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Scampi and chips could soon be off the menu! Woke scientists call for Brits to ditch the seaside staple - amid fears it carries a 'hidden climate cost'

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Conniving couple whose greedy'pervert' plot'drove innocent disabled man to suicide' given stunningly short sentences Obama Center asks for 100 unpaid volunteers despite hiring the former president's'close friend' as CEO on $740K Harry Styles shares gay kiss with SNL star in wild opening monologue as he addresses'queerbaiting' claims Housing nightmare in America's'best state to buy a home' as banks suddenly seize thousands of properties Insufferable blowhard Stephen Colbert is being taken out like the trash... and thank God! What he's done is so diabolical: MAUREEN CALLAHAN JFK Jr's mortifying night of phone sex... day Sarah Jessica Parker ditched her underwear to seduce him in public... and the girlfriend he REALLY wanted to marry: All the women before Carolyn Mass cancellations as Southwest Airlines pulls out of two of America's biggest airports Truth about'super secretive' Michael B. Jordan's love life... and real reason he is perpetually single: Years of private'heartache' and'loneliness' laid bare Beloved young dad and inspiring female'Air Force superstar' among US heroes killed in Iran mission crash as all six are named Insane moment NYC cab plows into pedestrians... and the miracle that saved them from death Caitlin Clark goes viral for bizarre behavior after Team USA's win over Italy: 'What are you doing? We fled Trump to chase the REAL American dream in the most idyllic European hotspot... here's why we're coming back to a red state I looked like a monster after a car accident burned off my face... but a pioneering face transplant gave me my life back. Furious flower farm owner blasts'feral' customers after they trampled tulips to get perfect photos Harry and Meghan hit back at new book claims she was accused by Camilla of'brainwashing' him - dismissing accusations as'deranged conspiracy' Extramarital sex with witches, cursed bloodlines and possessed politicians: DC's chief exorcist reveals the potent stench of evil among America's elite Iran's deadly drone arsenal is a'wake-up call for America': Expert warns US defenses may be unprepared for swarm attacks Iran's foreign minister admits Islamic Republic is receiving military support from Russia and China Hollywood costume designer names VILE A-Listers including pervert James Bond star, slob female sitcom icon... and details the hilarious evil of Shannen Doherty Scampi and chips could soon be off the menu! Woke scientists call for Brits to ditch the seaside staple - amid fears it carries a'hidden climate cost' Woke scientists are calling for Brits to take scampi and chips off the menu, amid fears that the seaside staple carries a'hidden climate cost'. Scampi is a traditional chip shop treat made from the breaded and fried tails of Norway lobsters, also known as langoustines.


We Strapped on Exoskeletons and Raced. There's One Clear Winner

WIRED

WIRED put the latest consumer exoskeletons from Dnsys and Hypershell in a head-to-head test on a pro athletic track. Personal exoskeletons were everywhere at CES 2026 . There were ambitious designs from newcomers WiRobotics, Sumbu, Ascentiz, and Dephy, while Skip Mo/Go was back promoting its long-overdue tech trousers. Dnsys (pronounced Deen-sis), a comparatively well established name, had some new launches to tease, Hypershell was back with its top model, and Ascentiz had us sprinting across the show floor . An exoskeleton is a relatively new class of wearable device designed to enhance, support, or assist human movement, strength, posture, or even physical activity.


'Living rocks' suck up a lot of carbon

Popular Science

Super tough microbialites are some of the oldest evidence of life on Earth. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Among the tricky carnivorous plants, great white shark-killing orca whales, and other remarkable flora and fauna that call South Africa home is a remarkable group of "living rocks." Called microbialites, these communities are similar to coral reefs and are built up by microbes. These tiny living organisms absorb and release dissolved minerals into more solid rock-like forms.


Biodiversity: A missing link in combating climate change

MIT Technology Review

With healthy populations of animals that disperse seeds, tropical forests can absorb up to four times more carbon. Deforestation, hunting, and wildlife trade threaten the hornbill's ability to disperse seeds throughout Asian tropical forests. A lot of attention has been paid to how climate change can reduce biodiversity. Now MIT researchers have shown that the reverse is also true: Loss of biodiversity can jeopardize regrowth of tropical forests, one of Earth's most powerful tools for mitigating climate change. Combining data from thousands of previous studies and using new tools for quantifying interconnected ecological processes, the researchers analyzed numerous tropical sites where deforestation was being followed by natural regrowth, focusing on the role of animals such as birds and monkeys that spread plant seeds by eating them in one place and then defecating someplace else. Evan Fricke, a research scientist in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the lead author of a paper on the work, has studied such animals for 15 years, showing that without their role, trees have lower survival rates and a harder time keeping up with environmental changes.


