A dromaeosaurid most likely scavenged an 8-year-old Albertosaurus, a University of Alberta study of tooth marks on its jaw concludes. The case rests on one specimen, so it documents a single meal and cannot yet show how often small carnivores ate tyrannosaurs.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives30
- Confidence50
Seeded native grasses split between shade and sun beneath an Edmonton solar farm
University of Alberta researchers tracked seven seeded native grasses for two years at an Edmonton solar farm and found some favour shade, others sun. That points to zone-matched native seed mixes as an alternative to the cheap turf often sown on solar ground.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives
- Not scored
- Confidence52
Huifeng Zhang and Mathieu Dumberry reconstructed the torques between Earth's core and mantle and found the inner core's gravity driving the millisecond wobble in day length while electromagnetic and topographic coupling resist it.
Reality
- Evidence64
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives20
- Confidence60
Alberta's musician survey puts AI hostility at 87 percent of the 142 who raised it
Of 263 working Canadian musicians surveyed at the University of Alberta, 142 addressed generative AI and 87 percent of those were negative about it. Venue closures and streaming payouts run through the same answers.
Reality
- Evidence44
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives55
- Confidence45
Astrus raises $12 million to train a chip-layout model on data it generates itself
Brad Moon's Kitchener-Waterloo startup closed a $12-million Series A led by Caffeinated Capital to automate analog physical design. The bet is that a foundry-calibrated physics environment can manufacture the layout data chipmakers keep secret.
Reality
- Evidence29
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+46
- Incentives78
- Confidence41
Illuminated gas pins a quasar pair's depth to half a million light-years in simulations
Redshifts of double quasars can be wrong about depth by as much as 10 million light-years, because the black hole's own outflows spoil the velocity. Huanqing Chen's team tested reading the separation from lit-up gas.
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+14
- Incentives62
- Confidence55
Leg bones and mixed soil split Pień's anti-vampire grave into two episodes
A team at Nicolaus Copernicus University ran isotopes, DNA and textile analysis on a 17th century Polish burial, and the sequence they report puts the padlock on the toe at interment and the sickle at the throat only after someone dug the grave open again.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives35
- Confidence55
Ancient DNA traces plague through hunter-gatherer families at Lake Baikal 5,500 years ago
An international team sequenced Yersinia pestis from teeth at four Siberian cemeteries and found it in 18 of 46 people, among them siblings and parents who appear to have died in the same outbreak. The work is published in Nature.
Reality
- Evidence64
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives62
- Confidence58
Negative posts nearly tripled on Replika's subreddit after an unannounced update
Harvard and Alberta researchers coded 54,861 subreddit posts around two real AI updates and surveyed 1,452 people. The reaction to Replika's silent change was larger, and it lasted longer than the reaction to GPT-5.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption50
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives60
- Confidence55
Moorings left through a canceled field season caught Canada's last epishelf lake draining
Instruments nobody could reach in 2020 recorded the Milne Fiord lake losing its freshwater layer within months of the ice shelf breakup, and the annual visits since have found nothing of it coming back.
Reality
- Evidence70
- Adoption22
- Hype gap+8
- Incentives58
- Confidence66
Rewriting 26,000 crowdfunding pitches with AI cut the variation in length and quality by about 80%
The Manchester and Alberta authors argue that easier polish for one founder means harder differentiation for all of them, and they are careful to call their 26,000-pitch exercise an illustration of that argument rather than a test of it.
Reality
- Evidence46
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives55
- Confidence52
A coating copied from the mammalian egg kept transplanted islets working for 100 days in mice
Penn State's 20-micrometre shell copies how a fertilised egg hardens its coat, assembling on each islet in solution with a fraction of the polymer of today's capsules. It targets the drug burden that limits islet therapy rather than the supply of donor cells.
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption6
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives
- Not scored
- Confidence44
Two foreign pipelines into Alberta's referendum, and only one of them hides
Cipher AI's first month of data separates covert Russian content-farm seeding, laundered through Canadian accounts, from overt American influencer promotion. The defences are not the same.
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption42
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives58
- Confidence50