An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It's no secret that students worldwide use AI chatbots to do their homework and avoid learning things. On the flip side, students can also use AI as a tool to beef up their knowledge and plan for the future with flashcards or study guides. Google hopes its latest Gemini feature will help with the latter. The company has announced that Gemini can now create free SAT practice tests and coach students to help them get higher scores. As a standardized test, the content of the SAT follows a predictable pattern. So there's no need to use a lengthy, personalized prompt to get Gemini going. Just say something like, "I want to take a practice SAT test," and the chatbot will generate one complete with clickable buttons, graphs, and score analysis.

Of course, generative AI can go off the rails and provide incorrect information, which is a problem when you're trying to learn things. However, Google says it has worked with education firms like The Princeton Review to ensure the AI-generated tests resemble what students will see in the real deal. The interface for Gemini's practice tests includes scoring and the ability to review previous answers. If you are unclear on why a particular answer is right or wrong, the questions have an "Explain answer" button right at the bottom. After you finish the practice exam, the custom interface (which looks a bit like Gemini's Canvas coding tool) can help you follow up on areas that need improvement. Google says support for the SAT is just the start, "with more tests coming in the future."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Conversation: The line between human and machine authorship is blurring, particularly as it's become increasingly difficult to tell whether something was written by a person or AI. Now, in what may seem like a tipping point, the digital marketing firm Graphite recently published a study showing that more than 50% of articles on the web are being generated by artificial intelligence. [...]

It's important to clarify what's meant by "online content," the phrase used in the Graphite study, which analyzed over 65,000 randomly selected articles of at least 100 words on the web. These can include anything from peer-reviewed research to promotional copy for miracle supplements. A closer reading of the Graphite study shows that the AI-generated articles consist largely of general-interest writing: news updates, how-to guides, lifestyle posts, reviews and product explainers.

The primary economic purpose of this content is to persuade or inform, not to express originality or creativity. Put differently, AI appears to be most useful when the writing in question is low-stakes and formulaic: the weekend-in-Rome listicle, the standard cover letter, the text produced to market a business. A whole industry of writers -- mostly freelance, including many translators -- has relied on precisely this kind of work, producing blog posts, how-to material, search engine optimization text and social media copy. The rapid adoption of large language models has already displaced many of the gigs that once sustained them.

The dramatic loss of this work points toward another issue raised by the Graphite study: the question of authenticity, not only in identifying who or what produced a text, but also in understanding the value that humans attach to creative activity. How can you distinguish a human-written article from a machine-generated one? And does that ability even matter? Over time, that distinction is likely to grow less significant, particularly as more writing emerges from interactions between humans and AI... "If you set aside the more apocalyptic scenarios and assume that AI will continue to advance -- perhaps at a slower pace than in the recent past -- it's quite possible that thoughtful, original, human-generated writing will become even more valuable," writes author Francesco Agnellini, in closing.

"Put another way: The work of writers, journalists and intellectuals will not become superfluous simply because much of the web is no longer written by humans."

Google rolled out three big Gemini updates: the app now supports audio uploads (with tiered limits for free vs. paid users), Search gains AI Mode in five new languages, and NotebookLM expands to generate reports, study guides, quizzes, and other formats in over 80 languages. The Verge reports: According to a Monday post on X by Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and Gemini, audio file compatibility was the "#1 request" to the Gemini app. Free Gemini users max out at 10 minutes of audio, and five free prompts each day. AI Pro or AI Ultra users, meanwhile, can upload audio up to three hours in length. All Gemini prompts accommodate up to 10 files across various file formats, including within ZIP files.

Additionally, Google Search's AI Mode has rolled out five new language options: Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese, thanks to the integration of Gemini 2.5 with Search, according to a company blog: "With this expansion, more people can now use AI Mode to ask complex questions in their preferred language, while exploring the web more deeply." The Gemini-powered NotebookLM software is also getting an update in the form of new report styles in over 80 languages based on a user's uploaded documents, files, and other media.

"The truly universal properties of languages are not independent of our physiology and cognition," argues the co-author of a new study. Instead he says their research "strengthens the idea that intonation units are a universal feature of language."

