OECD REPORT RANKS CANADIAN STUDENTS AMONG TOP PERFORMERS GLOBALLY IN SCIENCE - PR Newswire Canada

A flu forecasting model built with Google AI was the best at forecasting flu-related hospital admissions during the 2025-26 season, the Centers for Disease Control announced this week. From October through May, the CDC’s FluSight combines weekly submissions from government, industry, and academic teams predicting U. S. hospital admissions for the current week and three weeks into the future. The CDC uses the combined forecast each week to communicate the anticipated state-level demand for medical services. The end-of-season analysis published this week shows that of 39 eligible models, Google’s best matched the season’s observed hospital admissions. This performance validates our confidence that AI combined with human ingenuity will improve our ability to forecast diseases worldwide. Google forecasts were developed using Empirical Research Assistance, an AI tool that generates optimization algorithms across a range of scientific fields. Research on ERA was recently published in the journal “Nature.” ERA’s underlying technology is now available to trusted testers as part of our experimental science tools.

The spacecraft delivered materials and equipment for new research studies to the station.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.