Botched ballots

A mistake in the first batch of postal vote packs for Trumpington ward incorrectly instructed voters to select just one candidate. A by-election occurring on the same day as the City Council election entitled voters to select up to two candidates, as correctly stated on the ballot paper. 15 votes had arrived before the error was spotted on the reverse of Envelope A. Most of the affected voters were contacted by text or email, while the remaining 138, who did not provide their details, received letters on Thursday (23/04).

Gadgets and Gizmo

AI-powered learning platform, Gizmo, which was founded by three Cambridge graduates, has raised £16 million in its first round of financing. Co-founders Petros Christodoulou, Robin Jack, and Paul Evangelou told BusinessCloud that Gizmo aims to “make learning addictive,” by personalising learning and generating customised study materials based on students’ notes or web links. The learning platform has accrued over 13 million users in over 120 countries. The founders plan to use some of the funds to expand Gizmo’s engineering team.

The (not-so-smart) phone ban?

Many Cambridgeshire schools have backed the government’s plan to ban smartphones during the school day, while parents remain divided. The Keys Academies Trust, which runs five schools in Peterborough, told the BBC it “welcomed” the government’s announcement that it would table an amendment to its Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. The amendment would give schools “a clear legal requirement” to ban phones during the day. Parents’ reactions have been mixed – one parent told the BBC it was a “first step in regulating phones and content,” while another said: “it’s sort of taking too much freedom away from children”.

Meltwater’s ice-breaking summer

Cambridge scientists have launched a project to investigate how summer meltwater pools cause cracks in Antarctic ice shelves, speeding up sea-level rise. The project will deploy sensors, cameras, GPS, and seismic tools across two ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula to capture the first real-time field measurements of this cracking process, known as hydrofracture. The data will then be fed into KRAKEN, an ice flow model that will produce hydrofracture predictions for the whole continent. Dr Rebecca Dell, a researcher at the Scott Polar Research Institute who is leading the project, said that the data collected “ultimately means more accurate global sea level predictions, which is vitally important for governments, communities and climate preparedness efforts around the world”.