Indiana University and Instructure receive NSF funding to develop TOPSAIL, the first-of-its-kind infrastructure for testing AI tools in education
Grant and Award Announcement
This month, we’re focusing on artificial intelligence (AI), a topic that continues to capture attention everywhere. Here, you’ll find the latest research news, insights, and discoveries shaping how AI is being developed and used across the world.
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 21-Nov-2025 20:11 ET (22-Nov-2025 01:11 GMT/UTC)
Researchers led by Noah Cowan at Johns Hopkins University have secured NIH funding to probe how animals alternate between "explore" (sensing) and "exploit" (task-oriented) behaviors in uncertain environments, using the weakly electric glass knifefish as a model. The team includes researchers from four universities who will integrate their expertise in neuroscience, math, engineering, and machine learning to build on 2023 findings in Nature Machine Intelligence that revealed the explore/exploit pattern across species from amoebas to humans. The project aims to decode decision triggers, with implications for robotics and medicine.
A recently published study – the largest to date – led by researchers from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago found that impaired motor coordination is the primary driver of autism-related differences in imitation ability, with other overlapping causes contributing to a lesser degree.
How do you program a computer that doesn’t exist yet? In a new project, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are looking into this question and developing software for quantum computers – even though no such computers are working yet and may not be for decades to come. But once the hardware is available, it needs to be usable without further delay; even the most powerful quantum computer will certainly be useless without suitable programs.
Researchers have discovered how ‘pirate phages’ hijack other viruses to break into bacteria, sharing new genetic material for dangerous traits.