Phys.org explains: Have you ever noticed that a natural conversation flows like a dance — pauses, emphases, and turns arriving just in time? A new study has discovered that this isn't just intuition; there is a biological rhythm embedded in our speech...

According to the study, led by Dr. Maya Inbar, alongside Professors Eitan Grossman and Ayelet N. Landau, human speech across the world pulses to the beat of what are called intonation units, short prosodic phrases that occur at a consistent rate of one every 1.6 seconds. The research analyzed over 650 recordings in 48 languages spanning every continent and 27 language families. Using a novel algorithm, the team was able to automatically identify intonation units in spontaneous speech, revealing that regardless of the language spoken, from English and Russian to endangered languages in remote regions, people naturally break their speech into these rhythmic chunks. "These findings suggest that the way we pace our speech isn't just a cultural artifact, it's deeply rooted in human cognition and biology," says Dr. Inbar.

"We also show that the rhythm of intonation units is unrelated to faster rhythms in speech, such as the rhythm of syllables, and thus likely serves a different cognitive role...." Most intriguingly, the low-frequency rhythm they follow mirrors patterns in brain activity linked to memory, attention, and volitional action, illuminating the profound connection between how we speak and how we think.
The work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A five-year study by Wageningen University and the German Primate Research Center found that wild chimpanzees in Guinea-Bissau repeatedly strike stones against trees, presumably as a form of communication. Phys.Org reports: Over the course of a five-year field study, the research team collected video footage at five distinct locations within a nature reserve in Guinea-Bissau. This was made possible through the use of camera traps and with essential support from local field guides. In specific areas, a striking behavioral pattern was observed: adult male chimpanzees repeatedly struck stones against tree trunks, resulting in characteristic piles of stones at the base of these trees. [...]

The observations point to cultural transmission. Young chimpanzees adopt the behavior from older group members, indicating that it is learned socially rather than genetically inherited. Marc Naguib, Professor of Behavioral Ecology, underscores the broader significance of the discovery: "It illustrates that culture is not unique to humans and that such behaviors need to be considered also in nature conservation." The study is published in the journal Biology Letters.

Google's NotebookLM has added a new "Discover sources" feature that allows users to describe a topic and have the AI find and curate relevant sources from the web -- eliminating the need to upload documents manually. "When you tap the Discover button in NotebookLM, you can describe the topic you're interested in, and NotebookLM will bring back a curated collection of relevant sources from the web," says Google software engineer Adam Bignell. Click to add those sources to your notebook; "it's a fast and easy way to quickly grasp a new concept or gather essential reading on a topic." PCMag reports: You can still add your files. NotebookLM can ingest PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, audio files, Google Docs, or Google Slides and summarize, transcribe, narrate, or convert into FAQs and study guides. "Discover sources" helps incorporate information you may not have saved. [...] The imported sources stay within the notebook you created. You can read the entire original document, ask questions about it via chat, or apply other NotebookLM features to it.

Google started rolling out both features on Wednesday. It should be available for all users in about "a week or so." For those concerned about privacy, Google says, "NotebookLM does not use your personal data, including your source uploads, queries, and the responses from the model for training." There's also an "I'm Feeling Curious" button (a reference to its iconic "I'm feeling lucky" search button) that generates sources on a random topic you might find interesting.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic announced on Wednesday that it's launching a new Claude for Education tier, an answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT Edu plan. The new tier is aimed at higher education, and gives students, faculty, and other staff access to Anthropic's AI chatbot, Claude, with a few additional capabilities. One piece of Claude for Education is "Learning Mode," a new feature within Claude Projects to help students develop their own critical thinking skills, rather than simply obtain answers to questions. With Learning Mode enabled, Claude will ask questions to test understanding, highlight fundamental principles behind specific problems, and provide potentially useful templates for research papers, outlines, and study guides.

Anthropic says Claude for Education comes with its standard chat interface, as well as "enterprise-grade" security and privacy controls. In a press release shared with TechCrunch ahead of launch, Anthropic said university administrators can use Claude to analyze enrollment trends and automate repetitive email responses to common inquiries. Meanwhile, students can use Claude for Education in their studies, the company suggested, such as working through calculus problems with step-by-step guidance from the AI chatbot. To help universities integrate Claude into their systems, Anthropic says it's partnering with the company Instructure, which offers the popular education software platform Canvas. The AI startup is also teaming up with Internet2, a nonprofit organization that delivers cloud solutions for colleges.

