In the early 1900s, beavers had almost completely disappeared from the United States due to hunting and trapping. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Beavers might rival even the most hardworking corporate employee in productivity and hustle, but they're not quite cut out for business travel--especially the airborne kind. Nevertheless, in 1948, 76 industrious beavers were subjected to a once-in-a-lifetime "work trip" to Idaho's remote Chamberlain Basin--via parachute. The event, which was captured in a now-viral video, has become celebrated as a quirky example of human ingenuity and environmental stewardship. After all, who can resist a flying beaver?

What are freeze-dried sweets and why are they popular? When Savannah Louise West first tasted freeze-dried gummies, she was intrigued. I think the crunch is so satisfying, and I find it interesting to experience a candy I'm familiar with that has an entirely new texture, says the Toronto resident. Ms West is describing one of the main features of this spin-off candy that independent and major confectionary manufacturers have been releasing onto shelves, both online and offline, for the past three years. It's been largely a US phenomena, hence we'll use the US term candy, but for our UK readers, we're talking about sweets here.

Microsoft is wading deeper into generative artificial intelligence for gaming with Muse, a new AI model announced today. The model, which was trained on Ninja Theory's multiplayer game Bleeding Edge, can help Xbox game developers build parts of games, Microsoft says. Muse can understand the physics and 3D environment inside a game and generate visuals and reactions to players' movements. Among the various use cases for Muse that Microsoft outlines in its announcement, perhaps the most intriguing involves game preservation. The company says Muse AI can study games from its vast back catalog of classic titles and optimize them for modern hardware.

This paper focuses on the analysis of human gait cycle dynamics and presents a mathematical model to determine the torque exerted on the lower limb joints throughout the complete gait cycle, including its various phases. The study involved a healthy subject who participated in a series of initial walking experiments. The development of a mathematical model that accurately represents the natural motion of the human lower limb has garnered significant attention in the field of lower limb prosthetics design. In this study, the researchers incorporated the functional relationship between the limb joints and the end effector of the lower extremity. This knowledge is crucial for rehabilitation purposes as it helps in understanding the connectivity of joints, links, and the overall body orientation required to effectively control the motion of the actuators. When analysing physical activities, measurements of human strength play a crucial role. Traditionally, these measurements have focused on determining the maximum voluntary torque at a single joint angle and angular velocity. However, it is important to consider that the available strength varies significantly with joint position and velocity.

When ChatGPT was released late last year, people around the world suddenly awoke to the major advancements going on in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). For many, what once seemed like a science fiction fantasy was now reality. In truth, the technology behind the groundbreaking chatbot had been brewing behind the scenes in research labs and major tech companies for years. But refined and released in its most accessible form yet, ChatGPT stands to herald in a transformational age of AI adoption. ChatGPT, and other generative AIs like DALL-E, which can create original text and images from a simple prompt, won't just transform education. It will reshape the way people conduct business, create art and do research. Commentators have likened what's coming to the next Industrial Revolution: one in which the role of humans may radically change. While ChatGPT and DALL-E are both products of OpenAI, an American research company, other Silicon Valley giants have been moving quickly to show they're capable of similar technology. With names like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta and even Baidu capturing international headlines for their generative AI offerings, it's easy to forget that the foundational principles upon which these technologies rest were developed in large part by Canadian scientists.

Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and Professor of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Avi is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab, Senior Editor at Marketing Science, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Avi's research focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy. This work has been discussed in White House reports, Congressional testimony, European Commission documents, the Economist, the Globe and Mail, National Public Radio, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in economics of Northwestern University.

Video games and heavy metal music have long shared a passing curiosity with one another. Look no further than the iconography of Doom, or Tim Schafer's Brütal Legend, for evidence of that. But it was in the mid 00s – during the reign of music and rhythm games such as Guitar Hero – that the link was most obvious. Count me among the ranks of those who learned about Pantera and Megadeth by way of the plastic instrument. Which is why this year's Metal: Hellsinger is on my radar.

This is part of a Globe and Mail series in which Beijing correspondent Nathan VanderKlippe looks at China's present and future challenges before his return to Canada. The people tapping on keyboards at Liang Zhi Data Technology possess an unusual set of skills. Some have backgrounds in artificial intelligence, a skill set that has grown common across the Chinese high-tech companies. They are experts in economics, and their work at Liang Zhi is to find new ways of making decisions from data. Mr. Shao stands at the forefront of a bid to bring authoritarian capital – the Chinese economic model – into the supercomputer age.

Researchers can use AI to reduce the number of experiments needed to develop new medications. Drug discovery is traditionally a high-risk and resource-intensive process -- so much so that it has drawn comparisons to gambling. Brendan Frey, a U of T professor, put it bluntly: "It's like the Big Pharma companies come into a casino, put a million-dollar coin into a slot machine, and with some probability like 10 per cent or something, they get a win." But recently, a growing trend in the field is reducing uncertainty around drug discovery by using artificial intelligence (AI) as a prediction tool. Dr. Christine Allen, a professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, together with post-doctoral researcher Pauric Bannigan, recently published a review paper on the subject in the Journal of Controlled Release.

Millions of drivers are betting their livelihoods on Uber and Lyft. On Friday, Wall Street bet billions of dollars that the companies won't need those drivers. Lyft and Uber, which helped pioneer the gig economy with its armies of drivers, lose massive amounts of money to pay drivers for each ride. The firms could slash their costs of each ride by as much as three-quarters by replacing human drivers with autonomous vehicles, according to the companies, turning ride-hailing into a profitable enterprise. But widespread deployment of the technology is a decade away at best, experts say.