Sam Fender has won the 2025 Mercury Prize for his third album, People Watching, a steely-eyed dissection of working-class life in the north of England. The singer looked stunned when his name was announced. I didn't think that was going to happen at all, he told the BBC as he came off stage. I've spent the last 10 minutes crying. Fender beat the likes of Pulp and Wolf Alice - both former winners of the £25,000 prize for the best British or Irish album of the year - at a star-studded ceremony in Newcastle's Utilita Arena.

The idea of entire cities being plunged underwater might sound like the plot of the latest science fiction blockbuster. But it could become a reality in just 75 years, according to a terrifying new study. Scientists from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, have predicted that global sea levels could rise by a staggering 6.2 feet (1.9 metres) by 2100 if carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions continue to increase. 'The high-end projection of 1.9 metres underscores the need for decision-makers to plan for critical infrastructure accordingly,' said Dr Benjamin Grandey, lead author of the study. If global sea levels were to rise by 6.2ft (1.9 metres), towns and cities around the world could be plunged underwater - including several in the UK.

The questionnaire is a professional research methodology used for both qualitative and quantitative analysis of human opinions, preferences, attitudes, and behaviors. However, designing and evaluating questionnaires demands significant effort due to their intricate and complex structure. Questionnaires entail a series of questions that must conform to intricate constraints involving the questions, options, and overall structure. Specifically, the questions should be relevant and specific to the given research topic and intent. The options should be tailored to the questions, ensuring they are mutually exclusive, completed, and ordered sensibly. Moreover, the sequence of questions should follow a logical order, grouping similar topics together. As a result, automatically generating questionnaires presents a significant challenge and this area has received limited attention primarily due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets. To address these issues, we present Qsnail, the first dataset specifically constructed for the questionnaire generation task, which comprises 13,168 human-written questionnaires gathered from online platforms. We further conduct experiments on Qsnail, and the results reveal that retrieval models and traditional generative models do not fully align with the given research topic and intents. Large language models, while more closely related to the research topic and intents, exhibit significant limitations in terms of diversity and specificity. Despite enhancements through the chain-of-thought prompt and finetuning, questionnaires generated by language models still fall short of human-written questionnaires. Therefore, questionnaire generation is challenging and needs to be further explored. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/LeiyanGithub/qsnail.

Artificial intelligence is taking over countless industries around the U.S., raising concerns among Americans who fear they will be replaced by the tech. Now, new research has revealed the most and least AI-proof cities across the nation, based on five key metrics including job availability, the state's population growth rate, and job diversity. Workers based in major tech hubs should look to large, coastal metropolitan areas if they want to avoid losing out to artificial intelligence, with Phoenix, Arizona coming in first as the most AI-proof city in the country. The report warned that Providence, Rhode Island is the top city most susceptible to AI-related job loss. A report revealed the best cities to move to if you want to avoid AI and the top cities you should consider moving away from.

England is famous for its eccentric place names, from'Matching Tye' to'Fingringhoe' and'Upton Snodsbury'. But a new AI study now reveals the most English-sounding locations in the country – and they certainly conjure up images of cricket and afternoon tea. The study shows that'Harlington', a district of London, is the most archetypal English place name, along with'Widdington' in Essex and'Colworth' in West Sussex. It contrast, 'Anna', a settlement in Hampshire, is the least English-sounding, along with'Belgravia' in London and'Moira' in Leicestershire. Although AI was used to determine the language basis of English place names, not the meaning, the results could reveal more about the history of the locations.

From London's Big Ben to Edinburgh's castle, many UK cities are instantly recognisable thanks to their distinctive buildings. But these famous landmarks could be hidden away behind bulky transport systems in just 26 years, according to artificial intelligence (AI). Brighton-based film editor, Duncan Thomsen, used AI to imagine what five of the UK's largest cities could look like in 2050. The resulting images feature a range of futuristic tranport systems running through the cities, which resemble scenes from Blade Runner. 'I like the idea of this Blade Runner future - it brought a smile to my face,' Mr Thomsen said.

