'Rats have a bad reputation, but they actually make really great companion pets.' Rats are much more clean than their reputation suggests. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A non-profit organization in Massachusetts received a boatload of pet rats in need of new homes. An individual in northeastern Massachusetts surrendered 163 rats in early February. That's almost 60 percent more than the total number of rats that were adopted from the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals-Angell (MSPCA-Angell) in 2025 alone.

Weaponized drones are being tested inside US schools, flying through hallways with the ability to neutralize active shooters in seconds. Equipped with non-lethal pepper spray, powder pellets, and live video feeds, the drones launch from secure charging stations, six per school, when gunfire is detected. Developed by Campus Guardian Angel, the system has already completed trials in Texas and was recently demonstrated in three Florida schools. Permanent installations are scheduled this fall, with full deployment expected by January. The rollout has divided parents, some welcoming the extra layer of protection, while others call it a dystopian nightmare and'an accident waiting to happen.'

Russian and Ukrainian delegations met in Istanbul for the second time in a month on June 2 to explore the possibility of a ceasefire. The talks lasted just over an hour and, once again, produced no meaningful progress. As with the May 16 negotiations, both sides claimed they had laid the groundwork for prisoner exchanges. But despite Ukraine's offer to hold another meeting before the end of June, a deep and unbridgeable divide remains between Kyiv and Moscow. More meetings are unlikely to change that.

"No intelligence operation in the world has done anything like this before," defence analyst Serhii Kuzan told Ukrainian TV. "These strategic bombers are capable of launching long-range strikes against us," he said. "There are only 120 of them and we struck 40. It is hard to assess the damage, but Ukrainian military blogger Oleksandr Kovalenko says that even if the bombers, and command and control aircraft were not destroyed, the impact is enormous. "The extent of the damage is such that the Russian military-industrial complex, in its current state, is unlikely to be able to restore them in the near future," he wrote on his Telegram channel. The strategic missile-carrying bombers in question, the Tu-95, Tu-22, and Tu-160 are, he said, no longer in production. Repairing them will be difficult, replacing them impossible. The loss of the supersonic Tu-160, he said, would be especially keenly felt. "Today, the Russian Aerospace Forces lost not just two of their rarest aircraft, but truly two unicorns in the herd," he wrote. Beyond the physical damage, which may or may not be as great as analysts here are assessing, Operation Spider's Web sends another critical message, not just to Russia but also to Ukraine's western allies. My colleague Svyatoslav Khomenko, writing for the BBC Ukrainian Service website, recalls a recent encounter with a government official in Kyiv. "The biggest problem," the official told Svyatoslav, "is that the Americans have convinced themselves we've already lost the war.

In this report, we introduce our first-generation reasoning model, LexPro-1.0, a large language model designed for the highly specialized Chinese legal domain, offering comprehensive capabilities to meet diverse realistic needs. Existing legal LLMs face two primary challenges. Firstly, their design and evaluation are predominantly driven by computer science perspectives, leading to insufficient incorporation of legal expertise and logic, which is crucial for high-precision legal applications, such as handling complex prosecutorial tasks. Secondly, these models often underperform due to a lack of comprehensive training data from the legal domain, limiting their ability to effectively address real-world legal scenarios. To address this, we first compile millions of legal documents covering over 20 types of crimes from 31 provinces in China for model training. From the extensive dataset, we further select high-quality for supervised fine-tuning, ensuring enhanced relevance and precision. The model further undergoes large-scale reinforcement learning without additional supervision, emphasizing the enhancement of its reasoning capabilities and explainability. To validate its effectiveness in complex legal applications, we also conduct human evaluations with legal experts. We develop fine-tuned models based on DeepSeek-R1-Distilled versions, available in three dense configurations: 14B, 32B, and 70B.

Indeed, many of Tracy's pieces of film criticism aren't reviews--they're movie-centered essays, in which she develops in detail her probingly comprehensive view of the art form over all. She may even be the cinema's first major theoretician. Her body of work cries out for a complete reissue in book form. Tracy, born in 1874, was the daughter of actors, and she began her career on the stage, in the eighteen-nineties. In 1909, she published a book of short stories about the lives of theatre people, "Merely Players." In her love of movies, she was fighting an uphill battle against the intellectual orthodoxies of the time, which revered theatre as a serious art form and disparaged movies as merely popular entertainment.

Autonomous precision navigation to land onto the Moon relies on vision sensors. Computer vision algorithms are designed, trained and tested using synthetic simulations. High quality terrain models have been produced by Moon orbiters developed by several nations, with resolutions ranging from tens or hundreds of meters globally down to few meters locally. The SurRender software is a powerful simulator able to exploit the full potential of these datasets in raytracing. New interfaces include tools to fuse multi-resolution DEMs and procedural texture generation. A global model of the Moon at 20m resolution was integrated representing several terabytes of data which SurRender can render continuously and in real-time. This simulator will be a precious asset for the development of future missions.

Russia's troops fought Thursday to regain lost ground in areas of Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin has illegally annexed while Moscow tried to pound the invaded country into submission with more missile and drone attacks on critical infrastructure. Russian forces attacked Ukrainian positions near Bilohorivka, a village in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine. In the neighboring Donetsk region, fighting raged near the city of Bakhmut. Kremlin-backed separatists have controlled parts of both regions for 8½ years. Putin declared martial law in Luhansk, Donetsk and southern Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions on Wednesday in an attempt to assert Russian authority in the annexed areas following a string of battlefield setbacks and a troubled troop mobilization.

A deepfake video depicting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urging his citizens to surrender amid Ukraine's conflict with Russia circulated on social media and several news websites. The fake video showed a rendering of the Ukrainian president asking his troops to lay down their weapons and surrender to Russia. The footage, which ran about a minute long, was shared widely across online platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, on Wednesday before it was removed. "Earlier today, our teams identified and removed a deepfake video claiming to show President Zelensky issuing a statement he never did. It appeared on a reportedly compromised website and then started showing across the internet," Nathaniel Gleicher, Meta's head of security policy, said in a tweet. Meta is a tech company that owns Facebook and Twitter.

Vision-based navigation solutions require training and validation datasets that are as close as possible to real images. Our team and partners develop computer vision algorithms for space exploration (Mars, Jupiter, asteroids, the Moon), and for in-orbit operations (rendezvous, robotic arms, space debris removal). There is a new wave of missions targeting cislunar orbit or the Moon surface. Of course "real images" are rarely available before the mission. Ground-based test facilities such as robotic test benches embarking mock-ups or experiences with scaled mission analogues (mars terrain analogue, drones flights, etc.) are useful, yet they are limited.