The selection of 19 projects as part of the Texas Society of Architects’ 2025 Design Awards program has been announced at the conclusion of a cycle that drew 194 applications. This year, the projects chosen represented an exceptional variety in client, typology, and size. The winners can be said to represent the very best design talent in a state that has an estimated 16,000+ architects. Their achievements also add to a growing body of other industry-wide recognition that includes San Antonio-based Lake|Flato's inspiring 2024 AIA Gold Medal victory. Likewise, the prestigious jury for this year’s program included Germane Barnes, Barbara Bestor, Tom Kundig, and Víctor Legorreta. The results can be read below. Each of the winning projects will be featured in the Awards issue of Texas Architect magazine later this fall. 310 W Grayson in San Antonio by Beaty Palmer Architects

Rebellion hasn’t been keeping the success of its newest title, Atomfall, a secret. The studio has expressed interest in making more games in that franchise. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, however, studio CEO Jason Kingsley has said that more Atomfall games happening will depend on whether or not the studio can find resources for projects like it. Referring to studio CTO Chris Kingsley, Jason spoke about wanting to do more games in general, including Sniper Elite, Zombie Army, and Strange Brigade, as well as Atomfall, since both of them want to repeat the studio’s successes. “I don’t think we got it just right,” said Jason in response to a question about managing the scale of new projects like Atomfall right. “I think that one of the things Chris and I want to do is repeat success. So we want to do more Sniper Elite, we want to do more Zombie Army, we want to do more Strange Brigade.” “Now it looks like we want to do more Atomfall.” Jason did mention, however, that Atomfall had managed to surpass the studio’s estimates for how well it would do. “We’ve done a lot better than our mid-range estimates, actually,” he said. “It’s nice when marketing comes back to you and says ‘yep, we underestimated our high-level success.” He also praised the idea of releasing Atomfall on Xbox and PC Game Pass along with the title’s regular release. According to Kingsley, the fact that Atomfall was a smaller project than the studio’s usual releases benefited from being on Game Pass. “They brought their skills and their scale to bear on our small project, and it’s done really, really well for them, so they got a good deal, we got a good deal out of it as well,” he said. Ultimately, the studio head believes that being able to manage the scope of its projects is what will help it in the long run. “We don’t deliberately fit into this mid range, but that’s what we can do, and what we can do successfully,” he explained. “We literally can’t afford to spend 200 million on making a game. We just don’t have 200 million.” Kingsley had praised the title’s success on Game Pass quite a bit in the same interview. Among other things, he spoke about the value Game Pass brought to Atomfall since it encourages subscribers to try out random new games, which in turn helps with word-of-mouth marketing. “With Game Pass, you can get people to try it, then as a result of those people trying it, they like it, and they then tell their mates on social media, ‘I found this game on Game Pass, I really enjoyed it, you should have a go,'” he said. “And then some of them are on Game Pass, and will [play] it. But some of them aren’t on Game Pass, and will also want to be part of that conversation. So, they’ll go and buy it.” Atomfall is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. Check out our review for more details.

Édouard de Reszke (1853–1917) was a Polish bass from Warsaw. A member of the musical Reszke family, he was a successful opera singer, as were his brother Jean and his sister Josephine. He made his debut in Aida in Paris on 22 April 1876. Photograph credit: Nadar Recently featured: Sherlock Jr. Trou au Natron African hawk-eagle Archive More featured pictures

April 22 Pedro Álvares Cabral 1500 – A fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral (pictured) anchored off present-day Brazil; he later claimed the land for the Portuguese Empire. 1885 – The first meeting of the Colonial Defence Committee, a standing committee of the British Colonial Office, was held to discuss the defence of Barbados. 1918 – The short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic was established on territory formerly part of the Russian Empire. 1951 – Korean War: The Chinese People's Volunteer Army attacked positions occupied mainly by Australian and Canadian forces, starting the Battle of Kapyong. 2016 – The Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change, opened for signature and was signed by 175 parties. Philip of Poitou (d. 1208)Robert Ludwig Kahn (b. 1923)Regine Velasquez (b. 1970) More anniversaries: April 21 April 22 April 23 Archive By email List of days of the year About