Anthropic says that it has already struck "full campus agreements" with Northeastern University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Champlain College to make Claude for Education available to all students. Northeastern is a design partner -- Anthropic says it's working with the institution's students, faculty, and staff to build best practices for AI integration, AI-powered education tools, and frameworks. Anthropic hopes to strike more of these contracts, in part through new student ambassador and AI "builder" programs, to capitalize on the growing number of students using AI in their studies.

Google's NotebookLM and its podcast-like Audio Overviews are being updated with a new feature that allows listeners to interact with the AI "hosts." Google describes how this feature works in a blog post. The Verge reports: In addition to the interactive Audio Overviews, Google is introducing a new interface for NotebookLM that organizes things into three areas: a "sources" panel for your information, a "chat" panel to talk with an AI chatbot about the sources, and a "studio" panel that lets you make things like Audio Overviews and Study Guides. I think it looks nice.

Google is announcing a NotebookLM subscription, too: NotebookLM Plus. The subscription will give you "five times more Audio Overviews, notebooks, and sources per notebook," let you "customize the style and tone of your notebook responses," let you make shared team notebooks, and will offer "additional privacy and security," Google says. The subscription is available today for businesses, schools and universities, and organizations and enterprise customers. It will be added to Google One AI Premium in "early 2025." Google is also launching "Agentspace," a platform for custom AI agents for enterprises.

Chegg, the online education company, is laying off 319 workers as it struggles to compete against modern AI chatbots. SFGATE reports: Chegg announced the new layoff round, which will hit 21% of its workforce, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. The company delivered the news alongside another brutal quarterly financial report; Chegg lost more than $212 million from July through September. CEO Nathan Schultz, in prepared remarks accompanying the report, expressed some optimism but called it a "trying time" for his company. Chegg provides grammar and plagiarism checkers, plus course-by-course study help, along with much-used textbook solution guides.

"Technology shifts have created headwinds for our industry and Chegg's business specifically," Schultz said. "Recent advancements in the AI search experience and the adoption of free and paid generative AI services by students, have resulted in challenges for Chegg. These factors are adversely affecting our business outlook and are requiring us to refocus and adjust the size of our business." He specifically called out Google's AI overviews, a recent change to search results that pulls information from news outlets and sites like Chegg and summarizes above the classic blue links. Schultz said that his team believes Google is "shifting from being a search origination point to the destination" in an attempt to keep market share.

Schultz also blamed generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, saying that students see the tool and others like it as "strong alternatives" to Chegg. Web traffic has dropped sharply as a result, Schultz wrote. A Wall Street Journal story published Saturday said Chegg "is trying to avoid becoming [ChatGPT's] first major victim" and that the company had lost more than 500,000 subscribers, some who paid almost $20 a month, since the chatbot's 2022 launch. Despite the negative business impact, it seems Chegg is experimenting with new tech. Schultz said in the remarks that the company had formed an "arena" to evaluate AI models and aims to "integrate AI into the full learning journey."

The Verge's Emma Roth reports: NotebookLM, Google's AI note-taking app, can now summarize and help you dig deeper into YouTube videos. The new capability works by analyzing the text in a YouTube video's transcript, including autogenerated ones. Once you add a YouTube link to NotebookLM, it will use AI to provide a brief summary of key topics discussed in the transcript. You can then click on these topics to get more detailed information as well as ask questions. (If you're struggling to come up with something to ask, NotebookLM will suggest some questions.)

After clicking on some of the topics, I found that NotebookLM backs up the information provided in its chat window with a citation that links you directly to the point in the transcript where it's mentioned. You can also create an Audio Overview based on the content, which is a podcast-style discussion hosted by AI. I found that the feature worked on most of the videos I tried, except for ones published within the past two days or so. [...] In addition to adding support for YouTube videos, Google announced that NotebookLM now supports audio recordings as well, allowing you to search transcribed conversations for certain information and create study guides.

