In the run up to Christmas, carols fill the air. Many have an astronomical twist, singing of the "Christmas Star" from the story of the nativity. Described in the Gospel of Matthew, the star guided the three wise men to the cradle of the young baby Jesus in a manger in Bethlehem.

Restoration Ecology, EarlyView.

Mark your calendars.

arXiv:2512.22147v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In high-performance computing, hotspot GPU kernels are primary bottlenecks, and expert manual tuning is costly and hard to port. Large language model methods often assume kernels can be compiled and executed cheaply, which fails in large applications …

Thomas Warrick talks about Trump’s plan for rebuilding Gaza and why reconstruction may only take place in certain areas.

General secretary of party’s main union backer says it must change course or risk sowing seeds of its own destructionUnite’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, has told the government it must do more for workers in 2026 or risk sowing the seeds of its own destruction.Graham accused Labour of being pr…

Petersen & Cooper, WSJ Many people don't sleep well. And now there is a booming class of companies that say you can drink your way to better sleep.

China continued on December 30 for a second day its live-fire military exercises around Taiwan. The exercises involved 130 military jets and 22 warships in the vicinity of the island in the space of 24 hours. Beijing considers the self-ruled island part of its territory and claims it is acting again…

Improving DDR5; algorithm-driven on-chip integration; AFM for hybrid bonding-ready copper pads; proton radiation effects; LLM-based development for HW design; 2T-SOT-MRAM; thermal modeling for 2.5D/3D heterogeneous chiplet systems; nano gap MEMS switches for power gating.
The post Chip Industry Tech…

Iran's president Masoud Pezeshkian said he had asked the Interior Ministry to "listen to the legitimate demands" of the protesters after several days of demonstrations by shopkeepers in Tehran as Iran's embattled currency hit new lows on the unofficial market, state media reported Tuesday.

From sovereign cloud and AI compute to gaming and quantum, PwC research shows how the region is reshaping growth, competitiveness and digital sovereignty

President Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday, as negotiations on ending Russia’s war in the Eastern European nation continue. Upon greeting Zelensky at the entrance to the club, Trump projected optimism, telling reporters that the sides “have the makings of…

Access to clean drinking water is essential for everyone, which is why the Alliance for the Great Lakes supports a bipartisan Ohio bill designed to eliminate all lead water lines […]
The post Testimony in Support of Bipartisan Bill to Eliminate Lead Water Lines in Ohio appeared first on Alliance for…

arXiv:2512.22364v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Text-to-SQL systems powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve high accuracy on standard benchmarks, yet existing efficiency metrics such as the Valid Efficiency Score (VES) measure execution time rather than the consumption-based costs of cloud …

The LIT token supply is split evenly between the ecosystem and team/investors, with a portion airdropped to early participants.

Paul Dano wasn’t the only actor whom the mouthy director had words for.

Metaplanet's bitcoin income generation business generated about $55 million in annual revenue for 2024.

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Scientists have uncovered evidence that a newly identified niobium-rich deposit in central Australia formed during the early breakup of an ancient supercontinent. Unusual rocks found deep below central Australia are helping scientists trace the origins of a highly promising new source of niobium, a …

arXiv:2205.03368v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: This work studies the computational aspects of multivariate convex regression in dimensions $d \ge 5$. Our results include the \emph{first} estimators that are minimax optimal (up to logarithmic factors) with polynomial runtime in the sample…

arXiv:2512.23412v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Traditional workflow-based agents exhibit limited intelligence when addressing real-world problems requiring tool invocation. Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) agents capable of autonomous reasoning and tool invocation are rapidly emerging as a powerful…

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After completing the police academy earlier this year, 7-foot-3 Jordan Wilmore fell short of passing the state exam by one point. NBA legend Shaquille O'Neal learned about his story and offered his support. Jericka Duncan reports.

