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Category: education

Governor-General’s Design Challenge 2025

Are you keen to explore quantum concepts with your students? Have you been looking for ideas on how to make abstract ideas more accessible and engaging for young learners?

The 2025 Governor-General’s Design Challenge celebrates the Year of Quantum Science and Technology by supporting you to turn your students into “photon detectives” in the classroom.

This hands-on STEM experience for students in Years 5–10 sets out a challenge for your class to complete, with the challenge introduced in a special video co-presented by the Governor-General, Her Excellency the Honourable Sam Mostyn AC and Questacon.

Unified Equation: A Berry-Curvature Theory of Quantum Gravity, Entanglement, and Mass Emergence

Many Thanks to Sabine Hossenfelder for giving me puzzles.

What if everything — gravity, light, particles, and even the flow of time — came from a single equation? In Chavis Srichan’s Unified Theory, the universe isn’t built from matter, but from the curvature of entanglement — the twists and turns of quantum information itself. Space, energy, and even consciousness are simply different ways this curvature vibrates.

The One Equation.

At the smallest scale, every motion and interaction follows one rule:

[D_μ, D_ν]Ψ = (i/ħ) [(8πG/c⁴)⟨T_μν(Ψ)⟩ − Λ_q g_μν + λ ∇_μ∇_ν S]Ψ

It means that the “shape” of space itself bends in response to energy and information — and that same bending is quantum mechanics, gravity, and thermodynamics combined.

Mass: When Curvature Loops Back.

Continue reading “Unified Equation: A Berry-Curvature Theory of Quantum Gravity, Entanglement, and Mass Emergence” | >

AGI is still a decade away

Reinforcement learning is terrible — but everything else is worse.

Karpathy’s sharpest takes yet on AGI, RL, and the future of learning.

Andrej Karpathy’s vision of AGI isn’t a bang — it’s a gradient descent through human history.

Karpathy on AGI & Superintelligence.

* AGI won’t be a sudden singularity — it will blend into centuries of steady progress (~2% GDP growth).

* Superintelligence is uncertain and likely gradual, not an instant “explosion.”

Continue reading “AGI is still a decade away” | >

Why Sorbonne pulled out of university ranking

France’s Sorbonne University plans to leave the Times Higher Education (THE) Rankings, adding its name to a growing number of universities rejecting lists that play one institution off against another. According to its president, most of these rankings are “black boxes” whose methods not only raise ethical questions but also fail to cover the breadth and diversity of university contributions.

“By deciding to stop sending our data to THE, we are leaving this specific ranking, but our criticism of major international university rankings is global,” Nathalie Drach-Temam, president of Sorbonne University, told Science|Business. “These rankings, built on selected quantitative indicators amalgamated into a single score, are not designed to evaluate research nor reflect the breadth and depth of the missions of research and higher education institutions.”

From the UK-based Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) ranking to the US News and World Report (USWR), university rankings set out to measure how well a higher education institution performs and how its performance and quality compare to its peers. Prospective students turn to them for guidance, and governments and investors base their research funding decisions on them.

Alzheimer’s disease research in brain tissue from African American donors points to roles for many novel genes

The prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is approximately two times higher in African Americans (AA) compared to white/European-ancestry (EA) individuals living in the U.S. Some of this is due to social determinants of health such as disparities in health care access and quality of education, biases in testing and higher rates of AD risk factors such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes in those who identify as African American.

Although many studies have examined differences in (a measure of the amount of protein encoded by a gene) in from AD cases and controls in EA or mixed ancestry cohorts, the number of AA individuals in these studies was unspecified or too small to identify significant findings within this group alone.

In the largest AD study conducted in brain tissue from AA donors, researchers from Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine have identified many genes, a large portion of which had not previously been implicated in AD by other , to be significantly more or less active in tissue from AD cases compared to controls. The most notable finding was a 1.5 fold higher level of expression of the ADAMTS2 gene in brain tissue from those with autopsy-confirmed AD.

The loser’s brain: How neuroscience controls social behavior

Social hierarchies are everywhere—think of high school dramas, where the athletes are portrayed as the most popular, or large companies, where the CEO makes the important decisions. Such hierarchies aren’t just limited to humans, but span the animal kingdom, with dominant individuals getting faster food access, higher mating priority, and bigger or better territories. While it’s long been thought that winning or losing can influence the position of an individual within a social hierarchy, the brain mechanisms behind these social dynamics have remained a mystery.

In iScience, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) investigate the neurological basis of social hierarchy in male mice, pinpointing the neurons they believe crucial in determining these social hierarchy dynamics.

“You may think that being dominant in the is all about , like size. But interestingly, we’ve found that it seems to be a choice, based on ,” said Professor Jeffery Wickens, head of the Neurobiology Research Unit at OIST and co-author on this study. “The involved in these decisions is well conserved between mice and humans, so there are likely useful parallels to be drawn.”

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