Bilingualism has long been known to have cognitive benefits for older adults. Research shows it helping delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease by up to five years compared to monolingual adults. This is one of several lifestyle factors that may contribute to brain resilience as we age. In a new study published in the journal Bilingualism:...
Changing precipitation patterns in the Neotropics, one of Earth’s most biodiverse regions, could threaten two-thirds of the area’s bird species by the year 2100 if climate change goes unchecked, according to new research led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and George Mason University. This would represent a dramatic loss, as the region is home to 30% of...
When X (formerly Twitter) changed its verification system in 2022, many foresaw its potential to impact the spread of political opinions on the platform. In a modeling study, researchers show that having verified users whose posts are prioritized by the platform’s algorithms can result in increased polarization and trigger the formation of echo chambers. Because...
Too much stuff in the periphery of our vision can make it difficult to identify what we’re seeing. Yale researchers now know how that clutter affects the brain. Whether we’re staring at our phones, the page of a book, or the person across the table, the objects of our focus never stand in isolation; there...
When private citizens disrupt a criminal event or avert a potentially dangerous situation, they are termed guardians, and the concept of guardianship forms the foundation of various crime-prevention strategies. Although guardianship has been examined by researchers, few studies have considered how guardians make judgments and decisions that are critical to preventing crimes. In a new study,...
A new study has found that after watching a docudrama about the efforts to free a wrongly convicted prisoner on death row, people were more empathetic toward formerly incarcerated people and supportive of criminal justice reform. The research, led by a team of Stanford psychologists, published Oct. 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...
Lagos is Nigeria’s economic powerhouse, but it has some of the worst slums in the country. Lagos slums are characterised by high levels of poverty – the state of not having enough resources to meet basic needs for living, such as food, water, shelter, healthcare and education. Poverty is multidimensional. It is not only about...
Stories written by the latest version of ChatGPT were nearly as good as those written by human authors, according to new research on the narrative skills of artificial intelligence. But when people were told a story was written by AI — whether the true author was an algorithm or a person — they rated the...
Cellphone chats have become death sentences in the continuing, bloody factional war inside Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel. Cartel gunmen stop youths on the street or in their cars and demand their phones. If they find a contact who’s a member of a rival faction, a chat with a wrong word or a photo with the wrong...
The new study also identifies factors that can make these efforts more successful. When an election result is disputed, people who are skeptical about the outcome may be swayed by figures of authority who come down on one side or the other. Those figures can be independent monitors, political figures, or news organizations. However, these “debunking”...