Lawson, one of Japan's biggest convenience store operators, has said it will roll out three new AI-inspired food items, which were created around the theme What on earth is this? Fears that advanced artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity have dominated global headlines, but in Japan the technology is being used for a sweeter purpose -- developing never-before-seen convenience store desserts. For customers tired of the usual egg sandwiches and rice balls, major chains are turning to AI to develop products, including some unexpected flavors. Lawson, one of the country's biggest convenience store operators, said on Tuesday it will roll out three new food items, including a pickle-flavored lemon tart and a bread roll filled with red bean paste, margarine and yogurt cream. These products, to be launched this month in Tokyo and neighboring regions, were created using AI around the theme "What on earth is this?

College football's chaos era is here: Texas rallies, Oregon falls and Lane Kiffin eyes return to Ole Miss Oklahoma State stuns Oregon, deals early season blow to Ducks' national title hopes Former ESPN host hypocritically calls network a'political lobbying firm' after Ted Cruz appearance Team USA survives Spain scare with fourth-quarter surge to reach FIBA Women's World Cup final It's only week two, but Kansas QB Isaiah Marshall might have completed the pass of the year WWE's Roxanne Perez earns No 1 contender spot for AAA Reina de Reinas Championship at Triplemania 34 Ted Cruz got booed so loudly during'College GameDay' interview you couldn't hear a thing he said Trespasser stopped by security at Kamala Harris' Malibu property Kyrsten Sinema: Trump has been'tremendous' on AI data centers Charles Payne: America voted for the'reindustrialization' of the nation Charles Payne: America voted for the'reindustrialization' of the nation Israeli ambassador to US: It's always been Israel, and always will be Israel Charles Payne praises'phenomenal' blue-collar boom under Trump Ret Col John Folsom outlines Dunham House's mission for combat-wounded veterans Ret Col John Folsom outlines Dunham House's mission for combat-wounded veterans OutKick America's women's basketball epic reaches its climax with national unity on the line in FIBA World Cup final The rivals-turned-teammates highlight the'young and turnt' crew as Americans defend a 35-game winning streak in Berlin Team USA women's basketball coach Kara Lawson spoke out on the importance of winning the FIBA Women's World Cup for the country on the weekend of the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and the U.S. women's national basketball team will defend its dynasty in Berlin on Sunday in a World Cup championship against France. But this weekend, the pursuit of gold carries a distinctly heavier, and distinctly American, weight. Taking the court on the 25th anniversary weekend of the September 11 terrorist attacks, head coach Kara Lawson isn't just looking to protect a historic 35-game World Cup winning streak. And as far as unity, I think unity is not just exclusive to the women's basketball community, Lawson said.

My position feels more precarious than ever. It's a question that I sometimes toss out in the company of friends who--like me, and maybe like you--have a complicated relationship to their job. I've worked at WIRED as a writer for eight years, and with much success. Eight years is also an eternity in news media, and especially if you are Black. All industries suffer from unique growing pains. Ours just so happens to have laughably high turnover rates, a distaste for racial and gender diversity, and the dubious distinction of being perpetually on the verge of extinction. So on nights when friends and I gather, trading war stories of workplace microaggressions and corporate mismanagement under damp bar lighting, we wonder how we've lasted as long as we have. The only reason I've survived, I joke, is because I'm Black. It's a silly thing to say, particularly because I have no actual proof of it other than the occasional feeling. What I do know is that I've been The Only One in more spaces than I care to remember, and rarely by choice.

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.