanoukville that day, she said, and was ready to start work immediately. Those impressive language skills, however, have likely been put to use as part of elaborate " pig-butchering " scams targeting Americans.

Could Iran be using China's BeiDou system? The United States and Israel continue to carry out attacks as the war with Iran enters its 17th day. Iran has retaliated by launching missile and drone barrages towards Israel and by attacking neighbouring Gulf countries. Unlike the June 2025 strikes, which US President Donald Trump said curbed Iran's nuclear capabilities, the current conflict has spread across at least a dozen countries, closed the Strait of Hormuz - the world's major oil artery - and killed more than 2,300 people in the region. Al Jazeera tracks how events have panned out over the past 16 days.

The evolution of biological sequences, such as proteins or DNAs, is driven by the three basic edit operations: substitution, insertion, and deletion. Motivated by the recent progress of neural network models for biological tasks, we implement two neural network architectures that can treat such edit operations. The first proposal is the edit invariant neural networks, based on differentiable Needleman-Wunsch algorithms. The second is the use of deep CNNs with concatenations. Our analysis shows that CNNs can recognize star-free regular expressions, and that deeper CNNs can recognize more complex regular expressions including the insertion/deletion of characters. The experimental results for the protein secondary structure prediction task suggest the importance of insertion/deletion. The test accuracy on the widely-used CB513 dataset is 71.5%, which is 1.2-points better than the current best result on non-ensemble models.

Could Iran be using China's BeiDou system? Iran war: What is happening on day 17 of US-Israel attacks? Israel launched a new wave of attacks on Tehran as the US-Israel war on Iran entered its 17th day on Monday. Escalations continue in the Gulf region, where authorities suspended flights at Dubai international airport after a drone incident sparked a fire nearby. Dubai-based Emirates announced later that it was resuming limited flights, with several planned routes cancelled for the day.

Could Iran be using China's BeiDou system? The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has announced diversion of some flights from the Dubai international airport, one of the world's busiest, after a drone attack sparked a fire near the facility, as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia also reported intercepting drones and missiles. The Dubai Media Office on Monday said civil defence teams had "successfully contained the fire resulting from impact to one of the fuel tanks in the vicinity" of the airport, noting that no injuries had been reported so far. The Dubai Civil Aviation Authority, meanwhile, said it was temporarily suspending flights at the airport "as a precautionary measure to ensure the safety of all passengers and staff". It did not say when they expected flights to resume.

Beyond local convolution networks, we explore how to harness various external human knowledge for endowing the networks with the capability of semantic global reasoning.