President Trump is consuming himself with foreign policy matters as the first year of his second term comes to a close, even as concerns about the economy are set to consume the Republican Party in 2026. Trump is spending the final weeks of the year at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where he host…

The Justice Department released thousands of files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, which includes documents, recordings of phone calls and videos gathered during state and federal investigations.Why it matters: The trove includes hundreds of thousands of pages that give the most…

Artificial intelligence continued to have a big impact on information management in 2025. Also selected are case studies and interviews with data chiefs that show the enduring value of good data management

Strictly and Traitors presenter and ‘true national treasure’ will front The Claudia Winkleman Show from springShe has ruled the Traitors castle and waltzed out of the ballroom on Strictly Come Dancing. Now Claudia Winkleman is taking up residence in one of television’s most traditional settings – on…

Powerball's $1.817 billion Christmas Eve jackpot was won by a single ticket sold in Arkansas, lottery officials said Thursday.Why it matters: The win caps one of the largest jackpot runs in U.S. lottery history and delivers a rare Christmas Eve payout — turning a $2 ticket into a life-changing windf…

Just a few years ago, Santa Claus literally couldn't come to town: Headlines warned of too few St. Nick lookalikes available to make appearances at malls, stores, office parties and private gatherings. Recent anecdotes suggest that demand for Santas has become more Grinch-like, mirroring what's happ…

By directly communicating with the brain, a new wireless device could someday help restore lost senses or manage pain without medications, its developers say.

Scheduled for release next year, Valve Corporation’s flexible device aims to bridge the great divide between PCs and consoles

Even the most skilled face recognizers are duped by AI-generated faces, a new study finds. But they can improve with training.

This year, the right-to-repair movement got a boost from—surprisingly—big tech, tariffs, and economic downturn. But the companies controlling who fixes their stuff aren’t giving up that power willingly.

Global Change Biology, Volume 32, Issue 1, January 2026.

Grammy-winning artist joins husband Jay-Z and artists like Taylor Swift following the success of Cowboy Carter tourBeyoncé is now a billionaire, according to a report from Forbes – becoming the fifth musician to obtain the status.The Grammy award-winning artist, 44, has joined the world’s wealthiest…

Iranian traders and shopkeepers staged a second day of protests on December 29 after the country’s currency plummeted to a new record low against the U.S. dollar. The overall inflation rate in December rose to 42.2%, but foodstuff prices rose 72% and health and medical items were up 50% compared to …

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China is holding its second day of drills around Taiwan, which it claims as its own, simulating a blockade of the island's key ports and assaults on maritime targets. The drills are the sixth since 2022, and the second to include a blockade simulation. But 'being capable of an invasion does not mean…

It’s a plan George Clooney alluded to in early December, when he praised French privacy laws that protect his family from paparazzi.

A new technical paper titled “Algorithm-Driven On-Chip Integration for High Density and Low Cost” was published by researchers at University of Southern California. Abstract “Growing interest in semiconductor workforce development has generated demand for platforms capable of supporting large number…

When your parental figures are fighting, sometimes you have to take action.

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Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has observed an elliptical galaxy known as NGC 4486B. Results of the observational campaign, published Dec. 16 on the arXiv preprint server, deliver important insights into the properties of the double nucleus of this …

A new technical paper titled “Effects of Proton Radiation on Tin Oxide: Implications for Space Electronics” was published by researchers at Kyungpook National University and Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute. Abstract “This study examines the effects of 5 MeV proton irradiation, applied at flue…

Allies of President Trump have set their sights on Minnesota in the wake of a fraud scandal in the state. The scandal centers on hundreds of millions of dollars stolen via a federally funded nutrition program. The New York Times late last month propelled the story into national prominence, noting fe…

Human life is intimately connected with the rest of nature.

arXiv:2512.22972v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: 4D millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar has been widely adopted in autonomous driving and robot perception due to its low cost and all-weather robustness. However, its inherent sparsity and limited semantic richness significantly constrain perception capabi…

arXiv:2512.23694v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We introduce Iterated Bellman Calibration, a simple, model-agnostic, post-hoc procedure for calibrating off-policy value predictions in infinite-horizon Markov decision processes. Bellman calibration requires that states with similar predicted long-…

arXiv:2512.22390v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Branch mispredictions cause catastrophic performance penalties in modern processors, leading to performance loss. While hardware predictors and profile-guided techniques exist, data-dependent branches with irregular patterns remain challenging. Tradit…

The removal by a U.S. military cemetery in the Netherlands of two displays recognizing Black troops who fought in World War II has spurred anger there.

