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The AI Use Case Question Teachers Are Still Asking

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This article is part of the collection: Teaching Tech: Navigating Learning and AI in the Industrial Revolution.


A fourth-grade teacher asked a simple question:

“What can I actually use this for in math?”

This teacher captured the broader moment in education. Over the past several years, schools have been urged to respond to the rapid emergence of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT with limited information and a lot of hype and horror stories. Some have framed the technology as potentially transformative for teaching and learning, while others claim the opposite. Yet in many classrooms, adoption has been slower and more selective than the surrounding hype might suggest.

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That hesitation is often interpreted as resistance to innovation, but conversations with educators suggest a different interpretation. In many cases, teachers behave as experts in most fields do when encountering a new technology, evaluating whether it solves a real problem. When professionals encounter a tool that is widely marketed but still evolving, they ask a basic question: What does this actually help me do better?

For many educators, that question remains unresolved when it comes to classroom instruction, and that’s what our research project aimed to answer: What are teachers experiencing with generative AI in their classrooms?

In fall 2024, EdSurge researchers facilitated discussions between a group of 17 teachers from around the world. We convened a group of third to 12th grade teachers, and some of them designed and delivered their own lesson plans, either teaching with or about AI.

Overall, our participants’ responses reflect a few major themes, with the most prominent sentiment being an air of indifference. In particular, a fourth grade math teacher participant attempted to use generative AI in her instruction. However, before adoption, she asked how AI could help her elementary students learn math. Her question captured what several participants were thinking, aligning with 2024 data from the Pew Research Center that shows educators were split on whether student AI use was more harmful than helpful.

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A Technology Arriving Faster Than Schools Can Unpack

A high school computer science teacher from Georgia describes her fears about generative AI’s widespread push into classrooms:

One of my biggest fears is actually Arthur C. Clarke’s rule: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic…we have students, parents, and teachers looking at AI as if it’s magic.

A high school library media specialist from New York described the same tension from a different angle:

There’s a fear about not being able to keep up with how things progress…the new tools and the impact it has on education.

Schools typically adopt new technologies through deliberate cycles of experimentation, professional development and evaluation. Generative AI has entered classrooms through a different pathway. Consumer tools became available to teachers and students simultaneously, often before schools had developed policies or instructional frameworks for using them.

The result is a situation in which educators encounter the technology while they are still trying to understand its implications.

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Where AI Is Already Providing Value

In conversations with teachers, the pattern that appears consistently is a classic user design case. The most immediate use cases for generative AI have little to do with student learning. Instead, an engineering and computer science teacher in New Jersey addressed workload:

I have a running discussion with some of my colleagues about how to use AI to lesson plan. I use it routinely to lesson plan. I don’t really use the lessons, but we have to produce all this stuff for admin that no one reads… AI will just roll it off.

Another teacher described similar experimentation among colleagues:

It’s really great that so many people have kind of scratched the surface and are using it to support their productivity and efficiency… lesson planning and newsletters and stuff like that.

These examples reflect a pattern seen across many professions: Generative AI is particularly effective at drafting, summarizing and generating text. In contexts where professionals face time pressure and administrative demands, those capabilities can be immediately useful.

Teachers experience those same pressures. Beyond instruction, many juggle grading, lesson planning, parent communication, extracurricular supervision and administrative reporting. In that environment, a chatbot that helps compress routine tasks can feel genuinely helpful.

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Recent research, as well as national survey data from RAND’s American Educator Panels, suggests that teachers are adopting generative AI primarily as a productivity tool rather than a core instructional technology, a pattern that mirrors how educators in this study described their own early experimentation.

However, instructional discretion is different from a teacher’s administrative workload.

The Instructional Use Case Remains Unclear

When teachers consider introducing AI tools to students during class time, the calculations they make change. The relevant question becomes: What student learning problem does this tool solve? Many educators are still trying to answer this question, even after several years of exposure to generative AI in some capacity.

Some teachers are experimenting with AI in limited ways, such as using it as a revision partner in writing. A science teacher from Guam said:

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Students write a first draft and then feed it into ChatGPT for a second draft… but I push them not to use it for research.

