No longer a technological novelty, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has become a common tool for everyday academic tasks among the university community. In view of this, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) has carried out a research project to establish the extent to which GenAI-specific training can help ensure more responsible and critical use by students.
Over half of Americans believe tech companies should take action to restrict extremely violent content on their platforms, according to Pew data, yet even trained content moderators consistently disagree in their decisions about how to classify hate speech and offensive images.
A study led by researchers at the Department of Civil Engineering at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) has uncovered alarming evidence that soil worldwide is emerging as a significant reservoir and amplifier of high-risk antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), which enable bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics, and that their threat to public health has continued to increase over the past decade or so.
One of the most detailed 3D maps of how the human chromosomes are organized and folded within a cell's nucleus is published in Nature.
In the past year, two separate experiments in two different materials captured the same confounding scenario: the coexistence of superconductivity and magnetism. Scientists had assumed that these two quantum states are mutually exclusive; the presence of one should inherently destroy the other.
The basics of photosynthesis are something that every student learns in school: carbon dioxide, water and light in; oxygen and sugar for growth out. In a world where atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising, it is plausible to think that trees and other plant life growth will rise in lockstep.
Right now, the debate about consciousness often feels frozen between two entrenched positions. On one side sits computational functionalism, which treats cognition as something you can fully explain in terms of abstract information processing: get the right functional organization (regardless of the material it runs on) and you get consciousness.
The textbook version of the "Out of Africa" hypothesis holds that the first human species to leave the continent around 1.8 million years ago was Homo erectus. But in recent years, a debate has emerged suggesting it wasn't a single species, but several. New research published in the journal PLOS One now hopes to settle the matter once and for all.
A new University of British Columbia study published in Urban Climate finds that people waiting at bus stops they find visually pleasant are more likely to feel thermally comfortable during hot weather, even when physical heat levels are high.
The low-latitude highlands region of southwestern China experienced two major climate events in recent years: a severe drought in 2009–2010 and an extreme heat wave in 2019. Though both sprang from similar large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns, the events produced different responses, raising questions about how multiple stressors can push ecosystems toward contrasting outcomes.
