Trending Now Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Mashable Selects Mashable Voices Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off In My Bag All Series This innovation could help address both pollution and hunger. But would you eat one? Amanda Yeo is an Assistant Editor at Mashable, covering entertainment, culture, tech, science, and social good. Based in Australia, she writes about everything from video games and K-pop to movies and gadgets. Scientists have transformed PET plastic into nutritious edible cookies, an innovation that could help address both pollution and hunger in one fell swoop.

Young people are already discontented. It's not going to get better anytime soon. Youth sentiment is a notoriously hard thing to track. Polling is a fraught enough enterprise without having to deal with flaky kids, occasionally impenetrable survey questions, and the real possibility that words such as "confidence" or "satisfied" might not mean the same thing from one generation to the next. What I've come to believe is that the only way you can genuinely track the attitudes of young people is through annual surveys, which, from year to year, sometimes show bright trend lines.

Asbestos killed my mum in her 40s - was her school to blame? To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Figure caption, 'Mum died young from asbestos - now my family want justice' When Caroline Bryan was enjoying high school with friends in the early 90s, she would never have imagined replaying those memories in her final weeks, while searching for answers about her terminal condition. The mum was 46 when she died from mesothelioma, an incurable cancer linked to asbestos exposure. As she came to terms with her difficult diagnosis, Caroline's belief was the only place she could have encountered asbestos was during her time at school decades earlier.

One school is using a traffic light metaphor to explain when students can use AI for their assignments. Chatbots took many schools by surprise upon their release a few years ago. Suddenly, students carried an app in their phones that could magically answer almost any homework question or spin up an essay in seconds. Of course, teachers can often tell when a student is using AI--models make mistakes that most humans don't, and some teachers say that AI-generated text has simple giveaways like too many em dashes . Nevertheless, the generative AI boom increased the burden on teachers, who were already working long hours to plan lessons, make homework assignments, and grade exams, and now needed to adapt to a new technology. For many, it still feels like there's no clear path forward.

The deepfake epidemic in schools is affecting more than students. Four teachers tell WIRED about becoming targets of sexualized, AI-generated content--and how difficult it was to find accountability. For Luis DeSantiago, a substitute teacher in Los Banos, California, it started with a few text messages. On March 12, as he was working his other part-time job at a coffee shop, his phone lit up. A fellow barista said there was an AI photo circulating on social media. Her cousin wanted to know if it was DeSantiago.

LLMs need vastly more data than children to learn language. Understanding why could help us create more efficient models--and reveal more about developing minds. People have been talking to each other for at least 100,000 years, as best we can tell. And in all that time, there has been only one thing in the world that could learn a human language to perfect fluency: a human child. Four short years after the release of ChatGPT, many of us now take it for granted that we can converse naturally with our phones or computers. LLMs like Claude, DeepSeek, and OpenAI's GPT models are fluent and flexible enough to masquerade convincingly as humans. But peek behind the computational curtain, and there's a catch: Teaching a computer to use human language still requires an inhuman amount of data. An LLM can easily churn through a hundred thousand times more words than a person will experience in the process of mastering their mother tongue--and way more than children might hear by their first birthday, when they typically start to grab hold of language. "The progress recently has been amazing," Michael C. Frank, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, says of LLMs. "But we still have to burn down a forest and scrape the entire sum of all human knowledge to re-create this milestone that happens in our living rooms over the course of a year."

