05 Sci-Tech

Future teachers want more guidance on AI– www.futurity.org

pgnewser July 30, 2025 0

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As generative artificial intelligence is woven rapidly into society, teachers-in-training—as well as the professors who educate them—feel unprepared to adopt the technology in the classroom, according to a survey.

To respond, institutions should implement clear guidelines and provide professional development opportunities for educators, the author of the new paper says.

While faculty serve as subject matters experts who best understand their course needs, they require institutional support and learning opportunities to grasp how these algorithms work, their affordances and limitations, appropriate usage, and ethical considerations.

This foundational knowledge will help educators make a thoughtful decision about integrating these tools or not into their courses.

“The main takeaway of all of this is that our students are asking to learn more about AI, our teachers are asking to learn more about AI, and we do not have the support to do it,” says Priya Panday-Shukla, an instructional designer in the WSU Global Campus whose paper appears in Teaching and Teaching Education.

 

Researchers turn yoghurt into tissue repair gel– cosmosmagazine.com

pgnewser July 28, 2025 0

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Researchers are one step closer to developing a gel that can be used to repair and regenerate tissue.

The team from Columbia University in the US has created an injectable hydrogel using a by-product of milk and yoghurt – extracellular vesicles (EVs).

Experiments in mice showed that within one week the yoghurt EV hydrogel promoted the formation of new blood vessels, a process known as angiogenesis which is required for effective tissue healing and regeneration.

“Being able to design a material that closely mimics the body’s natural environment while also speeding up the healing process opens a new world of possibilities for regenerative medicine,” says Artemis Margaronis, a graduate research fellow at Columbia Engineering.

Extracellular vesicles are tiny sacs that are secreted by cells and carry important materials like proteins, DNA and mRNA. EVs allow cells to communicate and transport complex materials, something scientists have found difficult to replicate in the lab.

NASA alert! Asteroid 2025 OL1 set for close Earth encounter on July 30 at 16,900 mph; scientists track rare near-Earth flyby |– timesofindia.indiatimes.com

pgnewser July 28, 2025 0

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Earth is about to witness a close celestial visitor as asteroid 2025 OL1 approaches our planet. Roughly the size of a small aircraft, measuring about 110 feet in diameter, this space rock will make its closest pass on July 30, 2025. Travelling at an impressive speed of 16,904 miles per hour, it will safely skim past Earth at a distance of approximately 1.29 million kilometres. Though this event may sound alarming, NASA assures that the asteroid poses no threat. This flyby underscores the critical need for continuous monitoring of near-Earth objects and the evolving strategies by agencies like NASA and ISRO to defend our planet.

NASA tracks asteroid 2025 OL1 for closest pass on July 30: Speed and distance

At roughly 110 feet in diameter, asteroid 2025 OL1 is about the length of a small passenger plane. Moving at a rapid speed of nearly 17,000 miles per hour, it covers the vast distance between Earth and its orbit quickly but safely. Although over a million kilometres away at closest approach, this flyby is significant because it offers scientists a chance to study an asteroid up close, better understand its trajectory, and refine detection techniques for future near-Earth objects.

Ditch your dish now, and Sky will give you a blockbuster TV upgrade for free– www.express.co.uk

pgnewser July 28, 2025 0

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Those still using the ageing Sky Q platform might want to finally ditch their dish and try something new this week. Sky is currently offering a very tempting freebie when customers buy its latest Glass Air TV. As long as you act before July 30, you’ll get free access to eye-popping Ultra HD 4K content – that’s something all users usually need to fork out extra for.

For example, those with a Q box under their telly will find £13 added to their monthly bill when wanting to watch shows and movies in stunning UHD.

It’s a decent saving and means you’ll get an image that’s four times more packed with pixels than regular High Definition (HD).

Of course, you will need to switch to that Sky Glass Air telly, but even that has its advantages.

This broadband-powered screen starts from just £6 per month and offers simple set-up, no need for an engineer to visit and regular updates from Sky.

