Waterloo researchers find chatbots approve existing plans about twice as often as new climate policies
University of Waterloo researchers found 11 chatbots approved existing plans 70% of the time but new climate policies only 34%, across nearly 55,000 prompts. The work measures recommendations to standardized prompts, so how far the lean reaches real purchases and votes is a separate question.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+35
- Incentives30
- Confidence50
Minerva Humanoids raised about $10M for Roger, a humanoid that bomb-disposal and energy specialists steer through VR while software keeps it upright. Paid pilots this fall will show whether crews pay for remote hands before autonomy.
Reality
- Evidence35
- Adoption10
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives70
- Confidence60
A small model solved nearly three in ten ARC-AGI-1 puzzles without writing out its steps
BDH-CQ updates a fixed-size internal memory instead of generating chain-of-thought tokens, and its authors put a single puzzle query at about $0.00070. Two outside researchers say the result does not yet credit the design.
Reality
- Evidence42
- Adoption10
- Hype gap+14
- Incentives65
- Confidence58
Random regular graphs can now inherit their properties from the easier random model
The sandwich conjecture that Jeong Han Kim and Van Ha Vu posed in 2004 was proved in 2025, so a property established for a random binomial graph now carries to the regular graph containing it, once the graph is large enough.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives32
- Confidence54
A combination of explanations leads the dark matter answers in the largest physicist survey
A worldwide survey led from Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute records what working physicists believe about dark matter and quantum gravity, and the way its answer options were drawn shapes what those percentages can prove.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives60
- Confidence40
Descendant DNA settles the identity of the Franklin sailor found with the expedition's papers
University of Waterloo anthropologists matched skeletal DNA to living relatives and named Harry Peglar, William Orren, David Young and John Bridgens. Six of the 105 men who walked away from Erebus and Terror now have names.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+14
- Incentives62
- Confidence64
Squeezing the electrolyte turned lithium dendrites sideways in SLAC's test cells
Compression let the needles keep growing sideways inside the ceramic instead of into the electrodes. That hands a large part of the solid-state failure problem to whoever specifies stack pressure in the module.
Reality
- Evidence56
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+24
- Incentives55
- Confidence45
Twenty dollars a photo: the FBI's O'Hare affidavit is a fence-line problem, not a network one
A Waterloo undergraduate was told to burn SIM cards and keep his Huawei phone out of the country. What got him noticed was standing on a forklift in a FedEx employee lot.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption22
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives55
- Confidence52
Canada's forest carbon ledger is missing an entry: the colour of the ground in winter
A UNU-INWEH policy brief says dark boreal plantations absorb enough winter sunlight to cancel 6 to 20 percent of the cooling they are credited with, and Canada's frameworks do not subtract it.
Reality
- Evidence42
- Adoption8
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives62
- Confidence45