A team of researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, spotted a rare kind of planet that's unusually hot and eccentric. TOI-1355 b orbits its star, TOI-1355, which is also much hotter than our sun, in a strange way and incredibly quickly, completing an orbit in about two Earth days. The work is published in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

Is everyone entitled to a fair process before being forced out of their home?

California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order on Friday pushing to implement guardrails on artificial intelligence in the state that’s the epicenter of the technology’s boom.

Amsted Industries is exploring a sale of cooling system provider Baltimore Aircoil Co., as strong demand for data center components pushes more owners to test the market, according to people familiar with the matter.

PWC CEO Paul Griggs says AI should be viewed as a business transformation, not simply a technology upgrade. He says companies most exposed to AI are seeing stronger productivity and hiring, while PWC itself is adding engineers, data scientists and machine-learning experts as its workforce evolves. (Source: Bloomberg)

Amazon.com Inc. is under scrutiny from the European Union for potentially imposing unfair restrictions on firms selling on its platform.

One of Dublin's "lost" medieval castles has been found hiding in plain sight inside University College Dublin's Roebuck Castle. New research reveals that substantial remains of the Norman castle of Roebuck, an important fortress on one of the approach roads into the medieval city of Dublin, are preserved within the modern-day building.

Students may come for the dog, but new research from UBC Okanagan published in the Journal of College Student Mental Health suggests that's not always what they leave with. In a study of 676 students—most in their first year—researchers asked an open-ended question about what made a therapy dog visit meaningful and found the answers extended well past the animals themselves.

Imagine you are at a cocktail party. The room is crowded, people are coming and going, and you can barely hear your friend as they tell you some juicy gossip about the date they went on last week.

The fact you can still follow what their saying is down to your brain performing some very complex operations amid all the noise. Out of all the sound waves reaching your ears, it is successfully isolating the one of interest while filtering out the rest.

Trying to understand how the brain does this has kept auditory neuroscientists occupied since the 1950s, when British cognitive scientist Colin Cherry first coined the term “the cocktail party problem”.

This was initially studied in experiments that asked volunteers to listen to two speeches simultaneously – but only repeat one of them aloud afterwards. Cherry found that listeners could follow and repeat the pre-selected message remarkably well, despite both speeches being played simultaneously, one in each ear. In contrast, they recalled very little of the other message.

These experiments laid the foundation for decades of selective attention research. But it is only in the past 15 years that scientists have studied this phenomenon in experiments that more closely resemble the complicated, multi-layered way we listen in the real world – using technology that accurately tracks the brain’s activity as speech unfolds.

The most common non-invasive option, electroencephalography (EEG), uses what looks like a swimming cap fitted with small sensors. These measure very fast changes in the electrical activity of populations of neurons (the brain’s nerve cells) with millisecond precision.

In a 2014 study, neuroscientists found that, within 200 milliseconds of hearing someone speak, the brain favours the conversation someone is focusing on over all other noise. This prioritised attention shows up most markedly in secondary brain areas such as the superior temporal gyrus, which are responsible for piecing together the sounds we hear into meaningful speech.

This suggests that our attentive brain is not just enhancing the voice of who we are listening to, but helping us make sense of their words while filtering out all other conversations and background noise.

Attention switching

The original cocktail party problem did not investigate the full range of people’s listening experiences, which are often much less static. In everyday life, we repeatedly switch and reorient our auditory attention – for example, when hearing our name called across a crowded room, or when a door slams.

But what happens in that brief moment when we stop listening to one person and turn our attention to another? Can the brain switch from one voice to another instantly, or does it briefly have to process both? These were questions we investigated in our latest study with colleagues from the Eriksholm Research Centre in Denmark, which is funded by Danish hearing aid manufacturer Oticon.

Clarifying how the brain manages these rapid shifts in attention can help explain why some conversations are easy to follow while others become difficult, especially in noisy environments.

Coming back to the cocktail party: here you are, focused on your friend’s voice as they reveal the identity of their recent date. But then another familiar voice suddenly reaches your awareness. Your partner is (secretly) telling a friend about the surprise birthday gift they are planning for you. Your attention immediately shifts to your partner’s voice, while still giving the appearance of listening to your friend.

When we tested such a scenario in our laboratory, we found something striking. During this attention reorienting, the brain does not simply drop one voice and turn to the other. Rather, for a short period of between one and two seconds, the neural signals associated with the two voices overlap. In other words, the brain starts tuning into the new speaker before it has completely let go of the old one.

This mechanism may help explain how we navigate the constantly changing soundscape around us, moving our attention from one voice or sound to another while maintaining enough information about the previous speaker to make that transition seamless. This efficient processing strategy could be described as the brain maintaining a smooth “attention continuum”.

Improved hearing aid design?

These insights have some important real-world applications. For example, traditional hearing aids are often designed to favour sounds coming from in front of the listener, which is obviously limiting in many situations.

