As fears of all-out nuclear war intensify, scientists are sounding the alarm that the decision to launch a catastrophic strike could soon rest not with world leaders, but with a machine. In a stark warning, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), an independent group that monitors global security issues, reported that the decades-long decline in global nuclear arsenals has come to an end. Instead, nations are now modernizing, expanding, and deploying their stockpiles at a rapid and alarming pace, signaling the onset of a new, high-tech arms race. While AI and similar technologies can accelerate decision-making during crises, scientists warn they also raise the risk of nuclear conflict through miscommunication, misunderstanding, or technical failure, the report stated. In a nuclear standoff, decision-makers often have only minutes to assess threats and respond.

Scientists have unveiled the world's fastest computer in California that will be used to secure America's nuclear weapons stockpile. The 600 million exascale supercomputer, called'El Capitan,' is only the third of its kind in the world. That's equivalent to the processing power of about one million high-end smartphones working simultaneously, researchers said. El Capitan launched at the Livermore National Laboratory (LNNL) in November 2024 and was officially announced to the public on January 9. It will primarily focus on national security, including nuclear data and weapon testing, high-energy-density physics, materials discovery and other sensitive or classified tasks.

In this paper, we propose a model to schedule the next 24 hours of operations in a bulk cargo port to unload bulk cargo trains onto stockpiles. It is a problem that includes multiple parts such as splitting long trains into shorter ones and the routing of bulk material through a configurable network of conveyors to the stockpiles. Managing such trains (up to three kilometers long) also requires specialized equipment. The real world nature of the problem specification implies the necessity to manage heterogeneous data. Indeed, when new equipment is added (e.g. dumpers) or a new type of wagon comes in use, older or different equipment will still be in use as well. All these details need to be accounted for. In fact, avoiding a full deadlock of the facility after a new but ineffective schedule is produced. In this paper, we provide a detailed presentation of this real world problem and its associated data. This allows us to propose an effective constraint programming model to solve this problem. We also discuss the model design and the different implementations of the propagators that we used in practice. Finally, we show how this model, coupled with a large neighborhood search, was able to find 24 hour schedules efficiently.

White House correspondent Peter Doocy reports on how the White House push for Ukraine spending may be jeopardized after McCarthy ouster on'Special Report.' Russian military officials claim they fended off a massive Ukrainian drone attack overnight Wednesday, which would be the largest single cross-border drone assault reported by Moscow since it first invaded Ukraine 20 months ago. The Russian Defense Ministry said Wednesday its national air defenses shot down 31 Ukrainian drones launched by Kyiv's forces on border regions, but there were no immediate reports of any damage or casualties. The Russian Defense Ministry didn't provide any evidence for its claims about intercepting Ukrainian drones nor any details about any damage or casualties. Moscow also said Russian aircraft thwarted a Ukrainian attempt to deploy soldiers on Russian-annexed Crimea.

All of the the world's governments will, at least officially, be out of the chemical weapons business. The US Army tells The New York Times it should finish destroying the world's last declared chemical weapons stockpile as soon as tomorrow, July 7th. The US and most other nations agreed to completely eliminate their arsenals within 10 years after the Chemical Weapons Convention took effect in 1997, but the sheer size of the American collection (many of the warheads are several decades old) and the complexity of safe disposal left the country running late. The current method relies on robots that puncture, drain and wash the chemical-laden artillery shells and rockets, which are then baked to render them harmless. The drained gas is diluted in hot water and neutralized either with bacteria (for mustard gas) or caustic soda (for nerve agents).

Modelling stockpile is a key factor of a project economic and operation in mining, because not all the mined ores are not able to mill for many reasons. Further, the financial value of the ore in the stockpile needs to be reflected on the balance sheet. Therefore, automatically tracking the frontiers of the stockpile facilitates the mine scheduling engineers to calculate the tonnage of the ore remaining in the stockpile. This paper suggests how the dynamic of stockpile shape changes caused by dumping and reclaiming operations can be inferred using polygon models. The presented work also demonstrates how the geometry of stockpiles can be inferred in the absence of reclaimed bucket information, in which case the reclaim polygons are established using the diggers GPS positional data at the time of truck loading. This work further compares two polygon models for creating 2D shapes.

The tanks and trench warfare in Ukraine may seem old-school, but US experts say the conflict has provided strategic insights into future possible conflicts from the Middle East to Taiwan. They range from the mundane -- the need for bigger weapons stockpiles -- to the high-tech, with Ukraine a proving ground for artificial intelligence and robotic warfare. Ukraine has been a test for "sensor fusion," triangulating diverse sources of information to create a fuller picture of the battlefield, said Stephen Biddle, a defense expert at Columbia University. US firm Palantir has provided Kyiv with artificial intelligence-powered tools that sort through gigabytes of data to help commanders understand the war in real time: Russian troop movements, positions and targets. Drone warfare came of age in Ukraine, but now both sides are roughly matched in capabilities, and armies around the world are catching up.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES – Iran is not ruling out negotiations with the United States even after an American drone strike that killed a top Iranian general, the country's foreign minister said in an interview released Saturday. Mohammed Javad Zarif told Germany's Der Spiegel magazine that he would "never rule out the possibility that people will change their approach and recognize the realities," in an interview conducted Friday in Tehran. There has been growing tension between Washington and Tehran since in 2018, when President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the nuclear deal with Iran. The U.S. has since reimposed tough sanctions that have crippled Iran's economy. But Zarif suggested Iran was still willing to talk, though reiterated his country's previous demand that first the U.S. would have to lift sanctions.

For centuries, following bloody conflicts, military leaders acknowledged that some weapons were simply too awful to be used, but those same militaries generally continued to use them. The first world war (WWI) saw the successful deployment of chemical weapons on a massive scale for the first time. The horror of millions of dead soldiers, in trenches and on battlefields, shocked nations into signing the Geneva Protocol pledging to refrain from the use of chemical and biological weapons in future wars. Over the past century, the weapons that cause "unjustifiable" suffering in an indiscriminate and "unpredictable" manner have been subject to multilateral treaties that aim to disarm countries that possess them and control or ban the use of these weapons altogether. While some may feel sceptical that these efforts to disarm the world are effective, and challenges to disarmament remain, the disarmament treaties serve a key role in the regulation and reduction in stockpiles, as well as in the testing and use of certain weapons in conflicts.

Drones have quickly become one of the most versatile tools on the construction site. Whether it's for documentation before pouring concrete, making pre-design processes more efficient, or speeding up data collection for infrastructure projects, drones have become the aerial eye of the jobsite, helping construction professionals work better and more productively. One area that drones have had a big impact is in managing earthworks projects. We've identified 5 key reasons why: It can take hours to walk the jobsite and measure aggregates and stockpiles with traditional workflows, and then it usually takes 1-2 days to process the data and produce the final deliverables. Drones are doing this work in a fraction of the time.