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arXiv:2512.22374v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We introduce the Self-Evaluating Model (Self-E), a novel, from-scratch training approach for text-to-image generation that supports any-step inference. Self-E learns from data similarly to a Flow Matching model, while simultaneously employing a novel …

Dutch firms are betting that hulls made with 3D printing machines will mean cheaper boats.

Traders are forcing macro risk through metals rather than crypto, with silver volatility spiking on physical tightness while bitcoin stays trapped in a low-volatility holding pattern.

President Trump said after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Hamas must disarm soon or "there will be hell to pay." He said the next phase of the Gaza peace plan could move forward quickly if Hamas disarms. Ed O'Keefe has details.

If cleaning up your digital life is on your New Year's resolution list, we've got good news: 1Password is offering half off its subscription plans now through December 30. This includes the Individual and Families plans.
That brings the price of the Individual plan down to $24 for a year and the Fa…

arXiv:2512.23512v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language large models are moving toward the unification of visual understanding and visual generation tasks. However, whether generation can enhance understanding is still under-explored on large data scale. In this work, we analysis the unifie…

Looking back at the skills and hiring landscape in 2025, Computer Weekly shares key moments for IT careers and skills over the past 12 months

Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock is a space scientist and science educator who has worked on a number of instruments that are revolutionising our view of the cosmos, including the James Webb Space Telescope. This year she will be giving the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, Britain’s most prestigious p…

Israeli President Isaac Herzog swiftly denied President Trump's claim on Monday that he had told the U.S. president he would pardon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Why it matters: Trump has intervened repeatedly in Israel's politics and judicial system by pressuring Herzog to pardon Netanyahu, wh…

A photo of President Trump along with a batch of other files was initially removed from the Justice Department's newly released tranche of thousands of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents, images and recordings.The photo of the president has since been re-uploaded by the DOJ.The big picture: The vanis…

The lead Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees said they are "exploring all legal options" after a top Justice Department official signaled the agency won't produce all its documents on Jeffrey Epstein by the statutory Friday deadline.Why it matters: The so-called "Epstein files"…

Militias and far-right extremists believed they would be central to Trump’s mass deportation plans. Instead he militarized law enforcement agencies.

A groundbreaking step in AI hardware efficiency comes from Germany, where scientists have engineered a vast spin waveguide network that processes information with far less energy. These spin waves quantum ripples in magnetic materials offer a promising alternative to power-hungry electronics.

Repeated, rapid drainages from a meltwater lake on Greenland’s 79°N Glacier are exposing how warming-driven fractures and hidden channels may be pushing the glacier into an unfamiliar and potentially unstable state. Since the mid-1990s, the Greenland ice sheet has steadily lost mass, and only three …

The true story of one of the world's most popular board games, Monopoly.

Tributes pour in from around the world as Bangladesh mourns Khaleda Zia.

Nobody relaxes too much in the fleeting moments of near-normalcy because they know these can disappear at any time.

ETH Zurich scientists have created “MetaGraph,” a revolutionary DNA search engine that functions like Google for genetic data. By compressing global genomic datasets by a factor of 300, it allows researchers to search trillions of DNA and RNA sequences in seconds instead of downloading massive data …

We look at 10 players likely to create headlines next month, including the ‘new Kevin De Bruyne’While Semenyo would doubtless prefer to be in Morocco at the moment, one of the advantages to Ghana’s failure to qualify for the Africa Cup of Nations has been that the 25-year-old is in the same country …

There are structural tailwinds favoring silver, plus potential export restrictions by the U.S. and China that could tighten the stretched physical market even further.