CarBoN: Calibrated Best-of-N Sampling Improves Test-time Reasoning

Tang, Yung-Chen, Chen, Pin-Yu, Cavallaro, Andrea

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Allocating more computation during inference time (test-time scaling) improves language model performance, especially for reasoning tasks. To address this inefficiency, we introduce a general test-time calibration framework that adaptively modifies the model toward high-reward reasoning paths, with theoretical guarantees of improving the lower bound of expected reward under finite sampling, all without large language model (LLM) retraining. Within this framework, we propose CarBoN (Calibrated Best-of-N), a two-phase method that first explores the solution space and then learns a calibration of the logits via an input-specific temperature T and additive shift vector δ, guiding generation toward more reliable reasoning. Experiments on MA TH-500 and AIME-2024 show that CarBoN improves efficiency, with up to 4 fewer rollouts to reach the same accuracy, while often achieving higher accuracy under fixed budgets. We also analyze the complementary roles of T and δ in balancing output diversity and correctness, and demonstrate that the framework also generalizes to step-level sampling strategies such as beam search. Test-time scaling (TTS) is a practical alternative to ever-larger training, enabling models to "think longer" at inference by allocating additional computation to reasoning. As these studies suggest, TTS allows smaller LLMs to match or even outperform larger ones, providing a more cost-efficient and flexible inference strategy. Despite these benefits, simply increasing test-time compute does not guarantee optimal performance. Recent work has shown that inference without effective verification is often sub-optimal, as models may spend additional computation on low-quality reasoning paths (Setlur et al., 2025). To overcome this inefficiency, we propose a general test-time calibration framework that strategically reallocates the inference budget by leveraging feedback from a verifier or reward model during inference. Rather than treating generation as a fixed forward pass, the model adaptively steers toward high-reward (likely correct) regions, improving reasoning reliability under a fixed query budget. The reward is defined as the inverse distance to the target plus noise.


A Collision With Another Planet Could Have Allowed for Life on Earth

WIRED

Analysis by researchers at the University of Bern suggests that water and other volatile compounds arrived on Earth from outer space--specifically via a collision with a Mars-sized planet billions of years ago. Many scientists believe that in its infancy, Earth collided with another world the size of Mars, and that instead of being destroyed, it was transformed, incorporating the mass of that foreign body to become the planet we know. Recent research adds another layer of relevance to that hypothesized cosmic event: Scientists believe that without that other body, the basic conditions for life to emerge on Earth might never have appeared. A team from the University of Bern in Switzerland argues that, due to its proximity to the sun, the proto-Earth that existed before this potential collision lost the volatile elements essential to form complex molecules. Any hydrogen, carbon, or sulfur, their analysis suggests, evaporated in just the first 3 million years after proto-Earth's formation.


A Proof of Theorem

Neural Information Processing Systems

For the first argument, we use induction. For the second part, we it is essentially a Coupon Collector's problem. The colors represent the target environment. The environment is shown in Figure 6. The results are shown in Figure 5. Forward} to reach the target grid (green).


Assessing the Chemical Intelligence of Large Language Models

Runcie, Nicholas T., Deane, Charlotte M., Imrie, Fergus

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models are versatile, general-purpose tools with a wide range of applications. Recently, the advent of "reasoning models" has led to substantial improvements in their abilities in advanced problem-solving domains such as mathematics and software engineering. In this work, we assessed the ability of reasoning models to perform chemistry tasks directly, without any assistance from external tools. We created a novel benchmark, called ChemIQ, consisting of 816 questions assessing core concepts in organic chemistry, focused on molecular comprehension and chemical reasoning. Unlike previous benchmarks, which primarily use multiple choice formats, our approach requires models to construct short-answer responses, more closely reflecting real-world applications. The reasoning models, OpenAI's o3-mini, Google's Gemini Pro 2.5, and DeepSeek R1, answered 50%-57% of questions correctly in the highest reasoning modes, with higher reasoning levels significantly increasing performance on all tasks. These models substantially outperformed the non-reasoning models which achieved only 3%-7% accuracy. We found that Large Language Models can now convert SMILES strings to IUPAC names, a task earlier models were unable to perform. Additionally, we show that the latest reasoning models can elucidate structures from 1D and 2D 1H and 13C NMR data, with Gemini Pro 2.5 correctly generating SMILES strings for around 90% of molecules containing up to 10 heavy atoms, and in one case solving a structure comprising 25 heavy atoms. For each task, we found evidence that the reasoning process mirrors that of a human chemist. Our results demonstrate that the latest reasoning models can, in some cases, perform advanced chemical reasoning.


Why the climate promises of AI sound a lot like carbon offsets

MIT Technology Review

There are reasonable arguments to suggest that AI tools may eventually help reduce emissions, as the IEA report underscores. But what we know for sure is that they're driving up energy demand and emissions today--especially in the regional pockets where data centers are clustering. So far, these facilities, which generally run around the clock, are substantially powered through natural-gas turbines, which produce significant levels of planet-warming emissions. Electricity demands are rising so fast that developers are proposing to build new gas plants and convert retired coal plants to supply the buzzy industry. The other thing we know is that there are better, cleaner ways of powering these facilities already, including geothermal plants, nuclear reactors, hydroelectric power, and wind or solar projects coupled with significant amounts of battery storage. The trade-off is that these facilities may cost more to build or operate, or take longer to get up and running.


The Download: an intro to AI, and ChatGPT's bias

MIT Technology Review

What's new: A company called Aspen Aerogels, which makes materials to go inside EVs' batteries to stop fires spreading, just got a 670.6 million loan commitment from the US Department of Energy. The company will use the money to finish building a new factory in Georgia to produce its materials. Why it matters: As more EVs hit the roads, concern is growing about the relatively rare but dangerous problem of battery fires. Materials like Aspen Aerogels' thermal barriers could help improve safety. MIT Technology Review Narrated: Inside the quest to engineer climate-saving "super trees" Biotech startup Living Carbon is trying to design trees that grow faster and grab more carbon than their natural peers, as well as trees that resist rot, keeping that carbon out of the atmosphere.