Washington Post CEO and publisher Will Lewis has stepped down amid growing backlash over his handling of the paper's mass layoffs as chief financial officer Jeff D’Onofrio is been tapped to take over.

Washington Post CEO and publisher Will Lewis has stepped down amid growing backlash over his handling of the paper's mass layoffs as chief financial officer Jeff D’Onofrio is been tapped to take over.

It is an online romance that has overcome a 3,500-mile distance, and also the Covid pandemic - which meant they had to get married virtually. Welsh cheesemaker Lewis Relfe struck up a relationship with Ameila Henderson, from Virginia, USA, while playing the Friday the 13th horror video game in 2017. She made a number of visits across the Atlantic, including one for six months, and he proposed on Aberystwyth Pier, dressed as the game's main character, Jason Voorhees. While they admit to seeing the humour in being the couple that met and married virtually, they now live together in Ceredigion, with daughter Evelyn. But because of parental responsibilities, they no longer get to enjoy the thing that brought them together.

If you find it hard to focus after a wakeful night, it's because your brain is busy trying to catch up on crucial housekeeping. Nearly everyone has experienced it--after a night of poor sleep, your brain might seem foggy, and your mind drifts off when you should be paying attention. A new MIT study reveals what happens biologically as these momentary lapses occur: Your brain is performing essential maintenance that it usually takes care of while you sleep. During a normal night of sleep, the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that cushions the brain helps flush away metabolic waste that has built up during the day. In a 2019 study, MIT electrical engineering and computer science professor Laura Lewis, PhD '14, and colleagues showed that the CSF flows rhythmically in and out in a way that's linked to changes in brain waves. To explore what might happen to this CSF flow in a sleep-deprived brain, Lewis, who is also a member of MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and her colleagues tested 26 volunteers on several cognitive tasks after they'd been kept awake in the lab and when they were well-rested.

Large pre-trained language models have been shown to store factual knowledge in their parameters, and achieve state-of-the-art results when fine-tuned on downstream NLP tasks. However, their ability to access and precisely manipulate knowledge is still limited, and hence on knowledge-intensive tasks, their performance lags behind task-specific architectures. Additionally, providing provenance for their decisions and updating their world knowledge remain open research problems. Pre-trained models with a differentiable access mechanism to explicit non-parametric memory can overcome this issue, but have so far been only investigated for extractive downstream tasks. We explore a general-purpose fine-tuning recipe for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) -- models which combine pre-trained parametric and non-parametric memory for language generation. We introduce RAG models where the parametric memory is a pre-trained seq2seq model and the non-parametric memory is a dense vector index of Wikipedia, accessed with a pre-trained neural retriever. We compare two RAG formulations, one which conditions on the same retrieved passages across the whole generated sequence, the other can use different passages per token. We fine-tune and evaluate our models on a wide range of knowledge-intensive NLP tasks and set the state-of-the-art on three open domain QA tasks, outperforming parametric seq2seq models and task-specific retrieve-and-extract architectures. For language generation tasks, we find that RAG models generate more specific, diverse and factual language than a state-of-the-art parametric-only seq2seq baseline.

Cybercriminals using malware and AI tools have stolen over $318 million in cargo shipments nationwide, targeting freight during transit with sophisticated online fraud schemes.

'Bigfooters' often employ credible scientific methods in their searches. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Bigfoot remains firmly in the realm of cryptozoology, along with the likes of the Loch Ness monster . However, its pursuers often are not the stereotypical crackpots depicted across pop culture. According to two social scientists, they frequently rely on widely accepted, reliable methods and tools to search for the elusive Sasquatch.

There is no doubt artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to improve access to mental health care. "One could imagine a world where AI serves as the'front line' for mental health, providing a clearinghouse of resources and available services for individuals seeking help,'' wrote the authors of the 2023 article "The Potential Influence of AI on Population Mental Health." Targeted interventions delivered digitally through chatbots "can help reduce the population burden of mental illness, particularly in hard-to-reach populations and contexts, for example, through stepped care approaches that aim to help populations with the highest risk following natural disasters," the article states. Besides Nomi, there are an increasing number of AI platforms people are using to create chatbots to take on several roles, including that of ad hoc therapist. Yet, while AI can assist in mental health management, it cannot replace human intuition. A trained therapist observes nuances that AI can't, such as body language, tone shifts, and unspoken emotions. Chatbots can be helpful, but mental health experts stress that they should never fully replace the human experience. That said, these mainstream chatbots are frequently being used for therapeutic purposes, as opposed to chatbots designed with mental health management in mind. Industry observers say the reasons are many: They provide emotional support when people are not ready to reach out to a therapist. They are anonymous, easy to use, convenient, available anytime, safe, judgment-free, affordable, and fast. These general-purpose chatbots help by providing comfort, validation, and a safe space for users to express themselves--all without the stigma that sometimes comes with traditional therapy settings. "Talking to a therapist can be intimidating, expensive, or complicated to access, and sometimes you need someone--or something--to listen at that exact moment,'' said Stephanie Lewis, a licensed clinical social worker and executive director of Epiphany Wellness addiction and mental health treatment centers.

Billionaire UK businessman Joe Lewis, whose family trust owns Tottenham Hotspur football club, has received a pardon from US President Donald Trump. Lewis, 88, pleaded guilty to insider trading as part of an agreement with prosecutors in 2024 that saw him avoid prison. He was accused of passing on information about his companies to his private pilots, friends, personal assistants and romantic partners in a fraud that authorities said netted millions of dollars in profit. A White House official said Trump approved the pardon for Lewis, who requested it so he could receive medical treatment and visit his grandchildren and great grandchildren in the US. Mr Lewis admitted he made a terrible mistake, did not fight extradition in the case, and paid a $5 million fine, the official told the BBC.

Druggan did not respond to a request for comment. But in a separate post, he clarified his views. "I don't want human extinction, of course," he wrote. But, in a cosmic sense, I recognize that humans might not always be the most important thing." Last week we got another worrying insight into ChatGPT's ability to send users down delusional rabbit-holes--this time with perhaps the most high-profile individual yet. Geoff Lewis, a venture capitalist, posted on X screenshots of his chats with ChatGPT. "I've long used GPT as a tool in pursuit of my core value: Truth," he wrote. "Over years, I mapped the Non-Governmental System.