I t is traditional for any feature about cosy entertainment at this time of year to mention the nights drawing in, roaring open fires and the desire to curl up in an armchair with something nonthreatening. Well, as familiarity is an important element of cosiness, I'm not going to divert from convention. Here then, are 10 new games you'll be able to settle into the sofa with as the evenings darken and the heating goes on A follow-up to the charming retail puzzle game Strange Horticulture, this one has you filling in as a temporary sales assistant at a store filled with strange artefacts, totems and potions. Customers come in with specific problems and you need to consult your encyclopedias and examine your eerie stock to find the right occult object for them. This is intriguing enough, but all the while you are also drawn into a wider mystery that will envelop and entertain you through many raining evenings.

All civil servants in England and Wales will get practical training in how to use artificial intelligence to speed up their work from this autumn, the Guardian has learned. More than 400,000 civil servants will be informed of the training on Monday afternoon, which is part of a drive by the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden, to overhaul the civil service and improve its productivity. At the same time, the size of the civil service is being reduced by tens of thousands of roles through voluntary redundancy and not replacing leavers. The government said officials would be tasked with figuring how they could use AI technology to streamline their own work wherever possible. Officials are already piloting a package of AI tools called Humphrey – named after the senior civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby from the 1980s TV sitcom Yes, Minister.

Around 50 percent of Irelands rural population relies on unregulated private wells vulnerable to agricultural runoff and untreated wastewater. High national rates of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) and other waterborne illnesses have been linked to well water exposure. Periodic well testing is essential for public health, yet the lack of government incentives places the financial burden on households. Understanding environmental, cognitive, and material factors influencing well-testing behavior is critical. This study employs Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) to simulate policy interventions based on national survey data. The ABM framework, designed for private well-testing behavior, integrates a Deep Q-network reinforcement learning model and Explainable AI (XAI) for decision-making insights. Key features were selected using Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) with 10-fold cross-validation, while SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations) provided further interpretability for policy recommendations. Fourteen policy scenarios were tested. The most effective, Free Well Testing plus Communication Campaign, increased participation to 435 out of 561 agents, from a baseline of approximately 5 percent, with rapid behavioral adaptation. Free Well Testing plus Regulation also performed well, with 433 out of 561 agents initiating well testing. Free testing alone raised participation to over 75 percent, with some agents testing multiple times annually. Scenarios with free well testing achieved faster learning efficiency, converging in 1000 episodes, while others took 2000 episodes, indicating slower adaptation. This research demonstrates the value of ABM and XAI in public health policy, providing a framework for evaluating behavioral interventions in environmental health.

Objective: This study aims to explore a novel deep learning approach for analyzing electroencephalogram (EEG) data and guiding human perceptual states, inspired by the Level of Detail (LOD) theory. The core objective is to improve the accuracy of identifying perceptual states from EEG signals and to provide new avenues for personalized psychological therapy. Methods: The research employs portable EEG devices to collect data, combined with music rhythm signals for analysis. We introduce the LOD theory to dynamically adjust the processing levels of EEG signals, extracting core features related to perception. The software system is developed using the Unity engine, integrating audio materials and MIDI structures, and enabling the integration of EEG data with Unity. The deep learning model includes a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for feature extraction and classification, and a Deep Q-Network (DQN) for reinforcement learning to optimize music rhythm adjustment strategies. Results: The CNN model achieved a 94.05% accuracy in the perceptual state classification task, demonstrating excellent classification performance. The DQN model successfully guided subjects' EEG signals to the target perceptual state with a 92.45% success rate on the validation set, requiring an average of 13.2 rhythm cycles to complete the state guidance. However, subjective feedback from users indicated that approximately 50% of the researchers experienced psychological sensations corresponding to the target state during the rhythm adjustment process, suggesting room for improvement in the system's effectiveness.

Traditionally, visitors to Kyoto in October come for momijigari, the turning of the autumn leaves in the city's picturesque parks. This autumn, however, there is a new draw: a Nintendo museum. The new attraction, which opens on Wednesday, is best described as a chapel of video game nostalgia. Upstairs, Nintendo's many video game consoles, from 1983's Famicom through 1996's Nintendo 64 to 2017's Switch, are displayed reverently alongside their most famous games. On the back wall, visitors can also peer at toys, playing cards and other artefacts from the Japanese company's pre-video-game history, stretching back to its founding as a hanafuda playing card manufacturer in 1889.

As a type of figurative language, an East Asian idiom condenses rich cultural background into only a few characters. Translating such idioms is challenging for human translators, who often resort to choosing a context-aware translation from an existing list of candidates. However, compiling a dictionary of candidate translations demands much time and creativity even for expert translators. To alleviate such burden, we evaluate if GPT-4 can help generate high-quality translations. Based on automatic evaluations of faithfulness and creativity, we first identify Pareto-optimal prompting strategies that can outperform translation engines from Google and DeepL. Then, at a low cost, our context-aware translations can achieve far more high-quality translations per idiom than the human baseline. We open-source all code and data to facilitate further research.

With summer gone and the skies already greying over in preparation for six months of uncontested rain, you may well be thinking more seriously about video games. September and October tend to see the biggest releases of the year, so you can expect many evenings spent hiding from the world while playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 or Mario Party Jamboree. If your gaming set-up is looking a little tired and you want to treat yourself to a serious seasonal upgrade, here are some suggestions. If you have a PS5 or Xbox Series X, you'll want a 4K TV at the very least, but also a model that supports a 120-Hz refresh rate, which provides incredibly smooth, fluid image quality for compatible games. The TV should have at least one HDMI 2.1 port and you'll need a 2.1 HDMI-compatible cable to plug in your console.

From Harry Potter to The Jetsons, flying cars have been staple features of science fiction blockbusters for years. But with these futuristic vehicles rapidly getting closer to becoming a reality, a key question remains – where will they operate? In the hopes of making air travel simpler, Skyports Infrastructure has revealed plans to build the UK's first permanent'vertiport'. The vertiport will be built in Bicester, Oxfordshire, starting this autumn and will serve as a base for electric air taxis. Duncan Walker, chief executive of Skyports, said: 'The tests and trials we conduct at this facility will be instrumental to the future of quiet, electric, vertical flight.'

Elon Musk announced Monday that he'll ban Apple devices from his companies' premises if the iPhone creator goes forward with its planned OpenAI integration. Apple held its annual Worldwide Developer's Conference Monday, and the biggest takeaway was OpenAI's ChatGPT will be paired with Apple's assistant Siri. In one example shown, Siri recommended that the iPhone user consult ChatGPT for further dinner recipe ideas, flagging all the way that these new answers were coming from OpenAI's chatbot and advising users to'check important info for mistakes'. Musk responded to the partnership on X, saying employees and visitors to his companies would'have to check their Apple devices at the door' where they will be stored in a'Faraday cage' - a cage that blocks electromagnetic fields.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida unveiled a plan on Monday to hold a video conference with Group of Seven leaders this autumn to formulate international guidelines and a code of conduct for developers of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Kishida showed the plan in a speech at a special session of the U.N.-sponsored Internet Governance Forum in Kyoto. The theme of the guidelines and code of conduct is part of the Hiroshima AI Process, an initiative for international best practices regarding generative AI, according to the Japanese leader. Kishida also said that the Japanese government's new economic package, planned to be drawn up late this month, will include aid for the development of computational resources, used for processing huge volumes of data needed for AI development and use, and of basic computational models, as well as stepping up the introduction of AI in small businesses and the medical field. The Hiroshima AI Process, which was agreed on at the G7 summit held in Hiroshima in May, also calls for creating international guidelines by the end of the year that will also cover generative AI users.