Will the start of 2026 see a change of fortune for BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton, whose title hopes are fading fast? After Sutton made a strong start to the season, AI has taken charge of the predictions title race, clinching another win last week. It's been a bad start to the new year for me, with AI top of the table, Sutton said. I also lost to my daugher Sophia at cards over Christmas. We played rummy and I think she was cheating - a lot like AI, she was definitely getting some help from somewhere. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For week 20, he takes on singer-songwriter Andrew Cushin, who is a Newcastle fan.

Aston Villa boss Unai Emery had an unhappy 18-month spell in charge of Arsenal that ended in 2019, but can he get the better of his old club on Tuesday? After the abuse he took from Arsenal fans, I'd love nothing more than Emery to go back to the Emirates and win, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. He absolutely didn't deserve that. Some of those fans should take a long, hard look at themselves for the way they mocked him. I hope Villa go there and spank them, just because of that. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For week 19 - which includes the final games of 2025 on Tuesday, 30 December and the first matches of 2026 on New Year's Day - he takes on singer-songwriter Tom A Smith, who is a Sunderland fan.

Arsenal's 10-game winning run was ended by Sunderland before the international break, but will the Premier League leaders bounce back against north London rivals Tottenham on Sunday? I feel like Arsenal are miles ahead of Tottenham at the moment but Spurs boss Thomas Frank will have a plan for this game, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. Frank will try to nullify Arsenal, who have not always been at their scintillating best this season - but Mikel Arteta's side usually still find a way to win. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For week 12, he takes on singer Olly Murs, who is a Manchester United fan . Murs' new album, Knees Up, is out on Friday.

'He lives for the goals' - robot Haaland returns from malfunction Is Erling Haaland a big fan of Peter Crouch - or is he actually programmed like a robot? That may - or not be - a question posed after Manchester City's impressive Premier League victory over in-form Bournemouth on Sunday. The Norway striker malfunctioned for only the second time this season when he failed to score in last weekend's loss at Aston Villa, but he was back to being a goal machine with a ruthlessly efficient first-half double against the Cherries. If he is hiding any nuts and bolts under those blonde locks of his, Haaland did prove he was still human by missing a couple of chances to complete his hat-trick. But his scary statistics this season have left many in awe of the 25-year-old's prowess in front of goal, prompting a robot dance to mark his opener in the win that took his side up to second place.

Is this the beginning of the rise of the machines? Last week saw AI triumph outright for the first time in our Premier League predictions battle, although BBC Sport's own expert human, Chris Sutton, points out he is still top of the overall league this season. This time, as well as AI, Sutton faces a different hi-tech challenger. His guest opponent for this weekend's fixtures is a computer game: Football Manager 26, the latest edition of the long-running management simulation series. The FM26 game engine has played out this weekend's matches and you can see its results, including goalscorers and red cards, below. Miles Jacobson, the studio director of Sports Interactive, the company behind Football Manager, also joined in.

Childhood vaccination is a cornerstone of public health, yet disparities in vaccination coverage persist across England. These disparities are shaped by complex interactions among various factors, including geographic, demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural (GDSC) factors. Previous studies mostly rely on cross-sectional data and traditional statistical approaches that assess individual or limited sets of variables in isolation. Such methods may fall short in capturing the dynamic and multivariate nature of vaccine uptake. In this paper, we conducted a longitudinal machine learning analysis of childhood vaccination coverage across 150 districts in England from 2021 to 2024. Using vaccination data from NHS records, we applied hierarchical clustering to group districts by vaccination coverage into low- and high-coverage clusters. A CatBoost classifier was then trained to predict districts' vaccination clusters using their GDSC data. Finally, the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) method was used to interpret the predictors' importance. The classifier achieved high accuracies of 92.1, 90.6, and 86.3 in predicting districts' vaccination clusters for the years 2021-2022, 2022-2023, and 2023-2024, respectively. SHAP revealed that geographic, cultural, and demographic variables, particularly rurality, English language proficiency, the percentage of foreign-born residents, and ethnic composition, were the most influential predictors of vaccination coverage, whereas socioeconomic variables, such as deprivation and employment, consistently showed lower importance, especially in 2023-2024. Surprisingly, rural districts were significantly more likely to have higher vaccination rates. Additionally, districts with lower vaccination coverage had higher populations whose first language was not English, who were born outside the UK, or who were from ethnic minority groups.

A coastal survey using drones in Dorset has laid bare the scale of the UK's litter problem. The drones flew over beaches in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole across seven days in the May half term this year. Eighteen sites along the seafront in the region were monitored between May 27 and June 2, covering an overall area of 475,000 square metres. The technology found more than 1.5 tonnes of rubbish left behind by visitors – a third of which were glass bottles when measured by volume. In all, more than 123,000 items were identified, up from 22,266 in a drone survey of the same areas during the March lockdown – marking an astonishing 454 per cent increase due to relaxing lockdown measures.

A pilot scheme in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) will see drones used to help councils reduce litter. BCP Council is partnering with the environmental charity Hubbub, startup Ellipsis Earth and fast food brand McDonald's – which is funding the trial – to use drone data to inform the placement of bins, street cleaning schedules and behaviour change campaigns around litter. The partners have called the pilot "the most scientifically robust litter survey ever undertaken in the UK". Drone imagery is processed by Ellipsis Earth software to automatically and rapidly detect discarded litter items and quantify them by type and brand to create litter heatmaps. This data, along with expert analysis and recommendations, will be shared with BCP council, Hubbub and McDonald's, to help them better understand and prevent littering.

"I thought at first it was a sign of insanity, speaking to a little thing like that and him talking back!" says 92-year-old John Winward of the first time he tested a smart speaker. The former head teacher was one of a group of residents at an elderly care home in Bournemouth, England who recently took part in a half-year academic experiment designed to test if artificial intelligence voice technologies could help tackle loneliness. He was a fast convert. "I was so surprised... it was such fun!" he says, explaining that several months later he remains an active user of his Google Home device. He asks the speaker for news and weather updates, music and audio book tips and crossword puzzle clues.