Plants Are Getting Better at Spotting Bacteria, Here’s How– www.techexplorist.com

pgnewser July 28, 2025 0

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Plants also have immune systems, just like animals. They use special receptors to spot harmful bacteria and defend themselves. One key receptor, called FLS2, helps plants detect flagellin, a protein in the tails that bacteria use to move.

But bacteria are clever. They continually modify the protein to evade the plant’s defenses.

To help plants fight back, scientists at UC Davis used artificial intelligence, specifically AlphaFold, a tool that predicts protein shapes. With it, they redesigned FLS2 to recognize more variations of flagellin, thereby strengthening the plant’s immune system and making it harder for bacteria to trick it.

The researchers studied plant receptors that could detect a wide range of bacteria, even if those receptors came from non-crop plants. By comparing these with less effective receptors, they determined which amino acids needed to be modified.

Fossilized Teeth Offer Clues to Dinosaurs’ Favorite Foods About 150 Million Years Ago– www.discovermagazine.com

pgnewser July 28, 2025 0

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Dinosaurs might not have dental records, but their fossilized teeth offer fascinating clues into their dietary habits. Inspecting chemical signatures stored in the enamel, scientists writing in Palaeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology found that different species of herbivores had different preferences and were partial to different parts of the plant — a fact that enabled vast and diverse ecosystems to flourish for millions of years.

“It’s really just more proof that this ecosystem was as spectacular as we thought it was,” lead author Liam Norris, a recent doctoral graduate at the University of Texas’ Jackson School of Geosciences, said in a press release.

Scientists Create First Antimatter Qubit– www.scientificamerican.com

pgnewser July 28, 2025 0

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Physicists have created a quantum bit, or qubit, the fundamental storage unit of a quantum computer, out of antimatter for the first time. The researchers used magnetic fields to trap a single antiproton—the antimatter version of the protons inside of atoms—and measured how fast its spin changed direction for almost a full minute. The findings were published on July 23 in the journal Nature.

Quantum computers made of antimatter qubits are still a long way off and would be much harder to build than matter quantum computers—which are already extremely tricky. The feat is exciting, however, because of what such antimatter experiments could reveal about the universe itself.

A particle’s spin can be in a state of “up” or “down,” just like a computer bit can take on a state of “0” or “1.” But where a classical bit must be in either of the latter two states, the antiproton qubit’s spin could be up, down or any combination of both at the same time. This fantastical ability of qubits is what sets them apart from classical bits and promises that quantum computers will one day offer incredible improvements in calculation speed and ability compared with today’s computers.

China buys banned NVIDIA AI chips on black market: Report– www.theblaze.com

pgnewser July 25, 2025 0

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Less than a day after the Trump administration announced its ambitious plan to lead the world in the AI industry, news broke that China has accessed high-tech AI chips on the black market despite U.S. industry protections, threatening America’s competitive advantage in the cutthroat industry.

The Financial Times reported on Thursday that China has been selling and receiving cutting-edge AI chips on the black market despite Trump’s export controls and tariffs to curb Chinese access to leading technologies.

‘Trying to cobble together data centers from smuggled products is a losing proposition, both technically and economically.’

The report went on to say that more than $1 billion worth of NVIDIA B200 chips has been sold on the black market in China. Lawyers familiar with the trade rules told FT that while it is legal to sell and receive restricted chips within China, on the condition that the proper tariffs are paid, entities selling and sending them to China would be violating U.S. regulations.

The report indicated that NVIDIA was not aware of these illegal sales by third parties.

Airplane-Sized Asteroid Will Fly Past Earth Next Week, Sparing Us From an Impact– www.discovermagazine.com

pgnewser July 25, 2025 0

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In just a few days, an asteroid the size of an airplane will pass by Earth, but there’s no need to ring the alarm bells. That’s because the asteroid, named 2025 OW, is sure to miss our planet as it makes its closest approach on Monday, July 28, 2025.

While some may break out in a cold sweat hearing about a passing asteroid, astronomers are almost never flustered by this kind of event. With the help of data collected by observatories, they know that 2025 OW — and thousands of other asteroids coursing through space right now — pose no threat to our planet. Even though 2025 OW won’t impact Earth, the need to keep a close eye on similar asteroids remains a round-the-clock priority. 

