When disasters happen ' such as hurricanes, wildfires and earthquakes ' every second counts. Emergency teams need to find people fast, send help and stay organized. In today's world, one of the fastest ways to get information is through social media. In recent years, researchers have explored how artificial intelligence can use social media to help during emergencies. These programs can scan millions of posts on sites such as X, Facebook and Instagram. However, most existing systems look for simple patterns like keywords or images of damage. In my research as an AI scientist, I've developed new models that go further. They can understand the meaning and context of posts ' what researchers call semantics. This helps improve how accurately the system identifies people in need and classifies situational awareness information during emergencies. The results show that these tools can give rescue teams a clearer view of what's happening on the ground and where help is needed most. People share billions of posts on social media every day. During disasters, they often share photos, videos, short messages and even their location. This creates a huge network of real-time information....

Teenagers with mental-health conditions spend more time on social media than their peers ' on average, 50 more minutes on a typical day. They are also more likely to be dissatisfied with aspects of the experience, such as their number of online friends, a survey of 3,340 adolescents in the United Kingdom has revealed. The study, published today in Nature Human Behaviour1, explores how teens with specific mental-health conditions use social media, finding that participants with disorders such as anxiety and depression are more vulnerable to negative online experiences than are those with conditions such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). 'That is a question that very few studies have addressed, especially on such a large sample,' says study co-author Luisa Fassi, a specialist in young people's mental health and social-media use at the University of Cambridge, UK. The results are 'a good warning to families that if your youth is vulnerable because of anxiety, a tendency to have depression or be low in mood, then social media is something that really needs to be carefully monitored', says Anne Marie Albano, a clinical child and adolescent psychologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City....

The corpses started appearing in the early 2000s, hanging from overpasses with threats scrawled on their shirts. Everyone in Mexico knew that drug cartels were murdering people, but they rarely made such a show of it. Then, in 2005, a kingpin named Edgar Valdez Villarreal (a.k.a. 'La Barbie') ramped up the exhibitionism, posting a video online of his gang torturing and murdering its rivals. My stepbrother, a telenovela actor, agreed to play Valdez in a biopic; the film turned out to be written and financed by La Barbie himself, who often wandered the set. Two decades later, I realize that these grim spectacles were the beginning of a trend: Cartels are influencers now. They have converted their criminality into a commodity, broadcasting with impunity while law enforcement and social-media platforms struggle to rein them in. On TikTok, drug traffickers filmed themselves fleeing from customs agents in a high-speed boat chase, garnering millions of likes. Some content is less Miami Vice and more cottagecore: farmers harvesting poppy seeds, for instance. Keep scrolling and you might find henchmen bagging bales of $100 bills, tiger cubs lounging in trucks, and dogs trotting with decapitated heads in their mouths....