If you’ve ever tried to pay attention to a Zoom lecture projected onto a whiteboard, you know how brutal it can be. (If you haven’t, count your blessings, and put down that grad school application.)

But at Loughborough University in England, learning might become — gasp — engaging again. The university is experimenting with holograms in the classroom, ushering in a new, high-tech teaching tool, per The Guardian.

The tech allows individuals to beam in from anywhere in the world using their smartphones, appearing life-sized and in real time inside a hologram box in a classroom across the world.

This solves a host of problems for higher-ed institutions:

• It’s more sustainable than flying guest lecturers in for short speaking engagements.
• Holograms can be more effective for showcasing complex, 3D equipment than traditional video calls.

The university says it plans to use the tech to have scientists from MIT — all the way in Cambridge, Massachusetts — teach its fashion students about immersive shows and run business students through exercises.

The tech is still being tested, and will be officially added to the school’s curriculum in 2025.

Holo promises

The life-sized holograms are produced by Los Angeles-based Proto, which also supplies its tech to companies like IBM (to reduce travel needs) and H&M (for interactive product displays).

And Proto has another, less expected business priority: resurrecting the dead.

The hologram box could display an image of a deceased celeb and train AI on their books, lectures, and social media, allowing users to interact with them in real time.

While beaming in holographic lecturers to teach freshmen might seem like a novelty, the tech is here to stay in education. Just this month, Arizona State University became the first higher-ed institution to partner with OpenAI.

Get ready to say, “Back in my day, the teacher rolled in a TV and VCR on a cart.”

It feels good when your assumptions about the world are confirmed by cold, hard data. For instance:

• The majority of Americans (73%) only eat pizza with their hands — none of that fork and knife business.
• Are pets part of the family? Sure thing, according to 97% of US pet owners.

We’ve got another one for you: If you’ve seen young Americans freely spend money and assumed they’re getting help from their parents, well, it’s more likely than not that they are, per Pew Research Center.

Yeah, duh

Parents providing financial backing for their adult kids is hardly a new or surprising concept, but the scale of that support jumps off the page:

• The majority of under-30 Americans lack total financial independence from their parents. Just 16% of adults ages 18-24 are entirely off their parents’ payroll. That number goes up to 44% for those ages 25-29.
• While most young adults (67%) achieve full independence by their early 30s, nearly one-third of adults ages 30-34 still receive parental help.
• Household expenses, phone bills, and streaming subscriptions are the most common chip-ins. Despite the horror show that is rent and mortgage, only 17% of adults ages 18-34 get help making those payments.
• That said, the number of young adults living with their parents has increased: 57% of American adults under age 25 share an address with a parent, up from 53% in 1993.

The “why” behind all of this isn’t hard to find. For starters, inflation has been extra painful for young Americans, and the housing market increasingly favors the old.

What are parents saying?

Fifty-nine percent of parents reported financially assisting their adult children over the past year — and many aren’t blinking much of an eye at it.

• Of those parents, 64% said giving support did little or no damage to their own personal finances.

They think it’ll be temporary: 72% of parents believe their adult kids will cut the “financial umbilical cord” eventually.

It isn’t just a one-way street, BTW: Parents giving help is far more common, but 33% of adults ages 18-34 say they’ve financially supported their parents in the past year. (Only 14% of parents acknowledged receiving help, though. Hm.)

~$26.7k: The hammer price of a rare Star Wars toy. Made by Palitoy in 1978, the Jawa figure is believed to be one of 10-15 such toys in existence. The vendor once worked at Marvel UK and was gifted a number of Palitoy figures, including another Jawa toy that previously nabbed ~$33.9k at auction. We wish we had that kind of luck.

45m: Views an explicit AI-generated image of Taylor Swift received during the 17 hours it remained on X. The bogus images reportedly originated in a Telegram group where users were able to bypass Microsoft’s text-to-image generator’s protections against creating pornographic images. Microsoft is now investigating, X has disabled search results for the singer’s name, and the incident has reignited concerns around nonconsensual and explicit AI-generated content.

1T+: Number of cicadas that could emerge in the US this year thanks to Brood XIX and Brood XIII, which emerge from underground every 13 and 17 years, respectively. The last time this happened was in 1803, and it won’t happen again until 2245.

25%: How much investment banking bonuses dropped for work completed in 2023, per Wall Street consultancy Johnson Associates. This follows a disappointing 2022, but a great 2021 in which business was up and other expenses had dropped due to the pandemic. Now, as one expert put it: “Flat is the new up, and that’s if you had a solid year.”