Others are designing lessons where the technology itself becomes the subject of inquiry. A high school special education teacher in New York shared how she removes the veil from the magic of chatbots.

We purposely trained [a chatbot] wrong, so students could understand the data is only as good as how and who trains it.

Learning science research suggests that students benefit most when technology supports reflection and revision, rather than replacing the productive struggle of critical thinking and problem solving, a principle that many teachers in this study have applied. In these cases, AI becomes a tool that students analyze and critique. The participants do not attribute AI as a source of authoritative knowledge.

AI Literacy as a Practical Classroom Entry Point

Many teachers see the most promising instructional opportunity in AI literacy, as it may feel most appropriate to teach students about the tools they’re hearing about and encountering daily. International guidance from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) increasingly frames AI literacy as a foundational skill for students, encouraging schools to help young people understand how algorithmic systems generate information, rather than incorporating AI tools into everyday classroom tasks.

Students already live in environments shaped by algorithmically designed systems, from social media feeds to recommendation engines. Generative AI introduces another layer to that ecosystem.

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An elementary teacher from New York state describes focusing on helping students understand how these systems produce information and where they fail:

For me it starts with literacy — [teaching] students how to prompt, and then how to fact-check the information that’s generated to make sure there’s no bias in it.

A middle school teacher from New York uses simple analogies to illustrate how machine learning systems work:

We used an exercise about making the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The ingredients were the dataset, the procedure was the algorithm, and the output depended on how it was designed.

These lessons treat AI less as a productivity tool and more as a window into how digital systems generate knowledge.

Hallucinations, Bias and the Question of Trust

Teachers also raised consistent concerns about the reliability of generative AI outputs. An elementary library media specialist from New York said:

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You ask ChatGPT to write a paper on something and it makes something up totally imaginary.

To illustrate the risks, some educators point to real-world examples. A high school French teacher shared:

I tried ChatGPT. I think it’s very useful if you know your content very well. IIf you don’t know your content, it’s hard to tell whether or not it’s accurate.

Others connect these issues to broader discussions about algorithmic bias, explaining why they fear that students will become reliant on these tools. A high school computer science teacher in New Jersey shares her concerns about the increased use of AI by students. She works at a school with large populations of African American, Latino and Black newcomer families from African and Caribbean countries:

When we talk about bias, we look at hiring data and incarceration data… and facial recognition systems where error rates vary depending on who the system is trying to recognize.

In these contexts, AI becomes less a tool for answering questions and more a case study of how technological systems shape information.

The “Air of Indifference”

Taken together, these conversations reveal a stance that is not often captured in public discussions of AI in schools. What initially appeared to be an insignificant factor in keeping teachers interested in robust discussions about AI turned out to be a prominent theme aligned with both existing and emerging research.

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By and large, teachers are not rejecting the technology. But they are also not reorganizing their classrooms around AI.

Instead, many are adopting a posture that might be described as pragmatic indifference:

“I use it for lesson planning… but I don’t really use the lessons.”

“I push students not to use it for research.”

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In other words, teachers are using AI where it clearly saves time while maintaining boundaries around core learning tasks. This posture reflects professional judgment, rather than resistance to inevitable technological innovation.

Schools exist partly to create conditions in which students practice complex cognitive work, such as deep reading, methodical writing, reasoning through problems and evaluating evidence. If a tool primarily reduces the need to perform that work, teachers have reason to question whether it advances or undermines learning.

And that brings us back to the fourth-grade teacher’s question: What can I use this for with fourth-grade math?

If the instructional use case for AI remains unclear, what should students be learning instead?

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That question leads to a deeper conversation about the kinds of skills that remain valuable even as technologies change.

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Earth’s Airglow Meets the Milky Way from Orbit

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NASA Chris William Earth Airglow ISS Orbit
Last month, NASA astronaut Chris Williams floated aboard the Crew Dragon Freedom, pointing his camera out the window. What he photographed shows our planet enveloped in a delicate ribbon of light, called airglow, with the Milky Way arching overhead like a faint road through the stars. The photograph, shot on April 13 while the spacecraft was docked to the International Space Station, provides a clear view of something that occurs high above us every night.



