Google on Monday announced a series of updates intended to bring its Gemini AI and other AI-powered tools deeper into the classroom. At the ISTE edtech conference, the tech giant introduced more than 30 AI tools for educators, a version of the Gemini app built for education, expanded access to its collaborative video creation app Google Vids, and other tools for managed Chromebooks.
The updates represent a major AI push in the edtech space, where educators are already struggling to adapt to how AI tools, like AI chatbots and startups that promise to help you “cheat on everything,” are making their way into the learning environment.
School-aged kids and teens today are more likely to ask ChatGPT for help with their homework (or to even do it for them) than they are to ask a teacher to explain the concepts again. In higher ed, meanwhile, colleges are wrestling with whether or not plagiarism detectors can even identify AI-written content.
Amid this disruption, Google is charging ahead with AI tools, saying it thinks that “responsible AI” can help drive “more engaging and personalized learning experiences,” when used in conjunction with human-led teaching.
Since announcing its plans to bring Gemini to the classroom last year, Google on Monday said that its Gemini AI suite for educators is now available for free to all Google Workspace for Education accounts.
This includes over 30 new features, like the ability for teachers to brainstorm ideas, generate lesson plans, and personalize content for students using AI technology.
Over the next several months, Google will give teachers the ability to create interactive study guides using the AI research tool Notebook LM, along with their classroom materials.
Teachers can also create custom versions of the Gemini AI called “Gems,” which will work as AI experts that help students who need extra support or want to better understand the subject.
This is essentially just taking an activity that students are already doing — asking an AI chatbot to explain a topic or answer questions — and redirecting that activity back to Google’s own AI technology, where it’s specifically been trained on the teacher’s own classroom materials.
Soon, teachers will also be able to offer students real-time support for the AI-powered reading buddy when using the Read Along in Classroom tool.
Google is expanding basic access to its AI-powered video creator, Google Vids, as well, to make it available to all Google Workspace for Education users. Teachers can use the tool to make instructional videos, while students can use Vids for things like book reports or other assignments.
The company is also rolling out a series of new features designed to track student progress against learning standards and skills, view analytics on student performance and engagement, better secure Gemini user data and data in Gmail, manage who has access to AI tools like Gemini and Notebook LM, have better control over Google Meet waiting rooms, and more.
Plus, along with a handful of updates for managed Chromebooks, Google introduced new teaching mode called Class Tools. This allows teachers to connect directly with their students via Google Classroom and share content to the kids’ screens, like videos, articles, slides, and quizzes. These tools can be adapted to the student’s own language, if need be, and are designed to keep kids focused on learning by restricting browsing to specific tabs.
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FOUR food manufacturers have pledged to eliminate synthetic dyes from products sold in the US by 2028, following on from health secretary Robert F Kennedy (RFK) Jr’s proposal to ban them entirely.
Kraft Heinz, General Mills, and Conagra Brands have announced plans to eliminate synthetic dyes from all US products by the end of 2027, while Nestlé said last week it would achieve this within the next 12 months.
Currently, seven certified Food, Drug, and Cosmetic (FD&C) dyes are approved for use in foods in the US by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), including Yellow No. 5 (tartrazine). In March, RFK Jr warned food and drink manufacturers of his intent to ban all seven dyes entirely.
Kraft Heinz said they will replace the synthetic dyes either with natural colourings, such as dyes from beetroots and grape skins, or by “reinventing” colours and shades if natural alternatives do not exist. They also said they will remove colourings without replacement “where it is not critical to the consumer experience”. Kraft Heinz says that around 90% of its US products by net sales are already free of synthetic dyes. General Mills, meanwhile, says 85% of its US products are already dye-free.
In addition, Kraft Heinz will immediately cease the launch of new US products containing synthetic dyes.
Conagra, known for its Birds Eye and Healthy Choice brands, has also said it plans to remove synthetic dyes from all frozen products sold in the US by the end of 2025, while making a pledge to stop offering dye-containing products to US schools by the start of the 2026-27 school year. General Mills, which makes brands including Cheerios cereal and Häagen-Dazs ice cream, has made the same promise, adding that “nearly all” of its school products are already free of synthetic dyes.
Jeff Harmening, CEO of General Mills, said: “Across the long arc of our history, General Mills has moved quickly to meet evolving consumer needs, and reformulating our products portfolio to remove certified colours is yet another example”.
