How a 1993 plan to launch ads into space turned into a national freakout. In the 1990s, space was for sale. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In 1993, Mike Lawson, an aerospace entrepreneur based in Roswell, Georgia, unveiled his vision for a brave new future of advertising: space billboards. This wasn't a half-baked scheme: Lawson had meticulous plans for a proposed 1996 launch: His team of engineers would shoot a package of tightly-wound mylar into orbit about 180 miles above the Earth.

The total number of US Customs and Border Protection device searches jumped by 17 percent over the 2024 fiscal year, but more invasive forensic searches remain relatively rare. Over the Past year, United States Customs and Border Protection staff searched more phones and electronic devices at the border than ever before, according to new statistics published by the government agency. Phone searches jumped around 17 percent during the past 12 months--with a marked increase over the past six months. Newly published CBP figures show that for the full fiscal year of 2025--running from October 2024 to the end of September 2025--border agents conducted around 55,424 searches of electronic devices. This is up from around the 47,000 searches that were completed during the government's 2024 fiscal year.

Three major Japanese convenience store operators posted growth in their group operating revenues and profits in the March-May first quarter of the current business year, according to their earnings reports. Retail giant Seven & I Holdings, the operator of industry leader Seven-Eleven Japan, saw its mainstay overseas convenience store operations recover thanks to labor and other cost cuts. FamilyMart's operating profit grew 17.9% from a year before to 27.8 billion, as advertisements featuring Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani helped attract more customers and boost sales of onigiri rice balls. FamilyMart also attracted budget-minded consumers thanks to its discount sales of food items such as eggs and milk. As a result, the company's net profit jumped 36.7% to a record 21.1 billion.

Lawson and its owners, major trading house Mitsubishi and telecommunications carrier KDDI, said Wednesday they will open convenience stores of the "future" that utilize digital technology in Tokyo next spring. The new stores, to be in the Takanawa Gateway City complex in Tokyo's Minato Ward, will feature robots that can stock shelves and cook, as well as artificial intelligence signage that recommends products to customers. A booth will also be set up where customers can remotely consult on topics such as nursing care and asset management. The project aims to reduce the workload of store staff by 30% by fiscal 2030. Labor shortages are the number one issue that needs to be address, Lawson President Sadanobu Takemasu said at a news conference on Wednesday.

Artificial intelligence is making its way into esthetics with a new application in eyelash extensions. A Bay Area-based company called Luum has released an AI-powered eyelash extension machine, currently available at only a few select California locations. Nathan Harding, CEO and co-founder of Luum, who is based in Oakland, California, told Fox News Digital in an interview that the company is using robotics and AI to "completely transform the experience of eyelash extensions." "For the client, it's going to be super fast, super comfortable and super consistent," he said. "And the provider will be able to do three times the appointments they could do otherwise."

Wining and dining, wooing clients with creative offers, and cashing big bonuses provide the glamor to sales work. Drafting answers to hundreds of dull questions posed by a prospective customer's request for proposals? Mercifully for workers, after months of speculation about ChatGPT-style AI taking over white-collar work, the corporate chore of responding to RFPs is one of the first that generative AI is disrupting. In April, communications software maker Twilio introduced RFP Genie, a generative AI tool that digests an RFP, scours thousands of internal files for relevant information, and uses OpenAI's GPT-4 to generate a suitable response. The company's sales staff simply copy and paste the text over into a formal document and make a few adjustments.

For a number of years since its introduction to hydrology, recurrent neural networks like long short-term memory (LSTM) have proven remarkably difficult to surpass in terms of daily hydrograph metrics on known, comparable benchmarks. Outside of hydrology, Transformers have now become the model of choice for sequential prediction tasks, making it a curious architecture to investigate. Here, we first show that a vanilla Transformer architecture is not competitive against LSTM on the widely benchmarked CAMELS dataset, and lagged especially for the high-flow metrics due to short-term processes. However, a recurrence-free variant of Transformer can obtain mixed comparisons with LSTM, producing the same Kling-Gupta efficiency coefficient (KGE), along with other metrics. The lack of advantages for the Transformer is linked to the Markovian nature of the hydrologic prediction problem. Similar to LSTM, the Transformer can also merge multiple forcing dataset to improve model performance. While the Transformer results are not higher than current state-of-the-art, we still learned some valuable lessons: (1) the vanilla Transformer architecture is not suitable for hydrologic modeling; (2) the proposed recurrence-free modification can improve Transformer performance so future work can continue to test more of such modifications; and (3) the prediction limits on the dataset should be close to the current state-of-the-art model. As a non-recurrent model, the Transformer may bear scale advantages for learning from bigger datasets and storing knowledge. This work serves as a reference point for future modifications of the model.

Signal loss calls for the use of, well, other signals. "The biggest trend for us right now is finding ways to be less reliant on cookie data," said John Kirk, media director in charge of digital investment at 22Squared, an Atlanta-based media agency whose clients include Baskin-Robbins, Publix and Southeast Toyota. One alternative approach, Kirk said, is to "home in on audiences where we do have the data." In that vein, 22Squared has been testing a solution released by AdTheorent on Wednesday that uses machine learning to score programmatic inventory based on the probability that an impression will lead to a desired outcome. Southeast Toyota is also a launch partner for the product.

Google's interactive Doodle today celebrates the life and accomplishments of video game pioneer Gerald "Jerry" Lawson on what would have been his 82nd birthday. The Doodle lets you play five retro pixel-art platformers in your browser -- with two even letting you play as Lawson. The Doodles' creators want to inspire young people to follow in his footsteps, and it includes a built-in level editor and creator to nudge them on that path. Lawson was known as the "father of the video game cartridge," which he developed as Director of Engineering and Marketing at Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1976, the company released the Fairchild Channel F home console, with Lawson serving as lead developer.

The Google Doodle on Dec. 1 honors Jerry Lawson on what would have been his 82nd birthday. The engineer and entrepreneur created the technology that paved the way for modern gaming. The Google Doodle on Dec. 1 honors Jerry Lawson on what would have been his 82nd birthday. The engineer and entrepreneur created the technology that paved the way for modern gaming. Anyone who goes online Thursday (and that includes you, if you're reading this) can stop by the Google homepage for a special treat: A set of create-your-own video games inspired by the man who helped make interactive gaming possible.