Earth softly curves over the bottom of the frame, with brown and reddish land extending out next to patches of deep blue ocean, all speckled with beautiful white clouds. A thin, consistent ribbon of green and yellow hugs the edge of the atmosphere, where the planet meets empty space. Above that ribbon, the sky becomes absolutely dark, with thousands of sharp stars. The Milky Way traces a wide, hazy path across the top, with dense star fields and dark dust lanes easily visible.

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Williams captured the image from the zenith docking port on the night side of the orbit. The window frame and a bit of the station’s solar array emerge at the borders, reminding viewers that this sight came from a small spacecraft hundreds of miles high. The camera was pointed at the horizon, where the glow is greatest, so no city lights appear. Instead, the attention is on the natural light that surrounds the entire globe.

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NASA Chris William Earth Airglow ISS Orbit
That light is known as airglow, since sunlight penetrates the upper atmosphere during the day and provides energy to the atoms and molecules that float there. After sunset, such particles gradually release their additional energy as weak photons. The procedure creates the colored layers that Williams recorded. Green and yellow tones are most common because oxygen and nitrogen react in different ways at different heights. The effect is similar to the soft brightness inside a glow stick after snapping it, but on a planetary scale and driven by ordinary daylight rather than chemicals.

People occasionally mix airglow with the brighter curtains of an aurora. Both include charged particles emitting light, while airglow relies on consistent solar energy that arrives each day. Auroras require bursts of solar wind to light up. Airglow is always present, but it is too dim for most ground viewers to see unless the sky are very black and the camera exposure is long.

NASA Chris William Earth Airglow ISS Orbit
Williams later explained that the night side of the orbit is comparable to standing in one of Earth’s most isolated dark-sky locations. The station’s path allows him to observe stars in both the northern and southern sky at the same time. In his words, the view of the galactic plane is clear because nothing in the thin air above obscures the distant stars. This single frame combines those details: the planet’s curve, the luminous atmosphere shell, and the galaxy beyond.
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Netflix’s New Crime Thriller Does Revenge Better Than ‘Reacher’ — and Denzel

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Man on Fire is a story that first hit my radar, like many of you, when Denzel Washington stepped into the role of former CIA operative John Creasy in Tony Scott’s 2004 action film. The story of that film, like Netflix‘s new thriller, draws inspiration from A. J. Quinnell’s book of the same name — which is the first entry in the five-book series.

For all intents and purposes, the 2004 film is a solid adaptation, and thanks to the performances of Washington (who plays Creasy) and a young Dakota Fanning, it has stood the test of time and remains a quality actioner to dig into.

Also, potentially like many of you, I’m shocked to say that Netflix’s episodic adaptation of Quinnell’s work is far superior. 

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If you’ve paid attention to the numbers, you already know that Man on Fire hit the top of Netflix’s streaming charts with a whopping 11 million views in the show’s first four days on the platform. It was this news that nudged me to give the show a try — and I was immediately hooked.

Read more: 40 of the Best Movies on Netflix You Should Stream Now

Netflix’s Man on Fire isn’t a retread of the 2004 movie because the series loosely adapts the original material. Taking a note from shows of a similar ilk, like Reacher and Cross, Man on Fire takes its own creative liberties while using the books as a narrative foundation. And it works brilliantly.

This Man on Fire takes to the streets of Brazil, altering the conflict of the original story, while adhering to the basics of a weathered man doing anything and everything to protect a girl who’s being hunted by gangs and terrorists hell-bent on killing her. That’s just one piece to an intricate and violent puzzle. 

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If it sounds heavy, that’s because it is. But thanks to smart writing and the emotional resonance of the cast performances, the movie is as engaging and heartfelt as it is bloody. 

You want to watch this beatdown man get lit on fire for this purpose — it’s Death Wish for a whole new generation.

Abdul-Mateen holds a gun while crouching next to a black car with an airplane in the background.

Abdul-Mateen stars in Man on Fire on Netflix.

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Abdul-Mateen stars as Creasy in this rendition, which shifts the character’s backstory from CIA officer to PTSD-stricken Special Forces operative, and from the get-go, the emotional stakes are viscerally there. They steadily ramp up through each episode, justifying Creasy’s Jack Bauer-style actions, all with the motivations of enforcing justice and eliminating every evildoer he crosses paths with.

