Well, those little green shoots of recovery I forecast last year have flowered. This year is set to bring tighter scripts, cheaper projects (which is good, because studios can take more chances) and a more enjoyable cinema-going experience all round. On 16 January, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple will deliver (honest) on all those promises exasperatingly kept back in 2025's 28 Years Later . There will be Cillian Murphy reprising his role from 2002's 28 Days Later, plus more from actor Jack O'Connell's "Jimmys", an acrobatic killer cult. There will also be Nia DaCosta in the director's chair - a young, much-lauded talent who not so long ago had the misfortune to helm The Marvels .

Environment Animals Wildlife Spiders Beware, beachgoers: New spider discovered in California's sand dunes Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Just in time for Halloween, researchers have identified a new species of trapdoor spider. The newly discovered is about the size of a quarter, brown, and pretty chunky. It's the fourth known species of trapdoor spiders in California whose habitat is limited to sandy coastal dunes. Female trapdoor spiders are basically vampires .

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are increasingly vital in dynamic domains like online gaming, yet the lack of a dedicated benchmark has impeded standardized evaluation in this area. The core difficulty lies in Dual Dynamics: the constant interplay between game content updates and the shifting focus of the player community. Furthermore, the necessity of automating such a benchmark introduces a critical requirement for player-centric authenticity to ensure generated questions are realistic. To address this integrated challenge, we introduce ChronoPlay, a novel framework for the automated and continuous generation of game RAG benchmarks. ChronoPlay utilizes a dual-dynamic update mechanism to track both forms of change, and a dual-source synthesis engine that draws from official sources and player community to ensure both factual correctness and authentic query patterns. We instantiate our framework on three distinct games to create the first dynamic RAG benchmark for the gaming domain, offering new insights into model performance under these complex and realistic conditions. Code is avaliable at: https://github.com/hly1998/ChronoPlay.

We introduce Open Deep Search (ODS) to close the increasing gap between the proprietary search AI solutions, such as Perplexity's Sonar Reasoning Pro and OpenAI's GPT-4o Search Preview, and their open-source counterparts. The main innovation introduced in ODS is to augment the reasoning capabilities of the latest open-source LLMs with reasoning agents that can judiciously use web search tools to answer queries. Concretely, ODS consists of two components that work with a base LLM chosen by the user: Open Search Tool and Open Reasoning Agent. Open Reasoning Agent interprets the given task and completes it by orchestrating a sequence of actions that includes calling tools, one of which is the Open Search Tool. Open Search Tool is a novel web search tool that outperforms proprietary counterparts. Together with powerful open-source reasoning LLMs, such as DeepSeek-R1, ODS nearly matches and sometimes surpasses the existing state-of-the-art baselines on two benchmarks: SimpleQA and FRAMES. For example, on the FRAMES evaluation benchmark, ODS improves the best existing baseline of the recently released GPT-4o Search Preview by 9.7% in accuracy. ODS is a general framework for seamlessly augmenting any LLMs -- for example, DeepSeek-R1 that achieves 82.4% on SimpleQA and 30.1% on FRAMES -- with search and reasoning capabilities to achieve state-of-the-art performance: 88.3% on SimpleQA and 75.3% on FRAMES.

Recent multi-teacher distillation methods have unified the encoders of multiple foundation models into a single encoder, achieving competitive performance on core vision tasks like classification, segmentation, and depth estimation. This led us to ask: Could similar success be achieved when the pool of teachers also includes vision models specialized in diverse tasks across both 2D and 3D perception? In this paper, we define and investigate the problem of heterogeneous teacher distillation, or co-distillation, a challenging multi-teacher distillation scenario where teacher models vary significantly in both (a) their design objectives and (b) the data they were trained on. We explore data-sharing strategies and teacher-specific encoding, and introduce DUNE, a single encoder excelling in 2D vision, 3D understanding, and 3D human perception. Our model achieves performance comparable to that of its larger teachers, sometimes even outperforming them, on their respective tasks. Notably, DUNE surpasses MASt3R in Map-free Visual Relocalization with a much smaller encoder.

The potential for untrustworthy conversational agents presents a significant threat for covert social manipulation. Taking inspiration from Frank Herbert's "Dune", where the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood uses the Voice for influence, manipulation, and control of people, we explore how generative AI provides a way to implement individualized influence at industrial scales. Already, these models can manipulate communication across text, image, speech, and most recently video. They are rapidly becoming affordable enough for any organization of even moderate means to train and deploy. If employed by malicious actors, they risk becoming powerful tools for shaping public opinion, sowing discord, and undermining organizations from companies to governments. As researchers and developers, it is crucial to recognize the potential for such weaponization and to explore strategies for prevention, detection, and defense against these emerging forms of sociotechnical manipulation.

A new top-grossing film that has received global recognition for its cinematic prowess is now being revered by the most successful director of the century. Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg recently proclaimed Dune: Part Two as a'visual epic' in a new interview, calling it'one of the most brilliant science-fiction films I've ever seen.' Spielberg said his favorite scene in the Blockbuster was watching Timothée Chalamet - who plays Paul Atreides - ride a sandworm. Spielberg has also lavished praise on Denis Villeneuve who directed both Dune films, saying Villeneuve's name will be added to the list of sci-fi filmmakers who have built incredible and unique worlds. 'You have made one of the most brilliant science fiction films I have ever seen,' adding that it'is truly a visual epic and it's also filled with deeply, deeply drawn characters,' Spielberg told Villeneuve in the Director's Cut podcast: Dune: Part Two cleared 82.5 million in its opening weekend, surpassing Oppenheimer which brought in 82.4 million. Since its release, the film has grossed nearly 240 million at the domestic box office and 570 million globally.

Chalamet tells Fox News Digital that Zendaya helped film rehearsals in Hungary. Timothée Chalamet's newest movies have helped him reach record-breaking status. In the late '70s, John Travolta had two top-grossing films come out within eight months of each other. "Saturday Night Fever" came out in December 1977 and "Greece" came out in June 1978. The 28-year-old Chalamet, who was in the recently released movies "Wonka" and "Dune: Part 2," became the first actor since Travolta to lead the top-two domestic grossing films over a time span of eight months, according to Indiewire.

Sign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter. Science fiction has historically been considered a niche genre, one in which far-flung scenarios play out on distant planets. Today, though, such plots are at the center of our media landscape. The hosts are joined by Joshua Rothman, an editor and writer at The New Yorker, who makes the case for science fiction as an extension of the realist novel, tracing the way films like "The Matrix" and "Contagion" have shed new light on modern life. The boundaries between science fiction and reality are increasingly blurred: tech founders like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have cited classic sci-fi texts as inspiration, and terms like "red-pilling" have found their way into our political vernacular.

I have questions about Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two. If the Fremen have lasers, why don't they just shoot the sand harvesters and run away? Why don't they use their sandworms until the last battle? Wouldn't it make more sense to fight the other great houses on Arrakis itself, where they have sandworms, rather than board ships off-world to go off to war? If Paul (Timothée Chalamet) has to invade the galaxy at the end, why bother marrying the daughter of the emperor he just deposed?