Weird World News

December 9, 2023

Top Headlines

Scholars Say It's Time to Declare a New Epoch on the Moon, the 'Lunar Anthropocene'

Dec. 8, 2023 — According to anthropologists and geologists, it's time to acknowledge humans have become the dominant force shaping the moon's environment by declaring a new geological epoch for the moon: the Lunar ...

ChatGPT Often Won't Defend Its Answers -- Even When It Is Right

Dec. 7, 2023 — ChatGPT may do an impressive job at correctly answering complex questions, but a new study suggests it may be absurdly easy to convince the AI chatbot that it's in the ...

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 ...

Complex Data Becomes Easier to Interpret When Transformed Into Music

Oct. 30, 2023 — Researchers in the field of human-technology interaction have demonstrated how a custom-built 'data-to-music' algorithms can help to better understand complex data. The transformation of digital data into sounds could be a game-changer in the ...

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updated 11:13pm EST

'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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

AI Tests Into Top 1% for Original Creative Thinking

July 5, 2023 — New research suggests artificial intelligence can match the top 1% of human thinkers on a standard test for ...

Illusions Are in the Eye, Not the Mind

June 15, 2023 — Numerous visual illusions are caused by limits in the way our eyes and visual neurones work -- rather than more complex psychological processes, new research ...

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 ...

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Summaries
Headlines

Teaching Physics from the Din of Flying Discs

Dec. 4, 2023 — The sound a disc makes while soaring through the air is full of information about how fast the disc is flying and how quickly it spins. This inspired Kyle S. Dalton of Penn State University to ...

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 ...

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 through entire populations. An evolutionary ...

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 academic publications. Researchers say in their ...

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 ...

Virtual Reality Games Can Be Used as a Tool in Personnel Assessment

Mar. 9, 2023 — Fast gamers are more intelligent: Intelligence can be predicted through virtual reality ...

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 ...

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 beneficial to both parties, 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 ...

A Broader Definition of Learning Could Help Stimulate Interdisciplinary Research

Oct. 21, 2022 — By embracing a broader definition of learning that includes any behavioral adaption developed in response to regular features of an environment, researchers could better collaborate across the fields ...

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 ...

Monday, December 4, 2023