Abdul-Mateen holds his own in the role, quickly eliminating the remnants of Washington’s performance two decades earlier. And that’s no easy undertaking. Yet, as we’ve seen with the roles the actor has taken, from Dr. Manhattan in HBO’s Watchmen to playing Candyman in the 2021 horror remake and Wonder Man earlier this year on Disney Plus, he’s got range and a top-tier skill of wearing his heart on his sleeve, no matter what his character must do on screen. 

In short, you can’t help but root for Abdul-Mateen, which means it’s nearly impossible to not root for Creasy.

It doesn’t stop with him, though. Every actor that graces the screen in Man on Fire is legit (as the kids say) fire. Bobby Cannavale dips in for a hot second to remind everyone of how great he is. Alice Braga, as Valeria, serves as a supportive counterpoint to Creasy’s hotheaded actions.

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It’s Billie Boullet as Poe, the teenage girl Creasy protects from every possible danger, who steals the show, though. She’s got the same sort of wide-eyed emotional resonance Fanning had opposite Washington, yet it hits different and better here. She’s notably older than Fanning was, and the character she’s playing is a departure from earlier portrayals. That only works to her benefit, allowing her to find her own emotional footholds in the character. Boullet paired with Abdul-Mateen is a perfect match, full stop.

Instead of taking place in Mexico City, where Washington unleashed hell in the Tony Scott movie, this rendition sends Creasy to Brazil. The Netflix series shows off the beautiful, tourist-friendly areas of the country, then flips it, shoving us deep into the favelas to explore an often misrepresented culture. 

The entire time I watched the show, I found myself leaning in close to take in the surroundings of each scene. Was this shot in a studio in front of a blue screen or on location? I’m pleased to say it was shot in multiple urban landscapes, like Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. That tactile authenticity brings the story to life in a necessary way, embracing its realness rather than re-creating it in post.

Oh, and did I mention how action-packed and violent the show is? I did, but it bears repeating. 

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This is Jason Bourne-style action, in the form of a TV show where each episode runs approximately 40 minutes. If ever there was a way to guarantee my attention and keep me glued to the screen for hours on end, everything I just mentioned — from the writing to the acting and the viscera in between — adds up to the perfect formula to do just that. If you’re anything like me and you’ve read this far (so I assume you are), you’ll feel the exact same way.

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Could Contact-Tracing Apps Help With the Hantavirus? Not Really

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After three people died on a cruise ship struck by a hantavirus, authorities are actively tracking down 29 people who had left the ship. They’re trying to trace the spread of the virus. It’s a long, arduous, global process to find and notify people who might be at risk of infection.

Hey, wasn’t there supposed to be an app for that?

Contact-tracing apps were a global effort starting in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Enabled by phone companies like Apple and Google, contact tracing was designed to use Bluetooth connections to detect when people had come in contact with someone who had or would later test positive for Covid and report as much. It didn’t do much to solve the spread of the pandemic, but tracking the virus became more effective at least. The same process wouldn’t go well for the hantavirus problem.

“There is no use of apps for this hantavirus outbreak,” Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an email response to WIRED. “The number of cases are small, and it’s important to trace all contacts exactly to stop transmission.”

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On a smaller scale of infection like this, officials have to start at the source (an infected individual), then go person-by-person, confirming where they went and who they might have come into contact with. Data collected by apps from a broad swath of devices would not be anywhere close to accurate enough to give a good idea of where the virus might have hitchhiked to next.

Contact tracing on a wider scale, like, say, a global pandemic, is less about tracking the individual infections and more about understanding what parts of the population might be affected, giving people the opportunity to self-quarantine after exposure. But that depends on how people choose to respond, and how the technology is utilized by public emergency systems. During the Covid pandemic, contact-tracing via apps tended to work better in more carefully managed European countries, but did not slow the spread in the US.

Making devices accessible to that kind of proximity information has also brought all sorts of concerns about privacy, given that the technology would require always-on access to work properly. Contact tracing also struggled to maintain accuracy, and in some cases could be providing false negatives or positives that don’t help further real information about the spread of the virus.