You're viewing the US edition You can switch to the UK or AU homepage at any time using this menu. William and Kate attend King's'Sussex summit' at Balmoral: Waleses'have no interest in engaging' with Harry and Meghan after they announced return to UK The humiliating reason Pete Hegseth's wife never leaves his side - and it's rattling the Pentagon Crying girl, 12, came running out from remote woods after being'kidnapped' from sleepover... as hero details rescue Some in royal circles who have dealt with the Sussexes tell me they fear'there is more to this than we know', writes REBECCA ENGLISH West Wing chaos as Susie Wiles'little pet' protege's dirty secret is exposed... leaving Trump insiders aghast I know the exact moment Meghan Markle was finished in America. Imposing waterspout looms over New York as storm, tornado and flood chaos cripples three of America's biggest airports What Kate told my close source makes me deeply worried as Meghan and Harry return to the UK... William now faces the biggest decision of his life: ROBERT JOBSON Jennifer Lopez shows Ben Affleck what he's missing in racy top as the exes narrowly avoid awkward run-in on what would have been their fourth wedding anniversary Rob Reiner children's clever revenge scheme as brother Nick tries to drain their MASSIVE inheritance Sarah Jessica Parker's nepo baby James Wilkie Broderick, 23, shows off bulging biceps at gym before making shock statement about his'modeling career' New York Times must pay college basketball star $9.25M as it loses defamation case for first time in 50 years over false report This is an epic humiliation for Harry and Meghan. But these two are dangerous... we should fear a twisted real strategy behind their UK return: MAUREEN CALLAHAN'I saw everything': California dad's horror at finding teen best friends killed in fiery crash after their car was split in half US woman falls to her death from hotel's 18th floor in Mexico: Husband quizzed by cops after telling staff his wife had'done something outrageous' 'Gwyneth is glad Meghan is moving out of Montecito': The Sussexes' neighbors deliver brutal verdict on move back to UK... as insiders reveal'Hollywood chatter' and one local says, 'We don't really give a cr**' Neutrogena breaks silence on Hayden Panettiere controversy: 'This is not what we stand for' I thought becoming an escort at 22 would give me a life of glamour and financial freedom. Meghan Markle could return to acting after'being offered new role' Harry and Meghan'cheerleader' says the couple have'slowly and methodically' planned their return to Britain'with clues there all along' The idea that his little brother is going to swan back in to steal William's thunder must be enraging: SARAH VINE A Chinese startup has unveiled a huge'cyber horse' robot that people can actually ride.

Get a Tech Job, Babies! If your idea of a perfect board book for people under the age of three is Sandra Boynton's 1982 classic " Moo, Baa, La La La!," you might be surprised to discover what's passing for toddler literature these days. Forget the silly animal high jinks, the humble slapstick of peekaboo and patty-cake, and the earnest overviews of shapes, colors, and numbers; some of today's baby books have far loftier ambitions. A sampling of titles from the past decade: " Bath Time Physics," " General Relativity for Babies," " Baby Loves Aerospace Engineering! Open the sturdy turquoise cover of Ruth Spiro's " Baby Loves Coding!," illustrated by Irene Chan, and you might be lulled into thinking that this is, indeed, a book for very young children. It's small (about seven inches square), short (only ten spreads), made of chunky cardboard, and full of bright colors. It starts off promisingly, with a smiling toy train rolling toward a bobbleheaded, pink-cheeked baby. This pattern of steps is called an algorithm. The train follows an algorithm, too. A tiny computer tells the train what to do. A programmer writes an algorithm in a language the computer can understand. The language is called code. The computer reads the code and follows the steps in the algorithm. Lately, these tech-oriented books for infants and toddlers seem to be everywhere. The twenty-six books in Spiro's "Baby Loves Science" series are rivalled by Chris Ferrie's extensive "Baby University" collection, with such winning titles as " Electromagnetism for Babies," " Quantum Computing for Babies " (co-authored by William Hurley), and " Robotics for Babies " (co-authored by Sarah Kaiser). And let's not forget the "Big Science for Tiny Tots" series, from MIT Kids Press, featuring " High Chair Chemistry " and " Playtime Engineering ." In a manic burst of science geekery, there are even special holiday versions of Spiro's "Baby Loves Science" books, though you might have trouble getting past the word-salad titles: " Baby Loves Angular Momentum on Hanukkah!

You might be forgiven for glancing at this year's GCSE results and thinking not much has changed. And sure, if you're just looking at the pass rate across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, that would be more or less correct. But, when you dig into the detail, you find a more complicated picture, where some existing issues have become even more stark. You'll see the grades of students resitting their English and maths GCSEs in England are dragging down the overall results in those subjects - all part of a system the government itself says is demoralising and needs fixing. You'll see that boys' and girls' grades are looking more similar - though that's more to do with girls slipping than boys improving.

Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. As executive director of the XPRIZE Healthspan competition, Jamie Justice oversees a professional science fair for cutting-edge longevity science around the world. With her team of more than a dozen judges, Justice, a gerontology researcher, has spent the past several years soliciting and then reviewing applications from the world's best scientific minds, looking for the most exciting ideas on how to live longer, better.