As issues like climate change, global warming, and renewable energy dominate the national conversation, it’s easy to assume these topics are exclusive to the modern world. But a huge collaborative study in Science reveals that early humans across the entire globe were changing and impacting their environments as far back as 10,000 years ago. “Through this crowdsourced...
Women gave more than half of TED talks in the first half of 2017, up from less than one-third in 2006, according to a new study published in Political Research Exchange. But the German research team also found that ethnic minorities remain under-represented as TED speakers, giving just one in five talks over the same time...
Securing enough energy to meet human needs is one of the greatest challenges society has ever faced. Previously reliable sources–oil, gas and coal–are degrading air quality, devastating land and ocean and altering the fragile balance of the global climate, through the release of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, earth’s rapidly industrializing population is projected...
When reading words on a screen, the human brain comprehends words placed on the right side of the screen faster. The total amount of presented information on the screen also affects the speed and accuracy of the brain’s ability to process words. These are the findings of HSE University researchers Elena Gorbunova and Maria Falikman...
The utterances of Old World monkeys, some of our primate cousins, may be more sophisticated than previously realized — but even so, they display constraints that reinforce the singularity of human language, according to a new study co-authored by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) linguist. The study reinterprets evidence about primate language and concludes...
Humans and machines worked together to help train an artificial intelligence — AI — model that outperformed other clickbait detectors, according to researchers at Penn State and Arizona State University. In addition, the new AI-based solution was also able to tell the difference between clickbait headlines that were generated by machines — or bots —...
Emails, instant messaging, app notifications, RSS feeds, and a plethora of social networks inundate almost every aspect of daily life from work to home or just keeping in touch socially. Some people average more than four information technology (IT) switches per minute. This barrage of IT interruptions makes it increasingly difficult to focus on the...
However convinced we may be that science is not just for men, the concept of science remains much more strongly associated with masculinity than with femininity in people’s minds. This automatic bias, which had already been identified among the general public, also exists in the minds of most scientists, who are not necessarily aware of...
In the midst of the space race, Hereward Lester Cooke, the former co-director of the NASA Art Program, observed, “Space travel started in the imagination of the artist.” If the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing is an opportunity to celebrate a remarkable technological achievement, it’s also a good time to reflect on the...
If you lose sleep over the number of likes on your Instagram account, you might want to think twice before posting that selfie. That’s the main takeaway from a new study in the Journal of Research in Personality by Washington State University psychologists. The scientists conducted a novel experiment with hundreds of actual Instagram users to determine...
