Exactly 20 years ago this month, Arthur Andersen — the accounting firm Enron had hired to audit the company’s financial statements — was investigated by the Department of Justice. Arthur Andersen quickly collapsed, and even though most of the firm’s 85,000 partners and staff weren’t directly responsible for what happened, they lost their jobs, their...
Having trouble hearing? Just turn up your shirt. That’s the idea behind a new “acoustic fabric” developed by engineers at MIT and collaborators at Rhode Island School of Design. The team has designed a fabric that works like a microphone, converting sound first into mechanical vibrations, then into electrical signals, similarly to how our ears...
If you’re reaching for the last piece of pizza at a party and see another hand going for it at the same time, your next move probably depends both on how you feel and whom the hand belongs to. Your little sister—you might go ahead and grab the pizza. Your boss—you’re probably more likely to...
Faced by one too many obstacles on the way to achieving their personal goals – be it an important, valuable or fun one – people may experience an action crisis where they start questioning their pursuit and even feel like giving up. With their experiment, reported in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychological Bulletin, a research team at...
Despite wide variety amongst hunger-gatherer cultures, a new analysis finds that a ‘small world’ network configuration is common to the social structures of all such groups. These network structures are constrained by the flows of energy and information through them and operate as ‘collective computers’ optimized for the solving of complex problems. The research was...
For 700 years, Mexico City’s public square, known as the Zócalo, has been the place where many of the nation’s most significant events unfolded. Benjamin Bross, an architecture professor and urban historian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, wrote an urbanism-based cultural history of the Zócalo, using the public square and historic events that took place there...
Two years after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, inflation, money issues and the war in Ukraine have pushed U.S. stress to alarming levels, according to polls conducted for the American Psychological Association. A late-breaking poll, fielded March 1–3 by The Harris Poll on behalf of APA, revealed striking findings, with more...
People without jobs or with less secure housing have poorer outcomes when treated for depression with talking therapy or antidepressants, compared to more socially advantaged peers, finds a study led by UCL researchers. The authors of the new study published in JAMA Psychiatry say that addressing employment and housing needs may be helpful alongside depression treatments to...
As COVID-19 upended societal norms when it swept through the United States in 2020, a second pandemic — or “infodemic”— was also on the rise. An analysis of Twitter users by researchers at the University of California, Davis, and University of Texas, Austin, suggests that Republican-identifying individuals who believe their local government has positive intentions...
Multitudes of amateur chefs will soon enjoy perfect al dente pasta and cleaner kitchen walls, as new research shows how measurements with a ruler — not the mythologized throwing against the nearest vertical surface — may be the best way to confirm when pasta is fully cooked. In their presentation at the American Physical Society...
