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Nature has retracted a paper that claimed AI had a positive impact on student learning.  The original paper, titled “The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysis,” was originally published in May of last year by Jin Wang and Wenxiang Fan of the Hangzhou Normal University…

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation.  Less than 72 hours before Weber State University in Utah was scheduled to host a conference on censorship, presenters were told not to discuss identity politics, or be removed from the official program agenda. In an email to presenters selected to participate in the 27th…

A new, bipartisan bill introduced by Democratic Senator of California Adam Schiff and endorsed by the biggest AI developers in the world—including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft—would change the K-12 curriculum to shoehorn in “AI literacy,” something that young people and teachers alike already hate in schools. The Literacy in Future Technologies Artificial Intelligence, or LIFT…

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the stories this week that dared to dream, slinked through the city, mourned their mothers, and visited ancient graveyards. First, scientists studied thousands of dream reports and discovered that world events—like the COVID-19 pandemic—can manifest in our vespertine visions. Then: the science of urban snake rescues, the lonely…

The Chinese government pressured Zambia to cancel RightsCon, the world’s largest digital human rights conference, at the last minute, according to the conference’s organizers. Beijing was upset that the speaker’s list included prominent figures from Taiwanese civil society, AccessNow, the group that organizes RightsCon, wrote Friday. On Wednesday, guests and speakers from across the planet…

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss a wild message, big questions about consciousness, and a visit to a museum. JASON: I got an extremely funny Signal message yesterday after I published my most…

The Complier is the hardest boss to reach in the extraction shooter Marathon. To even have the chance to fight it, you need to have cleared six vaults—increasingly elaborate puzzle rooms—in the Cryo Archive, Marathon’s end game map. To even get the chance to enter each of those vaults, you need to obtain a key…

Japan’s Minister of Defense Shinjirō Koizumi posed with a cardboard drone on Monday during a meeting with drone manufacturer AirKamuy. The AirKamuy 150 is a cheap pre-fab cardboard drone meant to die on the battlefield and it comes shipped in a flatpack like an IKEA shelf. According to Koizumi, Japan’s military has already begun to…