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The blunt, stony response that showed the woman who had played the role of our stepmother for two decades did not care about us. Dad was dead, and so were we to her.

On Saturday, the Juice hitmaker took to Instagram to share a video of herself modeling a sexy piece of swimwear from her brand Yitty as she lounged poolside.

Even the the threat of constant rain couldn't keep celebrity fans away as Silverstone hosted the British Grand Prix on Sunday.

A NUMBER of roads will temporarily close across north and mid Essex this month.

Officers have addressed the most common myths after carrying out a speech check on a main road in Braintree.

The supermarket chain has opportunities at its stores across Essex if you're looking for a fresh start

His family said the 21-year-old was 'full of life' and left a 'lasting impression on everyone he met'

The Prime Minister this week caved to rebel MPs over proposed welfare cuts as he performed yet another U-turn following his previous reversal on winter fuel payments.

Police in riot vans were called to a 10-bed £635,000 home in the quiet village of Norden, Greater Manchester, after revellers from as far as London turned up.

You don't need six months of pain in the gym to tine up your arms and lose bingo wings - with clever creams, expert tweaks and a few cosmetic cheats, you can tone, tighten and glow in weeks.

"Scientists have created the first lasers made entirely from edible materials," reports Science magazine "which could someday help monitor and track the properties of foods and medications with sensors that can be harmlessly swallowed." [The researchers' report] shows that tiny droplets of everyday cooking oils can act like echo chambers of light, otherwise known as lasers. By providing the right amount of energy to an atom, the atom's electrons will excite to a higher energy level and then relax, releasing a photon of light in the process. Trap a cloud of atoms in a house of mirrors and blast them with the right amount of energy, and the light emitted by one excited atom will stimulate one of its neighbors, amplifying the atoms' collective glow... [The researchers] shot purple light at droplets of olive oil, whose surfaces can keep photons of light bouncing around, trapping them in the process. This reflected light excited the electrons in the oil's chlorophyll molecules, causing them to emit photons that triggered the glow of other chlorophyll molecules — transforming the droplet into a laser. The energy of the chlorophyll's radiation depends on the oil droplets' size, density, and other properties. The study's authors suggest this sensitivity can be exploited to track different properties of food or pharmaceutical products. When researchers added oil droplets to foods and then measured changes in the laser light the droplets emitted, they could reliably infer the foods' sugar concentration, acidity, exposure to high temperatures, and growth of microorganisms. They also used the lasers to encode information, with droplets of different diameters functioning like the lines of a barcode. By mixing in sunflower oil droplets of seven specific sizes — all less than 100 microns wide — the researchers encoded a date directly into peach compote: 26 April, 2017, the first international Stop Food Waste Day. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is the moment police dog Lando finds two men hiding in a toilet cubicle inside a closed garden centre in Essex

She played the likeable secretary who quickly became a fan favorite on a hit legal drama for her ability to clap back at her boss and how relatable she was... can you guess who?

Joshua Myers, died on Thursday, June 3, after police and paramedics rushed to the tracks near Poynton station at around 10.09pm.

A 76-year-old grandmother has spoken of her heartbreak and humiliation after being duped out of £67,000 by a romance fraudster who reeled her in with sweet words and fake photos

I'm in my early 30s, and after years of struggling with my weight and finding it impossible to shed the pounds - I finally decided to go on Ozempic.

Most of the time, the rich and famous, as Us Magazine used to say, are just like us. But - shock! - sometimes even raging narcissists who live for external validation can be a bit much.

Tim Clarkson, 37, was said to have taken the evening as an opportunity to 'try it on' with multiple women as his marriage to a policewoman fell apart.

"Apple quietly dropped a new AI model on Hugging Face with an interesting twist," writes 9to5Mac. "Instead of writing code like traditional LLMs generate text (left to right, top to bottom), it can also write out of order, and improve multiple chunks at once." "The result is faster code generation, at a performance that rivals top open-source coding models." Traditionally, most LLMs have been autoregressive. This means that when you ask them something, they process your entire question, predict the first token of the answer, reprocess the entire question with the first token, predict the second token, and so on. This makes them generate text like most of us read: left to right, top to bottom... An alternative to autoregressive models is diffusion models, which have been more often used by image models like Stable Diffusion. In a nutshell, the model starts with a fuzzy, noisy image, and it iteratively removes the noise while keeping the user request in mind, steering it towards something that looks more and more like what the user requested... Lately, some large language models have looked to the diffusion architecture to generate text, and the results have been pretty promising... This behavior is especially useful for programming, where global structure matters more than linear token prediction... [Apple] released an open-source model called DiffuCode-7B-cpGRPO, that builds on top of a paper called DiffuCoder: Understanding and Improving Masked Diffusion Models for Code Generation, released just last month... [W]ith an extra training step called coupled-GRPO, it learned to generate higher-quality code with fewer passes. The result? Code that's faster to generate, globally coherent, and competitive with some of the best open-source programming models out there. Even more interestingly, Apple's model is built on top of Qwen2.5-7B, an open-source foundation model from Alibaba. Alibaba first fine-tuned that model for better code generation (as Qwen2.5-Coder-7B), then Apple took it and made its own adjustments. They turned it into a new model with a diffusion-based decoder, as described in the DiffuCoder paper, and then adjusted it again to better follow instructions. Once that was done, they trained yet another version of it using more than 20,000 carefully picked coding examples. "Although DiffuCoder did better than many diffusion-based coding models (and that was before the 4.4% bump from DiffuCoder-7B-cpGRPO), it still doesn't quite reach the level of GPT-4 or Gemini Diffusion..." the article points out. But "the bigger point is this: little by little, Apple has been laying the groundwork for its generative AI efforts with some pretty interesting and novel ideas."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gere, a practicing buddhist since 1978, was seen reverently kissing the spiritual leader's hand at the event, held at Dharamshala.