Archaeologists in Peru Discover Graves of Men, Women and Children Killed in Battle, Then Buried With Honor The 24 members of the mysterious Chuquibamba culture were interred with valuable grave goods The burials were filled with rich grave goods like pottery and corn cobs. Institute of Archaeology at the University of Wroclaw In southern Peru’s Atico River Valley, archaeologists have unearthed a large tomb filled with the battle-scarred skeletons of 24 women, men and children. Interred in various stone enclosures, the two dozen individuals all appear to have died from traumatic injuries sustained during an armed conflict. Researchers from the Institute of Archaeology at Poland’s University of Wroclaw discovered the burials last fall within the El Curaca archaeological site, near Peru’s Pacific coast. According to a translated statement posted on Facebook, artifacts found in the graves indicate they belonged to the Chuquibamba culture, also known as the Aruni. The remains were wrapped in textiles and buried alongside corn cobs; pottery fragments; and artifacts made of bone, stone and wood, reports Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove. Because the individuals were interred with such valuable grave goods, the researchers believe they were ritualistically buried as honored, fallen compatriots who were probably killed during a battle that the Chuquibamba won.The Chuquibamba occupied the region between about 1000 and 1450 C.E. Their society “preceded (and later coexisted with)” the more famous Inca Empire, which dominated the Peruvian highlands in the 15th and 16th centuries, notes the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Archaeologists don’t know much about the Chuquibamba, and it was only in recent years that researchers determined that their culture was distinct from the Inca. According to the statement, El Curaca is located north of the Chuquibamba’s center in the Majes River basin. The researchers created 3D models of the entombed skulls, in addition to conserving and documenting the textiles found at the El Curaca site. The Chuquibamba were skilled weavers, and various examples of their multicolored, intricately patterned textiles survive today, including tunics and a fringed bag made to hold coca leaves, which many South American Indigenous groups chewed as a narcotic. According to Mary Frame’s book Textiles Chuquibamba, many of these fabrics were made of camelid fiber, likely from alpacas. They were “intensely patterned,” with repeating motifs and colors that often overlaid each other. A joint Polish and Peruvian archaeological expedition surveyed the Atico basin in 2017 and 2019. Per a project summary, the team discovered caves filled with paintings and traces of hunter-gatherer settlements. Ceramics uncovered at El Curaca bore notable similarities to pottery found in Peru’s Tambo and Quilca valleys. As Frame writes, Chuquibamba pottery “is typically dark red with black linear patterns,” and it often features such designs as birds, camelids and eight-pointed stars. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

The segment ended with a meditation on the future: a world where AI tools could transform almost every human endeavor.Read More

Tariffs International shipping company DHL is temporarily suspending packages bound for consumers in the US that are valued at over $800 “until further notice.” The BBC reports that DHL was hit with a surge in formal customs clearances due to the Trump Administration’s new tariff changes, which added the need for additional paperwork for more packages. This isn’t just a problem for ecommerce giants like Shein and Temu, as it introduces a new hurdle for many companies that ship goods directly from China to customers in the United States. It’s also kicking in with only days left before the de minimis exception is set to expire on May 2nd, ending the rule that allowed packages valued under $800 to enter the US duty free, and for recipients in the US to receive up to $800 worth of stuff per day without paying import taxes. DHL explains the change in a statement posted to its site:  Effective April 5, 2025, all shipments to the U.S. with a declared customs value over USD 800 require formal entry processing – down from the previous USD 2,500 threshold due to new U.S. Customs regulations. This change has caused a surge in formal customs clearances, which we are handling around the clock. While we are working diligently to scale up and manage this increase, shipments over USD 800—regardless of origin—may experience multi-day delays. To manage this, starting Monday, April 21, 2025, and until further notice, we will temporarily suspend B2C shipments to private individuals in the U.S. where the declared value exceeds USD 800.

