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Holding in your sneezes really can hurt you

Popular Science

It's rare, but it happens. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . When I was a kid, the word on the playground was that holding in a sneeze would make your eyeballs pop out of your head.


Oura Ring 5 review: a stunning generational leap for smart rings

The Guardian

The Oura Ring 5 is the smallest, most discreet and best smart ring available. The Oura Ring 5 is the smallest, most discreet and best smart ring available. Tue 30 Jun 2026 02.00 EDTLast modified on Tue 30 Jun 2026 02.02 EDT The Guardianâ s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. Ouraâ s new Ring 5 is a massive upgrade for smart rings, dramatically shrinking in size and weight to bring them right into line with standard wedding bands and other jewellery.


b64401e90a03f04dbfb2b6caf8691d1a-Paper-Position_Paper_Track.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

This position paper argues that real-time generative AI has the potential to become the next wave of addictive digital media, creating a new class of digital content akin to "digital heroin" with severe implications for mental health and youth development. By shortening the content-generation feedback loop to mere seconds, these advanced models will soon be able to hyper-personalize outputs on the fly. When paired with misaligned incentives (e.g., maximizing user engagement), this will fuel unprecedented compulsive consumption patterns with far-reaching consequences for mental health, cognitive development, and social stability. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, from clinical observations of social media addiction to neuroscientific studies of dopamine-driven feedback, we illustrate how real-time tailored content generation may erode user autonomy, foment emotional distress, and disproportionately endanger vulnerable groups, such as adolescents. Due to the rapid advancement of generative AI and its potential to induce severe addictionlike effects, we call for strong government oversight akin to existing controls on addictive substances, particularly for minors. We further urge the machine learning community to act proactively by establishing robust design guidelines, collaborating with public health experts, and supporting targeted policy measures to ensure responsible and ethical deployment, rather than paving the way for another wave of unregulated digital dependence.


The Sperm-Maxxing Bros Are Actually Onto Something

WIRED

Wellness influencers have stumbled onto a huge issue when it comes male fertility, though not every solution they're pitching is good advice. Supplements are "like a religion" for Pachi Paris, a 29-year-old from Miami who works in finance. So when he and his wife started trying to conceive last year, it felt only natural that he started taking pills meant to boost his fertility, to the tune of $250 per month. Six months later, "we found it odd that she's not pregnant yet," Paris said. "We both got a workup done, and it turns out that I was one that had some health issues going on with my sperm."


TabSODA: Tabular Diffusion based Imputation with Skip Pattern Detection and Ordinal Awareness

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Missing data imputation in large-scale surveys faces two challenges that are not well handled by current tabular diffusion methods. First, \emph{structural skips}, cells made inapplicable by questionnaire design, should not be imputed but are often conflated with item nonresponse. Second, \emph{ordinal} responses encode ordered categories, yet most pipelines treat them as nominal levels through one-hot or analog-bit encodings. We introduce \textbf{TabSODA} (\textbf{Tab}ular diffusion with \textbf{S}kip pattern detection and \textbf{O}r\textbf{d}inal \textbf{A}wareness), an Expectation-Maximization (EM)-based diffusion imputer built on the Elucidated Diffusion Model (EDM) framework. TabSODA propagates structural skips through the denoising loss and reverse-time sampler, and represents ordinal variables with cumulative-probit scalar latents while retaining analog-bit encodings for nominal variables. When a codebook skip mask is available, TabSODA uses it directly; otherwise, the TabSODA+SKIP variant estimates the mask from raw responses and questionnaire order using a CART-based skip-pattern miner. On Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) study and the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), two nationally representative U.S.\ surveys, TabSODA reduces ordinal MACE by up to $23.7\%$ and improves categorical accuracy by up to $9\%$ over the strongest baseline across MCAR, MAR, and MNAR masking. The skip miner achieves near-perfect precision on both datasets, allowing TabSODA+SKIP to closely track the codebook-mask variant.


Why the Hantavirus Cruise Ship Outbreak Isn't Likely to Become a Global Crisis

WIRED

Here's What You Need to Know About the Hantavirus While the outbreak aboard a cruise ship in the Atlantic is concerning, the virus isn't easily transmitted through casual contact. Cruises are so closely associated with illness that the highly contagious norovirus is commonly called the "cruise ship virus." But a ship headed for Spain's Canary Islands has attracted global attention due to a rare outbreak of hantavirus that's left three dead. While alarming, health officials and infectious disease experts say the risk to the general public right now is low because hantavirus is less contagious than other respiratory diseases like the coronavirus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic . "This is not Covid, this is not influenza. It spreads very, very differently," Maria Van Kerkhove, director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention at the World Health Organization, said at a press conference on Thursday.


Google Is Rebranding the Fitbit App to 'Google Health'

WIRED

Google is sunsetting Google Fit by year’s end. While Fitbit remains very much alive, the rebranded Google Health app is your one-stop shop for all things health and fitness.


25 Tech Insiders on the Innovations Defining American Life Today

TIME - Tech

Apple's iPhone is unveiled at a press conference in central London in September 2007. When iPhone arrived in 2007, it didn't just change technology. It changed how we live. That same year, TIME named it the Invention of the Year and called it "the phone that forever changed phones." But what mattered most wasn't just what iPhone was, but what it made possible.


The science of hosting the perfect dinner party

Popular Science

You may be using the wrong plates. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. The ideal dinner party size is somewhere between five and eight guests. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. You don't have to be Martha Stewart to host a successful dinner party .


Checklist

Neural Information Processing Systems

For all authors... (a) Do the main claims made in the abstract and introduction accurately reflect the paper's contributions and scope? While MARL algorithms may be implemented for potentially harmful applications, we do not believe this work uniquely enables such applications. If you ran experiments... (a) Did you include the code, data, and instructions needed to reproduce the main experimental results (either in the supplemental material or as a URL)? [Yes] In the supplemental material (b) Did you specify all the training details (e.g., data splits, hyperparameters, how they were chosen)? If you used crowdsourcing or conducted research with human subjects... (a) Did you include the full text of instructions given to participants and screenshots, if applicable? [N/A] (b) Did you describe any potential participant risks, with links to Institutional Review Board (IRB) approvals, if applicable? [N/A] (c) Did you include the estimated hourly wage paid to participants and the total amount spent on participant compensation? Our allocation proposal network and Q network are illustrated in Figures 7 and 8. Low-level action utility functions and mixing networks are similar to those described in Iqbal et al. [10] with the only 13 difference being a replacement of the RNN layers with standard fully connected layers.