Microsoft Dynamics 365's "field service management" tools enable employers to monitor mobile workers via smartphone apps -- "allegedly to the detriment of their autonomy and dignity," reports The Register. From the report: According to a probe by Cracked Labs - an Austrian nonprofit research group -- the software is part of a broader set of applications that disempowers workers through algorithmic management. The case study [PDF] summarizes how employers in Europe actually use software and smartphone apps to oversee field technicians, home workers, and cleaning staff. It's part of a larger ongoing project helmed by the group called "Surveillance and Digital Control at Work," which includes contributions from AlgorithmWatch; Jeremias Adams-Prassl, professor of law at the University of Oxford; and trade unions UNI Europa and GPA.

Mobile maintenance workers used to have a substantial amount of autonomy when they were equipped with basic mobile phones, the study notes, but smartphones have allowed employers to track what mobile workers do, when they do it, where they are, and gather many other data points. The effect of this monitoring, the report argues, means diminished worker discretion, autonomy, and sense of purpose due to task-based micromanagement. The shift has also accelerated and intensified work stress, with little respect to workers' capabilities, differences in lifestyle, and job practices. "Field service workers travel to multiple locations servicing different products every day," a Microsoft spokesperson told The Register. "Dynamics 365 Field Service and its Copilot capabilities are designed to help field service workers schedule, plan and provide onsite maintenance and repairs in the right location, on time with the right information and workplace guides on their device to complete their jobs."

"Dynamics 365 Field Service does not use AI to recommend individual workers for specific jobs based on previous performance. Dynamics 365 Field Service was developed in accordance with our Responsible AI principles and data privacy statement. Customers are solely responsible for using Dynamics 365 Field Service in compliance with all applicable laws, including laws relating to accessing individual employee analytics and monitoring."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A study claims to have proof of what some have suspected: return to office mandates are just back-channel layoffs and post-COVID work culture is making everyone miserable. HR software biz BambooHR surveyed more than 1,500 employees, a third of whom work in HR. The findings suggest the return to office movement has been a poorly-executed failure, but one particular figure stands out -- a quarter of executives and a fifth of HR professionals hoped RTO mandates would result in staff leaving. While that statistic essentially admits the quiet part out loud, there was some merit to that belief. People did quit when RTO mandates were enforced at many of the largest companies, but it wasn't enough, the study reports.

More than a third (37 percent) of respondents in leadership roles believed their employers had undertaken layoffs in the past 12 months as a result of too few people quitting in protest of RTO mandates, the study found. Nearly the same number thought their management wanted employees back in the office to monitor them more closely. The end result has been the growth of a different office culture, one that's even more performative, suspicious, and divisive than before the COVID pandemic, the study concludes. According to the report, most employees working remotely and in-person both feel the need to demonstrate productivity, which for more than a third of employees means being seen socializing and moving around the office. That intense need to be visible may actually be harming productivity, study author and BambooHR's own head of HR Anita Grantham concluded in her findings. A full 42 percent of employees who responded to the Bamboo survey said they show up solely to be seen by bosses and managers. If bosses think their presence in the office is making any difference to the amount of work getting done, the results indicate that's not the case.

Remote employees and in-office employees both report spending around two hours of every day not working. Those in-office ones, of course, are probably spending those ten hours a week looking as busy as possible. Away from the office, employees feel the need to demonstrate presence by being hyper-available and never going offline -- the so-called "green status effect," the data suggests. "The distrusting and performative cultures some companies are cultivating are harmful to bottom-line growth," Grantham said, adding that RTO policies are okay, but not if they don't consider individual employee needs. "The conversation around work modes is one of the most important things to address and get clear on as a business," Grantham said. "It often gets reduced to just RTO, but it's actually a much bigger conversation."

In the high-stakes world of AI, "The fundamental agreement behind robots.txt [files], and the web as a whole — which for so long amounted to 'everybody just be cool' — may not be able to keep up..." argues the Verge: For many publishers and platforms, having their data crawled for training data felt less like trading and more like stealing. "What we found pretty quickly with the AI companies," says Medium CEO Tony Stubblebin, "is not only was it not an exchange of value, we're getting nothing in return. Literally zero." When Stubblebine announced last fall that Medium would be blocking AI crawlers, he wrote that "AI companies have leached value from writers in order to spam Internet readers."

