WonderSTEM

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September 28, 2025

Can meditation apps really reduce stress, anxiety, and insomnia?

Meditation apps are revolutionizing mental health, providing easy access to mindfulness practices and new opportunities for scientific research. With the help of wearables and AI, these tools can now deliver personalized training tailored to individual needs.

Meditation apps are transforming mindfulness by making it more accessible, measurable, and personalized. However, their long-term success depends on solving the problem of user drop-off. Credit: Shutterstock

Do you have a meditation app on your smartphone, computer or wearable device? Well, you're not alone.

There are now thousands of meditation apps available worldwide, the top 10 of which have been collectively downloaded more than 300 million times. What's more, early work on these digital meditation platforms shows that even relatively brief usage can lead to benefits, from reduced depression, anxiety, and stress to improved insomnia symptoms.

"Meditation apps, such as Calm and Headspace, have been enormously popular in the commercial market," said J. David Creswell, a health psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University and lead author of a review paper on meditation apps,…

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July 30, 2025

AI is here to stay, let students embrace the technology, experts urge

A new study from UBC Okanagan says students appear to be using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) responsibly, and as a way to speed up tasks, not just boost their grades.

Dr. Meaghan MacNutt, who teaches professional ethics in the UBCO School of Health and Exercise Sciences (HES), recently published a study in Advances in Physiology Education. Published this month, the paper -- titled Reflective writing assignments in the era of GenAI: student behaviour and attitudes suggest utility, not futility -- contradicts common concerns about student use of AI.

Students in three different courses, almost 400 participants, anonymously completed a survey about their use of AI on at least five reflective writing assignments. All three courses used an identical AI policy and students had the option to use the tool for their writing.

"GenAI tools like ChatGPT allow users…

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July 30, 2025

Social media platform tailoring could support more fulfilling use, study finds

Redesigning social media to suit different needs of users could make their time online more focused, according to new research by University of Bristol academics.

The study, presented today at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Yokohama, Japan, suggests that the key to a having a positive experience online is finding the right level of personal investment -- neither too much nor too little.

Conducted by researchers examining digital self-regulation, they reveal distinct user types and propose that social media platforms could be remodelled to support more intentional use.

Lead author Dan Bennett from Bristol's Faculty of Science and Engineering said explained: "Many people feel the need to better control their time on social media. While social media offers entertainment, social connection and opportunities for personal growth, people feel the need to better manage their engagement,…

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June 16, 2025

Sharper than lightning: Oxford’s one-in-6. 7-million quantum breakthrough

Physicists at the University of Oxford have set a new global benchmark for the accuracy of controlling a single quantum bit, achieving the lowest-ever error rate for a quantum logic operation -- just 0.000015%, or one error in 6.7 million operations. This record-breaking result represents nearly an order of magnitude improvement over the previous benchmark, set by the same research group a decade ago.

ree — A rendering of the Oxford University team’s ion trap chip. Credit: Dr Jochen Wolf and Dr Tom Harty

To put the result in perspective: a person is more likely to be struck by lightning in a given year (1 in 1.2 million) than for one of Oxford's quantum logic gates to make a mistake.

The findings, published in Physical Review Letters, are a major advance towards having robust and useful quantum computers.

"As far as we are aware, this is the most accurate qubit operation ever recorded anywhere in the world," said Professor David Lucas, co-author…

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