The adverse health impacts of the seven FD&C dyes are debated. While the previous US administration banned Red No. 3 (erythrosine) in January, citing a 30-year-old study linking it to cancer in rats, the FDA maintained its belief that it was unlikely to have the link in humans.
The most cited health concern linked to synthetic dyes is their potential impact on children’s behaviour. A 2022 report by the National Institutes of Health reviewed 25 studies and found that just over half suggested a connection between food dye exposure and behavioural issues in children. However, only one of the seven dyes being phased out of US products – Green No. 3 (fast green) – is banned for use in food products in Europe.
More serious health risks are thought to arise from other food additives banned in Europe but certified in the US. These include potassium bromide, added to white flour to make dough rise higher and banned in the UK since 1990 owing to cancer links in animals; azodicarbonamide, a whitening agent used in dough and banned in the EU for over 15 years as a possible carcinogen; butylated hydroxyanisole and butylated hydroxytoluene, used as preservatives and banned in Europe as possible carcinogens.
The colouring titanium dioxide is also banned in Europe, owing to potential genotoxicity, but not in the US. It does not come under the FDA’s seven FD&C dyes and will be unaffected by the changes planned by the four food giants.
It’s never too late to join the F1 Fantasy fun, and to celebrate McLaren’s home race at Silverstone we have a new McLaren Mini League for you to join.
The new F1 Fantasy league covers three iconic European events with the British Grand Prix, a Sprint weekend at Spa for the Belgian Grand Prix and the Hungarian Grand Prix, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.
If you missed the start of the fantasy season, here’s a great opportunity to put your F1 knowledge to the test, pick your team and compete for exclusive prizes, including a tour of the McLaren Technology Centre, McLaren’s legendary HQ and home of their F1 team.
For existing players, if your team is flagging in the league, it’s a chance for a reset. Just make sure to join the league within the game.
If you’re new to the game, this is a great place to start and try your hand at building a team.
F1 Fantasy is free and easy to play. Picking your team and joining the league is done in minutes. You get a $100m fantasy budget to spend on your selection of five drivers and two constructors. Then you join to play against friends, family or other fans, taking the Grand Prix weekends to the next level.
McLaren returned to the top last year, winning the Constructors’ Championship and matching Williams with a ninth team title – second only to Ferrari in the all-time standings.
We’re offering some exclusive papaya prizes to the top players in the McLaren Mini League, including a tour of the futuristic Technology Centre. You could win:
Sprint in Spa
Extra points are available in Belgium with the Sprint format, giving you an opportunity to make the most of chips like Limitless or Extra DRS.
Are Ferrari back?
Should the Scuderia be in your team after upgrades put them back on the podium?
Stick with Papaya
McLaren are still scoring well, with both drivers regularly in the top points as they duel for the Drivers’ title.
To join the McLaren Mini League, pick your F1 Fantasy team and finalise before Qualifying at The British Grand Prix starts on Saturday July 5 at 1500 local time (1400 UTC). Come on in and join the F1 Fantasy fun!
A mini solar telescope strapped to the side of the International Space Station (ISS) has captured its first images, revealing subtle changes in our home star’s outer atmosphere that have never been seen before.
NASA’s Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX) is a small solar telescope attached to the outside of the ISS. It is a coronagraph, meaning that it blocks out the solar disk to allow the telescope to focus on the sun’s atmosphere, or corona, in unprecedented detail — mimicking the way the moon blocks the sun’s visible surface during a total solar eclipse on Earth. The occulting disk blocking out the sun’s light is around the size of a tennis ball and it is held in place by three metal arms at the end of a long metal tube, which also cast distinctive shadows in the resulting images.
CODEX arrived on the ISS on Nov. 5, 2024, on board a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule, Live Science’s sister site Space.com previously reported. It was affixed onto the station’s hull by the robotic arm, Canadarm2, on Nov. 9, according to NASA.
The first photos from CODEX were released on June 10 at the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Anchorage, Alaska. They include footage of temperature fluctuations in the outer corona, captured over the span of several days, and a photo of giant “coronal streamers” shooting out of the sun.
“The CODEX instrument is doing something new,” Jeffrey Newmark, a heliophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and the principal investigator for CODEX, said in a statement. “These are brand new observations that have never been seen before, and we think there’s a lot of really interesting science to be done with it.”
Related: Watch eerie ‘UFOs’ and a solar ‘cyclone’ take shape in stunning new ESA video of the sun
The main goal of the new telescope is to discover how the superhot particles constantly streaming out of the sun, known as the solar wind, interact with the sun’s outer atmosphere. “Previous coronagraph experiments have measured the density of material in the corona, but CODEX is measuring the temperature and speed of material in the slowly varying solar wind flowing out from the Sun,” Newmark said.
