Whenever I fantasise about a couple of hours of uninterrupted relaxation during the chilly winter months, my mind immediately conjures up images of curling up on the sofa with a deliciously good book. And when summer eventually comes around, just swap the location to a sun lounger in the back garden (or somewhere more exotic). So with 2026 nearly upon us, join me for an eclectic taste of a few literary delights worth feasting upon over the next 12 months. It's the final instalment of Oseman's hit graphic novel series which has followed the lives of Nick and Charlie, two teenage boys who fall for each other at school. Along with their friends, we've followed all the ups and downs of their relationship as they navigated family drama, homophobia and mental health issues, alongside the joy of first love.

In this work, we propose that reasoning in knowledge graph (KG) networks can be guided by surprise minimization. Entities that are close in graph distance will have lower surprise than those farther apart. This connects the Free Energy Principle (FEP) from neuroscience to KG systems, where the KG serves as the agent's generative model. We formalize surprise using the shortest-path distance in directed graphs and provide a framework for KG-based agents. Graph distance appears in graph neural networks as message passing depth and in model-based reinforcement learning as world model trajectories. This work-in-progress study explores whether distance-based surprise can extend recent work showing that syntax minimizes surprise and free energy via tree structures.

We introduce HARPER, a novel dataset for 3D body pose estimation and forecast in dyadic interactions between users and Spot, the quadruped robot manufactured by Boston Dynamics. The key-novelty is the focus on the robot's perspective, i.e., on the data captured by the robot's sensors. These make 3D body pose analysis challenging because being close to the ground captures humans only partially. The scenario underlying HARPER includes 15 actions, of which 10 involve physical contact between the robot and users. The Corpus contains not only the recordings of the built-in stereo cameras of Spot, but also those of a 6-camera OptiTrack system (all recordings are synchronized). This leads to ground-truth skeletal representations with a precision lower than a millimeter. In addition, the Corpus includes reproducible benchmarks on 3D Human Pose Estimation, Human Pose Forecasting, and Collision Prediction, all based on publicly available baseline approaches. This enables future HARPER users to rigorously compare their results with those we provide in this work.

Last autumn, Christa, a 32-year-old from Florida with a warm voice and a slight southern twang, was floundering. She had lost her job at a furniture company and moved back home with her mother. Her nine-year relationship had always been turbulent; lately, the fights had been escalating and she was thinking of leaving. She didn't feel she could be fully honest with the therapist she saw once a week, but she didn't like lying, either. Nor did she want to burden her friends: she struggles with social anxiety and is cautious about oversharing. So one night in October she logged on to character.ai From a list of possible attributes, she made her bot "caring", "supportive" and "intelligent".

Autonomous vehicles could be on UK roads as soon as 2026, the transport secretary has said, as ministers seeks to capture as much as £42bn of the international self-driving market within the coming decade. "This technology exists, it works, and what we're doing is putting in place the proper legislation so that people can have full confidence in the safety of this technology," Mark Harper told BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Wednesday. Asked if people would be able to travel in self-driving vehicles "with your hands off the wheel, doing your emails" in 2026, Harper replied: "Yes, and I think that's when companies are expecting – in 2026, during that year – that we'll start seeing this technology rolled out." Responding to a question by the former Top Gear presenter James May – who was Today's guest editor – about why the government was supporting the development of autonomous driving, Harper claimed there were "a few" reasons. He said: "I think it will actually improve road safety. We already have a very good road safety record in Britain but there are still several thousand people a year killed on our roads. "It's a big economic opportunity for Britain to get what will be a big global share of market.

The National Eating Disorder Association (Neda) has taken down an artificial intelligence chatbot, "Tessa", after reports that the chatbot was providing harmful advice. Neda has been under criticism over the last few months after it fired four employees in March who worked for its helpline and had formed a union. The helpline allowed people to call, text or message volunteers who offered support and resources to those concerned about an eating disorder. Members of the union, Helpline Associates United, say they were fired days after their union election was certified. The union has filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.

Christen Harper, co-winner of the 2021 Swim Search, was named co–Rookie of the Year with Katie Austin following her 2022 issue appearance. The model is featured in the 2023 issue of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit. Christen Harper and Jared Goff found love in a not-so-hopeless place. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model and the Detroit Lions quarterback met on Raya, a dating app favored by celebrities. The couple was first linked in 2019.

This story is part of Future Tense Fiction, a monthly series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives. When I get home from work at 6:00, the light is fading, and I see my sons and their little friend playing in the street, two white boys and a Black boy throwing a foam football back and forth. I pull around the corner and they scatter, Oliver running one way while Jameson and the neighbor kid run the other. At the last minute, though, Jameson changes his mind, dropping the football and dashing across to his brother's side of the street. I slam to a halt, the bumper almost touching him. My heart throbs in my jaw: so close. Then, just as I release the brake, the neighbor kid runs across, too, and I have to stomp to a stop a second time. Don't any of you have common sense?" Through the unrolled window I see them all staring at me with wide eyes. "What is wrong with your ...

Valerie Harper is an excellent actress with a strong background and a long list of accomplishments. She has demonstrated her ability and variety as an actress over the course of a career spanning more than six decades. Do you want to learn more about her greatest professional successes and achievements? Just a few of her accomplishments are listed below: - Harper played Rhoda Morgenstern in the popular television series "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." The seven-season program was a numerous award winner, with Harper winning three Golden Globes for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.

To doctors, pajama time means homework. In fact, it's a common phrase describing the nighttime ritual of finishing up clinical notes about the patients they saw earlier that day. As demands for notes and data to chronicle patient interactions from hospital administration and insurance industry payers have increased, the amount of time physicians spend on the computer has squeezed their already tight schedules. A 2017 study published in Annals of Family Medicine found that primary care physicians spend nearly six hours a day interacting with their electronic health records systems during and after clinic hours. Amid pandemic burnout, the stress is enough for doctors to hand over the work of writing clinical notes to an AI-based tool, even if it could create patient data privacy risks and medical errors.