Human populations need at least 2.7 children per woman – a much higher fertility rate than previously believed – to reliably avoid long-term extinction, according to a new study published April 30, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Takuya Okabe of Shizuoka University, Japan, and colleagues.

Rice’s César A. Uribe has won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to advance the mathematical foundations of decentralized learning, a critical area for the future of artificial intelligence, data science and distributed systems.

Madrid will host Eurocrypt 2025 for the first time from May 4 to 8 at the Riu Plaza España Hotel, with pre-conference workshops on May 3 and 4 at the Complutense University. Organized by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), Eurocrypt is one of the world’s leading scientific conferences in cryptography. This 44th edition will feature 123 selected papers from 624 submissions and is expected to welcome over 650 participants. The IMDEA Software Institute leads the local organization, alongside Universidad Carlos III, Universidad Complutense, and Inversed Tech.

The research team (NEAL) at the University of South China has proposed an innovative radiation-shielding optimization method based on a reference-point-selection strategy. This method has been successfully applied to the optimization of radiation-shielding designs for nuclear reactors. By integrating genetic algorithms with artificial bee colony algorithms, the method substantially improves the lightweight, compact, and radiation protection performance of shielding structures, thereby providing vital technical support for the design of nuclear reactors.The research team (NEAL) at the University of South China has proposed an innovative radiation-shielding optimization method based on a reference-point-selection strategy. This method has been successfully applied to the optimization of radiation-shielding designs for nuclear reactors. By integrating genetic algorithms with artificial bee colony algorithms, the method substantially improves the lightweight, compact, and radiation protection performance of shielding structures, thereby providing vital technical support for the design of nuclear reactors.