Weird World: Science & Society

April 19, 2024

Top Headlines

Data-Driven Music: Converting Climate Measurements Into Music

Apr. 18, 2024 — A geo-environmental scientist from Japan has composed a string quartet using sonified climate data. The 6-minute-long composition -- entitled 'String Quartet No. 1 'Polar Energy Budget'-- is based on over 30 years of satellite-collected climate data ...

Researchers Envision Sci-Fi Worlds Involving Changes to Atmospheric Water Cycle

Apr. 4, 2024 — Human activity is changing the way water flows between the Earth and atmosphere in complex ways and with likely long-lasting consequences that are hard to picture. Researchers enlisted water ...

New Technique Helps AI Tell When Humans Are Lying

Mar. 18, 2024 — Researchers have developed a new training tool to help artificial intelligence (AI) programs better account for the fact that humans don't always tell the truth when providing personal information. The new tool was developed for use in contexts when ...

Sprinting 'Like a Jet' Will Produce Premier League Strikers of Tomorrow, Study Shows

Mar. 5, 2024 — Sprinting 'like a jet plane taking off' will help produce Premier League star strikers of tomorrow, new research has revealed. A new study of Tottenham Hotspur's academy has shown that just a few ...

Latest Headlines

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AI Writing, Illustration Emits Hundreds of Times Less Carbon Than Humans, Study Finds

Apr. 2, 2024 — A group of scholars calculated the amount of energy used by AI tools for the tasks of writing and illustrating and compared it to the average amount ...

Advanced Army Robots More Likely to Be Blamed for Deaths

Mar. 14, 2024 — Advanced killer robots are more likely to blamed for civilian deaths than military machines, new research has revealed. The study shows that high-tech bots will be held more responsible for ...

Researchers Overestimate Their Own Honesty

Feb. 26, 2024 — The average researcher thinks they are better than their colleagues at following good research practice. They also think that their own research field is better than other research fields at ...

The West Is Best to Spot UFOs

Feb. 28, 2024 — Researchers identified environmental factors that explain why reports of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) are more common in certain regions of the country. Most sightings occur in the American ...

Mystery Solved: The Oldest Fossil Reptile from the Alps Is an Historical Forgery

Feb. 16, 2024 — Palaeontological analysis shows that a renowned fossil thought to show soft tissue preservation is in fact just paint. The fossil discovered in 1931 ...

Are Bugs Bugging Humans or the Other Way Around? Study Reveals a Few Surprises

Jan. 13, 2024 — Research has determined key factors that impact biodiversity among spiders and insects in urban areas. The response of specific groups varied ...

Artificial Intelligence Can Predict Events in People's Lives

Dec. 18, 2023 — Artificial intelligence can analyze registry data on people's residence, education, income, health and working conditions and, with high accuracy, predict life ...

Can AI Be Too Good to Use?

Dec. 12, 2023 — Much of the discussion around implementing artificial intelligence systems focuses on whether an AI application is 'trustworthy': Does it produce useful, reliable results, free of bias, while ...

Single-Use E-Cigarettes Contain Batteries That Last Hundreds of Cycles Despite Being Discarded

Dec. 12, 2023 — While the lithium-ion batteries in disposable electronic cigarettes are discarded after a single use, they can continue to perform at high capacity ...

Artificial Intelligence Systems Excel at Imitation, but Not Innovation

Dec. 12, 2023 — Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are often depicted as sentient agents poised to overshadow the human mind. But AI lacks the crucial human ability of innovation, researchers have ...

Last Chance to Record Archaic Greek Language 'Heading for Extinction'

Apr. 2, 2024 — A new data crowdsourcing platform aims to preserve the sound of Romeyka, an endangered millennia-old variety of Greek. Experts consider the language to be a linguistic goldmine and a living bridge to ...

Is There a Common Link Between the Physical and Social Worlds? Two Brothers Think So

Jan. 11, 2024 — A Rutgers biophysical chemist and his brother, a political scientist on the West Coast, have joined intellectual forces, realizing a long-standing dream of co-authoring an article that bridges their ...

Thinking About God Inspires Risk-Taking for Believers, Study Finds

Dec. 14, 2023 — Does thinking about faith make religious people more likely to take leaps? A new study says yes, finding that participants were more likely to take risks when thinking about God as a benevolent ...

How a Drought Led to the Rise of Skateboarding in 1970s California

Dec. 12, 2023 — Why did professional skateboarding arise in southern California in the 1970s? Was it a coincidence, or was it a perfect storm of multiple factors? It's fairly well-known that a drought in ...

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: ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 recording of the Temple of Isis in Philae, ...

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 ...

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.' ...

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 ...