Livvy Dunne gets emotional after Paul Skenes' incredible gesture to baseball kids, Spurs fan beaten & MEAT Ex-Cowboys star relishes in Knicks loss after fans were'hating on President Trump' Trump torches Stephen A Smith's presidential hopes after Knicks lose Game 3 with Trump at MSG Justin Gaethje targets Ilia Topuria's divorce, igniting feud before White House showdown Lewis Hamilton, worth $500M and dating billionaire Kim Kardashian, wants to put'a limit' on wealth Panthers' Bryce Young, Xavier Legette spend offseason weekend riding horses and ripping ATVs Fever vs Mystics betting preview: Why the over 170.5 looks like the smart play College athletics integrity'left the building' after judge lets Sorsby play despite gambling admission Lindsey Vonn's six-pack leaves heads spinning, NFL WAG enjoys a bikini country club & disgusting HelloFresh Stephen A Smith claims Trump has'no business' attending Knicks game at MSG: 'It is selfish and narcissistic' Nelly Korda impossibly wins US Women's Open, JT Poston finds it at Memorial, and Tyrrell Hatton the family man Nelly Korda is officially the most important US female golfer in modern history, WVU guy's raccoon & lobster Maine GOP gubernatorial candidate slams Democratic rivals as'bottom of the barrel' Kevin O'Leary dismisses North Korea's economic revival report NBA Commissioner defends Trump's Finals attendance amid mixed fan reaction China approves world's first commercial brain chip Penn State student shot and killed near family's home in Philadelphia Fox Nation's'Rescue Nation' takes viewers inside the heroic rescues of a first responder OutKick Sports Hurricanes vs Golden Knights Game 4 preview: Carolina's comeback magic faces a must-win situation Frederik Andersen's struggles in net could prompt a goalie change as Carolina tries to even the series NHL superstar Matthew Tkachuk reflects on his father Keith Tkachuk's'compete' philosophy and why he still doesn't consider himself a'great skater.' Hockey has been phenomenal this postseason. We've seen tons of teams battling to fill up the series slate. We've also seen some series sweeps, but that's not that big of a deal. Even those games at least had some close matchups that give us some fun.

A nature-loving 10-year-old girl who found an endangered amphibian under a bridge has left her mum in shock, surprise and disbelief. Melanie Hill said her daughter, Evie, discovered the nine-inch Mexican axolotl as they spent the day near the River Ogmore in Bridgend. She said Evie was always finding things like newts and bugs, but said the axolotl discovery was a surprise. It is the first documented discovery of an axolotl in the wild in the UK with only 50 to 1,000 individuals left globally today, according to experts. Axolotls as pets have seen a surge in popularity in recent years after they were introduced to video games such as Minecraft and Roblox.

McDonald's boss on abuse claims: 'I don't want to talk about the past' The boss of McDonald's UK and Ireland has said she doesn't want to talk about the past when asked about allegations of abuse at the fast-food chain. Lauren Schultz told the BBC what had happened in recent years was unacceptable but said we have drawn a line under it. A BBC investigation in 2023 heard from more than 100 McDonald's workers in the UK claiming they faced a toxic culture of sexual assault, harassment, racism, and bullying. Last year, staff said they still faced sexual abuse and harassment. The UK equality watchdog agreed tougher measures with the company to protect staff in November, including new sexual harassment training.

The new book explores the uneasy relationship between Chinese internet users and a government that is always watching. Let's play a game of two truths and a lie. Of the three following statements, which one would you guess is made up? China was once home to the world's largest gay dating app with more users than Grindr, and it later went public on Nasdaq. The app's founder was a Chinese police officer who didn't come out at work until after he had been running an online forum for gay men for a decade.

At a crucial moment for climate change, these technologies show us where we're heading. I know it's a bit late to say, but it never quite feels like the year has started until the new edition of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies list comes out. For 25 years, has put together this package, which highlights the technologies that we think are going to matter in the future. This year's version has some stars, including gene resurrection (remember all the dire wolf hype last year?) And of course, the world of climate and energy is represented with sodium-ion batteries, next-generation nuclear, and hyperscale AI data centers . Let's take a look at what ended up on the list, and what it says about this moment for climate tech.

Modeling complex human behavior, such as voter decisions in national elections, is a long-standing challenge for computational social science. Traditional agent-based models (ABMs) are limited by oversimplified rules, while large-scale statistical models often lack interpretability. We introduce FlockVote, a novel framework that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to build a "computational laboratory" of LLM agents for political simulation. Each agent is instantiated with a high-fidelity demographic profile and dynamic contextual information (e.g. candidate policies), enabling it to perform nuanced, generative reasoning to simulate a voting decision. We deploy this framework as a testbed on the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, focusing on seven key swing states. Our simulation's macro-level results successfully replicate the real-world outcome, demonstrating the high fidelity of our "virtual society". The primary contribution is not only the prediction, but also the framework's utility as an interpretable research tool. FlockVote moves beyond black-box outputs, allowing researchers to probe agent-level rationale and analyze the stability and sensitivity of LLM-driven social simulations.

The Trump Administration's Data Center Push Could Open the Door for New Forever Chemicals The EPA is prioritizing review of new chemicals to be used in data centers. Experts say this could lead to the fast approval of new types of forever chemicals--with limited oversight. In recent months, the Trump administration has opened a deregulatory floodgate in the name of building more data centers. Among other things, this has involved ordering rollbacks of clean water regulations and opening up public lands to coal mining. Now, it's turning its eye to chemical regulation with a new policy that could, experts say, potentially fast-track the approval of new chemicals for use in the US--including new types of forever chemicals--with limited oversight. In September, the EPA announced it would be prioritizing the regulatory review of new chemicals used in data centers or related projects.

Starting with the Thomspon sampling algorithm, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Bayesian algorithms for the Multi-armed Bandit (MAB) problem. These algorithms seek to exploit prior information on arm biases and while several have been shown to be regret optimal, their design has not emerged from a principled approach. In contrast, if one cared about Bayesian regret discounted over an infinite horizon at a fixed, pre-specified rate, the celebrated Gittins index theorem offers an optimal algorithm. Unfortunately, the Gittins analysis does not appear to carry over to minimizing Bayesian regret over all sufficiently large horizons and computing a Gittins index is onerous relative to essentially any incumbent index scheme for the Bayesian MAB problem. The present paper proposes a sequence of'optimistic' approximations to the Gittins index. We show that the use of these approximations in concert with the use of an increasing discount factor appears to offer a compelling alternative to a variety of index schemes proposed for the Bayesian MAB problem in recent years. In addition, we show that the simplest of these approximations yields regret that matches the Lai-Robbins lower bound, including achieving matching constants.

It was October 2024, and Hurricane Helene had just devastated the US Southeast. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia found an abstract target on which to pin the blame: "Yes they can control the weather," she posted on X. "It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done." She was repeating what's by now a pretty familiar and popular conspiracy theory: that shadowy forces are out there, wielding technology to control the weather and wreak havoc on their enemies. This preposterous claim has grown louder and more common in recent years, especially after extreme weather strikes. But here's the thing: While Greene and other believers are not correct, this conspiracy theory--like so many others--holds a kernel of much more modest truth. This story is part of's series "The New Conspiracy Age," on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology.