Environment Animals Wildlife Spiders Psychologists made people look at spiders. Humans will try to focus on almost anything else. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. There are plenty of studies examining why humans are so hardwired to detest spiders . However, fewer researchers have spent time investigating just far we'll go to avoid even looking at them.At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, psychologists decided to find out for themselves.

The maker of Ozempic and Wegovy is suing a rival firm for selling what it says are unsafe, knock-off versions of its weight-loss drugs in the US. Danish company Novo Nordisk asked US courts on Monday to ban Hims & Hers' range of weight-loss pills and injections, which it says are not approved by US authorities and infringe on its patent. The legal drama began on Friday after Hims & Hers launched a new weight-loss pill, leading to an initial threat from Novo Nordisk. Over the weekend, Hims & Hers said it would stop selling the pill. On Monday, its share price slumped as it called Novo Nordisk's decision to press ahead with the lawsuit a blatant attack.

There is currently a significant gap between the performance of fine-tuned models and prompting approaches using Large Language Models (LLMs) on the challenging task of text-to-SQL, as evaluated on datasets such as Spider. To improve the performance of LLMs in the reasoning process, we study how decomposing the task into smaller sub-tasks can be effective. In particular, we show that breaking down the generation problem into sub-problems and feeding the solutions of those sub-problems into LLMs can be an effective approach for significantly improving their performance. Our experiments with three LLMs show that this approach consistently improves their simple few-shot performance by roughly 10%, pushing the accuracy of LLMs towards SOTA or surpassing it. On the holdout test set of Spider, the SOTA, in terms of execution accuracy, was 79.9 and the new SOTA at the time of this writing using our approach is 85.3. Our approach with in-context learning beats many heavily fine-tuned models by at least 5%. Additionally, when evaluated on the BIRD benchmark, our approach achieved an execution accuracy of 55.9%, setting a new SOTA on its holdout test set.

In this paper, we propose a new technique named \textit{Stochastic Path-Integrated Differential EstimatoR} (SPIDER), which can be used to track many deterministic quantities of interests with significantly reduced computational cost. Combining SPIDER with the method of normalized gradient descent, we propose SPIDER-SFO that solve non-convex stochastic optimization problems using stochastic gradients only. We provide a few error-bound results on its convergence rates. Specially, we prove that the SPIDER-SFO algorithm achieves a gradient computation cost of $\mathcal{O}\left( \min( n^{1/2} \epsilon^{-2}, \epsilon^{-3}) \right)$ to find an $\epsilon$-approximate first-order stationary point. In addition, we prove that SPIDER-SFO nearly matches the algorithmic lower bound for finding stationary point under the gradient Lipschitz assumption in the finite-sum setting.

In this paper, we propose a new technique named \textit{Stochastic Path-Integrated Differential EstimatoR} (SPIDER), which can be used to track many deterministic quantities of interests with significantly reduced computational cost. Combining SPIDER with the method of normalized gradient descent, we propose SPIDER-SFO that solve non-convex stochastic optimization problems using stochastic gradients only. We provide a few error-bound results on its convergence rates. Specially, we prove that the SPIDER-SFO algorithm achieves a gradient computation cost of $\mathcal{O}\left( \min( n^{1/2} \epsilon^{-2}, \epsilon^{-3}) \right)$ to find an $\epsilon$-approximate first-order stationary point. In addition, we prove that SPIDER-SFO nearly matches the algorithmic lower bound for finding stationary point under the gradient Lipschitz assumption in the finite-sum setting.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated significant promise in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Text2SQL LLMs, especially with advanced algorithms such as GRPO and DAPO. However, the performance of these methods is highly sensitive to the design of reward functions. Inappropriate rewards can lead to reward hacking, where models exploit loopholes in the reward structure to achieve high scores without genuinely solving the task. This work considers a constrained RL framework for Text2SQL that incorporates natural and interpretable reward and constraint signals, while dynamically balancing trade-offs among them during the training. We establish the theoretical guarantees of our constrained RL framework and our numerical experiments on the well-known Text2SQL datasets substantiate the improvement of our approach over the state-of-the-art RL-trained LLMs.

Learning dexterous and agile policy for humanoid and dexterous hand control requires large-scale demonstrations, but collecting robot-specific data is prohibitively expensive. In contrast, abundant human motion data is readily available from motion capture, videos, and virtual reality, which could help address the data scarcity problem. However, due to the embodiment gap and missing dynamic information like force and torque, these demonstrations cannot be directly executed on robots. To bridge this gap, we propose Scalable Physics-Informed DExterous Retargeting (SPIDER), a physics-based retargeting framework to transform and augment kinematic-only human demonstrations to dynamically feasible robot trajectories at scale. Our key insight is that human demonstrations should provide global task structure and objective, while large-scale physics-based sampling with curriculum-style virtual contact guidance should refine trajectories to ensure dynamical feasibility and correct contact sequences. SPIDER scales across diverse 9 humanoid/dexterous hand embodiments and 6 datasets, improving success rates by 18% compared to standard sampling, while being 10X faster than reinforcement learning (RL) baselines, and enabling the generation of a 2.4M frames dynamic-feasible robot dataset for policy learning. As a universal physics-based retargeting method, SPIDER can work with diverse quality data and generate diverse and high-quality data to enable efficient policy learning with methods like RL.

Don't worry, you probably aren't swallowing spiders. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. All of us lay down every night and proceed to be completely unaware of what's happening in the waking world around us as we snooze. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that there are all kinds of myths about sleep. We have inaccurate ideas about what prevents us from sleeping, what helps us sleep, and what happens while we're sleeping.

Nobel Prize-winning American scientist James Watson has died aged 97. His co-discovery of the structure of DNA opened the door to help explain how DNA replicates and carries genetic information, setting the stage for rapid advances in molecular biology. But his honorary titles were stripped in 2019 after he repeated comments about race and intelligence. In a TV programme, he made a reference to a view that genes cause a difference on average between blacks and whites on IQ tests. The death of Watson, who co-discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, was confirmed to the BBC by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he worked and researched for decades.

Robots with anthropomorphic features are increasingly shaping how humans perceive and morally engage with them. Our research investigates how different levels of anthropomorphism influence protective responses to robot abuse, extending the Computers as Social Actors (CASA) and uncanny valley theories into a moral domain. In an experiment, we invite 201 participants to view videos depicting abuse toward a robot with low (Spider), moderate (Two-Foot), or high (Humanoid) anthropomorphism. To provide a comprehensive analysis, we triangulate three modalities: self-report surveys measuring emotions and uncanniness, physiological data from automated facial expression analysis, and qualitative reflections. Findings indicate that protective responses are not linear. The moderately anthropomorphic Two-Foot robot, rated highest in eeriness and "spine-tingling" sensations consistent with the uncanny valley, elicited the strongest physiological anger expressions. Self-reported anger and guilt are significantly higher for both the Two-Foot and Humanoid robots compared to the Spider. Qualitative findings further reveal that as anthropomorphism increases, moral reasoning shifts from technical assessments of property damage to condemnation of the abuser's character, while governance proposals expand from property law to calls for quasi-animal rights and broader societal responsibility. These results suggest that the uncanny valley does not dampen moral concern but paradoxically heightens protective impulses, offering critical implications for robot design, policy, and future legal frameworks.