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March 11 (Asia Today) — Nearly half of South Korean high school students are using artificial intelligence to help them study, a survey showed, as the government moves to expand AI education in public schools.

According to a survey conducted by education company Jinaksa of 3,525 high school students nationwide, 47.7% said they use AI for studying at least once a week.

The most common usage frequency was once or twice per week at 25.2%. Another 14.4% said they use AI three times or more each week, while 8.1% reported using it almost daily.

Meanwhile, 22.7% said they never use AI for studying, and 29.6% said they use it only once or twice a month.

Students most frequently used AI to ask for explanations of unfamiliar concepts, accounting for 49.7% of responses. Other common uses included help solving problems at 29.0%, summarizing notes or reading passages at 27.9% and requesting feedback on answers at 17.4%.

The findings suggest students are not using AI simply to find correct answers but increasingly treat it as a question-based learning tool that explains concepts and helps guide problem-solving.

Education officials are also expanding artificial intelligence education in public schools.

The Ministry of Education said it has designated 1,141 elementary, middle and high schools nationwide as “AI focus schools” in cooperation with 17 regional education offices.

These schools will integrate AI-related lessons across subjects and expand interdisciplinary programs that combine artificial intelligence with existing curricula. Schools will also strengthen ethics education to encourage responsible use of AI and provide activities such as AI clubs and hands-on learning programs.

The ministry plans to gradually expand the program to 1,500 schools by 2027 and 2,000 schools by 2028.

Woo Yeon-cheol, director of the admissions strategy research institute at Jinaksa, said students are increasingly using AI as a form of “digital tutoring.”

“Students are not simply using AI to complete assignments,” Woo said. “They are using it to ask questions about concepts they do not understand and to check the direction of problem solving.”

He added that the ability to ask questions anytime and receive immediate explanations is helping AI become a new learning support tool.

Woo also noted that even as the government moves to expand AI-based education in schools, students have already been adapting quickly to AI-driven learning environments outside the classroom.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260311010003167

March 9 (UPI) — A daily multivitamin may slow biological aging — the rate at which our bodies age on a cellular level — significantly, especially for people biologically older than their actual age.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Mass General Brigham found that daily cocoa extract and multivitamin slowed biological signals that are predictive of mortality, they write in a study published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Epigenetic clocks can estimate biological aging based on changes in DNA by looking at sites that regulate gene expression and change as people age.

By monitoring these signals, it is possible to track mortality and the pace of aging, as well as the predict it.

“There is a lot of interest today in identifying ways to not just live longer, but to live better,” Howard Sesso, lead author of the study,” said in a news release.

“This study opens the door to learning more about accessible, safe interventions that contribute to healthier, higher-quality aging,” said Sesso, preventive medicine specialist at Mass General and epidemiologist at the Harvard Chan School of Medicine.

Using data from the Cocoa Supplement Multivitamins Outcomes Study, the researchers analysed DNA changes in blood samples from 958 randomly selected healthy study participants who had an average actual age of 70.

The participants were randomized to take daily cocoa extract and a multivitamin, cocoa and a placebo, placebo and multivitamin or only placebo for two years, with researchers analyzing five epigenetic clocks in blood samples from the study’s start, at the end of the first year and at the end of the second year.

Overall, compared to the placebo-only group, those taking a multivitamin saw a statistically significant slowing of biological aging by about four months — especially for those who were biologically older than their age when the study started.

The researchers also found that cocoa extract had no effect on biological aging.

While the results are promising, the researchers concluded in the study that additional work is needed to better determine the clinical relevance of multivitamins on biological aging.

“We plan to do follow-up research to determine if the slowing of biological aging — observed through these five epigenetic clocks, and additional or new ones — persists after the trial ends,” Yanbin Dong, study co-author and researcher at the Medical College of Georgia, Agusta University, said in the release.

As he watched the Boston Celtics play from the stands of TD Garden, one noise kept catching Adel Djellouli’s ear.

“This squeaking sound when players are sliding on the floor is omnipresent,” he said. “It’s always there, right?”

Squeaky shoes are part of the symphony of a basketball game, when rubber soles rasp against the hardwood floors as players jab step, cut and pivot and defenders move their feet to stay in front of their assignment.

Returning home from the game, Djellouli wondered how that sound was produced. And as a materials scientist at Harvard University, he had a way to find out.

Djellouli and colleagues slid a sneaker against a smooth glass plate over and over. They recorded the squeaks with a microphone and filmed the whole thing with a high-speed camera to see what was happening under the shoe.

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, they described what they found. As the shoe works hard to keep its grip, tiny sections of the sole change shape as they momentarily lose then regain contact with the floor thousands of times per second — at a frequency that matches the pitch of the loud squeak we hear.

“That squeaking is basically your shoe rippling, or creating wrinkles that travel super fast. They repeat at a high frequency, and this is why you get that squeaky noise,” Djellouli said.

The grip patterns on the soles may also play a role. When researchers slid blocks of flat, featureless rubber against the glass, they saw a series of chaotic, disorganized ripples but didn’t hear squeaks.

The ridge-like designs on the bottom of your shoes may organize the bursts to produce a clear, high-pitched sound.

Other researchers have studied these kinds of bursts before, but this sneaker study examines friction happening at much faster speeds. And for the first time, it links the speedy pulses with the squeaking sound they produce.

These insights don’t just serve to satisfy the curiosity of a basketball fan. They could also help answer important practical questions. “Friction is one of the oldest and most intricate problems in physics,” wrote physicist Bart Weber in an editorial accompanying the new research. Yet, despite its practical importance, he wrote, “it is difficult to predict and control.”

Understanding friction better could help scientists better understand how the Earth’s tectonic plates slide and grind during earthquakes, for example, or to save energy by reducing friction and wear.

It could also help eliminate moments off the court when squeaky shoes can be a little awkward or embarrassing, such as in a quiet office hallway.

This research doesn’t offer a fix, though the internet has plenty of advice that may be risky, including rubbing soap or a dryer sheet on the soles. But some of the insights from the study could help to design squeak-free shoes in the future.

For example, one additional experiment found that changing the thickness of the rubber could make the squeak sound lower or higher in pitch. In the future, could we fine-tune our shoes to squeak in a pitch so high we can’t even hear it?

“We can now start designing for it,” said Weber, who is with the Advanced Research Center for Nanolithography and the University of Amsterdam, in an interview. “We can start making interfaces that either do it if we want to hear this sound, or don’t do it if we don’t want to hear it.”

Ramakrishnan writes for the Associated Press.