What do we look for when choosing a video game for our children, nephews, or grandchildren? Probably that it’s not violent, that it’s age-appropriate, and that it encourages creativity. However, we rarely stop to consider a key question: who can young children interact with while they play? Many video games allow direct communication with other […] … learn more→

Every time we click a star to rate a restaurant, leave a comment on a shopping site, or “like” a video, we leave a digital footprint. Individually, this may seem insignificant, a simple little sign of preference, a micro-opinion among many others. But collectively, these footprints form a vast social landscape, a cloud of visible […] … learn more→

Higher education is under stress. The highest-profile threat has been the Trump administration’s efforts to cut funding to several universities, including Harvard, Columbia and Northwestern. Research universities heavily depend on federal money to conduct research and carry out other areas of work. For example, after tuition, federal money allocated for research made up 40% of the total revenue for two major […] … learn more→

Many high school seniors are now focusing on what they will do once they graduate – or how they don’t at all know what is to come. Families trying to guide and support these students at the juncture of a major life transition likely also feel nervous about the open-ended possibilities, from starting at a […] … learn more→

On Feb. 22, 2020, “Mad” Mike Hughes towed a homemade rocket to the Mojave Desert and launched himself into the sky. His goal? To view the flatness of the Earth from space. This was his third attempt, and tragically it was fatal. Hughes crashed shortly after takeoff and died. Hughes’ nickname – Mad Mike – might […] … learn more→

At times, I feel exhausted and irritable. I might get angry at a petty request to sign another PDF or because I have to send another reminder. I end up trapped between past times when I had the patience and time to take care of everything and my current need to minimise frustration and take […] … learn more→

While we ask artificial intelligence (AI) to help us solve climate change, its own carbon footprint is skyrocketing. And while it helps us design drugs, optimize power grids, and predict natural disasters, this technology comes at a hidden and exorbitant cost. The problem is its energy appetite. Training a model like GPT-3, now outdated, required around […] … learn more→

The use of generative artificial intelligence is now widespread among new generations of students, disrupting the established norms and challenges of knowledge assessment. This poses a number of dilemmas for universities. How can they rethink their exams to maintain the credibility of their degrees? If truly disruptive innovations exist in education, the uses of generative […] … learn more→

In the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, a spacecraft and its crew are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the body of an injured astronaut to remove a life-threatening blood clot from his brain. The Academy Award-winning movie – later developed into a novel by Isaac Asimov – seemed like pure fantasy at the time. […] … learn more→

When OpenAI’s Sam Altman told reporters in San Francisco earlier this year that the AI sector is in a bubble, the American tech market reacted almost instantly. Combined with the fact that 95 per cent of AI pilot projects fail, traders treated his remark as a broader warning. Although Altman was referring specifically to private startups rather than publicly […] … learn more→