Author(s): Yuval Mehta Originally published on Towards AI. Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash In a world increasingly enamored by the shimmering promise of generative AI, it’s easy to forget the models that quietly power much of the technology we rely on every day. The glitz of ChatGPT crafting essays or DALL·E spinning art from text has, for many, overshadowed the more unassuming forms of artificial intelligence — those that don’t talk, draw, or compose, but simply decide: Will this customer churn?Is this transaction fraudulent?How much stock should we order next week? These aren’t the kinds of problems where you need a massive transformer model. They are about precision, predictability, and often, explainability. And they are solved remarkably well by the quieter, older siblings of the AI family: traditional machine learning models. The Quiet Strength of Simplicity Beneath the surface of this generative renaissance, traditional machine learning continues to thrive. Not because it’s old-fashioned, but because it’s incredibly good at what it does. There’s a reason why the best data science teams at top-tier companies still rely on logistic regression, XGBoost, and decision trees. It’s not resistance to innovation, it’s recognition of what works. These models are lightweight, effective, and interpretable. You don’t need billions of parameters and terabytes of data to get results. Sometimes, all you need is a clean dataset and a tried-and-tested classifier. AI generated Image from Napkin AI The Data Most Businesses Care About Let’s face it: much of the world’s data isn’t text, image, or video. It’s tables. It’s rows and columns.It’s structured, clean, and curated.According to a 2024 McKinsey report, over 70% of enterprise AI deployments focus on structured data. From banks to hospitals, manufacturing plants to marketing teams, this kind of data forms the operational heartbeat of organizations. And in this structured world, traditional ML shines. You don’t need a 175-billion-parameter model to predict monthly revenue or catch anomalies in server logs. In fact, trying to use one would likely waste compute, time, and money. Interpretability Is Not Optional The beauty of traditional ML lies in its transparency. These models: Train fast (even on a laptop) Are interpretable and auditable Can be easily explained to non-technical stakeholders Try explaining the hidden layers of a transformer to a CFO.Then show them a decision tree with feature importances.Guess which one gets a nod of approval? In sectors like healthcare, finance, and law, where accountability and traceability are legally mandated, traditional ML’s interpretability becomes more than a convenience — it becomes a requirement. Even LLMs Rely on Classical ML Ironically, many LLM pipelines depend on traditional ML under the hood. Tasks like: Intent classification Spam filtering Ranking responses Personalization layers …are often handled by smaller, faster models. So while generative AI gets the spotlight, traditional ML is often doing the heavy lifting backstage. For example, OpenAI’s GPT-based systems frequently use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where a traditional vector store is queried using embeddings to retrieve context. The ranking of those results? You guessed it: often powered by traditional ML models. AI generated Image from Napkin AI Cost, Control, and Practicality Not every team has the budget for cloud GPUs or the need to fine-tune massive language models. Sometimes, a well-engineered LightGBM model trained on a few thousand examples delivers more ROI than an entire transformer stack. With traditional ML, you get: Lower training and inference costs Fine-grained feature engineering control Better compliance and governance fit Easier deployment on edge devices In a time when sustainability and carbon emissions are gaining attention in AI development, traditional ML models offer an eco-friendly alternative. The Hybrid Future This isn’t a battle of old vs. new. The most powerful AI systems will be hybrid — combining: The brute strength of generative AI With the surgical precision of classical ML AI generated Image from Napkin AI Imagine an e-commerce platform using a fine-tuned LLM to generate product descriptions, but relying on traditional ML to handle demand forecasting, supply chain optimization, and user segmentation. The future belongs to those who can wield both swords. Final Thoughts Just because a tool is shiny and new doesn’t mean it’s the right one for every job. Traditional ML: Solves real-world problems It is cost-effective and explainable Integrates seamlessly with modern AI stacks As we continue to push the boundaries of what AI can do, let’s not forget the models that already do so much. So next time you’re faced with a machine learning problem, ask yourself: “Do I need a generative model… or just a good old decision tree?” Chances are, the quiet classics still have your back. Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor. Published via Towards AI

