Genome sequencing is the basis for many modern biological and medicinal studies. With recent technological advances, metagenomics has become a problem of interest. This problem entails the analysis and reconstruction of multiple DNA sequences from different sources. Shotgun genome sequencing works by breaking up long DNA sequences into shorter segments called reads. Given this collection of reads, one would like to reconstruct the original collection of DNA sequences. For experimental design in metagenomics, it is important to understand how the minimal read length necessary for reliable reconstruction depends on the number and characteristics of the genomes involved. Utilizing simple probabilistic models for each DNA sequence, we analyze the identifiability of collections of M genomes of length N in an asymptotic regime in which N tends to infinity and M may grow with N. Our first main result provides a threshold in terms of M and N so that if the read length exceeds the threshold, then a simple greedy algorithm successfully reconstructs the full collection of genomes with probability tending to one. Our second main result establishes a lower threshold in terms of M and N such that if the read length is shorter than the threshold, then reconstruction of the full collection of genomes is impossible with probability tending to one.

The US 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms was added to the Constitution in 1791. In the two centuries since, firearm technology has changed significantly. In 1791, for example, US citizens were given the right to carry a single-shot firearm or sword in public. Because, well, that's all there was. In 2021, however, there exists a vast array of weaponry ranging from easily-concealed handguns to assault rifles capable of firing hundreds of rounds per minute with uncanny accuracy.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Authorities in Wichita, Kan., said Sunday that they are investigating a shooting that injured three police officers this weekend and working to determine if the shotgun was rigged to the door. A "modified, loaded shotgun" discharged as the officers entered a home in the city on Saturday, according to a release by Wichita Police Department spokesman Officer Trevor Macy. "Apparently there were several modifications made to this one," Macy told The Wichita Eagle.

Prediction of future states of the environment and interacting agents is a key competence required for autonomous agents to operate successfully in the real world. Prior work for structured sequence prediction based on latent variable models imposes a uni-modal standard Gaussian prior on the latent variables. This induces a strong model bias which makes it challenging to fully capture the multi-modality of the distribution of the future states. In this work, we introduce Conditional Flow Variational Autoencoders which uses our novel conditional normalizing flow based prior. We show that using our novel complex multi-modal conditional prior we can capture complex multi-modal conditional distributions. Furthermore, we study for the first time latent variable collapse with normalizing flows and propose solutions to prevent such failure cases. Our experiments on three multi-modal structured sequence prediction datasets -- MNIST Sequences, Stanford Drone and HighD -- show that the proposed method obtains state of art results across different evaluation metrics.

No, this isn't an April Fool's joke: A Russian defense contractor has patented a drone that uses a shotgun to blast other drones out of the sky. It comes from Almaz Antey, a Russian defense contractor that manufactures the S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile that caused a rift between Turkey and the US. The tail-sitting drone takes off on the spot but flies like an airplane for greater efficiency, giving it a 40-minute range while packing a fully-automatic Vepr-12 shotgun with a 10-round magazine. The drone was built by the "Student Design Bureau of Aviation Modeling" at the Moscow Aviation Institute for Almaz Antey. It's of a similar type used by mining companies, farmers and others to survey pipelines and other installations. A visor-wearing operator uses a live video link to fly the drone and aim the weapon, which is tucked into the nose of the aircraft.

Last night I had a daily challenge pop up on my Fortnite: Battle Royale account asking me to eliminate four players with shotguns, and I haven't gotten to it yet. I think I may just wait for tomorrow, because shotguns will be readily available in the upcoming "Close Encounters" Limited Time Mode, which starts tomorrow, likely at 4:00 a.m. Close Encounters sounds a little bit like Tequila Sunrise, a limited time mode that ran in PlayerUnkown's Battlegrounds recently but with one major addition: Jetpacks. Weapon drops will be limited to shotguns, which were already one of the most popular weapon types in the game. Tactical and Pump Action shotguns will spawn as floor loot, with Heavy Shotguns and Jetpacks reserved for chests and supply drops. We assume that shells won't exactly be hard to come by.

I never got around to playing Nier: Automata. Yes, I know it was on a bunch of GOTY lists, and I know that it combines solid gameplay with some genuinely intriguing ruminations on artificial intelligence and humanity. But it was a busy year, and nobody can play all the games that come out, not even all the big ones: Divinity Original Sin 2 nearly sucked an entire two weeks out of my life, after all, and Destiny 2 chewed up a huge chunk of playtime before running thin. So where was I supposed to find the time to play Nier: Automata? Yes, alright, I guess I have more free time than I thought.

IF DRONES COULD eat other drones, the SparrowHawk would sit somewhere near the top of the flying-robot foodchain. Click here to watch the video.

If drones could eat other drones, the SparrowHawk would sit somewhere near the top of the flying-robot foodchain. On a baking stretch of 110-degree dust an hour west of Phoenix, the six-rotored arachnoid rises with a menacing buzz, like a swarm of several dozen hornets' nests. Then the 14-pound, hexagonal drone lurches forward, towards its prey, a 3D Robotics quadcopter that its five-and-a-half-foot armspan dwarfs. The two drones perform a brief, mid-air dance before the SparrowHawk overtakes the quadcopter, and pulls it into a rectangular net that hangs beneath its body, tangling the smaller drone's rotors. The SparrowHawk then lowers to the ground, the captured quadcopter still twitching in its web.

Late last month, a federal court dismissed a lawsuit brought against a Kentucky man who shot a drone out of the sky when it allegedly flew over his property in 2015. The man, who used a shotgun to take out the drone, later dubbed himself the "Drone Slayer." The drone operator, who filed the lawsuit in 2016, argued that his DJI Phantom 3 quadcopter, flying at an altitude of some 200 feet, was in federally protected airspace and was in no way trespassing based on the Federal Aviation Administration's rules and even the trespassing laws of his state, which according to his suit prohibit a person from intruding, not a drone. In short, it wasn't because it thought this drone operator was incorrect; it was because it didn't deem the matter important enough to make a decision that might influence the delicate balance between federal and states' rights. And one of the justifications for that conclusion was that the FAA hadn't involved itself in the incident.