For a few years, I've been trying to write a story about a cat. A.I. will not be able to write this, partly because the story is still inside my imagination and on a few rough pages that were originally drafted in Boston, on sheets of notebook paper, as I sat in my daughter's apartment on a hot summer day. If I have it published (who knows, it's a strange story), perhaps some machine will suck it into a system, break down my style, my usage, the themes I like to touch upon -- loss and despair, love and hope -- wide-ranging themes that, like all themes, arrive out of my own unique human concerns and have fueled me through six story collections. But for now, this story I haven't yet finished is inside my imagination, safe and sound, and no machine can make it or conjure it because no machine has been in my head as I wandered the streets of South Chicago, or stared at Lake Michigan from Promontory Point on the particular day I was there in June, or stopped in the parking lot of a supermarket called Treasure Island to examine a pile of snow, left over from a long winter, honeycombed and covered with dirt and grime, which is the image that closes the rough draft of my story; no machine stood with me in front of the Obama house, on the corner of 1118 Hyde Park Boulevard, and watched a Secret Service agent as he approached, another image that sparked the plot of my story, and certainly no machine was with me watching a cat named Baudelaire, my daughter's cat, as he played on a particular Chicago afternoon, in a particular moment years ago, clutching a piece of string -- yet another image that spoke to me through the retrospect of memory. No machine -- and I use that phrase because A.I. is a machine, and no matter how complicated, or even organic, its still-binary, open-and-shut gates may be -- looked through my eyes as I took the train to my hometown in Michigan, gazing out over the old steel mills of Gary, Ind., making note of images with intent, storing and twisting them in relation to the pain I felt that moment, riding back to my hometown in Michigan, to my father's interment ceremony, an experience that reminded me that I, too, will die someday, and the art I create will be all I leave behind.

Washington, DC, is the home base of the most powerful government on earth. City agencies use automation to screen housing applicants, predict criminal recidivism, identify food assistance fraud, determine if a high schooler is likely to drop out, inform sentencing decisions for young people, and many other things. That snapshot of semiautomated urban life comes from a new report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). The nonprofit spent 14 months investigating the city's use of algorithms and found they were used across 20 agencies, with more than a third deployed in policing or criminal justice. For many systems, city agencies would not provide full details of how their technology worked or was used.

Witch Beam was right, playing "Unpacking" is a Zen experience. Its soundtrack, a synthy mix of acoustic guitar and lofi beats by BAFTA award-winning composer Jeff van Dyck, sets the mood while you sort through the boxes at your own pace with no timers or scores to worry about. Between considering each item's worth and whether to keep it, carefully packing everything away to (hopefully) make the trip in one piece, wondering what you'll find in the next box, and inevitably lingering on the nostalgia one thing or the other kicks up, it's hard to do mindlessly. That duality -- the simple satisfaction of mechanically putting everything in its place alongside the more ambiguous emotions stirred up in the process -- is why "Unpacking's" story still feels compelling with minimal dialogue and exposition.

Walmart has revealed it is using fully driverless trucks to bring groceries from a fulfillment center to one of its Arkansas supermarkets, in a move that will cut costs and address the ongoing labor shortage affecting retail supply chains. Twelve hours a day, apair of trucks are running on a seven-mile loop of public roads from a fulfillment center to the Walmart on Regional Airport Boulevard in Bentonville, Arkansas, where the mega-retailer is headquartered. From there customers can conveniently pick up their orders. Walmart started driverless deliveries in August using autonomous trucks from Palo Alto, California-based start-up Gatik, but waited to make the announcement until Monday, after two months of incident-free deliveries. The trucking industry has faced a record worker shortage since the pandemic started, Chris Spear, president of the American Trucking Associations, told CNN, with 80,000 drivers still needed.