Mission scientists also want to understand how solar wind gets heated to such high temperatures — up to 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million degrees Celsius), which is around 175 times hotter than the sun’s surface, according to Space.com.
To do this, the telescope measures the sun using four narrow-band filters, two for temperature and two for speed. “By comparing the brightness of the images in each of these filters, we can tell the temperature and speed of the coronal solar wind,” Newmark said.
The researchers hope that better understanding the solar wind will help predict dangerous space weather events, particularly those that originate from gigantic “coronal holes” that spew streams of particularly fast solar particles toward Earth.
In the last few weeks, Earth has experienced two significant geomagnetic storms, which were both triggered by coronal holes: First, on June 13, when a sizeable storm triggered auroras in up to 18 U.S. states; and more recently on June 25, when a slightly weaker disturbance briefly lit up the night skies.
This flurry of activity is the result of solar maximum, the most active phase of the sun’s roughly 11-year sunspot cycle. This chaotic peak is now likely coming to an end, meaning less explosive outbursts in the future. However, some experts believe that solar wind could remain unpredictable for several years as the sun’s localized magnetic fields vie for dominance in a period dubbed the “solar battle zone.” Therefore, the CODEX instrument has likely switched on at the optimal time.
“We really never had the ability to do this kind of science before,” Newmark said. “We’re excited for what’s to come.”
Warning: spoilers ahead for “F1.”
“F1” could be on the road to getting a sequel after it broke box office records in its opening weekend.
Joseph Kosinski, the film’s director, said in interviews published by GQ and Entertainment Weekly last weekend that it’s up to the audience to decide if a sequel should be made.
So far, things are looking good.
The racing drama is already being dubbed a hit after it topped box office charts in its opening weekend, grossing $144 million worldwide. In the US, “F1” beat the record for the best domestic debut for an original movie held since 2020, which was broken earlier this year by “Sinners.”
“F1” is also Apple’s most successful theatrical debut. The movie was produced by the tech company’s original film branch, which has until now struggled to make box office hits.
F1 has grown in popularity in recent years thanks to shows like Netflix’s documentary series “Drive to Survive” and social media platforms like TikTok, Twitch, and podcasts.
Capitalizing on the trend, “F1” follows APXGP, an underdog Formula 1 racing team as it tries to win its first race and establish itself.
Damson Idris plays Joshua Pearce, a rookie for APXGP who represents the modern F1 driver. JP is forced to act like a celebrity by attending influencer parties, modeling, and constantly smiling for the camera.
Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), a veteran racer whose F1 career was ruined by a near-fatal crash, is the opposite. He’s a rulebreaker who refuses to engage with the press, but APXGP is desperate, since the board plans to sell the team if they do not win their next competition.
“I think we leave it on a really open-ended moment for Sonny, for Kate, and for Joshua,” Kosinski told GQ, referring to Kerry Condon’s character Kate, who was APXGP’s technical director. “So yeah, I think there’s certainly more to tell of the APXGP team, and where Sonny Hayes goes from here. But that’s not my decision.”
Apple
In the interview with GQ, Kosinski was asked to pitch a film idea starring Tom Cruise and Pitt, as he worked with them in his last two films, “F1” and “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Kosinski suggested the film could be a crossover with the 1990s racing drama “Days of Thunder,” which starred Tom Cruise as a rookie NASCAR driver trying to win the Daytona 500.
Kosinski’s pitch was: “Well, right now, it’d be Cole Trickle, who was [Cruise’s] ‘Days of Thunder’ character, we find out that he and Sonny Hayes have a past. They were rivals at some point, maybe crossed paths.
“I heard about this epic go-kart battle on ‘Interview with a Vampire’ that Brad and Tom had, and who wouldn’t pay to see those two go head-to-head on the track?” he added, referring to the 1994 movie, which starred both actors.
Paramount Pictures/Getty Images
While the crossover movie is only an idea, Cruise did show up at the “F1” premiere.
Cruise and Pitt almost starred together in the Oscar-winning racing drama “Ford v. Ferrari.” When Kosinski was chosen as the movie’s director, they were going to play the rival lead characters, Shelby and Miles.
Kosinski told GQ that he, Pitt, and Cruise left the movie when the studio couldn’t meet his proposed budget, and James Mangold decided on a different cast.
