Bombarding gamblers with offers greatly increases betting and gambling harm
University of Bristol researchers have found that frequent promotional offers from gambling operators significantly increase betting activity and associated harms among users. The study suggests that current marketing regulations fail to adequately protect consumers from aggressive promotional tactics. Policymakers are being called to consider stricter controls on gambling advertising frequency and personalization.
The Download: Quantum computing for health, and why the world doesn’t recycle more nuclear waste
A $5 million prize is motivating researchers to prove quantum computers can solve healthcare challenges, with practical experiments already underway at facilities like Oxford. Meanwhile, the nuclear industry continues to struggle with recycling spent fuel, demonstrating how technological capability doesn't always translate into widespread adoption when facing regulatory and economic obstacles.
Can quantum computers now solve health care problems? We’ll soon find out.
Researchers at the UK's National Quantum Computing Centre are testing a quantum computer built from suspended cesium atoms and light, exploring whether the technology can finally solve complex healthcare problems. The machine's ability to process information in fundamentally different ways from classical computers could accelerate drug discovery and personalized medicine. The coming period will be critical in determining whether quantum computing can move from laboratory success to practical medical breakthroughs.
Why the world doesn’t recycle more nuclear waste
The nuclear industry faces significant challenges in recycling spent fuel, despite viable recycling technologies existing. While reprocessing nuclear waste could reduce storage burdens and extract usable material, economic factors, regulatory hurdles, and public concerns have prevented widespread adoption of these solutions worldwide.
Extending single-minus amplitudes to gravitons
Researchers have successfully extended single-minus amplitudes to gravitons with AI assistance, using GPT-5.2 Pro to derive and verify nonzero graviton tree amplitudes in quantum gravity. This advancement could enhance computational methods for understanding quantum gravitational interactions and accelerate progress in the field through improved amplitude calculations.
Why we no longer evaluate SWE-bench Verified
OpenAI has discontinued reliance on SWE-bench Verified due to data contamination, flawed tests, and training leakage that distort measurements of AI coding progress. The organization recommends switching to SWE-bench Pro as a more reliable alternative for accurately evaluating frontier software engineering capabilities.
Trading inference-time compute for adversarial robustness
Trading Inference-Time Compute for Adversarial Robustness
Simplifying, stabilizing, and scaling continuous-time consistency models
OpenAI has enhanced continuous-time consistency models to achieve image quality comparable to leading diffusion models while requiring only two sampling steps instead of many. The improvements involved simplifying the architecture, stabilizing training, and scaling the approach effectively. This advancement makes generative models more computationally efficient and practical for real-world deployment.
Introducing SWE-bench Verified
OpenAI has released a human-reviewed version of SWE-bench, a benchmark that evaluates AI models' ability to solve real software engineering problems. The validated subset provides more dependable performance metrics by incorporating expert verification. This effort helps ensure that AI coding tools are assessed fairly and accurately against practical, real-world challenges.