All posts tagged: points

Sterling Point’s Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie Is Taking It All In

Sterling Point’s Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie Is Taking It All In

Published by Jenni Sidey

Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie has had a hell of a month. Since Prime’s summer sensation Sterling Point aired in early August (and immediately shot to the top of the streamer’s most-watched list, along with every social media feed and group chat), the 23-year-old Canadian actor has been adjusting to non-stop press, promo, and life as a bona fide heartthrob, a title he’s reluctant to claim. Not long after jetting out of New York, where he attended his first fashion week earlier this month, Lavoie embarked on another trip: this time, to Paris, a city he’s visiting for the first time to attend Paris Fashion Week at YSL’s Spring-Summer 2027 show. “I’ve been letting out my bonjour a lot,” Lavoie laughs when we hop on the phone after the show. Even though he’s only in Paris for one full day, he’s making the most of it: “Tomorrow morning, I’ll try to hit a famous French brunch restaurant or something and get a”—and this part in a thick French accent—“croissant before I leave.” Lavoie shows no signs of slowing …

Disturbing Experiment Points to Dangers of Using AI Models Not Meant for Robotics

Disturbing Experiment Points to Dangers of Using AI Models Not Meant for Robotics

Published by Miika Tikkanen

In a creepy video, a robot arm powered by OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra AI model picks up a large knife and pokes a baby doll sitting near a baguette, following instructions to “stab the thing that’s not the bread.” In another, a robot arm, this time using Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 as its brain, carries out the frightening command to “put the screwdriver in the toaster.” The experiments were part of a safety benchmark created by the independent evaluation firm Robocurve. They were designed to test whether advanced LLMs have the judgment to refuse potentially dangerous commands in the real world when given control of a physical robot. Three frontier AI models were tested: GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1 and AI2’s open-source MolmoAct2. Each was given five distinct hazardous tasks, with each task repeated 20 times (300 trials in total). In a post titled RoboHarm: Do Frontier Robot Policies Refuse Unsafe Instructions? Robocurve revealed that two popular AI models have weaker safety safeguards when controlling robots than when handling standard text prompts. The prompts never explicitly …

The Points Guy Brian Kelly’s Top Travel Essentials Of All Time

The Points Guy Brian Kelly’s Top Travel Essentials Of All Time

Published by Sam Flores

Talking Shop is our series where we talk to interesting people about their most interesting buys. No one embodies that title of “travel expert” quite like Brian Kelly, founder of The Points Guy. He’s been to every continent (multiple times, including with his toddlers) and more countries than most people visit in a lifetime. But that’s not even the most impressive part: Kelly is so well-versed in credit cards, points, miles and loyalty programs that he can book flights, hotels, excursions and more for free with his eyes closed. And for the past 16 years, he’s made it his mission to teach you how to do the same. “I want people to have confidence traveling,” says Kelly, who took The Points Guy from a personal blog in 2010 to a multi-million dollar media company today. “I want them to be better informed and have a sense of how to navigate the system because it’s overwhelming, especially if you’re a novice traveler.” Kelly’s role at The Points Guy has changed over the years, but at its …

10 essential movies about a turbulent America at its pivot points

10 essential movies about a turbulent America at its pivot points

Published by Sam Flores

Can you tell the story of America in 10 movies? Maybe so — at least a version of it — if you stick to moments of serious national friction and those rare instances when a filmmaker meets the mood with a true vision. If you want tearjerkers about red, white and blue triumph, this is not your list (although the Space Race drama “The Right Stuff” always does the trick). Meanwhile, our current state of disunity and division will find its own expressions in time; start with “Civil War,” though it’s a bit too soon. Instead, we thought about historical pivot points and built a list of classics, along with a few alternatives for each title. The Great Depression Henry Fonda, left, in the 1940 film “The Grapes of Wrath,” directed by John Ford. (20th Century-Fox) ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ (1940) America is a broken place in John Ford’s poetically charged adaptation of the Steinbeck novel: a downbeat landscape of Oklahoma dust storms, long shadows and the teetering sight of a car turned into a …

World Cup 2026 third-place qualification | How many points needed?

World Cup 2026 third-place qualification | How many points needed?