Over the last year, a large chunk of the media industry has echoed Stubblebine's sentiment. "We do not believe the current 'scraping' of BBC data without our permission in order to train Gen AI models is in the public interest," BBC director of nations Rhodri Talfan Davies wrote last fall, announcing that the BBC would also be blocking OpenAI's crawler. The New York Times blocked GPTBot as well, months before launching a suit against OpenAI alleging that OpenAI's models "were built by copying and using millions of The Times's copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more." A study by Ben Welsh, the news applications editor at Reuters, found that 606 of 1,156 surveyed publishers had blocked GPTBot in their robots.txt file.

It's not just publishers, either. Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, WikiHow, WebMD, and many other platforms explicitly block GPTBot from accessing some or all of their websites.

On most of these robots.txt pages, OpenAI's GPTBot is the only crawler explicitly and completely disallowed. But there are plenty of other AI-specific bots beginning to crawl the web, like Anthropic's anthropic-ai and Google's new Google-Extended. According to a study from last fall by Originality.AI, 306 of the top 1,000 sites on the web blocked GPTBot, but only 85 blocked Google-Extended and 28 blocked anthropic-ai. There are also crawlers used for both web search and AI. CCBot, which is run by the organization Common Crawl, scours the web for search engine purposes, but its data is also used by OpenAI, Google, and others to train their models. Microsoft's Bingbot is both a search crawler and an AI crawler. And those are just the crawlers that identify themselves — many others attempt to operate in relative secrecy, making it hard to stop or even find them in a sea of other web traffic.

For any sufficiently popular website, finding a sneaky crawler is needle-in-haystack stuff.
In addition, the article points out, a robots.txt file "is not a legal document — and 30 years after its creation, it still relies on the good will of all parties involved.

"Disallowing a bot on your robots.txt page is like putting up a 'No Girls Allowed' sign on your treehouse — it sends a message, but it's not going to stand up in court."

Government researchers in the U.S. are studying methods to help identify hackers based on the code they use to carry out cyberattacks. From a report: The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the lead federal research agency for the intelligence community, plans to develop technologies that could speed up investigations for identifying perpetrators of cyberattacks. "The number of attacks is increasing far more than the number of forensic experts that are available to go after these attacks," said Kristopher Reese, who is managing the research program at IARPA and holds a doctorate in computer science and engineering. The lack of forensic resources means hackers who target small organizations or companies that don't fall under critical infrastructure sectors often escape identification, he said.

Tools that are developed as part of the planned 30-month research project won't replace human analysts, who are crucial for identifying social and political dynamics that might explain why a particular hacking group targeted a victim, Reese said. But using artificial intelligence to analyze code used in cyberattacks will make investigations more efficient, he said. IARPA is accepting pitches from researchers until next month and plans to begin research next summer. [...] There hasn't been enough research into how analyzing code can reveal a hacker's identity, Reese said. Behavioral traits evident in code can reveal specific countries where hackers might be from or even the university where they were trained, he said. Some companies also have style guides outlining how employees should program, which could leave traces that indicate a person worked there, he said.

Tereza Pultarova reports via Space.com: Light pollution is a growing threat to astronomy, but a new streetlamp technology could restore clear views of the night sky. [...] A study published earlier this year found that stars are disappearing from the sky at an average rate of 10% per year. This trend affects even the world's most remote observatories. Germany-based startup StealthTransit recently tested a solution to this growing issue. "Unfortunately, this problem haunts almost all observatories today," Vlad Pashkovsky, StealthTransit's founder and CEO, told Space.com in an email. "Modern telescopes are highly sensitive and feel the impact of outdoor lighting of cities located at the distance of 50 or even 200 kilometers [30 to 120 miles]. This means that virtually every observatory on Earth either already needs, or will need in the future 10 years, protection from the light of large cities."

StealthTransit's solution relies on three components: A simple device that makes LED lights flicker at a very high frequency that is imperceptible to the human eye, a GPS receiver, and a specially designed shutter on the telescope's camera that can blink in sync with the LED lights. The GPS technology guides the telescope's shutter to open only during the fleeting moments when the LED lights are switched off. The experiments, conducted at an observatory in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia, showed that the technology, dubbed the DarkSkyProtector, could reduce unwanted sky glow in astronomical images by 94%. "We can say that the telescope was seeing almost a dark sky at this time," Pashkovsky said. "The important thing about our technology is that it makes all kinds of lights astronomy-friendly, including outdoor advertising and indoor lighting in apartments, offices and stores."

