News
Synthetic biology promised to rewrite life " with the death of its pioneer, J. Craig Venter, how close are scientists?
26+ min ago (981+ words) When scientist J. Craig Venter and his team announced in 2010 that they had created the first cell controlled by a fully synthetic genome, it marked a turning point in how scientists think about life. For the first time, DNA " the molecule…...
Sramcbled wrods: the real reason you can still read jumbled text
12+ hour, 54+ min ago (1008+ words) You've probably seen it on social media before: a paragraph of scrambled text that looks like nonsense at first glance, yet somehow you can read it with surprising ease. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in…...
What Canada, the U. K. and other G7 nations learned about building resilient education systems during the COVID-19 pandemic
1+ week, 4+ day ago (906+ words) By a dictionary definition, the word resilient means an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. The key words here? "Recover" and "change." The notion that psychological characteristics strongly influence resilience is likely familiar to many…...
When fake data is a good thing " how synthetic data trains AI to solve real problems
5+ mon, 1+ week ago (585+ words) There are other reasons that help explain the growing use of synthetic data in training AI models. Some things are so scarce or rare that they are barely represented in real data. Rather than letting these gaps become an Achilles…...
An AI tool is trying to predict your risk of getting many diseases years in advance " here's how it works
6+ mon, 4+ week ago (969+ words) Being able to instantly and accurately predict the trajectory of a person's health in the years to come has long been seen as the pinnacle of medicine. This kind of information would have a profound effect on healthcare systems as…...
Girls and boys solve math problems differently " with similar short-term results but different long-term outcomes
4+ mon, 3+ week ago (913+ words) But those who use traditional methods on basic problems are less likely to solve more complex math problems correctly. These are the main findings of two studies our research team published in November 2025. In a 2016 study of U. S. elementary students, boys…...
Claude Mythos and Project Glasswing: why an AI superhacker has the tech world on alert
2+ week, 4+ day ago (984+ words) New, more powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models are announced pretty regularly these days: the latest version of Chat GPT or Claude or Gemini always has new features and new capabilities that its makers are eager for customers to try out....
Water flow in prairie watersheds is increasingly unpredictable " but AI could help
1+ mon, 10+ hour ago (914+ words) Assistant Professor, Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, University of British Columbia Ali Ameli receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. University of British Columbia provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation…...
Truth, or misinformation? A statistician explains the challenge of assessing evidence
1+ mon, 1+ day ago (937+ words) Professor & Associate Dean, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo Mu Zhu receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. University of Waterloo provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation CA. University of Waterloo provides…...
Popular AIs head-to-head: Open AI beats Deep Seek on sentence-level reasoning
1+ year, 1+ week ago (878+ words) Manas Gaur receives funding from USISTEF Endowment Fund. Chat GPT and other AI chatbots based on large language models are known to occasionally make things up, including scientific and legal citations. It turns out that measuring how accurate an AI…...