But using enhanced these attention decoding techniques, hearing aids could be neurally steered not only to enhance the speaker that is currently attended to, but to switch between different speakers, almost in real time, as the listener’s attention is dynamically reoriented.

More generally, understanding how the brain shifts, maintains and combines information from different speakers can give us a clearer picture of how attention shapes what we ultimately hear, understand and remember.

The approach introduced in our study could be particularly useful for studying how individuals vary in their attentional strategies, particularly in noisy environments – and for relating these differences to the mental effort they use to follow and understand speech.

Ultimately, this brings us closer to understanding how the brain makes successful communication possible – at cocktail parties and everywhere else.

Sara Carta received funding from the William Demant Fonden and Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland.

Giovanni Di Liberto receives funding from William Demant Fonden and Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland. He is also supported by Research Ireland at ADAPT, the Research Ireland Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology at Trinity College Dublin.

On Sept. 15, the eruption of Mount Anak Krakatau sent volcanic ash up to 15,000 meters (50,000 feet) and produced rumbling heard 700 kilometers (435 miles) away. Eight airports suspended operations, thousands of flights were disrupted, and more than 270,000 passengers were stranded.

A new study sheds light on how Syrian archaeologists risked their lives to rescue approximately 30,000 priceless artifacts from the Deir ez-Zor Museum during the summers of 2014 and 2015 as the city faced the imminent threat of capture by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as Daesh.

The cops who’re using Flock cameras to supposedly track down criminals and stalk their ex-girlfriends alike are quite literally laughing in our faces as they tap into the all-seeing surveillance panopticon.

According to a new investigation by the Electric Frontier Foundation, a not insignificant number of police officers are submitting nonsense, joke reasons to officially justify the searches they conduct on Flock systems.

One officer with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff’s Department wrote “LMAO” in the Flock software’s “reason” box, before searching across more than 19,000 cameras in over 1,500 cities and towns.

The frivolous reasoning is a case in point of why there’s so much outrage over Flock’s AI-powered cameras — which are nominally intended to be licenese plate scanners — and how they’re frequently being abused by cops. Unlike traditional surveillance cameras, Flock’s are part of a centralized network and require no warrants to use. With such little oversight, it’s easy for police officers to conduct sweeping searches for wanton reasons.

In its investigation, which was reported on by 404 Media, the EFF found dozens of examples of cops writing childish responses like “LMAO,” “LOL,” “Hehe,” and “IDK,” in the reason box for Flock searches. 

An alarming number simply button mashed their keyboards. “ghjhghjg,” was a sufficient reason for one officer in Oklahoma to plow through the recordings of over 83,000 cameras. Thousands of others simply wrote uninformative responses like “investigation” and “test.” The odd cop left short little messages, all seemingly unaware that their stated reasons would become public record.

“robbery I don’t remember the case number leave me alone,” one wrote. 

“f*** this new search engine,” wrote another.

Following up on its findings, the EFF contacted police departments  and found that few, if any, of the cops were meaningfully disciplined for their flippant entries. At most, a few were “counseled,” but by and large the departments tried to deflect and offered excuses.

Flock, conveniently, changed its software in late 2025 so that cops can no longer type in their own “reason.” Now, they’re provided a dropdown list of pre-made reasons instead.  The EFF blasted the move for causing a “loss of transparency,” as it obviously doesn’t encourage cops to be more serious. It merely papers over the fact that they weren’t treating the powerful surveillance tools seriously in the first place.

“This culture of abuse has allowed police to treat a mass surveillance network like their own personal search engine,” condemned the EFF in a post about its findings, “permitting the tracking of the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints, personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols.”

More on privacy: Trump Throws His Weight Behind Flock Cameras

The post Cops Are Giving Complete Nonsense Reasons to Search Thousands of Flock Cameras appeared first on Futurism.

Cysteine is one of the main building blocks that cells use to make proteins. But this amino acid is a double-edged sword—too much cysteine is toxic to the cell. Cells therefore keep free cysteine levels to a minimum, converting most of the amino acid into the antioxidant glutathione.

Yahoo Finance has ended a partnership with Polymarket in which the financial news platform used Polymarket data to create a prediction market hub on its website.

A new study by Chester Zoo and Nottingham Trent University scientists revealed that just over a third (38%) of more than 230 householders in Cheshire and North Wales were willing or able to introduce more wildlife-friendly features to their gardens.

A new way to accurately measure the distance between quasar pairs—the blazing, black-hole-powered centers of distant galaxies that appear side by side in space—is showing promise through University of Alberta research.

Lord Howe Island sits about 600 kilometers (370 miles) off the New South Wales coast, a crescent of rainforest and sea cliffs that draws visitors to its beaches and birdlife. Few people realize they are standing on the worn-down remains of a volcano.

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A liquefied natural gas tanker bringing fuel from the US to Europe suffered a systems failure that the crew reported as a suspected cyber attack, according to people familiar with the matter.