Knowledge@Computing

The next time you search for a flight and watch the price jump $200 overnight, you might feel like the system is rigged against you. And you wouldn't be alone. Few things irritate travellers quite like the volatility of airline fares, that nagging sense that some algorithm, somewhere, is squeezing every last dollar from your wallet. 

You've felt it before. That low, insistent rumble in your belly during a long meeting. The unsettling churn before a nerve-wracking presentation. We call these "gut feelings" – and while the phrase gets used loosely, science increasingly tells us they're anything but casual. The gut-brain axis, a two-way communication highway between the digestive system and the brain, shapes everything from appetite and mood to decision-making.

For the roughly 500 million people living with diabetes worldwide, even a small cut or blister on the foot can become a crisis. Diabetic wounds heal slowly, resist treatment, invite infection, and in severe cases lead to amputation. Doctors have limited options, and the search for better therapies is painfully slow.

Every day, millions of lines of code are written without a single human typing them. AI coding assistants have become the fastest-growing contributors to software projects worldwide – generating, completing, and committing code at a pace no human team can match.

Led by Professor Zhang Yang from NUS Computing, NUS Biochemistry, and the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore, a research team has developed a hybrid framework that combines deep learning with physics-based modelling to improve the predictions of complex protein structures.

You probably don’t even notice it anymore. One moment you’re scrolling through Instagram on your phone, the next you’re clicking a mouse on your laptop to finish a work document. We transition between digital devices with barely a thought. But what if those seemingly small physical differences, like the direct tap of your finger on a touchscreen versus the indirect click of a mouse, are not so small after all?