Especially in the case of something like the Hantavirus, where every person on that cruise ship can theoretically be directly tracked and contacted, it’s better to do that process the hard way.

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“During small but highly fatal outbreaks, more precision is required,” Gurley wrote.

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How to watch Barcelona vs Real Madrid: Live Streams & TV Channels for El Clasico

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Today’s El Clasico live stream sees the La Liga title up for grabs at the Camp Nou, with Barcelona requiring only a point to seal the crown and Real Madrid needing nothing less than a victory.

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Speech Jammer Gets Jammed Up

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This project is perhaps the single most passive-aggressive thing we’ve ever seen on this site: rather than tell someone directly to ‘shut up’, [Blytical]’s speech jammer lets you hack their brain from across the room to stop them from speaking. It’s also a bit of an object lesson in why you shouldn’t just copy reference implementations without careful study — by his own implementation, [Blytical] was forced to learn a lot more than he intended going into this project.

The brain hack behind it is called ‘delayed auditory feedback’: by feeding their speech back to the target with a short delay — only 50 to 200 ms — it creates a confounding effect that is apparently very difficult to speak through. The array of ultrasound transducers is used to accurately aim the audio by serving as an inaudible, low-spread carrier wave, as we saw in another project this year. A shotgun mike picks up the audio from the speaker you wish to harass, and an array of audio processing circuitry takes care of the rest.

That’s where problems happen, as [Blytical] admits he just tossed some reference implementations onto a PCB without bothering to think too hard about what he was doing. It’s the datasheet version of vibe coding, and it usually goes about as well — sometimes perfectly, but rarely without a lot of troubleshooting. That troubleshooting is really, really hard when you don’t quite understand why things were laid out the way they were on the datasheet. We don’t blame [Blytical], you can learn a lot when you bite off more than you can chew. The fact that he risked this failure mode rather than do the whole thing in software with a Pi says good things about how he’s conducting his education.

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It’s a shame, though, because we’ve been waiting to see another one of these speech jammers in action for quite some time. Perhaps someone will try again; the ultrasonic array portion seems solved, so if the delay circuit was the problem, perhaps a tiny tape loop would suffice.

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‘Marshals’ Release Schedule: When Episode 11 Hits Paramount Plus

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Marshals, a new Yellowstone spinoff starring Luke Grimes as Kayce Dutton, is airing on CBS right now. You can also tune in with Paramount Plus. The Yellowstone sequel series sees Grimes’ former Navy SEAL join an elite unit of US Marshals to bring range justice to Montana, according to a synopsis from CBS.

The show includes Yellowstone actors Gil Birmingham as Thomas Rainwater, Mo Brings Plenty as Mo and Brecken Merrill as Tate. Spencer Hudnut is the showrunner of Marshals — formerly known as Y: Marshals — and Taylor Sheridan is an executive producer.

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When to watch new Marshals episodes on Paramount Plus

Episode 11 of Marshals airs on CBS on Sunday, May 10. Viewing options for Paramount Plus customers vary by subscription tier. You can watch the episode live if you have Paramount Plus Premium, which includes your local CBS station. If you subscribe to Paramount Plus Essential, you can watch the installment on demand the following Monday, but not live on Sunday.

Here’s a release schedule for the next three episodes of Marshals.

  • Episode 11, On Thin Ice: Premieres on CBS/Paramount Plus Premium on May 10 at 8 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT/7 p.m. CT. Streams on Paramount Plus Essential on May 11.
  • Episode 12, The Devil at Home: Premieres on CBS/Paramount Plus Premium on May 17 at 8 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT/7 p.m. CT. Streams on Paramount Plus Essential on May 18.
  • Episode 13, Wolves at the Door: Premieres on CBS/Paramount Plus Premium on May 24 at 8 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT/7 p.m. CT. Streams on Paramount Plus Essential on May 25.

You can also watch CBS and the eleventh episode of Marshals without cable with a live TV streaming service such as YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Live TV or the DirecTV MyNews skinny bundle. In addition to offering a lower-cost option, Paramount Plus lets you watch the other two Yellowstone spinoffs: the prequels 1883 and 1923.