The technology could filter out lights from nearby towns and villages as well as those surrounding the observatory itself. It might sound impractical to refit an entire town with devices that allow lamps to blink, but Pashkovsky said that most existing LED lights can operate in the blinking mode and that new lamps designed specifically with sky protection in mind would be no costlier than existing LED technology. The most expensive element of the DarkSkyProtector system is the telescope shutter, which needs to be lightweight and agile enough to blink about 150 times per second. StealthTransit tested the prototype shutter on a 24-inch-wide (60 centimeters) telescope and hopes to make the technology available for larger telescopes. Although StealthTransit's technology is not yet ready for commercial use, Pashkovsky said, the firm hopes to have a product fit for the world's best telescopes in five to seven years.

First, Yale Law School. Now, Harvard Medical School. One by one, some of the nation's top graduate programs are quitting the great who's-up-who's-down scorecards of higher ed: US News & World Report's rankings. From a report: Harvard, No. 1 on the publication's latest medical-school list for research, joins a growing boycott of the most famous name in US college rankings. This week, the medical schools of Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania announced they will no longer participate. Yale kicked off the movement in November, and was followed soon after by Harvard, Penn and Georgetown University law schools. The big question now is whether the movement will trickle down to undergraduate institutions. Critics of the rankings say their methodology is flawed and fail to represent the student experience, while supporters argue the lists are valuable guides for students. While this may put pressure on undergraduate colleges to reconsider their participation, those who study the rankings say the exodus might take some time.

Love 'em or hate 'em, they exert a powerful hold over institutions, students, parents and even recruiters. For some schools, sliding in the rankings can mean lost funding. Undergraduate schools have been tight-lipped about what happens next, although many admissions officers privately question the rankings' value. The criticism has been mounting for years. "I am convinced that the rankings game is a bit of mishegoss -- a slightly daft obsession that does harm when colleges, parents, or students take it too seriously," Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber wrote in a 2021 op-ed in the Washington Post. In August, US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called rankings "a joke."

A new article on the Verge argues that the era of fixing your own phone "has nearly arrived." When I called up iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens, I figured he'd be celebrating — after years of fighting for right-to-repair, big name companies like Google and Samsung have suddenly agreed to provide spare parts for their phones. Not only that, they signed deals with him to sell those parts through iFixit, alongside the company's repair guides and tools. So did Valve.

But Wiens says he's not done making deals yet. "There are more coming," he says, one as soon as a couple of months from now. (No, it's not Apple.) Motorola was actually the first to sign on nearly four years ago. And if Apple meaningfully joins them in offering spare parts to consumers — like it promised to do by early 2022 — the era of fixing your own phone may be underway. Last October, the United States effectively made it legal to open up many devices for the purpose of repair with an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now, the necessary parts are arriving.

What changed? Weren't these companies fighting tooth and nail to keep right-for-repair off the table, sometimes sneakily stopping bills at the last minute? Sure. But some legislation is getting through anyhow... and one French law in particular might have been the tipping point.

"The thing that's changing the game more than anything else is the French repairability scorecard," says Wiens, referring to a 2021 law that requires tech companies to reveal how repairable their phones are — on a scale of 0.0 to 10.0 — right next to their pricetag. Even Apple was forced to add repairability scores — but Wiens points me to this press release by Samsung instead. When Samsung commissioned a study to check whether the French repairability scores were meaningful, it didn't just find the scorecards were handy — it found a staggering 80 percent of respondents would be willing to give up their favorite brand for a product that scored higher.

"There have been extensive studies done on the scorecard and it's working," says Wiens. "It's driving behavior, it's shifting consumer buying patterns." Stick, meet carrot. Seeing an opportunity, Wiens suggests, pushed these companies to take up iFixit on the deal.

