Muslims and atheists in the United States are more likely than those of Christian faiths to experience religious discrimination, according to new research led by the University of Washington. In the study, which focused on public schools because they are government-run, community-facing institutions, the researchers tested responses to an individual’s expression of religious belief. In...
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News Coverage in Chicago Disproportionately Devalues Black and Hispanic Lives
The recent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery added new momentum to the Black Lives Matter social movement in the United States. But Stanford researchers have found that local news media have not treated Black and Hispanic lives as equal in value to white lives in stories. Forrest Stuart, associate professor of...
When Bots Do the Negotiating, Humans More Likely to Engage in Deceptive Techniques
Recently computer scientists at USC Institute of Technologies (ICT) set out to assess under what conditions humans would employ deceptive negotiating tactics. Through a series of studies, they found that whether humans would embrace a range of deceptive and sneaky techniques was dependent both on the humans’ prior negotiating experience in negotiating as well as...
When Painting Reveals Increases in Social Trust
Scientists from the CNRS, ENS-PSL, Inserm, and Sciences Po revealed an increase in facial displays of trustworthiness in European painting between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries. The findings, published in Nature Communications on 22 September 2020, were obtained by applying face-processing software to two groups of portraits, suggesting an increase in trustworthiness in society that closely...
COVID-19 Vaccines: Open Source Licensing Could Keep Big Pharma from Making Huge Profits Off Taxpayer-Funded Research
An international, multi-billion-dollar race is underway to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, and progress is moving at record speed, but with nationalistic, competitive undertones. If and when an effective vaccine is invented, its production will require an unprecedented effort to vaccinate people across the globe. However, for the country that invents a safe and effective vaccine,...
Why You’re Getting So Many Political Text Messages Right Now
Text messages and emails from political campaigns are pouring into Americans’ phones and inboxes right now. It’s happening to political junkies, to people who gave their phone numbers to campaigns, and even to people who try to keep their contact information off mass mailing lists. I study political campaigns, including how they use social media...
How Can Smoke from West Coast Fires Cause Red Sunsets in New York?
If you are one of the millions of people in the Midwest and Eastern U.S. who turned your gaze toward the sky recently, you may have noticed the Sun shining through an odd, milky haze. This widespread opaque veil was caused not by clouds, but rather by smoke from wildfires in the Western U.S. The...
SARS-CoV-2 Infection Can Block Pain, Opening Up Unexpected New Possibilities for Research into Pain Relief Medication
Imagine being infected with a deadly virus that makes you impervious to pain. By the time you realize you are infected, it’s already too late. You have spread it far and wide. Recent findings in my lab suggest that this scenario may be one reason that people infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19, may...
Humans Ignite Almost Every Wildfire That Threatens Homes
Summer and fall are wildfire season across the western U.S. In recent years, wildfires have destroyed thousands of homes, forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate and exposed tens of millions to harmful smoke. Wildfires are a natural disturbance for these regions, but when combined with climate change and housing growth in the wildland-urban...
The Case of Biden Versus Trump – or How a Judge Could Decide the Presidential Election
Imagine the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020. Given the unprecedented number of mail-in votes this election, Americans may wake up and still not know who won the presidential contest between Republican President Donald J. Trump and Democratic challenger Joseph Biden. The contest could be so close that a result can’t be known until mail-in...