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More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Pull straight up without wiggling to quickly remove a tick. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . Ticks are an unfortunate reality during warm spring, summer and even early autumn months, and since these are periods when people tend to spend a lot of time outdoors, your odds of getting bitten and potentially exposing yourself to Lyme disease increase.

Your dog is a tick magnet. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Don't let your dog bring ticks into your home. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .

Don't flush ticks down the toilet Water does not kill them--and they could come back. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . Tick season is in full swing--and it could be a doozy.

Like many of us, the bugs have been hunkered down waiting for spring to return. CDC/ James Gathany; William L. Nicholson, Ph.D. (left). Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. With days to go until the official first day of spring, it was a tale of two winters in the continental United States. Colorado's mountains had record low snow levels, while Salt Lake City and Phoenix were among the cities who had their highest winter temperatures on record .

We introduce the STATION, an open-world multi-agent environment for autonomous scientific discovery. The Station simulates a complete scientific ecosystem, where agents can engage in long scientific journeys that include reading papers from peers, formulating hypotheses, collaborating with peers, submitting experiments, and publishing results. Importantly, there is no centralized system coordinating their activities. Utilizing their long context, agents are free to choose their own actions and develop their own narratives within the Station. Experiments demonstrate that AI agents in the Station achieve new state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of benchmarks, spanning mathematics, computational biology, and machine learning, notably surpassing AlphaEvolve in circle packing. A rich tapestry of unscripted narratives emerges, such as agents collaborating and analyzing other works rather than pursuing myopic optimization. From these emergent narratives, novel methods arise organically, such as a new density-adaptive algorithm for scRNA-seq batch integration that borrows concepts from another domain. The Station marks a first step towards autonomous scientific discovery driven by emergent behavior in an open-world environment, representing a new paradigm that moves beyond rigid pipelines.

We present X-SYCON, a xylem-inspired multi-agent architecture in which coordination emerges from passive field dynamics rather than explicit planning or communication. Incidents (demands) and obstructions (hazards) continually write diffusing and decaying scalar fields, and agents greedily ascend a local utility $U=ϕ_{\mathrm{DE}}-κ\,ϕ_{\mathrm{HZ}}$ with light anti-congestion and separation. A beaconing rule triggered on first contact temporarily deepens the local demand sink, accelerating completion without reducing time-to-first-response. Across dynamic, partially blocked simulated environments, we observe low miss rates and stable throughput with interpretable, tunable trade-offs over carrier count, arrival rate, hazard density, and hazard sensitivity $κ$. We derive that a characteristic hydraulic length scale $\ell\approx\sqrt{D/λ}$ predicts recruitment range in a continuum approximation, and we provide a work-conservation (Ohm-law) bound consistent with sublinear capacity scaling with team size. Empirically: (i) soft hazard penalties yield fewer misses when obstacles already block motion; (ii) throughput saturates sublinearly with carriers while reliability improves sharply; (iii) stronger arrivals can reduce misses by sustaining sinks that recruit help; and (iv) phase-stability regions shrink with hazard density but are recovered by more carriers or higher arrivals. We refer to X-SYCON as an instance of Distributed Passive Computation and Control, and we evaluate it in simulations modeling communication-denied disaster response and other constrained sensing-action regimes.

Microgrids are deployed to reduce purchased grid energy, limit exposure to volatile tariffs, and ensure service continuity during disturbances. This requires coordinating heterogeneous distributed energy resources across multiple time scales and under variable conditions. Among existing tools, typically, power-system simulators capture physical behaviour but assume centralized control, while multi-agent frameworks model decentralized decision-making but represent energy with no physical grounding. In this context, the EnergyTwin is introduced, an agent-based microgrid simulation environment that couples physically grounded models with forecast-informed, rolling-horizon planning, and negotiations. Each asset is modeled as an agent, interacting with a central agent that obtains forecasts, formulates predictions, and allocates energy through contract-based interactions. EnergyTwin targets tertiary-layer decision making and is extensible for digital-twin use. Its feasibility was evaluated in a university campus microgrid scenario where multiple planning strategies were compared. Achieved results show that forecast-driven rolling-horizon planning increases local energy self-sufficiency, maintains higher battery reserves, and reduces exposure to low-resilience operating states. They demonstrate also potential of EnergyTwin as platform supporting research on resilient, negotiation-driven microgrids.

The advancement of general-purpose intelligent agents is intrinsically linked to the environments in which they are trained. While scaling models and datasets has yielded remarkable capabilities, scaling the complexity, diversity, and interactivity of environments remains a crucial bottleneck. Hand-crafted environments are finite and often contain implicit biases, limiting the potential for agents to develop truly generalizable and robust skills. In this work, we propose a paradigm for generating a boundless and adaptive curriculum of challenges by framing the environment generation process as an adversarial game. We introduce a system where a team of cooperative multi-agent defenders learns to survive against a procedurally generative attacker. The attacker agent learns to produce increasingly challenging configurations of enemy units, dynamically creating novel worlds tailored to exploit the defenders' current weaknesses. Concurrently, the defender team learns cooperative strategies to overcome these generated threats. This co-evolutionary dynamic creates a self-scaling environment where complexity arises organically from the adversarial interaction, providing an effectively infinite stream of novel and relevant training data. We demonstrate that with minimal training, this approach leads to the emergence of complex, intelligent behaviors, such as flanking and shielding by the attacker, and focus-fire and spreading by the defenders. Our findings suggest that adversarial co-evolution is a powerful mechanism for automatically scaling environmental complexity, driving agents towards greater robustness and strategic depth.

In emergency situations, every second counts. The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in time-sensitive, low or zero-connectivity environments remains limited. Current models are computationally intensive and unsuitable for low-tier devices often used by first responders or civilians. A major barrier to developing lightweight, domain-specific solutions is the lack of high-quality datasets tailored to first aid and emergency response. To address this gap, we introduce FirstAidQA, a synthetic dataset containing 5,500 high-quality question answer pairs that encompass a wide range of first aid and emergency response scenarios. The dataset was generated using a Large Language Model, ChatGPT-4o-mini, with prompt-based in-context learning, using texts from the Vital First Aid Book (2019). We applied preprocessing steps such as text cleaning, contextual chunking, and filtering, followed by human validation to ensure accuracy, safety, and practical relevance of the QA pairs. FirstAidQA is designed to support instruction-tuning and fine-tuning of LLMs and Small Language Models (SLMs), enabling faster, more reliable, and offline-capable systems for emergency settings. We publicly release the dataset to advance research on safety-critical and resource-constrained AI applications in first aid and emergency response. The dataset is available on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/i-am-mushfiq/FirstAidQA.