Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Gaming
  4. Mobile
  5. News

Lumosity just released a series of games designed to make you a more limber linguist

Add as a preferred source on Google

If your lexicon has stagnated a bit since your SAT-studying days, it may be time to expand your vocabulary. After all, there’s nothing like a word no one knows to break the ice in awkward social settings, and if you’re looking to become the life of the party, Lumosity may be able to help with its new language-focused games. On Tuesday, the brain game company announced the launch of a brand new Language category, designed to aid users with their language skills. With these five new games, you can expand your vocabulary, determine the etymological foundations of your favorite words, discover the nuances of definitions, and of course, learn how to use all the aforementioned in a cogent sentence.

“At Lumosity, we’ve learned a great deal about creating adaptive, game-based products and we are excited to build on these learnings to create new experiences for our users,” said Beverly Chung, senior product manager at Lumosity. “We are always looking to create rich experiences for our users and we chose language as the first new area to explore because of feedback we’ve received from them.”

lumosity2
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Created in partnership with what Lumosity calls “vocabulary experts,” the company’s Science and Games team developed brand new ways to work out your brain with games like Word Bubbles, Editor’s Choice, Taking Root, Continuum, and Contextual. Think of them as test prep … for the test of the real world and adult human interactions, where language skills really are important.

Recommended Videos

“Lumosity’s new offering provides adults of all ages with an accessible and fun way to practice language skills,” Judith Scott, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz’s education department. “I especially like that it provides playful encounters with words and patterns related to words.” Scott worked with members of Lumosity on the new Language games, bringing some of her academic expertise to the table.

Moving forward, the education technology company says that it plans to expand its current collection of games and focus on other knowledge verticals like math to offer an even more robust product range to consumers. And if we can get smarter by playing a game (though that may be an open question), might as well give it a shot.

Lulu Chang
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
Anthropic’s sensitive internal data was exposed, and AI helped make it happen
Even the company behind Claude isn't immune to AI-powered security threats, as researchers discovered some worrying vulnerabilities.
Claude Anthropic Featured

AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.

The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.

Read more
A new startup wants to fix the military’s working-dog shortage with cloning and gene editing
Promising pitch, plenty of unanswered questions about the dogs.
a new startup wants to fix the militarys working dog shortage with cloning and gene editing warhound featured image

Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.

Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).

Read more
AI can describe a picture, but it still struggles to understand blind users
A University of Maryland study finds that Be My AI often buries useful answers in lengthy descriptions, leaving blind users to work harder to get the information they need.
Blind Man using walking stick

AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.

The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.

Read more