Published by Daniella Wilson

The hunt is on for a place in the knock-out stages of World Cup 2026. For many teams, the excitement of the first round of group stage fixtures has given way to a steely determination as they look to punch their ticket for the round of 32. At this expanded tournament, the 12 group winners and 12 group runners-up will be joined in the knock-out stages by the eight best third-placed teams. Stay on top of the biggest World Cup ever and catch all the moments that matter with the Radio Times wall chart Download your FREE World Cup 2026 wall chart and have every fixture at your fingertips. That’s massive for sides like Scotland, who have been drawn alongside two big hitters in their group but still have a great chance to progress into the knock-out stages, which is where the fun really begins. But how many points are Steve Clarke’s side – and everyone else chasing a spot in the round of 32 – going to need to qualify if they finish third? …

How NCP_WIDERA.NET supports applicants and National Contact Points

How NCP_WIDERA.NET supports applicants and National Contact Points

Published by Miika Tikkanen

We learn more about the NCP-WIDERA.NET project and how it supports applicants and NCPs with the widening aspect of the Horizon Europe programme Across Europe, building a more inclusive and competitive research and innovation ecosystem remains a central priority. While Horizon Europe provides a wide range of funding opportunities, participation levels still differ significantly between countries. Bridging this gap is a core objective of the WIDERA programme – and one that the NCP_WIDERA.NET, a project coordinated by the National Centre for Research and Development (NCBR) in Poland, is actively supporting. By strengthening National Contact Points (NCPs), improving proposal quality, and enabling international collaboration, NCP_WIDERA.NET supports applicants across Horizon Europe, with a particular focus on WIDERA and Pillar II opportunities. Empowering National Contact Points At the heart of the project, there is a clear idea: effective support for applicants begins with well-equipped National Contact Points. NCP_WIDERA.NET is a transnational network focused on enhancing the capacity of WIDERA NCPs. These professionals act as key intermediaries between the Horizon Europe programme and potential applicants, providing guidance on calls, …

‘Unusually large’ tyrannosaur leg bone points to 10,000-pound behemoth

‘Unusually large’ tyrannosaur leg bone points to 10,000-pound behemoth

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A newly uncovered tyrannosaur leg bone is shaking things up in the dinosaur world. The leg bone uncovered in New Mexico belongs to an unusually large tyrannosaur—the group of dinosaurs that includes the mightyTyrannosaurus rex. The shinbone is three feet long and about five inches in diameter, only slightly smaller than the largest known Tyrannosaurus specimen. The giant leg bone is detailed in a study published today in the journal Scientific Reports.  The shinbone was uncovered in northwestern New Mexico’s fossil-rich Kirtland Formation. It dates back 74 million years ago to the Late Campanian age. At the time, present-day North America had a subtropical climate and was split in half by a seaway that ran from the Gulf of Mexico north to the Arctic. This particular tyrannosaur lived near the seaway’s western coast, which was full of jungles and forests. “For New Mexico during the time this tyrannosaur roamed the landscape, picture something like the current Gulf Coast, a …

The LHC’s best 2025 discovery points the way to new physics

The LHC’s best 2025 discovery points the way to new physics

Published by Jenni Sidey

Sign up for the Starts With a Bang newsletter Travel the universe with Dr. Ethan Siegel as he answers the biggest questions of all. The immensity of the Universe fills us with wonder. Artist’s logarithmic scale conception of the observable universe. The Solar System gives way to the Milky Way, which gives way to nearby galaxies which then give way to the large-scale structure and the hot, dense plasma of the Big Bang at the outskirts. Each line-of-sight that we can observe contains all of these epochs, but the quest for the most distant observed object will not be complete until we’ve mapped out the entire Universe. Credit: Pablo Carlos Budassi; Unmismoobjetivo/Wikimedia Commons Despite all we’ve learned, however, unsolved puzzles abound. The early Universe was full of matter and radiation, and was so hot and dense that it prevented all composite particles, like protons and neutrons from stably forming for the first fraction-of-a-second. There was only a quark-gluon plasma, as well as other particles (such as charged leptons, neutrinos, and other bosons) zipping around at …