Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. If you've ever wondered whose addresses Charles Darwin was sure to keep tabs on--or even a few rat poison recipes--you're in luck. A digitized edition of the famed naturalist's personal address book is available online for the first time. "It's incredible that this little treasure-trove of details by Darwin has remained unpublished until now," NUS science historian John van Wyhe said in a statement . "It offers fascinating new insights into his life and the way he worked."

Analogical reasoning is at the core of human cognition, serving as an important foundation for a variety of intellectual activities. While prior work has shown that LLMs can represent task patterns and surface-level concepts, it remains unclear whether these models can encode high-level relational concepts and apply them to novel situations through structured comparisons. In this work, we explore this fundamental aspect using proportional and story analogies, and identify three key findings. First, LLMs effectively encode the underlying relationships between analogous entities; both attributive and relational information propagate through mid-upper layers in correct cases, whereas reasoning failures reflect missing relational information within these layers. Second, unlike humans, LLMs often struggle not only when relational information is missing, but also when attempting to apply it to new entities. In such cases, strategically patching hidden representations at critical token positions can facilitate information transfer to a certain extent. Lastly, successful analogical reasoning in LLMs is marked by strong structural alignment between analogous situations, whereas failures often reflect degraded or misplaced alignment. Overall, our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit emerging but limited capabilities in encoding and applying high-level relational concepts, highlighting both parallels and gaps with human cognition.

Charles Darwin chatting with students about evolution, primary school pupils seeing their writing transformed into images, Luton reimagined as a cool automobile – artificial intelligence is invading schools across England in surprising ways. While Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, in January called for a "digital revolution" involving AI in schools, it has already begun in places such as Willowdown primary school in Bridgwater, Somerset. Matt Cave, Willowdown's head teacher, said his pupils improve their descriptive writing by feeding their work into an AI client to generate images. "All of a sudden they've got all these pictures from different people's descriptions, and they can then discuss with their classmates whether that was the image they expected to be in the reader's head," Cave said. "It was really stimulating and thought-provoking for them to have a different audience."

Two centuries after Charles Darwin put the theory forward, a new study finally shows that birds living near the equator are more colourful. Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the amount of colour in photos of over 24,000 preserved birds from the Natural History Museum's collection. Tropical birds living near the equator are roughly 30 per cent more colourful than non-tropical birds living nearer the poles, the scientists found, but they don't know exactly why. The long-held theory, first suspected by Charles Darwin and other naturalists in the 18th and 19th centuries, hasn't been proven until now, the experts say. Research from the University of Sheffield found tropical birds living near the equator are roughly 30 per cent more colourful than non-tropical birds living nearer the poles.

Men who only briefly catch a glimpse of a woman are much more likely to overestimate how attractive she is than a woman glimpsing a man, a study reveals. Researchers, led by Murdoch University, in Perth Australia, worked with nearly 400 volunteers, asking them to rate the attractiveness of people of the opposite-sex from a blurry image, and then from a clear image. The results showed that on average men overestimate women's attractiveness, whereas on average women underestimate men's attractiveness. If you've been having trouble finding love on dating apps, you might want to try dating one of your friends. A study looked at data from just under 2,000 couples of different demographics in Canada.

We present the Open Predicate Query Language (OPQL); a method for constructing a virtual KB (VKB) trained entirely from text. Large Knowledge Bases (KBs) are indispensable for a wide-range of industry applications such as question answering and recommendation. Typically, KBs encode world knowledge in a structured, readily accessible form derived from laborious human annotation efforts. Unfortunately, while they are extremely high precision, KBs are inevitably highly incomplete and automated methods for enriching them are far too inaccurate. Instead, OPQL constructs a VKB by encoding and indexing a set of relation mentions in a way that naturally enables reasoning and can be trained without any structured supervision. We demonstrate that OPQL outperforms prior VKB methods on two different KB reasoning tasks and, additionally, can be used as an external memory integrated into a language model (OPQL-LM) leading to improvements on two open-domain question answering tasks.

Cyber security vendor Sophos is invoking the spirit of famed English evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin to rally the security industry around its vision for connected cyber defence, opening the company up to working with APIs and other third parties to tackle sophisticated threats. Former Sophos product SVP Dan Schiappa, who is now the company's chief innovation officer, said the industry should take a joined-up approach to applying artificial intelligence to security decisions. Speaking with Computerworld UK, Schiappa explained how the company's internally named'Darwin Project' evolved from its previous work. "About four years ago we introduced the concept of'synchronised security' and this is where security products speak directly to one another, and share information," he said during a telephone interview. "The simplest example was, if we saw a compromise at an endpoint, it would share that information to the firewall and then the firewall would eliminate that endpoint from being able to talk to the outside world."

The theory of natural selection is a masterpiece, probably the most compelling idea ever. If you haven't read Charles Darwin, then The Genius of Charles Darwin is an uncommonly good television documentary written and presented by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins uses the term "Selfish Gene" as a means of expressing the gene-centered view of evolution in his book "Selfish Gene". From the gene's point of view, evolutionary success ultimately depends on leaving behind the maximum number of copies of itself in the population. It reveals that, in such a competition, the more efficient replicators increase in number at the expense of their less efficient competitors.

The Google Home smart speaker has finally made it to the UK, bringing the company's always-listening voice assistant into direct competition with the incumbent Amazon Echo and its own assistant, Alexa. But is Google's best worth buying? Artificially intelligent voice assistants are the new battleground between the big US tech companies and while Google is no stranger with voice search and Google Now being available on Android smartphones for years, it was beaten into US and then UK households by Amazon and its hit Echo speaker. Google Home is a wifi-connected, voice-controlled smart speaker capable of playing music, answering questions and controlling other devices about the home. Inside awaits Assistant – Google's virtual assistant – the same Google Assistant present in many Android smartphones, including the Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy S8 and others.

If you are among the scant 33% of U.S. adults who believe that humans and other living things evolved solely by a process of natural selection, it might be time to put your money where your mouth is. No, this is not a political fundraising pitch. It's a notice of the impending sale, by auction, of a piece of scientific history -- a signed manuscript page from the concluding chapter of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species." Written in the compressed, right-slanting script of Darwin himself, the sheet is numbered "245" in the upper right-hand corner, and would go on to become page 514 of the latest, 3rd edition of his landmark tome. It was likely written in 1859, when the English biologist was about 50 years old.