STEM

News Corp rebranded its educational unit as Amplify in July. Since then the Joel Klein-headed company has been working with AT&T to develop a tablet expressly designed for the K-12 educational market. After months of testing the Amplify Tablet, an unspecified 10-inch Android slate loaded with custom software, is ready for its official debut. Lots Continue Reading →

Doctors announced on Sunday that a baby had been cured of an H.I.V. infection for the first time, a startling development that could change how infected newborns are treated and sharply reduce the number of children living with the virus that causes AIDS. The baby, born in rural Mississippi, was treated aggressively with antiretroviral drugs Continue Reading →

Calling the choppy language of text messaging a scourge on society would not be controversial. But Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter has a different interpretation. He thinks texting, with its abbreviations and odd constructions and novel usage, is “a linguistic miracle happening right under our noses.” “A whole new language has developed among our young Continue Reading →

More middle- and secondary-school teachers are using digital tools in their classrooms and professional lives, a new report says. A study by Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project released Thursday delves into teachers’ increasing technology use, but also expresses educators’ concerns about the digital divide. The study surveyed Advance Placement and National Writing Continue Reading →

Apple has just announced a significant milestone for iTunes U, as content on the “iTunes for education” platform has now passed a billion downloads. iTunes U is designed to help distribute information to learners around the world, with institutions such as schools, universities, libraries and museums able to have a single home for all their Continue Reading →

“Where are we?” “Who did we play in the last game?” “What is the date today?” Those are some of the questions N.F.L. players are asked after they are hit in the head during a game. Next season, they are coming to an iPad. The mandatory postinjury sideline concussion assessment tool, instituted for the 2012 Continue Reading →

When diagnosing neuromuscular problems in patients — when they age or get a concussion, for example — doctors typically make conclusions based on information that is qualitative, or subjective. But a tablet app developed by researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering may be able to quantitatively measure neuromuscular performance for the Continue Reading →

In the final round of a televised game show that pitted top players against IBM’s AI program Watson, a humbled human jotted down an aside to his written response: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.” Now even doctors are speaking that way. “I’d like to shake Watson’s hand,” says Mark Kris, an oncologist Continue Reading →

Some of the most lovable Google Doodles — the search engine’s custom logos celebrating a particular subject — don’t emerge from Google itself. They’re the winners of the company’s Doodle 4 Google contest, in which the company invites students from kindergarten through 12th grade to submit Doodles on a theme that’s been designed to inspire Continue Reading →

On Tuesday, the largest university system in the world, the California State University system, announced a pilot for $150 lower-division online courses at one of its campuses — a move that spells the end of higher education as we know it. Lower-division courses are the financial backbone of many part-time faculty and departments (especially the Continue Reading →