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Tensions Rise in Middle East as Iran Warns of Regional War
Tensions in the Middle East escalated as Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned that any attack by the United States would ignite a "regional war." The statement, made on Sunday, February 1, 2026, represents the most direct threat from Khamenei amid rising tensions with the U.S., according to the Associated Press. The warning comes as President Donald Trump has threatened military action against the Islamic Republic.
The geopolitical tensions coincide with other developments across the globe. In France, a clown school near Paris is teaching students that failure is a key lesson. According to NPR News, students at the school are often put in situations where pleasing the instructor is nearly impossible, teaching them valuable lessons about performance and resilience.
Meanwhile, in Chile, scientists are working to preserve plant biodiversity in the world's driest desert. NPR reported that researchers at the Initihuasi Seed Bank in Vicuña, Chile, are freezing seeds to protect plant species for the future. Ana Sandoval, a researcher at the seed bank, is dedicated to nurturing the future by preserving biodiversity.
In the realm of technology, enterprises are grappling with the limitations of current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. VentureBeat reported that many companies have deployed RAG systems with the promise of democratizing corporate knowledge by indexing PDFs and connecting them to Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the reality has been underwhelming, particularly for industries dependent on heavy engineering. The failure, according to the report, lies in the preprocessing, as standard RAG pipelines treat documents as flat strings of text, using fixed-size chunking that destroys the logic of technical manuals by slicing tables and severing captions from images.
In other scientific news, researchers are exploring the potential of fungi as a future insecticide. Ars Technica reported that certain species of fungi could be used to eliminate wood-devouring insects like beetles, termites, and carpenter ants, offering a potential alternative to noxious insecticides. The Eurasian spruce bark beetle, a bane of spruce trees, could be targeted using this method. These beetles ingest bark high in phenolic compounds, organic molecules that often act as antioxidants and antimicrobials, protecting spruce bark from pathogenic fungi.
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