An explosion at a fireworks shop in central China's Hubei province has killed at least 12 people, state media reported, marking the second deadly blast linked to fireworks as the country celebrates the Lunar New Year . The explosion tore through the shop in Xiangyang on Wednesday afternoon. Officials said five children and seven adults died in the explosion. The victims included the shop owner and customers who had been buying fireworks for holiday celebrations. Some had travelled from other areas to visit relatives during the festive period .

We thank reviewers for their valuable comments. We respond to the main concerns below. Similar to that in Zhang et al. [31], we chose 10k block ResNet to stress the We will rephrase L243 to better express this. Derivative of weights depend on this term due to the chain rule. We will make this explicit in the revised manuscript.

A research team has successfully imaged a nova in high resolution--and the images suggest that the nova was not a single, impulsive explosion. The Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA Array) at Georgia State University has generated detailed images of the early stages of two nova explosions that were detected in 2021. Through near-infrared interferometry, a process that combines light from multiple telescopes, the CHARA Array was able to capture in high resolution the rapidly changing conditions of their early post-explosion phase. A nova is an astronomical phenomenon that occurs in a binary system when a white dwarf strips its companion star of hydrogen-rich gas, causing a thermonuclear runaway reaction on the white dwarf's surface. The name derives from the sudden brightening that makes it appear as though a new star has appeared in the night sky.

Trump says US hit'big facility' linked to alleged Venezuelan drug boats Donald Trump has said the US has carried out a strike on a dock area linked to alleged Venezuelan drug boats. The US president said there had been a major explosion where they load the boats up with drugs - but did not give more details. Venezuela's government is yet to respond. The explosion was caused by a drone strike carried out by the CIA, CNN and the New York Times reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. If confirmed, it would be the first known US operation inside Venezuela.

Three people - including two police officers - have been killed in an explosion in Moscow, Russian authorities have said. Two traffic police officers saw a suspicious individual near a police car on the city's Yeletskaya Street, and when they approached the suspect to detain him, an explosive device was detonated, Russia's Investigative Committee has said. The two police officers died from their injuries, along with another individual who was standing nearby. The attack comes two days after a senior Russian general was killed in a car bombing in the capital on Monday. Lt Gen Fanil Sarvarov died after an explosive device - which had been planted under a car - was detonated.

Science Space Deep Space Space Telescope Two neutron stars may have formed the first known'superkilonova' The historic explosion was 1.3 billion light-years away from Earth. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A double blast of dying stars may be the first observed case of a long-hypothesized, never proven "superkilonova." Although astronomers are still searching for concrete answers, a study published in may detail the historic explosion about 1.3 billion light-years from Earth. Most of the universe's massive stars end their lives in a blaze of glory as supernovae, but that's not always the case.

New images of two novae are'like going from a grainy black-and-white photo to high-definition video.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The recent deaths of two white dwarf stars are challenging our understanding of both novae and the powerful physics underlying star death. According to astronomer John Monnier, the initial analysis of these often dramatic novae offers an "extraordinary leap forward" for the field. "The fact that we can now watch stars explode and immediately see the structure of the material being blasted into space is remarkable," said the University of Michigan astronomer and a co-author of a study published on December 5 in the journal .

Ensuring the safety of embodied AI agents during task planning is critical for real-world deployment, especially in household environments where dangerous instructions pose significant risks. Existing methods often suffer from either high computational costs due to preference alignment training or over-rejection when using single-agent safety prompts. To address these limitations, we propose MADRA, a training-free Multi-Agent Debate Risk Assessment framework that leverages collective reasoning to enhance safety awareness without sacrificing task performance. MADRA employs multiple LLM-based agents to debate the safety of a given instruction, guided by a critical evaluator that scores responses based on logical soundness, risk identification, evidence quality, and clarity. Through iterative deliberation and consensus voting, MADRA significantly reduces false rejections while maintaining high sensitivity to dangerous tasks. Additionally, we introduce a hierarchical cognitive collaborative planning framework that integrates safety, memory, planning, and self-evolution mechanisms to improve task success rates through continuous learning. We also contribute SafeAware-VH, a benchmark dataset for safety-aware task planning in VirtualHome, containing 800 annotated instructions. Extensive experiments on AI2-THOR and VirtualHome demonstrate that our approach achieves over 90% rejection of unsafe tasks while ensuring that safe-task rejection is low, outperforming existing methods in both safety and execution efficiency. Our work provides a scalable, model-agnostic solution for building trustworthy embodied agents.

In 1181, Egyptian, Chinese, and Japanese scholars documented a cosmic explosion. A scan of an Arabic manuscript of the dīwān of Ibn Sanā' al-Mulk dating back to 1181-1182 (left). The Annual perseid meteor seen in the sky on August 14, 2023. The meteors have a radiant bordering on Cassiopeia and Camelopardalis (right). Fischer et al. 2025, Astronomical Notes (left).

Is the fall of Pokrovsk inevitable? Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Russian drones struck two central districts - Slobidskyi and Osnovyansk - in Ukraine's second largest city Kharkiv, injuring five people in an apartment building and triggering a fire, authorities said. Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said 22 residents had been evacuated from one section of the damaged apartment building while another drone struck an area outside a medical facility, injuring a doctor and damaging the building and nearby cars. The Kharkiv region's governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said 11 drones were deployed in the attack and seven people were injured in total.