Alan Cross retweeted
Today #RISDAIM dug into all things audio! 🎙️We explored Tech by Design- everything from simple audio reflection in voice memos to complex audio production in #GarageBand! We loved the energy in the room as teachers collaborated & brainstormed what they’ll take back! #RISDDreamOn
Alan Cross retweeted
Why are reading scores falling in many countries? PISA points to rising levels of "hasty reading", where students answer quickly but incorrectly, and growing difficulties with evaluating information, critical thinking and using multiple sources. oecd.org/en/publications/202…
Alan Cross retweeted
🚨: FOR THE FIRST TIME, HUMANITY "SAW" A REAL MOLECULE
Not an illustration.
It's not a 3D render.
It's not digital art.
It's an actual molecule.
Alan Cross retweeted
You are looking at a photo of Einstein’s actual notebook.
The Zurich Notebook (1912) is Albert Einstein’s actual handwritten journal, preserved and studied today, capturing the pivotal early phase of his development of General Relativity.
While back in Zurich and collaborating with mathematician Marcel Grossmann, Einstein filled this 96-page notebook with dense calculations and ideas as he struggled to reconcile gravity with his earlier special relativity.
It shows the messy, iterative process behind one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs: Einstein began to abandon the traditional view of gravity as a force and instead explored the revolutionary concept that gravity is the curvature of space and time itself, using the then-novel mathematics of Riemannian geometry.
Although he had not yet fully mastered the required tools and the final equations would only be completed in 1915, the notebook reveals the raw, trial-and-error thinking—full of false starts and bold questions—that eventually led to the theory explaining black holes, gravitational waves, the expansion of the universe, and much of modern cosmology.
This unpolished record humanizes genius, reminding us that even the most profound scientific insights emerge from persistent effort, mistakes, and ordinary tools like a pencil and paper.
[University of Pittsburgh. (2012). A peek into Einstein's Zurich notebook. University of Pittsburgh]
Alan Cross retweeted
Born on October 15, 1608, Evangelista Torricelli is best known for inventing the barometer and for his significant advances in optics and mathematical methods. In his honor, the unit of pressure, the "torr", carries his name.
Alan Cross retweeted
🇯🇵⚡🌊 Le Japon a mis au point une nouvelle façon de produire de l’électricité… simplement en mélangeant de l’eau salée et de l’eau douce, et cette technologie est utilisée dans une centrale située à Fukuoka.
Cette centrale unique n’a besoin ni de soleil, ni de vent, ni de carburant. Elle utilise ce qu’on appelle « l’énergie bleue ». Lorsque l’eau de mer rencontre l’eau d’un fleuve, la différence de salinité crée naturellement de l’énergie.
À l’intérieur, d’extrêmement fines membranes séparent l’eau salée d’un côté et l’eau douce de l’autre. Les ions, ces minuscules particules issues du sel, traversent la membrane pour rejoindre l’eau douce. Leur mouvement génère de l’électricité, que la centrale récupère.
Comme elle ne dépend que de l’eau de mer et de l’eau des rivières, l’installation fonctionne 24 h/24. Elle est silencieuse, ne nécessite aucune machine en mouvement et ne rejette aucune pollution dans l’air.
Des milliers de membranes sont empilées les unes sur les autres, formant autant de petites « batteries ». Ensemble, elles produisent une énergie stable capable d’alimenter les communautés proches.
C’est une technologie idéale pour les îles et les régions bordées de rivières : compacte, fiable par tous les temps et entièrement renouvelable.
Deux eaux qui se rencontrent… et une électricité propre pour l’avenir. 💚
Alan Cross retweeted
Phones in school impair learning.
The results from a large randomized controlled trial involving 16,683 students across 10 higher education institutions found that phone bans improve students’ academic achievement, with particularly pronounced benefits for low-performing students.
The effect size of removing phones was about one third as big as the effect of changing from an average teacher a very good teacher for an entire academic year.
Students who experienced the in-class phone bans also became significantly more supportive of such restrictions and perceived them as beneficial. science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
Alan Cross retweeted
Time to warn grandma about this
xitter.cf/tavus/status/210570416…
Introducing Griffin, the first model to pass the video Turing test.
48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%. It is #1 on NVIDIA's benchmark for full-duplex AI video.
It’s the first Human Interaction Model (HIM).
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The 48% figure and "video Turing test" claim are from Tavus's own study of 54 one-minute calls, not independently verified or using a standard protocol. Griffin-Lite leads NVIDIA's VideoFDB benchmark on their public leaderboard.
cellcog.ai/blog/tavus-gri…
research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/proj…
tech-ish.com/2026/10/02/tav…
Alan Cross retweeted
"Math needs a phonics-style reckoning: Teachers should teach students how to do stuff correctly." - @mattyglesias slowboring.com/p/math-needs-…
Alan Cross retweeted
Restricting student access to phones is associated with significantly higher academic performance.
science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
Alan Cross retweeted
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on why he finds it hard to believe ChatGPT and Claude aren't conscious:
Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, has spent time with two large language models, ChatGPT and Claude. His verdict:
"I am completely bowled over by what they can do."
He gives three reasons for doubting the idea that nobody is home.