Researchers at Tsinghua University developed the Optical Feature Extraction Engine (OFE2), an optical engine that processes data at 12.5 GHz using light rather than electricity. Its integrated diffraction and data preparation modules enable unprecedented speed and efficiency for AI tasks. Demonstrat…

Researchers have reimagined Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, engineering a trade-off that allows precise measurement of both position and momentum. Using quantum computing tools like grid states and trapped ions, they demonstrated sensing precision beyond classical limits. Such advances could rev…

Scientists have used DNA's self-assembling properties to engineer intricate moiré superlattices at the nanometer scale—structures that twist and layer like never before. With clever molecular “blueprints,” they’ve created customizable lattices featuring patterns such as honeycombs and squares, all w…

Accused of being a smokescreen for metals smuggled from DR Congo, country now boasts Africa’s largest tungsten mine

Two Sydney PhD students have pulled off a remarkable space science feat from Earth—using AI-driven software to correct image blurring in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Their innovation, called AMIGO, fixed distortions in the telescope’s infrared camera, restoring its ultra-sharp vision without t…

Spotting an AI-generated face is harder than you might think. How confident are you in your ability?

Announced earlier in December but flying under the radar until now is the initial reoease of a QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop. This is a developer environment for the QNX real-time operating system primarily used on embedded systems. With now having this developer desktop option, the hassle of cr…

Marina Vance had an E.P.A. grant to help homeowners counter the impact of wildfire smoke, until the agency deemed the research “no longer consistent” with its priorities.

President Trump said the targets of airstrikes in Nigeria were Islamic State terrorists responsible for killing Christians, but experts question his framing.

ACA premium subsidies, drug pricing changes, and PBM reforms are among the issues to watch.

Global Change Biology, Volume 32, Issue 1, January 2026.

Astronomers have decoded the hidden past of a distant red giant star by listening to tiny vibrations in its light, revealing clues of a dramatic cosmic history. The star, which quietly orbits a dormant black hole, appears to be spinning far faster than it should—and its internal “starquakes” suggest…

The sun is just starting to set off the tip of Galinhos, a peninsula in northeast Brazil, and Rafael Revorêdo is holding a beer koozie as he sits in a folding chair with legs that have sunk deep...

All the NASA engineers and scientists need is a star on top of the telescope in the cleanroom.

Technical analysis suggests a defensive market stance, with XRP struggling to reclaim resistance levels and momentum indicators showing oversold conditions.

Traders expect BTC to regain its mojo next year.

President Trump and his top advisers asked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to change Israel's policies in the occupied West Bank during their meeting on Monday, according to a U.S. official and another source, both with direct knowledge.Why it matters: While the security situation in the West Bank…

Kylie Jenner is offloading her Los Angeles concrete megamansion for $48 million after finishing building her sprawling Hidden Hills property.

While superconducting qubits are great at fast calculations, they struggle to store information for long periods. A team at Caltech has now developed a clever solution: converting quantum information into sound waves. By using a tiny device that acts like a miniature tuning fork, the researchers wer…

Restoration Ecology, EarlyView.

It was a very interesting year for Ubuntu Linux. Ahead of the important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out this coming April, Ubuntu Linux this year was expeditiously migrating to new Rust-based system tools like sudo-rs and Rust Coreutils, new performance optimizations continued to be explored for be…

In office for three terms, she traded the country’s leadership with Sheikh Hasina, the head of another political dynasty, over decades. She was believed to be 80.

The volume of new medical studies is too vast for individual doctors to absorb.

Looking to watch some of the best Sci-Fi movies and shows ever without having to rely on streaming? Don't skip these out-of-this-world Blu-ray editions.

A 2021 astronaut photo shows a triple valley system in Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park where a massive climate-resilient glacier, a pristine turquoise lake and a murky green "river" come together at a single point.

The South Sandwich Islands were born from a tectonic collision, forged by volcanism and relentlessly reshaped by ice, wind and waves.

Hunt for key terms that define one of the universe's most mind-bending phenomena—from event horizons to singularities.

Government said the move was due to its ‘unrestricted respect for human rights’ in the face of US aggressionVenezuela has said it has carried out its largest release of political prisoners this year, claiming to have freed 99 people detained for taking part in protests after the 2024 election, widel…

A free online course is making it easier for educators, forestry and conservation professionals, and sustainability leaders to help strengthen community connections to trees and increase forest literacy. Forest Literacy: Understanding the Values of Trees, Forests, and Sustainability is a free, two-h…