Nathan Proctor, director of the Campaign for the Right to Repair at the US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), still thinks the stick is primarily to thank. "It feels cheeky to say 100 percent... but none of this happens unless there's a threat of legislation... These companies have known these were issues for a long time, and until we organized enough clout for it to start seeming inevitable, none of the big ones had particularly good repair programs and now they're all announcing them," Proctor notes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A London secondary school is trying to stop its pupils from using "basically" at the beginning of sentences and deploying phrases such as "oh my days" in a crackdown on "fillers" and "slang" in the classroom. Ark All Saints academy has produced lists of "banned" language which includes "he cut his eyes at me", which the Collins dictionary says originates in the Caribbean and means to look rudely at a person and then turn away sharply while closing one's eyes dismissively. Neither should they use "that's long," which can mean something that is boring or tedious, or "that's a neck" which indicates a comment or action is stupid. "Bare," "wow," "cuss" and "oh my God" are also out. The list -- which is intended to steer the language used in formal learning situations and exams rather than in the playground -- has drawn criticism from linguists who described it as "crude and shortsighted ... a disservice and discredit to young people."

Teachers say it guides pupils to use language that fits more formal situations and helps them succeed. The school said the specific words and phrases on the list were selected because they were "showing up a lot in pupils' work" and it stressed the importance of pupils expressing themselves "clearly and accurately." Expressions that must not be used at the beginning of sentences include: "ermmm," "because," "no," "like," "say," "you see," "you know," and "basically." "The development of reading and speaking skills is a central part of what drives our school to help our students learn effectively and fulfil their potential in academic and non-academic ways," said Lucy Frame, the principal at the school in Camberwell, south-east London. "None of the words or phrases listed are banned from general use in our school or when our students are interacting socially. But this list is used in some formal learning settings to help students understand the importance of expressing themselves clearly and accurately, not least through written language in examinations."

The intervention may reflect a widening gap between language that is accepted by examiners and that used day-to-day by pupils in some areas of the UK. External examiners have noted pupils nationwide using "unnecessarily rude and strident vocabulary" in weaker answers. Bridging the gap between what is normal language for pupils and what is acceptable for exams is a challenge for teachers. A 2019 survey of 2,100 tutors found that "slanglish" was the most common reason for English GCSE failures. Yet, as a subject of study, "code-switching/style-shifting, youth slang ... and use of accent and dialect" is increasingly of interest to English language A-level students, according to the AQA exam board. [...] Some fear such moves could alienate some pupils. Dr Marcello Giovanelli, a senior lecturer in English language and literature at Aston University, said: "Slang has always been at the forefront of linguistic innovation." He described "he cut his eyes at me" as a "wonderfully creative example" and said "dismissing students' home or own use of language may have negative effects on identity and confidence."

Tony Thorne, a language consultant at King's College London and the director of the Slang and New Language Archive, said: "It shouldn't be about good or bad language, it should be about appropriate language for the context."

"You don't want to make them feel they have to reject the cultural aspects of their own language," said Dr Natalie Sharpling, who teaches applied linguistics at Warwick University. "We should celebrate the different ways language is being used and concentrate on the content of what is being said." Sharpling said she had observed an increasing trend in schools to police language and said "it would be a shame if it becomes a case of if you want to be successful, this is the way you have to speak."

Astronomers reconstructed a space rock's path before it exploded over southern Africa in 2018 and sprinkled the Kalahari with meteorites. From a report: On the morning of June 2, 2018, an asteroid was seen careening toward us at 38,000 miles per hour. It was going to impact Earth, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Astronomers were beside themselves with excitement. Five feet long and weighing about the same as an adult African elephant, this space rock posed no threat. But the early detection of this asteroid, only the second to be spotted in space before hitting land, was a good test of our ability to spot larger, more dangerous asteroids. Moreover, it afforded scientists the chance to study the asteroid before its obliteration, quickly narrow down the impact site and obtain some of the most pristine, least weathered meteorite samples around. Later that day, a fireball almost as bright as the sun illuminated Botswana's darkened sky before exploding 17 miles above ground with the force of 200 tons of TNT. Fragments fell like extraterrestrial buckshot into a national park larger than the Netherlands.

