From predictive analytics to personalized fan experiences, data and AI are powering the next generation of motorsport, says Rohit Agnihotri, principal technologist at Infosys, and Dan Cherowbrier, CTIO of Formula E. When the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship launched its first race through Beijing's Olympic Park in 2014, the idea of all-electric motorsport still bordered on experimental. Batteries couldn't yet last a full race, and drivers had to switch cars mid-competition. Just over a decade later, Formula E has evolved into a global entertainment brand broadcast in 150 countries, driving both technological innovation and cultural change in sport. Gen4, that's to come next year, says Dan Cherowbrier, Formula E's chief technology and information officer. You will see a really quite impressive car that starts us to question whether EV is there. Formula E's digital transformation, powered by its partnership with Infosys, is redefining what it means to be a fan. "It's a movement to make motor sport accessible and exciting for the new generation," says principal technologist at Infosys, Rohit Agnihotri. From real-time leaderboards and predictive tools to personalized storylines that adapt to what individual fans care most about--whether it's a driver rivalry or battery performance--Formula E and Infosys are using AI-powered platforms to create fan experiences as dynamic as the races themselves. Technology is not just about meeting expectations; it's elevating the entire fan experience and making the sport more inclusive, says Agnihotri. AI is also transforming how the organization itself operates. Historically, we would be going around the company, banging on everyone's doors and dragging them towards technology, making them use systems, making them move things to the cloud, Cherowbrier notes.

Battery and hydrogen-powered aircraft are cleared for takeoff. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Air New Zealand has cleared its runways to test both all-electric and hydrogen-powered planes . Although in its early stages, the four-month "intensive proving program" may help one day usher in a new era of sustainable flight. Aircraft remain some of the biggest sources of vehicle-based pollution in the world.

Players walk clockwise in a circle. When the music stops, everyone sits in a chair. Big Tech is setting in motion its plans for the next gen of lead designers, engineers, AI chiefs, and even CEOs. In Cupertino, Apple execs with familiar faces are retiring or reducing responsibilities. Well, chief operating officer Jeff Williams retired in November, and the speculation is that CEO Tim Cook could follow in the near term. Lisa Jackson, who has led Apple's sustainability efforts since 2013, is now set to retire in January too.

The game I'm most looking forward to right now is Big Walk, the latest title from House House, creators of the brilliant Untitled Goose Game. A cooperative multiplayer adventure where players are let loose to explore an open world, I'm interested to see what emergent gameplay comes out of it. Could Big Walk allow for a kind of community archaeology with friends? When games use environmental storytelling in their design – from the positioning of objects to audio recordings or graffiti – they invite players to role play as archaeologists. Game designer Ben Esposito infamously joked back in 2016 that environmental storytelling is the "art of placing skulls near a toilet" – which might have been a jab at the tropes of games like the Fallout series, but his quip demonstrates how archaeological gaming narratives can be.

"When not wasting money on bureaucracy," he wrote, "The Department of Education has been funding anti-Americanism, gender nonsense and anti-meritocratic racism." By the end of the month, the department had been stripped to the bone, dismantled by Donald Trump and Musk's DOGE. And on Thursday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who has said her agency's "final mission" would be to send education programs "back to the states," was on hand as the president signed an executive order to begin eliminating what remained of the department. The companies' founders share an admiration for Musk and desire to help their students replicate his success. At the same time that federal support for public education is imperiled, two private online education programs whose seeds were planted with Musk and SpaceX are getting a second wind.

Half a billion people worldwide live with diabetes. There are different types with different causes, but all lead people to have too much sugar in their blood. If not well controlled, this excess glucose can inflict damage throughout the body, putting people at risk of gum disease, nerve damage, kidney disease, blindness, amputations, heart attack, stroke and cancer. For now, patients manage the condition with medicines, insulin and lifestyle changes, but a new generation of treatments could reverse the disease. Details of the first woman treated for type 1 diabetes with stem cells taken from her own body were announced last month.

Cultural accumulation drives the open-ended and diverse progress in capabilities spanning human history. It builds an expanding body of knowledge and skills by combining individual exploration with inter-generational information transmission. Despite its widespread success among humans, the capacity for artificial learning agents to accumulate culture remains under-explored. In particular, approaches to reinforcement learning typically strive for improvements over only a single lifetime. Generational algorithms that do exist fail to capture the open-ended, emergent nature of cultural accumulation, which allows individuals to trade-off innovation and imitation. Building on the previously demonstrated ability for reinforcement learning agents to perform social learning, we find that training setups which balance this with independent learning give rise to cultural accumulation. These accumulating agents outperform those trained for a single lifetime with the same cumulative experience. We explore this accumulation by constructing two models under two distinct notions of a generation: episodic generations, in which accumulation occurs via in-context learning and train-time generations, in which accumulation occurs via in-weights learning. In-context and in-weights cultural accumulation can be interpreted as analogous to knowledge and skill accumulation, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to present general models that achieve emergent cultural accumulation in reinforcement learning, opening up new avenues towards more open-ended learning systems, as well as presenting new opportunities for modelling human culture.

There aren't enough games with queer characters and themes -- and GLAAD, the world's largest LGBTQ media advocacy group, has the statistics to prove it. GLAAD's first annual report on the video game industry found that nearly 20 percent of all players in the United States identify as LGBTQ, yet just 2 percent of games contain characters and storylines relevant to this community. The report highlights three critical truths: Representation matters a lot to LGBTQ players, the remaining gaming audience largely welcomes these themes, and new generations of gamers are only becoming more open to queer content. GLAAD has the numbers, so let's take a deeper look alongside a few bits of gaming news from the past week: Xbox is preparing to address a bunch of rumors on Thursday about the company's plans to bring its exclusive games to PlayStation, Switch and other platforms. The rumors have centered on major releases like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Starfield, but according to The Verge's Tom Warren, the first titles scheduled to make the leap are Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment.

Tom Newhouse, vice president of Convergence Media, discusses the potential impact of artificial intelligence on elections after an RNC AI ad garnered attention. A Marine veteran lawmaker says the U.S. should be pushing for a new international agreement to govern the use of artificial intelligence on the battlefield and believes it's a "strategic mistake" the Pentagon hasn't started this important task. Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., said the U.S. needs to work with other military powers to flesh out rules of the road on how AI can and cannot be deployed by military forces before AI becomes much more advanced. "When we get to the point of having killer robots, it's going to be a real problem for us if we don't have some established international norms for their use," Moulton told Fox News Digital. "Adversaries like China and Russia -- which don't care about collateral damage, they don't care about civilian casualties, they don't care about human rights -- they're going to have an advantage in making their robots more lethal because they'll be less constrained."

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. The Super Mario Bros. Movie introduces its namesake duo with a commercial. It's Brooklyn, before they get sucked into the Mushroom Kingdom, and they've made a local TV ad to hawk their plumbing skills. As a filmmaking tool, it's a near-perfect piece of exposition, establishing who the Mario brothers are in mere minutes. Most transmedia properties are about milking intellectual property for fun and profit.