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• SETI experts have updated their official guidance on how to share news regarding the potential discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life. • The new framework emphasizes the need for transparency and rigorous verification to prevent premature or false announcements that could mislead the public. • These guidelines aim to protect scientists from undue pressure while ensuring that any confirmed discovery is communicated through a structured, scientific process.

The UCL study also found physically punished children were more likely to struggle in schoolChildren smacked by their parents struggle to get good exam results and are more likely to bully others, causing a negative impact on society, according to new research calling for smacking to be banned.The study by University College London (UCL) found that children in England who were physically punished at the ages of three, five and seven were significantly less likely to pass GCSE exams compared with other children, even after factors such as family background were taken into account. Continue reading...

• Cybersecurity researchers are criticizing Anthropic's new AI model, Fable, claiming its safety guardrails are too restrictive for practical cybersecurity applications. • These constraints mirror previous restrictions placed on biology-related queries to prevent the development of biological weapons. • The issue follows the April release of Mythos, which was limited to select organizations under Project Glasswing to secure critical infrastructure.

• Researchers at Sapient developed a 1B parameter reasoning model, called HRM-Text, by training it from scratch for approximately $1,500. • The model was trained on 40B tokens and achieved performance levels competitive with larger models ranging from 2B to 7B parameters. • This breakthrough demonstrates that foundational pretraining is no longer exclusive to wealthy institutions, allowing smaller organizations to build capable reasoning models affordably.

Peptides join melatonin, cannabis and weight loss medications as priority concerns. Follow today’s news liveGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastGood morning and welcome to our live news blog. I’m Martin Farrer with the top overnight stories and then it will be Nick Visser with the main action.A non-profit organisation that runs a helpline for young people says there is little sign of a dip in cyberbullying or image-based abuse in the six months since teenagers under 16 have been banned from social media. More coming up. Continue reading...

Chemical tank overheated in May and forced evacuation of 50,000 nearby residents due to danger of explosionThe FBI is searching a southern California aerospace facility where an overheated chemical tank forced 50,000 residents to evacuate last month, after federal authorities served a search warrant there on Wednesday.Signed by a federal judge last week, the warrant approved the seizure of records related to the “storage, use or disposal” of methyl methacrylate, the chemical stored inside the tank that authorities feared could explode. Continue reading...

• University of Cambridge researchers conducted a systematic review of over 3,000 scientific papers focused on climate change mitigation. • The analysis revealed that policy recommendations are often an "afterthought," frequently being non-existent, ignoring uncertainty, or presenting "wish lists" unrelated to the actual study findings. • This gap is critical because it hinders the effective translation of scientific evidence into actionable government policies needed to combat climate change.