Immediately, Botswanan scientists and guides joined with international meteorite experts to hunt for the asteroid's wreckage. As of November 2020, the team has found 24 individual meteorites. And thanks to the telltale geology of these rocky leftovers, observations of their path to Earth and the memories of a dead NASA spacecraft, scientists were able to unspool the history of this asteroid with breathtaking detail. As reported earlier this month in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, Botswana's off-world visitor was once part of Vesta, a gigantic ramshackle asteroid forged at the dawn of the solar system. About 22 million years ago, another asteroid crashed into one of its lonely hills, leaving a modest crater and sending countless shards of Vesta on a space odyssey. One of them was the object that fell over southern Africa in 2018, an explosive end to a lonely journey. 'It is such an amazing thing to be in possession of such a rare specimen with so much history attached to it," said Mohutsiwa Gabadirwe, a geologist and curator at the Botswana Geoscience Institute who is a co-author.

Named 2018 LA, the asteroid was first seen by the Catalina Sky Survey, a trio of telescopes north of Tucson, Ariz. Additional telescopes, like the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey, saw it too, allowing scientists to tentatively map out an impact site in southern Africa. Peter Jenniskens, a meteorite expert at the SETI Institute and study author, said that the initial search area was a 1,400-square-mile patch in Botswana. Hoping to shrink it down, he visited local businesses with Oliver Moses of the Okavango Research Institute. They located security camera footage at a hotel and gas stations that had recorded the fireball, allowing them to more precisely pinpoint the fall site: a (still-sizable) spot within the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. This was a surreal place to go meteorite hunting. Bat-eared foxes and warthogs strolled past, lions stealthily stalked and slaughtered giraffes while leopards lounged in trees. Wardens from Botswana's Department of Wildlife and National Parks protected the search party in case a fanged predator got too close for comfort. The meteorites also looked a lot like animal poop, meaning the team were frequently bamboozled by coprological impostors. 'It was a totally unusual experience for all of us,' said Mr. Gabadirwe.

In a piece for the BBC, Chris Baraniuk writes about how the intelligence of New Caledonian crows may be far more advanced than we ever thought possible. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Intelligence is rooted in the brain. Clever primates -- including humans -- have a particular structure in their brains called the neocortex. It is thought that this helps to make advanced cognition possible. Corvids, notably, do not have this structure. [New Caledonian crows belong to the corvid family of birds -- as do jackdaws, rooks, jays, magpies and ravens.] They have instead evolved densely packed clusters of neurons that afford them similar mental prowess. The specific kind of brain they have doesn't really matter -- corvids and primates share some of the same basic capabilities in terms of problem-solving and plasticity, or being able to adapt and change in the face of new information and experiences. This is an example of convergent evolution, where completely different evolutionary histories have led to the same feature or behavior. It's easy for humans to see why the things corvids can do are useful. From identifying people who have previously posed a threat to them or others in their group to using gestures for communication -- we too rely on abilities like these.

[Christian Rutz at the University of St Andrews] is unequivocal. Some birds, like the New Caledonian crows he studies -- can do remarkable things. In a paper published earlier this year, he and his co-authors described how New Caledonians seek out a specific type of plant stem from which to make their hooked tools. Experiments showed that crows found the stems they desired even when they had been disguised with leaves from a different plant species. This suggested that the birds were selecting a kind of material for their tools that they knew was just right for the job. You wouldn't use a spanner to hammer in a nail, would you? Ranking the intelligence of animals seems an increasingly pointless exercise when one considers the really important thing: how well that animal is adapted to its niche. In the wild, New Caledonians use their tools to scoop insects out of holes, for example in tree trunks. Footage of this behavior has been caught on camera.

You might think that some animals are smarter than others -- with humans at the top of the proverbial tree. Certainly, humans do rely excessively on intelligence to get by. But that doesn't mean we're the best at every mental task. Chimps, notes Dakota McCoy at Harvard University, have been shown to possess better short-term memories than humans. This might help them to memorize where food is located in the forest canopy, for example. Ranking the intelligence of animals seems an increasingly pointless exercise when one considers the really important thing: how well that animal is adapted to its niche. Intelligence is, first and foremost, a means towards specialization. "New Caledonian crows, like us and other clever animals, have moods and memories. Strategies and expectations. They seem remarkably able to engage with complexity," writes Baraniuk in closing. "Evolution made this possible. But cognition, like life itself, serves more than just a need. Animal intelligence allows all sorts of fascinating phenomena to arise. [...] Nature provided the notes, but animal brains make the music. The mind, as they say, is the only limit."