Dell has one of the best prices on an RTX 5080 equipped prebuilt desktop computer. Right now you can pick up an Alienware Aurora R16 RTX 5080 gaming PC for as low as $2,399.99 shipped. This is a reasonable price for a well-engineered (and warrantied) rig that can handle 4K gaming at high frame rates. It's also the only way to score an RTX 5080 GPU without having to settle for an exorbitant markup. If you were to try to find a standalone 5080 GPU for your diy PC build, you'll probably spend nearly as much for the GPU as you would for an entire system.Alienware Aurora R16 RTX 5080 Gaming PC for $2,400Alienware Aurora R16 Intel Core Ultra 7 265F RTX 5080 Gaming PC (16GB/1TB)$2,399.99 at AlienwareThis Alienware Aurora R16 gaming PC is equipped with an Intel Core Ultra 7 265F CPU, GeForce RTX 5080 GPU, 16GB of DDR5-5200MHz RAM, and a 1TB NVMe SSD. The current-gen Intel Core Ultra 7 265F Meteor Lake CPU boasts a max turbo frequency of 5.3GHz with 20 cores and a 30MB cache. It's cooled by a robust 240mm all-in-one liquid cooler and the entire system is powered by a generously equipped 1,000W 80PLUS Platinum power supply.Better Deal: Upgrade to Core Ultra 9 and 2x RAM for $2,500Alienware Aurora R16 Intel Core Ultra 9 285 RTX 5080 Gaming PC (32GB/1TB)Dell just discounted an upgraded Alienware Aurora R16 RTX 5080 gaming PC, making it the better deal despite the $100 higher price tag. This config is equpped with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285 CPU and 32GB of DDR5-5200MHz RAM. The Core Ultra 9 285 CPU has a turbo frequency that's 300MHz faster and boasts 4 more cores than the Intel Core Ultra 7 265F.The GeForce RTX 5080 GPU will run any game in 4KThe RTX 5080 is the second highest end Blackwell graphics cards available, surpassed only by the $2,000 RTX 5090. In our Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 FE review, Jackie writes that "If you already have a high-end graphics card from the last couple of years, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 doesn’t make a lot of sense – it just doesn’t have much of a performance lead over the RTX 4080, though the extra frames from DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Generation do make things look better in games that support it. However, for gamers with an older graphics card who want a significant performance boost, the RTX 5080 absolutely provides – doubly so if you’re comfortable with Nvidia’s AI goodies."Check out more of the best Dell and Alienware gaming deals of 2025.Why Should You Trust IGN's Deals Team?IGN's deals team has a combined 30+ years of experience finding the best discounts in gaming, tech, and just about every other category. We don't try to trick our readers into buying things they don't need at prices that aren't worth buying something at. Our ultimate goal is to surface the best possible deals from brands we trust and our editorial team has personal experience with. You can check out our deals standards here for more information on our process, or keep up with the latest deals we find on IGN's Deals account on Twitter.Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.