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After a price increase in early 2026, the ad-supported Essential version runs $9 per month or $90 per year. The ad-free Premium version runs $14 per month or $140 per year. Paying more for Premium gives you downloads, the ability to watch more Showtime programming than Essential and access to your live, local CBS station.

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Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of May 3, 2026

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Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of May 3, 2026.

Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter.

Most popular stories on GeekWire

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Resident Evil Requiem Gets A New Leon Must Die Forever Mode, Out Today

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Oh, you wanted more Leon? You devoured Resident Evil Requiem in Standard and Insanity difficulties, and your bloodlust isn’t satiated? You wanted more hordes of infected monsters to shoot, more mutant bugs to slice in half, more close-up shots of the golden strands behind Leon Kennedy’s right ear, perhaps always and until the end of time? Capcom’s got you.

Leon Must Die Forever is a free mode that’s live today in Resident Evil Requiem, unlocked for anyone who’s completed the main story. In the new minigame, players fight through increasingly chaotic waves of enemies to defeat the final boss before the clock runs out. Leon Must Die Forever features stronger enemy variants than the main game, five difficulty ranks and a suite of “enhancer abilities” for Leon that power up as he takes out zombies. It all takes place in locations you’ve previously visited in the campaign, so take comfort in what familiarity you can.

Today’s update also comes with basic bug fixes across all platforms, and PC support for the DualSense controller’s adaptive triggers, haptic abilities and motion sensor. Resident Evil Requiem came out at the end of February for PC, PlayStation 5, Switch 2 and Xbox Series X/S, and it was an instant hit for Capcom, selling more than 5 million copies in its first week. Capcom teased the Leon Must Die Forever mode in March, alongside the announcement of a coming story expansion, which will take significantly longer to produce.

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Hopefully the minigame can tide you over until the mainline Requiem content materializes, but if you require additional distraction, just follow Leon’s lead. Add Romeo Must Die to your watchlist and get lost in the campy millennial violence, and then let that inspire you to watch one of Aaliyah’s best music videos again. Soon enough, you’re sliding Queen of the Damned to the top of your movie lineup, and between Leon Must Die Forever and all of this beautiful bittersweet nostalgia, you won’t have time to think about how much you really just want more Requiem. Damn it — forget that last part.



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A cyberattack on Canvas knocked out access for students at Harvard, Columbia, and hundreds of other schools during finals

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The company’s chief information security officer, Steve Proud, wrote in an incident log that Instructure had “recently experienced a cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor.” A day later, he added that the exposed data included names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages exchanged on the platform. How…
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Why You Probably Shouldn’t DIY A Car Airbag

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Car airbags are both a very simple concept and a marvel of engineering, replacing the bone-shattering impact of unforgiving plastic and steel with a relatively soft landing in a funky-smelling air cushion. This deceptively simple concept requires that the gas generator activates only when there is a crash and finishes filling the airbag in the milliseconds before the squishy human’s cranium with its soft filling attempts to occupy the same space as said airbag. This makes mad Aussie bloke [Turnah81]’s attempt at DIY-ing a car airbag a most daring proposition.

Rather than messing about with an IMU and microprocessors, he went low-tech with an inertial fuel cut-off switch. These are mechanical switches that hold a steel ball in place with a magnet until a sufficiently large force — like a crash — dislodges the ball and triggers an event. Usually, a switch like this cuts off the fuel pump.

After a bit of fun with a crash-test rig and the airbag of a salvaged steering wheel, a DIY airbag was assembled using a compressed-gas cylinder instead of the fancy gas generator, along with an electrically triggered valve. Here, you can already see why modern airbags use a gas generator, as it is simply far more compact.

For the bag itself, a pillow case was adapted, with the subsequent crash test — as pictured above — going about as well as you can imagine. After this, he tried a few improvements, like using a bin liner and detonating some fuel, but it seems that the gas generator is very hard to beat for producing a large amount of gas in very little time.

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Meanwhile, the inertial cut-off switch turned out to be more than sufficient for this purpose, and it was also used to trigger the original airbag. Of course, with how cheap those off-the-shelf airbag units are and are tested to be fit for purpose, you’d never DIY them for actual use in a car unless you were stark raving mad.

Airbags have a checkered history. There are some places you shouldn’t try to save costs.

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