Health Psychology Mental Health Go ahead and swear--it's good for your health Cursing can boost your workout, mood, and even confidence. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Yelling a properly timed swear word isn't only emotionally satisfying--it may have real physical and psychological benefits . In fact, a well-voiced expletive might even help take you to the next level during a particularly strenuous workout. "In many situations, people hold themselves back--consciously or unconsciously--from using their full strength," explained Richard Stephens, a psychologist at Keele University in the United Kingdom.

Late this spring, I was led into a car in Kyiv, blindfolded, and driven to a secret factory in western Ukraine. The facility belongs to TAF Drones, founded three years ago by Oleksandr Yakovenko, a young Ukrainian businessman who wanted to help fend off the Russian invasion. When the war started, Yakovenko was busy running a logistics company in Odesa, but his country needed all the help it could get. Ukraine was overmatched--fighting a larger, wealthier adversary with a bigger army and more sophisticated weapons. "The government said to me, 'We need you to make drones,' " Yakovenko told me.

Sparse linear regression is a fundamental tool in data analysis. However, traditional approaches often fall short when covariates exhibit structure or arise from heterogeneous sources. In biomedical applications, covariates may stem from distinct modalities or be structured according to an underlying graph. We introduce Neural Adaptive Shrinkage (Nash), a unified framework that integrates covariate-specific side information into sparse regression via neural networks. Nash adaptively modulates penalties on a per-covariate basis, learning to tailor regularization without cross-validation. We develop a variational inference algorithm for efficient training and establish connections to empirical Bayes regression. Experiments on real data demonstrate that Nash can improve accuracy and adaptability over existing methods.

We introduce a new empirical Bayes approach for large-scale multiple linear regression. Our approach combines two key ideas: (i) the use of flexible "adaptive shrinkage" priors, which approximate the nonparametric family of scale mixture of normal distributions by a finite mixture of normal distributions; and (ii) the use of variational approximations to efficiently estimate prior hyperparameters and compute approximate posteriors. Combining these two ideas results in fast and flexible methods, with computational speed comparable to fast penalized regression methods such as the Lasso, and with competitive prediction accuracy across a wide range of scenarios. Further, we provide new results that establish conceptual connections between our empirical Bayes methods and penalized methods. Specifically, we show that the posterior mean from our method solves a penalized regression problem, with the form of the penalty function being learned from the data by directly solving an optimization problem (rather than being tuned by cross-validation). Our methods are implemented in an R package, mr.ash.alpha,

Sparse Principal Components Analysis (PCA) has been proposed as a way to improve both interpretability and reliability of PCA. However, use of sparse PCA in practice is hindered by the difficulty of tuning the multiple hyperparameters that control the sparsity of different PCs (the "multiple tuning problem", MTP). Here we present a solution to the MTP using Empirical Bayes methods. We first introduce a general formulation for penalized PCA of a data matrix $\mathbf{X}$, which includes some existing sparse PCA methods as special cases. We show that this formulation also leads to a penalized decomposition of the covariance (or Gram) matrix, $\mathbf{X}^T\mathbf{X}$. We introduce empirical Bayes versions of these penalized problems, in which the penalties are determined by prior distributions that are estimated from the data by maximum likelihood rather than cross-validation. The resulting "Empirical Bayes Covariance Decomposition" provides a principled and efficient solution to the MTP in sparse PCA, and one that can be immediately extended to incorporate other structural assumptions (e.g. non-negative PCA). We illustrate the effectiveness of this approach on both simulated and real data examples.

Since its debut earlier this year, tens of thousands of developers around the world have downloaded the source code and used it to render spectacular scenes, sharing eye-catching results on social media. The research behind Instant NeRF is being honored as a best paper at SIGGRAPH -- which runs Aug. 8-11 in Vancouver and online -- for its contribution to the future of computer graphics research. One of just five papers selected for this award, it's among 17 papers and workshops with NVIDIA authors that are being presented at the conference, covering topics spanning neural rendering, 3D simulation, holography and more. NVIDIA recently held an Instant NeRF sweepstakes, asking developers to share 3D scenes created with the software for a chance to win a high-end NVIDIA GPU. Hundreds participated, posting 3D scenes of landmarks like Stonehenge, their backyards and even their pets.

Boston Dynamics, the company known for its robotic dogs, now has a humanoid robot capable of doing gymnastics. The robotics company previously has shown how its robot dogs can go down stairs and open doors. Some police departments have begun using the robot dogs, typically called Spot, to help patrol. And Atlas, which the company dubbed "the world's most dynamic humanoid," showed in an earlier video how the robot can jog and jump over a log. In a new video, Atlas now can do parkour – a sport of moving through obstacles – jumping and running along uneven platforms. Then, two humanoid robots do synchronized movements including turning, spinning and two flips, mirroring each other moves.

One of the most pressing questions in climate science is that of the effect of anthropogenic aerosol on the Earth's energy balance. Aerosols provide the `seeds' on which cloud droplets form, and changes in the amount of aerosol available to a cloud can change its brightness and other physical properties such as optical thickness and spatial extent. Clouds play a critical role in moderating global temperatures and small perturbations can lead to significant amounts of cooling or warming. Uncertainty in this effect is so large it is not currently known if it is negligible, or provides a large enough cooling to largely negate present-day warming by CO2. This work uses deep convolutional neural networks to look for two particular perturbations in clouds due to anthropogenic aerosol and assess their properties and prevalence, providing valuable insights into their climatic effects.

Interested parties now have just less than three weeks to apply to become the USPTO's first-ever Senior Level Artificial Intelligence Technical Expert. The post, which is being advertised on the US government's USAJobs website, comes with a salary of between $127,914 and $176,900 a year, and a wide-ranging brief: The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is seeking a technical expert to advance the shared understanding of how to best implement the opportunities presented by Artificial Intelligence. The role will provide technical expertise in developing solutions for real-world, large-scale problems using Artificial Intelligence at the USPTO. More specifically, the USPTO is an entity that produces a high volume of data each and every day. The person appointed to lead its AI operation will be responsible for developing and implementing systems that will enable that data to be used both internally and externally to improve processes, enable staff and enhance services.

When a fight broke out recently in the parking lot of Salt Lake Park, a few miles south of downtown Los Angeles, Cogo Guebara did what seemed the most practical thing at the time: she ran over to the park's police robot to push its emergency alert button. "I was pushing the button but it said, 'step out of the way,'" Guebara said. "It just kept ringing and ringing, and I kept pushing and pushing." She thought maybe the robot, which stands about 5 feet tall and has "POLICE" emblazoned on its egg-shaped body, wanted a visual of her face, so she crouched down for the camera. Without a response, Rudy Espericuta, who was with Guebara and her children at the time, dialed 911.