Last year in The Conversation Canada, we described Agrilo, an affordable “colorimetric” soil-testing system developed through research at MacEwan University. Using a smartphone camera to interpret colour changes, Agrilo measures soil nutrients and can provide farmers with timely guidance to support fertilizer decisions. Our goal was to make practical soil information more accessible — so […]

Prof Stephen Blundell on the plight of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and Peter Forbes on bacteriophages and AI Much of the commentary about the UK Research and Innovation science funding cuts has centred around the decision to close Jodrell Bank, with the iconic Lovell telescope rightly identified as a “source of wonder and pride” (Letters,

The Trump administration is trying to stop New York from enforcing its gambling laws against Kalshi, and yesterday said it ordered the prediction market to continue operating in the state. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced that it exercised its emergency authority in response to a “market emergency.” The CFTC said it acted “to

If you can truly appreciate an old book—and maybe even marvel at how its fragile, yellowing pages contain some of the earliest ways that people tried to make sense of the world around them—then headlines about tech companies destroying books to train AI likely torture a tender part of your soul. It’s indeed depressing to

 Developed in collaboration with Cisco and available exclusively through Cisco, Stack Automation by Quali closes the gap between AI ambition and AI production, accelerating deployment of full stacks, GPUs, models, and applications while enabling agentic management of hybrid infrastructure at scale. Ask any infrastructure leader what stands between a good idea and a running workload,

AI isn’t causing mass job losses in Australia yet, but slower hiring and shifting employment trends reveal how the workforce may be changing. The post AI Job Losses in Australia Explained: Why the Numbers Tell a More Complicated Story appeared first on TechRepublic.

Broad DDR5, LPDDR5 and LPDDR5X-compatible memory support gives developers more bandwidth, greater flexibility and improved supply resilience Altera, the world’s largest independent FPGA solutions provider, today announced expanded DDR5 memory support across its Agilex® FPGA portfolio with the release of Quartus® Prime Pro Edition Software version 26.1.1. The update adds new DDR5, LPDDR5 and LPDDR5X-compatible

For protestors rising up against the data centers undergirding the AI boom, the math is simple: wherever they sprout, the facilities make frightfully poor neighbors — inflating utility prices, discharging hazardous waste, and blasting horrid noise at all hours of the night. For data center developers, there’s a different calculation to be made: namely, one

Muse Glimmer 30B is a new 30-billion-parameter causal language model from the Meta Superintelligence Lab, distilled directly from Muse Spark. Released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, it is purpose-built to execute complex, autonomous agentic workflows entirely on consumer hardware without relying on cloud infrastructure. You can read more about the model on AIModels.fyi here!

Ancient remains from Vietnam suggest diseases like yaws may have been passed from mother to child thousands of years ago, a form of transmission often assumed to indicate syphilis. The discovery could overturn how scientists interpret ancient infections and complicate the long-running mystery of syphilis’s origins.