Maryland is set to become the first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores after Gov. Wes Moore said he will sign the new law taking effect October 2026.

Environment Animals Wildlife Sharks Megalodon set to become Maryland's state shark The Bay State is now home to the first state shark in the country. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. The bill now goes to the governor's desk. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The megalodon () is another step closer to becoming the first state shark in the United States.

Environment Animals Wildlife Sharks Megalodon could become Maryland's official state shark The 66,000-pound prehistoric predator once stalked the Bay State's waters. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In a state better known for its delicious seafood and as the home of the United States Navy, there's a new effort to create the country's first state shark. Earlier this month, Maryland State Senator Jack Bailey and House Delegate Todd Morgan filed SB135 to designate the megalodon () as the official state shark. While the mighty megalodon is not swimming along the shores of the Bay State now, the enormous prehistoric shark relative once dominated the shallow seas that covered Maryland and the rest of the Atlantic coastal plain .

Abrego Garcia released as U.S. bid to detain him ruled'constitutionally infirm' Salvadoran migrant and U.S. resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia arrives at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Baltimore, Maryland, on Aug. 25. A federal judge in Maryland has ordered the immediate release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant at the center of political and legal battles as a symbol of U.S. President Donald Trump's hard-line immigration policies. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis held on Thursday that U.S. officials lacked legal grounds to keep Abrego Garcia in custody and that his ongoing detention appeared to be "constitutionally infirm." Abrego Garcia has been fighting Trump administration efforts to deport him while also defending against human smuggling charges in Tennessee. U.S. officials' latest plan had been to send him to Liberia, but a judge has blocked that for now.

Selecting a college major is a difficult decision for many incoming freshmen. Traditional academic advising is often hindered by long wait times, intimidating environments, and limited personalization. AI Chatbots present an opportunity to address these challenges. However, AI systems also have the potential to generate biased responses, prejudices related to race, gender, socioeconomic status, and disability. These biases risk turning away potential students and undermining reliability of AI systems. This study aims to develop a University of Maryland (UMD) A. James Clark School of Engineering Program-specific AI chatbot. Our research team analyzed and mitigated potential biases in the responses. Through testing the chatbot on diverse student queries, the responses are scored on metrics of accuracy, relevance, personalization, and bias presence. The results demonstrate that with careful prompt engineering and bias mitigation strategies, AI chatbots can provide high-quality, unbiased academic advising support, achieving mean scores of 9.76 for accuracy, 9.56 for relevance, and 9.60 for personalization with no stereotypical biases found in the sample data. However, due to the small sample size and limited timeframe, our AI model may not fully reflect the nuances of student queries in engineering academic advising. Regardless, these findings will inform best practices for building ethical AI systems in higher education, offering tools to complement traditional advising and address the inequities faced by many underrepresented and first-generation college students.

Fox News senior medical analyst Dr. Marc Siegel shares his perspective on whether the mosquito-borne virus in China will spread to the United States and how AI can be detrimental to children's and young adults' mental health on'Fox Report.' The first case of a travel-associated human screwworm infection has been detected in Maryland. Andrew Nixon, spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, confirmed to Fox News Digital that the patient had recently returned from a trip to El Salvador, a country affected by a screwworm outbreak. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) worked in conjunction with the Maryland Department of Health to investigate the case. The CDC confirmed the diagnosis on Aug. 4 after experts reviewed larvae images. "The risk to public health in the United States from this introduction is very low," Nixon said.

--This paper investigates the application of large language models (LLMs) to financial tasks. Building on Qwen2.5 and Deepseek-R1, we employed techniques including supervised fine-tuning (SFT), direct preference optimization (DPO), and reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance their financial capabilities. The fine-tuned models demonstrated substantial performance gains across a wide range of financial tasks. Moreover, we measured the data scaling law in the financial domain. Our work demonstrates the potential of large language models (LLMs) in financial applications.

Traditional artificial neural networks take inspiration from biological networks, using layers of neuron-like nodes to pass information for processing. More realistic models include spiking in the neural network, capturing the electrical characteristics more closely. However, a large proportion of brain cells are of the glial cell type, in particular astrocytes which have been suggested to play a role in performing computations. Here, we introduce a modified spiking neural network model with added astrocyte-like units in a neural network and asses their impact on learning. We implement the network as a liquid state machine and task the network with performing a chaotic time-series prediction task. We varied the number and ratio of neuron-like and astrocyte-like units in the network to examine the latter units effect on learning. We show that the combination of neurons and astrocytes together, as opposed to neural- and astrocyte-only networks, are critical for driving learning. Interestingly, we found that the highest learning rate was achieved when the ratio between astrocyte-like and neuron-like units was roughly 2 to 1, mirroring some estimates of the ratio of biological astrocytes to neurons. Our results demonstrate that incorporating astrocyte-like units which represent information across longer timescales can alter the learning rates of neural networks, and the proportion of astrocytes to neurons should be tuned appropriately to a given task.

At first, in mid-November, the mysterious lights were seen blinking across the night skies of New Jersey. Reports of incandescent flying objects were logged in New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Bystanders in Virginia Beach said they saw an aircraft "unlike any other they've seen". Sightings have now come from as far afield as Louisiana, Florida and Arizona. People across the US are looking up.

Former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland said Friday that he personally witnessed "dozens of large drones" flying above his home on Thursday evening. Former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland has said that he personally witnessed "dozens of large drones" flying above his home in Davidsonville, Maryland, on Thursday evening as the mystery surrounding the various unexplained sightings continues. "Last night, beginning at around 9:45 pm, I personally witnessed (and videoed) what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above my residence in Davidsonville, Maryland (25 miles from our nation's capital)," Hogan wrote on X Friday. "I observed the activity for approximately 45 minutes." The former governor said he does not know if these drone sightings are evidence of a threat to public safety or national security, but he called out the federal government for a "complete lack of transparency" in the face of Americans' concerns.