Weird World: Science & Society

December 1, 2023

Top Headlines

To Help Autonomous Vehicles Make Moral Decisions, Researchers Ditch the 'Trolley Problem'

Dec. 1, 2023 — Researchers have developed a new experiment to better understand what people view as moral and immoral decisions related to driving vehicles, with the goal of collecting data to train autonomous ...

'Monstrous Births' and the Making of Race in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Sep. 7, 2023 — From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, 'monstrous births' -- malformed or anomalous fetuses -- were, to Western medicine, an object of superstition. In 19th-century America, they became instead ...

Barnacles May Help Reveal Location of Lost Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370

Aug. 23, 2023 — Geoscientists have created a new method that can reconstruct the drift path and origin of debris from flight MH370, an aircraft that went missing over the Indian Ocean in 2014 with 239 passengers and ...

GPT-3 Can Reason About as Well as a College Student, Psychologists Report

July 31, 2023 — The artificial intelligence language model GPT-3 performed as well as college students in solving certain logic problems like those that appear on standardized tests. The researchers who conducted the experiment write that the results prompt the ...

Latest Headlines

updated 11:12pm EST

Participating in Genetic Studies Is in Your Genes

July 13, 2023 — Why do some people take part in genetic studies while others do not? The answer may lie within our genetic makeup. According to a groundbreaking study, people who participate in genetic studies are ...

Chatgpt Designs a Robot

June 7, 2023 — Poems, essays and even books -- is there anything the OpenAI platform ChatGPT can't handle? These new AI developments have inspired researchers to dig a little deeper: For instance, can ChatGPT also ...

Robots and Rights: Confucianism Offers Alternative

May 25, 2023 — As robots assume more roles in the world, a new analysis reviewed research on robot rights, concluding that granting rights to robots is a bad idea. Instead, the article looks to Confucianism to ...

Researchers Use 21st Century Methods to Record 2,000 Years of Ancient Graffiti in Egypt

Mar. 30, 2023 — Researchers are learning more about ancient graffiti -- and their intriguing comparisons to modern graffiti -- as they produce a state-of-the-art 3D ...

New Chip Design to Provide Greatest Precision in Memory to Date

Mar. 30, 2023 — Everyone is talking about the newest AI and the power of neural networks, forgetting that software is limited by the hardware on which it runs. But it is hardware become 'the bottleneck.' New ...

What Should We Call Evolution Driven by Genetic Engineering? Genetic Welding, Says Researcher

Mar. 28, 2023 — With CRISPR-Cas9 technology, humans can now rapidly change the evolutionary course of animals or plants by inserting genes that can easily spread ...

Can AI Predict How You'll Vote in the Next Election?

Mar. 30, 2023 — Artificial intelligence technologies like ChatGPT are seemingly doing everything these days: writing code, composing music, and even creating images so realistic you'll think they were taken by ...

Paper Written Using ChatGPT Demonstrates Opportunities and Challenges of AI in Academia

Mar. 23, 2023 — In an innovative new study, researchers used a series of prompts and questions to encourage ChatGPT to produce the type of content commonly seen in ...

Island-Inhabiting Giants, Dwarfs More Vulnerable to Extinction

Mar. 9, 2023 — Island-dwelling mammal species often expand or contract in size, becoming giant or dwarf versions of their mainland counterparts. A new Science study from a global team shows that those giants and ...

Fishing in Synchrony Brings Mutual Benefits for Dolphins and People in Brazil, Research Shows

Jan. 30, 2023 — By working together, dolphins and net-casting fishers in Brazil each catch more fish, a rare example of an interaction by two top predators that is ...

Earlier Headlines

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Headlines

New Zealand One of Few Island Nations With Potential to Produce Enough Food in a Nuclear Winter, Researchers Say

Feb. 7, 2023 — New Zealand is one of only a few island nations that could continue to produce enough food to feed its population in a nuclear winter, researchers have ...

See No Evil: People Find Good in Villains

Dec. 20, 2022 — No matter how egotistical, power hungry or greedy the person is, many of us are still attracted to their dark side -- in part because we suspect some may have a redeeming quality. A recent study ...

Does Throwing My Voice Make You Want to Shop Here?