An Asteroid Approach Forecast

It should come as comforting news that asteroid approaches happen all the time with no repercussions. In fact, multiple asteroids are approaching within the next week. But with the exception of 2025 OW, they’ll all be more than a million miles away from Earth. Also, none of the asteroids are large enough to raise concern. 

Trump DOJ Eliminates 4 Dark Web Child Abuse Websites, 18 Convicted– lidblog.com

pgnewser July 25, 2025 0

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The Trump Department of Justice has announced the shuttering of four dark web child abuse websites and the conviction of 18 men involved in those sites.

In a press release from Wednesday, the DOJ reported the results of “Operation Grayskull” which took down a ring of child sex abusers and the convictions resulted in more than 300 years in prison collectively.

The DOJ noted that the operation “resulted on the dismantling of four dark web sites dedicated to images and videos containing child sexual abuse material (CSAM). To date, the operation has led to the convictions of 18 offenders, including a Minnesota man who was sentenced yesterday to 250 months in prison and lifetime supervised release for his involvement with one of these dark web sites. He was also ordered to pay $23,000 in restitution.”

“Today’s announcement sends a clear warning to those who exploit and abuse children: you will not find safe haven, even on the dark web,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “These offenders thought that they could act without consequences, but they were wrong. Thanks to the relentless determination of our prosecutors and law enforcement partners we have exposed these perpetrators for who they are, eliminated their websites and brought justice to countless victims.”

FDA’s Artificial Intelligence is Supposed to Revolutionize Drug Approvals. It’s Making up Studies– www.madinamerica.com

pgnewser July 25, 2025 0

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From CNN. “To hear health officials in the Trump administration talk, artificial intelligence has arrived in Washington to fast-track new life-saving drugs to market, streamline work at the vast, multibillion-dollar health agencies, and be a key assistant in the quest to slash wasteful government spending without jeopardizing their work.

“The AI revolution has arrived,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared at congressional hearings in the past few months.

“We are using this technology already at HHS to manage health care data, perfectly securely, and to increase the speed of drug approvals,” he told the House Energy and Commerce Committee in June. The enthusiasm — among some, at least — was palpable.

Weeks earlier, the US Food and Drug Administration, the division of HHS that oversees vast portions of the American pharmaceutical and food system, had unveiled Elsa, an artificial intelligence tool intended to dramatically speed up drug and medical device approvals.

Yet behind the scenes, the agency’s slick AI project has been greeted with a shrug — or outright alarm.

Six current and former FDA officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal work told CNN that Elsa can be useful for generating meeting notes and summaries, or email and communique templates.

Quantum Scientists Have Built a New Math of Cryptography– www.quantamagazine.org

pgnewser July 25, 2025 0

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Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the security of modern encryption. Any clever trick for solving them will doom most forms of cryptography.

Several years ago, researchers found a radically new approach to encryption that lacks this potential weak spot. The approach exploits the peculiar features of quantum physics. But unlike earlier quantum encryption schemes, which only work for a few special tasks, the new approach can accomplish a much wider range of tasks. And it could work even if all the problems at the heart of ordinary “classical” cryptography turn out to be easily solvable.

But this striking discovery relied on unrealistic assumptions. The result was “more of a proof of concept,” said Fermi Ma, a cryptography researcher at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in Berkeley, California. “It is not a statement about the real world.”

Now, a new paper by two cryptographers has laid out a path to quantum cryptography without those outlandish assumptions. “This paper is saying that if certain other conjectures are true, then quantum cryptography must exist,” Ma said.

The more advanced AI models get, the better they are at deceiving us — they even know when they’re being tested– www.livescience.com

pgnewser July 25, 2025 0

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The more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) gets, the more capable it is of scheming and lying to meet its goals — and it even knows when it’s being evaluated, research suggests.

Evaluators at Apollo Research found that the more capable a large language model (LLM) is, the better it is at “context scheming” — in which an AI pursues a task covertly even if it misaligns with the aims of its operators.

The more capable models are also more strategic about achieving their goals, including misaligned goals, and would be more likely to use tactics like deception, the researchers said in a blog post.

