rates of color rectal cancer have been rising in young people over the past decade.

And I remember back in the day somebody being diagnosed in their 30s and I was, you know, everybody was quite shocked.

It was a travesty and it was something that was just not heard of.

It's Tuesday, February 13th, but just like every day, today is Science Friday.

I'm Cyfry producer Kathleen Davis.

It used to be that cases of colorectal cancer

were limited to sedentary older people with excess weight.

But it's more and more common for healthy people in their 40s, 30s, and even 20s to be diagnosed.

We'll talk about that story in just a bit.

But first I spoke to Dr. Wei Kien Vong, who ran possibly one of the cutest studies

ever done, teaching AI about language via a camera strapped to a two-year-old.

Let's take a listen.

There's a lot to learn in the first couple of years of a child's life, not the least of which is how to talk.

But little kids don't sit down and just study a vocabulary book.

They soak up language from their daily experiences, which are often filled with

parents and caregivers asking questions like, do you want some water or saying things

like, oh look a kitty cat.

Scientists wondered whether an AI model

could learn about language the same way.

Not by being fed a curated set of pictures and words

or the entire content of the internet, but by eavesdropping on the day-to-day activities of a two-year-old.

Dr. Wei Kienvong is a research scientist in the Center for Data Science at New York University

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