A Hungarian man has set a new record for longest video game marathon by playing the rhythm-based music game Dance Dance Revolution for six days. Szabolcs Csépe, from Budapest, bopped to over 3000 songs and burned more than 22,000 calories in his quest to romp into the record books. The 34-year-old, known as GrassHopper on his gaming channels, said that preparation for the marathon took six months and included physical training, focusing on his legs and glutes, as well a a diet plan. Playing DDR is always fun for me, he told BBC News, so this challenge was best described as tediously joyful. His feat has been officially recognised by Guinness World Records.

The Atlantic CEO's new book,, examines his complicated relationship with the sport. On this week's episode of, he talks about the ways tech is helping him become a better runner. To most of the world, Nicholas Thompson is known as an editor, an AI enthusiast, or something of a LinkedIn influencer. But the former WIRED editor in chief, who is now CEO of The Atlantic, is often better known to colleagues as . On Tuesday, Thompson is releasing . As the title suggests, it's a book about his commitment to running--Thompson runs a ridiculously fast marathon and holds the American 50K record for the 45-49 age group. Ultimately, though, the book examines the complicated relationship between the sport, Thompson, and his father, who first took him on a run when he was just 5 years old. Tech obsessives, of course, will also get their fix: includes plenty of science-backed training guidance and documents Thompson's experience training with elite Nike coaches. On this week's episode of, I talked to Thompson (who was also my first boss; he hired me as an intern at WIRED in 2008) about his book, the interplay between running and addiction, and what he thinks AI can do for runners for writers. It is a joy to be here with you at Condé Nast at WIRED. I loved coming up those elevators. I love seeing you as the editor in chief. I'm thrilled that you're here. We're going to start this conversation the way we start all of them, which is with a little warmup, some rapid-fire questions. In honor of your new book,, I'm gonna make them entirely running themed. I mean, if your listeners don't wanna hear about running Trail run or track run? Worst running injury you've ever had. The one you wish people would stop talking to you about. You only need to run a 20-miler before a marathon. What do you need to run? Why do people die at mile 20? Because they only train for [marathons] with 20-mile-runs. I generally prefer people, but then you have to schedule it. Backup sport of choice if you could never run again.

The lifespan of a games console has extended a lot since I was a child. In the 1990s, this kind of technology would be out of date after just a couple of years. There would be some tantalising new machine out before you knew it, everybody competing to be on the cutting edge: the Game Boy and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive in 1989 were followed by the Game Gear in 1990 and the Super NES in 1991. Five years was a long life for a gaming machine. The Nintendo Switch 2 will be released in a couple of weeks, more than eight years since I first picked an original Switch up off its dock and marvelled at the instant transition to portable play.

On an evening in December 2023, 43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. "It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed," she says. "That pain was worse than childbirth." Rosenkranz's migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain, she says. This was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz's 5-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a "red beam behind her eardrums." It didn't occur to Sarah that these symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses.

For many avid gamers, the idea of a gaming marathon sounds like heaven. But just how long is too long when it comes to a continuous session? One gamer has pushed himself to the limit after playing nearly 60 continuous hours of'World of Warcraft' to break the world record. But his impressive feat didn't come without its risks. Barnabás Vujity-Zsolnay admits he got bored 30 hours into the session, while he even started to experience'mild hallucinations' from hour 45!

Although there are currently many benchmarks available for evaluating the long context understanding and reasoning capability of large language models, with the expansion of the context window in these models, the existing long context benchmarks are no longer sufficient for evaluating the long context understanding and reasoning capability of large language models. In this paper, we have developed a fresh long context evaluation benchmark, which we name it Marathon in the form of multiple choice questions, inspired by benchmarks such as MMLU, for assessing the long context comprehension capability of large language models quickly, accurately, and objectively. We have evaluated several of the latest and most popular large language models, as well as three recent and effective long context optimization methods, on our benchmark. This showcases the long context reasoning and comprehension capabilities of these large language models and validates the effectiveness of these optimization methods. Marathon is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Lemoncoke/Marathon.

In a world where unmanned spacecraft have landed on Mars and artificial intelligence can read your mind, one would think someone would have figured out a precise way to measure how much athletes should drink while exercising. Hydrating, or replacing body fluids lost through sweating, exhaling, and eliminating waste, is essential. When 2 or more percent of body mass is lost through dehydration, the body can go haywire, with elevated cardiovascular strain, reduced aerobic exercise performance, and impaired thermoregulatory function. After losing 12 percent of body mass to dehydration, a human will die. It's rare for an athlete to exercise to the point of death by dehydration.

When I opened the email telling me I'd been accepted to run the London Marathon, I felt elated. Barely six months on from my last marathon, I knew how dedicated I'd have to be to keep running day after day, week after week, month after month, through rain, cold, tiredness, grumpiness, and hangovers. The marathon is the easy part. It's the constant grind of the training that kills you--and finding ways to keep it fresh and interesting is part of the challenge. Some exercise nuts think they've found a way to live their routines up: by using the AI chatbot ChatGPT as a sort of proxy personal trainer.

Well, every year, for the first week of this module, we engage in what I like to call our Data Science Bootcamp. This is an intensive preparatory week in which I present the students with a sample data science project, from start to finish, to give them a sense of what is expected from their group efforts. Every year I try to create a new project on a contemporary topic. In the past, I have covered topics such as marathon running (linked to Elide Kipchoge's efforts to break the 2-hour barrier), Hollywood movies (is it true that movies are rarely as good as the books on which they are based?), and the COVID pandemic, among others. During the bootcamp week, I describe how to take a topic from a vague project idea to a concrete set of suitable research questions, how to assemble an appropriate dataset, how to clean and analyze the data, and how to use the results of the analysis to carefully answer the research questions in a clear and compelling way.

There isn't a day that goes by without hearing about some fascinating development in artificial intelligence research, whether that might be an AI that can process and produce language in a human-like way, or an AI that can unlock the mysteries folded up within a protein, or automatically make scientific discoveries. But in the headlong rush in the to find the next breakthrough, there are legitimate concerns that the competitive nature of the "AI race" might mean that things like safety and ethics are being inadvertently overlooked, resulting in phenomena like algorithmic bias, or an escalating AI arms race between rival military powers to build lethal autonomous weapons. All of these recent developments point to a need for better regulations when it comes to engineering and implementing AI. Of course, too much regulation might stifle innovation, but too little might also bring what could have been a preventable disaster. As an international research team from Teesside University, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and Université Libre de Bruxelles now suggest, AI can also be used to navigate this delicate balance by determining which types of AI research projects might need more regulation than others. "Whether real or not, the belief in such a race for domain supremacy through AI, can make it real simply from its consequences," wrote the team in a paper that was published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.