Karachi faced severe traffic jams on Monday after police used tear gas and water cannons to stop protesting government employees. The protesters, part of the Sindh Employees’ Alliance (SEA), were marching towards the Chief Minister’s House to demand better salaries and pensions. Police intervened when talks between the protest leaders and government officials failed to reach an agreement.
DIG South Syed Asad Raza said the protesters wanted a 70% pay and pension raise for grades 1 to 22 employees. They also demanded a 50% Disparity Reduction Allowance and post-retirement benefits similar to those in Balochistan. After talks collapsed, the protesters began moving from the Karachi Press Club towards the CM House, where police had already blocked roads.
To stop them, law enforcement used water cannons and fired tear gas near Aiwan-e-Saddar Road, close to the Governor House. Protesters were pushed back and redirected to the Karachi Press Club. Police confirmed that no arrests were made, but protest leaders claimed officers used force and “tortured” some demonstrators.
SEA leaders said that Planning and Development Minister Nasir Shah had accepted their demands. However, CM Murad Ali Shah asked for three days to finalize discussions. The protest leaders are now planning their next move, possibly marching to Bilawal House in Clifton if their demands remain unmet.
The protest caused chaos on Karachi’s roads. Major roads like Aiwan-i-Saddar, Dr Ziauddin Ahmad, and Din Muhammad Wafai were closed. As a result, traffic from 4pm to 7pm was badly affected, especially on I.I. Chundrigar, Abdullah Haroon, and Saddar. Police diverted vehicles to alternative routes to manage the congestion.
A three-dimensional model of lung tissue developed by University of Colorado Cancer Center member Chelsea Magin, PhD, will help the U.S. military better research, treat and prevent lung cancer.
“Military service members are more likely to develop lung cancer than the general population due to a combination of occupational exposures and lifestyle factors,” Magin explains. “Many veterans were exposed to hazardous substances, such as particulate matter from burn pits or diesel exhaust, during military service. Additionally, smoking rates among veterans are approximately twice as high as the general population. Due to these factors, nearly 1 million veterans remain at high risk for lung cancer.”
A three-dimensional model of lung tissue developed by CU Cancer Center member Chelsea Magin, PhD, will help the U.S. military better research, treat, and prevent lung cancer
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— CU Cancer Center (@cucancercenter.bsky.social) June 26, 2025 at 2:02 PM
In response to a call for novel research on lung cancer treatment and prevention, Magin recently received a Department of Defense (DoD) grant for her 3D hydrogel lung modeling system, which she says is superior to the petri dish cultures commonly used to study lung cancer cells.
“Our research uses hydrogel materials that contain proteins from the lungs,” says Magin, principal investigator of the Bio-Inspired Pulmonary Engineering Laboratory in the Department of Bioengineering at the CU School of Medicine. “We want to compare healthy lungs, lungs from people who smoke, and lungs from lung cancer patients. We can put those proteins into our material, then put our material around a very thin slice of lung tissue that has all the cells and architecture of the lung. We can use that model to look at how the different proteins in the lungs influence the initiation of lung cancer.”
Magin’s research lab is also working with the lab of CU Cancer Center member Erin Schenk, MD, PhD, to study how different immunotherapy treatments interact with different types of lung tissue. The research also includes collaboration with Bradford Smith, PhD, associate professor of bioengineering, and CU Cancer Center member Robert Keith, MD, professor of pulmonary sciences and critical care medicine.
“The material that holds your cells together is called the extracellular matrix, and it’s made up of proteins and carbohydrates and other big molecules,” says Magin, also an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Division of Pulmonary Sciences and Critical Care Medicine. “We think that different exposures, like being exposed to smoking or not, creates changes in that microenvironment that can influence the initiation of or susceptibility to cancer. It could also influence whether you are a good candidate for immunotherapy treatment.”
Over the course of the three-year project, Magin and her co-researchers plan to analyze the proteins they put into the hydrogels, looking for differing protein signatures in healthy, cancerous and smoke-exposed lungs.
“What we learn about how the tissue responds to each protein signature will help us understand things like, ‘If a patient has this protein signature, they’re more likely to get cancer, or their cancer is more likely to be aggressive,’” Magin says. “We also hope to learn which protein signatures are most responsive to the immunotherapies.”
Eventually, Magin hopes, the research could lead to a clinician’s ability to biopsy a small amount of lung tissue and analyze its protein signature to determine the best course of treatment.
