Depending on who you are, Instagram might now seem a bit more PG-13. That’s by design.

Meta has rolled out a suite of new content moderation tools on Instagram aimed at addressing concerns that young people are seeing “unsafe content” on the social media platform. Users under the age of 18 will now by default only see content that matches what one would see in a PG-13 movie, based on the Motion Picture Association’s definition.

The rollout of these new tools, which Meta calls the “most significant update to Teen Accounts” since they were introduced in 2024, comes amid renewed concerns that the company’s platforms remain unsafe for young users. This, after social media CEOs, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, have been put in the congressional hot seat over the risks their platforms pose to teens.

The question remains: Will making Instagram PG-13 for teen users really protect them?

Ursula Smartt, an associate professor of law at Northeastern University’s London campus, isn’t so sure.

“The changes apply only to teen-specific accounts, which are accounts that teens have created using their truthful birth dates or accounts that Instagram has determined,” Smartt says. “Yet, it is common for teens to lie about their ages online to avoid certain restrictions.”

Age verification laws are already being introduced in a number of countries to avoid this problem. However, the number of people using virtual private networks, or VPNs, has surged in response, Smartt explains.

“Most teenagers know and use VPNs already, which mask their internet traffic and spoof their location,” allowing them to get around age verification laws in a given country, Smartt says.

Given how resourceful teens are in evading rules regardless of whether they’re in the virtual or real world, Instagram’s new rules could actually put more pressure—and responsibility—back on parents.

Anything that minimizes the amount of unsafe content teens don’t want to see on social media is a move in the right direction, according to Rachel Rodgers, an associate professor of psychology at Northeastern who studies the impact of social media on young people. However, these new tools are much more effective as a jumping-off point for educating children about how to engage with social media.

“The more children are having conversations with their parents about what they’re doing on social media and why and how and what this means, the better the outcomes,” Rodgers says.

That’s admittedly a big ask. Most parents barely have enough time to watch along during their children’s screen time, she says, let alone every time their teen hops on Instagram. But the sooner parents can start talking about how to use social media with their children, the better. Those conversations help young people develop critical skills, like how to detect intent behind what people are saying and posting on social media. That’s integral for learning how to then interact with and respond to people online in a healthy way, Rodgers says.

There are options for making the platform even more restrictive, and Rodgers admits it can be tempting for parents to just turn on these settings and let Meta’s designers do their job. It’s much better for parents to approach these new tools collaboratively and make it a conversation.

“That’s when you’re explaining to teens why some content would be restricted,” Rodgers says. “Why would you want them to see it? Why might you not want them to see it?”

Those conversations might reveal something surprising: Parents and their children are more aligned than either might think when it comes to content on social media.

“[Teens are] generally not trying to go view things that we would consider really outside of their age,” Rodgers says. “They’re quite happy to not be pushed too much on that. They find it uncomfortable.”

This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News news.northeastern.edu.

I opened DaVinci Resolve and started editing some 4K footage and everything felt buttery smooth, but more important is the fact that thanks to iPadOS 26, you’re able to complete rendering tasks in the background without needing to stay on the app. I hit the export and render button, swapped to another app, and … well, turns out DaVinci Resolve doesn’t support this new feature just yet, so I had to keep the app open for the render to complete. You shouldn’t have an issue on Final Cut Pro, though.

The most professional task I typically use with my iPad is editing RAW images in Adobe Lightroom, and, unsurprisingly, the M5 performed its duties with ease, even with my liberal use of Adobe’s AI-erase tool. However, I also didn’t really have much issue with this on the “weaker” iPad Air. What I find annoying is the fact that this powerful machine still only comes with one USB-C port. I can’t plug it into my camera and edit photos and charge the tablet at the same time; you need a USB hub.

The iPad Pro is for a very specific type of person, and you probably know who you are. If you’re mostly editing photos and typing up documents like me, the iPad Air is more than sufficient. But if you’re regularly in apps like Final Cut Pro or generating all sorts of weird AI images, you may like the extra power the M5 iPad Pro provides—though you can certainly get by with the older M4 model and maybe save some cash.

But unlike the iPad Air, which is just affordable enough to exist as a nice complement to a MacBook for days you don’t want the bulk of a laptop, the Pro feels more like a choice you have to make between clamshell and slate because of its high price. At present, I’d probably pick up the new M5 MacBook Pro instead, but with more desktop apps coming to iPad, I don’t think you’ll have to wait too long until the iPad Pro finally becomes the touchscreen Mac of your dreams.

Researchers from the James Watt School of Engineering in Glasgow are claiming to have constructed a new development in affordable, open-source mobile networks that enables near-real-time control of robotic arms. The technology could help doctors work on patients in remote locations in the years to come.

The first demonstration of the medical innovation has seen the research team use the system to perform mock dental exams on a pair of dentures, highlighting its potential for use in medical procedures.

The system is based on off-the-shelf hardware that has been used to build a 4G LTE mobile network which connects a haptic controller to a robot arm, with the network allowing users to direct the arm’s movements with very low latency, enabling a high level of control.

The research team built their framework using the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) framework, which uses open-source software to control mobile network hardware. They repurposed a USB network dongle, more commonly used for consumer mobile internet, to create stable connections between the haptic input device, the robotic arm and a computer configured to act as an intelligent base station.

The system’s signal quality, data rates and latency were monitored and fine-tuned using specialised xApps software.

Its mobile dongle also helped the team create a network that drew considerably less power than comparable connections using the software-defined radio (SDR) more commonly used in similar tasks. The system used 4.5 watts, a 90% reduction on the 45 watts required by traditional SDRs to perform the same activities.

From a performance basis during lab tests, the researchers enabled communications between the base station, the controller and the robotic arm with a bandwidth of 10Mbps. They said that such a connection allowed them to control the arm to simulate a dental exam on dentures with less than a second of latency and minimal signal loss.

The James Watt School of Engineering is part of the University of Glasgow, which was the first institution in the UK to confer degrees in engineering, and established the first chair of engineering in the UK in 1840. Its research environment includes coverage of a broad range of engineering subjects, as well as the interfaces with biology, chemistry, computer science, medicine and physics. 

The college claims its research and teaching is “at the forefront of discovery, creation and practice that is internationally leading in education, innovation and new capability”.

Commenting on the project and its aims in a paper outlining the research, Saber Hassouna of the James Watt School of Engineering said: “The O-RAN framework holds a great deal of potential for enabling intelligent, data-driven, programmable and virtualised networks, but a significant amount of work remains to be done to demonstrate that potential being achieved in the real world, beyond theoretical modelling.

“The testbed we’ve developed here using commercially available hardware shows that O-RAN can be used to enable excellent performance in robotic teleoperation, which is a complex task. For applications like dental procedures, the robotic arm must move very smoothly, which requires high data throughput and low latency, both of which we’ve been able to achieve for the first time with O-RAN.”

Qammer Abbasi, head of the University of Glasgow’s communications, sensing and imaging hub, added: “This is a very encouraging demonstration of the potential of O-RAN to enable fine-grained, close-to-real-time control of a robotic arm. [This] showcases the performance we’ve been able to deliver in a single room with a direct line of sight between the base station and the arm, and we’re currently working on developing the system further to ensure it can deliver the same level of performance at greater distances.

“Ultimately, this could be a step towards creating reliable, affordable methods of performing complex tasks remotely, opening up new applications in medicine, automation, industry and beyond.”

The research was supported by funding from the Communications Hub for Empowering Distributed Cloud Computing Applications and Research and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.