Returning to the mainland after a week cruising the Galápagos Islands feels like crashing back to earth from an otherworldly voyage. There’s no need to kiss the ground upon arrival, though. By the end of your trip to the archipelago located 560 miles west of Ecuador, nobody wants to leave the geological wonder that draws visitors from around the planet for a once-in-a-lifetime journey. Or twice in a lifetime. Remarked one enthusiastic tourist, who returned to the islands after 30 years to share her love of penguins with her young grandson: “This is the last item to cross off on the bucket list of my entire life.”  National Geographic’s latest documentary series, Secrets of the Penguins, offers a glimpse into why the Galápagos Islands elicit such strong reactions from its visitors.  Each of the 13 major islands and six minor islands, the majority completely uninhabited, feature a magical combination of colorful habitats, from black basalt lava cliffs, to red sand beaches and one of the world’s most active volcanos, on Fernandina Island, towering almost 5,000 feet. The headliner for visitors, though, often weighs less than five pounds, and its elusivity in some ways is the main attraction.  The Galápagos penguin is one of the rarest penguins in the world, which according to National Geographic’s May issue, are considered vulnerable or endangered along with more than half of all penguin species. Though these majestic creatures are negatively impacted across the globe by threats like pollution, warming climates, and overfishing, the blueprint on how humanity can affect positive change through conversation are found in the Galápagos. Secrets of the Penguins, which is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu, is led by director of photography, producer, and National Geographer explorer Bertie Gregory. He started filming the series in Galápagos, and joked that the cold water acclimatization “spoiled me,” as he hung out in the tropics with the sea turtles. Soon after he was traveling to colder climates like Antarctica to follow emperor penguins in often treacherous and potentially dangerous conditions. However as the production packed up for various locales, the efforts of the Ecuadorian people and natives of Galápagos stuck with Gregory.  “[Galápagos] is set up with this ethos and this mantra that wildlife has value both intrinsically and of course economically It’s an amazing model for how we should be treating nature.”  We got to see it firsthand as Den of Geek was invited to experience the islands through National Geographic Lindblad Expeditions on an expedition cruise that toured islands like San Cristobal, where Charles Darwin famously first landed in Galápagos, and the seahorse shaped Isabela, the largest island formed by the fusion of six shield volcanoes. It was off Isabela where I caught my only peek at those elusive Galápagos penguins during a deep sea-snorkeling excursion. After adjusting my snorkeling mask above water, I dunked down only to lock eyes with a sea turtle, then whipped my head around underwater and two penguins darted past me like torpedoes. I failed to spot another penguin the rest of the trip, though my subpar deep-sea swimming skills could be to blame.  Being flanked underwater by those penguins was fleeting but unforgettable. When we spoke with Gregory on the vessel via Zoom, after watching a special premiere of the docuseries’ three episodes, he was in awe that we spotted penguins after mere days, when it took their crew weeks to corral suitable footage for the show. For our group of press and general public aboard the expedition, a major part of what made the journey special was the expertise on board that not only helped us spot wildlife, but contextualize their relationship to breathtaking habitats that surrounded them, from land iguanas of various sizes, textures, and colors at Urbina Bay to the flush forest of the highlands on Puerto Ayora, where great giant tortoises roam.  Lindblad Expeditions relationship to the island dates back to 1967, when the company’s founder, Lars-Eric Lindblad, led the first voyage to the islanders for international travelers. Through their partnership with National Geographic, the expertise only deepened. Aboard the ship, National Geographic certified photo instructors helped arm guests with the best practices to capture shots of the blue-footed boobies or sea lions flopping around the beaches. The naturalists, almost exclusively from Ecuador or Galápagos, made themselves readily available day or night to answer questions pertaining to the wildlife, environment, or conservation. They have immense pride in the creatures on these islands and take seriously the efforts to protect them. When you disembark the expedition vessel on zodiac boats, all groups of no more than 16 people must have at least one naturalist with them at all times. So limited are the number of visitors and ships around these islands, you’re constantly required to keep the vessel moving every 12 hours. It leaves you in awe of the pristine playground wildlife like penguins have. And you walk away with a new or renewed interest in community efforts around conversation.  “The challenge is never with the wildlife,” Gregory says. “My hope is that this series kind of gets people to sit up and think about penguins a bit more and realize that their success is intertwined with our success. If more places around the world were like the Galapagos, the world would definitely be a better place.” Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!