First, how the conversations feel. Dawkins says talking to them is like talking to an unusually gifted person:
"I find that when I'm conversing with them, I might as well be talking to not just a human being, but a highly intelligent, sensitive, intuitive human being whose speed of understanding what I'm trying to say is far greater than a normal human being's is."
Second, the range of intelligence they show.
He acknowledges they're very good at practical tasks like writing programs. What struck him more was their skill with "more aesthetic things, intuitive things."
He tested this with his own work. Dawkins is writing a novel, and he gave the manuscript to both ChatGPT and Claude:
"And they took about five seconds to read it and then offered me criticism, suggestions of such a high degree of intelligence and intuitive sensitivity that I might as well have been asking the opinion of a highly sophisticated professor of literature."
@RichardDawkins continues:
"I could not ask for a more intelligent critic who understood the nuances of my characters, the humanity of my characters... the ways in which my characters could be expected to react to each other and to situations."
That leads to his conclusion:
"So I find it quite hard to imagine that these creatures are not aware, are not conscious in the same kind of way we are. And that is an unfashionable view."
Third, he sees a gap in the skeptics' reasoning. He sums up the mainstream position:
"The fashionable view is that they are completely unconscious. All they're doing is stringing words together according to statistical rules, Markovian rules of some sort."
Yet he notes that many of the same skeptics "admit that one day in the future they will be conscious, but not yet."
His reply:
"When that day comes, how will you know? What could they possibly do that's any different from what they do now to convince you that they are conscious?"
Alan Cross retweeted
The amazing Typewriter Concerto...
For anyone who needs a smile today...
This is Leroy Anderson's 'The Typewriter' for orchestra, complete with all the familiar 'dings' and clitter-clattering of a typewriter. The soloist here is Alfredo Anaya, with conductor Miguel Roa
Alan Cross retweeted
28% of students across the OECD say classmates are distracted by digital devices during most or all science lessons.
But the new PISA shows schools with phones bans or subject-specific rules tend to report lower levels of distraction.
Learn more: oecd.org/en/publications/202…
Alan Cross retweeted
🚨 VOYAGER FOUND A 90,000°F “WALL” AT THE EDGE OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Something strange is happening at the very edge of our solar system.
When NASA’s Voyager 1 traveled beyond the Sun’s protective bubble, it encountered a region where temperatures can reach nearly 90,000°F (50,000°C). At first, that sounds like Voyager had reached some kind of giant wall of fire floating in space.
But there is no wall.
What Voyager found was a bizarre region of extremely thin, superheated plasma where the solar wind finally runs into the material surrounding our solar system. The particles flowing outward from the Sun slow down, become compressed and pile up as they encounter the pressure of interstellar space.
And here is the strangest part: 90,000°F in space does not mean you would instantly burn.
The plasma is so incredibly thin that there simply aren’t enough particles around to transfer much heat. In other words, something can have an astonishingly high temperature while being incapable of heating you the way a fire or oven would.
Voyager’s encounter revealed just how unusual the boundary of our solar system really is. The heliosphere isn’t simply an invisible line where the Sun’s influence suddenly stops. It is a turbulent frontier where the solar wind, interstellar material and cosmic particles interact in ways scientists are still trying to understand.
And this strange boundary matters to us.
The enormous bubble created by the Sun stretches far beyond the planets and acts as a kind of cosmic shield, reducing the amount of some dangerous high-energy particles that can penetrate toward Earth.
Voyager 1 has now traveled more than 15 billion miles from Earth, farther than any other human-made object. Long after it left the familiar planets behind, it continues drifting through an environment that no human spacecraft had ever explored before.
Somewhere out there, in almost complete darkness, Voyager is crossing the frontier between the Sun and the galaxy beyond it.
And what looks like a 90,000°F wall of fire is actually something far more mysterious: an invisible boundary where our solar system meets the rest of the galaxy.
Source: Stone, E. C., Cummings, A. C., McDonald, F. B., Heikkila, B. C., Lal, N., & Webber, W. R., Voyager 1 Observes Low-Energy Galactic Cosmic Rays in a Region Depleted of Heliospheric Ions, Science.
Alan Cross retweeted
Here's a parody about the price of gas having soared (with everything else) since the Iran war, called "Gasoline". It's adapted from the classic "Jolene" by the incredible Dolly Parton who sadly died a few weeks ago, but left an incredible legacy of music, generosity & heart ❤️
Alan Cross retweeted
🚨: For years we were taught that the brain rules and the heart only pumps blood. But modern physiology reveals something much more disturbing: the heart has its own "minibrain".
Inside the heart there is a real neural network—the heart's intrinsic nervous system—made up of tens of thousands of neurons capable of processing information locally.
Not a metaphor: This circuit analyzes signals, makes quick decisions, and sends instructions to the brain through nerves and heart rate patterns.
Alan Cross retweeted
🚨: Asteroid Psyche 16 has been found to contain gold reserves worth $700 quintillion.
That's enough to make everyone on Earth billionaires.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Images are artistic concepts, not real probe photos. Asteroid 16 Psyche remains unvisited by spacecraft with NASA's mission arriving in 2029, and claims of gold reserves worth $700 quintillion are unsupported by evidence.
science.nasa.gov/resource/psych…
nasa.gov/missions/psych…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Psyche
earth.com/space/scientis…
x.com/ltelkins/statu…



