Dec. 12, 2022 — By breaking the laws of physics in a virtual reality environment, researchers find that changing the location of a virtual assistant's voice in specific ways can be used as a tool to build ...

Masks Can Put Cognitive Performance in Check, Chess Study Finds

Dec. 9, 2022 — Wearing a face mask can temporarily disrupt decision-making in some situations, a new study of chess players has found. The study analyzed almost three million chess moves played by more than eight ...

In Negotiations, Hoodwinking Others Has a Cost, Study Finds

Dec. 5, 2022 — Lying to another person to get the better of them in a financial negotiation might win you more money, but you are likely to end up feeling guilty and less satisfied with the deal than if you had ...

Basho in the Machine

Dec. 2, 2022 — AI shows potential in creating literary art rivaling that of humans without human help. AI-generated haiku without human intervention was compared with a contrasting method. The evaluators found it ...

Witchcraft Beliefs Are Widespread, Highly Variable Around the World, Study Finds

Nov. 23, 2022 — A newly compiled dataset quantitatively captures witchcraft beliefs in countries around the world, enabling investigation of key factors associated with such ...

U.S. Political Partisanship Affects First Impressions of Faces

Nov. 9, 2022 — In an experimental study, participants' first impressions of photos of strangers' faces were strongly influenced by disclosure of the stranger's political ...

Actors Suppress Their Sense of Self When Playing a New Character

Oct. 27, 2022 — Actors may suppress their core sense of self when acting, as they immerse themselves in a new role, according to a new ...

Extreme Temperatures Fuel Online Hate Speech

Sep. 8, 2022 — Temperatures above or below a feel-good window of 12-21 degrees Celsius (54-70 °F) are linked to a marked rise in aggressive online behaviour across the USA, a new study ...

Scientists Develop Model That Adjusts Videogame Difficulty Based on Player Emotions

Sep. 6, 2022 — Scientists have developed a novel approach for dynamic difficulty adjustment where the players' emotions are estimated using in-game data, and the difficulty level is tweaked accordingly to ...

News Addiction Linked to Not Only Poor Mental Wellbeing but Physical Health Too, New Study Shows

Aug. 24, 2022 — People with an obsessive urge to constantly check the news are more likely to suffer from stress, anxiety, as well as ill health, finds a new ...

Music-Making and the Flow of Aerosols

July 14, 2022 — If simply breathing can spread the SARS-CoV-2 virus to others nearby, what about blowing into a tuba? Researchers used fluid mechanics to study the movement of aerosols generated by professional ...

Algorithm Predicts Crime a Week in Advance, but Reveals Bias in Police Response

June 30, 2022 — A new computer model uses publicly available data to predict crime accurately in eight U.S. cities, while revealing increased police response in wealthy neighborhoods at the expense of less ...

Scent of a Friend: Similarities in Body Odor May Contribute to Social Bonding

June 27, 2022 — Researchers have found that people may have a tendency to form friendships with individuals who have a similar body odor. The researchers were even able to predict the quality of social interactions ...

Who's Really in Control?

June 27, 2022 — Researchers studied the effect of the 'attitudes' of a semi-autonomous telepresence robot on its human operator. They found that when a person controlled only a part of the body of a ...

Are People Swapping Their Cats and Goldfish for Praying Mantises?

May 19, 2022 — Praying mantises have gained recent popularity as pets, sold at animal fairs and pet markets, but also collected in the wild by a fast-growing community of hobbyists and professional marketers. An ...

Highway Death Toll Messages Cause More Crashes

Apr. 21, 2022 — Displaying the highway death toll on message boards is a common awareness campaign, but new research shows this tactic actually leads to more crashes. This new study evaluated the effect of ...

Are 'Person' or 'People' Gender-Neutral Concepts? New Study Finds Male Tilt in Analysis of Billions of Words

Apr. 1, 2022 — The concept of a 'person' or 'people' is, despite its definition, not gender-neutral when it comes to how we use these terms. In fact, we tend to prioritize men when referring to ...

Seen and 'Herd': Collective Motion in Crowds Is Largely Determined by Participants' Field of Vision

Mar. 22, 2022 — Researchers have developed a new model to predict human flocking behavior based on optics and other sensory ...

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