When the Supreme Court ruled on March 4, 2024, that former President Donald Trump could appear on state presidential ballots for the 2024 election, it did not address an idea that seemed simple and compelling when Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised it during the Feb. 8, 2024, oral arguments in the case: “What about the idea...
Score another one for artificial intelligence. In a recent study, 151 human participants were pitted against ChatGPT-4 in three tests designed to measure divergent thinking, which is considered to be an indicator of creative thought. Divergent thinking is characterized by the ability to generate a unique solution to a question that does not have one...
Suppose two speakers of the same language are playing a guessing game where each has the same color swatches, and Player 1 tries to get Player 2 to guess a hue by naming the color. If the second player consistently guesses correctly as often as possible, that indicates their language has an efficient color naming...
More than 40 percent of Americans know someone who has died of a drug overdose and about one-third of those individuals say their lives were disrupted by the death, according to a new RAND study. Analyzing a national representative survey of American adults, researchers found that the lifetime exposure to an overdose death is more common...
The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from different cultures. According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, ‘consonance’ – a pleasant-sounding combination of notes – is produced by special relationships...
Closer proximity to and a higher number of ready-to-eat food outlets — particularly pubs, bars and fast-food restaurants — may be associated with a greater risk of developing heart failure, according to a study of half a million adults in the UK Biobank. The association between food environments and increased heart failure risk was stronger...
Are museums, theaters, and opera houses truly walking the talk when it comes to social and environmental sustainability? The University of Lausanne (UNIL) delved into this pressing question, conducting an international survey with over 200 major cultural organizations. The verdict? While there’s significant room for improvement across the spectrum, Anglophone countries lead the charge. Cultural...
Archeologists have long used the shapes and styles of pottery as a proxy for ancient cultures. But how does the cultural alignment of ceramic forms arise? To explore this question, Tetsushi Nonaka and colleagues asked 21 potters in three different communities—one in France in Bourgogne and two in India in Bulandshahar district, Uttar Pradesh—to throw...
Why do men and women seem so different? According to a study, a wide range of gender differences that have been attributed to biological sex may actually be due to differences in power. Psychological differences between men and women have multiple possible explanations, including natural selection for sex-specific adaptations on the one hand and socialization...
Heightened use of social media during the coronavirus pandemic brought with it an unprecedented surge in the spread of misinformation. Of particular significance were conspiracy theories surrounding the virus and vaccines made to combat it. Though conspiracy theories about vaccines are not a new phenomenon, this was the first time they were observed becoming elevated...
