UK pupils have performed well again in international science, reading and maths tests sat every three years by hundreds of thousands of teenagers around the world. The UK's performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) remained steady, ranking below the highest-performing countries like Singapore, Estonia and parts of China, but ahead of the US, Australia and other major European nations. But the Pisa report also warned of a worldwide decline in teenagers' reading skills. England's schools minister, Georgia Gould, said the government wanted to build on the positive results and go further so all young people leave school with strong literacy and numeracy. The Pisa tests, run by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), assess teenagers on their ability to solve problems, think critically and communicate, before asking them a wider range of questions about their education in a questionnaire.

Many of the tech billionaires who built our world have taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction. A fter reading Jill Lepore's The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, I have a new destination for a time machine, should I ever finally get my hands on one. I'd set the dial to some night in the late 1970s or '80s and visit the boyhood rooms of the Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman. Then I'd confiscate all of their science fiction. As young people, the future billionaires were spending hours (under their covers with flashlights, I imagine) consuming stories about killer robots or Mars colonies. What they seemed not to get--maybe couldn't get--was that these were cautionary tales, stories that projected deep societal worries into space or onto a future many millennia away.

A meningitis B (MenB) vaccination programme targeting young people and university students in Northern Ireland will roll out from 31 July, NI's chief medical officer has said. It follows an outbreak in England earlier this year, in which two people - a university student and a sixth-form pupil - died. The two-dose vaccine will be offered to those deemed most at risk from the infection, including Year 14 students and under-25s starting university or a Higher Education institution for the first time this autumn. MenB is a bacterial infection that can cause serious, life-threatening illness including inflammation of the lining of the brain and blood poisoning (sepsis). It is spread by close contact such as kissing, sharing vapes or drinks, or living in close quarters - like student accommodation - with a person who has the disease.

Do esports students do more than play games? Playing video games in college may seem unusual, but for many teenagers across the country, it could lead to professional careers. Students at Central Bedfordshire College have just finished their first year of the Level 3 Pearson BTEC in esports, the first time the college has offered such a course. While gaming is a key part of the learning, students also study a broad range of modules designed to prepare them for work both inside and outside competitive gaming. These can include psychology to understand how the brain reacts under pressure, alongside nutrition and fitness to ensure they have the energy to compete effectively.

A joint congressional report describes a spam operation that turned tens of thousands of fake podcasts into search-engine bait for illegal pharmacy and scam sites. For the past year, Spotify has been quietly purging tens of thousands of podcasts that advertised illegal online pharmacies. A report released Thursday by Senator Maggie Hassan, ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, faults the company for acting only after news outlets exposed the content and her office spent nearly a year pressing for answers. None of what it removed was sent to law enforcement, the report says. Spotify reportedly removed more than 57,000 podcast episodes and 3,000 shows, and took enforcement action against 3,500 accounts, all pushing links to illegal online pharmacies advertising opioids, benzodiazepines, and stimulants for sale without a prescription.

'I spoke to ChatGPT 8 times a day' - Gen Z's loneliness'crisis' Working from home after years spent alone over Covid lockdowns, 23-year-old Paisley said he began to feel trapped, and felt only AI could help him. I lost the ability to socialise, he said, and like many in Gen Z, he turned to AI for company. At one point, I was talking to ChatGPT six, seven, eight times a day about my problems, I just couldn't get away from it, it was a dangerous slope. He shared his experience of loneliness with 22-year-old documentary maker Sam Tullen, who told the BBC what Paisley was going through was part of a wider Gen Z loneliness crisis. Gen Z, a term used for those born between 1997 and 2012, often referred to as the first'digital native' generation.

The Download: mimicking pregnancy's first moments in a lab, and AI parameters explained Plus: Google and Character.AI have settled a lawsuit linking their AI to the death of a teenager At first glance, it looks like the start of a human pregnancy: A ball-shaped embryo presses into the lining of the uterus then grips tight, burrowing in as the first tendrils of a future placenta appear. This is implantation--the moment that pregnancy officially begins. Only none of it is happening inside a body. These images were captured in a Beijing laboratory, inside a microfluidic chip, as scientists watched the scene unfold. In three recent papers published by Cell Press, scientists report what they call the most accurate efforts yet to mimic the first moments of pregnancy in the lab. They've taken human embryos from IVF centers and let these merge with "organoids" made of endometrial cells, which form the lining of the uterus.

'A predator in your home': Mothers say chatbots encouraged their sons to kill themselves Megan Garcia had no idea her teenage son Sewell, a bright and beautiful boy, had started spending hours and hours obsessively talking to an online character on the Character.ai It's like having a predator or a stranger in your home, Ms Garcia tells me in her first UK interview. And it is much more dangerous because a lot of the times children hide it - so parents don't know. Within ten months, Sewell, 14, was dead. He had taken his own life.

Kids everywhere know her voice--if not her name. WIRED talks to the former SM trainee about her rise to global superstardom with her hit song "Golden." EJAE, the voice and the writing talent behind "Golden," has gone platinum. The night before our interview, the 33-year-old singer-songwriter found out that record sales from the soundtrack had surged past a million units. Jimmy Fallon, of all people, delivered the news alongside a glimmering framed record when she was appearing on with Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami for the first full live performance of "Golden." Together the trio make up the singing voices of girl group -Huntr/x in Netflix's animated musical turned bona fide phenomenon. If you have a kid, you probably don't need a refresher, but the movie follows Huntr/x's Rumi, Mira, and Zoey as they juggle being astronomically famous while moonlighting as demon hunters. That Fallon appearance, and the appearance that predated it, might have been the first times that American audiences actually saw (and heard) the human being behind that inescapable song.

Character.ai to ban teens from talking to its AI chatbots The platform, founded in 2021, is used by millions to talk to chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI). But it is facing several lawsuits in the US from parents, including one over the death of a teenager, with some branding it a clear and present danger to young people. Online safety campaigners have welcomed the move but said the feature should never have been available to children in the first place. Character.ai said it was making the changes after reports and feedback from regulators, safety experts, and parents, which have highlighted concerns about its chatbots' interactions with teens. Experts have previously warned the potential for AI chatbots to make things up, be overly-encouraging, and feign empathy can pose risks to young and vulnerable people.