NASA's Class of 1978, 'represent the most competent, talented, and experienced people available to us today.' The first six women in newly issued, incompletely adorned astronaut jumpsuits, 1978: (front, left to right) Sally Ride, Rhea Seddon; (rear) Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, Anna Fisher, Judy Resnik. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Smithsonian Books. Out October 28 and available wherever books are sold. Members of the media peppered administrator Robert Frosch with questions and sought assurances about the selection process, the number of women and people of color, and the number of military and civilian pilots selected. Chris Kraft, director of the Johnson Space Center, fielded questions and explained the experience-based filters and rating process for competitive selection. He was satisfied that the men and women selected "represent the most competent, talented, and experienced people available to us today." The main press conference to introduce the new astronaut candidates to the public occurred on January 31.

For years, conservative media, lawmakers and talking heads have been sounding the alarm about President Joe Biden's cognitive free fall. And for years, left-wing media, lawmakers and their loyal mouthpieces waved it off with the same condescending dismissal -- accusing us of lying, fear-mongering or worse. Some even went so far as to say they couldn't keep up with Biden's supposed brilliance and jam-packed schedule of what was mostly just one morning briefing and two mid-afternoon naps. Now that Biden has shuffled out of office, left-wing media seems to be waking up to the glaringly obvious. The New York Times of all places -- yes, the same paper that acted as Biden's PR firm -- has revealed that he relied on teleprompters during intimate fundraisers in private homes.

The widespread adoption of machine learning in scientific research has created a fundamental tension between model opacity and scientific understanding. Whilst some advocate for intrinsically interpretable models, we introduce Computational Interpretabilism (CI) as a philosophical framework for post-hoc interpretability in scientific AI. Drawing parallels with human expertise, where post-hoc rationalisation coexists with reliable performance, CI establishes that scientific knowledge emerges through structured model interpretation when properly bounded by empirical validation. Through mediated understanding and bounded factivity, we demonstrate how post-hoc methods achieve epistemically justified insights without requiring complete mechanical transparency, resolving tensions between model complexity and scientific comprehension.

The White House issued its first national security memorandum outlining the use of artificial intelligence for the military and intelligence agencies. The White House also shared a shortened copy of the memo with the public. The memo sets a series of deadlines for agencies to study the applications and regulations of AI tools, most of which will lapse following President Biden's term. The memo also aims to limit "the most dystopian possibilities, including the development of autonomous weapons," according to the New York Times. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan announced the new directive today at the National Defense University as part of a talk on AI's presence in government operations.

Hijackings, missile strikes and drone assaults on ships by Yemen's Houthi rebels have forced AP Moller-Maersk, a Danish shipping and logistics giant, and Hapag-Lloyd, a German shipping and container transportation company, to pause shipments through the Red Sea. Their decisions, announced on Friday, are a sign that major corporations are taking the security situation in the Red Sea increasingly seriously. But the consequences might also be felt by the world's oil markets and the cost of energy that consumers need to bear – though the extent of any disruption might depend on how major global players respond to the looming crisis, said experts. Maersk said in a statement that its decision stemmed from the company's concerns about the "highly escalated security situation in the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden" over the past few weeks. Recent missile and drone attacks on commercial vessels represent a "significant threat to the safety and security of seafarers," it said.

India's foreign minister has confirmed that he discussed his country's row with Canada over the killing of a Canadian Sikh leader with top United States government officials during a visit to Washington, DC, this week. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said on Friday that he laid out India's concerns about Sikh separatist movement supporters in Canada during talks a day earlier with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on September 18 that his government was investigating "credible allegations of a potential link" between Indian government agents and the June killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh leader in western Canada. "They [Blinken and Sullivan] obviously shared US views and assessments on this whole situation and I explained to them … the concerns which I had," Jaishankar said during an event on Friday morning at the Hudson Institute, a conservative US think tank. "Hopefully we both came out of those meetings better informed."

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, criticizes America's stance on the world stage at the hands of President Joe Biden in an exclusive interview on'Sunday Morning Futures.' White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan was pressed in an interview Sunday over an alleged civilian casualty – a father of 10 who was tending sheep – by U.S. forces in Syria. CNN's Jake Tapper asked Sullivan about the reportedly botched missile strike, which the Pentagon initially claimed was a successful assassination of a "senior Al Qaeda leader," but later backtracked and launched an investigation. Sullivan said he could not comment on the matter until the Pentagon's "full and thorough investigation" was complete – and instead touted President Biden's record on military accountability. "It was President Biden who stood up with Secretary Austin's guidelines for this administration to ensure there would be accountability and oversight of any potential civilian casualties from counterterrorism strikes," Sullivan said. "So far we do not have evidence to validate the claims being made in Syria. But I am going to withhold any judgment on what actually happened here until the Pentagon's investigation is complete."

Numerous dual-energy CT (DECT) techniques have been developed in the past few decades. Dual-energy CT (DECT) statistical iterative reconstruction (SIR) has demonstrated its potential for reducing noise and increasing accuracy. Our lab proposed a joint statistical DECT algorithm for stopping power estimation and showed that it outperforms competing image-based material-decomposition methods. However, due to its slow convergence and the high computational cost of projections, the elapsed time of 3D DECT SIR is often not clinically acceptable. Therefore, to improve its convergence, we have embedded DECT SIR into a deep learning model-based unrolled network for 3D DECT reconstruction (MB-DECTNet) that can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. This deep learning-based method is trained to learn the shortcuts between the initial conditions and the stationary points of iterative algorithms while preserving the unbiased estimation property of model-based algorithms. MB-DECTNet is formed by stacking multiple update blocks, each of which consists of a data consistency layer (DC) and a spatial mixer layer, where the spatial mixer layer is the shrunken U-Net, and the DC layer is a one-step update of an arbitrary traditional iterative method. Although the proposed network can be combined with numerous iterative DECT algorithms, we demonstrate its performance with the dual-energy alternating minimization (DEAM). The qualitative result shows that MB-DECTNet with DEAM significantly reduces noise while increasing the resolution of the test image. The quantitative result shows that MB-DECTNet has the potential to estimate attenuation coefficients accurately as traditional statistical algorithms but with a much lower computational cost.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a scorching hot topic lately, especially since the launch of ChatGPT Nov. 30. Microsoft Bing has plans to add ChatGPT to search. Some have questioned whether it's a Google killer. Bankrate is the latest example. It is having some of its content written by machines but reviewed by human editors.

Independent algorithmic auditing firm Parity AI has partnered with talent acquisition and management platform Beamery to conduct ongoing scrutiny of bias in its artificial intelligence (AI) hiring tools. Beamery, which uses AI to help businesses identify, recruit, develop, retain and redeploy talent, approached Parity to conduct a third-party audit of its systems, which was completed in early November 2022. To accompany the audit, Beamery has also published an accompanying "explainability statement" outlining its commitment to responsible AI. Liz O'Sullivan, CEO of Parity, says there is a "significant challenge" for businesses and human resources (HR) teams in reassuring all stakeholders involved that their AI tools are privacy-conscious and do not discriminate against disadvantaged or marginalised communities. "To do this, businesses must be able to demonstrate that their systems comply with all relevant regulations, including local, federal and international human rights, civil rights and data protection laws," she says. "We are delighted to work with the Beamery team as an example of a company that genuinely cares about minimising unintentional algorithmic bias, in order to serve their communities well.