More internet users in the US are ditching Google search for ChatGPT – Computerworld– www.computerworld.com

pgnewser July 25, 2025 0

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Using OpenAI’s ChatGPT instead of Google’s search engine is becoming more common in the US, according to a new survey of 1,000 people by Adobe Express. More than three-quarters (77%) of respondents say they use ChatGPT for searches — and 25% have it as their first choice.

Not surprisingly, children and young people in particular prefer ChatGPT to Google. What attracts them most: getting answers to everyday questions or getting creative inspiration. Users said they also appreciate the ability to get summaries of complicated topics and to avoid having to click on a lot of links.

Three in 10 people surveyed said they trust ChatGPT over other search engines, and 47% of marketers and business owners use ChatGPT to promote their business.

Sen. Murphy Pushes $4,709 NFA Tax Just Weeks After Congress Voted to End It– www.usacarry.com

pgnewser July 25, 2025 0

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 A newly submitted Senate amendment aims to reverse a key victory for gun owners: the elimination of the $200 tax on National Firearms Act (NFA) items. Senate Amendment 2973, introduced by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), would raise the tax on NFA-regulated firearms such as suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns to $4,709 — even though Congress recently reduced the same tax to $0 in the One, Big, Beautiful Bill (OBBB).

How the NFA Tax Was Lowered to $0

The reduction was part of a carefully structured reconciliation effort that unfolded over months. Lawmakers originally intended to include the full Hearing Protection Act (HPA) and SHORT Act in the OBBB, which would have fully removed suppressors and other NFA items from regulation. However, because reconciliation rules limit what types of provisions can be included, particularly under the Senate’s Byrd Rule, much of the original repeal language was excluded.

Instead, the House and Senate agreed on a strategy to zero out the NFA tax via a tax-focused provision. This change was upheld by the Senate Parliamentarian and supported by Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), who declined to override the Parliamentarian’s rulings throughout the process. The bill passed both chambers, and President Donald Trump signed it into law on July 4, 2025.

Anthropic unveils ‘auditing agents’ to test for AI misalignment– venturebeat.com

pgnewser July 25, 2025 0

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When models attempt to get their way or become overly accommodating to the user, it can mean trouble for enterprises. That is why it’s essential that, in addition to performance evaluations, organizations conduct alignment testing.

However, alignment audits often present two major challenges: scalability and validation. Alignment testing requires a significant amount of time for human researchers, and it’s challenging to ensure that the audit has caught everything. 

In a paper, Anthropic researchers said they developed auditing agents that achieved “impressive performance at auditing tasks, while also shedding light on their limitations.” The researchers stated that these agents, created during the pre-deployment testing of Claude Opus 4, enhanced alignment validation tests and enabled researchers to conduct multiple parallel audits at scale. Anthropic also released a replication of its audit agents on GitHub. 

“We introduce three agents that autonomously complete alignment auditing tasks. We also introduce three environments that formalize alignment auditing workflows as auditing games, and use them to evaluate our agents,” the researcher said in the paper. 

China sees surge in Nvidia AI chip repair businesses despite export bans– www.techspot.com

pgnewser July 25, 2025 0

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In brief: There’s a strange situation occurring in China: despite Nvidia’s high-end AI chips being restricted from export to the country, businesses that repair these GPUs are experiencing a boom in demand. One company now handles up to 500 AI chip repairs every month.

The US has restricted the export of Nvidia’s most powerful AI chips to China since 2022 over fears that they could be used for military purposes.

Although these chips aren’t officially available in the Asian nation, a booming repair business has emerged. Reuters reports that one firm in the country, which began fixing gaming GPUs 15 years ago and started including AI chips in 2024, created a new company to handle all accelerator-related customer repairs, which now account for 500 repairs per month.

The company has been advertising its extensive facilities on social media. It even boasts a room that can pack 256 servers to simulate customers’ data center environments.

It’s a lucrative business, with the firm charging between 10,000 yuan and 20,000 yuan ($1,400 to $2,800) to fix one of these GPUs depending on the complexity of the repair.