“They could tailor the therapies based on that combination of proteins,” she says.
This article was originally published June 9, 2025, by the University of Colorado Cancer Center. It is republished with permission.
LA JOLLA, CA, & PITTSBURGH, PA—New research from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and La Jolla Institute for Immunology, published today in Nature Microbiology, reveals an opportunity for developing a therapy against cytomegalovirus (CMV), the leading infectious cause of birth defects in the United States.
Researchers discovered a previously unappreciated mechanism by which CMV, a herpes virus that infects the majority of the world’s adult population, enters cells that line the blood vessels and contributes to vascular disease. In addition to using molecular machinery that is shared by all herpes viruses, CMV employs another molecular “key” that allows the virus to sneak through a side door and evade the body’s natural immune defenses.
The finding might explain why efforts to develop prophylactic treatments against CMV have, so far, been unsuccessful. This research also highlights a new potential avenue for the development of future antiviral drugs and suggests that other viruses of the herpes family, such as Epstein-Barr and varicella-zoster virus (which causes chickenpox and shingles), could use similar molecular structures to spread from one infected cell to the next while avoiding immune detection.
“If we don’t know what weapons the enemy is using, it is hard to protect against it,” said senior author Jeremy Kamil, Ph.D., associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Pitt. “We found a missing puzzle piece that represents one possible reason why immunization efforts against CMV have been unsuccessful.”
In the United States, approximately one in every 200 babies is born with congenital CMV infection. Of the babies infected, one in five will have birth defects, such as hearing loss, or go on to have long-term health challenges. For most adults, CMV infections are asymptomatic. But a CMV infection during pregnancy presents significant health risks to the developing child and could be deadly for people who are immunosuppressed, including organ transplant recipients.
Because of the large size of its genome and its complicated molecular machinery, CMV long evaded attempts to develop prophylactic treatments. Similar to other herpes viruses, CMV relies on a protein called gH to enter cells of the vessel lining. But unlike other herpes viruses, which use a protein partner called gL to facilitate infection, the new study found that CMV replaces gL with another partner called UL116 and recruits a protein called UL141. The resulting complex of gH-UL116-UL141, called GATE by the authors, then becomes an alternative tool for breaking into cells lining the blood vessels and causing internal damage while simultaneously preventing the body’s own immune system from recognizing the signs of infection.
The newly discovered GATE could become a potential vaccine target for CMV and other herpes viruses.
“Previous attempts to generate a CMV vaccine have failed, but that was before we identified the GATE complex. We hope that new strategies targeting GATE will improve our chances to combat CMV infection, and also perhaps cleanse our bodies of this lifelong infection,” said Chris Benedict, Ph.D., Associate Professor at La Jolla Institute for Immunology and co-senior author of the study with Kamil and LJI Professor, President & CEO Erica Ollmann Saphire, Ph.D., MBA. “If we can develop antiviral drugs or vaccines that inhibit CMV entry, this will allow us to combat the many diseases this virus causes in developing babies and immune-compromised people.”
Other authors of the study, “The GATE glycoprotein complex enhances human cytomegalovirus entry in endothelial cells,” are Michael Norris, Ph.D., of the University of Toronto; Lauren Henderson, Mohammed Siddiquey, Ph.D., both of Louisiana State University Health Shreveport; and Jieyun Yin, Ph.D., Kwangsun Yoo, Ph.D., Simon Brunel, Ph.D., and Michael Mor, Ph.D., all of La Jolla Institute for Immunology.
This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants AI11685, AI139749, AI101423 and T32HL155022) and by ARPA-H APECx contract 1AY1AX000055.
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About the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
As one of the nation’s leading academic centers for biomedical research, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine integrates advanced technology with basic science across a broad range of disciplines in a continuous quest to harness the power of new knowledge and improve the human condition. Driven mainly by the School of Medicine and its affiliates, Pitt has ranked among the top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1998. In rankings released by the National Science Foundation, Pitt is in the upper echelon of all American universities in total federal science and engineering research and development support.
Likewise, the School of Medicine is equally committed to advancing the quality and strength of its medical and graduate education programs, for which it is recognized as an innovative leader, and to training highly skilled, compassionate clinicians and creative scientists well-equipped to engage in world-class research. The School of Medicine is the academic partner of UPMC, which has collaborated with the University to raise the standard of medical excellence in Pittsburgh and to position health care as a driving force behind the region’s economy. For more information about the School of Medicine, see www.medschool.pitt.edu.